Ronald D. Moore said:
"By the end of the pilot, you have the Maquis in those Starfleet uniforms, and boom we've begun the grand homogenization. Now they are any other ship. I don't know what the difference is between Voyager and the Defiant or the Saratoga or the Enterprise or any other ship sitting around the Alpha Quadrant doing its Starfleet gig. That to me is appalling, because if anything, Voyager coming home, over this journey, with that crew by the time they got back to Earth, they should be their own subculture. They should be so different from the people who left, that Starfleet won't even recognize them any more."
"What are the things that would truly come up on a ship lost like that? Wouldn't they have to start not only bending Starfleet protocols, but throwing some of them right out the window? If you think about it in somewhat realistic terms: you're on Voyager; you are on the other side of the galaxy; for all you know, it is really going to take another century to get home, and there is every chance that you are not going to make it, but maybe your children or grandchildren will. Are you really going let Captain Janeway [Kate Mulgrew] rule the ship for the next century. It seems like, in that kind of situation, the ship would eventually evolve its own sort of society. It would have to function in some way, other than just this military protocol that we repeat over and over again because it's the only thing we know."
"You've got the Maquis onboard. From the get-go they are supposed to be the anti-Starfleet people. They behave exactly like the Starfleet people with the occasional nod towards B'Elanna [Roxann Dawson] making a snide remark about Starfleet protocols, or Chakotay [Robert Beltran] getting a little quasi-spiritual. But in essence, they are no different than any other ship in the fleet. The episodes that you watch week after week are so easily translatable to NEXT GEN that it's almost a cookie-cutter kind of thing. It's a waste of the premise. That's not to say they don't have any good episodes. There are some good episodes in the mix, and I have seen a couple. The show can work."
"But VOYAGER doesn't go there. It just will not go there. You are trying to tell the audience on the one hand, 'We're so far from home, and it's going to take us so long, and we really wish we could get home. It's rough out here.' Janeway wrings her hands about all the things that she has sent the crew through. Then, it's off to the holodeck. You can't talk with any kind of a straight face about food rations and energy conservation, and having a real kitchen in the mess hall, when at the same time you've got the holodeck going. It's such a facade, and no matter what kind of technobabble bull**** you come up with, the audience intuitively knows, again, that's not truthful. There is no reality there. That would not happen. Even on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, they didn't have the Skipper and Gilligan sitting in the Minnow, watching color television."
"But on VOYAGER, who cares? We want the holodeck to run so we can go do period pieces, and we can do dress up and we can do fun adventures on the holodeck, and we don't want to give that up. Okay, but don't try telling me at the same time that you are really out scraping by and barely making it out there on the frontier, when none of their hair is out of place, and their uniforms are pristine, and the bridge is clean every week.'"
"What is the difference really between Voyager and the rest of the fleet? When that ship comes home, it will blend right in. You won't even know the difference. They haven't personalized the ship in any way. It's still the same kind of bare metal, military look that it had at the beginning. If you were trapped on that ship and making your way home, for years on end, wouldn't you put something up on the walls? Would you put a plant or two somewhere in a corridor? Wouldn't you try to make it a little more livable? That is the challenge that I think they have really dropped. They just won't deal with the reality of the situation that ship is in."
"If you can't believe in your own premise, you then certainly can't take the next step and try to have a point of view about life, about what it means to be human: what is the nature of the human heart, and good and evil, all of the great questions that STAR TREK is famous for trying to grapple with in a science fiction context. When VOYAGER tries to go there it is so completely superficial that it doesn't mean anything. Even when they are trying to really mine something, it's undercut by the fact that nothing else surrounding it is real, and that you can't accept these people in the positions and what they are doing."
"Kirk and company had a point of view. Kirk was a man of opinions. He was a man who had his own take on right versus wrong, when to take action, and when not to. I think he is respected for that. People that looked up to that character, looked up to him because he was a leader who said, 'We are going this way, and this is the right thing to do.' Picard is a different kind of leader. Picard was a more thoughtful guy who saw there was a little more gray in the world, but still had a very high sense of ethics, such a high sense of ethics that I think it bound us a little too much; it bound the character a little too tightly. Sisko [Avery Brooks] was a man who saw the world in shades of gray, who was always thrust into ambiguous situations, who was always having to grapple with questions of faith and reason and right and wrong, and had to do it in an interesting in compelling way. The people around him supported that premise. They were all flawed characters on a flawed station dealing with a flawed situation. It gave them permission to explore that ground."
"[But] I don't know what VOYAGER is about. It just doesn't seem to speak to me. I watch the show; I try to understand what it is saying to me, what it's trying to explore. But it doesn't seem to explore the human condition. It doesn't have a point of view on the subject. It falls back on STAR TREK boilerplate; it falls back on the Prime Directive. The Prime Directive has now become this cop out for doing anything in an episode, for having any point of view."