Voyager ain't that bad, tbh. It can be a bit campy sometimes, but Star Trek has always been campy, even a bit cringy. DS9 is fine, but sometimes people just want Star Trek to continue being dark and serious and all about a war when, sure, that aspect of Star Trek is also necessary, but Janeway's crew was in a different circumstance. Not everything had to be about war.
And the new movies are just that, too serious. No fun allowed.
I quoted it before on this thread, I'll recite it from memory here, the interview Ronald D Moore did where he talked about Voyager some.
It's not about the fun - it's not about the camp.
It's about being
serious.
And as I've stressed before on here as well, being serious doesn't mean you can't laugh or have fun either, it just means you treat things
seriously.
You don't even have to do a war, all you have to do is hold to voyager's
fucking premise. Like, ok, instead of year of hell, let's do "year of silly." One season (or a 2 part episode) where Voyager has to go through Talaxian controlled space and each episode they get into sillier and sillier situations that amount to largely side-quests of fun. Know how you make it work? You sell it based on the premise. You have Janeway bitching about something like "I can't stand these hedgehogs! I wish we could be rid of them!" "I know, Captain, but we don't have Starfleet to repair the ship. We need those parts, yada yada."
That's what always annoys me about it more than anything. You could do a swap of actors and 99% of the stories would work just as well in TOS or TNG - them being separated is that irrelevant.
The best parts of voyager were
always the parts that actually dealt with the premise for this very reason. 7 or 9? (besides being a fine piece of ass) Totally unique to the show and not really doable anywhere else (since in those you could just ship her off to a federation therapy center). Same with the Doctor. An actual character arc built around the fact that they HAD to keep this guy and work with him. Scorpion 1 & 2? Masterpieces because it worked upon Voyager being alone.
They didn't have to make it gritty and war-torn all the time, they just had to keep it consistent to the set up. They could even had consistent stand-alone A plots, as long as they went with character arcs and long running B plots that looked at the struggle and adaption of a ship stranded.
But they didn't.
That's what always annoys me about Voyager. Enterprise was largely doomed from the start. Kelvin is a waste. Discovery should have been post-Voyager from the start and Picard is another waste. Voyager is by far the show of all them which had the most potential, the most set up, and squandered it all. It is the BIGGEST disappointment.
