A Semi-Hater Revisits Voyager

[J47]

^ The only good thing about both "Heroes & Demons" and "Cathexis" is Janeway's hair. I frakking loved that style on her.

Praetor wrote:

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I agree! This was a great episode that needed just a little more buildup to be perfect. I don't think this would have undermined the surprise at all, but rather made the 'betrayal' resonate more.

Seska was a pragmatist. There might not have been any events that really justified her betrayal, but she wasn't wrong in expecting that having allies might be in their best interest sooner rather than later. It never struck me as a bad play on her part.

[TheGodBen]

J47 wrote:

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Seska was a pragmatist. There might not have been any events that really justified her betrayal, but she wasn't wrong in expecting that having allies might be in their best interest sooner rather than later. It never struck me as a bad play on her part.

Voyager is the fastest and most powerful ship in the DQ so far, why make an ally when you will have left them behind in a few months? I know we are going to see the Kazon Nistrim a lot in season 2 because Tom couldn't stop Voyager from going in loops for some reason, but logically there was little reason for Seska to do what she did. If they had showed the Kazon as a greater threat, or even bothered to show them at all after Caretaker, then State of Flux would have been almost perfect.


Faces (****)

This is a good character episode for B'Elanna and it has some interesting scenes. There's a particularly good scene where the Human and Klingon B'Elannas meet and talk about girl stuff like boys and lipstick and how to slowly sap all happiness from their significant other. Oh sorry, I meant they talked about the psychology of the two halves of her personality. I get those two things confused sometimes. There is also a really cool bit where the Vidiian rips off Durst's face and uses it as his own in order to attract Klingon B'Elanna. The Delta Quadrant truly is fucked up.

But this episode runs a bit too long and gets a little dull in places. It is a problem with the format of this sort of episode where main characters are captured and in need of rescue, and I see this problem in pretty much every TV show which has done an episode like this. We know that they are going to escape in the end (except for Durst who had a big target on his back) so you have to fill the hour with interesting scenes and characters. This episode clearly has some good scenes, but it also has some plodding scenes.

There is also that plot hole you could fly a plane through left by the fact that the Vidiians apparently have the ability to create entirely new people through magic, so why are they going about the galaxy murdering people? Any sympathy I had for the Vidiians in The Phage is completely erased by how stupid they seem to be.

Ultimately I think it is a good episode that needed a little more in order to be great.

[tomalak301]

Faces is my favorite episode of the season, right next to Caretaker. Great character development and just a great plot. I really wish sometimes the Vediians were more developed than the Kazon. They definitely were the most interesting Aliens we've seen in Voyager.

[Praetor]

GodBen, I completely agree with your assessment of this episode. It was a great opportunity to explore the idea of the 'dual self' embodied in B'Elanna and the actual setup (being captured, ZOMG! d00d, will they exscape?!) was far less important or interesting dramatically than the interaction of the two B'Elannas.

Also as you point out, this episode seeemed to diminish rather than enhance the Vidiians, so the secondary use of the episode should have actually been to have make them both more sympathetic and more repulsive (which the Durst face-stealing did a bit) rather than look stupid.

Personally, I imagine the Vidiians' magic cloning device, if used on one of them, would probably clone the Phage within them too. Their may have been dialogue that directly contradicted this that I'm not remembering, but it's my happy-place assumption for giving the poor bastards the benefit of the doubt.

[Tachyon]

I like Faces, too. Roxann did superb job in the episode.

[TheGodBen]

Praetor wrote:

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GodBen, I completely agree with your assessment of this episode.

One of these days we're going to disagree on an episode, and then I'm going to feel bad.


Jetrel (***½)

"If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst into the sky,
that would be like
the splendour of the Mighty One—
I am become Death, the shatterer of Worlds."
-Bhagavad Gita


There is a good scene in this episode where Neelix and Jetrel are talking about what happened in the aftermath of the Metreon Cascade and Jetrel explains that he would never be able to apologise for building the weapon so he never tried. I love James Sloyan, he also played Admiral Jarok in TNG's The Defector which is my favourite episode of that series. There's some great acting going on there and you really get the sense that this is a man haunted by what he has created. So the Oppenheimer quote came to mind (I play a lot of Civilization 4), and that led to me learning that he took it from sacred Hindu scripture. So I learned something new today.

I liked the episode very much, but there are problems with it. I shall now list them so as to prevent myself from making a very muddled paragraph.
1) While this is a very good use of the Neelix character, he is still annoying in some scenes.
2) Neelix/Kes doesn't work. It just doesn't, stop trying.
3) The dream sequence irritated me. It didn't add anything that we didn't already know and it looked goofy.
4) The idea that Neelix is blaming Jetrel for his own cowardice is silly and a cliché. The guy built a weapon that killed your family Neelix, I'm pretty sure that you are angry at him and not yourself.
5) We really didn't need Jetrel trying to deceive everybody into saving the colonists. It felt tacked on and distracted from the emotional character story they had been telling.

A good episode, some annoyances, some structural problems but ultimately it is the kind of show I enjoy.

[RAMA]

Voyager is my least favorite, but I've watched 30-40 random episodes recently and I still say it's best episodes rank very highly with all of ST. Even so probably half of seasons 1-3 are pretty mediocre or bad. Season 4 might be the best, and it picks up from there and is better than seasons 1-3.

The production values on Time and Again are off, but I LIKE the idea of a Starfleet ship being responsible for an inadvertent disaster.

RAMA

[Praetor]

GodBen wrote:

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One of these days we're going to disagree on an episode, and then I'm going to feel bad.

Well it won't be this day. I totally agree again.

This was another 'not quite' but is enjoyable nonetheless.

[Brolan]

DGCatAniSiri wrote:

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I think Phage should have been aired first after Caretaker - it's a good story that emphasizes the differences between the Alpha and Delta Quadrants, since if they were an Alpha Quadrant Alien of the Week, they could just petition for medical assistance from the Federation and recieve it, while in the Delta Quadrant, the species has to resort to organ piracy. It would have been a good hook, better than a technobabble plot, heavy on the characters or not.

And I also love Tom's 'we ate him because we are demons and I'm still hungry' bit. Never fails to amuse me.

This "organ piracy" never made any sense to me because of the huge plot hole this episode opened up. If you have the technology to scan, transport, and store organs you would also be able to copy the stored organs. If you can copy stored organs you don't have to run around the universe stealing them from everyone.

[Tachyon]

Being able to scan organs automatically means they can be also copied? Perhaps the scan used by Vidiians did not enable such a thing. Or perhaps it did, but the demand of billion individuals made it impossible to copy complex organs for all that needed them, since the phage did destroy them on the cellular level.

So for me there is not really an obvious plot hole there.

[TheGodBen]

Praetor wrote:

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Well it won't be this day. I totally agree again.

I might have to give Threshold a five star review just to assert my individuality.

[TheGodBen]

Learning Curve (*)

I hadn't seen this episode in years and went into it having no preconceptions or memories from it.

Worst episode of the season.

The story idea is good; Maquis crewmen need help fitting in. The execution is TERRIBLE. Firstly, crewman Dalby is completely in the right; Starfleet regulations don't apply out here and he shouldn't be chastised for trying to fix a problem before it gets worse. In order to make him seem like the bad guy they write him as a complete ass. However, the coveted GodBen Award for Greatest Ass of the Season™ goes to Tuvok for making people run for 10km without telling them that he turned up the gravity. If I was Dalby I would have taken off my backpack and used it to beat Tuvok to death.

Yes, I have anger issues.

This is not a Starfleet ship anymore! You are not in Starfleet, your crew is not Starfleet, your mission is not Starfleet. Why adhere to rules and regulations which don't apply anymore in your situation? The Enterprise was less rigid than this and they were the frakking flagship!

And I haven't even talked about the cheese plot yet. Let me sum it up; some lights start to flicker and to fix it they have 5 minutes of technobabble. I can't believe they didn't win an emmy for the writing in this episode.

This episode left such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to eat some jelly-worms to wash it out. True story.



I haven't borrowed season 2 yet so it might be a few days before my next episode. Try not to panic like last time. I'm planning to do some sort of season recap, and if you are really lucky it might just include a few graphs.

[TheGodBen]

GodBen wrote:

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GodBen Award for Greatest Ass of the Season™

This is not to be confused with the GodBen Award for Finest Ass of the Season™ which went to that chick in Ex Post Facto and would go on to be won by Chakotay for his ass' performance in Tattoo and later by Seven of Nine four seasons in a row.

[Praetor]

GodBen wrote:

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This is not to be confused with the GodBen Award for Finest Ass of the Season™ which went to that chick in Ex Post Facto and would go on to be won by Chakotay for his ass' performance in Tattoo and later by Seven of Nine four seasons in a row.

Agreed again () regarding 'Learning Curve.' While having a great premise, I've always thought that the opportunity here was for Tuvok to have learned from this experience, perhaps as well as the misfits learning a small 'lesson' of sorts - that lesson being that while Starfleet has something to offer in this situation the ship is in, that the predicament also requires some unconventional thinking.

I'm also agreed that the 'plot' was just bad cheese filler mixed with technobabble, really the laziest kind Trek has to offer. I think that substituted with a better plot, it should have bee the misfits who were ultimately able to solve the situation combined with Tuvok, thus illustrating the point of them both learning something.

[JustKate]

I didn't like this episode either (though I also liked the premise) - I didn't hate it, but goodness, it wak weak.

I think both sides needed to learn from each other, and we didn't get that, as far as I can remember. I know they are out in the middle of the DQ, but they still have to learn the Starfleet way because ...what else have they got? That Starfleet ship that they're on is the only piece of home they've got. What's Janeway supposed to do? Command it as though it's a Maquis ship? I don't think so.

But I agree that some of that discipline is just silly. The Bajoran ear cuff, for example - if Picard could let Ro wear hers, why couldn't Tuvok let it go?

And I agree that Tuvok could have learned some valuable lessons here, too. He was awfully...drill sergeanty.

Edit: Oh, and I meant to point out that not using the really interesting potential for Maquis-Starfleet conflict is one of the weaknesses of Voyager. They did some, but not nearly enough, particularly after Keska left. I didn't want a mutiny or anything, with dead bodies in the turbolifts, but some signs that people had to really work to work successfully together would have been very interesting and would have made the show different from other Trek.