Star Trek: Voyager (Spike, Syndicated)

STAR TREK: VOYAGER follows the crew of a starship that's been teleported to the very farthest reaches of the galaxy and is struggling to find its way home, a 70,000-light-year journey that could take decades. This handy plot device means that Voyager's structure can be pretty much identical to its predecessors, but with an almost completely new set of alien guest stars. Many of the ship's crew members perished when the Voyager was zapped across the universe; a renegade ship that the Voyager was pursuing was destroyed shortly afterward. Circumstances force the two groups to team up -- predictably, the "marriage" of the Starfleet crew and the rebels doesn't always go well.

Because the Voyager is stranded out in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) -- the only female captain in the Star Trek franchise -- has to solve any problems that arise on her own, without being able to call for backup. The influence of characters who never attended the rigid Starfleet Academy leads her to make decisions that might never have happened on another starship or on a more traditional mission. In this way, the series harkens back to the original Star Trek's off-the-cuff feeling and can be refreshing.

What Voyager doesn't have is many storylines that serve as metaphors for important social issues, which gave the original series such cultural heft -- though this isn't necessarily a flaw, just a difference. The lost-in-space premise gave Voyager (which originally aired from 1995 to 2001) a compelling narrative arc. It may not be as deep as the original series, but it was ultimately a good addition to the Star Trek universe.