i got a preowned copy of pokemon sapphire, so i snooped around in the game a little bit, and the only pokemon they had left was a magikarp with this letter attached to it:
Making your characters insanely OP is good for your soul sometimes. Just juice em up. Just crank the dial. Make them absolutely batshit terrifyingly good at what they do
not to be a walking fucking stereotype here but just stood over the stove eating boiled potatoes with slabs of butter just shovelling them into into mouth with my fingers and I felt so connected to my bog dwelling peasant ancestors in that moment like I absolutely get it now
There is a cynicism about [Star Trek: Voyager] that truly troubles me. We loved DEEP SPACE NINE. We loved the show. We loved all the characters. There are actors that always give you trouble, and there are always times when the producers and actors are sometimes at each other, because, ‘You don’t understand my character.’ ‘No, you don’t understand the character I am writing.’ That’s fair game. On VOYAGER, there are characters they have given up on. They will just say that to you, flat out. I started asking questions about B’Elanna, who she is. I was saying, ‘I’m having a little trouble watching episodes and getting a handle on her, and what she is about.’ The response was, ‘We don’t have an idea. The past doesn’t matter. Just do whatever you want.’ What are you talking about? How can you give up on your own show? How do you give up on your characters? There is such a cynicism about the show within the people that do the show. I’m not just talking about the writing staff. It permeates the production.
I’d like to add that in the time since this interview Moore has considerably softened his opinion on the Voyager production, but I still think what he says here is relevant as someone who had the experience of being in both writing rooms.
Voyager is amazing because of the cast and their acting. The writers I just feel like they hated the show. Like they wanted to do just so they could say look we tried a female captain look how progressive we are but then they actually had to put the work in and didn’t bother.
Ron Moore said that he thought the VOY cast was the best of all the Treks. Great chemistry, right from the start. But they didn’t do anything with them. Writers knew that if you were pitching a story to DS9, you had to explain how it would affect the characters. With VOY, they just didn’t care about that. They wanted something high concept.
I can kind of understand it. DS9 was seen as a failure back then. Because its ratings were so low compared to TNG’s. The prime directive for VOY was to be “not like DS9.” And UPN desperately wanted male viewers under age 25. Braga decided that lots of action and Seven in a painted-on catsuit was the solution. (It wasn’t. VOY’s ratings continued to fall steadily, though the writers and UPN tried to claim otherwise.)
And yes, the writers were pretty open in their disdain for some of the characters. They said they left Harry Kim out of the holodeck games in “The Killing Game” because they thought he was “boring.” (And were surprised at how interesting he was when the episode ran short and they were forced to write some extra scenes for him.) According to Ron Moore, they didn’t like Tom/B’Elanna; they compared it to Neelix/Kes. (So why did they keep the relationship, when Robbie McNeill was pleading for them to end it? Likely because by the rules of ‘90s TV, Tom having a girlfriend/wife allowed him to hang out with Harry all the time without looking too gay. Just like Bashir/O’Brien and Keiko.)
VOY was very daring in its casting for the time…and that may be one reason why the characterization and relationships ended up lacking. There was a woman in command, and 4 out of 9 regulars were POC. I think that’s more than any Trek until PIC. This at a time when La Raza and the NAACP were threatening boycotts because non-whites were so under-represented on screen.
But they ended up using mostly the white characters. Perhaps because the writers were mostly white guys, and they just weren’t very good at writing for other demographics. They tended to fall into stereotypes. Harry Kim ended up a nerd, when he wasn’t at first. B’Elanna was a Fiery Latina, only we’re supposed to blame it on her Klingon half. And don’t even get me started on Chakotay.
Plus, race and gender ended up something of a minefield. Janeway and Tuvok were supposed to be like Kirk and Spock, but a relationship that close between a man and a woman would be seen as romantic, and they ended up shying away from it. Black man/white woman was (and still is, kinda) the third rail. Kate Mulgrew ended up nixing Janeway/Chakotay, because she felt Janeway had to set an example, and having a relationship with a subordinate was unacceptable. Tuvok and Chakotay should have been the Spock and McCoy of Voyager, but that kind of conflict might have been seen as sexual jealousy over Janeway.
It might not be all on the writers. Studios at the time ran focus groups, and found that white viewers would change the channel if they saw too many brown faces on their screens. So maybe some of it came from the studio. Whatever the reason, the non-white characters ended up shoved in the background, and I think that really hurt the show.
