I was there at the dawning of the fourth age of Trek-kind. Working at a Fox affiliate at the time, which had recently undergone a bit of mitosis and spawned a second TV station which was earmarked from early on as a potential UPN station, I was more keenly aware of Star Trek: Voyager than I was of any Trek spinoff before it. I was aware of it not only as a fan, but in a more businesslike sense. I cringed at the hasty exit of Genevieve Bujold, and cringed again when the WB premiered a week ahead of UPN (though, again at the time, I predicted they’d never make it when their coolest offering was the series of Michigan J. Frog commercial bumpers and their lead program was a pale clone of Married…With Children).
Then Voyager premiered, on January 15th, 1995. I watched the live satellite feed at work – mainly because our little independent sister station hadn’t made the deadline for UPN’s consideration before the premiere. The local ABC station carried Voyager instead, dropping it into Next Generation’s old 10:40pm Saturday night time slot (ironically, at the time of this writing, that’s where I work now). The new series promised so much, and the cast was rich with possibilities, and the effects raised the bar from what we had come to expect from Next Generation. Star Trek lived again! And then, by the end of the season, Voyager’s greatest enemy was…cheese.
This set chronicles that first season, in broadcast order, and boy does it bring back the memories. Actually, the first season wasn’t bad at all – for most of it, Voyager truly was a worthy successor to the Trek throne. Kate Mulgrew, as Captain Janeway, doesn’t get nearly enough credit for endowing the series with a massive amount of credibility. Poor as the scripts were from time to time, Mulgrew was magnificent, never giving the character of Janeway anything less than her all. Even later on, when Voyager became more and more derivative and shallow, Mulgrew’s performance alone was enough to merit at least one viewing of any given episode. Actually, it’s a bit disingenuous for me to heap all the praise on her: the cast of Voyager was excellent across the board. If there was a single weak link, it may have eventually been Robert Beltran as Chakotay, though the drought of stories focusing on and strengthening his character is more at fault than the actor is – Beltran simply had nothing to work with later on while other characters, even newcomers, were more fully developed. In this first season, Beltran gets his juiciest material, in these early episodes where there’s a more sharply defined division between Voyager’s original crew and the Maquis rebels.
Many of my thoughts, and those of fellow theLogBook.com writer Rob Heyman, on those early episodes have been chronicled here already, so to save a bit of time I’ll refer you to those early, written-the-day-after-the-episode-aired reviews. One thing that occurs in hindsight is how rollicking and fast-paced the series premiere, Caretaker, is. It cruises along at a breakneck pace, establishing – for better or worse – that Voyager would be an action-adventure series, with the emphasis on action. Next Generation’s more introspective moments would be a thing of the past, as would DS9’s engrossing empire-building and serialization. Voyager’s early fortè would be what former Next Generation producer Herb Wright dubbed “weird shit,” and that weirdness was the specialty of future executive producer Brannon Braga. The first two Voyager hours out of the gate after the pilot were time paradoxes, and strange ones even by Star Trek standards. The first real standout episode was Phage, which introduced the underused and/or misused Vidiians, a race of plague-stricken aliens whose only means of survival was harvesting organs from others. And even their first outing, though arguably their strongest, spent a great deal of time on more “weird shit”, including a space chase through a gigantic hall of mirrors big enough for Voyager herself to get lost in. The Cloud is a bizarre mix of a jeopardy plot and several character vignettes, all of which are jockeying for “A”-story status. Eye Of The Needle is one of the show’s better “tech” mysteries, a good example of a ship-based bottle show that works.
And then the first real bona fide stinker hits in the form of Ex Post Facto, a murder mystery that can’t decide if it wants to focus on Tuvok as the investigator or Tom Paris as the wrongfully-accused suspect. The next few episodes are better-than-average and set up some far-reaching story arcs, particularly where Seska, a Maquis crewmember who turns out to have been a treacherous Cardassian spy all along, is concerned. Where I really got a kick in the stomach was from the episode Cathexis, yet another paint-by-numbers crewmembers-possessed-by-aliens plotline, a device that had grown miserably stale from what seemed like once-every-third-week use on Next Generation. Following that, Faces at least scores points for being one of Voyager’s better attempts at horror, while Jetrel does an interesting war-criminal-meets-war-survivor tale and gives Ethan Phillips a chance to do some heavy drama that belies his appearance. With Learning Curve, there’s an interesting story about Tuvok trying to give some of the more rebellious Maquis crew a crash-course in proper Starfleet protocol, but it’s brought down by a B-plot in which Voyager – a ship that has survived being transported 70,000 light years, bombarded by Kazons, attacked by Vidiians, and brought to a halt by a warp core ejection – is sent to its knees by cheese. The predictable feel-good ending of the episode doesn’t help matters either.
As with previous Star Trek series DVDs, there are no commentaries, but there’s at least a healthy slate of bonuses taking up the set’s fifth disc. Featurettes examine the location shooting, special effects, and the creation of the series itself, and one nice featurette gives Kate Mulgrew a chance to say whatever she wants about the show and on her work since, particularly her one-woman biographical play about Katherine Hepburn, Tea At Five. There’s a brief feature about the evolution of Star Trek on the world wide web, which to me is interesting because I’d forgotten how much the original Paramount Voyager site looked like…well, an only slightly fancy fan site. But the show is really stolen by a featurette simply titled The First Captain: Bujold, offering us the first glimpses of Genevieve Bujold as Captain Nicole Janeway (changed from the original character name of Elizabeth to reflect Bujold’s middle name). Several scenes are shown in their entirety without any sort of commentary – comments are heard from Rick Berman in between scenes – and the difference between Bujold and Mulgrew is absolutely, jaw-droppingly striking. It’s not that Bujold plays Captain Janeway badly, or in some way that subverts the whole legacy of actors-as-starship-captains before her, but it’s so different – Bujold’s take is quiet and, in places, almost emotionless. It’s unfair to really deliver any kind of value judgement when we have nearly 200 hours of Mulgrew to hold up against several minutes of Bujold, but it’s interesting to finally see what might have been. Genevieve Bujold herself wasn’t interviewed for the featurette – not much of a surprise, what with the press reports of the time attributing to her a quote about not wanting to play “a comic book character” anymore – and Berman remains very complimentary of her, but admits that her style of working is more suited to filming a movie.
Sadly absent from the proceedings is the late-1994 Robert Picardo-hosted documentary Star Trek: Voyager – Inside The New Adventures, distributed by UPN to its newly-signed-up affiliate stations to air…well, really, whenever, however and as often as they wanted to. I remember running this hour-long (well, 40-odd minutes with commercial breaks) program endlessly in time slots where infomercials hadn’t been sold, and as sick as I grew of it at the time, I have to admit to being sad that it’s not featured here. No doubt, a lot of this box set’s extra feature material was originally shot for the special (though I’m sure there where hints even then of digital media that would demand value-added material), and yet there are quite a few interesting bits from that special that didn’t make it to DVD.
A mixed bag as far as the episodes themselves go, but the bonus features – especially the truly unusual sight of Genevieve Bujold occupying the captain’s seat – just about make up for it. Is it worth the price? Hard to say. Paramount is charging as much for this five-disc set as they previously charged for seven-disc sets of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, which is just short of highway robbery in my book. It really depends on how much you liked this season of this particular series.