Here are the top 10 episodes of Voyager, based on IMDB user ratings but rearranged in chronological order, as I’ve done with other series. However, you may want to start with the pilot (“Caretaker”) for its introduction of the premise and characters, even though it is ranked #73 of 172 episodes (rating 7.4).

EpisodeIMDB RatingRankSeasonEpisode
Scorpion8.9#2326
Scorpion, Part II8.8#341
Year of Hell8.7#748
Year of Hell, Part II8.6#1049
Message in a Bottle8.7#6414
Living Witness8.7#5423
Drone8.6#952
Timeless8.7#456
Blink of an Eye9#1612
Endgame8.6#8724

I’ve seen every episode of every Star Trek series except Voyager. I watched Voyager when it originally aired but with many small children at home missed quite a few episodes. At some point, UPN reran it late every weeknight, and I caught up while giving a bottle to our youngest, then watched the final season in full as it aired.

When I recently told a friend I was going to stream Voyager to finally make sure I’d seen every episode, he advised me to skip the first three seasons:

Average Rating of Each EpisodeAverage Rank of Each EpisodeNumber of Top 10 Episodes
Season 17.08#1000
Season 27.10#940
Season 37.21#901
Season 47.56#675
Season 57.44#712
Season 67.29#841
Season 77.48#691

In fact, only the last episode of the third season, part of a two-parter, makes it into the Top 10. But I struggled through the first three seasons anyway, as a completionist. Weirdly, episodes 3, 4, and 7 of season 1 are all time travel related. Other early episodes are repetitive as well.

Sadly, the series didn’t fully embrace its premise: Voyager has been transported over 70,000 light years away, to the Delta Quadrant, the other side of the galaxy, and has to find its way home. There’s little about actually trying to find resources to survive, other than the creation of the galley, in marked contrast to early episodes of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, for instance (more on this in a bit).

Part of this was in reaction to how Deep Space Nine was regarded within Paramount. While now considered one of Star Trek’s best series, its serialization was ahead of its time. As a result, Voyager’s showrunners were pushed to do an episodic approach for the first three years. The two-parter “Year of Hell” was originally envisioned as a seasons-long story arc, then a four-episode story arc, before being reduced to two episodes. Given how well these two episodes are ranked (#7 and #10 in the top 10), and how well the ongoing story arc of season 4 was received, the fans seemed to have a bigger appetite for serialization than the studio.

Another way the show abandoned it’s premise—the show is constantly looking for connections to the Alpha Quadrant, in incredibly unlikely ways, as this quote from the Memory Alpha article about the episode “Friendship One” makes clear:

This is the thirteenth time the crew of Voyager discover a direct connection between the Alpha Quadrant and Delta Quadrant, having previously discovered a wormhole connecting the two quadrants (“Eye of the Needle“), descendants of Human abductees (“The 37’s“), descendants of aliens who have visited Earth (“Tattoo“), a Cardassian weapon (“Dreadnought“), Ferengi (“False Profits“), former Borg that were assimilated in the Alpha Quadrant (“Unity“), descendants of Earth dinosaurs (“Distant Origin“), a communications network that extends to the Alpha Quadrant (“Message in a Bottle“), and another Federation starship (“Equinox“), another former Borg that was assimilated in the Alpha Quadrant (“Survival Instinct“), a long-lost Earth spaceship (“One Small Step“), and Klingons (“Prophecy“). In this episode, they discover another long-lost Earth spaceship. 

Fortunately, some of the flaws in how Voyager addressed its premise inspired Ron Moore to create his reboot of Battlestar Galactica. So without the bad episodes of Voyager, we might not have gotten BSG.

In any event, you can skip the bad episodes and get a great overview of the series by watching the top 10 episodes.

Photo Credit: CBS