If Seven of Nine were just Jeri Ryan in a catsuit and no substance, the character would not have worked. This was the season that wrote out Kes (a perfectly nice character, but one for whom the showrunners had run out of ideas) and replaced her with provocatively-dressed ex-Borg Seven of Nine. Voyager’s best season by far, however, was season four. Season five included the magnificent one hundredth episode Timeless (easily Harry Kim’s finest hour) and made a conscious effort to delve deeper into the psyches of the crew and how damaged they are in episodes like Night, Extreme Risk and Latent Image, but it also took the time to let it all go and just have fun in classic comedy hour Bride of Chaotica!
Season three has some fairly low points ( The Swarm, Coda, Favourite Son) but two-parter Future’s End showed that Voyager could deliver entertaining fluff when the occasion called for it, while Unity introduced the threat of the Borg, which came to fruition in the brilliant season finale, Scorpion Part 1. Seasons three to five, however, are solid seasons of television. The rest of the show focuses mainly on the crew jumping around from one Planet of Hats to another, because that is what Star Trek is at its heart, and seasons three-seven of Voyager do their job with enthusiasm and a sense of fun sometimes missing from more po-faced iterations of the franchise. Yes, story arcs tend to take a backseat to more stand-alone storytelling for the most part, and the show tends to press the re-set button at the end of every episode, but as season two had proven, complex, plot-driven story arcs were not really Voyager’s forte (though it was a bit better at long-term character development through smaller arcs). In season three, Voyager found its feet and seasons three, four and five are all excellent examples of classic Star Trek. Although it contains the occasional impressively thought-provoking hour ( Meld, Death Wish, Tuvix, The Thaw) the season was far too concerned with its interminable Seska/Kazon plot, and it also has the honour of having produced Threshold, the only episode to give Spock’s Brain a run for its money in the competition for Worst Episode of Star Trek Ever Made, so bad it was later ret-conned out of Voyager’s canon.īut this is not the whole story.
Season one has its high points ( Eye of the Needle, Faces) but also some memorably bad lows ( Learning Curve’s “Get the cheese to sickbay!” for one) while season two is, to put it bluntly, bad. This was at least partly because, following its excellent pilot, it got off to a rather slow start. Poor Star Trek: Voyager spent many years as the under-appreciated black sheep of the Star Trek family (until Enterprise came along, at least).
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