Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

And I doubt Voyager's are big enough for a group of people to go skiing in.

Maybe one person, as everything would "move" around him, but two or more, forget about it.

As for various Voyager denizens milling about an entire village like in Fair Haven, that's just inexcusable.

Holodecks/-suites were theater of the absurd in Star Trek.

The truly absurd thing is that, despite the way the holodecks were portrayed, our heroes on multiple occasions encountered and were baffled by simulations that were created via direct input into the brain. These simulations should have been easiy recognizable as a minor variant on holosuites. I think DS9 was actually worst in this regard, but my knowledge of DS9 is much more comprehensive than my knowledge of the other Trek series so I can't say for sure.

And crumble into TARDIS-like magic when you bring in two baseball teams!

And the stands...they could be explained away as being "projected on the wall", if Rom and Sisko weren't sitting up there.

^
Actually the TNG tech manual does go in to detail about some of these problems.

What is SUPPOSED to be happening with Rom and Sisko is that they are right next to you but the computer is projecting an image of them in between you and them giving the illusion of distance.

The baseball thing isn't that big of a stretch because according to the TNG manual noone actually moves any real distance in the holodeck, everyone is just running on force field treadmills encased by a holodeck image bubble.

So really a whole team could fit in a TNG holodeck, I don't know about Quarks. That might be pushing it.

Skiing should be no problem, because like my original Nintendo racing games, it's the background and foreground that moves - not you.

Even when you think you're falling, you're only being held up by an AG field with wind being shot up at you.

My only problem with the holodecks is that the level of tech needed to make them work really should have been WAY BEYOND the federation. I mean imagine the size of the computer needed to generate all those billions upon billions of instantaneous calculations for AG fields, relative images, force fields for movements, force fields to create objects, etc, etc.

Every time Ben hits a ball to Jake the computer has to create the ball, let Sisko strike it, decreate the ball, create a ball image to pass through the unreal plane between Sisko and Jake, decreate that image, then recreate another ball for Jake to catch - all while interacting with the most realistic 3-d physics engine ever made for a gaming platform.

It really falls apart when you consider two people interacting closely with one another. The computer has to account for their fields of vision contrasting, environmental interactions, etc., etc.

Further, if all of this perspective wankery is how the system works, then really, why do they need multi-story holodecks in the first place?

Additionally, I'm pretty sure that holographic characters are consistently portrayed as creepy flesh puppets - after all, how else would Janeway fuck Irish Springs - how does the system handle that?

Hell, how does the system handle holo-ejaculation? We've always joked about the holodeck jizz moppers, but is the holodeck itself compounding the problem?

Goddammit Kyle!

You put a disturbing image in my head of a holodeck character cumming inside a naked Captain Janeway...

Damn, that pissed me off.

How many crewmen died because Janeway wouldn't share technology with the Kazon, or because Janeway wouldn't violate the Prime Directive?

And then not only does she share technology with the Hirogen, but she shares it fully expecting it'll alter the natural development of their species.

Welcome to my hell.

Furthermore, what helps drive the holodecks? Replicators and transporters. She just handed over the holy trifecta of Starfleet technology to an alien race that hunts sentient beings for sport.

I'm glad she's dead.

The holodeck would have made more sense if they had made it like the Matrix, but without the jamming a metal spike in the back of your head.

You just go to the room hop in the bed or chair and put a fancy helmet on and away you go......

You can have multiple people all joining up for a game of something.

You can still turn off the safeties and be in mortal danger. If you die in the Matrix you die in the real world.

All doable with a fast enough computer and accurate enough sensors. There's no fundamental problem there.

Weather and to reduce computational load. I'm sure it's easier to make bleachers actually a dozen feat off the ground than it is to do an escalator in force fields.

Since when? Holocharacters are just force fields and photons. See "Heroes and Demons - the doctor gets sliced with a sword, but it just disrupts his appearance a little bit.

No, the holodeck makes it easier. Remember the first holodeck malfunction episode on TNG? The holodeck has the capability to disintegrate people if it thinks they're characters (thus spake Wesley, "If we do this wrong, everyone on the holodeck could disappear".). Presumably it can disintegrate jizz as well.

Given that she didn't give them a huge honking pattern buffer, or any other infrastructure looking thing, I'm guessing the Hirogen - who, after all, built a quadrant-spanning communications array 100,000 years ago - have transporters and replicators already.

Vis à Vis
Lately, Janeway's been getting all the fun mood swings, so it's someone else's turn. Who better than the galaxy's least-bad bad boy and womanizer, Tom Paris?

He's working on a muscle car in a holographic garage that seriously looks like it was reused from the set of Baseketball. I guess he's feeling restless or something, because he's holed himself up in the holodeck rather than banging Torres or chilling with the Eternal Virgin Harry Kim. Now, see, unlike when we saw Tom being all moody and shit before during the Basics arc, this just came out of the blue, and will conveniently not really crop up again.

However, he's soon called up to do his, y'know, job, as a ship rapidly approaches. It uses a coaxial warp drive, which is basically a warp drive on steroids. Tom recognizes the technique immediately, as he apparently didn't sleep through the warp theory course at the academy (and you have this man flying a fucking starship? Fuck!), but states that Starfleet believed it to be only theoretical. He comes up with a way to stabilize the ship, and its occupant eagerly thanks them. He requests help with repairs, and Tom eagerly volunteers.

The pilot is a man named Steth, and he's a test pilot for a local alien race. He and Tom discuss the finer points of putting their penises in alien vaginas and warp drive maintenance, but the cause of the issue remains a mystery. Tom realizes he's late for a date with Torres, and hurries back to Voyager, only to get in a fight with her.

Steth, meanwhile, is not quite all he appears to be. He shifts into a female form, and then reconstitutes himself as the affable test pilot. He needs new DNA to copy himself into, and hey, who better than our boy Tom? Tom eagerly drags Steth to the holodeck simulation of the garage, and explains that, essentially, he thinks the coaxial warp drive needs a carburator to help regulate the technobabble flow through the drive. Steth agrees and has him return to the ship to implement it. While there, though, Steth phasers Tom and starts a'body swapping.

Back on Voyager, Tom reports to duty and watches Steth's ship warp off. He has a rather smug smile on his face, as he's really Steth. However, despite managing to figure out how to pilot the ship, he gets in a fight with Seven when she catches him reading the captain's logs (this is after a really awkward scene in which he seduces Torres).

Tom, however, is having a very poor day indeed, as when he wakes up, in a brand new body, his ship is immediately captured by the aliens that Steth was supposedly working for - one beams over and demands the return of the body Tom's currently occupying. Realizing that they've both been had, they lay in a course for Voyager.

And they arrive none-too-soon, as Steth is trying to choke the shit out of Janeway, apparently realizing what we the viewer know all too well - she's an unstable murderous psychopath. After phasering him and sending him off to sickbay, Janeway is stunned to see Tom and the alien chick (whom I'm sure Tom banged on the way), claiming that he is Tom, and that Steth changed places with him.

Janeway orders Tom's ship to be held in a tractor beam, and says that she'll be visiting sickbay. However, she actually heads to the shuttlebay and escapes in a shuttlecraft - Steth had swapped bodies again. That means that Janeway's in Tom's body, which I suppose is slightly better than having fucked him as a lizard. Tom soon disables the shuttle, though, and the Doctor comes up with some bullshit way to put everyone back to where they belong. The male alien previously known as Steth vows to take Steth, now in the female form, to the authorities and continue to track down all the bodies that she swapped.

This episode could best be described as tedious, with inconsistent characterizations across the many iterations of Steth. It is a terrible sign when the guest star playing the male alien does a better job of being Tom Paris than Robert Duncan McNeill does at playing Steth, and that Kate Mulgrew just played it as "smarmy" rather than actually trying to emulate the guest star's performance and mannerisms at all.

Oh, and at no point did Voyager try to get its hands on the coaxial warp technology. What the fuck.

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

There are many problems with the holodeck concept, but the issues you raise aren't among them.

If computer advancement continues at the rate it has for the past few decades by the 24th century computers will have long since reached the theoretical limits of performance. To give you an idea of this advancement, by some benchmarks a modern $1000 PC is many times more powerful than the fastest supercomputers in the world when TNG started airing.

If anything, TNG underestimated the computer technology available to the Federation. If you look at the Enterprise D plans the computer core is absolutely massive, taking up many decks.

edit:Also to add, basically all the technology used in the holodeck is just an extension of that already needed elsewhere in in show.

Physically, they wouldn't, but the all the funky shit would make each person perceive that they were.

It's a great copout, as you've got the holodeck altering perception, physical objects (via replicators and transporters), so can get away with just about anything other than shoehorning a load of real people in it.

It's like someone, one day, thought "hey, the universe is filled with lots of nasty shit, but what we really need is some high-grade headfuckery that can go wrong at the drop of a hat, and install it on the ship. That should ensure the fuckers aren't safe anywhere"

Someone call me when the holodeck discussions end.

KTHXBI

You also noticed that the three characters who died in the toss to the Delta Quadrant were the three that were the meanest to Tom Paris, the doctor and the first officer, who were assholes to him, and the Betazoid helmsmen who rejected his advances.

Clearly Tom Paris was in league with the Caretaker.

Comes with the territory of a trip speeding across the galaxy in a beeline. They shouldn't encounter the same aliens for too long at once. Especially in later seasons, when Voyager would occasionally make huge leaps in their journey.

The single biggest offense was the episode where the ensign who died (offscreen) in season 3 was resurrected and somehow caught up with Voyager in Season 6, despite the huge swaths of space Voyager covered in the interim thanks to the noncorporeal Kes (9500 ly) in The Gift, the jury-rigged slipsteam (300 ly) in Hope And Fear, the Malon vortex (2500 ly) in Night, the more elaborate slipstream (10,000 ly) in Timeless, the Borg transwarp (20,000 ly) in Dark Frontier, the subspace corridor (200 ly) in Dragons Teeth, and the graviton catapult (600 ly) in The Voyager Conspiracy, over 43,000 light years in all.

Also in season 6's Pathfinder, Starfleet was able to estimate from its position in season 4's Message In A Bottle, the likely position Voyager would be in to within three sectors, and despite being clueless to all of the afforementioned leaps it had taken in that time frame, they were somehow correct...

Have you forgotten encountering Talaxians near the end of season 7?

Because by the 7th season, she'd have been on Geritol.

Also about the '37s...if the humans on the planet are descendents of the 37s, how's that jibe with their frozenness?

I didn't find that one as bad, because we don't know what time intervals were involved in how those Talaxians to get there, and there wasn't the absurdity of them actually catching up with a ship that experienced several unique furtherances of their journey.

So a shuttle that had gone Warp 10 (because it transformed Janeway) was able to be found by Voyager in three days. That makes ENT's four days to Q'on'os look positively reasonable by comparison.

On a starship zipping through space, where there are likely several duty rosters, what exactly is the meaning of "morning"?

Apparently it is taught in some Cardassian academy.

That would have been an interesting real-life Tuvix...

I dunno...I can't decide what was more annoying, Nana Visitor's high pitched hyena laugh or Jennifer Lien's baritone scream.

Earth is actually on the Alpha Quadrant/Beta Quadrant line...I believe it's actually the point of delineation...a line going through the galactic center and Sol forms the border between Alpha and Beta, and Gamma and Delta, and a line perpendicular to it, and also passing through the galactic center is the border between Alpha and Gamma and Beta and Delta. The Federation straddles both Alpha and Beta, and both the Klingon and Romulan empires are mostly in Beta, while Cardassia and Bajor are in Alpha.