Ezri Dax was a terrible character and her introduction basically killed the whole show by simultaneously ruining three long-running character arcs at once.

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Voyager rewatch s1 ep1: Caretaker

I'm finally doing it- I'm re-watching all of Star Trek: Voyager from beginning to end, in order, for the first time since it originally aired!

I've watched re-runs many times in the intervening years, but never in a complete and methodical way (including episodes I hate and usually avoid- pray for me lol) and now I'll also be recording my observations on tumblr!

I have a love-hate relationship with Voyager, since I feel the writing was extremely uneven, but I'm definitely on the side of love for the show, overall. I'll critique it and be snarky about the bad stuff to high heavens, but it's still one of my formative childhood Trek shows, and I'll always be loyal to it.

First up: Caretaker (long post behind cut)

The two hour special pilot was an event back in the day, and you can tell they spent a ton of money on it, and it still looks good. (I had forgotten all about the little opening info text, lol, like it's Star Wars, and we're some general audience unaware of Star Trek lore. But they were still hoping to bring in a general audience beyond Trekkies back then- does anyone here remember how Voyager was the show that launched the UPN network? Or is that just obscure trivia to the baby Trekkies now??)

Voyager was the first Star Trek series I actually remember watching the premiere of, since I was too young to remember the premieres of Next Gen and DS9, though I was surely in the room while my mom watched them. But I was a proper Trekkie by the time Voyager came around, and as a little girl, having a woman captain on a Star Trek series for the first time was a big deal. And from the first moment Captain Janeway appeared on screen with her Katherine Hepburn voice and full-on Gibson Girl hairdo (in the 24 century no less, what an icon!), she commanded every scene, and I loved her instantly. I can never watch the first ep without remembering that first viewing. We were all crazy excited, and it lived up to the hype. It's a solid, exciting adventure story, and it sets up the characters and the series premise well. And it might not seem like it now, but I can't begin to describe how fresh and high tech and cool this show looked to us in 1995. The opening credits alone had us all oohing and ahhing like the Webb space telescope images do now. And tbh, it's still really pretty, almost 30 years later. It has more of a movie look to it than most 90s Trek eps, for one thing, the lighting looks different from most of the rest of the series, I should go back and see if it was different designer than they usually used. But the whole scale is just bigger. They were able to fit in lots more locations than a regular ep with the two hour timeslot, which gives it a grand adventure/quest sort of vibe. Wherever they filmed the Ocampa city scenes was huge and looked nicely futuristic, it really added to the big movie feel. (I'm suspecting part of it at least was a shopping mall, since there's a scene where Janeway and crew are literally riding on an actual escalator. Lolwut?) The matte paintings as well are just goregeous. I will forever and always stan old Trek's matte paintings of alien cites, they're so beautiful and atmospheric and so full of cool tiny details that usually get overlooked in CGI.

I'd forgotten how Tom Paris-centric that first ep was. Looking back, I can imagine the predominantly white male writer's room desperately clinging to their one white male character for dear life, since they were already stretching their little brains to figure out the whole 'woman captain' thing, and were probably having a hard time identifying with a woman lead character because patriarchy, so they had to fall back on Paris, who I think actually ended up being the character with the most POV scenes in the first ep. (Apparently Robbie McNeill was second on the call sheet for the pilot, according to Garrett Wang on their Delta Flyers podcast, so they apparently thought of Paris as the second lead going into the series.) I don't feel sorry for the writers at all though, and I don't forgive them for the weirdly racist lines they gave Paris in this one- I'm ignoring it and casting it out of canon in my mind the same way I do for the crazy sexist lines that get tossed out in the original series every other ep. Obviously they were trying to make Paris a bad boy in the beginning, but the stuff about 'can't Native Americans magically turn into animals if they want' (!!) was egregiously racist even in the 90s, and it's incredibly anachronistic for a story that's supposed to be set in a post-racism utopian future where no one would even think something like that, let alone say it, even as a joke.

Luckily Tom and Harry immediately adopting each other as new best buds is adorably sweet from the get go, and already undermining the Tom Paris bad boy narrative. Even in this first ep, half the time Tom is going out if his way to help people, even though at this point he barely knows them. What a rogue! So un-Starfleet! lol

I'd forgotten how creepy the alien abduction scenes were too. They were pretty brief, and that particular sub-plot wasn't well fleshed out, but they definitely ramped up the suspense for sure.

Also I'm now gonna always be a little bitter that the unamed chief medical officer who had one scene before getting killed off was played by Jeff McCarthy. As a huge musical theatre nerd, I've been a fan of his on several cast recordings, and would absolutely have loved to have him on a Star Trek show as a regular, if only! I'm not the hugest fan of the EMH, and Jeff McCarthy can sing too, and how! What we could have had!! (But then they'd have had a hard time selling whitebread little Tom Paris as a lothario next to Jeff and his devastatingly sexy baritone voice lol. Seriously, go listen to him on the Side Show album and swoon. And per Garrett Wang, Jeff was really nice in real life and gave him encouranging words on set during their scene, aww!)

All the main characters had really nice scenes that gave a nice essence of who they were. I think Harry and B'Elanna were good characters to throw together since they're such opposites, they played off each other really well, and I wish we'd have had more of them working together throughout the series. The only exception to the otherwise good charcter revealing scenes was Chakotay, who just had to make do with complaining about not liking Tom Paris. Unfortunately I think it foreshadowed a larger problem with the writers not really knowing who he is either, but that's a subject to be explored in subsequent episodes.

My biggest disappointment on re-watching is how they failed to make the reason for Voyager being stuck in the Delta quadrant actually make sense. I get that they tried to make it a moral dilemma, and show that Starfleet people are so noble that they'll chose harm to themselves before causing harm to others, but the particular setup here doesn't really work. There's no reason they couldn't have used the array to get home and like, left a bomb on a countdown to destroy the array right after they left, but they didn't even consider it, even though Starfleet officers totally would at least consider possible options. They didn't stay to protect the Ocampa anyway, and eventually when the Caretakers' gifts run out their society is probably going to collapse, so how much good did Voyager really do for them by destroying the array? It might have helped them temporarily, but eventually, and maybe not even that long after, the Ocampa were still gonna end up in a vulnerable position. It kind of makes the whole series seem a little frustrating, in that the main problem is something that didn't really even have to happen at all. (But on the other hand, no wonder Janeway spends the whole series wracked with guilt, yikes.) I truly wish they'd have come up with something that made destroying the array the only possible choice, with absolutely no loopholes, but sometimes in fiction we have to suspend our disbelief and go with it. This is one of those times, so I'll just savor Kate Mulgrew's impassioned closing speech, with her signature soap opera pathos (she's the only actor on the planet who can deliever a monologue and then look off into the distance with a pensive Soap Opera Stare, and I buy it completely. I love her and her face, ugh) and I'll try to ignore the parts of the story that don't work, and keep focused on the things that do. (Which is the mantra I use to get me through like half the episodes lol)

On to episode two!

okay so as someone who has never ventured out of my star trek safe bubble of TOS, i would like to ask your opinion on non-TOS shows?? like...what is your favorite[s], which would you recommend, etc etc <3

ooooooooooo okay i alas don't think i'm 100% the best person to ask bc i haven't watched every series like some people n what i've seen of like enterprise and voyager is not a lot!

uhm i would say TNG is like. generally a good place to go afterwards. 's got good episodes, bad episodes, it's similarly episodic for the most part with a few longer arcs, n i like almost all of the main characters :0 n it still has the general Vibe TOS does while introducing new elements n whatnot!

DS9 is much more serialised which isn't everyone's vibe but i really like the characters there they're super fun but it's set after TNG n certainly in the pilot n stuff calls back n builds upon a few different elemets introduced in DS9 so that's good to watch beforehand, but i wouldn't say it's necessary at all, like it's still an independent show but some stuff is just contextualised a bit more with TNG information.

some people like enterprise, uh... it's certainly a thing that exists. watch the pilot n you'll know what i mean. the intro kills me every time i hear it.

i haven't enjoyed what i've seen of voyager which similar to DS9 is much more serialised than TOS n TNG were but a lot of people do like it! i think it's just not my vibe but again worth watching the first few eps and see how it sticks :) they're just kind of weird to the native character chakotay n i'm not 100% sure if that improves but i guess all star trek series Get A Bit Weird like that :( Tuvok is cool though n after seven of nine joins the cast it massively improves i am told.

also the animated TOS series is underrated please consider watching it it's so funny. idk it's the most canon show in my heart.

i haven't watched any of the more recent ones beyond these unfortunately :( but yeah TNG n DS9 are my favourites n certainly what i would personally recommend. i haven't watched lower decks but i've heard very good things abt it so also consider that! hope this helps but i'm by no stretch someone who has watched every star trek show so idk if you want to ask more people who have seen more of these shows bc i'm very much so a TOS boy dchdfvhb