December Meme: Star Trek, er, Voyager

[quarter_to_five]

December meme - favorite parts of Star Trek:

I'm not sure about this one either. I've seen a lot of Star Trek, and yet there's a lot of Star Trek i've missed (All the movies, TOS) or seen in bits and pieces in rather random orders. (TNG, Enterprise, yes, I know we don't talk about Enterprise but I did see a bunch of it.)

Truth be told, while I love DS9 and think it's definitely probably the strongest Trek overall, "my" Star Trek will always be Voyager. I know, I know, and in retrospect I can see a lot of the problems with it (and I'll probably never rewatch, because that will be sad) but I watched it religiously when I was, like, 9 years old or something and it has my heart.

First of all, it had women in it. It had Captain Janeway who was acerbic and mild mannered and in charge, and it had Seven of Nine, and it had B'Elanna, who was clearly the coolest person in the entire universe. (And I was embaressingly shippy about her and Paris. I was 9, yes?) Chicks on spaceships, running the spaceships, far, far away, was pretty much everything I needed from life at that point. (Probably because I had also discovered Robert Heinlein by then.) And there was the Doctor (and to a lesser extent, Seven of Nine) which nicely fed my "People who are not quite people try to learn how to be people," thing.

I also just liked the idea of the journey and the fact they had no idea where they were and were trying to claw their way through this...distance. There was something exciting and compelling about that, in the same way I always find untangling some vast and ever growing logistical catastrophe delightful, but don't care in the slightest about letting it build up in the first place. (When I play tetris, I first make a mess almost to the top, and then spend the game trying to battle it down. This makes more sense with 3D tetris where you also block your view of the bottom and so don't know what's coming. I can't for the life of me see the point of just making and destroying layer after neat layer. This may explain much about my life, now that I think of it.)

(And I love DS9 for all the usual reasons - Kira and Garak and Bashir, and the moral and political complexity and the atmosphere and the plot arcs and the worldbuilding and everything, but, eh, that's easy.)


Snow: still blanketing the city. Uni: not happening tomorrow either.

Comments

[frayadjacent]

Voyager was my first Star Trek love. I'll never forget when I watched the scene -- I think it might have been the pilot, or some early episode -- where Janeway and B'ellana have some epic brainstorm where they figure out the solution to some black-hole-event-horizon problem or other. I'd never seen two women interact like that on screen before. I was totally entranced.

[quarter_to_five]

Yes! They could be really, really cool and competent, but still have their flaws and issues, I guess. I mean, B'Ellana's 'too angry and unmanageable but still an auteur we can't do without so lets put her in charge' thing was just not anything I had ever seen a woman be before. And Janeway had a mentoring relationship both with her and with Seven.

[wendelah1]

I've seen everything Star Trek, except the latest movie. They lost me with that one. It doesn't even sound like Star Trek anymore. I also love Deep Space Nine best. Maybe it's easy to love now but I don't think it was very popular back when it was first televised.

But Voyager is wonderful, too, and I was not nine years old when I was watching it devotedly, back in the nineties, along with my son and my husband. I love Captain Janeway, the Doctor, and Seven of Nine, too. You might have outgrown it, but it might hold up better than you think.

[quarter_to_five]

I think I saw the first re-boot movie, and it was so tedious that it lost me. It didn't function as a regular action movie and it didn't function as Trek. So what was the point, really? I didn't even try the last one.

I did rewatch a few Voyager episodes a few years ago, and they felt clunky (compared to DS9, which holds up much better) so i'm hesitant to go back. I think you're right that DS9 is much more lovable today - it's become, fairly enough, the cool Trek, whereas Voyager, with it's very Trekkish insistence on moral questions, slight cheesiness and can-do spirit has been relegated to the dork pile. Which might also be fair, but i'm pretty happy to watch ST and proudly wear my dork hat sometimes.

[thisbluespirit]

Aw. :-)

Voyager is my favourite, too, but that has a lot to do with me being not-really a ST fan. (I mean, I like it whenever I watch it, but that's not quite the same thing.) Voyager had all the things that the odd episodes of others didn't seem to have - being stranded well away from the Federation, an amazing female captain, a more natural sense of humour, and I fell in love with it a bit (mostly Janeway). And I wasn't nine, heh.

Tom and B'Elanna are great, though - just because they're that rare thing on TV where a couple get together gradually and naturally, have rows, work through them together and all that. TV is often so bad at that.

Mind, I haven't perhaps seen enough of the others to maybe compare enough - but now I shall try, which I wouldn't have done before Voyager caught me and taught me how to Star Trek.

[quarter_to_five]

I'm not sure i'm a coherent ST fan either. I'm not terribly fannish about any of it, but i'm just really glad it exists and is such a significant touchstone in our collective sci-fi consciousness. It's far, far from the best or the smartest or the most interesting things the genre has to offer, but it sets a certain tone that a lot of things are reacting to and have been for a while.