lol fuck rick berman forever

[TheFeniX]

I think everyone's wrong. There was a central antagonist to the show from beginning to end: Rick Berman XD

Ha! On that note, is there anything from Berman about Voyager? All I could find was this old article. I figure he'd just dump the blame on Paramount while thinking he was the one sane man holding Trek back from the brink of destruction. I still don't get Spinner's claim of "producing a show is haaaaard, so cut Berman some slack." A job being difficult is no excuse for producing a crappy product.

High use of Holodeck on Voyager was somewhat due to writers being "anxious" to use again device after DS9, where Quark’s holosuites were "whorehouses" with "nasty purposes"

Bad grammar aside, that explains a lot really. I swear they fucking lived in that thing on Voyager.

[Baffalo]

Gene Roddenberry hired Berman partially because he liked that Berman had never seen any Star Trek before

This explains so much

Roddenberry’s 24th century vision with no conflict between core characters "hardest rule for writing staff"

Of course it's difficult, because no crew is going to work together seamlessly without being almost Borg-like themselves. Drama between the characters adds tension and makes the show more interesting, even if it's just a difference of opinions or a rise in tensions boiling over.

Ending TNG after 7 years was "financial’ due to increasing costs and that Paramount motion picture headSherry Lansing wanted a Next Generation movie

That and it was getting stale. But then you go and release Generations. It's probably good it ended where it did.

Co-creator Michael Piller suggested idea of black Captain, resulting casting of Avery Brooks

Thank God it wasn't just a token black guy for political correctness, and instead we got The Sisko.

Without TNG the "could go back to a ship" but wanted woman captain and new setting (Delta quadrant) to "do something we hadn’t done yet"

What, rape Star Trek for all you could?

Berman on character of Kes "it just didn’t work, her character became superfluous" so she was written out

AND YOU KEPT NEELIX YOU FUCKING IDIOT!?!

Bringing on Jeri Ryan as 7 of 9 in response to studio concern about ratings slippage and requirement to "spice things up"

Is that producer talk for "Bring in someone with big tits"?

Impetus for Enterprise again came from studio as Voyager was ending, and Berman "begged them to let it have a few years rest"

Even you knew this was going to be a shitty venture, didn't you?

Berman disagrees with fans who felt he and co-creator Brannon Braga ignored Star Trek canon and continuity, noting "we absolutely didn’t, we tried to pay great attention to it"

So that you could fuck it up just that extra bit, huh?

Scott Bakula brought in by studio, but they were "blown away" by him as he was "perfect fit" for Archer, and he was "just a mensch"

mensch - Means a person of great honor and integrity. Am I the only one who sees the exact opposite out of Archer?

[Eternal_Freedom]

quote="Rick Berman"]
Co-creator Michael Piller suggested idea of black Captain, resulting casting of Avery Brooks

Thank God it wasn't just a token black guy for political correctness, and instead we got The Sisko.[/quote]

I find it entertaining how this was a new idea when you had Commodore Stone from TOS, Captain Tyrell from TWoK, and Admiral Cartwright from STIV and STVI.

[Eternal_Freedom]

True.

[CaptainChewbacca]

There's never been a lack of black officers in higher ranks in Starfleet. As I recall in a TNG season 1 episode (the one with the headcrabs) it was a black woman who held the distinction of being the fastest rise to Captain in the history of Starfleet.

[Patrick Degan]

There's never been a lack of black officers in higher ranks in Starfleet. As I recall in a TNG season 1 episode (the one with the headcrabs) it was a black woman who held the distinction of being the fastest rise to Captain in the history of Starfleet.

Or you need only look to The Search For Spock: Adm. Harold Morrow, COMSF.

[aussiemuscle308]

Really that was the biggest problem with Voyager; they get into a scrap, stuff blows up and the ship takes damage; by next week the ship is spotless,

they should've run it like SGU "ok, we got some more fuel, now, where to do we get some more fuel"

DS9 was ok apart from the Vic Fontane heavy episodes, lucky for a fast forward button...

[Minischoles]

I think what would have helped Voyager a lot more isn't actually the presence of a strong central villain but rather have their situation and circumstances be the 'antagonist'.

Stuff like 'oh shit we're about to enter a battle, we better be careful with our photon torpedoes we can't replace them when they're gone'. Or 'how many shuttles do we have left?' etc.

Really that was the biggest problem with Voyager; they get into a scrap, stuff blows up and the ship takes damage; by next week the ship is spotless, sometimes even by the end of the episode. It should have been more like how in BSG the Galactica started showing signs of damage as the show went on that just couldn't be repaired without a drydock. Voyager should have really pushed that whole 'how are we going to survive and get resupplied/repaired this week?' motif. Why would you have holodeck episodes for example? When power consumption was such a huge issue early on, they completely disregarded it and said 'ok lets have a holodeck episode now'. Why would Voyager even have a holodeck? Why would the Maquis agree to wear starfleet uniforms?

That is actually one of the few things I liked about Enterprise. I think it was during the Xindi arc, the ship is off trying to stop this superweapon from destroying Earth and they get into a fight and they just get trashed. Next episode begins with the Enterprise still trashed and Trip making repairs as best he can but their warp core is still screwed. You actually get a situation where Archer is forced to compromise on his morals and steal a warp core from another ship and leave them stranded there with sublight in order to complete his mission.

[JME2]

Yeah, "Damage" was one of the best episodes of Season 3.

[PREDATOR490]

Really that was the biggest problem with Voyager; they get into a scrap, stuff blows up and the ship takes damage; by next week the ship is spotless,

they should've run it like SGU "ok, we got some more fuel, now, where to do we get some more fuel"

DS9 was ok apart from the Vic Fontane heavy episodes, lucky for a fast forward button...

Running it like SGU would hardly be a good idea since that series got shit canned and the pacing was awful.

Year of Hell managed to do it rather well and they could easily have made all of Season 3 - 4 a LITERAL year of hell running through Borg space between the giants of S8472 and the Collective hammering each other.

Instead they decide to have an epic confrontation that supposedly threatens the entire galaxy... resolved when S8472 get bitch slapped.

Enterprise Damage was rather good... although the obvious follow up to that episode would have been going back to help the folks they stole from after the crisis was over.

Personnally, I would have loved to see Voyager start all pristine and 'new' then by Endgame come out looking worn with stuff bolted on. For added emphasis the fleet that meets Voyager can have a stock Intrepid class to compare.

This is one aspect that nBSG managed to perform wonderfully with the battle scars becoming visible on the Galactica as time went on to the point she eventually collapsed.

The crap that occured when they tried to destroy the Defiant in First Contact was more than enough to demonstrate the stupidity at the helm. On the one hand the Defiant was meant to fight the Borg and it would make sense for her to go down against them but it is massively cheap the way they were going to do it.

However, the Defiant has always been my favourite ship in Star Trek even more so than any of the big E's.

[Stark]

Destroyed in heroic but futile attemp to save world = cheap?

[PREDATOR490]

Destroyed in heroic but futile attemp to save world = cheap?

Deja Vu

Seems apparant Berman didnt give a shit about DS9 and nowhere near the desire to make good stories like the DS9 crew so his use of the Defiant as nothing more than a vehicle to get Worf into the movie then throw it away is cheap. Fucking over DS9 by blitzing the Defiant for a battle that isnt even the focus of the movie is exceptionally cheap and causes pointless fallout for DS9 to clean up so the uninformed masses can watch an unknown ship they dont care about get wasted because Worf HAS to give the standard Klingon sterotype bullshit.

[FedRebel]

I doubt it would have been possible to have Voyager show ongoing damage. It'd mean the cost would skyrocket, since you can't use stock footage as well as the work involved in making it happen.

They could've had a "stock" CG model and a series of damage textures for it, at the very least the ship would look quite "weathered" at the end of the series run.

Hero models would be reserved for occasions where detail is imperative (borg upgrades, batmobile armor, etc.)

[Uraniun235]

Voyager didn't switch to CGI until some time midway through the show.

And I'm not arguing that your idea is implausible or unworthy, but it would still have a cost attached. Especially at that time, simply re-rendering the scene would still impose an additional cost, let alone creating new textures every other episode.

[Stofsk]

U I thought Voyager switched to CGI fairly early on. Do you know when the switch took place? Besides, the 'Year of Hell' idea would be really interesting if it had been a season-long arc.

[Uraniun235]

I don't know when the switchover was done. I might be thinking of DS9. I do know that Voyager was models at the beginning.

"Year of Hell" should really have been the whole series.

[Stofsk]

It was, but not the way they intended

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

"Year of Hell" should really have been the whole series.

They tried that with the first season of sgu and grognard fans whined like motherfuckers to try to make it more like Generic Stargate Spin-Off X. They succeeded. And the show was cancelled.

NOBODY IS INNOCENT.

[Cesario]

I regret nothing about SGU being canceled. Nothing.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret. SGU was not about a sci-fi crew stranded far from home forced to improvise, innovate, and scrounge in a resource-poor environment.

SGU was about petty interpersonal drama involving characters more suited to the slasher genre, who just happened to be aboard an alien space ship.

The atrocious pacing, the deliberate breaks from continuity, and the refusal to provide the audience any reason to care about this ship, its crew, or its mission is what doomed SGU.

The writers actively telling people who wanted an actual Stargate show to fuck off and quit watching it if they didn't like it, then whinging when the audience took their advice and stopped watching it leaves me with absolutely zero sympathy for them.

Voyager shot more in the Year of Hell standard would have had a few vital elements that SGU lacked:

1) Direction. We know from day 1 what the hell the goal is, and can measure progress towards acheaving it.

2) Likeable characters. Not everyone on Voyager was Nelix. The best of the people on SGU make me miss Nelix.

3) Continuity. It wasn't until Enterprise that they started deliberately jetosoning continuity in the interests of not wanting to bother with it. As such, it was clearly set in the familiar Star Trek universe. SGU was not set in the familiar Stargate universe.

SGU failed on its own merrits, and if it weren't shamelessly hiding behind the name recognition of the Stargate franchise, it wouldn't have been given as much time as it was before people waked away in disgust.

[Skylon]

Voyager didn't switch to CGI until some time midway through the show.

And I'm not arguing that your idea is implausible or unworthy, but it would still have a cost attached. Especially at that time, simply re-rendering the scene would still impose an additional cost, let alone creating new textures every other episode.

Or you could slowly trash the sets over the course of the show (steadily dirty them up, maybe don't repair one of the useless consoles when it blows up).

There are other ways to convey the ship getting worn down.

More than damage though, simply dialogue and the crew's daily activity would have been enough to improve the show's tone. As noted here, have them actually give a damn about the shuttles and torpedoes, and barely (if ever) use the replicators and holodeck.

[Uraniun235]

"Year of Hell" should really have been the whole series.

They tried that with the first season of sgu and grognard fans whined like motherfuckers to try to make it more like Generic Stargate Spin-Off X. They succeeded. And the show was cancelled.

NOBODY IS INNOCENT.

There's no way a pack of internet nerds constitutes a substantial fraction of the show's viewership, unless the show was already so pathetically low-rated as to be doomed anyway. Either the producers fucked up by actually listening to buttangry internet nerds, or the producers had already fucked up and were going to fail at running a successful show with or without the input of the internet.

[Baffalo]

Voyager had its flaws, but I still watch it. I may not like each episode, but there are some that are definitely worthy of the name Star Trek. Every series has its flaws, TOS included, but we tend to overlook some in favor of others. However, Enterprise is a major problem in that they tried to go back and get the feel of Star Trek without realizing a few major problems that could've been fixed fairly early on.

An example would be the types of computers we saw on the original Enterprise. They were limited, as only the 60's could be, because computers were very limited. A single panel on the NX-01 has more computational power than everything they showed in TOS. If they'd done something to actually appear even more primitive than the TOS Enterprise, it would've gone a long way to cement their status as a prequel. Have actual guns instead of phasers (or whatever they called them), mass drivers and lasers instead of torpedoes and pulse cannons. That's part of what bugged me. DS9 felt more in keeping with the era than Enterprise because they weren't always given nice, pretty and clean solutions.

I know I'm just bitching about the same shit but Berman's history of fucking things up starts with TNG and ends with ENT. DS9 was a fluke because he didn't have full control, but when he did we saw what happened. Personally, I'm glad Paramount ended Berman's reign as king of Star Trek, because he just made it worse and worse.

[ThomasP]

If they'd made Enterprise as a real prequel you'd just have nerds whining about how it's not 'real star trek'. Nerds say they want different shit but the reality is it won't fly on TV, because your audience is unimaginative and can't handle the ambiguous or unfamiliar.

SGU was a fresh take on that particular universe which had some clear flaws, but also a lot of potential. Try that move with a Star Trek show and you've got once canceled show and a lot of internet whining.

[Stofsk]

SGU had horrible characterisation and utterly boring plotting; that's what doomed it. I came into it as a neutral viewer and left after the fifth or sixth episode I think. It may have had potential but frankly if by a certain point you haven't shown me SOMETHING that's good why would I stick around week after week?

A 'fresh take' in writing is held up to be an elusive gold standard, but it's pretty worthless really - mostly it's just a gimmick, or some kind of attribute in the setting that sets it apart from any antecedents. Say, DS9 is a Star Trek show set on a space station. Voyager is a Star Trek show where they're trying to return home, not go far from it like in TOS and TNG. Both of these shows had bad flaws but in various ways, but at least DS9 tried to make use of its gimmick by calling attention to it in novel ways. Yet even then they still caved in and got themselves a starship so that they could go away and have adventures on alien worlds. As for Voyager? Its gimmick or fresh take didn't last the end of the premiere episode before they abandoned everything and went 'well let's just treat this show as TNG mk.2, without any of the things that made TNG work, like the characters we grew to love'. Half the crew is supposed to be rebels yet they caved by the end of the pilot and had them all dress up in Starfleet uniforms with provisional Starfleet ranks. The ship is supposed to be decades away from getting home and thus things like repairing and refueling the ship are going to be a Big Deal, yet by several episodes into it they're already doing a holodeck episode. That show's a remarkable contempt for the audience.

Enterprise's biggest draw was in showing us how it all started, how the Federation and Starfleet were like in their formative years. But what's important in a show like that is not violating previously established continuity. Because if you do it shows that the writers don't respect the stories that make up the foundation on which they're working on, and if they don't respect it why the fuck would an audience member invest their time and energy watching a show like that? I do not agree that the problem is the audience in general is unimaginative or can't handle the unfamiliar. TNG season 1 was pretty bad television all told, but people accepted it because it both did something fresh and was unfamiliar to the standard set before it, but it also wasn't creatively or imaginatively bankrupt like the spinoffs were. Sure many of the episodes in TNG's first season sucked, and so did the ones in the second season, but enough of them were good and had a lot of effort put into them to make them good. And it still had that sense of 'while we have unfamiliar faces in the cast, and an unfamiliar looking ship, they are still out there doing very familiar things'.

[TheFeniX]

Both of these shows had bad flaws but in various ways, but at least DS9 tried to make use of its gimmick by calling attention to it in novel ways. Yet even then they still caved in and got themselves a starship so that they could go away and have adventures on alien worlds.

I don't really think the Defiant was them "caving" so much as giving the show a more formidable mobile platform, although I do recall an actor saying something to that effect. To be honest, I was getting fucking tired of away missions into the Gamma Quadrant (basically Space Australia, where everything there wants to kill them) being done in Runabouts.

They never really bothered to "call attention" to their gimmick using the space station. DS9 was not only the setting, but also a core focus of the show throughout the first 5 seasons. It's used in too many forms for it to be considered a gimmick. Overarching story-lines concern the competing technologies of the station being held together with O'Brien duct-tape, showing how characters view it as a prison or backward step in their lives to it becoming their home, and as a hub for one of the most important locations in the Alpha Quadrant. And at least we see some changes in the station over time. It goes from the risk of destruction by 3 Galor ships to taking on an entire Klignon fleet over the course of a few years.

Even when the Federation gets kicked off the station, we still spend a rather large amount of screen time looking at how the station operates under Cardassian Occupation 2.0.

I have plans to plod through Voyager again once I've finished up DS9 on Netflix, so maybe my tune will change: but there are so few DS9 episodes that don't advance some plot or character development as the show goes on. Now, not all of them are good (just most of them), but that's beside the point. You can't just drop in new characters or set-pieces, change a few names, and start re-filming those episodes as "Sci-Fi series X." But the more I watched Voyager, the more I realized that with the combination of a generic ship, cardboard characters, and recycled plots: you could rip over half the episodes off the show, delete "Star Trek," and you could make another Sci-Fi series easy.

I look at an episode like "Waltz" and I see how far DS9 could go without any of it's gimmicks: just two actors playing out their arcs in some cave, leading to Dukat actually saving Sisko's life in the end showing how badly he either wants Sisko's respect and/or has decided he wants Sisko alive when he implements his master-stroke. I just cringe to think how bad the Voyager team would have fucked an episode like that up. That's not true: Voyager didn't even have two characters, much less an antagonist, with that kind of workable dynamic. The best... for lack of a better term... I can think of is Neelix trying to strangle Tom on an away mission because he's a psychotic asshole who views Kess as his personal property.