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[A Link to the Past]

I mean, it's weaker than Deep Space Nine, Next Generation, and The Original Series, and the writing is bad, and Seven of Nine's design was so horndoggy, and the lizard episode was really bad, but there were enough elements for me to overall have some enjoyment, and while Janeway was written in a clumsy way, Mulgrew did a really good job I thought.

Then again maybe the people who hate it are just really vocal and it's in fact just treated as the bottom tier of Star Trek, but I just kinda wanna talk about Voyager

EDIT: To clarify, I ain't saying "oh, you're not right to hate it," that ain't my style :>

 

[Sephzilla]

Voyager had a really great concept that got squashed because the writers basically turned the show into an episodic nuTNG. It also didn't help that the writing was all over the place, which resulted in Janeway looking like a monster of a captain, and also resulted in most of the characters feeling like parodies of themselves in the later seasons. Seven of Nine is a bit horndoggy in design but she and The Doctor are two of the only characters who actually get any kind of development over the course of the series. Voyager basically suffered from having too many cooks in the kitchen in my opinion. If the series stuck to its early idea of being an isolated ship with a split crew that was fighting to stay alive, it could have been more interesting.

Part if it's hate also comes from the fact that it followed up the two best Star Trek series ever in TNG and DS9.

Real talk - the over-hated Trek series is Enterprise. That show gets damn good in seasons 3 and 4.

 

[TheChaos0]

Now I want to watch it again. Maybe I'll hate it now after all these years.

What's up with Voyager's hate though. It was never that bad.

 

[Sir_Crocodile]

No, it's not as bad as people make it out to be; it's worse.

Firstly, Janeway is the most incompetent and genocidal captain going.

The way it's written, Voyager wouldn't have even been a series with a competent captain, as a competent captain wouldn't have destroyed the array before it had taken voyager home in the series debut.

She had three options:

a)Load the array with timed explosives
b)Stay behind on a shuttle and make sure it was destroyed, sacrificing herself for the crew
c)Destroy the array and strand voyager in the delta quadrant

she choose option c[razy]

And then she went on to murder people (tuvix) and straight out change trillions of lives because she didn't like what happened to tuvok (Endgame)

Then there's Chakotay. Beltran is ALREADY not a particularly good actor, which is fine for Voyager because the writers have nothing for him to do or say from from day one. Part of the crew being marquis gave a huge opportunity for conflict, which Chakotay should either have been starting or mediating depending on the issue. And him not starting a mutiny during Scorpion was a huge missed opportunity. Scorpion, while fun, was absurd when you step back and think about it. "Borg's in our way, guess we better help them to save our own skins, who cares about everyone else". They did throw in some line about the aliens wanting to wipe out all life, which they then hilariously walked back on later in the series, making the decision to help the borg even worse.

The Doctor & Seven were the only decent characters in the show (which was especially surprising in seven's case given she often bore the brunt of Janeway's bizarre and psychopathic moralistic soliloquises). Then we had often-creepy-always-ensign-kim, the ever annoying neelix, and paris, b'ellana and kes who were kinda just there (and all complicit in the murder of tuvix).

99% of the time, the idea of Voyager as a ship lost, having to forage for supplies and patch itself up was ignored. The ship was magically fine after every episode, and thus a fantastic theme that should have been the backbone of the show was utilised only really in the two parter Year of Hell (which of course was excellent). I remember back then being hyped affter reading excellent tie-in books like The Garden, which showed voyager having to negotiate for supplies and make hard decisions about what they would trade given the prime directive. I remember being hyped for seeing that in the show. I was to be disappointed.

And let's not even begin on absurd episodes like Threshold and The Q and the Gray.

Man what a bad show.

 

[krang]

I liked Voyager. So do many others, round here.

This topic seems to have been discussed to death, though. I can't have been 2 weeks since we had the exact same conversation.

In fact, I swear the guy above me just did a copy pasta.

 

[Wolfe]

It's no TNG.

Then again maybe the people who hate it are just really vocal and it's in fact just treated as the bottom tier of Star Trek, but I just kinda wanna talk about Voyager

Sums it up pretty well imo.

 

[JC Lately]

Something, something, Tuvix, something Threshold, something Harry Kim.

That ought to cover the next couple of pages.

My hate Voyager has softened considerably since the the new movies showed me how bad it could truly get. It's got some gems, but when it misses the mark, oof, it gets rough.

 

[Begbie]

Voyager isn't over hated, Thor 2 is.

 

[AntChum]

One of the few saving graces of Voyager is that it gave us an episode with Robert Picardo and Andy Dick hamming it up.

 

[Htown]

It's not the worst TV show I've ever seen.

It is my least favorite Trek show, though.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but after all the groundwork that both TNG and DS9 laid with the Maquis conflict, the premise of Federation and Maquis hating each other but trying to work together to get home on one ship is a great one.

And they abandoned it immediately. Like, end of the pilot immediately.

And the saddest thing is that Enterprise did the "we're the only human ship out here" thing better than Voyager did.

Show had a few great episodes, but other than that I'd be very happy never to watch Voyager again.

 

[ElTorro]

Voyager had a really great concept that got squashed because the writers basically turned the show into an episodic nuTNG. It also didn't help that the writing was all over the place, which resulted in Janeway looking like a monster of a captain, and also resulted in most of the characters feeling like parodies of themselves in the later seasons. Seven of Nine is a bit horndoggy in design but she and The Doctor are two of the only characters who actually get any kind of development over the course of the series. Voyager basically suffered from having too many cooks in the kitchen in my opinion. If the series stuck to its early idea of being an isolated ship with a split crew that was fighting to stay alive, it could have been more interesting.

Yeah, pretty much. Voyager's biggest flaw is how it wasted it's own potential. Instead of using the crew's desperate situation as a background for morally ambiguous situations and actions, they just turned it into a Starfleet propaganda movie. The entirety of Voyager should have been more like the story of the Equinox.

Apart from that, I actually enjoyed most of it, despite some utterly terrible episodes and a few very weak characters like Kim and Chakotay.

 

[Ovek]

When Voyager had a good episode it was unfortunately only one of the few from a season of twenty plus episodes with the rest either mediocre or fucking awful garbage lizard people bottom of the barrel tier TV.

Over-hated? Perhaps but people do have a very valid reason to hate on it when compared to TNG or DS9.

 

[SlipperyFishes]

I burned through most of it recently ant it holds up really well.

 

[davepoobond]

A bad show with some good moments is basically what it comes down to

 

[Zabka]

A friend taped the first episode for me since I was a huge fan of TOS/TNG/DS9 and getting through the first episode was a chore. Janeway's voice was like daggers in my ears and everyone else was boring as hell. Only saw a few other random episodes.

Also Ensign Kim remembered being in the womb. That guy is a fucking liar.

 

[Sephzilla]

Another part of the show's problem was it had some weird plot armor, for lack of a better term, to always keep Voyager stranded in the delta quadrant. Voyager getting stranded in the first place requires everyone conveniently forgetting that timed explosives exist in the Star Trek universe. Then at other various times in the series there are very clear times where the ship could make it home, but something has to happen specifically to keep Voyager stranded.

The most egregious of these moments was when Q offered to teleport Voyager right into Earth's orbit if Janeway would simply stay out of an internal matter of Q politics regarding the suicidal Q. But Janeway had to go all Bo Jackson on the Prime Directive and snap it over her leg like a baseball bat, because who gives a shit about all of the crewmates that could die if they don't accept this actually fair and logical offer from Q?

 

[A Link to the Past]

Also Ensign Kim remembered being in the womb. That guy is a fucking liar.

That's pretty common actually

 

[Steiner84]

if your into "monster of the week" like episodes, voyager is absolutely enjoyable.
Also some of the best two parters in whole star trek with scorpion, year of hell and killing game, propably futures end, too.
great show, ill rewatch it every few years.
skip the corny episodes and all is fine.

 

[Krejlooc]

I've been watching a few episodes and... eh. It's not really worth going to bat over thus far. But then again, I also didn't like Deep Space Nine very much. Only TNG has really gripped me.

 

[Dynomutt]

Yep. Scientific Method is an amazing episode!

 

[Jackpot]

It's a goddamned tragedy is what it is. From one of the main Trek writers:

http://www.lcarscom.net/rdm1000118.htm

"By the end of the pilot, you have the Maquis in those Starfleet uniforms, and— boom—we’ve begun the grand homogenization. Now they are any other ship. I don’t know what the difference is between Voyager and the Defiant or the Saratoga or the Enterprise or any other ship sitting around the Alpha Quadrant doing its Starfleet gig. That to me is appalling, because if anything, Voyager—coming home, over this journey, with that crew—by the time they got back to Earth, they should be their own subculture. They should be so different from the people who left, that Starfleet won’t even recognize them any more.

If you think about it in somewhat realistic terms: you’re on Voyager; you are on the other side of the galaxy; for all you know, it is really going to take another century to get home, and there is every chance that you are not going to make it, but maybe your children or grandchildren will. Are you really going let Captain Janeway [Kate Mulgrew] rule the ship for the next century. It seems like, in that kind of situation, the ship would eventually evolve its own sort of society. It would have to function in some way, other than just this military protocol that we repeat over and over again because it’s the only thing we know. You’ve got the Maquis onboard. From the get-go they are supposed to be the anti-Starfleet people. They behave exactly like the Starfleet people with the occasional nod towards B’Elanna [Roxann Dawson] making a snide remark about Starfleet protocols, or Chakotay [Robert Beltran] getting a little quasi-spiritual. But in essence, they are no different than any other ship in the fleet.

You are trying to tell the audience on the one hand, ‘We’re so far from home, and it’s going to take us so long, and we really wish we could get home. It’s rough out here.’ Janeway wrings her hands about all the things that she has sent the crew through. Then, it’s off to the holodeck. You can’t talk with any kind of a straight face about food rations and energy conservation, and having a real kitchen in the mess hall, when at the same time you’ve got the holodeck going. It’s such a facade, and no matter what kind of technobabble bullshit you come up with, the audience intuitively knows, again, that’s not truthful.

"What is the difference really between Voyager and the rest of the fleet? When that ship comes home, it will blend right in. You won’t even know the difference. They haven’t personalized the ship in any way. It’s still the same kind of bare metal, military look that it had at the beginning. If you were trapped on that ship and making your way home, for years on end, wouldn’t you put something up on the walls? Would you put a plant or two somewhere in a corridor? Wouldn’t you try to make it a little more livable? That is the challenge that I think they have really dropped.

 

[Ovek]

Also Ensign Kim remembered being in the womb. That guy is a fucking liar.

Not forgetting the original Kim dies and his alternate dimension / clone replaces him... and in typical Voyager fashion it was never mentioned again, nor was the catastrophic damage done to Voyager in that episode come to think about it. ;P

 

[Drazgul]

None of the crew apart from the Doctor are likeable, and even he acts like a total dick in some episodes.

 

[Zabka]

That's pretty common actually

So are alien abduction stories and people talking to dead relatives. Doesn't mean they're real.

 

[Sephzilla]

The Doctor is such a consistently well written and developed character that he almost feels like he's from a different Star Trek series at times.

 

[Sir_Crocodile]

Not forgetting the original Kim dies and his alternate dimension / clone replaces him... and in typical Voyager fashion it was never mentioned again, nor was the catastrophic damage done to Voyager in that episode come to think about it. ;P

Not mentioning it's a different kim actually makes sense, because mentioning it would imply they care about him, which flies in the face of series continuity.

 

[Schlorgan]

Voyager had a really great concept that got squashed because the writers basically turned the show into an episodic nuTNG. It also didn't help that the writing was all over the place, which resulted in Janeway looking like a monster of a captain, and also resulted in most of the characters feeling like parodies of themselves in the later seasons. Seven of Nine is a bit horndoggy in design but she and The Doctor are two of the only characters who actually get any kind of development over the course of the series. Voyager basically suffered from having too many cooks in the kitchen in my opinion. If the series stuck to its early idea of being an isolated ship with a split crew that was fighting to stay alive, it could have been more interesting.

Part if it's hate also comes from the fact that it followed up the two best Star Trek series ever in TNG and DS9.

Real talk - the over-hated Trek series is Enterprise. That show gets damn good in seasons 3 and 4.

First post nails it.

 

[Knuckle Sandwich]

The characters are pretty shitty compared to the previous shows.

The Doctor was great but the rest are either bad or forgettable.

 

[MisterHero]

Harry Kim is the only survivor, the rest are temporal clones.

Good for him.

 

[JoeM86]

My main issue with Voyager is lack of cohesive continuity.

They kept making jumps of thousands of light years (such as Dark Frontier where they jumped 30,000), and yet still encountered some of the same species. The ship's crewcount kept varying, and I'm not just talking about the losses here, the gains from Equinox there, it was ridiculously fluctuating.

Yeah it has bad episodes, and yes the characters sometimes made questionable choices, but the latter doesn't make it a bad show, it makes it a different show.

It's no DS9, TNG or even Enterprise, but it's not horrific.

 

[MHWilliams]

I mean, it's weaker than Deep Space Nine, Next Generation, and The Original Series, and the writing is bad, and Seven of Nine's design was so horndoggy, and the lizard episode was really bad

This is where you started.

I don't think it's horrible, but it is my least favorite Trek and I don't really like the Original Series.

The Doctor is such a consistently well written and developed character that he almost feels like he's from a different Star Trek series at times.

I cannot argue with this however.

 

[dluu13]

It was the first Trek I watched and it got me into the rest of the treks so it couldn't have been that bad.

 

[A Link to the Past]

So are alien abduction stories and people talking to dead relatives. Doesn't mean they're real.

I remember being in the womb

It was wet

 

[spekkeh]

It's my second favorite one, right after TNG. But then it's also the most similar to TNG.

 

[Lord Error]

I really liked it. The characters in that show made it. I didn't even care all that much what they've been doing, it was just fun watching them. I can't say the same about DS9, where I've found characters mostly uncharismatic, same problem I had with Enterprise.

 

[Dcube]

I love Star Trek. When someone says Voyager ain't so bad I go back and try to watch some of the higher rated episodes and give it another chance, and every time I can barely get through one. I just can't stand the characters and crappy writing no matter how much I want to.

 

[PalaceBrother]

Yeah but did you know the Rock was on it?

 

[TemplaerDude]

No. It's crap. I watched all of it, it all blew. Even the episodes everyone swears are "totally the best!" are crap. It's a bad show with bad writers and bad characters.

 

[Sir_Crocodile]

Yeah but did you know the Rock was on it?

I think I've heard of that guy. Isn't he Roman Reign's cousin?

 

[Escape Goat]

Thor The Dark World is "over-hated". Voyager is hated.

 

[Kai Dracon]

While I do think the show was over-hated in its day, I have to agree with this: whenever an episode focused on the survival aspect of Voyager, the show suddenly got really interesting and unique. Which yes, points to the overall weakness of Voyager, that being how often it just used a script that could be a generic TNG episode.

 

[liquidtmd]

It's very watchable schlock, it does hit some high notes but even its lows (which are semi regular) are entertaining in the world it paints.

Fantastic comfort background viewing.

 

[borghe]

first two seasons of Enterprise were much worse, but Voyager doesn't have the fortune of staying ahead of Enterprise's 3rd and 4th seasons which were incredible (or at the least very very good)

still, the series is watchable. anyone saying otherwise is full of shit. Not "it's actually good" watchable, but at least "oh hey! this isn't utter shit" watchable.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

It's certainly the most inconsistent series with the worst captain. Seriously, she literally kills one of her crew with her bare hands.

I agree 100% that they didn't act like a ship that was never going to reach home.

And yeah, they did absolutely nothing with Clone Kim.

Seven of Nine's bond with Janeway (or rather, the other way around) was under-developed and felt more creepy than anything else.

 

[Escape Goat]

Seven of Nine's bond with Janeway (or rather, the other way around) was under-developed and felt more creepy than anything else.

wut

It was one of the main relationships on the show.

 

[jstripes]

The Doctor is such a consistently well written and developed character that he almost feels like he's from a different Star Trek series at times.

Yup. He's probably the only redeeming thing about Voyager.

 

[Sagroth]

OP's criticisms are on point for me, and in addition, I was personally expecting a lot more from the premise. Aside from the time stuff, the Year of Hell two-parter was exactly what I wanted from Voyager's premise: being under constant threat of attack from an unknown and superior alien force, having to learn the engineering challenges of incorporating patchwork bartered/stolen/salvaged alien tech(and the diplomacy challenges from such), etc. But nope. It's Next Generation Lite.

That said, I did dig everything about the fluid universe and Species 8471(?).

 

[Vilix]

It's my favorite out of all the Treks.

 

[Dougald]

Voyager has some good episodes and some good ideas, but generally was pretty poor and held together only by the Doctor and to a lesser extent Seven of Nine. That Janeway is only almost unwatchable is testament to the acting ability of Kate Mulgrew, because the script never did her any favours

Oh, and the series finale is a punch in the face to the viewer

Also no Voyager thread is complete without the Photon Torpedo count

 

[Podge293]

I really enjoy it. Some episodes are meh but same can be said for all the treks.

Thought janeway was pretty good. Bull Kim didn't get promoted through it all tho ha. Poor Kim never gonna win