Hated Voyager, Glad It's Over (Still Watched It)
by Brian McGinty

There have been teraquads of words written about the final adventure of Captain Safeway and her crew of ill-defined stereotypes. While opinions on Star Trek: Voyager have split predictably along strict party lines, it is unfair to blame a show for the technical limitations of television itself. Technical limitations? This is an electronics column, after all, you didn't think I would skip over the tech details?

"How Could She Not See That Guy? Doesn't She Have Any Peripheral Vision?"

People can perceive objects throughout about a 190 degree field of view. (You can see more than 180 degrees because your eyes bulge out a little). A TV camera sees a lot less, about 40 degrees. This image then appears on a TV in your living room that covers perhaps 5 degrees of your field of view. This leads to many contrived shortcuts to get things on the screen that are big enough to see.

Consider the "two-shot", or a shot with two faces on the screen at once. Think about all the contrived poses you've seen: one character standing directly behind another, or two people standing unnaturally close together, or people talking with their lips just two inches apart. People have a "body space" of about 18 inches around them, and they begin to feel uncomfortable if anyone encroaches on that. It is just hard to preserve this space on TV. Heterosexual men never get nose-to-nose unless they are fighting, or are in a ritual form of fighting such as a baseball manager and umpire arguing.

This problem translates to spaceships as well; there was a comical scene in Starship Troopers where the invasion fleet was so close together they actually began to bump in to each other. I also question the tactical advantage of running up to within five feet of a bug to machine gun it to death. Already on the modern battlefield your doom arrives from over the horizon or a plane flying invisibly high up, so you have to wonder why in Independence Day they ignored the standoff capabilities of the B2 bomber in order to fly right up to the spaceship in order to then fire the missile? It will just be a given that battles in the Star Trek universe happen at such close quarters that they should have just admitted defeat and fixed bayonets to the ships.

Don't Be Thrifty, Throw on a 750

A 75- watt light bulb, that is. Cameras take a lot of light and the lights are hot. Costumes are hot, sweaty, time-consuming and expensive. (Expensive because they stop looking new pretty fast--next time you're at a theme park take a close look at the frayed edges and hanging threads on a costumed character). Star Trek took the path of least resistance and the aliens just aren't very alien. Nearly all alien make-up consisted of a piece of plastic glued to the bridge of the nose or forehead. There are exceptions of course, they spent a little extra and bought wigs for the Kazons. The alien devolution reached its nadir with Naomi Wildmon, an entirely normal looking little girl with three upturned fishhooks glued to her forehead. I could never see her on-screen without wondering about the painful perinatal issues involved.

Production is just plain expensive, and this is reflected in the scripts. My dream script would be all space battles, all the time. It's never going to happen, as long as Paramount is running things. Many of the most shopworn plot devices are reflected in the expense hiring extra actors (not another time-travel episode), or in building extra sets (not another holodeck story set in, oh, 1930's Chicago, or whatever back lot happens to be available). My favorite example comes form Deep Space Nine ("to boldly sit where no one has sat before"), where they travel to an identical but abandoned space station. It's a little difficult to explore the boundless reaches of space when the show itself is set-bound.

Stereotypes and Deus ex Ante

Scene: A sitcom bar. Star says something. A drunk at the bar interjects something stupid, and the star makes a funny rejoinder. Plot moves on.

What did not happen was thirty seconds of exposition explaining why the drunk was at the bar, or how he came to be a drunk. Screen time is very valuable (imagine the millions of index fingers poised over the remote). There is no time to flesh out minor characters, so all the visual cues must be picked up in a second or two. Episodic television is a vast wasteland of stereotypes, recycled ad nauseam. Perhaps Voyager did run into a race of evil aliens that looked as cute as cocker spaniel puppies, but I must have missed that episode. Gene Roddenberry did try to place a woman commander on the Enterprise but was over-ruled by the studio. The silly controversy even lasted until the casting of Voyager: A woman captain? A black Vulcan? Unfortunately, Hollywood has lagged behind society in this regard. Could any of those studio heads have ever imagined that Nurse Chapel would end up running the franchise?

Not only must all good thing come to an end, all episodes must return to their beginning. It's called deus ex ante, which loosely translated means "God sets everything as it was before". All episodes must re-set the pieces so next weeks episode can begin again. Unless an actor leaves the series, in which case it is introduced as "Tonight, on a very special...". The Star Trek universe is limited by this restriction more than most. For example, in an episode of Next Generation they discover a way to use the transporter to grant eternal youth. Instead of even minor interest in this innovation, it is never referred to again. Yes, Voyager repaired extensive battle damage every week and found a mail-order source for its limitless supply of photon torpedo's.

Star Trek: Voyager was a terrible show. For shows on the six major networks, Voyage to the Bottom of the Ratings usually ranked sixth of six (The Drew Carey Show usually won the time slot). Yet I'm going to miss it, and for the new series starting this fall I hope...I just hope.

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