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Star Trek: Voyager. Series Review.

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Khushrenada:
Well, even though my Futurama Review Project didn't quite pan out as expected, what the heck, I'll try something like this again and see how far I get.

Why?  :o

Recently, I just finished watching Deep Space Nine a couple weekends ago on July 1. It was a long journey of 176(!!!) episodes over the course of 4 - 5 months. I had some breaks in it and watched other stuff from time to time but overall, it was an interesting journey with a Trek show quite different from the others. I may do a similar run through of that show in a separate thread despite making a bunch of comments on it in the TV review thread already. For now, I'd like to try tackle something while it is still fresh from my viewing experiences.

I made the comment in the TV review thead that DS9 "has got me fired about Trek again that [I'm] thinking about watching Voyager again and finally going through that series to get more of my Trek fix." Now, it wasn't really my intention to start watching this series. I've never had a high opinion of it but the idea of maybe just watching a couple random episodes of it to remind me what the flavor of the series was like again as a comparison to all the DS9 might be interesting but I had no definite plans to watch it. However, when I stopped in at my local library (literacy, bitch!) to browse through the selection, I was surprised to see Season 1 of Star Trek Voyager on the shelf. I had seen Season 4 of it at one time as I was stopping by to borrow the DS9 series but I often forgot they even had the Voyager stuff because it is hardly ever on the shelf. (I think it goes to other branches mainly.) I wondered if I really wanted to bother taking it out or trying to start watch the series all the way through like DS9. It just seemed like such a favorable coincidence that a few days after finishing DS9, Season 1 would be waiting for me that I decided to at least watch some of the first season again. (Who knows? Maybe I'm following some other library users trail who is always a season ahead of me as they return the season they just watched to move on to the next, it is perfect timing for me to then pick up that season they've dropped off.)

As I was watching DS9, I got curious about some of the people on it and some Trek lore which invariably lead me to Voyager articles on Wikipedia. It was actually reading the main page entry of Voyager that got me interested in giving the series a 3rd chance. (More on that in a moment.) Especially when skimming through the summery and then reading some of the plot elements like Getting Home and Body Count. It got me thinking of how the show had a really great premise/narrative hook. My curiosity of watching the show again for these elements helped sway me in checking out this show once more.

Khushrenada:
First Contact / Initial Reception of the Show

My history of this show is one where I remember watching the occasional episode of it here and there on a Saturday afternoon. (Alongside other tremendous contributions to the TV medium like Sinbad the Sailor, Viper or V.I.P. which would air around that time, IIRC.) However, Next Generation was the Trek series I'd see more of because a local station would air an episode late afternoon every weekday like 5 or 6 pm. As such, my view early on was that Voyager just seemed a bit off / weird because the characters were different from the TNG ones who stood out more / were instantly memorable.

Even in to high school, I remember sometimes watching a new Voyager episode when it aired here and there if there was much else on in the evening but among some of my geekier friends in Electronics class, we often dismissed the show as just not being as good as the entries that came before. Even for a lot of episodes I never watched, I'd hear them talk about the latest dumb thing that had happened like Tom Paris surfing some galactic wave which would make laugh at how stupid it sounded. (If I really do follow through on watching this whole series now, I am kind of looking forward to seeing this surfing episode after having just imagined it for all this time and, almost 20 years later, finally seeing what it is actually like.)

I had a spare period and I'd often go to the library to read the newspaper (or other books, I was such a wild guy in high school!). It was actually from reading the paper and the sports section that pushed me over the edge and started making me a hockey fan and begin watching hockey games in the playoffs so it goes to show what can happen when you start to inform yourself on things but that's a whole other story. I bring up this factoid because I remember reading something in the entertainment section one time talking about Voyager as it was getting near the end of its run and there was a comment in an article that there were only two main reasons for anyone to watch Voyager and they were both on Jeri Ryan's chest.

That comment stuck with me at the time and still does because I kind of agreed with it. Not being a huge fan of the show and characters, Jeri Ryan really was a big force in why'd I even bother to watch it at the time. At least she played a former Borg member which made her kind of cool since I still thought the Borg were the best but it also led to me disliking Voyager even more because the show seemed to ruin the Borg mythos that TNG had created. As such, I'm kind of curious as to whether I'd still agree with my 18 year old hot take of the series treatment of the Borg or not. I remember watching the finale of the show when it aired and being so upset at the state of the Borg in the end. At the same time, coming into this and knowing how the show will end keeps my expectations in check and from creating scenarios of what might play out instead like I was doing at times when watching DS9 and wondering where it was all headed.

Khushrenada:
Latent Interest

At some point in the early 2000's, like 2002 - 2004, when the internet was full of fan sites thanks to Geocities, I use to look up various TV shows I'd start to get into or were into and read all the episode guides for them and other people's ratings/rankings of them. If I saw episode descriptions that looked neat, couldn't remember or an episode I'd missed, I'd check for that show on satellite TV and look ahead on the guide to see what order a channel was airing the episodes and make sure to wait and mark down when it would air so I could record it later. When I got into something like a new TV show or movie or game, I used to obsess over it so much back then.

This led to me going through Next Generation and realizing there was stuff I didn't remember or hadn't seen. At this point, the Space Channel was now in existence and Star Trek series was its main bread and butter. I wanted to see that series completely and was now able to pick up on more details and things I had missed or half-remembered when watching the series as a kid playing at the same time it was on so I wasn't fully paying attention. I also checked out some Voyager sites and guides because I was now curious what it had to offer and there were episodes I read about that sounded really great and amazing.

The one thing that stood out back then was that there were aliens even more powerful than the Borg called Species 7482 (or something like that). I know there was other stuff that also sounded neat at the time but that was the detail that most set my imagination on fire. So, from time to time, I'd check out the upcoming Voyager episodes on the Guide menu to keep an eye for when some of these episodes might air and would watch them. At some point, I did finally see the episode introducing this species but all I remember of it is a green lizard thing coming through some breach in a wall and the camera zooming up to it's eye where you see a reflection of the crew staring at it. I've been trying to rack my brain as to what else happened but I just can't remember anything else. I just know that I ended up not being as impressed at the reality compared to my imagined expectations.

Again, the idea of watching Voyager now to get another take on what it has to offer with better context, like I gave Next Generation by watching it with more attention to details all the way through, does intrigue me. If I had watched DS9 haphazardly of what were the "best" episodes, would I have really enjoyed it or gotten the reason as to why they were considered the best without the context of what had come before in establishing the characters and moments that made these great episodes? (As for why I never obsessed over DS9, I had no history or any connection to the series at that point [I don't even think I knew Worf had even been a main part of that show yet] and the clips and bits I had seen for it never looked that interesting to me. It always looked like the most boring of all the Trek shows compared to the others.) At the same time, Enterprise was on the air and I liked that series a whole lot more so Voyager continued to disappoint me when it's "great" episodes didn't impress me much and it's cast seemed to be so much lesser than the characters I liked on TNG and Enterprise.

Khushrenada:
The Second Chance

Well, about 7 or 8 years ago, I thought I would give Voyager a real chance. A lot of time had passed since I'd watched much Trek. I was interested in revisiting Enterprise because I was forgetting things about the series and there were some episodes of it that I never did get to see in the later 3rd and 4th seasons which had bummed me out at the time with it getting more serialized so missing an episode could mean missing out on some details of the plot. I watched that series through again and thought it held up quite well. I do get some of the complaints against it but I'm not going to start a discussion on that. This intro is long enough. Suffice to say, I still think it was a shame it ended when it did because it was showing how it could really integrate well into the Trek mythos and create a great legacy for itself. When I finished watching that series through to the end, I was looking into where Deep Space Nine and Voyager were at on their run-throughs on the space Channel. By this point, I'd begun to hear a lot of positive opinions about Deep Space Nine and the phrase "Dominion Storyline" to be interested in checking out but wanted to do so from the beginning. It was not close to it's pilot episode though but Voyager was in a couple weeks. So, I decided to start recording that series to check out. I don't think I ever saw the Voyager Pilot in all that time that I had seen various episodes of the show.

Well, I watched the pilot and I HATED it! I just couldn't believe what seemed to be dumb idea after dumb idea and execution. It boggled my mind as to what was going through the creators of the show when they were putting this together. Right away, I was already on the Voyager hate train. But then, the next couple episodes seemed to be way better to the point that I thought they maybe should have served as the first episodes to somehow introduce the series. Yet, the quality soon seemed to dip again and I just became uninterested in pursuing the idea of watching the series through and gave up a bit into Season 1.

Thus, Voyager has remained the Trek series I have disliked the most. From time to time, I've seen some people talk positively about it but the general consensus seems to be negative. A few years ago, I remember seeing an article that theorized the reason Voyager was so hated by a lot of Star Trek fans is that it is the most feminist Trek which meant most of the male fans would have hated it for it's female perspective. In my mind, my response was that no, it is hated because it had incredibly dumb plots with uninteresting characters and didn't compare to other series with a good cast and better material. Seeing weird support for Voyager like that further added to the viewpoint that the series was terrible if it inspired that kind of defense for it.

Khushrenada:
Recent Opinions

The biggest thing that changed to make me check in on Voyager again came from the AV Club. I may have mentioned this before when I hosted the Star Trek Mafia but in a news article of how there wouldn't be Blu-Ray or upgraded HD editions of DS9 and Voyager like TNG received, I was reading through the reader comments made in which people began discussing the different series. It had been a long time since I'd really thought much about Trek aside from seeing the recent films when they came out but it was interesting to see the opinions of others again on these series. DS9 seemed to have a lot of popularity among the commenters with Voyager getting a less than positive response. However, it wasn't all negative against Voyager and there were some positive comments made about it that got me kind of interested in the show again.

Here are some snippets of them:

Shields - "Voyager's strongest episodes were always the 2-parters which would be visually striking, have memorable plot lines and character moments & rewatch value. the single story eps varied wildly in quality & depended upon which character was featured in the episode: Generally Good: 7 of 9, The Dr, Tom/Kim paired together, Variant in quality: Tuvok, Janeway, Tom solo stories, Belanna, Neelix. Bad: Harry Kim solo stories, Chakkotay stories, Kes stories (excluding her season 3 arc/departure which only happened because of the actress's allergy to ear glue & her being chosen as the actress to get the boot to keep a cast of 9 when 7 of 9 joined), Janeway solo stories that involved a dress & the holodeck, Naomi Wildman."


Edmund Fitzgerald - "Voyager would have benefited strongly from serialization. It would have better complemented their original story of being trapped in the Delta Quadrant, and it would have let them explore stories like the Maquis and Starfleet crews having to work together. Plus like you said, the two parters tended to be the best.

But honestly, I think that some of the real hidden gems of the series were actually single episodes. Off the top of my head, Latent Image, The Raven, Counterpoint, The Omega Directive."

Prole Hole - "Voyager does two-parters better than any other branch of the franchise. In it's entire run there's only one two-parter that's actively bad (Unimatrix Zero), and when it did them well (Scorpion, Year Of Hell, Flesh and Blood... actually basically all the other ones) it absolutely knocked it out of the park."

Actually, Prole Hole had other comments including:

"Season One: Decent, though fairly unremarkable for a first season.
Season Two: Godawful. Miserable runarounds with Seska and the Kason, failed story arcs, and very little of real interest.
Season Three: Big, bright primary coloured action in the TOS mould.
Season Four: One of the best overall seasons in Star Trek history, an oftentimes dark rumination on responsibility, history and trauma.
Season Five: Good character work in the first half, surprisingly experimental in the second half.
Season Six: Mostly obvious and predictable, and just flat
Season Seven: Way better than its reputation. Not flawless but actually a really good ending for the series."

And

"I've published two books defending the series.

https://www.amazon.com/Thin...

https://www.amazon.com/Thin...

Those are the links for the Kindle editions, Vol 2 is also available in paperback from Amazon. It's an episode-by-episode redemptive review, pretty much in the style of AV Club reviews."

Which seems odd considering his breakdown of each season that he would defend it so much so in book form but obviously there was something there he liked.

Source of the quotes: http://www.avclub.com/article/star-trek-deep-space-nine-and-voyager-might-never--249744 (I'll probably pull a few more from there yet.)

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