Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

The holodeck was one of the most poorly conceived ideas of post TOS Trek. In true form, DS9had the most amount of holodeck episodes that weren't completely DOA. But then, it took them four seasons to write one.

The worst part is, Voyager had the episode with the Doctor losing his shit because he had basically been running constantly, so even if Starfleet hadn't already figured that out, Janeway and her crew of idiots certainly knew it.

One wonders what the advantages to the bio-neural gel packs were.

I never saw their computers perform an incredible feat that the TNG computers couldn't, and their holodeck technology was WORSE.

Holonovels that go screwey if you run them too long, a Holodoc that goes nuts if you run him too long, something magical about the Holodoc that you couldn't run off backup copies of him, something magical about the Holodoc that if you transmitted him, he was gone from the computer....
Computers don't even work that way!
I don't expect the writers to take an A+ certification class, but for fuck's sake you'd think they had to y'know, operate a fucking PC on their jobs.

Plus the whole "vulnerable to biological viruses", deal.

They never had an episode where the bio-neural circuitry was a boon.
Not once.
Why did they bother?

If I had godlike control over the show...well, first of all, I wouldn't have had a bio-neural computer, because TNG's nanoscopic optical gates boosted by subspace are fucking better than brains already, BUT, if my one handicap was being stuck with bio-neural, I would have had Tuvok mindmeld all the mental powers of Vulcans into the thing, and had it be a fucking kinetic ESPer ship.

It would have been woo-ey, but it would have been something different.
At least it would have impacted the plots week to week, and justified the contrivance.

Oh, and also, something magical about the Holodoc that you couldn't program another one from scratch without it crashing in a fizzle of static....but on TNG they created Moriarty by saying the wrong thing to the fucking computer.

Voyager's writers seemed to be operating under the delusion that you couldn't pull off an episode-of-the-week show while maintaining continuity and telling an ongoing story. That really isn't true. You don't have to go all Babylon 5, or even all DS9, to maintain a credible continuity. You could simply go SG1, where the episodes generally worked pretty well as standalone episodes, even as there was a significant ongoing story that developed over the years; seeing the episodes out-of-order might have been spoilerific at times, but it wasn't particularly confusing to the viewer. Voyager could have done that and satisfied UPN's demands for a show that didn't demand religiously viewing the episodes in order. All it would have taken was writers who cared.

I have a really hard time being sympathetic to people in showbiz finding their jobs to be tedium.
Oh, you poor darlings, would you like to empty the sifting grate at the sewer treatment plant?
Scoop up roadkill with a snow shovel?
Would that fill your ennui ridden souls with purpose?

Well... that didn't create Moriaty. It was a Sherlock Holmes program, Moriarty would have been there all along. It just upgraded him to be able to "defeat Data."

I'm not convinced he was ever really sentient. Most than likely he just faked it convincingly enough to make Data sympathetic enough to not cheat and delete his program.

Voyager wasn't even fucking consistent about how The Doctor worked, because Living Witness had a backup copy of the Doctor.

The bio-neural gel packs were a Sternbach creation, I believe, and written straight into the Voyager technical manual prepped for the writers. In more capable hands, I'm sure they could have amounted to more than a plot about giving the things a fever to cure a cold. If they hadn't given up on them as a plot point, though, I'm sure I'd have had to create a gel pack count like the damn shuttles and torpedoes, because their claimed scarcity would have inevitably been ignored.

The bio-neural gel packs worked by combining "gel" and "neural-ish computing" during the '90s.

Ashes to Ashes

Some alien chick is running away from a ship in a crappy shuttle. After speaking in an alien language, in English, she hails Voyager. Cue dramatic Jerry Goldsmith music for whatever poor bastards didn't change over to Voyager's competition at the time, Fox's deep and thought-provoking drama, Temptation Island.

After we get back from seeing Voyager majestically sweep through generic space scenes, the little Borg girl (yeah, remember them? The ones they completely forgot about so that they could fuck around on the goddamn holodeck?) receives the alien woman's call, but promptly hangs up on it like every child ever given a cell phone ever. Voyager calls her back, and she says she's Lindsay Ballard, an ensign Voyager previously torpedo-coffined up and sent on her way after an away mission went sideways, and while she's congenial to Janeway, she basically can't stop making eyes at Harry Kim.

Yes, that Harry Kim. The one whose socks crunch with every step. The one who uses half his replicator rations on Space Kleenex and hand lotion.

After they bring her aboard, the Doctor confirms that she is, in part, made of Lindsay Ballard-flavored DNA. She explains that her corpse was found by an alien race that reproduces by swiping dead bodies, reviving them, and rewriting their DNA. Oh, and she was killed by the fucking Hirogen in what apparently would have been a far better episode than most of what happened in Season Six.

Anyway, the crew eagerly welcomes her back - she resumes her post in Engineering, she eats Neelix's terrible food and claims that she dislikes it because of her new alien DNA tastebuds, and the Doctor invents some kind of fucking goddamn magic hypospray that starts to revert her appearance to something more human. She ends up spending most of her time hanging out with Harry, who tells her about her funeral and other depressing shit.

The next day, however, doesn't go so well. Even though the Doctor fully reverts her to her human appearance, she feels like people are staring at her in Engineering, and she botches a one-on-one dinner with the captain (Janeway is so fucking incompetent at operating a goddamn replicator that she can burn a fucking potroast in it) by basically accusing her of sending her off on an away mission to die, and she can't stop accidentally talking her new alien language.

Meanwhile, Tom had been teasing Harry about having a crush on Lindsay. So, when Lindsay shows up at Harry's quarters to talk her down after her terrible day, what does he do? Well, apparently Harry is a stereotypical Nice Guy - her guard is down, so he kisses her, and it's heavily implied they fuck, because he wakes up later and finds her still in there, though now, she's apparently got some kind of telepathic link that lets her know that her alien parents have showed up.

They demand that she comes back, but she wants nothing to do with it, given that they kidnapped her corpse and pulled some Frankenstein bullshit on it. However, she feels more and more isolated from the crew, and it probably doesn't help that Harry is now in full-on-please-date-me-I-am-so-desperate mode. She suddenly collapses, and the Doctor reveals that the "pathogen," (which, on Voyager, means "convenient plot device") that scribbled alien shit all over her DNA is re-asserting herself - if she wants to continue to appear human, she'll have to put up with the Doctor being annoying twice a day.

So, when the aliens show up and start trying to steal her back, she reveals to Janeway that she wants to go be with them. Once she lets the aliens know, they call off the attack, and Harry tries one last time to convince her to stay, but the "mistranslated attempt at speaking the native tongue" trope strikes again. She kisses him, in what is probably his last kiss for the remainder of the show, and beams away.

Oh, and the B-plot with the Borg kids is that Seven of Nine is trying to structure their day with typical Borg precision, but because they're kids, they're rebellious, moody, and act out when they don't do what she wants. One of them even makes a terrifying bust of Seven of Nine - it was either actually made by the kid, or the art department is very skilled at making clay have that distinctly terrifying quality of when kids try to depict faces. It was forgettable.

It's an interesting concept, but I can't help but feel like it probably would have been better back when Voyager was in Vidiian territory - Harry has to come to terms with his girlfriend being a patchwork fucking quilt brought back from the dead in an attempt to harvest her organs or something. Either that, or reference the episode in which the Doctor's program starts falling apart because he saved Harry over some ensign chick since he knew Harry better, and use that girl. As far as Voyager goes, it's not that bad - it's a pretty forgettable, unassuming episode. It's time had just come and gone.

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

Oh dear lord... Lindsay Ballard. She was so damn annoying especially with her list. Number on it should have been kill herself by shoving a phaser on overload up her own ass. And she probably looks more like a man than Janeway does.

Child's Play

Well, that's a hell of a TNG-esque title for an episode, isn't it? You can almost feel the leg warmers. Fitting, too, given how frequently kids-on-a-goddamn-starship came up on that show, because that's what this one is about too! It's even going to crib a bit!

The mess hall is hosting a science fair for the kids, and Janeway and Chuckles have shown up to look it over. The Borg twins have cloned a potato, the Borg girl, Mezoti, has made an ant colony in the shape of a giant cube (because an ant colony on its own wasn't fucking on-the-nose enough for Voyager), Naomi painted a sphere of her absentee father's homeworld and had holographic weather patterns drawn over it, and Icheb, the eldest Borg kid, has made a special kind of sensor to help Voyager find wormholes. Seven is especially proud of it, and tells Janeway that Icheb wants to work in Astrometrics.

Janeway shoots that the fuck down, though - they've found Icheb's family, and she wants to take him home. Where's home? A shithole planet right next to a Borg superhighway that gets attacked every time they do anything remotely interesting with technology, leaving them to leave a largely agrarian existence outside of dabbing in genetic engineering for their crops.

Icheb's mom and dad (who is fucking Mark Sheppard) are excited to see him, and welcome him back with open arms. He's not terribly interested in giving up a life in the stars for fucking around with growing corn, though, and is hesitant. Seven is as well, and openly questions whether his parents are fit to keep him, especially due to their proximity to the Borg. Apparently Janeway is the only one who is allowed to get over-protective of her wards, however, and chews her the fuck out, basically accusing her of projecting her feelings about her own parents onto Icheb's. Seven also mentions that she never saw her father after they were assimilated, but that's not true - she saw him as Generic Borg Drone Seventeen of Forty-Two or whatever in Dark Frontier (and there's a strong possibility she watched him get blown the fuck up by Voyager as well).

Seven agrees to follow orders and make Icheb spend more time with his family. However, as he does, he grows closer and closer after being welcomed by his siblings, and convinced that he can do good work with genetics instead of astrometrics. He eventually decides to leave Voyager. As Seven packs up and builds a portable regeneration station for him, she speaks with his father, and comes to something of an understanding. She also learns of how Icheb was assimilated - the colony had built a new piece of technobabble, and Icheb was curious about it, sneaking off to learn about it. The Borg saw it, got grabby, and swiped him and a bunch of other colonists along with it.

Side note - the matte paintings of the episode depict the settlement in the bottom of a crater seemingly carved out of a middle of a destroyed metropolis. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but if so, it's a hell of a reference to The Best of Both Worlds.

Anyway, Icheb beams on down, leaving Seven and the Borg kids to be emo in their alcoves as Voyager gets underway. Mezoti complains that she can't get to sleep, expressing concern that the Borg are going to re-assimilate Icheb. Seven tries to reassure her - since there would be little left the planet could offer new to the Borg, they likely wouldn't bother. Mezoti says that she's more worried about if he's on a ship like last time - when Seven questions her about it, she finds out he was assimilated on a small one-person spacecraft. Seven pulls up the information from the dead Cube they got the kids from, then contacts Janeway - there are a bunch of inconsistencies from Icheb's dad's version of events and what the Borg recorded. It's enough to convince Janeway to head back.

And it's a good thing they do, because Icheb's parents can't wait more than a day to knock him out and toss him back on another shuttle, replete with a fake warp signature designed to attract the Borg's attention. It turns out they had genetically engineered the plot device that had killed the Borg Cube, and Icheb was a dormant carrier - they used their son to try to kill the Borg, and apparently, they weren't discouraged at all by how it didn't fucking work last time.

Janeway learns of all this, and apparently forgets how Picard and company once considered doing the exact fucking thing with Hugh, getting all high and mighty, apparently content in the knowledge that she won't have to deal with Admiral Nechayev who got all up in Picard's shit about not taking advantage of such an option.

Voyager arrives in the nick of time, naturally, but gets caught in a Borg tractor beam just as it's slurping up Icheb's shuttle. Seven plucks him out of it and beams in a torpedo, which Voyager detonates just as it enters the Sphere, warping away from the Borg, and Icheb's crazy-fuck family.

So, it ripped off I, Borg and naturally, it did so without all of the messy "prejudice" to deal with, but it got a couple solid scenes from Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Ryan, and, fuck, at least they're trying to do an arc. We'll see how I feel about it - I gave it three stars since it's clearly outside of Voyager's comfort zones, what, with requiring acting and planning out plots in advance, but I don't know if "competence" warrants stars.

Rating: ***
Torpedoes remaining: -37/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

It could be worse. He could use replicator rations to create flowers for his holographic "date." Oh, wait.

Good Shepherd

Voyager hasn't ripped off Lower Decks enough with Learning Curve. Let's do it again. Fucking hell, Voyager isn't content with just ripping off TNG, it's ripping off itself.

The episode opens with a gorgeous shot slowly zooming in to the window of Janeway's office. In fact, this episode has a lot of really nice CG. That's about all it has going for it, but hey, at least the guys at Foundation didn't share the writing staff's work ethic. Chuckles enters and asks if Janeway wants to look at some fucking space anomaly; she agrees, and asks that the Delta Flyer be prepped for the mission.

You know, Janeway, I'm pretty sure that if you get lost in the woods, no one is going to fault you for not climbing every tree you find on your way back to civilization. But maybe I'm just a pragmatist.

We then follow the life of a PADD, as it changes hands from the bridge crew, to astrometrics, to engineering, then finally down to the 24th century equivalent of the back of the bus, Deck 15. But don't call it a lower deck. Jesus fucking Christ, it doesn't get any fucking lower than that. There, we meet the worst person on the crew (had he met Tom Paris in the series premier, he would have ended up dead), some theoretician who is happy being locked in a broom closet to try to disassemble theories of how the universe works because he is fucking dead inside.

The fuck-this-is-totally-not-Lower-Decks-or-Learning-Curve-we-promise crew in this episode is the aforementioned awful human being, a Bajoran who is awful at her job of performing sensor scans, which the computer does for you, and a hypochondriac guy from the science division that basically cleans up the messes she makes. They'd probably fuck if he wasn't terrified of catching Space Gonorrhea and if she was competent enough to put Peg A into Slot 1.

Seven delivers a performance analysis and determines that these three bastards are basically useless. Janeway gets all mopey about it (probably because she hasn't had a good Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants moment with Seven lately), and decides to take charge of the Delta Flyer mission and take them along since none of them have been on an away mission. I can't imagine why. Chuckles suggests that maybe they should just be taken off of active duty, but Janeway wants to try to reach them. That's right. If you don't do your job on Voyager, you just get to do whatever the fuck you want all day. Fuck, if Harry had been taken off of active duty, he would have sealed himself into his quarters from the dried ejaculate alone.

Anyway, Janeway drops PADDs with mission details that terrify Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, then she goes down to Deck 15 to hand Señor Douchebag his orders, and promptly gets lost. Can you imagine Captain Picard getting lost on the fucking Enterprise, a ship that's got like twice the number of decks and four times the square footage per deck? Fuck no, he knows every inch of his ship, yet you're terrified watching this scene that Janeway's going to smack her head on a fucking low-hanging pipe like in Star Trek V.

Despite their whining, Janeway drags them into the Delta Flyer and sets off toward the anomaly of the week. While Janeway tries to be kind and encouraging to the crewmen, Little-Miss-Can-Be-Wrong is distraught that Janeway keeps checking her work - she heads off to the magical back compartment of Starfleet's equivalent to the fucking TARDIS to help the science guy make lunch, leaving Janeway to talk to the jerk, who continually insults her and the concept of Starfleet in general, stating a preference to, well, be stuck in a stuffy office somewhere trying to disprove postulates. Given that that's what he gets to do all fucking day, he sure does fucking whine a lot.

Then something hits the hull and tears a chunk of it off. Sadly, Captain Bipolar and her band of idiots doesn't get sucked out into space. A giant chunk of technobabble follows, interspersed with the chick claiming that the only reason she even made it through the academy was because people felt badly for Bajor and that, were Voyager in the Alpha Quadrant, she would have been reassigned quickly. While repairing something, the hypochondriac starts being all hypochondriac-y, and Fuckwad Of The Year won't fucking shut up about being a theoretician.

With a hint of original thinking, the Bajoran beams aboard the hull fragment. Dickwhistle claims it's evidence that dark matter is being attracted to their warp core, and that they need to dump it, which Janeway doesn't want to do for...some reason. And then an electronic rubber snake bursts out of the hypochondriac's neck and starts sucking up the Delta Flyer's power and killing environmental controls. Shit-for-brains phasers it to death, which causes Janeway to lose her fucking shit about how he just ruined first contact with an alien that, left unchecked, would have killed them.

They realize that the life forms are attracted to and chasing down the ship's antimatter Janeway decides to send the crewmen out in the escape pods (yes, the Delta Flyer, in addition to having room for a giant cockpit, an aft compartment the size of my fucking kitchen and dining room, and a Jeffries Tube, also has three fucking human-sized escape pods on board). They all pull an oh-captain-my-captain except for Fucksicle, who happily hops in one and blasts himself off. While the remaining people aboard start working on a way to escape, they notice that their favorite fucking theoretician is driving his escape pod right toward the life forms to hopefully attract them, because apparently there's fucking antimatter aboard a goddamn escape pod now. Janeway runs after him, beams him out, then shoots a photon torpedo out of the navigational deflector (I take back what I said about Foundation not being asleep at the wheel, never mind that the Delta Flyer doesn't shoot photon torpedoes, so it doesn't even add to our tally) to blow up an asteroid that pushes them away from the life forms. This presumably also kills a lot of them, but apparently it's only wrong for the Starfleet equivalent of Shia LeBouf (ooh, topical!) to murder them.

In what would surely be a nightmare for Janeway, Chuckles wakes her up and tells her that they found them knocked out and adrift in orbit around a planet. Janeway talks about how she, the "good shepherd," got lost tending to her flock. And that's the end of the episode. What's the deal with the life forms? Nothing, we'll never hear about them again. How about these morons who probably can't pin a commbadge to themselves without self-administering a nipple piercing? Gone - don't think about them again. Damage to the Delta Flyer? Let us not speak of it. Hell, the Delta Flyer's escape pods are only referenced one more time in an upcoming episode, but we certainly don't see them again.

There was no point to this fucking episode, they couldn't even figure out how to end it, nothing redeeming or interesting happened, and everyone in it was annoying. Fuck this.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -37/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

FYI.... Fucksicle is the guy who played Bug in Uncle Buck.

Live Fast and Prosper

The episode opens with two aliens wearing halloween-costume-party-quality versions of Starfleet uniform beaming down to the Generic Cave Set to talk to some miners. "Janeway" and "Tuvok" (and yes, that's how they're closed-captioned) offer to sell some dilithium to the energy-strapped miners in exchange for, fuck, I don't know, a rock or something. To sweeten the deal, "Tuvok" claims that the dilithium is worth more than the rock, but "Janeway" tells him to ignore that - a bunch of orphans need the rock for...things. Whatever orphans use rocks for. The miners agree, so "Janeway" and "Tuvok" beam up to the "Delta Flyer," which is depressingly represented by a repainted Defiant bridge. They beam up the rock, then, as the miners inquire why they haven't beamed down the dilithium, the "Delta Flyer" warps away.

Back on the real Voyager, all sorts of things are failing all over the ship, and the cause is traced back to a spare part Neelix installed in his kitchen. It's a damn good thing that alien technology can be so easily integrated into Starfleet hardware and software, otherwise, how would we have such fascinating and in-depth storytelling? Neelix explains that he got the part in trade from a Space Nun who was in charge of a bunch of orphans. Chuckles calls Janeway up to the bridge, and she has to deal with the leader of the mining colony being ready to blow shit up over his lack of dilithium, even showing transmission logs of the trade. Janeway denies that it's her, but when he accuses her of defrauding orphans, she realizes the truth.

She goes and talks with Neelix and Tom, who sheepishly admit to having the wool pulled over their eyes (bah-dum-psh). Further investigation reveals that while Space Nun and Space Friar were "praying" along with Neelix and Tom for the blessing of the trade, they had also downloaded the Delta Flyer's entire fucking database. So, instead of, say, selling that to anyone who needs replicators, transporters, warp drive, tactical data, etc., etc., they use it to research their new roles as "Janeway" and "Tuvok," and the alien playing "Tuvok" takes it very seriously. He's method as fuck. Yes, it is more cost-efficient to create a giant scam than it is to sell the database of one of the most advanced cultures to ever stumble through the fucking Delta Quadrant like a drunken amputee.

Tuvok detects the warp signature of the imposters and Voyager heads off to interrupt "Janeway" in the middle of another scam - selling membership to the Federation. The scam even features a third member of the crew, "Chuckles." Her mark is unhappy that the photon torpedoes he was given as part of the "welcome" package are worthless, and he starts threatening to attack. Voyager shows up just in time to lend credence to the scam artist's story, though, and Voyager is forced to fend off the attacking ship. The "Delta Flyer" escapes once more, but Seven transports "Janeway" off of it before it can get away.

Even when faced with the real thing, "Janeway" is unrepentant, so Janeway and Tuvok decide to make her sweat a little in hopes of drawing out her compatriots. Janeway basically forces Tuvok to "exaggerate" the truth of the miners' society's criminal justice system, to awkward effect. Later, Neelix shows up to the brig and tries to get "Janeway" to come around, sitting down with her in her cell. She seems to do so, then swipes Neelix's phaser, shoots him from three feet away, shoots the security guard on-duty, then goes and steals the Delta Flyer.

Of course, this was all a ruse on Voyager's part - Tom is stowed away in the medical scanner on the Delta Flyer, and he has the Doctor's emitter with him. But, before we continue, let's think about this plan. First, it relied on Neelix packing fucking heat, and remember, he can't even be trusted to install a new heating element in his stovetop. Second, it relied on "Janeway" not setting that phaser to goddamn fucking vaporize. Then, you have to consider that the plan required both Neelix and some poor bastard to get shot, likely at close-range, where even phasers set to stun can do physical damage. Next, it relies on "Janeway" having the technical knowledge and ability to operate the Delta Flyer, and her loyalty to the rest of the con artists to not take the Delta Flyer and get the fuck out of Dodge instead of going back to split up a bunch of shitty fucking rocks.

Anyway, ""Janeway"" beams over to the "Delta Flyer" and convinces them to beam down to where the rocks are being kept. After tense moments between ""Janeway"" and "Chuckles," it's revealed that ""Janeway"" is in fact the Doctor. "Tuvok" is in awe as the real Tuvok phasers him in the resulting ambush. While Janeway narrates away that the con artists returned everything they stole, they never indicate what happened to them. Did they just drop them on a planet? Are they under arrest? Which fucking people did Janeway leave these poor bastards with?

This episode had all the "charm" of certain Ferengi episodes on DS9, but without all the talent. So...it went about as well as you'd expect.

Pour a forty for our fallen homie, the Defiant, though - once Voyager gets their hands on sets, they immediately paint everything a shitty brown and cover all the surfaces with vinyl clings of generic alien text, so it wasn't gonna come back from this.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -37/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

The holodeck was actually created for the TOS animated series.

True fact dat.

Huh. No doubt you're right, but in the TNG pilot, the crew was acting as though this was a new technology.

Tom Morello scene was so forced!

What's a junction room?

And why is there only one window on the bottom of the ship?

I reconcile that with the logic that Colecovision, and Xbox1 are both video game consoles, but which do you want for Christmas?
Kirk's holodeck was probably workable enough, but Picard's was good enough to 100% fool your senses.

Shit, WE haven't cracked that. As good as real CGI has gotten, you can still tell.

Ugh, the poor Defiant. Couldn't they have at least gotten different seats? Taken out the riser where the Captain sits? Something to make it look not Defiant?

There are ZERO on the model, whether it's the physical or the CG one. They had to do a special shot with an added window to depict it.

Muse

Before Kellie Waymire (may she rest in peace) was busy being too damn beautiful to belong on Enterprise, she appeared in an episode of Voyager that seems intended to convince someone that Joe Menowski actually took enough theater classes in college to understand the Greek chorus and their style of theatre.

The episode opens with an alien chorus enacting log reports from the Delta Flyer, and the audience is enraptured. I think that's what B&B must have believed it was like to watch Voyager. The nail-biting conclusion leaves Harry missing, and Torres stranded. After the performance, Kellie Waymire's character goes up to the playwright and suggests that they go "celebrate." He turns her down.

THE FUCKING BASTARD TURNS HER DOWN. THE FOOL.

Instead, he runs off to the crashed Delta Flyer, waking Torres up by cutting across-the-street, not down-the-road, along her wrist. When she awakes, bound and angry, he explains that he's releasing the fever from her body. Yes, these dumbasses are pre-warp. Fuck, they're pre-internet-pornography. To Torres, they must be like cavemen. After his play's success, the playwright is desperate for more stories about the "Voyager Eternals," which is apparently the synonym for "god" they went with this week. Torres agrees to help him in exchange for untying her, but as soon as he does, she threatens him with a phaser and tells him never to return.

So, naturally, the next morning, just as she fails to repair the Delta Flyer due to a lack of dilithium, this dumbass shows up again. Torres conscripts him to go find some more on his patron's property. As soon as he returns, Torres makes good on her promise, and the playwright starts working on another play, believing it could be the key to resolving their civil war, though it bewilders his cast. The motivations of the characters are strange (fuck, you're telling me). The actor assigned to Tuvok objects, stating that people will just believe him to be a terrible actor since he's not allowed to display emotion. Oh no, my friend. People will believe you're a terrible actor because you're stuck pretending to be someone pretending to be a pretend alien.

Anyway, Torres needs another part that requires metallurgy, so in return, the playwright demands that she come and assist him the next day. When she shows up, the playwright's girlfriend is smoldering, believing that he and Torres are fucking in the woods, despite his story that Torres is a fellow playwright from far enough away that nobody questions why she has a bunch of forehead ridges. Torres is shocked, and amused, by the amount of romance in the play, especially a scene in which it's said that Chuckles has basically fucked everything with ovaries on Voyager. Torres tells him that, if he wants to stop the war, he needs to drop all the romance and show people behaving like grownups instead of kids with sharp functional points in their hands. The playwright agrees, stating that Janeway would show forgiveness to the Borg Queen, letting her atone for her mistakes.

After Torres leaves, the playwright's girlfriend follows her back, and discovers that Torres is one of the "Voyager Eternals" herself. However, she appears to take it remarkably well, only demanding that she stop distracting the playwright romantically. After she leaves, Harry shows up to the party. Fucking hooray, just what this episode needed, the King of Technobabble.

The next day, the playwright still can't finish his story. It's supposed to end with the rescue of Torres, but he's having trouble reconciling it with the change of heart Janeway has in the play. Even as the play starts, he has no idea how it's going to end. Meanwhile, back on the Delta Flyer, they've managed to make contact with Voyager, and are preparing to beam up. However, just before they go, Torres decides to head over to check on the playwright.

His girlfriend sees her, and immediately interrupts the play, claiming that Torres really is one of the Voyager Eternals. However, the patron believes that the entire thing is an act, a a part of the play, so he lets things continue. Torres and the playwright give a speech, then Torres beams up, dazzling the audience with the seeming miracle.

And the whole episode is interspersed with scenes on Voyager looking for these morons. Fucking yawn-fest. If the synopsis seemed short, it's not, really. I just cut out the terrible dialog, the awful scenes on Voyager, and the attempts to be "deep" with the play, which made no goddamn sense. While not guilty of most of Voyager's many, many sins, I'm never going to get that time back. I'm too young to die.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -37/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

Damn, that sounds like a boring episode!

I know I missed a lot of episodes from the last Voyager seasons, and now I remember why.

And isn't 'Muse' also the title of one of the few truly awful DS9 episodes?

The one where Jake Sisko meets this succubus who provides him with story material or some shit?

No, no, that was The Muse, totally different. I seem to recall the DS9 staff were embarrassed by that one. I'm sure everyone was "very pleased" with Muse.

Just like they were with the next episode...

Fury

Jennifer Lien was always too damn good for fucking Voyager. And I don't mean as an actor. I mean as a human being. Her character was given so little backstory to work with, she was paired with two extremely overbearing characters, and it's obvious the writers had no idea what to do with her. And rather than figure it out, they canned her in a ratings ploy. They gave her a send-off, but The Gift was pretty awful, focusing more on Seven than Kes, which torqued off a lot of Kes' fans. So, now, three years later, after the wounds have healed, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga decide to invite her back for a second shot at ending the character in a positive way.

She should have known better. She shouldn't have trusted the people who fired her due to a lack of sex appeal. But she must have felt like it would have been a valentine to the fans, so she agreed. And wouldn't you know it, they fucked it up. If they weren't so fucking goddamn incompetent, I'd say that it was intentional and malicious, but it has all the hallmarks of an episode they, and Brannon Braga in particular, decided to dump their particular brand of shit all over. You're in for a ride of unnecessary explosions, inexplicable characterizations, and the destruction of the one character on Voyager that deserved it the least, all saved up as a ratings ploy to get people to tune in to the latter half of this shitty fucking season.

We open with Janeway being all serious with Tuvok, before revealing that she's discovered that it's his birthday, then promptly says that he's about to enter the triple-digits, even though it's been established that he's over a hundred in past episodes. I think the fanwank to fix that was that she was talking Vulcan years, but let's be fucking honest, what fucking happened was that when this scene was being written, they thought back and said, "Hey, Spock was a hundred or something when he was on TNG, and he looked old as fuck, but Tuvok looks fine, so, uh, maybe he's less than a hundred?" and then never bothered to fact-check that shit. They get called out to the bridge, as a shuttle is fast-approaching with a single Ocampan life sign aboard. They call it up, and are shocked to see Kes, aged, and tired-looking, who begs to come aboard. Janeway agrees, so Kes naturally drives the goddamn shuttle straight into the ship, beaming aboard once she was through the shields.

Once aboard, as she walks down the corridors, they explode behind her (in a bit of CG that looks a little hokey today, but for the time, would have been quite impressive) due to what Tuvok calls "neurogenic energy," which is writer-speak for bullshit that makes shit blow the fuck up. She arrives in engineering, and immediately goes up and hugs the warp core, draining its energy somehow. When Torres tries to stop her, Kes fries her with a lightning bolt before suddenly disappearing. There was about ten whole seconds of Tom looking shocked that Torres was dead before...

We follow Kes back in time to Season 1. See, I told you this had Brannon Braga's shit all over it. Once there, Kes somehow manages to make herself not only look young, but act young as well - instead of her croaking voice and shuffling gait, she's now just as much the spring chick that she once was. She goes to Sickbay, endures, with visible agony, the Doctor explaining how he's trying to pick out a name, then swipes a hypospray and heads to the Airponics Bay and knocks young-Kes the fuck out, dumping her in a drawer.

Next, Kes goes to the mess hall to get some coffee to take to Janeway for...reasons? I guess? There, she finds Neelix, and rather than having a nice, sweet scene between the two of them one last time, the writers fucked this up too and had her be all grumpy and miserable. It's like, why the fuck even bother? Just have her replicate the fucking coffee and head on upstairs, if you're going to half-ass this shit. She heads up to visit Janeway, and interrupts a meeting in which Janeway and Chuckles are discussing the Vidiians - Chuckles basically accuses them of being kidney thieves like in urban legends. Kes then spills coffee all over Janeway's desk, and as Janeway heads off to the bridge instead of helping her clean it up, Kes accesses her computer.

Meanwhile, Janeway consults Ensign Wildman about the Vidiians and the Phage before heading into a staff meeting about how to evade the Vidiians. They come up with a plan to fly Voyager through a region of science bullshit by pre-navigating a course with a shuttle, then letting the ship's bio-neural gel packs drive. The reason? They can't warp through the region because apparently, just for this episode, you can't make any course corrections while at warp. You have to go in a straight line. What. The. Fuck.

We're then treated to an extremely awkward scene between Tom and Kes in one of the shuttles, after he catches her trying to plot a course away from Voyager, followed by Kes returning to her quarters, seeing that Neelix has laid out a nice meal for her, and her flipping the fuck out and knocking it all off the table. She then calls up the Vidiians, offering to exchange Voyager's position, route through the anomaly of the week and tactical data in exchange for safe passage to Ocampa for two. When the Vidiian is skeptical as to her motivations, she explains that Voyager "abandoned her long ago."

Uhg, I guess I should address the B-plot to all of this. Ever since old-Kes had arrived in the past, the Tuvok of that period had experienced visions of the future, including seeing Naomi Wildman, Seven of Nine, and the Borg kids. With each vision, he became more and more distressed, even leading Carey (yes, that poor bastard gets to make an appearance here as well) to ask if he's OK. He's not, and ends up in Sickbay, where Janeway presses the Doctor on what Tuvok told her. The Doctor confirms that Ensign Wildman is pregnant, and explains that since it's half-Ktarian, that means she'll be pregnant for twice as long as usual. Yes, of all the continuity blunders they could have fixed, this is the one they go with.

Anyway, as Voyager starts to flair they way through the spacial bullshit, the Vidiians catch up to them, anchoring themselves onto the ship with two giant tractor cables and boarding the ship. As they were able to cut through Voyager's shields instantly, Janeway knows something's up. They figure out that a transmission is coming from the Airponics Bay, and the readings indicate the presence of two of Kes there. Janeway shows up, and demands to know what Kes is doing. Kes explains that she's from the future, and that Janeway and her crew of merry idiots would corrupt her poor young Ocampan mind into wanting to explore her abilities, eventually abandoning her to her own personal hell, unable to even return to Ocampa due to her powers. Unable to reason with her, and with Kes telekinetically throwing Janeway around the room, Janeway phasers her to death. After dying, she reverts to her true, older self.

Meanwhile, on the Bridge, Chuckles and company change the polarity of the hull a few times, enough to break one of the cables anchoring the Vidiian ship to Voyager, then shoot three torpedoes at the ship and tear away from the other cable, ripping off a section of the hull. Now, if torpedoes were limited, they just eliminated three additional torpedoes from their compliment. If Voyager had actually taken torpedoes seriously, that would have meant that they would have been three short, which would have changed the entire course of Voyager's history, and thus, in all likelihood, caused a giant paradox. In addition, given that a giant chunk of the hull was gone, presumably, some people got sucked out into space, and that would have created a giant paradox too.

However, with the Vidiians addressed, young-Kes recovering, and Tuvok making enough sense of his visions to understand how Kes traveled back in time, they get back on their journey. We cut back to Season Six, where now, Janeway is able to cut off Kes, even showing her a holo-recording in which Kes explains that she's there willingly, and happily. Old-Kes basically had Space Alzheimers, and after being reminded that she had taken off in her blaze of glory from Voyager willingly, she gets back in her shuttle and departs, heading for Ocampa, apparently not afraid of being ostracized there any more. They attempt a sad moment between Kes and Neelix, but it comes off as both of them just being irritated with each other.

Of course, having prevented her from going back in time, the Vidiians were never able to attack and destroy part of Voyager, they never expended their torpedos, and most importantly, they never made the holo-recording of Kes, resulting in an even more ridiculous paradox.

What a fucking pile of garbage. The Gift might have been insulting in just how quickly, and with how little fanfare, they got rid of Kes, but at least it fucking made sense. At least it fit with the character. This? This was Rick Berman and Brannon Braga taking a giant fucking dump all over the poor bastards still watching this fucking disaster of a fucking show and fucking laughing at it. It's fucking insulting, and an utter disaster of an episode that could have fucking worked if they had just not killed Old-Kes and Torres, but had her go back to the future and make amends. That's right - they could have avoided all of the paradoxes if they had just bothered to write the episode a little better. And they certainly could have done it without pissing all over the character.

Fucking hell.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -37/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 12

I remember reading that Garrett Wang was to get the axe before winning some award as one of People magazine's 100 most beautiful people...thus giving Voyager some free publicity. So the second most useless character in Trek next to Mayweather got a stay of execution and Kes got the boot.

Morons. This is why Braga and Berman can't have nice things.

ETA: to add insult to injury, Bermaga don't even play that shit up. Season four on fowards was basically Threevs Company with the Janeway/Doc/Seven Big Three anyway, so why not just write Kim out the show and keep the one fairly intersting addition to the cast?

Kyle, is your name actually Kyle?

I was actually thinking of going back and watching the Trek I missed out on (the last 2.5 seasons of Voyager and all of Enterprise) but after reading some of these reviews, I think I will just stick to my original plan...

My Star Trek ended on June 2nd, 1999 with the DS9 finale. There was no Voyager, Enterprise, Insurrection, or Nemesis. Those productions basically do not exist for me. Ten years later, Star Trek would be re-booted with a feature film for a new generation of fans.

Season 4 of Enterprise was good, and there were a smattering of good ones throughout 1-3.