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Jun. 26th, 2022 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWe've finished Season 3 of Voyager! At the beginning of this post I wrote 'Broadly speaking, we liked it!' but in fact now I'm reviewing I realize that I do not actually think many of the individual episodes were that great BUT THEN WORST CASE SCENARIO HAPPENED and rose-tinted my entire perception of the season, well done Worst Case Scenario.
... but first we went back and watched the VITAL episode of Season 2 that we somehow completely missed, lol, thank you to everyone from my last post expressing distress at this situation because the whole Janeway/Chakotay arc of S3 would have been deeply mystifying to us without it. GREAT episode. LOVED seeing Janeway and Chakotay attempt to balance SCIENCE! and ROMANCE! while STRANDED IN A ROBINSONIAD! VERY funny how the show provides a fig leaf of 'ah ... look at this will-they/won't they! Look at them nobly restraining from giving in to their mutual passion!' when everything about the way the actors actually relate to each other in this episode and the first half of S3 projects full established relationship leading to an amicable but still fraught breakup in the back half when they realize that dating actually is incompatible with the chain of command.
Also, I can't believe we were just complaining about the show completely forgot all its previous Vidiian organ-stealing continuity when introducing the Doctor's sweet Vidiian doctor girlfriend, only for both of these things to be plot-relevant and connected in the one single episode that we missed! Apologies, Voyager, you were right in this case, and we were wrong.
15. Coda
Timeloop episode! The thousand deaths of Kathryn Janeway! It was very funny watching this right after Resolutions because it features both Chakotay and Janeway being trapped on a planet together and sinister Vidiians. We're right back in continuity! Anyway it turns out this was all a clever ruse by an evil alien pretending to be Janeway's dad to convince her that she's dead and then ... steal her body? eat her soul? Janeway's dad is Len Cariou whom I mostly know from his star turn as Sweeney Todd in the original Broadway cast so we all should probably have known he was a cannibal from the start.
16. Blood Fever
sajdk;fjskda;ld COMMUNALLY TRANSMITTED PON FARR IS THE FUNNIEST CHOICE THIS SHOW HAS EVER MADE. okay, so in this episode B'Elanna's junior Vulcan engineer gets pon farr'd and accidentally infects B'Elanna with pon farr by ... grabbing her? telepathing with her? what's important is that B'Elanna and Paris get trapped underground together and have to wrestle a lot while Paris earnestly tells her that he respects her too much to let this happen. I realize this is all part of the long arc of getting B'Elanna/Paris together, but it's also so funny that this is the second time this season that Paris has had to erotically wrestle a teammate who is under the influence of sexy hormonal aggression ... the actual funniest thing about this episode is that you could swap B'Elanna and Harry out for each other so it's Harry in Blood Fever and B'Elanna in The Chute and literally pretty much nothing would change.
The other funniest thing in this episode is the fact that it takes Tuvok until the third act to get involved in the plot. For the first half hour people keep coming to him like "we understand this junior Vulcan engineer and maybe also B'Elanna might have to fuck or die...?" and he simply refuses to engage or provide any advice whatsoever.
ME: Look, I get that pon farr is a private and awkward Vulcan thing to discuss, but as most senior Vulcan on the ship, don't we think he has some sort of responsibility to provide guidance to younger Vulcans on the crew?
DEBI: Just because they're both Vulcans doesn't mean they have to get along!
ME: Like, if Janeway was the only human woman on the ship, and there was a thirteen-year-old starting their period -- but I do love the idea that Tuvok just finds this junior Vulcan extremely annoying! they don't hang out!
17. Unity
The plot: Chakotay accidentally gets stranded on a planet with a colony of ex-Borg who are happy not to be part of the big Borg hivemind anymore but still want to try and form a little, kinder and gentler hivemind; Chakotay starts dating one of them and briefly gets tricked into being nonconsensually part of the hivemind but they let him go after briefly controlling him into giving them what they want. Some uncertainty and ambiguity re: hiveminds overall which I do genuinely appreciate!
The extrapolation: Chakotay and Janeway seem to have been attempting to FWB since Resolutions, because actually dating would be against Starfleet Protocol, but Janeway is clearly not comfortable with how uncomfortable she is when Chakotay has a brief romantical interlude with someone else; this seems to mark the point in the long arc of the season at which they begin transitioning to awkward exes
18. Darkling
THEY CALLED
THE MR HYDE TO THE DOCTOR'S JEKYLL
DARKLING
I'm sorry I do want to talk about the Doctor-Kes relationship (still cute! it's cute that his evil side still wants her as his protege actually!) and the fact that the Doctor's evil side comes from a computer program of Lord Byron (HILARIOUS) but I'm stuck here
(as a sidenote, the fact that we know that Kes and Seven of Nine don't overlap much but we don't know why has us extremely tense at this point -- every time Kes gets a major focus in an episode we're like "oh no! is this it? D:" and it is genuinely too bad because Kes is getting much more interesting stuff to do in the back half of S3 than she ever did as a Neelix satellite)
19. Rise
Tuvok and Neelix have a tense mission together in which they have to survive by fixing an alien space elevator with several alien officials and a potential saboteur on board and it is ... pretty fun??? Given that the last Tuvok-Neelix episode was the appalling Tuvix, up there with The One Where Neelix's Lungs Get Stolen and The One Where B'Elanna Gets Split Into Species Essentials for my least favorite Voyager episodes of all time, this is a truly pleasant surprise! One of the better Neelix episodes of the show imo; relatedly one of the few episodes that remembers that his backstory includes surviving a genocidal war.
20. Favorite Son
A bunch of hot alien women attempt to convince Harry that he is secretly a long-lost member of their species and has to stay there to help them repopulate it, except obviously they have a Dark Secret and are planning to drain his life force for reproduction or something idk. A few thoughts:
a.) evil interchangeable sexy man-eaters! WOW this feels like a TOS episode
b.) probably something worth saying/something other people have already said about the way Harry Kim is constantly positioned in these plots that require us to look at him as an extremely young man, the whole ship's son-by-proxy -- like, Garret Wang is thirty years old at this point, and plots like 'Harry Kim falls in love with a hologram' and 'hot alien women engage in a paternity battle over Harry Kim with Janeway' truly seem written for an 18-year-old? something something masculinity racism something
c.) lol Harry is SO much more interested in homosocial bonding with the one other guy who's here than in being seduced by evil interchangeable sexy man-eaters; they really should've targeted Paris, Harry Kim Simply Too Square For This [insert further masculinity discourse here]
21. Before and After
Yet again we fear for Kes, yet again she makes it through! This basically feels like a preview episode for Next Season On Voyager (Next Season On -- Paris and B'Elanna will be dating! Voyager will at one point have a very bad year!) but I am very glad to have context for the spoiler I accidentally saw years ago about Harry Kim dating Paris and Kes' daughter and realize that was a thing that will only happen in this one AU episode where it can be easily forgotten and never, at all, in the actual continuity of the show.
22. Real Life
The Doctor, in his ongoing quest to experience Human Life, creates himself a fake holodeck family; they are perfect and adore him, 1950s sitcom style. After B'Elanna and Kes are invited to fake holodeck dinner, B'Elanna decides to gamify the doctor's family program and throw him some Family Challenges to make his experience More Realistic. A couple big questions that this raises that the episode does not really engage with:
a.) the eternal question of holo-personhood -- the Doctor is engaging with and exploring his own personhood, but the Fake Holodeck Family are gamified props; the episode eventually turns on the Doctor's real grief for his holo-daughter when things go south but the fact that we know we'll never see this holo-family again past their utility in teaching the doctor an important lesson does really lessen the impact a little (Debi suggested that it would have been great to have the holo-family showing up in B-plots for the past few episodes to build to this, and I agree, but alas Voyager still does not know how to do B-plots, except, ironically, for this episode, which has a space B-plot I've already completely forgotten --)
b.) on a metafictional level, how much of the stuff that B'Elanna programs into the Doctor's family -- for example, the Doctor's kid making Klingon friends (and the Doctor being really quite frankly pretty racist about it) -- is pulled from B'Elanna's own Childhood Experiences in some way or another and how much is her absorbing cliches about Typical Federation Families? this could have been a great B'Elanna characterization episode if anybody had wanted it to be
c.) WHY IS B'ELANNA CONTINUING TO MAKE TOTALLY WILD CHANGES TO THE DOCTOR'S PROGRAMS WITHOUT ANYONE TO REVIEW HER CODE??
23. Distant Origin
Alien scientists are very excited to discover humans, which support their theory that these particular aliens evolved from Somewhere Else (i.e. Earth) and made it here from somewhere else instead of evolving entirely alone on their planet! Unfortunately the Alien Catholic Church disagrees and threatens them into silence. This is a perfectly fine Galileo allegory and it's fun to see an episode entirely from an alien POV; although Debi the paleontologist was apoplexing about every single scientific element in the "we evolved from dinosaurs!" premise I know nothing about science and so I had no problems!
24. Displaced
The more I think about this episode the more uncomfortable I get about it. So the plot is that Voyager is undergoing what seems to be a harmless little glitch in which one confused alien blips into Voyager every couple minutes while one Voyager person gets blipped away somewhere else. It turns out this is all a long con to quietly transport all of Voyager to a person so these aliens can take over the ship, as they have done to many groups before, but the heroic Voyager crew manages to defeat them and liberate everybody!
My qualms are twofold: a.) it's honestly just kind of boring that a bunch of other aliens have been hanging around here for decades without figuring out how to help themselves until the Voyager came to save the day but b.) the whole episode is weirdly literalized Replacement Theory? confused refugees turn out to be sinister operatives attempting to remove and take over a superior civilization? This may be unfair to Voyager as I'm not sure Replacement Theory was even a thing in the 1990s, at least not under that name, but I don't love it!
25. Worst Case Scenario
THIS EPISODE IS PERFECT. THIS IS THE PEAK AND PINNACLE OF WHAT VOYAGER CAN BE.
Okay, so the plot of this is that B'Elanna has discovered that someone has written a secret holoprogram about What If Chakotay And The Maquis Had Mutinied Back In S2 in which you, you! play a naif Voyager security officer who has to figure out how to thwart the plot. You might think this would be interpersonally awkward given that all the checkpoints are things like 'do you shoot Harry Kim?' but in fact B'Elanna, Paris, and in short order the entire crew rapidly get narratively obsessed with this Real Person Fanfiction and are playing it all the time to find out what will happen; unfortunately, the story is unfinished!
This soon becomes SO popular among the crew that Janeway brings it up at a staff meeting, at which point Tuvok stiffly admits that he wrote the thing as a training exercise, but orphaned it when it became clear that 'tension between the Maquis and Starfleet' was literally never going to be a plot point that Voyager cared about. Janeway and Chakotay both clearly think this is hilarious and Janeway orders Tuvok to finish his real person fiction speculating about how his colleagues will act during a mutiny and who will be the sexiest and most heroic during this event because we're out here in deep space with no new media content and people just want to have a good time!
What follows is a deeply charming interlude in which Tuvok, Paris, and the rest of Voyager argue about narrative priorities and accurate characterization until it turns out that Seska From Way Back sabotaged the program to turn into a death trap if Tuvok ever tried to go back and finish it: this is her fanfiction now! She is the heroine and will get all the sexy banter with Chakotay while smirking and threatening the Voyager crew, thank you and goodbye! The only way to crack the case is by leveraging the laws of narrative to fix the fic on the fly, which everyone has a wonderful time doing and Debi and I have a wonderful time watching. This episode is perfect to me. My one single note is that we never got a chance to see Harry Kim play the game featuring Checkpoint: Will You Shoot Harry Kim and I for one feel we were cheated.
p.s. also go listen to the Yamok Sauce podcast episode about this episode', which not only has a shout-out to These Very Posts but also spins out a truly delightful speculation on the Everyone Stays AU version in which Seska stayed with the crew the whole time and has to help crack the case to fight the holo-program she set up years ago and now I desperately want that fic.
26. Scorpion, Part 1
It's Borg time! Technically we now have seen Scorpion, Part 2 as well, which is the start of Season 4, so I'm going to leave most of my discussion for the next post, but I will just pause and say that Janeway and Chakotay are very clearly in their awkward breakup phase by this point. Also Leonardo Da Vinci is there!
... but first we went back and watched the VITAL episode of Season 2 that we somehow completely missed, lol, thank you to everyone from my last post expressing distress at this situation because the whole Janeway/Chakotay arc of S3 would have been deeply mystifying to us without it. GREAT episode. LOVED seeing Janeway and Chakotay attempt to balance SCIENCE! and ROMANCE! while STRANDED IN A ROBINSONIAD! VERY funny how the show provides a fig leaf of 'ah ... look at this will-they/won't they! Look at them nobly restraining from giving in to their mutual passion!' when everything about the way the actors actually relate to each other in this episode and the first half of S3 projects full established relationship leading to an amicable but still fraught breakup in the back half when they realize that dating actually is incompatible with the chain of command.
Also, I can't believe we were just complaining about the show completely forgot all its previous Vidiian organ-stealing continuity when introducing the Doctor's sweet Vidiian doctor girlfriend, only for both of these things to be plot-relevant and connected in the one single episode that we missed! Apologies, Voyager, you were right in this case, and we were wrong.
15. Coda
Timeloop episode! The thousand deaths of Kathryn Janeway! It was very funny watching this right after Resolutions because it features both Chakotay and Janeway being trapped on a planet together and sinister Vidiians. We're right back in continuity! Anyway it turns out this was all a clever ruse by an evil alien pretending to be Janeway's dad to convince her that she's dead and then ... steal her body? eat her soul? Janeway's dad is Len Cariou whom I mostly know from his star turn as Sweeney Todd in the original Broadway cast so we all should probably have known he was a cannibal from the start.
16. Blood Fever
sajdk;fjskda;ld COMMUNALLY TRANSMITTED PON FARR IS THE FUNNIEST CHOICE THIS SHOW HAS EVER MADE. okay, so in this episode B'Elanna's junior Vulcan engineer gets pon farr'd and accidentally infects B'Elanna with pon farr by ... grabbing her? telepathing with her? what's important is that B'Elanna and Paris get trapped underground together and have to wrestle a lot while Paris earnestly tells her that he respects her too much to let this happen. I realize this is all part of the long arc of getting B'Elanna/Paris together, but it's also so funny that this is the second time this season that Paris has had to erotically wrestle a teammate who is under the influence of sexy hormonal aggression ... the actual funniest thing about this episode is that you could swap B'Elanna and Harry out for each other so it's Harry in Blood Fever and B'Elanna in The Chute and literally pretty much nothing would change.
The other funniest thing in this episode is the fact that it takes Tuvok until the third act to get involved in the plot. For the first half hour people keep coming to him like "we understand this junior Vulcan engineer and maybe also B'Elanna might have to fuck or die...?" and he simply refuses to engage or provide any advice whatsoever.
ME: Look, I get that pon farr is a private and awkward Vulcan thing to discuss, but as most senior Vulcan on the ship, don't we think he has some sort of responsibility to provide guidance to younger Vulcans on the crew?
DEBI: Just because they're both Vulcans doesn't mean they have to get along!
ME: Like, if Janeway was the only human woman on the ship, and there was a thirteen-year-old starting their period -- but I do love the idea that Tuvok just finds this junior Vulcan extremely annoying! they don't hang out!
17. Unity
The plot: Chakotay accidentally gets stranded on a planet with a colony of ex-Borg who are happy not to be part of the big Borg hivemind anymore but still want to try and form a little, kinder and gentler hivemind; Chakotay starts dating one of them and briefly gets tricked into being nonconsensually part of the hivemind but they let him go after briefly controlling him into giving them what they want. Some uncertainty and ambiguity re: hiveminds overall which I do genuinely appreciate!
The extrapolation: Chakotay and Janeway seem to have been attempting to FWB since Resolutions, because actually dating would be against Starfleet Protocol, but Janeway is clearly not comfortable with how uncomfortable she is when Chakotay has a brief romantical interlude with someone else; this seems to mark the point in the long arc of the season at which they begin transitioning to awkward exes
18. Darkling
THEY CALLED
THE MR HYDE TO THE DOCTOR'S JEKYLL
DARKLING
I'm sorry I do want to talk about the Doctor-Kes relationship (still cute! it's cute that his evil side still wants her as his protege actually!) and the fact that the Doctor's evil side comes from a computer program of Lord Byron (HILARIOUS) but I'm stuck here
(as a sidenote, the fact that we know that Kes and Seven of Nine don't overlap much but we don't know why has us extremely tense at this point -- every time Kes gets a major focus in an episode we're like "oh no! is this it? D:" and it is genuinely too bad because Kes is getting much more interesting stuff to do in the back half of S3 than she ever did as a Neelix satellite)
19. Rise
Tuvok and Neelix have a tense mission together in which they have to survive by fixing an alien space elevator with several alien officials and a potential saboteur on board and it is ... pretty fun??? Given that the last Tuvok-Neelix episode was the appalling Tuvix, up there with The One Where Neelix's Lungs Get Stolen and The One Where B'Elanna Gets Split Into Species Essentials for my least favorite Voyager episodes of all time, this is a truly pleasant surprise! One of the better Neelix episodes of the show imo; relatedly one of the few episodes that remembers that his backstory includes surviving a genocidal war.
20. Favorite Son
A bunch of hot alien women attempt to convince Harry that he is secretly a long-lost member of their species and has to stay there to help them repopulate it, except obviously they have a Dark Secret and are planning to drain his life force for reproduction or something idk. A few thoughts:
a.) evil interchangeable sexy man-eaters! WOW this feels like a TOS episode
b.) probably something worth saying/something other people have already said about the way Harry Kim is constantly positioned in these plots that require us to look at him as an extremely young man, the whole ship's son-by-proxy -- like, Garret Wang is thirty years old at this point, and plots like 'Harry Kim falls in love with a hologram' and 'hot alien women engage in a paternity battle over Harry Kim with Janeway' truly seem written for an 18-year-old? something something masculinity racism something
c.) lol Harry is SO much more interested in homosocial bonding with the one other guy who's here than in being seduced by evil interchangeable sexy man-eaters; they really should've targeted Paris, Harry Kim Simply Too Square For This [insert further masculinity discourse here]
21. Before and After
Yet again we fear for Kes, yet again she makes it through! This basically feels like a preview episode for Next Season On Voyager (Next Season On -- Paris and B'Elanna will be dating! Voyager will at one point have a very bad year!) but I am very glad to have context for the spoiler I accidentally saw years ago about Harry Kim dating Paris and Kes' daughter and realize that was a thing that will only happen in this one AU episode where it can be easily forgotten and never, at all, in the actual continuity of the show.
22. Real Life
The Doctor, in his ongoing quest to experience Human Life, creates himself a fake holodeck family; they are perfect and adore him, 1950s sitcom style. After B'Elanna and Kes are invited to fake holodeck dinner, B'Elanna decides to gamify the doctor's family program and throw him some Family Challenges to make his experience More Realistic. A couple big questions that this raises that the episode does not really engage with:
a.) the eternal question of holo-personhood -- the Doctor is engaging with and exploring his own personhood, but the Fake Holodeck Family are gamified props; the episode eventually turns on the Doctor's real grief for his holo-daughter when things go south but the fact that we know we'll never see this holo-family again past their utility in teaching the doctor an important lesson does really lessen the impact a little (Debi suggested that it would have been great to have the holo-family showing up in B-plots for the past few episodes to build to this, and I agree, but alas Voyager still does not know how to do B-plots, except, ironically, for this episode, which has a space B-plot I've already completely forgotten --)
b.) on a metafictional level, how much of the stuff that B'Elanna programs into the Doctor's family -- for example, the Doctor's kid making Klingon friends (and the Doctor being really quite frankly pretty racist about it) -- is pulled from B'Elanna's own Childhood Experiences in some way or another and how much is her absorbing cliches about Typical Federation Families? this could have been a great B'Elanna characterization episode if anybody had wanted it to be
c.) WHY IS B'ELANNA CONTINUING TO MAKE TOTALLY WILD CHANGES TO THE DOCTOR'S PROGRAMS WITHOUT ANYONE TO REVIEW HER CODE??
23. Distant Origin
Alien scientists are very excited to discover humans, which support their theory that these particular aliens evolved from Somewhere Else (i.e. Earth) and made it here from somewhere else instead of evolving entirely alone on their planet! Unfortunately the Alien Catholic Church disagrees and threatens them into silence. This is a perfectly fine Galileo allegory and it's fun to see an episode entirely from an alien POV; although Debi the paleontologist was apoplexing about every single scientific element in the "we evolved from dinosaurs!" premise I know nothing about science and so I had no problems!
24. Displaced
The more I think about this episode the more uncomfortable I get about it. So the plot is that Voyager is undergoing what seems to be a harmless little glitch in which one confused alien blips into Voyager every couple minutes while one Voyager person gets blipped away somewhere else. It turns out this is all a long con to quietly transport all of Voyager to a person so these aliens can take over the ship, as they have done to many groups before, but the heroic Voyager crew manages to defeat them and liberate everybody!
My qualms are twofold: a.) it's honestly just kind of boring that a bunch of other aliens have been hanging around here for decades without figuring out how to help themselves until the Voyager came to save the day but b.) the whole episode is weirdly literalized Replacement Theory? confused refugees turn out to be sinister operatives attempting to remove and take over a superior civilization? This may be unfair to Voyager as I'm not sure Replacement Theory was even a thing in the 1990s, at least not under that name, but I don't love it!
25. Worst Case Scenario
THIS EPISODE IS PERFECT. THIS IS THE PEAK AND PINNACLE OF WHAT VOYAGER CAN BE.
Okay, so the plot of this is that B'Elanna has discovered that someone has written a secret holoprogram about What If Chakotay And The Maquis Had Mutinied Back In S2 in which you, you! play a naif Voyager security officer who has to figure out how to thwart the plot. You might think this would be interpersonally awkward given that all the checkpoints are things like 'do you shoot Harry Kim?' but in fact B'Elanna, Paris, and in short order the entire crew rapidly get narratively obsessed with this Real Person Fanfiction and are playing it all the time to find out what will happen; unfortunately, the story is unfinished!
This soon becomes SO popular among the crew that Janeway brings it up at a staff meeting, at which point Tuvok stiffly admits that he wrote the thing as a training exercise, but orphaned it when it became clear that 'tension between the Maquis and Starfleet' was literally never going to be a plot point that Voyager cared about. Janeway and Chakotay both clearly think this is hilarious and Janeway orders Tuvok to finish his real person fiction speculating about how his colleagues will act during a mutiny and who will be the sexiest and most heroic during this event because we're out here in deep space with no new media content and people just want to have a good time!
What follows is a deeply charming interlude in which Tuvok, Paris, and the rest of Voyager argue about narrative priorities and accurate characterization until it turns out that Seska From Way Back sabotaged the program to turn into a death trap if Tuvok ever tried to go back and finish it: this is her fanfiction now! She is the heroine and will get all the sexy banter with Chakotay while smirking and threatening the Voyager crew, thank you and goodbye! The only way to crack the case is by leveraging the laws of narrative to fix the fic on the fly, which everyone has a wonderful time doing and Debi and I have a wonderful time watching. This episode is perfect to me. My one single note is that we never got a chance to see Harry Kim play the game featuring Checkpoint: Will You Shoot Harry Kim and I for one feel we were cheated.
p.s. also go listen to the Yamok Sauce podcast episode about this episode', which not only has a shout-out to These Very Posts but also spins out a truly delightful speculation on the Everyone Stays AU version in which Seska stayed with the crew the whole time and has to help crack the case to fight the holo-program she set up years ago and now I desperately want that fic.
26. Scorpion, Part 1
It's Borg time! Technically we now have seen Scorpion, Part 2 as well, which is the start of Season 4, so I'm going to leave most of my discussion for the next post, but I will just pause and say that Janeway and Chakotay are very clearly in their awkward breakup phase by this point. Also Leonardo Da Vinci is there!
