All of that having been said, the show was still better than Deep Space 9. The first 3-4 season of that series might as well have been called ‘The Miles O’Brien Saga’. Which would have been fine if O’Brien’s character weren’t as boring as possible. And Avery Brooks rarely seemed like he was actually acting. He had no vocal inflection, and his relationship with Jake seemed creepy more than anything else. I mean like..come on. No dad actually kisses their 18 year old son on the cheek every damned day. At least I hope not.

Neelix wasn’t the first or last nail on the coffin, and sadly the cool characters weren’t enough to save the series. But I think we all can agree that he was 10,000% better than Balana Torres who single handely ruined the Klingons and managed to ruin showtime.

Voyager was original and I love it! Sure Nelix was a rubbish character, but not as bad as Belana or Kes. The doctor and seven of nine should have hitched up, not chakota what was she thinking?

To be honest Voyager had alot to live up to. It had so much weight on its shoulders in the first place. But at the end of the day, it is a product of its time and takes itself far too seriously.

so many of these points are so wrong. i love the b’ellana character. the inner turmoil and frustrating aspects of her personality greatly display her conflict of being a human/klingon hybrid. it shows that she is unable to cope with being this person which is the entire reason she left starfleet in the first place. the character works fine. i think her episode in the first season where she was split in half by the videans was probably one of the most compelling episodes of the unincredible first season. also a later episode where she is stranded on an alien planet and has to become a story teller… that was a really interesting show which is completely hated by most. lame.

i will agree that chakotay sucks. they never developed his character and he remains the least interesting first officer ever written. but neelix? harry kim? you have got to be joking!!! harry was even getting the boot at one point i read, but then he made a list of 100 sexiest men or something so the writers felt like they had to keep him. i hate harry kim. harry, chakotay, neelix are the most useless nuisance characters.

and you hate tom paris? over harry kim? CRAZY -_- i love tom’s character. i also really missed kes. everyone LOVES 7of9 and yes, bringing in the borg aspect in the form of a hot borg chick was cool but did kes really need to get kicked for this? no one likes her but that episode warlord was one of my fav voyagers, where she gets taken over by a tyrant. really cool!! if they got rid of neelix and kept kes i think things would have been way more interesting. neelix is the only character who cripples the show in my opinion. he is always a nagging uncharismatic annoyance that no one wants to see. i dont find any form of neelix character being interesting so i wish people like you would stop contaminating the internet with your flawed voyager hate.

i agree that tng>ds9>voyager but honestly, lets take an in depth look at what truly killed star trek, and that is : ENTERPRISE. ugh. you want to talk about uninteresting characters? look at that crew. no one holds their own and they cant even write shit episodes for any of them to get anyone to care about them. enterprise boils down to a wussy captain, a charismatic redneck hick (ugh?) and a hot vulcan bitch. (stress on the bitch).

what a shit of a show. janeway would have kicked archers ass any day.

to me voyager is still a part of the ultimate era of sci fi television. all these newer 2000s era shows have been so godawful and voyager deserves praise above the rest of the shit which includes : battlestar galactica, stargate atlantis, farscape, andromeda, enterprise or any of the other disgusting shows that people seem to give far more respect. voyager belongs to my star trek trinity and when i watch old voy episodes, i still get just as excited and nostalgic as i do for tng or ds9. i wish more people would write from this perspective. maybe i will start. theres too much misdirected hate from people who are more into the shittier shows like fucking bsg (*vomit*)

Still, I’ve found that the first season of TNG, DS9, and even Voyager were all weaker than what came later (except for the last seasons of each, when in all three cases, I felt that they were coasting). Even the second season of TOS felt stronger to me than the first. Enterprise was my only exception, because I kept waiting for the show to get better, and eventually I just gave up on it.

But it’s definitely not just Trek. I have watched The Daily Show from the very first episode, and the first season was definitely not as strong as the second, and those were both with original host Craig Kilborn. (Of course, when John Stewart took over, the show really took off, but that’s another topic.) Same with Lost, NYPD Blue, Babylon 5, Firefly (Whoops, only one season there), The Venture Bros., The Simpsons (although, seriously, FOX, give it a rest), etc.

But again, YMMV.

Your point that Star Trek should tell us human stories, stories about human beings is fine — to a point: all storytelling, all literature is about people experiencing recognizable conflict. What makes science fiction unique as literature is that it expands the definition of what is ‘recognizable’, usually through the device of technology, and so doing, expands the definition of what is human.

This is what made the optimism of earlier Star Trek so valuable. Far from being the unimaginable cop-out that fanbois today would make it, the optimism was itself a part of a mythos in which human beings had evolved, mastered the baser parts of themselves, and now embarked on an experience of exploration and discovery which was on the outer edges of what it meant to be human.

Making Star Trek more ‘realistic’ a la the fractured polyethnic strife of the Berman years amounted to a dumbing down of Star Trek. Instead of seeing human beings interact in circumstances that were *hard* to recognize (the optimistic future) now we were back to seeing humans in situations *easy* to recognize (internecine warfare, more mundane human situations, etc.). It’s this latter you seem to be arguing for.

I don’t think optimism (naturally) is all that’s required in a good series. I enjoyed the new BSG, which was dark, gritty, and bloody. I also enjoyed The Wire (not sci-fi, but far from Roddenberry’s vision of a glorious future). But the Roddenberry vision in the context of today’s world was very subversive. If Trek wanted to get its edge back, it’d go back to that.

Voyager had an extremely unfortunate problem, like mentioned above, that it decided to do the “individual episodes for syndication” route rather than the “story arcs and character driven plots” route. Having, say TNG doing the syndication route was fine because they always had supplies and were never far from help or repairs. DS9 also had this to back them up, but told long story arcs because they could and wanted to.

Voyager, being stranded in space, would have been a much better series with a solid continuity.

Keep in mind that despite everything, I still see all the Trek series as having an optimistic view for humanity in the future, but Trek also told many allegorical stories, straight from TOS onward, and by taking DS9 and turning it into a long story arc about the Cold War, as you say, they made a great series. I also find TNG and TOS to have their great moments, and in fact TNG is my favourite Trek series, but I think DS9 had to differentiate itself from the Trek formula or end up like Voyager, a series which was just so many dead ends.

In conclusion, I think what makes Trek what it is, is not the optimism and exploration, but taking a specific view of the future and using it to explore stories about ourselves, holding it as a lens to shine truth on our condition. TOS, TNG, and DS9 did this quite well. Voyager rarely, if ever, did this. The episodes it did do with this shone, but those rare instances could not save a series so disjointed. Bringing Trek back to the 60′s would be grounding it in a time past and leaving it hopelessly out of date. That is not to say there is not room for optimism, but I think it needs to be tempered with our current reality as well, to do what Trek has always done well.