Is it just me but does anyone enjoy Voyager Seasons 1-2 than 3-7? I feel as if they lost their stride in season 3-7. I mean sure we got 7 of 9 who is a fantastic character and I find Jeri Ryan to be a talented actress no matter what roll she plays in, We got better visuals, more interesting aliens (for the most part). But I feel as if Seasons 1-2 had sort of story arcs such as Seska who I think if she had lived longer could have held a candle to Gul Dukat, We had the Kazon not the best enemies but kept Voyager on their feet, and we had the Vidians which are my favorite enemy in all of Voyager maybe even all of Star Trek. But I feel when Season 3-7 roll around it just became aliens of the week. The only arcs that really caught my eye were the Borg and the Hirogen. I also felt that with the exception of Jeri Ryan and Robert Picardo the cast just for lack of better words just didn't care anymore. Idk maybe its me what do you all enjoy Seasons 1-2 or Seasons 3-7
Funny that you said that. One of the common complaints about the Kazon and Vidiians were that we saw them too often, especially the same individuals. They are stranded and trying to get back to the Federation. It would make sense to have an alien of the week format for most of the time, if they keep traveling toward Earth at Warp 6. Voyager should be constantly entering and leaving territories. To put it in this way, if an stranded alien ship was trying to get back to their area with the Federation lying in the middle of their route, The Federation would probably only would be seen for a several episodes, maybe a couple for the Klingons and Cardies each...
On my most recent watch of Voyager, I found the season 1 episodes to be a whole lot better than I remembered. And I thought the series really fell off a cliff in seasons 2 & 3. I mean, it went straight to shit starting in season 2. I chalk this up to network interference. UPN really wrecked Voyager.
There are things to recommend the early seasons. I think Voyager did have a stronger start than other Treks did. * S2 had some particularly strong episodes: "Deadlock", "Death Wish", "The Thaw", and "Tuvix" to name a few. * Did Janeway have the ponytail yet? That was my favorite hairstyle of hers. That might've been S3, though. * No excessively sexualized outfits. The step forward that began with Season 6 Troi and continued with Kira and Dax, continued further with Janeway and B'Elanna's uniforms and Kes's modest outfits. * Harry's rank actually made sense. * They were still dealing with shortages, as opposed to infinite torpedoes, limitless shuttles, and building multiple Delta Flyers. * Sandrine's was a better holo-hangout than Fair Haven.
If you had asked 1-3 vs. 4-7 I might have seriously thought about it (if for Kes alone, the first three make more of a unit for me than 1 and 2), although in the end I still would have chosen 4-7. Season 4 and 5 are simply the strongest seasons they did.
Agreed; I wouldn't divide it like that. 6 and 7 were duds. The first five were great, albeit in different ways.
Season 1 was great, season 2 was magnificent and season 3 was good. Those are the seasons I prefer. Season 2 had so many excellent episodes, the only one which wasn't good was Threshold and it's actually funny to watch if you pretend that the whole episode was just a nightmare Paris had after eating too much of neelix's food the evening before.
They should use "Lower Decks" to make that... well, as canonical as LD is. Just have Tom the Plate explain to Boimler that yep, that's what happened. It was a hallucination. Never mind those salamanders who mysteriously turned up on the Osler.
Don't forget that the salamanders were part of Tom's nightmare. Then he told it to Harry, who told it to Ensign Kayla, who told it to.....etc. The salamanders on Osler were part of someone else's nightmare, someone who obviouisly heard the story about Tom's nightmare.
Boimler. It makes sense now. His glowing ended when he realized that his life on the Farm wouldn't be so bad. That's how it usually is in dreams.
"Threshold" did nothing wrong. Star Trek is a world with sound in space and no relativity, infinity speed evolved salamanders is nothing.
Let's not forget holographic people, and devices that break you down molecule by molecule and transmit you like a radio signal.
You seem to be saying "if anything is questionable, everything is questionable". I believe the term is "whataboutery"...!
Perhaps if "Year of Hell" had been a full season or Species 8472 infiltrating the Federation had been a story arc it also could have given us the DS9/VOY story arc that we always wanted. Oh the endless possibilities
Considering how good Season 3 of Enterprise got, it would have been a treat to see what a yearlong YoH could be.
Seasons 1 and 2 were overall weak, essentially just seasons 8 and 9 of TNG. Season 3 was the start of the improvement.
Personally, I divide the series a little differently. Season 1 isn't too well focused on it, but there's an overarching idea of the crews blending together (it's honestly why I feel like The 37s getting held back for the season premiere ended up hurting the episode overall, as that empty cargo bay would have hit a lot harder after fifteen weeks of showing the development of Voyager's blended crew, rather than waiting another three months to give that emotional payoff). Season 2 builds on it, into the Kazon arc (for good and for ill). Seska is something of a binding factor in these two seasons, since she'd appeared a few times before leaving Voyager and then being the power behind the Kazon throne. Season 3 is a change up, but I would still pair it together with the first three seasons, for the simple fact that at this point in the series, there does seem to be a feeling of the crew bonding and developing. You see little character arcs starting to appear, things that aren't long lasting but still continue across a few episodes with their payoff not coming in the episode they're introduced. If season 1 was "learning to get along" and season 2 was "well, the neighbors won't get along with us, so we might as well move," then the overall theme of season 3, to me, is "learning to love the Delta Quadrant." This is the season that really builds on the idea that, whatever length of Voyager's journey, the crew is coming together and building up a connection with each other and exploring this distant part of the galaxy they're experiencing, going beyond the borders of any prior Federation ship. The thing is, that all gets chucked out the airlock as of Season 4. Scorpion is, in and of itself, a great episode, it's in my personal top episodes of Star Trek as a whole. But it makes a turning point in Voyager's identity. Voyager is presented with a definitive choice - what matters, above all else, getting home or exploration? Because once Voyager reaches Borg space, once Janeway decides to make an appeal to the devil, once she says that she will not turn around and leave well enough alone in the name of getting this crew home... That's it. Voyager's course is set. This is no longer "learn to love the Delta Quadrant, and don't forget, you're here forever." This is "we will get home." And then on top of that, you have the writers losing interest in the characters - in the 104 episodes that make up seasons four, five, six, and seven, how many episodes are centered on Chakotay? On Harry? On Neelix? On Tuvok? Oh, sure, occasionally, they'd get something, if they were lucky, maybe one episode per season would center on them. But that would be one episode out of twenty-six per year, and otherwise, they're there to rattle off lines of technobabble, or even just battle damage, rather than doing anything that really develops their characters as people or individuals. While I won't argue that Seven and the Doctor are fan favorites who probably kept the show afloat until the finale, the fact is, the way that the writing handled things, they ended up sucking up all the air in the room so that no one else got the development that once was theirs. The show stopped being an ensemble, and centered around them and Janeway (who still got plenty to do, because she was The Captain™, but her character was pulled by the writing to be what they needed per episode enough that it became a popular interpretation to assume that she was bipolar - didn't even Kate Mulgrew suggest that on one occasion?). Like, near the end of season three, after Neelix can no longer act as a guide because they've moved beyond the area of space that he'd explored, he started working on all sorts of odd jobs and training around the ship, to the point that in various forms of the potential future episodes, he was wearing a Starfleet uniform like the Maquis did. But this never happened in the main timeline, because he faded in to the background. Harry was stuck as the perpetual ensign, while Tuvok got a promotion for seemingly no reason, and Tom's promotion back to Lieutenant equally is out of left field. Everyone starts getting reduced to one line descriptions - Tuvok's the logical emotionless Vulcan, B'Elanna's the angry forehead, Harry's the naive wet-behind-the-ears-ensign, Tom's the flyboy pilot... Season four and on do not CARE about the people of Voyager beyond what they provide in any given scene. There's no real development or growth for anyone, save Seven and Doctor. Once you get to season four in any given rewatch, you can effectively swap around episodes from various season and there is almost no difference. And while there's certainly shades of this in TNG, it is just all the more pronounced in Voyager, because TNG never proposed it would be anything different. Voyager was sold as two crews coming together, so put forward as a show about the people going on an emotional journey. But at this point, Voyager is no longer about the characters on this journey, it is just about the journey. About getting this ship and crew home. Their emotional journey no longer matters. And that's honestly such a disappointment, because they had a good cast, good characters, and the beginnings of something with season three. But it all gets flushed down the toilet. And, look, even after all of what I just said, I DO still love Voyager. It's the Trek I grew up on - I watched it from premiere to finale, all through my elementary school years. But I look back on it now, and I just see how it failed to live up to its potential. As much as I love what we have, I mourn what we could have as well.
There was some serious character evolution on Voyager that wasn't confined to the Doc and Seven... there was love, loss, pain, recovery, marriage, family, the wonderful and terrible journey of life itself... and then "Before and After" ended. Tuvok's promotion to LCDR and Tom's restoration to LTJG were perfectly in line with the norms set by previous shows in the TNG era. Worf, Geordi, Deanna, Ro, Wesley, Dax (both versions), Bashir, Sisko, Kira, Nog, they all ranked up now and then. They were Trek ranking done right. Harry was where they got it wrong: there was no legitimate reason why they couldn't just spend 20 seconds having Janeway stick a hollow pip on his collar, then send him back to his duties a background character. And by the end of the series, instead of fixing the mistake, they had made the decision to rub the viewer's nose in it instead. That's Voyager in a nutshell: a competent cast, an intriguing premise, some great ideas, and some very bad writing decisions.
I'm rewatching season 6 for the first time since it aired, and so far it's better than o remember. There's nothing wrong with many of the stories per se; I remember at the time the constant frustration at wanting to see the development of the journey and the characters, and being constantly shown the sci-fi trope of the week. BSG did much more to show the realistic issues of a ship on the run, and Voyager started in the first couple of seasons but never delivered on it. It made it feel less like a journey and more like seasons of random events followed by "...oh, and then they got home one day".