Slashdot Mirror

There is no "canon" for "crime drama".

I put it in quotes for a reason. I even spelled it out earlier in this thread.
And they never seem to run out of material. One one planet. With one species. In one genre. WITHOUT TIME TRAVEL.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1032403&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=25795391#25795635

Now, do you agree that the crime drama TV series have that in common? You don't have to. And yet the people who write crime dramas do not seem to run out of material. Despite being limited to only Earth, only humans and no time travel.

You can force the writers to do the bookkeeping, but then you shouldn't be surprised when the final product has all the excitement of an accounts-receivable ledger.

Yeah, and CSI doesn't have a lot of viewers.

You might want to work on that thought.

Law and Order and Starsky and Hutch could both be described as "crime dramas", but beyond the barest outlines of the plot they are completely different.

Hmmm, that seems to contradict your other statement about "bookkeeping".

Despite not including Japanese attacks on New York, the crime dramas continue to be produced and they continue to draw large audiences. Despite the lack of alien races.

I've already posted this but why not post it again?
http://www.psiphi.org/cgi/upc-db/booklist.html
There are a LOT of books out there, published, that pretty much conform to existing canon.

Yet people like you keep saying that doing so is damn near impossible.

Well, what you consider to be impossible has been done over and over and over again for decades.

By the end of Voyager, the 24th century is no longer interesting. The galaxy is too small, and the players too firmly established.

Yet we have year after year of cop shows on TV. And crime drama movies. All set in present day.

And they never seem to run out of material. One one planet. With one species. In one genre. WITHOUT TIME TRAVEL.

What limits the writers of the Star Trek movies is their self-imposed requirement that every movie MUST feature the crew of a previous TV series. And their skill as writers.

And the reason they do that is because they're depending upon the existing fan base to drive ticket sales.

Other writers are not so limited.
http://www.psiphi.org/cgi/upc-db/booklist.html
There's enough material there for a hundred movies.

Ferengi:Rules of Acquisition::Microborg:Rules of Assimilation [MS eyes only]

We Are Microsoft. Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated.

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,

In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:

To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After reviewing Voyager's first season, I wrote:

"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."

Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?

That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.

Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain". ...

I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....

So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.

If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.

Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.

[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]

But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...

Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....

Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week. ... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.

I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general

Regards,