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Aug. 3rd, 2025 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsgod have I really not posted about Voyager in a year and a half?? we are still very slowly watching Voyager! we are almost at the end of season six! but I am NOT posting about thirty episodes in a single post so, let's see, I left off with Latent Image, let's see what I remember about the rest of Season 5.
12. Bride of Chaotica!
God, I SHOULD remember things about Bride of Chaotica. It's a trapped-in-a-holodeck loving parody B-movie serial episode! Catnip for me personally! And yet I do not remember anything about it at all except that Kate Mulgrew was obviously having an absolutely wonderful time. I'd rewatch it though.
13. Gravity
Paris and Tuvok get stranded on an alien planet with a woman who gets a bit crush on Tuvok. I remember being so starved for Tuvok-centric episodes that I fell on this like a starving wolf even though Voyager clearly has problems With Vulcan Culture ... like Voyager clearly believes to some extent that Tuvok needs to learn to be More Emotional and I just don't agree! He's perfect as he is! But I'm nonetheless happy to have had most of an episode with Tim Russ' beautiful judgmental face.
14. Bliss
Fake wormhole to home! Seven and Naomi are the only people who can save the crew because they're the only people who don't actually want to get back to Earth! It's always nice when a Voyager episode engages deeply with the premise of the show and it's also always nice when Seven and Naomi Wildman get bonding time.
15-16. Dark Frontier
The double-length Seven backstory episode/Seven present-story episode/Janeway Seven Rescue Romance! Now I'm just thinking nostalgically about how good seasons 4-5 were for Seven. This is the one where we get a lot of detail about Seven's childhood and her parents the Borg researchers, and we shout a lot at the screen about the choices her parents the Borg researchers are making, but broadly speaking all in exactly the way that the episode wants us to be doing (interesting research, interesting way of looking at the Borg, DO NOT BRING YOUR SMALL CHILD WITH YOU). Not sure the Borg Queen's obsession with Seven makes any sense, but Janeway's obsession with Seven makes perfect sense and the episode pays off the rival-sexy-mother-figure-seduction-fight perfectly so you will not see me complaining.
17. The Disease
Harry Kim gets an alien STD while banging a woman from a xenophobic species and Janeway is SO JUDGY about it. This episode I think does not work because a.) Harry Kim's romances are inevitably pretty boring but b.) the show has been going for five years and it really has to stop trying to convince us that everyone on Voyager sees Harry Kim as a little baby birthday boy when this is like the third or fourth time an entire episode plot has revolved around Harry Kim's Bad Idea Sex.
18. Course: Oblivion
The crew of Voyager discover that they're actually a duplicate crew created by the Demon Class Planet from Season 4 and they're all going to die and dissolve in outer space. They go to various heroic efforts to save themselves, and, when that proves impossible, to at least create some record of the fact that they lived and had experiences, but, unfortunately, all of them and all of their attempts at memorials continue to die and dissolve in outer space. At the end, Real Voyager hears a distress signal, arrives, finds nothing, is like 'huh! weird!' and continues on their way. I'm really not sure what the point of this one was -- there's no turn and no stinger, just a real 'wouldn't it be fucked up if' that persists in the same vein from like act 2.
19. The Fight
Aliens attempt to contact Chakotay through the medium of a hallucinatory boxing match. I was like 'well, at least the show didn't call the hallucinatory boxing match a vision quest!' and then I looked at the Memory Alpha page and they did. They did call it a vision quest.
20. Think Tank
The joke in this episode is that there's a group of alien interstellar Policy Consultants who want to recruit Seven and attempt to trade Janeway various pieces of helpful advice for her, which probably would not be all that funny except that the chief Interstellar Policy Consultant is Jason Alexander playing against type with a sort of chill evil Zen and that's exceptionally funny. Please admire Alien Think Tank Consultant Jason Alexander:
21. Juggernaut
Every time the Malon show up we have to spend five minutes complaining about the fact that Voyager met ONE garbage freighter tank from this alien species and then immediately decided they were a whole species whose only trait was Garbage Freighter Tank. Anyway, they meet another Malon Garbage Freighter Tank that's about to blow up and also haunted by a monster, and Chakotay, Torres and Neelix get to have a little horror movie adventure teaming up with the Malon to fix it. B'Elanna gets to do things, which is nice and unfortunately quite rare these days. The real monster is of course Malon society.
22. Someone To Watch Over Me
This is one of the few episodes of Voyager I remember seeing when I was a kid and so I did in fact spend most of S4 & S5 dreading the moment when the Doctor falls in love with Seven because I knew it was going to happen .... so the fact that a.) this episode, while undeniably awkward, is not as awkward as I remember it being when I was at max Embarrassment Sensitivity at the age of twelve and b.) mostly after this episode it's not much mentioned again is actually a tremendous relief on several points!
23. 11:59
We were trying to figure out why this episode existed and the best thing we can come up with is that someone really wanted to write a Hallmark Holiday Christmas Special. Anyway, Janeway here plays her great-great-great-great-grandmother whom Janeway believes made important contributions to science but whose only contribution in fact was having a Hallmark Holiday Christmas Romance that convinces the town curmudgeon to let himself be gentrified out of his charming small-town bookstore to make way for Progress. Confusing episode with confusing politics but it's nice that Kate Mulgrew had fun doing Acting.
24. Relativity
Seven gets recruited by a ... future time ship? To do time shenanigans?? to save Voyager from exploding??? I really have no memory of this episode at all.
25. Warhead
Voyager sort-of-befriends an AI that turns out to be attached to a nuclear warhead that thinks it has to complete its mission to kill and takes over The Doctor to do it. I like it when the Doctor gets to have complicated and interesting relationships with other AI, and, relatedly, when Bob Picardo gets to chew scenery ... he just loves chewing scenery so much and I love watching a man do what he loves!
26. Equinox
Season finale! Voyager finds another Federation starship floating out in the Delta quadrant and everyone is initially very excited before the slow reveal that this Federation starship has made Bad Moral Decisions in order to try to get home. It's fun to watch Janeway have ethics battles with another captain, and the episode has enough of the force of its convictions to almost convince us that Janeway's ethics have also been fully consistent throughout Voyager's run!
WHEW. OKAY. Now let's see if I manage to write up the first half of S6 before we're actually done with the second half of S6. I still wish these writers knew what a B-plot was.
12. Bride of Chaotica!
God, I SHOULD remember things about Bride of Chaotica. It's a trapped-in-a-holodeck loving parody B-movie serial episode! Catnip for me personally! And yet I do not remember anything about it at all except that Kate Mulgrew was obviously having an absolutely wonderful time. I'd rewatch it though.
13. Gravity
Paris and Tuvok get stranded on an alien planet with a woman who gets a bit crush on Tuvok. I remember being so starved for Tuvok-centric episodes that I fell on this like a starving wolf even though Voyager clearly has problems With Vulcan Culture ... like Voyager clearly believes to some extent that Tuvok needs to learn to be More Emotional and I just don't agree! He's perfect as he is! But I'm nonetheless happy to have had most of an episode with Tim Russ' beautiful judgmental face.
14. Bliss
Fake wormhole to home! Seven and Naomi are the only people who can save the crew because they're the only people who don't actually want to get back to Earth! It's always nice when a Voyager episode engages deeply with the premise of the show and it's also always nice when Seven and Naomi Wildman get bonding time.
15-16. Dark Frontier
The double-length Seven backstory episode/Seven present-story episode/Janeway Seven Rescue Romance! Now I'm just thinking nostalgically about how good seasons 4-5 were for Seven. This is the one where we get a lot of detail about Seven's childhood and her parents the Borg researchers, and we shout a lot at the screen about the choices her parents the Borg researchers are making, but broadly speaking all in exactly the way that the episode wants us to be doing (interesting research, interesting way of looking at the Borg, DO NOT BRING YOUR SMALL CHILD WITH YOU). Not sure the Borg Queen's obsession with Seven makes any sense, but Janeway's obsession with Seven makes perfect sense and the episode pays off the rival-sexy-mother-figure-seduction-fight perfectly so you will not see me complaining.
17. The Disease
Harry Kim gets an alien STD while banging a woman from a xenophobic species and Janeway is SO JUDGY about it. This episode I think does not work because a.) Harry Kim's romances are inevitably pretty boring but b.) the show has been going for five years and it really has to stop trying to convince us that everyone on Voyager sees Harry Kim as a little baby birthday boy when this is like the third or fourth time an entire episode plot has revolved around Harry Kim's Bad Idea Sex.
18. Course: Oblivion
The crew of Voyager discover that they're actually a duplicate crew created by the Demon Class Planet from Season 4 and they're all going to die and dissolve in outer space. They go to various heroic efforts to save themselves, and, when that proves impossible, to at least create some record of the fact that they lived and had experiences, but, unfortunately, all of them and all of their attempts at memorials continue to die and dissolve in outer space. At the end, Real Voyager hears a distress signal, arrives, finds nothing, is like 'huh! weird!' and continues on their way. I'm really not sure what the point of this one was -- there's no turn and no stinger, just a real 'wouldn't it be fucked up if' that persists in the same vein from like act 2.
19. The Fight
Aliens attempt to contact Chakotay through the medium of a hallucinatory boxing match. I was like 'well, at least the show didn't call the hallucinatory boxing match a vision quest!' and then I looked at the Memory Alpha page and they did. They did call it a vision quest.
20. Think Tank
The joke in this episode is that there's a group of alien interstellar Policy Consultants who want to recruit Seven and attempt to trade Janeway various pieces of helpful advice for her, which probably would not be all that funny except that the chief Interstellar Policy Consultant is Jason Alexander playing against type with a sort of chill evil Zen and that's exceptionally funny. Please admire Alien Think Tank Consultant Jason Alexander:
21. Juggernaut
Every time the Malon show up we have to spend five minutes complaining about the fact that Voyager met ONE garbage freighter tank from this alien species and then immediately decided they were a whole species whose only trait was Garbage Freighter Tank. Anyway, they meet another Malon Garbage Freighter Tank that's about to blow up and also haunted by a monster, and Chakotay, Torres and Neelix get to have a little horror movie adventure teaming up with the Malon to fix it. B'Elanna gets to do things, which is nice and unfortunately quite rare these days. The real monster is of course Malon society.
22. Someone To Watch Over Me
This is one of the few episodes of Voyager I remember seeing when I was a kid and so I did in fact spend most of S4 & S5 dreading the moment when the Doctor falls in love with Seven because I knew it was going to happen .... so the fact that a.) this episode, while undeniably awkward, is not as awkward as I remember it being when I was at max Embarrassment Sensitivity at the age of twelve and b.) mostly after this episode it's not much mentioned again is actually a tremendous relief on several points!
23. 11:59
We were trying to figure out why this episode existed and the best thing we can come up with is that someone really wanted to write a Hallmark Holiday Christmas Special. Anyway, Janeway here plays her great-great-great-great-grandmother whom Janeway believes made important contributions to science but whose only contribution in fact was having a Hallmark Holiday Christmas Romance that convinces the town curmudgeon to let himself be gentrified out of his charming small-town bookstore to make way for Progress. Confusing episode with confusing politics but it's nice that Kate Mulgrew had fun doing Acting.
24. Relativity
Seven gets recruited by a ... future time ship? To do time shenanigans?? to save Voyager from exploding??? I really have no memory of this episode at all.
25. Warhead
Voyager sort-of-befriends an AI that turns out to be attached to a nuclear warhead that thinks it has to complete its mission to kill and takes over The Doctor to do it. I like it when the Doctor gets to have complicated and interesting relationships with other AI, and, relatedly, when Bob Picardo gets to chew scenery ... he just loves chewing scenery so much and I love watching a man do what he loves!
26. Equinox
Season finale! Voyager finds another Federation starship floating out in the Delta quadrant and everyone is initially very excited before the slow reveal that this Federation starship has made Bad Moral Decisions in order to try to get home. It's fun to watch Janeway have ethics battles with another captain, and the episode has enough of the force of its convictions to almost convince us that Janeway's ethics have also been fully consistent throughout Voyager's run!
WHEW. OKAY. Now let's see if I manage to write up the first half of S6 before we're actually done with the second half of S6. I still wish these writers knew what a B-plot was.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-03 03:39 pm (UTC)I actually really like Course Oblivion, because it's such a poke in the eye to Voyager's central premise - you're traveling these thousands of light years across space to get home, what a story, what a quest; but really, that's so many light years, and you probably won't get there! It's only by the magic of Story that we know they will despite everything, and this episode is such an odd little sliver in that certainty.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 10:00 pm (UTC)That said, if you guys ever do revive your Star Trek podcast, the thing I am coming to you hat in hand to request immediately is a Bride of Chaotica episode.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-03 04:14 pm (UTC)This is the correct response.
Some of these episodes are in my "always skip on rewatch" category, to the extent that I don't remember them anymore at all, which is fine. I don't think I need to remember the boxing match vision quest.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-03 06:37 pm (UTC)like Voyager clearly believes to some extent that Tuvok needs to learn to be More Emotional and I just don't agree! He's perfect as he is! But I'm nonetheless happy to have had most of an episode with Tim Russ' beautiful judgmental face. --I love this sentence, especially the part about beautiful and judgmental. But also I agree with the sentiment! And it's so funny how even howevermany years after TOS Star Trek Voyager was, it's still got a STRONG vein of "This alien culture is interesting but our way is best, isn't it, crew? Isn't it, audience? Isn't it, world? RIGHT. God Bless America... I mean, the Federation!"
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 05:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-05 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 10:08 pm (UTC)My watch buddy and I keep commiserating with each other over the fact that the universe that invented Vulcans never seems to much like or understand Vulcans, but you're right, it's really a consistent Star Trek point of failure -- it's just so difficult, I guess, to put yourself in an alien mindset without wanting to try and inch your way back to a more familiar one!
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-05 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 05:15 am (UTC)We just watched this episode today, and concluded that the logical course of action was for Tuvok to punch Tom in the face.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 05:55 am (UTC)Oh man I hated the writing for Chakotay so much. So very much.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 06:21 pm (UTC)I haven't actually seen any Voyager but I feel like this explains a lot about Chakotay anyway.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-06 01:47 pm (UTC)However, my very favorite modern Star Trek show is Lower Decks.