I like to think I’m being fair in my reviews of Voyager, I don’t discount every episode, because each season has a few standout episodes. This season’s standouts include “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy” which was hilarious, “Pathfinder” which was well written and featured the fantastic Dwight Schultz reprising his role of Barclay from TNG (and got us out of Voyager for an episode), “Life Line” for more Picardo and Barclay, and bits of “Collective” and “Child’s Play.” But mostly this season continued the trend of Season 5, of mediocre and dull episodes.
This season was the first season of any Star Trek series to premiere on it’s own since TNG’s fifth season as DS9 finished it’s seven year run the previous year. I think DS9’s ten hour final arc makes this humdrum going through the motions season of Voyager seem even more mediocre in hindsight. You think of the incredible highs reached by DS9 as it came to an end and compare it with the ultimate average-ness of all things Voyager in it’s penultimate season...and you have to wonder where the disconnect was.
By this point in the series run it was clear the series wasn’t a happy place to work. Beltran is on record as saying this season was not a terribly fun experience, and early on long time Trek writer Ronald D. Moore didn’t last more than three episodes working on this particular series...and the Head Writer and Executive Producer of this show was his former writing partner! Clearly there were plenty of bad unhappy moods backstage, and it is a shame that people treated this like a bad job, and not like a labor of love the way DS9 clearly was treated. TNG had a happy set too, but DS9 was clearly like a pet project for many involved.
Then the season just ends with a big Borg cliffhanging episode that left me with the same underwhelmed feeling I felt throughout the bulk of the season. I find it increasingly odd that this show seems to have a fan-base as big as it seems to.
NEXT TIME: Assimilated