How do Niners feel about Voyager?

I tend to agree, but I would qualify that judgement a bit. I think DS9's characters are stronger from the beginning, and their interactions are more interesting. Also the occupation and the prophets lend some strong themes to the show from early on, at least the political and religious overtones are interesting to me personally.

That said, for those who are tuning in for some sci-fi adventure, I could easily see them prefering Voyager in the early stages. Maybe they just find the prophets and the Bajorans annoying. Maybe they're not interested in the political dimension, especially considering the fact that terrorism, occupation, etc. were not in the forefront of anyone's mind when these episodes originally aired. Mostly the respective quality of these shows is a matter of taste in the early stages.

Taste will always play a role of course, but by the later seasons DS9 is the superior show on every level: better characters, better story arcs, political and religious concepts for those who are interested, better, more exciting sci-fi adventure for those who aren't, more stand-out individual episodes.

Mostly my gripe with Voyager is that it never got me interested. I would love for there to be 7 more seasons of Trek out there that I could look forward to watching and re-watching. Some very cool individual episodes aside, Voyager has never made me feel anything other than indifferent.

 

IMO Descent is by far the worst TNG two-parter.

 

That's the way I feel. Voyager really had several very good episodes, but I never learned to like the characters enough to find enough good in the mediocre and bad episodes to feel the need to watch them again.
By contrast, I simply like the DS9 characters. That means I like re-watching even the okayish (plot-wise) episodes, or even some of the bad ones.

 

Do you include Ecounter at Farpoint in that? I know it's not two-parter as such, but...

I wouldn't say Descent is far worse than the others. Looking at a list of two-parters, they're all fairly good. Except Farpoint, if we include that.

 

Yes, I include Encounter of Farpoint (Which I like a lot, btw) and All Good Things... in that.

 

What's interesting to me is that, DS9 aside, Trek has never really relied on interesting characters per se.

Kirk, Spock and McCoy are archetypes, the rest of the crew are paper-thin, just people with a job and an ethnicity, basically.

TNG muddies the waters a bit, so the three archetypes are less obvious and less dominant (Picard/Data for Spock, Riker/Worf for Kirk, Crusher/Troi for McCoy), and all the characters get fleshed out a bit, with a family and so on, but nothing that would really hold anyone's attention if characterization were the show's main attraction.

I think what makes it work is that there is something compelling about the group, the idea of this crew out there exploring space, relying on each other, learning about the universe, learning about themselves.

I guess for those who love Voyager, that particular crew works for them and captures or recaptures the magic of that idea. For me that particular crew never inspired me, like TNG's did, and TOS (though that was after the fact for me personally).

DS9 is a bit of a separate case because that show developed characters that had more depth and were individually more complex than has otherwise been attempted in Trek. It relied less heavily on the "crew."

 

Encounter at Farpoint, for me, rates among the worst of all Trek.

 

I pretty much agree exactly with PKTrekgirl here on VOY's strengths and weaknesses. However, my personal "Trek Top 25" includes some TNG and some TOS in addition to some VOY and some DS9. I do agree that DS9 is, generally speaking, a better show than VOY, and usually a much better show, but there are some truly great VOY episodes, and I do really like most of the crew.

 

DS9 was great storytelling. I always wanted to know what happened next, and the series arc had some great dramatic beats that made waiting a week (or a summer!) very difficult. There were some great characters, and a few excellent episodes that I might recommend to a non-Trekkie as an example of what Trek can be, and I'd recommend the entire series if they seemed interested.

Voyager was not great storytelling. Between the hero shields and the reset button, nothing of consequence could really happen. Consequently, I never cared what would happen. The main characters rarely said or did anything interesting; I didn't care about them. The episodic nature stymied most attempts to introduce recurring minor characters, and the minor characters they did introduce were unappealing--either ugly, crass villains or precocious children. I can really only think of two episodes that I'd show a non-Trekkie ("Living Witness" and "Blink of an Eye"), and I wouldn't tell one to watch the series.

I don't loathe Voyager. It's not worth loathing. It's just silly empty calories, tastes okay at first but quickly sours.

 

I'm a mod. I'm used to taking blame when things go badly. It's part of the job description.

Although I would really like to know who voted for each option.

Wouldn't want anyone stacking the deck. Because these polls should really just be for the hardcore fans of DS9 (for the one in here) and the hardcore fans of VOY (for the one in there).

That would give us 'real' results.

 

So I can't go jihad the VOY poll?

 

^ That would be a 'no'.

 

What's the problem? We Cardassians aren't like Klingons. We don't bite. At least, not in the literal fashion.

 

Cardassians don't do anything in the literal fashion. Straight shooters, you are not.

 

What can I say? We love complexity!

 

Walking in a straight line makes a Cardassian dizzy!

 

No, it doesn't! We have wonderful headpieces to compensate for that!

Oh, wait...that's right...the funding for that got cut back in 2367...

 

See, I CAN still have friendly conversation here!

 

I consider my self a fan of all the Trek shows, but if pushed, DS9 is my favourite and (discounting the Animated series, as I've never seen it) Voyager is my least favourite. Having said that, possibly one of the episodes I enjoy the most is the Voyager episode, Distant Origins. This is despite my irrational dislike of the Chakotay character, or maybe not so irrational, I always felt he 'acted' like he was just happy to be getting a steady paycheck. The biggest problem I had with Voyager was the fact it would drop in quality too often and always left me with the feeling it could have been so much more after the 'good' episodes.