Jonathan Frakes: "TATV an unpleasent memory"

A turkey is still a turkey.

But as all Thanksgiving afficionadoes know...some turkeys are much bigger than others.

 

I can at least laugh at episodes like Threshold and Spock's Brain. TATV gives me no joy.

 

Even "The Way to Eden(TOS)" offered twice the sheer entertainment value of "TATV." Perhaps more. Some episodes that are ranked as bombs and turkeys might have stunk, but they didn't rally the entire fanbase behind them in scorn. And none of the others were much-hyped series finales either.

 

It managed to do what was thought impossible.

It was a worse series finale than Voyager's.

 

VOYAGER's finale wasn't that bad, really. "Endgame" rehashed the tired, worn time travel-to-change-history-for-the-better bit and we didn't really need to see the Borg again so soon...especially after the series effectively defanged the Collective and made it seem so much less threatening than it was in TNG and FIRST CONTACT...but I liked it overall. A nice sendoff to a show that was notoriously disappointing.

 

Endgame wouldn't have been so bad if they had just not cut to the credits literally five seconds after they got home.

But, of course, I think they should have used the Caretaker's mate instead of the Borg in the finale.

 

Yeah, that was "Endgame"'s weakest point. We didn't get to see Voyager *actually* return to Earth. It was a bit of an emotional experience to see the ship nestled in a flotilla of its fellow Starfleet vessels...being escorted back home like a lost duckling. But it ended after just a few seconds and we got no reward of seeing Earth respond to the ship's return after almost a decade on the other side of the galaxy. The scene was missing a human touch.

 

I've heard people say "well, we saw what the characters would have done at the beginning of the episode." To me, that just doesn't cut it. An alternate timeline is one thing, but the timeline has obviously changed by the end of the episode.

What are Seven and Chokatay going to do, now that they're not, you know, DEAD!? What's Tuvok going to do now that his mental illness will be cured? What's Janeway going to do now that she doesn't have to devote her life to changing the past?

A human touch is exactly what it needed. Five minutes of closure is all the episode required.

 

Endgame was fine the way it was.

 

"Endgame"'s main failing was in wasting time with Tuvok going nuts and not playing up the stakes enough to justify Admiral Janeway's actions.

Have the Federation on the verge of collapse because of the Borg, and somebody mention how they could've crippled the Borg all those years ago "if only we'd taken out that transwarp hub," and now you have a legitimate reason for Janeway to take a battering ram to the Temporal Prime Directive.

 

Yeah. Fair enough.

But it was still a lot better than "TATV." And for a VOYAGER episode that can really be saying something.

 

I didn't mind "These Are the Voyages," but I'm not an Enterprise fan. I can understand why it would cheese off a fan of the show.

 

Personally, I've always thought that Endgame should have started with The Voyager getting home instead of ending with it. The phony homecoming in the altered timeline doesn't count. And then deal with the fallout of that.

For one thing, Paris never finished his prison term, Chakotay and Torres were both Maquis on the run when the show started, and that should have been addressed.The point being that just because the Voyager crew forgave and forgot (they had to in order to survive), doesn't mean that Starfleet is going to.

As a Borg Drone, Seven would have been made to answer for the Collective's crimes. The Doctor's program had been enhanced over and over again. Starfleet Medical would have wanted to bring him in and study him.

Of the crew, only Janeway, Tuvok, and Kim did not have something to answer for, so the episode should have been about them trying to get their friends out of trouble after the ship got home in the first ten minutes.

 

I had another issue with the VOY finale. They returned home after being lost for seven years. And yet many of their experiences occurred over the course of days, weeks or even months (Year of Hell anybody?).

 

No. Seven was a victim of the Borg, just as Picard was. ALL drones are victims.

 

I would tend to agree, although I don't think Spock's Brain is the worst of TOS.

 

Well, "Year of Hell" occurred in an alternate timeline that was excised and restored to normal when Janeway sacrificed herself and Voyager to destroy Annorax's temporal warship. So that doesn't really bother me. VOYAGER had a plethora of other problems to worry about...like the ship's seemingly endless supply of shuttlecraft and photon torpedoes.

 

Tell that to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 folks.

 

Has TATV been on MST3K?? Hyperbole and deflection much??

 

"Will Riker: The Holodeck of Fate"

Starring a Deanna Troi with enormous knobby knees who keeps repeating the line "The Master does not approve of this holoprogram!"