The Red Letter Media Appreciation Thread

Voyager is at times very, very good. It just has less of those times than it's predecessors. It's a show that never recognized the opportunities it had. There is no "hey, let's use Andrew Robinson in more episodes" or "hey, I know we killed Weyoun but we should bring him back" equivalent. There's not even a Nog.

The show doing a "will they get home?" story a couple episodes in to season one was a bad omen.

There are a ton of issues with Voyager - it was really tough to recommend compared to a DS9 or Babylon 5 that were airing at the same time; most of the characters are wet blankets (the most interesting being The Doctor doing a Diet Data); the episodic (compared to serialized) nature meant that nothing major happened between episodes, and only rarely between seasons; coming up with a ton of interesting one episode alien species is a tough task, leading to a lot of alien-of-the-week-with-bumps-on-their-face; large chunks of setup went nowhere, suggesting behind the scenes rewriting was happening long before we saw it on screen with, say, a Seven (e.g. a giant chunk of the crew being Maquis barely came up).

There are probably less low points to Voyager compared to the early seasons of TNG or DS9, but way less high points as well. If you want Star Trek on in the background as an alternative to watching Nu Trek, its fine, but I still wouldn't recommend it over TNG, DS9, B5, probably The Orville and a half dozen other sci-fi shows.