Star Trek: Voyager 1-01: Caretaker, Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the second and final part of my review of Caretaker. If you want to jump back 70,000 light years and read the first part, CLICK HERE.

I should probably put some trivia here to fill up the space. Uh... Star Trek: Voyager started in January, so that's kind of unusual. Trek series usually like to start around September.

Deep Space Nine was already 12 episodes deep into its third season at the point that Caretaker aired, but after Past Tense the series took a two week break so that Voyager could be the only new Trek on television for a fortnight. They really wanted as many eyes on this as possible, and it seems like they got around 12.4 million viewers in the US on that first airing. It's a bit of a step down from Emissary's 17.7 million, but it's still a really good number, not much lower than what the Original Series (13.1m), Next Gen (13.9m), and Enterprise (12.5m) got on their debut... possibly. To be honest I calculated these figures myself from numbers I found on the internet and I don't trust any of them.

SPOILER WARNING: Caretaker probably isn't the only episode that's going to be spoiled here, as I'm considering everything from TOS's The Man Trap to DS9's Past Tense to be fair game.

Star Trek: Voyager 1-01: Caretaker, Part 1

Episode:

1

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Writer:

Michael Piller & Jeri Taylor

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Director:

Winrich Kolbe

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Air Date:

16-Jan-1995

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the 343rd story in the Star Trek franchise, Caretaker! It also the first story of Star Trek: Voyager, the fourth live-action Trek series and the successor to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The episode gives a 'story by' credit to Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor, who were also the show's three creators. Each of them apparently had an equal amount of input and control, so the series had three captains at this point. Berman had succeeded Gene Roddenberry as the executive producer of the entire franchise, and had worked with Piller to create Deep Space Nine. Piller had been the saviour of Next Gen, coming in as the new head writer during season 3 to fix it, and had been running DS9 for the last two and a half seasons. Taylor had also been a Next Gen showrunner, as she'd taken over from Piller for its final (disappointing) season. So they were definitely the three most obvious candidates to create a Trek series at this point.

With Next Gen over it made sense to make this another Trek show about a Starfleet crew flying around on a starship, but the three creators made things difficult for themselves by choosing to isolate it from almost everything established during the earlier shows. They couldn't fall back on the classic iconic villains, like the Romulans, Ferengi, and evil admirals. Plus their premise of a ship on long journey meant they had to give viewers something new every week. They also had to deliver an action-packed tale of survival in deep space, without being too bleak and dark for the studio. And they had a network looking over their shoulders now, as the series was airing on UPN, unlike Next Gen and DS9 which had been made for syndication. The potential was there for something great though.

Caretaker was filmed as a feature-length story, not a two-parter, but I'll be tackling it in two parts for the sake of my sanity. I'm going to be recapping and screencapping the whole story in addition to my commentary, so there's a lot here for me to cover. There's also going to be HUGE SPOILERS... but only up to January 16th 1995. I might spoil a episode like Where No One Has Gone Before or The First Duty, but I'll never say the words "Spore drive".