starlady | Twenty years later, I put a few things together (Reply)

My roommates have been making their way through the middle three Star Trek series (they're not watching ENT like sensible people and I can't convince them to watch TOS, like highly illogical people), and the penny has finally dropped for me that DS9 is in many ways (particularly in the first three seasons) playing off B5, while VOY is playing off Farscape. Or rather, both VOY and Farscape are dealing with very similar setups and issues, but Farscape explicitly goes about dealing with masculinity in a way that VOY just…doesn't, in the initial seasons. Masculinity and its fragility are consistent problems on Voyager, and Janeway and Torres (and to a lesser extent Kes and even Seska) are consistently forced to deal with the problems they cause, but VOY doesn't really do anything about them the way Farscape does; the Star Trek show treats the symptoms rather than the root causes.

In so many ways I'm glad they made DS9 when they did, because they could never make it now, but for VOY it's just the opposite, and I really wish it had been made in this era rather than 20 years ago.

ETA: And of course Stargate: Atlantis is the unification of both these strands of sci-fi: space station + we've been flung to the far side of the [$very large unit of space]. Note, of course, that neither SGA nor VOY could maintain that isolation forever.