Star Trek - Voyager

[purlieu]

Cheers, this is all fascinating reading!

The Gift. Two stories that really feel let down by the enforced episodic structure. Kes's changes have been rushed - I'm glad she and Neelix finally actually got a conversation about their breakup here, if nothing else - but this was ridiculous, basically 20 minutes spent on her going from normal to... whatever that was (I love how the Memory Alpha wiki entry for her says "For whatever reason, Kes became telekinetic"). Similarly, the last scene with Seven should have been two or three episodes away. And we really needed the Doctor's reaction to Kes's departure there. Buuuuut, despite all that, everything there was still really good. And I'm glad they've had their journey shortened by ten years. I was afraid the whole story would be seven years then a quick wormhole and they're home, so a nice push like that was definitely appreciated.

Day of Honor. Lots happening there. Nice Seven growth, finally some proper traction with the Paris and Torres plot, some aliens acting out of desperation. Felt a lot longer than a normal 45 minutes. Good stuff.

[MojoJojo]

I can understand Mulgrew being frosty about that, though maybe being unpleasant to Ryan, who was simply an actor who had bagged herself a gig, wasn't really on.

Mulgrew has acknowledged Ryan shouldn't have got the blame. I do wonder how bad she actually was to Ryan, and how much her being pissed off with the character has been described as against Ryan to make a better story. The story about her wanting Ryan to not go to the toilet could be anger at the producers choosing a costume that made toilet breaks take half an hour rather than trying to torture Ryan.

Guess I'm suspicious because there's not a hint of it in the show (airc) and they shared a lot of scenes together. It seems unlikely they would have been put together so much if she was that horrible.

[Mr Trumpet]

They had brilliant chemistry, which made it all the more surprising when these stories began to emerge. I know Janeway and Seven were very popular "shipping" characters among the section of the fanbase which enjoys such things.

[purlieu]

Nemesis. Ughhhh I was so ready to lay into that for being utterly tedious, and then the last five minutes redeemed it somewhat. Still, 40 boring minutes is still 40 boring minutes.

[purlieu]

Revulsion. The main story was great, something Star Trek hadn't really done by this point and very well handled. The Harry and Seven plot was a nice humorous b-plot, and, as ever, the Doctor was a joy to watch. Really fun episode.

[Lemming]

If I'm remembering right, the Harry/Seven plot annoyed me because of Chakotay. Harry comes to Chakotay and says he's not comfortable, and Chakotay - who is essentially a middle manager - fails to do his one job properly.

Main plot is great fun though. There seems to be an unusual amount of episodes that essentially boil down to "B'Elanna is trapped aboard a ship with some kind of imminent danger that will kill her in minutes", and they're all great.

[Mr Trumpet]

Just watched this one. Liked the "this could get tedious" line from the Doctor as he and the other hologram's punches pass through one another.

[Mobbd]

Just watched this one. Liked the "this could get tedious" line from the Doctor as he and the other hologram's punches pass through one another.

Haha, yeah, that moment's a gem.

A great episode all round really. I wish Spectrum could have made an appearance after the episode - just briefly shown to have been transferred to Voyager's Sickbay as a pet for the Doc.

[Malcy]

If I'm remembering right, the Harry/Seven plot annoyed me because of Chakotay. Harry comes to Chakotay and says he's not comfortable, and Chakotay - who is essentially a middle manager - fails to do his one job properly.

Main plot is great fun though. There seems to be an unusual amount of episodes that essentially boil down to "B'Elanna is trapped aboard a ship with some kind of imminent danger that will kill her in minutes", and they're all great.

If it's the episode I think it it, I'm away ahead on Equinox Pt2, Chakotay sees the humour in it and pretty much challenges Harry to man up.

[Deanjam]

That Harry/Seven 'Do you wish to copulate' moment has given Garret Wang an entire career at conventions.

[purlieu]

The Raven. It's a bit like the writers have gone "ah shit we've not done that much character work in Voyager so far, let's really develop the new character!" Great episode, but I feel like I know more about Seven than I do Kim or Torres, and she's only been in a handful of episodes.

[Lemming]

Yeah, from here onwards it's pretty much a show about Seven and the EMH, and sometimes Janeway. There are a few good episodes for Torres and Paris scattered around too.

[Mobbd]

The Raven. It's a bit like the writers have gone "ah shit we've not done that much character work in Voyager so far, let's really develop the new character!" Great episode, but I feel like I know more about Seven than I do Kim or Torres, and she's only been in a handful of episodes.

So true. When the do a similar thing on, say, Tores with Day of Honor or Barge of the Damned it's a bit of a yawn.

Do the Hansens fuck up the Borg/Federation chronology? I can't remember. Do they make it clear if their research take place after the events of Q Who?

[Wonderful Butternut]

Do the Hansens fuck up the Borg/Federation chronology? I can't remember. Do they make it clear if their research take place after the events of Q Who?

The Hansens were looking for the Borg at least 10 years before Q Who. (Although it's not stated that's what they were doing until season 5's "Dark Frontier")

The extent to which it was the first fuck up of the Borg/Federation chronology is debatable to a degree. It's definitely the first time there's explicitly said any knowledge of the Borg in the Federation prior to Q Who. But:

1) First Contact was released before this episode and that saw Lily Sloane exposed to the Borg 100s of years before they were encountered in Q Who. You can handwave it by saying she STFUd about them & her experience on the Enterprise either out of responsibility for not fucking up the timeline or because she didn't think anyone would believe her.

2) Likewise the El Aurian refugees rescued by the Enterprise B in Generations were meant to be running from the Borg. Even though this is not stated in the movie, Guinan said in TNG that the El Aurians were scattered by the Borg long before the Enterprise D encountered them. That's a long time for the El Aurians to have not told the Federation what they were running from. Maybe some of them were more talkative about the Borg than Guinan was, who didn't think to mention the existence of such a threat until the Enterprise encountered a cube.

But if the Hansens were operating on "rumours" and stuff the El Aurians related, it is a bit much that Magnus Hansen has an accurate model of a Borg Cube on his desk in the 2350s.

Then of course, Enterprise goes and really fucks it up by having Archer fight some leftover frozen Borg from First Contact, but in the real world that fantastic idea for an episode was done after Voyager and the Hansens. This episode also mentions that Cochrane told people about the Borg but was ignored because he was an alco.

[mothman]

It's before I think, but they're out there investigating reports of a strange alien race not knowing it's the Borg. Maybe there were aware of the (unexplained) events of ENT "Unity" (though it'd have to be retconning if there were, since that episode was made years later).

[Mobbd]

I think I'm okay with all of this. I don't mind that there might have been some unofficial encounters prior to the Enterprise D's official first contact with that cube. The Hansens were kinda freelance, right? That's fine. The information didn't get back to HQ.

I feel the same about the time travel element. The Borg have time travel so things are bound to get messy. I can't remember how they handle it in ENT but I bet it's respectful of the timeline: I remember they did well enough to satisfy me re: the Ferengi.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Well up to the production of the Ent episode it's reasonable to assume they'd at least know something from the El Aurians. How specific the something is can be speculated about.

I feel the same about the time travel element. The Borg have time travel so things are bound to get messy. I can't remember how they handle it in ENT but I bet it's respectful of the timeline: I remember they did well enough to satisfy me re: the Ferengi.

It's not, even by Star Trek's fairly loose standards re: The Timeline. The Borg assimilate a load of Federation scientists, nearly assimilate Phlox and it only doesn't work cos his physiology is resilient enough that he can irradiate himself (or something) to kill the nanoprobes. Oh and they discover that the Borg directed a subspace message towards the Delta Quadrant at the end of the ep. You couldn't not know what the Borg are after that.

[Endicott]

I have a vague memory that the star trek usenet group I was on at time of broadcast of ENT started talking about alternate timelines introduced by ENT meeting the borg, in order to handwave away all the bs that it introduced. To be honest I had already stopped watching it by then.

[Mr Trumpet]

Think back to the S3 episode with the Borg cooperative outcasts that Chakotay meets. The woman he runs into there says she got assimilated at the Battle of Wolf 359 (i.e. the battle with Picard as Locutus in TNG). But that cube got blown up in the episode, so how did she get back to the Delta Quadrant?

I think the Borg just keep messing with the timeline or something.

[Mobbd]

Hah! Oh well.

[mothman]

Yeah, but Picard asks the Queen how they met when that same cube got destroyed, and she waves it away with some lime about humans thinking so three-dimensionally. Which could allude to some temporal shenanigans, or just be a hasty attempt to not get bogged down in an intractable problem. [nb]It's notable that around this time "Trials and Tribbleations," with its "We do not discuss it with outsiders" hand-wave of the Klingon Forehead Problem, happened; however Picard & the Borg Queen don't get their two-part episode to properly explain it! Maybe an animated Short Trek..?[/nb]

[purlieu]

Scientific Method. A slightly misleading "oh they're contracted a virus" opening that led into a very nicely creepy story. Very good. Imagine what would have happened had Seven not been on board.

Year of Hell. Fuck yeah. Superb stuff. Ok, so the reset button was signposted from the word go, but everything there was fantastic. Never seen everything go to shit quite so much on Star Trek, and Annorax was an enjoyably complex villain with a name like several coats. Kate Mulgrew was utterly brilliant throughout.

[Lemming]

"TIME'S UP"

Two great consecutive episodes where Janeway kamikazes something.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Scientific Method. A slightly misleading "oh they're contracted a virus" opening that led into a very nicely creepy story. Very good. Imagine what would have happened had Seven not been on board.

Contains possibly my favourite Seven quote:

Seven: Load of technobabble to save the ship
The Doctor: I assume you know how to do that?
Seven: You assume correctly

[Mobbd]

Yonk of Hell was great. I like that they actually ran with that detail from Before and After (though why didn't they use the temporal weapon cheat code Kes got for them, eh?).

[purlieu]

Ah, but it was a different timeline - where Kes was still on the ship - so things were different.

[Malcy]

I think the Year of Hell was supposed to be a full series arc but I due to it being syndicated that was abandoned.

I've just started S6 and there has been loads of things in the past few episodes that make no sense whatsoever. I'll wait and see if Purlieu picks up on any of it when he gets there.

[Mobbd]

Ah, but it was a different timeline - where Kes was still on the ship - so things were different.

Aha!

[Wonderful Butternut]

I think the Year of Hell was supposed to be a full series arc but I due to it being syndicated that was abandoned.

I've just started S6 and there has been loads of things in the past few episodes that make no sense whatsoever. I'll wait and see if Purlieu picks up on any of it when he gets there.

Tbf whilst it would've been interesting to put away Voyager's patented reset button for while, it would've been hard for the writers to do a whole season of Year of Hell. Once the ship has taken a certain level of damage, you couldn't have them do anything that's not part of the main Year of Hell plot. Go explore a pulsar and find a dark-matter space lifeform in it or something? Nah, can't really be doing that with a ship that's in bits, in hostile territory and a crew who's nerves are frayed to fuck. Would've gotten miserable after a while, I think.

DS9 were able to have some episodes in S6 & S7 that weren't War related as a break, cos after the initial 6 episode arc they weren't on the front line all the time.

Maybe they could've made a season out of it by having Annorax fuck with the timeline many more times before Voyager becomes protected from the changes. So after a few episodes we reach the point where Voyager is basically derelict, and then Annorax goes and fucks something up and as a side effect restores Voyager to full working order and we have a couple of fluffy episodes before the Krenim start ruining their shit again. But there are so many mistakes you can have Annorax make before it becomes implausible that his crew haven't mutinied already.

Also I know he's basically a megalomaniac by the time Voyager encounter him, but given how smart he is, you think it might've occurred to him somewhere in the 200 odd years that erasing the temporal weapon itself might be an option to undo everything he's done.

[Mr Trumpet]

It would also be pretty annoying to erase the events of an entire year's worth of episodes, Dallas style. Maybe they could have pulled it off - it's not as though rich character development was a hallmark of the show. But I think it would have irritated audiences.