The series, released 25 years ago, was going to break free of the confines of 'Next Generation,' but it didn't fully deliver on its premise.

Star Trek: Voyager is a noble misfire. Twenty-five years ago today, Voyager aired its two-hour pilot, “Caretaker.” It gave us Captain Janeway and her crew — stranded 75,000 light-years from home in the uncharted Delta Quadrant — and made TV history by being the first Star Trek series to have a female captain (this was a centerpiece of the series’ marketing launch on then-new network UPN). The series would spend seven seasons (the first two very bumpy) trying to get Janeway and a diverse group of Starfleet personnel and former officers known as the Maquis back to Earth. How does a starship survive this far away from all the comforts it, and the fans, are used to? There are no starbases at which to refuel or make repairs. Space is full of unpredictable alien races with hidden agendas and no motivation to help a lost ship. Also, the cybernetic villains known as the Borg are out here — which raises the stakes for Voyager even more. The promise of all that rich, uncharted drama and big emotional stakes, sadly, went mostly unfulfilled. Fans were promised that when Voyager would get into a battle, the damage would have lingering consequences. Instead, things were usually back to normal by the time the next episode aired. At the end of the pilot, not one member of the crew protests when Janeway essentially says the ship will make pit stops and explore this sector of space on their way home. I’ll believe Klingons and food replicators are real before I’ll ever believe an entire crew almost eight decades from home would be fine sightseeing the scariest parts of space as they try to get back to their families.

It was business-as-usual, mission-of-the-week storytelling. Again. Ironically, for a show designed to be free of all that confined its more successful predecessor, Star Trek: The Next Generation, the farther Voyager wanted to venture out on its own, the more it seemed to gravitate toward playing it safe. Voyager seems like a show ahead of its time, given its conceit being perfect for serialized storytelling. Had it come out now, it likely would have found an execution more worthy of its premise than it did then. So why didn’t it reach its full potential? Blame the often hermetically sealed, “don’t-color-outside-the-lines” feeling of '90s Trek under executive producer Rick Berman. Had Voyager fully been allowed to venture outside that very specific and confining box, it could have achieved true greatness — on par with former Trek writer Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot — instead of often being a show filed under “Next Generation lite.” In fact, Voyager is somewhat responsible for Moore’s BSG.