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I want to like Star Trek: Voyager.

I tried when it first came out. I really did. So did my dad. We were rabid TNG fans, didn't mind DS9*, and we were excited about more Trek. Three seasons later, the new Whose Line Is It Anyways? came on the air, in the same time slot. We told ourselves that we'd watch half of Voyager, then switch to Whose Line if we weren't invested yet.

That's how we started watching only 30 minutes of Voyager a week. Eventually, less than a season later, those 30 minutes became no minutes.

Years later, I tried watching individual Voyager episodes, hand picking ones that were on "best of Voyager" lists. This attempt actually made things worse. Most of these were among the infamous Voyager Reset Button (VRB) episodes, where an hour passes and at the end all the events of the episode are magically reverted. Worse, because I didn't care about the characters, I'd often find that while the plot synopsis sounded interesting, the execution would let me down. I became an even more outspoken critic of Voyager, because I could cite examples of Voyager Heresy.

Now I'm sure, as Trek fans, you've all met the Anti-Trek Sci-Fi Fan. The one who thinks that liking Trek would somehow diminish Babylon 5 in some way. You can like both, people! I've seen exhaustive essays about Star Trek being racist because some one-off writer used the Prime Directive as a cheap plot trick instead of a source of intellectual discussion. We all know that the writing of Trek can be schizophrenic due to the large number of different voices contributing to it, but to the ATSFF, each bad episode erases everything good about all the the series and movies.

I'm worried I've become that guy, but within Trekdom.

I've become the Anti-Voyager Trek Fan.

My wife remembers Voyager much more fondly than I do. It was her first Star Trek, and, while she never watched the whole series, it carries a bit of nostalgia for that. We watched all of Firefly and Battlestar (redux) together and loved them, and she convinced me to give B5 a chance. We really enjoyed going through the whole series. Then, I got her to try TNG (skipping most of the first 2 seasons), and it was a hit. Then we watched DS9, and it blew us away. I remember liking it well enough the first time, but I didn't watch it religiously, and missed most of the last couple seasons.

What if the same thing happens with Voyager?

Well, we're going to do it. We're netflixing the whole thing, top to bottom. And I'm going to share my experiences with you. Because it is worth giving things another chance, whether it is some televised sci-fi series, or calculus, or a book, or whatever.