Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

I liked Spirit Folk...

You would.

Eye of the Needle
Harry Kim accomplishes something useful and finds a wormhole! However, because while he might occasionally do things, he can never do them correctly, the wormhole is about the size of Chakotay's facial tattoo.

Way to fuck up again, Harry. No wonder you never get beyond ensign. Anyway, because there's nothing better to do, they fire a probe into the damn thing, and somehow, it gets stuck. They try to explain away how absurd this is with a bit of technobabble, but I'll accept it as a deus ex machina sort of situation. Kim figures out that he could use the probe as a repeater for a message, and so they make a phone call.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is stuck in Sickbay treating some asshole who looks really familiar. He refuses to talk to the Doctor, instead communicating via Kes. The Doctor is frustrated with this situation, so Kes goes to see Janeway about it. As soon as Kes mentions the Doctor, Janeway becomes an utter bitch. She whines about how she's received complaints about his beside manner and, since he's just a hologram, she's thinking about having him reprogrammed. Kes protests, asking if he deserves to be mistreated simply for not being enough of a person.

Finally, Janeway gets a call back. It's a Romulan in the Alpha Quadrant. The crew is ecstatic, as it means that they'll be able to send messages back home. However, the Romulan doesn't believe Janeway's story of being stuck in the Delta Quadrant, and hangs up on her. He calls back in a little bit, and we're "treated" to a scene where she wanders around her quarters in a nightie talking to him. Now, I think Kate Mulgrew was really pretty attractive, all things considered, but this was a bit much. He tentatively agrees to relaying the messages, and indicates that he thinks he can set up a video link, which he would want to try before making any definite arrangements.

After they do so, he still hems and haws about relaying the message. Janeway makes an appeal to his sense of family, and he agrees. Torres comes bursting in after they hang up, and reveals that the frequency/bandwidth/whatever used by the video link could be used instead to run the transporter. Janeway throws caution to the wind and basically tells her to tell everyone and use any resource necessary to set it up.

After a successful series of test transports to and from the Alpha Quadrant, the Romulan agrees to be the test subject, as he can't afford the security risk of any Starfleet personnel beaming aboard his ship. If successful, however, he would have a troop transport take the Voyager crew back to Federation space. Meanwhile, Kes informs the Doctor of the developments, and he is immediately dejected, noting that he was fully integrated into the ship's systems, and could not, at that time, be removed and taken back with them to the Alpha Quadrant. Kes apologizes, but the Doctor makes one request - that he be turned off before everyone goes.

Off to the Transporter Room, where Kim and Torres successfully beam the Romulan to the ass end of the galaxy after the transporter bitched and moaned for a bit. Janeway is thrilled, and orders Chakotay to start evacuation procedures. Tuvok stops her, though. There was a reason the transporter was pitching a fit. They weren't just transporting him through space. They were transporting him through time - the wormhole had an opening 20 years in the past.

In the Conference Room, Janeway breaks the bad news - there's no way they could beam to the Alpha Quadrant, the damage to the timeline would be too great. Harry is very disappointed, enough so to spur the Romulan to offer to clue Starfleet in on how Voyager's first mission would go, and to avoid it. Janeway turns this down, arguing that they've made too big an impact on the Delta Quadrant (Let's see, they blew up the Caretaker's Array, which would have occurred anyway had they not helped the Kazon Party Bus crash into it, they dicked around with themselves in a black hole, they caused a civilization to almost be destroyed via technobabble, a guy stole Neelix's lungs, and they shanked a giant living nebula. Yeah, the Delta Quadrant is clearly better with your presence). He does, however, agree to transmit the messages from the crew in 20 years, and offers his name and position so that, if Voyager makes it back to the Alpha Quadrant, he can learn how their mission went.

They beam him back, but Janeway is happy to be able to tell the crew that their messages will be sent. Tuvok pisses all over that parade, though. Turns out the Romulan was in Voyager's computer - he died six years prior to Voyager's launch. No guarantee that those messages would ever be sent.

In the end, though, the Doctor is happy - he's finally started standing up for himself, and is beginning to be treated like a member of the crew rather than a ghost.

Y'know, this episode had its weak points, but I really liked it. It featured a somewhat 'classic Trek' sort of vibe, and had two peoples bridging their differences to really just do the right thing. The Romulan was played by Vaughn Armstrong, one of the better actors in Star Trek's guest stable, so that certainly didn't hurt.

Oh yeah, and I just remembered - the guy who was a dick to the Doctor was the dad from that Disney Channel show Even Stevens. God, why the hell do I know that?

Rating: ****
Torpedoes Remaining: 37/38

Dean Stockwell should've played EMH2 in the one with the USS Prometheus. Not Andy Dick.

Would've been cool & a good allusion to QL

My 2 pennies

uhhhh because you're a kid?????

I think they would have been better off just cloning his lungs. With the amount of medical tech they have I've always had a hard time believing that they couldn't clone body parts. Hell we are almost on the verge of figuring out how to do it in real life.

I've always believed that Roddenberry should have just said, "look Klingons always looked the way they did in TMP. We just didn't have the money during the first series. Fucking deal with it already you basement dwelling nerds."

On the Romulans I agree. They should have never changed them. They should have always looked like what they were: emotional Vulcans.

As for the Founders I think you are in the wrong here. Look at it from the Founders point of view. From their history they've been long abused and hunted down for what they were. They decide to protect themselves by creating an empire. You need soldiers. So they make some but no doubt they are wary of the fact that even though they've created these soldiers there is always the chance they would turn on their masters and attack the founders and take the empire for themselves. What better way to cut that possibility off then making something that the soldiers need to live and if you cut off they will die?

As for the Dominion War the supply was only cut off because they managed to mine the wormhole and prevent resupply while destroying what production facilities of Ketracel White there were in the Alpha quadrant. Of course the wormhole aliens helped in the end too.

If the Dominion had instead bordered on the Federation I think the Dominion would have won because there would be no way to stop the supply of Ketracel White to the Jem'Hadar and we know that the Federation and even the Klingons were being worn down from the Jem'Hadar.

(Of course in the Star Trek universe the good guys would have still found a different way to win the war..... )

The Founders had never encountered anyone who could stop them in the Gamma quadrant and when they encountered the Federation it was only the wormhole being cut off by the aliens in the wormhole that finally stopped them. So it made sense to the founders to do what they did.

This is a good idea. In fact you could take it a step further and say the Borg are responsible for the Phage not because they created it but because they drove the Vidiians into trying to create something that would fight the borg assimilation process and it backfired on them.

When they do the Voyager remake they should do this idea.

from Wiki: "However, other Jem'Hadar have been less devoted. "To the Death" featured a group that gained control of an Iconian gateway and plan to use it to rebel against the Founders. Their leader expected this group to pick up considerable support, to the point where the Jem'Hadar as a whole would be able to seize control of the Dominion and liberate themselves from the Founders. Even after these had been defeated, however, the loyal Jem'Hadar first murdered their Vorta for questioning their loyalty"

Seems Ketracel White is a mighty handy thing....

Oh, I'm not questioning why the Founders did it. Devoted army, sign me up. But I question why they couldn't have done it with something that didn't rely on a supply chain. I mean, they genetically engineered these guys, IIRC, and pretty much grew them, so I'd find it difficult to believe that they couldn't just, y'know, add a bomb into their spinal column or something that goes off if John Locke doesn't enter the code or whatever. Anything but 'Oh, if a ship gets held up, our soldiers are going to go fucking nuts.'

I guess that raises the question: Would the Dominion's enemies really want to try and capture, or hold as prisoners, Jem'Hadar? It would be impossible to contain them. It forces the enemy to fight to kill, something the Jem'Hadar are expert at.

As for the Eye of the Needle episode...the Romulan: Doesn't this make him 13 years pre-TNG? As in, before the new contact with the Romulans made in early TNG (The Neutral Zone was it?)

Because of two reasons...maybe three....

#1 They never had to worry about a supply chain until they invaded the Federation. Where they were located in the Gamma quadrant they were the top dog. No one could stop them. (much like the Borg in the Delta Quadrant)

#2 The Ketracel White kept the Jem'Hadar under control but it also provided a huge benefit to the Dominion in that it eliminated the need for Jem'Hadar to eat or drink.

#3 A bomb or something is easy to remove. Genetically altering a species so that they need something only you can produce for them will enslave them to you forever.

And just so we're clear, they began producing Ketrecel White in the Alpha Quadrant pretty quickly after entering (A Time To Stand). I think they continued to do so.

Yep but once their production plants were destroyed and the wormhole to the Gamma quadrant was blocked they had problems.

Fixed that for you.

Never, don't care for head-ridged "Klingons". It goes beyond their appearance.

They're Space Cavemen.

Romulan foreheads should've been left alone.

Ex Post Facto
The episode opens with Tom slipping tongue to some alien hottie, as seen through the eyes of an old guy. Say what you will about Riker, but Tom Paris gets results, whether he's in the Alpha or Delta quadrants.

Hell, he's probably done both of the Delaney sisters while Harry's been in his quarters jerking it to his clarinet.

Anyway, the old guy pitches a fit about it being his wife, and Tom pulls a Coffee Nebula on him and shanks him. Tom's experiencing all of this, though - the penalty for murder on an alien world is to relive the last moments of the victim, every thirteen hours, until death. And on that light note, roll the credits!

Anyway, Harry comes back and details what happened. He and Tom flew off to a planet to get a piece of technobabble repaired, and the scientist that was helping them out invited them for dinner. There, they meet his disaffected wife, whom Tom ogles like an eight-grader staring at the one attractive teacher at his school. After the alien couple departs momentarily, Harry gives Tom a look. Tom exclaims "What are you looking at?" and Harry replies "Not what you're looking at." Lifetime point total: Harry - 1; Tom - 8675309.

Anyway, the next day, Harry and Tom went off to fix the gadget, but Tom got bored and wandered off to meet up with the chick - that's all Harry knows, after that, he was interrogated for two hours and shipped back to Voyager.

Voyager runs over to the planet, which is warring with a faction of its people - apparently, irreconcilable differences exist between a people if one of them wears goofy head carapaces. Anyway, Tom passes out, which surprises the aliens, so they permit him to go back to Voyager for better human treatment.

And then Janeway hit Warp Factor 9 and got the fuck out, the end.

Ha. Sisko would have done that, but she pulled a Picard Maneuver and decided to put up with these aliens, even though the rebels are busy trying to take the ship. Chakotay plays dead with the ship, then phasers the hell out of them, disabling their ships despite Neelix claiming that they have shields superior to Voyagers mere moments earlier.

Tuvok launches an investigation into the murder, which is the focus of the rest of the episode. He goes down to the planet and talks with the widow, who seems much happier now, though her (really ugly) dog doesn't seem to like the strange Vulcan in their house. He then goes back to the ship and mind-melds with Paris, experiencing the crime along with him. He then sets up a trap. He sends Kim and Paris out in a shuttlecraft, to which the rebels flock, and them beams them out once one of them positively identifies Paris. Before the rebels caught up with the shuttle, Harry tells Tom that this would never happen to him. Yes Harry, we know that a hot alien woman making out with you would never happen to you. Subtract off the point you earned earlier.

He then has everyone meet him at the scene of the crime, where he details how the memories were altered. He shows that the victim saw that Paris and his wife were of equal height, while in reality, Paris was clearly taller. He also talks about codes that flashed throughout the memory that turned out to be relevant to the species' weaponry that they were using against the rebels. However, this isn't enough to convince one of the aliens, the medical administrator, whom Tuvok accuses of the crime. So Tuvok brings in the dog, who immediately runs over to greet the medical administrator, who had just gone to great lengths to say that he had never been in the house before. Oops, looks like he wasn't a stranger to the alien chick, proving that she had little taste.

The memories are removed from Paris' head, and he thanks Tuvok for clearing his name. Oh yay, a warm and fuzzy ending after the real downer from the previous episode.

It wasn't a bad murder mystery, but as Paris incredulously notes himself, Tuvok's entire defense relied on the testimony of a dog.
Rating: ***
Torpedoes Remaining: 37/38

I just watched Eye of the Needle again. Too bad they couldn't beam Harry Kim into the wormhole and let him be crushed by those gravitational eddies. I'm sure he would've volunteered.

Oh my... how fucking ironic is that?

This is essentially what Janeway ended up doing in the series finale to get them all home.

Fuckin' hypocritical bitch.

Eminations
Voyager attempts a cerebral episode. Featuring Harry Kim.

Basically, the crew finds a brand new element that will basically let them pimp their ride. Asteroids are filled with it in the system they are in, so Janeway has Torres investigate mining them. Torres has the bright idea to beam over, because the asteroids have M-class atmospheres. While over there, they discover bodies covered in weblike film. Cue ominous music.

Chakotay gives a sanctimonious lecture about respecting the dead, but then they have to beam out because the cavern they were in was collapsing. Chakotay and Torres make it out. Kim, nope.

But if only he were dead. No, he merely swapped places with a dead chick the Doctor manages to revive - she's not happy about the lack of an afterlife. Harry, meanwhile, has to deal with a culture that doesn't wait for people to die before killing them and letting them be beamed into asteroids - they believe they will be ascending to a higher plane of existence. He meets a man who is preparing to die - he was getting to be a little old and his family voted him off the island. Like a chump, he agreed with it. Harry is disgusted, failing to realize that his parents are thrilled that their underachieving son is no longer a social anchor around their necks.

The resuscitated alien chick agrees to be the test victi...subject in an attempt to replicate the circumstances of the transporter accident. It kills her, and this doesn't seem to phase any of the crew. Sucks to be her, I guess.

Anyway, Harry and the guy preparing to die decide to switch places - the guy is planning to run away and live a life in peace where he won't be a burden on his family, and Harry is hoping that Voyager has its act together and will rescue him when he gets back.

So Harry wraps himself in the plot device...err...the 'ceremonial gauze' and gets killed.

If only we coiuld roll the credits there. Nope, he is revived. Yay. Janeway tells him to take it easy for a few days and to think about his experiences. She encourages him to write or paint about it. He's probably going to go off and cry into his clarinet or something, like saltwater is good for the thing.

It wasn't the episode I thought it was, though, which had Janeway taking part in some alien ritual for the entire goddamn episode. Fuck, that one was boring. Probably moreso than this one. Doesn't save it, though.
Rating: *
Torpedoes Remaining: 37/38

Prime Factors
Or, as I like to call it, 'Starfleet's sanctimonious bullshit bites Voyager in the ass.'

We open with easily the most hilarious scene thus far on the show. Torres is checking out some random ensign, but tells Seska that nothing will come of it because he's seeing one of the Delaney sisters (who, I am getting the impression, are bigger sluts than Tom Paris or Riker). Seska mentions that she thought that particular sister was seeing Harry Kim. This prompts Torres to snort out "Harry Kim?" and then busts up laughing. Seska also starts laughing, realizing how absurd that is. So then Torres turns around to Harry Kim, sitting not two feet from her, and asks him if he's seeing her. See, this is comedy gold. Harry then admits that on a virtual double date to Venice with the sisters and Tom Paris, that he fell out of the gondola. Let's just hope that the holodeck doesn't replicate how hilariously polluted that water is, otherwise Harry will never be able to get it up, even for that episode where the society of women want to swallow his soul.

Janeway remarks that she thinks this is the tipping point, that the Maquis and Starfleet crews are finally starting to integrate. What the fuck. There has been a grand total of one conflict between the two since the pilot, and that was Torres punching Carey in the face. Anyway, the ship picks up a distress call, they go to investigate. However, when they track down the ship, its pilot says that he is not in distress, but that Voyager is.

Turns out that according to the Frommer's Guide to the Delta Quadrant, Neelix, that this guy's people are renown for their generosity. This alien convinces them to take a vacation at his planet. At least his entire planet isn't a fucking casino run by evil body snatching aliens.

While on the planet, the alien is macking on Janeway. Despite everyone's claims that she is falling hard for him, every interaction has Kate Mulgrew's face plastered with the look of a teenage girl receiving unwanted sexual advances from, well, boys who watch Star Trek. Harry also finds a girl, who shows off this scientific/musical instrument, then beams him out to this place where the pre-dawn winds basically get you high. Harry realizes something is up when it's a binary sunrise. The alien's homeworld has only one sun. After blindly ignoring her sexual advances (I guess the holoVenice canals must be polluted after all, Harry, you fucking dumbass), he insists on knowing where they are. She beamed him 40,000 light years away.

Harry reports to Janeway about this, and she basically says "GIMMEGIMMEGIMMEGIMME." However, her alien suitor breaks it to her that per his society's laws, they cannot distribute any of their advanced technology, lest it be abused.

For the first time in Star Trek, and as Janeway points out, the crew is on the flip side of the Prime Directive coin. These aliens are essentially being dicks and refusing to help because of their principles, and she mentions that there have been countless times where races the Federation has encountered would certainly feel that way regarding the Prime Directive. Torres suggests trying to reverse-engineer the technology, but Janeway refuses to let her. Tuvok instead suggests that, since they know nothing about the culture, the first refusal might simply be a prelude to bartering, and suggests that their love of stories and literature might be sated with a copy of the Federation library.

While Janeway attempts to negotiate this, Torres ignores Janeway's orders and starts working on the problem in Engineering. Seska is, of course, eager to help, but even Carey volunteers, mentioning that he has a wife and child waiting for him that override Starfleet sanctimony. Meanwhile, Harry is contacted by his space girlfriend, who introduces him to a shady character who has heard about the trade being offered. He insists that Janeway's boy-toy is only stalling, and will never give up the technology, but that he is willing to accept the trade to become, essentially, a story-merchant. Harry immediately tells Janeway about this, who insists on continuing formal negotiations.

However, these break down after the alien realizes that she won't be sticking around, and after she realizes that all he's interested in is novel things, not lasting things. He demands that Voyager leave his planet, and she agrees, telling the ship to start recalling the landing party. In what I think might have been one of Chakotay's few lines in this episode, he mentions that it'll probably take hours to get everyone back on the ship (Why? Transport them the fuck up. You've only got like 140 people or something.). Anyway, this prompts Torres and Seska to download the library and try to beam down to the planet to perform the illicit trade. They are intercepted by Tuvok.

Tuvok insists that he be the one to make the trade. That was actually a plot twist I didn't remember from when I had seen this one before. He gets the technology, and Torres, Seska and Carey eagerly try to integrate it into Voyager before it leaves the planet, as it is the planet's quartz-based crust that enables the technology. However, the device starts making Voyager's systems go critical - it was completely incompatible. Torres destroys the device, saving the ship. Seska goes to cover up what happened, but Torres says that it's finally time to man up and stop acting like children running around behind their parents' backs, and goes to Janeway to admit what she had done.

However, Tuvok throws a wrench in that, claiming that he was the most senior officer. Janeway was pissed off before, but that seemed to send her right over the edge. She tells Torres that if she fucks up again, her ass is grass, and dismisses her. She then lays into Tuvok, telling him that he is her moral compass (I guess someone holds a magnet too close to him later on when she starts acting completely insane). He points out that her promise and duty to the crew was to get them home as quickly as possible, but that her morals prevented her from accomplishing that goal. He simply did what she could not. She tells him that logic can be used to explain away anything, both good and bad, and warns him not to do it again.

Overall, I liked the episode, because this is really what Voyager should have had more of. Desperate attempts to get home, people living in the morally gray, and an increasingly irrelevant Prime Directive. And, as I mentioned before, it was actually applying the Prime Directive to the protagonists, which was new and interesting.

Rating: ****
Torpedoes remaining: 37/38

Yep, that was episode was a standout from the first season. It should have been what the whole series was like.

Gotta ask, Kyle.

How is it you're watching these? What ungodly medium has given you this capability?

As terrible as this sounds, while I saw some first-run TNG when I was REALLY young, Voyager was the first Trek I actually remember watching. It is, indirectly, why I am at WF . I can watch it via this really screwed up sense of nostalgia, I guess.

In other news, I heard a couple actually talking about the Vidiians and the Hirogen. As much as it might drive people crazy, Voyager enjoyed a reasonably large audience.

I can freely admit VOY had a larger audience than the vastly superior DS9. Though, I can also freely admit that most of humanity is, in fact, stupid.

When I think of Kyle watching all these VOY episodes, I can't get this image out of my head.

State of Flux
Hey look, Voyager's actually doing something that makes sense given the premise of the show and is gathering supplies. Carey enthusiastically bounds up to Chakotay with some apples, which Neelix then reveals to be poisonous. Neelix prefers the kala root, which tastes absolutely awful.

In orbit, Tom detects a semi-cloaked ship. It wasn't cloaked in the traditional sense, but instead was merely hiding from Voyager's specific sensors. Janeway orders an evacuation of the planet, one that is held up because Seska is missing. Chakotay finds her in a cave, but is stunned by a Kazon, whom Seska dispatches.

Voyager 'escapes,' and later on, Seska brings some of Chakotay's favorite soup by. It turns out that Seska and Chakotay had romantic aspirations, but much like Riker and Troi, they decided to ignore it to...well...it's not like Chuckles is sleeping around much, so who knows why. After her sexual advances are rebuffed, Seska mentions that maybe she'll just go chase after Harry instead. As whiny as I think Robert Beltran is, it takes great skill to not bust up every time that line was read. Good on you, Mr. Beltran.

Voyager soon responds to a Kazon distress call (fuck, it's a wonder they made it back in seven years, even with Future Janeway being a giant hypocrite). They beam aboard the ship, and find that the crew has been USS Eldridge'd into the bulkheads. One crew member survived, his blood infused with metal somehow. They beam him aboard, and the Doctor and Kes set about trying to find a suitable donor. Meanwhile, Torres discovers that the console that exploded in the Kazon ship, causing the accident, had Federation parts (and that is proof that Federation workmanship is responsible for the exploding console that has been a favorite for over 40 years).

Janeway and Tuvok start an investigation and discover that a secret transmission was sent from Engineering. They have two suspects - Carey, as it came from his station, and Seska, as she was incommunicado for a long time on the planet where the Kazon were maxin' and relaxin'. After Seska is passed over for an away mission to retrieve the console, she goes to visit the Kazon, where Kes confronts her about her lack of a blood profile in the ship's computer. She mentions that she had a bloodborne disease as a child that prevented her from donating blood, so she hadn't gotten around to giving the profile.

Seska then beams over to the Kazon ship without permission, telling Janeway via comm that she has a plan that can work in minutes, rather than the day the away mission would take. However, she ends up accidentally getting irradiated, so she ends up in sickbay. Torres and her away team then retrieve the console without incident, which has to be the first time that has ever happened in Starfleet. Anyway, they discover that the console was a replicator, and that because they didn't shield it well enough, it decided to convert everyone into bitchin' metal statues. Frankly, this is terrifying - if you put a ding in a replicator, you can T-1000-ify everyone in the goddamn room? And they let kids use these things?

Chakotay confronts Seska, after the Doctor reveals that he believes her to be a Cardassian. He and Tuvok set up a trap, and Seska walks into it. She exclaims that she did it for the crew, that if they ever wanted to make it back to the Alpha Quadrant, they would need strong alliences with powerful races. She says that a Cardassian crew would be back in the Alpha Quadrant already, but they weren't because of Janeway's actions at the Caretaker's Array. She calls Janeway a fool, then Chakotay a fool for following her, rather than sticking with the woman who loved him (Seska, apparently). She then executed a command that beamed her onto the Kazon ship, and Voyager was forced to leave due to Kazon reinforcements arriving. Seska would return (in what was actually a pretty good two-parter, IIRC), but for now, justice must wait.

Overall a pretty decent episode, yet another example of what Voyager should have done more of, but it was marred by the sudden introduction of a Seska-Chakotay pairing that, while continued in later episodes, should have been hinted at more strongly in previous episodes.

Rating: ***
Torpedoes remaining: 37/38

Heroes and Demons
So, we have a Cardassian spy running around the Delta Quadrant. She hates Starfleet, she hates the Maquis, but most of all, she hates Janeway. So what does that mean?

Time for a holodeck episode!

Janeway and Torres are fishing some sort of plasma out of a protostar to hopefully increase the performance of the Technobabblator by 15%. "Maybe even 20%" Torres helpfully exclaims. Janeway thinks that she can convince Harry to give up his free time to help Torres out, so she tries to call him. No dice. She asks the computer where he is - and he isn't on the ship.

No big loss, but this seems to concern Janeway. They discover that his last known location was in the Holodeck, so Tuvok and Chakotay go to investigate. They discover that he was running a holonovel of Beowulf, but the characters inside mention that Beowulf, whom Harry was portraying, was dead. Soon, Grendel comes to the hall to attack, and then, both Tuvok and Chakotay wink out of existence as well.

Torres demands that they keep sending people in to gather more data, but Janeway points out that they're down three already, and one of them was actually a worthwhile character. Tom points out that one crew member would be safe. Cue the Doctor's away mission...to the holodeck.

Nonetheless, he treats it quite seriously, doing research and even deciding on a name (Schweitzer) on the suggestion of Kes, to encourage him to feel more like an actual officer embarking on an away mission. He is greeted by the holocharacters with suspicion, which dissolves away when he turns off the forcefields giving him solidarity, allowing a sword to pass right through him. Grendel soon attacks, and is an orange whispy creature that somehow manages to destabilize the Doctor's arm.

However, they somehow realize that the plasma they beamed aboard was causing this. A container holding it leaked, and a creature quickly left the ship and joined what looked like Balok's ship. Ah, if only it were a tie-in to that episode (there was actually an excellent Voyager short story that served as a sequel to that episode, published in one of those Pocket Books anthologies a few years back). They scanned the creature's destination and realized that there were complex neural signatures. Three of them. They take the one remaining creature back to the Holodeck, where the Doctor releases it to 'Grendel' as a show of good faith. Tuvok, Chakotay, and yes, even Harry Kim are returned, and Janeway congratulates the Doctor on not only a successful away mission, but a successful first contact with a new race.

That they know nothing about and will never see again.

Oh yeah, and there was a holochick whom the Doctor slipped some tongue to, and she died trying to protect the Doctor from a holocharacter when the Doctor was forced to remain solid in order to carry the container with the creature.

This was the first Doctor-centric episode, but overall, it was awful. Even Robert Picardo couldn't save this one.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: 37/38

Cathexis
Tuvok and Chakotay are rescued from a nebula after an energy discharge of some sort seems to essentially sap Chakotay's body of all energy. The crew sets about to try to figure out how to save Chakotay, all while continuing on their journey.

However, bizarre incidents around the ship seem to be sending it back towards the nebula. The course of the ship seems to be continually reset on a reverse course, and it is eventually revealed that Tom entered the commands - something he insists he didn't do. After the ship is stopped by Torres, again, something she insists she didn't do, the crew realizes that some alien presence is controlling Voyager's crew.

Meanwhile, Torres sets up a medicine wheel by Chakotay. Remember, he's Native American! Did you forget? Here's a reminder! The Doctor keeps his pimpin' hand strong, though, by telling her that she has set it up incorrectly, and directs her on how to lay it out to "best lead Chakotay's spirit back to his body" or some other hippy new age nonsense.

Janeway ends up assigning command control to the Doctor, as he is the only one on the ship who cannot be possessed by the alien. Meanwhile, Kes believes that she might be able to use her telepathic abilities to help find the alien, and Tuvok agrees to help her focus her attempts. However, Kes is soon knocked out with damage to a nerve bundle, and the Doctor is soon taken offline through mysterious means. The command codes have reverted back to Janeway, putting them back in the control of someone who could be possessed.

After a shootout on the bridge, which Tuvok solves by simply phasing everyone into unconsciousness, Tom realizes something - the nerve damage was consistent with a powerful Vulcan neck pinch. Janeway attempts to relieve Tuvok of command, but he insists that Janeway is the one possessed, and directs Harry to give control of the ship to him. Oh, yeah right, like Harry has the balls for that - that's evidence enough that Tuvok is the one possessed. He soon takes control of the Bridge, and directs the ship back into the nebula. Before that, though, something possesses Torres and has her eject the Warp Core, buying the crew extra time to try to figure out how to fight the energy beings. The command codes reveal that Chakotay ejected the core, not Torres - she was possessed by Chuckles! Other energy beings start to attack the ship's shields, and the alien possessing Tuvok reveals that they plan to sap the energy of everyone on board. However, they manage to perform a scan that forces the alien out of Tuvok's body, and they attempt to leave the nebula.

However, because of how the alien manipulated the navigational logs, they don't believe that they'll be able to reverse the course out of the nebula. Luckily, Chakotay possesses Neelix and uses the medicine wheel to depict a way out of the nebula. The Doctor is then able to reintegrate Chaoktay's consciousness with his body, and everything's all better. Yay.

In a nice and rare bit of continuity for Voyager, the nebula looked very similar to the Mutara nebula. However, that was not enough to save this Brannon Braga penned episode, which attempted to combine a mystery with a heavy-handed look at noncoporeal life. Plus, it was just boring.
Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: 37/38

Oh yeah, forgot - back in Cathexis, we get the start of Janeway's trashy Victorian holonovel. Who fucking cares.

Faces
We open in a dimly lit room, bathed in green light. A character says "Regeneration cycle complete." Is this it? Is this the return of the Borg? No. Instead, the camera pans up to reveal a fully-Klingon Torres in the hands of the Vidiians.

An away team mission with Tom, Torres, and a Yellow Shirted Lieutenant has ended with Tom and Yellowshirt trapped in a Vidiian prison camp. Torres has been separated from the group, her human half seemingly erased, as the Vidiians hope to use Klingon DNA to try to fight the Phage. To this end, the Vidiian scientist has infected Torres with the phage, and she starts to feel its deleterious effects.

Meanwhile, while Tom and Yellowshirt are trying to escape, they come across a human woman in Starfleet gold - it's Torres, fully human and wholly terrified. The Vidiians have split apart her disparate DNA sequences in a process that they call advanced cellular regeneration, where they essentially supercharge cell division. Yellowshirt is taken away to contact Voyager, and Tom protests, but human-Torres begs him to stay.

In the next scene, the Vidiian scientist enters the room to speak to Klingon-Torres. He says that he's come up with a solution that might let them work better together. He shows her Yellowshirt's face, grafted onto his own. This infuriates Klingon-Torres, and she breaks free of her restraints, and starts an escape attempt.

Meanwhile, Voyager isn't just sitting on its hands. They've come up with a plan to invade the Vidiian facility, with Chakotay disguised as a Vidiian with the Doctor's plastic surgery skills. He soon arrives and tracks down Tom and human-Torres, but she is seperated from the group. She is saved by her Klingon counterpart, and they bond for a while and have a philosophical discussion about how the other both helps and hinders them. In the end, there is a shootout as they prepare to beam back to Voyager, and human-Torres mans a console to bring down the shields while Klingon-Torres fights. Klingon-Torres ends up taking a shot intended for human-Torres just before they all beam out, leading the Vidiian doctor to scream in terror - she had been resisting the Phage - it was the closest they had come to a cure.

On the transporter pad, Klingon-Torres dies, but tells her that her death is noble for having saved human-Torres, who risked her fragile human life in an attempt to save Klingon-Torres. The Doctor then explains that he has to reintegrate the Klingon DNA, as human-Torres' cellular division has slowed dramatically.

Overall, I enjoyed this episode. However, I do now agree that the Vidiians really should have adequate cloning technology. I'll accept it as a dramatic conceit that they don't, though, as a race of intergalactic organ thieves is certainly part of the premise of the show.

Oh, yeah, and there were other prisoners there too that Voyager left to rot, including the first non-Neelixian Talaxian to appear.

Rating: ***
Torpedoes remaining: 37/38

Jetrel
In this episode, Voyager attempts character development. The results? A mixed bag.

Voyager is contacted by a ship specifically requesting Neelix. Understandably unnerved by the idea that someone would actually want to speak to Neelix, Janeway requests his presence on the bridge. The ship is of a design matching that of a race the Talaxians lost a war to about a decade back, but the person hailing is even worse - the scientist responsible for the creation of a weapon that wiped out the moon Neelix called home.

Jetrel has some bad news - the fallout from his weapon could have infected Neelix with a destructive bloodborne disease. Neelix doesn't care - if he has it, then he's just going to die anyway, as there's no cure, so he'd rather live not knowing. Janeway and Kes persuade him to get tested, and the Doctor performs the test while Neelix describes exactly what the weapon did - it essentially slowly burned through the flesh of its victims, but some weren't so lucky to die relatively quickly - others languished for weeks.

Jetrel convinces Janeway that, with her transporter technology, she could beam in some of the particles in the moon's upper atmosphere which might lead to a cure. Apparently, her only concern is Neelix getting the cure, as that is her sole reasoning for deviating from their journey. Keep in mind this was the same person who was more than willing to chill out on a pleasure planet for a week, but she's having misgivings about helping develop a cure for a disease affecting thousands.

After the particles are beamed aboard, Jetrel deactivates the Doctor and sets about on his real experiment - a strange glob of a creature appears in the storage container. Neelix comes to apologize about his behavior because he has absolutely no spine, but discovers this instead. It turns out Jetrel has a plan to use the transporter to reintegrate the vaporized Talaxians as a way to atone for his sins. After much persuasion, Janeway agrees to the experiment. A Talaxian starts to appear on the transporter pad, but there simply isn't enough information to fully reconstitute him, and he fades away.

Jetrel dies shortly after of the disease he hoped to cure, but not before Neelix could say that he forgives him for what he did. 'Cause the guy deserved that, I guess. Fuck, I wouldn't have said that.

Oh, yeah, and Neelix reveals to Kes that he was actually a deserter, and never actually fought in the war. Kes tells him that if he did it to save lives, of those he would kill or otherwise, then it was still noble. That's...a debatable position, I suppose.

Interestingly, some of these plot points will be revisited later on in the series. However, the presentation was just kind of...blah. And it isn't really utilized in any significant sense later on, either.

Rating: **
Torpedoes remaining: 37/38

Learning Curve
More Janeway holonovel trash. I mean, for those who have watched the show before, this is their attempt at an 'arc' leading up to an episode that features the holonovel in, I believe, season 2, but honestly, nobody wants to see a couple Victorian brats bitching about their mom's non/existance.

Anyway, Tuvok is asked to check out a power failure because it interrupted Janeway's precious holonovel. A Maquis crewman was repairing a bio-neural gel pack without authorization, and directly confronts Tuvok about it. Bad move, guy - should have saved that rant for someone who doesn't have a stick up his ass about regulations.

It turns out there are still some members of the Maquis who have failed to integrate well into the crew. Janeway tasks Tuvok with bringing them up to speed with Starfleet protocol, as Tuvok taught at the academy for 16 years.

Meanwhile, more bio-neural gel packs are going down. This is a problem, since they can't be replicated, and there are a finite number of them aboard. Don't worry, guys, in true Voyager fashion, the number of bio-neural gel packs will never be an issue again.

Tuvok starts to try to whip the Maquis into shape, but they simply walk out on his first session. Chakotay has a 'talk' with them, which means punching the guy who replaced the gel pack in the face, telling him that was the Maquis way, and if he wanted to do things the Maquis way, he could look forward to that every day until he reports to Tuvok. This scene was actually played pretty well - Robert Beltran can act when the situation demands it, I guess.

More systems are failing along with the gel packs as Torres attempts to find a solution. Coming up with nothing, she takes the gel pack to the Doctor and Kes, who discover that it is infected with bacteria - but without knowing the source, they can't generate a solution to kill them off, as none of Starfleet's antibacterials would work.

Tuvok trains the Maquis some more, including a failed Bridge simulation, but still has yet to earn their respect. He ends up talking with Neelix about this (unlike some, I actually don't mind the Neelix/Tuvok interaction - I always thought that both actors handled those scenes pretty well), but soon notices a cheese that Neelix has developed. Bacteria is required to produce cheese.

Torres and her staff come up to investigate, and seal the cheese in a jar - it looks like it's the most likely candidate. Torres tells Neelix not to feel badly about it, as he couldn't have known what would happen. She then says one of the most famous lines in Voyager history. "Get this cheese to Sickbay."

As Tuvok leads his charges in another exercise in the cargo bay, the gel packs finally start to go critical, trapping them inside. Systems are shutting down shipwide, and the Doctor rushes to find a cure. Kes strikes on the idea that it might be a virus hiding inside of the bacteria, and the Doctor agrees. However, in order to duplicate our bodies' natural defensive systems, the ship will have to endure a 'fever' in order to clear out the virus. As they heat up the ship, a conduit explodes, and Tuvok has to evacuate the cargo bay via the Jeffries Tubes. One of the Maquis is trapped, though, and he forces the others to go ahead without him as he rescues him.

Soon, the virus has been killed off, and the systems are restored. The Maquis save Tuvok and the other Maquis from the toxic gas filling the cargo bay, and Tuvok has finally earned their respect.

The A-plot of this episode is pretty good, while the B-plot is a little ridiculous. Clearly a take on TNG's "Lower Decks," though. What it is perhaps better noted for is that lays the groundwork for the excellent video game Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force, where Tuvok trains another team to deal with exceptional situations. And one of those team members is Chell, who was one of the Maquis trainees in this episode.

Rating: ***
Torpedoes remaining: 37/38

Season One
Yep, so Voyager's first season was short, mostly due to the circumstances surrounding UPN's launch. Overall, how did this season fare?

*: Time and Again, The Cloud, Eminations, Heroes and Demons, Cathexis
**: Parallaxis, Jetrel
***: Caretaker, Phage, Ex Post Facto, State of Flux, Faces, Learning Curve
****: Eye of the Needle, Prime Factors

So, to correspond with the / system, we have 7 and 8 . The average rating is **, which would put it into territory.

Probably not the loftiest launch it could have hoped for. Comparing it with RTM's TNG reviews, it doesn't even fare well when set against TNG's rather hit-and-miss first season. Will Season 2 improve? Will I start mumbling about neutrino cascades in my sleep? Stay tuned!