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Feb. 10th, 2022 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsIt'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 becauseinnerbrat 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!
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!
no subject
Date: 2022-02-13 05:25 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-14 01:03 am (UTC)...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.)
no subject
Date: 2022-02-14 01:12 am (UTC)