The Mutual Respect Boat

Star Trek Voyager is the fourth installment in the Star Trek legacy and deserves more success than it has enjoyed. The series boasts the franchise's most romantic theme and its sharpest ship. Trek's traditionally male audience is treated to three original female leads and the crew is journeying through a lush and uncharted region of the galaxy.

Logically, Voyager should be compelling and different but for all the good choices the series' writers have made, they consistently avoid the dynamic. They prefer stories to plot, narrative to intrigue. The characters are fine variations on a theme rather than bold contrasts. Janeway is isolated, B'Elanna Torres is angry and Seven of Nine is very isolated and very angry. Tuvok is detached while the Doctor is detached, fussy, isolated and sometimes angry as well. Paris and Kim are the disenfranchised frat boys Wesley Crusher probably grew up to be. Chakotay is the sex symbol female fans would wish on Janeway but again the writers hold back, directing him instead to meditate.

The crew all talk too much. No stone is left unscanned for traces of nucleogenic particles. We could do with more action and a little more amore, even if the days when a Captain could drop-kick the bad aliens and kiss the pretty ones are well past.

Maybe the writers are confounded by the Trek mythology and the nit-picking fan sites. Maybe their work is being spoiled by TV's many cooks who change the flowers in Janeway's cabin and make teenage passengers appear and disappear from week to week.

Season six of Voyager is making a better start. In the second half of 'Equinox' Janeway finally popped a hatch and tried to hunt down and kill another Federation ship. She had no real reason to do it but at least she was doing something.

This week Seven bumps into some old friends in a grim Borg flashback. The suspenseful story includes a decent reason for Naomi Wildman even if the moral is dispensed with too quickly.

And B'Elanna confronts her Klingon self in the 'Barge of the Dead', a good idea that opens and closes on the right note. The following week the Doctor takes command of the ship for an extremely funny second run at 'The Corbomite Manoeuvre'.

And visually the series is a delight. The crew quarters look better than the apartments on Coruscant. There are probably paper wrappers around the toilet seats and mini-bars loaded with Saurian brandy.

Gene Roddenberry wrote the first draft of Star Trek in 1963 using a manual typewriter and the high-minded premise that humanity would evolve into a better species in order to reach the stars. Voyager is true to that vision. Instead of a bang or a whimper the Trek universe is ending with a luxury, mood-lit cruise.

-- NZ Herald, 2001