The writing is really bad.
This is the biggest problem. Voyager regularly deals up truly horrendous episodes at a pace roughly equivalent to the Original Series, but it doesn’t surround those episodes with the highs of TOS (which produced some of the best episodes of television ever made).
The acting on the show is also incredibly problematic. There are several performers who are just flat-out terrible. Others are crippled by the bad writing. The cast notably lacks the stellar talents like Shatner and Stewart: The best actor on the show is Robert Picardo, but it’s really difficult to run a show out of sickbay. (Which is why most of the series’ best moments come after the Doctor gets a portable holo-emitter and Jeri Ryan joins the cast.)
Coming back to the writing, though, we can also note that the writer’s room was burned out: The same basic team had produced hundreds of episodes of Star Trek at this point and they were just running out of ideas. There’s a lot of rehashed Trek fan-fiction taking the place of original science fiction ideas. (And if you peek behind the scenes, you’ll discover a surprisingly large number of rejected scripts from other series getting dumped into Voyager.)
Finally, the show embraced ideologies that were curiously antithetical to a lot of the futurism that the franchise had previously fanfared. For example, “Measure of a Man” is one of the most celebrated episodes in all of Trek, so it was weird to see so many episodes of Voyager endorsing Janeway’s position that the Doctor (and other forms of artificial life) weren’t actually sentient beings. Voyager is also where the Prime Directive reached bat-shit insanity.
What might have saved the show would have been to embrace the long-running story arc with meaningful continuity that its premise inherently promised. But meddling from above repeatedly prevented that from happening.
Nail in the coffin: The entire series hinges on Voyager being stranded in the Delta Quadrant. The writers accomplished that by making Janeway an asshole; misinterpreting the Prime Directive; and then executing a plan that makes no sense. (Put your bombs on a timer!) The entire series got off on the wrong foot and was based, ultimately, on some really stupid writing.
Bad acting, dislikable cast, and the show jumped the shark on the third episode when the captain and her 2nd in command got turned into giant salamanders and had salamander babies together. If you ever need to provide empirical proof Voyager is the worst Star Trek, just point out that Kirk, Picard, Sisco, or Archer NEVER got turned into salamanders.
I would add that the series main cast mostly consisted of fairly bland characters. There is just little that is interesting about nearly anyone of them. Additionally, the few interesting traits of each was forced into the background and rarely came about into the stories.
The Doctor not only had the best actor on the show but also was inherently the character with the most interesting everything.
Janeway’s barely a character at all, her personality and skill set changes depending on what is needed for the plot. Sometimes I wondered if the writers couldn’t get past the idea of a women captain as being more then a trope. Not sure any actor playing her would have been able to saved the character.
Yeah, I very much agree. Voyager was not a good show and it was somewhere in the middle that I stopped watching it. After having watched Star Trek almost continiously five days a week for as long as I can remember. (One of the stations in Germany had one Star Trek show in a daily slot for many years.) And Voyager just never worked for me.
The very erratic writing was probably one of the major factors. The biggest problem I see now with the show looking back on it was that they tried to do the same thing as The Next Generation. But after Deep Space Nine (and Babylon 5), that concept just was no longer viable. “Alien planet of the week” was no longer going to cut it and while Picards incredibly patronizing and culture-imperialistic treatment of “less advanced civilizations” might have been able to fly in the late 80s, it just no longer cut it in the early 2000s.
The really sad part about it is that the initial setup of Voyager did actually adress the way the real world had changed in the meantime very well. DS9 introduced the idea that “maybe our utopian way of life can’t simply be forced on other cultures and we can’t expect people who live in completely different conditions and environments to behave according to our standards”. Which was really a step in the right direction and I still enjoy watching DS9, while I find most episodes of TNG highly uncomfortable to watch. The initial setup for Voyager went even further ans raised the question “can we even expect ourself to live up to our utopian standards when we lose all the comfort and security we are used to?” I think Janeway makes a big speech at the end of the first episodes that this journey will not be like a regular deep space exploration mission, but they will have to adapt to be surrounded by foreign cultures and being the weak party in encounters with other species instead of representative of the greatest power in the galaxy. It was a good idea. And immediately abandoned. Almost instantly it was back to the old Picard-paradigm of educating the primitive natives in the superior ways of the Federation and life on the ship kepts being just the same way as it was on any other Starfleet ship. I think that was Voyagers biggest mistake. And also the reason why Enterprise didn’t make it, as it made exactly the same mistake again.
That the writing on Voyager was often terrible made things even worse, but I think even the better episodes were not really that good.
Oh, the writing was so bad in Voyager. I think I made it through the first season, because the basic concept was a really cool idea, and after that I made it a point to watch an episode every season to see if the writing was still terrible . . . sadly it never failed to live up to my low expectations.
Contrary to Martin Kallies, I liked Enterprise, especially once they dropped the stupid time war plot.
>>“less advanced civilizations”
Are you implying you don’t believe in technological advancement?
(christ, political correctness is batshit stupid. no offense to you; a lot of people think that way, but fuck!)
>>“less advanced civilizations”
Are you implying you don’t believe in technological advancement?
People who link achievements in technology to advancement of a civilisation are presumably the same people who think the amount of money you have is linked to your happiness.
Violated its own premise right out of the gate. A ship far from supply never out of supplies, a ship far from repair always looking pristine, a ship traveling at high warp always bumping into the same foes. Gah. One wonders why they’d present such a premise if they weren’t interested in pursuing its consequences.
I find Voyager incredibly frustrating to watch, because there are so many good ideas that are executed so poorly. The basic idea behind the show is a great one, but it never lives up to that potential. The tensions between the Starfleet crew members and the Maquis never really go anywhere, which is too bad, since they represent an interesting conflict between different kinds of idealism. The Borg, some of the most interesting villains in Star Trek, get developed in mostly stupid ways that make them less interesting and less menacing. And when they introduce new villains in the form of Species 8472, they squander them with a truly lame resolution.
Some friends and I were talking the other night about where we would like to see Star Trek go after the current movies, and what occurred to me was that I would like to see a remake of Voyager, or something like it. The premise is so good, and I think that it would be executed much better today, in the renaissance of serialized storytelling.
Voyager was great! Go fuck your self!
@Tim: You can see the lack of foresight really clearly in the character of Neelix. Somebody had the idea of a local guide. Somebody else had the idea of nobody in the area having significant warp capability. Those two people didn’t talk to each other and we ended up with a cook/ensign/apprentice/we have no idea what to do with this character.
I actually think a show based out of sickbay could be amazing, handled right. Picture something like ER and/or Scrubs, on a Galaxy-class starship out on a looooooong survey mission far away from everything. Just day to day dealing with all the horrible injuries and diseases that result from Starfleet’s blatantly stupid away mission regulations.
[…] Thought of the Day – Why People Don’t Like Star Trek: Voyager […]
I agree 100%, but I’m the leper of Trekkies… my favorite was Enterprise.
It’s really a lot to do with the poor casting too. I can only imagine how Voyager would have been better had B’Elanna was cast and written as well as K’Ehleyr (Worf’s flame) was. I would have also would have like to have seen a less militaristic command structure, but it seems like once the Maquis settled in, the series relied heavily on TNG dogmas of who’s outranking whom.