Why does everyone agree that Season 3 is the worst season of VOY?

[M.A.C.O.]

Season 3 is where I feel the show finally started working. There were a lot of memorable/entertaining episodes.

Far better than season 2. And better than season 1, now that the initial shock of the crew being stranded in the Delta Quadrant being the status quo.

Plus, all that build up for Kes that season to drop her in the next. Oh what could have been.

 

[Oddish]

Season 7 was pretty mediocre, but season 3 had a huge slump of just meh to awful episodes in the middle. "THE Q AND THE GREY", "MACROCOSM", "ALTER EGO", "BLOOD FEVER", "CODA", "RISE", "DARKLING", and "FAVORITE SON".

At least some of those episodes seem to have widely varied opinions. Some liked them, others didn't. Maybe that's S3 in a nutshell.

 

[tomalak301]

At least some of those episodes seem to have widely varied opinions. Some liked them, others didn't. Maybe that's S3 in a nutshell.

I would describe that for Voyager as a whole. I liked some of those episodes listed too, like Macrocosm, Blood Fever and Coda. Also there was Susie Plakson as the female Q so I can't hate that episode by default.

 

[Oddish]

I would describe that for Voyager as a whole. I liked some of those episodes listed too, like Macrocosm, Blood Fever and Coda. Also there was Susie Plakson as the female Q so I can't hate that episode by default.

And the scenes with Q and Janeway. You could see the chemistry between John de Lancie and Kate Mulgrew, close friends IRL.

 

[TheAdmiralty]

Not a Voyager fan but was not aware people thought this, I think it was an improvement over the first two years.

*B'Elanna might have been a manageable sacrificial lamb. She was important enough that the viewers would feel her loss, but her character was kind of on a treadmill.

Ron Moore said when he was trying to write Barge of the Dead and was asking the more experienced writers about B'Elanna to try and understand the character they just told him they'd given up and he could write whatever he wanted.

 

[Oddish]

Ron Moore said when he was trying to write Barge of the Dead and was asking the more experienced writers about B'Elanna to try and understand the character they just told him they'd given up and he could write whatever he wanted.

You can't expect people who can't even ration out 38 torpedoes to understand the abstract concepts of half-Klingon angst.

 

[Captain Zog]

I would say that Voyager improves with each season for the first couple of seasons, much like DS9 - although it never reaches the heights that show achieves in its later seasons.

Season 3 is a step up from Season 1 and 2. The Kazon arc end, we get a GOOD Borg episode, the best Maquis episode in the entire show, a fantastic time travel story and several interesting sci-fi tales. It's a solid season with far more good than bad. I never heard of it being widely disliked and such a sentiment would confuse me no end.

 

[Starflight]

Voyager in general seems to polarise opinion, both the show as a whole and pretty much every individual episode.

S3 is better than S2 overall but the back half of S2 is very strong - Lifesigns, Meld, Tuvix, The Thaw, Dreadnought, etc. S3 on the other hand has a lot of 6/10 or 7/10 episodes that are good but feel like a step down after late-S2. Plus, Future's End doesn't really work IMO and slows the mid-season to a crawl.

There's also some tonal weirdness - Blood Fever, Darkling, and Real Life all have extremely awkward elements that land weirdly.

 

[Farscape One]

The problem with season 3 of VOY (going by production order, which is excluding the 4 holdovers from season 2) is it starts off well ("THE CHUTE") and ends strongly (final four episodes, "DISTANT ORIGIN" to "SCORPION"), but a vast majority of the middle is so... middling, to downright bad.

"REMEMBER" (while I like the episode, it did feel like it dragged), "THE SWARM", "FUTURE'S END" two-parter, "THE Q AND THE GREY", "MACROCOSM", "BLOOD FEVER", "DARKLING", and "FAVORITE SON" are examples of what I mean.

The season, and most of the episodes, felt like they dragged and were a bit of a slog to go through.

While several were character focused, they felt like they just wouldn't end. Compare that against many character focused season 2 episodes, and you can just feel the difference. Those ones didn't feel like a chore to go through.

 

[Oddish]

"REMEMBER" (while I like the episode, it did feel like it dragged), "THE SWARM", "FUTURE'S END" two-parter, "THE Q AND THE GREY", "MACROCOSM", "BLOOD FEVER", "DARKLING", and "FAVORITE SON" are examples of what I mean.

I thought a lot of those were pretty good. Though "Favorite Son" holds a special place on my Worst Eposodes list.

 

[Lord Garth]

When I look at the list of episodes in the third season:

I like "The Swarm" but I don't like that it was undone so quickly. If you're not going to stick to the Doctor losing his memories for a little bit and if you're not going to make it take real work to get them back, then don't bother to have that subplot in "The Swarm" in the first place. In isolation, it's fine. In the bigger picture, it's not.

"False Profits" is VOY taking everything I can't stand about TNG Ferengi and amping it up to 11.

"Coda" feels like five episodes of TNG strung together into one with an evil demon ghost pretending to be Janeway's father. Some good scenes, especially at Janeway's "funeral", aren't enough to make up for the episode overall.

"Favorite Son" is a terrible episode, but a Guilty Pleasure. I'll list it here anyway because, even though I enjoy it, I acknowledge it's bad.

"Real Life" has a sound premise; the only problem is that Torres waaaayyyyy overcorrected in trying to make the Doctor's holo-family less perfect. Talk about going from one extreme to the other. If the Doctor pushed back and they found a way to come up with a happy medium and the Doctor learned something from the experience that he was able to use in Sickbay somehow someway, that would've worked better.

So, there are only five episodes in the season that I have some sort of issue with. The other ~80%, I'm fine with.

I know "The Darkling" isn't on here. It's not a favorite of mine, but I also don't have a problem with it, and I get a kick out of watching Bob Picardo act out all those different personality types.

 

[Farscape One]

When I look at the list of episodes in the third season:

I like "The Swarm" but I don't that it was undone so quickly. If you're not going to stick to the Doctor losing his memories for a little and if you're not going to make it take real work to get it back, then don't bother to have that subplot in "The Swarm" in the first place. In isolation, it's fine. In the bigger picture, it's not.

"False Profits" is VOY taking everything I can't stand about TNG Ferengi and amping it up to 11.

"Coda" feels like five episodes of TNG strung together into one with an evil demon ghost pretending to be Janeway's father. Some good scenes, especially at Janeway's "funeral" aren't enough to make up for the episode overall.

"Favorite Son" is a terrible episode, but a Guilty Pleasure. I'll list it here anyway because, even though I enjoy it, I acknowledge it's bad.

"Real Life" has a sound premise; the only problem is that Torres waaaayyyyy overcorrected in trying to make the Doctor's holo-family less perfect. Talk about going from one extreme to the other. If the Doctor pushed back and they found a way to come up with a happy medium and the Doctor learned something from the experience that was able to use in Sickbay somehow someway, that would've worked better.

So, there are only five episodes in the season that I have some sort of issue with. The other ~80%, I'm fine with.

I know "The Darkling" isn't on here. It's not a favorite of mine, but I also don't have a problem with it, and I get a kick out of watching Bob Picardo act out all those different personality types.

I'm not a fan of "CODA", either. Just felt like a mess.

And I didn't include "FALSE PROFITS" because it was a season 2 holdover. Otherwise, I would have... easily among the worst of the entirety of VOY.

 

[Oddish]

"Real Life" has a sound premise; the only problem is that Torres waaaayyyyy overcorrected in trying to make the Doctor's holo-family less perfect. Talk about going from one extreme to the other. If the Doctor pushed back and they found a way to come up with a happy medium and the Doctor learned something from the experience that was able to use in Sickbay somehow someway, that would've worked better.

The dumb thing about it is that the EMH created his family to emulate EVERYDAY FAMILY LIFE. And unless the anti-vax crowd has completely gotten their way by 2374, a kid dying is NOT everyday life. It is a horrific, worst-case scenario event. Why B'Elanna even wrote it into the program is a mystery. "Kenneth" should have just said, "Computer, ameliorate Belle's condition to a survivable injury", then gone on with the scenario from there.

"Coda" feels like five episodes of TNG strung together into one with an evil demon ghost pretending to be Janeway's father. Some good scenes, especially at Janeway's "funeral" aren't enough to make up for the episode overall.

But I have to admit, her telling the personification of the Grim Reaper to "go back to hell, coward" was a pretty awesome Janeway moment.

 

[Starflight]

Is "Real Life" meant to be funny? I never understood what they were going for - B'Elanna fucking with the game to turn the difficulty up to Ultra-Nightmare and rigging it so that his family falls into ruin no matter what he does is genuinely funny, and most of the episode plays it that way, but the finale is obviously meant to be taken seriously.

But it's hard to take it on those terms because the ending is the ultimate punchline to B'Elanna messing up the program beyond repair because she got bored and annoyed at dinner. It's a really confusing script.

 

[Tosk]

Why B'Elanna even wrote it into the program is a mystery.

She didn't.

"She's simply added some randomized behavioral algorithms to the program I constructed. [...] Events will simply unfold as a matter of natural evolution of probabilities within the program, but there's no way to predict what those might be." -- The EMH.

 

[Lord Garth]

But I have to admit, her telling the personification of the Grim Reaper to "go back to hell, coward" was a pretty awesome Janeway moment.

That was an awesome line.

Is "Real Life" meant to be funny? I never understood what they were going for - B'Elanna fucking with the game to turn the difficulty up to Ultra-Nightmare and rigging it so that his family falls into ruin no matter what he does is genuinely funny, and most of the episode plays it that way, but the finale is obviously meant to be taken seriously.

It seems to me like they were trying (and failing) to make a contrast. They wanted the Doctor's version of the family to be like Father Knows Best, and they wanted to make Torres' version look like some exaggerated funhouse mirror version of All In the Family meets Rosanne, "We're making it realer than real!" And, instead, it looked like its own type of ridiculous.

 

[Oddish]

The "improved" family did feel more real, and was certainly better for showing the EMH the reality of family life... and having Belle get taken to the hospital with a sports injury would be a normal part of it. Because what parent hasn't had to take their kid to the hospital on occasion? But that's a relatively normal event, not an "every parent's worst nightmare".

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Belle was the Doctor's Lal. The parallels would be too evident if he gave himself a single child, though. Also, nobody tried to seize her for research.

She was killed off by the writers so it could be a self-contained episode - no reappearance of Jeffrey and Charlene in later episodes, either (though it's too bad they weren't at least mentioned, like him saying he was going golfing with his son (offscreen)).

 

[DonIago]

I would have liked to see some follow-up to "Real Life". Whether or not one considers Belle's death to be overkill...so to speak...the fact that he never revisits the program in future episodes just makes it seem as though he wasn't able to bear the experience, and I don't think that's a great message. I would have liked to have seen him either care enough about his holofamily to want to see this through despite an early tragedy, or admit that it was too painful for him. Instead we get the one resolution scene and then...nothing.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

It became more like a novel than a life - he reads a book with a tragic ending and decides not to read the sequel.