Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

These were easily the most annoying aliens since the Skreeans on DS9.

It wasn't an issue of timing for me, it was the fact that they somehow made it through Borg space, past the Swarm, through that deadly expanse that forced everybody but Seven to hide in stasis, through that years-long region of total blackness... yet when Voyager finds them, they've basically defenseless.

Either they fell through a wormhole they didn't mention, or something doesn't add up.

They didn't seem to have transporters whenever they've encountered Voyager.

I wonder though, would it violate the Prime Directive to give a civilization technology they used to have, but lost over time?

I believe it was established in a couple of Next Generation episodes that Starfleet vessels keep a diurnal rhythm going. Data, IIRC, was usually the bridge officer on the Enterprise for the night shift, since he didn't need to sleep.

Pretty much. The Talaxians getting that far is utterly and unforgivably ridiculous regardless of how long it took.

Voyager itself was farther from home for most of the show's run than those Talaxians were, so I guess I'm not seeing the huge deal.

At least not compared to a resurrected ensign making up a 43,000 ly deficit to reach Voyager...in a shuttlecraft.

I'm baffled by that opinion. To me it's akin to saying that someone with multiple personality disorder has to get the consent of all of them before seeking treatment.

Being Q, he probably created a temporary fold or crease in space or something that they could just surf over..

Well, at this point, what's the downside of eating it? The civilizations are gone, except for consumable morsels. Let them decay instead?

What happened to the count of lost shuttlecraft?

Nebulae really were the be all and end all in Voyager, weren't they? The equivalent of latinum on DS9. It started with the Caffeine "Nebula" and went from there.

It's scary that you know all of that about Voyager.

The Omega Directive
Kim and Tuvok are playing Kal-toh together when Seven walks into the mess hall to fetch Kim for his duty shift. He had inadvertently stayed up all night playing the game with Tuvok, and was still no closer to winning. Seven examines the tangled sphere and places a single rod, winning the game - a "simple matter of spacial harmonics." Tuvok is impressed, Harry is emo about it.

But enough of that filler bullshit, let's get on with the episode. The ship abruptly drops out of warp and, remarkably, for once it isn't due to the crew's incompetence. The ship did this automatically, and it overrides every display with the Greek letter Omega. Janeway bursts onto the bridge and locks herself in her quarters after clearing the lockout and telling everyone to not breathe a word about what has happened.

In her ready room, she asks the computer about the presence of Omega particles, and the computer responds that they have been detected, and that Janeway is to immediately implement the Omega Directive, which supersedes all other Starfleet directives, orders, and regulations.

She starts dictating orders through Chakotay, but it is clear that the work isn't proceeding on schedule. So, Janeway calls Seven in and asks her what she knows about Omega Particles. She clues in the audience by means of her assimilated knowledge. The Omega Directive is known only to captains and flag officers (so you can thank Jean-Luc Picard for letting the cat out of the bag for this one), and it is to eliminate any traces of Omega particles found. While they are essentially a limitless energy source, they are exceptionally dangerous, and if they destabilize, they take subspace along with it, rendering FTL communications and propulsion inoperative.

However, Seven initially refuses to help Janeway destroy the molecules when found. The Borg were fascinated by its existence, and viewed it to be, in a word, 'perfect.' Despite the attempts to stabilize Omega costing the collective millions of drones, they still continue research and development.

Janeway again issues more nebulous orders, and the Doctor expresses surprise at her requests for radiation treatments. Tuvok's stuck making, essentially, a super-torpedo with an absurdly high destructive force (which leads me to wonder why all torpedoes aren't equipped this way by default, but it's no small wonder - Starfleet are a bunch of pussies).

Finally, after Chakotay begs her to tell him what's up (and think, this time, he isn't trying to wheedle wanking material out of her sexual dreams and fantasies!), Janeway agrees to clue in the senior staff. They agree to help, especially after Janeway recounts the Federation's discovery of Omega, and how it obliterated a science outpost (a nice allusion to some of the Soviet Union's scientific fiascos, though I have a feeling, an unintentional one). Tom confirms that the space around the area was almost unnavigable even at sublight speeds.

So, Voyager finally reaches the planet where the Omega readings emanated from, and sure enough, subspace is in a bad way, and half of a facility on the planet's surface has been destroyed. Janeway beams down with a team to expose it so that they can detonate it, and discovers injured. She beams them aboard, and tells them that she doesn't give a flying fuck about their property - Omega must be destroyed. However, she discovers that they've produced an absurdly high amount of the particles, and she has Seven construct a chamber that will lower their yield before they attempt a space detonation.

Somewhere in here, there's a reference to Carol Marcus and the Genesis device, a really nice touch, given the subject matter.

Soon enough, the particles are in the chamber, but Seven believes that she can stabilize them. Janeway refuses to let her, and they start reducing the yield. The scientists are throwing a fit, and their people have arrived to protect their crew and property, launching waves of attacks on Voyager. However, just before the Omega particles reach the necessary yield for safe detonation, Seven notices something - they are stabilizing on their own. She looks into the face of Borg perfection in wonder before Janeway yanks it away from her and beams it into space.

Tuvok shoots the uberTorpedo at it and destroys them - Voyager beats a hasty escape from the aliens, safe in the knowledge that the accident and events of that day will likely end that race's investigation of the phenomenon as well.

I really enjoyed this episode - it had a good deal of action and, best of all, urgency. It's probably the closest to the clandestine underpinnings of Starfleet that we'll ever get on Voyager, which of course still pales to Section 31 on DS9 (though it easily whips the ass of Enterprise's representation of S31). It's kind of a rare episode in that, at least for me, I can't imagine it having occurred on TNG - Picard would have found a way around it or something, and it probably would have been pretty damn preachy. Overall, a surprisingly good episode from the hit-and-miss Lisa Klink.

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

I liked him better as Maihar'du...

You could have Watermelon Man via the holodeck...

Unforgettable
The title is a lie. Robert Beltran's "favorite episode" is a snoozefest barely worthy of note, which proves that while he might have been the voice of reason amongst the cast regarding Voyager's quality, he is still suspect in contributing to the train wreck that was Voyager.

Voyager's under attack, but it doesn't look like there's anyone around. They soon discover two cloaked ships duking it out, and one calls Voyager for help. The female pilot begs Chakotay, by name, to help her.

She is from a race that emits pixie dust or something to make people forget about them after a few hours, and the race goes to great lengths to stay hidden from the universe. She claims that she was on Voyager for a month while trying to capture a fugitive from her society - his only crime was trying to leave. Now, she's committed the same crime, and asks Janeway for asylum.

Of course, nobody remembers her being there, and she planted a virus in the computer to wipe out all traces of her presence aboard. She soon reveals to Chakotay that they had fallen for each other, and it is implied that Chakotay got laid, which, frankly, makes this one of the least believable episodes of the entire series. I'd buy Janeway and Tom banging each other's salamander sex organs over this. They rekindle their relationship.

But, naturally, there are reset-button clouds on the horizon. Another one of her race shows up and easily boards Voyager. He zaps her with a Rohypnol Phaser or something, and she passes out, her memories of her time on Voyager slowly becoming, uh, a memory.

Soon, she remembers nothing of fucking Chuckles. She doesn't even want to stick around, nor does she believe that she ever liked the guy. Ice burn. So Chakotay bids a tearful farewell, knowing that he'll have to schedule more time on the Holodeck for his computer-aided masturbation sessions. However, before that, he writes down all he can remember about her - let's see a computer virus take on pen and paper!

Uhg. A train wreck. The very premise of the episode doesn't make any sense. Take, for example, the idea of a computer virus removing all trace of someone having been aboard. Transporter logs, communications, sure, whatever, that's believable. But it's when you start getting into stuff like, for example, replicator rations, that it becomes laughable. Say that Chuckles replicated a bottle of wine so that he could try to drink her into touching his penis. He won't remember having done this, but how will the computer virus know that the replicator record of one box of Oak Leaf Box Wine was for plying the virtue of an alien visitor? Even if it knew, and changed it to, say, boxes of doughnuts, it'd then have to coordinate with his memories so that he'd remember eating a whole box of doughnuts in a post-masturbatory stupor.

Oh, yeah, and a romantic episode focusing on Chuckles. That alone earns its rating.

One more thing. Andrew Robinson, fuck, pick better episodes to direct. Did you just get tired of working on a good show and decide that you want to slum it up over on Voyager for a while?

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

In a later episode, Icheb beats Tuvok, and he takes it somewhat worse. Must be a he-borg vs. she-borg thing.

Yeah hopefully your all caught up now Marathon and don't have to have an absurd amount posts back to back on the subject......

Where's Kes when you need her? She probably could have made those particles disintegrate themselves.

I posted as I read through the thread. Sue me.

Somehow I get the sense that Kyle is not a fan of the Chakotay character . . .

I'm guessing that he used the actual character's name only rarely was Clue One.

I consider Chakotay to be the most useless character on the show.

Yes, even moreso than Harry Kim - let me explain.

Harry Kim was ineptly written and poorly conceived - I swear, the only thing they must have written about him in the writer's bible was that he was a doey-eyed recent graduate.

However, over the years, with every train wreck of an episode, Harry Kim became, unintentionally, Star Trek's most scathing satire of its own fan base. He's smart, but a social disaster. Book smart, in other words - the man could rewire the ship to be a giant bouncy castle for Naomi Wildman, but his every idea was cribbed off of someone else. He chases unattainable women, and follows in the shadow of someone who is actually popular. He's totally a mamma's boy, given how frequently he talked about his parents, and he holes himself up in his quarters playing the clarinet. And, to top it off, the only times he actually stands up for himself is when he can tell everyone else thinks he's fucking useless - he's always on the defensive.

In fact, the only time he told anyone to shove it was when his Space Virginity was taken and Janeway inexplicably ordered him to stop pulling a Riker Maneuver. And he whined about it too, like Janeway took away his fucking Fleshlight or revoked his holomasturbatory privileges.

Chuckles, on the other hand, never grew out of being a Crying Indian. I can't buy for a second that he played a key role in the Maquis. He was Janeway's lap dog from Episode 1 to Episode 168, and that's all he ever was.

I disliked nearly every Voyager character by the end of the seven seasons.

I liked Kes, but probably because she left before the writers could fuck up her character too badly...

oh, wait. nevermind.

They did that too.

Don't you love how they had to bring her back for one episode just to make sure you'd hate her as much as you hate the rest of the crew?

There are lots of Voyager episodes that were worse on their own merits than Fury, but few that were worse as additions to canon. You really get the feeling that there was no plan at all for the script beyond "Kes returns," with the result being an episode that gutted character and continuity like a starving lion guts its kill.

Fury was basically a 'FUCK YOU' from Brannon Braga to all the fans of the show who missed Kes and wanted her back or who preferred those earlier seasons to the Barbie of Borg years.

Braga: So you assholes want Kes back, huh? Well, fuck you... we'll bring her back but we'll totally destroy everything good about the character and turn her into some evil sociopath. How do you like that valentine to the fans, bitches??


Braga was the worst thing to happen to Trek, plain and simple.

Another one of those "we believe in diversity. As long it's our diversity" Federation things.

They decided to make the Federation look so accepting and understanding of other cultures, that, uh, everything was human-centric...

Living Witness
And now, bounding back from the script that was obviously simply stroking Robert Beltran's ego, we get on to something that's actually good. There's a story within a story here, so I'm going to tell them seperately, as they are kind of interspersed in the episode.

A very butch looking Janeway gives a speech. She says that when diplomacy fails, all that remains is violence. Wearing black leather gloves and a black turtleneck beneath her uniform, she is very clearly not the Janeway we've come to know and, uh...anyway. She agrees to help a Vaskan ambassador kidnap the leader of the Kyrian rebels so that he could end the war that had torn their planet apart. In return, he'd show her a local wormhole that would get her closer to home.

Going onto the bridge, populated with Kazon and a sadistic, laughing Vulcan, Janeway calls down to Sickbay, and asks the Emergency Medical Android (complete with gold eyes and circuitboard skull) to whip up an aerosolized virus. The plan? To hit some Kyrian military installations with them and force their hand. The Vaskan ambassador isn't too sure, but he hesitantly agrees.

However, after the assault begins, Janeway is disappointed at the Kyrian resistance. Tuvok reminds her that the effects will only spread, but she wants more prompt action. She orders the Doctor to increase the yield, and Tuvok happily fires upon civilian populated areas. The Vaskan ambassador protests, and Janeway shoots back that she was going to complete the bargain, and he is as well. She has him thrown in the brig until the inevitable Kyrian surrender.

We see the warship Voyager, bristling with weapons and armor, firing upon the planet, when a ship starts an assault. Kyrian forces board Voyager and try to take Engineering, so Janeway dispatches Voyager's strike force - a small collective of Borg drones, lead by a fully-Borg Seven of Nine. They quickly stop the Kyrian forces in Engineering, and conveniently, the Kyrian leader is among them. Janeway has Kim and the Doctor torture one of his lackeys for information by dissolving his retinas, and takes the leader and his girlfriend up to the Mess Hall for 'interrogation.' When Seven asks what to do with the remaining Kyrians, Janeway grins and reminds Seven that she has been requesting an increase in the size of her collective.

Janeway goes to interrogate the Kyrian leader, and has the Vaskan leader there as well. When the Kyrian leader refuses to surrender and call off his forces, Janeway shoots his girlfriend in the back, point-blank, with a phaser. Unfazed, there is still no surrender. So Janeway shoots the resistance leader in the back as well, and as he slowly slumps to the floor, Janeway tosses the Vaskan the phaser rifle and reminds him that this was what he really wanted.

Fuck yeah, that was fucking awesome.

Fast-forward seven hundred years, and it's revealed that all of this is a holodeck recreation of the start of the Vaskan-Kyrian war. The Kyrians came out of it on top, though, and the two warring races come to an uneasy peace. The recreation was part of the Kyrian Heritage Museum, dedicated to preserving the memory of what lengths the Kyrians had to go through to bring peace to their world, and to the reminder of Voyager's terrible influence on the events.

Tensions are obviously high, though, as Vaskans in the group question the validity of the simulation. A Kyrian scientist eagerly shows them the proof of Voyager's maleficence, including a hand phaser and an unexploded photon torpedo. He has even found a data storage module that he hopes will shed even more light on the events.

However, he's unhappy with what he finds. Upon discovering that it's a holographic data stream, he loads it into the simulation, and finds a backup copy of the Doctor, spouting his signature line. After the Doctor witnesses the simulation, he's appalled at how the entire crew of Voyager is depicted, and that he will apparently be held accountable for their actions 700 years after the fact, without any evidence at all.

Eventually, the Doctor convinces the Kyrian scientist to let him create a new holographic simulation of what actually happened. The Vaskans were simply engaging in trade negotiations with Voyager when, out of the blue, the Kyrians attacked, initiating the entire war. They boarded the ship and slaughtered three engineers before being cornered in the mess hall. In a moment of desperation, the Vaskan ambassador killed the Kyrian leader to protect himself.

The Kyrian scientist doesn't believe it, but brings it to the attention of the planet's leaders. They agree to look over his new simulation, and the Doctor reveals that with a tricorder in the exhibit, he can prove that the weapon fire that killed the Kyrian leader was Vaskan, meaning that Janeway certainly didn't execute the prisoners.

This revelation sparks a whole new conflict, with Vaskans bombing the museum to protest all the lies the Kyrians had been promoting over the years. The Doctor tries to convince the Kyrian scientist to shut him down, but he is eventually convinced that he could do more good as a witness to the events, and the proof that neither race could continue to blame Voyager for its ills.

Fast-forwarding again, we are told that all of this was a computer recreation, albeit a far more accurate one. The Doctor helped negotiate a new and far more stable peace before taking a shuttle and pointing it to the Alpha Quadrant, hoping to eventually make it home and discover the fate of Voyager.

A damn fine episode. We get the closest we ever came to a Voyager Mirror Universe episode, a very nice tale of the dangers of revisionist history and how easy it is to draw conclusions from the barest of evidence, and, amusingly, it was, up until Enterprise's In A Mirror, Darkly, the only episode of Star Trek in which none of the actual characters appeared - in this case, just poor simulations and backup copies. It did raise an issue of just why there was a backup copy of the Doctor floating around when it was pretty clear that he was a unique commodity in previous episodes, but the premise of the episode is just so fucking good that I'll easily let that slide.

Oh, and Chuckles' tattoo covered half of his face. Whoopee.

Rating: ****
Torpedoes remaining: 7/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 9
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 8

What's amazing about that episode is that it is set so far in the future one would think the Federation would have shown up in the Delta Quadrant by now.

Chakotay may not have developed, but the sheer feat of being more annoying than Wesley Crusher means that Kim is, hands down, far worse than the injun.

Yeah you'd think by then they'd at least know if the Doctor made it home.

Of course the episode turned out to be a simulated history lesson about the unreliability of simulated history lessons. So not knowing the fate of the Doctor, or mentioning the Federation fits in fine with the lesson plan.