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Robert Beltran confirmed at NYCC to be reprising Chakotay
eazzie
Member Posts: 4,000 Arc User
in Ten Forward
It has been confirmed at NYCC that Robert Beltran will be reprising the role of Chakotay in the upcoming Prodigy
https://intl.startrek.com/news/star-trek-prodigy-announces-new-voice-talent-during-nycc
https://intl.startrek.com/news/star-trek-prodigy-announces-new-voice-talent-during-nycc
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#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
If anyone else should be brought it, it's Kate's pizza, pinot grigio and whiskey buddy The Picardo.
Chakotay is a especially bland character indeed. Not only did he fail to stand out as a first officer or Maquis, but his whole "native"-Spiel was ill thought out and borderline racist.
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I would have given anything for Chakotay's role to have been a Roga Danar or Outrageous Okona-type. Like Rios even, but with some edge to him...and a lot more sexual tension there in with Janeway.
I disagree at least in the regard that one thing I really like about Janeway is that she didn't stumble into unnecessary romantic involvement with anyone from the crew. Chakotay's romances were completely random and out of nowhere, it'd have been the same with Janeway.
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Oh, there was still sexual tension with Chakotay. They never acted on it, but it was there. And I always enjoyed in the novels when they actually got together after they returned to Earth.
In the original setup for the show Chakotay was supposed to be a lot edgier and act as a bridge between the Starfleet and Maquis crews, but Berman was not comfortable with the relatively dark and tense (even compared to DS9) show that was in run-up at the time and told the producers to tone it down and make it more like TNG's "space procedural" format, and especially to bland-out the humans to make the aliens seem quirkier.
That edgier, survival style of show would have highlighted both the internal friction of the two crews forced to work together to survive, and against outside threats the interplay (or clash) between Janeway's relatively aggressive direct-action command style and Chakotay's more angry-yet-contemplative one (and that headbutting would in part drive the potential romantic thread between them), which one of the producers (or writers, I forget which at the moment) described as the battleaxe (Janeway) and the dagger (Chakotay).
Unfortunately, those threads had nothing to connect with when they watered the show down and the humans remained dulled down for three seasons so the chance to do that was already long gone by the time Garrett Wang kicked up such a fuss about it that the producers decided to get rid of him and kill Harry Kim off in Scorpion part I but recanted and saved him in part II due to fan kickback about the whole issue of the dulling and (according to the rumors of the time) firing Wang over his efforts to break the human characters out of that stifling box.
I mean, they had a lucky escape firing that paedophile, but if he hadn't won that competition...
So...do you think they'll redress his character, or it'll just be a continuation of the unflushed Chakotay we knew for seven-years?
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Oh, it dropped out early. Mentions in Caretaker, Spirit Guide in the Ready Room, hand-tapping, the Rubber People...and that was it, right? It was never a part of him in any way, other than the tattoo.
Part of the problem could have been that they had the canon swept out from under Chakotay's bio. Originally, he was supposed to be from Dorvan V, but they got their wires crossed since his bio assumed it was an old established colony but the TNG episode said it was a single village in a valley. His homeworld was officially changed to Trebus but that brought up the problem of two similar colonies in the same area and the confusion was apparently enough that the writers preferred to not mess with it.
If they had made the change successfully they could have covered for some of the quackery of their "expert" by having Chakotay mention the colonists were a blend of different Native American nations and their traditions mixed to some extent. Unfortunately, between the dulling down of humans in favor of the alien of the week and the mandated shift from mainly survival type (and more bottle) episodes in favor of more TNG-like external-alien-oriented ones, they never fixed either of those problems.
An interesting paper on the issue of who the Rubber Tree people could be (and not be) is here if anyone is interested:
web.archive.org/web/20190911075651/http://spiletta.com/rubbertree.html
The most likely way of getting Chakotay into the show would from flashbacks from holo-Janeway's point of view, like the old Kung-Fu series and all those vampire and immortal series that had a lot of flashbacks (in fact often the story was mainly in the past in a lot of the episodes of those types of series). Of course, they could also have a "live" engram of Chakotay in the system too, though I kind of suspect otherwise.
I'm sure they wouldn't have wanted to be doing exactly the same thing with two concurrent series, but then Chakotay ended up with no religious side whatsoever. He didn't have a personal life, except for Virginia Madsen and the forced weirdness that was Seven, a few sparing Native American moments in seven-years and that was it.
I still maintain that a more renegade Roga Danar or even Rios character would have been more interesting. The character would have run rings around Voyager's vanilla in comparison Tom Paris though.
I love Voyager, but the characters weren't fully flushed-out. I'm not sure why an Ensign was at Ops to begin with and I do judge Janeway a little for both her Doctor and FO being really horrible people. At least Stadi was nice.
I agree, the dulling down of human characters and dropping most of the crew friction/interaction threads was a serious flaw in the show (in fact, the worst one of all), unlike the boon to making the aliens stand out that Berman thought it would be.
They did have a few Bajorans on the Val Jean but they wanted the captain of it to be ex-starfleet and about Janeway's age and experience (so the chemistry would work, though they dropped that romantic tension thread along with most of the other on-board interaction stuff in the dulling-down) and as far as I know of Ro Laren was the longest-in-service and highest-ranking Bajoran in Starfleet at the time.
Also, they wanted to continue to draw the parallels between Native American history, the resistance movement in WWII, and the Federation/Cardassian conflict that TNG tried for and DS9 was pussyfooting around. It was partially for the shorthand value of it since the viewers would be familiar to some extent with that kind of thing from school so they would not have to lay it out in as much detail and could concentrate on the plot, and also (in VOY only of course) they wanted Chakotay for the diversity factor.
Chakotay was supposed to have a strong spiritual side, but they did the botch-then-back-away thing that was seen a number of times in Berman-era Trek productions. Instead of doubling down and fixing that wild mix of traditions and beliefs by bringing up the fact that he was from a long established, initially isolated, and mixed colony world where that kind of blend can happen, they backed off in embarrassment as the criticism started rolling in.
And the really sad part of that backing-off is that Trek had already shown colonies with a mix of similar ethnic groups (both Preserver founded from cultures in Earth's pre-space days and United Earth colonies. For instance, the planet in The Paradise Syndrome is (as Memory Alpha puts it) "a mixture of Navajo, Mohican, and Delaware", and the New New Aberdine that Scotty hails from seems to be mostly Scottish but (from the accent) is apparently a mix of various Gaelic (and possibly some other) peoples. It is a hazard of pushing the limits I guess, the creators of VOY wanted to push the envelope of the time it was made then got cold feet.
It's funny you should mention that, because of course Tabor, played by the delightful Jad Mager...I could tell you more about his character on Voyager than I could about a single character of Disco. I'll be honest, he was a more interesting character in just one episode than we're getting in four seasons' worth.