He looks a little like a Pakled:

https://youtu.be/KeFoGo3N_4g

I think this might be the shittiest audio quality I have ever heard on a youtube video.

I love Trek, but I've never understood people who defend Voyager. Can we get into this argument on the internet?

I can't watch voyager, I've tried a few times. It says a lot when the doctor and Tom Paris are the most interesting characters.

I liked the Barclay episode, because Barclay is cool, and there are a few others that are pretty good, but otherwise blech!

Voyager, to me, is just a never-ending fountain of missed opportunities. Watching them set up a cool idea and then blow it, time after time, is actually worse than watching a show that has no interesting ideas to begin with. I don't think there's anything inherently worse about Neelix or Harry Kim than Tasha Yar or Nog, but the Voyager characters were just never redeemed by having anything worthwhile to do. Which is a shame.

I didn't like Voyager either, but the two part episodes were a cut above and I can still rewatch them with new people. Scorpion I and II were weak, but Year of Hell is some of my favorite Star Trek, and I'm a TOS Nazi (on an alien world creating a new order don't tell Starfleet). The two parter with the other Federation vessel is iffy Trek, but good space drama. Basically, the writers seemed to only care about character development for the two part ones, and that development seldom survived back into the series proper (Year of Hell literally erases itself, which is a real shame, the show should have went on from there unreset). No episode of Voyager ever hits the In the Pale Moonlight, Best of Both Worlds, Spock's Brain, In A Mirror Darkly level of top tier Star Trek.

Also, I enjoy Star Trek even when I think it's bad, so don't think I didn't watch all of Voyager, TNG, DS9. It's fun to be a picky ubernerd about it, but at the end of the day it's still Star Trek, so hell yeah. I cherish my memories of Seven of Nine versus Satan's Robot. No one can take those from me.

Oh, and you want holodeck failure episodes (there should be a box set at this point), no holodeck fails harder than on the Hirogen. Utter holodeck catastrophe.

Yeah, your immediate caveat about Year of Hell, "they should have gone on from there unreset," is pretty much what I'm talking about. It's not that they had no good ideas--they had lots--but even their best episodes don't quite follow through in a satisfying way. There's always a big "if only...". On the other hand, I wouldn't know how to make The Visitor or City on the Edge of Forever more satisfying, story-wise.

But yeah, I do have fond memories of watching it as a kid. My brother and I got really excited when Scott Thompson (of The Kids in the Hall) showed up as an alien who spent the whole episode drunk. And actually, Voyager has one of my favourite moments in all of Trek. The episode starts off with the ship flying through an area of total nothingness: no little stars shooting past, no planets to beam to, no nothing. They've been in it for months and, strangely, it's wearing on everybody's nerves. The captain's isn't showing up for meetings, the staff doesn't give a shit about movie night, they're getting into argument. They're not relieved at all; they're all wound-up. Then we go to the bridge, which is usually a humming cortex of activity, but it's deserted. The only one there is Harry "Ineptitude" Kim, and he's got his feet up on the captain's chair, and he's toodling away on his clarinet. On the bridge of a starship! I really love that moment, for one thing because it's a unique image in Trek. But also, it's like: what if, after surviving disaster after disaster, this is what finally kills them? Sheer boredom. These are A-type people who get high on crazy-ass emergencies, and if you take away those emergencies they don't know how to chill. You could have fights break out over municipal-council-level politics, you could have old rivalries emerge, all this great stuff that could happen once you revoke Trek's mandate to boldly go look at weird shit and nearly die every week. And no other Trek show had done it before, because no other show's premise would force a spaceship to fly through a boring part of space for months on end. But then, just as this great premise is sinking in, some aliens attack the ship or something, and it's all !red alert! !rotate those shields! !modulate the frequency harmonics or we're all gonna die!

When did Seven of Nine fight Satan? I might have tuned out by then. Didn't she fight The Rock, too? I seem to remember Picard debating Satan to death, once.

Satan's Robot!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI7bv7jw8ew

My favorite Voyager character was Lon Suder, the crazy murderer guy.

Had to look the character up, but that's Brad Dourif! I once watched a whole season of Deadwood just for that guy's grizzled country doctor. I should check out the crazy murder Voyager episode, too.

I don't know if they should have used Year of Hell to set up the rest of the series -- things got a wee bit too shitty for Voyager there -- but in basic concept I agree with you. Voyager should have been a show where the ship does take damage that isn't magically repaired, crewmembers die, the command structure isn't so brainlessly Starfleet, and it's necessary to bend the Prime Directive just a little on occasions. Basically, take advantage of the conditions that initially set "Voyager" apart from "Star Trek".

It could have been a very interesting show, where as Voyager worked its way back to the Alpha Quadrant, it changed the Delta Quadrant, fostering alliances and swapping technology. We even had a taste of that in a two-parter called ... "The Void", maybe? ... where Voyager and some other local ships were stuck in an inescapable part of space. Not only did Voyager have to collaborate and decide which partners they could trust, they even radically changed the fortunes of a scavenger species living there, who had intelligence but no organs for speech (whom Voyager equipped with keypads capable of making noises, which let them rapidly devise a "spoken" language).

I mean, we've talked about this in other comment threads, but when Ronald D. Moore joined the show, that what he wanted to do it with it. Voyager would have a set amount of supplies, and Federation ideals would be tested against desperation and the instinct to survive. He ranted about how they could also seem to "pop a new shuttle out of the oven" whenever they lost one.

But, he got in arguments with the writing staff and they laid him off after a few eps (where he then went on to do the war arc in DS9). The basic idea he had for Voyager would eventually become the Battlestar Galactica remake, so, I guess we got the Star Trek show he wanted eventually.

He probably watched Angry Nintendo Nerd too, whose shtick is a lot like this and not much better, but is weirdly popular in nerd circles.