Neelix is what happens when producers want to force another Quark.
Oh come on! Not a compelling story? He’s a space scavenger, his people are nomadic because OF GENOCIDE, who are wandering space in search of a new home.
He’s an ex-soldier, ex-criminal, who can’t quite come to terms with his past because he wants to be morally and ethically good, he has SEVERE “people pleaser” issues and tries to be everyone’s friend - BUT is not so weak that he can’t fight or stand up for himself or his friends. He’s multi talented, but doesn’t always know when to reign it in and he serves as a motivational character for the Voyager crew who are lost in space – and actually does a good job of it!!
This is the character of our generation. Wtf do you mean “not a compelling story”?
Bad acting? Actually agree, but you can also say that it’s the mannerisms of his people, because it seems to be a mainstay that they are all sort of “whimsical forest creatures” - for lack of better terms - which could be a writeoff in terms of acting.
But Neelix is just so endearing to me. To see how Tuvok struggles to understand him or even accept him - being the “LoGiCaL VuLCaN” that he is - is just one of those Star Trek duos that’s up there with Bashir and Garek, Kirk and Spock, etc.
He might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but a bad character, bad story? That’s boulderdash. Now cut a little jig and make a pot of space weavels - bring some light into your friends life, you low energy having, negative nancy ass bastards.
Be like Neelix.
I wouldn’t say it’s bad acting? It seems right in line with an anxious people-pleaser who doesn’t know when to quit. I thought he was spot on.
But he is so goddamn unbelievably annoying.
Balderdash* no boulders were harmed.
Bashir and Garek, Kirk and Spock
How about Quark and Odo? I love both of these stick-in-the-mud cop vs lovable rogue duos!
Quark and Odo <3
There’s so much comedy in the Quark/Odo relationship that’s played perfectly and isn’t at the expense of either of the characters.
The uptight lawman/morally good criminal will-they-wont-they frenemyship is one of my favorite dynamics in the show and is up there with Garak/Bashir or even La Forge/Data.
isn’t at the expense of either of the characters
It always felt like Odo had the slight upperhand (or narrative sympathy?) in every scenario which was a tad annoying when a major theme of his character arch is his possible propensity for outright authoritarianism (a character arch I thought was brilliant to give him and, sadly, not explored nearly enough).
I still love both of them but that aspect of the dynamic will always bother me.
Mall Cop Paul Odo.
Such a good show… I also wish they had explored it more.
Still no
“bitches”, is what I assume is the end of that sentence. You bring shame to Jonathan Frakes.
neelix is super cool, ethan phillips went to the same spiritual center (so cal off-brand buddhism) as i did growing up
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.
Straight up. I love my weird little Adderall-fueled space Hobbit. He rocks. And that episode where he dies and then worries about the afterlife? One of my favorites during my first run!
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.
I like Nelix plotlines.
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.
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.
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.
…new headcanon unlocked.
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.
Lower decks is barely canon, much like Clerks was barely a movie.
/s
Like Boimler, I don’t see the resemblance between the two.
EDIT: Posted too soon as I see someone else made basically this same joke below. Leaving it here as both a testament to my unoriginality and to save everyone from thinking that God deleted my comment
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.
deleted by creator
“Yes mam.”
“if” doing a lot of heavy lifting there
tom paris is imo easily the most forgettable character amongst the main cast
Not while Chakotay exists.
Chakotay is memorable because the “Native American” advisor they hired to help write the character was a total fraud, just some honky from LA pretending to be Cherokee and making everything up, That’s why Chakotay sucked so hard, he was made of some loser’s stereotypes.
Only because Neelix and Harry are so fucking annoying, they’re impossible to forget.
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.
Wesley Crush is already really shallow character like the rest of tng
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
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!
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.
Now I’m imagining if they had somehow managed to cast Robin Williams (RIP) as Neelix!
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.
“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).
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!”
Holy shit, I was imagining Robert Beltran at first, and nearly died.
deleted by creator
He should have played Picard.
Ah yes, Captain Robert Picard.
I think he could act, but that’s the only part I disagree with.
HOW DARE YOU SAY THIS ABOUT NEELIX
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!”
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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
