Editing Star Trek (section)

==''Voyager''==
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[[File:USS Voyager.jpg|thumb|400px|left|''"Are we home yet?"'' 
"No."
''"Are we home yet?"''
"No."
''"Are we home yet?"''
"Tuvok, please give Ensign Kim a dose of the Medical Phaser.]]
Star Trek: Voyager centers around the eponymous USS ''Voyager'', a smallish ship which gets teleported over to the other side of the galaxy. The plot of the series centers on the crew's efforts to get back home, which COULD have made for an excellent premise. Unfortunately, there were few lasting story arcs, with most episodes being fully self-contained (as well as being littered with far too many episodes featuring holodeck or transporter incidents). As a consequence, despite being completely isolated from the Federation, no matter how bad things got Voyager always appeared in the next episode without a scratch, fully supplied, and with all its shuttlecraft intact. Think ''Gilligan's Island'' on a starship.

Like ''TNG'' and ''DS9'' it's a character-driven drama just as often as it is a sci-fi adventure romp, although compared to TNG only a few of the characters are particularly memorable. The captain and arguable "main character" is Kathryn Janeway, a Katharine Hepburn lookalike (I see what you did there) who is stern without being cold, and principled without being inflexible. The fan favorite is a character called "The Doctor" ([[Doctor Who|No relation]]); he's the solid-light hologram representative of the ship's emergency medical computer, who has to take on actual medical duties when their chief medical officer was conveniently killed in the pilot episode. Other than this, Chakotay is a peace-loving and spiritually rich indian <s>freedom fighter</s> <s>terrorist</s> [[FAIL|who was written with the help of a special Cherokee consultant so native his name was Jamake Highwater and it turned out later on that he was actually Jewish and didn't know dick about native cultures so he made everything up resulting in Chakotay basically being a borderline racist caricature of what you think Indians are like. Akoochimoya.]] Tom Paris is an annoying jerk and is counterbalanced by Harry Kim who is the ideal boy-scout, making him only half as annoying and twice as boring. B'elanna Torres tries to perpetuate a lineage of dudes getting shit done but ends up blankly reciting her technobabble, having second degree plasma burns and – worst of all – systematically fails to get shit done whenever the warp core goes nuts. Tuvok tries hard to be as cool as Spock but ends up being a lame version of the n°1 Vulcan who uses logic to justify everything and makes it short for "you are wrong, I am right because I said so." Kes is passed as a fragile and nice character but it takes a couple of episodes to realize that having a short lifespan does not change the facts: [[powergamer|when you can boil someone to death from the inside of their body, drain life from everything around you to become stronger and do anything you want without knowing how, just by thinking of it]], you are a goddamn Mary Sue. From the fourth season onwards the only character the writers seemed to care about was Seven of Nine, [[Mary Sue|a human woman who recently escaped from Borg control and kept all of her cyborg enhancements but regained her free will]]; another Mary Sue, to be sure, but she's [[Hot Chicks|hot]], and the other characters are much worse, so that's not really a bad thing. Fortunately, The Doctor still received a lot of attention from the writers and almost single-handedly made the show watchable. There was also Neelix, who was the apparent inspiration for Jar-Jar Binks, and any sane crew would have pushed him out of an airlock on the first episode. Fans who stuck with the show despite its glaring failings were given one final slap in the face with the <s>controversial</s> shit final season, in which the producers decided "screw steadily crafting a satisfying conclusion to a story which we have wasted for most of the last seven years anyway; lets just ignore it until the final episode and then throw in some shit about trans-warp conduits and time travel, bitches love time travel!" If you did not care about any of the characters or the subplots or time travel making sense (the writers sure didn't), then the final episode was made just for you (and the Borg got a major setback, too, just don't think about the setup too hard).

The Doctor never once stopped being totally fucking awesome though (enough so to even earn a cameo in First Contact and for Robert Picardo to turn up as his inventor in an episode of DS9), Jeri Ryan proved she wasn't just eye candy, and the (mostly) great acting from the rest of the cast carries the series from being horrific to ''occasionally'' watchable. Just goes to show that no matter how good your actors are, they can't make diamonds out of shit.

Overall, most Star Trek fans view Voyager's legacy with a shrug and a "meh." Unfortunately, hopes that Voyager's successor would revitalize the franchise would soon prove to be overly optimistic.

* '''Outstanding Episodes''': "Timeless" (excellent time-travel episode), "Year of Hell" (absolutely savage two-parter that trashes ''Voyager'' in service to a story of obsession and why you don't fuck with the timeline), "Tuvix" (one of the all-time skubbiest episodes of any ST show, deals with the complicated ethics of what happens when two people are fused into a new individual by a transporter accident), "Bride of Chaotica!" (aliens get trapped in Tom Paris' 1940s pulp holodeck program, Janeway has to become one of the characters to sort it out, good comedy episode), "Someone to Watch Over Me" (the Doctor falls in love with Seven but can't admit it), "Equinox" (''Voyager'' encounters another castaway Starfleet ship that's tossed Federation law and ethics into the bin to survive and Janeway gets ''really'' pissy about it)
* '''Episodes to Avoid''': "Threshold" (Tom Paris and Janeway turn into [[salamander]]s and have salamander babies; so terrible that rumors persist it was declared non-canonical to this day), "Fair Haven" and "Spirit Folk" (holodeck malfunction episodes full of more cringe Oirish stereotypes and Janeway wanting to bang a hologram), "Alice" (Stephen King's ''Christine'' IN SPAAACE!)

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