I know you don’t really mean that, Mr. Vulcan!
Tuvok would never admit it but they’re secretly besties.
Tuvok danced for him on the last episode
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.
Still better than jar jar
Was literally just thinking this. Star Wars fans had it worse.
Darth Jar Jar was the original plan, Lucas changed it after the backlash against the character. He was supposed to be the new trilogy’s foil to the goofy character in a New Hope, Yoda. Lucas has said that he was making the new trilogy rhyme with the original, no other character matches with that initial Yoda introduction. That is also why Grievous and Dooku come out of nowhere despite supposedly being big characters, to fill the gap.
Darth Jar Jar was the original plan, Lucas changed it after the backlash against the character.
Was this ever confirmed? I just thought it was a fan theory.
That said, if Lucas had actually gone down this path, it would have totally redeemed Jar Jar.
Oh it’s just a fan theory, but it makes sense and matches with comments Lucas has made with regards to the overarching themes. It also explains odd things the character does, which must have been intentional since he was a CG character.
Lucas will probably never confirm or deny it officially because it would confirm that either he got scared and made a huge mistake abandoning that plotline and making the story worse in the process, or that he made a bad character a pivotal linchpin of the storyline since Jar Jar is the deciding vote that gives us the Empire.
Neelix is awesome.
I like Nelix plotlines.
Neelix is what happens when producers want to force another Quark.
I think he could act, but that’s the only part I disagree with.
In another timeline we would have had Robert Picardo as Neelix. That’s the role he initially auditioned for!
I want a version where he plays Neelix but his character is otherwise unchanged
Please state the nature of the culinary emergency
Hah, reminds me of the time Bender tried to become a cook on Futurama.
“There was nothing wrong with that food. The salt level was 10% less than a lethal dose.”
“Uh oh, I shouldn’t have had seconds!”
He should have played Picard.
Ah yes, Captain Robert Picard.
Holy shit, I was imagining Robert Beltran at first, and nearly died.
Robert Picardo ended up exactly where he was needed.
“Please state the nature of the acting emergency.”
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).
Am I the only one who appreciates Ethan Phillips and acting the way he was written?
I’m not a fan of Neelix, but I don’t think what was wrong with him was necessarily Ethan Phillips’ fault.
He was in a short lived show called Avenue 5 which I can only describe as “The Love Boat” in space. And he was hilarious! https://youtu.be/CUVFAgwdfEQ
Avenue 5 was taken from us too soon. I’m just glad that we got to see douchey-Josh-Gad sorta reprise his role in Wonder Man.
He was also briefly in the Alec Baldwin film The Shadow. I was rewatching it recently and was like “No, Neelix! Don’t do it!”
oh, come on, if you lower your humour threshold enough, it was a fun addition to the show!
You know what? The real world is filled with people like that. On any given day, you might be one. Embrace mediocrity.
Huh. Yeah Neelix wasn’t great. Which made me think a little further on it. I wasn’t particularly fond of many of the Voyager crew. For comparison I’m fond of most all the crew from the other shows of roughly the same era, TNG and DS9.
I liked The Doctor, 7 of 9, Tom Paris, and Ensign Kim. Captain Janeway was a badass and I think Kate Mulgrew’s performance in the role was quite good. But didn’t find the character likeable. I did find her character likeable in those… I want to say two episodes where she played her descendant.
Should be mentioned, that his character was also a pedophile.
That’s a big stretch, considering she wouldn’t even be old enough for middle school when she died of old age. She aged faster than a dog. Her entire character was originally developed to give viewers a new perspective on the concept of time. She was portrayed by (and acted as) an adult even though the character was only 2 years old. She was inexperienced and naive due to her age, but that was also largely due to the fact that she (along with her entire race) was kept as part of an uneducated slave society for her entire childhood.
Neelix was possessive and jealous, (which are perfectly valid criticisms by themselves), but calling him a pedo is difficult. There are several age-related criticisms you could make without resorting to outright pedo accusations. For instance, Neelix appeared to be in his late 20’s/early 30’s (by human standards) when the series started, and Kes was only ~19-20 (again, by human standards). And most people would cringe at seeing a 19 year old dating a 29 year old. So there was a marked age difference between them, even if she was above the age of majority for her race.
But again, her character was meant to age extremely quickly. IIRC the writers original concept was for her to age the equivalent of one human year every two or three episodes, but that was scrapped due to the actress developing an allergy for prosthetics, (which meant they wouldn’t have been able to do proper age makeup in the later seasons). So by the time they actually started dating, it’s possible that the relative age gap would have been closer.
Come on, don’t water down that term. For her species she was fully developed and presented as an adult human. He was a possessive creep but not a pedophile.
It’s not the internet if we don’t make broad generalizations for the sake of moral pseudo-superiority.
She was 2 years old.
- Pedophilia has to do with physical appearance (attaction to prepubescence).
- She was like 20-25% of the way through her lifespan.
Saying “she was 2 years old” would only mean something if she had a similar developmental cycle to humans.
Pedophilia is an age thing. You can try to normalize it all you want, but it just comes off sounding like a Lolicon argument. “She’s physically mature at that age”, sounds a lot like “But she only looks like a child…she’s actually 200 years old.”
Fuck off, I’m quoting definitions from the DSM-5 and the ICD-11 - not trying to “normalize” a psychological disorder. Go back to reddit. If you want to get into this argument then he would be a infantophile, not a pedophile. But he is neither.
To that point. I recently saw the episode where she goes through puberty prematurely and they talk about having a baby even though her species doesn’t ovulate until 4.
It’s creepy. It’s hard to pin down because the actress is obviously of age but that episode was gross.
You know what, we can probably blame Rick Berman for this as well.
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.
In the early seasons, I couldn’t figure out how the fastest ship in the area could travel in one direction and still keep meeting the same people over and over.
I was too distracted by the insanely nonsensical main storyline to ever worry about Neelix.
They kept stopping to fuck around. Stopping on random planets to find food, stopping on random planets to talk with new aliens, stopping at random anomalies to investigate, stopping so Chakote could do some stupid made up ritual.
pan flute music intensifies
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.
Neelix is a subdued, cerebral character compared to what I’ve seen from the Starfleet Academy show’s trailer.
Besides, it’s called a mess hall for a reason.
