S2 E01: The 37's

Okay, to start off with, the title of the show is grammatically incorrect. If your show is called diaries of teenage angst or whatever, you can do whatever you want with your titles, but if you are Trek, get it right. Then you would have done one right thing with this episode.

Voyager detects trace amounts of rust and gas in space. Turns out there's a '36 Ford floating around in space in the Delta quadrant. Just floating there. Of course Tom knows everything about it - I'm okay with the conceit that there's always a member of the crew who is obsessed with something from 20th century Earth. They have a sickeningly cutesy scene where they fire it up in the cargo bay, and then hear an SOS on the car's radio. They follow the signal, and find a planet where there are humans in cryostasis underground. And one of them is Amelia Erheart (who Janeway is an expert on, of course). Some alien race had been abducting humans across the galaxy and storing them in stasis for use in slave labor - which we find out from the human civilization (undetected until now) on the planet, who had overthrown their captors years ago. They are goofy, have vast and amazing cities that we never see, and go from antagonistic to obsequious at the drop of a hat.

Janeway almost saves the episode by giving the crew the opportunity to make new lives for themselves and settle on the planet. There is a brief moment where she and Chakotay have a nearly intellectual discussions about giving the crew that choice, but it dissolves into melodrama. Oh, hey, everyone loves you Janeway, and no one wants to stay on the planet. That must comfort you greatly as you watch your show's ratings plummet.

I can enjoy camp. I even liked The Royale (TNG season 2), but I could not find anything to enjoy about this episode. Acting, dialogue, direction, sets, effects, everything was terrible. Even characters I'm generally pleased with struggled with blatant exposition set-up lines. Most deliveries seemed straight out of daytime soaps or infomercials. Amelia is bland, her boyfriend is bland, everyone and everything is bland bland bland. I don't need a show to have a good budget to be enjoyable, but show us some indication of how supposedly awesome this human civilization is. That could have been fascinating! The art challenge alone of deciding what their architecture would look like, a mix of the 30s and that of their captors, is very intriguing to me. They blew their budget on landing Voyager on the planet (which looks ridiculous), instead of something to help flesh out an otherwise flimsy story.

Watchability: 1/5

Bottom Line: I could kind of maybe excuse this as a mid-season filler episode, but this is what they open with? Worse, the plan had been to use this episode as the finale for season one. If people are going to tune in for an episode, it's going to be at the beginning or end of a season. Make it count, people! You can do better than this, I know you can.