Star Trek: Voyager/YMMV


 * Alas, Poor Villain: Seska's last act before dying is to try and crawl towards her baby. If that doesn't get you (it is Seska after all), it still might be hard not to get a little heartstring-tugged as Cullah falls to his knees, cradling her body and the baby, eyes squeezing closed as he whispers a heartbroken "Oh, no..."
 * Alien Scrappy: Neelix
 * The Kazon. They're so pathetic that the Borg didn't want to "infect" itself by assimilating them. From the getgo they're presented as Exclusively Evil Too Dumb to Live space pirates.
 * Alternate Character Interpretation:
 * Is Janeway really a tyrannical, Trigger Happy Omnicidal Maniac who abuses her crew as she carves a swath of destruction and ruination through the Delta Quadrant? Or just suffering from manic-depression? According to Kate Mulgrew when asked during an autograph signing, she said her Word of God belief was that Janeway was in fact at best Bipolar or at worst, suffered some kind of mental instability.
 * One episode, "Night", has the crew suffering from a severe drop in morale, thanks in large part to Janeway having locked herself in her quarters, with the lights off, for two months and refusing to communicate with anyone but Chakotay. She's the very picture of mental health!
 * It didn't help that the character was written poorly, making the mood swings unintentional at best.
 * Chakotay is revealed in "Shattered" to have a hidden supply of Cider in one of the cargo bays for the last 7 years. No wonder he comes across as being wooden, spouts nonsensical mysticism at the strangest times, has questionable command abilities, and for the life of him can't land a shuttle without crashing it into something! Its entirely plausible that he's been secretly tapping the Admiral for the entire trip.
 * Chakotay's not the only one who might have been intoxicated. Kes constantly sees visions that no one else can see, and speaks in an oddly calm, half-there tone of voice. Kes has a little garden where she grows exotic plants. Coincidence?
 * One interpretation of Harry Kim is that he's a severely repressed homosexual who deliberately seeks unattainable women in order to vastly overcompensate for his unrequited love for Tom. This would explain a lot.
 * Actor Allusion: Considering Garrett Wang is gay himself, it achieves a bit of Hilarious in Hindsight.
 * Broken Base: The cast was actually split almost down the middle over whether Endgame was a suitably epic finale to the series or a rushed clutter of loose end tying-up.
 * Canon Sue: Janeway has received more than a few accusations of being a Mary Sue for the show's co-creator, Jeri Taylor, mostly because the episodes written by Taylor always seemed to spend their time fawning over what a wonderful and virtuous person Janeway was, even in the face of the utterly crazy decisions she often made.
 * Critical Research Failure: Lots of them; SF Debris loves to point them out.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Certainly had one of the best Star Trek themes, if not the best. So good, in fact, that it won an Emmy. It has been said that Voyager's opening theme is the music to what the show should have been.
 * Complete Monster: The Monster Clown in "The Thaw."
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: The Doctor. Not only is he considered by many fans to be their favorite character, but there's an argument to be made for him being the most prominent example in franchise history, eclipsing even Spock or Data. Nearly every single episode that is generally agreed to be "good" or better features The Doctor prominently. It does help that Robert Picardo enjoyed his character and working on the show a good deal more than any of the other major cast members, and that The Doctor was easily the most consistently-written character.
 * Family-Unfriendly Aesop: "Mortal Coil" gives us the message that there is no afterlife, you won't see your dead loved ones again and that the only way to find any meaning in all of existence is in others. The fact that the scenes used to hammer this in consist of Naomi's adorable antics make it even worse.
 * Bryan Fuller's disillusionment with Catholicism was the catalyst for The Cessation of Existence message in "Mortal Coil," according to Memory Alpha.
 * Add the fact that this episode originally aired one week before Christmas on to that.
 * Given that the episode takes place during a Talaxian holiday celebrating family and kinship, the air date was probably intentional.
 * Fan Dumb: A more objective viewing of the series shows that the amount of Neelix hate is rather undeserved. The character can be slightly annoying, but he was far from useless, several times saving the ship in less contrived ways than Wesley ever did, and he did have sincere diplomatic chops (salvaging an outing with a race after Janeway got herself into serious trouble with an ambassadorial faux pas), and even his most consistent negative trait (his bad food) was eventually revealed to be not his fault but rather a biological difference that the Starfleet crew never considered. It seems that the initial negative reaction to his character simply snowballed and everyone decided that despising him was part of being a "proper" Star Trek fan.
 * "Janeway got her ship lost!" No, she didn't, and it's really stupid to say she did. Her ship was pulled into the Delta Quadrant by an outside force that she was powerless to do anything against, and the only one to blame for it was the Caretaker. Oddly enough, the exact same thing happened to Chakotay and his ship full of Maquis, and yet no one ever blames Chakotay for getting the Maquis "lost" in the Delta Quadrant, adding a little bit of extra dumb to this meme.
 * Fan Nickname: "Captain Hepburn" for Janeway, due to the fact that she's basically a Katharine Hepburn look-a-like. Kate Mulgrew even starred in a play about Hepburn.
 * "HMS Reset Button" for either the ship or the entire series. Depending on how snarky you feel.
 * Also "Gilligan's Starship" or "USS Minnow" for the number of times they nearly made it home...
 * Also 'The Bun of Steel' (Janeway's original hairdo), plus her Gooey Look and Glare of Death. Chakotay is often called 'Woodentop' (or variations thereof) due to his acting skills. Seven of Nine's nicknames tend to focus on her... attributes.
 * "38-of-D".
 * "Six of Nine"
 * Neelix has one too. But it's not really repeatable in polite company... (HINT: It has to do with how useful his mind is, and what his head looks like...)
 * SF Debris prefers to call him "Hedgehog," or "S**thead."
 * Fan-Preferred Couple: Janeway and Chakotay.
 * Seven and the Doctor is vastly more popular than Seven and Chakotay.
 * Seven and the Captain is also vastly preferred over Seven and Chakotay. For that matter, you can probably find more fans of almost any pairing than that one, even Tuvok/Neelix.
 * Fanon: Of a metatextual sort. It seems generally known and accepted that all of the actors on Voyager hated the series, hated their characters, and disliked their entire stint on Star Trek. However, their commentary and interviews tell a different story... they were actually quite enthusiastic about episodes featuring their characters most of the time, and probably got a lot more input on their characters' actions and storyarcs than almost anyone previously in the franchise. (Tim Russ, particularly, was responsible for much of the Vulcan backstory and cultural concepts that Voyager introduced.) There were certainly issues (among other things, Jeri Ryan was literally sick for almost her entire first season on the show, with a mild illness that just dragged on due to exhaustion), and they don't seem to have been as close as the cast of Next Generation were, but the idea that the Voyager cast was miserable and angry for seven years is essentially taking a small handful of comments and blowing them up to ridiculous proportions.
 * Good Troi Episode: "Timeless", "Fair Trade". also literally, in that the episodes in which Voyager makes contact with Starfleet, Marina Sirtis reprises her role as Deanna Troi and plays a bigger, more important role than she ever did in the Next Generation series or its movies.
 * Holy Shit Quotient: While "Coda" had some definite problems, the scene where  is downright chilling. Also, the scene shortly thereafter where Chakotay tries and fails to bring Janeway back with CPR; this doubles as a Tear Jerker.
 * Internet Backdraft: If anyone asks, you like (or dislike) Kes and Seven equally. Because otherwise a horde of fans will tear you limb from limb.
 * Moral Event Horizon: Captain Janeway herself very nearly leaps over the Moral Event Horizon in "Equinox". The supposed bad guy, Ransom, is sympathetic by comparison. He only wanted to get his crew home.
 * Ransom, however, was killing self-aware beings and using their corpses as fuel. He ran over the moral event horizon long ago.
 * Also Tuvix, where Janeway splits the eponymous being back into Tuvok and Neelix, against his express wishes.
 * Express wishes nothing: he actually went from person to person begging to not be murdered in cold blood by the crew he had dedicated himself to serving since the moment of his birth, and whats worse, aside from the Doctor, no-one even seemed to care.
 * Nearly an unintentional one in Time and Again. Janeway knew that a civilization was less than a day away from accidentally wiping itself (and everything else on the planet) out because of an energy source it was using. She outright refused to warn them, citing the Prime Directive . The only thing that prevented her from being partially responsible for the deaths of every living thing on the planet was some luck with a phaser.
 * This isn't quite fair, as it leaves out that Janeway thought that either the destruction was the natural result of the society doing something to itself, in which case the Prime Directive does and should apply, or could potentially be the result of something the crew did in which case they should really avoid interfering any further and try to fix their current interference. Once she realizes that their presence and then not doing anything was going to be the cause of the destruction, she takes deliberate action with the phaser to stop it.
 * One episode that, in typical Voyager fashion sweeps this nicely under the rug, is that in The Omega Directive. The alien race has enough of the Omega molecule to render Warp travel useless in most of the Galaxy and Janeway is under direct orders to neutralise the threat of this molecule by any means necessary. The crew destroys their current supply and the episode ends with this seemingly resolved. We don't know if they ever tried to contact them to warn them, nor do we know if they will even listen and continue creating more . The only way Janeway could permanently end the threat their actions pose would literally involve her destroying the entire civilisation.
 * Paranoia Fuel: The possibility that the "loved ones" you see during an NDE are actually beings who want to devour your soul. As if this weren't horrible enough, it could also mean that many religions are essentially massive farming operations, as people conditioned to unquestioningly trust certain religious figures would be likely to follow them into the light without a second thought.
 * Ron the Death Eater: While both the series and the characters are quite flawed, Voyager's memetic status as the worst show of the franchise causes people to vilify actions characters take that are entirely consistent with previous aspects of the franchise, or writing that's also generally in line with previous episodes.
 * Special Effects Failure: While this example by no means detracts from the beauty of it. Word of God states that in the last shot of the opening sequence (done in CGI), the three (incredibly tiny, almost window-like) grey patches on the bottom of the Voyager's nose before it jumps into warp were actually missing texture spaces. This is the shot in question
 * The macroviruses. They're fairly terrible, especially whenever they have to try and interact with one of the crew like Janeway. Granted, this was really Trek's first outing with portraying an interactive non-humanoid alien with CG (other than Odo when he was transitioning between forms), so it's understandable they weren't going to be amazing right out of the gate. It seems they learned their lesson, and generally kept their next attempt at such (the Undine) at a bit more of a distance from the live actors.
 * In general, Voyager suffered from a lower budget than any Trek series than the last season of TOS or the early seasons of TNG, at least up until around the time they did some of the Borg episodes. It led to a lot of corner-cutting and cheaper effects in the early seasons, so the fact that there's not worse and more effects failure is almost praiseworthy.
 * Straw Man Has a Point: Shortly before she defects to the Kazon in the first season, Seska delivers a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Janeway. While the episode tries to make her out as being a raving lunatic, it's hard not to agree with some (if not all) of Seska's criticisms.
 * Of course, Janeway later made a lot of changes to avoid the behaviors Seska mentions... which of course the "fans" began immediately tearing her apart for.
 * Stoic Woobie: Seven. As good as she is at keeping her emotions in check, you know when she starts getting just slightly teary-eyed or starts acting even somewhat angry, she's really feeling it.
 * They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: According to some of Voyager's production staff (including the late Michael Piller), Voyager was a victim of Executive Meddling. UPN execs wanted TNG-type ratings, and they decided the best way to achieve that was to turn Voyager into TNG-Lite. Hence little or no character conflict, no ongoing story arcs (for example, producer Brannon Braga wanted a year-long "Year of Hell" but UPN vetoed it), and various other flaws (real and imagined) the series had.
 * A good example of how Voyager is TNG-lite? The production codes for the first few series started at 801.
 * Kes and Neelix had a breakup during season 3 that didn't really get so much as lip service after it started in "Warlord" (3x10); it just ended somewhere between two episodes (3x17 and 3x18). Ethan Phillips (Neelix's actor) found this a frustrating point (after all, the relationship featured prominently since the first episode)--and to make matters worse, they actually filmed a scene for "Fair Trade" (3x13) that decisively gave it finality, but it got deleted from the final cut.
 * The production issues even showed themselves in the episodes, with Mulgrew struggling to figure out Janeway's character, Beltran's actor revolt against the role and Garrett Wang getting direction to be constantly expressing Dull Surprise, amongst other problems.
 * Too Cool to Live: One, from "Drone". A Borg drone comprised of technology from a few centuries in the future, and whose humanity had nurtured since his "birth". Unfortunately, that advanced technology also quickly made him a priority target for the Borg,
 * Villain Decay:
 * The Borg once destroyed a fleet of thirty-nine ships, but on this series, one lone starship kept escaping their grasp. While the decay arguably began with the introduction of the Borg Queen, the Collective were still an almighty force to reckon with. The decay really set in with their appearances here. Obviously, if the Collective assimilated Voyager, there wouldn't be a series. They had to keep losing, but they were also serious ratings grabbers following the strong box-office of First Contact. So they showed up a lot... and promptly lost a lot.
 * Species 8472. Introduced in "Scorpion," they were Scary Dogmatic Aliens from another galaxy with the technology to take on the Borg Collective and win. Turns out the Borg picked that fight, but there was serious concern that Species 8472 would take the fight to the rest of the galaxy after finishing them off. Decay came in their final appearance: "In the Flesh," where they were more humanized and appeared to make peace with humanity.
 * Though 8472 (aka the Undine) do show up again in Star Trek Online, and have been un-decayed back into serious threats. Their ability to be anyone they want, use psychic influence on others, and the fact that they're Borg-level threats in space have been returned, to the fact that it really can take a small fleet of ships to take out a single Undine cruiser. (Of course, you fight them quite a bit just on your own later, but that's after you've become a suitably Badass combat monster who's got a high-level ship that can take out small fleets of lesser vessels itself.)
 * Q turned from a frivolous yet dangerous omniscient being who nevertheless delivered some important lessons to Captain Picard, to a lovesick puppy who goes to Captain Janeway for advice on parental relationships and conflict resolution in the Q Continuum. In fairness, Q's portrayal was almost always Depending on the Writer - varying from villain to jokester and anything in-between.
 * Unfortunate Implications: On the fandom side, there's the fact that fans of both genders and very different viewpoints refuse to view Seven of Nine as anything more than Ms. Fanservice. The fact that Jeri Ryan is a talented actress or that the character had some interesting development and good episodes in spite of her fanservice factor is generally ignored by everyone.
 * One episode has a species that is a persecuted minority with museums featuring the story of the attempted genocide perpetrated against them, and how that museum is hated and opposed by people that deny the holocaust (or at least it was their fault). Turns out their story of a holocaust really was phony, plus they were the aggressors. ... Um...
 * Unpleasable Fanbase: Voyager tried to have the Black and Grey Morality of Deep Space 9 along with the more episodic space exploration and adventure of The Next Generation. Unfortunately, rather than pleasing the divided segments of the fanbase that liked these things, it just wound up pissing them off because both hated the other thing more.
 * Visual Effects of Awesome: The title sequence.
 * The series generally has some amazing set pieces, and the Undine are pretty impressive for TV CG of the time period, especially considering that it was one of the first times Trek had really dared have a lot of interaction with an utterly nonhumanoid threat that wasn't a bug or a pool of goo or a floating energy ball.
 * What Could Have Been: Originally, many of the show's creative staff wanted the "Year of Hell" episodes to last, well, a year. It would have been an entire season-long storyarc of Voyager routinely getting the crap kicked out of it and being taken about as low as it could go. The studio balked. Whether this is a case of "What a shame" or "Dodged a bullet" will never be known, as it could easily have gone either way.
 * There was originally talk of having Seven stay fully Borg for her entire run on the show. Brennan Braga disagreed with this idea, saying that it would be more difficult for the audience to empathize with her but, more importantly, it would be absolute hell on Jeri Ryan. Ron Moore, perhaps channeling Alfred Hitchcock's opinion that actors should be treated like cattle, was fully in favor of keeping the full borg suit (which weighed thirty pounds and took multiple hours to apply) for Seven's entire run on the show.
 * The Woobie: Tom, Harry
 * Seven.