Star Trek: Voyager

I moved to Texas in December of 1992, and at this point in the franchise, this was the first Star Trek series to be conceived fully after I moved here.  DS9 started about three weeks after I moved to Texas, but I knew about it beforehand.  Voyager is something else.  This has no bearing on the drama of the show at all, just a personal memory I wanted to stick in there.

Voyager tried to do a few things different.  After DS9, they were back on a starship as TOS & TNG were, but this time around they were determined to do something different.  Voyager is the first series to have a female captain of the ship.  In no way did that bother me at all, but I did wonder at the time if the audience was ready for something like that.   Star Trek fans are generally more open minded than some fan bases can be – but still.  They’ve never tried a series with a female lead before.  After a brief sidetrack with Geneviève Bujold, they settled on Kate Mulgrew as Capt Kathryn Janeway of the USS Voyager.  Additionally, they were going to remove the crutch of Starflet, by having the ship be marooned 70,000 light years into another sector of space.  Which means there wasn’t always some Admiral to oversee them, or correct their decisions.  From a plot standpoint it was a good idea.  In practice though I ended up feeling I missed the trappings of “Star Trek” more than I thought I would.  It didn’t stop me from liking the show, I quite loved it.  Some of it is stellar Star Trek.  Like most Trek series, it took a little time to find its footing, but once it did, it got quite good.

They had some carry over from existing Trek to start the series – the crew was initially made up of Maquis characters, a concept set up on TNG & DS9.  However, it didn’t last long as the Maquis angle was pretty quickly absorbed into the overall feel of Voyager.   They made a big effort to make this not feel like “just another crew on a Starship”, as that’d been done a few times already to this point.

Voyager was the last of the “big” Star Trek Series.  It ran seven years and 172 episodes from 16 Jan 1995 through 23 May 2001.  Every subsequent Star Trek series that has come after this has lasted at most 5 seasons, and the number of episodes was reduced.  Enterprise had the traditional 26 or so episodes a season, but only lasted four years.  Everything from Discovery forward was anywhere between 10 to 15 episodes a season (mostly just 10 though).

Season 1

Like most Trek series, Voyager’s first series was more of a “getting a feel” for what’s going on.  It’s not bad (like TNG season 1 was), but I felt they spent too much time on the Kazon as the main bad guys.  They never had any real bite IMO.

There were some good moments though.  I’ll edit this bit later once I see more of Season 1, as I don’t have a huge recall of the “pre-Seven” years individually, it’s just a blur to me.  :)