Which is Better: Voyager or Enterprise?
 

Which do you think is the better Star Trek series, Voyager or Enterprise? Now I know both series were both widely maligned by many Trek fans during their respective runs, but despite this I enjoyed both shows and see them as solidly entertaining and highly underrated.

However I slightly prefer Voyager over Enterprise, even though the writing for Enterprise was in some ways superior in comparison to Voyager's writing. I believe Voyager was the better show in that many of it's characters were much stronger than most of the character's found on Enterprise and it had a more solid premise, despite screwing this premise up before it's first season was out. However Voyager had many individual episodes that were just as good as any top episode found in TNG and DS9, although the last two seasons of Enterprise were more coherently written and more consistent than a typical season of Voyager. Anyway this is how I break up the seasons of both shows in terms of overall quality:

Best Seasons:

Voyager: Seasons 1, 4 & 5

Enterprise: Seasons 3 & 4

Average Seasons:

Voyager: Seasons 2, 6 & 7

Enterprise: Season 1

Worst Seasons:

Voyager: Season 3

Enterprise: Season 2

if Ent. had been given a chance to go 7 years, and if it had continued to improve like it did the last season it would have easily surpassed Voy.

I voted Voyager. It was a terribly inconsistent show, but it had enough good episodes to somewhat redeem it. I can't think of any Enterprise episodes that I'd even watch a second time.

I don't like either.

That's like asking which is better, a poke in the eye or a kick in the gut. Both pretty painful. But I'd have to go with Voyager... I hardly remember a single Enterprise episode.

Voyager, I guess, as I seem to recall enjoying more episodes from them than Enterprise.

I hate to say it, but probably <i>Voyager</i>. Had the <i>Enterprise</i> finale not sucked so much ass, I could point to the disgusting "Endgame" as a tie-breaker, but since "These are the Voyages ..." was also a steaming pile of shit, I have to lean to the early episodes of <i>Voyager</i> and the promise they showed. Also, while the scripts were often insulting, the acting on <i>Voyager</i> was typically stronger.

das

ENTERPRISE was miles better than VOYAGER; VOYAGER suffered from questionable casting and a predilection for the threat to the ship of the week stories, with very little of the old Roddenberry philosophy and reflection of the human condition to be found in comparison with every other TREK, ENTERPRISE included. As a die-hard Trekker who's put up with more than many fans have been willing to, VOYAGER was the closest I ever came to being bored with TREK...

I despised them both. Voyager did have Robert Picardo as the hologram to its credit, but one actor/character does not a show make.

I liked them both.
And, I liked Voyager more. 38DD, I mean 7 of 9, was enough for me.

I liked Voyager at first, then lost interest in it. Whereas I had no interest in Enterprise at first, but then started to like it towards the end. If I had to choose, I'd probably say Voyager though.

I'll agree with this.

This is like being asked to choose between the salisbury steak and the breaded veal cutlet at the school cafeteria.

I'm only two thirds of the way through season 2 of ENT at this point, but so far it is leaps and bounds better than Voyager. No Amelia Earhart, no goddamned dinosaurs who built spaceships to escape Earth, and no evolving into giant salamanders. Oh, and the starship Enterprise isn't incapacitated by a piece of cheese like the USS Voyager was.

"Take that cheese to sick bay!" :D

Yeah "Threshold" where some of the crew turn into salamanders is deservedly seen as a turkey, even the universally scorned Trek writer who penned that crap, Brannon Braga, thought it was a stinker.

The one dinosaurs in it was called "Distant Origin" and I actually thought it was a very good Trek episode if you can get past the somewhat silly premise.

Oh and your are in the Second Season, lotsofdvds, widely seen as Enterprise's "worst" season, so if you think Enterprise is great so far then your gonna be blown away by Seasons Three and Four, lotsofdvds.

Both are shows that I would break my longstanding tradition of wanting complete season sets for tv shows, instead opting for "best of" sets. Voyager had a few really bright spots, and the 4th season of ENT (minus the opening and closing eps) was really great. I truly hope Paramount has learned their lesson about how to run Trek, they had great concepts for both shows, but they just didn't understand what made Trek, Trek.

Neither show held my attention.

To me, Voyager was bad Star Trek, whereas Enterprise never seemed like Trek at all to me. As far as Trek shows are concerned, I'd take the bad one over the one which wasn't Trek to begin with.

To continue the food analogy, even bad pizza is still pretty good. I'd eat bad pizza like Little Caesar's over some crappy food I hate, like German food.

Please add an "I'm ambivalent towards both" selection. If Voyager and Enterprise were both drowning people, first I'd get a good cup of coffee and then call someone to rescue them. They both had crummy shows and fairly decent shows, and to me there's no clear winner. Enterprise had some jaw-droppingly great eps, but Voyager had fewer seasons that didn't completely, utterly suck.

I'm discouraged about both of them not living up to their potential. On Voyager, Ron Moore got so discouraged about the ship being rebuilt every week that he had to go make his own show where people scrounge for materials to keep the ship going; Enterprise asked the good questions ("why do the Vulcans act so different?", etc.) far too late.

Oh, and when I read the initial post, my reaction was "I dunno - which is better, a poke in the eye or a kick to the crotch?", but THX7966 beat me to it, darn you.

Last season of Enterprise was very very good, almost great. Never like the season 1-3, garbage. The first 3 seasons were not Star Trek, but the 4th started to feel like what the show should have been from the very beginning. If they would have started the 1st season like the 4th, we would still be watching the show on TV now. It is a shame that they had a great blueprint to make a show tons of ST fans would have loved, but they messed with the history and no one watched.

I enjoyed Voyager tons, seasons 1 and 2 were avg or below, but Season 3 and beyond had me watching every week. They whole crew seemed to grow together and stories were getting better every year. Loved the Borg and the last show.

The 4th season of Enterprise was very good, But that was pretty much a situation where they knew they weren't gonna get any new viewers, so they just started telling stories for the true Trek fans.

I voted Voyager because I am absolutely certain that I could go through a Voyager episode recap and pick out 30 episodes that stand alongside the best of any Trek, be it TOS, TNG, or DS9. I don't think there are 10 episodes of Enterprise about which I would make that claim.

Plus
http://gamera.unas.cz/pix_celebs/jeri_ryan_1.jpg Resistance is Futile, Indeed!!

Neither, last consistently good Trek was DS9.

I won't.
Though Enterprise got better it was still weak and relied too much on original ideas and prequeling them.
I'd say Voyager is the stronger of the too and that's a tough decision because they were both missed opportunities with sub par writing. Voyager's cast was much stronger too.

I saw season one of "Enterprise" and lost interest fast.

I liked seasons 1-3 of Voyager immensely (especially the time-travel to 1996 two-parter "Future's End"), but when season 4 came around, it became a dull chore to watch but stuck with it for the rest of it's run. I grew to hate the Borg real fast.

However, and this is stating the obvious BIG TIME- Tuning in to Voyager every week was made very easy thanks to Jerry Goldsmith's theme. Even though I've had it on CD for years, it always gave me chills to hear it every episode...so beautiful.

I never cared for the reason behind her addition- 'eye candy'....I'm not against Jeri Ryan, but that reason was pathetic to say the least.
She had nothing to do with it obviously- it was UPN. If they had put her in a Starfleet uniform like everyone else, that would have shown an effort to rise above that sort of thing, instead of that stupid leotard.

I just found the whole Borg thing very annoying, and boring. Seven Of Nine was a part of that, only because there was too much emphasis on her and the Borg children, Queen (both of them), and all that came with it.

To put it simply, I resisted till the bitter end.

I don't care about the reason for her addition.

Voyager became a much better show after 7 joined the crew.
She and The Doctor became the most interesting characters on the show, and the episodes that focused on them were the best ones.

DS9 was a series that was out of favor with many core Trek viewers, and they added Worf to the cast because he was a familiar face that would draw the attention of their target audience.

The reason for Worf's addition to DS9 doesn't change the fact that the series improved after his addition, and the two big reasons for Jeri Ryan's casting don't mitigate that VOY was the better for it.

And though you didn't make any positive comments about ENT, Nick Martin, I think it's worth mentioning that ENT is just as reprehensible as VOY when it comes to leotards and eye candy.
http://www.nationmaster.com/wikimir/...x-TPol2003.jpg

And nothing made me reach for my remote faser than that Enterprise song. What were they thinking?

This was a tough decision. I think the finale of Enterprise is still pretty fresh in my mind, so I'll go with Voyager.

so which are you choosing? a poke in your eye or a kick in your gut/crotch?

i picked voyager for me. it was more in line with what TREK should be.

Neither of them were as good as the originals. But I'd say voyager is slightly better because of the holo-graphic doctor and tom paris and his flash gordon type adventures. And voyager was the ones who introduced the borg queen which was later used in first contact.

Enterprise didn't seem remotely like star trek.

Strike that, reverse it. Borg Queen was first introduced in First Contact (1996). She was later watered down in Voyager.

Voyager killed Star Trek

Enterprise just affirmed its death.

Voyager for me

I wouldn't be blunt like that, but you are partially correct. I don't think Voyager or Enterprise really "killed" the Trek franchise per se, but it was more to do with Star Trek slowly losing it's mainstream popularity since the mid 90s after the stunning success of TNG.

I guess the creative process for the Trek franchise started to stagnate as well, plus there was a market saturation with so many Trek spin offs going at the same time.

And say what you like about the much scapegoated Rick Berman, he was not the main person who ran the Trek franchise into ground although he still has alot to answer for. When Voyager had finished it's run, even Rick Berman knew that the Star Trek franchise was in dire straights so he begged the excutives at Paramount to give the Star Trek franchise a rest for a few years before they launched a new Trek series and get their creative process back together. But no, the Paramount vultures were fixated on profit, profit, profit.

The Paramount bosses demanded Rick Berman to make a new Trek show as soon as possible to milk more money out of Star Trek, and I guess that's one of the reasons the Star Trek franchise was burned out. I'm suprised that Enterprise was as successful as it was and how it still ended up a fairly solid Trek series considering the bad circumstances surrounding it.

"Enterprise" was something I ignored completely- I may have watched most of its first season, but I don't even remember any of it.

As for 'Voyager", well I have the opposite point of view here- Seven Of Nine came on and I didn't like the show anymore, and while she herself was sort of interesting, all that focus on her made me hate all things Borg, and turned the Doctor into a lovesick, opera-singing shell of his former self...he was so much more interesting as a cold jerk than a disgustingly sweet softy.

I'm just stunned (no pun intended) at the amount of people saying VOYAGER had a better cast. Garrett Wang is the single most painful actor (and I use the word lightly) we've had to suffer with in TREK's history (and TREK's chief virtue has always been the likeability of its characters), and Robert Beltran isn't far behind. In ENTERPRISE's favor, Connor Trinneer is the best actor of any TREK since Rene Auberjonois (well, to be fair, Robert Picardo did rock). He was a delight, and I'm crushed I'll never be able to see him perform as Tucker ever again (to say nothing of the despicable fate his character suffered at the hands of Berman/Braga). None of the other ENTERPRISE actors were poor actors; if any complaints can be hurled at them, it's that some of their characters were underwritten, but VOYAGER actually had bad actors.

One aspect of the show that caused me to ignore it completely.

This is one of the things that Voyager and Enterprise had going against it but the powers that be thought it was a good thing. Putting a babe in a tight suit to get viewers in. Trek is not about this and they sold their audience short. Trekkers tune in to see good storytelling not chicks in silver mylar.
I'll agree with this. I stayed with Voyager throughout the 7 seasons even though it was pretty bad at times. I did this because I was a dedicated Trek fan. When Enterprise did the same things, well, fool me once...

Garret Wang and Robert Beltran were certainly weak links, although Beltran started off OK but then began to "phone in" his performances in later seasons.
But Voyager still had a strong cast what with Kate Mulgrew, Robert Picardo, Tim Russ, Robert Duncan McNeill. Roxann Dawson, Jeri Ryan and even Ethan Phillips (although Neelix was an annoying pr*ck).

I thought the Enterprise cast was solid and underrated as well, and though they were not a bad cast per se, they were let down by the character writing, even in the much better later seasons.

And Nick Martin, although the Borg were dumbed down in later seasons, I still felt that Season Four and Five were the best seasons of Voyager. Sure Seasons One and Two were alot stronger on hindsight, but Season Three was a very weak season which was why the writers made the big changes they did in the Fourth Season.

And the EMH Doctor did change, at least Robert Picardo was still as entertaining as ever and his Doctor character actually went through real character development. The common complaint about Voyager was that it lacked character development.

During an episode of Voyager that involved finding your "Spirit Guide", I actually thought to myself that Star Trek was dead. I didn't watch the show again till the finale.

This is really DS9's fault ;-P DS9 was a departure from the previous two shows. It involved a fixed base and a nearby world. I think if it had been more successful, the franchise would have been allowed more room to be creative. Voyager and Enterprise are unimaginative and poorly executed rehashing of the original theme. I am not that fond of TnG either, but it had its moments. DS9 is my second favorite ST (ToS is first).

Voyager may not have killed Star Trek for everyone, but it sure did for me.