Voyaging Home

Today I finished Star Trek Voyager. As usual, after watching a long-running television show, I'm experiencing a kind of withdrawal (though one of my roommates is watching Enterprise. It's not quite the same, but it's better than nothing.)

I have to say, I think that the show's been judged harshly. Admittedly, they don't take the premise as seriously as they ought to - Voyager has an easy time getting repaired, refueled, rearmed, and seems to have an infinite supply of shuttles, not to mention that the Delta Flyer gets literally blown to tiny pieces in one episode and by the next one, they've completely rebuilt the thing.

Yet I like the cast of characters, and that's a huge part of making a show successful. Janeway's a badass,  Tuvok is an awesome grumpy grandpa, Seven of Nine is inherently interesting (and not just because she's attractive) and everyone in the cast is likable.

Starting with the Next Generation, the makers of Star Trek created a huge consistent world of the 24th Century, building on the foundation laid in the 60s with the original and creating something that, at least so far, seems to be aging more gracefully (if you ignore the first couple seasons of TNG or some of the less-believable CGI of the mid-90s.)

Part of what makes me sad about seeing Voyager come to a close is that it's the last of the 24th Century setting (well, other than Star Trek: Nemesis.) As I've said before, I was raised on TNG, and the 24th Century is my default "future" setting.

Despite Voyager's lower popularity than DS9 or TNG, the makers began Enterprise the following season, and while I appreciate the idea of seeing the sort of bridge between our modern, underfunded space program and what would become the Starfleet of Kirk and later Picard, Sisko and Janeway, it doesn't really have the same feel (also, the opening theme to Enterprise is a hate crime against nerds.)

The finale of Voyager has the problem that I think most episodic shows have, which is that it comes sort of out of the blue. I started watching TV by the season with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in that show, and indeed most of the shows of the past decade, season finales, and especially series finales, are built to (if the show doesn't get cancelled, that is.)

There's little hint that there's about to be some big discovery that finally gives Voyager the shortcut they need in the seventh season (other than that we know the show's going to end and it would be really depressing if they didn't make it back to the Alpha Quadrant.) So we get a story about time travel (a common theme for Voyager) as well as the Borg (Voyager was, of course, the show that most thoroughly explored the Borg.) We get to see Janeway be incredibly badass, sacrificing herself to cripple the Borg Collective and take out the Borg Queen, who was the closest thing to a series Big Bad that they had. But then, because it's a time-travel episode, we also get to keep our Janeway, who gets to bring everyone (minus those who've already died, and of course Kes and Neelix, who went back to be with their people) back to Earth.

It's a pretty cool finale, and it's awesomely satisfying to see Unimatrix One go up in flames. It might have been nice to see get a bit of an epilogue to see how everyone turned out, though A: we get most of that with Admiral Janeway's alternate future, and B: the awful Vic Fontaine-soundtracked epilogue to DS9 nearly ruined my impression of the entire series (really Vic Fontaine in general,) so perhaps we should be grateful that we got a huge action sequence and then just watched as Voyager was escorted by an armada of Starfleet ships back to Earth.

Star Trek's current incarnation is all about the JJ Abrams alternate-timeline-reboot. That's all well and good. I enjoyed the first one and look forward to the second, but I do hope that at some point, somehow, we get to see more of the 24th Century. And if it's another TV show, I would like to write for it.