I have finished watching Star Trek Next Generation and Deep Space 9 following a friend’s recommendation. I enjoyed both shows and started watching the other one, Star Trek Voyager.
So far, I’m not finding it as enjoyable as the other two. I want to try to see it through the eyes of someone who enjoys the show, maybe it will also help me understand why it feels different somehow.
The cast. That’s what I love about the show. The writing can be uneven and often downright contradictory (they ignore the whole “we have limited photon torpedoes” thing from the pilot pretty much immediately and have fun counting the number of shuttle craft they wind up destroying over the course of the series). But the cast is great, especially after a season or so when everyone has figured out their characters a bit.
I can totally forgive the photon torpedoes and shuttlecraft counts because I don’t see Voyager as being a strictly serial show. It kinda straddles the line between episodic and serial without being fully either - and on that basis I’ll allow it some degree of ‘reset’ between episodes.
Where Voyager certainly is serial are the show’s characters, and their change and growth as the seasons progress. That’s the real story in Voyager, versus whatever problem-of-the-week the ship finds itself in.