Voyager season six episode reviews

I generally just post about political events, but how about some reviews of Star Trek Voyager episodes for a change of pace.

The Voyager Consipracy
An episode that makes fun of conspiracy nuts! I love it!

The narrative rides on a clever premise. Seven of Nine has altered her Borg alcove to allow her to assimilate enormous amounts of data while she’s regenerating. The trouble is, it’s too much information for her brain to handle, despite her Borg hardware, and she starts to go a little loopy trying to make sense of all the information. This isn’t apparent at first, as she is correctly able to diagnose a problem with the ship using some pretty disparate bits of information. But then Seven takes the fact that an alien the ship is assisting is using technology similar to the Caretaker’s from Voyager’s first episode, and she starts to spin some pretty wild conspiracy theories about Starfleet deliberately establishing a military presence in the Delta quadrant. They’re doing it in collaboration with the Cardassians, no less! She delivers this bit of information to Chakotay and actually has him wondering if there’s validity to the theory. Jeri Ryan approaches Seven’s impartation of information as though it’s verbal assault, following one stardate and events that took place on that date with another in rapid fire fashion. She then tries the same thing with Janeway, but tries to convince her that the whole stranding of Voyager was a Maquis plot.

The whole thing comes across as great fun, because it’s so absurd and the twisting of facts is so obvious to the viewer. But people do this all the time in the real world. Look at the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ conspiracy theorists for a prime example of taking lots of facts, combining them with assumptions, and producing a nutty theory. Of course, in the real world, there’s no malfunction of Borg technology to excuse the lunacy. The Doctor is able to work out what’s gone wrong with Seven of Nine and ultimately help her recover, after one of Voyager’s standard cliches, the “unauthorized shuttle launch” that’s always too late to be stopped, as Seven decides that she was the ultimate target of the consipracy and runs for her life.

Failing to stop the shuttle launch is a cliché that made me downgrade the episode a bit, but it’s not the only weakness. I find it hard to believe that Janeway and Chakotay would so easily believe Seven’s wild theories, but apparently they are convinced enough to investigate what she had to say, and to briefly distrust each other. That’s weak characterization of the captain and first officer.

On the positive side, in a series that’s often far too devoid of continuity, this episode is a breath of fresh air. Events from Voyager’s first episode are referenced, and indeed, we get to see clips from that episode. Characters discuss those events with Seven. Other episodes are mentioned, and Kes is name-checked as well, for the first time in a long time. This episode feels like part of a continuing series, rather than an episode that’s disconnected from the overall Voyager story arc. Voyager needed more stories like this.

At the end of the episode, Voyager makes some progress towards home in this episode via a “subspace catapault”, which gives them several hundred light years of progress in a few hours, and shaves three more years off the trip. It’s a happy ending to a fun episode. And the alien of the week is actually friendly and helpful for once, rather than simply being belligerent for the same of being belligerent.

Individual story rating: 7.5 out of 10
Voyager uniqueness rating: the idea behind the story could be adapted for other series with major changes, but by and large this is a story specifically tailored for Voyager and its characters.



Pathfinder
Pathfinder is an excellent story with one major flaw, which I’ll get to shortly. The episode updates the audience on events back on Earth, as Starfleet makes continual efforts to contact Voyager from halfway across the galaxy. And rather than populate the episode with all new characters, the story uses Reginald Barclay from TNG as the protagonist. Barclay is the engineer who was so socially inept and shy that he would retreat into the holodeck and live out a fantasy life where he was a success and a ladies’ man. As the story begins, he’s in some trouble, and is paid a visit by TNG regular, Deanna Troi, who had become friends with Barclay.

In addition to these two familiar characters, the episode also introduces Barclay’s supervisor, a decent guy who suffers Barclay’s quirks in the same way that LaForge did back in the original TNG episode. And the guest characters are rounded out by the presence of Admiral Paris, father to Tom Paris.

The plot concerns Barclay’s plan to contact Voyager via an artificially created wormhole and other technobabble that I won’t repeat here, based on where Starfleet has calculated the ship to be since they last made contact back in season four. This is where the story’s only major flaw comes into play. Voyager has gained nearly 30,000 light years since they contacted Starfleet in “Message in a Bottle” and “Hunters”, so Starfleet would be looking for them in the wrong place. The attempt to contact Voyager is ultimately successful, but it should not have been. On the other hand, to have the episode end in failure would have basically made the whole thing pointless, so it comes down to ending the story with a significant advance in Voyager’s quest to get home, or adhering to logic and continuity and rendering the episode meaningless. The writers could have avoided this by planning ahead and dropping another contact somewhere earlier in the season, but strict intro-series continuity is always fast and loose with Voyager. It’s one of my biggest gripes with an otherwise enjoyable series.

Barclay is well written, and his character’s history is put to good use as a basis for his obsession to contact Voyager. The crew of the Enterprise had become his surrogate family, and since being transferred to Earth, he’s become lonely and withdrawn. He’s drifted back towards his holo addiction and become obsessed with Voyager and her crew, which he has re-created in the holodeck as a ‘diagnostic tool’. He’s even named his cat Neelix. He gets very worked up when talking about how lonely the crew must be, stranded in the Delta quandrant, and it’s obvious he’s telling us more about himself than Voyager. In the end, he breaks protocol and disobeys orders to try out his theory for contacting Voyager. Had he failed, his career would have been over, but his success mitigates his misdeeds, and Janeway has her first two-way conversation with Starfleet in five and a half years.

In the end, the continuity flaw is annoying, but sadly par for the course. Otherwise, this is a very strong episode that uses Voyager’s unique situation to produce some good drama. We needed more episodes that did what this episode did.

Individual story rating: 9 out of 10
Voyager uniqueness rating: this story is tailored to specifically advance Voyager’s overall storyline


Fair Haven
Fair Haven is a quite a letdown after the excellence of Pathfinder. The town of Fair Haven is the latest holodeck getaway for the Voyager crew. Yes, it’s a holodeck episode. With a whole galaxy of ‘real’ things to explore, we have to endure another episode of the crew play-acting.

To be fair, the ship is stuck in place in this episode. The arbitrary spatial danger of the week is, in essence, a thunderstorm in space, which has collapsed Voyager’s warp field. They can’t outrun it, so Janeway makes the decision to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. Since they can’t go anywhere, the captain initiates an open door policy for holodeck usage and lets the village simulation run 24 hours a day. It acts like artificial shore leave, I suppose. There’s nothing terribly offensive about the idea and story, but neither is there anything compelling about it. We’re watching the crew relax, which doesn’t have a lot of entertainment value. Or at least, not enough to carry an entire episode.

The ethical problem in the story comes about when Janeway finds herself attracted to one of the holodeck characters. In the Star Trek world, the holodeck simulates real people to the point that we’ve seen several characters fall for one. Way back in TNG season 1, Riker makes out with a lady in a jazz club and has enough feelings for her that he still remembers her and she becomes a plot point in season 4. Harry Kim falls for a hologram in season 3 of Voyager, though in his case there was an alien hacked into the computer and interacting with him. In both cases, characters treat a simulated human as though they were real. Janeway does much the same thing here, and the story uses that attraction to explore just how lonely she is after five years of being “the captain”, with no intimate contact with anyone. Everyone on the ship is her subordinate, not her equal, and therefore relationships are off limits. She’s closer to Chakotay than anyone else, but she really has no one to open up to or be vulnerable to. It’s the old ‘loneliness of command’ storyline applied to Janeway. This is a very valid character issue to explore, and the episode tries to do so in an interesting manner. This small community of 150 humans have no one but themselves for companionship, and given the capabilities of the holodeck, Janeway’s dilemma makes sense. In the context of the series, her actions are no more unbelievable than someone getting addicted to internet porn as a substitute for an actual physical relationship, for example.

So she develops romantic feelings for one of the holograms, who is the bartender in the village. She later feels regret for it and berates herself for allowing herself to have feelings for someone who isn’t even real. Oddly enough, she discusses it with the Doctor, who is himself a sentient hologram and therefore not quite the same as the more limited simulations on the holodeck. He’s not likely to be sympathetic to her point of view, and indeed he isn’t, trying instead to sell her on the benefits of a “relationship” that’s not real, since she can’t have a real relationship in her situation.

There’s a good, strong exploration of Janeway’s situation buried somewhere in this episode, but I’m just not sure the story that surrounds it really serves the character well. Janeway’s dilemma is the only meat in an otherwise very, very lean story, and I can’t help but feel that the story would have benefitted from less of the superfluous space danger and filler with the village’s inhabitants, and more development of Janeway’s “relationship”.

The bottom line: the story has something to say about the captain and her solitude, but can’t quite figure out how to get its message across in a compelling way. The end result is a lot of harmless fluff that is hardly compelling.

Individual story rating: 4 out of 10
Voyager uniqueness rating: some elements unique to Voyager’s situation, but could generally work for TNG or DS9 just as easily

Blink of an Eye, Virtuoso,

Memorial
Memorial feels like an old-school Voyager episode. It focuses on characters other than Seven of Nine for once, and it sets up a situation where our main characters have supposedly taken part in something that we, the viewers, know they would never do, namely a massacre of civilians during some type of forced resettlement by an alien military. The episode reminds me of Projections or Coda, where events are occurring that cannot have taken place as we see them onscreen, and so the point of the episode is to unravel the mystery behind the mind games. Sometimes this approach works, and sometimes it’s unsuccessful. Memorial is a definite success.

Chakotay, Paris, Neelix and Kim all return from a long-term away mission and begin to experience memories of being involved in the massacre. Voyager investigates by retracing their flight path, which causes other members of the crew to remember the same events, including Janeway. They locate the planet where the massacre took place, only to discover that the events they “remember” happened three centuries ago, and that memories have been implanted in their minds via the episode’s titular memorial, a stone monument. The memorial monument in question does more than just describe events, it forces visitors to the planet to experience them via implanted memories, ensuring that the massacre is never forgotten.

It’s a strong concept, and the acting by all the regulars really sells it. Maybe this material was something they could really get their minds around and believe in, and that contributes to solid, emotionally believable performances. The characters feel more real in this episode, rather than looking like pawns for the plot. Janeway’s final solution, to repair the memorial despite the trauma it’s caused the crew, is a decision that most of the crew don’t seem to agree with. And I tend to side with them rather than Janeway. At some point, history is just that: history, and however well-intentioned the memorial was, forcing innocent passers-by to live horrible events they had nothing to do with is cruel. But Janeway’s the captain, so she gets her way.

Individual story rating: 8 out of 10
Voyager uniqueness rating: could easily be used in any of the other Star Trek series and lose nothing

Tsunkatse
Who ever thought I’d see the Rock in a Star Trek episode?

Tsunkatse is Star Trek’s take on boxing, or pro-wrestling, or any such similar sporting event. It’s not a deep episode, but it has some entertainment value. I suppose. At least, if you like choreographed fights between Jeri Ryan and the Rock, which shows off the rather impressive physique that both sport in this episode. But then, that was probably the point.

Tsunkatse is a sport that’s enjoyed by the denizens of half a dozen planets in the region of space that Voyager’s passing through. Some of the crew take an interest in it at first, believing it to be akin to a martial arts tournament. That changes when Seven of Nine and Tuvok are kidnapped, and Seven is forced to compete in the matches, and the crew learn that not everyone in the sport fight willingly. But since the sport is so profitable, no one in the local governments are willing to do anything other than turn a blind eye to the occasional alien forced to fight for his or her life.

Voyager tracks down the source of the fights, which take place on a traveling spacecraft and are transmitted to all the local planets. It’s pay per view. Despite the fact that Voyager is outgunned and generally outclassed by the ship hosting the Tsunkatse matches, they manage to do enough damage to the ship to enable them to rescue first Tuvok, and then Seven, along with her opponent in a deathmatch. I note that this happens while Janeway’s away from the ship and Chakotay’s in command. Looks like he’s better at space combat than she is.

The ethical core of the episode boils down to this: will Seven take a life in the arena to save her own? Or Tuvok’s? It’s nothing we haven’t seen before in Star Trek, including the original series episode “Arena” where Kirk refuses to kill the helpless Gorn. Couple that with the overuse of Seven of Nine episodes where she “explores her humanity” and learns lessons about being human, and the content is not anything new or novel. But the episode does entertain on a surface level as a ‘crew members in jeopordy’ plot, and the pairing of Seven of Nine with Tuvok offers some interaction that we haven’t seen much of before. And DS9 fans get a nod with the presence of both J.G. Hertzler and Jeffrey Combs as characters in this story.

One final comment. The presence of a Hirogen in this story is another case of the writers ignoring Voyager’s progress, as they so often do. Voyager has traveled nearly 20,000 light years since we last saw the Hirogen, and yet they find a Hirogen ship for our friend to travel back home on far too easily. Like the Malon in Juggernaut, and the Ankari in Equinox II, the writers simply don’t seem to pay any attention to how far Voyager has traveled and how unlikely it is that races like the Malon and Hirogen would be spread out over that many light years. At least with the Hirogen, we know that they are a culture that travels far and wide on their hunts, so the mistake is less egregious here. But it still challenges the willing suspension of disbelief, not to mention simple logic.

Individual story rating: 6.5 out of 10
Voyager uniqueness rating: substitute Klingon for Hirogen, and it could easily be used in any of the other Star Trek series and lose nothing

Obama's in over his head. Very much so.

I don't think Obama has a clue what he's doing. I'm sure he doesn't. 900 Billion dollars on pet projects for Democrats, and that's supposed to jumpstart the economy? If government spending made a strong economy, we'd have the best in the world.

That last $700 billion didn't do much, did it? So of course, we keep throwing money at the problem. Typical Democrat "solution" to everything.