I just have to tell you how I discovered Voyager.
I had been an ardent TNG fan for many years and also watched all episodes and movies of TOS which I also liked.
In 1997, TNG was on re-run on one of my the channels I had access to and DS9 had started on another. Unfortunately the channel which aired DS9 cancelled the series after only one season and it took many years until I could watch the whols series.
At that point I didn't know anything about Voyager. OK, I knew about the series but I avoided all websites with information about it since I realized that it wouldn't take long before some channel I had access to would start airing it and I didn't want to spoil the fun by reading too much about it.
Anyway, then came the night when one of my channels was airing the DS9 episode "Move Along Home". I was going to a rock concert that evening and didn't have the time to watch the episode so I taped it on my old VHS to watch it the next day. Piece of cake!
Or not!
The next day when I was going to watch the episode , I had only watched 10 minutes or so of it when the screen went gray and stayed that way the whole episode. A closer examination showed that there had been a technical failure at that channel, therefore the gray screen.
Jump forward a few months, to 8 January 1998, an uneventful evening when I had nothing important to do so I decided to go down to a shop downtown where it was possible to rent movies and serie episodes on VHS for a decent sum of money.
I knew that they had a lot of Star Trek, all of TNG and TOS but I'd also seen some DS9 VHS there as well so I thought "maybe they have the Move Along Home VHS here?"
So I searched and searched but they didn't have that particular DS9 episode.
But what they had was the whole season 1 of Voyager!
So I thought "why not" and borrowed "Caretaker".
I was expecting something good and this was more than that. The episode was fantastic! Exciting from the beginning to the end and all the main characters were introduced in a very good way. It was also the first time ever when I took an immediate liking to all the main characters in a series, that hadn't happened for me before.
I remember that I got goosebumps when I watched the scene when Kim says "Wer'e on the other side of the Galaxy!"
"Now the adventure really starts", I thought. In fact I still get goosebumps everytime I watch that scene in "Caretaker".
Not to mention when a certain beauty shows up after a little more than half the episode!
Kes!
Anyway, I was very impressed by this pilot episodes and realized that this will be very good. So already the next day I rented the VHS with "Parallax" and "Time And Again" because I just had to watch more of the series.
So when one of my TV channels started to air Voyager three months later, I had already watched the rst season and was about to start watching the second which the shop had just bought in. That didn't stop me from watching season 1 on TV again and tape the episodes as well!
Voyager became my favorite there and then and despite some serious dissapointments later on, it still is, in some strange way!
