S7 E01: Unimatrix Zero, Part II

Assimilated Janeway, Torres, and Tuvok succeed in spreading the virus through the weighted companion cube central plexus, but are captured when Tuvok is overcome by the collective. The Borg Queen attempts to force Janeway to give up by destroying whole cubes in order to eliminate the few infected drones aboard each one, but gets nowhere. Instead, she develops a counter-virus that will kill all the drones affected by the mutation, but the only way she can spread it is through Unimatrix Zero. Voyager works with the freed drones to disable Unimatrix Zero, leaving them unable to communicate with each other, but safe from the Queen. A sphere that has been taken over by the rebellion assists Voyager in freeing their captured crew members.

It seemed odd to me that the away team wouldn't have just infected themselves with the virus from the start, since that would have protected them from the Queen's influence. I suppose that maybe the virus only works for those drones who have the mutation, and since no one seems to know what that even means (hardware, software, biological, mechanical, etc) they couldn't count on using it to their advantage. Plus, it gave the writers another chance for Tuvok to be the weakest link, which they seem to love; his conversion seems to be the only plot reason for not using the virus in that way. It is also strange that, while the drones are no longer connected to the collective, they are still connected to Unimatrix Zero. That makes the virtual reality into some kind of long-distance telepathy, but I never really liked it anyways, and I'm just thrilled that the solution to this episode wasn't some sort of climactic battle in there.

As for the scenes between the Queen and Janeway... I sincerely hope that the Queen did not really believe that destroying cube after cube would in some way make Janeway reconsider. "So, my options are help you re-assimilate all the lost drones or watch you do my dirty work for me? Let me think about this for a while. No, keep blwoing up cubes in the meantime, it'll help me think." The insults that they hurl at each other sound like your average internet forum debate on creationism, by about page thirty when all the sane people have left and it is just two zealots saying the same thing over and over. Really, Janeway, you think that the Queen is genuinely afraid that a taste of individuality will win her over to your side? And Queen, do you really think Janeway would rather see the drones reassimilated than dead? To her, assimilation is worse than death.

Part of the problem here could be that, in between watching parts one and two, I played through Portal 2, and man, GLaDOS would have made such a better Borg Queen. Hard not to go into details without going into spoiler territory for Portal, but suffice it to say that they have a lot in common, except that GLaDOS is hilarious and awesome. The Queen isn't really Voyager's fault, but considering that the Borg are so much weaker in Voyager she does come across as being kind of pathetic.

The romance that made no sense in part I is back, but as long as you forget that part I happened, it is relatively benign here. The Doctor's scene with Seven is nice, and while it is consistent with a terrible episode, it is at least consistent, and not too uncomfortable. In the end, it is kind of a shame that we'll probably never see that guy again. Maybe we'll see the Klingon drone who comes to Voyager's aid again, I have intentionally not looked him up so that I can cling to that hope. Also, it was nice that they did kind of use Paris' promotion in this episode, if only to reinforce how much more appropriate a choice Kim would be for a promotion.

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: While, yes, I'm going to try not to get too snarky, this simply wasn't a very engaging episode. I've seen them in Voyager, plenty of them, but this just wasn't one of them. It was, however, an improvement over the first part, so that's worth a 3.

Season Seven Preamble

XKCD recently ran a strip that references Darmok, and even though I should know better, I ventured over to the forums and checked out the thread for it. Here are some of the gems that the hipster-geeks had to say about it:

"To me, this was one of most irritating of all Star Trek episodes. I mean, isn't every language intrinsically built on referents and idioms? The whole premise that a universal translator exists but doesn't work because of this makes no sense at all. Bothers me to this day."

"I just always thought that those aliens would never have actually been able to develop a warp capable society with a language where trying to describe even the most basic concept took a fifteen minute story, at best. Electric circuits, mater/anti-mater reactors, warp fields, yeah right. They'd be lucky to be able to describe fire or the wheel to each other."

"How would they even tell each other, or their children, who "Darmok" was, or what and where Tanagra is, or what a freaking TREE is? If they can teach their children language, their language CANNOT work this way!"

There's even an external link to another page that gives a systematic breakdown as to why the language in the episode doesn't work. It bothers me that all of these condemnations seem to be operating on the assumption that Tamarian language acquisition works the same way it does for humans, when we are given no reason to believe that it does. For all we know, Tamarians get a memory transfer in the womb so that all of the stories in their language immediately have personal significance. Of course, the episode itself doesn't go there, but that's because it isn't particularly relevant to the story it is trying to tell.

The idiom language is a writing tool used to bring language back as a hurdle in a first contact scenario in a universe that has universal translators. On top of that, it opens the door to the dramatic use of narratives with personal meaning as a starting point for developing common ground. The nitpicks feel like their authors are really digging for a way to be dissatisfied with an element of the story, especially considering that they need to go outside of the episode (and, for the most part, to other Trek series) to find evidence.

When the rebuttal to each of the arguments can be "maybe, just maybe, these aliens from another planet don't work the same way humans do," it is hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that the people putting them forth simply don't want to like the episode. And it's a real shame, because I consider it to be one of the greatest episodes of any TV show, ever.

My last couple of reviews, including the end-of-season evaluation, have been perhaps a bit unfair. I am frustrated with Voyager, but maybe it is more because it is not being the show I want it to be than because the show itself is bad. Reading that thread has helped remind me of my original purpose in giving Voyager a chance, and has reinvigorated me for the task of reviewing the season ahead.

Season Six Evaluation

Equinox, Part II	4
Survival Instinct	5
Barge of the Dead	5
Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy	4
Alice	2
Riddles	4
Dragon's Teeth	4
One Small Step	3
The Voyager Conspiracy	2
Pathfinder	2
Fair Haven	2
Blink of an Eye	5
Virtuoso	1
Memorial	5
Tsunkatse	4
Collective	2
Spirit Folk	1
Ashes to Ashes	4
Child's Play	3
Good Shepherd	1
Live Fast and Prosper	4
Muse	3
Fury	1
Life Line	4
The Haunting of Deck Twelve	3
Unimatrix Zero	2
Average Score:	3.1

I think that it is safe to say that the honeymoon is over. When Voyager appeared to turn the corner in season four, I had hope. Things were getting better, slowly, but the improvement was noticeable. Season five was a holding pattern, not much better or worse than season four, but at least they had downplayed my biggest complaint about the previous season: the Janeway-Seven debates. Those are back with a vengeance this season, and this time they've added plain, simple nonsense to the condescension. Often times Janeway's arguments won't even make sense within the context of her previous line - but she's got to be right in the end because she's Janeway. If they would have honest, intellectual debates about the benefits and disadvantages of collectivism versus free will, I would be glued to the television - but that would require a little effort on the part of the writers.

In general, I am becoming quite disillusioned with Voyager because of the intellectual laziness on the part of the writers. It isn't just the bad science that would take one look at in a general reference encyclopedia to fix (though that's infuriating too), it's the whole strategy of "hey, people like Seven and the Doctor, so let's make every episode about them!" To be fair, they have a better handle on what to do with those characters (Virtuoso and Someone to Watch Over Me notwithstanding), but when they can't figure out what to do in a Chakotay episode, they just give it over to Seven and hope for the best. That particular example (One Small Step) pointed me in the direction of Robert Beltran's thoughts in the form of this article, which I consider required reading regarding this point.

It is pretty damning that the best episodes, by a pretty wide margin, were both Ronald D. Moore efforts, and he left after the third episode of the season. The difference in storytelling cohesion is so stark; it's almost like the rest of the writers wanted to distance themselves from quality after he left. Both Survival Instinct and Barge of the Dead are character pieces that don't take the central crew member back a step in order to develop them, they build on what we already know about them in a consistent manner, and neither one offers any easy answers. While it would have been awesome to see what would have happened if he had taken over the show, I think we already have a good idea given the similarities between the Voyager and Battlestar Galactica premises.

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: The bottom line is I expect a show to get better over time. I expect the writers to get more comfortable with the characters, for the actors to have a better handle on what's expected of them, and for the producers to be a bit more hands-off. I'm definitely harder on the series now than when I started, and that's why. They should know better by now.

9. Kathryn Janeway - Another example of the writers' dearth of creativity glimmers in episodes like Good Shepherd, wherein they prove how clueless they are about making a character likable. I mean, maybe you could start by making her fallible? A character that humans can identify with? Or they could try giving a single heroic, self-sacrificial deed to her name, as I suggest in Live Fast and Prosper. These are just ideas. Maybe she could not treat her crew, every member of which I like more than her, like naughty puppies who just can't seem to figure out this not-pooping-on-the-rug thing. No character in the show has had more episodes devoted to her, and yet I still cannot stand her.

8. Chakotay - He's still here? Seriously, this article. That's all I have to say on him.

7. Tom Paris - This is the first character evaluation since adding the character tags, and Paris has had the same number of episodes total as Kes, and she left three seasons ago. Seriously. Every single time he comes on, I have a new idea for what they could do with his character (for the most recent one, see Unimatrix Zero), but nothing ever materializes. I guess that he at least did get an episode this season (Alice), which is more than Chakotay could say, but then again Alice was a complete waste of time.

6. Harry Kim - Kim also had no episodes that focused on him this season, though he had an okay piece of the ensemble episode Memorial. I am just generally neutral towards him this season. His friendship with Paris is one of those opportunities for dramatic character growth that seems to be withering. Maybe they'll do something with the lack of promotion next season? I mean, why else would they have his character lampshade it? Oh. Yeah. This show is so frustrating.

5. Tuvok - Tuvok also had only one episode, which he shared with Neelix, but he was sort of playing some other character. Riddles was decent in the end, but the Tuvok character still feels really stagnant.

4. Neelix - Neelix had a couple of middling episodes this season, and has been a bit more annoying than in seasons four and five, but no where near seasons one through three levels.

3. B'Elanna Torres - She shoots to number three because she had one of the RDM episodes, and it was good, and she was good in it. Congrats, Torres, one of your two episodes this season was great. Welcome to what is realistically the top of the list for non-Seven/Doctor characters.

2. Seven of Nine - I am beginning to see the Seven fatigue, but at least the writers know enough about their own shortcomings to stick to what works, I guess. Still, when you have all the episodes, you have all the best episodes.

1. The Doctor - I do not, however, have Doctor fatigue. Sure, Virtuoso was terrible, and he actually has no fives this season, but in terms of total numbers of stories about him, he's just barely keeping pace with Seven. Both are at seventeen episodes apiece, but the Doctor has been around for twice as long as Seven has. And his delivery is still perfect, his comic timing is still amazing, but now, based on Life Line (which Picardo got partial story credit for), it is that much more clear how well he knows his character.

S6 E26: Unimatrix Zero

Seven is contacted in a dream by a group of Borg drones who, through a mutation, have regained their individuality while they are regenerating. The collective is close to being able to infiltrate their separate network, so they ask Seven for her assistance. Janeway agrees to help after meeting with them through a three-way mindmeld, and the crew hatches a scheme to infect the hive with a "nanovirus" that will allow these drones to keep their individuality while awake. This plan involves getting Janeway, Torres, and Tuvok assimilated into the collective. To be continued...

Though it is entirely unrelated to the plot, Paris is re-promoted here, and it is a complete waste of what could have been a dramatic moment. They could have built a big Paris episode, and done it then. Or, they could have promoted Kim instead, and played with the dynamic of Kim as Paris' superior officer for a while. They even lampshaded Kim's lack of promotions in this scene before moving on with the plot. Instead it just looks like the writers forgot that they haven't re-promoted Paris yet, and wanted to get it out of the way before another season rolls around.

A Borg "underground" is an interesting way to approach the weak spot that the Borg need to have every time Voyager encounters them. The technobabble surrounding them is oddly vague, and I'd rather they just didn't attempt to explain the cause at all - after all, these drones obviously cannot be doing research on it while active, so odds are they wouldn't even know. It also seems unnecessary that Seven happened to be a part of this second collective and can't remember it. This feels distinctly different from the back-story in Survival Instinct, and I'll try to articulate how; in Survival Instinct, the "Hey, here's some back-story you didn't have" parts were understated, the events were clearly something whose significance was greater to the other three involved than it was to Seven. That difference made it easier to swallow, especially given Seven doesn't remember a whole love interest from her time in the underground. And since we've already done a "Seven got separated from the hive while she was still a drone" story, It would have been nice if there were some sort of tie-in between those episode. Of course, the writers can't even remember that this is actually the third time that they had Seven dream, so that's probably a bit too much to hope for.

I had worked out just about this much of the review in my head when I went to the memory alpha page and read this: "The original story, pitched by future Voyager and Enterprise staffer Mike Sussman, was to have featured the return of Seven's father, Magnus Hansen. In that version, it would have been revealed that the Borgified Hansen had managed to create a "cyber underground" where like-minded drones could meet and plan an insurgency against the Collective. Hansen would have called upon his daughter to help in their fight, giving Seven hope that her father might someday be liberated from the Collective, as she had been. The producers opted to pursue a romantic story for Seven instead of a father-daughter reunion."

While this is a wiki, editable by anyone, and that quote does not cite a source, it explains a lot. The romance does feel shoehorned in, especially when the lines related to it don't even make any sense. I mean, at first, the guy doesn't say anything about it to Seven; a decision which, when confronted about it after Seven dimly recalls a relationship, was based on his determination that, because she did not remember it, it wasn't his place. In other words, it wasn't relevant, as she was no longer the same person. Seven is very strangely off-put by that choice of actions, and in what seems to be an attempt to distance herself from him, tells him that their relationship is irrelevant. But even though that was essentially his position in the first place, for some reason he takes umbrage with her saying it. The cognitive dissonance here is killing me.

Look, I don't care if the writers don't want to care about consistency, but would it kill them to be consistent within a single episode? Forget the fact that a story about her dad, urging her to join the Borg resistance, would be six hundred times more compelling than some schmuck we've never met before - I just want them to make this one story that they've chosen make sense. I'm not even talking about the whole two-part cliffhanger. I'm sure the next part wasn't even written when this was first aired, I just want this one to be constructed logically. There are all these unconscious world sequences, and then there's a Klingon who threatens to kill someone, but they're all like "It's cool, I'll just respawn," but then when the Borg infiltrate the underground and they dream-assimilate people they are permanently despawned and their locations are recorded, but if you're a Klingon you come equipped in your dreamstate with a Bat'leth like you're a damn action figure, but somehow even after you're unconscious in your dream, another person can pick up a figment of your imagination and gut a drone with it. Oh, and then the Delta Flyer is destroyed but that's not a big deal because it wasn't really a big deal to make it in the first place.

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: When one Starfleet officer was abducted by the Borg, I held my breath, fingers gripping the armrests, bolt upright in the chair, and was full of anticipation. Now, when three officers are abducted, I'm kind of glad I don't have the next disc here yet, because it means my wife and I get to watch something interesting next instead.

S6 E25: The Haunting of Deck Twelve

Seven puts Neelix in charge of watching the Borg kids when Voyager needs to power down in the middle of their regeneration cycles, and instructs him to make sure they don't get scared. Neelix decides that the pitch-black of a ship-wide power outage would be a great time to introduce them to ghost stories, and proceeds to weave a yarn about a non-corporeal alien that enters Voyager in a nebula, and takes over the ship. The crew gets separated, and eventually Janeway has to out-macho the electric gas creature to convince it to let her take it to a new nebula home. In Neelix's story, she succeeds, but it is never made clear afterwards if there was actually any truth to anything Neelix said.

While it seems out of character for the Protector Neelix of Once Upon a Time to decide to actively attempt to scare the children by telling them the tale in ghost-story format, it did give the episode a unique narrative style (at least for a Trek episode). I do appreciate that the veracity of his story is never exactly confirmed, though I like to think that maybe he learned something from Once Upon a Time and he did give an accurate representation of events. Either way, leaving me with a bit of leeway to imagine what the actual events were is, on average, a good thing.

The title of this episode has drawn my attention a number of times when looking at lists of Voyager episodes in various places. Reason number one is that it is simply a long episode name, but number two is it is a creative episode name. With a name like that, it conjures up images of a genuinely scary horror-themed episode, which the episode itself does not exactly live up to. There is one scene, when Story-Neelix is leaving the mess hall, that did capture the haunted house vibe, but that's about it. I'm not really one for the horror genre in general, so that's not much of a disappointment to me, but it didn't have much else going for it either. The humor that the writers keep trying to use by having the Borg kids use Borg buzzwords doesn't do anything for me, and the actual story of the ship's possession isn't exactly new ground.

This episode is unfortunately also another sighting of the recurring "insult the audience" trope, which I first complained about in Spirit Folk. Here, the Borg kids are stand-ins for the Trek audience that cares about details and complains when they are incorrect - in this case, something about some emissions from the bussard collectors. Sure, Neelix is right when he brushes off the complaint and says that it isn't particularly relevant to his ghost story, I too can often brush these minor inconsistencies. But if the writers thought that those were the only types of inconsistencies that their show had, they were truly delusional. I've complained about them for about six months now, and I haven't even touched on the shuttlecraft issue - I know other people have been there before me and have done it better. I'm more concerned with the Voyager solution to character development, the take a step backwards to take a step forwards approach.

Anyways, I could be reading into it too much, maybe the writers don't mean to condescendingly brush us off like we're a bunch of kids who just don't know any better. But this is the third time I've picked up on it (counting the "screw you" to J/C fans in Muse), and in the Voyager environment, three episodes basically constitutes a theme on par with the Alzheimer's theme.

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: A creative title and some minor chances taken with the narrative style of the story elevate this episode all the way up to three. Definitely the least interesting Neelix episode in a while.

S6 E24: Life Line

Voyager gets another message from Starfleet, but it isn't all good news: the Doctor's creator, Lewis Zimmerman is dying. The Doctor convinces Janeway to transmit his program back to Starfleet command, even though they only get one message a month at this point. Once there, he tries to convince Zimmerman to try a treament he has developed, but his designer is suspicious of the talents of an EMH mark one. Over the next few weeks, the two fight and fight and fight, and eventually Barclay calls Troi in to help. The Doctor's program malfunctions, and Zimmerman helps restore it, but he has a breakdown when the Doctor refuses personality upgrades. You see, all the EMH mark ones were made in his image, but since the advent of the mark twos (and beyond), they have all been relegated to menial duties. Now all of these copies of this arrogant, intelligent man are scrubbing plasma on scows, which has broken his heart. But now he's willing to admit that at least one of his "children" has met with success, and accepts his treatment. Barclay and Troi are thrilled that the malfunction they caused intentionally worked as intended.

I'll put it right out there: the premise of this episode is pretty ridiculous. Whenever they package up and send the Doctor somewhere, you wonder why they can't copy his program instead. And since, for whatever reason, they can't, it is simply a bad idea to send him away for a whole month. I understand the Doctor's motives, I do, but honestly he could've done more good in the delta quadrant after just sending his research to Barclay.

There are other problems too; most of the episode is a fairly straightforward Doctor plot. Wants to expand his program? Check! Wants to prove himself? Check! People doubt him? Check! With the help of other people who have come to appreciate him, he wins everyone else over? Check! Additionally, I cringed when Barclay and then Troi showed up after the Pathfinder disaster (though every other review I've found glows about it). Listen, enough with the chocolate ice cream bit. I looked it up - Troi's affinity for that food was mentioned on three occasions in TNG, but now on Voyager is has been mentioned in 100% of her appearances. Guys, I'm going to know it's Troi even if she's not eating chocolate ice cream. It almost feels like product placement when a Barclay, out of nowhere, seems to jump out of the shadows to present her with the confection.

Despite those faults, this is definitely one of the best episodes of the second half of the season. Picardo does have fantastic chemistry with Picardo, and he does a great job of making Zimmerman "the same but different." Most of all, the crux of this episode, the depression and displaced anger that Zimmerman feels over the failure of the EMH made in his image, is very effective. The idea that they're scrubbing plasma is silly and over the top, you don't really need a trained doctor hologram for that, and I don't think is necessary for driving home his internal struggle. Zimmerman's characterization is effective in that it is an extension of the Doctor's characterization, and based on that I think it would be plenty degrading to just have the EMH ones relegated to medical duties on scows.

There are about thirty authors for this episode, but there is one that stands out: Robert Picardo got partial story credit for this episode. I tried to look up exactly what parts of the story were his ideas; while most of the articles I found were pretty fluffy, the central premise of the Doctor wanting to prove himself to his creator is definitely his. I was unable to determine if the catch, the Zimmerman's self-image angle, was his, but I'm fairly confident that a number of the things that I didn't like about this episode weren't his ideas - particularly the chocolate ice cream element. I can see it now: "Hey, Bob, as long as you're going back to the alpha quadrant, we've just got to use Barclay again. And I'm sure Marina's not doing anything, why not throw her in there too? And get this: just have her eat ice cream - no, not just any ice cream, chocolate ice cream - the fans will just looooove it."

Watchability: 4/5

Bottom Line: This is the only episode in all of Trek history that has an actor getting any share of the writing credits. I think it would have been interesting to have at least one episode for each of the major cast members - we've got a whole season left after all, and it's not like they've got tons of ideas floating around unused. Even if some of those episodes were bad, seeing what Tim Russ or Robert Beltran or really any of them would have done with the characters and the show would have added another layer of interestingness. Even if they took the characters in directions that the writers didn't like, they could always just hit the reset button eight more times.

S6 E23: Fury

Kes is back, and she is angry. She rams Voyager with her shuttle, beams aboard, blows up bulkheads in her wake, taps into the warp core (thereby zapping and killing Torres), and phases herself into the past. Once there, she incapacitates her past self and gets in touch with the Vidiians. Meanwhile, Tuvok is having visions of the future, but is incapacitated before he can do anything. When the Vidiians catch up with Voyager, Janeway has put the pieces together, and subdues old Kes before she can run off with young Kes and return her to the Ocampan homeworld. Then she convinces young Kes to film a holographic plea for old Kes, so next time she visits Voyager in the future, Janeway can play that plea for her, and convince her that she doesn't actually want the Voyage crew dead. Instead, sad, old, broken Kes, miserable from her years of not being on Voyager sullenly gets back on her shuttle and heads for home.

As much as this is not really the capacity in which I had hoped Kes would return, I did greatly enjoy the visuals of the first five minutes of the episode. During that time, it isn't clear yet why she's angry, so I could just sit back and appreciate the wanton destruction. Maybe she was possessed, or incensed by some future Voyager action that hasn't happened yet. Either way, seeing her grimly stagger down the corridor with chunks of wall exploding behind her was pretty awesome.

My hopes were raised even higher when Tuvok got to be important to the plot due to his Vulcan mind stuff! It was going to be great! Tuvok was always the most compelling pairing with Kes, and he was going to be the one who figured out what was going on, who could reach out to her, who could bring her back to reality. Their chemistry was underused before, but now it was going to be different.

I was so naive back then. Of course he was going to be incapacitated and his hallucinations would only serve as breadcrumbs for the real hero, Janeway. Only Janeway could be smart enough to find the tachyons, only Janeway could resist Kes' mind bullets, only Janeway would have the strength to shoot her dead. Of course Janeway would be the one to talk her down the second time, not Tuvok or, god forbid, Neelix. You know, the two people who actually had strong connections with her.

Kes, underutilized, underappreciated, abandoned Kes. I do miss her, even though looking through the reviews with the Kes label doesn't turn up many high scores. And yeah, she's back, but most of this episode isn't even really Kes. This episode reminds me of a number of whedonesque themes, but this will contain major spoilers, so if you haven't watched Buffy, read no further. It reminds me of Buffy's return from death, where she's all shell-shocked, and unable to relate to those around her, unable to forgive them from returning her from heaven. That worked over the course of a series of episodes, finally culminating in the cathartic Once More, With Feeling, wherein her secret, her reason for hating her friends, is finally revealed. Kes' return is big, it deserves to be big, and the way it is dealt with here is small.

Watchability: 1/5

Bottom Line: This episode has piled up a number of negative reviews, and it is not hard to see why. Kes was reasonably well liked, and here, in her last appearance, she is just a shell of her former self. I don't mind emo Kes so much, but if the writers wanted to deal with her loss of innocence, it deserved more than just a five minute coda at the end of the episode. This episode's sin is not in its content (although that's pretty lame too), but in the lack of content.

S6 E22: Muse

Torres has crash-landed in ancient Greece (well, close enough to it), and awakes days later to find that a poet has been using the logs on the Delta Flyer to inspire his plays. Now that she's up and about she needs his assistance in order to get what she needs to send out a distress call, so she helps him to find inspiration for the rest of the story. His patron is about to go to war with a neighboring area, and the poet wants to use the play to convince him to seek peace. On the night of the final performance, Kim, who had been jettisoned in an escape pod, miraculously shows up with a missing part, but Torres feels obligated to help make the poet's show special. She arrives just in time to be the star of the play about her, and beams out at the end to reveal that their gods are "real."

So, writing about writers and how important writing is. It is tough to do the topic justice. You may recall my annoyance at this particular trope's appearance in Worst Case Scenario; it is even more central to the plot here. That's not to say that it can't be done well - I'm not about to say that Hamlet sucks because of those themes, and it is also a critical component to one of my favorite books of all time. At its worst, it is very easy to allow those themes to appear self-serving and self-congratulatory, while at its best it can make the story more intensely personal. This episode does not walk that line particularly gracefully.

It is very heavy-handed about the overall importance of writing; there is a lot of exposition about how great writing can change minds and even shape the direction of cultures, but there is nothing particularly compelling in the actual writing of the play. Not to harp on last episode's rant again (though they do it again here) but you can say that Janeway is great all you want, but that won't miraculously change my mind. If anything, the play is a commentary on Voyager in that the thing that "saves" the play without an ending is essentially a big old special effect - not any spectacular writing ability.

It is also rife with little bits of metahumor; the actors complain that playing an emotionless character will make them look like a bad actor, or that the ideas are too far-fetched for the audience so no one will appreciate it. Good work writers, way to cushion your own egos there. The time-table demands on the part of the Patron also echo writer sentiment about "rushing inspiration," and Torres' complaint about the poet's romances (particularly between Janeway and Chakotay) as being pointless is particularly suspicious in a world where many Voyager fans were crushed when the two never got together.

So, I hated it, right? Well, not really. It wasn't painful to watch most of the time, and even if the writers couldn't come up with anything good for the writer to write, the point that stirring rhetoric can change minds still holds water. Torres was definitely the right choice for the lead character here for a couple of reasons. First, it allowed her to not care that she was crushing the prime directive into little pieces, burning them, and vaporizing the ashes. Second, Torres is not really the touchy-feely type to start out with, not one to advocate for literature and flowery prose, so it gave her character somewhere to go in the story.

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: Very preachy, and definitely self-congratulatory, but not bad. A solidly average episode.

S6 E21: Live Fast and Prosper

Moving ahead of Voyager is a team of con-artists, stealing and deceiving in the name of Starfleet. Janeway catches wind of their trickery when a ship arrives, demanding of Voyager some dilithium they'd been promised by the impostors. A circumstantial bit of of information from the victims allows the crew to trace their first contact with the villains back to a pair of "monks" who Neelix and Paris met on an away mission. Voyager catches up to the crooks right after they've been caught selling Federation memberships to opposing sides in a war, but the transporter lock only catches the Janeway impostor before the ship jumps to warp. The fake won't cooperate, so Janeway hatches a plan to let her escape, and track her to her ship with Paris and the Doctor aboard. The Doctor masquerades as fake Janeway, buying time for Voyager to capture the rest of the criminals.

There's not much to this episode besides fun and silliness, but I'd say it does deliver on both counts. The impostors are fun to watch and make for a good parody of the Federation. The fake Janeway is mostly just a predictable con-artist stereotype, all cunning and no ethics, but fake Tuvok is actually interesting. He's gotten into his role so much that he has trouble dropping character, and begins to feel bad about his crew's treachery. Fortunately, he also manages to avoid the cliche of feeling so bad that he turns them over, though he does recommend that at one point. His is not a part that is played out a lot when it isn't used as an important plot device, and I appreciate that.

The best scene by far belongs to Neelix, Paris, and the Doctor. Neelix and Paris have begun to worry that they've lost their touch - they used to do their share of deceit but they were both completely fooled by the "monks." They're devastated, but Neelix thinks maybe they could get their groove back by working a little shell game on an unsuspecting mark. Their victim, the Doctor, plays right into it, but is able to determine that the nut is in Neelix's hand instead of one of the cups, thus deflating their egos even more. The scene is revisited at the end of the episode, and they are able to trick the Doctor, but it wasn't really necessary for the writers to go back to that - Neelix and Paris were already part of the plan to capture the fakes.

The grandstanding done by the real crew about how much more awesome they are is minimal, and largely from Janeway only. I expect that of her, I'm working on blocking it out altogether. Neelix's approach, while still somewhat saccharine, at least isn't so self-righteous. I really could do without all this exposition about how awesome Janeway is though. I get it; they've created a character that isn't as interesting as they think she is. The solution is not to just tell the viewers how awesome she is, over and over and over. Kirk, Picard, and Sisko weren't great because the characters said they were great - we loved them because they were heroes who took heroic actions and made heroic, sometimes self-sacrificing choices. Kirk was heroic because he could give up someone he loved to restore the timeline. Picard was heroic because he would put his Starfleet career on the line for the truth. Sisko was heroic because he sacrificed his own sense of honor in order to save the alpha quadrant. I can think of multiple examples for each of those captains. I'm having trouble thinking of a single one for Janeway, and I've written over a hundred and seventy single-spaced pages about her adventures.

Watchability: 4/5

Bottom Line: Rants about Janeway aside, this was a fun episode, and gets the fun episode score.

S6 E20: Good Shepherd

Three misfits have been identified by Seven through a ship-wide efficiency analysis, and Janeway makes it her goal to make sure they become functional, happy members of the Voyager crew. She takes them on their first away mission: a routine Delta Flyer survey mission. Of course, what makes it routine is that everything goes wrong and everyone almost dies. There's some (more) dark matter nonsense but by the end everyone is fixed by Janeway and lives happily ever after.

As this love letter to Janeway got underway, I was certain that Jeri Taylor, queen of the Janeway fan club, would have some share of the writing credits here. To my surprise, it was just Dianna Gitto, with some teleplay assistance from Joe Menosky (one of the more consistent Voyager writers). Memory alpha didn't have any more information on her, she's never written anything else in the history of recorded visual media, and I abandoned a google search on her name nine pages in after all that produced were tons of automatically generated pages and enough Voyager episode reviews to make me feel generally unimportant. Fortunately, no one else disliked this episode as much as I did, so I guess I've got that going for me. Anyways, I have no more information on this Gitto character than I started out with, but at least I'll never have to watch anything she's written ever again.

This episode takes the "Janeway knows best" theme, clones it enough times to make an army, and invades your home town with it, killing everyone you've ever loved despite your home town's complete lack of strategic importance. Well, unless you grew up somewhere strategically important. That's not the point. Janeway has every single answer ever here. No, Chakotay, she can't simply leave these people who would have washed out of Starfleet be, she must bend them to her will and make them love her. No, guy with five advanced degrees in theoretical cosmology, of course Janeway knows more about that than you do. Person with no self-confidence, Janeway will find that one good quality about you that will make it not matter that you constantly make mistakes in your work. And you, hypochondriac? I guess you could say that she just got lucky that the alien that burrowed inside you happened to cure you, but you know she planned it that way all along.

It doesn't help that these unknowns that surround her for the episode are caricatures of caricatures. It isn't enough to have one advanced degree in theoretical cosmology, of course he has to have five. And he has to show how much more interested he is in his research than he is in being on a starship in the great unknown by also being a complete jerk all the time to everyone forever. You bet that his one interest informs every single interaction he has with anyone else. The other two aren't any better; the cowardly lion no-self-confidence girl not only has no confidence in anything, but she also doesn't seem to know anything until Janeway happens to be there to appreciate that one time that she knew a thing. And the hypochondriac, we never even find out what his role is on the ship. He even only comes up in Seven's efficiency analysis as a detriment to the Doctor's department because he constantly wasting the Doctor's time. None of them really matter though; Mortimer Harren, Tal Celes, William Tefler, they all exist solely to elevate Captain Kathryn Janeway.

That does leave two things undiscussed: Dark Matter is back as a meaningless buzzword after its abuse in One Small Step, and Tom Morello, the lead guitarist from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, makes a cameo appearance. I always feel bad for the celebrity Trek fans, who are so eager to go on Trek and finally get to use their fame to live their dream, but then they get stuck in an episode like this one. As for the bad science? Well, it's bad, I guess I should be used to that by now. But there was some more bad science when they start discussing a stellar nursery, and I think, because my wife knows that sort of stuff because of her job, the inaccuracies may have given her a seizure. I guess it would be my job to diagnose that, but there was no postictal phase, so maybe it was just a fit of uncontrollable rage.

Watchability: 1/5

Bottom Line: I can't really see how this vapid plot would even please a staunch Janeway fan. But I guess there's a reason why creationists would go to a creationist museum, and it isn't for the purpose of hearing scientifically rigorous debate.

S6 E19: Child's Play

Icheb, the eldest of the Borg children, has just begun to fit in when Voyager finds his homeworld - and his parents. He's not excited about returning to people he doesn't remember, but Seven is even less excited. She has become attached to him, but is also concerned for his safety on an agrarian world that is the site of frequent Borg raids. Janeway convinces her to give the parents a chance, and they win Icheb over. After Voyager leaves, Seven discovers some inconsistencies in the father's story; but when they return to ask more questions, Icheb has already been sent away. You see, Icheb himself was genetically designed to be the biological weapon that infected the Borg cube that he was found on. Voyager rescues him from the sphere he'd been sent to destroy, and he happily remains with the crew.

Normally, I'd pan an episode (or at least whine about it) for focusing on a minor character rather than spending time on one of the underused major characters, but I think it works here. Any time that a major character has a chance to leave, particularly mid season, it is very hard to take seriously (see, for example, Virtuoso). But Icheb occupies a plot space between major character and background nobody where he could actually leave the show, and it would kind of matter. Additionally, the episode does a good job of tying his departure emotionally to Seven, so it doesn't just matter to Icheb what Icheb does.

Of course, Icheb's choice and Seven's mixed feelings open us up for one of those miserable Seven-Janeway debates. You know the ones I'm talking about: Janeway behaves condescendingly towards Seven, makes arguments that boil down to "I'm Janeway and I know what's best" and/or "individuality is the best because it is awesome." Other than the one from Latent Image, these debates have consistently been the conversations most devoid of intellectual merit on the entire show - made worse by Janeway's ability to always be right (again, except in Latent Image), meaning that everything Seven says will be thrown in her face by the end of the episode. To this episode's credit, some of Janeway's arguments aren't exclusively tautological, and Seven displays some excellent emotional maturity in her ability to recognize her own bias, so I'll give this part some leeway.

Icheb's dad is played by Mark Sheppard (Badger from Firefly, Romo "that lawyer guy" Lampkin from BSG), and boy is it weird to hear him without a cockney accent. In general, Icheb's parents do a good job of making the "boy, we sure wish you remembered us" scenes not that awkward. The process by which he becomes more enamored of leaving Voyager and the astrophysics that he loves, and begins to see a life for himself with his parents feels natural, but somewhat rushed. I was enjoying the episode well enough up until the 28 minute mark where they leave Icheb on the planet and you know something is going to go wrong. You know that all the subtleties of Icheb's choice are going to go out the window and we're going to find the dirty secret.

Then I started thinking about how the conflict is kind of contrived to begin with. I mean, Borg engaging in raiding tactics? When, in the Voyager Borg cannon, have we heard of the Borg just taking what they want and leaving - essentially farming a society for technological advancements and going back to harvest periodically. Actually, now that I think about it, for the Voyager Borg, who don't develop new technology, this is a pretty great scheme. Keep the smart people unassimilated and just harvest their idea crops from time to time. I'm of two minds on the ending too. Icheb being the biological weapon that infected his ship, that's a pretty interesting idea, even if it undermines the whole first two thirds of the episode. But Voyager weaponized the pathogen in a couple of hours already, so the need to use a living, sentient host is kind of moot, but that is never addressed here. It all seems to be half-thought-out, and left me generally irritated.

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: While it is generally a well-constructed frame of an episode, the details frustrated me more often than not. It isn't great, but it is never outright bad either, and it has good ideas but some of them feel accidental.

S6 E18: Ashes to Ashes

An alien hails Voyager and greets the crew warmly; she identifies herself as Lyndsay Ballard, an ensign who died on an away mission three years ago. She now looks like an alien, but she claims to have been resurrected by a species who use the dead of other species to reproduce. She and Kim revive their friendship as well, but she slowly realizes that she simply is no longer the person that she used to be. Her new "father" arrives, and since she has left against their wishes, is ready to take her back by force. During the ensuing battle, Lyndsay decides that she no longer belongs on Voyager anyways, and opts to rejoin her new people.

The aliens from this episode (the Kobali) are an interesting idea. It seems odd that a species that harvest the dead in order to reproduce could evolve, but then not every creature in the universe has to have an evolutionary origin. They could have been created by another species as a means of cheating death, only to spiral out of control. What seems most strange to me is that they also have a family structure - which I guess isn't out of the question, but feels weird when you consider that their kids come to them fully matured and with a lifetime of experience that in no way endears the parent to the child. Now, discussion of the details of this species is by no means the point of the episode, but I'm always happy to have a cool idea to think about. Leaving stuff to the imagination is okay.

What this episode is really about is Kim not coping with loss, and only finding out that he hasn't been coping when the woman he thought he lost reappears - only to lose her again. Garrett Wang plays his part well, and surprisingly our guest actress of the week isn't bad at it either. Kim remains amusingly puritanical (despite his antics in The Disease, which, honestly, I'm perfectly happy to forget), and the story oddly omits Kim's old girlfriend from home (Libby) by extending the retcon of their relationship back to the academy, but those are mostly just nitpicks.

This episode does have a B-plot, about Seven and the Borg kids, but it is best forgotten. It is eye-rollingly heavy-handed, with Seven ending up learning a lesson from the kids about the need for spontaneity in fun. I'm just thrilled that it wasn't made into a whole stand-alone episode though. Sure, throw it into a B-plot, see if it works. Maybe some people even liked this part of the episode. I didn't, but then I was happy with the whole A-plot, so I had that to hold on to.

Watchability: 4/5

Bottom Line: An emotionally-driven story with a cool idea for an alien. Works for me.

S6 E17: Spirit Folk

The characters in Fair Haven (see: Fair Haven) are starting to become aware of the control the Voyager crew exerts over their program. When Kim and Paris go in to attempt to fix things from within the program, they are taken hostage by the superstitious townsfolk, and even the Doctor cannot save them. Janeway's boyfriend takes the mobile emitter, and is beamed to the bridge, where Janeway explains the situation. Tom and Harry are released, and the program is no longer kept running, as that is what caused the problems in the first place.

Remember when I praised Fair Haven for at least not being a holodeck malfunction story? Well, in this sequel to that bad episode, the writers made sure to fix that thing that kept it (barely) afloat. The problem here though is not just that it is a holodeck malfunction story, it is that it is an unimaginative, uninteresting story that builds on another dull story using elements that don't fit into the Trek continuity. I guess the closest parallel here is Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang, another episode with something going wrong in a long-running holodeck program. But the problem there wasn't a malfunction - there was no problem with it running so long - it was a built-in element placed there to keep the program interesting. And you know what? It did. While it was a by-the-numbers recreation of your average heist movie, the comedy was good, the action was good, and the characters were involved and engaged.

Before the malfunction was introduced, and I was hoping desperately that something else was going on, the episode seemed like it was just flying in the face of known holodeck mechanics. Even in Fair Haven, people reprogrammed the holodeck in front of the characters without being noticed, that's just how generic holodeck characters work. Why would they work differently here? It's like we're following the writer's thought process, as they were coming up with the story. Someone must've raised the point, when they were deep into the writing process, that this sort of thing isn't consistent with how holodecks work - so they hastily added the malfunction to cover it. And don't get me started on a holodeck gun shooting the holodeck control panel. And I'm still annoyed that Voyager keeps putting control panels behind paneling on the sets! Holodecks are supposed to use false perspective and treadmill effects to keep the people in them from reaching the edges - which is also why throwing a real object will hit a wall. But why then would there be control panels in specific spots in the wall? Blargh!

Now, continuity has never been Voyager's strong suit, so to see it wasted on a pair of episodes like this is a real shame. And you know what? I don't even really need continuity from Voyager, I just need consistency. All I want is for Seven to act a little more normal after she's learned some sort of humanity lesson, or for Torres to exhibit a little more emotional control if last time she learned to temper her temper, or if they're going to bring back replicator rations (which they seem to have done this season), then maybe they shouldn't have a holodeck program running non-stop.

But it gets worse. Consistency is actually the villain of this episode. Consistency is the thing that caused the holograms to malfunction. This feels like the writers are comparing dedicated viewers, ones who have watched every episode and just want some growth to matter, to the fanatical, superstitious, simple townsfolk who don't know what's best for them. Add to that the meta-problem of this terrible episode being a rare example of continuity itself, and you have the writers essentially flipping the bird at their most dedicated fans. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, maybe it is just a bad episode, but I do take it a bit personally.

Watchability: 1/5

Bottom Line: This is the lowest-rated episode in the entire series on the GEOS poll, and it is not hard to see why. Sacred Ground will always be the worst for me, but this is definitely more of an equal-opportunity offender.

S6 E16: Collective

Paris, Neelix, Chakotay, and Kim are on a Delta Flyer Survey MissionTM when a Borg cube sneaks up on them and captures them. Voyager arrives late to the party, and sends Seven over to negotiate with the hive there, but it turns out that the hive is only composed of five premature drones. The ship had been infected with a pathogen that only affects cybernetic beings (perhaps the handiwork of the guys from Infinite Regress?), and now these "Borg kids" are the only ones left. While the Voyager crew attempts to mount a rescue effort, Seven meets with more success by appealing to the newfound individuality in these new drones. One of them, the leader, is aggressive and arrogant, but he is conveniently killed at the end. The four remaining kids join the Voyager crew.

At the rate that the Borg are experiencing malfunctions, it is becoming hard to consider them a threat anymore. I know that they have to water them down or they'd be too much of a threat for a lone Federation starship, but frankly I'd rather that the writers just use them more sparingly. Or, you know, get Voyager a cloaking device. That would be cool. There's no ill-advised treaty with the Romulans out here, and we've seen plenty of aliens with equivalent technologies lately. That'd be one way at least to keep the Borg around without neutering them completely.

So, while other characters have some activities to engage in, this is primarily another episode about Seven's quest for individuality and Janeway's quest to say "I told you so" to anything with a pulse (but mostly to Seven). There's the generic set up with Seven saying it wouldn't be possible to introduce individuality to the kids, and then Janeway smugly implying that Seven's too stupid to realize that she also happens to be a Borg drone who gained independence. And then Seven learning an important lesson about giving the kids a chance. The whole thing is so ham-fisted that I was bored throughout, watching the time on the DVD player.

The idea of Borg maturation chambers from Q Who is revisited here, but it feels out of place. In Q Who, when the Borg were more interested in assimilating technology than they were in assimilating people, baby Borg made sense as a means of reproduction. Why go through all the trouble of mass assimilation when you can catch a few important individuals and just compose the rest of your population with genetic engineering? The children here aren't test-tube babies though, they all seem to have been assimilated as children, and that doesn't really fit with the Borg philosophy of abandoning the weak or defective. In this very episode, the hive just abandons the children, ignoring their distress calls, but why assimilate them in the first place? When the Borg are focused on efficiency and perfection, this behavior doesn't make much sense.

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: It's not really a bad or offensive episode, but it is completely predictable and unengaging.

Addendum: Chris reminded me that I did not mention the Borg baby that Seven rescues from the cube when its incubator malfunctions. He and Memory Alpha have informed me that we never see it again, so its only purpose is to be a prop for the Doctor to hold when he asks Janeway not to use the biological agent that they've harvested. It's kind of a cheap move, but it's hard to say that it is much different than Hugh's plot purpose in I, Borg. Again, a Federation crew has a weapon that can be used against the Borg; I guess the real distinction here is the paradox puzzle that Data and Geordi designed was intended to kill all Borg everywhere, whereas this one is of significantly smaller scale. I'd be interested to see if the weapon comes back, and if the debate about its use returns - Memory Alpha gave me no spoilers, so I'll just have to wait and see.

As for the baby, I'm okay with it not coming back. I'm comfortable assuming that they just kept it safe until they could find others of its species to hand it over to.

S6 E15: Tsunkatse

Voyager is visiting a friendly planet, and the crew is taking this opportunity to take a little shore leave. While most of the crew is entranced by a sort of mixed martial arts fighting curcuit, Seven and Tuvok opt to enjoy some peace and quiet on a routine nebula survey. However, shortly after they leave, they are abducted, and in the process Tuvok is seriously injured. Penk, the owner of the Tsunkatse fighting franchise, has captured them, and coerces Seven into participating in return for medical care for Tuvok. When the Voyager crew sees her in the ring, they are outraged, but discover that the matches are holographically telecasted from a remote ship. Seven is taken under the wing of an honorable Hirogen fighter, who had been captured years ago. He prepares her for a "red fight" - a fight to the death - which Penk believes will bring in more viewers due to the antipathy that many of the delta quadrant denizens have towards the Borg. When Seven enters the ring, she finds out that her opponent is the Hirogen, who reverals that he has been training her in the hopes that he may finally have an honorable death. Seven is poised to deliver the killing blow, hesitating, with the Hirogen begging her to end it, when Voyager beams the two out at the last minute.

This is oddly the of the lowest rated "event" episodes on GEOS (ranked #138 of 171 episodes total) - and I actually quite enjoyed it. Now, I wasn't nearly as excited about the "big" guest star (The Rock) as I'm sure the network execs thought I would be, but I was thrilled about the other two (Jeffrey "Weyoun" Combs and J.G. "Martok" Hertzler). Both played favorite characters of mine on DS9, and it was a blast to see them again. Also, it would have been very easy for this episode to settle into the uncomfortable "moral high ground" of preaching against violent sport - I mean, the Doctor said his piece on that, and that's fine, but the episode itself only really took a stand on forced participation and fights to the death. In place as a counterpoint to the Doctor's position is Chakotay's defense of the art of combat. I'm sure that part of the reason for that fairness is the whole WWE tie-in element of the episode, so the writers probably felt they couldn't get away with demonizing it - but no matter the motives, I'll always be happier with a more even-handed Voyager story. While knowing that, exterior to the episode, Chakotay's speech comes off as a bit of a sales-pitch for fake wrestling, within the episode it makes perfect sense (and Tsunkatse really has very little to do with theatrical "wrestling" anyways).

Tuvok and Seven, of the under-used Voyager character pairings, is the one that I think the show suffers the most due to its absence. The two are great together, I love their blind-leading-the-blind relationship, and the opportunity it presents to give Seven a less narrow view of individuality than Janeway preaches about. You can imagine my delight when I realized I was going to get a Seven and Tuvok episode - the possibilities were endless! They could use their shuttle flight as a set up for debates about philosophies of idealism versus pragmatism, and then have those world-views put to the test. Tuvok, with his extensive security training and Vulcan strength would have to reluctantly train Seven; a fast learner with Borg reflexes, but whose emotions lead her to be less rational about the final bout, where Penk pits the two against each other!

The thing is, though, none of that happens. Their shuttle scene is cute enough, but then Tuvok is knocked out for the rest of the episode. Now, I thought Hertzler did a great job as the (curiously unnamed) Hirogen, and his story was fleshed out well enough (though not terribly creative - might as well have been playing a Klingon again), but this episode would have been fantastic if it had chosen to focus on two established characters that we already know and care about instead. As it is, it is still a good episode. But it could have been great.

Watchability: 4/5

Bottom Line: This was a much better episode than I was expecting, considering both on its GEOS rating and the tie-in with a show that I am completely uninterested in. I mean, if you watch it, that's fine, we can still be friends, it's just not for me.

S6 E14: Memorial

After returning from what seemed like an uneventful survey mission, Paris, Chakotay, Kim, and Neelix begin reliving parts from a brutal massacre of some alien colonists. When Neelix pulls out a phaser and starts shooting at anyone who comes near Naomi in the mess hall, they start putting the pieces together and Voyager retraces the Flyer's path. More and more of the crew begin experiencing the same resurfacing memories, until Voyager arrives at an uninhabited planet that has an active but ailing 300 year old device, intended to serve as a memorial for the dead colonists. Once the Doctor learns how to suppress the memories, Janeway orders a repair effort, so the device can continue to serve as a warning to those who would engage in the same actions as the aggressors from the memories.

Like many Voyager episodes (like, say, the previous episode, Virtuoso), this one is completely predictable. On the face of it, it is yet another "weird alien device alters the crews thoughts" episode. Yet, unlike Virtuoso, this episode manages to be very engaging despite the predictability. We knew that the Doctor wasn't really going to leave Voyager, so the whole episode was an exercise in waiting from something to go wrong with the aliens of the week; but here, even though I found it likely that the relived events were acquired second-hand, there remained the questions of how, why, and from whom?

Additionally, the characters seem genuinely affected by the memories, and that helps maintain the momentum as well. Even if the idea of the episode wasn't completely inventive, Braga (that's right, I'm praising a Braga episode) managed to keep me interested by exploring the emotional responses of the characters. Neelix seems to feel more guilty than many, which is consistent with the guilt he revealed in Jetrel over not taking up arms to defend his homeworld. In contrast, Kim's role, as the most naive of the group, was to defend their "actions" as best he could. And, get this, Tuvok's Vulcan control finally gives him some immunity to alien mental influence. I've been hoping for that for seasons and seasons, but the writers have always been more interested in using the Doctor or Kes or Seven. Moreso than a lot of recent episodes, this is definitely an ensemble episode, and I'm happy to reward that.

Janeway reprises her role as the decisive captain again; you know, that thing I like about her. She weighs the options, hears everyone out, then ends the deteriorating debate and makes her choice to repair the memorial. We've been seeing this Janeway less often again, and I think it helps that this is an ensemble episode. If it were Janeway-centric, we would have had more screen time to fill with Janeway being mad that someone doesn't agree with her, or for Kate Mulgrew to twist some innocuous line into being condescending. Instead, it is Janeway making a choice, even if it is unpopular - it is just icing that I happen to agree with that choice.

Watchability: 5/5

Bottom Line: As predictable as it was, Memorial managed to remain engaging throughout by rooting itself in the emotional reactions of the characters - reactions that are consistent with their behavior throughout the series without being a retreading of old ground.

S6 E13: Virtuoso

Voyager is playing host to the survivors of a damaged ship, and their smug superiority frustrates the Doctor's smug superiority to no end. However, he starts humming a tune, and they are entranced; they've never even heard of music before. The doctor's singing to so amazing to them that he becomes a cultural icon for them, and before long, he is contemplating staying on their planet when Voyager leaves. His departure plans depress the crew, but when one of his devoted fans makes an enhanced version of him, his adoring public moves on, and he sullenly decides to keep traveling with Voyager.

I get it, Picardo can sing. He's quite talented at it. But while the campy atmosphere and dialogue is evocative of TOS, it is also intensely uncomfortable. Homage is paid to the mathematical nature of music, but that just opens up opportunities for characters to wax poetic about music being more than just equations. This episode had an opportunity to get really nerdy about the foundations of music, about the math behind it - certainly, there is something very resonant with the human mind about the structure of musical scales and sound wavelengths and the way octaves work frequency-wise, and maybe they could have done something really creative with the aliens and how they perceive the music. However, instead of a music theory lesson, we get boring, stilted dialogue, with nothing deeper than what we'd learned in second grade playing the recorder.

A couple scenes in particular really sunk this episode, and unfortunately they were one after the other. The first is the one between the Doctor and his biggest fan, the one who leads him to believe that she's in love with him. The complaint about characters dismissing the math of music as missing the point stems primarily from this scene - but it got much worse. When the Doctor talks dismissively of equations, and his fan is trying to get him to stay, she drops this bomb: "What about the equation one plus one?" Voyager writers, you can't be serious. Really? Then there's the scene between the Doctor and Janeway, where she engages in some mental acrobatics bouncing around treating him like property, then making nonsensical statements about him treating himself like a piece of property, then calling herself his friend.

The idea for this episode, as long as the writers aren't going to do any music theory research, could have worked a lot better as a B-plot. There just isn't much substance to it, and it is stretched over the full hour. I recently added character tags to the reviews in the archive, and noticed that Voyager hasn't been using the A-plot/B-plot formula as much. While I've liked the later seasons better, I don't think that shift is responsible; I feel like a good B-plot can really keep a floundering episode afloat, or at least give me something to hold on to when I don't like the A-plot. Using that format more often could have evened out the bumpier spots of seasons four, five, and six.

Watchability: 1/5

Bottom Line: This episode's failure is no fault of Picardo, or really even his character. It's just too flimsy for him to do anything with it.

S6 E12: Blink of an Eye

Voyager has entered into orbit of a donut shaped planet with a tachyon core, and the warp drive goes off-line. Trapped in orbit, they discover that the planet is moving through time at a different rate from the rest of the universe, and supports a civilization that is progressing rapidly. Voyager's presence causes earthquakes on the planet, and, over the centuries, has attracted the attention of the populace below. First they send radio transmissions, a response to which is forbidden by the prime directive, but the Doctor is sent down to observe the planet and hopefully get information about getting home (and due to a glitch in the transporter, spends 3 years down there in the minutes it takes to reestablish a transporter lock). Next, the planet's residents send a manned space mission, but only one of the astronauts survives the time differential. By the time he awakes, years have passed back home. He tells the Voyager crew of the place their ship has held in his culture for centuries, and agrees to help Voyager by returning to his planet when the ship starts being bombarded from the ground. In a few hours, he returns in ships that are more advanced than Voyager, and helps them escape the planet's field.

Trek has a long history of "accelerated time" stories; other than Voyager's own less than awesome Gravity, there's The Inner Light, The Visitor, Wink of an Eye, and Timescape, all episodes where time passes faster or slower for some than it does for others. Additionally, this episode is also evocative of Children of Time, where the Defiant travels forward in time to meet it a culture made of its own descendants. This particular episode has a larger scope than many of those other episodes, since we get snapshots of a whole species' development. That the scope is larger does not make this a quality episode on its own, it is in the details of the development and the personal connections where it meets with success.
 
While overall One Small Step faltered when it came to storytelling, I mentioned that I really appreciated the undertones of excitement about manned space travel. This episode focuses more directly on its theme of Voyager inspiring the inhabitants to go to space, and doesn't get bogged down in a heavy-handed story about Seven learning to be more human. It does a good job of showing different reactions to Voyager's presence throughout the culture's development; religious interpretations, the questioning of those beliefs, and uncertainty regarding Voyager's intentions. For me, the best tie between the planet's culture and Voyager is the Doctor; his time on the planet allows him to make a connection with the people there, and I feel that the best realized scene of the episode is the one between him and the guy from the planet who comes to the ship.

Of course, what would a Voyager episode be without really terrible science? A tachyon core? Really? The core of the planet is moving faster than light? Or how about the visit from the planet's astronauts - why don't they slow down as they approach Voyager? How does that make any sense? If time is moving at one speed on the planet, and another in orbit of the planet... I guess maybe they were assuming there could be such a thing as temporal momentum? Doesn't seem very likely to me, but then again I have never been to a planet with a tachyon core. It doesn't really add anything to the story to gave time work in this nonsensical way - why do it then?

Watchability: 5/5

Bottom Line: Bad science aside, the idea of this episode is very interesting, which made it very enjoyable to watch.

Addendum: Over the last couple of months, I've been enjoying SFDebris' video sci-fi reviews, but this is the first time I've watched one of his reviews before I've "published" my own review of that episode. In his Blink of an Eye review, he brings up a number of striking similarities between it and a science fiction book by the name of Dragon's Egg. While it is more than a bit of a stretch to imagine that Voyager's writers actually read hard sci-fi, the detail of some of the parallels is suspicious to say the least.

I've always thought of Trek, particularly TOS and TNG, as kind of a sci-fi sampler dish. DS9's a little different due to its format, but on the whole the alien-a-week shows hit upon a lot of well-worn sci-fi tropes. Even a story as good as The City on the Edge of Forever wasn't exactly groundbreaking in terms of its concepts - anyone who examines the idea of time travel to the past is going to need to deal with the reality that changing things, even for what seems like the better, is going to have consequences. While I haven't read Dragon's Egg (though I should, it sounds great), and if it truly inspired this episode some sort of credit should have been given, I feel like Blink of an Eye fits right in with other Trek episodes that get the imagination flowing and encourage the viewer to seek out more, similar stories. Either way, even knowing now that it wasn't a unique and original concept, I still had a great time watching this episode.

Double Addendum: Apparently, CBS has just made SFDebris take down all his videos, and he hasn't uploaded this one to his BlipTV site yet, so you won't see that one up anymore. Boo on them.

S6 E11: Fair Haven

Paris has recreated an Irish village as the latest holodeck vacation spot for the crew - you can tell it is Ireland right away because every single extra on the streets has red hair. Janeway begins falling for the roguish bartender, and then starts modifying his program to suit her needs. Once she has sex with him she starts feeling guilty about it, and abandons him, but since the whole crew uses the program it is constantly running and the guy goes nuts and spills the beans for the crew. Then a magical space phenomena that Voyager had to ride out rather than avoid destabilizes the program, and it must be shut down for six weeks, so Janeway says her goodbyes to him, but says maybe she'd see him in six weeks.

I do have two nice things to say about this episode. One: it is a holodeck story that is not a holodeck malfunction story. Sure, parts of the program are lost at the end, but the central conflict of the story is not entirely based on a piece of luxury equipment going haywire; it is instead about a crew member going haywire. That at least is the foundation for a better story; we explore what the character's personal reaction is to the holodeck, and that gives us a good opportunity for character growth. It is squandered of course, but the idea started in the right place.

Number two is the Doctor's conversation with Janeway about her experiences. It is not preachy (despite his priest's garb), and covers a number of important holodeck and Janeway-related issues. He raises a good point that Janeway's by-the-book nature does exclude her from forming romantic relationships from the crew, and though he doesn't state this explicitly, if she's going around looking for romance from the alien-a-week people then she's bound to enter into a conflict of interest that way, so a hologram may be her best choice for romantic release. Her concern is about being able to just alter her boyfriend to her liking, to the point that he is better than life - and to Janeway, there's really no good reason to be that happy. I guess Rimmer is to Red Dwarf as Janeway is to Voyager.

This episode feels strange following on the heels of Pathfinder, a re-exploration of Barclay's holo-addiction. Holodecks definitely do have the potential to make real life... obsolete, which Barclay would be the first to tell us. As much as I appreciate the Doctor's sentiment in his plea that Janeway consider having some fun, I do think that the threat of convincing virtual realities as a replacement for life (that is captured perfectly in Red Dwarf) is something to be genuinely concerned about.

But here's the real problem with this episode: it is another run of the mill love story that builds way too slowly - it's even run of the mill for a holodeck love story. At least Harry Kim's holodeck love story (Alter Ego) had another angle to it, and twisted into a tale about Tuvok's loneliness. There's just nothing going on here. I don't even particularly like the setting. The Talaxian resort program, I think that's probably my favorite group holodeck destination so far - everything else has seemed to tailored to (or by) one or two crew members. To Neelix's credit, he tried to pick something everyone would like, and when people wanted to make additions, he was okay with it (even back when he was awful). Fair Haven doesn't seem like the kind of place that would exert the draw on the crew that the writers want us to believe it does.

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: It's not just a love story, it's not just a holodeck love story, it is a Janeway holodeck love story.

S6 E10: Pathfinder

Reginald Barclay has called Deanna Troi over to chat, but also to beg her to call up an admiral and tell him that Barclay's clear for duty. You see, Barclay's become obsessed with the Voyager crew, even to the point of creating a holographic version of them for him to pal around with. This obsession came about through his involvement in a project to communicate with Voyager. He's thought of what might be a breakthrough, but he's had misfires in the past so no one will hear him out. Instead of waiting a day to see if the admiral (admiral Paris, to be exact) will make good on his promise to try out his technique, Barclay breaks into the office, fires up the machine, and leads Starfleet security on a chase through his holoprogram. Everything is forgiven when Voyager returns Barclay's call, so now Barclay's impatience and insubordination makes him a hero one day earlier than being a reasonable human being would have.

The first scene of this episode, between Troi and Barclay, is intensely uncomfortable. Remember back during the Timeless review, when I said that I'd only made it through two episodes when I tried to watch the best of the best? I said that because I'd completely blocked this one out. It all came rushing back to me during that first awful scene, where the two of them are awkwardly name-dropping everything they possibly can from The Next Generation, as if it were pathetically begging "Please, TNG viewers who are watching this because they heard Troi would be in it, come back to us. We loved you. See, we even remembered that Troi looooves chocolate!"

I didn't even make it through this whole episode the first time. The pacing is, in a word, wretched. I mean, watching it, you know that Barclay is going to succeed by the end. That's not a surprise. So the reason why the writers thought it would be a good idea to draw out all the "Barclay is awkward" parts is completely lost on me. This isn't even new development for Barclay. He's had, at best, four, five episodes? And they still couldn't come up with anything new for him other than bringing him back to square one? Even TNG, renowned for its episodic, restore the status quo before the end of the hour format didn't just have the same holo-addiction episode four times. Each time Barclay showed up, he was still awkward, but he was a little more competent, a little more different. It wasn't just the first scene, it is the whole episode prostrating itself, trying to lure viewers back with a gambit that never works: "Come back and you'll get more of the same!"

At least the last five minutes are relatively cathartic, with Voyager finally able to speak directly with home. It's a big moment, and it is played well, I can't take that away from this episode. But since the rest of the episode was so bad, I didn't even get to that part on my first time through this episode.

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: I guess five minutes of good content really can save the other thirty eight minutes of meaningless fan-pandering from a one out of five rating.

S6 E09: The Voyager Conspiracy

Seven has some new implant, and uses it to download all of the Voyager computer's databases. The information helps her detect some photonic fleas that have been draining trace amounts of power for years, but when Voyager encounters a guy with a space slingshot, Seven begins spinning some crazy conspiracy theories. First she gets Chakotay worked up about Janeway's secret plan to invade the delta quadrant, then she convinces Janeway that their presence in the delta quadrant is all part of a plan to use the slingshot as a Maquis weapon. By the time they get things sorted out, Seven is on her way to destroy the slingshot, but Janeway beams over and condescends her out of it. They then use the slingshot to get a couple years closer to home, and Seven deactivates the new implant.

When Seven started talking about downloading the Voyager database, it seemed silly that she hadn't already done so. I mean, she's clearly got the whole Encyclopedia Borgica in her head, I'm sure whatever is in the computer would seem like a thimbleful in comparison. But, for story reasons, all that information destabilizes her and somehow makes her paranoid. I guess maybe in the process her Hanlon subroutines got deleted: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

This episode could easily have been played for humor, in a manner akin to Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down. Now, I know that's not a highly favored BSG episode, based on reviews, discussions, and its place as the second lowest rated episode of the first season on the GEOS poll. However, I feel that it brought a welcome tension release, and was the kind of episode that the latter seasons could have benefited from. Certainly, Voyager is not the type of show that needs comedy episodes to relieve the strain of constant hardship, but the idea of Janeway and Chakotay buying into the conspiracy theories that Seven comes up with is so ludicrous that I think that the only way that it makes sense to play this idea is as the core for a humorous episode.

One interesting thing that has occurred to me, thanks to this episode and several others in this season and the last: what if the writers had approached the first couple of seasons the way they have approached these seasons? Episodes like Latent Image, Equinox, Part II, and this one (with its flirtation with Janeway-Chakotay conflict) all would have felt more at home in the first two seasons, without four seasons of characters behaving the same way behind them. It may have engaged more viewers by going in these directions with the characters, which might have boosted the writer's morale some. Ronald Moore certainly described the Voyager offices as quite a dreary, downcast place, and I can't imagine the "no matter what we do, the ratings will keep slipping" mentality helped.

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: Drawn-out and ludicrous, this episode might have been better if the writers just punted and played it for humor.

S6 E08: One Small Step

In 2032, during a manned mission to Mars, a graviton ellipse emerges from subspace and consumes one of humanity's primitive spacecraft, never to be seen again. Never, until it emerges in the delta quadrant in Voyager's path. The crew is uniformly excited about exploring it, except Seven, who is all of a sudden extra skeptical about inefficient diversions again. Janeway talks down to her until she consents to "volunteering" for a Delta Flyer mission into the ellipse, commanded by Chakotay. They find the module intact, but a dark matter asteroid's impending collision with the ellipse forces a retreat - a retreat which Chakotay bungles by insisting they disobey Janeway's orders and slow themselves down by retrieving the module. Seven is understandably mad at him, since now the Flyer is damaged and they need to salvage parts from the module in order to repair the Flyer and escape. While Seven is aboard the ship, per Paris and Chakotay's request, she leaves the module's commander's logs running, and is so moved by his valor and thirst for exploration that she downloads his logs (and beams his corpse back) practically causing the same problem Chakotay did by delaying their departure. The Flyer escapes just before the ellipse returns to subspace, and while Seven has nurtured her inquisitive side, no one has learned any lessons about reckless behavior.

I do appreciate the thread in this episode about the emotional impact of manned space missions. While that topic is only once addressed somewhat tangentially in the dialogue, the story fairly clearly presents a case for manned space missions as inspiring events. The admiration that the characters show is not directed at the Mars missions so much as the human heroes who undertook those missions. Don't get me wrong: the Mars rover missions are also inspiring, in their own way, and it is certainly economically inefficient to send a human to Mars, but I'd love to know that we put a human footprint on that planet. There was a recent XKCD strip, whose alt-text expresses my point better than I can: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

I have one nitpick before I launch into the "what is wrong with these characters??" section. A graviton ellipse is just a magical space phenomena, so sure, it can do anything they want it to. But then there's the matter of the "dark matter asteroid." I knew very little about what dark matter is, so I spent about five minutes on wikipedia, and I already know enough to know that the writers were just like "Anyone heard a good space term recently? What's that, dark matter? Works for me!" So the vast majority of dark matter is non-baryonic, which is to say, isn't composed of atoms. I think that rules out that class of dark matter from being called an asteroid. Some small fraction is baryonic dark matter, which is composed of massive compact halo objects, which is a fancy way of saying "big things that don't emit light." A "dark matter asteroid" would just be an asteroid that isn't near a star. Doesn't sound so special now, does it? If you're going to make a show that glorifies manned space travel, could you at least make it not punish people for knowing things?

So, again, we've got par-for-the-Voyager-course take a step backwards to take a step forwards development for Seven. Janeway is back at it, preaching and condescending, and it rings all the more hollow when a perfectly valid lesson from this episode could be "taking risks with your friends' lives makes you a pretty lousy friend." But, no, Janeway has to be right, so the lesson is that "the quest for trivia is more important than your life or the life of anyone you know or care about." Worse, Chakotay's insubordination is out of the blue, recless, and he never faces any consequences for it. Well, I have a treat for you. I had heard a number of times that Robert Beltran had been outspoken in his dislike for the Voyager writing team, but hadn't seen any evidence of it. All the memory alpha annotations have shown no evidence of that dissention, until now, when it sent me to this article. While his reflections seem somewhat self-serving at times, I cannot say that I disagree with many of his sentiments. I recommend checking out the whole article, but will leave you with a nice juicy quote about this particular episode: "Everybody was so impressed and saying what a great script it was; I wasn't so impressed with it, because it ends up the same way - Seven of Nine saves the day, and Chakotay's prostrate on the bed and impotent, not able to do anything. It ultimately became all about Seven of Nine appreciating something that she hadn't appreciated before. And how many times have we all seen that? So to me, it was the same thing dressed up in a different cloth."

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: The episode itself is dreadfully boring, smothered by the Janeway and Seven scenes, with inconsistent characterization that ignores any previous growth by the characters in the past. But, the heart is completely in the right place, and I will always reward that highly (yes, 3/5 is a high reward compared to the score I would have given it otherwise).