Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) Review
-1/10
A hundred and seventy-two episodes about a Federation ship and a crew of insurgents thrown seventy thousand light years from home, forced to serve together on a single vessel with no support, no relief and a seventy-five year journey ahead of them. That’s among the best premises in the franchise and the show discarded it almost immediately. The minus 1 is for a series that had a real conflict engine in its first hour and chose not to use it. The exceptions are real and they’re narrow. Everything involving the Borg is worth watching, the fourth season is good, and Seven of Nine rescued the show in a way no other single casting decision has rescued a television series.
I’ve passed on most of it and watched pieces here and there across the years. The good pieces are exactly what makes the rest maddening, because every one of them proves the show could do better and mostly couldn’t be bothered.
The Maquis Premise Was Abandoned
The group the pilot sets up are the Maquis, Federation colonists turned insurgents who had been established in the last season of The Next Generation and across Deep Space Nine, and they’re the entire reason the premise works.
Caretaker puts a Starfleet crew and a Maquis crew on the same ship with half the senior staff dead. Chakotay is a terrorist commander made first officer. Torres is a Maquis engineer with a discipline record. Tuvok had been undercover inside Chakotay’s cell. That means the first officer’s tactical officer had been informing on him.
That’s a conflict engine that would have run for seven years on its own. Two crews with incompatible loyalties, one chain of command, no Federation oversight within seventy thousand light years, and nobody able to leave. The show resolved it in about three episodes. By the end of the first season everybody is cooperating, the uniforms match, the Maquis are Starfleet officers with Starfleet ranks, and the question of why any of them accepted that’s never asked.
Where did these people go is the correct response and the show has no answer. A group defined by refusing Federation authority accepted Federation authority off screen because the writers didn’t want to keep writing the argument.
The one time it resurfaces is Scorpion Part II, at the end of the third season, when Chakotay countermands Janeway over the Borg alliance and acts against a direct order. That scene is electric and it’s electric because six seasons of premise are suddenly present in it.
The tension was available the entire time, the show proved it worked when it finally used it, and it used it once in an episode that was about something else.
A conflict built into your premise doesn’t have to be invented later. Voyager began with two crews who should have been enemies and dissolved that into cooperation inside a month of screen time. The reason is always the same. Sustained internal conflict is harder to write than a problem arriving from outside, and a weekly schedule rewards whichever is easier.
If you resolve your central tension in act one, the rest of the work has to import its problems. Every alien of the week on this show exists because the conflict at home had been switched off. Notice when your own draft gets easier. That’s usually the point where you stopped writing the difficult thing.
The Reset Button
Nothing on this show ever mattered, because they needed to be lost again next week, and that’s a structural decision instead of an accident. The ship takes catastrophic damage and is repaired by the following episode. Shuttlecraft are destroyed at a rate that exceeds any plausible complement and are replaced without comment. Crew die and the complement stays the same. Supplies run out and are never short in the episode after.
Year of Hell is the purest example and it’s also among the best episodes. Two hours in which Voyager is progressively destroyed across a year, the crew are scattered, people die, Janeway stays aboard a hulk, and a timeline reset in the closing minutes erases every bit of it.
That episode is a masterpiece and a confession. The production was willing to write an entire year of consequence as long as none of it was permanent. That tells you exactly what the show understood about itself.
Compare what Deep Space Nine was doing in the same years. That’s covered separately on this site. Jadzia Dax stays dead, Nog stays maimed, and the station stays occupied for six episodes. The reason is the format. Voyager was built for syndication where episodes air out of order, so nothing could depend on anything, and the writers turned a premise about a journey into a series of stops that leave no mark. What that costs is the audience’s investment. If damage is always undone, tension in any individual hour is a formality, and viewers learn within a season not to worry about the ship.
Consequence is what converts events into a story. A work in which damage is always repaired teaches the reader not to care, and it teaches them fast. The reader is doing arithmetic whether you want them to or not. Three episodes of undone damage and they’ve worked out the rules.
An episode that spends a year of consequence and then erases it’s worse than one that never risked anything, because it shows the writers could do it and chose not to.
If your format forbids continuity, the format is the problem. Voyager’s premise demanded a journey and its distribution demanded interchangeable hours, and the premise lost.
Janeway Is a Different Kind of Bad Captain
She’s stronger than Picard and she’s not a good captain, and those are separate findings.
The strength is real. Janeway decides, acts, takes responsibility and doesn’t need a first officer to run the ship for her. That’s more than the previous flagship captain managed across seven years. The problem is judgment. She puts the ship in serious danger repeatedly on decisions that were hers, and the show frames almost all of it as courage and not as error.
The Prime Directive is where the inconsistency is worst. She invokes it rigidly when it prevents her helping somebody and abandons it freely when it stops her doing what she wants, and across seven years there’s no principle that reconciles the two.
Tuvix is the case that settles it. A transporter accident merges Tuvok and Neelix into a third person who’s sentient, competent, wants to live, and asks not to be taken apart. Janeway has him restrained and dismantled to get two crew members back, the Doctor refuses to perform it on ethical grounds, and she does it herself.
That’s an execution and the episode knows it. What the series does afterward is nothing. It’s never raised again, nobody holds her to it, and there’s no scene in six later years in which anybody says his name. Tuvix is where my irritation with Janeway turns into contempt for the writers, who had their captain kill a man and then went back to the next planet as if nothing had happened.
Compare Sisko poisoning a planet in For the Uniform. It’s covered in the Deep Space Nine review. Same category of act, and that show made him own it. This one moved on to the next planet.
Seven of Nine Rescued It
The single most effective casting decision in franchise history, and the show needed rescuing badly enough that it worked.
Her arrival is Scorpion Part II, at the start of the fourth season, and she’s severed from the Collective in The Gift. Both episodes are excellent and The Gift is the better one, because it’s about withdrawal instead of about a battle. What made her work is the rough edges. Seven arrives hostile, contemptuous of individuality, unwilling to be there, and dangerous, and she says so in terms nobody on a Starfleet bridge talks in. She’s a prisoner being told it’s a rescue.
The early run is the strongest material the series produced. The Raven, Infinite Regress, One and Survival Instinct all work, and the Janeway relationship is written as coercion with good intentions. That’s far more interesting than a mentorship.
Then they watered her down. That’s the standard trajectory and it’s a mistake every time.
Each season she’s more human, more agreeable, more socially competent, and less interesting, until by the final season she’s doing dating episodes. Watching the most dangerous person on the ship get sanded down into a pleasant dinner guest makes me grind my teeth.
The Chakotay romance in Endgame is where it finishes, and it’s invented in the last hour with no groundwork. That tells you the writers had stopped thinking of her as a character with a problem and started thinking of her as a cast member who needed pairing off.
The correct version keeps the edges. A character whose whole value is that she doesn’t fit shouldn’t be gradually made to fit, because fitting is the end of the story and there’s nothing after it.
A character who doesn’t fit is only interesting while she doesn’t fit. Smoothing the edges off is the most common way a work destroys its own best creation, and it happens gradually enough that nobody notices the decision.
Seven arrives as a hostile prisoner and leaves as a crew member with a boyfriend. Nothing was gained in the trade. Write the assimilation as coercion if that’s what it is. Janeway keeps her aboard against her stated wishes, and the show is briefly honest that this is a kidnapping performed by sympathetic people.
If you can’t think of what your character wants next, that’s not a reason to give them a relationship.
The Borg War and Species 8472
The Borg material is the exception to everything above and it’s worth seeking out on its own.
The species you’re thinking of is Species 8472, from fluidic space, introduced in the Scorpion two-parter. They’re the only thing the franchise ever established that the Borg were losing to. That’s the premise’s entire value.
Scorpion works because it forces an alliance nobody wants. Voyager offers the Borg a weapon in exchange for passage, which is a pact with the devil, and the title refers to the fable about the scorpion and the frog. Janeway is the one insisting it can be managed.
That two-parter drew the highest ratings the show had seen since the pilot. That’s the commercial fact behind everything the fourth season became. Dark Frontier in the fifth season is the other major piece, a feature-length raid on a Borg sphere with Seven’s parents established in flashback, and Unimatrix Zero and Endgame close the arc out with diminishing returns.
The cost of all this Borg attention is that the Borg stopped being frightening. A species that was an unstoppable horror in two Next Generation episodes became a recurring antagonist that a single lost ship defeats repeatedly, and the franchise has never recovered them.
That’s the trade the show made and it’s worth naming. Voyager got its best material out of the Borg and spent the Borg to get it.
What Works Besides Seven
Two other things on this show are good and a fair review has to say so.
The Doctor is the best character in the series and probably the best thing the production did. An emergency medical hologram with no bedside manner who was never intended to be a person, who has to be switched on and can be switched off, and who develops across seven years into the crew member with the most at stake in being treated as real.
Robert Picardo is doing comedy and pathos in the same scenes and the writing keeps up with him. Message in a Bottle, Latent Image and Author are all about what he is, and Latent Image in particular is a serious hour about whether a program can be traumatized.
Living Witness is the best episode of the series and almost nobody names it. Set seven hundred years later, on a planet that remembers Voyager as a war criminal, with a museum exhibit of the crew as brutal invaders, and the Doctor’s backup module wakes up to correct the record.
Tim Russ, who played Tuvok, directed it, and it’s the one hour where the show is interested in how history gets written and not in getting home. Year of Hell is technically superb whatever the reset costs it. Message in a Bottle is very funny. Blink of an Eye, Timeless and Counterpoint are all worth an evening.
That’s perhaps fifteen hours out of a hundred and seventy-two. That’s what the minus 1 with exceptions is describing. The exceptions are excellent and the baseline is what the rating is about.
A character who has to justify their own existence will outwrite everybody around them. The Doctor wants to be considered real, which is a want with a different answer every episode, and the rest of the crew only want to get home. That’s why he took over the show without anybody planning it.
For a late-series swing, Living Witness is the model. One hour, seven centuries later, everything you know reframed as propaganda, no consequences for the ongoing story. A format that forbids continuity can still permit that.
Let somebody who works on the show direct. Tim Russ made the best episode of a series he had been acting in for four years.
The Essential Episodes
If you’re going to watch pieces of this instead of the series, these are the pieces.
Start with Scorpion, both parts, at the end of season three and the start of season four. Then The Gift. It’s Seven’s severance and Kes’s departure in the same hour.
Kes being written out to make room is worth knowing. Jennifer Lien left, the character hadn’t worked the way Berman and Jeri Taylor intended, and the production replaced a telepath nobody had solved with a Borg they had a clear idea about. After that, Living Witness, then Year of Hell as a two-parter, then Latent Image and Author for the Doctor and The Raven and Infinite Regress and Survival Instinct for Seven.
Message in a Bottle, Timeless, Blink of an Eye, Counterpoint, Dark Frontier, One and Equinox round out a list of about eighteen hours. Equinox is the interesting one for the Janeway argument, because another Starfleet captain in the same situation has done far worse and she’s unrecognizable while pursuing him.
Tuvix belongs on the list as well, for entirely different reasons. It’s a well-made episode about an atrocity that its own series refuses to acknowledge, and it’s the single best piece of evidence for the case against the captain.
The floor is deep and mostly forgettable instead of memorable. Threshold is the notorious one, in which Paris breaks the warp ten barrier and evolves into an amphibian who abducts Janeway and mates with her, and the production has effectively disowned it. Spirit Folk, Fair Haven, Tattoo and The Fight are all worse than anything a seven-year show should have shipped.
And the finale is the last reset. Endgame brings a future Janeway back to change the past so the ship gets home sixteen years early. That undoes the timeline the series just spent seven years in. That’s the show’s entire method applied one final time to itself.
Should you watch Star Trek: Voyager?
In pieces, and skip the rest. A superb premise about two crews who should have been enemies, dissolved inside a month, a ship that was never once permanently damaged, a captain who dismantled a sentient being and was never asked about it, and Seven of Nine and the Doctor carrying a hundred and seventy-two episodes between them.
The minus 1 is my verdict on the other hundred and fifty-odd hours. Somebody handed this show a setup that good and it spent seven years acting as if the setup had never happened, trading it for aliens of the week, reset buttons and Fair Haven. That’s a damn waste, and the Borg episodes and Living Witness only make me angrier about it, because they show exactly what the rest could have been.
