Reviews Series / Star Trek Voyager

A Shadow of What it could have been.

I have to admit that my first time watching Voyager was nearly the last. Luckily, I decided to revisit the series after finishing DS 9. The pilot, while not as awful as many, many pilots of the entire Star Trek Series, showcased many of the problems that plagued the first three seasons. After watching it for the first time, I thought that the writing was uneven and dumb in some aspects (no one knew how to make a timed bomb?), in a science vessel without any scientists.

But then I decided to push through, and realized that Voyager shouldn't be hated, it should be mourned. It's a clear child of many showrunners and meddling producers, each one with an idea with immense promise, but cancelling each other out, ending in a mediocre product. At the same time it wanted to explore the weirdness of space like TOS, be orderly and nice like TNG, and try to be gritty and survivalist testing the morals of the crew. If it had chosen just one of those aspects and stuck with it, it could have been great. And in its best episodes it almost reaches the glory of the past series with really good questions and really good moments and good points, for example Janeway pondering about the 'prime directive' being used on the federation for a change, and for all his problems, Chakotay was actually one of the best First officers of the entire franchise, trying to help Janeway but not being afraid of confronting her, and there are many moments where the guidelines and optimism of the federation do save the day. But this series builds lots of good premises and never fulfils them, for example, nearly half of the ship's crew are wanted criminals by the federation, but it takes only a literal episode and everyone is wearing federation clothes and obeying orders. The infamous usage of the reset button is also something that seriously damaged its potential, as Janeway's multiple personalities deciding what was good and moral, and what it wasn't by the episode.

And I agree with both sides of the fandom, those who hate it, and love it, but choose neither. There are two phases of the show, the first three seasons and the last four. In the first three seasons Neelix is a horrid jealous selfish jerk with unfortunate implications, and after that he turns into a bumbling genuine helper. Seven of Nine did helped the show a lot, but also took away too much screentime from the other characters that needed it. There are at least three janeways depending on the writer, etc.

But frankly, it only lasted as long due to the sheer power of the cast being able to make the best out of subpar, if not awful writing. Captain Janeway is a woman that is (badly) written to be a person that will threaten you, feel pity for you and want to genuinely help you in less than five seconds (I counted) and Kate Mulgrew pulls it off. The Doctor is an annoying self-conceited jerk, but Robert Picarto makes it a joy to watch. Everybody betted that Seven of Nine would be the 'Tn S', except that Jeri Ryan showed that she is a superb actress and can sing! Seeing Ethan Phillips show his true chops in episodes where Neelix is brought to his extremes made me really sad that he was written as such a jerk, and the cast does have a really good chemistry. I would have loved more episodes with Tuvok acting like a detective (as he was originally written to be). Unlike TNG where the only experienced actor was Patrick Stewart, this series had a really good cast from the getgo.

So I think that, weirdly, this was at the same time better and worse than DS 9, but I enjoyed this more. If you watch this series, you'll have to give it a LOT of leeway and focus on the good moments and good aspects, use a series guide and not be afraid of skip the (many) awful episodes.