A Semi-Hater Revisits Voyager

[The Grim Ghost]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I just don't buy 11:59. I found the sentimentality forced and the story to be duller than dirt. Half a star from me on this one.

 

[PolloCaballo]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

11:59 *snooze*

I’m of the exact opposite opinion of Ben’s . . . or shall I call you The Hater Formally Known As Steve?

As a standalone story by itself, 11:59 was fine for all the reasons you mentioned. Nothing wrong with the production or acting. But as a Voyager ep, or even a Star Trek ep for that matter, it stunk.

For someone who normally grades as strictly as you do, I have to wonder what happened to your standard of not liking any episode that doesn’t make use of Voyager’s lost-in-the-Delta-Quadrant premise? What happened to your deducting half a star for any ep they could have done on TNG?

I’d give it 1.5 stars out of 5 for the character moments mentioned. The closing scene in the mess hall was nice, but that’s about it.

 

[Tachyon]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

11:59 ---> *


Snoozefest. An okay story, but it had only little to do with Trek. And therefore I was bored.

 

[NumberSix]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I have to agree with the haters of this episode, bored me to tears. I actually fell asleep -twice- watching it, and after forcing myself to stay awake, wished there was a 'delete' button on the dvd. The only part I liked was the Voyager "family portrait" at the end.

 

[Tachyon]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

The only part I liked was the Voyager "family portrait" at the end.

That and Neelix/Seven moment in mess hall. Sven Buttercup made me lol.

 

[Seven of Five]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

'11:59' was a nice little episode, I just didn't find myself overly enthralled with Shannon's plight. This episode sits alongside 'Far Beyond The Stars' and 'Carbon Creek' as shows that deal with castmembers appearing in our past as a different characters. Which is almost interesting!

3/5, above average, just about.

 

[happydave]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

JANEWAY: I don't know what my relatives were doing this far back in history.

OMG itz da suxor!!! This continuity error has raped my childhood!

Seriously, I'm not going to let a random line from a "fun" episode like Future's End ruin my enjoyment of 11:59. You're going to have to look for gross negativity elsewhere, perhaps my review of Coda...

I found Voyager (and its continuity) much more fun if you view the show as individual stories rather than a continual arc (like DS9). Sure on occasion things like this pop up, but I prefer to just enjoy the episode's story (as flawed as it may be).

To draw the comparison back to The Original Series, (especially in the beginning) you get all little continuity errors (Spacefleet rather than Starfleet) but again it became a loved show despite this as people looked past it at the characters / stories rather than continuity.

And that's how I like to view VOY/TOS.

Personally I like VOY, it works really nicely as action episodes and some character episodes. But it seems they do like they do stretch the show to fit the plot in. It's fun, it's watchable, it's enjoyable, it's Voyager. And I think the people who do nitpick are ruining a fun show for themselves.

I must say, I do enjoy this thread.

 

[TheGodBen]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I’m of the exact opposite opinion of Ben’s . . . or shall I call you The Hater Formally Known As Steve?

I think The Hater Never Known As Steve might be a more accurate moniker.

As a standalone story by itself, 11:59 was fine for all the reasons you mentioned. Nothing wrong with the production or acting. But as a Voyager ep, or even a Star Trek ep for that matter, it stunk.

There was an episode in the fourth season of The West Wing called The Long Goodbye where CJ goes home to her school reunion and has to deal with her father's Alzheimer's. While it is a very well made episode it is often considered to be one of the worst episodes of the show because it doesn't feel like a West Wing episode; no politics, only two main characters appear and it wasn't written by Aaron Sorkin (who wrote almost every episode of the first four seasons).

In contrast 11:59 includes the whole Voyager cast, it was written by long-time contributor Joe Menosky and it tells a tale which feels like a Star Trek episode to me. The Shannon O'Donnell story fits within the larger story of Janeway's hero worship and it directly contrasts the myth which Janeway has believed her whole life. Star Trek is about more than spaceships and aliens, and in my opinion I think this is the type of story which could only be told within Star Trek.

For someone who normally grades as strictly as you do, I have to wonder what happened to your standard of not liking any episode that doesn’t make use of Voyager’s lost-in-the-Delta-Quadrant premise? What happened to your deducting half a star for any ep they could have done on TNG?

That's a valid concern, I haven't been paying too much attention to that since season four and I have no doubt that one or two episodes slipped my judgement on this. However, this does feel like a Voyager episode to me, I can't imagine a similar story about Picard. I'm probably basing this on how much screen time Kate Mulgrew had in this episode, but I can't imagine this episode on TNG.

 

[Alex1939]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I found Voyager (and its continuity) much more fun if you view the show as individual stories rather than a continual arc (like DS9). Sure on occasion things like this pop up, but I prefer to just enjoy the episode's story (as flawed as it may be).

Personally I like VOY, it works really nicely as action episodes and some character episodes. But it seems they do like they do stretch the show to fit the plot in. It's fun, it's watchable, it's enjoyable, it's Voyager. And I think the people who do nitpick are ruining a fun show for themselves.

This attitude annoys me. I didn't like the show only because I chose to nitpick it?

I like 4 Star Trek shows, I have no reason to try and not like a show. I like Enterprise and it's flaws can easily be nitpicked, but you know I still enjoyed much of it.


I don't like Voyager because I don't find it fun, or enjoyable. No longer will something with the "Star Trek" name automatically be "watchable" for me. And the action which works for you, does not work for me. It's too cliche.

And considering it's a given that Voyager was not going to get blown up in a regular episode, it's hard to take any action or "grave situation" with much seriousness. Particularly when there are no consequences when Voyager does take severe damage.



What really annoys me is I really like a select few Voyager episodes. It pisses me off because you can see what a great consistent show it could've been, if those in charge actually cared about what they were doing.

 

[Tachyon]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

^Relax dude. It's quite alright.

 

[TheGodBen]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

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.

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]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

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]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

"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]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

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]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

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]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

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]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

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]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

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]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

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]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

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".