[O]ne thing defines [Seska] in contrast to the Cardassians we’d been regularly seeing on Star Trek at that moment in time: she’s just kind of an absolute hot mess.
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But it’s kind of what makes Seska work as a character: despite all this, villainy or otherwise, nothing ever quite clicks for her. It’s a great mirror to uphold against Janeway’s decision to have the crew take the long way home in the first place, the idea that, if they did ultimately just go Seska’s route and exploit their advantageous power in an unknown quadrant, it would doom them.
I think Seska was an interesting character who was ultimately hampered by her association with the Kazon. The Kazon were poorly-designed antagonists; there was nothing compelling about them, either politically or aesthetically. I love Voyager, but it’s a real slog getting through Kazon space.
I think it would have been cool to have 1 or 2 Kazon episodes, and then maybe a surprise one or two seasons later when Voyager discovers they had been followed or something. But it was just not a good idea to try and make them the main antagonists as long as they did.
The Kazon also had big logical fallacies, they are somehow very technologically advanced, but have weird gaps in their knowledge. They have space travel, but clean water is an issue? How is that even possible?
And Voyager, one of the fastest ships ever made flies at ultra high warp, but is somehow months inside their territory? And not like there is just a lot of them, no, they were interacting with the same people all the time. Later this is explained by Voyager needing to stop all the time getting supplies, which meant their speed dropped down to a crawl, but that’s a different issue. But the Kazon are season 1 when Voyager has plenty of supplies. So the Kazon, a backwards people, can somehow move people faster than Voyager?
They stole the tech. They don’t have replicators.
Sure but when you have space travel, its dead simple to get water. Just park up at any old moon or asteroid, a lot of them are almost all ice. Sure you need to filter and clean it, but that’s the easy part. Replicators seem like the hard way to get water.
You’re not remembering the season very well. There’s very little water in this region of space and people are always fighting over it.
That’s interesting. I’m no spaceologist, but I wonder if that’s consistent with our observations of the universe. My cursory searches lead me to believe that there’s just a boatload of ice out there. I’ll have to rewatch Voyager at some point, and see what the technobabble explanation is.
I think the idea is that it’s weird and different and has created a politically unstable area of space not unlike arid regions of earth. Probably exactly that when you include the later addition of the Trabe species who are the wealthy colonizers.
Agreed, and she still ended up trying to fuck over Chakotay and Voyager one last time too. Great and flawed villian.
I think my two favorite Seska episodes were the ones after she was dead. The one with Tuvok’s hacked security training program / holonovel and then “Shattered”. She just seemed way more cunning and dangerous in those two than she ever did when she was allied with the Kazon (“Shattered” notwithstanding).
