(no subject)
Dec. 3rd, 2023 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThis week on Voyager --
THE DOCTOR: I was quite a shutterbug [18 months ago]. Not a day went by when I didn't record an image for posterity.
ME: hey do we remember the Doctor being very into photography 18 months ago?
innerbrat: I think perhaps every episode of Voyager takes place in a very slightly different AU from every other one
Anyway, I did mean to catch up on Voyagerposting two weeks ago, but in the two weeks since we have seen two episodes we really quite enjoyed back-to-back (including the one with the Doctor's new old photography hobby) so perhaps it's for the best that I'm going into this post on a high!
1. Night
Voyager enters a region of space with no stars for a while. Everyone, especially Janeway, gets incredibly depressed. Debi and I spend a lot of time brainstorming morale-boosting activities that the crew could be organizing in order to be slightly less depressed. Voyager community chorus! Voyager talent show! Voyager groupwatch of The Terror so they can all feel a bit buoyed by the fact that at least they're not those poor bastards!*
*I have not actually seen The Terror but I've osmosed a lot about it and I do know that someday it's coming for me.
Anyway then it turns out there are some aliens that are indigenous to starless space that attack Voyager because they mistakenly think it's affiliated with another set of aliens from a completely different part of space who've been using starless space as a toxic waste dumping ground via wormhole. Voyager immediately offers a superior technological solution to the toxic waste dumping ground problem, but since Voyager's only contact with these aliens is through a guy whose entire livelihood relies on the toxic waste dumping ground solution, this turns out to be a no-go.
DEBI: but this guy could introduce this superior technology to his entire species! he could patent it and make so much money if he just accepted the offer!
ME: alas I do not find it at all implausible that he would not think this far ahead
I also think it's great that there's an entire species out there the broader cultural habits of which we might not ever know anything about because Voyager was only ever in contact with this one random trash collector. This doesn't actually last but I enjoyed it while it did.
2. Drone
Some particles of borgium bounce against some particles of doctorium in a weird way and start growing a baby drone, which Seven immediately gets very invested in. I am starting to say "this is a Seven episode so it's probably good" and indeed it is very good! It's very easy to get me emotional about Star Trek characters who feel like outsiders because of their specific unique backstories finding themselves in a position to care for/mentor/project onto younger members of their culture or species! (See also the DS9 episode where Odo gets a baby Changeling which STILL messes me up.)
3. Extreme Risk
This episode spends several scenes like "WHAT weird sci-fi thing is up with B'Elanna?" and then reveals that there is no weird sci-fi thing up with her, she is just incredibly depressed about the fact that all her Maquis friends back home are dead, which, so fair! One could wish this was a long arc spread out over several episodes since this news dropped in S4 instead of being crammed into forty minutes, but one will also take what one can get.
4. In the Flesh
Chakotay has to go undercover at a Fake Starfleet, which it turns out is actually being set up by species 8472 in its preparation to invade Earth. This episode was quite fun and for once Chakotay's propensity to start romancing every ambiguously evil alien he meets works to everyone's benefit by Arranging A Truce, but why did they not then ask the evil aliens about their travel technology that they were planning to use to invade Earth in a timely fashion? Guys! Guys! You could have been home tomorrow!
5. Once Upon a Time
Naomi Wildman! We have been saying to each other quite a lot recently that Voyager really lucked out with Naomi Wildman's incredibly charming child actor. Anyway, Ensign Wildman is in life-threatening danger on an away mission and Neelix takes it on himself not to tell Naomi about it, with predictable consequences that play out in large part through a children's holodeck program. I have some questions about how the children's holodeck program works but I'm happy to spend time there anyway.
6. Timeless
AJFK:LSDJFDSKL okay. So. This is the one where Voyager ends up buried under ice for fifteen years and then grimdark future Harry Kim and Chakotay come back to try and reverse the time polarity to undo it while Levar Burton cameos as Geordi attempting to stop them from undoing the entire timeline.
a.) Geordi is unequivocally in the right here and Harry and Chakotay are unequivocally wrong
b.) Chakotay has a grimdark future girlfriend who seems to be along on this mission to undo the entire timeline in which she and Chakotay met and fell in love and launch herself into a completely unknown and irrelevant-to-her alternate future for shits and giggles. Ma'am? Why are you here? The only thing we could think of was that she was an unrelated time terrorist who had purposefully seduced Chakotay and was attempting to undo the current timeline for her own, completely separate plot that Voyager was simply not choosing to tell us about
c.) I'm sorry but grimdark Harry Kim is so, so, so funny. I madeinnerbrat take these screenshots for me:
Harry. What are you talking about. You've literally always gone by Harry. Someone calls you Harry every episode. Harry.
("I'm sorry they're so dark," said Debi, giving me these screenshots, "but this episode is set 15 years in the future so I assume they're using 2020s lighting practices --")
7. Infinite Regress
Seven is infected by a Borg virus that causes her personality to be constantly submerged by the personalities of various other people that she assimilated over the course of her Borg career. Once again, this episode is just phenomenal because Jeri Ryan is just phenomenal -- absolutely nailing it over and over again as she turns on a dime from Classic Seven to frightened child to Klingon warrior hitting on B'Elanna to politely confused Vulcan to Classic Seven again but existentially terrified herself.
Also, the Tuvok-Seven relationship -- one of my favorite dynamics on Voyager! -- is front and center here as he does a Dangerous Mind-Meld to try and pull her out of it; unclear tbh if this helps in any way except moral support (the situation is being fixed externally at the same time) but the moral support is lovely regardless.
(It is also worth listening to the Yamok Sauce episode about this episode which I was so excited to finally be able to do!)
8. Nothing Human
B'Elanna gets attacked by a giant leech alien that attaches itself to her spinal cord or something and in order to fix the situation the Doctor activates a specialist medical hologram, which unfortunately turns out to be a Cardassian war criminal doctor whose expertise was gained via illegal experiments on Bajoran citizens, setting off the first of several accidental romances with a pseudo-Nazi this season.
Two things that would have vastly improved this episode:
1. This would be a vastly more interesting moral quandary if the hologram version, having been created from publicly-accessible medical records of the war criminal, did not actually know about, remember, or identify with the war crimes of his original
2. Seska still around ... Everyone Stays AU really speaking to us now in this moment in particular
9. Thirty Days
Tom Paris Acts Out, but in a moral and ethical way by briefly becoming an environmental terrorist! Good for him. This episode was fine.
10. Counterpoint
In a new and different Nazi analog to all the other Nazi analogs we've had on this show, Voyager is smuggling telepathic refugees through a section of space in which Telepathy Is Illegal. At this point the polite Nazi alien officer who's been evilly flirting with Janeway through all of the Nazi Inspections shows up, claiming that he wants to defect, and starts doing science with Janeway in her quarters in a tight t-shirt. Everyone on the crew is surprisingly enthusiastic about this budding romance, possibly because Janeway HAS seemed very stressed recently and this DOES seem like it's relieving it.
Anyway, after a poignant farewell in which the Nazi alien officer gives Janeway a passionate hand kiss and then seemingly sacrifices himself to save Voyager and the refugees, he turns back up again and reveals that it was all a long con .... after which Janeway spends several minutes acting grimly betrayed and then reveals that in fact she suspected him all along and was conning him right back. Wonderful. Top tier forties thriller on a spaceship. To any other show I would say 'perhaps you could have fewer episodes about Nazis' but the truth seems to be that Voyager is often really good at doing forties thrillers so I'm happy for it to keep doing them!
11. Latent Image
The Doctor discovers a gap in his memory by way of his pre-existing passion for photograph that we have only just learned about; at first he thinks this is an alien conspiracy but it turns out that Janeway removed some of his data out of a belief that it was causing him to malfunction, which in turn causes Seven to come confront Janeway-in-pyjamas with a passionate ethical debate about the Doctor's rights and personhood.
Really good episode for a number of reasons! This is one of the times that the conflict between the Doctor as computer program and the Doctor as crew member is really well set-up; if a person made out of code is caught in what seems to be an infinite ethics-malfunction feedback loop, is this something that ought to be resolved with code review or with an attempt at therapy from a crew that does not have an in-house therapist? Especially when he is in fact the only well-trained medical expert keeping a crew of several hundred people healthy and well? This is one of those situations where the decision to treat the Doctor as a person rather than a program does feel genuinely difficult, and the ending as a result does feel earned, and meaningful.
Also I do love Seven arguing with Janeway in pyjamas about ethics, always.
(In fact I like the episode so much that I'm only going to really briefly point out that iirc 18 months ago Kez would still have been on the ship, so they would in fact have had a second doctor when the Terrible Accident that caused the ethics problem happened, thus making the entire point moot --)
THE DOCTOR: I was quite a shutterbug [18 months ago]. Not a day went by when I didn't record an image for posterity.
ME: hey do we remember the Doctor being very into photography 18 months ago?
innerbrat: I think perhaps every episode of Voyager takes place in a very slightly different AU from every other one Anyway, I did mean to catch up on Voyagerposting two weeks ago, but in the two weeks since we have seen two episodes we really quite enjoyed back-to-back (including the one with the Doctor's new old photography hobby) so perhaps it's for the best that I'm going into this post on a high!
1. Night
Voyager enters a region of space with no stars for a while. Everyone, especially Janeway, gets incredibly depressed. Debi and I spend a lot of time brainstorming morale-boosting activities that the crew could be organizing in order to be slightly less depressed. Voyager community chorus! Voyager talent show! Voyager groupwatch of The Terror so they can all feel a bit buoyed by the fact that at least they're not those poor bastards!*
*I have not actually seen The Terror but I've osmosed a lot about it and I do know that someday it's coming for me.
Anyway then it turns out there are some aliens that are indigenous to starless space that attack Voyager because they mistakenly think it's affiliated with another set of aliens from a completely different part of space who've been using starless space as a toxic waste dumping ground via wormhole. Voyager immediately offers a superior technological solution to the toxic waste dumping ground problem, but since Voyager's only contact with these aliens is through a guy whose entire livelihood relies on the toxic waste dumping ground solution, this turns out to be a no-go.
DEBI: but this guy could introduce this superior technology to his entire species! he could patent it and make so much money if he just accepted the offer!
ME: alas I do not find it at all implausible that he would not think this far ahead
I also think it's great that there's an entire species out there the broader cultural habits of which we might not ever know anything about because Voyager was only ever in contact with this one random trash collector. This doesn't actually last but I enjoyed it while it did.
2. Drone
Some particles of borgium bounce against some particles of doctorium in a weird way and start growing a baby drone, which Seven immediately gets very invested in. I am starting to say "this is a Seven episode so it's probably good" and indeed it is very good! It's very easy to get me emotional about Star Trek characters who feel like outsiders because of their specific unique backstories finding themselves in a position to care for/mentor/project onto younger members of their culture or species! (See also the DS9 episode where Odo gets a baby Changeling which STILL messes me up.)
3. Extreme Risk
This episode spends several scenes like "WHAT weird sci-fi thing is up with B'Elanna?" and then reveals that there is no weird sci-fi thing up with her, she is just incredibly depressed about the fact that all her Maquis friends back home are dead, which, so fair! One could wish this was a long arc spread out over several episodes since this news dropped in S4 instead of being crammed into forty minutes, but one will also take what one can get.
4. In the Flesh
Chakotay has to go undercover at a Fake Starfleet, which it turns out is actually being set up by species 8472 in its preparation to invade Earth. This episode was quite fun and for once Chakotay's propensity to start romancing every ambiguously evil alien he meets works to everyone's benefit by Arranging A Truce, but why did they not then ask the evil aliens about their travel technology that they were planning to use to invade Earth in a timely fashion? Guys! Guys! You could have been home tomorrow!
5. Once Upon a Time
Naomi Wildman! We have been saying to each other quite a lot recently that Voyager really lucked out with Naomi Wildman's incredibly charming child actor. Anyway, Ensign Wildman is in life-threatening danger on an away mission and Neelix takes it on himself not to tell Naomi about it, with predictable consequences that play out in large part through a children's holodeck program. I have some questions about how the children's holodeck program works but I'm happy to spend time there anyway.
6. Timeless
AJFK:LSDJFDSKL okay. So. This is the one where Voyager ends up buried under ice for fifteen years and then grimdark future Harry Kim and Chakotay come back to try and reverse the time polarity to undo it while Levar Burton cameos as Geordi attempting to stop them from undoing the entire timeline.
a.) Geordi is unequivocally in the right here and Harry and Chakotay are unequivocally wrong
b.) Chakotay has a grimdark future girlfriend who seems to be along on this mission to undo the entire timeline in which she and Chakotay met and fell in love and launch herself into a completely unknown and irrelevant-to-her alternate future for shits and giggles. Ma'am? Why are you here? The only thing we could think of was that she was an unrelated time terrorist who had purposefully seduced Chakotay and was attempting to undo the current timeline for her own, completely separate plot that Voyager was simply not choosing to tell us about
c.) I'm sorry but grimdark Harry Kim is so, so, so funny. I made
innerbrat take these screenshots for me:Harry. What are you talking about. You've literally always gone by Harry. Someone calls you Harry every episode. Harry.
("I'm sorry they're so dark," said Debi, giving me these screenshots, "but this episode is set 15 years in the future so I assume they're using 2020s lighting practices --")
7. Infinite Regress
Seven is infected by a Borg virus that causes her personality to be constantly submerged by the personalities of various other people that she assimilated over the course of her Borg career. Once again, this episode is just phenomenal because Jeri Ryan is just phenomenal -- absolutely nailing it over and over again as she turns on a dime from Classic Seven to frightened child to Klingon warrior hitting on B'Elanna to politely confused Vulcan to Classic Seven again but existentially terrified herself.
Also, the Tuvok-Seven relationship -- one of my favorite dynamics on Voyager! -- is front and center here as he does a Dangerous Mind-Meld to try and pull her out of it; unclear tbh if this helps in any way except moral support (the situation is being fixed externally at the same time) but the moral support is lovely regardless.
(It is also worth listening to the Yamok Sauce episode about this episode which I was so excited to finally be able to do!)
8. Nothing Human
B'Elanna gets attacked by a giant leech alien that attaches itself to her spinal cord or something and in order to fix the situation the Doctor activates a specialist medical hologram, which unfortunately turns out to be a Cardassian war criminal doctor whose expertise was gained via illegal experiments on Bajoran citizens, setting off the first of several accidental romances with a pseudo-Nazi this season.
Two things that would have vastly improved this episode:
1. This would be a vastly more interesting moral quandary if the hologram version, having been created from publicly-accessible medical records of the war criminal, did not actually know about, remember, or identify with the war crimes of his original
2. Seska still around ... Everyone Stays AU really speaking to us now in this moment in particular
9. Thirty Days
Tom Paris Acts Out, but in a moral and ethical way by briefly becoming an environmental terrorist! Good for him. This episode was fine.
10. Counterpoint
In a new and different Nazi analog to all the other Nazi analogs we've had on this show, Voyager is smuggling telepathic refugees through a section of space in which Telepathy Is Illegal. At this point the polite Nazi alien officer who's been evilly flirting with Janeway through all of the Nazi Inspections shows up, claiming that he wants to defect, and starts doing science with Janeway in her quarters in a tight t-shirt. Everyone on the crew is surprisingly enthusiastic about this budding romance, possibly because Janeway HAS seemed very stressed recently and this DOES seem like it's relieving it.
Anyway, after a poignant farewell in which the Nazi alien officer gives Janeway a passionate hand kiss and then seemingly sacrifices himself to save Voyager and the refugees, he turns back up again and reveals that it was all a long con .... after which Janeway spends several minutes acting grimly betrayed and then reveals that in fact she suspected him all along and was conning him right back. Wonderful. Top tier forties thriller on a spaceship. To any other show I would say 'perhaps you could have fewer episodes about Nazis' but the truth seems to be that Voyager is often really good at doing forties thrillers so I'm happy for it to keep doing them!
11. Latent Image
The Doctor discovers a gap in his memory by way of his pre-existing passion for photograph that we have only just learned about; at first he thinks this is an alien conspiracy but it turns out that Janeway removed some of his data out of a belief that it was causing him to malfunction, which in turn causes Seven to come confront Janeway-in-pyjamas with a passionate ethical debate about the Doctor's rights and personhood.
Really good episode for a number of reasons! This is one of the times that the conflict between the Doctor as computer program and the Doctor as crew member is really well set-up; if a person made out of code is caught in what seems to be an infinite ethics-malfunction feedback loop, is this something that ought to be resolved with code review or with an attempt at therapy from a crew that does not have an in-house therapist? Especially when he is in fact the only well-trained medical expert keeping a crew of several hundred people healthy and well? This is one of those situations where the decision to treat the Doctor as a person rather than a program does feel genuinely difficult, and the ending as a result does feel earned, and meaningful.
Also I do love Seven arguing with Janeway in pyjamas about ethics, always.
(In fact I like the episode so much that I'm only going to really briefly point out that iirc 18 months ago Kez would still have been on the ship, so they would in fact have had a second doctor when the Terrible Accident that caused the ethics problem happened, thus making the entire point moot --)
no subject
Date: 2023-12-03 05:53 pm (UTC)This is so exactly what the show is like that if I had the time and energy, I would write a fic about it.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-09 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-03 07:19 pm (UTC)I also love Once Upon A Time way more than anyone who's ever met me would think? Mostly because of Tuvok's two or three lines of dialogue to Ensign Wildman when she's frightened for Naomi. My beloved Vulcans!
no subject
Date: 2023-12-09 01:51 pm (UTC)TUVOK TALKING ABOUT PARENTING WITH ENSIGN WILDMAN IS SO GOOD. I was writing up this post and seeing commentary about how Once Upon a Time is considered one of the worst episodes of Voyager, or at least Voyager S5, and I immediately went from fairly neutral about Once Upon a Time to Strongly Pro Once Upon a Time in response.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-03 09:47 pm (UTC)Seriously! Dealing with the consequences of the crimes of your unremembered former self is one of the sf and noir evergreens. I have encountered multiple instances of both over the decades. Babylon 5's "Passing Through Gethsemane" (1995) was probably my formative TV example and Somewhere in the Night (1946) was the most recent noir.
This is one of those situations where the decision to treat the Doctor as a person rather than a program does feel genuinely difficult, and the ending as a result does feel earned, and meaningful.
"Latent Image" is one of the episodes that
no subject
Date: 2023-12-09 01:56 pm (UTC)I absolutely think it would have deserved the nomination, at the VERY least. In addition to being really good SF it's really smartly constructed, in a bunch of ways; the fact that it starts out strictly as thriller from the Doctor's POV and then pulls back to provide the full context is so well done and better than three quarters of the 'twist' thrillers that one sees as a full length film.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-04 03:01 am (UTC)Also just by reading your reviews I've definitely gotten the idea that every Voyager episode takes place in slightly different AU from every other one.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-09 02:06 pm (UTC)Voyager really leaning in on the premise that 'you can't go home again' ... once you get there you'll be a different person by over two hundred AU steps to the side ......