Anonymous says:

Which is worse, Voyager or Enterprise? It's a tough call. Voyager began a really steep slide in quality that ended on Enterprise.

There were a few bright spots on Voyager, a very few episodes that rose to be the best of Trek, like the entertaining "Message In A Bottle", but on the whole there were just too many mediocre run-of-the-mill holodeck malfunctions or "anomaly off the port bow" stories.

Voyager also had what is considered the absolute worst episode in the franchise, "Threshold". Tom Paris breaks the warp 10 barrier, turns into an iguana, kidnaps Janeway, and they have iguana babies. Wrong on so many levels.

The slide continued on into Enterprise. I would agree that the theme music deserves its own recognition as quite possibly the worst theme in TV history. But on to the show itself.

Berman/Bragga decided a clever way to cut costs was to generate all the stories and scripts in-house, rather than solicit scripts from independent writers the way they had for all the previous series. Arguably, the best stories in the previous series had indeed come from those independent sources.

Berman/Bragga soon ran out of new idea (you can argue that they actually started with no new ideas) and the storylines and scripts suffered. They even went as far as using scripts that had been rejected in previous series. They tried to reuse ideas like the Borg or a war like the Dominion War that reinvigorated DS9, but to no avail.

By the end of the third season, the catcalls and hissing had even reached up to the lofty ivory towers that Berman/Bragga lived in, and it was clear that something had to be done. They gave creative control over to Manny Coto, who made a valiant effort to redirect the show back to what viewers wanted to see: the Star Trek universe before the original series.

Too little, too late. The series had already driven away any potential viewers, and got canned.

I don't think it's fair to single out any particular actor in either franchise for abuse. Yes, arguably Scott Bakula was really just playing Scott Bakula, the same guy that he had played in Quantum Leap, but it's hard for even a Shakespearean actor to rise above bad dialog and crappy stories; ask René Auberjonois.

Both Jeri Ryan and Jolene Blalock knew what they were getting into when they strapped themselves into those corsets.

I think I would have to come down on the side of Voyager, just because it did indeed have a few gems amidst the turds (admittedly very few). And that theme song… But isn't this discussion a bit like asking whether runny poop is worse than chunky poop?