Voyager actually got me into Trek, when I was 14 but when I watch it now and compare it to TNG, Deep Space Nine or Battlestar Galactica it's severely lacking. Here's some additional vocabulary for you:
- It was basically a watered down TNG. The writers never really made the delta quadrant feel strange or dangerous. The ship got thrown 70,000 light years and we're seeing aliens that don't look that different from what we saw in the Alpha Quadrant. Granted we got the Caretaker, The Swarm and Species 8472 and the vidiians, but the series needed more of those types of aliens. The Delta Quadrant could have been strange and weird and deadly, filled with crazy anomalies and space monsters but it turned out to be just as boring as the alpha quadrant. We're told ad nauseum how dangerous it is but that rarely made it on screen. Voyager epitomised that the production team had run out of ideas and couldn't stretch themselves creatively. The amount of holodeck episodes that Voyager had is testament to this. The ship is in uncharted space but hey, let's have the crew explore fake ireland instead.
- There was never any sense of danger or hardship because the replicators always seemed to work, replacement shuttles came out of nowhere, torpedoes were endless. The ship could suffer a massive alien attack and be fully repaired by the next episode. There was no danger or drama because of this. Why should i care about the warp drive almost being destroyed in when i know that there will be no lasting repurcussions beyond the end episode. Why should I care about the crew needing to stop at this planet for food when neelix just replicated a cake for someones birthday? The ship should have been falling apart from the constant Kazon attacks, which seemed to happen mostly offscreen, but the ship always looked like it had rolled off the assembly line floor.
- The following of 'Federation values' wasn't very realistic given their situation, and generally curtailed any stories that may have been morally or ethically challenging and led to a thought provoking episode. Janeway and the crew should have been placed in more situations that threatened their ethics or their morality like the episode Prime Factors. Janeway in particular should have been given more opportunities to be conflicted over whether to follow federation values or have her crew starve to death. The writers should have provided situations that not only challenged the crew morally, ethically and culturally but the audience as well. I think they failed in this regard.
Those are just some of my critical thoughts about the show. I could include more, but the criticisms I have on Endgame alone could probably fill a thread of it's own. Overall I don't mind Voyager, I appreciate it for what it is and will always love it for introducing me to star trek. Watching it as an adult and comparing it to the stand out drama's both sci-fi and not that have come out in the last 16 years it doesn't hold up well. It did have some solid episodes but i feel voyager never really lived up to its potential. Sadly I think it was mostly a victim of writing fatigue, the same people had been writing trek for years and I think they just reached a point of burnout. There was too much playing it safe because I don't think Rick Berman really respected the intelligence of the audience, and it shows in a lot of the creative decisions (or lack thereof) that were made.
