Review: Voyager 4.2: The Gift

Kes says one final goodbye (Shush, Fury isn't, like, a thing.)

Star Trek Voyager - Season Four, Episode Two - The Gift
Written between 30th January and 8th February 2016.

Seven of Nine and Kes share a surprising number of attributes. They're both attractive blond women from very alien cultures who help serve as an audience avatar when the rest of the crew explain things to them. They occupy the same spot in the credits and they both have unique abilities which help the show's writers make stories more interesting. But there's a very key difference between them - Kes was a background character who rarely ended up having a huge effect on the show, while Seven of Nine practically takes over the show for the rest of its run. The Gift is the meeting of two worlds - Kes' definite goodbye and Seven's incredible hello.
     Janeway and crew are trying to help Seven adapt to being disconnected from the Borg, something which the drone greatly resents. As they attempt to treat her, her body now beginning to reject the Borg implants, Kes begins displaying greater telepathic and telekinetic powers. Seemingly brought on by the recent encounter with the telepathic Species 8472, she begins to be able to wield her powers in much greater magnitudes. She uses her mental powers to save Seven's life, and Tuvok begins attempting to train her again like he did in Cold Fire. Janeway tries to have Seven help to remove the Borg technology fused to the ship, but in a moment of opportunity she knocks out Harry and attempts to contact her people. Kes begins to turn incorporeal and to save the ship and herself, she leaves Voyager on a shuttle. As a last gift to the crew who gave her so much, she launches Voyager 10,000ly forward - taking 10 years off of their journey home, and taking them far out of Borg Space. Seven is finally convinced to come round, and The Doctor fits her with a catsuit and a bionic eye.
   Harry Kim couldn't go, but the show couldn't afford to keep him and another actor, so the writers decided to get rid of Kes. As irritated as I am by how much Kes' development felt a little stunted and misdirected over the course of the first three seasons, her departure is at least the culmination of a character arc, with her slowly becoming more independent and headstrong as time went on. The way that it was tied into the examination of Ocampan abilities from Caretaker and Cold Fire felt like a very neat tie back to the show's beginnings, and helped to blend Kes' story with Seven's in a way which felt both tragic and necessary. I really don't see why they couldn't have removed Neelix instead - he was hated by the fans at the time, and the fact he was often coupled with Kes was one of his few saving graces. (Although, as I've said in some of my other reviews, Neelix can be a good character if he tries.)

From one unique female character onto the next.

     The episode's main moral quandary was one that was very much tied into the entire concept of The Borg - the nature of individuality, and of individual freedom. The Federation purports to be the ultimate in individual freedom - there is no money, so everything you do is towards making yourself better, and the galaxy better in general. Want to become a starship pilot? Go ahead, we'll train you up, give you a ship, off you go. Want to be a cook? Go on, enjoy yourself scamp. The Borg, on the other hand, is the most exaggerated nightmare of statism and communism - every being a drone with no individual thought, every action done for the good of the collective. The question that this episode asked was thus: by how much does having been a Borg remove one's ability to hold individual thought once they are disconnected. The answer seems to be, entirely. Seven, now separated from the collective, demands to be reunited with it, but Janeway tells her that, ironically, she no longer has the right to make that choice. I know they had to make this work to keep the character in the show, but it does make Janeway sound a little controlling and hypocritical - especially due to the fact she doesn't even have a long consideration about it.
      Kes' departure from the show and Seven's integration into the cast set forth a new era for the show. It didn't exactly reinvent itself in the way that DS9 managed to do two years earlier, but it did manage to take a show that was spiralling in mediocrity and provide its best season and some of the show's best episodes. The Gift feels a little disparate from the first two parts of this trilogy of story, but I think that's kind of the point - Kes' departure is important, and her decision to leave and launch the crew forward 10,000ly begins the point in the show where Voyager's attempts to find shortcuts home actually work. It's a great departure for Kes, a great development piece for Seven of Nine, and it showed the bright new direction the show was headed in.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: We finally bring the Tom/B'Elanna romance to a head with the B'Elanna-centric Day of Honor.

Review: Voyager 4.1: Scorpion, Part II

Jeri Ryan finally appears as Seven of Nine

Star Trek Voyager - Season Four, Episode One - Scorpion, Part II
Written between 26/1/16.

The first half of Scorpion was designed as an apology to the fans, giving them a proper Borg episode after the incredible misfire that was Unity. Like Scorpion's spiritual predecessor The Best of Both Worlds over on TNG, the two halves of this story were written months apart, with the second half being adjusted to meet with fan reactions to the first. The main changes became very obvious - the arrival of Seven of Nine as a way to bring in a horny-teenage-boy demographic and shake up the cast, and the decision that instead of finally killing off Garratt Wang's Harry Kim for good, they would ask Kes actress Jennifer Lien to leave the series. Scorpion, Part II ended up being the episode which saved Voyager from complete and total ratings mediocrity, and ensured that it would reach seven seasons.
       The truce continues and Janeway and Tuvok begin working on the weapon with the Borg which will help them to destroy Species 8472. The Borg want to partially assimilate them to enhance communication, but Janeway makes a different bargain - choose one Borg to represent them, or the deal if off. Said Borg chosen is the intimidating Seven of Nine, a human girl assimilated by the collective when she was a small child and has spent the past 18 years as a drone. Eventually the Borg Cube that they are all stationed on is forced to destroy itself to stop a Bioship from attacking Voyager, and so Janeway, Tuvok and the Borg take a ride on Voyager, with the Borg assimilating one of the Cargo bays as part of their "truce". Seven of Nine eventually hijacks the ship and takes it into Species 8472's home dimension, Fluidic Space, revealing that the entire war was due to a Borg invasion of their space in an attempt to assimilate Species 8472 for their genetic diversity. The weapon is deployed and upon the Borg's betrayal most of them are blown out of an airlock - except Seven, who they manage to separate from the Collective by force.
       This episode didn't carry as much of the tension of its first half, although it did rather admirably carry on the themes between Janeway and Chakotay, this time focussing a lot more on Chakotay as he is forced to take command in Janeway's incapacity and the rift it creates between them. I loved the animosity that very quickly developed between Chakotay and Seven, with Seven standing in for what Chakotay considers to be Janeway's worst decision, and the bitterness he has over the fact that he feels obligated to continue following her (slightly crackers) plan until the last possible moment. The scene near the end where Janeway recovers and confronts him over his disloyalty was an incredibly strong moment for Voyager the show in general, finally managing to portray with high drama the conflict between Federation and Maquis philosophy, the problems this causes between two people clearly with love and affection for each other, and the way that each must compromise their values in order to keep things running. It's a dynamic that would make Deep Space Nine proud.

Harry Kim... lives? What the hell?

     Elsewhere, a lot of the character work was also shifted over to Kes and Seven of Nine, with the latter sitting as a big obvious neon sign saying "LOOK THIS CHARACTER IS IMPORTANT." (Well, that and the fact that Jeri Ryan's name had replaced Kes' in the opening sequence.) Seven immediately gives a good impression, with Jeri Ryan managing to admirably catch the spirit of the Borg with a commanding screen presence which makes you want to learn about her story and her character. It was this presence which would make Season Four (and arguably the rest of the show) work so well. I've not done gushing about Seven of Nine, not by a long shot. On the other hand there was Kes, with her magical abilities both serving as some slight character development for her an as the episode's main form of exposition about Species 8472 and their impending threat.
     Part of me knows that this episode isn't as classically "good" as it's first half - there's a lot more focus on action rather than the well-developed character drama, the plot sort of just floats around, and Harry Kim lives. But the arrival of Seven of Nine and the immediate shake-up it has on the cast of characters is incredibly interesting to me, and it puts this episode onto the map of the series as a whole.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: We carry on the story of Seven of Nine and say a sad farewell to Kes in The Gift.

Review: Voyager 3.26: Scorpion

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Twenty-Six - Scorpion
Written 23rd January 2016.

The idea of reviewing Star Trek was always a very daunting one to me when I started here on Nostalgia Filter, mainly because a lot of the context which I had for these shows was from having watched them back when I was a kid. Star Trek was a relatively new addition to the pantheon, and as well as being a more long-winded US show it also had seven seasons. I told myself that I might review it, but that if I did, it might make sense to stop at the end of the third season. That's not going to happen,  but I thought it was important to mention anyway.  Scorpion, like many end-of-third-season episodes for these shows, is something of a game changer, opening up many new avenues for the show and, for a time, taking us out of the doldrums.

Species 8472 are the show's most alien species yet.

     Voyager is about to enter Borg Space - the massive home territories of the Borg, a race of cyborgs who seek only to assimilate and destroy. (We met them back in Unity.) The crew are very tense, planning to continue their journey home via "The Northwest Passage", a thin corridor of space unvisited by Borg Ships due to Technobabble. Being passed and ignored by an armada of Borg Ships, they're later confused to find that all of them have been destroyed by a bizarre species of non-humanoid creatures who use biological ships and who telepathically tell Kes that, "The weak will perish." While exploring an abandoned bio-ship, Harry Kim is attacked by one of the species, and his body starts to be enveloped by toxic vines. The alien race, known only by their Borg designation of Species 8472, turns out to be basing itself in the Northwest Passage, emerging through a wormhole from a place known as Fluidic Space. Debating how to proceed, Janeway consults a Hologram of her idol Leonardo Da Vinci, and decides to make an important decision - to make an alliance with the Borg.
     This episode is often called the Best of Voyager, and it's easy to see why. Voyager often lost a lot of points on the consistency of its characterisation, to the point where even Kate Mulgrew was on board with the fan theory that Janeway had some form of bipolar disorder. This episode sets up a character play between Janeway and Chakotay, in three scenes which explore all aspects of their relationship - the first showing their almost romantic admiration and devotion to one another, the next showing Chakotay's role as an advisor and advocate, and the last showing the ideological divides between them that separate Federation and Maquis. The issues of the episode are discussed thoroughly, and we aren't driven by the narrative to necessarily agree with either of the two on their stances on the Borg Alliance. It's not in-depth characterisation as Voyager often does; instead, it's utilising those characters for the good of the plot, and it works marvellously.
     One of the episode's hallmarks that set it apart from the season it's about to finish is the sense of tension woven through the script. This is before the days when Voyager would go around blowing up Borg cubes willy nilly, and there's a feeling that everyone involved is terrified, either at the possibility of inevitable assimilation, the new possibility of destruction by Species 8472, or the prospect that their 67 year journey will have to be postponed even further to find some way around Borg Space. This comes across in everyone's tone - there is still some mild humour, but everyone feels more alert and the idea that the Borg does this to Voyager lends them an amazing sense of gravitas.

Janeway negotiates with the Borg. I'm actually impressed at
that badassitude.

       This balances out the other side of the episode, the introduction of Species 8472. Their introduction here presents them almost as the "new" Borg, a new villain for the series to hook itself on. Unfortunately they wouldn't get to use them this way (having only two appearances after this two-parter, the latter of which saw them going to great lengths to make peace), but right here it works immensely well - the sheer alienness of the 8472 and their (as yet) unexplained hostility towards our Galaxy, their living ships and their immune system, which is so powerful it can destroy Borg nanoprobes. It was a really interesting concept which was, at least initially, fairly well executed, and the added threat they present manages to make the Borg that more interesting an enemy.
     Scorpion isn't my favourite episode of Voyager - they tend to be the more stand-alone character pieces or great, well-executed concepts. As a piece of serialised television, though, taking Voyager into the next stage of its evolution, Voyager's attempt to reach the heights of TNG's Best of Both Worlds manages not just to reach its target, but excel it and take the show into a brand new direction. Scorpion marks the beginning of a string of amazing Voyager episodes, and I look forward to taking on Season Four with fresh eyes and fresh enthusiasm. And to see Seven of Nine, of course.

Thanks.

NEXT TIME: We rejoin the conflict and meet Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine in Scorpion, Part II.

Review: Voyager 3.25: Worst Case Scenario

Thank you, Tuvok. At least someone understands. *cough*

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Twenty-Five - Worst Case Scenario
Written between 7th and 8th January 2016

Back when this show started, the main conflict set down by the writers was the struggle between Voyager's remaining crew and the Maquis rebels that they had been forced to work with. The Maquis were created and placed into Next Generation and Deep Space Nine just to set the show up, but the conflict between the crews was more or less dropped by the end of the first season. From then on, it would only be discussed in episodes that flashbacked to the first season, and this is the first time that happened. I don't know whether it's too early in the show's life for it to become self-aware, but the tone of the episode does feel slightly like it's closing the door on those old tensions, and throwing one last bone to the storylines that ran through the show's first two seasons.
     We open on what looks like Chakotay planning a mutiny, with B'Elanna playing the part of a Starfleet ensign going along with the rebellion. Janeway and Paris leave the ship in a shuttle, and Chakotay rounds up the remaining Starfleet crew and offers them an ultimatum. The real Paris then walks in and it turns out that this whole thing is a Holodeck program created by an unknown author. We see a couple of scenarios where Tom and B'Elanna try different things in the program, until eventually Tom reaches the end of the story. Tuvok reveals that the program was originally created by him as a security measure in the case of mutiny back in the early days of the show. With Tuvok's help, Tom is given permission to finish the program's story, but it turns out that the program had been booby-trapped by Voyager villain Seska before she died, and Tuvok and Tom are forced to explore the holographic Voyager and avoid being killed while Janeway works on getting them out.
     This is the first outing for two recurring types of Voyager episodes - "romp about in Voyager's past" episodes, and "Alternate Character Fun" episodes. Both of them happen about once a season, and allow the writers and cast to spend some time working with very different characters than they usually would. For what it's worth, I really enjoyed the segments set in Voyager's potential past, especially because for me it fit a lot more with the characters outlines in the pilot. We're given some hints in Resolutions as to why Chakotay basically just capitulated to Janeway straight away, but it never really made sense to me, and seeing him take the first opportunity to take control (and trying to do so without killing anyone) felt really satisfying. Also, despite how slightly one-note she can sometimes be, it was great to see Seska again, in her penultimate appearance on the show.

Oh, Seska. Don't remind me of the Kazon arc, please.

     Therein lies the episode's main appeal, then. What else is here though? There's a strange segment in the episode between the fun hypothetical scenarios and the finale with Seska's revenge in which Tuvok and Paris debate narrative method, and the difference between writing for the art and writing for an audience. It came out of nowhere but I actually found it really interesting, and I would have liked it if the episode had ran this theme throughout the episode. Usually episodes of TV Shows which are about writing are called cliché because it's writers who are writing them, but there's only one other story with that theme in all of Voyager so it wouldn't have gone amiss here. It might have been difficult to work it in with the episode's concept, but that's their job, not mine.
     Part of me doesn't want to find fault with Worst Case Scenario, because it's such a fun poke back at those early days of the show that it builds a lot of good will with me very quickly. At the same time though, the climax with the Seska hologram feels a little forced, and you end up taking a fairly interesting story about narrative structure and the rights of the author and turning it into a silly run-around. Despite this though, it just feels like an important event, and one episode before the arrival of the Borg as the show's main villains, it perhaps feels appropriate that the show finally leaves its old self behind in an entertaining and tongue-in-cheek way.

Thanks.

Review: Voyager 3.24: Displaced

Herp-a-derp, coming ta steal yo spaceship.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Twenty-Four - Displaced
Written 7/11/16

Back at the end of Season Two, Voyager was overwhelmed by their main enemies, the Kazon. This was used as a way of escalating the tension of the situation, as that trope often is, as it showed Voyager being brought to a point of desperation. As ridiculous as the Kazon were, they had the help of traitor Seska to work their way onto the ship, and you believed that they were capable of this one final triumph. In this week's episode, a random, badly-dressed race of aliens manages to overwhelm Voyager in the space of less than 20 minutes. Talk about lowering the stakes as you go along. The feeling you get after finishing Displaced is a feeling that none of this should have happened, and you're not quite sure how it did.
     Tom and B'Elanna are arguing (with much sexual tension) when a silly-hatted alien suddenly appears before them, claiming to not know where he is. The crew discover that Kes disappeared at the same time, and from then on there appears to be a teleport swap of Human and Nyrian every nine minutes. Although Janeway has a gut feeling about there being "something wrong here", everyone is taken aghast when, of course, the Nyrians take over Voyager. As B'Elanna is beamed over, we find that the crew of Voyager have been placed inside an artificial environment suited to their needs. Slowly, the crew begins to build weapons and find gaps between the environments that the Nyrians have created, and with The Doctor's help they take over the Nyrian's spacecraft, teleporting all of them into a cold environment and threatening them with hypothermia unless they send everyone home.
     One of my problems with this episode is that I don't believe the Nyrians as a species. This faction of Nyrians employs the swapping-out method because it's easier to deceive people than to outright attack them. In order to carry out this "humane" method, they built a giant space station capable of holding thousands of prisoners indefinitely, using tons of power to maintain different environments and atmospheres. We never meet the Nyrians again so I can't imagine that they're a huge empire with limitless power - so it seems so strange that they would burn up so many of their resources when they could just use their magical somehow-gets-past-Voyager's-shields transporters to beam people into space. Voyager starts its rebellion and overruns their space station in the course of an hour or two in-show, and the idea that our heroes managed what dozens of other species couldn't also rubs me the wrong way. It's not very believable, is my point. And it's also difficult to be caught up in the tension of an episode where Voyager is overrun when you don't find the villains intimidating, and it's inevitable that they'll lose at the end of the episode.

Technically speaking, this is a B'Elanna episode. Technically.

     The only really important character notes in this episode were between Tom and B'Elanna. It felt a little bit like a retread of the events of Blood Fever in that respect, as they didn't really go over anything more interesting than the fact that B'Elanna gets angry and Tom uses humour as a defence mechanism, both of which we already knew and didn't really need spelling out to us. It was nice to see them continuing to build up the relationship between those two, which would later go on to become "official" in Season Four, but it felt so irrelevant to the rest of the episode's plot that it might as well have been a bit of an afterthought. Elsewhere, we had a nice out-of-the-blue scene between Chakotay and Tuvok where they reminisced about their time at the academy.
      Promising so much in premise and delivering so little, Displaced is one of a long list of classic Voyager filler episodes; you could reasonably drop this episode from your marathon and not lose much beyond one slight gradiation towards the Tom and B'Elanna subplot for next season. Compared to the rest of the season it isn't a particularly bad show, and the action is well-executed, but compared to the last two episodes of this season, it really isn't anything special.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Mutiny on Voyager? We revisit Season One plotlines for one last time in Worst Case Scenario.

Review: Voyager 3.23: Distant Origin

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Twenty-Three - Distant Origin
Written 09/12/15

In 1633, the Catholic Church put Galileo Gallilei on trial for his adherence to the scientific theory of heliocentrism, the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. It's held up as a classic case of reason and science being crushed under the power of a religiously motivated establishment, and it's a clear-cut inspiration for the this week's episode, which follows a race of lizard-men descended from Hadrosaurs as they attempt to bypass their race's central religion and prove that they actually hail from Earth. It's a really interesting twist on the idea, but I wasn't as impressed as I wanted to be.
     We follow two reptilian aliens as they retrieve the remains of Hogan, an ensign of Voyager who died back in Basics. They are excited to discover that Hogan shares genetic markers with them, supporting their hypothesis that they are not in fact The First Race, but are descended from species on a far-off planet. This hypothesis is not supported by their race, the Voth's, high council, who follow "Doctrine", the underlay of their society. The originator of this theory is Professor Gegen, who is forced to escape Voth when the High Council attempts to detain him. His ship follows Voyager's path over Season Three, through the Nekrit Expanse. Luckily the Voth ship seems to be much faster than Voyager, and they catch up pretty quickly. Gegen kidnaps Chakotay and forms a friendship with him, but the vast Voth mothership overwhelms and captures Voyager itself, and in order to save them from a life of penal slavery, Gegen is forced to recant his views before the ministry.
     For a while it was interesting to see our characters from a distinctly alien point of view, and this gave the beginning of the episode a distinctly comic tone. This was perhaps not the best episode to begin back on after a ten-week hiatus in writing these reviews, as my sense of who these characters are is a little less toned than normal. The character who shined through the most Chakotay, and it was a difficult balance between the character actually being useful and courageous and the writers indulging the finer aspects of their "mystical spirit guy" schtick. Surprisingly, however, this episode saw Chakotay fighting for the side of science and progress against mysticism. I'm not sure whether this was a deliberate choice to demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of the philosophy of Star Trek, or just a really shoddy character move on the writers' parts.

      The tracing of Voyager's path across the past season was really fun to witness, and the reappearance of Hogan posthumously had me giggling like a madman, especially with the show's patented pattern of introducing a "redshirt" character, giving them two episodes of minor development and then killing them off anyway. I expected (and, for some reason, even remembered) there being a more thorough coverage of the season; if you're going to do a continuity episode, then why only reference two previous episodes? (Hogan died in Basics, Part II, and Gegen visits the space-station from Fair Trade.) The fact that it broke through to allow the main thrust of the plot to develop isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it did render the appearance of Hogan a little bit of a pointless in-joke. How Voyager.
      I made mention of the Gallileo comparison in the intro, and that's true. There are a few other little analogues here or there - there's some racial purity dynamics going on which are reminiscent of backlash against Darwin (Me? Related to a monkey?) The main problem was that it wasn't particularly subtle, and hence didn't add much to the discussion beyond presenting the historical events in a sci-fi context. Great for a Saturday Morning Cartoon, but the fact that the concept wasn't really taken anywhere meant that it lost a lot of its oomph. There was the tragedy inherant within the premise, but this is Star Trek. The whole initial starting point of the show is that these problems have been bypassed. Voyager's crew come from a utopian society where the theocratic repression of the Voth has been thrown off, but they never seemed to have any positive influence besides essentially fucking Professor Gegen over. Which is a real shame.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: A beautiful filler episode. It's the utterly forgettable Displaced.

Review: Voyager 3.22: Real Life

The Doctor and his original, "perfect" family.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Twenty-Two - Real Life
Written between 23rd and 24th October 2015

Context is a big part of what makes a long-running series have that special feel. If a show is trying to develop characters over a long period of time, it makes sense to have continuity from one episode to the next, so that a character's previous experiences can realistically inform them as time goes by. TNG and DS9 were brilliant for this, with Picard being left reeling from the Borg attacks and his time as a Ressikan, and all of the characters in Deep Space Nine having their characters be thoroughly consistent throughout. Voyager often tries to do this, but often doesn't quite hit the mark, and that's what happens this week - okay in isolation, unforgivable in context.
     The Doctor has created a family on the Holodeck in order to better understand his patience - he's made himself a human wife, Charlene, and two children, Jeffrey and Belle. When he invites Kes and B'Elanna to come to dinner, they lambaste him for creating a "perfect" family, all of whom have perfect behaviour, adore him and follow his every desire. Seeking to help The Doctor's program have the intended effect, and drawing on her own troubled childhood, B'Elanna alters his program without him knowing. Charlene is now a busy lecturer, Belle has realistic childish strops and Jeffrey hangs out with Klingons who want to involve him in blood rituals. The Doctor attempts to fix things, but when his daughter has an accident he can't fix he simply stops the program and tries to get back to life aboard Voyager. Tom convinces him to see it through and watch his daughter die, and The Doctor is changed forever. There's also a subplot about Voyager encountering subspace anomalies, but I was barely listening for that.
   The episode's premise is not a bad one - The Doctor has done things to help him understand humans before, like in Tattoo where he gave himself a virtual flu and Kes taught him a similar lesson to what B'Elanna teaches him here. The difference is that said plot was the B-plot of that episode; a funny little side addition to the more important (if stunningly racist) A-plot about Chakotay's heritage. Here The Doctor has gone so far as to create holograms with which he identifies as family - something which in itself raises so many philosophical questions that this episode never touches upon. Instead of maybe presenting the idea of an artificial being creating more of himself and beginning to identify more with them than with the "real" world, we're instead given a series of trite lessons about family life and fatherhood, in which teenagers are moody, kids are crap and how dare a woman work? It also beggars belief for me that The Doctor need this particular lesson teaching in the first place - this is way before The Doctor's character shifted towards his intense egotism, and it just comes off as weird that he could be this clueless.

Kes from this episode starts wearing her hair long, and starts to
sport catsuits eerily similar to those of Seven of Nine. 

      The worst thing about this episode, however, is the emotional pull at the end. We watch as The Doctor, a being literally created to save lives, is unable to save the closest thing he has to a daughter - someone he created, too. Tom forces him to face this trauma, teaching him that real people simply can't stop and avoid confronting tragedy and grief. Except... when they can? The problem with this whole interpretation is that this episode's events never come up again. An episode designed to be an important moment in the growth of The Doctor's character, in which he undergoes the heart-wrenching and forever-life-altering tragedy of losing a child, has no continuity with the rest of the series. How amazing would it have been to see the family recur? For the next few episodes to show The Doctor trying to adjust to his duties while overcoming that grief? The simple fact is, you don't just get over losing a child. You don't just get over losing anyone. And the fact that The Doctor doesn't refer back to the events of this episode ruin its entire message.
     Voyager is guilty far too often of taking itself too seriously, but this episode suffered from exactly the opposite problem - it didn't take itself seriously enough. Buried in this episode is the potential for an amazing sci-fi concept and a heart-breaking change to The Doctor's character which does what this episode wants it to do and makes him seem more human - but it's not here. Instead, we are presented with something which aims to be funny with a sad ending, simple pimple. I want to say something about how I just have to expect this from Voyager, but I don't want to - sometimes this show can be extraordinary. It was just a shame they made such a tasteless mistake this close to one of the show's best episodes.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Star Trek's answer to the Silurians in the continuity-stuffed Distant Origin.

Review: Voyager 3.21: Before and After

Well, they got this make up completely wrong.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Twenty-One - Before and After

Written 7/10/15

When you look back on Voyager as a whole and see how Kes actress Jennifer Lien was asked to leave at the end of the third season, you may be under the impression that she wasn't a very important character in the show, hence why she was written out. Needless to say, this is not true. Right now we're a good five episodes before the season finale, Scorpion, and until that episode, this was supposed to be building up for the departure of Harry Kim. Hence why this episode, an interesting and well-executed time travel story, has Kes as its main star, and features an alternate future in which Kes is still on Voyager, there is no Seven of Nine, and Neelix worms his way into more important ship functions. Eugh.
     Kes awakens - an old woman, surrounded by family, on her deathbed. She feels cold, and when she awakens she is in her own quarters, no more the wiser. In her first memory, she was being put into a special chamber to extend her life, but now The Doctor claims that that hasn't happened yet. As Kes keeps flashing back into the past at greater and greater intervals. Kes discovers the problem - roughly one year into Season Three's "present", Voyager encounters a race known as the Krenim who use time-based torpedos. Kes is infected with Time-radiation, and the special chamber activates this radiation and starts sending her consciousness backwards. Kes soon reaches "the present", and despite having little to work from, The Doctor is able to stabilise her. Kes regains her memories of the past, while still retaining the memories of the alternate future she has now erased.
     The time-travel aspect of the narrative makes this episode instantly memorable - it's rare that Voyager tampers with episode structure like this, but it works. Taking a page from the book of DS9's The Visitor, the Time-Travel aspect of the story is given a very light dusting of technobabble explanation, with the format of the story being used as a unique mechanism to develop Kes all over again. This story takes the view that Kes is still herself even if all of her memories were removed. I loved the little nods to some of the stranger aspects of her character - Kes is baffled at the idea that she was once "involved" with Neelix, and both she and her mother are shown to be giving birth through a sac on their upper back. (From the absurd alien biology of Elogium).

The bitterness on Tom Paris' face is award-worthy.

     It was also a fun use of alternate timelines. Apparently, in a future in which Kes stays and Seven of Nine never appears, B'Elanna and Janeway are killed in Season Four. Paris falls back on his old crush and gets together with Kes, and just over a year after the birth of their first daughter, Linnis, she too gets pregnant by Harry Kim (eugh) and they have a son, called Andrew. (There is suprisingly no appearance by Naomi Wildman, who would go on to appear as a child in the next season and beyond.) I love how often Voyager writes its own fanfic.
     I don't know, this episode often leaves me underwhelmed. Perhaps that's because I've seen it so many times - this is an episode I've been inspired to rewatch a lot. The sci-fi plot is fun and very well executed, although if we go back to my time-travel discussion, we miss the huge thing that every time Kes goes back, she in essence travels to (or creates) a brand new Universe. I liked Kes' development, but it didn't run very much in sync with the plot from Darkling, which I wish had been done better here. Shipping Kes with Tom Paris feels so much like a step backwards for the character that even if it's in this form, a fun "what-if" game, it still stings a little bit. Oh, Kes. You could have had so much better.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The brilliant-yet-also-kinda-appalling Real Life!

Review: Voyager 3.20: Favorite Son

This was supposed to be a genuine smile. I haven't even had
to pause this at an awkward moment, he holds that for about
two full seconds. Harry Kim, everyone.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Twenty - Favorite Son
Written 4/10/15

There's an unfair stereotype made of Captain Kirk and the original incarnation of Star Trek - namely that he went around seducing hot space babes like some He-Man sex god. That was actually very rarely the case on TOS, but that hasn't stopped this plot from resurfacing in the spin-offs. From the more general idea of the Planet Risa in TNG and DS9 to the incredibly misogynistic Angel One, there is no episode of Star Trek that most closely follows this idea than this episode. Who is the sex god in question this week? Harry "I'm in love with a Hologram" Kim. The resulting episode is one which, in the right hands, could have played off of Harry's deep seated neurological fears of immasculation and rejection, but instead plays out like a battle between Gandhi and the staff of an Amsterdam brothel.
     Voyager talks to an alien spacecraft, and Harry feels the urge to fire upon the ship despite no provocation. He wakes up the next morning covered in spots, his blood chemistry physically changed, and having had strange dreams. The aliens chase after them again, but they are saved by a member of a species called the Taresians, who immediately identify Harry as a member of their race. Upon beaming down, Harry is swarmed by female Taresians, who claim that their species are implanted in other species and left to return to Taresia in adulthood, incoporating the host species' DNA into the genome. The species is 90% female, and so males are in high demand for lots and lots of sex. Voyager loses contact with Kim, and The Doctor reveals that he was human, before his DNA was altered on purpose. Harry fights back, and Voyager rescues him.
     I make a lot of light out of Harry Kim being a bit... uncool. This is not new. I have a specific "Kim Death Count" tag, I make jokes with him having silly middle names. Really it's a bit of a cop-out. Harry is an easy target for me - easier than Neelix, because when the writers feel like it, you can at least take Neelix seriously as a survivor of warfare and hard times. Harry is a pampered, naive Starfleet officer who repeatedly shows how very squeamish he is around women, and how adoring he is of his friend Tom. If you're going to work that into a character, then just do it! There's a lot of room for that to work - write Harry as a young man, struggling with his sexuality, either due to a crippling social anxiety around girls or due to feelings for his friend Tom that he can't really accept. It's sad that this never gets addressed, because despite how awkward it may get, it's still ten times better than this repeated crap that Harry Kim becomes as chaste as can be if the choice is between sex and Starfleet. It's like Non Sequitur all over again.

You're expecting me to believe that everyone was so horny
right here that nobody questioned this statistic? Psh.

      And this plays into how Voyager treats sexuality in general. I spoke back in Blood Fever how Star Trek was forced into a certain level of immaturity due to never being able to really address sexual themes. The story being adapted here - implied by a quote at the end to follow the archetype of the sirens in Jason and the Argonaughts - is one which fundamentally demonises female sexuality as something to be used for lies and deceit, to drive men away from their true purpose. For Harry, even if these girls weren't trying to harvest his body for DNA, they're luring him away from his ship and his duty. It wouldn't have been so hard to adjust this episode to make it just that little bit better - make the consequence of staying on the planet not death, just the inability to ever leave. That way there's a genuine choice between leaving on Voyager and staying to "help" a race genuinely in need, and you avoid the predictable and ridiculous "sexy ladies lure you to death" thing.
      When it comes down to the wire, the basic problem with Favorite Son is that it's ridiculous. There's so much there that could have been used to make Harry Kim into a fleshed-out, three-dimensional character with realistic aims and problems. It's particularly ironic that the episode which tries to convince us Harry isn't human does such a good job of ignoring any humanity the character actually has, making his entire inner monologue about how confused he is and how much he's looking forward to touching someone, as long as he can go back to Voyager afterwards. It's weird, it's backwards and it's far below what the viewers, the show and Garrett Wang deserved.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: Time travel mayhem and wonder in Before and After.

Review: Voyager 3.19: Rise

Now... kiss

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Nineteen - Rise
Written 4/10/15

This is not a bad episode. The distinction between a good and bad episode of Voyager goes thusly: A good episode makes me cheer in the middle of the story, and a bad episode makes me cheer at the end. Rise did not make me cheer, or feel much else for that matter - an episode squarely in the middle. It had some okay character work, but the dynamic isn't anything we haven't seen before. The plot was kind of interesting, but the twist was predictable. This is as close that I've seen Voyager come to Doctor Who's Base-Under-Siege format - although I may just be thinking that because I'm going through Cybermen Month and my brain is somewhat saturated.
     Voyager is helping an alien species to destroy asteroids that have been impacting their planet, killing thousands. A respected astrophysicist Dr. Vatm goes missing on the surface, and so Voyager sends shuttles down to the planet to go look for him, as he has information about the asteroids. Tuvok ends up being assigned Neelix, who wants to learn more about away missions, and they crash-land on the planet, conveniently not far away from where Vatm happened to be. Together they discover a Tether lift, a shuttle designed to lift people to a low-orbit space-station along a giant space-rope, which Neelix claims to have expertise in piloting. Despite revealing later that he's only seen models, he proves to be the only one capable of using it. Vatm is murdered, and it's soon revealed that the alien ambassador sent with the party, Sklar, was a traitor for another species who wished to conquer that planet for their own.
     The episode was another outing for Voyager's go-to Odd Couple dynamic, Tuvok and Neelix, although for some reason their interactions felt incredibly muted. In the past, Neelix was an unending source of constant irritation, and Tuvok's bouncing off of him was actually quite amusing as well as cathartic, especially in Meld. Here, though, Neelix has calmed down a little and speaks to Tuvok as a respected superior, merely suggesting he find better ways of motivating and understanding people rather than trying to bludgeon him with overbearing silliness. I'm not sure whether this worked in the episode's favour or not - I was surprised to find that I actually really liked Neelix in this episode, and got a little pissed off at Tuvok for a few of his more condescending put-downs. I'd think this was decent character development if I hadn't watched the rest of the series.

Neelix bullshits his way into a position of power again, but
at least this time he's actually quite competant. 

     I think the fact that the dynamic was taken into such a... pleasant direction meant that it lost a little bit of the spark that made it work in the first place, and when you bundle that in with a political plot about a group of people we've only just met there's not a lot to latch on to. Of course the trusted advisor is going to be the traitor, of course the asteroids are arriving deliberately. (That one just seems borrowed from Frontios.) We know absolutely nothing about the Nezu society that Voyager is helping beyond the patterns of bumps on their forehead, other than the fact they're a people and some of them are dying and it's all very sad. Had we been given some insight into who they are, we might have felt something at the fact that they were being attacked, but that plot never really came into its own.
     As I say in my introduction, I can't bring myself to call this a bad Voyager episode - there's nothing particularly wrong with the execution, and it does one or two things which are fairly interesting. There are the sci-fi ideas there that I'm always craving, and there was character development. But it felt so self-contained and irrelevant, the story so predictable in its twists and turns, that at the end of the episode you're left wondering how the previous 42 minutes passed you by. Despite it's title, this episode really failed to rise to expectations.
     I'll get my coat.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: Harry Kim is secretly a member of an alien species, who wish nothing but to whisk him away and mate with him, forever. Jammy git. He's the Favorite Son.

Review: Voyager 3.18: Darkling

Wait, does Dark!Doctor have more hair?

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Eighteen - Darkling
Written 30/9/15

Okay, okay, okay. This review was going to go a very different way. I had a whole bit about how this story was the beginning of the "Terrible Trilogy" of Season Three stories between the okay Unity and the amazing Before And After, and then I'd pick it apart for how obviously terrible it is. I do have a problem with this episode, and that's the simple fact that it is not the episode it advertises itself as being, going from a plot which is important to the continuity of the show and derailing it with another plot which, while interesting and very well executed, really should just have been done some other week.
     The episode's initial thrust is about Kes, following on from her separation from Neelix in Darkling. She has become enamoured with a member of a nomad species named Zahir, and is reconsidering her life on Voyager in favour of pursing the life of adventure and travel which originally inspired her to leave Ocampa. The Doctor, simultaneously, interferes with his own program by incorporating the personalities of various historical figures, intending on picking and choosing the best traits to improve himself. A byproduct of this is his transformation into a "Mr. Hyde" version of himself formed from the personalities' negative qualities. This new Doctor is murderous, jealous and possessive, and not only assaults Zahir but kidnaps Kes, fighting to control The Doctor's "body" for as long as possible.
     Kes's arc on the show is one that so rarely gets its deserved development. It's about Kes finding her way in life, and taking control of her own agency. The beginning and the end of her story work really well (let's not discuss Fury) but the steps along the way often had Kes' story sidelined for the exploits of other characters... usually guys. Here, we see a Kes free of Neelix, exploiting her newfound sexual freedom and attempting to live as a free adult. That story is cut short by The Doctor becoming so jealous and protective (though admittedly through technobabble and not by choice) of her that this chance is cut short. At the end of the episode Zahir just disappears like the disposable, lazy love interest he is, and any sense of Kes' development is thrown out with the bathwater when she decides that "she best stay here."

Three huge assholes in a line. I knew Neelix was a Gandhi fan.

     However, as I said, The Doctor's plot is not even that unpleasant in isolation. The Jekyll and Hyde story is of course a well-worn one, but Picardo has the acting chops to make his "Dark!Doctor" distinct from the original in an entertaining and interesting way. Unlike the regular Doctor, who is programmed to believe in the Hippocratic Oath, Dark!Doctor has absorbed the hypersexual traits of Lord Byron and the discriminatory shrewdness of Gandhi, turning him into a ruthless, lecherous deviant whose main philosophy rejects the notion that people are innately good and/or worthy. Ignoring for now the involvement of Byron and Gandhi, I think it's interesting to see the black-and-whiteness of the Doctor's darker persona have some justification behind it. A computer program is more likely to deal in absolutes, which explains why the Dark!Doctor is so ardent in his misanthropy.
     The Doctor's Jekyll and Hyde story is clearly one that Picardo could handle, but it didn't need to be here. Instead of Zahir being an empty character who appears only for about five minutes on screen and declares his love for Kes twice in that time, we could have spent longer developing their relationship, watching Kes become embroiled in Zahir's attractive outsider persona, before being involved in a misadventure with him which would then remind her of how she felt the same thing about Neelix, making her realise that she still had some growing up to do. That would have been an amazing character piece for Kes, and it's so frustrating seeing her sidelined when I know that she's not going to be here next season.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: A Neelix/Tuvok bonding episode. Because there aren't enough of those. Why not make reference to a film I haven't seen and Rise?

P.S. Whose idea was it to give Kes some of Seven of Nine's catsuits?

Review: Voyager 3.17: Unity

Reference to the previous bald Star Trek girl?

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Seventeen - Unity
Written between 28th and 29th September 2015

How appropriate that as I begin Cybermen Month on Nostalgia Filter, we encounter Unity, the first Voyager episode to star the Borg, Star Trek's direct equivalent. It's funny now to see look here and see that Unity was considered such a highlight episode, a rare guest appearance. While this episode may have only been added to the series in order to tie the show in with the release of Star Trek: First Contact, the movie which renovated the Borg, Voyager would go on to use the pre-existing lore around them to turn them into their most important recurring villains - and would even have one as a main character. It's no exaggeration to say that the Borg were Voyager's saving grace as a show.
   Chakotay is on a shuttle with Obviously-Dead-Ensign™ when they crash onto an island with a Federation hail. Chakotay awakens to find himself in a community inhabited by lots of species from back in the Alpha Quadrant - the result of a Borg Ship being separated from its collective, its inhabitants regaining their old lives. In particular, Chakotay becomes friends with a human woman, Riley. Voyager is trotting along until it encounters a burnt-out Borg Cube. Riley says that they're creating a shared society, and asks Chakotay to ask Voyager for weapons and supplies should they arrive. Chakotay has a brain injury from being attacked upon the crash, and so the Borg-ettes implant him with a temporary brain device which allows him to become part of their collective, somehow healing his wounds. When he returns to Voyager and Janeway refuses to help them in their desire to reestablish a collective, they use the residual trace connection to force Chakotay to reactivate the Cube, allowing them to spread their collective across the planet and achieve peace and harmony.
     Despite last week leaving that big ol' cliffhanger that this was the Borg episode, and the presence of the Borg being a massive part of the publicity around this episode, the episode tries its best to keep their presence here a secret. When Riley explains the reason why she's in the Delta Quadrant in the first place, she's obtuse in her description of the Borg, simply calling them "aliens". This has a story purpose, of course, but it feels a little lacklustre to hold this information hostage - I would have preferred it had the episode had Voyager encounter the cube in the cold open, allowing the scenes with Chakotay's shuttle to feel more sinister with the knowledge that the Borg are here, just not in plain sight.

Because we had to have at least one active Drone for it to be
considered a Borg episode.

     While there were hints towards the Borg's future in the series (the "greater enemy" which would become Species 8472), there's really nothing here that hasn't either been done better before in Trek or would be done better later. Meditation of whether it's possible to return from life as a Borg was already thoroughly examined as a philosophy in TNG's I, Borg, while the emotional side would be embodied in the character of Seven of Nine. It would have been a decent character piece for Chakotay if it hadn't felt more like a Love-Interest-Of-The-Week plot which didn't really characterise him as anything other than "Starfleet guy." Considering that Chakotay is supposed to have become a member of the rebel Maquis (that plotline's relevance being shown by how seldom I write that word), I think it's a real shame that it never came up here - and that this episode wasn't a better showing for one of Trek's biggest villains.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The "unholy trio" of bad Season Three episodes begins with Darkling.

Review: Voyager 3.16: Blood Fever

Rated M, Lemon, Paris/Torres hurt/comfort, a little smut.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Sixteen - Blood Fever
Written 24/9/15.

Star Trek, as a rule, is not very open about sex. It was supposed to be teatime viewing, after all, and despite the show's tendency to fight back against injustice and inequality, the executives at the top were fairly conservative in terms of their censorship of the show. However, the writers still wanted to discuss sex and sexual things, and so there arose an uneasy middle-ground where certain episodes would be more sexual and fanservicey than others, even if it didn't usually make sense. This is the reason why you sit here today, reading a review of Blood Fever, one of the most sexually uncomfortable stories in Voyager, joining the ranks of Elogium and 25% of everything to do with Seven of Nine.
     Voyager has a great need for the made-up mineral... "spins wheel"... galicite! Upon ordering an exhibition of a planet stuffed to the gills with the stuff, recently appeared recurring character Ensign Vorik propositions B'Elanna, accidentally mind-melding her. Vorik has entered the Pon Farr, a period in a Vulcan's life whereby every seven years he must have sex or die. With The Doctor being tactlessly fascinated by the idea of treating him, Vorik is left out as B'Elanna, Paris and Neelix go on the away mission. While away, however, B'Elanna starts becoming aggressive, and all hot-and-bothered. Investigation by Tuvok and Chakotay reveals that the accidental mind-meld transferred the Pon Farr to B'Elanna too, so now she must mate or die. She gets locked in a cave-in with Paris, where despite her attempts to mount him, he resists for the sake of preserving their friendship. Upon leaving the cave-in, Tuvok orders Tom to have sex with her, which is only broken up when an enraged Vorik engages B'Elanna in a ritual mating dual for her own sexual agency, which somehow ends up curing both of them. On the abandoned planet, Chakotay and Janeway find a body - a dead Borg.
   The Pon Farr originally existed in order to give Spock a storyline in which he was emotional and irrational, in contrast to his usual composed self. In Voyager and Enterprise, however, the Pon Farr moved much more into the area of fanservice, and this more or less the first time this appears. Given the intimate nature of what telepathy means to Vulcans, the episode from the start hits on some decidedly rapey tones - Vorik enters B'Elanna's mind, and through the power of inception manages to alter her behaviour. The episode essentially then works as a huge metaphor for an abuse victim repeating the actions of the abused, with the caveat that both of them will die if they don't get their mack on.

Jeri Ryan inches ever closer. (Always a good mental image.)

      That perpetuates itself throughout the episode, as things are prone to do when dealing with the Pon Farr - an idea which collates sex with life-and-death necessity gang aft agley. Throughout the story, several people are robbed of their sexual agency, and it's mostly just paved over as a quirk of the sci-fi universe. B'Elanna is assaulted by Vorik at the beginning of the story, and the end, with intent to essentially rape her. B'Elanna spends a good chunk of the story doing the same thing to Tom, although at least she has enough self control to not do anything more than nibble him. (Klingon mating is weird.) Later, in a bizarre out-of-character moment, Tuvok orders Tom to "help" B'Elanna. In the alien culture of the show, I'm sure this can be explained away as a "logical" move, but for the viewer, we're shown one of the most rational guys on the show basically pulling rank to declare Tom's sexual agency forfeit.
     What this episode does foreshadow is the main canon relationship of Voyager, Tom and B'elanna. There have been hints to it before-hand, but the focus in the first production season seemed to be trying to set Tom up with Kes, and driving B'Elanna through her anger issues. Here in Season Three, the relationship is a great idea for the both of them - Tom grounds B'Elanna, and B'Elanna excites Tom. She loves fixing spaceships, and he loves flying them. (Alongside being a Doctor-Biochemist-Archeologist-Historian). It's such a shame that this is the first episode where they actually discuss having any feelings for each other, especially given all the rapey subtext. There's a nice scene closing out the episode where Tom makes an odd if rather sweet comment, and that almost saves it, but it's a bit of a pointed stick in a gunfight.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: We finally meet The Borg, after I've made a million references to them. It's Unity.

Review: Voyager 3.15: Coda

There's a frame where he's giving her the Kiss of Life and the
title card "Written by Jeri Taylor" appears.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Fifteen - Coda
Written 21/09/15

Sit down, kids. We need to have a serious talk about Jeri Taylor. The dichotomy between Deep Space Nine and Voyager did not come from indecisive scriptwriters. Near the end of the run of Star Trek The Next Generation, the writers going off to their respective series separated into two factions - Ronald Moore and Ira Steven Behr for DS9, Brannon Braga and Jeri Taylor for Voyager. There was of course a lot of overlap, but the important thing here is Jeri Taylor, who conceived of The Maquis, Janeway and several other important aspects of the show. While her influence on the show is very important, there came a point where her writing for the show was developing certain... themes. Mainly, long speeches about how people love Janeway, and especially about how much Janeway and Chakotay are deeply, madly in love with each other.
     It is because of this that this week's episode, Coda, ends up being a bit of a wet mush. The Braga-esque sci-fi plot, in which Janeway seems to die recursively until she is confronted by her father's spirit, does not as you might expect have anything particularly to say about the nature of human mortality. Now, I am an ardent Janeway/Chakotay shipper, as you will have seen over these many weeks. But here it seems really out of place. Every time Janeway "dies" we are shown character upon character lamenting her death with great prose, culminating in a lengthy funeral scene where each characters gives a loving eulogy for her. Then, she fights off the spirit of death by sheer will alone, and once recovered goes off to the Holodeck with Chakotay.
     The episode is crippled by the fact that, as it keeps telling us, Janeway is the brilliant main lead character that all the other characters love. There's no tension surrounding her actually being dead, because she's the main character of the show, and because temporary deaths on Voyager are like people being sent home on Top Chef. I mentioned Brannon Braga - this episode's beginning reminded me of Projections from the second season, where the layers of realtiy around our characters seemed to be fading away fast. But the episode doesn't really crank out it's main premise (Janeway is supposedly dead and in the afterlife) until the last fifteen minutes, leaving just under half an hour of confused plot, mad editing and everyone gushing about how beloved Janeway is.

I do most of my own screencaps now. Some are better
than others.

     I won't lie - I did enjoy this episode. Whether or not you agree with the politics behind Janeway and Chakotay, I believe that they work as a couple, and I love all of the little hints spread through the series (mainly by Jeri Taylor herself). But this episode, without that, is just a mess - a splattering of broken plot segments, leading up to a plotline which could have had some really fun sci-fi intricacies - themes on the nature of death like in Emanations, and later in Mortal Coil. Instead, this episode is content to be nothing more than the Captain Janeway show - and that's just not enough.

Thanks,

NEXT WEEK: B'elanna gets really horny and needs to Tom Paris to bonk her now. It's the teenage fanfic that is Blood Fever.

Review: Voyager 3.14: Alter Ego

No-one will convince me that the "Paxau Resort"
holoprogram wasn't just an excuse for skimpier out

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Thirteen - Alter Ego
Written between 13th and 19th September 2015

Last week, I described this episode as a Kim episode, which was half right, as this is a Tuvok episode which uses Kim as a plot device. This is an important distinction, because rather than singling out the magical mind of Harry "I remember being in my mother's womb" Kim, we're instead given focus on Tuvok, who Tim Russ employs with a brilliant mixture of comic Vulcan mannerisms and something hidden deep beneath the surface. It's that fact, along with a scattering of little character bits pointing towards future episodes in this season, that raises this episode from something run of the mill to something... well, slightly less run of the mill, but I'm trying to give some credit here.
   As Voyager heads into a volatile but stable nebula, Harry Kim goes to Tuvok for help, interrupting his game of Kal-Toh, a Vulcan logic game which makes its first appearance here. He wants Tuvok to teach him how to control his emotions, as he's fallen in love with a charismatic and buxom woman called Marayna - who exists solely on the holodeck. While Tuvok assists Harry in his endeavors, he soon finds himself drawn to Marayna, who in return seems to start falling in love with him. Kim gets pissy at Tuvok for this, and to resolve the situation Tuvok deletes Marayna from the system. It's later found, however, that Marayna isn't any old hologram - she's a projection being transmitted in from an external source, which is now preventing Voyager from leaving the nebula. Tuvok tracks her down and finds the real Marayna - an alien on an invisible ship, ensuring the nebula doesn't explode. He tells her that he cannot reciprocate her love, and that she should request a replacement so she can go out and meet people.
     As I've mentioned before, the love-interest-of-the-episode formula comes with a lot of its own particular ups and downs - it allows you to give a character a romantic subplot without major plot reprecussions, but it's hard to truly get a sense of why the relationship exists. This episode presents a nice twist on that theme, and works around the problem - Marayna falls for Tuvok so strongly because he's an outsider who actually engages her, and she's been alone for a long time. I also liked the way the episode created a red herring by making a reference back to some of the "Holodeck Character Comes To Life" episodes of TNG.

This episode is not about J/C. And yet, here it is. I love it.

     My problem with this episode on a base level is in its choice of characters. Tim Russ is fantastic and it was great to see Tuvok's mind work, but overall it comes back to a point about character development. By this point in the show, there have been some important character changes - Paris is more mature and less rebellious, Chakotay has fallen head over heels for Janeway (leave me and my shipper heart alone :P), B'elanna has become more sure of her abilities and less prone to anger. Harry "We were warned about the Ferengi at the Academy" Kim has not changed - he is just as naive and reckless as when he joined aboard, and Tuvok, as a pure-blood Vulcan, doesn't really have the capacity to change much as a character beyond learning to passively tolerate the rest of the crew. With no change in these characters, how are we meant to follow them on their journey through the show? Tuvok rides through the series on pure charisma and the immense talent of Tim Russ, while over time you start to just pity Harry and hope he feels better. (Although no disrespect to Garrett Wang, he's awesome.)
     Alter Ego marks the start of a point in Harry Kim's personal story (yes, he does have a personal story) in which from now on, all of his love affairs will be listed by Paris as a warning at the beginning of such episodes. The final list comes in somewhere in Season Six as "a hologram, the wrong twin, an ex-Borg and a girl from a xenophobic species". This is an odd trend, for, as we will discuss in a few months, this was meant to be Harry's last season on the show. Maybe those references in seasons after this one were just Harry counting his lucky stars that Kes got fired instead. Either way, it's perfectly representative of what Alter Ego is - ultimately, just another name on the list.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Bestill my shipper's heart! Kathryn Janeway must perpetually die in Chakotay's arms as he screams her name... it's Coda.

Review: Voyager 3.13: Fair Trade

Aaand roll credits.

Star Trek Voyager - Season Three, Episode Thirteen - Fair Trade
Written 12/09/15

It's that time again folks, the holiday bigger than Easter, Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's the Neelix episode, the time when the writers of Voyager decide to focus an entire forty-five minutes of your life around the show's most hated character, usually managing in their concentrated efforts to actually portray him as a character worth giving a shit about. While at times this episode felt like a cheaper version of a Season One DS9 episode, Neelix was given a coherent enough arc to make it entertaining, even if he does still have a few ridiculous lines. In context, this episode is far more important for the changes it makes to the plot - introducing the minor character of Vorik and plunging Voyager into the Nekrit Expanse, a region of space which Voyager travels through in one of Season Three's many "mini-arcs".
     The main thrust of the story followed Neelix's desire to be important on the ship. Despite having forced himself onto the ship under false pretences and taken executive control of a kitchen that shouldn't have been his to command, he suddenly starts to feel unwelcome, and upon reaching the Expanse he is terrified that he will get kicked off the ship, his usefulness as a guide ending here. They board a trading station and Neelix attempts to barter for a map, eventually running into old friend Wixiban, who tricks him into dealing narcotics. After consulting Paris about his crime (thanks for rubbing that in, Neelix, I'm sure he needed that), he decides to tell the truth, and he manages to coordinate with the station's commanders to save both he and Wixiban from imprisonment by arresting the narcotics dealers.
     One of the problems that Neelix has, amongst many, is that the writers never really decided on a limit to his abilities. Much like Tom Paris, the ace-pilot-biochemist-historian-doctor-engineer, the writers kept giving Neelix collections of new roles on the ship depending on the writer - except that with Neelix, they kept bringing it up. Neelix is the chef, he's the "Ambassador", he's a guide, he's the stupid made-up title of "Morale Officer". Cynical me found this episode's attempt to make Neelix feel worthless about himself a little hard to believe, seeing as he so readily intrudes outside his area of expertise, but I can also see this as an attempt by the writers to provide something which Neelix has been lacking - flaws which he identifies and works to change. This was attempted by his jealousy arc back in the first production season, but that was resolved almost by accident, and I think that's why this actually works - Neelix thinks about the issue, and decides that honesty and truth are the best way to go about things. He chooses the right thing over what's easy for him. And that's a quality that genuinely stays, which is why I think this episode does actually work. Not to mention Neelix's surprisingly badass turn near the end of the episode - that came out of left field and delighted me immensely. Well. Delight and confusion.

You literally deceived Voyager and led them
into a dangerous situation in the first episode.

     I often wish that Neelix was written this way all the time. Episodes like these make a lot of the same Voyager excuses when it comes to plot silliness, but when the character development is as focused as this, it doesn't really matter. Jetrel and Tuvix, the two previous Neelix episodes, are absolutely brilliant episodes of Voyager and this one joins its ranks at least in spirit. The pacing is great, no part of the script is wasted, everything goes towards developing this deranged hedgehog of a man into a believable and sympathetic character. And then next week he'll go back to being his old annoying self again. Would it kill you to have a little consistency, Voyager?
    And why the hell did you put a Kim episode next week?

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: Kim adds to his harem of unrequited lovers when he falls in love with a hologram. It's Alter Ego.