A Semi-Hater Revisits Voyager

[Jimmy Bob]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

The man who brought you Threshold joins forces for the very first time with the man who brought you False Profits in order to bring you...

Future's End, Part 1 (**)

The episode itself is pleasant enough once it gets to 1996 Earth, although I would hardly consider it spectacular. If it wasn't for all the complaints I posted above I would probably give the episode 3.5 stars, but I feel that each of these complaints amounts to a half-star deduction because of how much they irritate me personally.

This two-parter episode will be the highlight of Season 3 for a while. It gets really really bad for a moment there. Personally I like it as a sort of timecapsule of 90's. TOS has one of the 60's and Enterprise one of the 00's - so I like the episodes because they allow one to compare these decades and how ST saw them. Nothing spectacular, but fun.

As Future's End is also not really over, so some irrelevant things. Ignore at will, but I can't get rest if I don't do this.

"When Janeway failed to chastise B'Elanna for her actions in the mess hall. When Janeway sympathised with B'Elanna's viewpoint and suggested that she take her case to one of the aliens before they leave the ship."

I didn't see Janeway as being supportive of B'Elanna, as she did say: "whatever the Anarians have done, it's not our problem." She was more like a experienced life-smart person would be around wanna-be Che Guevara. Some facepalms, some exaggerated sigh's, a suggestion that would allow the person to spread his truth in the least harmful way possible.

"I can't judge a group of people based off of experiences with one individual."

The episode's main focus was how a person can so easily kill the person she is in love with due to patriot acts and similar things. So I don't see the problem that the regressive-progressive thing was more in the background, as it was a personal approach from the oppressor's point of view - she killed her lover and then said it was good. To ease the conscience with lies.

"Would it have ruined the episode from your point of view if they had one lousy scene where B'Elanna went to see lover-boy in his home and saw how these people lived?"

No.

That doesn't make me wrong, it just means that I wanted something more than what we got. It failed to satisfy my demands.

I hope you understand, that that wrong wasn't meant as personal attack but as a joking jest.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I agree that the set up of Future's End tends to drag down the rest of the episode. Like Godben, I find it incredibly unilikely that Voyager could do something like this to a 29th century ship. Either 29th century tech ain't all that, or the pilot was no good.

I think Futures End is kind of fun though. I enjoy seeing the Voyager characters in (what was) a present day setting. There is no denying that Star Trek IV did the whole thing much better though, with much more humor. Ed Begley Jr. does a nice job as Starling.

You kind of have to turn off your brain to enjoy most Trek time travel episodes. They are so all over the place with their rules. I (for the most part) am able to enjoy the episode for what it is.

This is complete bias on my part, but Sarah Silverman really brings the episode down a bit for me. I just can't stand this woman, she is like nails on a chalkboard to me anytime I see her.

 

[Praetorian]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Even if there's an entity called "Federation" in the 29th century, it doesn't mean it's a direct continuation of the 24th Century UFP. Like for example the (Western) Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. For all we know the UFP was destroyed in the 25th century, constituting the beginning of a new Dark Age, that lasted until the 29th century when a new Federation appeared. This would also explain why the technology wasn't all that.
Of course this is merely speculation, even grasping a straws perhaps..but really..who knows? =P

All in all I thought Future's End was fun, even if somewhat ilogical. I rate it as enjoyable...

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

There is no woman more desirable than Sarah Silverman.

Enterprise might not have been lying to us Praetorian.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

^ The fall of and subsequent rebuilding of the Federation is quite possible.

But their tech WAS better. Using it Starling was able to create the mobile emitter for example which was far beyond what current Fed science could produce. The episode has many other examples of the superiority of 29th tech as well. Starling was able to use it to thwart the resources of an entire starship using it, at least for a time.

 

[Praetor]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

The things that I enjoyed about 'Future's End' were the irony of Voyager getting to Earth, only Earth of the 20th century, and then the bits with them actually being on 20th century Earth. Plus, I like Ed Begley Jr. and Sarah Silverman.

The rest - the setup and the problem - kind of hurt my head. As did the lack of Eugenics Wars.

 

[Count Zero]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Better example: Hollywood produes a film after film of the evil of Nazi's, letting everyone forget that America too had concentration camps in World War II, as it was the contemporary zeitgeist. Everyone had them, but giving the nazi's more spotlight gives us the chance to forget our own evils in WWII.

This was probably said in the heat of debate and isn't meant to be an accurate depiction of history, but I still feel I can't let it just pass. I assume you're referring to the American internment camps for Japanese Americans in your post. I don't want to diminish the plights of those people getting imprisoned for their ethnicity, it really doesn't compare to the German concentration camps. Those camps were built to facilitate genocide on an industrial level. In this, they were pretty much unique.

One thing which bugs me about Captain Braxton and his 29th century timeship is the dramatic implications this has for any future Star Trek series. We now know that the Federation will still be in existence in the 29th century, so any threat against the future of Earth or the human race is made less interesting because we know that everything will be okay. This was one of the big problems with the Xindi arc in Enterprise, and I honestly feel the Dominion War arc on DS9 suffered a little because Voyager had already confirmed that the Feds will win. This may seem like a really stupid thing to complain about, particularly within the context of Voyager, but it has bugged me for years.

Mmh, I never thought about it this way. While I can understand your concerns, I never had any doubts the Federation would win the Dominion War. Even if the Xindi arc hadn't played in Trek's past I'd never have doubted Earth's survival. Trek does have some constraints, you can't go all bleak, there always has to be hope and optimism. This goes for other shows, too.

 

[StarryEyed]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I'm not going to comment on GodBen's rating because I always thought is was ridiculous to rate parts of episodes. It may have been aired in two parts but it's ONE story.

I thoroughly enjoyed Future's End but I agree that Voyager escaping Braxton is a tremendous plot hole. If a sane and competent Braxton wanted to use a 29nth century temporal weapon to destroy Voyager, they would have been destroyed. Period. GodBen's analogy is poor. It would be more like a hot-air balloon going against an F22. The F22 pilot would have to have a complete mental breakdown at the time of the encounter and bring about his own destruction.

It's sloppy, calous writing like this that reduced Voyager's quality below that of the series that came before - and there's no excuse for it. It wouldn't have taken much to come up with a believable way for Voyager to end up in the 20th century. This show was watched by geeky, tech-savy, science-savy people and we notice stuff like this and are REALLY bugged by it. The writers either didn't understand this or they didn't care.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

The rest - the setup and the problem - kind of hurt my head. As did the lack of Eugenics Wars.

Look very carefully at Raines office next time you watch the episode and you may be pleasantly surprised to discover a model of a DY-500 Class Sleeper Ship, the same as Khan used to escape Earth in 1996 after he finally lost control of South East Asia.

Rhane and Shannon from VOY: 11.59 both provide a noticeable presence in Greg Cox's Eugenics War Novels. Unfortunately he completed the manuscript a couple years before ENT Carbon Creek.

 

[Praetor]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I actually have read Cox's books, and they do help tie up the loose ends nicely. It just seemed weird to me that it didn't even get a mention besides the model's appearance...

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

America's homefront at war is not what it used to be from what I've learnt about WWII from old movies. Right now looking out your window, what proof do you have that there's 180,000ish US soldiers policing and maintaining order in Iraq?

But then America has been constantly involved in little wars across the world since they lost in Viet Nam to attempt to prove that that wrinkle was an aberration. The machine has to be fed you understand.

Archer said his grandfather was fighting the Eugenics War in South Africa.... I hadn't considered the implications of this before. Full grown adult soldier boys in the early nineties would have been built/manipulated by the South African state of the 60s and 70s... Crikey. I mean the ruling class whites were outnumbered 10 to one under the Apartheid system, so no wonder the crackers in charge tried to level the playing field by making sure that the next generation of whites were ten times smarter and ten times stronger than the blacks.

Hmmm?

ARCHER: My great grandfather was in North Africa during the Eugenics Wars. His battalion was evacuating civilians from a war zone when they came under attack. There was a school full of children directly between them and the enemy. If his men had returned fire, they might have hit it. So he called the commander on the other side, and got him to agree to hold his fire long enough to evacuate the school. There are rules, Trip, even in war. We have to help these children.

Never mind.


And like Greg supposed, it could have been a secret war.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I thought Janeway had a line about how the Eugenics Wars SHOULD be in full swing, but aren't, which is one of their clues of there being major temporal hijinks ensuing.

Then again, like I've said before, I haven't seen the majority of Season 3's episodes for years.

 

[Praetor]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

If Janeway did have such a line, I would have enjoyed it.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Yeah, I just checked Memory Alpha, which comments that there is no comment. Darn my faulty memory. *sigh*

Though this was the year that DS9 mistakenly placed the Eugenics Wars two centuries later, so maybe it's a problem amongst the entire Star Trek department, not just Voyager.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

You might be thinking about her comments on the computer revolution, or when she and Chakotay were comparing what they knew about their families form this point in history and Janeway says she knows nothing about her family at this point in history despite 11.59.

O'Brien had a line when he was wandering through time looking for his lost crewmates about the earths past "i know earths History was pretty bad, but it was never that bad."

Ignoring the war saved the props department and locations budget thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars... So where did the money go?

 

[The Grim Ghost]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

They were only in one city. A large important city sure, but still just one. For all we know 25% of the Earth could have been involved in the EW at the time. Or a small scale secret war could have been happening.

I personally don't hear comments on the ongoing war we are involved in on a daily basis unless I watch television or make an effort to.

Guy's points about looking out the window and not seeing any evidence of what's going on now is a good one. The sleeper ship model was more than enough, and I'm surprised they even put that in. Voyager haters, put that in your pipe and smoke it! Occasionally they put some thought into these things. Drawing more attention to it would have made me wonder why they didn't just do an entire episode around it.

 

[Praetor]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Drawing more attention to it would have made me wonder why they didn't just do an entire episode around it.

That's a very good point.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I just assumed that the writers didn't say that it was going to be there in their script, who were the producers, so it was either the director or someone in the prop department (goodness knows how far down the chain of command?) just using their initiative?

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Hmm.

I was just thinking while I was doing the dishes about those hypothetical South African apartheidists stocking for the Eugenics war... If they are the overmasters, ain't they already perfect? But what they really needed was a black (keeping in tune with the topical bigotry) workforce ten times stronger than a regular person (or ever further ten times stronger than a superman) but 1/2 as smart so that they would be very very easy to control like a herd animal. Which is just a civil war waiting to happen if the uber super human mules keeping the economy running are too stupid to forecast the consequences of their actions when they rebel that they could make some truly diabolical choices in trying to gain their freedom starting with the politics of Ghangus Khan, and then they just start moving, expanding their empire into the north...

Meanwhile if they'd made the Apartheid trumpeting overmasters ten times smarter, and perhaps their ego would be proportionately (according to Archer this is true anyway.) larger that they would think that they had the right to control 10 times as many black people as they already do within the borders of South Africa, and that they'd probably have the cunning and booksmarts to pull off such a question of social politics that an even more disproportionate prol to Superman overclass ratio would be possible, ergo they'd start moving, expanding their empire into the North too.

 

[Tomalak]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I think it's a pretty good episode, very much in the spirit of various TOS episodes, and of course Star Trek IV, though the plot is basically illogical, as most time-travel shows are.

It's just an excuse for some nice gags and action set-pieces - Voyager becomes a UFO on the news, 29th century man becomes a crazy dude living out of rubbish bins, Janeway wears a white trouser suit, Tuvok is the butt of all the jokes, and the Doctor gets out of sickbay.

The problem with going back to our Earth is that it quickly looks very dated, and actually very silly. Star Trek usually works better going to our recent past or the near future; Future's End is very nineties, just as The Voyage Home is very eighties. On the other hand, something like Time's Arrow still works well enough, and Past Tense is an often overlooked gem.

It never threatens to become especially profound, but it's decent fluff.

The things that I enjoyed about 'Future's End' were the irony of Voyager getting to Earth, only Earth of the 20th century

I was just shouting "Do the slingshot!" If Kirk can do it in a Bird of Prey a century earlier, surely Voyager could have managed it?

Problem solved.

Though this was the year that DS9 mistakenly placed the Eugenics Wars two centuries later, so maybe it's a problem amongst the entire Star Trek department, not just Voyager.

In the DS9 Companion, Ron Moore admits that was a mistake on his part - he was thinking of Khan's line in TWOK: "Two hundred years ago, I was a prince...", which is itself wrong.

Admiral Bennett just doesn't know his history very well.