Farewell Voyager. You did not have a good year.
Overall Voyager has had a curious trajectory. From a weak start it started to find its feet, and in season 4 had a pretty good run. But since then the quality seems to have been in decline. Season 7 is as weak as Season 2. The high point of the season was the finale, which while not up to the standards of *All Good Things*, manages a better completion to the show than *What You Leave Behind*. And there wasn’t a true stinker (although *Lineage* came darn close).
The average quality has lifted from last time – 12 bad or OK, versus 15 in Season 6. But it’s the first Voyager season since Season 2 to not have a truly great episode in it. There are really only a couple of episodes that even manage to get as far as ‘would watch if I came across it on cable’ (*Renaissance Man*, *Friendship One* and *Workforce*, for instance).
Overall this one just manages to avoid being the worst season of Voyager to date, but it’s a close run thing. One or two episodes that hadn’t worked out and it would be closer to the worst of TNG or TOS. That brings the rankings to:
The very best of Trek:
– TNG Season 6
– DS9 Season 2
Strong performers:
– DS9 Season 5
– TNG Season 3
– TNG Season 5
– TOS Season 2
– TNG Season 4
– VOY Season 4
Mixed bag:
– TOS Season 1
– DS9 Season 4
– DS9 Season 1
– VOY Season 5
– VOY Season 1
– TNG Season 7
Not good:
– DS9 Season 3
– DS9 Season 6
– VOY Season 6
– VOY Season 3
– TNG Season 2
– TAS Season 1
Really just awful:
– VOY Season 7
– VOY Season 2
– DS9 Season 7
– TOS Season 3
– TAS Season 2
– TNG Season 1
Overall Voyager is a disappointment of a show. It has its moments, and there are a handful of episodes that I’d put up against almost anything Trek has done. But it spends most of its time in mediocrity, playing it safe but never doing great things. My count has only six truly awful episodes for Voyager, lower than TNG and DS9. But Voyager only manages 8 great episodes, while TNG and DS9 both have managed almost that many in a single season at times. And while TOS has fewer great episodes (and almost as many bad ones), it’s on fewer seasons, making the average much better. But would I rather a Voyager episode than a random Animated Series one? I think so.
Series league table:
– Deep Space 9
– The Next Generation
– The Original Series
– Voyager
– The Animated Series
That’s 637 watched, 28,360 minutes, and 86.83% complete. 100,991 words written. 100 to go. Now on to my final frontier, the series that I know the least.