Blog:Star Trek: Voyager (seasons 1-2)

I've always thought that Star Trek: Voyager was a really underrated series, and I'm glad the utter failure of Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard is bringing home just how unfairly bashed Voyager has been over the years, and how misguided the "it should be more grimdark" and "it was too much like TNG" complaints at the time it originally aired turned out to be.

Buuut… having said that, I have to admit that the first two seasons are pretty weaksauce, and I can see why someone might have given up on the show after these seasons. They're probably not bad enough for an actual page on this wiki, but I created this mock-up of one anyway, to illustrate the problems in said seasons:

Plot
When the USS Voyager is assigned to track down a missing ship from a terrorist group called the Maquis, it and the Maquis ship are transported 70,000 light years to the Delta Quadrant on the other side of the galaxy. The Maquis ship is soon destroyed by an aggressive local species known as the Kazon, forcing its crew and that of the Voyager to work together to make what could be a 70-year journey back home.

Why These Seasons (Mostly) Suck

 * 1) Fails to deliver on its premise of two crews with dramatically opposing philosophies having to learn to work together. Co-creator Rick Berman has said that the idea was for the Maquis to learn that they were wrong to oppose the Federation and to embrace its ideals, which is perfectly legitimate and in keeping with the message of Star Trek, but having it happen halfway through the first season of what was intended to be (and did turn out to be) a seven-year series was way too fast!
 * 2) * The way they resolve the tension between the two crews is also really cheap; it turns out that a disguised Cardassian operative named Seska was engineering the conflict between the two crews, and once she defects to the Kazon, everything's fine again.
 * 3) * Eventually, the conflict does come back halfway through the second season - but only for a single episode. And to be fair, that episode ("Alliances") is a perfectly decent one with a valid message about how you can't give up your principles even in times of difficulty, but it just reminds you about how the show is throwing away an opportunity.
 * 4) Too many episodes in these seasons are boring "anomaly of the week" plots that TNG was starting to rely on too often by the end of its own run. They also contrive an excuse to keep on letting them do holodeck stories even though the holodecks should be the first thing to go in this situation. Worse still, when there were complaints about the excessive number of period stories set on the holodeck, co-creator Jeri Taylor insulted the show's fans and implied that they were unable to appreciate classic literature.
 * 5) The main recurring villains in these seasons, the Kazon, are basically just inferior copies of the Klingons. What's more, they're so stupid and ineffectual that many fans consider them to be the worst villains in the entire 1966-2005 run of Star Trek shows. The secondary villains from this era, the Vidiians, are better, but under-used.
 * 6) The only people who get any real character development are Tom Paris and the holographic Doctor, plus B'Elanna Torres to a certain degree. Captain Janeway, Tuvok, and Kes are all decent characters, but kind of generic (and Janeway can sometimes get too preachy for her own good in these early seasons), Chakotay and Harry Kim might as well not even be there, and Neelix is incredibly annoying.
 * 7) What few story arcs we get either have disappointing pay-offs (such as with the traitorous Michael Jonas in the second season), or are just plain bad (such as Neelix's inexplicable jealousy towards Paris's friendship with Kes).
 * 8) Despite them making a big deal in the early episodes about how they have limited resources, Voyager routinely sustains massive damage, loses shuttlecraft, finds itself short on critical supplies, and is absolutely fine the following week with absolutely no explanation. This problem would continue into the show's later years to a certain degree, but at least they made more of an attempt to explain it (often involving time travel).
 * 9) Surprisingly, considering that "woke culture" didn't really become a thing until near the end of the following decade, these seasons are very woke in a lot of ways:
 * 10) * In the pilot episode, Kim habitually refers to Captain Janeway as "sir". This is actually correct protocol as per modern navy traditions, but Janeway chews Kim out for misgendering her and demands to be referred to by the gender-neutral term of "captain".
 * 11) * At the start of the second episode, Torres assaults the acting chief engineer badly enough to land him in sickbay. Everyone seems to agree that the guy had it coming for being condescending to Torres, and at the end of the episode she's promoted to permanent chief engineer over him (though Chakotay does at least call her out for over-reacting, and Torres saves the ship from the anomaly of the week in the meantime).
 * 12) * Chakotay is constantly portrayed as being more spiritual and enlightened than the rest of the crew, just because he has Native American ancestry. This would become an early instance of writers trying to virtue-signal but instead just making fools of themselves, when it turned out that the guy they commissioned to come up with Chakotay's backstory was a notorious fraud with no actual Native American ancestry himself, and actual Native American spokespeople said that Chakotay was a poor role model and representative for their people.
 * 13) * Janeway, and occasionally also Torres, frequently lectures other characters about being chauvinistic. What's more, these seasons constantly insinuate that Janeway's gender makes her a better and more empathetic captain, even though DS9 had an African-American captain in the form of Ben Sisko at the same time, and there was a grand total of one episode in that show's entire run (and even then, it involved him hallucinating he was in 1950s America) where Sisko's race was even mentioned.
 * 14) These seasons contain some of the show's most infamously bad episodes, most notably "Threshold".
 * 15) The holographic Doctor is only able to work in the sickbay or holodeck during these seasons, severely limiting how much of a part one of the show's most interesting characters could play in episodes. Fortunately, the writers gave him a mobile emitter that allowed him to work anywhere early in Season 3.

Good Qualities

 * 1) While these seasons may be weak, they lay the foundation for what would become a very solid Star Trek show once they started coming up with better storylines, introduced Seven of Nine, and either marginalized or wrote out the characters who weren't working.
 * 2) The acting is generally pretty good. Only Garrett Wang and Robert Beltran tend to give poor performances, and even Beltran was actually pretty decent for most of Season 1.
 * 3) Good special effects for the time period.
 * 4) Nice theme tune by the late Jerry Goldsmith.
 * 5) A few genuinely great episodes, including "State of Flux" and "Jetrel" from Season 1, and "Projections", "Death Wish", and "The Thaw" from Season 2.