The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

by Mark A. Altman

You take the audience on a journey and by the end of the episode you’ve got troops on the street, and you think that’s cool, that it makes sense. I thought it was an important show that demonstrated that the best of governments had to be watched. You can’t allow our fear or outside forces or interior threats to chop away at our own democratic institutions.

We also promised the audience that the Delta Quadrant would be the great unknown. A territory like the Australian outback in the 1870s or whatever. Who knows what you’re going to find out there, but it’s really fucking dangerous. Probably gonna die, assholes. But that’s not what the show became, and fairly quickly it’s, like, “Okay, well, Chakotay is the first officer, he and Janeway have this cordial relationship, and we meet the Kazon, guys with a different kind of rubber mask than the other aliens we’ve met in the four hundred or some-odd episodes of Star Trek that had been produced to date.” It was really the same old thing in a somewhat different package. So there was nothing really different about it, and that ultimately disappointed people.

My thoughts on Voyager exactly.