Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), 172 episodes
Star Trek: Voyager is a Star Trek spinoff that takes place in the same time period as Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Here, a Federation ship and a Maquis ship are lost in the far reaches of the Delta Quadrant, and the two crews must work together to find their way home. At least, that’s the premise.
But Voyager devolves almost immediately into a sloppy TNG clone that also incorporates some of the poorer elements from the original series, although after the first couple of seasons, it does manage to find its own mediocre identity. This is not to say Voyager isn’t somewhat enjoyable; it can be, in part because it batters down your expectations such that you submit to its stupidity and go with it. Just don’t compare it to the other Trek series.
Voyager is removed from the traditional world of Klingons and Romulans and such, and it means the writers have the opportunity to do something new. Which, on the whole, they don’t. The premise of a ship alone with limited resources is filled with potential. But Voyager is Elijah’s inexhaustible starship. Throughout the series, they lose at least fourteen shuttlecraft. And, thanks to the resourceful nerds on the internet, I can tell you that over the course of the series, Voyager fires something like 93 of her 38 irreplaceable photon torpedoes.
The idea of two opposing groups working together is equally full of potential for drama. But it’s largely ignored. As if the Maquis would be fine with all this farting around and exploring. It’s mighty fortunate that these Maquis are a heck of a lot nicer than the ones from TNG and DS9. Tension between the groups, cliques, realistic depictions of how a situation like this might unfold – all are ignored 99% of the time.
Given the original premise, Voyager could have easily become a fantastic gritty show (although there are ways it could have been good and non-gritty, if only it had been willing not to be the kind of show where everything wraps up tidily at the end of every episode and puts things back exactly as they were). The two-part episode “Year of Hell” is a great example: it isn’t particularly good, but it does get at the spirit of what Voyager could have and should have been like. But by the end, none of it ever actually happened to the crew – just like most of the interesting things on Voyager.
The writing on Voyager is often sloppy and sometimes downright terrible. There are countless examples. In “Parturition,” you’ve got aliens with Federation-level technology who live in empty caves with no cities, no civilization, no nothing. In “Spirit Folk,” you’ve got holographic bullets damaging the holodeck computer while the safeties are on, disengaging the safeties. And Janeway’s plan to rescue her crewmen in this episode is like leaving your kids in a burning house while you go save your dating sim. In “Ashes to Ashes,” we have to accept not only that Harry had a best friend we never saw, but that she could also catch up to Voyager, which had made a couple of those big multi-year jumps in the meantime, in a raggedy shuttle. And then there’s “Threshold,” quite possibly the worst episode of television I’ve ever seen, where they whip up warp 10 technology overnight, and then Tom Paris turns into a salamander somehow. I could go on and on, but, with the infamous “Get the cheese to sickbay” line, I’ll move on.
Voyager does to the Borg precisely what Marvel Comics did to Venom in the 1990’s. By the end of Voyager’s run, the Borg are overexposed, played out and lame – they’re scarcely a credible threat. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, forty starships couldn’t defeat one Borg cube (“The Best of Both Worlds”). Voyager takes care of Borg ships on its own, with relative ease (“Dark Frontier,” “Collective,” “Child’s Play,” “Endgame”). “Endgame,” by the way, couldn’t be a more fitting series finale for Voyager, what with its convenient time travel solution, further neutering of the Borg, the hard-to-believe and out-of-nowhere relationship, and the episode’s focus on things blowing up to the neglect of character resolution (of the real crew, that is; the ultimately non-existent alternate future crew gets plenty).
Obviously, they can’t all be gems, but it often feels like the Voyager writers just don’t care. Voyager has a lot of the worst teasers ever, including a lot of what-was-the-point-of-that in media res ones. The writers can’t be bothered to keep track of how many people there are on Voyager, how far Voyager has traveled, or where Voyager should be in relation to other civilizations. They don’t care how frequently preposterous the stories get. They don’t care that they write the crew to act out of character all the time. They don’t care that the Prime Directive gets tossed out at the drop of a hat when it’s convenient for the plot.
Voyager always seems happy to tread familiar soil. All the old Trek tropes are here: nebulae, quantum singularities, and time paradoxes out the yin yang. It’s not that Voyager doesn’t do anything well; that’s certainly not the case. It’s just that most of the things Voyager does well have been done as well or better on prior Trek series. It boggles the mind that anyone, let alone so many people, can call Voyager the best Star Trek series.
It doesn’t help at all that we have a stable of boring and poor characters. We start with Janeway, a captain who alternates between bleeding-heart soft and completely ruthless (depending on who’s writing the episode and what the story needs to have happen). Kirk would have had the ship home in the first episode. Sisko, too. And the Janeway from a large number of episodes would have as well.
Next we have Chakotay, the bleeding heart commander – the nicest, gentlest Maquis ever. He’s a vegetarian (when the writers remember). With his respect for life, he’s practically a Buddhist, and his Maquis-ness never feels genuine. He’s also one of the biggest wastes of character. He’s a Maquis leader, a man betrayed, but in the fourth episode of the series, when the captain disappears, he doesn’t even consider taking command of the ship and going his own way. Never once does he consider leading a mutiny. He has no drive, no personality – he’s just a generic Starfleet officer. And that’s probably why he spends so many episodes just sitting in the first officer’s chair and saying things like “see if you can get a transporter lock.” And while Robert Beltran says he hated working on Voyager, he never did a whole lot with the character, acting-wise.
Neelix begins as the Jar Jar Binks of the Star Trek universe. Early on, you hate the sound of his voice and the sight of his grubby mullet. He’s so fussy you hope Tom Paris will snatch Kes away from him. But this was one of the problems the writers actually fixed. By season four he’s downright tolerable, and later, he’s even likeable. His growth is one of the show’s pluses. And, throughout, Ethan Phillips does a good job with the character.
Tuvok is merely adequate as a Vulcan – his unlikeability has more to do with how he’s written than with Tim Russ’s performance. If you have a Vulcan main character, he’s going to be compared to Spock. Tuvok is written to be a humorless, irritable, pompous jerk. Spock was none of these things.
Paris and Torres start out flat, but become decent enough characters as the show goes along. Kes was pretty good, too, until they killed her off to replace her with someone with considerably bigger breasts. But it’s not all adolescent hormones – Seven of Nine is easily the most interesting (and useful) character on Voyager.
And then there’s Ensign Kim, a generic, complaining loser with a Wesley Crusherian streak of usefulness, played by Garrett Wang, who is possibly the worst actor Star Trek has seen. In “Nightingale,” he whines, “If we were home, I’d be a lieutenant commander by now.” Yeah, right. Shut up, kid.
From the beginning, Robert Picardo, as the holographic doctor, is one of Voyager’s few highlights. To the writers’ credit, he never feels like a poor man’s Data because for the most part, they avoid all the deep, profound implications of sentient A.I. (although they tend to ignore the deep, profound implications of pretty much everything). In this case, it’s probably a good idea. And, while he doesn’t get a lot of chances to show it (“Darkling” and “Warhead” are good examples), Picardo is a very good actor with impressive range, although snarkiness is obviously his forte.
This group is, as a whole, adequate at best. DS9 had recurring characters that were better developed and more interesting than most of these regulars. O’Brien was more interesting while he was still on TNG. The writers eschewed so many opportunities to develop the characters. By the time Jeri Ryan joins the cast and Voyager becomes the Janeway-and-Seven show, you can hardly blame the writers for their skewed attention – who else are you going to do episodes about? Chakotay? Not after that season five boxing fiasco.
And the writers don’t even respect the viewers enough to show us the key moments in these characters’ lives. Kes and Neelix break up; it happens off-screen, and nothing is ever said about it. Tom and B’Elanna get married; it happens off-screen. It’s pathetic. On DS9, when Worf and Dax got married, it was a big deal, and a fun episode.
Voyager does feature quite a few good guest stars. Brad Dourif, John Rhys-Davies, The Rock, Mike McKean, Tom Wright, Andy Dick, and Lori Petty are ones that had comparatively interesting parts.
Voyager inherited many of the little problems that afflicted previous series. Just like on TNG, the shuttles here are absurdly easy to steal. And season one features the most egregious misrankings yet. Tuvok wears lieutenant commander pips – they call him lieutenant. Paris wears full lieutenant pips. So does B’Elanna. Then they all get bumped down a rank by the costuming department. (Chakotay wears the rank of lieutenant commander for the entire series, but he’s not referred to as anything other than commander. Since there are no other lieutenant commanders besides Tuvok, this isn’t really a problem.)
Other comments:
-Jerry Goldsmith’s title theme is fantastic. That and the Doctor got me through season one.
-Why is it “The Enterprise” and “The Defiant,” but it’s just “Voyager”?
-Why doesn’t Voyager ever try to get a cloak? It’d save the crew (and viewers) a lot of pain and suffering.
-The design folks seem to have run out of ideas (or budget) for aliens – a nose here, an ear there, a forehead over here – we get a lot of feeble efforts.
The best episodes:
1. “Projections”
2. “Scorpion”
3. “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy”
4. “Message in a Bottle”
5. “Meld”
Honestly, there are too many bad Voyager episodes to list. Here are the most egregious offenders:
165. “Fury”
166. “Ashes to Ashes”
167. “Nothing Human”
168. “Barge of the Dead”
169. “Alice”
170. “The 37’s”
171. “Spirit Folk”
172. “Threshold”
On the whole I try to overlook flaws, go with what the show is doing and enjoy it. But sometimes a show takes its flaws and smacks you in the face with them, and Voyager does this often. Voyager is almost never better than okay, and it’s happy that way. But the bottom line is that it was never quite bad enough for long enough to make me stop watching it. And that has as much or more do with the fact that I just love Star Trek than with Voyager’s own virtues, although Voyager does display a certain charm from time to time, and it did, in the end, have enough to keep me watching.
Voyager is easily the worst live-action Star Trek series of them all (to this point) – that isn’t the issue. In the end, it comes down to this question: is mediocre Star Trek better than no Star Trek at all? In this case, the answer is yes. Being generous, I give Star Trek: Voyager a 6.
