Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

Waking Moments
Yet another out of order episode. Sorry, guys.

It's nappy-time on Voyager, and everyone is having bad dreams. Tom's crashing a shuttle, Janeway dreams that the crew died waiting for her to get them home, Tuvok dreams of going on duty sans uniform, and Harry's making out with Seven of Nine.

Yes, that's right. A wet dream was lumped in with obvious nightmares. This is why Andre Bormanis should have stuck to being the science advisor. Anyway, everyone wakes up and eventually starts talking about their dreams, apparently because they've got nothing else fucking better to do, and they all realize that the same alien popped up in each of their dreams. Harry doesn't report for duty, though - they eventually find him locked in a dream state in his quarters.

Give the man some fucking privacy, this is the closest he will ever get to having a girl touch his penis. They shuttle him off to Sickbay, where he joins other practically-comatose crew members.

Janeway throws a party/staff meeting to try to figure out what to do - they obviously have to communicate with the alien in the dreams, but if they fall asleep, there's no guarantee they'd wake up, and God knows the Doctor can't fly the ship. Chuckles comes up with the idea of toking up...err...using his magical Peyote Tricorder to initiate a lucid dream, and using the moon as a signal to wake himself up.

While Janeway is concerned for Chakotay's safety, she lets him go ahead and do this. In Sickbay, he...activates his magical Peyote Tricorder...and falls to sleep. In his dream, he is hunting a deer through the corridors of Voyager. As it runs into the Mess Hall, he soon follows, finally finding the alien. They get in a brief fistfight, but soon come to an understanding. The alien reveals that they basically live their entire lives asleep. Chakotay tells him that they didn't mean to wander into their, uh, sleep territory or something, and the alien tells him to go towards a planet in a nearby system in order to clear their sleep territory.

After Chuckles wakes himself up, he directs Voyager to set a course towards the planet. They do so, and as they arrive, the aliens suddenly arrive in force, taking Voyager handily as they beam right through the shields. The crew is rounded up like cattle and shoved in the cargo bays, and conveniently, the entire senior staff is in one cargo bay, and conveniently, it's the one with the Borg additions, as apparently, they are too cheap to make that a removable wall for a normal, not-Borgified cargo bay. Janeway decides that they need to make a distraction so that Tom, Torres, and Chakotay can work on a way out, so Seven starts beating the fuck out of Harry. Man, she's livin' the dream. But as Chakotay starts working on a way out, he sees the moon reflected in a control panel. He realizes he is asleep, and wakes himself up.

The Doctor is none too happy - the entire crew's fallen asleep while in orbit of the planet. Chakotay runs a scan and discovers that the cave systems on the planet are filled with life-signs that are all asleep - it's the aliens. He beams down with an injection of Mystery Drugs that the Doctor says will keep him awake. Chuckles orders that a torpedo be trained on his position, and if he doesn't report back, to fire and destroy everything. Despite being a Doctor trained to do no harm, the Doctor agrees (and will apparently forget how to fire torpedoes by the time Message in a Bottle rolls around).

On the surface, Chakotay wakes up an alien, startling everyone in the group dream that the Voyager crew is enjoying. Chuckles soon falls asleep, though, and rejoins the dream. He informs the aliens to let them go, otherwise, a torpedo will kill them all. They let them all go. Surprise, surprise.

Another awful episode. There was a dream-within-a-dream plot that I left out too, but it was just as bad. It is incredibly frustrating to have first-season quality episodes floating around in the fourth season.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: 11/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 9
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 8

God, that sounds horrible.

What is it with Janeway and holodeck characters?

She treats Da Vinci and her holo-lover like members of the crew and then turns around and acts like a complete dick to Shmullus/Joe/Whatever.

VOY just went overboard with all the holodeck shit. And every argument Voyager made for or against holodeck characters as sentients was already amply covered in a couple TNG episodes like The Measure Of A Man, Elementary Dear Data, and Ship In A Bottle.

By season seven they were just beating a dead horse.

I liked this better when it was called Night Terrors.

It's like the writers failed to realize that, hey, they're in the fucking Delta Quadrant, they don't need the Holodeck to get the crew to wild and wacky new places.

I will say this, with regards to Janeway. Thank God Kate Mulgrew ended up playing her. Did any of y'all ever see the scenes they filmed with Genevive Bujold? They were a fucking train wreck. They had her eliminate her accent to the point that it just sounded like she had a speech impediment, and then she just decided to sleepwalk through the entire thing - dumping her ass was the best move the Voyager staff ever made.

Frankly, I can't imagine making it through an episode like Concerning Flight with Genevive Bujold at center stage. I would have been yanking out my teeth.

"Eets not crawnch time yet Mr. Keym."

Totally not! By episodic I mean every episode basically resets to the status quo. Think of The Simpsons, sure there might be minor changes over the years but they live in the same house, drive the same car, have the same hairstyles, remain the same age ... Voyager is the same way, sure they traded in for a new Kes but that's about it.

[action=Uncle Albert]now desires a magical Peyote Tricorder.[/action]

Yeah, and they could have been episodic in the same way with the ship. Gradual changes over time done in essentially the same way as different characters coming and going.

I'm not saying the ship has to look like it did in Year of Hell all the time but you can show damage that doesn't get fixed. You can show other things that show that they really have no support to fall back on and have to scavenge for everything.

Maybe buy some alien shuttles to replace the ones that they casually destroy.

Chuckles has to buy an alien blow up doll instead of banging holo-Janeway on some holodeck resort.

And it could be done and still be an episodic series.

^
Well they did build the Delta Flyer, so that's something.

And we did see them buying weapons in that 7-borg-rape episode.

I think you just have to accept that Voyager was just never conceptually a survivor show. I remember reading that the producers thought that if they went down that road it would "stop being Star Trek".

Retrospect
OK, we're back on track. Voyager nukes the shit out of some space clay pigeon or something. Turns out it was a tech demo from a local arms dealer that Janeway is working with, hoping to secure exciting new ways to murder people since they're down to a handful of torpedoes. She strikes a deal with him, and they set to work on integrating the weapons into Voyager's systems.

However, Seven is assigned to help the arms dealer, though she promptly beats the shit out of him when he grabs her arm. She doesn't know why, but she feels an immense dislike towards him. Janeway sends her off to Sickbay after the Doctor treats the arms dealer for a broken nose.

While there, Seven seems to experience severe distress as the Doctor is examining her, whether it be by the tools he uses or the biobed arch. The Doctor eventually decides that it's possible that she has repressed memories, and pitches the idea to Janeway that he try out some new psych subroutines he's given himself and try to bring the memories to light. Janeway agrees.

What. The. Fuck. This is the rough equivalent of me reading a medical textbook, walking into a Doctor's office, putting on a stethoscope, and saying "Bring on the patients!"

Anyway, the Doctor is at his most annoying in this episode, and he starts the regression. Seven soon reveals that earlier in the day, she and Tom were on the planet's surface examining some of the weapons (by blowing the fuck out of some rocks with them), and that she went to help the arms dealer with an adjustment that would improve the weapon's accuracy. While there, he aimed the weapon at her and fired. After this, he strapped her to a table and started sucking Borg nanoprobes out of her bloodstream, then uses them to assimilate a guy who was also strapped to the table. He then woke her and handed her a dermal regenerator, claiming that the weapon had misfired, using that as a cover story for her unconsciousness.

The Doctor and Seven naturally go to Janeway, as these are serious allegations. Seven feels "violated." Yep, looks like we've changed the channel to Lifetime, because this is Voyager attempting to tackle the subject of rape. Of course, much like TNG, they don't actually have the balls to properly address the subject, so it'll be nanoprobe-theft instead of mind-reading or emotion-dumping or any of what seemed like a half-dozen episodes about Deanna Troi. However, I will give Voyager some credit here - they'll mix it up shortly.

The arms dealer denies the charge, claiming that there had been an accident, but that he certainly hadn't stolen any nanoprobes. Nonetheless, Janeway believes Seven, and contacts the authorities. The arms dealer begs her not to, as even the accusation would label him and prevent him from ever doing business again. She does it anyway, though, and a representative from the arms dealer's government shows up. Tuvok and the Doctor assist him, and the Doctor finds evidence of active nanoprobes in his lab, compared to inactive ones as would be expected in an accident. The representative has seen enough, and he elects to charge the arms dealer. He flips out, grabs a phaser, and backs away slowly before beaming to his ship.

The representative, Tuvok, and the Doctor beam back to Voyager and pursue him. While on Voyager, Tuvok insists on an experiment that should duplicate the accident, and the results prove the arms dealer's story, not Sevens. Her memories of the...assault...were false, and now they are on a mission to try to prevent the arms dealer from doing anything rash. He doesn't believe that Voyager has exonerated him, and thinks that their proof of his innocence is a trap. He attacks Voyager and his weapons soon overload (notice a theme here?). His ship is destroyed, killing him with it.

Seven and the Doctor are emo about getting the guy killed over some wacky dream Seven had, and the Doctor tries and fails to convince Janeway to reset his program, but hey, no worries - this'll never be referenced again.

Overall, a pretty mediocre episode. However, it was redeemed slightly by going the unusual route for Star Trek and episodes about rape on television by having the protagonists ending up causing a totally unwarranted death.

Rating: **
Torpedoes remaining: 11/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 9
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 8

Fair enough, I'm not digging in my heels on the definition of an episodic series. I'll only add that as someone who actually liked Voyager I never expected any significant changes from episode to episode. Much like TNG, you could watch the episodes in any order and still know what was going on. Whereas in DS9, a decidedly non-episodic series, you couldn't watch the episodes in any order and know what was going on. Sure DS9 had stand alone episodes but there was also a continuing story being told. Think of the difference from premiere to finale in terms of the characters. You just don't have that difference in TNG, VOY or even TOS.

Ahem........

Perhaps you should read what you wrote following that statement.....

How dare you!!!!!



Hey man, like I said, I'm not hung up on fighting a definition battle, this is my take on the nature of the series.

You think a beat up Voyager could have worked. I'm saying it wouldn't fit the style of the show.

We've now entered the second half of Voyager!

The Killing Game, Part I
A Klingon woman is screaming like a harpy and doing what Klingon women do - fight. However, she promptly gets stabbed, and we can recognize who the woman is for the first time - it's Janeway, and now she's dying on the holodeck floor.

She's taken to sickbay by the Hirogen, and a harried-looking Doctor treats her. The Hirogen have captured the ship (fuck, Voyager gets captured more often than any other ship in the fleet, I fucking swear), and the leader of their hunting party has decided that, rather than kill his prey, he'll use them in holodeck simulations to learn more about them and so that his own hunters can improve their skills in limitless scenarios. A wire he has the Doctor implant in their heads makes them believe they are the characters they'll portray in the holodeck.

He decides to throw Janeway into a new simulation, much to the protests of the Doctor, especially given the subject matter. Janeway's heading to World War II.

Amusingly, this presents more than a passing similarity to the Season 3 cliffhanger and Season 4 opening for Enterprise, but this is the way to get scary looking aliens in Nazi uniforms, not fucking time travel.

In the simulation, Janeway plays the role of a nightclub owner and hostess, Tuvok is a bartender, Torres is a spy knocked up by her Nazi assignment, and Seven plays a seductive singer/munitions expert. Together, they make up a French resistance cell, but the episode goes to great lengths to avoid calling them the Maquis, despite that being utterly hilarious and self-referential. I don't care, though, I'm going to call them the Maquis anyway, because it's shorter than 'resistance.'

The Maquis receive an encoded transmission from the Allies that the Americans will be mounting an offensive on the town they're in, and to take out the Nazi communications equipment. To do so, they'll need to mount a raid into the local Nazi headquarters, which Torres scopes out under the pretense of something being wrong with the baby.

However, a Hirogen lieutenant is tired of playing with his prey, and wants to commence with murdering them and fully taking the ship as a pure virtual hunting ground. To this end, he shoots Seven and Neelix (who is playing a bicycle-riding merchant), and almost kills both of them.

After being taken to sickbay, the Doctor explodes at the Hirogen, claiming that he almost killed both of them, and that the express agreement was that he'd only help them with their game if they didn't kill any of the crew. The Hirogen lieutenant doesn't give a shit, but he gets reamed out by the Hirogen leader, who tells him that the simulations are vital to the Hirogen's survival. He paints the nomadic hunters as a dying race, dooming themselves to oblivion because their hunt for prey extends all over the quadrant. He envisions Voyager as a single hunting ground the Hirogen can use to sate their lust for the hunt, yet still localize and build the community necessary to survive.

The Hirogen captain then demands that Harry, one of the few Voyager crew members not engaged in the simulations, continue his quest to add the hologrid to more and more areas of the ship in order to enlarge the hunting grounds. He soon secretly communicates with the Doctor, and they come up with a way to disable the wire - the Doctor then does so to Seven, as she'll be returning to the WWII simulation - Neelix is being sent off to join a Klingon war party. Yeah. Worst Klingon ever.

Seven soon rejoins the simulation, but her new, out-of-character behavior concerns Janeway and Tuvok, the latter of which wants to kill her quite desperately. However, there is little time, as Seven and Janeway must infiltrate the Nazi compound and destroy their communications equipment before the Americans arrive.

Seven and Janeway barely make it in, and start placing explosives to simply destroy the entire facility, orders be damned. However, Seven works diligently at a LCARS panel hidden in a bookshelf to disable the Captain's wire. Just as Janeway points a gun at Seven, demanding to know why she betrayed the Maquis, the building is rocked by a detonation - the Americans have begun their assault, and they're lead by Chakotay and Tom. Seven uses the distraction to finally disable Janeway's wire, and they escape the building just as it explodes from the Allied assault. However, an unanticipated issue with leaving the safety protocols disabled appears - it's a very real explosion, and it has ripped a hole in the side of the hologrid, revealing that this new holodeck spans multiple decks. Nazi and Allied forces swarm into Voyager proper, waging a 20th-century battle in the 24th-century corridors.

Of course, this final scene creates a veritable truckload of issues. The ever-nebulous holodecks now behave even more inconsistently, as it somehow accounts for people needing to traverse entire decks, seemingly in the blink of an eye. If someone fell out of a fifth-story window, how would they go from deck to deck? It's a fucking mystery. Additionally, Harry and Torres struggled with even getting holoemitters fitted in Engineering, but now Harry, alone, has managed to outfit half the ship with what amounts to a magical uberHolodeck? Come on, the guy can't even get laid, we're to believe he built all of this?

However, last-minute absurdities don't negate from what is ultimately a pretty good story. It's a good use of the holodecks to spur storytelling, and it turns the Hirogen from senseless hunter-killers into a race with real conflict. The Hirogen leader and lieutenant put in fine performances, and are more strong guest stars to come out of this season, even if they don't quite seem to fit the massive, seven-foot build of what we've come to expect of Hirogen (though there are giants wandering about in the scenes as well - notably, one guy had to duck as he walked through the door into the Ready Room).

Rating: ****
Torpedoes remaining: 11/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 9
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 8

Turn up the gravity plating so they hit the floor with a velocity as if they'd been falling for five stories? Add in force fields to keep them hovering for a few seconds before the splat.

Yes, but they'd still somehow have to get to the deck that is depicting ground level for any other holodeck participants.

The holodeck gains further magical properties in Season 5 when the Chaotica simulation apparently physically alters the color of materials that enter the holodeck. Fucking terrifying, if you ask me.

Hmm. I hated these episodes. It was just too much. It's like the writers threw a bunch of different scripts together to make up a two-parter.

Hirogen! Klingons! Nazis! Malfunctioning Super Holodeck!

Half the ship gets destroyed in this episode and god knows how much of the crew died during all this madness. But the two-parter wraps everything up with a tidy bow and none of this is ever addressed again.

I guess the WWII setting was sort of fun, but there was really no point to any of this... the Hirogen guy who becomes enamored with the Nazis just made me roll my eyes....

I assumed the holodecks being several decks high was something that happened after the Hirogen took over.

Normally, a holodeck wouldn't need to be more than one deck high, since everything in it is an illusion. When you think you're walking upstairs, you're actually walking up an escalator that's going in reverse. You think you're walking forward, you're actually on a treadmill. You think you see your real-life friend getting smaller in the distance as you walk away, you're actually seeing a holographic image of that that's been placed in between the two of you.

That sort of thing is how you're able to play baseball with nine people in Quarks holosuites, which are only about the size of a living room.

Before, Harry had to consider the other needs of the ship and Starfleet safety standards. With the Hirogen in charge, he didn't have those concerns.

The Holodecks from what we've seen of them in Voyager and TNG were at least two decks high.

And I've never heard of Quarks holosuites being the size of a living room. Got an episode link?

Just about any time the holosuites were shown "off", they didn't look much bigger than a good-sized living room. I don't think they ever showed the "ceiling", though, so they could've been a couple of decks high I suppose.

In the holodeck you've always got the impression it was taller and bigger then a single living room when it wasn't activated.

I realize that it's not canon but the TNG blueprints for the D had several holodecks. Some small ones and then some large ones. It has eight small ones that are single deck high. Then it has another 4 slightly larger that are two decks and then it has 4 very large two deck ones. Maybe the scale is off that they put on the blue print but the very large ones are at least 200 feet long which makes sense if you are having a large gathering or party.

Well I guess it could go either way. Single deck or two deck or as high as one would like to make one.

In other words the script decides how big one is.

I betcha Quark's are nowhere near big enough to play fucking baseball in.

Wait, now on Voyager there was a holo-deck AND a Holo-Lab, people often forget that. I believe, for instance, when they're modifying those Fair Haven characters in the small holo room that is the Holo-Lab not a HoloDeck.

Some of the HoloDecks on TNG were shown to be pretty high. Did we ever see the ceilings in most shots? I forget.

We never saw the ceiling, because one was never built. They're definitely at least two decks tall though.

If you think about it they kinda have to be at least two decks high. If someone were to jump up in a single deck holodeck they could conceivably hit the ceiling. Especially if the gravity is lowered for the simulation. Having it at least two decks high would make it easier on the computer.

Or let's say you're climbing on a tank. You're bound to hit the ceiling unless it's a two deck high ceiling. Now some of you would say the tank would just sink in the ground and give the illusion of you climbing up but what if there is another person waiting on the ground with the tank? You can't sink him into the floor.

See all the fixes for the holodeck concept fail when you add more than one person.

The Killing Game, Part II
The Killing Game was originally intended to be a telemovie, but for one reason or another, it never quite worked out. As a result, the second part is a little anemic. You can tell that the writers stretched this one a bit.

Seven and Janeway fight their way through the corridors of Voyager and make it to Astrometrics, but they realize that the only way to disable the wires of the crew is from sickbay, which is heavily fortified, both by holographic Nazi forces and by the Hirogen. Left with no other alternative, they are forced to enlist the help of the Maquis and the Americans to fight their war.

Returning to the simulation, Janeway and Seven reassume their characters and tell their allies that the Nazi building was actually a cover for a secret, Wolfenstein-esque compound, and that they'll need help destroying a "generator" within it. Having been supplied with some safety-protocol-disabled explosives, Janeway and Chakotay head out via an "escape tunnel", a Jeffries Tube.

Meanwhile, Harry and the Hirogen Lieutenant raise their concerns with the Hirogen leader that the situation has become completely untenable. Harry wants to blow the holoemitters to erase all the holocharacters (and, of course, significantly lessen the value of Voyager to the increasingly harried Hirogen), but the Hirogen Lieutenant simply wants to kill everybody. The leader insists that the game be continued and that the mayhem be contained.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is flabbergasted when a Hirogen insists on a fellow Hirogen being treated for minor wounds over a dying Starfleet crewman. So he just gets deactivated. However, Janeway reactivates him in the Klingon simulation. He tells her that she'll have to destroy the surgical console to deactivate the rest of the wires. OK, now, what the fuck. Do they just have extra surgical consoles lying around to replace this thing with? And is it a good idea to blow Sickbay up? Come on, Janeway. She leaves the Doctor with Neelix to handle the Klingons.

She and Chakotay take the explosives to the Jeffries Tube beneath Sickbay and plant them for five minutes, as Janeway has to disable a forcefield surrounding the console. She barely escapes, though a Hirogen definitely does not. However, she is captured, as are the Maquis and Americans on the holodeck.

She is brought to the Hirogen leader, and she is quickly sympathetic to his cause. She offers an agreement - Voyager will give the Hirogen holodeck technology, and the Hirogen will leave Voyager. The Hirogen hesitantly agrees, and they both go to Engineering to overload the holoemitters. However, just as they are about to do so, the Hirogen lieutenant caps his superior's ass with a Nazi rifle, and says that the hunt has begun. Janeway runs as more mayhem breaks loose - the Hirogen and Nazis are fighting the Americans and Maquis, and soon, the Doctor, Neelix, and the Klingons join the fray, slaughtering Nazis and Hirogen left, right, and center.

Now, we get one of the most absurd uses of nanoprobes to date. Seven modified a WWII-era grenade to somehow explode nanoprobes, which will magically destabilize the hologrid. As she goes to throw it, though, she gets shot, and ends up destabilizing their weapons cache. Way to go.

However, Harry has started the hologrid overload, and it finally blows. No, it isn't spectacular at all. Hell, it doesn't even make any sense. Only the holographic characters disappear - the setting, weapons, etc., etc. all stick around.

Janeway, meanwhile, lays a trap for the Hirogen lieutenant, pretending to be injured just out of range of the holoemitters so that his gun will disintegrate. She bursts forth and steals the gun as it reintegrates. She gives him one last chance, but ends up shooting him, letting him fall to his death across four decks of the hologrid in the WWII simulation.

The Hirogen finally defeated, Janeway stays true to her word and gives the remaining Hirogen a holographic data cube and computer - in a nice bit of continuity, exactly what Moriarty happily lived out his existence in - and none of the extensive damage to the ship will be evident in the next episode. Surprise, surprise.

Anyway, it wasn't a bad episode, but it definitely suffered from wrap-it-up-itis. The technical absurdities continue to mount in this episode, though, making the entire premise seem absolutely absurd. We will, however, see a followup on this later on in Voyager's run, in a rare instance of, I can't recall, fifth or sixth season continuity.

Rating: ***
Torpedoes remaining: 9
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 8

Not necessarily. Picture two people in VR helmets walking on omnidirectional treadmills. That's basically what the holodeck does, but without the bulky helmet and treadmill. It can project a scene between you and your friend so it looks like he's walking off into the distance. As long as there's enough room so you can't reach out and touch him, you'll never know the difference.

Agreed... that made no sense whatsoever. Maybe they ran out of budget to pull the empty holodeck set out of mothballs?