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Let’s get this straight right up front: I like Kate Mulgrew as an actress.

I’ve never watched the Mrs. Columbo shows, but I liked her in Cheers and was probably one of the very few regular viewers of Heartbeat, a medical show about a clinic for women owned and operated by the doctors.

Heartbeat was hardly a signficant show, except in one fashion: it showed us Kate Mulgrew as the leader of a group of people, since her character was the head doctor in charge of running the place.

And that doctor, whose name changed during the course of the series, did so without being a queen bitch.

She was human, and even though she had a thing going with one of the male doctors at the clinic, she didn’t stomp him into the ground repeatedly or even feel a compulsion to touch his chest all the time.

But I don’t like Kate Mulgrew as Kathryn Janeway.

Let me amend that: I still like Kate Mulgrew and would watch her work in the future. I must confess to even liking her voice, which irritates so many other people.

But I don’t like Kathryn Janeway. Not only do I not like her, I loathe her. I do indeed hate Captain Janeway.

I didn’t like her very much when I first started watching the show, but Piotr Alexeivitch counseled patience.

And then, about the time I decided the captain was getting along okay, Piotr took a dislike to her. He was right.

And as the fourth season progresses, the only thing I can conclude is that U.S.S. Voyager would be much better off if they marooned Janeway on some passing planet with only a jug of potable water and her self-righteous thoughts to keep her company.

Janeway has no sense of humor. She has no friends, despite Chakotay’s repeated professions to the contrary, and I’m beginning to think she doesn’t have much of a soul.

Humorless, friendless, soulless. That’s not much of an argument in her favor, is it?

In essence, Janeway has become Captain Kirk, the smug autocrat doing his best for God and his kingdom.

But Captain Kirk never took himself so seriously. And he had sex a lot more than Janeway does. (Spock had sex a lot more than Janeway does.)

This is not Kate Mulgrew’s fault. I lay the blame entirely at the feet of the writers and producers, who have determined this wonky direction Voyager seems bent upon taking.

This could have been a great show, with clashing personalities and ideologies, i.e. the forced merging of Starfleet and the Maquis, who consciously rejected Starfleet ideals to take up terrorism (or patriotism; it all depends on whose side you’re on).

But it never was. We experienced a very Brady melding of the two groups, but then once we got to be friends, we apparently decided no further character development was necessary.

And any development Janeway was experiencing was arrested with the arrival of Seven of Nine.

I like Seven of Nine as a character, sort of. I still miss Kes, but I’m trying to get over. Kes had both soul and heart, and Seven is struggling to find either.

But since her arrival, Janeway has made it her mission to mold Seven into Janeway’s idea of personhood, and she has been very autocractic about it.

This autocratism has spread to her dealings with the rest of her crew.

She brooks no discussion about anything, she repeatedly makes ill-advised moves despite Chakotay’s pleadings to see reason, and she has assumed she knows what is right for all 140 crewmembers 100 percent of the time.

And the writers always make her right.

She is Everywoman: if a problem needs solving, it’s Janeway to the rescue. She can out-engineer B’Elanna, out-science Harry, out-fight Tuvok, and although she once said she couldn’t pilot very well, she has been the one to take the controls while zooming through gravity wells.

Nobody can be that perfect.

So why does this Janeway need a crew of 140 to get home? Obviously, she doesn’t. She doesn’t need anyone. And that makes her incredibly one-dimensional.

When she has a personal problem, she turns to no one. She has scorned Chakotay repeatedly (he needs to develop a spine of his own and quit crawling back to her, but that’s another essay entirely), and even when she drinks tea she does so alone in her ready room.

Where is her "Old Man" that Benjamin Sisko can talk to? Where is her "Dr. Crusher" who will share breakfast and conversation? Where is the trusted first officer whose judgment she values, the first officer that every other captain in the Star Trek universe has been happy to rely on?

Why can’t she see that she needs the people around her, particularly when she and they are so very far from home?

Or more correctly, why can’t the writers see this?

One rumor on the Internet is that Kate Mulgrew is very unhappy with her character since the advent of Seven–so unhappy she’s contemplating leaving.

Maybe they will maroon Janeway after all.

Or maybe now that Jeri Taylor has moved on her way, Brannon Braga will recognize the error of Jeri’s ways and fix them.

Or not: the scripts he has written this season have gone clear out of their way to avoid character exposition.

I think Voyager is doomed unless the writers recognize that humanity is a crucial ingredient in any show: sci-fi, westerns, medical dramas, cop shows, even documentaries on The Learning Channel.

The guys in those documentaries don’t just show us pyramids: they show how the builders and pharoahs embedded their personalities into the rocks which have survived for millenia.

And unless Kathryn Janeway is given a personality of more than one note, she, her ship and her show are destined to fail in their mission.

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