Charting The New Frontier

So, yes. I finally did it. I moved out. And it only took me five years to recover from the last time I tried it. Now, if memory serves, at this point, having lived away from home for about six weeks, give or take, when I was living over Gateshead I was in the midst of a terrible depression. Call it homesickness if you want, but I think it was something deeper than that. Am I experiencing that here? A little, but I'm depressed anyway (usual bollocks, but this time involving a completely different girl called Natalie - hey, at least I'm consistent, as Stef is with peeps called Chris, so I am with girls called Natalie. It's a motif.) and at least here I'm not tiptoeing around a nutty closet lesbian.

So, a bizarre side-effect of the move was that I for whatever reason ended up watching the first six series of Red Dwarf. You know, the good ones, before everything went off the boil. Not in order though. It was something like 1, 4, 5, 6, 2, 3, which serves only to highlight the massively varying quality between the series. Series 6 for example, for all it's Emmy award winning glory and shiny special effects is a big fat overweight series well on it's way to comedy heaven. The characters have long since ceased to be anything more than a collection of comedy tics (Lister with his curry and questionable hygiene, Kryten and his Space Corps directive and groinal socket jokes). True, it still has it's moments, but somewhere during Series 2 and Series 3 it stopped being a sitcom set in space and became a space show that happened to be a comedy. And not a very good one at that. Somewhere during Series 5 the quality just tails off and the much-vaunted 'Back To Reality', despite some intriguing ideas doesn't develop them enough for it to be good sf or is funny enough to be a good comedy. The Cat's Duane Dibbley character in particular is a lazy anorak joke that goes on far too long (and they had the tenacity to resurrect it the following season in 'Emohawk'). 'Holoship' is a good idea and has some hilarious moments (it's telling that most of the funny stuff in these twilight years is the product of Chris Barrie, it's also telling that from the moment he leaves the series in Series 7 the entire enterprise goes into nosedive) but again it's a schizophrenic turn - it doesn't know whether it wants to be a funny sf show or a sitcom that just happens to be set in outer space. This effect leaves most of the episodes feeling malnourished - the thirty minute mark is not long enough to introduce, develop and utilise a decent sf idea, as seen in 'Demons And Angels' for example. The first two series were essentially sitcom - the characters barely even moved out of the confines of their three stock sets, akin to Blackadder (now there was a show which knew its strengths and played them to the hilt) and whatever sf related plot turned up (echoes from the future, a subservient mechanoid, Holly getting replaced by a superior computer) were usually perfunctory enough to be dealt with quite nicely in the time allowed and in the manner the should have been; as a framework for the jokes to hang off.

I think it might be the case with any show that as time goes on, things become more and more formuliac. It happened with Friends, it happened with Cheers (and that show is perhaps the finest sitcom to emerge from America since Bewitched, speaking of Bewitched, that didn't so much become more formulaic as time went on but started out with a very strict formula and stuck with it), and it happened with Red Dwarf. By Series 6 you were guaranteed a Space Corps directive joke, a humourous reference to curry, some amusing metaphor for Rimmer's hair/Kryten's head and at least one fashion reference from the Cat. It obviously happened because Grant and Naylor were responding to popular demand. If one Space Corps joke got a big laugh, they were plainly going to try it again. Just witness the 'Tales Of The Riverbank: The Next Generation' conversation that tried and failed to top the hilariously insane conversation about Wilma Flintstone.

I think I might be being a bit harsh here. After all, watching the entire six series in the space of a week, I must have found something in them that I enjoyed. It's just I enjoyed some more than others. Peculiarly, going off conventional wisdom (ooh, there's that phrase again) the 'classic' episodes ('Backwards', 'Back To Reality', 'Gunmen Of The Apocalypse') were among my least favourite, while 'Meltdown', often cited as the series nadir was damn funny (perhaps, in that case, with the advent of bad taste comedy like Family Guy and South Park, we're more attuned to the comedy notion of Ghandi as a man in a nappy and Queen Victoria as an assassin). 'Holoship' especially because it had the lovely Jane Horrocks in, as well as that exhange between Lister and Don Warrington, would also be high on my list. But for me, the series' high point has to be Series 2. At that point, it was still true to its roots, while the kinks that had marred Series 1 (nothing serious, just the usual problems that need to be ironed out on any series) have been worked out.

Which brings us to Star Trek: Voyager. That unloved son of the Trek canon. Where to start? Okay, controversial opinion here, but, given that aside from DS9 (and that series is so unlike any other Trek it might be worth simply putting it in a category of its own) Voyager is quite good. Certainly as Space Opera goes, it's in the top ten of shows from the nineties. DS9 and Babylon 5 obviously top the chart, followed by TNG (which I hated as a kid and which I've learned to love much more as a adult). Stargate didn't really hit its stride until its third season, Andromeda was the televisual equivalent of laxative, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica had the good grace to start only once Voyager had finished (and will no doubt come up in a discussion of Enterprise, should I ever do one, which I probably will), leaving only the true might of Farscape to challenge it, and even then, that was only in Voyager's later years.

So why is Voyager so unloved? Does it have anything to do with the female captain? It's certainly an intriguing suggestion and bears looking at with the knowledge that a surprising amount of Trek fans, especially in America, are massively right-wing. Surprising given Trek's liberal lefty approach to politics that is, not America's right-wing leanings. You only have to look at the fact that no Trek series has yet done a story that addresses the gay issue. Sure, you had 'The Outcast' on TNG, a dreadful piece of polemic by Jeri Taylor, a writer who plainly had no understanding or empathy for sf, but that shot itself in the foot by casting a woman in the role of Riker's supposedly androgynous love interest. Had they cast a man, it might have meant something. As it was, it was obviously to the entire audience that she was a woman underneath all the make-up so that made it 'safe' because any notions of 'deviant' sexuality were purely associational at best. And DS9 did 'Rejoined' in which Jadzia Dax becomes involved with her former lover, only as they are both Trills (and I've never been able to get over that species name, given that it's the same as a type of bird food), they were in different bodies at the time, one female, one male and now they are both female. The episode does go some way to addressing the whole issue, doing what Trek as the Offical National Metaphor of America does best, disguising the issue so that instead of the stigma they receive being because that if they get reacquianted now they will be a same-sex couple, but rather they will have broken the Trill taboo of getting involved with partners from a past life, although why this should be a taboo, I have no idea, and anyway, it didn't stop Ezri from bonking Worf a few months after Jadzia's death. Or does the taboo only apply to Trills? You might think it should be the other way round. The possible psychological trauma for Worf (for example) would be much greater than for Ezri, or the Dax symbiont because as a joined Trill, she is used to living different lives, while for Worf, it's almost as if there's a lot of his wife in there and he's still in love with Jadzia Dax, while Ezri Dax is an entirely different person, but Ezri getting down and dirty with him might send the wrong signals.


But that's a bit of a digression. We were discussing female captains. Women are psychologically unsuited to command, or so the final episode of the original series claimed back in 1969. And true to form, the network got cold feet about a woman captain (Voyager's main selling point) and we almost had Nigel Havers in command of the Voyager. Doubtless the female role would have been transferred to first office. But what we have in Janeway is something special. Generally, women on TV fall into three main categories: Maiden, mother and crone. Two of Voyager's female cast, Janeway and B'Elanna, don't fall into either of these (at least not at first, a lot of Janeway's mothering instincts come out with regard to Kes, and especially with Seven) and that in and of itself is a huge achievement. Additionally, managing to make Janeway a recognisable woman without falling into the normal trap of writing for a man and then just sticking a pair of comedy breasts on (as often happened to Tasha Yar in the early days of TNG) or making her weak in respect to the men under her command or making her a ball-breaker in the Jane Tennyson mould. Janeway is recognisably a woman in the same way that Sisko is recognisably a man, but roles for the, shall we say 'mature' woman, on TV tend to either the caring mother or the shrewish. Or the slapper. I make no judgements but point you to a certain cast member from 'Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country' who gained a certain amount of subsequent fame in a certain HBO TV show with the words 'city' and 'sex' in the title.

It's a serious achievement, even in the nineties. An something that should be applauded. The producers even had the courage to make Janeway flawed. She does things that Picard would neverhave even considered. In the fifth season opener, she's retreated to her quarters and is brooding. Has been for days. She second-guesses herself. And she's allowed to, because she's alone in the Delta Quadrant. If Picard ever doubted himself, he could just pick up the phone to Starfleet Command and get some advice from the guest admiral of the week. Janeway (a lot like Kirk before her, although you suspect that Kirk would have probably found a way to destroy the Caretaker's array that stranded them in the Delta Quadrant in the first place and get them home, all in the space of fifty minutes - I doubt he would have let any of that 70,000 light years from home shit get in his way) makes choices because she has to and the only people she can really confide in are Tuvok and Chakotay. So, a good captain.

What of the rest of the crew?

It's here we begin to slip up. Chakotay is as wooden as you can actually get without becoming a two by four (although those occasions when he does try, basically those scripts he likes which sadly aren't that plentiful, he can hit his marks with the best of them - I'd like to see him share a screen with Patrick Stewart, either Stewart would blow him out of the water or Beltran would be forced to raise his game and that would be worth paying good money for). It doesn't help that his character is plainly rubbish. It's odd that a series so generally respectful as Star Trek should think it's okay to produce a character who's transparently written as a generic Native American/Mayan/South American Ethnicity Of The Week. His spirituality is a dreadful melting pot of whatever the story needs that week.

Tuvok is essentially Spock Redux. Over the course of seven years you never find out anything about him. Sure, you find out about his wife and his kids (a little bit anyway) and you find out about his experience on the Excelsior and a bit about his prior relationship with Janeway (a relationship that generally gone sidelined and ignored in favour of the romance between Janeway and Chakotay that some of the writers were trying to work in but which was ignored by everyone else). But you never found out about him as a person. What made him tick? It didn't help that he was written as a generic 'man without emotions' most of the time and Tim Russ had to inject whatever personality he could purely by means of gestures and suchlike.

Neelix. The less said about Neelix the better. You'd think that after Quark, the DS9 comic relief who worked so much better as a dramatic character (and, indeed, after introducing the Ferengi themselves onto TNG as the new Big Bad before deciding they worked so much better as comic relief) that they would stop trying to pigeonhole characters before they've had a chance to settle down and find their feet. Ethan Phillips is a fine actor, and many of his performances are exceptional (especially given that he's beneath a mask that looks like the bastard son of a baboon, a leopard and a big bag of pus) unfortunately, most of the episodes where he is the notional star are duds purely because Neelix as a comic character does not work. Think about it: Here is a man whose entire family have been wiped out in a war, who has spent God knows how long wandering about, just about eking out a living by trading. Does this sound like comedy gold to you? Because it certainly doesn't to me. Whereas on DS9 they eventually accepted Quark's role (he still got the comedy stuff, but DS9 was a much grimmer series than Voyager so he got his fair share of heavy stuff to) Neelix would veer wildly about depending on who was writing him, often in the space of a single scene. And whoever had the idea of pairing him up with Naomi Wildman should be shot. Neelix doing caring and paternal is enough to make any puke.

Harry Kim is, like Tuvok, a blank slate really. You can imagine they were running short a character for the regular cast (and it you're being particularly cruel, an ethnic minority) and the notes for Kim simply read 'Ensign - Fresh out of the Academy' because he's not so much a character, more someone to stand there so the other actor in the scene has someone to talk to. Garrett Wang is a competent enough actor (in fact, I would go so far as to say that no regular in Trek, certainly the post TNG iterations, has been a bad actor - it's too high profile a job for that, although some of the guest cast have been absolutely appalling - naming no names but a certain recurring Vulcan engineer springs immediately to mind), but, like Travis in Enterprise, Kim's character seems to have gotten lost down the back of Rick Berman's desk.

Tom Paris and B'Elanna. The great love story of Trek. No, really. I'm not bullshitting you here. Forget about Dax and Worf or whatever it was that Trip and T'Pol had (and the Kira/Odo love story? - you can fuck off right now, the entire beauty of that storyline was that Odo's love was unrequited, once Kira developed feelings back, it lost all its magic - let's face it, how many cases of unrequited love do we have these days? Not enough). Tom and B'Elanna are where it's at. They never did a lot on it, but that's what is so beautiful about it. It happens naturally, from them finding out they fancy each other, to admitting they fancy each other, to dating, all the way through to getting married and having a baby. They fight, sure. But they always make up. And because it's not a constant detail whenever we see them as it sometimes was with Dax and Worf it feels real. The main problem with Tom as a character was that his arc (the made good) was pretty much over and done with by the end of 'Caretaker', leading to odd throwbacks like 'Thirty Days' where Tom The Rebel suddenly resurfaced, seemingly purely for the purposes of shaking things up.

Kes. Hmm. In every Trek series there is a character who, on the surface, has a massive amount of potential but for whatever reason, never pans out. In the original series it was McCoy (despite being the third leading man he was never really given his chance to shine, although there was never any real chance for it, the way TV worked in those days, you had your hero and his sidekicks, Uhura was also someone who you occasionally got tantalisingly glimpses at and deserved far more screen time than she got), in TNG it was Deanna Troi, in DS9 it was Jake (amazingly the only human civilian who's been a regular) and in Enterprise it was Reed who got little more to do than stand around whingeing and making sarcastic comments. On Voyager it was Kes. Initially hamstrung by her relationship with the overprotective Neelix (and I'm not even going to go into the whole potential cradle snatching scenario, just to say that when Kes and Neelix are together, she celebrates her second birthday), the only times when Jennifer Lien got a chance to shine was when she wasn't playing the usual Kes (c.f. 'Before and After' and 'Warlord'). She got stuck in the same rut that Troi had on TNG for a while, popping up to the bridge once an episode or so and making asinine comments. While Troi eventually escaped this (although it took her till Season 6), on Voyager they decided to cut their losses and replaced Kes after Season 3 and replaced her with...

Seven Of Nine. Ah. Can you smell a desperate grab for ratings? Still, if you overlook Jeri Ryan's obvious... attributes and the fact that her uniform seems to consist solely of variously coloured skintight catsuits, Seven is a good character, and for once the writing staf aren't afraid to use that character. Too often in Seasons 1-3, Voyager comes across a planet, some stuff happens then they go on their way (and all too often, it often happened to guest stars - they do a Pon Farr episode, 'Blood Fever' and they hire a guest star to play the Vulcan undergoing the mating urge - how much better would it have been for it to have been Tuvok undergoing it, especially with his wife being 70,000 light years away). No real attempt was made to tie it into the characters, or even the overall arc of the series. Only the od episode, like 'The 37's' was really about the need to get home. With the introduction of Seven, they started generating stories that sprung out of the characters, well, I say characters, but it is really just Seven. It helps that Ryan is a very god actress (you only need to watch 'One', where she spends much of the time on screen alone and manages to hold your interest, or 'Infintie Regress' where she switchies between characters in less than a blink of an eye). The same is true of the Doctor, the other feather in Voyager's cap. Played by Robert Picardo as someone constantly on the verge of smacking someone out, the Doctor is the irascible jewel in Voyager's crown (and, were there any justice in the world, Seven and the Doctor would have ended up involved with each other). Like Harry, the Doctor starts off as a blank slate, but the writers actually do things with the Doctor. He's Voyager's Data substitute (although Data himself was just a Spock substitute, albeit with his goals reversed, while Spock distances himself from his human heritage, Data wants to become more human) and as such is guaranteed all the usual episodes like the 'first love' that Trek has down pat by now.

And maybe that's the problem people had with Voyager. By this point, Trek as a franchise had become very moribound. There were two series running, Voyager was designed to fill the gap as soon as TNG ended, there was a movie at the pictures every two or three years... Everything had become so predictable. While DS9 (like Voyager, a series that took a while to find its feet - in fact, both DS9 and Voyager didn't really find themselves until their third season and didn't produce a definitive season until Season 4, and each with fresh impetus - DS9's war with the Klingons and Voyager introducing Seven of Nine as well as featuring the Borg themselves, not really having been seen on TV since TNG's 'Descent' four years earlier) took its own path and did what it felt like doing (primarily due to Rick Berman leaving it alone and letting Ira Steven Behr and his team get on with it), Voyager was hamstrung by a number of factors that were inherent at the beginning of the series and they didn't take into account the lessons learned from TNG and the growing pains of DS9. That said, TNG didn't find its feet until well into its third year, nor did Enterprise (while back in the sixties, as the original Trek was entering its third series, everything was starting to go horribly wrong, c.f. Spock's Brain).

It's a funny old world. Voyager survived as long as it did simply because there was an expectaton for Star Trek (that and the fact of its placement as the flagship show of Paramount's TV station UPN guaranteed that no matter what ratings it got, it would survive) while Enterprise was crippled by the same expectation. When it comes down to it, Voyager is my least favourite Trek series, have to admit it. It would be Enterprise, but Seasons 3 and 4 of that show are up there with the best of what DS9 has to offer. But when Voyager was good (see Seasons 4 and 5, plus most of Season 7 until they get to that hideous finale) it stood up well against everything else that wasn't Trek. Had it not been Trek, it probably wouldn't have lasted as long as it did, which is a sad indicator of today's televisual climate when perfectly good quality shows aren't given the chances that they deserve, but it would perhaps have bee in Voyager's best interests. Had the show been forced to fight - and I mean really fight, facing a threat of cancellation every year - the producers and staff might have been pushed to do something truly great, rather than occasionally stumbling across it by accident. So, in conclusion, a good series (certainly one that deserves a better reputation than it currently has) but one which, given the odd kick up the arse, could have been a great one. After all, look what the desire to prove themselves did for Behr et al over at DS9. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a wasted opportunity (shows like Firefly or Wonderfalls being cut down in their prime through lack of understanding or empathy, that is a wasted opprtunity) but were it a student it would probably pass, but have a chastising 'could do better'.

Peace out.