Fuck that. Neelix was the heart of Voyager. Someone had to remind them to live on their way back to their lives.
Associate Producer
DAN SCHNEIDER
Nah, all those dancing swimsuit ladies are of legal age.
I know you don’t really mean that, Mr. Vulcan!
Tuvok would never admit it but they’re secretly besties.
I feel like the more ridiculous a neelix plotline, the better. Cheese premise all the way. Could have gone further with it tho. Maybe the cheese bacteria become horrendously infectious and produce a disgusting disease that incapacitates the crew. Bring that shit into DS9 Ferengi or TNG Q episodes of goof level wackery. I feel like his character was intended to fill a similar niche but they never made him into the chaos goblin he should have been.
Neelix is immune to the cheese infection of course because he’s been eating his own experiments for a while and we get a Neelix-Doctor teamup to save people from the disease. But not before most of the crew turns into an infection vomiting mess of cheese zombies. Neelix gets to show expertise and care in the recovery of his crewmates, as well as regret/pathos for wielding his dangerous culinary powers with abandon
I didn’t know that Ethan Phillips did that performance while being effectively blind and deaf. Impressive!
Now I’m imagining if they had somehow managed to cast Robin Williams (RIP) as Neelix!
Voyager cultivates the bio-neural cheese, making the smartest and most delicious cheese in the Delta Quadrant.
Cheese sales used for diplomacy, barter, and bribes. All Delta Quadrant species like this cheese.
Janeway, recognizing the power of the cheese to get home quickly, looks at a nutrient rich nebula in wonder saying “There’s cheese in that nebula!”
Bio-neural cheese easily defeats borg nanos in one-on-one nano deathmatches. Whole borg cubes left disconnected and smelling of cheese.
Neelix makes a fondue that becomes sentient for a few days. Janeway establishes diplomatic relations with the cheese. Neelix is now the ambassador of cheese.
Voyager gets home in 3 years, with borg defeated. Multiple successful diplomatic first contacts, and trade deals. Dramatic increase in all cheese related technology, and basic civil cheese rights across the Federation.
Tom Paris is the worst character on Voyager, fight me.
If you took a spoiled 6 year old from the 1950’s and suddenly turned him into an adult, that child would be Tom Paris. He’s overly childish, and not in a cute way. He character has practically zero depth. He’s like Wesley Crusher if Wesley was an idiot.
Tom Paris was a pseudonym. His real name was Nick Lacarno and he got kicked out of the academy while Westley Crusher was there.
A pseudonym cleverly concocted to avoid paying royalties to Naren Shankar, the writer of TNG 5x19: The First Duty, who was let go after TNG finished its run.
Lower decks squashed that theory.
That’s like saying Brunt of the FCA and Weayun are the same person.
Look, Lower Decks might have featured another person with the same name as Nick Lacarno, but that guy looked completely different, so it was obviously a new character.
…new headcanon unlocked.
Lower decks is barely canon, much like Clerks was barely a movie.
/s
Yeah it’s like they were going to give him a strong character arc by showing him growing up side by side with Harry Kim… But then the writers forgot to actually grow their characters. So they’re just children the whole time.
He’s also responsible for all the awful Captain Proton episodes that I always skip.
Yep, that’s one of the main reasons I compare him to a 6 year old from the 1950’s.
Tom Paris is the kind of character that would sleep in a racecar bed and think it made him cool.
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The thing i do like about tom, is that hes a pilot, and wants to be a pilot. Making a hot rod shuttle, building old muscle cars on the holodeck. Wanting to enter a star race… just wants to go fast.
“if” doing a lot of heavy lifting there
“Yes mam.”
Only near the end of the Voyager game did I realise there was a tab for tom paris logs, I’d gone the whole game missing them. What a pleasant discovery that was.
The thing about Voyager is all the characters kinda suck but all the actors portraying them were pretty fucking great. Excellent cast; film school writing.
Howling Mad Murdock’s character didn’t suck.
Oh, wow, I used to watch the a-team whenever it would come on at work (overnight office job) but I never even noticed that it’s the same guy who plays Barclay! So he’s just a little bit crazy in all his roles.
Same. Watching Voyager there was always something familiar about the actor. It took many many episodes before it clicked.
In another timeline we would have had Robert Picardo as Neelix. That’s the role he initially auditioned for!
Robert Picardo ended up exactly where he was needed.
Robert Picardo even says this
Yup! He was only familiar with TOS and assumed the Spock-type role would go to Tuvok (not an unfair assumption to make).
“Please state the nature of the acting emergency.”
Holy shit, I was imagining Robert Beltran at first, and nearly died.
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I find Neelix really difficult to watch in the early seasons. His stubborn attitude, jealousy and overall inappropriate relationship with Kez… Makes me sick to me stomach watching him.
Context: I am biased. I’ve been underage and been with men like Neelix. They are pathetic, narcissistic and not worth anyone’s time.
Naw you aren’t wrong, he is possessive as shit over his 3 year old girlfriend. But lets blame the writers for that and not the character.
If we’re going to keep bringing up a literal age of the Ocampa as though it’s some gotcha we should also mention they never reach an age we’d consider adult. Most of them die before they even become teens.
We could blame the writers, or we could blame the puritanical mouth breathers who’d rather virtue signal their disgust at the mere concept of pedophilia rather than over the very real problems of child abuse and rape.
eh? I just don’t like the way he reacted to Kes trying to have a friend in her short time in the universe (Tom Paris).
He got jealous over more than just Paris, it’s just none of the other ones were main characters. He also got paranoid and jealous because she knew which deck some male crew members rooms were on.
His jealousy was a flaw, but it’s the flaws are what make characters interesting. It doesn’t always make them likeable, but it certainly makes them more real. If he was perfect he’d be everything OP was claiming he was. Instead he was a much more real and deep character. His character also evolved over time to be less jealous and guarded as he came to trust his fellow crew members, including Paris. If he didn’t have those characteristics he’d be little more than a background character.
Those flaws aren’t the problem of bad writing, they’re a problem of good writing.
And if her age didn’t matter, why’d you mention it?
I was trying tro relate to kablez’s context statement to be honest, though now I’m wishing I hadn’t so my position would be clearer. But her literal age really doesn’t matter; her “world experience” is what matters. Or her lack thereof rather. Neelix, at times, seem’s to be taking advantage of someone who is young and naive. Neelix absolutely does evolve past it and becomes quite good friends with Tom later on. The last scene of “Parturition” always makes me smile. But up until that point I always find Neelix and Kes’s scenes a little bit cringey.
That’s the thing, he’s trying to protect her from people who will take advantage of her. He literally saves her from a group of people who at the very least tortured her to try and figure out a way to get to her people. Whom they’d likely massacre and make slaves of.
The problem is that over-protectiveness can be just as bad, which is something he comes to realize over the course of the first couple seasons.
I can’t remember the exact scene or episode for the life of me, but she’s talking to some male member of the crew and asks to keep something a secret between them “because neelix gets jealous”. She felt the need to hide just because of how she figured he would react.
Finally someone says it, it’s like that post I saw last month equating tall men with short girlfriend’s being closeted pedos, the social pendulum is swinging in a weird direction again
I used to be like this. But after understanding his trauma I grew to tolerate him.
I love the episode where he tries to get a map on the black market and someone dies because of him, all just because he wants to be of use for the crew and is afraid to be thrown out once they enter space he’s not familiar with
Yall haters
Edit: also this, meant only as a jest 🖖 :
Neelix is awesome.
Haters gone hate
Neelix is what happens when producers want to force another Quark.
He’s comic relief to counter the rest of the crew, but The Doc does that a thousand times better.
Now imagine if Robert Picardo had gotten the Neelix role like he wanted and Ethan Phillips was cast as the Doctor.
I like Nelix plotlines.
