Thirty years ago today, 'Star Trek: Voyager' warped onto our screens

The imperfect sci-fi show paved the way for a far better TV series that followed.

Image by Substack AI

If you consume enough popular culture, I’m sure you’ve had this experience:

• You stumble across an old movie or show that you don’t particularly like.

• But you vividly remember where and when you first saw it.

• And it sends you down a major nostalgia trip.

For me, “Star Trek: Voyager” is one of those shows. I know this not because I have any real fondness for “Voyager” — I hadn’t thought about it in years — but because the bullet points above are the exact experience I had when stumbling on the show last week.

Especially once I saw the original airdate of the first episode: January 16, 1995. Thirty years ago today.

If you know “Voyager,” maybe that 30-year anniversary is sparking some feelings for you too. Affection … ambivalence … persistent confusion about the character arc of Neelix.

For those who aren’t familiar, here’s the show’s conceit:

What if a starship called Voyager was abruptly thrown across the galaxy — along with the pirate ship it was locked in combat with? And the two crews faced a 75-year journey just to make it back to the edge of known civilization?

To put it another way: what would happen if at the end of a normal “Star Trek” episode, Captain Kirk or Captain Picard didn’t save the day? And their ship and crew were marooned, with no hope of ever making it back to Earth in their lifetimes?

It was a brilliant concept. It was quickly squandered.

Rather than grim, bleak storytelling about the realities of being isolated in deep space, “Voyager” tended to rely on goofy adventures-of-the-week. The titular vessel, the Federation starship Voyager, was always magically repaired in time for the next episode; the crew restored to good health.¹

And instead of an eight-decade journey home, the Voyager crew discovered a wormhole (or something) and the show tidily ended after seven seasons. I don’t know the details, because I had stopped watching by that point.

Ronald D. Moore, the genius TV writer who contributed to several Star Trek shows but quickly exited “Voyager,” summed up the show’s problems in an old interview:

I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true. VOYAGER is not true. If it were true, the ship would not look spick-and-span every week, after all these battles it goes through. How many times has the bridge been destroyed? How many shuttlecrafts have vanished, and another one just comes out of the oven? That kind of bullshitting the audience I think takes its toll. At some point the audience stops taking it seriously, because they know that this is not really the way this would happen.

(More on Moore in a moment.)

Still, seeing “Voyager” in my streaming TV carousel sent me on my own trip through time. It’s one of the first TV shows — perhaps the first — that I remember anticipating, in part because there was actual, cultural momentum ahead of its debut.

“Voyager” was going to be the flagship show of a new TV network, UPN, at a moment when the launch of another channel was a really big deal. It was going to inherit the legacy of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a popular show that had bonded my group of childhood friends before going off the air in 1994.

Then Jan. 16, 1995 came. Twenty-one million people — 21 million people! — watched the debut episode of “Voyager.”²

I was one of them, sitting at a friend’s house. And I recall being totally underwhelmed. I stuck around as a casual fan, catching some episodes over the next few years, but eventually checked out.

I’m sure there are “Voyager” fans who strongly disagree with my interpretation and adore the show.³ And yes, I did enjoy a few memorable episodes and characters — the holographic doctor played by Robert Picardo, or the redeemed Borg villain played by Jeri Ryan, for instance.

But in my mind, the greatest legacy of “Voyager” was how it radicalized Moore, who took his unrealized vision and created a show that wasn’t afraid to have its characters suffer, struggle and die while trying to keep humanity together on the edge of the galaxy.

That show’s name: “Battlestar Galactica.”

And while “Galactica” had its own problems — namely, a plot that Moore was sometimes cobbling together — it quickly became “one of the most original and provocative programs on television” (per the New York Times), “the best drama currently on television” (per critic Alan Sepinwall) and a show that grappled with 9/11 and America’s war on terror as a kind of allegory.

“Voyager” had no such aspirations, but consuming the old show isn’t without its merits. I’ve put a few episodes on as background noise this week — just something to listen to while washing dishes and picking up after my toddler — and occasionally have found myself sucked into their quest to get back to Earth.

Yeah, “Voyager” can be cheesy and predictable. Yeah, I should probably be trying to watch something more substantive in my limited spare time. But on some level, hearing the characters hash out 30-year-old plot points reminds me of the voyage that we’re all going on, too.

1. With a few notable exceptions. I vaguely remember a few two-part episodes where the ship, its crew or both were briefly imperiled.

2. For context, “Sunday Night Football” averages around 21 million viewers today — making it the reining TV ratings champ. We had a lot less to watch back in 1995, and middling shows like “Voyager” received massive audiences as a result.

3. Next time I see Sen. Cory Booker around the Capitol, I’m going to ask him about his legendary rewatch of “Voyager” and its 172 episodes.