Final Evaluation

This project, this attempt to give Voyager another chance, has been quite fruitful - I've enjoyed it a lot more than I've expected. Even still, Voyager is a show with a lot of baggage. It is the sequel to multiple loved TV series, and as such it is judged on a higher standard than many shows. When viewers go into a show with an expectation that the writers, producers, and actors will improve upon "awesome", there's a lot to live up to. This crew is representing the alpha quadrant, the home of everything the fans have come to love about Trek, to a whole new part of the galaxy.

Some complaints I've heard about Voyager don't carry as much weight as they used to. In particular, many early discontent with the show bemoaned the weakness of the initial villains. While I agree that the Kazon looked goofy, I ended up enjoying most of their stories. It made perfect sense to me to have one of the major villains that Voyager faced be deficient technologically, since Voyager's on their home turf and extremely outnumbered. The Vidiians had a fascinating concept, though their stories tended to be a bit too black-and-white for what could have been a very nuanced enemy. The Kazon and the Vidiians may not have been perfect, but they're hardly a major flaw in Voyager.

I've also heard it tossed around some that the Voyager writers were bad because they weren't Original Series fans. Well, I'd certainly prefer that the people who are making Star Trek spinoffs should be fans of the original, but that isn't exactly a prerequisite. I remember cringing when I read the article in which JJ Abrams said he liked Star Wars better than Star Trek - but the final product, whether you liked it or not, included a reverent re-imagining of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate. Like Voyager, it was not groundbreaking in the ways that TOS was, but it was a fresh take on Star Trek, one that excited new and old viewers alike.

I don't think Voyager's greatest sin was its poor continuity. Honestly, in the world of televised science fiction, I think there's room for both serial and episodic shows. From the alien-a-week of TNG, to the mixed format of DS9, and to the long form story of Babylon 5, I think there's merit in each approach. I loved all three of those shows, each for different reasons. It's hard to make room in a long-form story show for a one-off episode with the potency of Darmok, while a story like Sleeping in Light would not be nearly as powerful without the long character arcs to back it up. True, I found it very compelling each time Battlestar Galactica picked up and addressed one of the lost dramatic opportunities in Voyager, but I think that falls more under in-universe consistency rather than story and character continuity. I would have loved to see Voyager be more internally consistent, but on its own I don't think that is what diminished the series in comparison with its competitors.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of Voyager as a series of short-form stories by many authors, loosely held together in the framework of a show about a ship lost far from home. While it is true that Voyager didn't exactly embrace its own premise as a ship with limited resources and a divided crew, I don't think maintaining that consistency would necessarily have changed the fact that a great many Voyager episodes were simply unengaging. As it turned out, many of the attempts at maintaining continuity within Voyager led to some of my least favorite plots - I'm thinking specifically of things like the Tom Paris as a traitor plot or several of the botched Maquis episodes like Learning Curve. And most of my favorite Voyager plots were complete solo works, like Living Witness or Repentance.

I do think that Voyager's greatest weakness was the fact that it had Trek in the title, and not just because it raised everyone's expectations. Writing for Voyager has got to have been one of the cushiest jobs in the entire television writing industry. Considering the rate at which shows come and go, many shows of Voyagers quality would not have made it past seasons one or two. Yet Voyager, because it was a Trek, got all seven. That's my main theory - that Voyager was inconsistent because of complacency on the part of the writing staff. They didn't have to turn out excellent work in order to have a job. And even when they did, it never seemed to affect the ratings. Throughout Voyager's run, regardless as to what publicity stunts they tried, the ratings continued to slide steadily downward. This theory is supported in part due to the upturn in quality in the second third of season seven. At that point, they had to have known it was over. There was no way Voyager would last longer than TNG or DS9. With a light at the end of the tunnel, with a goal to work towards, the writing improved.

I think that's about it. Thanks for reading everyone - I appreciated having people out there to hear what I had to say, to bounce ideas off of, and to listen when I needed to vent. I had a good time with this project, saw some good and bad episodes, but it's nice to be done.

Well, done until I figure out what my next project will be.