I remember watching the premier of Star Trek: Voyager and being slightly disappointed. I was a fan of both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine so I was prepared for the first season of Voyager to stink a bit. And to be sure they mostly did stink. The first few seasons of Voyager were a uneven, but so were both TNG and DS9 as well as those shows spent time trying to differentiate themselves from what had come before.
But whereas TNG and DS9 both found their footing in their third seasons (“Best of Both Worlds” and “The Die is Cast” are two great stand-out episodes from then) to me Voyager never found its footing with similar episodes and never really came into its own as a series. I wonder if part of that was of the series main conceit that they were a lone ship trapped on the other side of the galaxy trying to get home? That they could never really call upon the Star Trek history of what had come before from the Federation to all the different alien species and had to create (mostly) everything from scrap every episode making it hard to build on what’s come before?
Then again Battlestar Galactica would follow this Voyager “lost in space” model a few years later to a much greater effect. 😉
