In its first three incarnations, Star Trek was a strong programme. Okay, so the original series was a bit dodgy in places, mainly on account of some of the acting (Captain Kirk's, for example) and the sets, and the special effects, and a couple of the stories; actually, just about on account of everything about it. And the movies weren't all that wonderful either. Come to think of it, The Next Generation had quite a lot of flaws, especially in its early years. Although the acting was much MUCH better than that in the original series, some of the stories were so obviously designed to appeal to the original series fans that they were laughable. And even Deep Space 9 had unfortunate lapses in its usual goodness - eg. most of the Ferengi episodes (the only exception to this is The Magnificent Ferengi, because this one actually managed to be quite funny) and quite a lot of the Bajoran episodes were dull as something very dull. But on the whole, these three series' managed to be good with a few bad patches.
Voyager, on the other hand, is bad with the occasional good episode every now and again. I admit I haven't seen much of Season 7, so it could be getting better, but then most people in the UK who haven't got Sky haven't seen much of it either, and what they are subjected to is the most utter trash I have ever been unfortunate enough to behold.
Voyager's pilot episode, Caretaker, had promise. It was way WAY better than The Next Generation's first episode, Encounter at Farpoint, and was probably better than DS9's Emissary as well. And the first two regular episodes weren't bad either. They were nothing special, but for first season episodes, while the show was still finding its feet, they were acceptable.
Then comes the first episode which really began to make me think. I believe it was called Phage, but in my family it is referred to as Neelix's Lungs, and has become an object of ridicule because it was so thoroughly ludicrous. Basically, a bunch of aliens steal Neelix's lungs, and the Doctor has to give Neelix a pair of holographic ones until Kes donates one of hers. Now that is silly.
The next episode, The Cloud, wasn't so much stupid as predictable and boring. Voyager enters a nebula in the hope of draining it of energy so they can get more replicated food, presumably because they can't put up with Neelix's cooking any more. Of course, the nebula turns out to not be a nebula at all, but some form of space-dwelling creature that just happens to resemble a nebula in almost every way, other than its habit of not letting ships called Voyager leave. The viewers were aware of this right from the beginning, and the entire staff of Voyager come across as dunces for not working it out sooner.
Most of the rest of Season 1 until Learning Curve is like the first two episodes of it: okay, but not inspiring. Of course, the writers aren't going to settle for a mediocre Season 1, now are they. Oh no. They're going to send it spiralling down into the depths of 'very very bad indeed' with episodes like Learning Curve, which manages to combine the graces of Phage and The Cloud in that it is both boring AND ludicrous. While Tuvok trains a bunch of not very happy Maquis crew members (which fulfils the boring part of the episode), Neelix cooks some cheese. This cheese gets into Voyager's bioneural gel packs (or some such gibberish) and stops the ship from working, thus necessitating the stupidest line in Star Trek ever (JANEWAY: Get this cheese to sickbay.). I ask you, how did this tripe get on the air?
After a few not-good-not-bad episodes, we have Elogium. I am told by my friends that this was the worst episode they have ever seen, but I fortunately missed it. Next we come to Twisted. In this episode, the ship enters a nebula or something of the like (I can't quite remember, firstly because it was so long ago and secondly because it was so bad, I think I blotted it out of my memory.) and the ship instantly turns into a maze. You tell a turbolift to go somewhere and it takes you somewhere else instead. Thrilling drama! I can't remember how they sorted it out, but it would be with some complicated technobabble that no one understands anyway, so you're not missing out.
Then there's The 37's. Star Trek: Voyager discovers what happened to Amelia Earhart! And they cock it up, of course. Amelia Earhart was, apparently, kidnapped from Earth by a bunch of aliens, who then took her and a load of other humans to a planet in the outer reaches of the Delta Quadrant. When their descendents are offered the choice of staying there or coming with Voyager, they very very sensibly decide to stay.
That wraps up Season 1. Season 2, I decided, for the most part, not to watch. Season 1 had been that bad. I did occasionally tune in, and of course when I did, I caught such gems as Threshold.
Threshold was, at the time, universally vilified as the very worst episode of Star Trek ever. It has been overtaken by DS9's Profit and Lace, which featured Quark getting a sex change and is now referred to as The Episode Whose Name We Do Not Speak. Anyway, Threshold. It has long been established that Warp 10 is the ultimate speed barrier. It CAN NEVER BE PASSED. Scientists in the Federation have tried for two centuries to break this barrier. This perhaps explains why it took Tom Paris, B'Elanna Torres and Harry Kim almost a MONTH to do it. That's stretching things a little too far already. But it gets better. On the test flight, Paris suddenly and inexplicably hyperevolves into a white lizardlike person. Uh oh. Perhaps Warp 10 isn't as useful as was previously thought. Then Paris kidnaps Captain Janeway, whom he takes with him on the Warp 10 Shuttle and so she hyperevolves as well! Wowee! Then they turn into lizards. Not just lizardlike humanoids. Lizards. They mate. Oh dear. The Doctor returns them to normal. Jolly good. All is forgotten by the next episode.
This was enough to stop me watching Voyager for many many episodes. When I returned, it was with a little story in the latter half of the third season called Darkling. This was a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde style story where the Doctor stops being as nice as he usually is. It was poor. Then there was Before And After, a story where Kes starts travelling backwards through her life. Interesting idea, very poorly done. And of course, Real Life, where the Doctor programmes himself a holographic family. Not an interesting idea, not interestingly done.
At the start of Season 4, the creators realised that Kes was a very boring character and consequently had to go. She was replaced by Seven of Nine, and thereafter Voyager becomes known as the Seven of Nine Show. Just about every episode henceforth is about Seven of Nine. Seven of Nine is not an interesting character, and the fact that all the episodes revolve around her makes this fact ever more plain. This trend comes to a peak with the episode 'One'. The one in question, obviously is Seven, and she gets about thirty five out of the forty five minutes of the episode all to herself! This is not good entertainment, people. It's not even watchably bad, like Threshold and, to a lesser extent, Learning Curve. It's just tripe.
There was, however, an endearingly bad Voyager episode in mid-season 4 that was just like its early days. It was called Vis-A-Vis and detailed some mental alien who kept swapping bodies with people and joy-riding them across the quadrant. As I recall, Seven had very little to do with it, and Tom Paris was the unfortunate individual involved. Wowee!
In later years, Voyager came to realise that centering too much on Seven was perhaps not the smartest thing they could do, and so the writers extended their repertoire to include Janeway and the Doctor. Now every episode is about one of them. Janeway is not a good captain (as she so ably demonstrated in Equinox Part 2, by wasting a great deal of time, resources and crewmen in a hunt for vengeance) and does not deserve much screen time, while the Doctor is good as a comic device when written well, as in Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy. However, it is more frequent that the latest Doctor comic outing makes you cringe, eg. Virtuoso.
In the latter two seasons of Voyager, there has been an increasing trend to bring in the character of Barclay from the Next Generation, who can communicate with Voyager every month or so. Barclay is, however, quite boring, especially when he sends holographic images of himself to Voyager, which then set about trying to steal Seven's nanoprobes (and is it just me, or does everybody, every week, want to steal Seven's nanoprobes?).
Season 6 was quite possibly the worst season of Voyager yet. It had nothing down to the standard of the truly terrible Phage, Threshold and so forth, but neither did it have anything remotely good (and I watched all but two episodes, just to be sure). Okay, so Muse was okay (and guess what, Seven was barely in that one) and Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy was pretty funny, but mostly, it was poor.
Near the end of Season 6 was Fury. This episode detailed the return of Kes, who then travelled back in time to near the beginning of Voyager's trip to betray them to the Vidiians, those infamous lung-stealing aliens. Fortunately, with the help of the other Kes, who was on Voyager at the time, the Janeway of the past was able to create a holographic message of the Kes of the past, who told the Kes of the future not to attack the ship. When in the future, the future Kes attacked Voyager, she suddenly saw the hologram broadcast at her, or something like that, and all of a sudden decided not to be nasty after all.
Now let's just think about this. Besides the fact that when you watched this episode, you could easily see the flaws in it, so the time-travel bits just didn't make sense. Okay, I'm willing to overlook that, so long as it's good drama. Sadly, it wasn't. If you were hellbent on killing your old crewmates, would you be so easily deflected as by a holographic message of yourself that you probably remember making? If you were likely to be deflected, you'd remember making the message and thus wouldn't attack in the first place. So the story doesn't really make sense from that angle. Kes' motive for coming back and getting revenge was rather suspect, too, as I recall, but I don't recall what it was. Lastly, Kes' whole method of getting revenge was rather convoluted - nay, even nonsensical. At the start of the episode, she flies up to Voyager, posing as a friend, and is invited aboard. Once aboard, she stalks down the corridors, blowing them up behind her as she walks, using only the power of her mind. Then she goes to Engineering and kills B'Elanna (not that anyone would notice, because this show is about Janeway, Seven and the Doctor, and NOBODY ELSE) and then uses the warp core to propel herself back in time, using some complicated technobabble explanation that doesn't explain anything. So why bother with the whole time travel bit in the first place? If you can blow up bits of Voyager using your mind, why not blow it all up? And if, for the sake of argument, you claim she can't blow too much of it up because it'll tire her out, why doesn't she blow up important and essential bits like the bridge, and perhaps Engineering? Then everyone would die anyway, and she wouldn't have to do the whole trip back in time that would mean she can be potentially defeated.
Right, that's that little rant over. Fury probably gets my vote for worst episode of Voyager. I can't recall a single redeeming virtue of it.
Two episodes later (the one in between being one I missed about Barclay, the Doctor and, doubtless, Seven of Nine and/or Janeway), we have a little self-parody entitled The Haunting of Deck 12. This was just like one of those awful Season 1 episodes we used to see. It was bad, and I'm not sure if it was bad on purpose. I certainly hope so, because if this was intended to be serious ... well, there's no hope.
In the last episode of the season, Unimatrix Zero, the producers return to their favourite alien baddy, the Borg. I don't know if you remember back in 1988 when the Borg first appeared (I certainly don't), but to the best of my knowledge, they were a little bit unbeatable back then. It was only really dumb luck Picard and co. managed to get the better of them in The Best of Both Worlds and First Contact. Voyager, however, has seen fit to change this, so that the Borg are just another species - slightly dangerous, but not too hard to defeat. As I recall, Voyager has beaten the Borg in many episodes, including, but not limited to, Scorpion, Dark Frontier, Collective, Unimatrix Zero, and doubtless many more that I have scrubbed from my memory. Chakotay said it all in Imperfection, when, in his only line in that episode, he stated, "It's not every day we go looking for the Borg."
Maybe not, Chakotay, but it certainly looks like it. The scrape Voyager got itself into in Unimatrix Zero, Part 1, and got itself out of again in Unimatrix Zero, Part 2, was caused, as I recall, by GOING OUT LOOKING FOR THE BORG in order to loot one of their ships - and not even a derelict ship, of course. And Imperfection was the episode right after Unimatrix Zero, Part 2.
Speaking of Imperfection (as I believe it's called - it's the second episode of Season 7, begins with I and ends in -tion), it too maintains the long tradition of Voyager of not caring. It's a typical Seven of Nine show, in just about every way identical to The Gift, The Raven, The Omega Directive, One, Hope and Fear, Infinite Regress, and basically every episode since Scorpion, Part 2, when Seven came aboard. But it gets worse! How can it do this? you cry. Well, I'll tell you.
First off, no character other than Seven, Janeway and the Doctor get more than one or two lines! Honestly, why can't the writers write for more interesting people? Let's show a little bit of character for Harry Kim, for example. Other than getting killed about once a season (sometimes twice), he hasn't done a lot. Or Tuvok, although Vulcans have already been done way back with Spock. But anyway, back to Imperfection.
Once again, Seven's bloody nanoprobes are malfunctioning, and they need help from some form of machine that can only be obtained by looting a Borg ship. Janeway shows a little bit of sense in that she chooses a derelict one this time, but she still runs afoul of some aliens, who claim that they own the Borg ship - it is their debris, and under salvage laws, they do have a case. But does Janeway offer to pay for what she needs, or even try to work out a non-violent solution? No. She shoots the lead alien. How clever you are, Captain. This, of course, provokes a space battle between the Delta Flyer (a little shuttlecraft) and the aliens' infinitely superior craft. How well thought out that plan was.
But here's the thing: the Delta Flyer got blown up in Unimatrix Zero, Part 1! The Delta Flyer is no more! It's GONE! You can't fly around in ships that have been blown up! And then, in the NEXT episode, Drive, the crew builds another Delta Flyer! Now, call me silly if you must, but wouldn't it have been infinitely more prudent to air Drive and Imperfection the other way round? It's even the way they were intended to be aired - Drive was written first and Imperfection was a follow-up script. So why didn't they get aired in that order? Typical.
I've seen two other episodes of Voyager's seventh and final season - one was all about ... yes, you guessed it, Seven of Nine and the Doctor, in which the Doctor has to occupy Seven's body. No, it wasn't very good, but you didn't honestly expect it to be, did you? The other was the afore-mentioned one with Barclay's hologram coming to steal Seven's nanoprobes.
At this point, after giving Voyager a huge number of last chances, I finally decided to give up. I will watch the last episode and see how they cock it up, but nothing else. Thank you, whoever is responsible for these riveting seven years of television. It's enough to make anyone watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.