While I didn’t hate the show, and enjoyed many of the episodes, I think it had potential it didn’t exploit. The character of Kes, with her 7 year lifespan- well GO with it- show her living out her existence and how she and the crew deals with her passing. It could have been great television if it were done well. And the “lost in space” aspect- deal with it- supply problems, crew morale, increasing desperation and such. It could have been the best of trek- instead it was average Trek.
Voyager had some real clunkers (but what Trek series didn’t?), but “Year of Hell” is not only one of my favorite Trek episodes, it’s some of the best TV I’ve ever seen.
I don’t remember how I originally happened across it.
I think it was a mistake for them to play up the “low on supplies” angle to begin with. With replicators there’s really nothing they can’t do. It’s shown/stated that they can de-replicate stuff and it’s sent back into whatever they use to store raw matter so presumably they could just grab rocks from any asteroid or planet they pass and fill up their holds. I guess maybe what they were low on wasn’t so much the matter but the energy required to use the replicators and my response to that is basically the same. Surely we can assume they were trading technology or whatever for energy every time they met up with a friendly race. We’re only shown the interesting meetings, we can assume they met with dozens if not hundreds of others that we don’t see because they just traded and went on their way. I just do my best to maintain my suspension of disbelief whenever they talk about rationing supplies. I mean they designed and built a brand new shuttle (the Delta Flyer that gets mentioned in every episode at this point in the show), I’m confident they can make some damned torpedoes.
Well, it had to happen: I just sat through the thoroughly awkward season 5 episode The Disease.
Pretty sure I’ve posted about this before, but for me the problem with *Voyager *was simple (and the exact opposite of the situation on all the other Trek shows): Namely, nearly all the main characters are either incompetent, unlikable, or unlikably incompetent! To go thru them one by one (remember I’m NOT talking about the actors playing them, but the characters as they are in the fictional universe):
[ul]
[li]Capt Janaway: She is simply an incredibly bad officer all around. Right from the pilot on, she consistently makes horrible command decisions, magnified ten-fold by their isolation. She is so obviously in over her head that it’s painful to have to watch everyone else continually accept & follow her as the leader. She wouldn’t be made an Admiral when they finally got home, she’d have been court-martialed for needlessly getting them stranded in the first place![/li][li]Chakotay: Not a bad guy (in fact, he’s a much better officer than Janaway) but he’s a bland, boring, ineffectual milquetoast. He’s not an incompetent leader like Janaway, he’s just not a leader, period.[/li][li]Tuvok: What can I say other than the actor does a perfect job at creating a realistic, cold, emotionless Vulcan. So cold & emotionless that I could not care less what happens to him. He might as well be an original series red-shirt![/li][li]Harry Kim: One word, loser. Nice guy, but not confident in anything he does and therefore, given their dire situation he would not ever be put in control of anything (let alone be a bridge officer!)[/li][li]Engineer Torres: Again like Tuvok, the actress perfectly portrays a human/Klingon hybrid woman. IOW a bitchy, disagreeable, miserable, unpleasant cunt who seems to suffer from constant PMS![/li][li]Neelix: Pure comedy relief. Not unlikable, just superfluous and annoying (and not good at much of anything). Kind of like the schoolyard retarded kid that nobody likes but tolerates.[/li][li]Seven of Nine: Only competent, likeable member of the whole Voyager crew (and she was a Borg for Christ’s sake!). Essentially Voyager’s Spock in almost every way. I think she was added because they realized the show desperately needed this. As such she would make the best Capt. [/li][li]The Doctor: Likeable and obviously competent (being that he’s a computer program), but too shticky and comedy-relief-esque. Can only take him in limited appearances.[/li][li]Tom Paris: Saved the worst for last. Selfish, smug, unreliable, arrogantly over-confident & woefully under-skilled. I would have beamed this jerk into a bulkhead the first week they got stranded![/li][/ul]
What made TOS, DS9, ENT and especially TNG so good is that all the main characters were both likeable and believably capable of doing their jobs. 
Everything you say is true; I’d love to have been a fly on the wall during that discussion at Starfleet Command. They couldn’t court-martial her because of the whole “defeating the Borg & bringing back a shitload of new technology” thing, promoting her to admiral and giving her a desk job was the next best thing.
I don’t think it was intended necessarily, but I just kind of assumed they managed to overcome whatever supply problems they thought they had by the third season or so, through a combination of trading and being innovative. Or maybe they rubbed some Borg technology on their replicators, since Borg anything is magical and after they brought Seven home from the shelter they had a lot more opportunities to Borgify their belongings.
That being said, the real reason is I don’t think “we’re stranded with no supplies” is honestly as interesting as people seem to assume it would be. Somebody pointed to BSG on this front, but aside from Galactica conveniently decaying when the plot called for it, the writers there realised the same thing, that “we have no supplies” really means “we can do a scavenging plot when we want, and ignore it the rest of the time because it’s boring.”
There was a discussion in the third or fourth episode (the one where they lose all their water) about how much food and supplies they were going through (Baltar reads off some staggeringly huge numbers, and somebody goes “is that per month?” Dramatic pause. “Per week.”), but then that never came up again. People kept eating noodles and drinking whiskey until plot gremlins poisoned their food and I think they had to eat algae instead.
For all that the Ragtag Fleet was on their own with no ability to replenish their supplies or repair their ships, they stocked up on all the ammo they would ever need in the very first episode, found enough fuel to last forever by the end of the first season, and then acquired a ship that let them magically replicate new Vipers (n.b. this was just after building their own Delta Flyer). So just like the Voyager, the Galactica was theoretically on its own but practically had all the starfighters, missiles, food, water, medicine, paper (they went through a lot of that) and cigarettes as they ever wanted at any moment where it wasn’t a plot point.
Hard to knock VOY too much for solving that problem in a universe that has magical replicators built into it. Even if they could’ve made less of a deal out of it.
I’ve always thought this as well. Perhaps Voyager is a victim of the time it came out. Done today with the long drawn out arc format that most shows seem to have anymore, Voyager could have been a pretty amazing show.
Or it could have become excruciatingly boring and depressing, like BSG did.
Eh, Voyager was already boring and depressing.
Disagreed!
But as if to counter my own point, I think I came across the downer episode grude was talking about. Was it Course: Oblivion? Jesus Christ what the hell was that? It was about interesting existential stuff but damn.
Edit: Also, when the fake Torres dies there are a bunch of shots of her body with fake Paris and fake Doctor standing over her talking and trying to revive her or whatever and in every single one the actress is very obviously breathing. Come on, guys. >.>
Tom Paris starting a pickup truck abducted by aliens in the 1930s and sitting in the middle of nothingness nowhere for centuries (without even a dead battery and fluids boiled into nothingness) . . . well, I never.
The only guy who could get away with that is Woody Allan.
Skald already pointed it out, but Deep Space Nine, which ran pretty much concurrently with Voyager, was doing very well with the long story arc format.
Voyager suffered from the some of the worst of the late-Berman era issues with Trek as a franchise - a scattered devotion to certain aspects of Roddenberry’s utopianism, the last gasps of purely episodic dramatic television (weirdly combined with a plot premise that just begs for continuity), and a studio-mandated blandness to the acting that severely limited the ability of the cast to really dig into their characters.
Of course, the most recent incarnations of Trek suffer from pretty much exactly the opposite issues (thanks, J.J.!), so I’m not surprised that Voyager’s had something of a resurgence in popularity lately - there’s something to be said for bland consistency when the alternative is over-the-top nonsensicality. But for me, watching Voyager only ever serves to reiterate all the more strongly how much better its two immediate predecessors were. TNG grounded its episodic science fiction in a far more likeable cast, and DS9 took a similarly continuity-oriented premise and really ran with it, while also featuring by far the strongest and broadest stable of characters on any of the Trek series. In comparison, Voyager just feels wooden and unambitious. Not awful, by any means… just thoroughly blahhhh.
Yes, Battlestar Galactica eventually solved most of their supply problems, but the point remains that they were problems that needed solving. The carbon Viper was mostly of symbolic value: They made it very clear that this was not a sustainable solution to their attrition problem. And when they eventually got control of the Pegasus, it was a really big deal that they could now make new Vipers, which they couldn’t before. A lot of consumables, the Galactica was able to recycle, which makes sense, since she was built for long deployments… But she was the only ship in the fleet that could do so, which reinforced the dependence of the rest of the fleet on her: Even without the constant Cylon attacks, they were completely incapable of going it alone.
http://blip.tv/confused-matthew/star-trek-voyager-intro-6633080
You’ll probably like this. Confused Matthew has some good reviews, incl. this one where he discusses Voyager as a whole.
You may want to just start the clip at about 2:10, as it starts with a bit of prelim before he gets to the actual review.
Fair warning, NSFW.
I always thought the writers should have a big chart in the story room with slots for every crew member. Every time a crew member is mentioned, even in passing, add them to the chart. Every time one is killed, even off camera (3 dead in engineering!), X-off the slot.
And ONLY use the same background actors - it’s not like a regular star ship, where crew come and go. Everybody there in the beginning has to still be there. (I know the practical limitations of that in Hollywood - can’t reasonably keep everyone on contract for 7 years. But they could try.)
So when you need a new, previously never mentioned character to tell a story, check the chart and see who is available.
“Activate the photonic cannon!”
Not as well as they would have liked. They had to fight to get the 6 episode arc that started season 6 (the writers wanted the battle to retrieve DS9 to last the entire season). The only reason Deep Space Nine ended up being able to get any arcs at all was because Rick Berman had shifted all of his interest onto Voyager by that time.
What a cool fucking episode Blink of an Eye was.