Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

I think his name is Zel Garish.

So did I for a while.

Needs moar @Kyle

*waves to @Kyle *

Fuckin' hell Anna.... I thought Kyle had a new review posted.

Dunno how else to contact him

Hey kids! I had a major life/career change since I last checked in (all good things, no worries), so I'm just now catching up on all the little things that make life worth living. Like reviewing awful television and using a lot of profanity on the Internet!

No new content yet, but hopefully soon!

Only a handful more to go!

I've always had faith in Kyle that he was wouldn't let this end him.

Flesh and Blood, Parts I and II

Two Hirogen hunters are stalking their prey through a forest that has probably since been decimated by the California drought. After their equipment fails, the elder Hirogen reminds the younger to rely on his instincts. Then they get shot the fuck up by a bunch of Starfleet crew members chilling in a lake.

And, back on Voyager, the Doctor is busy trying to convince Chuckles to let him attend some boring-ass conference, claiming that there'll be participants from "all over the quadrant." Apparently, the Delta Quadrant is a lot smaller than we thought if a representative sample can show up to a medical conference.

Janeway calls Chuckles up to the bridge due to a Hirogen distress call. Upon finding their outpost deserted, Chuckles beams himself, Tom, Tuvok, Seven, and some poor bastard over. They quickly find evidence of phaser fire and Klingon weaponry, and after fighting off one lone Hirogen, they discover that the entire fucking thing is a Starfleet holodeck. A giant ass holodeck. That they couldn't detect at all due to "modifications" that will never, ever be explained.

Rather than confront the fact that she is directly responsible for the deaths of almost fifty Hirogen due to the technology she traded them back in The Killing Game, she blames it all on them. After checking in on their Hirogen house guest, Janeway is pulled back to the bridge to deal with an attacking Hirogen vessel. They disable the vessel with one phaser blast. Such badasses, the Hirogen.

Anyway, Janeway invites the Hirogen aboard, and they immediately start laying into the surviving Hirogen technician. He reveals that the holograms that had slaughtered the rest of the hunters escaped in a conveniently holodeck-equipped Hirogen ship. After they find it, Janeway insists on helping, claiming they have "more experience with holograms than [they] do." Which is a fucking understatement - holograms are practically the Boogeyman in the Delta Quadrant. They probably do more damage than the Borg.

Tuvok and Chuckles want to get the fuck out, but Janeway insists on sticking around. She compares it to all the the times they "traded technology to help people feed and clothe themselves." What in the goddamn fuck. In the last fucking episode, we're all high and mighty about non-interference, but apparently, they've been giving away Starfleet tech whenever it's fucking convenient. And, incredibly, this is the first time it's come back to bite them in the ass. What aren't they giving to the Delta Quadrant - they've distributed holodecks and replicators. Transporters? Depending on how nerdy you want to get, the running theory is that transporter tech is vital to the holodeck. Warp drive? Could probably be salvaged from one of the shuttles they've left in their wake. "Replicators make weapons just as easily as they make food." Yes, Janeway, they do, which is why you don't fucking hand them out.

Anyway, turns out the hologram's vessel was actually a trap, and the Hirogen promptly get themselves blown up. The holograms show up and start laying the fuck into Voyager, and apparently, now, one phaser blast isn't enough to disable a Hirogen ship. Meanwhile, the holograms break into Sickbay and kidnap the Doctor. Why the fuck isn't the Sickbay hologram a dedicated, closed system? I mean, fuck, even if it wasn't originally, it should have been a priority once the Doctor became the only qualified medical officer aboard.

Anyway, the Doctor finds a ship staffed with holographic Bajorans, Romulans, Klingons, Humans, Vulcans, Cardassians, Borg, even Breen and Jem'Hadar (holo-Breen still don't speak English, by the way). They dragged the Doctor abroad to help repair the matrices of damaged holograms. Meanwhile, the Voyager crew discover that the holograms managed to build themselves a dedicated holodeck system. In other words, the one thing the goddamn incompetent assholes on Voyager couldn't figure it out. Plus, the random Hirogen technician has managed to make them self-aware, essentially-sentient holograms with some random upgrades.

Back on the hologram ship, the Doctor starts copy-pasting code to repair holograms. He also discovers that the Hirogen gave their holograms quite literal blood, sweat, and tears to make the hunt more realistic, and that the leader of the holograms, a Bajoran, has started handing out new, Bajoran names for everyone. He even prays to the Prophets, but couches all his language in the typical bog standard DS9 "Bajoran freedom fighter" garbage.

It becomes obvious the holograms have evolved because the Hirogen keep killing the same prey over and over, resurrecting them to murder them all over again. They even reference the plights of all the non-Starfleet-driven holograms, like those warring with the Lokirrim (yes, a reference to Body and Soul, an episode best left forgotten). After deciding that the Doctor doesn't empathize with them because he's never been hunted, the Bajoran tosses the Doctor into a holo-simulation in which he's the prey of a Hirogen hunting party. He thinks he's escaped, only to promptly get shanked by a hunter - the Bajoran forced a memory file from another hologram onto the Doctor.

Instead of being inspired, the Doctor is initially repulsed, but is swayed by the Bajoran's talk of establishing a home planet. Upon learning of plans for planet-wide holoemitters (what. the. fuck), he suggests trying to get Voyager's help. However, Voyager is already in the process of using a magical "anti-proton pulse" to take them down. Because what this episode needed was technobabble. While Voyager prepares to take down the holograms' shields, the Doctor hails them, and starts negotiations for the holograms. Janeway doesn't want to give up any tech, and despite Chuckles and Torres' attempts to convince the Doctor to meet them halfway on, say, removing all the murder subroutines, the Doctor won't budge.

Meanwhile, the Hirogen survivors from the blown up ship stage a mutiny, and call for reinforcements via some random panel beneath the mess hall wet bar. Why the fuck would a communications relay be in the mess hall wet bar? Anyway, the Hirogen are on the way, so Janeway decides to proceed with deactivating the holograms. Janeway asks them to do so themselves, but they refuse, because apparently they deleted their common sense subroutines. To a hologram, there's no difference in a simulated planet in a cube on Janeway's desk and a real planet, so why the fuck not? Hell, pull the same bullshit Picard did to Moriarty, and we wrap up this episode in the space of a few minutes.

The Doctor decides to run off with the Holograms, and gives up Voyager's shield frequencies so that he can be beamed aboard. Apparently, he hates Voyager so much that he won't even leave them the fucking mobile emitter. Voyager takes the opportunity to do the science bullshit, but the Doctor gave that up too, so they send feedback through the pulse that blows out Voyager's deflector and straight up electrocutes a couple folks, including B'Elanna. They kidnap her, and warp away.

As they survey the damage, Janeway and Chuckles wonder why the Doctor betrayed them. Janeway initially suspects that he was sabotaged, but Chuckles of all people points out that the Doctor fucks up almost every other week. Meanwhile, with the holograms, the Doctor plays the Maquis card with Torres, who wants nothing to do with helping the holograms. However, he convinces her that she'll be helping to end the violence between the holograms and the Hirogen. The holograms instantly have one of the Cardassian holograms help her, as if that's supposed to spawn some instant drama.

Anyway, because Janeway agrees to take on the Hirogen technician as a refugee, the reinforcements insist that Voyager will be in the crossfire if they attempt to engage the holograms. And back on the hologram ship, Torres and the Cardassian go back and forth in dialog that is almost excruciatingly boring. It's intended to be a deep meeting of very different minds, but it just comes off as generic bitching about Klingons and Cardassians. The Bajoran shows the Doctor the planet they plan to inhabit - a Demon-class planet that is impenetrable to the Hirogen. Again, how is that any better than a cube on Janeway's desk? Anyway, the Hirogen catch up to the holograms, so they dive into a convenient nebula.

The Hirogen hunting party pursues, and Voyager hides in their wake. While Torres and Generic Cardassian bond over building shit, the Doctor ends up annoying the Bajoran enough into revealing that he's planning on creating a new religion, one not bound to organic lifeforms. One that puts him at the center of the mythology. A fucking megalomaniacal hologram. This leads the Doctor to question everything, and he confides in Torres that the Bajoran has essentially lost his shit.

As the hunting party closes in, Torres directly confronts him in her typical confrontational style. The Bajoran then comes across some guy with some holograms, apparently no longer in the nebula, and basically mugs the guy for the holograms before blowing him the fuck up. The Doctor looks surprised, because apparently he hasn't been following along with the last five minutes. The Doctor informs the Bajoran that he wants to leave, but is informed that they're not pulling over to drop an escape pod with them in it, and he'll have to wait until they get to their new planet.

They bring the holograms they stole online, and discover that they're painfully simple holograms, intended solely for mining. But there's no time to deal with that, as they've arrived at their final location! The Bajoran reveals that he'd been crossing his fingers behind his back, and the Hirogen start to attack. Voyager reveals itself, and disables one of the Hirogen ships with a bunch of phasers. Again, tough guys. The second ship absorbs four more nonexistent torpedoes before it gives up. The holograms beam the Hirogen to the surface of the Demon-class planet (and apparently, the Hirogen can survive somewhat in this atmosphere), so Voyager immediately mounts a rescue mission, while the Doctor is all righteous and indignant. So naturally, the Bajoran deactivates him, steals his emitter, and beams the fuck down with the planetary holoemitter, taking a group of holograms down to hunt the hunters.

Torres manages to persuade the Cardassian to end the carnage, and she transmits the Doctor down to the surface to take out the Bajoran. He stops him from murdering a Hirogen, and shoots him. The holographic weapon somehow destroys the holographic Bajoran, and they all beam up to the Flyer. The Hirogen want all the holograms and holographic technology. Neelix shows up in the last five minutes of this two-hour television movie event to blather about hunting stories to convince them to relinquish control of the technology.

Janeway beams over, and offers to give the Cardassian a permanent fucking holodeck on Voyager. Luckily for Voyager's energy reserves, she and the Hirogen tech decide to take the holographically enabled ship and go do...stuff? Things? They never really talk about what the fuck they're going to do. She then somehow manages to sneak into Sickbay to ream the Doctor out. Or not, because the Doctor and Seven can get away with any damn thing they want - Janeway lets him off with a guilt trip.

This episode - admirably - tried to button up a long-standing loose end, and give the Hirogen a decent send-off. But instead of a relatively self-contained single episode, they dragged it into two parts (presented as a two-hour-long movie originally). And this would be fine, if it had been an ensemble piece like The Killing Game, or a decent story like Year of Hell. But this? Nothing. It could have fit into a standard 40-minute morsel of Voyager "entertainment," and probably would have been better for it. Instead, we get 84 minutes of the Doctor, stereotypical Hirogen, and reused DS9 props and rejected Kai Winn lines.

Rating: **
Torpedoes remaining: -50/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 15

Your VOY reviews are much better written and far more entertaining than my TNG reviews.

Everytime I think I've succesfully purged memories of this show from my mind, you come back and review another episode to remind us all over again how awful this series is.

The producers just. Didn't. Care.

I think they needed to be forced to work bedpan and sponge bath duty at an old folk's home for a month, to remind them of what a sweet dream job they had to make them care.

Shattered

Oh, we open with Naomi building a puzzle that's far too simple for her. A glimpse of the story to come? You bet!

Chuckles wanders into the Cargo Bay, where Icheb and Naomi are building said puzzle. Chuckles promptly shows the only two minor members of the crew the location of his legit, non-syntheholic alcohol supply that he somehow stole from his ship before it got blown the fuck up. The alcohol that he can't keep in his own personal quarters for some unknowable reason. Naturally, he's taking it to a dinner with Janeway to celebrate his position as Just A Friend. This is interrupted when they run into an anomaly of the week that emits chronotons, which you know means time travel fuckery is about to be afoot.

The anomaly zaps Voyager, seeming to leave highlighted rifts in the hull. Meanwhile, Chuckles gets hit from an energy blast straight from the warp core, and his face shifts dramatically between "young" and...old? Oldish? I don't know, it looks more like a halloween mask melted onto Robert Beltran's face. Torres has him beamed to sickbay.

The Doctor throws down some science bullshit once Chuckles wakes up. When he tells the Doctor to suit up with the mobile emitter, however, the Doctor has no idea what he's talking about. And as he takes some random prop up to the bridge, he passes through some sort of field and the prop disappears. On the bridge, nobody knows who Chuckles is (which is, uh, not that much different than usual). Janeway claims that she's about to take the ship into the Badlands, and despite being on a mission to capture Chuckles' ship, Harry doesn't have any idea who he is. I guess the Perpetual Ensign doesn't do his homework, no wonder he never gets promoted.

Janeway sends him to the brig, but on the way, the security officers disappear just like the random prop. He reroutes the turbo lift to Engineering, where Seska is waiting for him with a band of Kazon assholes. Yes, he's gone back to Basics, and per usual, Seska is already one of the best parts of the episode. After Chuckles runs through another anomaly, Seska realizes that all his blathering about time travel might actually be legit. Chuckles makes his way back to Sickbay, where he finds out from the Doctor that he's a year away from Future's End.

The Doctor's medical bullshit somehow managed to make Chuckles immune to the time shifts, and he asks the Doctor to make a magical hypospray which is made out of materials infused with this medicine so that he can go shoot up with Janeway. The reason random medical equipment gets time-shifted, but Chuckles' clothes do not, are never explained. He proves that he knows Janeway better than he should for the time by listing facts about her dog. She takes him to the ready room, and reveals that the convenient lack of the helmsman gal we saw back in the pilot is because she disappeared through one of the time-shifting rifts. It also reveals that the other door in Janeway's ready room empties onto a full and complete huge corridor behind the Bridge, complete with rooms on the other side and corridors going even further back. Apparently Deck One is a fucking TARDIS.

Chuckles takes Janeway to Astrometrics, while Janeway questions the very idea that Harry Kim could ever help create it. When they get to that deck, they discover that they're wandering around Voyager during one of the many times the entire crew of Voyager was incapacitated. Astrometrics, however, is crewed by an adult Icheb and Naomi, revealing that both Chuckles and Janeway eat it 17 years previous. They already know what the fuck is going on as well, and say that they're going to need Seven's help, but she's disappeared in a rift. Chuckles and Janeway go back to Scorpion, and find a fully-emBorgenned Seven of Nine. Luckily, she believes them, and gives them some technobabble to help.

Chuckles has no idea how to distribute the tech, because apparently what he did to the hypospray can't work for this shit, and Janeway has the solution - bio-neural gel packs. That's right, the fucking bio-neural gel packs are a major plot point. And Janeway has to explain to Chuckles what they are. Obviously, the writers couldn't trust that the viewers remembered these fucking things.

The Doctor outfits Janeway and Chuckles with bandoliers of hypospray refills that are also magically infused with medicine, and they start a deck-by-deck inoculation. However, Janeway starts getting suspicious about what happens that leads them to come to work together, asking questions about if they end up in the Delta Quadrant, and how many crew members she loses. Chuckles lies and says "we suffer casualties like any other starship," despite half her damn crew eating it in the first twenty minutes of the series.

This is interrupted by the macrovirus attacking them. Yes, the macrovirus from Macrocosm was a plot point deemed worth revisiting in an episode where you have Martha Hackett as a guest star. After escaping, Janeway proclaims that "It sounds like it's going to be one disaster after another on this ship." No fucking kidding.

Oh, and if you thought that was ridiculous, guess where they're off to next? Captain fucking Proton. And apparently the program is just running without anyone in it, and they can't shut it down because the holodeck controls are offline. Chaotica shows up and regards Janeway as Arachnia, his spider queen that he wants to kill. And Janeway has no time for this bullshit. She cues Chaotica into looking at the bio-neural gel pack control panel, and apparently now, conveniently, the holocharacters can see it. After being released, Janeway mutters, "If we restore the timeline, remind me to cancel Mr. Paris' holodeck privileges." Don't fucking tease us, you assholes.

After an encounter with a post-Caretaker Torres, Janeway realizes that she's responsible for stranding them all. They make it up to the Mess Hall, where they see the outcome of the temporal anomaly in the main timeline - it results in the death of Tuvok, in a poorly-executed attempt to bring the gravitas of The Wrath of Khan to Voyager. This shakes Janeway, who wants to modify Seven's plan to sync to her timeline instead of Chuckles', and he fucking shoots her down. Somehow, he talks her into thinking that getting stuck in the Delta Quadrant is a good thing, despite Janeway being single-handedly responsible for the deaths of at least tens of thousands of people.

Anyway, they decide to go get Seska's help for the final stage of the plan. However, after some flirting, she realizes that he's from a future where they've retaken Voyager, so she turns on them, tapping a few buttons to resync the ship with her timeline. That's right, Janeway's solution to saving everyone is as simple as a few taps on a keyboard. She goes to shoot him, but an inoculated Harry, Tom, Torres, Future Naomi, and Future Icheb jump into action. Seska corners Janeway, but the fully-Borg Seven shows up and just puts her in a chokehold.

Janeway flirtatiously (uhg...) asks Chuckles "just how close [they] get." He replies "Let's just say there are some barriers we never cross." That's right, because Janeway would rather fuck Tom as a salamander and a holographic barkeep over you, Chuckles.

Anyway, Chuckles does the technobabble and hops back to his timeline, just in time to let the deflector take the brunt of the anomaly's pulse. Janeway wants to know why the fuck he blew out the deflector, but he defers to the Temporal Prime Directive. They go off to have purely platonic drinks.

As much shit as I gave the episode, it's kind of fun. They were more concerned with telling a decent story than worry about the nitty-gritty (in the same vein that TNG's The Next Phase). In fact, I'd say it could have been a far better candidate for a two-parter than Flesh & Blood was, simply because the could have visited more time periods, pulled in more guest stars, etc. Sadly, it was obviously intended to be more of a bottle episode, and a last-ditch effort to give Robert Beltran something to do so that he'd stop badmouthing them literally every opportunity he got. I give it three, mostly due to Martha Hackett chewing up the scenery.

Rating: ***
Torpedoes remaining: -50/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 16

Sad to say, I shipped this. But I was a fan of Enterprise back then, too.

We all have regrets from our teenage years.

Chakotay- She...she was...THE MAN!

Tom-

Somehow, I remember the very first Voyager fanfic I read in 2001 was Janekotay (and also before portmanteaus became popular) that involved shared dreams, Q, a trip to some planet and a quickly wedding, with lame sex scenes I shouldn't have had access to on high school computers.

Oh, and Janeway was knocked up by Chuckles via these shared sex dreams that Q set up because reasons.

That fanfic is more memorable than most of this show.

It'd actually make for a fairly interesting couple of episodes - say, in one, some recurring cast member hooks up with some alien during shore leave, then, half a season later, the alien catches up and, whoops, she's pregnant - do they offer to bring the expectant mother along? Does the crewman consider staying behind? Maybe it's a question whether the baby can even come to term due to physiologies?

Or put it on its head - a female crew member gets pregnant. Will Janeway turn the ship around to track down the father? If she does, how does the rest of the crew handle it?

Of course, that would have actually had to deal with issues, and the idea of that is pretty fucking rich for Voyager.

Janeway would just override the Doctor's ethical subroutines, and make him perform a transporter abortion.

All I can say is this: Been watching some STARGATE SG1 with the little one (yes she's becoming quite the nerd!) It has aged horribly. But... I just don't care. Because it's a fun show with a timeless quality, at least from S3 onwards.

The Trek shows have aged equally horribly. But they are no real fun any more. Today they look slow, repetetive and anemic. The performances are, with a few exceptions, on the level of amateurs. There's not one character that stays with you once the show is over.

Given the history and legacy of both, it should be the other way 'round. It's a sad state for a multi-billion Dollar franchise. JJTrek injected some new life into it. But as long as it's not on TV it's just a series of one-offs.

Btw, to keep on topic: I don't think VOY is the worst of the bunch. That honor goes to ENT.

Not to stray too far from the thread topic, but I couldn't disagree more.

ENT was mostly awful, but I've actually managed to rewatch the whole series once.

I've tried to do the same with VOY a few different times and couldn't stomach more than a handful of episodes before giving up. It's just total shit, as @Kyle 's wonderful reviews show again and again.

Enterprise managed to at least attempt something new, between Season 3's arc and Coto's revamping that followed. I don't think season 4 is as cracked up as all the fans made it out to be at the time, but there was more obvious effort put forth than there had been in Trek since DS9 left the airwaves.

That, I think, puts it ahead of Voyager, that continued to be TNG: Lost in Space it's entire run. I know part of that was network mandated (ie, Year of Hell was supposed to be the whole of season 4, but Paramount shot that down) but that doesn't excuse that everyone on Voyager was phoning it in. TOS had even more restrictions and Roddenberry worked around those, not sat on his laurels.

Edit: to @Aurora , I will give you credit that ENT's characters blew chunks, and that's even after Coto's 11th hour attempts to make the cast more well rounded. The cast, apart from John Billingsley doesn’t stand out and Tucker was the only character who wasn't window dressing, grating irritating or the most hated lead chapter ever to grace TV before Amy Jenkins on Secret Life of the American Teenager.

Voyager had, on paper, a pretty decent character set up to work with and good actors. I've read accounts of Kate Mulgrew admitting she was tuned out due to personal issues at the time, but even there I'd say she could still act cir les around Robert Beltran. Tim Russ was the Manure Alchemist, turning many shit scripts into gold and even Ethan Phillips could knock it out the part when he was given something besides leota root jokes to work with.

Offhand, I just realized three of of six male cast members all shared the same first name. Why it took 15 years to notice? Because I didn't care about Voyager

I'd say they were both pretty bad, but in very different ways. Voyager simply didn't take its fundamental premises seriously at all, resulting in bad story telling, worse continuity, and a general lack of coherence about the show. The acting was pretty bad and the characters were just terrible, awful and one-dimensional people who simply weren't believable as a heroic, or even slightly competent, crew.

Enterprise suffered some similar flaws, but not to the same degree. It was however, just a deadly dull show, and while Voyager's time-frame and location made it an essentially stand-alone series, Enterprise totally mucked about with the foundations of the other series and was a big fuck-you to fans who cared about canon and continuity.

More so than most cases, it's a matter of personal preference which show was worse.

I give VOY a little more benefit of the doubt. It was the high time of Trek, they had to churn out many hours of content on a regular basis. Also, there was hardly any good serialized TV with good characters on in the mid 90s. They did what they thought was the smallest common denominator and would draw in a crowd still considered 'dumb' by then. IIRC only B5 was still running by then and they helped themselves there when they made DS9 (and vice versa). While VOY served up plate after plate of crapola, there's still the occasional gem.

With ENT they should have known better. The episode-by-episode format was all but dead by then. SIX FEET UNDER, SMALLVILLE, THE bloody OFFICE - all great examples of character driven shows with overarching themes. The ENT team couldn't even manage to properly characterize their leads (token black guy anyone?) There are no gems in this show up until the last season.

VOY and ENT was made by people who took their audience for granted.

And I disagree with your assessment about all Star Trek aging badly, because DS9 has aged quite well, and has actually managed to become relevant on certain issues in hindsight.

I agree. On my post 9/11 viewings of DS9 the show becomes much more topical.

See, my unpopular opinion is that season 4 wasn't all that great, either. More effort was placed in the show, but in a lotta ways this should've been what season one was: building up the familiar world we know, showing the origin or our relationships with the world's that would makeup the Federation. Season 4 should've been the aftermath of having to save humanity and maybe follow up on what happened to the Xindi. It should've been where the characters were expanded upon and not being fleshed out for the first time in some cases.* if TIIC wanted to explore an interspecies relationship, then by all means do that and stop the fucking Ross and Rachel bullshit.

*although given the limited acting range of Anthony Montgomery, I can hardly blame them for sticking him to the sidelunes. Which begs the question of why hire him at all? Was he the only person that auditioned for the part? Was he the cheapest actor? Did someone in Paramount owe his grandfather Wes a favor?

I think I've watched maybe 2 whole episodes of Enterprise. Never had any interest in it because right from the get go it never felt like a prequel to the original series.

It was commonly known that Berman and Braga weren't familiar with TOS and even probably disliked the show. Yet these two fuckos were gonna make a prequel to the show?

It felt more like a prequel to TNG. It was widely assumed that Spock was one of the first aliens to serve with humans aboard a star fleet vessel, yet in Enterprise we have Phlox (from a species we've never heard of and never saw in TOS or TNG) and T'Pol.

NCC 1701 was also widely assumed by fandom to be the first Starfleet vessel named Enterprise or at least the first one to immortalize the name. Yet now we have an even earlier one that we somehow never heard of before and was surprisingly never mentioned before.

Plus the characters just seemed boring and uninteresting. T'Pol was just Seven of Nine with ears and maybe bigger breasts. I liked Bakula in Quantum Leap but Archer was a bore. I don't even remember the names of the other characters. There was token Black, token Asian, token Southerner, and token Brit.

It honestly just felt like TPTB were trying write TOS out of the story and pretend it never happened. So I never gave the show a chance. I've read up on the 4th season and how they tried to repair the damage but too little too late.

Back on topic, I actually watched Voyager pretty faithfully for the first four seasons but I gave up soon after the 4th season finale. Another episode about their dashed hopes to return home? More Borg? The series quickly became the Janeway and Seven show and basically TNG 2.0. Compare VOY season 5 to DS9 season 7. It's like a joke. DS9 was pushing the limits of Trek storytelling with the Dominion War and Voyager was flying around in circles with a cast of very bored actors.

I don't know know if I can pick between ENT and VOY. Voyager squandered a great premise, while Enterprise never had a great premise to begin with.

I hope Brannon Braga reads this sometime and dies a little more on the inside.

VOY and ENT both really existed to try to jumper cable UPN to life in defiance of the laws of man and nature.
Much like "Phase II", tried to do 20 years before.

Now, the CW walks the Earth, wearing UPN's skin.

From what I read, Berman was a huge GR lackey, and was largely the reason they stuck to his rules even after he'd died. And as he started up TNG, GR had largely turned his back on TOS himself, so I can see Berman avoiding having anything to do with it for that reason. Braga probably just never gave a fuck.

I'd disagree that ENT never had a great premise, though. I thought it had enough promise to take it and run with it myself, only I and the other people who worked on it actually gave a damn. Not to push my stuff too much (especially since there aren't likely to be any new updates any time soon), but I'd be interested in seeing what people who were disappointed with ENT thought of Foundations.

Caught Shockwave Part 2 the other day, it wasn't terrible. Well, not until Archer did his gazelle speech at which point I cringed so much the Earth developed a slight orbital wobble.

ENT was a nicely sketched out idea, the problem came when colouring it in happened. It ended up looking like someone had unleashed a horde of concussed chimps with crayons into the Louvre, fine art scattered with monkey shit and day-glo crayola patterns...