A Semi-Hater Revisits Voyager

[Seven of Five]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

'Tinker, Tenor' was Voyager's best comedy episode, and ranks up there with the best Trek comedies. The Doctor's dream about B'Elanna, Seven and Janeway coming onto him in that meeting was hilarious, as was the computer suddenly gaining a bit of sentience. 'Last chance to be a hero Doctor. Get going!' (RIP Majel.) 4.5/5

'Alice' was rather disappointing coming off the first four episodes. Chakotay's comment about the full complement of shuttles had me lol-ing. Tom's character development is severly lacking, though his scenes with B'Elanna at the start are nice. It all delves into dull, silly nonesense - the malevolent Alice is particularly shite. 2.5/5

And what's next? Riddles? Oh dear, more missed opportunites.

 

[JustKate]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I'd think it was funny, but I've been married, like, forever. Or maybe I'm abnormally non-jealous/non-possessive?

Maybe I'm just unlucky then, the women I've been with tend to get jealous if I even email another woman. If I named my car after a prior infatuation I would fully expect to find it as a burned-out wreck the next morning.

Well, but of course you're young (at least you seem so to me), so your prior infatuations aren't all that far in the past. Maybe that makes a difference. I mean, it would be absurd for me to be jealous of somebody from before we were married. It was in the previous century, for goodness' sake, and not all that near the end of the previous century, either.

I do know people who would be, though, but they are...well, nuts. There's another possibility for you.

 

[TheGodBen]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

So you're saying that my strange and potentially insane behaviour means I attract strange and potentially insane women?

Goodo, they're my favourite kind!


Riddles (*½)

NAROQ: Captain, I don't blame you for finding my theories a bit eccentric, I'm used to it. It's why I'm still a deputy investigator, but I've brought equipment to help your investigation. Let me examine Commander Tuvok and run scans on the vessel where he was attacked, I may finally be able to prove my theories!

There are many reason why I don't like this character, but that line sums it up for me. If I was captain of Voyager then I'd tell him to go home and ask the government to send a competent investigator instead. But no, lets make the insane conspiracy nut right.

I know some think that Neelix and Tuvok had a Spock/McCoy thing going on, but I never bought into that because McCoy was awesome and Neelix is less than awesome. When McCoy antagonised Spock it was normally based out of philosophical differences not because he's a twonk, and then Spock would half join in so that the audience could know that he was enjoying the discourse. Neelix seems to pick on Tuvok because he is different, and Tuvok genuinely seems to want Neelix to go away. It was a joy to watch Spock and McCoy antagonising each other, for me it is a chore to watch Neelix antagonising Tuvok, it's like watching one man slowly destroy another's soul because he thinks it's a laugh.

That's my fundamental problem with Riddles; I don't want Tuvok and Neelix to become friends, I want Neelix to learn to leave Tuvok alone.

Then there is stuff about aliens and cloaking devices and that stupid investigator guy, none of which made much of an impact.

 

[startrekwatcher]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I liked Riddles. It gets 3 stars from me.

Normally I can't stand Neelix or Tuvok. The former is quite annoying and the latter is an unlikeable prick but surprisingly this episode manages to make them both quite pleasant to watch both individually and together. This is a VOY episode with a lot of nice touching character moments.

I also thought the aliens were neat.

 

[Dane_Whitman]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I liked Riddles. It gets 3 stars from me.

Normally I can't stand Neelix or Tuvok. The former is quite annoying and the latter is an unlikeable prick but surprisingly this episode manages to make them both quite pleasant to watch both individually and together. This is a VOY episode with a lot of nice touching character moments.

I also thought the aliens were neat.

I agree. One other thing I like about Riddles is Tim Russ availing himself of the opportunity to act beyond the rigid Vulcan exterior.

 

[Furtados_Feet]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Riddles (*½)

NAROQ: Captain, I don't blame you for finding my theories a bit eccentric, I'm used to it. It's why I'm still a deputy investigator, but I've brought equipment to help your investigation. Let me examine Commander Tuvok and run scans on the vessel where he was attacked, I may finally be able to prove my theories!

There are many reason why I don't like this character, but that line sums it up for me. If I was captain of Voyager then I'd tell him to go home and ask the government to send a competent investigator instead. But no, lets make the insane conspiracy nut right.

You're really grasping at straws to find reasons to dislike episodes now.
Janeway didn't have all year to spend time dealing with the bureaucracy of some alien world, she wanted to find out what was wrong with Tuvok, cure him and be on their way. You're forgetting that this captain has seen a lot of things and what might seem like a crazy conspiracy theory to a load of government bureaucrats will seem perfectly likely to her. There was nothing unrealistic about this exchange at all and I happened to love this investigation/mysterious enemy plot.
Unfortunately the Neelix/Tuvok plot made me cringe a bit, but overall the episode was OK.

 

[Tachyon]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Riddles is one of my favorites. I would easily hit it with ****. Tim and Ethan did great and the story was touching while there was the scifi component there as well.

 

[TheGodBen]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

You're really grasping at straws to find reasons to dislike episodes now.

When wasn't I?

You're forgetting that this captain has seen a lot of things and what might seem like a crazy conspiracy theory to a load of government bureaucrats will seem perfectly likely to her. There was nothing unrealistic about this exchange at all and I happened to love this investigation/mysterious enemy plot.

That's not my problem with that line, my problem is that the investigator makes it clear that he is starting his investigation with a preconceived notion as to what is to blame and he wants to work on the case in order to find evidence to back up his beliefs. He is not a reliable investigator because he is starting from a prejudiced position and is likely to overlook or ignore evidence which doesn't fit into his pet theory. For that reason I would want to get rid of that investigator and ask for someone who will follow the evidence towards a conclusion and not the other way round, and my problem with the conspiracy nut being right is that it justified his methodology rather than condemning it.

I don't dislike the guy because he is a conspiracy nut, I dislike the guy because I fundamentally oppose his way of doing things.

 

[Frazzled]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Riddles is one of my favorites. I would easily hit it with ****. Tim and Ethan did great and the story was touching while there was the scifi component there as well.

I agree that it was well acted but I found it a bit naff. Examining the Tuvok/Neelix relationship yet again felt a bit like flogging a dead horse to me.

I vastly preferred it to the previous 3 episodes though! I nearly gave up on season 6 after Alice. It gets much better later I think.

 

[Furtados_Feet]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Tuvok acting like some kind of child made me cringe. I generally find it pretty cringeworthy when characters act out of type, Data is "Masks" is the champ here, I nearly threw up watching that.

 

[Seven of Five]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Riddles was sort of good in the areas of Neelix's concern for poor Tuvie, and of course, Tim Russ's acting. Aside from that though, there's just a lacklustre side plot and and a very bad reset to end. All in all, very disappointing. 2/5

And for me now, I'm sure it's here where Voyager seems to flip between a bad episode and a good episode from one week to the next.

 

[TheGodBen]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Dragon's Teeth (***½)

This is a good idea for an episode that works most of the way through and then falls apart about ten minutes from the end when the whole thing turns into an action-filled mess. The episode begins by copying a concept from an earlier Voyager episode (The Thaw) but rather that go the evil clown route this episode decides to stick with the idea of a race trying to rebuild itself after nearly being wiped out in a war. This is Voyager, so of course the aliens are going to end up being evil, but I don't mind that this time because the way the crew uncovers the violent history of the Vaadwawr feels natural.

Then the aliens turn super-evil and start attacking Voyager, the bad aliens from the start turn good, Voyager starts to fall from the sky twice for some reason, Gedrin decides to assist in the potential wiping out of his whole race for no reason, Tuvok beams down to the planet and never beams back, and stuff gets blowed up real good. I would say that this sequence was rushed, but it lasted around 7 or 8 minutes so it really shouldn't have been, the whole thing was just unnecessarily complicated and paced really, really badly.

What this episode does well is give Voyager a sense of scope it normally doesn't have, this episode feels like it is playing out on a bigger stage than most episodes of Voyager do. So, even though it falls completely apart in the final ten minutes, I still admired what this episode was up until that point.

Amazingly, they only fired one torpedo in this episode that I noticed, it's incredible considering all the effects shots and they way they've been using the things lately.

Torpedoes: 61/38

PARIS: Direct hit to the port thrusters. We're losing altitude.
JANEWAY: Reroute emergency power, we need to get into orbit.

Here's a practical experiment that you can try at home. If you are using a desktop computer then get a small explosive, strap it to the side of your computer and set it off. If you don't have any explosives handy then get something heavy and start battering your computer until it breaks down. Now unplug your computer from the socket it was in and plug it into a different socket. Congratulations, your computer will now be working!

What sort of qualification did the science advisers to this show have, a degree in music theory?

 

[startrekwatcher]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Dragon's Teeth gets 3 stars from me out of 4.

Really my only problem with it was the fact that it definitely feels like this is going to turn out to be the first part of a two-parter given the flow except it decides in the last 10 minutes to go from an entertaining set-up to an abbreviated wrap-up of the preceding 50 minutes. So before shaking things up they scuttle them because the episode has to end. So it really can't do justice to all the potentially interesting threads it introduces. To be fair though the writers admitted this was suppose to be one of those telefilms like "The Killing Game" and "Dark Frontier" but something came up where they had to change their minds.

I liked the Vaadwauar. I liked the idea behind them. I liked the way the ensemble was used. Loved the FX, the exciting battle sequences at the end.

 

[Praetor]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Okay, time to play catchup.

I don't see how that would have added to the episodes on this season, really; what would have been the additional value of doing such a thing.

Two reasons; 1) the introduction of the Dominion was made more interesting because of how it was foreshadowed in several episodes and 2) it would have made the DQ feel more alive. I found the big bad Delta Quadrant rather dull in season 5.

Agreed.

Equinox, Part 2 (***½)

However, I'm a bit of a Ron Moore fan (more on that with the next episode) and I have to agree with him when he says that this episode fails to come together as a whole. The concept of Janeway turning bad while Ransom turns good is great, but it never goes anywhere at the end. It provided many great scenes but it doesn't seem to add up to much.

This exchange is galling:

JANEWAY: Chakotay. You know, you may have had good reason to stage a little mutiny of your own.
CHAKOTAY: The thought had occurred to me, but that would have been crossing the line.

Firstly, no it would not. Janeway was the one crossing the line, not you, you would have been the one trying to pull her back over the line. Secondly, CHAKOTAY RESIGNED HIS COMMISSION TO JOIN A TERRORIST ORGANISATION!!! This is a man who should have no problem challenging Janeway's authority when she does something wrong. What the hell happened to the Chakotay who defied Janeway's orders and stole a shuttle in order to deal with Seska back in season 2? Seriously, the guy serves no purpose on this show anymore other than being humiliated, just kill him off or something.

Also agreed.

Chakotay's balls are now in a lockbox in Janeway's ready room.

Seriously, Chakotay really looks passive in the later seasons. It's as though he just gave up after "Scorpion." Since Janeway pays no attention to anything he says, he doesn't bother to say anything.

Maybe he did give up?

Foreshadowing the Equinox would have been nice however what I would have really liked was for the Equinox to be a recurrent big bad in Season 6, with the story only finishing in the season finale...

At the end of Equinox, Ransom and the Equinox would have escaped and Janeway would vow to hunt him down. We would get some episodes about Voyager finding leads, perhaps even getting blamed for things the Equinox would be doing and then a big showdown...

Like Seska I would say...

That's not a bad idea.

Hi, I'm the hater never known as Steve, and I'm a Moore-aholic.

It started at a young age, I got caught up with the wrong crowd and I'd watch The Next Generation whenever I saw it on TV. My parents were a little worried, they feared I might become a nerd, but I was 3 and they trusted that I was old enough to know what TV shows were right for me. I don't blame them for what happened, I blame Michael Piller. One day Michael came to my house while my parents were away and said "Aw man, you gotta try this shit, it'll blow your mind. It's called Ron Moore". I should have known better, my life could have turned out so differently had I just said "no", but I trusted him so I watched The Bonding. It made me feel ill.

That kid was annoying and there was a magic space alien and Picard made a speech... it wasn't anything like Michael promised me.

But a few weeks later he came around again with more Moore and he promised me that it gets better after the first time. I was wary, but I didn't want to be a pussy so I gave into peer pressure and watched The Defector. It was like flying! "One world's butcher..." "...dance on the edge of the Neutral Zone!" "Shall we die together?" It was incredible, and I needed more! Yesterday's Enterprise, Tapestry, The Pegasus... Every once in a while you'd get a bad hit, but normally it was quality stuff. On special occasions I would mix a little Moore with some Braga, now that would create some memorable evenings!

I knew it was wrong, but lots of people were doing it, and I thought I had a good handle on things. I mean, it wasn't anything serious. It was still mostly episodic stuff, the conflict generally remained external sources, and the character flaws were minor if they even existed at all. And a lot of it was just some fun involving Klingons. It wasn't a problem, I was in full control.

But then I moved to DS9, and that's when things started getting heavy. I started mixing Behr and Wolfe regularly and after that regular old Moore just wasn't enough, I needed stronger doses of Moore. And Moore provided. Increased serialisation, more internal conflict, greater character flaws... lesbianism too! Plain old Braga just didn't cut it anymore, I needed Moore. I didn't realise it at the time, but I was losing control of myself. I was losing myself to Moore.

Then I hit some really rough times. DS9 ended, and my supply to most of the hardcore Trek writers was lost. I began to suffer from withdrawal symptoms from the mix of Behr, Beimler, Weedle, Thompson and Echevarria that I had been surviving off of. I needed my Moore then more than ever and I thought I had found a new dealer in Voyager. Sadly it was only a temporary affair and soon I was on my own, Mooreless. Nobody would deal the hard stuff to me any more and I was forced to fall back on legal stuff like Braga and Biller. The worst part was that I actually convinced myself that I liked Braga and thought that Enterprise was a reasonable substitute for Moore's work. It was embarrassing.

Luckily that horrible portion of my life came to an end thanks to an intervention held by Les Moonves. He hated seeing me wasting my life on Enterprise, so he sent me to rehab and forced me to get past my Trek-writer dependences. Once I was clean I started doing the hard work involved in getting my life on track. I fell in love with a wonderful woman, I got a job and I even managed to complete my university degree. I once tried some Battlestar Galactica to see what it was like, but my life had moved on and that sort of thing just didn't interest me anymore. Life was good.

But like a a thousand other tragic heroes I lost the love of my life and I let it ruin me. I didn't have any Trek writers readily available so I tried a little Babylon 5 only to find that it didn't agree with me, and then I started taking Firefly. It was good but there wasn't enough to sustain me. That's when a friend suggested I try out some Battlestar Galactica again, so in my darkest hour I gave it a shot. It was Moore nirvana. Heavily serialised, main characters getting into physical fights, tremendously flawed human beings... it was potent stuff and I loved it.

But this is not a relapse, I'm in complete control this time, I promise. I felt it was only fair that I lay this all out in the interest of full disclosure before I post my review of Moore's only Voyager script. I can enjoy Moore sensibly. It's just a little fun involving genocide, where's the harm in that? Because I can handle it. I can handle it.


Survival Instinct (******)

This episode earned every one of those six stars, it is beyond perfect, it is uber-perfect. It had Seven, some Borg, a strange tennis racket... there was a story in there somewhere. Did I mention the Borg? And there was a great moment towards the beginning of the episode, about a minute after the opening credits a caption appeared on screen saying "Written by Ronald D. Moore". Oh boy, I came.

Good grief.

Okay, lets get to the real review, shall we?


Survival Instinct (***½)

It is nice to have an episode like this where there is no easy technobabble way out, Seven has to choose between two equally bad choices because she messed up several years before. The first half of the episode is a little dull, and sometimes when the three Borg started talking in unison is was cheesy, but the second half of the episode was of a very high standard.

I also loved the setting of this episode, Voyager is docked at a friendly space station and they decide to allow aliens onboard and mix in with the Voyager crew. It makes for a refreshing change of pace from all the hostile aliens Voyager has encountered over the past few years, it is settings like this that help make the Delta Quadrant feel alive.


So lets review Ron Moore's impact upon Voyager.

Torpedoes: 0/-22
Shuttles Lost: 0
Harry Deaths: 0
Hostile aliens encountered: 0
Times Voyager placed in peril: 0
Times main character placed in peril: 0
Technobabble as plot resolution: 0

And how are the Voyager writers faring in comparison?

Well there you have it everybody, as of right now Ron Moore is Voyager's best writer. Take a bow, Ron!

I'd also tend to agree.

Barge of the Dead (**½)

I was tired when watching this episode so maybe this explain why I don't have a clue what it was about. The ending seems to suggest that B'Elanna has made a huge breakthrough that will significantly change who she is, but what was the breakthrough about? What did she learn about herself? Is she really going to be a different person from here on out? Why? Am I just being dumb for not seeing it?

I'm not normally the sort of person who gets annoyed about Klingon episodes, I usually like the Klingons, but in this instance I found all the Klingon stuff to be boring. The best part of the episode was in the middle as B'Elanna struggles to understand the meaning of what she saw in her near-death experience, but I just found the ending to be a mess of confusing imagery. Maybe I was too tired to understand it, I don't know.

Eh, I liked "BotD" a bit more than that... I guess I kind of understand the dejected religious/need to appease the parents issue though.

Tinker Tenor Shmully Spy (****)

I cannot deny, this episode made me laugh on a number of occasions, it is easily my favourite of the "light" Voyager episodes so far. Even a simple line where Shmully fantasises about Neelix giving him a cake made me laugh due to Robert Picardo's fantastic delivery. This whole episode works for me because Picardo has the comic timing to make it work.

Two issues. This is probably the third or fourth time where Shmully has adapted his problem without informing anyone and it led to serious problems, this guy really needs to learn Einstein's definition of insanity. Secondly, the whole issue of Shmully feeling like he is being treated as a second class citizen seems to have cropped up out of nowhere again, and Janeway giving in to his request to explore the concept of the Emergency Command Hologram is a bit of a reach for me.

But those two things aren't serious enough to stop me enjoying a scene where B'Elanna, Seven and Janeway vie for Shmully's affections, or the absurdly brilliant command pips. Okay, brilliant might be an overstatement, but it did make me chuckle.

Also a ditto from me.

I just don't 'get it'. I usually like it when Trek does comedy, I usually love the Doc. All you super informed trek fans seem to love TTDS. I should probably think it's the best episode ever (after Resolutions of course )

But I don't. I think it's just about the rubbishiest episode I've ever seen. I even prefer Threshold to this nonsense. It's just way way too overdone. Sorry!

Nah, it doesn't start to get annoying til "Author, Author."

Alice (*)

For ten whole years I've been waiting for the chance, to meet the Voyager writers to find out how this script passed, but now I've got to get over it and write a review for Alice. Alice? Why the f*#@ did they write Alice?

I remember reading once that "Alice" was their attempt to remake Stephen King's "Christine" in a sci-fi fashion and do it better.

Nice try, but no.

Now clearly I don't know much about women, but I do know it would be a bad idea for me to name my car after "the one that got away" while in a serious relationship with someone else. This scene happened before Tom connected up to the magic interface that made him crazy, so why is he acting so stupid this early in the episode?

Well, now...

I'd think it was funny, but I've been married, like, forever. Or maybe I'm abnormally non-jealous/non-possessive? (And I'm definitely not Klingon or half-Klingon.) Anyway, I thought it was funny when Tom said it, too, and it never so much as occurred to me that this would be a bad idea since he was in a serious relationship. I'm not too crazy about this episode, otherwise, mind you.

Eh, you just have evolved sensibilities.

Riddles (*½)

I had to look this episode up. I might not have even given it a star and a half. But in summary, this:

That's my fundamental problem with Riddles; I don't want Tuvok and Neelix to become friends, I want Neelix to learn to leave Tuvok alone.

Then there is stuff about aliens and cloaking devices and that stupid investigator guy, none of which made much of an impact.

Agreed.

Dragon's Teeth (***½)

This is a good idea for an episode that works most of the way through and then falls apart about ten minutes from the end when the whole thing turns into an action-filled mess.

That sums it up for me.

What sort of qualification did the science advisers to this show have, a degree in music theory?

 

[Dane_Whitman]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

What sort of qualification did the science advisers to this show have, a degree in music theory?

You know, my rewatch of Voyager has been running more or less parallel to yours (I'm a couple of episodes ahead of you), and I've noticed a trend of steadily decreasing logic and sense to Voyager's technobabble over the last two seasons. It wasn't much to begin with, but in season 5/6 they're spouting the most ridiculous technobabble phrases that just don't make any sense at all! It's very noticeable to the point that I'm getting quite annoyed at those stupid onliners. Thank god ENT did away with all that nonsense!

 

[Seven of Five]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Wasn't Dragon's Teeth supposed to be a double episode feature, like Dark Frontier and Flesh and Blood? I remember wondering why they changed their minds, and then when I eventually saw the episode I gathered that they just ran out of story.

It started off with good intentions, using Seven and Neelix's historical knowledge to slowly establish the new race. But then it's all thrown away in the end for a whizz-bang finale, which is such a shame. The Vaadwauar were being touted as a possible new ongoing villain, but they end up falling a bit short here, and never return. 2.5/5.

 

[TheGodBen]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Really my only problem with it was the fact that it definitely feels like this is going to turn out to be the first part of a two-parter given the flow except it decides in the last 10 minutes to go from an entertaining set-up to an abbreviated wrap-up of the preceding 50 minutes. So before shaking things up they scuttle them because the episode has to end. So it really can't do justice to all the potentially interesting threads it introduces. To be fair though the writers admitted this was suppose to be one of those telefilms like "The Killing Game" and "Dark Frontier" but something came up where they had to change their minds.

This episode could have been one of the better tele-films if they had stuck with it, it had a very good premise while having the scope of an episode like Dark Frontier, and with an extra hour they should have been able to sort out the problems with the Big Action Finale™. It was certainly more worthy of the treatment than The Killing Game.

Okay, time to play catchup.

I warned you this would happen when you got that job.

You know, my rewatch of Voyager has been running more or less parallel to yours (I'm a couple of episodes ahead of you), and I've noticed a trend of steadily decreasing logic and sense to Voyager's technobabble over the last two seasons. It wasn't much to begin with, but in season 5/6 they're spouting the most ridiculous technobabble phrases that just don't make any sense at all! It's very noticeable to the point that I'm getting quite annoyed at those stupid onliners. Thank god ENT did away with all that nonsense!

It has definitely gotten worse over the years, and it was particularly noticeable in Dragon's Teeth. I'm just browsing the script and here's some common technobabble phrases that were just thrown into the battle in order to make it "more dramatic".

Shields at maximum. Weapons standing by.
Target phasers, full spread.
Shields at ninety two percent.
Evasive manoeuvres.
Reroute emergency power.
Targeting sensors offline. Switching to manual.
Aft shields down to twenty percent.
Our sensor array took heavy damage.
We've lost impulse engines and navigation.
Thrusters are failing.
How about emergency power?
Thirteen power relays just blew out on deck six.

 

[JustKate]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

^ Can you really call it "babble" if it's understandable? Don't get me wrong, VOY did a lot of technobabble, but most of your examples here seem...well, sometimes unnecessary maybe, but not actual babbling. I mean, if shields are down or power relays have blown out, that is (or at least ought to be) a fairly important plot point, yes? Or at least indicators of the seriousness of the situation.

Edit: I mean, is it really any worse than those little dramatic things that non-scifi does? You know, like in a war movie when they start talking about running low on ammo or a mystery when the detective always ends up looking for stuff with a flashlight after dark instead of in daylight.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I think it's more all of that in one sitting - that's twelve lines of dialogue in a single scene, mostly detailing what we could understand with a few seconds of visuals. There's no talk of strategy or what evasive maneuvers entails, just 'evasive maneuvers.'

 

[JustKate]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

^ Are all those lines successive or nearly so? GodBen doesn't say that, as far as I can tell, but I could be wrong. If so, bleah.

But even so, I'm just not sure it qualifies as "babble." Unnecessary, maybe, but to me, the term technobabble implies that the stuff just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You know, blinding us with pseudo-science.