Welcome Lannister. Nice to have you here.
This is my opinion/review of Star Trek Voyager as a whole compared to the other Star Trek Series's. Most of this will be criticisms of the show. I felt like writing this to describe the things that bothered me with this show. A good portion of this has most likely been written about before. The show is not in anyway terrible at all. I would give the show probably a 7.5/10, but it isn't nearly as good as DS9 and TNG. I tend to watch the shows in chronological order as to when they aired, so Voyager after I finish TNG season 7, DS9 with TNG season 6 and forward, and along side Voyager for it's last 5 seasons. Watching Voyager and DS9 may further amplify the things that annoyed me with the show. I will say that I enjoyed Voyager more than the Original Series mostly based on the fact that I think it had a lot more "good" episodes. This probably seems blasphemous but, from the Original Series, I only liked the episodes featuring Klingons, Romulans, Mudd, Khan, and that one alien that was killing people in the mine to protect it's eggs. The Original Series suffers from the 60's goffiness like the Batman series. Had they taken it more serious in approach to something like Bonanza, it may have worn a little better. I was born in the 80's so I grew up with TNG. I'm just not a fan of the 60's t.v. show style, but I do love the movies 2 through 6. I will say that if I had not grown up with TNG, that DS9 would be considered my favorite, but I consider them a tie. Their is something special about TNG to me, though I will admit that DS9 had the best writing and characters as a whole.
You rank Voyager at a 7.5. That’s a pretty strong rating for all the problems you profess the series has. Without going into Star Trek too much, I’ll say if you can’t get past the sets you are missing everything that series has to offer. Just remember even when they had money, they really didn’t have any money if you know what I mean. Shatner said their budget in the 60’s was equal to what it took to feed the new Star Trek casts. It’s about the stories, not the appearance.
Note: I've yet to watch Enterprise so my opinions will be with respect to all the shows prior to Enterprise.
I hope you enjoy it, I loved it.
The first big problem with this show is the characters. This show has the worst characters of all Star Trek shows. I can honestly say that that I only like Seven of Nine, The Doctor, and Tuvok out of the entire crew of Voyager. Pretty much every other character is either annoying, rude, or retarded. B'lana Torres is basically a 13 year old teenage snotty teen. "Rarr, who are you and what do you want? Rarr Rarr." Basically every encounter with any person or alien species results in her insulting them or making some nasty comment. Neelix just acts goofy and retarded for the last 5 seasons."Herp derp morale officer. Lets play Cotiscot and be friends!". Kes has to be the worst character ever. "Gee I'm so naive. Look how utterly uninteresting I am." Talk about a waste. Even the writers admit this. I will state that the rude part doesn't apply to Kes or Neelix. Harry Kim is downright lame. "Oh my god, I kissed a girl. If Janeway finds out she'll ground me, wahhh." I mean jesus, he makes Wesley Crusher seem like Maverick from Top Gun. Chekotay was pretty much just there. "Oh gee captain, I just agree with everything you say". My fault with Janeway lies in how her character was so wishy-washy. Her personality never seemed consistent. Half the time she would act like Picard and then she would act like Kirk. She'd be willing to kill her entire crew and then the very next episode she wants to get them home and doesn't want to put anyone in danger. She'd be all about the prime directive and then completely disregard it. There are episodes where she'd encounter an alien species which tell her to get out of their territory in which she blatantly refuses, and/or destroys their ships in an ensuing fight, or disregards them because they don't impose a threat. Then the very next episode she is adamant about not violating the prime directive and taking the extra time to reach home. And then the next episode after this she'll smuggle people on her ship. I found it laughable how she was ridiculing Captain Ransom over their killing of a dozen aliens when she's done it so many times to shorten her journey.
If that’s how you see the characters, then that’s that. I will agree about B’Elanna early on as Roxanne was overacting horribly. But I think that’s something she overcame and I came to enjoy the Character. 7, the EMH, Tuvok were amongst the strongest characters for sure. I’d put Janeway up there and above them. She did push the Prime Directive many times, but as she stated she bent it, didn’t break it. Her actions were completely justified WRT Ramson. He was frying intelligent being for fuel and those beings were as a result attacking her crew. She had to defend her crew and stop Ransom, she did and at the ed even Ransom realized what he had done was wrong. Not “getting out of someone’s territory” is light-years different than cooking uncle alien. As far as smuggling, she was protecting people that were being wrongfully hunted down for nothing other than being telepathic. Can fault here there. Janeway didn’t have “help” out the in the Delta Quadrant and I for one liked that she didn’t need to call a board meeting to take a dump. She “had a pair”.
Another point: Pretty much every character with the exception of the three I mentioned treat the Doctor like garbage. I can't recall any episodes of TNG where the crew mates didn't treat Data like a human being. Yet in Voyager, the Doctor has to fight for the right not to be tampered with, etc. I really enjoyed the episode "Author, Author!" which played on this, and I found it hillarious how the crew acted like The Doctor was out of line. With the exception of the part where the holo-novel has Janeway killing a crew member, everything else was spot on and did happen. I also was annoyed with all the groveling towards Janeway. "Oh Janeway, you're so perfect. It's only because of you that I can function." Basically every character seems to come to her or rely on her advice and moral support for anything that they do. I will concede that some characters did rely on others half of the time, such as B'lana and Chekotay, and Harry and Tom, Seven and the Doctor. I don't remember every character in TNG or DS9 always coming to Picard or Sisko respectively for regular daily advice. I recall Geordi going to Guinan, Deanna confiding in Riker and Beverly. They just seemed to try their best to make Janeway perfect and always have the right answers over an over. "Oh Janeway, I can't believe I had the gumption to disagree with you!" Basically any fight or argument between her and a character would basically end up with Janeway being proven right. Case in point, and disagreement between her and Chekotay.
Doc was a hologram. Voyager explored their rights just as TNG explored Data’s. I thought Tom turned out OK, but I’ll agree that Harry was, well just Harry. An Ensign after 7 years… They could have dumped him and kept Kes. Chakotey did on many occasions disagree and a couple times actually went against Janeway. Don’t know what else you want, a mutiny? I’ll at least give the writers credit for trying something different with Kes. I liked the character even though Jen’s acting at times made me cringe. They didn’t think the character through really, but I thought she added to the show and was sad to see her go. Especially when Harry stayed. I thought Neelix’ character improved after Kes left. I always felt he was robbing the cradle.
The next big problem I have is with the writing in the show. I won't deny that there were very good episodes in the series. The show seemed to suffer from crap just happening to cause drama. There were three common scenarios that happened which always got on my nerves.
Scenario 1: Wham! Tuvok: "Shields down to 85%". Wham! Tuvok: "Shields down to 70%". Janeway: "engage warp!". Wham! Kim: "Warp drive is offline". Tuvok: "Shields down to 55%". Janeway: "Fire photon Torpedoes!" Wham! "Tuvok: "Photon Torpedoes offline, shields down to 40%". So on and so forth till finally they conjure up the most ridiculous way to win.
Scenario 2: Wham! Tuvok: "Shields down to 85%". Janeway: "Hail them". Wham! Tuvok: "Shields down to 70%". Wham! Tuvok: "Shields down to 55%". Janeway: "Keep Hailing!" Wham! "Shields down to 40%". Wham! "Shields down to 25%". Janeway: "Okay, I guess fire phasors now that we're almost dead".
Scenario 3: Basically similar to the two above, but where Janeway just orders Tuvok to disable their weapons and/or whatever system they want. This is just stupid. I would understand it if they were fighting an inferior ship, which they did in some instances which is okay, but this would happen for 75% of their battles. I don't remember this happening very frequently in the other shows.
Yes, Voyager suffered from Technobabble just as TNG and DS9 did. Neutreno’s anyone?
They may as well just have made the plot be that Voyager is a deep space ship exploring the delta quadrant. They never seemed to have any issues with supplies and ship repairs in general across the series as a whole. They did mention supplies and energy in a couple episodes in the beginning of the series which was cool, but that went away rapidly. How the hell wasn't the ship falling apart or showing the signs of battle/time. It's not exactly as if they had any starbases around to repair their hull which is something that DS9 and TNG crews had access to and were mentioned doing. I also love the fact that the crew of Voyager are the smartest people in the galaxy. Oh gee we just invented trans-galactic communication. Oh gee we are in the middle of now where but we just redesigned the engines to be way better with no access to equipment and crews. Oh gee we just invented this amazing stellar cartography system on our own.
Well, 7 was borg you know. Not sure you can have a better reference onboard. They made the point of being short on supplies early, addressed it and moved on. I didn’t want to see a show based on forging for stuff.
The other part which bothered me a lot was with the Borg. The Unimatrix Zero stuff was just retarded. This just seemed to completely trash all the stuff the Doctor did. It always seemed to me like post-TNG, the writers ruined the borg. Going off of the show, they never cared about the loss of individual drones whatsoever. Now one drone dreams and the Queen is all about destroying ships full of them, yeah whatever. It's amazing how a whole fleet of ships can barely take out one borg ship without stustaining heavy damage and losses, yet Voyager can single-handedly go toe to toe with the borg and just escape easily whenever. Watching Best of Both Worlds and Q, Who, you'd think they were a totally different race compared to Voyager's interpretation. The Borg in Voyager appear to be incompetent along with the Queen. I will say that I'm not the biggest fan of the Queen concept as introduced in First Contact, but atleast she didn't come across as totally incompetent in that movie.
Many don’t like the Borg Queen concept, but Voyager didn’t invent it. Kind of hard to change it after TNG made it canon. Janeway learned to outsmart them. I guess she could have been stupid and just got blown up, but that wouldn’t have made for a show then would it? The Borg did evolve, but the biggest leap was in First Contact not Voyager. I didn’t like Unimatrix Zero, but I thought Dark Frontier was one of Star Trek’s best episodes.
I absolutely loved the Hirogen up until they decided to make them retarded. Their first couple of introductory episodes actually showed them as menacing and then they turned into sissies who fall for obvious traps. The episode with the holgrams come to mind where they fall for the silliest traps ever. I'm sorry but any species that have been relying on hunting for 1000's of years and shown the competency that they showed in hunting species 8472 (cunning and dangerous) wouldn't fall for some rigged decoy ship. Especially given that their sensors were said to be far better than Voyagers, but conveniently they act retarded and Janeway once again saves the day! Don't get me started on the Kazon who were completely lame. Basically remove all the interesting parts of Klingon culture and you have the Kazon. The Vidians I actually liked. They actually did make these guys threatening. Hats off to the writers for this race.
The other area where Voyager falls short is on the secondary characters. The most interesting secondary characters that they came up with is Seska, Cullah, Borg Queen, the Wildmans, and Carey. Seska seems to be unanimously considered the most interesting character who was created in this series, and compared to the main secondary characters in DS9 and TNG, she is lame. "Har I'm bad and I'm deceiving you! Har I took your bodily fluids!"
I loved Seska. Great character very well played by Martha. But don’t blame Voyager for Star Trek’s habbit of neutering the bad guys. The Hirogen were awesome at first, as was Species 8472. But got casterated in grand trek fashion though. I hated the Kazon from the start. Just how big was their space? Voyager had many interesting secondard characters – Suder immediately comes to mind. I actually enjoyed Barkley as well.
I honestly think that if the show had better writing to the level of DS9 and Janeway's character was less Janeway like, I'd like the show a lot more. The writing just doesn't seem as intelligent as DS9 or TNG. Perhaps they just ran out of ideas or something I spent around $370 for the series on DVD, however, I don't know if I really would be willing to spend the same amount for the blu rays atleast at this time. I would if they have some sort of special holiday discount for a good price. DS9 and TNG are definate day one buys for me. I always felt that the shows to me could be grouped for different sets of people as follows: Voyager tends to have a liberal leaning, whereas TNG seemed to be balanced around the center, and DS9 tends to be conservative leaning.
TNG was “center”????? HA, OK.
