The shuttle bringing Freeman, Rutherford and Shax to the surface has a profile and colors resembling a Tatooine landspeeder, and the staff handling planetary landings were uniforms resembling Imperial ones and speak in pseudo-British accents.
Also, the background music when that shuttle landed sounded like it came straight from a Star Wars movie.
Voyager is alright. It’s just very uneven. What drags it down is that the producers only very rarely took big swings that had a lasting impact on the characters or the show. Voyager excels at being episodic television. There are a bunch of stinkers (as there are on any TV show) but when it’s good, it’s really good. It has some of the best Trek episodes.
Maybe use an episode guide with ratings (for example Jammer’s Reviews, Ex Astris Scientia or IMDb) and skip the episodes with low ratings.
However what I don’t think is justified is the label as one of the worst Star Trek episodes. Is it nuts? Yes. Is it annoying that they have the technology to bring everyone back to Earth and simply de-lizard them after the trip, and then it’s never brought up again? Also yes.
But it’s nowhere near the worst episodes because it’s neither offending and un-Star Trek (like TNG’s Code of Honor) nor is it boring. It’s actually pretty entertaining for the first 35 or so minutes. It just goes off the rails at the end.
Here is an excerpt from The Fifty Year Mission (book 2) by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross. I highly recommend those books. They are super insightful about the behind-the-scenes stuff from the first 50 years of Star Trek.
I mean, DS9 wasn’t as popular as TNG back then – both in terms of ratings and fan reception. Many considered it the black sheep of the Trek family. Berman focused on Voyager. So it was chrystal clear to every fan with even half a brain that DS9 would never get a movie. Perhaps Voyager had a tiny chance but by the time it concluded its run viewership had been in steady decline, and then Nemesis tanked.
I’m not good with scores so I’ll just explain how I rate Discovery.
Back in the 90s/00s I never understood the hate that some Trek fans had towards a new Trek series. Every time a new series premiered there was a large (or at least very loud) chunk of the fanbase hating on the new series. I liked them all. Some more, some less. But I enjoyed them all for being Star Trek and watched them all countless times. (same goes for LD and SNW)
To put that in perspective:
I still don’t remember the names of all the bridge officers on Discovery.
I only watch Discovery episodes once.
I never felt inclined to rewatch a single episode. It’s not that all of them are bad but there’s just nothing about them that makes me rewatch them. Especially since 90% of them are embedded in season-long story arcs. (same with Picard, although I do plan to rewatch season 1 and 3 at some point)
At first I liked Discovery for trying something new. I’m not one of those fans who wants a new Trek show to do exactly the same thing that other Trek shows have done before. You need to do new things if you want to keep a franchise alive. But when you do season-long story arcs you need a plan. And Discovery didn’t have that. It was quite obvious both in seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 was at least helped by Captain Pike. It’s hard to rate those two seasons because there were so many ups and downs. But in total I’d say the first two season were better than the 3rd and 4th seasons.
Season 3 was a chore to watch. Jumping to the future was like jumping the shark for me. There’s not nearly enough world-building to make that future interesting – and how can there be, when there’s only 13 episodes and all of them are part of a story arc.
Season 4 was okay. I give them credit for doing something big with non-humanoid and really strange aliens. But this story could have been told in the 23rd century with minimal changes. So why again are they in the future?
