Oh. My. God. [/charlton heston]
This was awful. Just completely awful. Although I found precisely two redeeming elements in the episode, this is one I wish I could forget. Yes, it's...
"The Fight"
We open with an uncommonly agitated Chakotay in sickbay, screaming, "I'm tired! I want to sleep." The Doctor makes him remember "a few weeks ago" when he was on the holodeck.
We get a very cheesy old-time boxing ring, with Boothby as Chakotay's trainer. I'm guessing this is mostly because Ray Walston was the closest they could find to Burgess Meredith and not because there's any logical reason that the Academy's groundskeeper would moonlight as a boxing trainer.
Chakotay's squaring off against a Terellian who he has about 50 pounds on, but he still seems skittish. Realistically, unless the Terellian was way better than him, Chakotay should be able to push him around the ring just because of the size difference. If they wanted to impress me, they should have gotten Tony Todd to come back to play his opponent.
And here's where I notice something strange. Kid Chaos (the Terellian) is wearing a tank top, while Chakotay is wearing a tank top on top of a t-shirt. And I notice they consistently don't show his bare chest. In the scene where Neelix is massaging him, he gets up and very carefully doesn't show his chest to the camera, and in the next shot is back to the t-shirt/tank top combo. What gives? I'm guessing he either has some extremely offensive tattoos across his upper body, or he's just flabby.
In any case, I now have an ace in the hole if, for some reason, Robert Beltran were to run into me at a convention and call me a geeky loser. Unlike Beltran, I have been on television with my shirt off. So there.
Anyway, this episode manages to hit FIVE horrible cliches--almost a record. They are:
1. Holodeck episode
2. Chakotay vision quest
3. DNA getting "switched on" and making instant changes
4. a cave
5. warped space
Any one of those would be enough to tank a decent episode, but get them together and they're deadly. But that's not to say a good episode can't handle them; "Tin Man" has Data reciting the thesaurus and a Betazoid feeling "great pain," but it's still an awesome episode. "The Fight," however, is definitely not.
Another really annoying thing is a cheesy alliterative nicknames that all boxers have: "Kid Chaos," "The Maquis Mauler," etc.
As far as the episode itself, it makes no sense--apparently the whole thing is a flashback, and at one point there's a flashback inside the flashback, which makes it double back on itself, because at the end we're back in real time. Head hurts--must lie down.
So what were the good things?
First, the guy who played Chakotay's crazy grandad had a very nice speaking voice. I'd love to hear him to books on tape.
Second, Tom's observation that the odds have come in "from Vegas, Mars, and Orion" proves that Las Vegas is apparently still around in the 24th century, and is still a center for gambling. Since it's my hometown, that's something I've wondered about for a while. I guess it's possible that it's actually another planet called Vegas, but the way Tom says it seems to go from closer to farther--Vegas (on Earth), Mars (solar system), Orion (other star system). So I can argue that it is canon that sports betting still exists on Earth in Trek's future. Maybe.
I used to work in surveillance, and when things got really dreary I'd just space out and watch the date/time stamp on the screen, seeing the seconds tick by. There were several times during this episode that I did the same exact thing with my DVD player.
So this is one of the worst episodes of Voyager I've seen, and one of the worst episodes of anything on TV. It made no sense, the acting was bad, and it was just a total waste of time.
I can see why Chakotay didn't get more of the spotlight.
This was awful. Just completely awful. Although I found precisely two redeeming elements in the episode, this is one I wish I could forget. Yes, it's...
"The Fight"
We open with an uncommonly agitated Chakotay in sickbay, screaming, "I'm tired! I want to sleep." The Doctor makes him remember "a few weeks ago" when he was on the holodeck.
We get a very cheesy old-time boxing ring, with Boothby as Chakotay's trainer. I'm guessing this is mostly because Ray Walston was the closest they could find to Burgess Meredith and not because there's any logical reason that the Academy's groundskeeper would moonlight as a boxing trainer.
Chakotay's squaring off against a Terellian who he has about 50 pounds on, but he still seems skittish. Realistically, unless the Terellian was way better than him, Chakotay should be able to push him around the ring just because of the size difference. If they wanted to impress me, they should have gotten Tony Todd to come back to play his opponent.
And here's where I notice something strange. Kid Chaos (the Terellian) is wearing a tank top, while Chakotay is wearing a tank top on top of a t-shirt. And I notice they consistently don't show his bare chest. In the scene where Neelix is massaging him, he gets up and very carefully doesn't show his chest to the camera, and in the next shot is back to the t-shirt/tank top combo. What gives? I'm guessing he either has some extremely offensive tattoos across his upper body, or he's just flabby.
In any case, I now have an ace in the hole if, for some reason, Robert Beltran were to run into me at a convention and call me a geeky loser. Unlike Beltran, I have been on television with my shirt off. So there.
Anyway, this episode manages to hit FIVE horrible cliches--almost a record. They are:
1. Holodeck episode
2. Chakotay vision quest
3. DNA getting "switched on" and making instant changes
4. a cave
5. warped space
Any one of those would be enough to tank a decent episode, but get them together and they're deadly. But that's not to say a good episode can't handle them; "Tin Man" has Data reciting the thesaurus and a Betazoid feeling "great pain," but it's still an awesome episode. "The Fight," however, is definitely not.
Another really annoying thing is a cheesy alliterative nicknames that all boxers have: "Kid Chaos," "The Maquis Mauler," etc.
As far as the episode itself, it makes no sense--apparently the whole thing is a flashback, and at one point there's a flashback inside the flashback, which makes it double back on itself, because at the end we're back in real time. Head hurts--must lie down.
So what were the good things?
First, the guy who played Chakotay's crazy grandad had a very nice speaking voice. I'd love to hear him to books on tape.
Second, Tom's observation that the odds have come in "from Vegas, Mars, and Orion" proves that Las Vegas is apparently still around in the 24th century, and is still a center for gambling. Since it's my hometown, that's something I've wondered about for a while. I guess it's possible that it's actually another planet called Vegas, but the way Tom says it seems to go from closer to farther--Vegas (on Earth), Mars (solar system), Orion (other star system). So I can argue that it is canon that sports betting still exists on Earth in Trek's future. Maybe.
I used to work in surveillance, and when things got really dreary I'd just space out and watch the date/time stamp on the screen, seeing the seconds tick by. There were several times during this episode that I did the same exact thing with my DVD player.
So this is one of the worst episodes of Voyager I've seen, and one of the worst episodes of anything on TV. It made no sense, the acting was bad, and it was just a total waste of time.
I can see why Chakotay didn't get more of the spotlight.
