Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

Could've been in the running as the most embarrassing hour of Star Trek were not for Enterprise's second season and their three way tie of ANISB, Precious Cargo and the one where T'Pol is, to quote the trailer "In HEAT!!!1"

Was there no other way of dealing with Janeway and....um, this topic?

Not only did they make a fucking sequel, they knew they were making a sequel when they wrote Fair Haven, and referenced it in the damn episode - Tom says that it's going to take "6 to 7 weeks" to repair Fair Haven, and Janeway later tells Sullivan that it'll be "6 to 7 weeks" before he can tend to her lady garden. Guess what was six episodes later? Spirit Folk.

Only SIX episodes later?

Fuck, these bozos couldn't even push it to next season? I wonder if these idiots had Kate Mulgrew shill for this episode like they somehow got Scott Bakula and John Billingsley to do for ANISB on the VOY s6 dvd set

Has anyone ever actually bought the Voyager DVDs? I'd imagine they're about as useful as AOL discs.

Let's not go insulting AOL discs like that.

Oh come on, Voyager wasn't that terrible. It's still watchable, it does have some issues. The biggest being Janeway, but then again I still think she started out a man and then couldn't get her hormone meds afterwards. Which would explain a lot of her bipolar disorder shit.

I met someone who had once.

It's on Netflix now. So if I'm feeling too happy about something, I can always watch VOY.

Y'know what would have been a great promotion?
If you had a PC with enough drives, and ran all the disks at the same time, it makes the Holodoc.
Now that woulda been an Ostrich sized Easter egg.

They probably thought the concept would be so popular that viewers would be clamouring for more.

They had stupid thoughts.

Wait, it's on Netflix? That would be a lot easier than my current...methods.

For certain values of "watchable." The best way to watch the show is as Direct-to-MST3K television. Voyager is quite terrible, but it's terrible in a way that makes it fun to mock the show.

On the other hand, if you watch Voyager wanting to actually care about the characters and hoping to see a show about a crew lost in space trying to find its way home then you're shit-outta-luck.

Yeah, all star treks are streaming on netflix.

Oh noes...Fair Haven got the better of Kyle.

Yes indeed! Go Kyle!

Blink of an Eye

Hold on to your butts, everyone, because Voyager's going to do actual science fiction for a change.

The episode starts like any other - Voyager detects some anomaly and ends up getting fucking trapped in it like a five-year-old putting his head through a bannister. The planet is has some vaguely science-y crap that causes it spin at such a rate that time dilation occurs - the people on the planet live and die exponentially faster than the rest of the universe. And that's it - we're pretty much done with the technobabble, which, for Voyager, is a fucking miracle.

When Voyager shows up, it appears to the tribal cultures on the planet that a new star has appeared in the sky, and they treat it as the arrival of a god, especially since an earthquake (if it's not on Earth, what's it called then?) comes along with it. In what is probably a move to keep Robert Beltran from hanging himself on the Engineering set, they have him eagerly launch a probe into the planet's atmosphere, letting it report back on what's happening on the planet.

We, the viewers, get to watch as the culture, now medieval, ties their messages to a hot air balloon to deliver to the mysterious object in the sky - the more scholarly believe that it is unlikely to be an actual god, but rather some sort of being that is punishing them with their earthquakes. When we see them next, they've advanced to the industrial age, knowledgeable enough to know that Voyager is actually some sort of vessel, referring to it as the "sky ship," filled with magical and wondrous beings they've even commercialized.

Back on Voyager, they're still stuck in the planet's orbit, and their orbit is decaying - there will be a point at which time starts dilating for them as well (never mind that it doesn't when they're at warp, but hey, dramatic conceit). Chuckles laments the probe's decaying condition, which Torres points out is due to its now centuries of dutiful continuous operation. Despite it being fairly obvious from transmissions that Seven has received that the people of the planet are cognizant of Voyager's presence, Janeway and her lackeys are still concerned about the Prime Directive and making contact, since the civilization is still pre-warp.

Ultimately, the Doctor volunteers to beam down to the planet to collect on-the-ground surveillance and determine what's going on - just for a few seconds, which should equate to a decent amount of time to cautiously explore. Janeway and Torres adjust his program to appear as one of the natives, then beam him down. However, the transporter, unsurprisingly, does not like fucking around with goddamn time dilation, and it takes them like two minutes to beam him back up. The Doctor is thrilled to see them, as it's been over three years on the planet. He brings exciting news - the idea of reaching Voyager has inspired the civilization to start a space race of their very own after having finally settled their wars diplomatically.

The crew uses the geological information the Doctor brought back to try to effect an escape, but it starts causing large amounts of seismic damage on the planet. Voyager ends their escape attempt, and soon enough, a rocket from the planet launches with the mission of communicating with Voyager. Though they try and try, the astronauts can't seem to contact Voyager, so they decide to dock manually with the ship and welcome themselves in. As they start to explore the ship, they realize something's very wrong - everyone is standing still, frozen in time and motion. The astronauts start feeling ill as they make their way to the bridge. Once there, they see time slowly start to speed up, until finally coalescing in the standard time frame, an experience that leaves one of them injured and the other dead.

Janeway shows the astronaut around the ship (apparently, the Prime Directive can go fuck itself now, but I'm willing to let her bipolar disorder slide since it actually makes sense for her to do so), and explains how the time on the planet passes so much faster than in the rest of the galaxy. Janeway offers to let the astronaut stay on Voyager, as due to the amount of time he's spent there, everyone he knew would likely be dead, but he decides to return to the planet to try to explain the situation to his people, since they've started lobbing tricobalt devices at Voyager (which, for the extraordinarily nerdy out there, ties nicely into Trek lore for Tricobalt devices' relationship with things having to do with tachyons - the stated cause of the planet's time displacement - like cloaking devices).

Janeway sees him off, and he pilots his craft back to the surface. His own people almost shoot him out of the sky, as he's been missing and declared dead for over fifty years. However, the landing of his craft is enough proof. Spurred by the understanding of Voyager's place in their universe, the civilization creates two new spacefaring vessels that are able to launch and pull Voyager out of the planet's orbit. A time-shifted communication hologram appears to thank Janeway, and express sadness that, at least for now, they'd be unable to join the spacefaring races of the Delta Quadrant. Voyager is able to head back on their way home, leaving behind a civilization that, for once, is actually better for their presence.

Except for the woman the Doctor was apparently banging on the planet and his adopted son. They probably wondered where the fuck he went. Who would have thought Voyager would ever depict an absentee father?

The episode shares a few similarities - and the title - with the TOS episode Wink of an Eye (and people even more cynical than I would probably say it ripped that episode off). But it shares more than that. It eschews modern Trek's tendency toward needing to explain every damn thing that happens, even though their explanations are usually just made-up jargon. It pushes characters ancillary to the plot, like Harry, Tom, Tuvok, and Neelix to the side, actually lets Chuckles and Torres shine and have some actual on-screen camaraderie, and while there were moments of the Janeway-Seven-Doctor show, it didn't feel pushy or forced. They also spent a great deal of time off of Voyager, and letting the astronauts drive a great deal of the plot.

In short, it told a story without getting stuck in the mechanics of it, and as a result, it was an episode that, more than any other on Voyager, felt like it would have been right at home in TOS. That's rare in modern Trek, and a one-in-168 shot for Voyager.

Rating: ****
Torpedoes remaining: -36/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 15
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

"Oh," you're thinking. "That's not so bad. After Fair Haven, I figured that the next episode would finish driving the ice pick into Kyle's brain."

Well, let me share something with you. A gift from Fair Haven. If I had to see it, so do you.



That's what it looks like when Janeway is thinking sexy thoughts.

NOW YOU KNOW MY PAIN. YOU CAN NEVER UN-SEE THIS IMAGE.

Virtuoso
or, Robert Picardo lip-syncing as a clown

Voyager has picked up a ship full of assholes who are busy bitching and moaning about how backwards and shitty Voyager is, and they've naturally stuck them with the Doctor, the most sarcastic member of the crew. They don't trust that he, as a hologram, is competent enough to be a doctor, since holograms in their culture tend to serve mostly as menial labor. While performing busy work, the Doctor starts to sing "I've Been Working On The Railroad," which shuts them the fuck up - they listen intently, as they've never encountered music before.

This "enlightened" race that all have Space Aspergers are fascinated by the mathematical implications of music, and demand that the Doctor sing more for them. They even invite Voyager back to their planet, which they assure Janeway to be a great honor due to their dislike of everyone who doesn't get a boner over math. Neelix arranges to have a musical presentation on Voyager, inviting the planets leaders up to listen, and the Doctor's opera performances are met with adoring applause. Harry starts playing some jazz with his band of people even less important than him, and the aliens demand the return of the Doctor to the stage.

After the recital, the aliens request that the Doctor be allowed to visit the planet and perform for a larger audience. He tells them to clear it with Janeway (apparently not realizing that Janeway needs to shotgun way more Red Bull and own a few more pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses to be an agent), who is already finding that all the attention is going to the Doctor's head. A female alien is assigned to assist the Doctor in preparing for his performance, and she comments that the crew doesn't seem to appreciate the Doctor's musical stylings much after he insults Torres while insisting she help him make a modification to his program for his performance.

The Doctor then makes his grand debut on the planet, to thundrous, standing applause. After the performance, Voyager's comm system is flooded with "fan mail," much to Seven's consternation, and the ship is filled with visitors from the planet, who are fervently attempting to get the Doctor's "autograph," a tiny holographic statue of him that sings a song. Tuvok calls for Janeway, who tells the Doctor to knock it the fuck off and go back to being a doctor in sickbay. When he gets there, the only two women in the goddamn universe who can resist the charms of Tom Paris throw themselves at the middle-aged bald guy. He isn't even dignified-bald like Patrick Stewart. Instead of getting it on with his groupies (apparently, being enormous douchebags to people who can't do calculus doesn't preclude sluttiness), the Doctor deactivates himself.

Back on the planet, the Doctor is chatting with his assistant, who begs him to stay on the planet to perform. And maybe his experience with the groupies was leading him to think with his holo-schlong, but the Doctor even thinks that she's implying she wants him to stay for romantic reasons as well. So, drunk on celebrity and the thought of banging someone who actively gets turned on by binary code, the Doctor returns to Voyager to resign his commission.

Janeway tells him to shut the fuck up with this goddamn bullshit, in what is probably the singular time where she is actually speaking what the audience is thinking. The Doctor claims she's treating him like a piece of equipment, but she points out that he's an integral member of the crew, given that he's the only legitimate medical professional on the goddamn ship. He insists, posing a hypothetical - if Harry Kim fell in love with an alien woman, and wanted to stay behind with her, wouldn't Janeway let him? She's forced to agree that she would. Ignoring the purely pragmatic replaceability of Harry Kim for a moment, this exact scenario came up in season five's The Disease, and she, in no way, shape, or form, agreed to this bullshit. She told Harry Kim to man the fuck up and be responsible enough to not think with his fucking cock, and to stop fucking the goddamn local wildlife. Normally, Voyager ignores the events of previous episodes, so in and of itself, this is nothing new, but to basically cite the plot and come to a different conclusion? No wonder everyone thinks Janeway is fucking bipolar - they can't even remember what they wrote a season ago.

Anyway, since Janeway lets him go, he starts saying goodbye to everyone. Seven is actively pissed off that he's leaving her to rot amongst the cardboard cutout crew, and Tom is frazzled, having essentially been promoted to Chief Medical Officer in addition to being responsible for flying the fucking ship, which it's been established he's barely able to do competently without being distracted by shiny things in the corner of his vision. The Doctor arrives at the planet, and reviews a composition his assistant has made for you to sing. After realizing there's no way for simulated human vocal chords to essentially sing math, he hurriedly asks Torres to change his program. She points out that she could make him into a teapot, but that he'd no longer be him. He agrees, and returns to the planet to break the bad news to his hopefully-girlfriend.

She, however, is thrilled to tell him that she's solved all their problems. She's made her own Doctor hologram devoted to singing these sorts of terrible compositions, which allows the Doctor to return to Voyager - this will be his last performance. She even tells him that she's not interested in riding his holo-johnson either. He goes out and performs a sad operatic song, to a smattering of applause, then is forced to listen as the crowd goes wild over an alien version of AutoTune. He returns to the ship, his tail between his legs. Seven forgives him, writing him a kind piece of "fan mail," and Janeway puts him the fuck in his place.

As I mentioned in the review for the previous episode, there are 168 episodes of Voyager. The fact that they'd waste one of them on this garbage is a fantastic example of what was wrong with Voyager. We got to watch an hour of Robert Picardo forced to play the Doctor even more insufferably than usual - this revealed nothing of the human condition, nor considered man's place in the cosmos. This was a plot that would be right at home in a goddamn Disney Channel sitcom.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -36/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 15
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

Memorial

The episode opens with Harry Kim, stuck aboard the Delta Flyer with the chucklefuck brigade of Tom, Chuckles, and Neelix, and he's pissed off - it's been two weeks, the shower isn't working, and Tom is leaving plates in the replicator (apparently, they can't amongst the four of them fix the damn shower even though they have a fucking replicator at their disposal).

After returning to the ship, they are more than eager to get back to their lives. Neelix wanders off to annoy someone, Torres welcomes Tom back by plying him with 20th century television on a custom-built 50s-style TV that inexplicably accepts isolinear chips of shows that Starfleet is fucking wasting hard drive space on keeping, Kim goes off to masturbate in a Jeffries tube or something, and Chuckles goes to bed because he is so fucking alone.

Tom starts seeing a war on TV that he's a part of, and has a panic attack as he sees himself get shot. Harry starts to hyperventilate in the Jeffries tube (though I think it was just a little autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong). Chuckles has a nightmare about taking orders from some jackass that they half-assed the forehead alien job on, basically giving the guy gills for eyebrows. And Neelix ends up taking Naomi Wildman hostage at phaser-point to protect her from the war raging around inside his head.

After Chuckles manages to talk Neelix down from phasering one of the nameless security guards or Tuvok, the Doctor diagnoses them all with PTSD, and makes a troubling discovery - the memories are all quite real. Because all of Voyager's problems are solved by sitting around the pea-soup-green conference room table, Janeway drags them all in to discuss what they're remembering. While it's fragmented at first, the story starts to become painfully clear - the away team remembered being part of a military force intending to forcibly relocate a colony. While it initially goes well, shit goes sideways when they realize their head count doesn't match up and are ambushed by some of the people of the colony. As panic breaks out, the innocents of the colony start to panic and flee, sending the military scrambling. Eventually, they start killing the civilians, innocent and otherwise - Harry even recalls being in a cave and personally murdering a woman and an old man who he thought was going for a gun.

Determined to find out if the away team had somehow been conscripted into a war, Janeway sets course along the flight path the away team took. Soon enough, they start to approach a rather miserable looking planet (that looks just fine in every scene on the planet, so I'm not sure what memo the VFX guys missed), and as they get closer, Janeway even starts remembering being part of the conflict, stumbling on the military leaders vaporizing the bodies of the civilians to eliminate evidence. In her memories, she screams at them that they need to do the right thing, to admit to what happened, but she's overruled at gunpoint by the leader of the platoon.

As more and more of the crew start to collapse from the debilitating memories, they finally reach the planet. Upon beaming down (with virtually the entire senior staff, because, hey, how dangerous could it be, beaming into an area they suspect to be filled with war criminals?), the away team splits up. Harry and Tuvok track down where Harry's memory took place, while Janeway, Chuckles, and the others explore the forest. They both come across some startling evidence - Tuvok finds the bodies of the people Harry remembered murdering, aged to over three hundred years old, and the others find a pillar in the middle of a field, its power signature slowly faltering.

Back on Voyager, they piece it all together - the pillar was able to transmit memories throughout the system, forever recording in the minds of passers-by the horrors of the atrocity that had been committed. Most of the members of the away team are furious at being forced to live through it, but Neelix insists that the memories are the only record of what had happened, and the best way to ensure that future generations knew not to make the same mistakes again. Janeway agrees, even ordering that the pillar be restored to full working order, telling the crew to leave a buoy to transmit continually, warning any ships that come close of what they would experience. The crew fixes the pillar, ensuring the memory of those events lived on.

This is an episode I can only recall seeing once, and it's a bit of a difficult one to slog through. So much time is spent with nudge-nudge-wink-wink talk of television and commercials with Tom's TV, and the episode is extremely dialog-heavy. Garrett Wang chewed the scenery, and for all of his bitching about not getting to do anything, Robert Beltran was about as stiff as could be. Robert Duncan McNeill turned in a decent performance, and, per usual, Ethan Phillips did a great job playing a dramatic role.

But what pushed this from being a two-star episode to a three-star episode was two things. The first was the actual content of the episode. Even though it was a little Inner Light-meets-Nemesis (the episode, not the movie), it was decent sci-fi and was at least trying to say something interesting, which is more than I can say for, say, the next episode. The second was the scene in which Janeway remembers seeing the platoon leaders vaporizing the evidence. For one brief, beautiful moment, Kate Mulgrew was allowed to act. Not just fuck around on a set with sliding particle-board doors that make an intern say "woosh" in black-and-red pajamas, but actually get to impart actual emotion and feeling into it. It was the highlight of the episode.

Rating: ***
Torpedoes remaining: -36/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 15
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

Tsunkatse
or, Can You Smell What UPN Is Cooking
Oh fucking hell.

Voyager's arrived at some planet and Janeway has decided to give everyone else shore leave so that she can conscript a few ensigns and make off with the Delta Flyer to go stare at some nebula or something without being bothered with, y'know, the responsibilities of command. Most of the crew elects to spend their time watching something called Tsunkatse on the planet - basically, an MMA cage match made up entirely by bog-standard stage combat moves, where people only really get hurt by getting touched on some hot plates strapped to their chest and back by their glowing gloves and shoes. For the fucking pansy-ass Starfleet crew, though, that's probably about as bloodthirsty as it gets. Chuckles is especially excited about it, as it means it will get to reference the godawful episode The Fight.

Seven and Tuvok have no time for this bullshit, though, and elect to go study some other stellar phenomenon, apparently bummed out that they weren't invited to go along with Janeway. Naturally, before they accomplish anything of note, their shuttle is disabled and a bomb is beamed aboard. Next thing they know, they're stuck in a locker room that looks all the world like a DS9 set redress, with Seven being sized up by Jeffrey Fucking Combs with a silly forehead and sillier mustache. Don't worry, that's not the only guest talent they're going to waste. He reveals that he helps produce Tsunkatse matches, and that Seven will put a bunch of Borg-hating asses in chairs. Tuvok got blown the fuck up by their bomb, and is busy languishing on a cot, letting Tim Russ have plenty of time to picture how he'd one day end up stuck in Star Trek fan films.

Soon enough, she's tossed into the ring, which surprises an onlooking Paris, Chuckles, Harry, and Neelix. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson then enters the ring (I believe it was his first legitimate "acting" job outside of his, y'know, wrestling acting job) and proceeds to beat the shit out of her while throwing up the People's Eyebrow so that someone at UPN can shit out a promo reel for this train wreck.

Chuckles desperately tries to beam them out, but he's surprised to discover that fighters appearing in the ring are actually holograms being simulcast from elsewhere. He beams up to the ship, and has Janeway turn around to come bail his damn ass out - he doesn't want to be responsible for the loss of the Traveling Pants. Meanwhile, Seven gets fighting tips from a Hirogen, played by J.G. Fucking Hertzler.

One of two things happened. Someone in the casting department realized how much getting The Rock on the show was going to shit away what little cred they had left with the poor bastards still watching this disaster of a show, so they asked a couple of fan-favorites to come aboard, or the casting department was so busy whacking off over "getting" The Rock that they forgot to cast the rest of the damn episode and called up the DS9 casting manager and asked for a favor.

Anyway, Seven is thrown back into the ring for a "red" match, which is a fight to the death. She's shocked that her mentor, the Hirogen, is her opponent. He says that he's lived as a slave long enough, and is ready to die as prey at the hands of a worthy hunter. They fight it out while Chuckles and the gang show up after tracking down the source of the holo-transmission and get their asses handed to them by a spacefaring ESPN SportsCenter studio. Janeway shows up in the Delta Flyer and manages to disable the transmission by blowing up one of their fucking satellite dishes they had mounted to the hull, which forces them to divert enough power away from shields for Voyager to beam everyone out.

What next? Does Janeway pick away at the Tsunkatse broadcasting ship until Jeffrey Combs is forced to give up his slave fighting force? No, they ignore the fact that the ship is filled with countless people against their will and get the fuck out of dodge and basically let Combs' character get away with everything scot-free. We're treated to the Hirogen thanking Seven, leaving her to reflect on the experience with Tuvok. She talks of it being degrading and shameful, in a monolog that, if you close your eyes, could basically be Jeri Ryan talking to her therapist about her experiences.

There's also a subplot of Neelix dealing with a sunburn. Jesus fucking Christ.

It's just a fucking worthless pile of shit episode that was probably conceived at a "synergy" meeting between hand-jobs at UPN HQ. Oh, and since Janeway didn't even stick around to save actual sentient beings from a lifetime of slavery and violence, I'm guessing she didn't grab the shuttle that Tuvok and Seven were on, so better add another number to that counter.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -36/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

Pace yourself man, pace yourself. No one should subject themselves to this kind of psychological torture. Not even Castle deserves that.

Collective

Chuckles, Tom, Harry, and Neelix are playing poker on the floor of the Delta Flyer, because apparently they've forgotten that the aft compartment has a table, and they've also apparently forgotten that the last time they were all in the Delta Flyer together, they ended up getting Platoon In Space embedded in their brains. Tom looks out the window and sees a Borg Cube approaching the ship, causing everyone to shit their pants. The Cube chases them down, and tractors the Delta Flyer into the Cube, despite Chuckles firing multiple photon torpedos at it.

What's that, you say? The Delta Flyer is only equipped with photonic missles? You're right! Voyager's writing staff fucked it up, surprise, surprise. Since it was a mistake, I won't count it as part of the torpedo complement.

While trying to fix systems on the Flyer, shots from the Borg ship successfully manage to knock Harry Kim out, who is in a goddamn Jeffries Tube in the fucking Delta Flyer. Where the fuck is there room for a goddamn Jeffries Tube? The rest of the crew of idiots are beamed aboard the Borg Cube. When they come to, they realize they're in an assimilation chamber, sharing company with a very dead victim of a botched assimilation. They start looking for ways out of the room, because duh.

Meanwhile, Voyager has tracked them down to the Borg Cube. Seven notes that it's extremely damaged and very few life forms are aboard, which is unusual for a vessel of its size. After the Borg's standard hail, Janeway demands that they give them back their crew. Surprisingly, the Borg agree - in exchange for Voyager's navigational deflector. Tuvok notes that the removal of the deflector would prevent Voyager from going to warp (or even impulse, given that it is what prevents space dust from turning the ship into swiss cheese, as we saw in Year of Hell). Janeway manages to convince them to let a member of the crew beam over to check on the safety and well-being of the crew, and immediately sends Seven.

Once aboard the ship, Seven is lead into a Voyager-updated version of the TNG Borg Nursery. Now, if you'll recall from Drone, Seven seemed bewildered at the very idea of a maturation chamber - there, there are a half-dozen of them, one complete with an assimilated baby. I'm all for Voyager actually acknowledging established canon, but fucking hell, they contradicted it on their own damn show last season, then un-contradicted it. Make up your fucking minds. Accompanying the bouncing baby Borg are five adolescent Borg as well, who are desperate to rejoin the collective. They take Seven to see the crew from the Delta Flyer, and Seven makes sure to signal to the others that she knows Harry Kim is safe. From this point on, we do not see the Delta Flyer crew again in the episode, only references to them. In case you weren't aware, this is an episode for Seven of Nine, and the Voyager writing staff are only capable for writing for a couple characters at a time.

Speaking of Harry, he finally wakes up after Tuvok piggybacks a comm signal onto Borg frequencies, then sets about establishing two-way communication with Voyager. Meanwhile, Seven makes a discovery as she analyzes the data from the Cube. The Borg on it were killed by an alien virus and were unable to adapt, and the Collective was aware of the Borg kids' attempts to rejoin - they wrote the ship off and proceeded to forget about them. Never mind that the Borg should have been able to analyze the very data Seven had, then realize that it would be much better to OBLITERATE THE GODDAMN SHIP so that the virus would be destroyed along with it. Anyway, Janeway eagerly tells the Doctor to whip up a bioweapon to kill a handful of kids in case the rescue operation goes south.

One of the Borg kids is obviously the lord of his little flies, and is getting more and more upset about delays and changes to their agreement - Janeway and Seven now insist on repairing the Borg ship so that it can contact the collective instead of giving them the deflector. The other kids seem to be far more eager to just follow Seven around like lost puppies. At one point, enough systems on the Cube start to fail that the maturation chambers start to go offline. Seven grabs out the baby, and begs to transport it back to Voyager so that it can be saved, with the lead kid finally agreeing. Once beamed over, the baby is promptly forgotten for the rest of time. That's right - they have a Borg baby on board and it is never, ever fucking referenced again. Brannon Braga supposedly claimed that rather than devote time to actually explaining that they dropped the kid off with other members of its species, that they just focused on the other Borg kids, but that is one hell of a fucking cop-out, considering all it would have taken was a ten-second throwaway line.

Anyway, the ship continues to deteriorate, and Harry Kim, who had been assigned a mission to go destroy their shield generator, got himself caught. This makes the leader of the Borg kids pissed off at Voyager's deceptions, so he decides to pump Harry full of nanoprobes (don't worry, Harry makes a full recovery, despite the injection of nanoprobes being the start of the fucking assimilation process in every other depiction of it), then rip the fucking deflector out of the ship with a tractor beam. Again, this would be fine, but in order to rip something off of something, you have to have an opposing force. In other words, Voyager would either have to apply the damn brakes themselves, and have them be strong enough to resist a Borg tractor beam, or they'd have to be using one to push the ship and the other to pull, which is never fucking mentioned.

Janeway technobabbles it the fuck up and sends some sort of feedback pulse along the tractor beam, which starts destroying the weakened ship. The lead Borg kid insists that they can overcome it, but eventually gets electrocuted and dies. Seven takes the rest of the kids and Harry and beams off the ship just before it is destroyed. Apparently, Voyager beamed the Delta Flyer the fuck out of there too (because they can do that...fucking Christ...), and the Doctor immediately de-assimilates them as much as he can. Seven gives them information she was able to download from the Borg regarding their names and histories, which is fucking stupid, because none of that matters to the fucking Borg, so why would they waste space on that information?

This is the start of a "Borg Kids" arc that runs throughout the remainder of Season Six and most of Season Seven. Because if there's one thing that both TNG and DS9 didn't realize, its that nobody wants to see a bunch of moody teenagers. So, yay, you can look forward to more of Seven exploring her humanity by re-hashing her previous struggles with this band of Borg factory seconds.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -36/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

No, I wanna see what happens.

I can't wait for the next review!

You say that like it's Spirit Folk or something.

'Tsunkatse' is one of those episodes that really illustrates the differences between the way VOY was produced and the way TNG/DS9 were produced.

TNG/DS9 never had to deal with that sort of network interference. I have nothing against Dwayne Johnson (in fact he is not a bad actor) but the Star Trek / WWE cross promotion was such an obvious ratings ploy. Somehow I don't think there is a lot of crossover between Trekkies and WWE fans, so I'm not sure what the point was.

Heck, I am surprised Moesha didn't show up in a Voyager episode. That was probably the most popular show UPN ever churned out aside from Voyager.

Speaking of the Borg children, whatever happened to Naomi Wildman? Did she die? Or does she ever show up in any episodes with the Borg kids?

TNG and DS9 didn't have nearly as much interference from the gorillas in three-piece suits because they were made for syndication. Voyager was produced especially for UPN - it was its flagship show - so it had both the studio and the network breathing down its neck.

Of course, I don't think either would have put up with it.

And Naomi's around - I think she's even in the final episode. She interacts with the Borg kids too.

Spirit Folk

What in the goddamn fuck happened. Either everyone on the Voyager writing staff was asleep at the fucking wheel, or they were part of an active and malicious campaign to shit all over everyone who ever gave a fuck about Star Trek. I can accept shitty episodes about the Borg - they're a popular enemy, after all. Filler episodes where Tom wants to fuck a shuttlecraft, Seven talks for 47 minutes straight, or the Doctor wants to be a rockstar? They are, at the very least, making a modicum of effort. And, while it was a disaster of epic proportions, there's at least the tinest spec, a morsel if you will, of an interesting story about the captain of a starship wanting to bang the shit out of a hologram due to half a decade of pent-up sexual frustration.

But this. This fucking piece of shit. They planned to drop this fucking deuce before anyone could even point out how nobody wants to see a fucking Irish hamlet in a science fiction show unless it involves a wacky time traveller crashing a goddamn telephone booth into a fucking marsh while trying to escape from human hatred personified as sentient killer teddy bears. They thought they were so fucking clever, that they had their finger on the goddamn fucking pulse of their fucking viewership, that they decided to treat us to not one, but two shows set in the most boring holoprogram of all time, fucking Fair Haven. But they couldn't even fucking manage that without cribbing from TNG. Here's what happened in the better part of an hour that I will never, ever get back:

Tom Paris is fucking around on the holodeck and crashes an early automobile into a pile of barrels. After chatting up one of the cardboard-cutout almost-cliched-to-the-point-of-racism locals, he requests that the holodeck put the fucking wheel back onto the car for him, but the holocharacter looks on in shock, witnessing the change.

Apparently, Tom has been leaving the program running for a month and a half, wasting countless fucking resources all so that he can get a laugh out of Harry Kim trying to fuck a pretty Irish lass and failing, just like he fails at everything. Later that night, while Harry is trying his best to get his game on, Tom giggles like a schoolgirl and changes Harry's date into a cow. Keep in mind, this is the same Tom Paris that, in the last fucking episode about this shithole Fair Haven, bitched and moaned about keeping things authentic and not changing things to fit the whims of the crew. I guess that all his goddamn principals about the 24th century's version of Candy Crush Saga go out the window if it means he can piss his own best friend off.

Anyway, Irish Stereotypes 1 and 2 witness this as well, and hurriedly call a meeting to order - they're convinced that the Voyager crew are spirits toying with the town until they see it fit to destroy it. Others mention Harry changing the weather at whim, and the Doctor popping in and out of existence in a decidedly non-Catholic fashion. Eventually, they manage to convince even Janeway's boyfriend (and she fucking calls him that in this episode, now apparently eagerly happy to let Chuckles know she's been naked in a room with possibly a dozen or so of her subordinates, shielded only by a few photonic projections). After she realizes they're beginning to suspect that something strange is going on, she shuts down the program.

Tom, Harry, and Torres analyze the program and realize that running it for weeks on end has destabilized basically everything. Tom and Harry pull up Janeway's boyfriend into the holo-lab, and instead of simply blithely standing there, he demands to know what's going on. He's quick enough to pretend that his program is repaired when they make a small change to him, though, and once he rematerializes back in Fair Haven, he tells everyone of his trip to the fairy world he believes Voyager to be.

Tom and Harry, for some reason, have to go into the holodeck and fuck around with some controls manually to fix the damage to the program, but, while there, the town rises up against them. They see the computer panel in Janeway's boyfriend's bar, then shoot the fuck out of it with a rifle.

ON FUCKING VOYAGER, HOLOGRAPHIC BULLETS, EVEN WHEN THE SAFETY PROTOCOLS ARE ON, CAN DESTROY THE ONLY FUCKING COMPUTER CAPABLE OF DEALING WITH THE SAFETY PROTOCOLS.

Anyway, the townsfolk capture Tom and Harry and tie them up. While Torres advocates manually killing the program, which would erase Fair Haven and its inhabitants, Janeway decides that getting plowed regularly is more important than the health and safety of her crew members and instead has the Doctor beam in with his mobile emitter, ensuring that his program isn't caught up in the simulation. Naturally, the townsfolk immediately capture him as well and remove his mobile emitter, dumping him into the program, which apparently has the side effect of making him susceptible to terrible hypnosis techniques. He starts babbling about Voyager, and indicates to Janeway's boyfriend that he can find out more if he puts on the emitter. He does, and Tuvok detects the signal being active and beams him to the bridge. Janeway is shocked to see her fuck toy on the bridge, but leads him around the ship, explaining everything to him.

Janeway and her boyfriend return to the holodeck. He gives the Doctor his emitter back, which brings him to his senses. Janeway's boyfriend then explains that they're not evil spirits, but rather visitors from space (apparently, Janeway never bothered explaining the whole "holodeck" thing), which the town happily accepts. He even says, in Voyager's favor, that "They've never used their machines against us."

YOU MIGHT THINK DIFFERENTLY IF YOU KNEW JANEWAY HOLO-MURDERED YOUR GODDAMN WIFE AND ERASED EVERYONE'S MEMORY OF HER.

Anyway, everyone's all fucking happy about that, and while they can't run the program non-stop, there's always time for a visit. Don't worry, though - this is the last we'll see of Fair Haven.

Thank fucking God for that.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -36/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

You didn't disappoint!

MORIARTY AGREES!

The absurdity of that episode is that after all these years of holo decks no one in the federation has run a program exceedingly long for experimental purposes. It seems this would have been settled by then - the effects of continually running a program - and techs would have compensated for the development of sentience.