Voyager Season 5 Review


This is the first season of Voyager that seems full of pointless episodes.  This is where "reset TV" rears it's ugly head.

A lot of TV shows in the 80s and 90s were set up so that they basically wrapped up every episode so neatly that you could watch it the next week without having missed anything.  Up through season 4 I felt like most of the Voyager episodes at least had some character development that pushed things forward each episode.  For season 5 this isn't true at all.

There are so many episodes in this season that don't move the story or characters forward at all.  You can easily watch the cold open and then the last 2 minutes and still understand everything you needed to get out of the episode.  In a lot of cases you could safely skip the episodes entirely.

At this point I'm committed to finishing the series but season 5 put a damper on my enthusiasm.  At least I know that there are only 7 seasons and then the show wraps up.

It's not like nothing happens at all.  The crew has a few incidents that push them ten or twenty years closer to home with new technology (which conveniently only works for a limited amount of time).

But some character growth happens too.  The only kid on the ship becomes old enough to become her own character.  Seven continues to develop into more of a human and less of a Borg.  Harry Kim feels like he's finally growing up.  The crew has had enough incidents to bring them closer to home so that they finally feel like getting back to the alpha quadrant is a when not an if.

The season ends with the first of a two part story where Voyager makes contact with another Star Fleet ship which has been pulled into the Delta Quadrant.  I'm sure it won't last, but it's really cool when the crew of the Voyager gets some interaction with Star Fleet.

There have been a couple of these that I haven't mentioned but I honestly really like the episodes where the Starfleet crews from the 29th century show up and have to clean up issues with the timeline.  They're basically time travel police and they end up drafting members of the Voyager crew because Voyager keeps messing up the timeline.  I love these episodes.

I would probably enjoy an entire Star Trek show in this setting.  A crew from the 29th century jumping to important places in the Star Trek timeline fixing problems.

I'm starting to get really excited for the new Star Trek series coming out on CBS next year.

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