In honor of N.O.C.’s Star Trek Week, I’m reposting something I wrote about four years ago on my own blog. It’s about Star Trek: Voyager. Wanna hear it? Here it go:
Over at Tempest’s blog, she asks why people really disliked Captains Sisko and Janeway. (If you don’t know why this is a loaded question, don’t bother reading this post, because it means you don’t know jill about Star Trek.)
I started to respond in a comment, but then it got really long, so I thought I’d just take it over here.
Voyager was a groundbreaking show. The first half of the show’s run was shaky, but once Seven of Nine stepped in, the show truly became something great, and new. In the Seven of Nine era, the characters and roles were slightly reshuffled, until the ship was led by a triumvirate of strong women. In fact, the ship, and the show, were led by the three archetypes of Maiden, Mother, and Crone: that’s Seven, Torres, and Janeway to you. (According to First Wives Club, in Hollywood they’re “Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.”) It took a little while for these roles to shake out, but watching them develop was thrilling. And watching how Voyager took these three archetypes and thoroughly subverted them, was even more thrilling.
Janeway started out as a shaky and boring character for one simple reason: we have archetypes of male leaders of all ages, but we don’t have valid archetypes of early-middle-aged female good leaders. Think about it: there are the bad mommies (Medea) and evil witches galore (Circe, wic witch of west), there are the insane women-of-a-certain-age (neither good nor bad), and there are the various monsters (harpies, sirens, Medusa, oh my!), and there are the magical wimmins, like sphinxes and such, who help heroes to something, but exact a price. There are no heroines, no protagonist archetypes, who are early-middle-aged women.
And let’s face it: Star Trek‘s bread and butter has always been Western archetypes.
So Janeway got off to a shaky start, since she had no archetype to embody. After a great deal of silly romantic trouble, and a genuinely touching reckoning with her relationship with Chakotay, she finally settled into her role as, not the captain of the ship, but the mother of all mankind. Yes, it took them about three seasons to realize that, out in the Delta Quadrant, Voyager was a microcosm of all humankind and Janeway was the Crone queen. They picked up on this when they opposed her to the Borg queen and discovered that they were equals. The good mommy of diversity, and the bad mommy of assimilation.
What was brilliant about the way they wrote her character was that they then used her position of power to question the way leaders in hierarchies make decisions. She didn’t always make the right one, but, while always acknowledging that, the show didn’t look down on her for it. Her wisdom was always greater than everyone else’s, but her wisdom wasn’t always right. They used the Borg queen and Seven of Nine to underline this lesson, comparing the hierarchy that may be necessary among diverse individuals, with the consensus that is possible among the thoroughly assimilated. Hierarchy and diversity were not always shown to be the best choice. What made Janeway interesting was that she wasn’t a static crone, but was rather a Mother in the process of becoming a Crone (and in the series finale, we finally get to see her become a literal crone; this is very satisfying.) It’s all three characters growing into and out of the archetype that makes them fascinating and subversive.
Torres started out as the fiery hottie, the amazon, the Woman Warrior, which is why her character didn’t work so well: it’s hard to have a fiery hottie who’s also a brilliant leader. Amazons are forces of nature, tamed by the love of a hero stronger than themselves. Also, every woman on the ship was almost by definition a warrior (except Kes, natch) so they detracted from the power of Torres’ archetype. By “taming” her fieriness a bit with marriage and a child, and giving her more responsibility they began transforming her into the archetype of Mother. However, the man she married wasn’t the hero stronger than herself, but the reformed weasel. So she got to remain the sole leader in their relationship. This ended up being the perfect platform to talk about a young woman growing into a position of leadership. It subverted, whether intentionally or un-, both the archetypes of Mother and of Woman Warrior.
And Seven subverted the Maiden archetype thoroughly. Raped, both in the sense of being abducted and of being thoroughly physically violated, at the age of 6, Seven as an adult retains a childlike innocence, coupled with some seriously dangerous hardware. And by hardware, I don’t mean the kind of ass-kicking karate-hardware that is the substance of millennial male fantasies from Buffy to whatever happened in the action film genre yesterday. By hardware I mean smarts: brain enhancements, databases, skills, abilities. She also has a fading sense of certainty about herself and her place in the universe that is the legacy of her Borg upbringing. This Borg confidence is depicted as one of the good leftovers of her background; the show doesn’t assume that everything she learned as a Borg is bad or wrong except her military capabilities, as a more salacious show would do. And there’s some very sophisticated discussion of her Borg spirituality (yes, they have some) and her Borg worldview.
This bumps into the fact that Voyager dealt with multiraciality and transnationality in a much more sophisticated way than all the previous (and subsequent) Treks. Although Torres is largely treated as a tragic mulatta, and her two species viewed reductively, note that her human half is Latina, itself a multiracial identity. Although the two episodes in the series that deal directly with her multiraciality are stupid (there’s an early episode where she splits into her Klingon and human halves, and her Klingon half can’t think, while her human half can’t fight — not offensive at all!; and a much later one in which she’s pregnant and goes crazy trying to make sure her daughter doesn’t end up with Klingon brow ridges), the rest of the show, when not focusing on what they think she should be doing with her multiraciality, deals with it rather delicately: showing how she extracts strength and trouble, questions and confirms herself, both, through her cultural uses and memories of her parents.
Seven, on the other hand, is a transracial adoptee, a third culture kid, and a multiracial (since she carries marks of both races on her face and body.) Like I said above, Voyager, unlike TNG, doesn’t assume that a Borg separated from the collective is better off. We see Seven having a lot of trouble adjusting, and learn slowly that part of her successful adjustment is owing to the confidence and centeredness she found as a Borg. In one episode, she says that her memories and experience as a child and as a Borg remain with the collective, and it comforts her to know that she will be immortal in that way. Nobody else on board has that kind of certainty of an afterlife. The show’s treatment of Seven is an example of true diversity: Janeway sometimes finds Seven’s ideas and decisions abhorrent, but she tolerates them and learns to live with them.
I find it strange that people are so hostile to Seven. She was brought in to replace the Maiden character of Kes, who was a mess, narratively speaking. Kes was both the virgin/ingenue, and the sexual/romantic partner of an old-looking and seeming character (Neelix.) That never worked out, for obvious reasons. And when they started giving her superpowers, it wasn’t believable — or desirable — because she’d spent the previous three years being annoyingly perky and powerless. Seven was very carefully thought out to replace her: Seven was the innocent Maiden, but with built-in strength and power. She was the opposite of perky, and was obviously on a coming-of-age trajectory. When Seven got with Chakotay, it was clearly the next phase in her evolution: she wasn’t going to be expected to get it on and remain virginal, like Kes was.
I truly think that people who think Voyager was a bad show either didn’t watch the second half of the run (most likely) or haven’t yet become comfortable with the idea of women in leadership positions. Even the somewhat groundbreaking Battlestar Galactica, which started out with women in leadership positions in civilian and spiritual life, couldn’t quite bring itself to depict a good woman military leader. That’s pretty radical.
Also, Voyager depicts three strong male characters who choose to take supportive roles vis-a-vis women. Chakotay is a strong character in more than one sense: he takes his own path, he’s a military leader and also a leader in personality, and he straddles the military and rebel worlds without breaking apart or going crazy. Chakotay, halfway through the show, in the episode in which he and Janeway confront their romantic feelings for each other, lays it out: he’s accepted the role of helpmeet, of the man who enables the woman leader. It’s completely awesome. Later, he becomes Seven’s lover, and it’s clear that he’s an older teacher-type lover, a kind of Kris Kristofferson to Seven’s Barbara Streisand.
Tom Paris is an immature wild-boy, who’s the best pilot in the whatever, but is traumatized by the consequences of his own cowardice and immaturity. He eventually grows up enough to atone for his past wrongdoings and Become A Man, but he doesn’t have the personality of a leader. Instead he falls in love with Torres, who is a leader, and takes on the implicit role of a woman leader’s partner. And then there’s Tuvok, who has a wife and kid at home, and is smarter, older, more controlled, and better educated than everyone else on board. And he willingly serves Janeway’s captaincy because he recognizes the power of her leadership, and because he believes that it’s the right thing to do.
(And one more thing: the Doctor plays the vain, fussy, diva character. The male Doctor. Think people might have a problem with that?)
The strong and satisfied male helpmeets are probably the bitterest pill for Voyager-haters to swallow, even though no one has mentioned it. In fact, no one ever mentions the male characters on the show at all, not to love or to vilify them (except poor Harry Kim, but that’s pretty much justified.) I think it’s the absence, the lack of male leadership that causes people to clock Voyager as “boring,” or “silly.” I used to watch queer films and think they were boring, until I read somewhere that this is a privileged response: most of the films I watch show heteronormative sexuality, which is more interesting to me in the titillating sense, so I don’t have to have any interest in other types of sexuality. But (cue violin music) once I got with the program and stopping making every narrative have to be about ME, I found a whole world of narratives out there about people nothing like me with concerns nothing like mine that were not just interesting, but amazing. Including queer narratives.
Which is all by way of saying that Voyager was definitely uneven. And I don’t hold it against people for misjudging the show based on the first few seasons. But ultimately, Voyager was one of the groundbreaking shows of the ages, and definitely the most groundbreaking Trek since the original series.
In my opinion.
Okay, I’ve said my very long piece. Now, what say you?