Thoughts: The concept for Voyager is a good one, on paper. At this point, there have been four Star Trek shows which have all taken place primarily in the Alpha Quadrant. (Yes, Deep Space Nine included the Gamma Quadrant, too.) We've dealt with the Klingons and the Romulans and maybe we're running out of story ideas for them... so let's strand a ship in the Delta Quadrant, a part of the galaxy we've never explored, so we can dream up new species and new stories to go along with them! Great! Then, one of the first species we meet is the Kazon, a sort of barbarous, warrior race with forehead ridges... or, basically, "Delta Quadrant Klingons." Ugh, what's the point of coming up with new species if you're just going to use the old ones but paint them a different color?

Indeed the show delivered on (some) new(-ish) species and new stories, and it did have that sort of familiar TNG-feel to it, but with a noticeable uptick in action over conversation. I very much enjoyed the show when it first aired in 1995, but over the years I have come to notice some of its flaws and shortcomings.

As series premieres go, this one certainly sets up some interesting threads, but the show really doesn't follow-through on many of them. The entire premiere is more of a prologue to the series, merely setting up the story of how they ended up in the Delta Quadrant. By the third episode, it's "business as usual" with a weekly story, often disconnected from any other story. Concepts introduced in this premiere, like the Caretaker and the strife among a mixed Starfleet-Maquis crew, are only occasionally revisited.

Thoughts: Paris is conscripted to be a field medic because he took two semesters of biochemistry at the academy. Wow, I'd hate to be a patient subjected to his tender mercies. There's over a hundred people on the ship, is there really no one better suited to train as a field medic? Janeway took all of 3 seconds to make that decision.

Janeway and Torres saying “WARP PARTICLES!” in unison is hilarious. What even are warp particles?! This is the only – and I mean ONLY – episode in the entire Star Trek franchise that mentions them. Ha, this episode is just silly, and it's also sort of the last time for a while that we'll deal with the consequences of merging the Starfleet and Maquis crews.

Thoughts: Janeway says she wants to make the crewmen feel like "part of the team," so Tuvok proceeds to put them through basic training and treat them like raw cadets. When they object, Chakotay punches one of them in the face and says he'll keep punching him in the face until he does what he's told, damn it! I'm sorry, WHAT? The episode proceeds to try and make it seem like Tuvok learned as much from the crewmen as they learned from him, but it does a poor job of that.