Voyager stronger first half than second half?

[Captain Kathryn]

I think Voyager's second half is the strongest, however it does feel refreshing to watch Seasons 1-3 every now and then because I tend to not rewatch them as often.

I don't even think that the reason is that Seven isn't on yet (although that is a contributing factor). For me, it's moreso that the relationships and characters aren't as fully developed yet in the earlier seasons. For instance, the Doctor hasn't developed his full personality yet...his great sense of humor and fun demeanor definitely shines more in later seasons (although earlier episodes like Lifesigns are great Doctor episodes). Tom and B'Elanna aren't together yet. There is still some tension between the crew. I prefer the later, more established version of the crew. However, I enjoy watching them nonetheless, especially wonderful episodes like "Future's End".

 

[Destructor]

I think Season 4 is Voyager's strongest.

I think S5-7 are all 'pretty solid', like, they had found their groove as a middle-of-the-road, no-surprises, no-continuity, no major shake-ups sort of show, but within that groove they told some very solid sci-fi yarns.

S1-3 are extremely variable (some stinkers, some classics) which I think makes for an interesting show but one that hadn't really found it's feet and was sort of arcing out in all directions trying to figure itself out.

I think each half of the show are 'strong' in their own way, depending on how you define strength. I prefer the show with Seven, tbh.

 

[Ithekro]

The only basic problem I had with Voyager was how the ship looked over the years. It had been in several instances of combat that had gotten through the shields. She had been rammed once. And she had had other issues including going into nebula, gas giants, particle fields, all sorts of stuff.

She was too clean. She had no wear on her. No patches. No carbon scoring, or plant lines from repairs. She wasn't designed for this sort of mission and wasn't setup for this sort of mission. She should, logically, have blemishes on the hull over time.

Now I know that would be basically impossible on a TV budget when one uses stock footage of the ship flying past a lot based on a model, as oppose to a CG model. But the ship looked the most "correct" to me in the second part of the Year of Hellm were there are carbon scoring, sections of the hull missing, and repairs being not perfect to the hull.

The interior was also probably too clean, or too much of the ship worked, but that seems more in line with what we know of Starfleet. Though it would seem more reasonable to have more and more obvious jury rigging going on, with some things not quite working all the time (sort of like Mr. Scott's Enterprise didn't always work as expected, and was jury rigged to compensate for the age of the ship and years out of port one would expect of a Five Year Mission).

 

[NightJim]

Year to Hell is to me the main example I can point to when I talk about Voyager's shortcomings. Such a brilliant concept, and an amazing first episode, but the ending totally and utterly ruins it by making the entire thing pointless. It feels like a poorly written tie-in that's been told that everything has to be back where it was when the author started.

 

[BruntFCA]

I have said it before, and I will say it again (until I understand); why do so many people think Voyager was a weaker show than TNG? I truly don't get it.
Unless you don't like some cast members, or the unfortunate lack of continuity, what does Voyager do wrong exactly?
The episodes themselves are the same type of stories you saw on TNG. Not so strange, because after all it was created, written and produced by the same people.

Well I can only speak for myself but I see VOY as being a much weaker show because I simply don't think it was anywhere near as well written as TNG.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I have said it before, and I will say it again (until I understand); why do so many people think Voyager was a weaker show than TNG? I truly don't get it.
Unless you don't like some cast members, or the unfortunate lack of continuity, what does Voyager do wrong exactly?
The episodes themselves are the same type of stories you saw on TNG. Not so strange, because after all it was created, written and produced by the same people.

In fact all four spinoff series are remarkably similar, and only differ in the details. Yet somehow Voyager (and Enterprise) is singled out as the 'bad apple'. Is it because these series came last, and didn't implement radical changes to the TNG formula?

Many people only fall in love one or twice in their lives. More of the same looks worse that the original you fell in love with.

 

[2takesfrakes]

True. Like a swan, I only fall in love once.

 

[Gaith]

I have said it before, and I will say it again (until I understand); why do so many people think Voyager was a weaker show than TNG? I truly don't get it.
Unless you don't like some cast members, or the unfortunate lack of continuity, what does Voyager do wrong exactly?
The episodes themselves are the same type of stories you saw on TNG. Not so strange, because after all it was created, written and produced by the same people.

In fact all four spinoff series are remarkably similar, and only differ in the details. Yet somehow Voyager (and Enterprise) is singled out as the 'bad apple'. Is it because these series came last, and didn't implement radical changes to the TNG formula?

You may be right that, ep for ep, VOY had writing and performances on par with TNG (apart from Stewart, of course, who's in a league of his own). I haven't seen enough of both series recently enough to say myself, but let's take that as a hypothetical starting point. VOY would still suffer in comparison, because:

- As you say, it was newer, and it's reasonable to ask for significant improvements in artistic quality, not just paddling along, after all that time on air.

- The characters just weren't as iconic or new, and were therefore less fun. Speaking of fun, the grayer look of the ship and the fact that, unlike the other series, most of the characters didn't want to be there and would gladly have quit their jobs to go back to their respective homeworlds made the whole thing less of a light-hearted hangout show.

- The setting meant that, generally speaking, there couldn't be fun appearances from old favorites characters and races, and new favorites could only stick around so long before the ship left their corner of space.

 

[Destructor]

Harry? Boring, boring, boring.
Neelix? Annoying when he wasn't being depressing.
Paris? The least-convincing 'bad boy' character ever written.
Kes? More like, uh, Less.

On the plus side:

Janeway: Amazing.
Seven: Interesting.
Doctor: Great actor, funny, great character, slightly overused but basically excellent.

I also liked Tuvok and Belanna. Hell, I liked everyone, I'm just saying it's understandable why lots of people didn't and it felt like a half-baked TNG ripoff with no continuity and no willingness to commit to anything that ever changed the status quo.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I have said it before, and I will say it again (until I understand); why do so many people think Voyager was a weaker show than TNG? I truly don't get it.
Unless you don't like some cast members, or the unfortunate lack of continuity, what does Voyager do wrong exactly?
The episodes themselves are the same type of stories you saw on TNG.

Same type of stories, yes. Not as well written, with less interesting characters, more TV-standard melodrama, less identity, no Picard, no Data, and no Worf.

Not so strange, because after all it was created, written and produced by the same people.

Brannon Braga and Jeri Taylor. The rest of the good writers went to DS9.

In fact all four spinoff series are remarkably similar, and only differ in the details. Yet somehow Voyager (and Enterprise) is singled out as the 'bad apple'. Is it because these series came last, and didn't implement radical changes to the TNG formula?

The problem wasn't ideas, it was lack of a likable cast, it was lack of identity, and it was extremely poor execution.

 

[Lance]

I've often thought the extent to which VOY was an alleged 'death' in the franchise (poor reception by the general public etc) has been a little over-stated over the years. I seem to recall that both it and ENT were very much still on the radar, people knew they existed, sure they didn't get TNG levels of popular appeal (but then again TNG itself didn't get TNG levels of popular appeal after they went to movies!) but I'd hardly say that people just stopped watching en masse, which seems to be how some people like to tell the story these days. Sure we all recognized the short-comings by the end, but I'd hardly say that either series was a 'popular failure', even if they were occasionally failures with the critics.

I knew guys and girls who were definitely "casual viewers" (as opposed to Star Trek fans) but who still watched both shows on-and-off. Maybe they were a minority. But again, I'd argue the extent to which some quarters state people 'switched off' from Star Trek in those later shows is definitely exaggerated.

 

[Destructor]

Voyager's numbers were fine- certainly not TNG-level good, but fine enough to justify the creation of a new show (better than DS9s at the time). By today's standards they'd be off the charts.

Enterprise's numbers were not fine- they dwindled and dwindled. They didn't cancel the show because the numbers were good. I maintain this is because Enterprise was not a good show, so no-one watched it. Hell I'm a hardcore Trekkie and I could barely bring myself to watch it.

 

[Ithekro]

Voyager was UPN's flagship show. Enterprise...not sure. I do know that UPN didn't last very long after Enterprise was cancelled though.

 

[tomswift2002]

Enterprise's numbers were not fine- they dwindled and dwindled. They didn't cancel the show because the numbers were good. I maintain this is because Enterprise was not a good show, so no-one watched it. Hell I'm a hardcore Trekkie and I could barely bring myself to watch it.

Also with Enterprise I think another thing was that it was on very few channels aside from UPN. I remember here in Canada the show was on Space, the CITY network and a channel from Edmonton. I was in a region where Space was the only channel on cable that carried it (the others were available on satellite), but even then Space was part of a specialties package, so if you didn't subscribe, you didn't get the channel. Whereas Voyager, I remember was, besides being on UPN in theStates was also on FOX (WUHF had the show in my area), and in my area by '97 the local channel had picked up the series in first-run syndication.

 

[Lance]

OT, but here's an interesting article I found which discusses some other reasons why ENT, and by extension Star Trek on TV as a whole, might have failed to 'connect' with the public near the end:

http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/enterprise-failed-star-trek.html

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I totally agree that if Enterprise started out the way it was in season four, it would have been more successful.

Seasons one and two mostly gave us a rehash of the same stories we'd been watching for 14 years but with less unique characters.

It's true Voyager's ratings even when they were low were 'great-for-UPN'. But it also debuted with a built in eight figure audience and couldn't hold on to 80% of them.

 

[Lance]

The trouble with Enterprise was that sense of 'entitlement', like those behind the scenes had gotten accustomed to Star Trek shows running seven years and were more than happy to just coast along on the assumption that simply being Star Trek meant a steady paycheck for two-thirds of a decade.

I guess what I'm saying is that I remember Braga claiming that "all our Star Trek shows take a few years to get into their stride", which might be statistically true, but it's the kind of attitude which stinks the place up. They needed to hit the ground running, and they should have been able to do so, because those early years are crucial to building an audience that carries your show through to the end. Enterprise f***ed up those early years so fundamentally badly that when it started getting good near the end nobody cared any more. Voyager never seen the same levels of Blah as did ENT, but it did likewise fail to capitalize in those early years, which must to some extent account for why a 'mid series revamp' was felt necessary.

If Years 1-3 had've been able to hold the audience that the show started with, then the revamp wouldn't have needed to happen. There's a cause and effect thing going on there.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I hope the next Trek series, if we are blessed with one, starts off with something hardhitting and keeps running with it. No one wants to watch episodes about people's favorite cake, that's the kind of warm hearted thing you do multiple seasons in when you can play around and have a silly ep. Not what you suck people in with.

 

[Gaith]

^ Wisdom and truth.

 

[tomswift2002]

I'd say that Enterprise was doing a terrible job at rehashing episodes that were 35 years old. That "Wisp" episode I found to be a revolting, and extremely weak rehash of "The Lights Of Zetar". Even that episode in Enterprise's season 3 with the ship spending a month crossing a nebula that was hazardous to everyone's health, except Phlox and Porthos was a poor rehash of the Voyager episode that had Voyager crossing a very similar nebula.