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Star Trek: Voyager continues to make us angry this week as we talk about the insulting and maddening “The Chute” and “The Swarm”. Plus! Is The Doctor dead?
Trekabout Episode 260: The Chute/The Swarm
mchan
-I think it’s going to be really interesting to revisit the comments on Janeway’s character in the future. The question about Janeway having some sort of mental disorder is something that’s been raised in the past.
Rewatching these episodes along with the previous episodes of season 3 really makes me wonder what is going on behind the scenes at Jeri Taylor-led Voyager. It’s possible that, like with “The Chute,” they’re burning off old episode ideas that refused to die (this seems to happen a lot in the Trek writers’ rooms), but episodes like this really make me feel that, whether for lack of ability or possible imagined misogynistic rebellion Taylor could not run the room this season. It’s probably one of the only ways that I can reconcile the bizarre characterization of Janeway with Taylor’s Janeway-centric novel Mosaic (which, you know, patron special), which is incredibly well-received for its portrayal of the character and was plugged for being the definitive take on the character written by the woman who created her.
But yeah, Richard, no one blames you for wanting to turn off the show here. It never quite redeems itself, but it tries a combination of retcon and repress.
Eric Brasure
-Yeah, I think if you look at season 7 of TNG, it also had some of the same problems as this season of Voyager. I think Taylor can write good Trek but for whatever reason she just had no direction for the show so it just sort of meandered.
Which makes me think that it’s kind of amazing that it’s Braga and Berman that get all the blame and not Taylor, since we live in a deeply misogynistic culture.
mchan
-I mean my interpretation of Voyager as a series is that the writers in general allowed the teleological nature of the show to become and at times supersede the philosophical direction of the show. It was poorly executed even then, but I think that you’re right to point out as you often do to Richard that Voyager often does not feel like more than the sum of its parts. But it’s hard not to feel that Voyager doesn’t have anything to say, and it’s not because it’s flailing to find something to say: it’s that the writers have consciously chosen to not think about what the show could be saying. I think, keeping in line with the theme of this episode, that it’s that laziness that is really insulting about the show by this point. I think that in many ways while time has not been kind of Voyager in the fan community, some of the broader points of the show (Janeway as feminist icon, for example) seem to have succeeded in spite of the show. Imagine what the writers could have done if whatever obstacles that were preventing them from being more careful about the show were not in place.
As to your point about misogyny, Eric, I definitely think that’s curious. My hunch is that a lot of the behind the scenes production crankiness about Voyager and Trek in general doesn’t spill out into the general public until Braga takes over Voyager, which may make him inadvertent patsy. But who knows…