Ronald D. Moore is wrong, Star Trek: Voyager was just starting after the pilot

Star Trek: Voyager will forever remain an interesting show that still to this day gets an unfair shake. The show essentially became the new version of the Original Series; flying through space, meeting new aliens, building a whole new universe, and exploring conflicts both real and sci-fi based along the way.

Yet, the original concept saw the crews of the U.S.S. Voyager and a Maquis ship forced to join forces to survive the Delta Quadrant. Despite exploring this concept over the first few seasons, and creating some of the best episodes the series had, many believe that the show didn't explore it enough. Former Star Trek writer Ronald D. Moore is among those, to the point that he thinks the series "died" after the pilot.

Moore was quoted as saying as such in the book, "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years" (via Screenrant) by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, and it's clear that Moore didn't watch the show.

"When the Maquis put on those Starfleet uniforms at the end of the pilot, the show was dead. That was the biggest mistake, because they went through this whole thing to bring on their enemies. We made up the Maquis on DS9 just so that they could appear on Voyager. Here are Starfleet officers who had become terrorist resistance fighters, guerrilla warriors. The Federation has got them on the run and both of these groups are thrown in a ship on another side of the galaxy and forced to live together. You’d think that’s the setup for a major show about conflict, but at the end of the pilot they all put on the Starfleet uniforms and that’s it. It was a huge mistake. It should have been these two sides that were forced to work together that still don’t like each other and still are gunning for each other, wondering who’s going to come out on top. Who’s going to betray who? It should have been gold, but they got scared. Unfortunately, the fact that DS9 didn’t do as well as Next Gen scared them and they didn’t want another dark show that wasn’t as successful. They wanted a show that was more like Next Generation and easier to swallow and where people didn’t have to think as much. So they drew all the wrong lessons and said, “Let’s play it safe.”

Had Moore actually watched the show, he would know that's exactly what the show featured. It wasn't the core of the show as Moore and others had hoped, but distrust between the two crews resonated for several seasons. There were episodes where they explored a Maquis mutiny, tensions between the group, and having to train members of the Maquis to better fit Starfleet guidelines, not to mention the entire Seska arc.

Voyager gets slept on a lot, by a lot of people, but for Moore to not even realize that the things he wanted to see in the show happen, really highlights how misjudged Voyager has been over the years.