It was never a secret in Hollywood that Paramount wanted to start its own broadcast network on the strength of an all-new Star Trek series. It just took two decades before that ambition would come to fruition. During the late 1970s, Star Trek: Phase II was going to be the show in question before those plans were abandoned and the series was reworked into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In January 1994, the United Paramount Network became a reality with Star Trek: Voyager as its flagship program.
Paramount had laid the foundation for UPN in the 1980s and early 1990s with a string of successful original syndicated shows, including Friday the 13th: The Series, The Arsenio Hall Show, War of the Worlds, and, of course, two Star Trek series — Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. By the time Voyager premiered, TNG had just finished its seven-season run and moved the cast into the Star Trek feature films, while Deep Space Nine was still coming into its own. Voyager had a lot to live up to after its two immediate predecessors, and it sometimes could not emerge from their shadows.
Among Star Trek fans, Voyager definitely has its admirers and devoted followers, but it’s not as beloved as either TNG or DS9. It’s an imperfect series, but also one that still inspires fans three decades later. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: Voyager, here is a brief look back at some of the highs and lows of the show’s seven seasons.
Captain on deck
After the previous three Star Trek series put William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, and Avery Brooks in the leading roles, Voyager featured a female captain: Elizabeth Janeway. Actress Geneviève Bujold was subsequently cast as the renamed Nicole Janeway, but not for long. It’s unclear why things with Bujold went south quickly, but she left the series after only two days on set. In her place, Kate Mulgrew stepped into the leading role, with one last name change: Kathryn Janeway.
Mulgrew’s Janeway did have a different persona than her predecessors. However, there were also divisive contemporary responses to Janeway, not unlike the ones fielded by Star Trek: Discovery and the second female captain in the franchise, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green). There was so much sound and fury over those respective casting decisions that it overshadowed many legitimate criticisms about how those two women were portrayed. In Janeway’s case, a lot of the flaws of the show itself were used to bash her character, and it was not always deserved. Regardless, the most die-hard fans of Voyager accepted her as the captain.
Lost in space
To further separate Voyager from the three series that came before it, the show was set in the Delta Quadrant, a distant part of the galaxy approximately seven decades away from the familiar planets in the franchise at the highest possible speed. There was so much lead time that the seeds for Voyager were planted in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine with the introduction of the Marquis, a group of freedom fighters/terrorists who felt that the Federation had sold out their colony worlds to the Cardassians in exchange for a peace deal.
In response, the people now living under Cardaassian control formed the Marquis to fight for their independence and their adoptive home worlds. That often put the Marquis at odds with the Federation as well. This plotline continued in the first episode of Voyager, as the titular ship pursued a fugitive Marquis vessel before both were stranded in the Delta Quadrant. To survive the perilous journey home, the crew of the Marquis ship was integrated into the crew of Voyager.
TNG lite
Some of the earliest episodes of Voyager deal with the tensions between the Federation and Marquis crews, with Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran) and B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) among the most prominent members of the former. Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) was an ex-Marquis who turned on his former comrades by joining Voyager’s mission to capture them for his own freedom, so he wasn’t very popular with either side.
One of the most interesting characters was Seska (Martha Hackett), a member of the Marquis who was the voice of dissent on the ship until certain revelations about her came to light. Seska was so anti-Starfleet that the show may have been better if it had kept her around. Without Seska, most of the Marquis officers became so watered down that you could barely tell they weren’t originally Federation officers.
Tuvok (Tim Russ) — Voyager’s resident Vulcan science officer — was undercover with the Marquis at the beginning of the series, but he was loyal to the Federation all along. The last prominent member of the Federation crew was Ensign Harry Kim (Garrett Wang). Two natives of the Delta Quadrant also joined the crew: Neelix (Ethan Phillips) and Kes (Jennifer Lien). However, the most exciting character out of this group was Voyager’s emergency medical holographic program, or The Doctor (Robert Picardo). Picardo gave that AI a personality, while the writers allowed the Doctor ample opportunities to discover his innate humanity.
Unfortunately, compared to the casts of TNG and DS9, Voyager‘s crew seemed less dynamic. Fans of the show may love them, but they didn’t capture the imaginations of a wide audience. It didn’t help that many of Voyager‘s stories also seemed like rehashes of earlier Star Trek tales. That’s not to say that there weren’t good, or even great, episodes of Voyager that rank among the very best in Star Trek. But there are also plenty of embarrassingly bad episodes, including Threshold, an infamous season 2 story that ended with Janeway and Paris transformed into space salamanders. If you have trouble believing that was real, here’s the proof.
The Seven of Nine Show
By the time the fourth season arrived, Voyager needed some fresh blood in the cast. Lien departed the series, and in her place, Jeri Ryan was cast as the Borg known as Seven of Nine. Ryan became the first performer to play a Borg in a regular role, but her cyborg appearance was soon given a human makeover with a heavy emphasis on sex appeal. Seven quickly became the show’s new breakout character, which was exactly what the producers wanted. Suddenly, most of the major stories revolved around Seven in some way, or around the Doctor to a lesser degree.
This didn’t always sit well with the rest of the cast, notably Mulgrew. Several cast members have shared stories about tension on the set, which was especially one-sided from Mulgrew to Ryan. Voyager wasn’t the first Star Trek series to have feuds among the performers, but it added an unexpected undercurrent to the scenes between Seven and Janeway, who were on much better terms on-screen.
The CGI Frontier
For the first two-and-a-half seasons of Voyager, the ship’s special effects were largely achieved through models and practical effects. Season 3 changed the game for the entire franchise when it switched to all CGI special effects. An earlier sci-fi series, Babylon 5, had already proven that CGI spaceships could be done for a weekly series. Foundation Imaging — the FX company behind Babylon 5‘s first three seasons — was brought in to do the same for Voyager.
The results led to some truly gorgeous work that holds up well even decades later. Even when the stories were lacking, the digital effects set a new standard for Star Trek.
“Borged” to death
Perhaps the biggest misstep of Voyager is that the show’s creative team never understood the risk of going to the same well too many times. The most thrilling villains of Star Trek: The Next Generation were the Borg, an alien collective of cyborgs who attempted to forcibly convert (or assimilate) any civilization they deemed worthy of becoming one of them. TNG only used the Borg in 6 episodes across seven seasons and in the movie Star Trek: First Contact.
Voyager, on the other hand, featured the Borg in 23 episodes across the final four seasons. By using them so many times, the show’s creative team killed the mystique of the Borg, and they no longer felt special or even threatening. Even in the series finale, the Borg were once again Voyager’s punching bag as they made their way home.
Star Trek: Legacy
Following the conclusion of Star Trek: Voyager, the characters from that series rarely appeared. Mulgrew had a cameo as Janeway in 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis, but that was it until Ryan was signed as a regular cast member of Star Trek: Picard in 2020. Ryan appeared in all three seasons as Seven, but it wasn’t until the final season that her character was given a chance to demonstrate her love and affection for her time on Voyager.
Seven’s profile rose even further during Picard season 3 as she went from First Officer to Captain, and she joined a very exclusive club by taking command of the newest ship, the Enterprise. Since then, there have been movements to convince Paramount+ to greenlight Star Trek: Legacy, starring Ryan and some of her Picard co-stars. There don’t seem to be any current plans to make that a reality, but if the legacy of Voyager is going to live on, it will once again be through Seven of Nine.
Watch Star Trek: Voyager on Paramount+.
