Voyager was the first Trek show I was able to watch from the beginning...I was nine and already familiar with TNG (but only from re-runs), the movies, a bit of DS9, and a precious handful of TOS shows. So a lot of the show was new and exciting to me. I'm starting to understand the perspectives of those who had watched TNG and DS9 from the beginning, and came into Voyager hoping for a totally different kind of show and ended up being disappointed. But for me, it was awesome. I loved Tom and Harry's friendship, the Captain Proton holodeck programs, the callbacks to previous Treks, and the Borg. Holy cow, was I excited about that. I had known (somehow) that the Borg were in the Delta Quadrant and it was only a matter of time before Voyager ran into them. When they finally appeared on the cover of TV Guide I just about exploded. I taped that episode--on VHS so I could re-watch it; on audio tape so I could listen to it in my own room whenever I wanted.
During the fifth season, the local station stopped rebroadcasting the network feeds from the UPN station in the city, and I had no way of watching Voyager. We didn't have cable, but we
did get the internet. I started looking up Star Trek reviews and recaps to find out what I was missing, and boy, was it clear that Voyager had gone downhill and
fast. The writers had gone off the rails. There were random Borg children. Voyager kept getting conveniently flung closer to home. There were just too many shuttle crashes, holodeck shows, and time travel episodes. And some of these plots were just absurd. Janeway falling in love with a hologram? Neelix telling campfire stories? The Doctor becoming a music star? It was like they were turning one of my favorite shows into a cartoon. It was probably just as well that it had disappeared from my world when it did.
And actually, I came to realize, there were all kinds of problems with Voyager to begin with--the Maquis and Starfleet conflict never really erupted, shuttles and proton torpedoes magically replenished themselves...I mean, I remembered some pretty good episodes, but when you compare it as a whole to other Treks, it was just flawed. It's a shame it never lived up to its early promise.
When I finally got around to watching Voyager in its entirety, however, (finished this year), I found that I actually liked the majority of seasons six and seven. Not only that, but some of the most ridiculous episodes in summary became some of my favorite episodes on viewing. And I started to really wonder: What exactly was wrong with shuttle crashes, time travel, and holodeck shows? These are usually devices to get the story started; it wasn't as though there's a generic template for each kind that was endlessly rehashed. Both "Real Life" and "The Killing Game" are holodeck stories, but the two shows have completely different tones and themes. And if the stories are good, what does it matter how many of them happen in a given season? And is a show's worth really determined by how closely it hews to the original concept?
A lot of the criticism surrounding Voyager is based on the show itself, true. (Seven's ridiculous costume is something we can probably all agree on.) Some of it is personal preference; I've seen those who despise B'Elanna and Neelix because of poor acting/writing, who are two of my favorite characters because of
good acting/writing. (We're obviously never going to agree.) Some of is highly specific pet peeves that I frankly don't understand. (My Aunt is a long-time Trekkie who nevertheless dislikes the lack of strong female characters in Next Gen and TOS. Yet she refuses to watch Voyager "Because the male writers put Captain Janeway off on the other side of the galaxy so she can't challenge the male-only Admiralty." About two seconds on Memory Alpha should render that opinion invalid, but she still holds fast to it.)
But I think it's high past time that the common knowledge I've seen online that Voyager is the weaker of the Treks and never really lived up to its premise be re-examined, at the very least. I can see where some aspects might have been disappointing when Next Gen had only recently ended, and when TV programs were starting to grow in ways that Voyager wasn't. And a lot of opinions are entangled in the behind-the-scenes drama, which at this point is a matter of historical record. But twenty years later, a lot of that can be put to one side. I'd recommend a Voyager re-watch for the skeptics--you might find that it's better than you remember. (I promise, making it to the end of Season 7 does
not turn you into a space salamander.

)
TC