Rewatching Voyager: 006 "The Cloud"

This episode bristles with the excitement of watching people play holographic pool and talk to animals.

Synopsis

After poking their noses into a nebula where they don’t belong, the crew proceeds to show how little sense of urgency they possess about returning home. Paris and Kim play pool. Chakotay demeans Native Americans everywhere by leading Janeway through the most insulting rendition of Indian culture this side of Tonto. When it turns out that the nebula was a living creature, Janeway goes all Jane Goodall and insists the crew risk their lives again to repair the damage they caused. Surprising no one, everything works out fine.

Nitpicks

• Neelix is fairly sensible at the beginning of this episode when he bemoans Captain Janeway’s insistence on playing explorer instead of focusing on the mission of returning her crew home. He still needs to die, however.

• Hopefully someone on board noticed that Janeway almost got them all killed in this episode in order to slake her thirst for replicated coffee. One wonders if the Kazon could have convinced her to give them the Caretaker Array’s secrets had they just thrown in a case of Taster’s Choice as part of the deal. 

• Technobabble reigns supreme in this episode. It’s used to describe the effects of the nebula on the Voyager, the structure of the nebula creature, and the crew’s solution to the “how do we heal it?” problem. This technobabble tumor will metastasize in later seasons.

• There are some excellent effects in this episode when the ship is traveling through the nebula being.

• I enjoyed the mutual snark between Tuvok and Kim after the Vulcan provides the ensign with some unwelcome criticism of his job performance.

• Because of this excursion, the ship will have to travel 14 light years out of their way to replenish the energy supplies lost in the nebula. At the roughly 935 times the speed of light the ship is traveling, that’s a 5-day sidetrack from their journey home.

Journey Statistics

Stardate: 48546.2 (~July 18, 2371).

Distance From Home: 69,795 light years.

Surviving Crew: ~141 and the Maquis.

Rewatching Voyager: 005 "Phage"

Ever see an episode of a television series that comes so close to being great, only to fall apart right at the end?

Synopsis

While scoping out a planetoid for dilithium, Neelix is critically injured by a Vidiian who uses a device to remove Neelix’s lungs. The Doctor, still seeming way too human for a hologram, creates “holographic” lungs, but they require Neelix to live in the 24th Century equivalent of an iron lung. Rendered incapable of movement, and forced to stare up at the Sickbay ceiling all day, perhaps for the rest of his life, Neelix eventually demands that the Doctor allow him to die. Unfortunately, before they can do so, Janeway and the crew track down and capture the Vidiians, whose advanced medical abilities are able to transplant a lung from Kes to Neelix.

Nitpicks

• The Vidiians, a race of biological scavengers who steal organs from others in order to combat a deadly disease, are pretty interesting, and their makeup is quite cool.

• Also nifty was the low-energy phaser trick used to locate the Vidiian ship in the “hall of mirrors” asteroid. 

• In other words, this is a pretty good episode of Star Trek, marred only by the fact that they let Neelix live.

Journey Statistics

Stardate: 48532.4 (~July 13, 2371).

Distance From Home: 69,803 light years.

Surviving Crew: ~141 and the Maquis.

Rewatching Voyager: 004 "Time and Again"

Synopsis

After detecting an explosion on a nearby world, the Voyager moves to investigate. They discover that the planet was destroyed because of its unusual power system. When Janeway and Paris are sucked back in time, they soon learn that their investigation into the cause of the explosion will actually have the effect of instigating the crisis. Yes, it’s another time travel episode. In the end, Janeway breaks the loop, and none of this ever actually ends up happening, which in terms of character narrative makes this entire episode pointless.

Nitpicks

• “Time Warp!” Ugh. Please note that we’re only three episodes into Voyager, and already 67% of them have been stupid time travel plots.
• This episode and the one before it do a good job of highlighting a unique trait about Janeway, as far as Trek captains go: she was originally a science officer. She likes to roll up her sleeves and dig into the technobabble. Which is fortunate for her, given that technobabble is more common than hydrogen on Voyager.
• By the late 1990s, time travel had become a crutch for weak writing in Star Trek. That Voyager begins its run by dipping deeply into this well bodes ill for the series’ future.
• Tom Paris and Harry Kim have one of the few very realistic male human friendships in Trek. But theirs is just a faint echo of the awesomeness that is Bashir and O’Brien.

Journey Statistics

Stardate: Unknown (By placing it halfway between the episode before and after it, we get ~June 26, 2371).

Distance From Home: 69,846 light years.

Surviving Crew: ~141 and the Maquis.

Rewatching Voyager: 003 "Parallax"

The first regular episode of the series. Note: in calculating the distance travelled between episodes when no specific distance is stated, I presume that the ship is traveling in a straight line towards Earth at a rate that would take it the stated “75 years” to get home. I then use the Stardate to ascertain how many days it’s been traveling at that rate since the previous episode. I will also make rough estimates of how many days the story in each episode takes away from the ship’s transit time, if any. So these estimates are, to say the least, very rough.

Synopsis

Commander Chakotay wants his engineer, B’Elanna Torres, to be the new chief engineer on the Voyager. Captain Janeway and the Starfleet engineering crew oppose this. After the ship gets stuck in a time-loop inside a quantum singularity, Torres proves her worth by figuring out how to get the ship out of it. Which we knew would happen, since she’s a listed-in-the-credits character.

Nitpicks

• This is the first “Time Warp!” episode of Voyager, where time travel plays an intricate part in the plot. Get used to this trope, my friends.
• Okay, let’s ignore the fact that the Doctor has personality and emotions and apparent sentience, even though he’s still “just a hologram” at this point in the story. If the crew just looks at him as a software program, why do they need a real member of the crew to help him in Sickbay? Why not just load multiple instances of the Doctor’s program, like launching multiple browsers when you’re both working on your Voyager blog and surfing porn... I mean, news sites. Yes, that’s it. News sites.
• That the ship was trapped in the quantum singularity was pretty obvious from the beginning of the episode.

Journey Statistics

Stardate: 48439.7 (~June 9, 2371).

 

Distance From Home: 69,880 light years.

 

Surviving Crew: ~141 and the Maquis.

Rewatching Voyager: 001 & 002 "The Caretaker"

Star Trek: Voyager hit the airwaves in early 1995, less than nine months after Star Trek: The Next Generation departed for it’s decade-long cinematic excursion. In order to differentiate itself from TNG and the contemporaneous Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Voyager set its story in the distant Delta Quadrant, where the crew of a Starfleet vessel and survivors from a renegade Maquis ship are forced to work together after being stranded 75 years from home. 

This series of blog posts will involve the re-watching, summarizing and critiquing of the adventures of the Voyager crew. Along the way, I’ll try to keep an on-screen body count, I’ll estimate how far from Earth each episode takes place at, and I’ll point out why I still prefer Deep Space Nine for my normal Trek fix. I will try to keep these reviews to a few hundred words.

Synopsis

“Caretaker” is the premiere of Star Trek: Voyager, and thus it goes to somewhat awkward lengths to introduce us to each of our new characters. Building from the foundation of TNG and DS9, the Voyager premiere was probably confusing to non-initiated Trek fans. The text crawl at the start tries to explain who the Maquis are, but it’s too brief to really clue the newbies in.

After being flung to the distant Delta Quadrant while searching for a missing Maquis vessel, the Voyager finds itself stranded decades from home. After destroying their only way back to save the Ocampa from the Kazon-Ogla, the surviving Alpha Quadrant residents take on two locals as guides, and set a course back to home. Let the “adventure” begin?

Nitpicks

• This is the first “Gilligan's Quadrant” episode of Voyager, defined as an episode where the crew has a chance to get home, but doesn’t do so because the chance is ephemeral, an accident occurs or, in this case, their morals prevent them from using the opportunity.
• The scene where Tom Paris and the Betazoid navigator fly to Voyager drives me nuts. She runs down the “awesome” specs of the ship in a way no real person would, and they’re on an impulse shuttlecraft flying towards Deep Space Nine at which only the Voyager is docked... so where did their shuttle come from?
• The Kazon sure are interesting. I hope Voyager doesn’t waste their potential.... Just kidding. I know that it does.
• The crew makes a horrible, horrible mistake in picking up Neelix in this episode.

Journey Statistics

Stardate:  48315.6 (~April 25, 2371).

Distance From Home: 70,000 light years.

Surviving Crew: ~141 (five on screen deaths, another seven off screen) plus an unknown number of Maquis.