I get it: Voyager was about Voyager’s voyage and there’s a strong case to be made that it ended exactly when it should have.
But on the other hand, every time I watch “Endgame” it strikes me how incredibly abrupt the actual ending feels. Do you think the show should have spent some time depicting the crew’s experiences of arriving home?
If you’re open to slightly less canon sources, there was a Voyager novel “Homecoming”, which pretty much covers this scenario. It’s generally positively received. Might help “scratch that itch” a bit?
I just finished my rewatch of Voyager and re-read both Homecoming and The Farther Shore, so I can weigh in here.
Respectfully, both books were traaaash. The author, Christie Golden, got almost all of the characterizations wrong - none of the characters sounded or behaved like the people I’d spent 7 seasons watching. The plot is beyond stupid, the main villain is laughably one-dimensional, her motivation was super thin and the motivations of her cronies were totally absent, our heroes are pretty dumb (like, really dumb), B’Elanna is off on some totally unrelated (and pretty pointless) quest, and the novels were full of typos, inconsistencies, and just generally careless writing. It very much read like a teenager’s underdeveloped fanfic. And it’s one story told over two books - the first ends in a pretty predictable cliffhanger, meaning that you have to buy both books if you actually want to read a complete story.
Seriously, if you want a laugh, go check out the one-star reviews on Amazon or GoodReads.
I don’t remember it being that bad… but on the other hand, everything you’ve written above sounds familiar, and probably true.
I definitely remember being annoyed about a few things, but overall still had a “actually, I’m glad I read that” by the end.
It probably helped that there was at least 10-15 years between when I last saw Voyager, and when I picked up a cheap copy of the book.
Not positively received. Actually quite the opposite.
I bought it in hardcover, then bailed on the entire Christie Golden Voyager series on the sequel.
A horrible return with heartbreaking situations for just about every beloved character.
I don’t truly blame tie-in writer Golden, or even Peter David who got tagged with responsibility for the most egregious plot and character point in the Relaunch universe version of the Voyager follow-up.
Paramount itself clearly had but dire restrictions on positives for the returning crew that only came off when Kirsten Beyer was allowed to undo the damage in her Voyager Full Circle series when she took the helm from Golden.