Star Trek: Voyager' at 30: why it was the right show at the wrong time

Jan 17, 2025
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How can an article about Voyager not mention Seven-of-Nine?
The show was dying and then Gene Roddenbury called from Star Trek heaven and said " Great show, now where is my hot girl to keep me coming back?"
After that, they cast Jeri Ryan in a catsuit, and the show's ratings soared.
 
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Jan 17, 2025
1
0
10
How can an article about Voyager not mention Seven-of-Nine?
The show was dying and then Gene Roddenbury called from Star Trek heaven and said " Great show, now where is my hot girl to keep me coming back?"
After that, they cast Jeri Ryan in a catsuit, and the show's ratings soared.
The Doctor deserves a mention too.

The ratings soared for a few months with Seven - year to year increases, which is a big deal. Then they were back to normal. She surely provided a sustained boost to ratings retention they otherwise wouldn’t have had - definitely gave them constant publicity fodder and good critical notices. But by season 5 Voyager was no longer UPN’s number one show and that’s more to do with erosion than it is the popularity of wrestling.
 
Sep 6, 2023
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Well, you know the joke about Janeway... they hand the keys to the starship to a woman, and the first thing she does is make a wrong turn and gets them lost in the Delta Quadrant.

I second the Doctor deserving a mention, along with Kes. I could have done without Neelix, or Paris, really. And I was no fan when Seven of Nine came along.

The best episode was the two-parter where they time travel back to Earth circa the 1990's and get wrapped up with Sarah Silverman (an astronomer at Griffith's Observatory who spots the starship in orbit) and Ed Begley, Jr. -- "Futures End" (Season 3).

There were quite a few other memorable episodes, and Species 8472 deserves mention as being other than your usual bad guys.
 
Feb 17, 2023
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Actually the show was way ahead of it's time because one of the creators was also its show runner, Jeri Taylor.

But this caused the one big story issue with the writing. Too many of the plots were about how only women could solve the issues and the men were only contributors, exactly a flip-flop of prior Trek.

This made it unattractive to a key demographic, young men. But it attracted women, daughters and grand-daughters, who would gather around the TV together like the next episode of Bold and the Beautiful. And why wouldn't they? It showed women in roles of authority, leadership, technical knowledge, and in blended families.

But the ratings were terrible, 18-34 men weren't watching. Out with Jeri Taylor, in with Michael Piller. Out with the weaker female role, in with a knockout female role.

It worked, the male 18-34 demographic came back and the show reversed its trajectory. The episode plot depth got deeper and richer and yes, it embraced the "tropes", which seems to be a popular term now in reviewing anything Star Trek.

I knew Voyager had made an impact in the Trek fabric when Janeway had a brief cameo with Picard in a TNG movie and the audience cheered and clapped.

Pillers use of the Nine character directly led to the creation of T'pol in Enterprise by Brandon Braga.

Jeri Ryan will always be associated with her role as Nine, just as Bill Shatner will always be Kirk.
 

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