(no subject)

[skygiants]

It's been like ten months since I posted about Voyager! Since then innerbrat and I have watched a lot more Voyager!

We're midway through S3 now and I have ... forgotten a lot ... about many of the episodes ... so this catch-up post is going to be a bit of an adventure and probably not very useful to anyone, but here we go!



16. Meld

This is the one where Tuvok mind-melds with murderous Crewman Suder to try to teach him to be less addicted to murder and instead catches murderous impulses from him by accident ... I think I was pretty ambivalent about this one at the time but feel more fondly about it in retrospect due to the fact that they hang onto Suder and attempt therapy and restorative justice over, like, multiple episodes in a way I did not at all expect.

17. Dreadnought

One full episode of B'Elanna V. An Intelligent Missile That B'Elanna Programmed But No Longer Trusts Her is just forty minutes of very good television. No complaints no notes! I would watch mech pilot B'Elanna having fraught relationships with robots any day.

18. Death Wish

An unfamiliar Q shows up asking for Janeway's help to commit assisted suicide, a more familiar Q shows up to try and prevent him, Janeway promptly calls a legal tribunal to settle the case despite not having a single trained lawyer on Voyager, and I don't remember what happens next because innerbrat and I ignored everything that was happening on the screen in order to complain to each other about how absurd it is that Star Trek ships and space stations don't include trained legal teams as a matter of practice given that they inevitably need to hold an elaborate legal tribunal at least once per season.

19. Lifesigns

The Doctor rescues a dying alien and they have a pleasant vacation romance before she goes back to responsibly fulfill her duties among her people. For the record, her people are the the organ-stealing aliens who took Neelix's lungs, performed genetic experiments on B'Elanna, and literally skinned a cannon fodder crewmember whose name I've forgotten and wore him as a person suit. None of this of course comes up in the course of the episode whatsoever, because here on Voyager we let bygones be bygones.

20. Investigations

Wikipedia tells me that this episode involved Paris being a fakeout traitor and Neelix finding a real traitor but I truly do not remember a single thing about it.

21. Deadlock

Two Voyagers! Two Janeways! Would Janeway fuck a clone? absolutely she would. Unfortunately she does not have time in this particular episode before one Voyager explodes, but we know it in our hearts.

22. Innocence

We really loved the 75% of this episode that's just Tuvok landing on a planet populated by three scared children and immediately going straight into Dad Mode. The fact that the ending makes no sense and is emotionally incomprehensible does detract a little, but I will still cherish what we had!

23. The Thaw

Did not care at all about this episode about the crew being trapped by an evil virtual clown until Janeway took the spotlight, but such is Kate Mulgrew's power that as soon as it became a one-on-one battle of wills between Janeway and the evil clown I was riveted.

24. Tuvix

Wow! Nobody liked this!!! Tuvok and Neelix are merged by a transporter accident into a new combo person. Various people who care about Tuvok and Neelix are, understandably, upset by this. Eventually, Janeway decides that Tuvix needs to be separated back into Tuvok and Neelix, despite the fact that Tuvix himself does not consent to the separation and considers it a death sentence; Debi thought this was an ethically appalling decision on Janeway's part and may well be right, but a.) Janeway is right that Original Tuvok would have hated Tuvix with every fiber of his being and b.) I hated Tuvix with every fiber of my being so frankly I agree that he was simply too annoying to live. Double-negative bonus points for how painfully uncomfortable poor Kes was in every scene where she had to engage with the fact that her boyfriend and her father figure had somehow merged into one horrible person who still wanted to date her.

25. Resolutions

asdjkf;sdjk I really absolutely have no memory of watching an episode where Chakotay and Janeway are trapped together on a planet -- Debi, did we accidentally skip this one?!?

26. Basics, Part 1

Season finale! The Kazon attack, most of the Voyager crew gets trapped on a planet, and there's some Seska and Chakotay baby drama, but in all honesty the only part that I actually care about is the fact that Suder is doing okay with his gardening therapy.





1. Basics, Part 2

Once again, I care very much about the Doctor and Suder show ... Suder was obviously always going to die redemptively at the end of this two-parter because Voyager is not interested in, like, 'continuity' and it's the easiest way to get rid of him but I'm still glad we got what we did wrt explorations of rehabilitation-focused rather than punishment-focused consequences for crime. Anyway some other stuff also happened I guess.

2. Flashback

The premise of this episode -- Tuvok's been infected with some kind of weird memory virus -- is more or less nonsense but it provides an excuse for an amazing flashback sequence with Sulu and baby Tuvok so I'm not at all mad, that was extremely enjoyable.

3. The Chute

That was one of the most homoerotic episodes of television I've seen in a while and I'm also not mad about it! Harry Kim and Tom Paris end up trapped together in a prison and implanted with microchips that emphasize their aggressive urges; in order to hold onto their sanity, their safety, and their loyalty to each other, they are simply forced to do a lot of homoerotic wrestling and carry each other dramatically around the prison while shouting at the other prisoners to back away, this one's theirs! Absolutely wonderful time. The Wire from DS9 I think edges it out in tropiness but only very slightly. Then of course they get back to Voyager and immediately start acting as if it never happened, indeed much like Tom and Janeway after they reproduced together on Newt Planet. Getting banished to strange planets to live through horrible, dehumanizing, but intensely romantic experiences with his coworkers is just a thing that happens every week to Tom Paris and it runs right off him like water off a duck's back.

4. The Swarm

The Doctor's program is suffering out of memory errors and needs a hard reboot; there's a lot of emphasis on AI personhood and also the Doctor's particular relationship with Kes, so yes, I did feel feelings about it.

5. False Profits

Bad Ferengi episode!

6. Remember

The crew pick up some friendly aliens and B'Elanna starts getting projections of memories from someone among the group, which reveals the genocide these friendly aliens committed against a religious subset of their people in the past and have since covered up. Thematically really compelling -- the question is what hold do and should the wrongs of the past hold on us, what justice do they demand when none of the wronged are left to speak of them directly, and it's an interesting question! -- but structurally weak, we really wanted more time focusing on B'Elanna's personal present-day relationships with the aliens and less time on B'Elanna making out with a tragic flashback rando and then enthusiastically describing the makeout sessions to Chakotay.

7. Sacred Ground

Janeway goes on a spirit quest to rescue Kes from a coma. Once again, one wishes that Voyager knew how to do B-plots.

8 & 9. Future's End, Part 1 and 2

The Voyager crew go to the 90s! The villain, presciently, is an evil tech billionaire! Everyone wears big nineties suits and shoulderpads, except for Tuvok, who gets sweats, a tank top, and a do-rag! Paris flirts with Sarah Silverman and reveals that he's secretly a twentieth century pop culture nerd! We all have a wonderful time!

10. Warlord

Kes gets possessed by the personality of an evil alien warlord who uses her to take over a planet while she fights him telepathically for possession off her own body! This was a blast to watch, the actress is clearly having an incredible time getting to do something else besides smile sweetly or look concerned and we had an incredible time watching her. Star Trek's commitment to having Evil and Sexy be synonymous is also funny every single time; one does love a villain whose solution to every single problem is to invade the problem's personal space and then attempt to seduce the problem and add it to their harem. Does make me even more regretful that 90% of Kes' plots are boring Neelix nonsense when we could have been having this much more fun nonsense the entire time!

11. The Q and the Gray

'This episode is going to be bad,' innerbrat told me upon opening up the page and seeing the summary, and! lo and behold!! anyway Q shows up and wants a Janeway baby for some reason. Janeway says no. We shout at the screen that there are some newts available for the taking, but nobody listens to us. Q's ex shows up. They do a lot of classic and extremely gendered bickering. We shout at the screen that Qs are ageless and unknowable extra-dimensional beings, but they still don't listen to us. There's a Civil War reenactment for some reason??

12. Macrocosm

JANEWAY BATTLES GIANT VIRUSES. You would think the virus infection plot might be distressing in this time of coronavirus, but given the viruses are enormous bad-CGI blobs that Janeway has to stab with a knife, we did not find it particularly stressful! Also Janeway spends the whole episode channeling Ripley in a grimy tank top and looks amazing. A win for her and a win for us.

13. Fair Trade

Neelix's Past Catches Up To Him on board a trading station where an old friend lures him into Crime. I literally just watched this one two weeks ago and I still remember almost nothing about it.

14. Alter Ego

Harry asks Tuvok to help him fall out of love with a hologram hydrosail instructor, but the hologram turns out to be a lonely and introverted lighthouse-keeper alien who's hacked into the ship and is crushing (understandably) on Tuvok (because he's dreamy). GREAT Tuvok episode, bad Harry episode, inexplicable Neelix episode -- why does this whole plot take place at a fake Polynesian luau? One feels a certain desire to read the polite HR complaint raised by Voyager's [hypothetical] Polynesian crew member afterwards. This is also the episode during which I first noticed that Voyager's bridge is essentially a horrible open-plan office, leaving Harry no opportunity to daydream and Facebook-stalk his crush during work hours without getting called out by his boss.

I am going to try to be more regular about these so I don't end up having to do 25 episodes at once, hopefully another post at least by the end of S3!

Comments

[cyphomandra]

I love The Chute. It totally commits to the trope and I am still super irked that both protagonists appear to have completely forgotten everything by the credits, likewise the writers etc (although to be fair this is my complaint about pretty much most of the central concepts of Voyager so at least they’re consistent?)

[skygiants]

Yeah it is so simultaneously funny and infuriating how at the end of every episode, no matter how intense or profound the emotions contained within it, the characters all kick back like "well, that was a normal one, lads!" GUYS, IT WAS NOT A NORMAL ONE. (It was, however, in the case of The Chute, a great one.)

[starlady]

It's very lol to me that you have no memory of the episode that cemented Janeway/Chakotay as a ship. TUVIX IS SO ANNOYING and also definitely sexual harassment adjacent, if he weren't too annoying to live it would be a much more compelling ethical dilemma.

"Macrocosm" is about where I tapped out of watching regularly but it remains probably my favorite episode of the series.

[skygiants]

We truly did somehow completely skip right over it! We just went back and watched it today and I can confirm: I would never have forgotten that episode.

"Macrocosm" was just good plain fun to experience. Show those guns, Janeway!

[sovay]

I think I was pretty ambivalent about this one at the time but feel more fondly about it in retrospect due to the fact that they hang onto Suder and attempt therapy and restorative justice over, like, multiple episodes in a way I did not at all expect.

I missed all the episodes with Suder, but strongly considered them because I really like Brad Dourif, although it means that at a distance I resent him redemptively dying.

[skygiants]

Brad Dourif really does a fantastic job of like -- giving you a character who is just a deeply unnerving presence, and not ever softening that in his performance, and making you care tremendously about him regardless. (innerbrat and I talk a lot about the Everyone Stays AU in which they get to actually just keep having all the interesting one- or two-off characters they encounter throughout the story as opposed to constantly winnowing things back down to core cast.)

[jothra]

Oh man, I VISCERALLY remember some of these episodes. You mention one scene or plot point and I can see it in my mind despite not having watched any Voyager for probably 10-15 years.

Also when you said 'I hated Tuvix with every fiber of my being' I chortled out loud.

[skygiants]

HE'S SO AWFUL, JO. I spent the whole episode screaming at him to stop! Stop what? EVERYTHING.

[sheliak]

Warlord! That was my absolute favorite as a kid. (I loved the part when Kes's personality was starting to bleed through the possession and she started making evil proclamations that EVERYONE MUST HAVE A GARDEN.)

I remember liking Suder as a kid and being sad when he died. Although knowing me it could just have been that I thought his eyes were pretty.

I think the reason Tuvok didn't wear shoulder pads in the 90s is that shoulder pads are Romulan and he would never.

[skygiants]

YES, possessed!Kes declaring that everybody had to have a garden was possibly the best moment in an episode that truly had a lot of fantastic moments.

I personally would call Suder's eyes 'unnervingly intense,' but they were definitely compelling!

I'm mostly just resentful that they didn't get Tuvok a fedora to cover his ears instead. 'but it was the nineties not the forties -' FEDORAS ARE TIMELESS! and in the nineties they didn't yet have any negative connotations!

[raven]

Absurdly, Death Wish is one of my favourite episodes of Star Trek and the only one where I’m not obsessed with the lack of lawyers, I guess you wouldn’t take any on your short trip to chase some terrorists? But maybe that is hoping too much.

[skygiants]

No, it's true, Voyager is actually the one show that is most justified in not having any staff lawyers (perhaps they did have one who didn't survive the trip, we know they lost a significant portion of the crew, and this is one area I would not be surprised that the Maquis couldn't fill the gap!) Death Wish really is by far the best Q episode [that I've seen] though and it is not at all fair to it that we were very distracted by the fact that we'd never considered the lawyer question before.

[kore]

Lifesigns

WHAT? I do NOT remember that one.

Oh ghod the clown one. Everyone I knew quit watching after that one, including T, leaving me to adore Janeway by myself. Even a guy online who was hate-recapping each and every single episode gave up. Such is the power of Kate Mulgrew that I kept watching every. single. episode.

TUVIX. Wow that was bad. I remember it mainly because another recapper wrote one of the most hilarious recaps ever about it, which has been lost to the sands of time and mists of Geocities. I might have it on a diskette somewhere.

And the people who stuck through the clown one (not many!) left after the Q and baby one. So, so very bad.

Janeway in a tank top! I do remember that one.

[skygiants]

If it helps, I did forget to mention that the Doctor's girlfriend spends most of the episode as a hologram and the actual central question of the episode is whether or not she's going to go back to her own body or remain holographic ...

There were some gems in between the clown and the Q-baby! The flashback one and The Chute and the Doctor-has-memory-loss and the nineties time travel and Warlord are all really quite good! The absolute disasters are getting further apart ....

[tree_and_leaf]

There's a Civil War reenactment for some reason??

What is with Americans and bizarre and pointless Civil War re-enactments? Like, I get that it's a national trauma whose consequences linger on, but it doesn't half come out in odd ways.

[starlady]

The extra unfortunate thing about this episode is…Q and Janeway are on the Southern side! What?? Why???

[vass]

this episode about the crew being trapped by an evil virtual clown

Misread this as "trapped in an evil clown" and thought "wtf" but was thinking it at Voyager, not at you, because I had no doubt at all this was a plot Voyager could have run.

Also Janeway spends the whole episode channeling Ripley in a grimy tank top and looks amazing.

Ah yes, I remember that.

[skygiants]

I mean they sort of were trapped in an evil clown, actually, because the evil clown was the representative embodiment of an evil virtual reality simulator that had trapped the consciousness a bunch of aliens for -- reasons? Something something last survivors of a planet the simulator was afraid of being shut down if it let its people go? Anyway. The evil clown did engulf them, or at least their brains.

[innerbrat]

1. The Real Traitor was one of the Marquis gay engineers and we never hear how his boyfriend dealt with him being a traitor.

2. WAIT. Did we miss the episode where they got together? Is this why they're clearly an established couple in season 3? I DEMAND.

[skygiants]

I think the reason I don't remember that episode is because we never heard about how his boyfriend dealt with him being a traitor, tbh.

I'M SO GLAD WE'VE FINALLY RECTIFIED OUR MISTAKE

[gramarye1971]

Still vocally advocating for a Space JAG show that is all about the sufferings of the unfortunate legal team who are constantly, CONSTANTLY trying (and occasionally succeeding) to keep their colleagues from accidentally starting wars or violating space-admiralty law or having inappropriate chain-of-command relationships. A found family of interstellar killjoys. I would watch at least four seasons of this show.

EDIT: Five seasons if we get a full on "A Few Good Men" multiepisode plot arc with ramifications that echo across at least two seasons and end with someone getting cathartically punched in the face.

[raven]

I don’t know you but I think we should be friends.

[pauraque]

Even though I don't think I've watched the episode in literal decades, I will never forget The Chute, nor the enthusiastic outpouring of slash fics that were written in response to it. Paris/Kim might have been a ship before then? But that episode was defining for it.

I've never been able to decide whether the Evil Clown being played by Michael McKean makes it better or worse or both.

[skygiants]

I'm so glad to know that fandom responded to The Chute as it deserved, I'd hate to think all that subtext went unobserved into the stratosphere!

I spent the whole episode being like "I know that evil clown from somewhere!" and then afterwards I looked him up and was like "oh my god, that's the evil clown?!"

[osprey_archer]

These write-ups are SO funny, I'm at work trying not to giggle all over the circulation desk. I love that Janeway just had some baby newts on some planet somewhere and then the show entirely forgot about it!

[skygiants]

In recent years people have started celebrating Theshold Day, in memoriam of all the baby newts who never got their day in the spotlight. The show may never remember, but we will never forget!

[oracne]

"Resolutions" is, I think, the where where Janeway and Chakotay do not bone after having hella chemistry whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Your description of "Tuvix," especially the last line, cracked me up. The newt episode is the one I hate even more.

"The Q and the Gray" - Q actually wanted Picard's baby, but Picard probably used the excuse he wasn't a human female.

Grimy!Tanktop Janeway is so hooooooooooooot.

[skygiants]

Having just watched it today to make up for accidentally missing it before: I refuse to believe they didn't. Boning offscreen isn't the same thing as not boning! Kdrama taught me that! We were a little confused why Chakotay and Janeway give off such 'yes, we're definitely dating' energy in some of the S3 episodes but now we understand.

TANKTOP JANEWAY IS DEVASTATINGLY ATTRACTIVE.

[copperfyre]

I am failing to not giggle over these reviews at work, these are hilarious. And bringing back some real memories! Truly why does my brain retain the plots of bad Voyager episodes and not anything more useful?

I do love any episode where Janeway gets to run around in a tanktop, though Voyager's continued determination to literally never having any lasting consequences really did drive me up the wall.

[skygiants]

It's very frustrating that the only recurring plots in S2 are the ones that we didn't like!* NOBODY CARES ABOUT SESKA'S BABY.

*with the exception of the Suder plot, and also, it turns out, the doctor's girlfriend plot -- I really wronged the show there, she comes back and is significantly one of the organ-stealing aliens in the one episode we accidentally didn't watch!

[schneefink]

I never watched the show but enjoy your reviews *g*

[skygiants]

lol, I'm very glad you're enjoying them! :D

[lizbee]

TUVIX DISRESPECTED KES'S BOUNDARIES AND MADE HER CRY, AND FOR THAT ALONE, HE DESERVES DEATH, HE IS SOMEHOW EVEN WORSE THAN NEELIX

ahem

Cannot BELIEVE you missed/forgot "Resolutions", the FOUNDATION of my adolescent OTP and frankly the source of too many feelings TO THIS VERY DAY. It's not actually good, but ... well. You know how it is when you're thirteen years old and offered canonical pining.

[sheliak]

According to my teenage memory Janeway killed Tuvix for making Kes cry, and, you know, fair.

[sdelmonte]

It seems like this is one of those shows people are rewatching now, as if they've run out of newer things and know this is at worst Star Trek comfort food. I am nearing the end of the whole series.

I liked Tuvix. What I don't like is that it's never ever mentioned again. The lack of serialization for anyone but the Doctor and Seven - and maybe for Torres and Paris - is understandable for the era but so frustrating. And this was parallel with/after DS9, so it's not like Trek hadn't discovered serialization.

[skygiants]

We finished DS9 in 2015, and then took a break to watch all of Clone Wars and a couple kdramas before I felt ready to watch a Star Trek show that wasn't DS9 without unfairly comparing it all the time.

...and admittedly I still am unfairly comparing it all the time, especially when it comes to the serialization, but less so than if we'd dived right in, for sure. I'm ready to love Janeway now! In 2016 I still missed Sisko and Kira too much. (I also do miss Kira all the time, but I'm dealing with it.)

[innerbrat]

I am FASCINATED by the fact that Voyager so failed to engage any of its audience in characterisation and moral quandry that everyone's clamouring for the full on redemption of the serial killer but is cheering on the death sentence for the sex pest.