I thought you were going to talk about the wild swings in characterization, the ratings-chasing premises, and the continual reset button mashing. The kind of minor plot hole/contrivances used to move the story along that you’re talking about never bothered me all that much. I feel like they’ve always been there to a degree, but you’re probably right, those were probably worse in Voyager, too.

It had some good moments and wonderful character dynamics when the writers managed to stay halfway consistent about it, but the franchise definitely showed a downward trajectory with Voyager and Enterprise.

All good points about sci fi writing.

I think part of it can be explained by the mental state of the crew due to being lost and alone with zero support in unfamilliar territory. They are all taking extra risk, desperate to find a way home.

Half of all Trek episodes go up in smoke if the given ship had security cameras. Trek sometimes ages poorly when modern technology unexpectedly leaps ahead of the show, but in this case they were already behind the times. i guess you could argue that the federation embraces radical privacy or something? but it’s a stretch, and doubly so on a ship with a large contingent of crewmembers who are defectors or never joined up to begin with. maybe they’re just too tired from immaculately refitting the ship every week

It’s been there since TOS.

It isn’t lazy writing, it’s the necessity of long term writing for a series.

If you take the tos concept of “wagon train in space” as the starting point, if you want to maintain a multiple season show, you have to explore every idea you can come up with. You discard the ones that don’t fit the vibe, or you tear them apart until they do. But you have a deadline, budgets, and an ever-critical audience.

So, you get episodes like the one (s3e8 TOS) being rewatched in that community. A zero stakes illness, some hand wavy tech, and a single episode romance that amounts to a pile of meh. They can’t all be winners, and Voyager had and extra limitation in that it was expected to do a roughly TOS journey, with TNG baggage, and still manage to not retread plots too obviously.

It isn’t lazy, and I’d argue that it isn’t bad writing either, as Voyager usually managed to keep characterization on point and didn’t fuck up with major contradictions often.

In universe, you had people far from home, unsure if they’d ever get back, surrounded by strangers and emitted enemies. So the crew slipped a lot. It fits well enough as a head canon that only the really egregiously bad stuff can’t maintain immersion.

But it’s the nature of series writing. You always run into a “what the fuck do we do this week?” wall. It’s really rare for a show to have a long enough commitment that there’s real planning involved the way Babylon 5 worked out. Where you can tell the big story and fill in little bits in episodes rather than having to shove little bits of big story into one-off episodes.

I’ve done some amateur grade serial writing. If you don’t start off with the big picture in place, every chapter is a wrestling match between the idea you’ve got now and how it fits in the long term. It’s fucking brutal sometimes. I’m struggling with one now that’s likely to end up with the same level of “really? That’s what happens?” just because too much stagnation while trying to get the idea to take shape makes it less likely to. You have to push with what you can make work… I have to push with what I can make work so that it doesn’t die entirely.

Imagine that kind of situation on a budget, a deadline, and whatever exchanges directors and producers throw into the mix. I seriously doubt I could do it. It’s its own skill set.

yes, Star Trek has always been like this – but so is every other show on TV, and I think that the reason we sometimes feel this way about Star Trek in particular is because we’ve come to idealise the Federation and think of its people as highly competent, the “best of the best”

all fiction requires a degree of suspension of disbelief, sci-fi perhaps quadruply so. many shows not only proceed at “the speed of plot”, but also often the answer to the question “why on Alpha Braga IV would you do that??!?!?” is “because narrative imperative” 💁‍♀️

I, too, get frustrated by some of the very obviously bad SOPs in Starfleet, like

– routinely sending all your senior officers on the same away mission & leaving the starship under the command of a lieutenant

– having senior officers on an away mission that includes a tactical security team & allowing the senior officers to lead the assault (see also, every cop show ever)

– not having standing orders that “if something seems even the slightest bit weird (e.g. you’re having visual or auditory hallucinations, events seeming to repeat themselves, etc.) then you must report it immediately”

– etc., etc., etc.

and I do also think that some specific episodes or recurring tropes exhibit particularly lazy writing in this regard, when a few tweaks could deliver the same outcome / message without requiring characters to do boneheaded things that are beneath their skill & intelligence, and I’d love to see some more instances where the writers do a bit more work to solve the more difficult writing challenge of having the characters exhibit the highest levels of competence & good procedures / tactics / strategies but still end up in situations that they then need to work together (and with others) to solve. it’s not like “superior alien intelligence / technology / resources exceeds the capability of Starfleet personnel operating at maximum efficiency, but our heroes manage to prevail anyway” isn’t a rich vein to mine

but as someone else has commented, the story – and in Star Trek’s case, very frequently the message – is the point, not so much the details of how we got there

so we watch anyway, and we enjoy immensely, and we love deeply, and we forgive the writers (usually) 🖖

There are space shows with good writing. Babylon 5’s security officer is rather good. There are still murders and failures, but the rigor is enough for most people to believe. (I vaguely recall he even complained about not being allowed to do more.)

In the same way that the Star Treks have inspired many to go into science and technology, I expect many have also been inspired to think about security and better ways to run an organization. Personally, I have notes about conducting dangerous research in space…

Trek has always been this way. In TNG, Data takes over the Enterprise singlehandedly to go see his dad. In the Darmok episode, they just beam Picard away. There are Q episodes. There’s the spinning disk metaphor for drugs episode.

Maybe it’s not the most reasonable on every single plot point, but it also spans a wide range of topics, genres, level of seriousness, etc. The point of Measure of a Man isn’t that the full legal system of the Federation is explained in a consistent way. The point of Darmok isn’t to do an audit of the security system.

If you can’t get past the points that are less than perfect to get to the points that are important, it may not be the show for you. Maybe try watching a few with the idea of looking for what’s important instead of trying to find what’s wrong and see how that goes.

The problem is that the writers are normal humans.

Imagine this: let’s say the writers themselves do understand the highest level of competence. They write the Voyager crew in a way so that they handle all issues perfectly. How would it be possible for them to come up with any situation where this Voyager crew is challenged? - they can’t. Because they are portraying them as perfectly competent, which is based in the writer’s imagination, the definition of this perfect competency is that the writers could not come up with a way for them to be challenged.

Hence, when making any story like this, it is absolutely essential that the writers leave a flaw that the writers know about. Otherwise they literally would be unable to come up with any challenges. So the characters in Voyager necessarily need to be less competent than the writers.

But since the writers are average humans, the characters necessarily end up being less competent than average.

Maybe you didn’t see it before because TNG and DS9 actually taught you things (i.e. the writers were more competent than you), but those shows were the same. Most issues in those shows are ridiculously badly handled. Some episodes of course are better or worse in this, but that’s just the nature of having to come up with a lot of episode ideas.

The thing is, it’s not actually that important that the characters are competent in actuality. This is where your suspension of disbelief comes in. You just have to believe for the context of the show that the characters are actually super competent. The story is mostly still valid and focuses on human growth and interpersonal relationships, which would be pretty much the same if the situations portrayed would actually be handled better. Even though the characters are not actually competent, you can act as if they are and then everything works again.

Voyager has terrible writing, it barely make sense. The only good things to come out of it are The Doctor and Seven of Nine.

All Trek is like this, but Voyager was a particularly blatant offender. Their writing quality was generally not great, and there were quite a few cases where they would run the same premise multiple times in a season, which just highlighted the implausibility of the crew having to make the same mistakes twice in a row.