Hardcore fans like to call Star Trek Voyager more suitable for "casual" fans, which means that this is the most approachable Star Trek TV series out of all Star Treks.
Voyager was similar to the original Star Trek with the same kind of balance between a sense of danger and the wonders of exploring different imaginary cultures, and without the mind numbing minutiae of keeping track of the sanctity of the story continuity or the micro-interactions between every single commanders in every fleet in some unnecessarily complex space war.
Every episode resets clean - to some fans' dismay - like a bitesized sitcom of the 90's, and I see that as a plus. You don't need to worry about jumping into the middle of an episode not knowing what had happened or spoiling what will happen, as every episode is a self-contained story, a single 45-minute episode you can enjoy at any time without the need to binge everything to understand what's going on. It's not so different from watching a random episode of Futurama or Friends. It's a guaranteed joyride, with Star Trek flavor.
The characters are interesting and likable. Unlike other Trek series, the technobabble is reduced to the minimum and the writing is more fun and intimate instead of stoic and serious. Captain Janeway is a flexible, warm yet tough leader and she sticks close to her moral compass. I don't always agree with her decisions, but that's the point. You see the ex-Maquis Chakotay and B'lanna slowly integrates with the crew, with the latter falling in love with Tom. And the cast was taken to the next level with the introduction of Seven of Nine, who does not need further introductions.
While I find other ST series kind of dry, ST Voyager is full of warmth. I genuinely cried at a few moments in the story. Despite the lack of emphasis on continuity, the story does keep track of how far they had travelled and how characters had grown and related to each other. Season 4, for example, had one big arc on the recovery of Seven of Nine with a couple smaller arcs on the Hirogen and the message from the Federation. There were also occasionally some two-parter episodes for a deeper storyline.
One might question how this small starship managed to survive so many hijacks and attacks within the course of 7 years with the crew seemingly still content as if nothing happened... but Star Trek has never been The Expanse, so it's pointless to try to compare Voyager to that. Deus Ex Machina (e.g. Q or usually some brand new unexplained scientific phenomenon) has been pretty much a main character of Star Trek since the original series. Star Trek has always been about the optimism of utopian futures and the pacifist and empathetic attitudes towards cultural conflicts. I much rather enjoy the guaranteed safety of this wonderful crew before I choose to watch an episode, in fact. It's nice to know that the crew will survive no matter what crazy difficult challenges they face. It's the optimism we need today.
Anyway, ignore the toxic fandom gatekeepers - get a nice warm cup of coffee like Captain Janeway, and enjoy the show for what it is.
This is an awesome show. From all the different Star Trek TV shows that have been made so far this one is still my favorite, Star Trek: The Next Generation comes in on a close second :)
Some of the episodes like "Blink of an Eye", "Message in a Bottle", "Living Witness" and "The 37's" are extremely well written. The stories have everything and more to make them among science fiction tv shows and movies exceptional. I can still remember those episodes vividly even though it has been years since i have seen them.
The actors all did an amazing job over the 7 seasons in total. You can really watch them grow and evolve from a separate Starfleet and Maquis crew to a unified crew that can take on any challenge or problem that gets in their way.
I really like the red line story of a lone starship that is far from home and is trying to get back that flows through the entire TV show, and it fits perfectly into everything that Star Trek stands for: the exploration of unknown regions, making contact with new species and off course to boldly go where no man has gone before :)
It is really too bad that the careers of main actors of the show never got over the (ironically) "I Am Not Spock" type casting trope (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IAmNotSpock). It seems that they are forever stuck (as so many other actors of the other Star Trek TV shows) in the minds of millions worldwide even when they are doing something completely different as members aboard the spaceships from Starfleet....
I´m a Star Trek fan and that will never change. Having said that Voyager always was my least favorite of the shows. I watched it when it originally aired with a bit more of the fanboy attitude and now 20 years later. It´s not that it is bad in general, there isn´t something fundamentaly wrong with it. But after finishing it now I found many little things that I didn´t like. For starters I never really had favorites among the characters. With very few exceptions I found them either annoying or I didn´t care at all most of the time. Voyager had the least amount of memorable episodes which I only noticed now while watching again. With every other Trek show I could name you multiple episodes that really left a mark in my brain so to speak, not with Voyager. There where quite a lot of episodes I had totally forgotten about. I found the later part in general to inconsistent and often times the story was a little to convenient. While at first they struggled to find resources left, right and center, later on it seem to be no problem at all. Loose a shuttle ? No problem next week we have the full complement again. Ship damaged in battle ? Again, next week bright and shiny as new. I could go on but I think I made my point. Maybe I´m beeing unfair, the show was clearly more directed to the casual viewer, it hadn´t a strong main story line beside the going home part and even that solution in the end was a bit to easy for my liking. I often thought maybe they should have brought the ship home a bit earlier and shown how the would all adapt back home. But that´s just me.
Having said all that, and please keep it mind it´s a personal opinion, I still never regretted watching Voyager. It is part of the Star Trek universe and for that reason alone I wouldn´t have missed it. But althought it is possible that I will watch other ST shows again in the future I´m not shure about Voyager.
I guess that this a good show if you are a newbie to "Star Trek" as it is a good introduction to the Star Trek universe, Starfleet and the "Star Trek" ideals without getting trapped into it's own continuity as it is centered on one sole ship's journey to get home while trapped in a new unexplored universe where there is not that much background stories to evolve from (with the exception of a few token appearance by semi-regular "Q" from older series and long-running villains The Borg). Sadly, the producers also decided that since it was to have a episodic nature, characters are not developed from episode to episode as they stay basically the same throughout the entire run. One could easily see an episode from the second season and one from the sixth and not lose much continuity at all. The only exception is a few hook-ups with cast members at the end that feel more like afterthoughts and none of love stories have any chemistry nor do I find them believable. Some stories are also pure updates of old ones in prior Trek shows. The most intriguing aspect where the series join two type officers by chance on the same ship should have created possible conflict between them but the problems are solved after two scenes in the second episode and hardly touched upon since. The worst thing is that any episode that show the cast-members in alternate time lines, parallel worlds or they do different versions of themselves are tons better and more interesting than all their normal stories where they are their boring selves and act with no emotion or heart. It is interesting that the characters that are the "least alive" end up as the most interesting (The Doctor and later new cast member Seven of Nine). Even worse is that one of the better actresses get written out while they keep annoying Neelix, who ruin everything he appears in or the indifferent blank page Harry Kim, who everyone seem to treat as a rookie throughout the entire run even after seven years of loyal service since just a few episodes progresses character or overall story at all. The most annoying is that the series would also have been a lot better if they had touched upon a few events from their home as a lot of stuff had happened while they were lost - maybe friends had been killed or there had been broken relationships? Would one really have to believe nothing happened while their ship was stranded seven years away from home? I was so annoyed by this show by the last two seasons that I even waited 15 years to see the remaining episodes which are weak and it made me indifferent to "Star Trek" for a L-O-O-O-N-N-N-G time. The best seasons for me was the third one and the first batch of the fourth one.
Review by Alexander von LimbergBlockedParent2022-07-14T06:35:06Z— updated 2022-07-22T18:58:07Z
It's perhaps the weakest of all Star Trek shows of that era. It didn't age well. It can't be remastered in HD (which is sad, 'cause production was probably more expensive than TNG) and the virtual absence of coherent story arcs doesn't meet the new standards of the streaming era. Instead, Voyager has this predictable pattern of recurring topics: one "Kim the Lover episode", one "let's get our hopes up, we're about to get home", "the silly holo novel" episode, the "holo character becomes sentient and endangers the crew" episode and so forth. This pattern becomes very dull very quickly. It's perhaps an unfair thing to say because that's how 2000's TV show were structured (for a good reason) but this prevents the show from being binge-watchable in the modern streaming era (it's a "reverse DS9" so to speak: DS9 never worked within the constraints of programmed TV schedules but gained popularity in the era of streaming). They never capitalized on the fact that they had a natural, clear story arch: a long journey back home. It's almost a perfect premise. But too often you feel that the show runners never wrote down a coherent vision and overarching story that is told throughout all seven seasons. The overall show is worse than many of its episodes. Ideally, it should be the other way 'round. But it's still classic Star Trek and I'd prefer to watch some selected episodes over Discovery or Picard every time.
Let's not talk about the first three seasons. They are weak. That's all I have to say 'bout them, but every new Trek show struggled in the beginning (not as badly as Voyager though). Seasons 4 to 7 are solid. 6th season maybe the best. Seven saves the show. She and the Doctor are responsible for the best moments in this show. All other main characters are kind of dull. Some have potential (Janeway, Tuvok, Kes, B'Elanna) but the writers never really knew how to tell their stories. Some characters are annoying most of the time: man-child Paris (originally some sort of renegade character), useless Mr. Vision Quest and the clown loitering in the mess hall. Worst character is maybe Kim: I couldn't care less whether he's there or not. He's just a dull guy and letting him appear in various romantic stories makes it all worse.. Most characters never show any kind of character development. They always seem to forget what has happened to them the previous week. Only exceptions are the Doctor and Seven (and perhaps Naomi) who exceed expectations and grow with every scene. Seven is remarkable. What probably was a desperate (and condemnable) attempt to infuse some one-dimesnional t&a tailored to nerds into the show, grew into one of the most complex, most funny, most interesting characters in Star Trek ever (before they murdered her in Picard) Plus, Voyager is very bad in telling romantic stories. They never got "Kim, the Lover" right, they tried various other romantic relationships (Paris/Kes, Neelix/Kes [that was outright disturbing], Janeway/Chakotay) but nothing worked. And the relationship they ultimately came up with (Paris and Torres) never felt credible, logical, emotional or romantic. Even worse, I often don't feel a basic chemistry between most members of the main cast. (Like the characters, the ship is invariable too. It virtually never shows permanent signs of degradation.)
On paper, Voyager was a good idea: a whole new and exciting quadrant to explore. A motley crew with lots of conflict potential (Marquis vs. Starfleet): An epic journey through hostile space with an uncertain outcome offered all the potential to bond with the characters by watching them working as a team and overcome enormous obstacles. A very intimate setting: the small crew was trapped on that ship and this offered the chance to show people socializing when off-duty. They never really capitalized on this setting. Instead they were limited by it: Star Trek was great when they told about the interconnected alliances, diplomacy, politics and trade. A utopia we created around Earth. Individual characters and ships were always embedded into the fleet and an interplanetary network. Every ship always represented this system and mankind.. Voyager is so distant from Earth, they often forget about the whole philosophy behind Starfleet. Writers could have used this in their favor though: the crew could have become more desperate, cornered, more ruthless but the writers were not willing to explore this idea (they only used the U.S.S. Equinox as a proxy to explore this dark possibility). Plus, the Alpha and Beta Quadrant (and thanks to DS9 even the Gamma Quadrant) offered this rich lore: Dozens of well-established species and unique empires. Voyager faced the monumental task to create all of this on their own... and they failed. All species and civilizations they invented were either uninteresting or they never invested enough time to explain how powerful/threatening they really are, what role their civilization/empire really play in the Quadrant and how complex their culture really is. They are all just one-dimensional "monsters of the week". Generic foes you know very little of. That's why they are so dull. When that became clear, writers resorted to the Borg as Voyager's main foe and isolated guest appearances of traditional characters (Barclay, Deanna, Ferengi, Zimmerman, Q, Klingons and Romulans). Don't get me wrong, the borgification of Voyager was perhaps a wise decision, given how lackluster every other race in the quadrant was, but the show also became almost too Borg-ish. Not only that: as if there were no other fascinating aspects of the Borg, most stories (just like Seven's story) were focused on the possibility of individuality within the hive. In turn, this demystified the Borg and in the end they were a minor nuisance necessary to get home. It's almost like they "sacrificed" the Borg in order to limp to season 7 and avoid early cancellation of the show.