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Seized Opportunities
Chakotay's relationship with Seska is just about all that I can point to when I'm looking for things they did right with Chakotay. Unfortunately, this part works because of some of the elements of his character that don't make much sense. Seska infiltrated his crew and became romantically involved with him, betraying him on two fronts. Since she betrayed him personally so completely, she was able to get a rise out of him that no one else could, she could make him betray his own pacifist ideals.
Missed Opportunities
...pacifist ideals?!?!?! I've said this about six thousand times throughout the course of this project, in a number of different ways, but here it goes again: You can hardly tell that Chakotay was the captain of a ship that engaged in terrorist attacks against a hated enemy in an effort to win back their homes and their self-determination. That was essentially the Chakotay mission statement, and almost none of it was in the final product. A whole character could have been built around the self-determination element, and it even would have tied in neatly with his american indian background.
Basically, Chakotay had several of the same problems that Paris did. That's part of what pushes me towards believing that the reason Paris wasn't Locarno was that the party line was actually true: Locarno wasn't used because he was thought to be irredeemable. When the writers sat down with the concept of Chakotay, they must've decided that he was irredeemable, and opted to shift the character's motives from day one. I don't understand why they felt that way, but the model just fits the data.
A Chakotay that fits with his past would be so awesome though. Fighting for freedom, that's pretty noble. You know, captain of his own rebel ship, but now the fight's over for him. He's got to struggle to put aside his old ways to make a new life, but there are hints that he's not really over the things he went through in the war. Is this starting to sound familiar? Fiercely loyal to his crew, and though you wouldn't think it once you've heard his story, he's got a heart of gold. You picking up what I'm putting down? Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds. Only, unlike Mal, he's now without a ship, and needs to work with the people who caused his war in order to survive. That is one delicious recipe for compelling television.
But, no, instead Chakotay went in the direction of... well, in very little direction at all. He became a model Starfleet officer right from the start, and wiped his past clean immediately. Because of that, the Chakotay character wound up with very little definition, and you can see it in the episodes I've listed above. He got to be the central character a fair number of times, but in a good half of those episodes there was no reason that it had to be him. Nothing that happened to the main character in Unity or Distant Origin needed that character to be Chakotay in order for the plot to happen. Chakotay's personality was completely irrelevant to the proceeding in Waking Moments, The Fight, In the Flesh, and Unforgettable. Even episodes like Nemesis and Initiations, require the central character to be the pacifist that Chakotay simply shouldn't be. Chakotay's american indian heritage also suffered from vagueness syndrome. Pick a tribe, any tribe, and you can reference specific atrocities committed against them - details are key! Without them, Chakotay remained some amorphous blob of a character.
Chakotay was also exceptionally passive for the leader of a rebel ship. He was a captain of a non-military crew, he needed to have some charisma, some sort of ambition for leadership to get people to follow him. He had none of that, and here's where I'm going to get into the real speculation: I think that maybe the reason why Chakotay was so passive is the writers felt they had to make him that way in order to have a strong female captain. I think that's completely wrong-headed, and his lack of strength made Janeway look weaker too, but I cannot otherwise justify his behavior. It got even worse in episodes like Scorpion, Part II, where he did show some kind of backbone, and Janeway devolved into some passive-aggression monster. If Janeway routinely had to hold her crew together despite real opposition, that would have made her a stronger character, not a weaker one; just more fuel for the latent sexism fire that I'll be building more furiously in the next installment.
Battlestar Galactica did a lot of things that I'd characterize as a direct effort to do Voyager better than Voyager, but exhibit A has got to be the Roslin/Adama relationship as a reworking of Chakotay/Janeway. The way those two, born of completely different worlds and world-views, gradually built a grudging respect (and, eventually, romantic feelings) for each other after being put together by circumstance was flawless. The fact that Roslin was a complete invention of the re-imagined Battlestar only adds to my certainty that Moore was taking that opportunity to show what he'd have done at the helm of Voyager.
The Actor
Hoooo, Robert Beltran. Buddy, I respect your bravery when it came to insulting the show that you were currently working on, and you certainly had some insightful things to say. At the same time, it is absolutely no surprise at all that you've gotten so little work since Voyager. Even if some producer didn't think "gee, I want that guy to come on my show and insult my work," you brought bland to a whole new level. Sure, Chakotay's bland to start out with; I already spent a page and a half on how poorly defined he was. But Beltran, he brought absolutely nothing to the part. When looking for an image for this page, I spent a couple hours paging through screenshots on trekcore.com trying to find an image where he had some sort of interesting expression on his face. As you can see, I had to settle for him kind of curling up one side of his mouth.
Final Thoughts
Chakotay was one big missed opportunity. The guy he turned out to be and the guy he could have been are so at odds with each other that I don't even know why the writers bothered with the whole Maquis storyline in the first place. That's a topic for my end of series evaluation though, so I'll just end this one here.
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