Not that I ever disliked her or anything like that; I just always heard some people being strong fans but I’d never watched Voyager, yet, and generally tried not to look too closely, for fear of spoilers. Funnily enough, I watched the first few episodes of Prodigy before I’d ever watched any Voyager.
But man; instantly liked her, right out the gate. Immediately engrossed by her character and her performance.
I…don’t know that there’s much of any real point to this post. I don’t know a lot of people who watch Trek and wanted to share, I guess.
Those of us who were on the old social media boards of the day recall the outright hostility against a woman as a captain as the principal character of a show.
The number and toxicity of rants about ‘political correctness’ was extreme if less generally known outside fandom.
Personally, I loved the technobabble in Voyager — it conveys the process of engineering and science more authentically than in any other show in the franchise. At a certain level, it’s more important to have a realistic applied science and engineering process in a Star Trek show than to be restricted to what’s currently known in science or that can be extrapolated from limited current knowledge.
Voyager gave us nerds nerding out. What made it exceptional was not only was it two women with STEM expertise, but that they were enthusiastically supporting one another rather than competing.
We saw some of that positivity and STEM process with Geordie and Data in TNG, but Voyager gave us a captain who was an engineer who moved to command track. Janeway’s uncompromising work the problem dammit ethos is all engineer, and it made her the right temperament for the scenario of a ship lost in another quadrant.