Star Trek: Voyager Season One - re:View

TL;DR

Two hosts revisit Voyager Season 1 and find it surprisingly good, while lamenting the show's wasted premise of two rival crews stranded 70,000 light-years from home.

Key Points

• 1.Voyager Season 1 holds up better than expected. Both hosts, rewatching for the first time since original airing, found themselves giving smiley faces to almost every episode, attributing some warmth to nostalgia compared to modern 'New Trek.'
• 2.The show fundamentally wastes its own premise. The concept of a Federation crew and Maquis terrorists stranded 75 years from home, forced to share a ship with dwindling resources, is never meaningfully explored.
• 3.Chakotay is the most disappointing character. An interesting concept — a rebel leader clashing with Starfleet authority — is abandoned immediately after the pilot, turning him into Janeway's obedient lapdog with a tattoo and occasional 'vision quest' references.
• 4.Janeway deserves a major apology. Both hosts admitted they wrongly remembered her as erratic and hysterical; on rewatch, her decisions — like blowing up the Caretaker array — have clear, well-reasoned justifications in the episodes.
• 5.The Caretaker pilot is clunky but foundational. It introduces the Kazon as lame Klingon stand-ins who want water, the moral dilemma of getting home vs. protecting the Ocampa, and Janeway's decision to strand the crew by destroying the array.
• 6.Chakotay's 'no tricorders on a burial ground' moment is shocking. In the episode Emanations, Chakotay invokes his Native American culture to ban tricorder use at an alien burial site while on a Starfleet away mission, which the hosts found absurd and infuriating.
• 7.Emanations is a standout episode about death and the afterlife. Harry Kim gets accidentally beamed into an alien coffin; the civilization believes their transportation process sends them to the afterlife, which turns out to be just an asteroid full of corpses.
• 8.Phage is effective body-horror Star Trek. The Vidiians — a race dying from a plague who harvest organs from other species — steal Neelix's lungs, introducing one of the show's most frightening and tragically complex alien cultures.
• 9.Janeway's moral calculus in Phage is now understandable. Rather than executing the Vidiian who has Neelix's lungs, Janeway chooses cooperation; hosts who once thought this was crazy now see it as the only logical choice given the circumstances.
• 10.Prime Factors is praised as one of the best uses of the premise. Torres, Seska, and others go behind Janeway's back to acquire alien technology that could shorten their journey home — one of the few times the Maquis/Federation tension is genuinely utilized.
• 11.Time and Again is a solid bootstrap-paradox episode. Janeway and Paris are stranded on a planet destroyed by polaric energy; it turns out Voyager's rescue attempt is the very event that caused the explosion — the hosts gave it a smiley face plus.
• 12.The ship should have deteriorated over time. The hosts argue the Voyager should have visibly broken down across seven seasons — mismatched hull panels, failing systems, replaced shuttle parts — instead of always appearing pristine with beauty-pass CGI shots.
• 13.Seska was wasted as a character. Revealed as a Cardassian spy embedded in the Maquis, she departs instead of staying aboard, throwing away what could have been a rich ongoing character dynamic in the crew.
• 14.The Maquis integration collapses too fast. Rather than sustaining conflict between the two crews, the show immediately makes everyone a cooperative Starfleet crew; the hosts suggest it would have been more honest to just write a single Federation crew from the start.
• 15.Strange New Worlds Season 1 finale is mocked as a contrast. The hosts open by noting SNW's season finale involves the ship's systems being infected by Neelix's stinky cheese, using it as a punchline to illustrate how modern Trek makes Voyager look sophisticated by comparison.