To the Journey: Looking Back at Star Trek: Voyager

Scott Hardie: “It ruled.”

It's yet another Star Trek documentary that I crowdfunded. Do I have a problem?

Voyager never lived up to its potential for a bunch of reasons, including the studio kneecapping it by forcing it to be a light adventure series instead of the heavy post-apocalyptic drama that it was engineered to be. This retrospective documentary is honest about many of the show's biggest flaws, from weak writing to the personal problems of the cast to the wave of sexism greeting mid-series addition Jeri Ryan that flew in the face of the show's feminist origins. No official Paramount documentary would be this blunt that yeah, Voyager could be really bad sometimes.

The film is best, however, when it praises the best thing about the show: Its legacy of female empowerment, especially in STEM fields. There's a good montage of women who say that they never would have begun their accomplished careers in science and engineering if they hadn't grown up watching Kathryn Janeway explore the cosmos, and you can't help but feel as moved as the obviously affected Kate Mulgrew while watching it.

In the end, the movie is meandering and inessential, but that's par for the course in Star Trek documentaries. (Why so much screen time was given over to a parabolic flight with Garrett Wang, I do not know.) I guess I'm getting old, because the Trek fandom of my younger years was tilted heavily toward the Kirk-era 60s show and its follow-ups, and now most of the nostalgia seems focused on the Picard-Sisko-Janeway-Archer era of the late 80s to early 2000s. Fine by me.

− October 7, 2026 • more by Scott • log in or register to reply