Trek fans go cold turkey (syndication notwithstanding) until UPN launches the fifth Trek series, "Enterprise," this fall. In the finale's flashback scenes, the previously cold Seven (Give her a break - she's half machine!) satisfyingly cozies up to a crew member. (Points given: The Borg are the best Trek villains since the Klingons.) Seven, the first authentic Trek bombshell since Uhura, is a human who had been captured by Janeway's longtime nemesis, the Borg, a hivelike race of drones who "assimilate" everything they encounter into "the collective," grafting mechanical parts onto organic beings. The show's most bewitching cast member was Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan).
In the finale, Tuvok - a Spock-like officer - becomes a scribbling madman, and we don't really care. Nevertheless, the finale succeeds in holding our interest.Īll in all, "Voyager" was a nice recovery from the static "DS9." Its main problem was that it offered up so few memorable characters. Suffice it to say, it hauls out the Trek trope of time travel, which is usually made to seem about as routine as ambling over to the office vending machine. Janeway hatches a plan to rectify matters that will not be spoiled here. (Say, come to think of it, where is Seven of Nine at that 10-year reunion?) Also, she is haunted by the unspecified but darkly hinted-at cost to her crew. She is deeply troubled that it took her 23 years to get Voyager home. In the "Voyager" finale, Janeway is at her most righteously grim. None since Kirk has seemed to appreciate this. Which brings us to Janeway, who emphasized the underlying problem all along: Piloting a big warp-drive starship around the galaxy should be fun, at least some of the time. "DS9's" critical flaw: It was set on a space station. "Star Trek: Deep Space 9" (1992-99) was a spinoff of "NextGen," as Trekkers call it, set in the same time period as "Voyager." "DS9" was the franchise's slightest effort, with a joyless Avery Brooks as a perpetually peeved Capt. Jean-Luc Picard was by acclaim the best actor of the lot, but as a starship captain he was - and let us say this delicately - a weenie. In the sequel, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (1987-94), Patrick Stewart's Capt. Kirk gallivanted lustfully around the cosmos in the original NBC series, which ran from 1966 to 1969. Let's face it: The "Star Trek" captains have been in steady decline since William Shatner's James T. Since then, I couldn't watch "Voyager" without expecting (and, I suppose, hoping) to hear Mulgrew tell some hostile alien: "You. "Star Trek," ultimately, is a game of Who's Your Captain? and, for years, I couldn't put my finger on what it was about Mulgrew that bothered me until a month ago, when a certain new game show debuted on television. Since Voyager's return, she's been promoted to admiral and her hair has gone stage-white. She is "Trek's" first female starship captain. In fact, the crew's return is a given: The two-hour episode opens with a 10-year reunion of their homecoming, after being lost in space for 23 years.Ĭenter of the show is Voyager's captain, Kathryn Janeway, played by Kate Mulgrew, with her usual monotone graveness and spoilsport seriousness. Tonight at 8 on Channel 20 in the series finale (and this is not a spoiler - if you watch "Voyager," you probably surf the Net and if you surf the Net, you know what's next), Voyager makes it back to Earth. Thus the show's "Gilligan's Island" motif was established: Each week, the space castaways tried to get back to Earth. In the first episode, the 24th-century starship Voyager tangled with a freak plasma storm that sent it tumbling into the Delta Quadrant, a sector of space so far from Earth it would take the crew 75 years to return. The most recent effort, "Star Trek: Voyager," is the fourth television series and, in January 1995, launched Paramount's UPN television network as its cornerstone program. Watching "Star Trek" these days is like showing up to see Meadowlark Lemon and instead getting a bunch of NBA tryout-camp washouts.
Over the years, "Star Trek" has become the Harlem Globetrotters of television and film: It exists solely as a brand name with none of the original members.
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