desperate to emote

TV One of the big problems with Star Trek: Voyager (besides the scripting, storytelling and premise) was that the standard of acting which always seemed slightly off, especially in comparison to its stablemate Deep Space 9 in later years.  What should have been big emotional scenes always had a slightly muted quality, especially in the case of Garrett (Ensign Kim) Wang who often looked desperate to emote but didn't seem capable. Recently he's explained his method. It wasn't his method:

"When casting ended on Voyager, all the actors were invited by executive producer Rick Berman to attend a congratulatory luncheon. It was during this lunch that Berman informed us that he expected all actors portraying human roles to follow his decree. He told us that we were to underplay our human characters. He wanted our line delivery to be as military — and subsequently devoid of emotion — as possible, since this, in his opinion, was the only way to make the aliens look real.

"My first thought was, “That’s not right! What the heck was Berman talking about? Was he pulling our legs? The human characters shouldn’t be forced to muffle their emotions. We were human, not androids!”

I've not seen any of Voyager much past season five for just this reason -- there's only so many times you can watch two actors playing against each other who might as well be on different soundstages for all the chemistry they have.  It also explains why B'Elanna Torres was my favourite character (Roxann Dawson was presumably allowed to act) and why Sarah Silverman seemed like such a breath of fresh air in her single appearance.