USA Today’s Robert Bianco pretty much sums up my feelings about tonight’s Star Trek: Voyager series finale,
As we bid farewell to the crew of the Starship Voyager, we ask ourselves one tiny question.
Who are these people?
Bianco manages to give the series ender a generous 2 and a half stars out of 4, but while I’m reading his review the two words that have become the destroyer of everything relating to Star Trek practically scream from the pages of the newspaper: time travel.
Although its probably the best single episode ever from a science fiction show, you have to wonder if the world might not be a better place if Harlan Ellison had never written “City on the Edge of Forever” and thus emboldened lousy writers through four (soon to be five) series to plug in lousy time travel plots when they ran out of ideas.
The time travel motif is so ingrained in Star Trek that the choice of Scott Bakula — a man whose only claim to fame is playing a time traveling scientist — to play the lead in the next series (on the other hand, if even a single Star Trek time travel episode since “City” had been half as inventive as some of the Quantum Leap episodes were, this wouldn’t be an issue. Maybe they should keep Bakula, fire Rick Berman and add Quantum Leap producer Donald Bellisario).
I couldn’t agree more with Bianco’s final assessment of Voyager’s 7-year run.
Imagine that: a plot twist [time travel] on this last Star Trek series that doesn’t work as well as it did on the first. Voyager may not be memorable, but at least it’s consistent.