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Jan. 13th, 2023 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsinnerbrat reminded me that it had been 8 episodes since my last Voyager write-up! It has now been over a week since then so actually it has been 9 episodes since my last Voyager write-up, but this means I get the reward of writing about ~*~white tuxedo Janeway~*~ in this batch so in this case procrastinating served me well...10. Random Thoughts
It's the thoughtcrime episode! B'Elanna is accused of being mad in public and thus introducing Violent Thoughts into a highly telepathic society; in order to prove her evidence Tuvok has to go undercover as a guy looking to buy some Violent Thoughts. This episode was fine but I would have enjoyed a higher proportion of Undercover Tuvok. I do think it's very funny that it ends with Seven being like "hey Captain Janeway maybe we should stop visiting random planets to have episodic plots in which someone inevitably gets into grave peril" and Janeway is like "I simply will not."
11. Concerning Flight
Janeway has been hanging out with her holodeck friend Leonardo da Vinci! Holograph Leonardo da Vinci accidentally ends up holographing around an alien black market, and he's been set up with a cool new workshop and is thrilled to have access to new technology and he's so happy and he and Janeway have a really charming buddy episode and it kills me that Janeway has to bring him back to the holodeck and convince him to forget all about his exciting and intellectually stimulating adventures! Let holo-Leo be free! This episode is good because Janeway and holo-Leo are very cute and fun to watch, and bad because it is simply not interested in questions like 'why does the holo-doctor get to be free and holo-Leo, who is CLEARLY LEARNING AND GROWING AND POSSESSED OF INDEPENDENT AGENCY AND DESIRES, has to go back to the holosuite. Anyway. Add another character to the rich and full cast of the Everyone Stays AU, except holo-Leo wouldn't stay on Voyager, he'd keep hanging out with mildly evil patrons inventing cool things, which is fine, this is his natural habitat and he should be allowed to thrive within it.
12. Mortal Coil
The premise of this one is 'Neelix gets resurrected after a death experience and doesn't see an afterlife or any of the loved ones he expected to see again and gets incredibly depressed about it', which tbh is grim but fair and interesting to explore ... then Chakotay decides he can fix it with a lot of exposure therapy and a vision quest. Instead it makes things worse! This is probably better than if the vision quest did fix it but it does really highlight a problem that will come up later in this batch with the fact that Voyager has no trained mental health professionals and instead keeps throwing band-aids like 'Chakotay will take you on a vision quest!' at everyone's ongoing trauma.
13. Waking Moments
I remember literally nothing about this episode. Memory Alpha tells me that there were some dreaming aliens and they were mad at awake people going through their territory. Okay. Tuvok has a naked stress dream which is deeply unexpected but strangely endearing!
14. Message in a Bottle
The crew manages to get a data channel open to the Alpha Quadrant! Then they send the Doctor through to a ship, where he teams up with an obnoxious baby Mk II Doctor hologram to save the ship from Romulans. This is just a buddy action comedy and it is a great one and Debi and I have spent every episode since pining for obnoxious baby Mk II Doctor to come and join the crew. They should be able to steal him no problems! The Doctor clearly needs an assistant and data is replicable!
In a B-plot that picks up on an ongoing thread throughout the course of this season, B'Elanna is annoyed at Seven for being so rude and bad at human communication all the time, which I deeply believe as B'Elanna characterization because of course it is always the problems that one has worked at painstakingly in oneself that annoy one the most in others. On the other hand it is also fair that B'Elanna is annoyed because Seven has absolutely taken a number of narrative roles that would have belonged to B'Elanna two seasons ago before Seven was around to be Ruder and Worse At Human Communication
In the C-plot, Paris asks Harry to help build a new Doctor while the Doctor is gone because he's tired of being asked to stand in for the Doctor as the only person with medical training. a.) this is so disrespectful to the Doctor b.) we do not understand why this is necessary? data is replicable? Anyway, in a shocking development, Paris and Harry learn the very important lesson that programming complex AI is hard and you can't do it in an afternoon. Let's hope everyone remembers this the next time the Doctor asks B'Elanna to program him a new subroutine.
15. Hunters
This episode is my favorite of the batch! Technically the plot is a way to introduce the Hirogen, who are just Predator knock-off aliens (more on this anon), but in fact the plot is mostly just about the slow process of getting letters from home to various people on Voyager and how everyone is very excited at first about hearing from home and then it all inevitably gets messier and more emotionally complicated.
Also Janeway deputizes Neelix to run around the ship telling people when they get letters instead of quietly sending them to their personal emails, which is such a believably well-meaning yet actively terrible idea as it means that everyone who gets a letter has to do so really publicly, and perform appropriate emotions in front of their peers, and meanwhile people who aren't getting letters are constantly having their hopes raised and then dropped again -- augh! Bad! I spent a lot of this episode shouting "WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS" at the screen, but, to be clear, I think this is a bad decision that makes for a very good episode. Characterization! Emotional arcs! Engaging deeply with the actual premise of the show! Chakotay and B'Elanna get a letter from a Maquis friend who is in prison, because while they were gone the Maquis got completely decimated by the Cardassian War! AUGH!
Anyway, in the actual plot, Tuvok and Seven get briefly held hostage by the Predator knock-off aliens which is extremely funny tbh because the Hirogen clearly want a major emotional reaction from their captives and they have accidentally acquired the two crew members who are least likely to give them anything whatsoever.
16. Prey
More adventures with Predator aliens! In this one they rescue an injured Predator alien, who is hunting a wounded Evil Telepathic Alien From The S3 Season Ender. Seven wants to let the Predator alien go ahead and fight the Evil Telepathic Alien and Janeway wants to help the Evil Telepathic Alien find a way to get home; this is broadly interesting but also a proxy for the much more interesting ongoing argument between Seven and Janeway in which Janeway is simultaneously trying to get Seven to become more human according to Janeway's idea of humanity -- independent! thinking on her own initiative! empathetic and compassionate! sometimes Janeway confuses 'humane' with 'human'! -- and a good crew member -- follows orders! obeys the chain of command! -- and Seven, understandably, is constantly pushing at the inherent contradictions in these two positions, and it's good conflict and good TV.
(DEBI: I am always trying to find a way for episode one-off characters to join the Everyone Stays AU but even I can't manage to make it work for this episode! It can't end any way but the way it did ...
This, for the record, marks a first in four seasons' worth of Voyager.)
17. Retrospect
Oh .... boy. A very special episode! A very special episode ft. an unsubtle rape allegory! An allegory in which it turns out that Seven imagined it due to past trauma! Everyone speaks very solemnly about fairness and impartiality. The guy Seven accuses ends up dying due to circumstances. The Memory Alpha summary concludes that the episode ends with "two of its crew sadder and wiser due to past experiences." This show is NOT good enough to do this episode well.
I will give it however half a point for picking up on two ongoing themes from earlier episodes in this batch, "boy it's a problem that we don't have any trained mental health professionals on this ship so we're just throwing things at everyone's trauma that don't work" and "programming complex AI is hard." The Doctor should never have been allowed to build his own mental health subroutine without QC checks and test them out on living crew members; nobody should have let him do this. This is what certification is for.
18. The Killing Game, Pt 1
Did I say that Hunters was my favorite of the batch? I'm afraid to say that was a lie. Hunters I think is the best episode in the batch but my actual favorite episode of the batch is The Killing Game because it is just a mini-40s noir in which Janeway leads a French Resistance movement and wears a dreamy white tux --
Let me start over. Up until now I will admit I thought the Hirogen were kind of boring, antagonist-wise. However! In this episode! A Hirogen commander with a GAMING ADDICTION takes over Voyager and immediately becomes obsessed with playing MIND GAMES with the HOLODECK while all his subordinates wander around looking long-suffering and asking plaintively if they can just kill the prey already.
(ME, TO DEBI: This is exactly the way all those Vulcans felt when Sisko's Vulcan nemesis forced them all to learn to play baseball.)
As a result, most of the episode takes place in the French Resistance AU, ft. Janeway as the bar owner who is secretly leading a resistance cell, Tuvok as her bartender and loyal second-in-command, and Seven as the hotheaded lounge singer who is constantly clashing with Janeway over the fact that she just wants to go ahead and assassinate Nazis instead of playing the long game, which leads Janeway and Tuvok to suspect that she might be an infiltrator! I actually just want a whole movie of this.
(Though again this role would absolutely have been B'Elanna's two seasons ago and I would also have watched a whole movie of that.)
Anyway then Seven gets injured and out long enough for the Doctor to let her keep her memories, which means when she goes back she's acting extra suspiciously and Janeway and Tuvok become even more convinced she's sabotaging them while she's actually working to bring back their memories! I also want a whole movie of this. Does any of it make any sense? No. Do I care? Absolutely not. Can't wait for more of this next week!
(Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Harry Kim, the only crew member left around to do IT work for the Hirogen rather than getting to join in the holodeck shenanigans, is doing an absolutely stellar job of malicious compliance and good for him.)
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Date: 2023-01-14 12:21 am (UTC)And I love Message in a Bottle and Predators both, but the C plot in the first one for some reason makes me laugh harder than any other ridic Voyager plot they've done. When he starts reciting Gray's Anatomy line by line because Tom and Harry have estimated their abilities like young twenty-something men often do.... aaaaaah. *chinhands*
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Date: 2023-01-15 05:19 am (UTC)& you are right it is soooooo extremely funny that they think they can pull this off because Paris is bored of being medical expert now that Kes is gone. GOD bless
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Date: 2023-01-14 09:28 am (UTC)I don't know if I want to encourage you actually to write the Everyone Stays AU, but I really appreciate its existence.
I actually just want a whole movie of this.
Based on photographic evidence: fair.
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Date: 2023-01-15 05:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-16 03:33 pm (UTC)*(Chakotay's Kazon son. The Everyone Stays AU doesn't actually have Seska non-consensually stealing Chakotay's sperm, because it's our AU and I don't want to.)
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Date: 2023-01-14 03:42 pm (UTC)This is so true and it's something I love about when the two of them interact. Lately I've been reading some B'Elanna/Seven fics (there was a fun one in an exchange recently and it got me interested) and the dynamic you're describing is definitely present in some of the better ones.
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Date: 2023-01-15 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
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