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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9735038" data-attributes="member: 18">Absolutely this. VOY was completely fixable, and I think a lot of why people stuck with it was they were expecting characters to grow and stop being incredibly boring or annoying, but... several of them just didn't... because fundamentally the showrunners weren't very good, and some extremely bad, extremely late '90s casting decisions had been made. Like, I don't think any bad actors were selected (maybe Kes, but it's unfair, the actor had substance abuse issues), but several were just not the right actor for the part. Like, Robert Duncan McNeil as Paris. McNeil seems really nice in interviews, far more charming than Paris (?!?!), and he's quite a prolific director of TV show episodes (and also a showrunner on successful shows), many of them clearly well-directed, so I don't hate that he got the opportunity and he moved in the absolutely the right direction (from acting to directing and showrunning), but my god, Paris absolutely needed someone intrinsically charming, who you just couldn't help but like, and he wasn't able to give that performance (I'm sure in part due to choices he was being told to make by the showrunners). And like, Neelix's actor Ethan Phillips? He's good in other stuff, but the character is just loathsome. A pedo-vibes clown of a creature, and no amount of "my past is I got warcrimed" is going to fix that (why intentionally give him what was effectively an underage girlfriend who acted like a child? What was going on?!). You can kind of go two ways with a character the audience is supposed to like/understand - either get a really charming actor to play them and direct them to play charming, and/or write them a decent, likeable person and make sure you don't cast an actor who manages to undermine that. VOY seemed to attempt to avoid doing either! Don't even get me started on Chakotay, whose entire conception was based on racist drivel written by a white guy who pretended to be a native american, and who was also basically written as a creep who'd get reported to HR a lot. Again what were they thinking?! Very strange. Also very strange decision to make Paris be LITERALLY RACIST, old-school Earth racist to him in literally the first or second episode. Like what the hell man?Arrrghhhh...</blockquote>

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