So I finally got around to watching Voyager. I first planned to do this ~5 years ago after watching (selections of) TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9 but I was way too exhausted to continue and I wasn't really motivated since I knew it was one of the least regarded Trek shows. But now with watching DSC and some other reasons I've (sort of) rediscovered my (sort of) love for Trek and decided to have a go at it.
Also, I suddenly became fascinated with the Borg Queen, with how it sort of contradicts the idea of the Borg (I had only seen the character in First Contact) and how she was campy in Voyager and I thought I may like it since I sometimes find something to love within stuff widely despised by fandoms.
First of all, I knew I wasn't going to suffer through seven seasons of boredom, so I scoured the Internet for lists of essential episodes along with episodes I was specifically interested in and so I made a preliminary list of ~40 episodes. I watched all of those and then I kept only the episodes which I enjoyed or were necessary for understanding the context of the former, yielding the following list:
1x01-02 Caretaker
1x03 Parallax
2x18 Death Wish
3x02 Flashback
3x11 The Q and the Grey
3x26 Scorpion
4x01 Scorpion II
4x02 The Gift
4x14 Message in a Bottle
5x15-16 Dark Frontier
6x09 The Voyager Conspiracy
6x10 Pathfinder
6x12 Blink of an Eye
6x24 Life Line
7x06 Inside Man
7x19 Q2
7x20 Author, Author
7x25-26 Endgame
I think you can with no problem watch only the above episodes and consider everything else that is referenced in them as having happened in broad strokes. If you are curious why some other episodes were not included on this list or on the preliminary one, you may ask me.
Now for thoughts on individual episodes.
*I found the pilot and Parallax to be needlessly boring and I wonder whether they are truly necessary for understanding the characters and the situation.
*The Q episodes contain the kind of whimsiness we need more in our life, so they are definitely in.
*I definitely enjoyed "Flashback" since the TOS movie era is my favorite era of Trek.
*I thought Species 8472 was going to feature more as a threat greater than the Borg but it was only serious in Scorpion - I couldn't bear to watch till the end the episode with the fake Academy. I found even Scorpion to be a bit unbearable (the scorpion story itself is now discussed e.g. on tumblr in subverted ways so I found it weird to be played straight), but I was curious how Seven of Nine came to be onboard Voyager.
*"Message in a Bottle" was fun, but "Eye of the Needle" was superfluous.
*And I now come to the actual reason I wanted to write this post, namely the episode which I consider to be the jewel of the show, "Dark Frontier". The Borg Queen was everything that I expected her to be -- with a spectacular entrance and a very "cyber" 1990s green background (I'd like to find some more films with this aesthetic, aside from The Matrix), and also not that contradictory since in that episode (at least) you can very well see her (as some fans have postulated) as simply a manifestation and not a ruler of the Collective. What really sold me on this episode was the story of the Hansens. (Of course, I had watched "Q Who" and immediately noticed the continuity issue - actually, the only to-do note I wrote during the show was "how did hansens know about the borg" but then I looked it up and found it can be easily fixed.) This was a story of true exploration, not in the reactive sense of "we received a distress signal from planet XYZ so we've come to investigate and fix it by the end of the episode" familiar from TOS/TNG but more in a research-y active sense of "there are weird things happening on the frontier of known space and we are gonna launch a many-year expedition to find all there is about it". And the Federation doesn't even sanction their mission which (i) shows something about the stagnation / lack of curiosity of the UFP in the 24th century and (ii) opens up fruitful story possibilities about independent explorers with no Prime Directive hamper in that same era (maybe this was what ENT was trying to do in the 22nd century...). I could watch a whole show about this kind of exploration and I am amazed no one ever produced such a thing (Trek or otherwise).
*Although "The Voyager Conspiracy" is a bit looked down upon on these forums (from what I've seen), it felt very emotional towards the end, so I kept it. Also conspiracy theories can be fun if you don't take them seriously.
*The four Pathfinder Project episodes were a nice reminder that life is still an utopia in the Alpha Quadrant and could serve as a sort of thematic epilogue to TNG (also, they made me consider dropping DS9 completely from my personal canon, a view reinforced after rewatching the DS9 episodes which were my favorites five years ago like "In the Pale Moonlight" or the Section 31 ones and finding them lackluster). Out of those, "Inside Man", however, I marked as "not that good but okay, I won't delete it".
*I liked "Blink of an Eye" since I have a soft spot for alternate modern-like human(oid) societies of which we see very few of in sci-fi (BSG/Caprica is an example).
*I found the whole Unimatrix Zero plot to be underdeveloped and ultimately leading nowhere (maybe, although he wasn't involved in it, it was an inspiration for RDM's Cylon civil war plot in BSG Season 4), so I dropped the episodes. The Queen is OK in those, though, I think one can still see her as simply a manifestation of a Collective. Where you can't is in the finale since near the beginning of the episode she communicates with the Collective and blatantly argues against it. For that reason, I'm inclined to drop it, if one can accept that they somehow got back to Earth. One thing I want to add about the Borg is that I don't think they are at all overused and definitely they don't suffer villain decay, since there are only four direct confrontations throughout the whole show (TNG had three and they aren't even in Borg space) and in the first three the Borg don't get defeated and the protagonists only narrowly escape.
Also, I suddenly became fascinated with the Borg Queen, with how it sort of contradicts the idea of the Borg (I had only seen the character in First Contact) and how she was campy in Voyager and I thought I may like it since I sometimes find something to love within stuff widely despised by fandoms.
First of all, I knew I wasn't going to suffer through seven seasons of boredom, so I scoured the Internet for lists of essential episodes along with episodes I was specifically interested in and so I made a preliminary list of ~40 episodes. I watched all of those and then I kept only the episodes which I enjoyed or were necessary for understanding the context of the former, yielding the following list:
1x01-02 Caretaker
1x03 Parallax
2x18 Death Wish
3x02 Flashback
3x11 The Q and the Grey
3x26 Scorpion
4x01 Scorpion II
4x02 The Gift
4x14 Message in a Bottle
5x15-16 Dark Frontier
6x09 The Voyager Conspiracy
6x10 Pathfinder
6x12 Blink of an Eye
6x24 Life Line
7x06 Inside Man
7x19 Q2
7x20 Author, Author
7x25-26 Endgame
I think you can with no problem watch only the above episodes and consider everything else that is referenced in them as having happened in broad strokes. If you are curious why some other episodes were not included on this list or on the preliminary one, you may ask me.
Now for thoughts on individual episodes.
*I found the pilot and Parallax to be needlessly boring and I wonder whether they are truly necessary for understanding the characters and the situation.
*The Q episodes contain the kind of whimsiness we need more in our life, so they are definitely in.
*I definitely enjoyed "Flashback" since the TOS movie era is my favorite era of Trek.
*I thought Species 8472 was going to feature more as a threat greater than the Borg but it was only serious in Scorpion - I couldn't bear to watch till the end the episode with the fake Academy. I found even Scorpion to be a bit unbearable (the scorpion story itself is now discussed e.g. on tumblr in subverted ways so I found it weird to be played straight), but I was curious how Seven of Nine came to be onboard Voyager.
*"Message in a Bottle" was fun, but "Eye of the Needle" was superfluous.
*And I now come to the actual reason I wanted to write this post, namely the episode which I consider to be the jewel of the show, "Dark Frontier". The Borg Queen was everything that I expected her to be -- with a spectacular entrance and a very "cyber" 1990s green background (I'd like to find some more films with this aesthetic, aside from The Matrix), and also not that contradictory since in that episode (at least) you can very well see her (as some fans have postulated) as simply a manifestation and not a ruler of the Collective. What really sold me on this episode was the story of the Hansens. (Of course, I had watched "Q Who" and immediately noticed the continuity issue - actually, the only to-do note I wrote during the show was "how did hansens know about the borg" but then I looked it up and found it can be easily fixed.) This was a story of true exploration, not in the reactive sense of "we received a distress signal from planet XYZ so we've come to investigate and fix it by the end of the episode" familiar from TOS/TNG but more in a research-y active sense of "there are weird things happening on the frontier of known space and we are gonna launch a many-year expedition to find all there is about it". And the Federation doesn't even sanction their mission which (i) shows something about the stagnation / lack of curiosity of the UFP in the 24th century and (ii) opens up fruitful story possibilities about independent explorers with no Prime Directive hamper in that same era (maybe this was what ENT was trying to do in the 22nd century...). I could watch a whole show about this kind of exploration and I am amazed no one ever produced such a thing (Trek or otherwise).
*Although "The Voyager Conspiracy" is a bit looked down upon on these forums (from what I've seen), it felt very emotional towards the end, so I kept it. Also conspiracy theories can be fun if you don't take them seriously.
*The four Pathfinder Project episodes were a nice reminder that life is still an utopia in the Alpha Quadrant and could serve as a sort of thematic epilogue to TNG (also, they made me consider dropping DS9 completely from my personal canon, a view reinforced after rewatching the DS9 episodes which were my favorites five years ago like "In the Pale Moonlight" or the Section 31 ones and finding them lackluster). Out of those, "Inside Man", however, I marked as "not that good but okay, I won't delete it".
*I liked "Blink of an Eye" since I have a soft spot for alternate modern-like human(oid) societies of which we see very few of in sci-fi (BSG/Caprica is an example).
*I found the whole Unimatrix Zero plot to be underdeveloped and ultimately leading nowhere (maybe, although he wasn't involved in it, it was an inspiration for RDM's Cylon civil war plot in BSG Season 4), so I dropped the episodes. The Queen is OK in those, though, I think one can still see her as simply a manifestation of a Collective. Where you can't is in the finale since near the beginning of the episode she communicates with the Collective and blatantly argues against it. For that reason, I'm inclined to drop it, if one can accept that they somehow got back to Earth. One thing I want to add about the Borg is that I don't think they are at all overused and definitely they don't suffer villain decay, since there are only four direct confrontations throughout the whole show (TNG had three and they aren't even in Borg space) and in the first three the Borg don't get defeated and the protagonists only narrowly escape.
