The Real Janeway Theory
As a Star Trek fan, it is with a certain amount of trepidation that I admit that Voyager is one of my favorite shows. Perhaps it’s because I was at just the right age when I watched it in the 90s, or maybe I was drawn in by the seeds of a good show that Voyager has buried deep in its topsoil, even though they often failed to sprout (I know it’s a weird analogy, just go with it).
As I’ve gotten older and wiser, I’ve begun to realize why it wasn’t the most beloved Star Trek series; despite intermittent flashes of quality, watching Voyager is watching interesting characters and concepts being slowly strangled to death by lazy writing. This makes it frustrating, which is much worse than simply bad. Certain aspects of certain characters are quite engaging, and there are moments when you’re invested in their growth and struggles. Then the show ruins it by taking the easy way out, and you’re left squirming in your chair.
No! Bad Voyager! Bad Voyager!
But I’m not going to go into all the ways that Voyager disappoints me, just one: the character of Kathryn Janeway. The Captain. The most important person on any Star Trek program. The character done the least justice by the writers.
As detractors often (correctly) point out, Janeway suffers from gross inconsistencies from episode to episode. Sometimes she’s a champion of the Prime Directive, whereas other times she throws it out the window as though it were a live grenade. She’ll insist a person has the right to direct their own lives one moment, then force them to do what she wants in the same scene. So just how many Janeways are there?
Well, I have my own thoughts about Kathryn Janeway. I call it the Real Janeway Theory. I believe that Real Janeway is a full, complete, and awesome character, who emerges periodically to knock our socks off. The downside is that we get to see her in brief flashes and glimpses, only to have her snatched away the moment the writers get uncomfortable doing anything creative. The traits that set her apart from the other Star Trek captains are as follows:
1. Real Janeway is sneaky as all getout.
One of my favorite appearances of Real Janeway is in a silly-but-fun two-parter about Nazis, “The Killing Game.” At one point she’s cornered by an enemy, who tells her to run so that he can have fun hunting her down. He believes he’s beaten her, as she’s wounded, alone, and unarmed. And it seems he’s right–instead of standing her ground, she limps away. When out of sight, she sets a trap. She then lures him into it by cowering, whimpering, and acting otherwise pathetic, until the moment she clubs him with a blunt object and steals his gun.
Let’s go over this again. He makes it clear that he considers her to be an animal. Her strategy is to allow (or even encourage) him to believe this, then take advantage of his overconfidence. She has to demean herself in order to do so, and Real Janeway is okay with that. As long as she gets the upper hand eventually, she’ll do whatever she has to. This is a trait unique to her among Star Trek captains.
It's doubtful things would have worked out as well for Captain Dignity.
2. Real Janeway suffers from profound sexual frustration.
A good character needs to have good problems. One of Real Janeway’s most interesting problems is the fact that she’s the only character on the ship who can’t have sex with anyone. Rightly knowing that having relations within the crew would compromise her authority, Real Janeway struggles to suppress her lustful side. What makes this especially difficult is the palpable sexual tension between her and her First Officer, Chakotay, notably in the early seasons (being Voyager, they of course dropped this potentially fascinating issue like a hot rock).
Of all the traits I ascribe to Real Janeway, this is the one that the writers of the show were best able to portray. We outright see her involved in romances with more than one holodeck character, which for her are ultimately hollow and unsatisfying pursuits. The show wasn’t shy about showing us Janeway’s loneliness and stress over her physical needs, which I always appreciated. I didn’t appreciate them jumping the shark with Q, though.
3. Real Janeway responds to threats with batshit insanity.
And here we come down to it. This is the riskiest and most potentially controversial trait of Real Janeway, but it is my personal favorite. Every captain so far has had their own way of dealing with Big Trouble: Kirk swings in on a rope and punches it in the face, Picard falls back on his principles and inherent nobility, Sisko springs one of his ten backup plans. And Real Janeway? Real Janeway flies off the handle.
Push her and Real Janeway will do something so outrageous, so unpredictable, that the sheer lunacy of it overwhelms her foes before they’ve even had time to think. This may seem superficially similar to what Kirk sometimes does, but believe me, it isn’t. Kirk knows what he’s going to do, and then does it. It might be crazy, but it’s his plan. Not Real Janeway. When in desperate straits, she howls into the wind and charges blindly forward like a Viking berserker. Her enemies don’t know what she’s going to do next because she doesn’t even know it herself.
This characteristic of Real Janeway is rarely seen because it is the characteristic that the writers were the most afraid of. The fact that it emerged at all is a testament to its genuineness as a part of her personality. We see it in episodes like “Scientific Method” , “Equinox”, and “Year of Hell”, and these are the episodes I like to watch, because watching Real Janeway in action is too awesome for words. It’s usually frustrating, however, to watch what happens next. As I said, the writers were terrified of this aspect of Janeway, and always made an effort to smooth it over again after every glimpse we got of it. A pity, really.
But can they smooth over all the slashfiction?
So, there you have it, the three identifying attributes of Real Janeway pursuant to my Real Janeway Theory. These are, of course, in addition to the general captainly traits of being incorruptible, brave, and protective of her crew. Those come standard with Star Trek captains. What I’m talking about here are the things that make her different, the things that make her a unique and distinctive character. This is a character that I love. When Real Janeway emerges in an episode, my heart jumps with joy. You’ve just got to catch her quick, because she’s like a goddamned groundhog.
Why Fantasy Keeps Going Nowhere
I would kill for a good fantasy TV show. I have often argued, and I still maintain, that fantasy as a genre has as much potential for creativity as science fiction. The people who make it are just much, much lazier. The history of fantasy on television reflects this, as all fantasy television shows are bad. Even the good ones are bad (forgive me, Xena). The thing is, fantasy has what sci-fi doesn’t: a collection of tropes so well-known, so recognizable, so easy to plug and play that they tempt the slothfulness of any writer, whether that writer is talented or not. Everybody who writes fantasy knows at the back of their minds that if they throw together a Dark Lord, a Beautiful Maiden, a Simple Farm Lad and a Prophecy involving a Magic Sword, they can just call it a day and no one will think twice about it. We just expect it at this point.
Something got me on this kick, of course. I checked out Legend of the Seeker, a relatively new show with a very impressive budget, considering its genre.1 Lots of hope to be had here, although I didn’t let my hopes get that high. There wasn’t much of a chance for that to happen, though, as the pilot consisted of the exact plot of A New Hope run through some sort of medieval fantasy translator. We’re talking a show where a person can literally watch the scenes go by, say in their head “I bet Simple Farm Lad here will find his parents dead and his cottage on fire in exactly five minutes,” and be right on the money. There was literally not a single thing in the pilot that could not have been randomly generated by a mildly retarded AI after it finished absorbing every paperback in the world to feature a sword, rose, castle or dragon on the cover.
Chronicles of Moronia, Book One.
Our hero, the Simple Farm Lad, is brash but stupid (of course). He runs into a Beautiful Maiden with the personality of a grapefruit who is annoyed by yet intrigued with him (naturally). He’s the long-lost object of some kind of Prophecy even though he’s a complete dunce, she’s far more skilled than he is but somehow can’t just go defeat the bad guy herself, the maguffins multiply and we all drown in seas of explanatory dialogue. The show’s best characters by far are the Wise Old Mage, who is at his heart also a cliché but played by a delightfully competent actor, and the main villain, who doesn’t have much to him beyond “dark and brooding” but looks a lot like the Prince of Persia. These two guys I enjoy watching, when the story centers on them.
As for the other characters on the show, I have a theory. A bus of Calvin Klein models, on its way to an underwear exhibition or something, overturned and crashed. The survivors, having gone feral, were discovered months later by a traveling Renaissance Faire, which clothed and fed them (well, clothed them anyway) and returned them to humanity. This not only explains why the characters spend most of their time standing around looking equally bored and confused, but also why they must constantly narrate their own lives through a stream of simplistic dialogue as though they would otherwise forget what they were doing mid-action. They wear quasi-medieval clothing and jaw about poor peasant’s tasks, but their body language suggests that they were never taught how to do anything but lean half-naked against things and glare intensely. At least Lucy Lawless always seemed at home plunging weapons into people’s vital organs.
It might seem like I’m being too harsh, but it’s hard to understate how much efforts like this disappoint me. This one has a budget, for god’s sake–-there are great sets and props and special effects that don’t look like someone drew on a filmstrip with a crayon. But none of this saves the tired, tired story and the Keanu Reeves-esque characters. Here’s the big secret seemingly kept from TV producers: great characters are what make or break a show. Programs like Star Trek and my still-beloved Xena had silly costumes, crappy props and often ludicrous storylines, but the characters were what made us want to watch. Their feelings, and the actions that resulted from them, seemed real to us. It’s on these kinds of connections that true fandoms are built. I know fantasy could do more of this if it wanted to. Just stop taking the easy way out.
- I know it’s based on a series of books by Terry Goodkind, but fantasy writers of both prose and live action share the same originality problems, so my complaints still apply. Besides, I didn’t want to read the damn books. [↩]
I Can’t Believe It’s She-Ra.
I found it. Deep in the primordial ooze of my infant memories, right next to Land Before Time, The Last Unicorn and The Brave Little Toaster, I always knew there was a cartoon blonde woman who rode a pegasus and wielded a sparkling, identity-switching greatsword. And like them, she was stamped indelibly in my subconscious. That’s right, there’s no telling how much influence She-Ra: Princess of Power has had over the person who is now me. We’re not talking about something I obsessed over when I was nine. This is no Power Rangers or Captain Planet. I must have been four or five when I encountered this thing.
I don’t know how I ended up watching it on the internet. But from the first few scenes, I was convinced I’d found her. I didn’t remember the name of the character or even much about the cartoon itself, but I’ve always remembered how it made me feel. Even from the time I was very little, I noticed how unfair gender roles seemed in the entertainment I consumed. Women just never seemed to be doing anything. My favorite genre, fantasy, sparked my imagination and transported me to other worlds, but the main character was invariably a man who I didn’t identify with. This meant that the few times I did encounter an animated fantasy centered around a woman, I’d latch onto it and never let go. I’ve always carried a memory of that brightly colored VHS tape sitting on the lower level of a wooden rack in the tiny video rental store in Navajoland–we were still living on the Rez, which is how I know I must’ve been really young–and that I begged my mother to take it out for me again.
Now, I know it was She-Ra.
After watching a few episodes, I also know why I remember my mother rolling her eyes and sighing when I went up to her, clutching the video. It’s literally the most unsubtle thing I’ve ever watched, and I watch Walker, Texas Ranger.
Later he'll stare down a bear.
There are some things from our foggy childhood memory-ooze that deserve to be enjoyed again as we grow up (the three films I mentioned in the second sentence of this post are excellent examples), but even as I watch this cartoon and torment my poor husband with the horrible voice acting, I know that the thrill I’m getting from it is entirely related to my memories and not the show itself. It’s just an animated advertisement for some toys, after all, with utterly ridiculous characters1 and cludgy moral messages. But I can take comfort in the fact that what it helped me to believe when I was very young, that it’s possible for female characters to ride around on horses swinging swords and being the main focus of a story, is worthwhile. Sometimes, something doesn’t have to be good in order to matter.
It’s also very gratifying whenever I discover that a piece of media I remember from long ago actually exists and isn’t just a figment of my imagination. I’m still holding out hope that that weird Alice in Wonderland ripoff that has mind control in it and a villain who lives in a bowling ball house wasn’t just a dream I had once. I mean, the kangaroo ninjas turned out to be from a real movie, and they were a much stupider idea! If anybody ever watches something that has a guy who lives in a bowling ball, they need to let me know.
- My favorite character description from the Wikipedia page is this: “Sweet Bee is a bee-woman from an intergalactic bee colony who came to Etheria seeking Bees and a new home when her race of Bee’s homeworld is destroyed by Wasps.” [↩]
