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[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

[pauraque]

Oh man, Neelix's Lungs... It was like they watched Spock's Brain and thought "what a great idea!"