The season lacked any real cohesion or arc. The characters are all stagnant, nobody really grows. At least in spite of how much Season 4 fell apart for me, Seven had a clear arc from beginning to end. No one has that this time, and with the stories being just rewrites of TNG scripts (and sometimes just rewrites of Voyager scripts) its hard to recommend the season as a whole.
I think the episodes that stood out were probably “Bride of Chaotica!” for its fun factor, even if it took a little long to get going, “Someone to Watch Over Me” which actually managed to be a solid romance story headed by the cast’s two strongest characters/actors, and “Dark Frontier” which in spite of it’s obvious plot flaws turned out quite nicely as a feature length epic. Beyond that I can barely remember most of the other episodes in the season. They just ran together, both within the season and with what has come before.
It would be nice to think that Voyager would be given new life when TNG/DS9 writer Ronald D. Moore (one of my favorite Trek writers) joined the staff at the start of Season 6, but the writers room and the whole atmosphere of Voyager was so awful that he didn’t last more than 3 episodes. Voyager remains stagnant and poorly written until it’s end I fear.
Season 5 is just a season, but it wasn’t a particularly interesting one even by Voyager standards.
NEXT TIME: Ronald D. Moore Joins Voyager! ...Briefly