(no subject)

[skygiants]

innerbrat and I have started watching Star Trek: Voyager! We're doing about two episodes a week; right now we're up through episode six.

Previously I have seen: none episodes except in the background when my parents were watching it in the nineties and I was in the room doing other things. I know who most of the characters are, that eventually Seven of Nine will turn up, and that at some point there will be an episode wherein Janeway and Chakotay become alien lizards and lay eggs, and that's it! That's my Voyager knowledge!


1-2. Caretaker

All right, so here we've got the premise: Janeway & Co. are chasing a Maquis ship with Janeway's undercover First Officer on it, but both of them have gotten kicked through to the Delta Quadrant, and then they accidentally get involved in local politics and Janeway decides she has to blow up their route home in order to stop it from falling into the hands of unfriendly aliens. At first I was concerned about the ethics of Janeway's unilateral decision to definitely trap her entire crew 75 light-years away from home to prevent a hypothetical bad thing from happening, but then I remembered that this is Star Trek, where every life-threatening problem is usually solved within the span of a 45-minute episode, which means it's actually perfectly reasonable for her to assume that if they solve today's problem today they'll figure out a way home next week.

At the end of the episode the Voyager crew and the Maquis crew have decided to integrate and everything's fine, which is terrible, because Chakotay and Janeway's decision to fully collaborate should have taken AT LEAST six or seven tension-fraught episodes of slow burn forced trust-building and instead we're just doing it? Everything's fine?? NONE of the members of this revolutionary cell are mad at Tuvok (undercover agent among the Maquis!) or Paris (betrayed the Maquis and led the Federation straight to them!!) for more than twenty seconds?!? What a waste of an absolutely incredible premise, I have to go watch the Kira-Garak-Damar arc of DS9 again right now immediately.

Other reactions: Harry Kim is introduced via a Comical Interlude at Quark's in which Harry says something about how "they warned him about Ferengi at the Academy," after which I was promptly so suffused with rage and concern about the idea that my beloved Nog would be facing microaggressions at Starfleet that I unfortunately took against both Harry Kim and Tom Paris (who rescues him from Quark's Comical Anger At Comical Anti-Ferengi Racism) on the instant. Harry Kim has done nothing else to offend me so far, but he's on thin ice. Meanwhile, Paris, who doubled down on being charmingly racist at the end of the episode, is through the ice and at the bottom of the river.

I'm very sad that it's going to be seven years before Janeway gets to see her dog again. :(((

3. Parallax

Most of this episode is about the tension about whether to promote Patronizing Starfleet Man or Angry Former Maquis Agent B'Elanna Torres to chief of engineering, culminating in Janeway and B'Elanna going on a science field trip together, and overall I actually really liked it! Or rather I would have really liked it IF it had come at the end of a fraught six-to-ten episode arc, the conclusion of which was Janeway and Chakotay deciding to collaborate, followed by this episode in which there's concern about Chakota's favoritism as First Officer and tensions among the crew -- anyway. If we presume that the long arc actually happened first to earn it, this is a good solid episode! Fun to see Janeway being an engineering nerd, hope they remember that she is one in future episodes!

... I do hope that Voyager is programmed with like. Some really good management training modules? I mean like in a general way I'm all in favor of B'Elanna getting promoted over Patronizing Starfleet Man but she does have a great point that being brilliant at science is not at all the same thing as being good at managing a team of people who annoy her ... and are all part of an organization that she deeply resents .... RIP B'Elanna's junior engineers.

4. Time and Again

Time travel paradox episode! Janeway and Paris accidentally time travel to the day before a huge nuclear explosion on a nearby planet and of course find out that they in fact were the ones who caused the nuclear explosion. I spend the entire episode really distracted by the fact that apparently every single person in this civilization wears a truly wild inexplicably uniform outfit comprised of a tricolor shirt with a color-matched corset?



EVERY SINGLE PERSON. They buy these clothes in the store! WHY!! Anyway. Janeway looks truly fantastic with flowing hair and a judgmental expression, so I guess that's something.



In the end it turns out it's all a chance to demonstrate that friendly alien tagalong Kes has nascent psychic powers that allow her to avert the time travel nuclear apocalypse, which I guess is nice to know, and nothing else that happened in the episode matters at all.

5. Phage

Oh .... boy. This one's a wild one! So friendly alien tagalong Neelix gets attacked by some organ-harvesting aliens that steal his lungs out of his body?? the holographic doctor has to create him holographic lungs while the Voyager pursues the organ harvesters, which only work if he lies very still in the same position in the holograph medical suite??? Everyone's very stressed about this but then they do catch the organ harvesters like 30 minutes into the episode ...

ORGAN HARVESTING ALIENS: we are SO sorry about this but you see our species is sick and we need to steal organs to survive, causing the deaths of other sentients. So regrettable!
JANEWAY: yeah I don't care about that we want Neelix's lungs back
ORGAN HARVESTING ALIENS: we are SO sorry about this but you see my friend here has already got Neelix's lungs and if you take them back you will cause HIS death. a moral dilemma. So regrettable!
JANEWAY: well ... you sure got me with that moral dilemma! I guess there's nothing I can do in this situation!
(DEBI AND BECCA: Really? REALLY? NOTHING YOU CAN DO????)
JANEWAY: So ... live a great life with your STOLEN LUNGS I guess ... I'll go break it to Neelix .....
ORGAN HARVESTING ALIENS: oh that's so kind of you. Perhaps there's something we can do to help, with our advanced medical technology, which we use, on the regular, to steal organs from other people, causing their deaths
JANEWAY: oh would you?? That's so kind!
ORGAN HARVESTING ALIEN, STANDING THERE, BREATHING EASILY THROUGH NEELIX'S TWO LUNGS: oh gosh why doesn't one of you just donate Neelix a lung? That would solve the problem! We can do that with our advanced technology no problem!
KES: I'd be happy to donate Neelix a lung! Thank you, Organ Harvesting Alien!
(BECCA: Well .... I guess ..... at least they made them promise to stop harvesting organs??
DEBI: They did NOT actually make them promise to stop harvesting organs. They told them not to harvest any more organs from anyone on Voyager. Those are two VERY different things.
BECCA: Oh .... you're right. Oh ......... oh boy.)

So, to sum up the math, at the end of the episode:
KES: one lung, original
NEELIX: one lung, donated by Kes
ORGAN HARVESTING ALIEN: two lungs, stolen from Neelix, plus a free pass to continue jaunting around the galaxy harvesting organs whenever they choose

This episode gives rise to many questions in me:

a.) why did Paris get assigned to be the doctor's assistant? He's already the helmsman ... he has a full-time bridge crew job .... SURELY there are enough ensigns running around the ship that somebody else who does not have a full time bridge crew job could devote some time to learning medicine instead of helping Neelix at the breakfast bar?

b.) why does Kes, whose significant other spends the entire episode on the verge of death, have to spend the episode soothing everyone else's upset feelings with a serene and placid expression on her face? Let Kes be emotionally unstable about the traumatic thing that has just happened for at least five seconds please! Five seconds is all I ask!

c.) WHY DID NO ONE SUGGEST THAT AT THE VERY LEAST ORGAN HARVESTING ALIEN GIVE BACK? ONE?? OF HIS LUNGS????

(innerbrat: On the other hand, Julian Bashir would have just cloned Neelix and then stolen the lungs from the discard clone.
ME: Well, the ethical logic of this episode is absolutely wild, but I guess it's nice to know that Holograph Doctor has better ethics around cloning than Bashir does ....)

6. The Cloud

The crew punch through a bit of space to fix a resource limitation problem (it IS nice when the show intermittently remembers that the crew is resource-limited!) and discover that instead they've actually punched through an alien, so then they feel bad and try to fix the alien up. This isn't actually very much A-plot, which allows for a whole host of B-plots, including:

- Paris breaks into Harry Kim's room in the middle of the night and hauls him out of bed to a holograph bar to watch Paris make out with a bunch of Sexy Holographic Barflys ... objectively this is very funny, but unfortunately Paris remains at the bottom of the river of my opinion so the fact that there is absolutely no heterosexual explanation for this behavior is completely wasted on me

- Chakotay talks Janeway into trying to connect to her spirit animal in a plot that is truly, extremely, painfully written by white people and caused us to expire multiple times of contact embarrassment ... however in addition to the contact embarrassment we also died laughing when Janeway was like "Chakotay, is your spirit animal a bear? You strike me as a bear type" and Chakotay was like "uhhhh definitely NOT a bear, my spirit animal is a SHE, I'm extremely heterosexual" and also again when Chakotay earnestly told Janeway that she was the only person he'd ever showed his spirit bundle to and then B'Elanna walked in less than ten minutes later to complain about the time that he tried to get her in touch with her spirit animal.

- B'Elanna and the Doctor have some fun rude people science banter and it's by far the most fun part of the episode, please let them yell at each other all of the time

Comments

[jothra]

Oh boy, godspeed. Voyager is one of the more uneven Star Trek series, especially early on. I'm still very nostalgically fond of it, particularly Janeway! I love her!

Things I do not love: Paris, everything about how the writers handle Kes and her relationship

I agree with you about the plotline. I understand why they did it like that in the pilot episodes, but if those episodes had been written now, I bet they would have done it more like you said. And it would have been much better.

[kore]

I cannot believe how even just reading these recaps brought back my LOATHING of Tom Paris full force.

[skygiants]

I do love watching Janeway do things .... During the first episode Debi was like "she looks JUST like her aunt" and I was like "who's her aunt?" but now that I know Katherine Hepburn is her aunt I absolutely can't unsee it.

IT'S SUCH A GOOD PREMISE, I'm still so mad about it!!! Could you not have waited five more years or so to make Voyager until DS9 seasons six and sevenish had proved that people would watch serialized Star Trek storytelling!

[kore]

//just lies back cackling

At the end of the episode the Voyager crew and the Maquis crew have decided to integrate and everything's fine, which is terrible, because Chakotay and Janeway's decision to fully collaborate should have taken AT LEAST six or seven tension-fraught episodes of slow burn forced trust-building and instead we're just doing it? Everything's fine?? NONE of the members of this revolutionary cell are mad at Tuvok (undercover agent among the Maquis!) or Paris (betrayed the Maquis and led the Federation straight to them!!) for more than twenty seconds?!? What a waste of an absolutely incredible premise

....yeah. I sat through EVERY EPISODE of this show for Captain Janeway, aka Captain of My Heart. I was watching it long after the hardcore Trekkies I knew and the people who were mocking it on the internet tapped out. And that was always the thing that pissed me off the most, there was this GREAT PREMISE, and it was so wasted.

[skygiants]

We're six episodes in and I don't even know why any of the Maquis cast members joined other than "well B'Elanna didn't work out in Starfleet." YOU GUYS ARE A REVOLUTIONARY CELL, please tell me about your actual beliefs maybe for a hot second before everyone puts on a Starfleet uniform!

[thistleingrey]

These summaries are hilarious--thank you.

[skygiants]

I was like "should I wait until I've watched more episodes to do a write up?" and then I hit the lungs episode and I realized that I had to scream about it on the internet immediately.

[starlady]

Every time I read through other people's blogging of Voyager episodes I am strengthened in my resolve never to rewatch the vast majority of them. There are some good parts but I jumped ship when the fourth season was airing and I've never really regretted it.

Poor Harry Kim, he deserved better.

[kore]

Harry Kim was so cute! And I don't think he ever got any, either. I would have happily given him all of stupid Paris' plotlines.

[skygiants]

Harry Kim seems perfectly nice! He really needs to bond with a fellow crew member who isn't Tom Paris! MAKE NEW FRIENDS, HARRY, YOU DESERVE BETTER.

[kore]

....also oh man, I forgot about all the horrible times poor Robert Beltran got stuck with the "I'm Native American! Let me spout a lot of cliches!" bullshit.

[starlady]

Apparently the "Native American consultant" the show hired was a white guy passing himself off as Native for $$$ and…it shows.

[asakiyume]

This was hilarious.

When we did a rewatch/watch-through (we had never actually watched every episode from cover to cover, so to speak), I was amazed at how long it took to reach episodes I actually liked. Basically I liked the show a whole lot more after Seven of Nine joined--I loved her character excessively. Such a great combination of competent, terrifying, and vulnerable!

But yes, she is not to appear for quite a bit. What I couldn't believe in the early episodes of Voyager was how sexist it was! Yes, they have a female captain, yes, B'lanna is an engineer, but then there is Kes. And there's some episode coming up soonish where Paris ends up on trial for murder on the Planet of We are in Television 1950s Land, and I kept shouting at the TV, "Why? Wasn't this running more or less contemporaneously with DS9? How can DS9 be as (comparatively) feminist and this show be so.... so.... SO??

But LOL the Planet Where Everyone Wears The Same Warm-Tone Striped Shirts! And yeah, you really have to wonder about the writers with that phage episode.

[skygiants]

"just sit back and enjoy the ride," I told myself, and then immediately googled "which season does Seven of Nine join the show" anyway. Season FOUR? Okay. Okay. Deep breaths. We can do this.

Yeah, there's this sense of cognitive dissonance because like -- technically DS9 has fewer main female characters than Voyager, it's really just Kira and Dax and even Dax (much as I love her) doesn't fully start to blossom into a full character until season two, but Kira is SUCH an intensely vibrant and complicated and fully realized presence from the beginning that it always feels like DS9 is taking its women seriously as people. Whereas Voyager actively passes the Bechdel Test much more often and Janeway and B'Elanna have a significant relationship right from the start but the writing on Kes and Paris undermines that so hard that it does feel much less progressive on that front ... metrics really aren't everything!

[viridian5]

The immediate, seamless integration of the Maquis and Federation crews made no sense at all, to the point where I appreciated even more when a later sci-fi show had an entire season of the warship's AI and original, high-minded military captain struggling in dealing with the small crew of freewheeling shipping/salvage/sometimes looting civilians he had to take on and vice versa. And they had far less personal beef between them!

[skygiants]

I cannot BELIEVE how much rich personal beef they set up and then just! completely dropped!!! The only person I respect on this front is the angry Bajoran who was like "let's lead a mutiny and take over their ship" after B'Elanna got thrown in the brig for punching her boss, at least she remembers that they used to be radicals for longer than twenty seconds.

[vass]

at some point there will be an episode wherein Janeway and Chakotay become alien lizards and lay eggs,

I regret to inform you that Chakotay does not have lizard sex with Janeway, Tom Paris does.

I'm very sad that it's going to be seven years before Janeway gets to see her dog again. :(((

One of the first fanfics I remember successfully getting a friend to read was a gen fic (I can't remember the author) in which Paris gets caught sneaking into Janeway's quarters, refuses to say why, and is in the brig or loses replicator rights or something for half a year, and Janeway finally finds out why on her birthday, when the crew presents her with a puppy: he broke into her quarters to get her liberty clothes and vacuum them for dog hairs, which they used to clone her dog.

[skygiants]

TOM PARIS HAS THE LIZARD SEX? TOM PARIS????? THIS IS TERRIBLE NEWS.

asdklfjdkl okay that fic does sound great

[goodbyebird]

YEEEEESSSSSS

I haven't watched all of it either! I really need to get back to it, they're all so great! Very much looking forward to your future mockery, and common loathing of Paris :D

[skygiants]

HE'S THE WORST! (The other thing about Paris is that he looks exactly like if you put DS9's Eddington and Benedict Cumberbatch in a blender and then ran it through a deaging filter on 3x blandness levels. This isn't at all why we don't like him, we don't like him because of the sexism and the racism, but I will admit it doesn't help ....)

[raven]

What a waste of an absolutely incredible premise, I have to go watch the Kira-Garak-Damar arc of DS9 again right now immediately.

yeeeeeep. I love Voyager because it was my first proper tv SF and my first Star Trek and also because of Janeway and Tuvok, but this really is the unforgivable bit of the show. It collapses itself into TNG's premise in about five episodes for no reason at all. Like, it does get better as it goes on and there are some really fantastic episodes but it is not DS9. :(

promptly so suffused with rage and concern about the idea that my beloved Nog would be facing microaggressions at Starfleet

ok now I'm angry about this too, how DARE.

... I do hope that Voyager is programmed with like. Some really good management training modules?

It's a way off yet but there IS an episode about officer training modules and it is a triumph. An utter joy.

[skygiants]

Even if they didn't want to serialize it properly they could have done character development stealthily! Or just had a full first season of Status Quo Everyone Mistrusts Each Other before doing a season-two opener that gets everyone to the point of Status Quo We're All Crew Now! ARGH. (I am now desperately looking forward to the officer training modules episode though, thank you for this extremely important information.)

I've said for years that the Star Trek show that I really want is Space Captain Nog but now I've discovered what I actually also desperately want is the drama about Nog in Starfleet, accepting that it would break my heart in both good and bad ways on the regular.

[pauraque]

Hahaha, oh gosh, these recaps are great. Voyager is a show I've had a... tumultuous relationship with. It was one of the first fandoms I started getting into fic for, precisely because it had SO much potential and it was so often wasted. There are some good and even great episodes, but they are way too rare, especially in the early seasons. It was a really frustrating show to watch week-to-week as it was airing, but in retrospect it's gained a certain sheen of nostalgia for me. It probably helps that I only ever rewatch the good episodes. I have no intention of ever doing a full rewatch, even though I actually still read and even occasionally write in the fandom, and that should tell you something.

Also, something I didn't know at the time was that the writers actually wanted to make use of the premise and have all this conflict and gradual trust-building between Starfleet and the Maquis, but The Powers That Be told them they had to make the show strictly episodic because they didn't want casual viewers to be "confused". Why they let them go forward with a premise that demanded serialization, only to forbid them from using it, I don't know, but it does make me a bit more sympathetic to the writing team.

[skygiants]

Yeah, like, I know that every Star Trek series has a rocky start in the first season or two but BOY, it is ROUGH to see all that potential wasted! I am definitely ready to direct my ire towards the Powers That Be that did not trust that viewers would actually want to enjoy the premise that they tuned in to watch. (But I don't think I can blame anyone but the writers for Neelix's Lungs.)

[halojedha]

I enjoyed this commentary very much! I only watched Voyager intermittently and never bonded with it as much as TNG or DS9, so I don't remember these episodes at all. I'm feeling tempted to do a rewatch, but I'm unlikely to have time, so thank you for watching them so I don't have to!

[skygiants]

I knew it was going to have to be a couple years between DS9 and any other Trek to give myself time to forgive another crew for not being the DS9 crew, and innerbrat is already watching TNG with her parents, so here we are! It's gonna be a Journey!

[sdelmonte]

Worth watching for the occasional moments of brilliance from the original cast, the occasional really good episode, the ones that are so bad they are funny, and the Doctor. Picardo is just wonderful even when the show is not.

And down the line, there will some good stuff with Seven despite how badly her run starts. Jeri Ryan makes so much lemonade from those lemons.

[skygiants]

I'm so excited for Seven of Nine .... I can't believe we have to wait THREE WHOLE SEASONS for her. Voyager! Don't you know what the people want?!

[lannamichaels]

...it has been 20+ years of fannish osmosis, including watching a couple Voyager episode when they first aired, reading various Voyager crossover fics, and listening to some Voyager filk, and I never ever ever picked up that the Voyager crew was a mashup of two completely different crews. Thank you for this education on the basic premise of Voyager that I somehow completely missed XD

[skygiants]

Apparently the writers/Powers That Be also more or less ignored the basic premise after its introduction, so I don't think you can be blamed too much for missing it, lol! Which is: let me reiterate: a GENUINE shame.

[rachelindeed]

Oh man, Voyager. This is the Star Trek series that I approached completely wrong, by which I mean I started watching it in real time from the beginning. With every previous Star Trek series, I loved each one so much that I resisted watching the next spinoff for a little bit because I thought I wouldn't be able to love it as much. So, I held off on TNG because I loved the original so much, which worked out well because by the time I gave in and started watching, TNG was in season 4 and actually good, as opposed to the trashfire of its early seasons. Then I loved TNG so much that I held off on watching DS9, and only picked that one up in its 3rd season. And it became my favorite Trek, I fell head over heels in love with it.

So when Voyager started up, I said to myself: Let's learn from our mistakes. Stop holding off on the new kid on the block just because you love the old ones! So I determinedly watched Voyager from the first, reassuring myself that if I just gave it time I would surely get into it.

I gave it three seasons, then gave up. It just did nothing for me.

Which means I left RIGHT BEFORE Seven of Nine arrived and the show reportedly got good. I've never gone back to verify, but I'm willing to believe there was an up-tick in quality once they actually got an interesting character who provided believable and nuanced conflict. But unfortunately the show used up all my goodwill in its early seasons and I just have never been interested enough to go back.

I look forward to your recaps, though! Even these first few are hilarious :)

[skygiants]

OH NO. Yeah, I very pointedly gave myself several years in between finishing DS9 to even think about starting Voyager, because I knew I just would not be capable of being fair to it! Unfortunately I find myself still making DS9 comparisons at every turn but it is at least much better than it would have been if we'd gone straight into it ...

[ceitfianna]

Oh wow, I remember watching Voyager when it was first airing and I don't really remember any of the episodes only some of the characters. I always felt like they deserved a better show.

[skygiants]

I really, really wish they'd just given the premise a chance to breathe -- in the last couple episodes we watched there were so many good moments that would have landed so much better with the proper buildup!

[sheliak]

Voyager was the Trek of my childhood (along with some scattered TNG) and I loved it (it was better than TNG as far as I was concerned because B'Elanna and JANEWAY), but I haven't rewatched it since I was a teenager. I am kind of reluctant to do so. Maybe a careful selection of episodes people actually think are good? And the one where Kes gets possessed by an evil alien dictator, because whether or not that one turns out to be any good I loved it so, so much as a kid.

I loved the female characters a lot, including poor Kes despite everything (and I remember wishing she and Seven had overlapped enough to interact some). Janeway was my favorite and she's still My Captain, really. (Even though I was a little disappointed to figure out that she was not actually played by Katherine Hepburn.)

(I was vaguely aware that people thought it was not good and that DS9 was better, but my parents were aggressively uninterested in war stories, so I only saw, like, three episodes of DS9. And one of those was the one where Holographic Singer Vic Fontaine matchmakes Kira and Odo, which I enjoyed at the time but...)

(I did read all the Star Trek books in the library, though! Conclusions reached by Small Sheliak: the Voyager and TNG books mostly sucked, the prequel series about Picard's first command was better, and the TOS and DS9 ones ranged from decent to amazing. I did not care if the Enterprise ones were good or bad because they had Jonathan Archer in them and fuck that guy, and I bounced so far off of Peter David's writing style that his series about the OC captain and crew was basically incomprehensible to me. I resented the poor quality of the Voyager books a lot, though in retrospect I think that was editorial's fault more than anything. Much like the show's own weaknesses...)

[skygiants]

Aw, do Seven and Kes not get to interact? That's a bit of a shame! The cast I remember my parents watching when I was a kid definitely included Seven and I have no memories of Kes or Neelix, so I wonder if my parents just tuned in around the fourth season ....

(DS9 is the only one I've really watched, because innerbrat and I sat down to watch it through in like 2013 as our Skype-watching show after she moved back to the UK. And it too CERTAINLY has its flaws, but I did imprint on it as one imprints on one's First Trek Proper despite not actually being a child at the time.

... relatedly, if you have any recommendations for particularly good DS9 novelizations I would SO happily take them. >.>)

[lizbee]

This post DELIGHTS MY HEART, as Voyager is my favourite Trek (and frankly it makes me a little sad that so many people here think it's shite. It's not! It's just better at characters than plot!)

If this is something you would find appealing, I've blogged about seasons 1 - 3 of Voyager so far (and I will add season 3 to my index post ... soon!)

Anyway, contrary to popular opinion, I think the show gets good in the final quarter of season 3, before Seven of Nine is introduced, and also I hope you stick around long enough to see Tom Paris become Solid Nerd Who Loves His Wife guy.

[skygiants]

Yessss I love your recaps, thank you! I am stoked to go through them as I hit more episodes :DDD (though I have to disagree with you about Janeway's hair, I LOVE her absurd enormous bouffant, it fills my heart with joy and respect.)

[sovay]

1-2. Caretaker

The most frustrating thing for me about the pilot is that it's a bang-up premise that should have been a rollercoaster and instead it just sort of . . . happens. The pacing is all over the place. I checked out on entire conversations even when they were plot-important. There is no way the two crews should have integrated so instantly and seamlessly, especially under the Starfleet aegis—at the very least I would have expected a mixed crew of civvies and uniforms.

At this point in the show Paris can be drop-kicked into a vacuum as far as I'm concerned, but I also found him weirdly weightless despite all the emphasis laid on his checkered past and the possibility of redemption that should also have taken more than forty-five minutes. Research suggests this may be due to the fact that he is an expy of a one-off character on TNG whom the showrunners of Voyager didn't want to import because then they would have owed royalties to his creators. Especially because both characters were played by the same actor, I find this incredibly stupid. Just pay the writers.

The Ferengi thing: aaaaaaaaagh.