Patron-exclusive bonus: This Week in Retro (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Jeremy here, announcing a new weekly feature that will be exclusive to patrons who pledge at the $5+ tier: Diamond Feit's "This Week in Retro" column. This is a little bonus in addition to the exclusive Friday bonus podcasts that should be running every Saturday, or thereabouts. 

The idea is pretty simple: Each week, Diamond will look back at a notable game-related anniversary that fell in the preceding week and contemplate its significance (both its holistic and its personal importance). To start, here's a tribute to the 25th (25th!?) anniversary of Star Trek: Voyager...

January 16, 1995:
Star Trek Voyager Launches, Promptly Gets Lost

By Diamond Feit

With the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation still fresh in the minds of fans and the adventures of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ongoing, Paramount launches Star Trek: Voyager as the flagship program of its own television channel, the United Paramount Network. The premise of the show: The eponymous vessel has become lost on the other side of the galaxy, and its return to Earth will encompass a decades-long journey without backup. Voyager makes headlines as the first Star Trek series led by a female captain (Kate Mulgrew as Kathryn Janeway), making it a rare science-fiction show that routinely passes the Bechdel Test—especially after a mid-series cast shakeup adds a female Borg (Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine) who is often at odds with her captain and the rest of the crew.

Voyager would be the only UPN show to survive the first year of the network and would go on to run for seven seasons (just as TNG and DS9 did), although Voyager never quite reaches the highs of either of its peers. My personal favorites include "Scorpion" (Seven of Nine’s debut), "Year of Hell," "Living Witness," "Course: Oblivion," and "Blink of an Eye." The lows, however, are very low. "Threshold" is a frequent contender on "worst Trek episode ever" lists, although I'm of the opinion that "Spirit Folk" is one of the dumbest episodes of television I've ever sat through.

While Star Trek and video games have gone hand-in-hand for decades, most adaptations have focused on managing a starship. Star Trek: Voyager would spawn three games, all of them first-person shooters (including a rail shooter arcade cabinet). Ironically, the concept of Starfleet-as-military was not a major theme in Voyager the way it had been in Deep Space Nine or would turn out to be in Enterprise.

Critics, both at the time and after the fact, would lament Voyager's lack of follow-through on the premise of a stranded crew fighting to survive on their own. Longtime Trek writer Ronald D. Moore famously disliked Voyager for that reason, left the show, and would revisit the concept in the 2003 reboot of Battlestar Galactica, which he wrote and developed.

For fans though, Voyager is pure comfort food: Not necessarily good for you, but it feels good to consume it, and when it ends, you miss it. Star Trek: Voyager begins as a show about very different people learning to coexist on a ship heading for home. By the finale, Voyager has become their home, and the feeling I experience each time I watch the (admittedly shaky) last episode is one that can only be described as homesickness—Voyager being the last Star Trek show of the ’90s, the last series fueled by a feeling of pure optimism that the people of Earth have put their worst behaviors in the past and are bound for better things. I miss the characters just as much as I miss that feeling.

(By the way, did you know that friend of Retronauts Zack Handlen is writing weekly essays about each and every episode of Star Trek: Voyager? Check them out on his patreon!)