A Semi-Hater Revisits Voyager

[TheGodBen]

Relax! Don't do it! When you want to... and I can't remember the rest of the words.

*The whole thread lets out a sigh of relief.*


Relativity (**)

After two episodes of nice, quiet character pieces we get an episode where Voyager actually explodes. Couldn't they at least try easing me back into it?

I'd recommend that everybody watch the first 20 minutes of this episode, up until Voyager gets blowed up real good, then turn your TV off and do something else. The scenes where Janeway first boards Voyager are good, as are some of the scenes as time begins to go all weird on Voyager. After that you get some mad-cap lunacy where people keep travelling through time while shooting at each other. I get that this is supposed to be light-hearted fun and I'm encouraged to turn my brain off and enjoy, but I just didn't want to.

For example, Seven sees the bomb in the Jefferies tube while Voyager is in dry-dock, yet two years later she goes to the same spot and say that "there's no sign of the weapon". All this time travel stuff is explained away by Janeway saying that she doesn't want a headache, but the truth is that there is no explanation to anything that happens here and there never can be. This is a "fun" episode about people randomly travelling through time with guns and if you enjoy that sort of thing then good luck to you. Personally, I found the second half of this episode to be as much fun as watching a random number generator.

Something really horrible must have happened in my childhood to ruin my sense of fun.

Ducane wrote:

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Oh Captain, Braxton was right about one thing; Voyager shows up on our sensors far too often. Try to avoid time travel.

Ah, but by the time Janeway decides to ignore these words she's no longer a captain, she's an admiral. She's a crafty one, that Janeway.

[DGCatAniSiri]

Hm, personally, I found Relativity entirely fun - almost tongue and cheek at the over-use of time travel stories throughout Trek, and Voyager specifically. It almost feel like a parody of the time travel stories of the past. Of course, given that I tend to think more than a little about the various paradoxes they use, I was getting the same headaches as Janeway, so I just let things go like the characters and enjoyed it. Since it felt so close to a parody of time travel, I could actually do that - when Voyager takes its stories seriously, even when it shouldn't, that's when I start having issues.

[startrekwatcher]

"Relativity" gets only 2.5 stars out of 4 from me.

If "The Fight" was VOY's technobabble equivalent of a sugar rush then "Relativity" is its time travel counterpart. Normally I don't mind a clever use of time travel but it was so incoherent here that it turned me off and I gave up trying to make sense of the gobs of it. It was too grating. I didn't even mind ENT's Temporal Cold War. I know many love this episode but it didn't do all that much for me which actually surprised me since these high concept sci-fi mysteries are some of my favorite Trek offerings.

Like I've noted many times, VOY could do a good job in setting up a mystery but when it came time to deliver an exciting satisfying payoff the writers failed to come through. Here the writers have me all curious about who is trying to destroy VOY and why and in the end the revealation it is Braxton is so anti-climatic. Sadly, you certainly never saw the kind of inventive mysteries that TNG's standouts had like "Night Terrors", "Remember Me", "Clues", "Cause and Effect", "The Survivors", "Timescape" or even DS9's "Visionary" or "Whispers".

Also once the secret was out the chase to stop Braxton was not that particularly exciting and a lot of the jeopardy fizzled.

It was neat finally seeing a futuristic temporal vessel and a temporal agency. The designs on the uniforms were nice. It was neat seeing Seven looking completely human in a Starfleet uniform. And like I've mentioned before, whenever the show in the later years would revisit those earlier seasons of the show I would get a kick out of the power bun, Carey, the Kazon attack on Voyager, Janeway/Tuvok's reaction to detecting Borg components in Seven etc.

[Dane_Whitman]

Trivia:

Relativity happens to be the episode that establishes that ST: First Contact didn't create an alternate timeline, but that events in that film were meant to happen. Something a lot of people are mistaken about.

[Praetor]

I know I'm in the minority, but I really enjoyed "11:59" too. It was something of a unique, premise-jumping story, but I still liked it.

"Relativity" I liked a lot more when it was new, but now not so much. I could see a possible attempt to go for a tongue-in-cheek thing, but if so I think they took themselves too seriously to pull it off.

[The Grim Ghost]

I liked Relativity. It should get an extra star just for how much better Seven looks in a Starfleet uniform than in her normal silly outfit.

[TheGodBen]

I think the problem is the inclusion of peril for Voyager and her crew, a true "light" episode shouldn't involve scenes of the ship blowing up. It's a similar problem as I had with Bride of Chaotica!, they wanted to have a fun episode in the Captain Proton program yet they felt the need to include the idea that Voyager is stuck in a subspace sand-bank and their systems are failing.

I'm just looking at DS9's light episodes and rarely did they ever see the need to include peril into the plots. That's why I think DS9 was more successful at doing light episodes, they didn't feel the need to include peril in the plots and when they did it usually involved Quark's life being at risk which isn't all that perilous.

[tomalak301]

GodBen wrote:

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I'm just looking at DS9's light episodes and rarely did they ever see the need to include peril into the plots. That's why I think DS9 was more successful at doing light episodes, they didn't feel the need to include peril in the plots and when they did it usually involved Quark's life being at risk which isn't all that perilous.

I'm not so sure about that. I mean Our Man Bashir (An episode I watched last week) seemed to put the lives of Sisko, O'brien, Kira, Dax, and Worf in peril, at least if Garak had his way.

[TheGodBen]

I actually wrote up a list to prove my point before deleting it for being too long, and I forgot to include Our Man Bashir! You're quite right, that episode did have a peril angle which annoyed me. Badda-Bing Badda-Bang also annoyed me because they put Vic's program in jeopardy when they really didn't need to.

Anybody think of any other examples of comedic DS9 episodes that put the ship or crew in a perilous situation (except the Ferengi, putting them in danger is almost exclusively played for laughs)?

[TedShatner10]

I loved "Someone to Watch Over Me" and "Relativity", the first episode scores 9/10 the latter episode gets a 8/10.

I merely liked "11:59", so 6/10, V'Ger's less emotionally affecting version of "Far Beyond the Stars". It was as weird to see Anthony Cooper in that episode as it was seeing John Locke in TNG's "The Pegasus".

[Tachyon]

Never been a huge fan of Relativity. Another Janeway/Seven -centric episode in the line of many. *sighs* From my perspective the episode is way too overrated. I'm gonna hit it with *** - not bad, but not brilliant either.

[Seven of Five]

'Relativity' is something I only began to enjoy having watched it a few times now. When I first saw it years ago I rejected it - more time-travelling, technobabbling rubbish that made no sense. Years later, during a rewatch, despite having had such negative memories about it I actually quite enjoyed it. I showed it to a friend a few weeks later, and again found it funny.

Yes, I do have to sort of switch my brain off, and it is all a bit silly, but since Janeway plays it up as silly I was halfway there. So I give it a 4/5.

[TheGodBen]

Warhead (**½)

Kim gets to be captain for a few hours and the first thing he does is bring a bomb onboard so that he can get revenge on this crew that is constantly being condescending towards him. It turns out that the bomb thinks it is a person and it is very upset to learn that it is a bomb because it will no longer be able to taste the delicious flavours of Walkers crisps. Then the bomb takes over Doctor Shmully, but when it realises that it is in a holographic body and still cannot eat the sublime new Walkers Builder's Breakfast flavour crisps it throws a strop and starts shouting a lot. This is annoying.

Janeway is a very traditional captain so she likes Walkers Ready Salted flavour, and she is also not willing to give in to the demands of a talking bomb. Captain Kirk (who adored Walkers Smokey Bacon) would have just talked the bomb to death with a logical paradox, but Janeway only skimmed TOS when it was on TV and can only remember parts of that episode with the furry things. However, Kim (Walkers Prawn Cocktail) is a bit of a lonely nerd so has every episode of TOS stored twice on his computer, in both production and air-date order. He remembered that you are supposed to talk a bomb to death and not waste time on some technobabble solution to the problem, so he reasons with the bomb and it agrees to kill itself and its whole race.

I don't normally give out points for trying, but part of the agreement with my new sponsors (Walkers crisps) is that I must try to be more positive towards the episodes.

[Dane_Whitman]

On to Equinox!

[apenpaap]

Warhead is very silly. Anyone ever saw "Dark Star"?