Been marathon-ing chunks of all of Trek by "six degrees of Kevin Bacon"-ing it. Started with JJTrek, jumped ahead to TAS, jumped back to some TOS, went to the TOS crossovers with "trials and tribbleations", and "in a mirror darkly", then chronologically back up to "mirror mirror", and then the DS9 mirror universe ones, then back to Enterprise with "first flight", and "judgement", then to "the undiscovered country", and then chronologically to "generations", and "first contact", then for the sequel, back to Enterprise with "regeneration", and then all the Borg ones chronologically, and I'm on the Voyager ones right now. I like 'em. Age has made it better. One of the old nitpicks has been Voyager struggled to have a distinct identity of its own, but age has given it that identity by sheer virtue of the barrier between pre and post 9/11. IMHO. Also, the perspective of JJTrek, and the fallow period leading up to it might have an effect as well. On "dark frontier", currently, and I really dig it. I actually think I may like it better than "best of both worlds", and equally with "first contact". Without being immersed in cacophony of the nitpickers and whiners from the TrekBBS days, I'm actually able to enjoy it as a damned show, and not a strange fixation. Good riddance to that noise. Seeing Trek evolve through all those incarnations at super-speed via this marathon has been pretty fucking cool. Shit, seeing TNG alone morph in texture via the Borg ones jumping along seasons was interesting. Hmm, wonder if I can Kevin Bacon it back to TAS when I'm done with these Borg ones... Yeah...I gotta cave in, and get the Q and Klingon sets now, and finish that off. I had my penny pinching justifications, but screw it, I want that whole set.
I think some of the main complaints bout Voy were justified. The lack of character development, the often annoying characters, the fact that the ship, shuttles and warheads seemed to last forever, the captains personality seemed to change too often. But it wasn't a bad platform for writing, and often the writing was pretty good.
Yeah, but those flaws were on evidence in TNG too. Just in the Borg episodes, Picard & Guinan's attitudes towards the Borg fluctuate to fit the story at hand, and it really bites you in the ass when you watch them back to back to back. I think TNG getting away with it comes down to the generation that got to nitpick Voyager were preteens and toddlers at the time of TNG, and there was no (widespread) internet. Agreed. It had the same proportion of good, bad, and mediocre as TOS. And talk about age making that one sacrosanct...
Coulda been a lot better. I think sometimes about the ways I'd change it and ugly it up, make it more to my liking. A lot of it was like TNG with better FX, and TNG overstayed its welcome.
I'll admit it: I enjoyed a lot of Voyager. It had its share of great episodes ("Blink of an Eye," "Year of Hell," "Timeless"), even if the show's overall batting average wasn't terribly high. But the premise was great and I liked most of the characters, in particular Janeway, the Doctor, Tuvok, and Seven.
I always wished it was grittier, dirtier, more dark. Then we got nuBSG. So Voyager is back to that squeaky cleanliness. Not so bad.
Great premise, great potential. However, shitty writing (for the most part) and races/characters/story arcs that well overstayed their welcome led to the general distain for the show.
Borg Voyagers are over...man, as they went along, the technobabble really got out of control. Trans-spatial, chronometric, tachiokinetic, neurolytic,....gah! Rinsing my mouth out with "errand of mercy", ahhhhh, beeetter! Same shoot 'em up happening, but they let Scotty deal with the frinkifrats.
Yeah, from time to time I've tried to check out some of the episodes when I see them on teevee somewhere, but I find the show just about unwatchable now.
The acting talent (aside from Beltran) is probably the only redeeming aspect of the show. And nothing against the others, but Picardo's acting and Ryan's rack were probably the only things I ever enjoyed about the show. Figures some of you would like VOY, though. After all, if you like Abrams Trek, that already shows that you have no taste, so VOY would be right up your alley.
I agree with you re TNG. I do not agree re TOS. The difference in the latter case is at a minimum two-fold: 1. No character on VOY is as remotely well-honed and whole as the big three on TOS. In fact, a case can be made that as a character, Scotty was as well developed as most of the Voyager cast and the most obvious exception wasn't even a person. 2. The extreme lows of both series are comparable, I'd even concede the worst Voyager eps are not as bad as the worst TOS eps in terms of pure storytelling. BUT the highs are not. the very best stories in VOY are a pale shadow upon the very best eps of TOS. Usually when a series is remembered as a classic, it's not said "every episode was great" - it's more that there were 2, or 3, or 5, really outstanding episodes in every season. Some TOS episodes are among the better hours of TV ever made, at a minimum genre TV - I don't think you can say that about any episode of Voyager (or TNG for that matter)
I don't exactly like JJTrek as "Star Trek" - I just liked it as a movie. for comparison, Insurrection was a by-the-numbers episode of TNG. but it sucked as a movie. Now, CAN a good trek story and a good movie exist in one? Sure - I'd give half my lottery winnings to see Chris Nolan make a trek film. But just because it's one and not the other doesn't mean i have to hate it. in fact, I hate Insurrection.
I'd love to see a middle ground. My complaint with NuBSG was that it was terminally dark. there were never any smiles, and humor, even if dark. Hardly any tension-reliever moments that people in a dark place NEED and WILL find. At least not in the part i saw. Gonna have to watch it right through sometime. Voyager on the other hand mostly avoided obvious darkness related to their situation. there has to be some sort of middle ground. Actually, SG:U is making a decent run at that kind of show (although it can be overly grim a lot of the time too, so i'm really looking for ward to the... oh...wait...
One thing that killed it for me was that in season one my two favorite characters BY FAR (check that, 2 of the 3 because the doc is on everyone's list) were Paris and Kes. so what did they do? Ditched Kes, and completely neutered Paris except when they needed him to be stupid. then they paired him up with the character on the show I liked LEAST.
I couldn't watch more than 5 minutes of NuBSG before the Flip-camera cinematography gave me motion sickness.
A dumbed down dumb action movie that carried itself on nostalgia and slapstick humor, and didn't have to work very hard because it had everything that came before it helping to prop it up. Kind of like VOY. Or the SW Prequels. Time will tell if it ages as well. And it would have sucked as an episode, too. Of course I'm not really a TNG fan either. The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country were both pretty decent, and honestly I see them on par with The Dark Knight, which is to say I think TDK was a decent movie but by no means flawless. And to be honest, viewing TMP in the same context as 2001, well, I like TMP better, mostly because there's a more conventional method of storytelling going on there. I don't hate either one, but they're both bad movies. And yes, I mean bad movies, not just bad Trek movies.
The missed a lot of opportunities with Voyager. However, there were a lot of excellent episodes, and being able to go back and view only those really gives you a better appreciation for what they did right.
I only said their good and bad were in equal proportion, not that they stacked up against each other side by side.
Much of Voyager is watchable, but its rarely excellent and more frequently awful, particularly in its later seasons.
Voyager was a wasted opportunity. There were a lot of eps that I liked but it had just as many which were just rubbish. The trouble with Voy was that it generally had a bad start. The early seasons were boring as were the races we encountered (like the fucking Kazon!). It improved after season 4 but they overplayed the Borg card too much. The end of season finales all became Borg-related and even the final episode was all Borg. Boring. There were some imaginative moments and a few of the characters were great, particularly the Doctor (he had the best episodes by FAR imo). A sad tale of what might have been, Voyager.
The best V'ger episodes were on a par with an average TNG episode. An average V'ger episode was on a par with a heaping blob of poo. IMHO.
