Best of Voyager?

W00t!

I am not the biggest Voyager fan. The series never lived up to the potential I thought it had. So my disappointment in it is all on my end as a viewer. That being said I recently watched the premiere episode again and was impressed by how good it was. The intro starts with a text crawl that looks like it came from a 16 bit video game. Its terrible. I don't think it was needed, some other contextual clue would have been better. The intro then drops us right in the action with Maquis being chased by Cardassians and disappearing. This is more action than most episodes get right off the bat. The main function of a premier is to show us the crew, the ship and the setting. Voyager does an excellent job introducing the crew. Disgraced officers, rebels and a mix of new and veteran Starfleet personnel promises for an interesting show. Captain Janeway is fully fleshed out from the get go, they did a great job making her character feel real for the audience. The cameo by Quark is also very well used, setting up a crucial friendship between Paris and Kim. They spend enough time and give us something about all of our main cast here which is a very strong start. The ship doesn't need alot of time and doesn't get it. It can't compare to the Enterprise so they don't try. It's a smart choice. The plot in how they ended up in the situation is where this gets a little thin. I actually think they would have been better served by making the alien more incomprehensible rather than a hologram that babbles. Janeway makes a difficult and understandable choice, but if I was a crewman I would be mightily pissed off. This is a strong start for the series and is the second best premier, after DS9, in my opinion. It was way lower for me prior to this rewatch, so I am somewhat surprised by Voyager here.

Reading all the widely varying opinions on Discovery these last few weeks, I found myself thinking back over the decades to my favorite reviews of earlier Star Trek series. So I thought I'd start a meta-thread on reviews in general. My favorite reviewer of all time is Jamahl Epsicokhan, who runs Jammer's Reviews . I first discovered him around 2000, when Voyager was still on. He got started writing DS9 and Voyager reviews "live", and then continued with Andromeda, BSG, movies, etc., and also went "backward" and reviewed some past things like TNG as time allowed. He's a great writer, extremely thoughtful and I have devoted years of my life to reading just about everything he has written about the shows that I have seen—and a few that I wanted to know what happened but not quite enough to actually continue watching (*cough* Enterprise). The other day I was lamenting that Jammer had gotten too busy, as we all do, to continue his reviewing hobby. I loaded up his website to see what was the last thing he had written, and I was shocked to see that he has actually been reviewing Discovery all along! I had just not noticed because the places he posts new reviews happen to not overlap with the places I look for things. (Nerdy aside: I still use RSS as my main news-I'm-interested-in discovery method. Jammer's Reviews used to be on my RSS list but somehow it must have fallen off. Long live RSS!) What are your favorite review sites?