Observations, rewatching Season 1 for first time in a while

Waching The Gift like "But Captain, don't you remember? You always knew I was going to leave and then come back and try to kill you all, that's why we made that recording!"

 

I always find the first two seasons to be surprisingly enjoyable, particularly Season 2, with the "Dynamic Duo" Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor at the helm. Season 2 has the tightest continuity and largest cast of recurring characters that the show would forget even exists in later years.
Season 3, with Taylor flying solo, however, was mostly bland and forgettable, and they knew it, what with the massive ratings drop requiring a "soft" reboot for Season 4.
Seasons 4 and 5 are pretty strong. The dialogue and scripts are certainly the best here.
However, Season 6 completely falls off the rails after "Equinox, Part II". To me, this is the point where the writers and producers simply stopped caring, but knew they were guaranteed two more seasons, so they just coasted until it was over. Some downright bad but also highly offensive episodes are contained in Season 6: Spirit Folk, Fury, Tsunkatse, among others. Continuity no longer exists. Characters and themes show up that are completely dropped by the next episode.
Season 7 tries to salvage it somewhat, but only through weak attempts at fan service for shows that aren't Voyager, and then it comes to an end in a finale that feels like it was written in under a minute.

 

I liked parts of the 1st & 2nd seasons, but really couldn't stand the Kazon characters. Their time with the Voyager crew dragged on painfully too long. I was glad when they were finally left behind.

I do agree that Season 3 had some really dull and bland episodes, and that Season 4 was a good "shot in the arm" for the series. Yeah, there were some really silly and poorly thought out episodes in Season 6 but I wouldn't call it a complete disaster. Season 7 was better, but I was also let down by the lack of a real "coda" episode, that lets us see what happens to the crew once they settle in. That "alternative future" is a weak attempt at that. We all know it doesn't become the real ending once time is changed by Admiral Janeway.

 

Last time I watched through I felt seasons 5 and 6 were a big writing improvement.

When the show originally aired I nearly quit in season 3. Several episodes in the middle I didn’t see until much later.

This is only my second time watching through since 2001 so a lot more is outside my memory than TNG and DS9.

 

Day of Honor: "Captain, as a Borg I am unaccustomed to deception."
(What Janeway could have said): "Didn't you just lie to us about starting the conflict with 8472 and then lie about allowing us free passage the moment the threat was over?"

 

"The Gift" is a horrible episode.

 

Scientific Method:

These guys left abruptly in a hurry. So, some of the crew still have invisible equipment hanging off them. Hopefully they carefully screened every crew member or else that equipment might still be there.

I like this episode overall but I wish they picked better odds than 1/20 at the end. It makes their survival seem too TV-convenient. Like making it too transparent it’s the plot shields that saved them.

 

There’s subtle things in Voyager that give away the writers forget sometimes that Voyager isn’t TNG.

In Year Of Hell, Tuvok reports two crew members died. Janeway doesn’t immediately ask who.

It would have been nice if they tried to square this more with Before & After. Kes or no Kes, why did they forget the temporal variance they JUST used to pull Kes back a year ago? Even if Janeway told her not to say anything, did nobody think “Hey, this may be what triggered Kes going back in time, and she told us the temporal variance!”

B&A and Year Of Hell are individually great episodes but together it seems lazy they just gave the crew amnesia about the former in the latter.

 

Before and After is one of my favourite VOY episodes! It does hurt that ultimately they got rid of Kes instead of Harry. I mean she wasn't the strongest character by a long shot, but she had more potential than Mr. Kim. Surely they could have had Seven and Kes in an ideal world? Meh.

I always liked the first couple of seasons more than the third. I think S1 is better than S2, though those two seasons had much tighter continuity, and the cast were generally getting a mix of stories. It's a shame that the Kazon/Paris/Neelix arc was botched in the end as that was fun to watch play out. S2 is also has a few dodgy episodes in the mix. Taylor/Piller was obviously the best mix for me.

S3 kind of exists in a vacuum. I think the writers were trying their best but were obviously struggling, until the last third or so of the season. Taylor alone seems to miss Piller, which I always think in S7 of TNG, though again there was end-of-the-series fatigue, DS9 also being run at the same time, and VOY getting up and running at the same time. And that's before Generations is even mentioned.

S4 and S5 were the most consistently written, though continuity, on the whole, was out of the window by this point. I remember getting a third, or maybe halfway into S6 before I though no-one was in the writers room anymore. It ended with such a whimper.

S7 is one you either love or hate, and I think it depends on how much you like Seven, the Doctor and Torres/Paris. Luckily for me, I like them all, so I enjoy it enough, especially since the continuity was suddenly a bit tighter again. Just a bit though. Episode quality was still hit and miss, and Endgame was pretty terrible obviously.

Sometimes I pretend to imagine what would have happened if VOY had never been on a network, and also hadn't had the turnover in writing staff.

 

I'm currently watching both Voyager and Orange Is The New Black.

And it's making me read Red into Janeway.

Just got through Random Thoughts. Interesting idea but mediocre episode in execution.

 

Anorax had been "fixing" the timeline for 200 (relative) years.

That's thousands of incursions.

So in some versions of the timeline, Before and After happened, and they knew the torpedoes variance, and in other versions of the timeline, they did not.

Anorax is not the local Krenim.

His Imperium was from thousands of incursions ago, a completely different place physically, so whoever the current people are in charge of the Krenim are, they have no idea about Anorax or what he is doing to time, and to the Krenim, and their neighbours.

If Janeway doesn't get her ass kicked, to the point that the only way to survive is to invent temporal shields then time is reset and jiggled, until a newer version of Janeway or no Janeway at all (Captain Chakotay!) comes face to face with Krenim Border Security "again".

In any timeline where Before and After happened, Janeway goes "around" Krenim Space. They kill her. They kill a lot of other crewmen. The ship gets frakked. Why wouldn't she go around, if she was aware of what will happen if she crosses the Border into Krenim Space?

If Janeway goes around Krenim Space, then she doesn't fight the Krenim, and doesn't invent temporal shields, and doesn't fight Anorax, and doesn't beat Anorax, so an unbeaten Anorax jiggles time, and then a new Janeway has to decide if she wants to go into the Imperium or not.

 

personally I find season 2 slightly better than season 1. I find most of the episodes in season 2 highly enjoyable and entertaining.

As for season 3, I like that one too but it had more bum episodes than season 1 and 2. It was like thew writers lost direction after the Kazon dissapeared as main villain. They couldn't come up with enough good ideas.

Season 4 and 5 were too much Seven and too much Borg. Not to mention that those seasons did lack something important.

Season 6 was horrible. Not only for the most insulting crap episode in the whole history of TV series but also for the same scenario as season 4 and 5 plus the fact that it looked like those in charge had already abandoned Voyager and started planning for their new pet project "Enterprise".

I never watched season 7 for obvious reasons. The only episode I watched was "Endgame" which was downright horrible.

 

Not sure I buy that explanation that the incursion wiped out Before & After. Unless you want to go the smart-alecky route and explain the lack of continuity with incursions and say no episode happened in any other episode's timeline.

Lazy writing is a better explanation. Hell, in any future where Kes didn't leave, they shouldn't have gotten the 10,000 ly bump from Kes leaving and even gotten to Krenim space.

It wouldn't have been that difficult to tell the same story with Before & After acknowledged.

Janeway "The Krenim, my God, they are the ones that terrorized us in the future that Kes saw! Take us out of Krenim space!"
Chakotay "Too late, we're under pursuit."
Tuvok "Captain, Kes brought back the temporal variance of their torpedoes from the future. Perhaps we can use that knowledge to design a form of temporal shielding."
Janeway "Do it!"

There, basically the same story, acknowledging B&A exists, and I came up with it in thirty seconds of spitballing. The writers had weeks.

 

I doubt the writers ever had "weeks." to come up with and write stories.

Are the stardates the same in both episodes? Voyager was going to encounter the Krenim either way.

"Lazy writing" is a lazy explanation any time.

 

At the end of the episode Janeway was kindly asked to go around Krenim space by a friendly face, so she went around Krenim space.

At the beginning of the episode Janeway was ordered and threatened by an angry face to go around Krenim space, and she didn't.

Janeway doesn't like being told what to do, but going through or around did not amount to a hill made of beans either way.

 

Concering Flight is an episode I usually skip. I watched it this time. I just really hate the way they portray their Leonardo Davinci character.

It's totally believable that if somebody designed a Davinci character in a holodeck program they'd know that their audience doesn't want a realistic Leonardo Davinci who seems like a man who lived in the 15th century. Somebody who flatters the 24th century way of looking at things and accepts all 24th century social touchstones, just like you'd expect Davinci to appear in a network TV show. But the way Janeway buys into it and seems to think that is really how Leonardo Davinci would talk, and regard women makes her seem kind of full of herself. Like she is writing herself as a Mary Sue in her own Leonardo Davinci fanfic.

 

Maybe Janeway wrote that program herself, so he is her idealized version of Da Vinci. Speaking of Da Vinci, a more interesting holonovel for Janeway to act out would have been Indiana Jones.

 

In Mortal Coil they introduce a death cure they totally forget later. I love how the entire universe just collectively agrees all death cures are one use only.

The Kazon comment gets me thinking about species numbering. Does 8472 imply that the Borg know of approximately 8472 sentient species as recently as they discovered 8472? Is that a canonical approximate numbering of sentient species in the galaxy?

 

I think it's pretty consistent that Borg nanotechnology can revive dead tissue. I know it's been mentioned in other episodes. And yes, it is a way to revive some people after death in certain conditions, but even before this, they could revive people from death past the point where we could today.

I don't know if they would have had an opportunity to use this again anyway, because hardly anyone dies after Mortal Coil.

 

Tons of people die. They're just not main characters. Lindsay Ballard, Carey, the one Doc chose to let die instead of Kim.