The first (two) season(s) suuuuuuuucked, even when compared to first season Next Gen, which got pretty bad at times itself. To be fair, Voyager never quite reached the depths that TOS could reach when it was at its absolute worst, but it still got pretty bad sometimes (*cough*Phage (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Phage_%28episode%29)*hack*Threshold (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Threshold_%28episode%29)*sputter*). I can't emphasize enough just how much I hated the Vidiians. The Kazon weren't quite as bad (they were just cut-rate Klingons with even worse hair, for the most part), but they were in a lot more episodes than the Vidiians, so it kind of evened out. But, fortunately, they're both pretty much gone after season 2, which is, not coincidentally, when the show as a whole started to pick up, in general.
It takes a bit to get used to the switch between Kes and Seven of Nine at the beginning of season 4, and I think I still preferred Kes over Seven overall, but Seven got a lot less annoying over the four seasons she was there. I still kind of wish they'd dropped Harry Kim instead of Kes, like the rumors say they were originally planning to do, up until Garrett Wang got on People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" list in 1997. Heck, I'd have preferred that they'd dropped Neelix and kept Kes, though I do have to admit that Neelix kind of grew on me over those seven seasons. Even Chakotay is higher on my personal list of who they should have dropped over Kes, especially given that Robert Beltran apparently hated the show (http://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/n6gg0/robert_beltran_says_he_hates_star_trek_says_star/) and wanted to leave. Another rumor has it that Beltran asked for a huge amount of money in the later seasons, explicitly trying to get fired because he disliked the show so much, but they just gave him the money instead. >_>; That said, to his credit, I never really got the impression while watching him that he was just phoning it in, though. Given all the rumors about him and how he supposedly was backstage, I was explicitly looking for signs of it. He seemed to still take it seriously up to the end, at least what he was given to work with, which admittedly didn't seem to be all that much. And he does have a point in that there were a lot of times, even more so than in previous Trek, where the cookie cutter technobabble dialog could have been swapped between characters and it wouldn't have made a difference. He did get a lot of that, as did the others. (I was also looking for "Chakotay saves the ship by being Native American" episodes that some people warned me about, but while there were a few eps that focused on his heritage, there were never really any eps that relied on Native American hoodoo or whatever to save the ship. ...well, okay, there was at least one (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Cathexis_%28episode%29) that came kind of close to that.) Not to say that he was the most exquisite of actors, mind you. Honestly, though, I don't know how much of any of those rumors are true, and I don't know how much of what he's said over the years was him being serious or just taking the piss.
Anyway... >_>;
The show kind of gets a bit more action-y around the time that Seven showed up as well, which could be good or bad depending upon whether they went too overboard with it, which they did sometimes. That said, some of my favorite episodes were actually the obvious "bottle shows (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BottleEpisode)" that only dealt with, like, crew personal issues and such, and didn't have some alien attacking or whatever. Most of these, what few there were, came in the later season eps.
And to compare to Deep Space Nine, Voyager never really had the huge multiple episode arcs that DS9 did. They'd have a few two-parters here and there, usually as season finales, and they tended to do a better job of remembering continuity and referring back to previous episodes than TNG and TOS did, but there weren't any giant 6- or 10-parters like they had in the final seasons of DS9, which again is a YMMV thing.
no subject
It takes a bit to get used to the switch between Kes and Seven of Nine at the beginning of season 4, and I think I still preferred Kes over Seven overall, but Seven got a lot less annoying over the four seasons she was there. I still kind of wish they'd dropped Harry Kim instead of Kes, like the rumors say they were originally planning to do, up until Garrett Wang got on People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" list in 1997. Heck, I'd have preferred that they'd dropped Neelix and kept Kes, though I do have to admit that Neelix kind of grew on me over those seven seasons. Even Chakotay is higher on my personal list of who they should have dropped over Kes, especially given that Robert Beltran apparently hated the show (http://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/n6gg0/robert_beltran_says_he_hates_star_trek_says_star/) and wanted to leave. Another rumor has it that Beltran asked for a huge amount of money in the later seasons, explicitly trying to get fired because he disliked the show so much, but they just gave him the money instead. >_>; That said, to his credit, I never really got the impression while watching him that he was just phoning it in, though. Given all the rumors about him and how he supposedly was backstage, I was explicitly looking for signs of it. He seemed to still take it seriously up to the end, at least what he was given to work with, which admittedly didn't seem to be all that much. And he does have a point in that there were a lot of times, even more so than in previous Trek, where the cookie cutter technobabble dialog could have been swapped between characters and it wouldn't have made a difference. He did get a lot of that, as did the others. (I was also looking for "Chakotay saves the ship by being Native American" episodes that some people warned me about, but while there were a few eps that focused on his heritage, there were never really any eps that relied on Native American hoodoo or whatever to save the ship. ...well, okay, there was at least one (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Cathexis_%28episode%29) that came kind of close to that.) Not to say that he was the most exquisite of actors, mind you. Honestly, though, I don't know how much of any of those rumors are true, and I don't know how much of what he's said over the years was him being serious or just taking the piss.
Anyway... >_>;
The show kind of gets a bit more action-y around the time that Seven showed up as well, which could be good or bad depending upon whether they went too overboard with it, which they did sometimes. That said, some of my favorite episodes were actually the obvious "bottle shows (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BottleEpisode)" that only dealt with, like, crew personal issues and such, and didn't have some alien attacking or whatever. Most of these, what few there were, came in the later season eps.
And to compare to Deep Space Nine, Voyager never really had the huge multiple episode arcs that DS9 did. They'd have a few two-parters here and there, usually as season finales, and they tended to do a better job of remembering continuity and referring back to previous episodes than TNG and TOS did, but there weren't any giant 6- or 10-parters like they had in the final seasons of DS9, which again is a YMMV thing.