Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

Indeed.

In my version, she accomplishes this with the "roofies + viagra" attack from Rescue Me.

Alliances
Voyager is taking heavy fire from the Kazon, and many are badly wounded. While the Kazon back off, a notable Maquis crewman dies at his duty station due to the Starfleet Exploding Console (tm).

After repairs are started, Chakotay confronts Janeway, and tells her that it's obvious that the rules are different in the Delta Quadrant. He notes that Voyager is much like the Maquis - alone, struggling for existence (ha), and desperate for help from any who would provide it.

After the funeral for the crewman, two more Maquis confront Janeway, expressing their belief that she should just give the Kazon replicators and transporters to get them off their backs (apparently, the Libertarian-minded Maquis have a soft spot for social welfare programs). Janeway tells them that she'd sooner destroy the ship than let Voyager's technology fall into the hands of the Kazon.

Chakotay has grown quite a spine, and calls Janeway out, telling her that her blind admiration for the Prime Directive is preventing her from seeing that there are other options with the Kazon than fight or capitulate - an alliance, for example. Janeway asks Tuvok his opinion, and he notes that Spock advocated peace and an alliance with the war-loving Klingons that ended up bringing a stability to the Alpha Quadrant previously unmatched in Starfleet's history. He even mentions that they were stronger as a result, using an orchid he had cultivated as a metaphor (which is a nice tie-in to a one-off line of his from Tattoo).

So, Janeway decides to try an alliance. No technology or weapons, just assistance. She has Neelix contact an acquaintance of his in one Kazon sect, and Janeway contacts Seska and the Kazon-Nistrim herself. However, their meeting goes badly, with Culluh being a sexist jerk and insisting on a crew exchange in the hopes of gleaning information about Voyager from those who would be placed on his ships (not to mention potential hostages). Janeway sends him on his way, and goes to rendezvous with Neelix.

Neelix, of course, managed to get himself arrested in (ironically, from the comments in this thread), a boring, half-assed Mos Eisley canteen that featured a stripper who would put out if you solved a matchstick puzzle - someone call the Doctor, there's a living petri dish dancing on stage. He is thrown into a holding area with members of the Trabe, a race who had previously enslaved the Kazon, but were now stellar nomads - whenever they tried to find a home, the Kazon would always stop them.

After Neelix helps escape, they go back to Voyager and propose a new alliance, between Voyager and the Trabe. The leader of the Trabe wishes to try a more daring plan of uniting both the Trabe and the Kazon together in a peace treaty, and because Janeway's panties get moist over the idea of 'peace,' she agrees to help.

Remember those Maquis that confronted Janeway? Well, one of them ends up contacting Seska in secret, intent on feeding her information. This will actually come into play in future episodes, which is a nice touch. Meanwhile, on Culluh's ship, he's busy bitching and moaning about the audacity of Janeway to try to tell him what to do, especially when he gets a message from Janeway requesting that all Kazon come for a sit-down with the Trabe. Seska reminds him that a lot can be gained from such a meeting, even with no intentions of any agreement.

Soon, all the Kazon sects have met, and Janeway starts to lead peace talks. However, the Trabe leader starts being a whiny bitch, and the room starts shaking - a Trabe ship opens fire on the room, trying to kill its inhabitants. Voyager beams Janeway out immediately, and fires THREE torpedoes at the Trabe ship, disabling it. Janeway is pissed, and the kicks the Trabe leader off her ship, despite his pleas that Voyager will need the Trabe, now more than ever, as they will be believed to have been involved.

Janeway then gives an utterly sanctimonious speech to the senior staff about how this should prove that the only allies they need in the Delta Quadrant are their Federation ideals - what a bunch of bullshit. We all know that by the end of next season, Janeway will be trying to give awkward handjobs to the Borg in the back of the Ford pickup they stole from outer space.

On the plus side, there was a solid story, and it was one that fit with the premise of the show. It even had crew members behaving badly and being spies.
Rating: ****
Torpedoes remaining: 34/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 3

I think the scene of the Trabe ship shooting up the meeting was a homage to a similar scene from Godfather III.

This was a good Voyager episode but so many important issues should have been explored over a few episodes IMO. Watch, they probably go back to playing in the holodeck next episode.

When men, women, and children woke up January 29th, 1996, they didn't know the world was about to change. In France, Jacques Chirac announced that France would never again test a nuclear weapon. More importantly, Tyra Banks appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated clad in an itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie, yellow polka-dot bikini. But most important of all would be what was on TV that night.

On a network called UPN, a televison show called Star Trek: Voyager aired. It would make history, and everyone would know it's name. This episode was...

Threshold
Tom is piloting the new Type 2 shuttle at incredible speeds - it is happily crusing along at warp nine. The speed ticks higher and higher. With Torres on the com, Tom activates the transwarp drive, but the ship starts shaking itself apart. Moments before reaching Warp 10...the holodeck grid. Torres quips, "You're dead."

After this failure, Tom, Harry, and Torres hit the mess hall to get some snacks and study what went wrong. Neelix tries to horn in, and eventually regales them with an utterly inconsequential story of losing a warp nacelle in a nebula. Somehow, though, this makes Tom and Harry realize that, get this, the nacelles aren't being torn from the shuttle, the shuttle is being torn from the nacelles. Does that make any sense to anyone else? That's like saying "The tires couldn't keep up with the car." Is this fucking shuttle on a treadmill or something? Fuck.

Anyway, they run a simulation and it is a success. This is enough for Janeway to allow a manned test flight (because the principled Federation doesn't believe in sending monkeys first or something), but the Doctor expresses concerns about Tom making the flight, as he has a slight electrical imbalance in the brain. Tom begs Janeway to let him fly the ship (I mean, seriously, he looked like he was on the verge of tears), and so Janeway relents.

Tom then hops in a shuttle and successfully breaks the Warp 10 barrier - according to Harry, this means that he will exist in every point in the universe simultaneously. There are lots of good reasons why that doesn't make any damn sense, I'll leave it to the reader to come up with your favorite. Anyway, he comes back, but soon starts seeming ill. The Doctor notes that he seems to be having an allergic reaction...to the water in his body.

Now, think about this. You're made of 70% water. You are now allergic to it. You'd think this would make you die, yes? Oh no, not Tom Paris. This causes his lungs to start processing an acid-based atmosphere. Naturally. (By the way, IIRC, there are people who are allergic to water, but not to this absurd of a degree). His mutations continue, but soon, his body can take no more - he is dying. Tom recounts his childhood and how he lost his cherry to the Doctor and Kes, and begs Kes to kiss him. Yeah, that's not a creepy association at all. However, he soon succumbs to the rapid changes in his body (which by the way, have yet to be satisfactorily explained, and never will be). After he's dead, Kes gives him a little peck on the cheek - I don't think that was the tongue-tango kiss he was hoping for.

However, during the night, the Doctor hears noises, and discovers Tom to be alive, the mutations continuing. The Doctor soon realizes that his DNA isn't really mutating, it's evolving down humanity's evolutionary path. Now, we had a physics moment earlier where it made no fucking sense, here's a biology one. Evolution doesn't work like that, it works from things strong or smart enough to not die fucking and making babies. Babies everywhere.

Tom and Janeway talk about what is occurring. Tom basically acts like a dick, and then coughs up his own tongue. I'm amazed he didn't try to give it to Kes.

The Doctor comes up with this scheme to essentially hook Tom up to the Warp Core and use some 'antiprotons' to reverse the process. They shove him in the Space Iron Lung that previously held Neexis still to bitch and moan while breathing with holographic lungs, but as the Doctor walks Torres through the procedure, he sees Engineering go crazy, then phaser fire.

Mutant Tom has escaped, and he soon kidnaps Janeway as well, knocking her out by simply knocking her over. He soon steals the Warp 10 shuttle and goes to warp, taking Janeway with him.

Voyager finds the shuttle three days later, and they beam down to the planet to recover Tom and Janeway. The only things they find are two large salamanders with signs of human DNA. They stun them and beam them back to Voyager, watching helplessly as three baby salamanders scamper away.

Somehow, the Doctor manages to revert them from salamanderhood. Janeway makes a crack about how she hoped to have children one day, but she never expected to with Tom, and then coddles him as he comes to the realization that the only person he needs to prove anything to is himself. Yay.

Oh yeah, and somewhere in there, the Maquis spy for the Kazon sent them data about the Warp 10 flight.

This episode was historic. It was the worst hour of Star Trek ever to be committed to film. Worse than TOS' Spock's Brain, TNG's Shades of Gray, DS9's Move Along Home, and ENT's A Night In Sickbay. There was absolutely nothing redeeming about the episode, everything about it was scientifically flawed, and, worst of all, it was insulting to every facet of the audience.

Brannon Braga had the following to say about Threshold:

You are not forgiven, Brannon Braga. Go fuck yourself, you shit-gobbling asshole.

Rating:
Torpedoes remaining: 34/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 3
Yes, that's right, a no-star rating. Fuck this episode

Oh, yeah, it even won an Emmy for makeup design. This was an Emmy award winning episode of Star Trek

lmao.............

This is one episode I have seen. And I didn't think it was as flat-out abominable as the general consensus led me to believe. Possibly because I didn't have high expectations.

I think I just sort of took it as a careless jaunt into the old style of mind-blowing science fiction that seems so ridiculous to us today. Up there with raygun-toting moon fairies, and Venusians that abduct fighter pilots to serve as emissaries to the rest of humanity, and extra-galactic invaders with belts that can be used to turn arbitrary people into Platonic solids, and astrodinosaurs that can be fought and defeated with a piece of bamboo and a little convenient gunpowder, and . . .

I suppose it could. Maybe there's a subspace backcurrent occurring between the nacelles, which just happens to be where the rest of the shuttle is located. You'd think someone would have seen that sort of thing coming, though.

salamander!Paris/salamander!Janeway is bad enough.

Recalibrating the warp scale so that infinity is at Warp 10 makes no sense to begin with. Personally I wonder how you can come out of such a state before the Big Crunch occurs. Maybe a quantum fluctuation jiggles your wavefunction or something . . . ?

Now, see, in the old days, Tom would have somehow stopped in the distant future and found humanity to be like this. (And probably been offered the chance to have appropriate genetic manipulation performed upon himself.)

There, see? "Antiprotons". Old-school technobabble, right there, I daresay. "This process bears no relation to Nature as we currently understand it, it just sounds really cool, and that's all the justification I need."

I distinctly seem to recall character moments or something . . . but then maybe it was all basic (mis-)characterization and I just didn't realize it.

There we go again. A basic message and who cares how ridiculous the means of conveying it sounds, or looks.

( Meanwhile Heinlein's Dr. Whatsit is muttering about determining your exact birth and death dates by means of treating people as pink fleshy tubes in spacetime and being able to build a machine that can apparently reach back and forward in time. Or whatever. )

I love how Paris kidnaps Janeway and fly off in the warp 10 shuttle, and they could go to any point in the universe...but end up just 3 days away from Voyager! What are the chances?
And another thing; why not use the warp 10 technology on Voyager to get back to the Alpha Quadrant? So they turn into giant lizards. No problem. The Doc can fix that right away!
Dumb episode, from start to finish, total rubbish.

As for Alliances...just how big is Kazon space? Surely it can't be that big that Voyager keep running into these deformed Klingons, ever episode? Go at maximum warp for a few days and they'd leave behind even the biggest of empires, but the mighty, backward Kazon sects are always there.

Meld
A lot of people note how schizophrenic Janeway is, shifting from mass murderer to coddler of Ocampans on practically a daily basis. The amusing thing is, though, that the show itself is much like this. We go from what I am comfortable claiming to be the worst hour of Star Trek to an episode that I feel is one of the best.

Torres calls Tuvok down to Engineering to take a look at something. That something was a dead body, slowly cooking next to an EPS conduit. Tuvok's first instinct is that it is an accident - that the Engineer cracked his head while doing a repair and died as he was slowly roasted like a Boston Market rotisserie chicken. The Doctor soon reveals otherwise, however - the directionality of the damage to his skull indicated something striking the skull, rather than the skull striking something - it was murder.

Tuvok immediately starts investigating the Engineering crew on duty. As Torres lists off the crewmen in Engineering when the death occurred, Chakotay is unsettled by the mention of Lon Suder, a fellow Maquis whom Chakotay felt enjoyed his job a little too much. Tuvok questions him immediately, but it is soon clear that Suder would have no motive - his only complaint about the victim was that he treated Suder like most of the Starfleet crew treated him, and that they had no real conflict.

The Doctor soon calls Tuvok back down to Sickbay, and informs him of a DNA scan he ran on the head wound the victim received. He found DNA not of the victim, but of Lon Suder. Tuvok immediately confronts him, and Suder confesses, stating that he beat the guy's brains in with an engineering tool and that he was surprised at the relative lack of blood (we wouldn't want to stain the carpets on the Engineering set, now would we?). Means and opportunity are covered, but Tuvok wants to know Suder's motive - his reply of "I didn't like the way he looked at me" didn't sate Tuvok's need to understand the crime.

Tuvok and Janeway discuss what they're going to do with Suder - the Federation has outlawed execution (bunch of Liberal space hippies), and it seems 'cruel' to Janeway to lock him in the Brig for the rest of the trip. Tuvok points out that due to the circumstances, execution might be the more humane choice, but Janeway ignores him and instead decides to confine him to quarters so that they don't have to staff the brig. Yeah, boy, it'd sure suck to have access to a computer and replicator all day. Fuck, if I were on Voyager, I'd kill someone just to get that treatment.

Tuvok then decides to mind meld with Suder to try to understand his motivations. He also tells him that a side effect will likely be that Suder will experience some personality transferrance, and when Suder points out that it'd mean that Tuvok would likely end up with Suder's aggressive tendencies, Tuvok tells him that he feels he can suppress them. All in all, this plot device is a nice nod to TNG's, IIRC, "Sarek."

Suder was quite correct, and Tuvok finds himself at ill-ease after the meld, both at the new feelings he has to suppress and that Suder truly had no motivation for killing, he simply did. Tuvok then starts taking out his frustrations on a holographic Neelix (God, why not the real thing). He soon talks to a much calmer, more centered Suder, and he can tell that he is losing control. Tuvok revokes his own security clearances and locks himself in his quarters, asking the computer to inform Janeway that he is unfit for duty.

And unfit he is - when Janeway goes to his quarters to investigate, they are destroyed, with an unstable Tuvok threatening Janeway with violence if she approaches him. She finally manages to sedate him and beam him to Sickbay.

The Doctor discovers chemical imbalances in Tuvok's brain. The Vulcan medical literature discusses how this might occur, and the only suggested treatment is to chemically inhibit the centers of his brain that would help him control his emotions.

Soon, a very emotive Tuvok calls Janeway out on her bullshit, telling her that she had made a naive call and that she was blinded by her own ideals. He tells her that the family of the crewman who died would hate her for what she did, and the clemency she had shown Suder, and that he deserved to die for his crimes. He even tries to play off of his mentor-pupil relationship with Kes to try to get her to release the forcefield, and he offers to kill Suder himself if Janeway cannot stomach it. Soon, the treatment had run its course, and Tuvok passed out.

When he woke in the night, however, he had yet to be fully cured. He takes an EPS tap to the forcefield to bring it down, and then goes to the Brig, disabling the guard and starting to forcibly meld with Suder, an action that Suder had previously suggested to be the ultimate in violence. However, Tuvok's self-control soon took over, and Suder calls Chakotay for assistance, telling him that Tuvok needs help, with almost a hint of concern for Tuvok in his voice.

The Doctor says that his ability to regain control was a good indication that the regimen had worked, and that they should continue, and soon, Tuvok is back to normal. But Suder remains alive, comfortably in his quarters while the ship continues its journey home - he'll be back.

Again, I really enjoyed this episode. I've always thought that after Robert Picardo, Tim Russ was probably one of the more capable actors on the show, and his interactions with the always-creepy Brad Douriff (who played Suder) were spot-on - there was a great chemistry there. In a rare moment for Voyager, you could really cut the tension with a knife whenever they had a scene together.

This episode also helps establish the events of the S2 finale cliffhanger, which shows that VOY wasn't really beneath arcs, and why it was disappointing when they fell through dramatically in the final seasons.

Rating: ****
Torpedoes remaining: 34/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 3

Dreadnought
Voyager comes across some space debris from what looked like an unmanned probe or monitoring station, and because they're nosy bastards, they bring it aboard. Not only do they discover that the damage was caused by Cardassian weaponry, but that it was caused by a Cardassian weapon that Torres herself had a hand in developing.

She soon reveals that the Cardassians had sent an incredibly sophisticated missle to attack a Maquis base - it had enough of an antimatter yield to destroy a small moon, it could defend itself, and it could learn and anticipate its enemy's actions. She claims the only reason it didn't work was because the Cardassians ended up being skinflints when it came to the actual detonation mechanism. She had then repaired it and sent it on a new mission to destroy a Cardassian moon without Chakotay's permission.

The crew then tracks down the Dreadnought and beams Torres aboard. After a number of security checks, she manages to disable the weapon and beam back to Voyager. Shortly after, however, it takes off again, resuming its course for a heavily populated, spacefaring world. Janeway calls ahead to warn them, and the aliens are suspicious, believing it to be a threat due to Voyager's reputation (again, what reputation - this is like Jeffery screaming "I'M GANGSTA. I'M O.G. LOC" in GTA: San Andreas or something), but he soon comes around after Janeway convinces him that they are trying to stop the weapon.

The Dreadnought has other ideas. It's decided that Torres is being coerced by the Cardassians, and has fed it false information about their location. Voyager soon breaks through the Dreadnought's shields and attacks its computer core, but the weapon then sends a feedback pulse back to Voyager, disabling the ship's entire navigation systems, giving the weapon more time to get to the planet unhindered.

Voyager catches up, and manages to beam Torres aboard. She tries a number of engineering solutions as the craft destroys alien fighters and fends off Voyager's attacks, and even attempts a very Kirk-like hypothetical game with the computer. This only causes the computer to reasses Torres as being a Cardassian sympathizer, however (after all, she's no Kirk. Kirk is gangsta).

However, she soon locates a backup copy of the Dreadnought's original software, and she sets about reinstalling it, which causes the old and new software to duke it out while Torres sneaks into a maintenance crawlway and just start phasering the antimatter containment.

Meanwhile, Janeway has evacuated Voyager, intending to blow it the hell up right next to the weapon in order to stop it - the loss of her ship is worth two million lives saved. It's OK, next week she'll probably just claim it was in their world's natural course of development and let them all die or something.

Torres' software succeeds in eradicating the backup, and promises Torres that it will let Torres return to Voyager if she just stops trying to destroy it. However, Torres soon breaks through the casing, and the ship starts to explode. Tuvok (the only remaining crew member besides Janeway and the Doctor aboard Voyager) beams Torres back, and the day has been saved.

Oh, yeah, and over the course of this episode, Tuvok fires seven torpedoes. Christ man, they're not candy.

This episode had an interesting premise that would have worked reasonably well on, I think, DS9 or something, but it just required yet another stretch of the imagination to believe that the Caretaker just happily brought shittons of ships over into the Delta Quadrant. And then, its crime was just being bland and forgettable - there was no real character development here.

It did, however, have a scene where the mole on the ship tried to contact Seska, whose Kazon answering service is very diligent in making sure that he is never able to talk to her, and I'm pretty sure that Tom's acting like a douchebag in this episode as a setup for a future episode that continues this arc.

In the end, it wasn't bad, it was just...wasn't good.
Rating: **
Torpedoes remaining: 27/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 3

I can't believe you're still alive.

Kyle, have you gotten up to "Distant Origin" yet

I only watched about a season and a half of Voyager, reading Kyle's reviews, I'm thankful for the valuable seconds of my life which were spared the agony of following this show for it's entire run.

the horror...

the horror...

[action=evenflow]shudders...[/action]

Managed to watch a whole ten minutes of Voyager today before my body subconsciously forced a big bit of the scoldingly hot meat pie in to my gob that managed to distract me before the urge to kill myself had taken hold.

Ya know what, I'm trying to follow along, but I can't even read reviews of these episodes without feeling ill.

Just wait till he gets to seasons 5-7!

These early years are actually the good years of Voyager, IMO. Though that is not saying much.

I've skipped over Kyle's posts because I was reliving the trauma that I endured while actually watching the show, but "rewinded" the thread and soldiered on. However, the reviews are 10 times more rewarding than the episodes they are for, so it was worth it.

Death Wish
We open to a shot of what looks like CG blatantly ripped off from DS9's title sequence of a comet. According to Harry, it's moving erratically. So, hey, what's the best course of action? Beam a hunk of it aboard the ship, nothing can go wrong there!

Torres heads to the transporter room, erects a forcefield around the transporter, and beams a sample aboard. However, what materializes is a middle-aged man in Starfleet red, four pips on his collar. He announces his name is Q.

However, this is not the Q we've come to know and love/hate over the years. No, this Q is different, and he wants to kill himself. He tries to do so, and with a flourish of his hand, makes all the men disappear. He claims his powers have become rusty due to three centuries of disuse in the comet, and has no way to bring them back.

Janeway, of course, accuses him of being the more familiar Q, telling him that all Starfleet captains are briefed on his existence and the sort of havoc he likes to wreck upon humanity, first and foremost introducing them to the Borg (I'm not sure, but I think this was their first mention on Voyager). Soon, The Q we know and love/hate arrives, and brings back all the men after basically stating that the only reason Voyager was stuck in the Delta Quadrant was because they left a woman in charge.

Oh Q, ever the misogynist. Anyway, the Q battle it out, first sending Voyager to before the Big Bang, then into an ornament on a Christmas tree, and then to a subatomic level before Janeway tells them to knock it the fuck off, and, for whatever reason, they listen to her.

The new Q requests asylum from Janeway. Q mentions that this should be hilarious to watch, as it means that Janeway either lets the Continuum reimprison the new Q or it means that Janeway lets him commit suicide, which is also against the vaunted Federation ideals (I'm amazed that they haven't outlawed death itself yet).

Janeway hosts a hearing on the plea for asylum, with Q representing the Continuum and Tuvok representing the new Q (the new Q asked Tuvok to do so because Vulcan is OK with suicide under terminal circumstances - nice to hear they gave that up to sign on the dotted line to join the Federation so that Jonathan Archer could procede to shit all over their culture and get his first officer infected with space AIDS). While the new Q takes the hearing to his cell in the asteroid to demonstrate his terrible living conditions, Q tries to make a case for how sacred the Continuum holds life to be, demonstrating how this new Q was responsible for Newton's theories on gravity, the establishment of Woodstock, and the existence of William Riker, who saved humanity from the Borg.

Janeway, of course, points out that would have never been necessary had Q not introduced humanity to the Borg in the first place. Jonathan Frakes makes a cameo as Riker, who seems mostly annoyed about Q's presence, though the chemistry between him and de Lancie was a nice and welcome throwback to a time when writers weren't shitting into paper bags and photocopying them as scripts for Star Trek. It does provide the only highlight of the episode, in which he points out that had the new Q not saved Riker's ancestor, Q would have missed out on dozens of opportunities to insult Riker. Additionally, Tuvok points out that the Continuum's track record on the sanctity of life has been pretty dismal, because even aside from putting countless millions in jeopardy, they practice execution as well.

Anyway, the new Q eventually suggests that the hearing be taken to the Continuum itself to display the type of life he'd be expected to live. The Q present it as a road in the middle of nowhere with a dusty little gas station, apparently the best approximation that Janeway's mind could understand. The new Q points out that while he was a philosopher, he eventually simply experienced all the universe had to offer, as had the other Q - that's why they're all just sitting around chewing on straw or, in the case of one of them, obviously being the town bike.

Eventually, after the new Q points out that Q had inspired him to the one original, new thought he had experienced in so long when Q was forced to endure life as a mortal, Janeway rules in his favor. After Q grants him mortality, he realizes that he could experience a whole new life as a mortal. He takes the name of Quinn, and Janeway and Chuckles try to figure out how to best take advantage of the genius that has just been dropped into their lap. The Doctor, however, soon calls and tells them that he's taken a rare poison with no known cure, and is minutes from death. Janeway rushes to Sickbay, and Quinn thanks her for helping him.

Janeway's pissed, demanding to know how he got such a rare form of poison. Then Q appears, telling her that he had given it to him. He explains that Quinn's speech about the rut the Continuum had gotten into had infected him with a new lust for, well, chaos, I guess, and granted Quinn his greatest wish. Q darts off, and Voyager continues home.

Oh, yeah, and the entire time, Q dangled a bribe in front of Janeway - if she just ruled in the Continuum's favor, she could have Voyager sent back to the Alpha Quadrant instantly and/or Q's dick, and apparently her Federation ideals prevented her from not interfering in the business of the fucking Q Continuum and just taking him up on his offer and/or boning.

There's always a problem with Q episodes. On one hand, I love John de Lancie. It's obvious that he really doesn't give a shit about the absurdity of the episodes he stars in, he just shows up, has a great time, and then leaves (for further proof of this, check out the hilarious game Star Trek: Borg, which is basically Q being a dick for three hours of gameplay). The character is infectious and prompts a strong reaction - you either like Q or you don't. I disagree with RTM that he should have remained this malevolent enigma as portrayed in Encounter to Farpoint - episodes like Tapestry or All Good Things... demonstrate that he can shift back into a more serious role quite effectively. But this episode was just a disappointment. It gets points for de Lancie, but fails elsewhere.

Rating: **
Torpedoes remaining: 27/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 3

In TNG Picard was okay with Worf commiting suicide.

I actually thought this was one of the better uses of Q outside of TNG. His appearance on DS9 was pointless and his later appearances on VOY were godawful.

I did like the representation of the Q Continuum as a dusty old place in the middle of nowhere.

But after this, it all goes down the crapper.

Q supposedly becomes great friends with the Voyager crew. They help out in the 'Q Civil War' and they help raise his son

So why the heck couldn't he have sent 'em back home? There is no real good answer for this other than that the show would have been over.

And, I agree, Janeway should have not hesitated to fuck Q if that would get them back home. She could have taken one for the team and saved them a lot of misery. The repressed grandma might have even like it better than her boring holodeck lovers.

But I guess altering the future and stealing restricted technology was okay.

Lifesigns
Tom comes onto the bridge late and acts like a dick, but soon, Harry picks up a ship drifting with a faint female Vidiian lifesign aboard. They beam her to Sickbay, where the Doctor discovers she has a neural implant that basically acts as a repeater for her brain. Her neural activity is fading fast, so he improvises a way to copy the activity in the implant into Sickbay's holoemitters and store her brain in the computer, giving her a holographic body.

Her name is Denara Pel, a Vidiian hematologist who was on her way back to her home colony after helping with a Phage outbreak. She is eager to help the Doctor with his treatment of herself, but she is far more eager to enjoy and experience her new body, a Phage-free one the Doctor generated based on her original, pure DNA (damn, these Sickbay computers are fucking incredible).

It soon becomes apparent that the Doctor and Denara are attracted to each other, both on a professional and personal level. When the Doctor takes her to Chez AssendofFrance-ine, it ends up being more of a date than a chance for her to strech her legs outside of Sickbay.

However, Denara's program must remain inactive for periods so as to not degrade her neural pathways further. While offline, the Doctor laments to Kes that he can't concentrate on his work, and that he wants to see more of Denara, but whenever he reactivates her, he feels awkward and has no idea what to say. Kes basically hits him with a clue bat and tells him that while his programming might not have initially allowed for romantic feelings, it has clearly adapted to the idea now. She encourages him to tell her how he feels.

So he does. While he's operating on her head. Kes has this look of terror on her face the entire time - frankly, I think the Picard facepalm would have been more appropriate. Denara stutters out that she feels they should keep their relationship professional - the Doctor is clearly hurt.

Tom meets up with Chakotay in the Mess Hall, and accuses Chakotay of not encouraging the creativity of the crew, instead forcing them to stick by Starfleet regulations. He does so by yelling it to the Mess Hall, which prompts Voyager's mole to report in. He finally gets to talk to Seska, who describes a plan to disable Voyager's warp coils in a trap for the ship. The mole initially balks, but she tells him that she's going to take the ship one way or another, and she doesn't give a fuck whether or not he's along for the ride.

The Doctor later goes to Chez Marseillesisashithole-ine, and asks Tom for advice, saying, "I'd imagine you've dealt with rejection frequently." Ouch, Doc, remember, this isn't Harry you're talking to (and speaking of Harry, I'd be surprised if he had more than a handful of lines over the last few episodes - in this one, he basically just looks embarrassed for Tom whenever Tom fucks up). After talking with the Doctor about it, Tom suggests that Denara might just be shy, and goes to show the Doctor how to put the moves on her in Tom's...signature...style.

Meanwhile, in Sickbay, Denara talks to Kes about it, and Kes points out that it's not only obvious that Denara likes the Doctor, but that she has a hard time accepting compliments from others. She encourages her to pursue the Doctor further.

Which leads to...Mars. Tom has set the Doctor up with a Martian Makeout Point, complete with a '57 Chevy convertible. Denara soon joins him, and after he points out the astronomical niceties of the Terran system, they proceed to make out. See, this is what I had done wrong for so many years - I didn't treat my dates like cliches! Way to go, Tom Paris - you have indirectly banged yet another woman with your charm (or at least, that's what the fan community has decided - because of a throwaway line later on in Voyager where the Doctor mentioned that he's done the horizontal tango, legions of crazy people online have pointed to Denara as the obvious recipient of the holoschong).

Now, a comic interlude - Tom strolls onto the Bridge flaunting his lateness, and when Chuckles calls him on his bullshit, Tom pushes him over, getting him sent to the Brig. Way to go, Tom, whether Suder's in there or not, you're going to make sure they keep the lights on down there.

After they finish making out and get back to actual work, the Doctor finishes up his repairs on Denara's body and sets about reintegrating her. However, an errant chemical in her system prevents it, and after the Doctor is visibly worried, thinking someone on the ship has poisoned her, Denara reveals that she, herself, did it. After kicking Kes out of Sickbay, Denara tells the Doctor that she'd rather live only a week as a hologram than as a few years as a Phage-ridden Vidiian, relating a story from her childhood of how after she became ill, suddenly, nobody wanted to so much as touch her ever again. The Doctor tells her that he hasn't fallen for her body (though that'd be understandable, she'd kind of a dish), but for her, and that he would do anything to spend as much time with her as possible.

The last shot is in Chez WhynobodylikesFrance-ine, with the Doctor and a decidedly Vidiian Denara dancing slowly together.

This was essentially Voyager's take on In Theory, and in a lot of ways, I think they did a nicer job. It didn't seem as forced, and I think that the Doctor ended up being a little more relate-able than Data was. The way they handled Tom being a bad boy was pretty iffy, though, and at times, I think that both the Doctor and Denara seemed a little too naive about things, but ultimately, a good effort that played well with the chemistry between Susan Diol and Robert Picardo.

Oh, yeah, and Susan Diol played a character in TNG's Silicon Avatar as well. One of Riker's conquests, IIRC.

Rating: ***
Torpedoes remaining: 27/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 3

I'm still not sure I can believe that the Holodoc could fall in love. That's just not in his programming.

What about Data, you say? Well Data had more complex programming and was constructed by his creator to actually become more and more human over time. Data was built and programmed primarily to show that artificial life could come close to approximating a real human.

The Holodoc was programmed for a specific task, to treat medical injuries. That's a rather far leap, programming wise, to falling in love and all the other stuff he got into over the years.

Well, first and foremost, it's a dramatic conceit - being programmed to go on a grand journey of human discovery is a pretty big leap in and of itself.

The Doctor wasn't just programmed to treat medical injuries, he was programmed to improvise medical treatments, backed by Starfleet's entire medical literature. He would then expand upon and learn new information based on his experiences. His program was only really ever intended to be used on a short-term basis, so these experiences, in testing, would have been minimal. But long-term use could end up providing a large enough data set to expand the program into behaving in an unintended manner.

It's a topic that gets touched on here and there over the course of the show - that the Doctor is operating in conditions that far exceed anything he was ever tested for. I think there's an episode later on that deals with the Doctor's program getting corrupted simply due to overuse. There are, of course, episodes here and there where his own little gene splicing experiments go awry as well (remember, his programming advances by both artificial and natural means).

Being a computer programmer, I still think that it's a little fantastical, sure, but I definitely don't have a problem with a program operating outside of expectations.

Investigations
Fuck Janeway's high-and-mighty Starfleet ideals. If I woke up to a morning show hosted by Neelix, I'd off myself. This is one of the most ridiculous concepts on Voyager (that is, of course, never touched on again). Neelix decides that it'd be good for ship morale to host a morning show, and Janeway, Chakotay, and half the ship endorse this. You think holograms getting busy tests the limits of believability, this would shatter them completely - no real person would entertain Neelix playing reporter.

Why? It was forced so that Neelix could discover and investigate a member of the crew leaving. He soon discovers that it's Tom Paris, who wanted to GTFO of Voyager after knocking over Chuckles last week. This does lead to a relatively nice scene between Tom and Neelix that actually acknowledges the relationship and development both of them have had over the course of the show thus far.

But then, rather than abandon that and let Tuvok get down to some Hardy Boys shenanigans, they keep pushing that round peg through a square hole and let Neelix continue. After kicking Tom out the door, the mole informs Seska that Tom Paris has left the ship. Soon, a failure in Voyager's warp drive forces them to vent plasma through the nacelles, destroying the casing to the warp coils. Sound familiar? It should - that's what Seska was discussing last week. Neelix is consulted, and of course, the nearest cache of the raw materials they need is the location Seska has set up as a trap.

Soon, Voyager gets word from the Talaxian convoy they left Paris with that they had been attacked and Paris had been kidnapped. Seska is busy offering Tom a deal - work with her, she'll make sure he's the one flying Voyager after she takes it as her own. He turns her down, and she leaves him in what is the most well-appointed cell I've ever seen - huge queen sized bed, giant computer terminal. Fuck, he's got it better than Suder. Anyway, he starts tapping away, reading Kazon with ease.

Back on Voyager, Neelix talks to Kes - he's confused by the attack on the Talaxian convoy. They were quick and methodical and took only Tom, almost immediately after he was with them. Neelix concludes that someone must have let the Kazon know where he'd be. He mounts another investigation, heading to Engineering to take a look at subspace transmission logs. Torres sets him up with a log viewer, and soon leaves the mole in charge of Engineering while she goes off to fix something. Neelix notices irregularities in the logs, which the mole tries to pass off as a result of the 'accident' with the warp coils. However, Neelix is not deterred, and the mole picks up a welder of some sort and activates it, intending to kill Neelix (cue cheers!). However, then the Doctor Ex Machina comes on the comm link to talk to Neelix about his inclusion in the morning show. Neelix brushes him off and runs off to Tuvok.

Tuvok tells him that he finds it unlikely that a traitor was transmitting to the Kazon, but says that he will look into it. Neelix looks forward to helping him, but Tuvok bitch-slaps him and tells him to knock it the fuck off, it's time to let the grown-ups handle it.

Neelix agrees, and then promptly ignores Tuvok's order. He goes back to engineering, and Hogan helps him recover some of the deleted log entries, that could be traced back to a section of crew quarters. Neelix goes to one - Tom's old quarters, and accesses his terminal, using an engineering code he overheard to decrypt it. He finds the transmission logs, and then announces on his morning show that Tom Paris was a spy for the Kazon.

Janeway calls him up to her ready room, and Tuvok and Chakotay join him. Tuvok and Janeway inform him that Tom was working undercover, pretending to be a malcontent in order for the mole to report it to Seska, hopefully uncovering who the mole was. Because Tuvok's not a moron, he had long ago discovered what Neelix had, but the fact that the trace to Tom's quarters had been added indicated that the mole would probably be comfortable with the heat being off. Janeway asks Neelix to continue his investigation to keep the heat on the mole.

Chakotay is, of course, pissed off that Janeway couldn't trust him with the secret plan, especially after she brushes him off, stating that she didn't want him to be in the position of having to deal with a potential Maquis traitor. Yeah, but apparently, the ever-mighty Starfleet could handle a Starfleet traitor. Yeah right, it'd bring Janeway's whole world crashing down - she practically crashed the ship into a moon after Tuvok stole that supertransporter.

Anyway, Neelix goes back to Engineering on his mission, but soon, Tom shows up in a Kazon shuttle, and Voyager must assist. With most of the Engineering staff repairing key systems, only the Mole is left in Engineering as Janeway asks for enhanced transporter range. Neelix notes that the mole is doing nothing to accomplish Janeway's order, and then discovers that he's erected a forcefield to prevent people from coming in. Tom soon sends a transmission confirming the mole's identity, but Tuvok cannot take him down - he's locked down engineering. However, as Voyager is attacked by the Kazon chasing Tom down, the mole goes upstairs in Engineering, and Neelix follows, cracking him in the kneecap with a space wrench.

Neelix and the mole fight hand-to-hand, but then, a plasma conduit ruptures on Engineering's lower level, and Neelix's space wrench falls into the plasma, destroying it instantly. Soon, as the ship rocks, Neelix throws the mole into it as well, and I'm sure he'll never notice the irony of disintegrating an enemy like his family was disintegrated by that scientist a few episodes ago.

Tom and Neelix go on the morning show and discuss all those wacky hijinx, and life on Voyager is back to normal. FOR NOW.

This episode gets points for relying heavily on material established in other episodes. Considering that it lacked even a "Previously, on Star Trek Voyager" segment at the beginning, B&B&JT obviously thought that the viewers could handle the arc, and I've got to say, it probably wouldn't have made a lot of sense without that previous information. But damn, it was just awful having Neelix be the center of the episode. It'd be like having an episode all about Chakotay's spirit bullshit and then having it inexplicably focus on Kes. Or having an episode focus on Harry Kim at all.
Rating: **
Torpedoes remaining: 27/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 3

Morning show?

The horror....

A savory tidbit thought for V'GER haters to salivate over

Investigations was everything wrong with Voyager. Everytime a nice story arc came up the episode that should have drove it all home was replete with good material executed in the most thoughtless way possible.

Frankly I can't wait until you get to Equinox Part II. It should be a very review.

I thought Death Wish was a good story.

Me too. Easily the best Q episode from Voyager, and one of the better episodes from Voyager's early seasons.

It was

& gave good backstory for elements of the Trekverse