"We're alone in an uncharted part of the galaxy. We've already made some friends here.and some enemies. We have no idea of the dangers we are going to face, but one thing is clear - both crews are going to have to work together if we're to survive." - Kate Mulgrew as Captain Kathryn Janeway
Star Trek: Voyager: Season One DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
On January 16, 1995, Star Trek: Voyager, the fourth live action television series in the venerable Star Trek franchise, premiered on the fledgling UPN network. Set in 2377, the show follows Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) as she leads the crew of the Voyager on a journey home. While pursuing Maquis rebels in the first episode, both the Maquis ship, captained by Chakotay (Robert Beltran), and the Voyager are thrust 75,000 light years from home by a mysterious entity known as the Caretaker. Stranded so far away from familiar territory that it would take seventy-five years to get home, the two groups form an uneasy alliance when the Marquis ship is destroyed in battle with the vicious Kazon warrior race.
Since her newest crew members were once enemies, Janeway extends an olive branch by appointing Chakotay First Officer. Other Maquis recruits include fiery half-Klingon B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Biggs-Dawson) and the mysterious Seska (Martha Hackett). Voyager's crew also includes Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill), a traitorous former prisoner who is commission by Janeway after their accident, Vulcan Security Chief Tuvok (Tim Russ), and rookie Ensign Harry Kim (Garrett Wang). Also along for the ride are enthusiastically helpful tour guide Neelix (Ethan Phillips) and his girlfriend Kes (Jennifer Lien), an Ocampan rescued by the crew while investigating the Caretaker. China Beach's Robert Picardo rounds out the cast as the ship's doctor, a holographic computer program activated when Voyager's human doctor is killed during the accident. The crew must learn to work together in order to find a way back home.
Voyager's biggest flaw is that it seems derivative. Even with a female captain and a far-flung locale, the series suffers from a lack of innovation. The plotlines, like in "Parallax," where Voyager encounters a mirror-image of itself, sometimes feel awfully familiar. Voyager also recycles from itself - Ensign Kim is captured by aliens and must be rescued by the crew in almost one quarter of the episodes in this short season. (Admittedly, other crew members get in trouble, too, but one expects Kim to be tied up on a railroad track by Snidely Whiplash at any minute. The crew could probably find its way home much sooner if they just allowed Kim to stay with one of his alien captors.) There is no denying that the Star Trek franchise is an enjoyable one, even in a fourth generation copy, but this sameness only serves to point out how Star Trek's creators too often rely on techno-babble and pseudoscientific gobbledygook rather then trying to find more interesting stories to tell.
The series also lacks a sense of urgency with regard to the crew finding its way home. Voyager's crew knows that another Caretaker exists and that it would be capable of sending them back home, yet for the most part they seem content to explore new worlds in the same lackadaisical way that the crews from previous series did. While the show would quickly grow redundant if it totally centered on the crew's attempts to get home, it should at least seem as if the crew has some sort of plan.
This lack of urgency carries over into the characters, as well. Both Torres and Paris are too easily assimilated into the crew. Torres' half-Klingon temper is too quickly tamed when she is named Chief Engineer. Cocky criminal Paris also becomes downright cuddly once he is given more responsibilities. The result is a noticeable lack of shading and complexity. Even the interesting complications that could arise from the synthesis of the Marquis and Federation crews are generally not faced head-on until "Learning Curve," the final episode of the season, and even then the focus is on four newly introduced Marquis crewmen.
None of the above-mentioned flaws totally sink Voyager. All of the elements do click into place in some of the episodes. "Eye of the Needle," for example, is especially strong. In it, the crew discovers a dying wormhole that may lead home. While the ship is too big to enter, they figure out a way to communicate through the hole. They are excited to discover that Romulan scientist Telek R'Mor (Vaughn Armstrong) is on the other side, and they set about trying to convince the guarded scientist to help them. As they race against the clock to earn the Romulan's trust, the urgency is, for once, palpable. Thanks to several emotionally charged plot twists, this episode is surprisingly affective.
The fifteen episodes that comprise season one are divided onto four discs. A fifth disc contains all supplemental materials. The discs are housed in neon orange translucent plastic compartments, the kind that are normally affixed to cardboard to form digipaks. In this case, there is no cardboard. Instead, the plastic holders are attached book-style via a clear strip of tape along the left hand side that functions as the binding. The clear compartments reflect back upon themselves, giving the illusion of great depth. This "book," in turn, is housed in a two-piece clear plastic slipcase. The front of the slipcase is decorated by a picture of Voyager while the back lists the original airdates, episode numbers, episode names, and stardates of the episodes found on each disc. This packaging is simple yet elegant, and manages to be simultaneously low-tech and futuristic.
This restrained sophistication carries over into the DVD menus. These menus transform the TV screen into a computer monitor, dividing the screen into four windows, one for each episode on the disc. Each quarter of the screen features a portrait of Voyager from various angles. The computer theme continues on the individual episode menus. From there, viewers can "Launch" the episode, change the "Communications" settings (audio and captioning), or access the "Chapter Log" (each regular episode is divided into eight chapters, while the double-length "Caretaker" also doubles its chapters).
