Recent OpinionsThe 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.)