Watched The Visitor for the first time in 10 years

Whether it 'actually happened' or not is not that relevant in how I rate an episode (unless of course it's a really flimsy construction), A lot of great episodes with time travel 'never happened' at the end, such as Year of Hell or Yesterday's Enterprise (the last one at least to the extent that Our Heroes remember none of it), or All Good Things.

It's a very good episode with a lot of emotional impact, but that alone isn't enough for me propel it into the highest regions, and the rest of the story (hence disregarding the emotional impact) isn't that exceptional. To me 'one of the greatest Trek episodes ever made' is slightly overrating the ep, even though I'd still say it's in 'very high quality' territory.

And frankly, her role isn't that important. She's only the excuse for Old Jake to tell his story, but it's not as if she inspired him to make his self-sacrifice or anything like that- he had long taken his decision to do so.

 

Maybe he should have just been narrating a personal log.

 

No. Because when something is already pretty much perfect, you don't mess with it.

 

"To my father -- who's coming home."

 

There's worse than episodes that never happened there's the Voyager it happened but nobody remembers episodes, the ironically named "Unforgettable" and the aptly named "Course Oblivion"... Neither makes any sense...

 

I've forgotten "Unforgettable".

(sorry, I'll see myself out)

 

Do you remember "Remember"?

*Oddish follows kkt*

 

None of it happened. It's fiction.

(Sorry, not leaving.)

 

*For speaking sacrilege, Bad Thoughts is violently seized by a mob of angry Trekkies, tarred, feathered, and defenestrated.*

(Should've left.)

 

(As he is being expelled, Bad Thoughts says, in Shatner voice: ) Get a life!

 

You look really cute with those feathers stuck all over you.

 

Here here!

Something else along these lines I hate: the term "filler episode".

 

Course Oblivion works because nobody remembers. It's like a dark Twilight Zone episode. First you find you aren't the real you just before you are about to get home. Then you and all the people you know and love start to die. Then to top it off your attempt to let anyone even know you once a existed fails. Complete with the real versions of you just missing finding out about you before all traces of your existence is limited to some file of a dust cloud and some debris found in space.

 

^It worked for some but not for others. There's an argument to be made that the ending is terribly cynical and renders the events of the episode largely pointless, and not even in the same way a "reset button" is arguably pointless in that we're at least seeing "our" characters versus copies. It may be for the best that the episode at least makes it clear early on that to some degree these aren't our characters, though it takes some time before we learn just how much they aren't our characters.

 

Course: Oblivion puts the Voyager cast in a situation that it's impossible to put them in for real, just to see how they handle it. It could have been undone by a temporal anomaly or parallelity shift or a snap of Q's fingers, but it would have the dark ending pack far less gravitas. C:O is Star Trek for nihilists.

 

If anything "Couse Oblivion" shows that Janeway is insane. How else to describe her behavior after she's learned that she wasn't the original Captain? Not listening to anybody and stubbornly maintaining a course of action that absolutely everybody else tells her that will doom her crew. It's good for her that the logs had been destroyed because it could have convinced the real crew that they should choose another Captain, quickly. It would definitely have convinced me.
Who wants an "I don't care if you're all dying, I'll get you home" Captain? Only someone who's as insane as she.

 

Insane or not, but it's fairly close to the character of the real Janeway (at least as we see her in a number of episodes). Headstrong, not always listening to advice because She Knows Better and with an obsession to get her crew home, and only settling for less if there really, really, really is no way to accomplish that original goal.

 

Yeah, and she committed the worst infraction to the prime directive in recorded history!!! Give a weapon of mass destruction to the BORG!!! If there was any justice Arturis would have succeeded in his plan to assimilate her... alone (given that her crew has... admittedly some mitigating circumstances in their favor, for one thing, they were used to her type of insanity). How dare she lecture anybody about the prime directive when what she has done is a thousand times worse?

 

Planned to give a weapon on mass destruction to the Borg. Since the Borg betrayed her, they never got it.