[Question] Why do people hate VOY so much?
- Thread starter AlanAlias
- Start date
Another "I don't hate Voyager" post. It had some good episodes and some bad ones. Some good writers and some bad ones. Some good actors and some bad ones... just like every other Trek show, and just like every other TV show. I think it failed to live up to its premise, that's all. It had a great premise that was undermined by the repeated use of the reset button.
The problem with DS9 for me is the characters were too amoral, and I find amoral characters unlikeable, no matter how more "realistic" they seem. Voyager's characters were more in the old fashioned "good guy" mold which I just find more likeable, even if they're more 2D.
So DS9 can muse about big issues like war and what not, but if the characters are too obnoxious (Bashir and Kira both fit that category, IMHO) then I just...don't...care what happens to them.
I adore Voyager. As much as the venom directed towards it disappoints me, I dont think it is actually as hated by the fanbase as a whole as those who loathe it would have you believe.
Voyager for me is my third favourite...yet on its day it is actually my favourite. I love Mulgrew/Picardo/Dawson/Ryan, the characters are very likeable, it is dramatic/funny/uplifting/interesting. It can be darker than TNG yet lighter than DS9 when it wants to be.
For me VOY is like popcorn, I can watch it and watch it and I think it deserves a lot of credit. Yet, it does make mistakes [Threshold], some performances are lacking [Beltran] and it has its share of forgettable episodes.
I really must reiterate, ON ITS DAY it is actually my favourite show of the franchise...but DS9 & TNG are more consistent.
Voyager for me is my third favourite...yet on its day it is actually my favourite. I love Mulgrew/Picardo/Dawson/Ryan, the characters are very likeable, it is dramatic/funny/uplifting/interesting. It can be darker than TNG yet lighter than DS9 when it wants to be.
For me VOY is like popcorn, I can watch it and watch it and I think it deserves a lot of credit. Yet, it does make mistakes [Threshold], some performances are lacking [Beltran] and it has its share of forgettable episodes.
I really must reiterate, ON ITS DAY it is actually my favourite show of the franchise...but DS9 & TNG are more consistent.
It's funny, I just finished a DS9 rewatch and wanted to do a few highlights episodes of VOY just to get a different taste of Trek. The differences between them are staggering. Not the universe of course, but the writing and style. And I don't mean the basic premise of each show when compared to each other. With DS9 it was far more serialized. Even in stand alone episodes there were bits and pieces that added to the overall narrative. The stories were more grounded, more dramatic. With VOY it was mostly "isolated threat of the week" plus complications and a "technobabble solution" equals success. DS9 was far more character driven, not only in its writing, its style, its stories, but also its solutions. There was a real sense that what came before mattered in DS9. With VOY, unless you accidentally started with part two of a two-parter, it didn't matter where you picked it up. I'm not saying VOY is bad, but those differences are precisely why DS9 is hands down my favorite iteration of Trek, despite a few quibbles with the final year.
Arrrgh "people" don't hate Voyager, look at the ratings on Amazon, very much majority positive, and there are several very active growing Voyager groups on Facebook where thousands of Voyager fans congregate, in several languages. There have been a number of websites devoted to Voyager (maybe some have shut down but some are still active). A number of articles about how "people" enjoyed Voyager can be found on the internet. Was Voyager perfect, no, did Voyager have some critics, yes. Are some Trekkers rude about Voyager, unfortunately yes. But Voyager also has many fans who still don't hesitate to speak of how much they like it, and still enjoy it over 14 years since the last episode was first broadcast on USA TV. Like me, a long-time Trek fan, who doesn't hesitate to note what might not be the best things @ Voyager, while happy to give the many examples about what IMO was right about it. PS My take on DS9, in comparison, it's almost the anti-Trek JMO.
Last edited:
I largely agree. DS9 for me is the deepest, most satisfying of all the Trek's. VOY is far more akin to TNG in its 'threat of the week' style.
I have such strong emotions about TOS that I never rank it.
Mine would go VOY> DS9> ENT > TNG. But DS9 and ENT are very close to each other and if I had just watched ENT I might switch 'em LOL. I get very enthused about whatever one I'm watching. I think the vast cast and long story arcs keeps DS9 above it though. Also, politics. Also, the station itself which I am a bit infatuated with. If we ever get new Trek I'd be super happy if it was set on a station, a mini city rather than jetting about from story/planet to story/planet.
TNG is miles behind the others.
I watched TOS in reruns and loved the even numbered films, but it was TNG that really got me hooked and of them all it's only DS9 that I can just endlessly rewatch. That said, it's still something like:
DS9 > TWOK-TVH-TUC-FC > TNG > ENT > VOY > TOS
for me.
DS9 > TWOK-TVH-TUC-FC > TNG > ENT > VOY > TOS
for me.
Amazon ratings are very skewed. The majority of people who leave reviews on Amazon are people who already liked the series enough to spend money on it.
@mos6507
I don't think 'Amoral' is an accurate reading of DS9 characters. Quark maybe, but even he had his moral moments. The main characters of DS9 were very principled, they just struggled between the strict high minded TNG principles and the survival of their own way of life. That is not being amoral, it's being practical. Chaotic good rather than lawful good. It would not have been moral to sacrifice their entire way of life to the Dominion just to stick to high minded principles.
I like the high minded morality of TNG and I think DS9 became something special criticizing and analyzing that morality.
As a Niner who likes Voyager the least of the Trek series, I find the "hatred" of Voyager to unfair and hyperbolic. It is a substitute target for one or two members of the production staff and their handling of the franchise. As much as people say that Voyager was a TNG clone, I would like to think that it is more a continuation of TNG ... or what TNG might have looked like had it stayed on the air another seven years.
This is very close to my ranking order! Although I also have a soft spot in my heart for TSFS and to a lesser extent GEN. Plus, I think I would split ENT into S1&S2 (meh) vs. S3&S4 (awesome). Anyway, I was just a little surprised to see a ranking list so close to mine!
To me a show always lives or dies with its characters. I need to find the characters interesting/entertaining in order to like a show. That's why DS9 is my favorite Trek show and TOS my least favorite.
With VOY....
as others said before it is a giant case of wasted potential and that can be more infuriating than just a bad show. In some episodes and plotlines you get glimpses of what Voy could have been if they had been willing to take more risks and actually run with their premise.
The Voyager characters....to me most of them seem.... weirdly....cold....they are just very cold impassive people and that doesn't make it very interesting to watch. Let alone that Trek at this point seemed to be more interested in doing homages and rehashes of older characters/plotlines.
Janeway....never allowed to develop as a proper character because she needed to be the perfect first female captain and got stuck with the cliche "Ship's Mom" role. Some attempts to make her less boring led to "Bi-Polar Janeway" due to inconsistency.
Chakotay...Bland as beige and a weird mish-mash of Native American cliches.
Harry....Bland as beige dry wall, whiny, wimpy, uninteresting, looks like a 12-year old
The EMH...Data without anything that made Data endearing (at least to me)
B'Elanna....An half-alien character in Star Trek who struggles with her heritage....boy I haven't seen that one before. She had little character beyond "permanently pissed off Klingon"
Tom...a wannabe badboy.
Kes....written well she could have been Trance from Andromeda...instead they shoved her into the background and then dropped her.
Tuvok....bland, typical Vulcan.
Neelix....a weird mix of Mr. Rogers and Barney the Dinosaur in space.
Seven...the best of the bunch, but all the focus on her got annoying.
Again....if you look at the writer's bible, all these characters seem much more interesting (particularly Kes, Neelix and Tuvok!) and again we have all that wasted potential.
With VOY....
as others said before it is a giant case of wasted potential and that can be more infuriating than just a bad show. In some episodes and plotlines you get glimpses of what Voy could have been if they had been willing to take more risks and actually run with their premise.
The Voyager characters....to me most of them seem.... weirdly....cold....they are just very cold impassive people and that doesn't make it very interesting to watch. Let alone that Trek at this point seemed to be more interested in doing homages and rehashes of older characters/plotlines.
Janeway....never allowed to develop as a proper character because she needed to be the perfect first female captain and got stuck with the cliche "Ship's Mom" role. Some attempts to make her less boring led to "Bi-Polar Janeway" due to inconsistency.
Chakotay...Bland as beige and a weird mish-mash of Native American cliches.
Harry....Bland as beige dry wall, whiny, wimpy, uninteresting, looks like a 12-year old
The EMH...Data without anything that made Data endearing (at least to me)
B'Elanna....An half-alien character in Star Trek who struggles with her heritage....boy I haven't seen that one before. She had little character beyond "permanently pissed off Klingon"
Tom...a wannabe badboy.
Kes....written well she could have been Trance from Andromeda...instead they shoved her into the background and then dropped her.
Tuvok....bland, typical Vulcan.
Neelix....a weird mix of Mr. Rogers and Barney the Dinosaur in space.
Seven...the best of the bunch, but all the focus on her got annoying.
Again....if you look at the writer's bible, all these characters seem much more interesting (particularly Kes, Neelix and Tuvok!) and again we have all that wasted potential.
^ I tend to agree Orphalesion , and it comes down to something I've said on other forums before, but don't think I've ever mentioned here. Which is that, in the context of the Star Trek before it, one of Voyager's great problems was that you could have titled it 'Star Trek: Generic'. 
Each of the shows that came along before VOY took great strides in expanding the 'verse and doing something different. DS9 was arguably the apex of this, ripping the concept of Starships out of the format completely and instead forcing us into storylines that weren't just this week's planet-of-hats. Each of the characters, like those in TNG and TOS as well, were clear and distinct from one another, and had believable, realistic characters outside of their job descriptions.
But from its very inception, VOY never felt totally 100% new, despite the ambition of the Delta Quadrant setting. The cast of characters were all very generic. The token Vulcan so they can do Vulcan stories, the token Klingon so they can do Klingon stories, the token half-alien hybrid so they can do half-alien hybrid stories (one and the same as the Klingon, to boot!), the token artificial life-form so they can do the "What Does It Mean To Be Human?" stories, and so on. Even the enemies they faced at the start, the Kazon, were really just Klingons with a different name. And later on the reliable (but predictable) Borg became the enemy of choice.
It's like the production team were being forced by the suits higher up into making this third Star Trek spin-off against their better judgement, and their hearts just weren't in it. ( Not too far from the truth, actually.
)
In theory the Maquis/Federation stuff was a great hook on which to hang new, unique stories. As something like "Worst Case Scenario" proves. But the Maquis crew simply got absorbed into the Starfleet crew, effectively meaning that the majority of the cast were defined not by their individual characters, but simply by what they do on the ship. B'elanna was the engineer, so she fixed stuff. Tom was the hotshot pilot (and occasional field medic). Chakotay was the dutiful First Officer, and that's all. Harry was the eager naive recruit straight out of the academy, for SEVEN YEARS. Neelix was the 'funny alien'. It was a very generic bunch of characters, and they produced very generic Star Trek stories out of them. It comes as no surprise that the three break-out characters were Janeway herself, Seven of Nine, and the EMH, all of whom at least had *something* unique about them (even if the EMH and Seven both were, as Orphalesion rightly points out, often used as supplementary Data proxies). Kes had potential too, but we all know the circumstances behind why she got dropped.
Don't get me wrong, I love VOY as much as the next guy. On its own merits it's got some great moments and truly some of the best Star Trek out there. But I'd be realistic enough to admit that the format was never anything more than Trek at its most basic. Its competent, but it was never extraordinary.
Each of the shows that came along before VOY took great strides in expanding the 'verse and doing something different. DS9 was arguably the apex of this, ripping the concept of Starships out of the format completely and instead forcing us into storylines that weren't just this week's planet-of-hats. Each of the characters, like those in TNG and TOS as well, were clear and distinct from one another, and had believable, realistic characters outside of their job descriptions.
But from its very inception, VOY never felt totally 100% new, despite the ambition of the Delta Quadrant setting. The cast of characters were all very generic. The token Vulcan so they can do Vulcan stories, the token Klingon so they can do Klingon stories, the token half-alien hybrid so they can do half-alien hybrid stories (one and the same as the Klingon, to boot!), the token artificial life-form so they can do the "What Does It Mean To Be Human?" stories, and so on. Even the enemies they faced at the start, the Kazon, were really just Klingons with a different name. And later on the reliable (but predictable) Borg became the enemy of choice.
It's like the production team were being forced by the suits higher up into making this third Star Trek spin-off against their better judgement, and their hearts just weren't in it. ( Not too far from the truth, actually.
)In theory the Maquis/Federation stuff was a great hook on which to hang new, unique stories. As something like "Worst Case Scenario" proves. But the Maquis crew simply got absorbed into the Starfleet crew, effectively meaning that the majority of the cast were defined not by their individual characters, but simply by what they do on the ship. B'elanna was the engineer, so she fixed stuff. Tom was the hotshot pilot (and occasional field medic). Chakotay was the dutiful First Officer, and that's all. Harry was the eager naive recruit straight out of the academy, for SEVEN YEARS. Neelix was the 'funny alien'. It was a very generic bunch of characters, and they produced very generic Star Trek stories out of them. It comes as no surprise that the three break-out characters were Janeway herself, Seven of Nine, and the EMH, all of whom at least had *something* unique about them (even if the EMH and Seven both were, as Orphalesion rightly points out, often used as supplementary Data proxies). Kes had potential too, but we all know the circumstances behind why she got dropped.
Don't get me wrong, I love VOY as much as the next guy. On its own merits it's got some great moments and truly some of the best Star Trek out there. But I'd be realistic enough to admit that the format was never anything more than Trek at its most basic. Its competent, but it was never extraordinary.
I really enjoyed certain episodes for a few of the characters, especially the Doctor and his "what it means to be human" episodes and holographic rights stories. I think my favorite along those lines was the "Doctor tries to publish a holo-novel" episode "Author, Author". I didn't mind the half-alien or "token" Vulcan characters or the attempts at stories based on them, though by that point I was completely tired of Klingons thanks to DS9. Considering Tuvok was the first regular Vulcan character in Trek TV since 1969, I didn't mind that at all, in fact, he's one of my favorites from VOY. I seem to gravitate toward "background" or "also ran" characters. So Tuvok, Neelix, the EMH were some of my favorites on VOY. Especially the Tuvok and Neelix heavy episodes. "Meld" and "Tuxiv". But then, I watch Trek for the characters and the weird moments of moral dilemmas and morality plays.
If they would have kept the promise of the premise--and done something more than "forehead-of-the-week" style stories--they would have had gold-pressed latinum on their hands.
If they would have kept the promise of the premise--and done something more than "forehead-of-the-week" style stories--they would have had gold-pressed latinum on their hands.
Blech have asked the thousands of Voyager fans in the largest FB Voy. group about the negativity (besides the stalwart fans) towards Voyager here and they told me to ignore it, so I will from now on, better off w/ positive people, cheers! (Still subscribing to a few pro-Voyager threads, take care Voy. fans.)
Last edited:
I suspect the explanation is built into your post. If Voyager was your first exposure to Trek . . . well, of course it seemed fresh and new and exciting to you. Why wouldn't it?
But if it was your fourth (or fifth, if you count TAS) Star Trek series, you're going to be comparing it to the earlier series and may experience it differently.
It's not an objective thing. It's just that different people come at shows with different expectations.
Similar threads
