Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

2 torpedos left?

Apparently it was large enough that it would have taken a year. Long-range sensors couldn't see any of it's edges.

Night
And now onto Season Five! Without the occasionally Lifetime-y, but firm, hand of Jeri Taylor, Berman and Braga begin to run amok, and what better place to start!

What's black and white and painful all over? That's right, it's Captain Proton! Tom and Harry are busy playing make-believe in the holodeck, fighting Satan's Robot and the evil forces of Dr. Chaotica. Then the Doctor wanders onto the holodeck and demands that he be allowed his time there to practice opera, and after Tom orders the computer to make him black and white to match, they get into a juvenile fistfight as the Doctor tries to manually switch over the program.

On the empty bridge, Chuckles is watching grass grow, and Seven reports that there's no good news - sensors haven't picked up anything at all. And this is grim indeed, as we soon cut to (what I have to admit is kind of a gorgeous shot for Voyager) Voyager, lit only by running lights, flying through a void lacking any stars or signs of life.

While we've joked about it here and there before, this is truly the beginning of Janeway's bipolar insanity. She's locked herself in her quarters and left the ship in the hands of the token minority so that she can beat herself up over getting stuck in the Delta Quadrant. Now, this would be fine, had we seen a buildup to this, but we didn't - instead, suddenly, she's just randomly emo. Anyway, in the staff meeting, Tom complains about Janeway's non-presence, and Neelix suggests rotating duty assignments to keep people busy. This is arguably the smartest thing Neelix ever utters on the show.

Blah, blah, blah, they find some radiation! Ooh, radiation! They're so bored flying through this endless expanse of nothing that they go to check it out. Harry and Tuvok are chilling on the bridge, with Harry in command of the night shift. He's trilling away at his Clarinet, and Tuvok's bored, so he listens. Tom convinces Seven to go play Captain Proton with him, but even as Captain Proton's cheesecake secretary, Seven doesn't fit in. She disables Satan's Robot with a few select pulls of wire.

Suddenly, the ship shakes, and goes black - total loss of main and backup power, only systems with separate power grids (life support, holodecks, etc.) are still powered. Harry manages to bring sensors back up, and detects a ship - Tuvok fires a torpedo blind to illuminate it, and discovers three ships in the darkness. Keep in mind that Voyager is now down to one torpedo according to the official count. Just then, Tom and Seven encounter a strange looking alien on the holodeck - Seven stuns it with a Proton ray gun in what is surely the high point of Jeri Ryan's career.

Apparently waiting for a moment to be a hero, Janeway drags a power cell into Engineering and has Torres hook it up, bringing power back online. Anyway, it turns out that the aliens are imbued with deadly levels of the radiation, and they reveal that someone has been poisoning them.

And hey, what do you know, that someone just happens to show up. A Malon garbage scow drops by and lights up the void with firework-like charges, driving away the aliens. The captain wants the alien in exchange for safe passage to a wormhole that'll get Voyager out of the void, but Janeway won't give him up. He pretends to listen to a pitch by Torres for a new device that'll rid the Malon of ever needing to dump their waste in the Void (or anywhere else) ever again, but he just laughs it off, mentioning how it'd destroy the economy and his job.

So, Janeway, being Janeway, says "fuck it," enlists the aliens for help, and heads for the wormhole herself, intending to collapse it. Of course, her plan is to stay behind in a shuttle to do so, but her crew, being less idiotic than she is, points out that there's another way to pull it off.

Voyager heads for the wormhole and fires six photon torpedos at the Malon freighter, destroying it. Yes, Janeway just murdered at least a dozen Malon in what has to be one of the worst first-contacts on record. And she did it with nonexistent torpedoes! Then, Voyager flies into the wormhole and fires off eight more nonexistent torpedoes, sealing the wormhole behind them as they fly through.

When they reach the end, however, there isn't a star in the sky. But soon, more and more stars start appearing in view, until an entire nebula is revealed. Yay, another nebula.

This episode was shit. It immediately established exactly how the next seven years of Star Trek would be run - incompetently and without sanity.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -13/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 9
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 9

Psst, Jeri Taylor.

Jeri Ryan is Seven.

I agree that Season 4 was the best season of Voyager but I thought 'Demon' was stupid and I wasn't a big fan of 'Hope And Fear' either.

This was around the point when I stopped watching Voyager regularly so I'm sure I won't recall many of the episodes you'll be reviewing from here on out.

I kind of remember 'Night' but don't remember whether I liked it or not.

They're at -13 torpedos, not 11.

2 - 15 = -13

Errors = fixed.

You neutered Brannon Braga?

Best Voyager Episode Ever!

Then they should have been able to see it from the start of their journey to avoid. Hell, at around a thousand light years across it would be well known as one of if not the biggest nebula in the galaxy.

I kinda liked Night, as Voyager episodes go anyway.

Although, yes, Janeway's random mood swings are jarring, and I really fucking hate the way Harry called Tuvok's torpedo trick a "warp flare."

Plenty of flaws, but it did have a hint of the "hanging your ass out in unfamiliar territory" vibe that should have ruled this show.

About the shuttles, let's see here...

The Enterprise had a crew complement of about 1,000 people, right?

Quoting from the pull-out page in Star Trek The Magazine April 2002 issue:
"With the Enterprise-D normally carrying 25 shuttles and having the capacity to cope with more non-Starfleet shuttles, it was important that a number of procedures were followed to insure everyone's safety."

That gives us the amount of shuttles the Enterprise-D carried.
That's 25 shuttles for 1,000 people. Voyager had 150 people and was considerably smaller than the Enterprise-D. They couldn't have possibly had more than 5 or 6 shuttles.

/nerd

Voyager really suffered from the use of nonsensical plot devices, and this was only exacerbated when the writers tried to avoid technobabble. Technobabble plot devices, which cheap outs, were much more amenable to Voyager's style than were those of the nontechnobabble variety, because they're pretty trivial to give some sort of internally consistent logic. If Voyager had failed to pick up a relatively small subspace anomaly that, among other necessary effects, limited them to impulse power in a particular region of space then you could do the same story without the inconsistent logic.

I think Voyager's writers occasionally grew sensitive to accusations of overreliance on technobabble, but they weren't really good enough writers to rely on anything else.

Somewhere I have the Voyager writers' guide, and it clearly states that the ship only carried two shuttlecraft!

Damn, you have a copy of that? I'd love to get my hands on it!

There's only one copy and it was written on a moist towelette while at a rest stop on I-5. From the writing, it appears the author was on methamphetamine.

Do you have 50 bucks or so?

What VOY really needed was for Neelix to have a voracious appetite and crap shuttlecraft.

And Janeway does act a little like Mom at times...

$50 for a book of blank pages, a pretty picture on the front and a post-it note inside from B&B saying "we'd appreciate it if you could fill this in as you went along"?

Exactly. I've always actually liked the idea of areas of space where warp travel is not possible. I was really hoping that one day we would see a race encountered from an area of space like that. Imagine a reason a few dozen light years across where subspace is disrupted to the point that no FTL communication or travel is possible. You could have immensely advanced civilizations that have no idea about the hundreds of races buzzing around on their relative doorstep.

With the whole premise of Voyagers folding nacelles being to prevent damage to subspace from its warp drive it would have even given a nice little environmentalist message to imply that this whole region of space had been accidentally rendered unnavigable by FTL means by some long dead civilisation.

It's a minor thing that get's flogged into the ground, but it woulda been really nice to see them knock down a few bulkheads and build a shuttle construction facility in the back of the hangar, maybe torpedo construction in one of the cargo bays. I woulda put Seven to work building new weapons from day 1, but that's just me.

Maybe that's what happened to the entire contents of deck 14 - they ripped out the decking and bulkheads and electronics to build the new shuttles and torpedoes. Conveniently, it gives them a nice wide open space to put everyone in stasis.

I really sucks when you think about the potential this show had and completely wasted. It should have been great because they didn't have to worry about all the civilizations and histories surrounding the other series so much... Instead they chose to stick to the same old crap and ignore the previously written rules and things like shuttle and torpedo count that they wrote themselves into a corner with.

You know the interior of the shuttlebay changed everytime I saw it. At one point it looked like several small mini-hangers that opened out into the slightly larger main bay. Its not hard to imagine one mini-hanger converted to a shuttlecraft factory.

The problem is that the shuttlebay just didn't match what they needed it to be. It was the Voyager's model one real downfall. The shuttlebay needed to be much bigger to match the stories.

I mean, just where the hell was Neelix's ship supposed to be stored anyway ?

The 'stardrive' section of Voyager should have been reworked instead of just slapping together a quick merger of ENT D and ENT A. Which is really all it was. No more thought was put into it than that.

Here you go.

http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/uss-voyager-ncc-74656.php

^
Is that fan made ?

Here's the on screen display I was just looking at....(see below)

I clearly remember talk of Voyager's unused second warp core. You drawing has it listed as Injector Assemblies.

Anywho, they really would have had to remove that whole thing, join the underneath cargo bays, and create a giant open shuttlebay/cargobay to really suit Voyager's needs. Something like me saw on the ENT refit in TMP.

It was meant to be a spare warp core casing.

Looking at that makes me think turbolifts are just a lame device for "intimate" dialogue. Put in some fucking staircases and hoof it, you lazy bastards. It ain't like you're living in a Galaxy-class Hilton, plus it beats getting stuck in tin cans and having to climb unenclosed ladders every time the power goes out.

Indeed. I work in a million-square-foot building. I once overlayed the 1701-A on a floorplan, and discovered I walk half the diameter of the saucer every time I go to the nearest mens room! They could have just had elevators and never mind the lateral shafts.

Waste of talent. Clearly Seven being put to work as my sex slave would be more productive. But that's just me.

Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep/Deepness In The Sky books were set in a galaxy in which travel, as well as thought was faster the further you got from the galactic core. Races crawled up from the deep, finding that FTL travel and computing power increased exponentially the further out they got. If a ship fell towards the deep it found itself stranded, years away from previously close destinations.

Like others, that's the crap that annoys me about Voyager. The Gamma quandrant should have been filled with non FTL civilizations, ringworlds, sailships, space hippies, sentient cows, jawas and flying monkeys.

The Xindi Arc of Enterprise had more weirdness and imagination than Voyager's entire run.