I thought Voyager improved considerably toward the end of the third season and especially in the 4th-6th seasons. There was about half a season in the 6th or 7th season that just sucked, but I thought the end run was great, besides the finale. It didn't hold a candle to DS9 and couldn't come close to competing wiht Stargate or B5, but it was better than most scifi TV.

I didn't see much in Enterprise that was political except one episode about a mind-melding disease intended to remind people of the stigma of AIDS, the endorsement of pre-emptive self-defense inherent in the Xindi arc, and then what seemed to be a few anti-Bush jabs from the new writers in one arc this year that turned out really to be very different in the context that the Romulans were behind the whole thing. Most of the questioned they raised, even in those episodes, weren't directly related to any political scenario in the real world but rather just raised complex questions in the way B5 did.

Their biggest hope to increase their viewership was to move from Wednesday night, so that part of the decision was correct. Unfortunately they picked wrongly, choosing the night of the week that Sci-Fi channel had already decided was going to be "original series" night. 1 Star Trek vs. 2 Star Gates and 1 Andromeda was a losing proposition; and then along comes Battlestar Gallactica. The writing was on the wall; there would be no audience. 'Tis a pity!

I think the thing that killed Enterprise is when they started inserting political ideology into it. They got away with making TNG a socialist propaganda machine, but the demographics have changed.

I think for the most part Rick Berman and Brandon Braga have done a commendable job. My kids and I were 4 of that 2.5 million that watched Friday's episode. I'll be sad to see it go.

But right from the start of Voyager they lost a lot of people with that voice.

DS9 seems to get an awful lot of praise, but I mostly couldn't stand it. Booooring. To "trek" one does not stay in one place.

Enterprise had captured closest to the flavor of the original series, gained adventure that DS9 lacked IMHO, lost some of the mushy political correctness/socialist/bureaucratic edge of Next Generation, and finally gotten excellent this season with the advent of some better writers and the stories we though we were watching for about the pre-Federation days and how the Federation came to be.

DARN

Oh well, there's now another reason to start watching the Battlestar Galactica series - besides the fact it's really good.