I think all of us can say this about a show...

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Title:	I think all of us can say this about a show...
Creator:	Alara Rogers
Date(s):	Dec 12, 1996
Medium:	USENET
Fandom:	Star Trek: Voyager
Topic:
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I think all of us can say this about a show... is a 1996 post by Alara Rogers.

Some Topics Discussed

• Star Trek: Voyager
• canon and continuity
• fans being better writers than official writers
• official writers not respecting their audience, jossing themselves, not playing fair with their audience
• the character Q

From the Post

I think all of us can say this about a show... I was heavily into a *very* primitive show with an incredibly number of scientific idiocies, characters who we never got to see do anything, and all kinds of annoying stuff for seven years, and I still am fond of it. :-)

See, I loved [the episode] "Death Wish." I agree with you that *it* was intriguing, that the mysteries it revealed about Q gave rise to even more interesting questions, and most importantly, that the hints it dropped about Q socieety and Q's role in it were totally consistent with what we'd learned before, while at the same time being new. They offered a new way to look at information we already had.

[The episode] "Q and Grey" *contradicts* information we already had. It is, basically, not about the Q, but about a bunch of powerful aliens who happen to be idiots. I never had a problem with *Q* occasionally being an idiot, because I figured he's a young and immature member of his species. Q and Grey says no he's not, they're all that stupid. It contradicts True Q in that it says two Q have never reproduced, and implies that either a human-raised Q or a child of two Qs would have an enormous impact on the society. So why didn't Amanda have such an impact? It contradicts Death Wish in that one member of the Continuum had been trying and failing to kill himself for centuries, and yet in one year the Continuum come up with truly nasty weapons to use against one another. It contradicts Roddenberry's vision in which species evolve toward a point where violence becomes foolish and unnecessary, by implying that beings who are suppsed to be incredibly advanced cannot figure out a way to solve their problems except by resorting to war.

As a fanfic writer, I synthesize all the information that comes to me to try to present a consistent vision of a character or a society or a technology. Sometimes the writers throw one a contradiction, and you have to work around it. For instance, I initially saw Garak being interested in Ziyal as a contradiction to a *very* obvious subtext of Garak being homosexual, until I came up with an explanation that allowed both to exist without contradiction. I initially saw the presence of a Borg Queen as a contradiction to everything we'd learned about the Borg, until I figured out a way to get both pieces of information to co-exist. Fan writing necessitates being able to rework your vision in order to incorporate new pieces of canon.

Well, I've tried and I've tried, and i cannot see any way that the Q we saw in "Q and Grey" could be the same people that they've been implied to be all along. This episode contradicts entirely too much, in letter and in spirit. And I could forgive it if what it produced was *more* interesting than what it left behind. Certainly I could have gotten behind an episode that revealed that the Continuum were gods with feet of clay; they'd be uninteresting if they were really as perfect and omnipotent as they pretend to be. But if they are as incompetent as they are in Q and Grey, they cannot possibly have the power we've seen them have.

The last episode I decided didn't exist was also a Voyager episode, the one with the salamanders. The reason that deeply offended me was that it, too, contradicted everything we'd learned. Humans, according to every episode of Trek but that one, will evolve into higher, more intelligent energy beings. But that episode said we will evolve into salamanders. Well, what exactly is the point to human striving if in the end we're all going to be salamanders? This contradicted a basic tenet of Trek. However, it *didn't* trash my favorite character, so as much as I despised it it didn't turn me off to Voyager entirely.

Do you see what I'm saying? When they don't play fair with us, when they contradict everything we already know about the universe, we're pushed to the point where we have to say either, "Well, none of it matters, it's just a TV show", or we have to start picking and choosing what parts of it are 'real' for purposes of our fanfic. They may pretend that the salamander episode never happened, but I really really doubt they will ignore the events of Q and Grey next time we see Q. This means they've just ruined any future appearance of Q, because I will be watching John de Lancie play an entirely different character than the one I fell in love with.

And if they've ruined my favorite character, how long before they destroy Janeway even more utterly than some of the more idiotic episodes already have? How can I retain my liking for these characters if I'm watching them do things that contradict every rule of common sense? At that point, I have to bow out and stick to the fanfic, because I like the characters too much to see idiots who I and half the people on this newsgroup could write circles around destroy them.

[...]

When Paramount has no respect for me and my love of the characters, and writes them poorly and inconsistently, why should I continue to support them? Life's too short to watch your favorite characters get trashed by bad writers.