Oh yes! On July 1st, all the Star Trek series went watch instantly at Netflix.
I haven't watched Voyager since it aired, and I haven't seen anything except the first season of Enterprise... Because, holy shit, are these shows bad sci-fi.
But... What the fuck! I'll sacrifice myself for the sake of entertainment. So we're starting with Voyager.
Voyager was an attempt to bring back in the ship-based fandom of Star Trek who were all suitably horrified by the strange and terrible trainwreck that was DS9. It attempted to blend the best of both worlds -- the glitzy, perfect life of TNG with the gritty death spiral of the Federation hinted at later in TNG and very much the theme of DS9.
The new Intrepid Class Voyager is a comparatively tiny ship sent to police a minor uprising that was set up late in TNG and in DS9 -- a Cardassian/Federation no man's land where unincorporated colonies are abandoned by both forces in a sort of de facto neutral zone arrangement. The colonists have formed a militia force called the Maquis (named for the French rural guerrillas in WWII) who seem to have no truly specific goals except some poorly-written angst. They've stepped up their protest into a shooting war, so the Voyager is sent.
Locked in combat with a Maquis ship, the ship and the Voyager get sucked into a wormhole by an advanced alien and find themselves in the far-flung Delta Quadrant, 70 years from Earth at maximum warp.
Janeway blows up the array that brought them there and the Voyager, with a fractious crew of Maquis and Starfleet folks, are forced to head back to Earth on the slow road through uncharted territory.
The idea -- an attempt to reclaim the wonder and magic of TOS. The Voyager is out there alone. No rules, no Starfleet, no way out. Throw in a dynamically diverse crew -- a black Vulcan, a female captain, an indian first officer, etc. -- and you have a show intended to reboot the franchise.
The result is an abysmal failure. This is clear from the pilot,
Caretaker, which is a cross-over episode with DS9. The pilot starts off with a bang, then devolves into 70 minutes of talky nonsense introducing the flat and impersonal crew and the new tech of the ship (they opted to go for a pseudo-living ship approach, bizarrely, though it only comes up two or three times after the pilot). Overall, the approach is talky, political TNG stuff, even though the obvious goal is swashbuckling TOS stuff. It's a wild, insane mess.
Background: Berman hated Voyager. The series was, very much, a child of the studios. Paramount launched their new network with this show, believe it or not. They wanted a flagship, jewel in the crown show.
As a testament to how much Berman sucks, he and his crew infamously bragged that they spent "at least two weeks" planning out Voyager, as if that was the most thought they'd spared for the show since they took over the franchise in the 80's.
Also famously, the pilot was star-crossed from the beginning. Initially rejected by Paramount, they had to go back and rebuild all of the uber-expensive sets to reshoot most of it. Ultimately, the pilot cost $23 million in 1994 dollars. That's more than Star Trek II cost to film.
