A bit of technobabble is needed to provide the reason for these events, but it's kept simple and to a minimum the natural focus of the story is on Kim dealing with the situation, and it works quite well. Take, for instance, one of the better episodes of the season, "Non Sequitur." Here, Harry Kim is thrown into an alternate version of reality in which he stayed on Earth instead of shipping out with Voyager. When the story works, it doesn't need a lot of tech-talk to jazz it up. Why do we get so much technobabble? That's the real question, and I suspect that the answer is that the episodes lack sufficient dramatic tension of their own. We really, really don't find it interesting to hear about how recalibrating the gazingus drive by fifty microwidgets and irradiating the ship with chrono-tachy-boolean radiation will do the trick. We know it's all pulled out of nowhere, even by Star Trek standards. Um, hello, Voyager writers? This stuff is all made up, and we know it. What's more, we're subjected to Torres describing in agonizing detail exactly what kind of whatchamacallit she's rigging up.
It starts moving beyond the silly, into the realm of the absurd, as in "Cold Fire," when we learn about a "sporocystian life form" (uh, ok) that gives off "sporocystian radiation" (uh-huh). It seems that in every episode, there's a new gadget, a new kind of radiation, or both, being invented. Scotty, Geordi, or O'Brien might come up with some nifty seat-of-the pants tweaking of something-or-other, but the actual mumbo-jumbo was kept to a tolerable level, and the basic vocabulary of gadgets was actually reasonably consistent: shields, deflectors, the warp core, Jeffries tubes, phasers and photon torpedoes, and of course a few different kinds of radiation (tachyons always being a favorite, it seems). Admittedly, technobabble has always been a feature of Star Trek, but in earlier shows, it was under control. One of the problems with Voyager is its love affair with technobabble. Others are bland from start to finish, like "Parturition," which is nothing more than a threadbare plot to accompany the "character development" of Neelix, and the dreadfully boring "Tattoo." Stories often get off to a reasonable start, but then fizzle partway through, like "Twisted," which creates an interesting premise (the ship is undergoing strange spatial distortions) but then drags through the middle to the end of the episode without developing the plot any further. Unfortunately, in Season 2 the writing continues to be rather weak. If Voyager is to pass up the chance to develop an ongoing storyline (and it's a big missed opportunity), then it must stand or fall on the merits of its individual episodes. (It doesn't help matters much that the "hook" is hopelessly cheesy and soap-opera-ish.) Similarly, "Alliances," in which Captain Janeway reluctantly decides to accommodate non-Federation tactics to help Voyager survive, is rather bland, and certainly not as interesting as it ought to have been. In episodes like "Maneuvers," we do see a recurrence of a character and plot from Season 1, but even with a "hook" thrown in at the end to suggest further development of that plot thread is planned, it doesn't feel like a coherent part of an overall story arc. The one concession to continuity is in the recurring alien races, most notably the Kazon tribes (clearly echoing the role of Klingons in the original series) and on a more minor note, the Ocampa. The basic premise of "trying to get home" is really the only overall theme, and even that is frequently passed up in favor of exploratory adventures of the week for a shipful of lonely, stranded people, the Voyager crew are remarkably complaisant about the time they're taking to get home. Voyager is clearly modeling itself more after the original Star Trek and Next Generation rather than Deep Space Nine, opting for a heavily episodic style with minimal attention to overall story arcs.
#VOYAGER STAR TREK DVD SERIES#
Season 2 might be reasonably expected to take the series a bit farther, but instead it looks like Voyager has already settled into a fairly predictable pattern of both content and quality. Star Trek: Voyager got off to an acceptably entertaining start in Season 1, introducing the characters and presenting the fundamental premise of the show: the adventures of a mixed Federation/Maqui crew stranded in the far-distant Delta Quadrant, struggling to find a way home while dealing with the strange, often hostile alien races around them.
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