LogFAQs > #932764192

#59. Chakotay

Chakotay. Must. BOX!
a very popular meme

Chakotay sucks. Not to put too fine a point on it or anything. There are characters in Star Trek that are poorly acted, characters that are poorly written, and characters that the writers never had any idea what to do with or how to use properly. Chakotay may be the only lead character in a Star Trek series who was a perfect storm of all three of these things at once. If the writers were going to try for some genuine Native American representation, which was, on its own, an admirable idea, they really should have done some actual research instead of relying on some con artist for the obviously fake, ludicrously stereotypical portrayal of Native culture on display in almost all of Chakotay's feature episodes. When people say that bad representation is worse than no representation at all, this is the kind of thing they're talking about. I genuinely like Voyager as a show, I do, but sometimes, especially in the early seasons (before the writers seemed to more or less forget he existed and just started acting like Tuvok was the second-in-command), it was really hard to get on board considering this guy was one of the leads.

So, okay, specifics. First of all, any time there was any sort of Vision Quest-related episode I just wanted to die. These episodes are, without exception, a blight on Voyager's record. Even that one Original Series episode where Kirk decides to become a Native American is handled more respectfully. Second of all, on the VERY rare occasion on which the writers found something halfway compelling to do with Chakotay, it would last for an episode and then get immediately dropped (a pretty common problem with Voyager, but particularly brutal when it comes to this guy). I'm talking, like, the second-season episode Resolutions, where Janeway and Chakotay get marooned on a remote planet for Reasons and end up starting up a kinda-sorta romantic relationship. The big twist of that episode is that the two of them actually have some pretty decent chemistry... but, of course, their relationship is never explored in such a way again and we're expected to act like it never happened.


I would have used a picture of Chakotay boxing but Quinton beat me to it.

Point is that they pulled shit like this all the time, and even though there might be three or four episodes over the series' 172-episode run where Chakotay was more or less all right, he spent the vast majority of that span as dead weight, and bringing the series' momentum to an utter crawl whenever the writers realized they hadn't done a Chakotay-centric episode in awhile and decided to give him another chance in the spotlight. For every Shattered, an actually pretty good seventh-season episode with him bouncing back and forth between time periods, there's countless outings like Tattoo or Nemesis or The Fight that I desperately wish I could forget. Although at least The Fight is hilarious in an ironic way. I guess.

PS: The fact that I didn't even think to mention he was a Maquis in my write-up is really kind of telling in terms of how much Voyager did with THAT particular concept.