I finished the entire series of Voyager this past week. Watching it one right after the other, instead of sporadically, I have to say, it's not as bad as I thought it was. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's still far from great, just barely good, but it's not bad.
The main problems with it are as follows. Firstly, the main problem is the series was episodic. What I mean it, what happened in one episode had no bearing on the next, or rarely any other. With the ship lost in the Delta Quadrant and no space stations floating around to help repair the ship or increase or decrease or replace the crew. So in one episode, the ship is nearly blasted apart, the ceiling's collapsed in parts of the hallways, and there's debris all over. And the next episode, everything is bright, clean, and shiney as if brand new. Huh? Also, at the beginning, there was 150 crew members. But yet, we never saw the same secondary or background characters more than once. Five crewmembers from the Equinox are brought on board at the beginning of, I think, the sixth season and...we never see them again. In another episode, some crewmember comes back to life, one that we've never seen nor heard of before. Wha? It's just irritating everytime it happens. It would have been nice for the writers to have things happen that went for more then one episode. The only main one I can think of is Paris and Torres' romance and marriage. That took place over a few seasons. Too bad they didn't do more of it.
The second major problem is the ending. We spend seven seasons getting to Earth and in the last episode, the ship emerges in the Alpha Quadrant, Janeway says head for earth, the scene shows Voyager with Earth in the distant and....cut to black, run credits. WTF???? We don't see Torres and her father? Paris and his father? Harry and his parents and/or Libby? Janeway and maybe her ex-fiance Mark? Chakotay and his sister? Seven and her aunt? How were the Maquis members treated? What happened with the Doctor and the other holograms in the Federation? I didn't want to see three or four episodes of resolutions, but definitely wanted to see more. Even just to see the crew emerge from the ship and set foot on Earth again would have been nice. But no. The ending was too abrupt and I felt cheated.
Thirdly, Voyager has some of the WORST episodes in ANY Star Trek series. I'll name just a few that pop immediately to mind: "Ex Post Facto" , "Threshold" , "Thaw" , :Favorite Son" , "Vis A Vis" , "Unforgettable" , :The Fight" , "11:59" , "Barge Of The Dead" , "Tsunkatse" , "Spirit Folk" , "Muse" . And mind you, there are other bad episodes, just not as bad as these stinkers.
On the upside, Voyager did have The Doctor, a truly unique, funny and interesting character. Seven Of Nine turned out to be NOT as overused as I had previously thought, but really, was it necessary to have her in those catsuit all the freaking time? She was in a uniform at least twice, and looked good there too. But whatever. And there were good episodes too: Living Witness, Author Author, Shattered are three that just come to mind right away.
All in all, I'd have to rate the series as a C+ to B- show. If anyone even remotely interested, I'd say watch it. But don't go out of your way to do so, there's better things out there.
POLT
1 comment:
Farscape did a good job at maintaining continuity within an episodic structure. For example, in the first season, their dwindling food supplies is an increasingly dire problem in the background until they finally run out of food and the problem becomes the center of an episode. They did have an advantage that their ship had no combat abilities so they avoided combat (and therefore combat damage) and was a living ship so any minor damage could be credibly healed without a massive effort by the crew.
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