Posted 2015-09-20
Nine months ago I got myself the entire series of Star Trek Voyager on DVD. Today, I watched the series finale. Usually those suck, but this one was pretty good! It did provide some closure but not at the cost of being an entertaining episode in its own right with plenty of action.
However, I must say that at several episodes a week the weaknesses in Star Trek in general and Voyager in particular became very apparent: a lot of talk, stories tend to be repetitive and are too self-contained. I would love to have seen Voyager with today's long-arch approach to TV. But the biggest issue is that the technology is magic: it's all way too advanced to be based on any real science. So basically anything goes, which makes for uninteresting stories.
I used to think the first couple of seasons were weak and the middle seasons (when the Borg show up) were much stronger. But this time around, the early seasons seemed stronger and the middle ones not really better. The last few seasons still have some good stuff, but there's nothing big in them to look forward to so at some point I started to look forward to the end.
So out the the old, in with the new: I got all ten seasons of Stargate SG1 on DVD, ripped the DVDs and imported everything into iTunes. SG1 is much more grounded in current-day reality, and the notion of traveling between worlds without ships is ingenious. So I'm looking forward to seeing that show again. I believe the first two and the last two seasons are weaker here, but I'll find out soon enough.