Star Trek: Voyager

This show looks a lot better after being subjected to the godawful Kurtzman Trek shows. That said, it never quite lived up to its potential, and was never as consistently good as TNG or DS9, producing both great and terrible episodes throughout. It eventually becomes The Seven of Nine Show, but hey, they knew their audience. The writers were still resisting serialization at this point, so you can totally stick to the "best of" episodes (I recommend this).

The weakest of the Trek series, but there's still plenty here to enjoy for Trek fans. The series is limited by some woefully extraneous characters like Kim and Paris, and in the early years Kes. Nonetheless Mulgrew was hugely underrated a Captain and at its best the whole series worked really well.

Supported almost solely by the rather unexpected charisma and staying power of Seven of Nine and Captain Janeway. Interestingly, having one overarching narrative goal diminished Star Trek's expected philosophical musings considerably. I think this is when to Boldly Go was more about the destination than the journey (or Trek, heh), and it suffered.

I've been going back and forth trying to decide whether I prefer this or TNG, but either way it's close. Between the two of them, Voyager is certainly more consistent in quality, having fewer great episodes but also fewer genuinely terrible ones. Where Voyager shines the most amongst the Star Trek shows is in its character-work, with The Doctor and Seven in particular having the two of the best arcs in the franchise, as well as Mulgrew's towering charisma as Cpt. Janeway carrying many episodes.

A boring cast, an uninteresting premise, this is the worst of the series.

Voyager is the kind of show where most episodes are somewhere between "okayish" and "awful", but once every three or four episodes it does stuff that ranks up with the best Star Trek of all time, and you can't tell which one an episode's going to be until you watch it. It's got some really and truly stunning actors, but I really wish we'd gotten less Tom Paris. Probably a bit underrated, but not for no reason.

Fantastic.

Like TNG and DS9, it struggled through 2 seasons to find itself. When it did, we were introduced to...Seven of Nine's catsuits. The doctor becomes insufferable, whiney, and a narcissist by series' end. B'Elanna's temper got old, fast. Mulgrew's acting was too stiff. Paramount also gave us a lot of recycled TNG episodes: some peripherally, some almost directly, and some done badly (and I'm sure there are others). Sometimes you need to know when to quit, especially when you've tried recycling.

It won't be everyone's favourite old Star Trek Series (that usually goes to DS9 or TNG) but for me it's one of my favourites. There are some hit and miss episodes of course, but overall I quite enjoyed watching it multiple times.

Best Star Trek that's still Star Trek?