Originally Posted by Trollheart

Jansz, it's not just that it was mostly standalone episodes that make it the soap opera of Star Trek, it's the overinterest in people's relationships in favour of proper sci-fi storylines. They spent more time worrying about how Seven would relate to the Doctor (two of the only good characters in the show imo and both wasted, again imo) than how paper-thin the plots in what they laughingly termed "stories" were, how they could be resolved and how they might have an effect on future storylines.

I mean, at one stage they lost Harry Kim in some accident. Huge cheers went up, but then they popped into some alternate universe and half-inched their Harry! Boo! Also very lazy and sloppy story-telling. The idea of all the Maquis just toeing the Starfleet line cos Janeway said so was laughable: the Maquis had no love for Starfleet (seeing as how they were always being hunted down by them, on behalf of a race who became one of both's biggest enemies, the Cardassians), not to mention the fact that Voyager's original mission had been to capture the leaders of the Maquis (Chakotay/Torres) with Tuvok a spy in their midst. They should have torn the ship apart, treated it as a basic prison ship from which they were never likely to escape! All this should have been explored, at least over a few episodes, with tensions arising as maybe some Maquis tried to take over Voyager. But no, it was all resolved in the very first episode. Pathetic.

I could go on. I may, if you're unlucky, but I'm just pointing out that the episodic nature of Voyager wasn't the only reason it was seen as a soap in space. And if DS9 was a soap, it was the biggest, baddest, most un-PC soap in the history of soaps!