Excessive Criticism of “STAR TREK VOYAGER”

[seldonp38]

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

A lot of it is exaggerated, and there's quite a bit of misogyny in it (Voyager is, after all, the one with the female captain). And there's a lot of tribalism involved in what "your" Star Trek show is, which always punches up the wankery.

My objection to the series isn't that it was bad or had no potential; but that it (and Enterprise) were the two Trek series with the most WASTED potential. There were so many very interesting things they could have done with that basic premise and that crew, but they usually chose the "safe" choice, the predictable choice, the one I knew they were going to make. There were too many episodes where I got about half-way through and realized, "oh, yeah, I've seen Star Trek episodes with this basic plot four or five times before, and they were all more interesting and original than this one." It's not that they were bad, just ... not very good, either. And then, every so often, they'd try to shake things up and do something "cool" or "edgy" and it usually a) was still something I could predict pretty quickly, and b) was edgy in a way that didn't feel true to the characters and/or the Star Trek universe.

Contrast this with DS9, with which it mostly overlapped, and which managed to be far more original while staying truer to the original spirit of Star Trek (i.e. using space adventures to tell morality tales about current-day life). Again, I don't think Voyager was bad. It wasn't. It just wasn't as interesting to me as TOS, TNG, or DS9, and it was very frustrating because I wanted to love it but I just kept getting bored.

[beatrice_otter]

I do totally agree with you that Voyager gets way more shit than it actually deserves. You get people talking like it was the most horrible thing evar, which it wasn't.