Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

I thought the Ferengi were the Jews?

No, the Ferengi were Americans.

Once more, the genius of DS9 was to make the Ferengi be the Ferengi, and then use that to create allegories.

Uhm, no.

If anyone had a crack at the Israel/Palestine it was B5, with the Centauri and the Narn not knowing when to stop the hate.

So really, where is an enlightened G'Kar and Vir when you need them?

It was only when DS9 was introduced that they started playing up the "Bajorans as Jews" angle. Even setting a Holocaust like death toll from the Cardassian occupation (10 million).

But, when the Bajorans were actually introduced in "Ensign Ro" the comparison to Palestinians was very clear.

Ethnic group displaced by militarily superior force living in refugee camps. Waging a guerrilla war against their oppressors and appealing to the superpower (the Federation) for aid.

The real genius of DS9 was that they let the actors "ACT" instead of pigeon holing the actors into the preconceived concept of the characters.

I doubt Armin Shimmerman or Rene Auderbois wouldn't done nearly as well with their characters if they had been micromanaged by Berman, Piller, and Braga.

Inside Man

Tom is harassing Harry over when he's going to get around to not fucking up the mail call like he did last month, though Harry insists that it wasn't his fault. When Harry gets to Astrometrics, he find's that the ship's Mary Sue, Seven of Nine, has solved the problem - someone had jammed a hologram into the data stream. Now, you'd think they might suspect this, given that Voyager themselves have previously shoved the fucking Doctor across a quadrant's worth of space, then received his program back. Nah. That'd be silly. Anyway, they wander down to the holo-lab (amazingly, Tom isn't in there designing a fucking wild west village or something), and fire it up. It's Barclay. Surprise!

The Barclay hologram proudly announces that his flesh-and-blood counterpart and Starfleet have put together a foolproof plan to get them home (is that a certain counter ticking upward I'm hearing?). Naturally, the crew is eager to put his plan into motion - the Doctor even lends the hologram his mobile emitter so that he can assist in Engineering. I'm sure that if there was one thing Torres needs, it's a smug, vaguely smarmy hologram wandering around. Harry is thrilled that the end is so near - a feeling the audience surely shares - but Tom is quick to pour cold water all over his hopes and dreams, pointing out how many times the crew has been fooled into thinking they're going home, and how all of their substantial progress has been via sheer happenstance.

Thanks, Tom, for breaking the fourth wall and speaking for the audience.

Anyway, there's only one real problem with the plan. Back on Earth, they show that the transmission has failed twice, and Barclay is losing his shit over what could be going wrong. Once again, his boss is strongly suggesting he take some time off. What Barclay is unaware of, however, is that a piece of equipment has been attached to the MIDAS array, permitting a Ferengi ship hidden near a star to intercept the Voyager transmissions. They've sent a modified Barclay hologram in its place.

On Voyager, the Doctor expresses some doubt as to the medical portion of the plan - the Barclay hologram is essentially proposing driving the ship through an artificial wormhole that will exit via a star, requiring heavy radiation inoculations for the crew and systems upgrades. The Doctor doesn't believe it will be enough, but the Barclay hologram tells him to shut the fuck up and mind his business, since the systems upgrades will take care of the rest. The Barclay hologram then runs off to ingratiate himself to Seven of Nine, and run a surreptitious scan of her. She's unsure that she wishes to return to the Alpha Quadrant (fuuuuuuck, we've been down this long road, getting from there to here), but the Barclay hologram assures her that she's practically a celebrity - after all, who could say they've escaped the clutches of the Borg and regained their humanity?

Captain Jean-Luc-MOTHERFUCKING-Picard, that's who.

The Barclay hologram asks to include a message in the return data stream Voyager is sending. The Ferengi intercept it, and are basically filling their little gnome shuttle with jizz over how they'll be able to get even more of Seven's nanoprobes than they thought.

Barclay, meanwhile, stalks down Deanna Troi while she's on vacation, because, hey, when you've got a galaxy within reach, might as well chill out on a beach. In talking with him, she discovers that Barclay is down not only because of the troubles with the hologram, but because his girlfriend left him. Deanna, rightly, assumes that there's no way anything not made of photons and forcefields would let Barclay inside of her without an ulterior motive eventually digs out of him that he secretly-kinda-sorta suspected that she wasn't an innocent schoolteacher who was really interested in the science behind sending holograms over interstellar e-mail.

Yes, she is a dabo girl, because DS9 hasn't adequately scraped the bottom of that barrel, and after Deanna Troi basically threatens her, she reveals she is working for the Ferengi in return for a share of the platinum all of Seven's nanoprobes is going to net them. She reveals that last fact to Barclay, and it's a revelation that he shares with no one, and when they do find out about it, they do not care. What in the goddamn fuck.

Back on our typical train wreck, the Doctor suspects that holographic Barclay isn't all he seems when he refuses to go golfing with him. Despite the crew falling in love with his impressions (which are not fucking hard for a goddamn hologram, it is basically all they do), the Doctor harasses Janeway into running a scan, which reveals nothing. This could be attributable to the skill of the Ferengi, given that they have a working plan to drag a bunch of Borg nanoprobes back to the Alpha Quadrant, or it could simply be due to the ineptitude of the Voyager crew.

Anyway, just as the plan starts falling into place, Seven questions whether or not the modifications will be enough to protect the crew. The Barclay hologram tries to pull the same BS on her that he did the Doctor, but she doesn't buy it, so he shoves his holographic hand through her skull, does an impression of her to the bridge to make sure they suspect nothing, then gets the fuck out of Dodge with himself, the Doctor's holoemitter, and an unconscious Seven of Nine in an escape pod.

Hey, remember when a hologram fucked up Torres' heart by getting all handsy with it? Apparently, you can fucking do the same thing to a circuitry-filled brain without issue. Go fucking figure.

The escape pod makes it through the science bullshit and winds up in the Alpha Quadrant. That's right, a bunch of Ferengi who had a fucking awful scheme to steal some nanoprobes can build a fucking wormhole, but not fucking Starfleet. The Ferengi are eager to collect their dead Borg corpse (as their original plan had simply been to let all of Voyager turn into corpses in the process), but they find nothing aboard the escape pod. The dumbasses in the Delta Quadrant managed to beam them out, deactivating the hologram and putting Seven on a road to recovery that is certain to never be referenced.

The episode concludes with Deanna inviting Barclay on a double date with her, Riker, and some poor chick that Riker probably fucked twenty years ago who he conned into coming. How heartwarming that that is the last experience we have with a non-alternate-timeline Barclay and Troi.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -46/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 15

In my opinion, The last couple of seasons of Voyager were crying out for a well plotted arc of episodes to round out the series and make their inevitable return finally make some sense.

but, I have a feeling that Berman and Braga considered that too "DS9ish" in concept.

By the way, I stopped watching Voyager on a regular basis about the time they introduced Jeri Ryan (was that season three or four?). Since then over the years I've probably picked up most of the episodes here and there out of sheer boredom and occasional curiousity .

Question: Was Voyager any better if you watched all the episodes in sequence when it was made?

I watched Voyager and Enterprise to the bitter fucking ends, because I stick with abusive relationships way too long.

The last time I saw that episode, my only question was what happen the spawn Lwxanna was preggers with in DS9....imagine Deanna becoming a big sis at forty years old.

I love how this thread becomes about DS9, btw.

Berman and Braga pitch Year of Hell as a season-long arc, but Paramount shot them down. Hell, it took Enterprise dropping into the 4.0 demo ratings before we got the Xindi arc idea.

Those two were stubborn prideful idiots, and I'm glad neither will work on future Star Trek projects; but UPN holds a lot of responsibility for shoiting down the few glimmers of good ideas these two had for either show.

I take down notes while I watch every episode, usually of things that are patently insulting or absurd. Some episodes generate a lot of notes, while others generate few.

Just because there are few notes doesn't necessarily mean the episode was good.

Body and Soul

Harry Kim is trapped aboard the Delta Flyer with the Doctor and Seven of Nine. If Harry has a personal hell, I am sure it's that. Because no one on that damn shuttle can actually read a damn sensor readout, some aliens sneak up and promptly disable the shuttle, demanding that they hand over the "photonic." Because if there's anything the Delta Quadrant hates, it's fucking holograms. They beam aboard, but the Doctor is nowhere to be seen - Seven claims that the attack on the shuttle destroyed his matrix. But between the holographic emitter and the space garbage they collected that can supposedly be used in weapons manufacturing, that's enough to get them arrested.

So, Harry's pretty emo about that, since the Doctor is dead and they're probably going to end up in space jail for looking like a bunch of hologram-loving terrorists, but Seven is very happy. Because, you see, the Doctor downloaded himself into Seven's Borg processors. Yes, that's right, the Doctor is occupying Seven's body. Mike Sussman and his band of idiots have decided to indulge in that trope. And to her credit, Jeri Ryan does a phenomenal job of emulating Robert Picardo's performance. The episode is terrible, but her performance is not.

The Doctor is quite enjoying all the new physical sensations of Seven's body, which I think is writer code-talk for "the Doctor felt up Seven's breasts." And if you think I'm joking, oh no, it gets better than that. But hey, what's happening on Voyager, you might ask? Well, on Voyager, our favorite Vulcan is going through that special time in every Vulcan's life in which he needs to fuck. And Tom Paris is the only person aboard who has any medical expertise whatsoever. And since that expertise is "he knows how to read a medical tricorder and administer hyposprays," Tom is compelled to find another solution to Tuvok's condition. That's right, Tom Paris is on a mission to help Tuvok fuck long and screw'er.

For that sentence alone, I am going to the special hell.

Anyway, because the aliens are the most incompetent jailers ever, they demand that Doc Seven help them examine the shuttle. While there, Doc Seven meets the captain of the alien vessel. And replicates him some cheesecake. And discovers that cheesecake tastes fucking delicious. So he replicates some more. And adds some more food. And wine. And proceeds to get totally shitfaced drunk because, in the one piece of continuity the writers delight in referencing, Seven is a fucking lightweight. And because the Doctor becomes a giggly fucking schoolgirl when he's sloshed, the Captain obviously starts to think that she's down to assimilate a certain part of him into her Collective, and hands over the mobile emitter.

Once Doc Seven gets back to the cell, Harry downloads the Doctor back into the mobile emitter. And Seven is pissed the fuck off. She's fully aware of everything the Doctor has been up to, and is feeling every single ill effect that his indulgences has had on her. It's clearly been a terrifying, intrusive, awful experience for her, so naturally Harry insists that she let the Doctor hitch a ride inside her head again so that they can go undercover, with Seven observing how to interact with their computers to let them call Voyager. Why she can't do this without the Doctor being as much of a dick as he can possibly be is never explained, naturally. And since the aliens are incompetent, they conveniently ask for Seven's help in sickbay. While there, they meet the ship's medical officer, engineer, and overall everywoman, who the Doctor immediately falls for. While in complete control of Seven's body. And I think you know what that means. Tingly sensations. In places.

Speaking of tingly sensations, back on Voyager, Tom Paris has set Tuvok up with his magnum opus - a holographic rendition of Tuvok's wife, so that he won't be cheating (also, earlier in the episode, when Tom suggested that Tuvok bang the shit out of a hologram, he directly accused Tom of cheating on his own wife with holograms.) But just as Tuvok is about to get his groove back, another one of the alien ships show up and demand their holodecks be shut down, which Janeway immediately does, cockblocking Tuvok like he's Chuckles or something, and agrees to not turn them on while the aliens escort the ship out of their space.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is just as disappointed when, even after getting all hot and bothered, his new acquaintance instead says that Doc Seven would be perfect for her brother. Seven's presence is requested by the alien captain, so Doc Seven goes off, rejected, to find that the captain has set up a very romantic viewing of a spacial anomaly (boy, he just knows what makes people on Voyager hot). The Captain kisses her, and the Doctor is repulsed.

You'll also be happy to know that Memory Alpha has an entire article about sexuality, and it is headlined by three pictures of various incarnations of Dax kissing someone, two of them being women. Fucking nerds.

Then, after running off, Doc Seven ends up back in Sickbay because of a pulled muscle, which their medic massages out, much to the Doctor's arousal. My fucking God, anything for a goddamn teaser trailer. After the Doctor realizes all the special feelings he's having, he runs off to attend to Harry, who is busy pretending to have a medical emergency. After retrieving the Doctor, Seven is livid, especially since the Doctor wanted to get it on, bang a gong, get it on, and let's be honest, we all are, because not only is this episode insulting to any thinking adult, it's too long by a long shot. Seven is again forced into co-habitating her skull with the Doctor, and goes off to flirt with the Captain so that they can make a call to Voyager.

On Voyager, Tuvok is obviously miserable, and Janeway picks up on it, so in front of the whole damn bridge, she authorizes him a lot of holodeck time once the aliens aren't around. That's right, Janeway is explicitly suggesting that one of her senior staff go fuck a hologram. Hence my note. However, Voyager receives an incoming hail from the Delta Flyer. It's Seven, appearing to behave oddly before eagerly explaining that it's the Doctor. Terrified of the idea that her Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants moments might be shared with a man, Janeway promptly disables the escort ship and warps off to rescue them.

Upon arrival, the alien captain is not happy to see them, but knows that Voyager won't risk harming their crew. So, the Doctor downloads himself back into the mobile emitter, surprising the aliens enough to gain the upper hand, knocking down their shields - attempting to restore them gets the alien captain electrocuted in the process. The crew of the ship looks on in amazement as, despite their hatred of holograms, the Doctor ably resuscitates him, and he's grudgingly forced to admit his biases. Which I guess is the lesson or something. Fuck, I don't know. This entire episode is a fucking train wreck, and this review was written with Sharknado 2 in the background, so that is saying something. Jeri Ryan's performance is the only good point in the entire episode, and even that is tainted simply by the knowledge that it's all about a man inhabiting a more-or-less unwilling woman's body, which is pretty shaky ground for the male-dominated sci-fi genre.

Oh, and you'll be happy to know that Tuvok finally got to go to the holodeck and get everything all sticky. Fuck, even the B-plot of this was about sex.
Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -46/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 15

So in passing, Voyager tells us that sexuality is so obvious that a hologram never programmed for it will develop it over time, but only the heterosexual version, complete with the historically unique revulsion of American teenagers at the thought of homoerotic desire.

Yo, dude.... you got the title wrong for this. It should be "Body and Soul".

The crappy 1989 sex comedy "Cleo/Leo", had the guts to have the man-in-woman's-body get turned all girly by heterosexual female drives, and a good hard man fuck.
No cutaway either, we get the whole mentally narrated fuck scene.

Eat that, Trek, straight to VHS schlock was ahead of the game plot-wise by 11 fucking years, and more sophisticated by well, the clock is still running.

I'd never heard of this, so I looked it up. It's got classic porn actress Veronica Hart in the lead. From the clips I saw, it's not a great movie, but she's pretty good playing a man trapped in a woman's body.

Nightingale

Voyager giveth, and Voyager taketh away. Because we open with a fucking gorgeous shot of the damn ship, parked on a planet, warp nacelles disassembled, getting repaired. A.K.A. the damn scene we've basically been asking for the entire damn series. I'm glad that we finally got to it seven years later. This should have been week two shit.

B'Elanna is overworked and understaffed, so Janeway assigns Icheb to her, as Janeway had previously had the guy who's redesigned half of the damn ship's sensors out delivering PADDs. And that makes no damn sense in the world. They treat the things like fucking paper, but all that shit has to be viewable on any PADD in the ship with the correct authorization. Why the fuck doesn't everyone have a PADD strapped to their belt the entire time like some kind of Space Grandpa with his flip phone? To be fair, this isn't a Voyager problem - every series of modern Trek has had pulled this shit - hell, even Picard's desk was sometimes depicted as being covered in the damn things, which is ridiculous - can you picture someone with 50 iPads on their desk (also, my God I started this thread before iPads existed)? At work, if I have more than five tablets on my desk for testing purposes I start to get antsy.

Anyway, part of the reason they're short-staffed is because, rather than send a bunch of science-division do-nothings out to look for it, Janeway has sent Harry and Seven out in the Delta Flyer to go look for deuterium. Again, this is something that we should have seen more of. Why Janeway sent someone with decent engineering skills and someone who was once a fucking robot engineer off on a milk run is fucking incomprehensible. Oh, and Neelix is there too. Because of fucking course he is.

I guess the Delta Flyer doesn't have any fucking sensors or anything, or maybe Harry and Seven don't know how to use the damn things, because for the second week in a row, an alien ship manages to sneak up on them. And it's being pursued by another one that's firing the fuck out of its weapons. You'd think something would have started to beep about all that commotion. The vessel being pursued begs for Harry's help, and after Harry tries to negotiate a cease-fire, the pursing vessel starts to attack the Delta Flyer too, so Harry disables it. Fucking diplomat, that Harry. The pursuing ship skedaddles, and the crew of the good ship Voyager beam over to the other ship, a medical transport carrying needed supplies to their homeworld, which had been blockaded by their attackers. The survivors, including Shepard fucking Book, who has somehow been conned into this nonsense, beg Harry to escort them back home, but he balks because of the delightfully amorphous Prime Directive, stating that "Interference in alien conflicts is strictly prohibited."

And that's fucking bullshit. The entire premise of DS9 was based on Starfleet and the Federation sticking their damn noses in alien conflict, Kirk mediating some alien skirmish was every episode that didn't have a transporter accident or strangely murderous lifeforms, and all Picard did was basically threaten to pull over, separate you two, and turn the damn car around. It's like the writers had a bible that said simply "Prime Directive: non-interference."

So, Harry agrees to at least escort them as far as the planet where Voyager's getting an oil change and handing the whole mess off to Janeway, but when they get there, they discover that the attackers are in orbit. This alarms Harry, who calls down to Voyager, but Janeway lets him know everything is fine, and the other aliens are there to help. That's right, Harry, it's obvious that Janeway is more than happy to accept help from people who, as far as Harry knows, are space Nazis (no, not those space Nazis), so long as they toss her some spare parts. Prime Directive my ass.

Harry informs her of what the refugees have encountered, and since Janeway has no problem with violating the Prime Directive, she agrees to let Harry take off with Seven to secretly escort the aliens home, since it's a humanitarian mission. Again, she needs to fix the damn ship and she lets two able bodies go fucking around on something that is obviously not all it seems to be. Harry's thrilled, as it means he'll be in command of a crappy, awful starship (no, not Voyager), even going so far as to tell Tom that he's tired of being Buster Kincaid all the time, and he wants his turn to be Captain Proton, because we won't let that die. He gets a wakeup call, though, when Neelix points out to him that he can't even decide what he'd like for dinner.

Meanwhile, Icheb is busy following B'Elanna around like a puppy dog after he notes that she's being friendly to him. And, like any nerdy fucking teenage boy, friendly = DOWN TO FUCK, so he asks the Doctor if there's any biological signals for attraction. Apparently, using the damn magical space Wikipedia on the ship is too complicated. The Doctor is only far too willing to indulge Icheb in what should be a plainly obvious indication that he should, in no way, learn this information. So the next time that he and B'Elanna are jammed in a hot, sweaty, intimate Jeffries Tube, he takes a scan of her, and is pleased by the results. Ugh.

Back on the alien ship, which Harry has egotistically renamed the Nightingale due to its medical mission, he's set up his ready room with all the creature comforts of home, but soon starts driving everyone fucking mad when he basically insists on doing everything himself. Seven reminds him that he needs to delegate, especially after the ship's cloak starts to fail, but he insists on doing it all himself.

Naturally, the cloak finally comes down, and a number of enemy warships advances on the Nightingale. Too bad it doesn't have the weapons of the ship the set was built for, the Defiant, huh Harry? After being attacked, Seven gets knocked unconscious and one of the doctors on the ship rushes down to help fix the cloak, but dies in the process after none of the other doctors can help her. Turns out they aren't medical doctors at all - they're scientists, and the cloak they've developed is the payload they need to deliver to their people.

Harry turns the ship around, and is promptly mutinied against. After giving up command, he talks to Seven, who questions his actions. He says that delivering the cloak would be interfering, to which Seven reminds him that they were already interfering since the moment they first encountered the aliens. Eventually, she prods him into admitting that he felt guilty because his orders had resulted in Seven getting hurt and the scientist getting killed. Seven points out that Janeway has got plenty of people killed (stating "over a dozen," which seems a little fucking low after the events of Unimatrix Zero), and that's one of the risks of being in command.

The other aliens, meanwhile, have already managed to defeat the cloak, making the entire thing pointless, but for some reason, this inspires Harry to immediately retake command with the mission of delivering the cloaking device. He pretends to surrender to the aliens, then uses some technobabble to disable their tractor beam, taking the cloaking device and the scientists home, where they can be useful.

Back on Voyager, Tom sees that B'Elanna is enjoying Icheb's company, so he invites Icheb to go race car driving with him. Icheb interprets this as a ritualistic challenge, so he goes to Engineering and "breaks up" with B'Elanna, who is so shocked and confused by it that she just goes along with it and plays along. And that's pretty damn misogynistic on the part of the writers. Sure, the entire thing is intended to be lighthearted (and if it had actually been anything but cringeworthy and awkward, I might have let it slide), but the entire thing is out of character. Icheb is too smart for that bullshit, and B'Elanna wouldn't have put up with that bullshit - she should have put him in his damn place. As should any woman, nay, any person, who encounters someone that out of touch with reality. But instead of it being a teachable moment, or a moment in which Torres could be a role model to whatever one teen girl was watching the show at that point, instead, they just let it sit that Icheb though that Torres was hot for him, and did nothing to disavow him of that. It's a fucking awful message to send.

Anyway, the aliens realize that Harry is helping their enemies, but at the same time, the fucking Delta Flyer took out one of their ships, so they instead just insist that Voyager get the fuck out of their space. Janeway gears up to rescue Harry and Seven, but he shows up in the fully-cloaked Nightingale, ready to get back to being just an ensign that the Captain can't throw a pity promotion to.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -46/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 16
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 15

I pinned this so you don't have to go hunting for it the next time you stop by.

BTW, I'm enjoying your reviews more than I ever enjoyed the show.

Or he could just save it in his favorites file instead of inflicting torture on us having to see a Voyager thread every-time we come here.

For that, I've set this thread as your browser's home page

Did @Kyle get kidnapped? Or did he commit suicide because watching Voyager finally got to him?

Can't believe I hadn't been reading this thread. (The very mention of Voyager probably turned me off.)

These are some excellent and frequently hilarious reviews.

Indeed. I'm gonna take his reviews and @Zor Prime 's of TNG and turn 'em into ePubs for if/when WF closes up shop.

I wish TKO would come by to do DS9. She wasn't a TBBS transplant, so it would've been interesting to have her fresh perspective on the show.

Zor prime ?

Voyager should've been called "Gilligan's Quadrant"!

I thought he was Robotec Master because he got locked outta that account and couldn't get back in.

I had no idea...

Indeed!

I came back after a long hiatus to discover that Robotech Master had been banned from the board.

And thus was Zor Prime created!

I guess TPTB were trying to ban Packard and got you by mistake.

For some reason I thought Zor Prime was Tamar's husband.