Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

Big galaxy, they may be in the DQ but just not got around to contacting that world yet.

Plus, could be the Federation ceases to exist.

FTFY.

John Logan is a close second.

Any organization that would make Janeway an Admiral is doomed.

Ugh, you reminded me of the one plot I absolutely hated when I used to read Voyager fanfiction (Yeah, talk about turning shit into explosive diarrhea... ). The plot in which either Janeway or Chakotay walks in on the other in the Holodeck banging a Holographic version of said officer looking in just seems wrong on so many levels. That's gotta violate some Starfleet code. There's other variations in other combinations, but usually Janeway/Chakotay always got the lion's share of this little cliche.

I'll partially agree and say it was Berman and Braga both. What brilliant idea was it for them to be producers AND head writers of Enterprise? It's no wonder that these two co-wrote of developed the ideas for most of that show's second season, which even the most dedicated fans would say was its worst season.

Braga had a few decent sci-fi concept episodes on his own (I was surprised to discovered he'd written "Cause and Effect" on TNG), but he was never that great on characterization. Berman should have never been allowed to write, period. He's a decent producer who helped with TNG's success, but never took it to the next level. Putting the two together as writers was a recipe for disaster.

It had some kind of time travel in. Of COURSE Braga wrote it!

Nothing emphasized these two's inability to write more than the Enterprise finale. After Manny Coto's season of fairly decent plot ideas and rather good character writing, the sudden outpouring of inexplicable plotting and inane writing that was that last episode smacked us over the head like a big plastic bag full of dogshit with "written by Berman and Braga" stencilled on it.

^
You'll never get any argument from me on that account.

The ENT finale was extraordinary bad, even for those two clowns. Some fans wondered if this was done on purpose because of all the praise Coto was getting, and especially the choice to kill the one character that wasn't either a complete cardboard cut-out or downright despised. And the TNG propping...goddamn. That was the biggest insult of all.

You forget the Peter Principle

Read Admiral Janeway heads up the thoroughly vital Stationary Supplies for the Boondocks Sector. Without her vital input, whole planets would be without pencils, erasers and paperweights.

Passing Captains have been known to faint from shock - and not develop boredom-induced comas as some cruel people have suggested - at her tales of derring-do with naught but a ringbinder, some blu-tac and a 32B pencil at her side.

Just wanted to let you all know that I haven't offed myself, I've just been pretty busy lately and haven't been able to write reviews. I have caught up with some more of Season 5, though. Oh boy.

Hey Kyle, here's something you might want to keep in mind.....

The episodes that fan boy hero Bryan Fuller was involved in...
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/42297
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0298188/filmoseries#tt0112178

One day in the summer of 1998, an impressionable twelve year old was at his aunt's house. The adults were out in the living room talking about, undoubtedly, boring shit. He, however, was in the family room. Sitting on the floor in front of a giant TV, he had the following at his feet:



The best space LEGO set ever made - the Galaxy Explorer. It was the one set his aunt had kept around for visiting nieces and nephews, and it was a damn good choice. On the TV, the boy tunes to channel 12, the local UPN affiliate. On the lazy afternoon, the station played repeats of some of the shows that had aired recently.

And so, after having not seen an episode of Star Trek for at least six years, he saw Deep Space Nine's Honor Among Thieves. Overall, it was a decent episode of DS9. No In The Pale Moonlight, but certainly no Move Along Home. And he'd remember that it was certainly a far loftier production than what he was going to see next. But, what was following that episode of Deep Space Nine was what was going to revitalize the boy's interest in Star Trek that had long ago become a distant memory. In fact, in a strange way, what would follow would change how the boy's life unfolded, at least for the next eleven years.

Demon
Voyager's running out of gas. And you goons said they were never desperate for resources on the show. It comes up a decent number of times, but it's always so hilariously out-of-the-blue that it just seems comical. Voyager has gone into Gray Mode, where they shut down nonessential decks and systems and all chill out in cargo bays and the mess hall eating rations. Janeway, is, of course, not going to be happy because she can't have her fucking coffee, and Neelix is not amused when Tuvok prohibits him from taking his entire damn quarters with him to the mess hall to sleep with. Meanwhile, I'm sure that Chuckles tried and failed to convince the Captain to camp out with him in the briefing room.

Seven, being the only member of the science staff not running around like a chicken with its head cut off, promptly finds a solution. A nearby Class-Y planet has rich deuterium deposits. Chakotay balks at going there, as a Class-Y planet is more colloquially known to Starfleet as a Demon class planet - the place is barely inhabitable to rocks.

Tom and Harry end up getting sent on a shuttle mission to the planet in EV suits, and for the first time in a while, you actually get the sense that they're friends, and it's not just Harry hanging on for dear life, hoping to catch whatever women Tom discards.

Anyway, they land on this planet that will supposedly start eating through the EV suits pretty promptly, so they'll have to hurry. So what do they do? THEY LEAVE THE DOOR TO THE FUCKING SHUTTLE OPEN. WHAT THE FUCKING CHRIST. You're going to get back and all your goddamn computer panels are going to look like a goddamn Horta made out with them. Anyway, they quickly track down the deuterium deposits in pools of mercury-like liquids inside caves. While Tom's off rambling about something, Harry promptly falls into one of the pools. Tom pulls him out, but Harry's suit has been compromised, and he's losing air fast. If Tom doesn't get him back to the shuttle in under a minute, Harry's going to bake like an ensign-flavored cake. And then Tom's suit starts going as well. They collapse before making it back to the shuttle.

Back on Voyager, Neelix harasses the Doctor by convincing Chakotay to let him and some background crew members chill out in Sickbay. The Doctor tries to one-up him by singing Opera while he tries to sleep, but Neelix just starts singing along - poorly. Hedgehog - 1, Hologram - 0. Overall, could have done without this pathetic excuse for a B-plot, or, really, Neelix in the episode at all.

Anyway, Janeway realizes that Tom and Harry are taking forever, so she has Chuckles land the ship. And, since at the very least, he isn't the whining harpy that is Deanna Troi, he manages to do so without cratering the damn thing. She then sends him and Seven out to find them.

And find them they do. Sans EV suits (how convenient, since there are only three EV suits, and it'd require four for such a scene!). Turns out that, somehow, Tom and Harry are just fine, and they can breathe and live in the Demon atmosphere without any problems at all. They try to convince the skeptical Chakotay and Seven to take off their helmets and take a deep breath of not-air, but are instead convinced to return to the ship with the deuterium they've collected.

But when they're beamed aboard, Tom and Harry start choking and collapse. They are beamed to sickbay, where the Doctor quickly drops them behind a forcefield and pumps the room full of the planet's atmosphere - whatever happened to them, it isn't good. The Doctor soon discovers that there is an unusual silver compound in their blood that appears to have reformulated their body chemistry to survive on the planet. Sending it off with Janeway and Torres to test, he's concerned that if they leave, they'll never be able to duplicate the atmosphere - Tom and Harry will have to stay.

Seven and Harry go back to the planet's surface to investigate further. Harry's practically coming in his Starfleet-issue trousers about how beautiful the planet is, but Seven isn't buying it. In fact, she finds...Tom and Harry. In EV suits. Perfectly fine, but unconscious. Fake-Harry runs away like a little bitch, and Seven and the boys beam back to Sickbay, just as the ship starts being sucked down into a pool of the silver liquid.

Well, fuck. Janeway and Torres figure out that it's a biomimetic compound when Torres spills some of the liquid on her thumb, and the liquid duplicates her thumb, right down to the DNA level. Voyager can't break free of the pull of the liquid, and they're slowly sinking. Tuvok fires a technobabble burst into it, and it works, but Fake-Harry calls up blubbering, begging them to stop. Janeway has him beamed to the transporter room along with a forcefield full of planetary atmosphere.

There, he pleads with Janeway to let the liquid duplicate the crew so that the biomimetic compound can flourish - after acquiring Harry and Tom, it's the first taste of sentience its ever had. And because Janeway's so hip to the Prime Directive, she is more than happy to interfere with the development of this fledgling sentient race. What she isn't so wild about is being knocked out for the duplication to occur. She and Fake-Harry eventually agree that DNA samples could be used for the duplication process, and she tosses in a disclaimer that only those wishing to participate will be duplicated.

But, since Voyager is a crew of people who would happily give up their homes for interstellar byways and never object to eminent domain, they all agree. Voyager departs, and leaves behind a wide shot of a CG throng of people, complete with out-of-place catsuit-clad blonde.

So, this is the warning. From this point on, we're venturing into territory that I saw first-run. There's a bit of nostalgia attached. I'll try really hard to keep my objectivity, but there are some fond memories here. Trust me, in terms of Middle School, Voyager was the only thing I had to look forward to, so that should say a lot.

Overall, though, this wasn't as bad as it could have been. It was an interesting premise, and the episode clipped along. The only real issue is that they didn't seem to have the balls to stick to how dangerous this type of planet was supposed to be. Sure, there was the usual schizophrenic "Oh shit, remember our premise? We've got to struggle here, guys." bit to set it up, but even DS9 frequently resorted to "So, uh. Let's do an episode about Bajorans and religion or some festival or something, and someone will disagree with them, and Kira will get indignant. Sound good?"

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

The worst thing about Demons is that it was followed up with Course:Oblivion, which has to be the most needlessly depressing episode of Star Trek and the most pointless follow-up. Yeah, including Spirit Folk. At the end of that, I was thinking "...Well. Fuck, what was the point?"

I took the episode as a harbinger of things to come, as the entire crew died needlessly because Janeway wouldn't compromise her principles. I wondered, "is that how the real Voyager is going to end as well?"



And then it didn't.

Ah, Demon. The episode in which Voyager struggled to find hydrogen. Dumb-ass writers didn't have a clue that deuterium is a real substance that Voyager could even make in its replicators, as it's found readily in water. The episode which amounts to the greatest violation of the Prime Directive in Trek history, a violation that would shame even Kirk. The episode where the characters are stupid enough not only not to find hydrogen but to believe that all that you need to survive a noxious atmosphere hot enough to boil blood is a new set of lungs.

Gotta disagree with your rating on this one, Kyle. Demon was a particularly bad and lazily written episode, even by Voyager standards.

Yeah, at least the Tech Manuals got that right - using the Bussard collectors constantly while at warp should mean the ship will never run out of deuterium... the only issue is getting enough antideuterium to enable the ship to maintain warp speeds. They can artificially produce it from regular deuterium by transporter trickery, but the process isn't sustainable without an energy input.

Antimatter and the occasional rare spare parts that couldn't easily be replicated should be the primary resource concerns of Voyager, since pretty much anything else can be replicated and you can top up the replicators' supplies of raw matter relatively easily by skimming atmospheres/nebulas or mining asteroids.

So listen: deuterium deposits. Underground. What?
Isn't deuterium an isotope of Hydrogen that exists freely in open space?
What's it doing underground?

Well, deuterium is relatively abundant in seawater, yes, but why would starship water supplies include any heavy water at all? Why wouldn't it have been extracted to begin with?

It would have been. There's a TNG episode where someone wryly remarks to Picard that "watching technicians fill deuterium tanks" isn't exactly rest and relaxation or some such.

This is my favorite Jammer review ever.

You actually think the brain trust crew of Voyager could keep the Bussard Collectors running?

Considering how often they vent shit out of the nacelles, I'm amazed they even work at all.

I actually had an idea for a Voyager story where the deflector dish finally started fucking up after all the abuse they put it through doing stuff it wasn't designed for, leading to the ship being damaged by space dust while at warp so it was cool to see a similar scene in Course:Oblivion.

One
Intriguingly, I had never seen this episode.

Seven is bulldozing through social conversation in the mess hall, and in her usual brusque manner, manages to offend Harry and Torres. The Doctor then pipes up with an annoyed 'Freeze Program', and the simulation pauses. Seven is not amused, and dislikes the social exercises the Doctor is putting her through.

Luckily, her salvation from the incompetent crew of Voyager is at hand. Voyager unsurprisingly runs across a nebula, and since it's a Mutara class (y'know, the kind that wipe out virtually all sensors and even put cameras on the fritz, making any ship a sitting duck), Janeway decides to plow right through it. However, as soon as they start entering the nebula, the crew starts experiencing pain and burns. Janeway decides to not go in the nebula.

However, it's apparently too large to just drive around, so they'll have to continue through. It'll take a month to get through, so unless they give everyone on the crew magical peyote tricorders to make them not give a shit about the terrible burns covering their bodies, they'll have to work out another solution.

And they certainly do - the Doctor figures out that if he just tosses them all in stasis chambers, they'll make it through just fine. However, that'll leave a grand total of two people in charge of the ship - the Doctor, who has already demonstrated a terrifying lack of ability when it comes to starship operations, and Seven of Nine, the only person on Voyager who isn't an utter idiot.

Janeway initially balks, but decides to go along with it, and they all hop into stasis pods in this giant room we've never seen before. Where the fuck does this thing fit onto the ship? Is this where they stored all the goddamn shuttles before they destroyed them? Seven quickly falls into an efficient routine, and about halfway through the nebula, even she and the Doctor start to feel the effects of the isolation. They start fighting with each other.

They are interrupted when the ship starts bitching about something. A warp core breach. Seven and the Doctor try to stop it, but they're unsuccessful, and the Doctor drags Seven out of Engineering. As if that'd help. But, surprise, no explosion - it turns out the computer was misreporting issues due to the bio-neural gel packs succumbing to the same issues facing the crew. These things are fucking useless - why the fuck are they there? Seriously - it'd be like requiring you to plug a cable into your arm to use a computer so that it can enjoy your precious bodily fluids or something.

While repairing the gel packs, the Doctor's holoemitter starts to fritz, and they rush back to Sickbay. The Doctor is saved, but now Seven is on her own.

Soon, a vessel hails the ship requesting a part, and Seven tries to help him. Remember how I said that Harry Kim was the perfect representation of a stereotypical Trek nerd? Well, this guy is a representation of a nerd who is just lecherous and creepy. The kind that everyone says is a "nice guy" to keep him friendly, but knowing he resents every woman who doesn't immediately put out.

He leaves, but soon starts taunting her over the comm about the fear of isolation and following her around the ship. The Doctor soon diagnoses him as a hallucination, however - the effects of the nebula are starting to get to even Seven. The hallucinations get stronger and stronger, but before the Doctor can treat them, the EPS conduits start failing, killing propulsion and knocking the Doctor offline. Seven has to confront the greatest fear of a Borg drone and of a human - being totally, completely, alone.

Hallucinations of the crew soon start plaguing her, claiming that she killed them because of her failure. A hallucination of Janeway in particular follows her as she tries to restore propulsion, trying to induce Seven to shut off power to the stasis units and save herself. However, Seven chooses to disable life support, sacrificing herself to save the crew. And the heat and oxygen run out damn fast - fuck, it's not like disabling the system sucks the oxygen out of the ship or something.

However, when Seven awakes, she is in sickbay, her friends happy to see her and thankful for her hard work and sacrifice over the past month.

I did a poor job of describing it, but there really was a fairly decent atmosphere to this episode. It was definitely a bottle episode, though, and almost entirely driven by one deus ex machina after another. And, hilariously, Voyager would crib from it in the very next season.

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

Didn't I just see this episode of Enterprise?

Which one was that, the one where they were chillin' in the nacelles for some ungodly reason?

Hope and Fear
Janeway and Seven are having a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants moment in the holodeck where the shoot phasers at a disc that hurtles around the room. Now, I'm going to stop for just a second. This game, called Velocity, has to be the most ill-conceived holodeck program I've ever heard of. You're taking the holodeck, the most unreliable bit of technology in Starfleet, and then adding phasers and spinning, flying, unpredictable discs to the mix. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

However, no such disaster is scheduled for this episode. Janeway beats Seven because, according to Janeway, of her intuition, and Seven thinks that's a BS answer, and I agree. Knowing Janeway, she probably reprogrammed the game to let her win as part of some lesson about humanity, then realized that the lesson might not end well since a phaser is in the hand of her opponent.

Anyway, Neelix comes back from an away mission with a guest - a man named Arcturis who helped Neelix with some negotiations. Arcturis is essentially a living universal translator, requiring only a couple sentences of a language before figuring out its idiosyncrasies. He'd like Voyager's help getting him to the next system, so Janeway decides to force him to finally break the encryption on the message Starfleet sent via the Hirogen communications network.

He quickly decrypts part of it - a message from Admiral Hayes, and a nearby spacial grid. All the while, Seven and Janeway watch him, and he comments that the Borg referred to his people as Species 116, "in their colorful vernacular," and Seven remarks that they were remarkably resistant to assimilation.

Janeway has Tom go to the coordinates specified by the spacial grid, and Tuvok soon picks up a ship on sensors. A ship with a Starfleet warp signature. No lifesigns aboard, an incredibly unique, but still decidedly Starfleet, hull configuration, and a complex and unknown warp configuration.

Chuckles, Paris, and Tuvok beam over, and the ship promptly goes into autopilot mode, first accelerating to impulse. Then, its 'quantum slipstream drive' activates, and a green energy field surrounds the ship before it hurtles off at unimaginable speeds. Janeway orders Voyager to follow its trajectory, then asks Arcturis to help her decode the rest of the message.

Two days later, Voyager has caught up with the ship named Dauntless, and Chuckles reports that they had traveled the entire distance in minutes. Arcturis has finished decoding the message, and Janeway plays it at a staff meeting. Admiral Hayes discusses the Dauntless, which uses a new experimental drive technology Starfleet developed, and they hope it'll bring Voyager home in what is practically a blink of the eye.

Janeway's skeptical - she's been burned by chances to return home eight times ( ) before, so she has Torres and Tuvok run a full sweep of the ship, and asks Paris to look into making slipstream modifications to Voyager so that it could come along for the ride. After dismissing her staff, she asks Tuvok to stay behind, and mentions that it's all just a little too convenient for her tastes, and asks him to keep an eye on Arcturis, since it all started when he arrived.

Meanwhile, Seven isn't happy about the discovery. It means she'll have to confront an entire planet of humans, when she's barely become accustomed to a crew of [127|135|148|152]. After talking with Harry and Torres about how they are excited to be returning, she is further disheartened. Returning to Astrometrics, she finds Janeway gazing at an image of Earth and trying to reconstruct the last little bit of the message from Admiral Hayes, which Arcturis claimed was a lost cause. Seven reveals that she won't be returning to Earth with Janeway and the crew of Voyager.

Naturally, this totally ruined a potential Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants moment, so Janeway's pissed, accusing her of being afraid to confront the challenges posed by Federation society (and fuck, who can blame her, it's like living with a bunch of Mormons half the time), and claiming that Seven owes Voyager a debt that it is time she repaid.

However, the computer chirps - the message was successfully reconstructed. Watching it, Admiral Hayes regretfully informs Voyager that they haven't figured out a way to get them home, but provides all their data on the Delta Quadrant in the hopes that they might be able to route a better way back to Earth. Arcturis drew them into a trap based entirely on their desperate desire to get home, and now, he was on a ship with half of their crew.

Janeway orders an evacuation of the Dauntless and beams over with Seven to confront Arcturis. He attempts to claim his innocence, but soon resorts to making a mad dash to the helm. Tuvok shoots him, but he's apparently got the 24th century equivalent of Kevlar on, because he's simply dazed, not defeated. He rips a panel off of the helm and pulls a strange looking switch. Instantly, the bridge changes appearance, shifting to blood reds and alien consoles. He throws a forcefield up around the remaining Voyager crew, but Harry manages to beam them out. Well, all but Janeway and Seven.

Arcturis engages the slipstream drive, hurtling off to parts unknown. Voyager follows them into the slipstream, field-testing Tom's modifications.

On the bridge of the Dauntless, Arcturis reveals his motivations. For centuries, his species had resisted the Borg. But with each attack, they grew weaker. Their forces were stretched thin. And then, Species 8472 arrived in the Quadrant, and started fighting the battle Arcturis' people had long hoped to against the Borg. We know what happens next. Janeway stumbles along and hands the Borg the tools they need to end the war. So they can get back to focusing on Arcturis' people. And they do, assimilating all but a handful. Janeway claims that she was acting in the best interests of the galaxy, but he doesn't buy it (and frankly, I'm not sure that I do either - had Janeway not gotten involved, it's about a 50%-50% shot that 8472 would continue their rampage, and if they did, they already had a weapon that would stop them).

So, his plan for retribution was simple. Get the crew of Voyager aboard his ship, then steer it on a collision course with Borg space, getting every single one of them assimilated, just like his friends and family. He decides that he'll be perfectly happy with only Janeway getting that treatment, though, and destroys the helm controls - there's no stopping the ship now. He then throws them into the brig.

Janeway and Seven then get to have their Sisterhood moment, and Seven admits her fears, which Janeway empathizes with. They soon escape after modifying Seven's implants to reactivate the Borg system that lets her walk through forcefields, and they return to the bridge, just as Voyager starts opening fire on the Dauntless.

Five torpedos are fired, bringing down the Dauntless' shields. Despite his transgressions, Janeway begs Arcturis to some with her and not be assimilated, but he refuses, instead firing at her gangsta-style with a sideways gun. Voyager diverts its slipstream and heads for the Alpha Quadrant, as Arcturis' ship drops out of the slipstream. Directly into a system brimming with Borg. Their metallic echoing voice fills his ships speakers as he settles into the captain's chair, condemned to an existence as a nameless drone.

And then Seven and Janeway play more Velocity after Janeway reveals that it shaved about a decade off of their trip home before the drive gave out.

For the first time, one of Voyager's three-hour-tour moments actually worked - this was at the end of a season, so they feasibly could have returned home and retooled the show, especially since it was common knowledge amongst fans that Season 4 was Jeri Taylor's final season with the show. And, for the first and, I think, only time, Janeway had to deal with real repercussions for her actions in the Delta Quadrant. Overall, a solid episode, and a good cap to what was Voyager's best season.

Rating: ****
Torpedoes remaining: 2/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 9
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 9

I knew it sounded familiar.

Season Four
With Voyager's fourth season, it found renewed vigor in storytelling thanks to the addition of Seven of Nine, a golden egg-laying goose that they'll soon beat to death. Overall, the season was marked with many high-quality episodes and a decent use of the characters throughout the cast. Had even half of the series been this good, Voyager would have been looked upon far more fondly.

*: The Gift, Nemesis, Concerning Flight, Waking Moments, Unforgettable
**: Revulsion, Retrospect, Vis à Vis
***: Scorpion Part II, Day of Honor, The Raven, Year of Hell Part II, Random Thoughts, Message in a Bottle, Hunters, Prey, The Killing Game Part II, Demon, One
****: Scientific Method, Year of Hell Part I, Mortal Coil, The Killing Game Part I, The Omega Directive, Living Witness, Hope and Fear

Total : 8
Total : 18
Average rating: ***,

Warning, still wasn't a full three, but I'm rounding up here. Finally! The first and only time a season of Voyager was in the category!

Of course, don't worry. With Jeri Taylor gone, the boys are in charge, and if there's one thing Berman and Braga can do, it's fuck up.

I had forgotten about that one. Damn, that is just fucking blatant, isn't it - it's like they just grabbed a Voyager script and changed the names. Of all the series to crib from, they'd pick Voyager?

I watched it the other night, found it a tedious episode, but a decent concept. Not knowing anything about VOY, I had no idea it was a blatant ripoff.

I'm not an expert on space travel or anything, but...um, isn't space three dimensional? What's preventing the ship from just flying vertical for a few dozen lightyears and flying over the damn thing once they were far enough above the damn thing?

This annoyed me when they still didn't get it right on Doctor's Orders--an episode which was only good the first time around because the one it followed ("Harbinger" where T'Pol has the one-night stand with Trip--Go, T/T'P!!!11!one ) stank so bad.