Summary: Voyager goes off the air with a finale that isn’t quite a bang but is a fitting farewell in keeping with its themes and tone.

Despite heading for a fifth series, Star Trek has only done two series finales before Endgame. That means there really isn’t a template enstablished for the series finale just yet. On the one hand, we have TNG’s All Good Things…, which was a poignant look ahead at the future combined with a brillant celebration of Star Trek’s ideals and a complex intellectual puzzle. On the other hand, we had DS9’s What You Leave Behind choose to do a conventional episode, wrapping the messy arcs and plot threads it had accumulated. Voyager’s finale Endgame on the other hand falls somewhere in between.

Unlike TNG, Voyager’s writers know this is their show’s last hurrah and that there will never be any further extension of the story. But unlike DS9, Voyager wasn’t overloaded with arcs that had to be wrapped up or apocalyptic struggles to be fought. So Endgame is a combination of the two styles. On the one hand there is a time warping premise to Endgame and a poignant look ahead at what time and history will do to its charachters as on TNG. On the other hand the actual episode is less about time travel, than it is about using it as a vehicle to examine the characters and resolve the series and various character issues like DS9. The result is a finale that doesn’t aim high like TNG’s but also one that doesn’t overshoot and crash and burn like DS9’s. It’s an average finale that encompasses all the good and bad that was Voyager and by doing so serves as a valid representation of what the show was all about.

Endgame’s opening takes less of a page from TNG or DS9 than it does from the TOS films. Specifically Wrath of Khan. A scene of Voyager’s joyous celebration cuts to a falsely cheerful retrospective on a TV monitor and a bitter-aged Captain Janeway pacing the room. These are scenes that call up the TOS Genesis trilogy both visually and emotionally. Janeway and the Doctor chat in her apartment in a scene strongly reminscent of Kirk and McCoy sans glasses. The Genesis comparisons only deepen as Janeway searches for a way to break Starfleet regulations to save former friends and crew members. Janeway herself no longer pilots a starship but has been bumped up to Admiral and looks forwards to teaching cadets. The crew has their reunions like an old group of Korean War vets who don’t seem to have that much in common anymore and Voyager is a museum from whose ready room you can see Alcatraz. Tuvok is in a mental asylum raving to himself and Chakotay and Seven are dead. And it took Voyager nearly two decades to get home.

Fans and viewers might have expected a long journey home ending with Voyager’s return, but the episode instead chooses to throw a splendid reunion at them and then turn it into ashes. It’s a scene that takes a certain amount of guts. Voyager might have easily gone the conventional route, or at least closed with the return scene as a payoff. Instead the payoff shot shows Voyager returning to Earth in the company of the fleet. We’ve already seen the return home and we know it won’t solve all the problems or too many problems for that matter. Janeway’s real problem remains unspoken and it isn’t Tuvok’s disease or Seven’s death. Her real problem is only stated openly by Paris, that she was only satisfied when she was on Voyager. Voyager was home. Time stood still on Voyager.

Janeway has always been obssessed with doing the best job possible of getting her crew home. And so she decides to go back in time and risk the past, not for any particularly compelling reasons, but because she wants to do a better job if it than she did last time. She wants to see if she can get the floor cleaner and the cabinets shininer and the crew home in seven years instead of twenty-something years. Janeway has always been a perfectionist and obsessed with her performance. She’s lost plenty of crewmembers before, so why not prevent Voyager from entering the Delta Quadrant period? The device on her shuttle allows her to choose any point in space or time. Presumabely because it would eliminate important parts of history, which Voyager changed. Captain Braxton and Q have said as much. Janeway herself states that these sixteen years featured major confrontations with the Borg Queen which helped them develop weapons and tactics that in the future allows the Federation to hold the Borg at bay. Is she throwing all this way just to rescue some friends? So are we to really believe that Voyager’s first seven years in the Delta Quadrant were important to galactic history but the succeeding sixteen years weren’t?

And here is at once the greatest strength of Endgame and its greatest weakness. Its strength lies in its depiction of Voyager’s future, but a future that is merely used to engineer a bit of time travel that occurs at this point in time for no particular reason, except that Voyager’s seven years are up. Worse yet, Admiral Janeway seems to have no idea how to bring Voyager home except by taking them through the worst the Borg have to offer. Couldn’t she have found an easier way to bring Voyager home? If Voyager could get home by breaking the rules, who not ask Q to do it? The entire Borg plot becomes tacked on as a means of resolving the Borg, even though they have little relation to the basic plot. Which means we’re asked to swallow two gigantic whoppers. The first being Admiral Janeway’s choice and the second being the involvement of the Borg.

Despite the All Good Things… “flashbacks” like Janeway’s shuttle being pursued by Klingon warships, Janeway convincing aged crew members to let her go on one final mission, and Tuvok suffering from a degenerative mental disease, future Voyager worked. So does present day Voyager. Given plenty of time, Endgame showcases a “5 minutes from now” future of Voyager that has Tuvok realizing his disease is getting worse when he loses a game, Torres expecting her baby and Paris finally settling down and abandoning his last desire for adventure. Both the past and the future are rife with neat continuity referrences from Barclay missing a golf game with the EMH, Kim’s desire to be Captain and Torres’s daughter turning out to be a bigger Klingon than her mother and involved in Klingon politics to boot. The future isn’t detailed but Janeway shopping around for technology with a renegade Klingon noble in exchange for a seat on the high council is plausible and rings true. So do the lecture halls and reunions, a Voyager version of Veterans of Foreign Wars. Or Veterans of Delta Quadrant Attritions.

The failure happens when Endgame does what All Good Things… and Voyager’s own Timeless knew not to do, combine the past and the future. On board Voyager, Admiral Janeway is just a pest and her motivations are bizarre. Her claims that “family comes before strangers” is completely bizarre and un-Starfleet even if it’s nice to see Janeway finally come out and admit the philosophy that’s been behind criminal actions such as Tuvix and Scorpion. Her technology gifts make things too easy. Sure the Borg have become a bit too soft but the cheesy armor-all effect and super torpedoes that blow up entire cubes are just ridiculous. Meanwhile Present Janeway demonstrates that she can’t even stand or work with herself, let alone anyone else. Her desire to blow up the Borg transwarp conduit is noble, but wouldn’t it make more sense to escape first and get the technology back to Starfleet which can outfit a hundred ships with it and do the job better?

People may make noises about the Temporal Prime Directive, but I note the TPD hasn’t kept the EMH from wearing a piece of 27th century technology and trying to donate it to the Daystrom Institute. Why is this any different? Janeway is ready to throw away the TPD when it’s a question of Tuvok’s well-being and when it’s a question of the welfare of her crew, and this is a question of the survival of thousands of entire species. Essentially, then, both Janeways have irrational agendas that have more to do with their own personal psychological problems, than with Starfleet regulations and the greater good. Kirk in ST3 and Picard in All Good Things… broke the rules but Kirk didn’t care about Genesis. He was simply trying to rescue Spock and that meant violating the No Trespassing sign. Picard had evidence that if he didn’t act the universe would be destroyed. Janeway wanted to save 22 people and possibly doom billions and wipe out portions of galactic history doing it. It just doesn’t add up.

And that is Voyager’s legacy, pettiness. Even when taking on the Borg and challenging all space and time, Janeway seems petty. And she manages to make the Borg seem petty too. It’s family versus family. Janeway’s family on Voyager which has come to a fractured old age in the future and the Borg Queen’s collapsing collective family. Both believe Seven of Nine is part of their family. And more than anything this episode seems to come down to Seven of Nine again. She dies. Her death devastates Chakotay. Her death is the unique thing that causes Janeway to go back. The other 22 crew members are nameless and Janeway has already lost quite a few people before this. But by choosing to develop the actual Chakotay/Seven romance only at this late date, the entire notion that Chakotay was so devastated by her loss that he pined away for longing is simply implausible. And fans who follow the inside news will note Beltran’s attacks against the producers and that actors the producers don’t like often meet unfortunate ends.

But then if the producers had decided to kill off the character they might have gotten some mileage from it by killing him off during the attempt to return to Earth. As it is there is little carnage and little real trial and risk. Future Janeway may die but that is to be expected. But to the crew, it is an episode that seems to carry less danger and risk than episodes like Dark Frontier or Year of Hell. You would think that the process of returning to Earth would be epic, but instead it seems very ordinary. It doesn’t even compare to Borg Voyager episodes like Scorpion or Unimatrix Zero. Eliminate the time travel and return-to-Earth element and you simply have a fairly conventional Voyager two-parter. The Borg Queen even falls for a variation of the same trick Janeway used on her in Unimatrix Zero. The collective must have a really poor memory to keep making the same mistake over and over again.

So what we have in Endgame is the fusion of a strong future episode, a strong view of Voyager 5 minutes from now and their clumsy combination in a weak and hackeneyd plot that results in them getting home. But this is only fitting for a show that has suffered from poor plots and rushed resolutions throughout its run. Endgame has many of the same successes and failures as Voyager in general has had. With Endgame it attempts to produce a linear resolution and a character arc wrap-up and while it does a better job of this than the muddled DS9 series finale, it suffers from many of the same flaws. Confrontation for confrontation’s sake, implausible actions and behaviors and a finale that feels rushed to complete an artificial schedule that wasn’t properly planned for. But it also has gems that DS9’s finale lacks and those gems, those character moments, are what link Voyager’s past and present.

Next week: Nothing. Now the wait for Star Trek Enterprise begins.

Summary: A “perfectly functional” episode that pretty much ties up the Doctor’s development and offers a somewhat decent adventure plot to boot. And it’s always fun to see the Doctor take Tuvok down a notch or two.

Renaissance Man isn’t a particularly inspiring episode but it is, as a Vulcan might say, “perfectly adequate.” It doesn’t remotely measure up to the wild brillance of Tinker Tailor, the episode it serves as a sequel to. But it does put the Doctor’s character under real pressure and creates genuine tension and conflict, something very few of the season’s adventure stories have managed so far.

Like Tinker Tailor, Renaissance Man’s villains are once again the Hierarchy race. And they use their ability to see what the Doctor sees to keep him under control. There is also the tension between the supervisor character and a more imaginatively-minded and kinder subordinate. But the episode, by attempting to recreate Tinker Tailor, misses the things that made that episode work. Where the office drone dynamic of Tinker Tailor provided a character we could relate to and linked him to the Doctor’s own troubles, Renaissance Man employs the aliens as stock characters: “bad alien” and “decent but spineless sidekick”. It’s been done more times than can be counted and Renaissance Man, unlike Tinker Tailor, brings nothing new to the table.

Indeed, the only reason for this stock relationship is to lead up to the predictable ending where the spineless alien will finally turn on his master. Worse, it’s the only reason the aliens are turned into renegades disconnected from the hierarchy. This makes the entire thing look ridiculous since basically Janeway is being held hostage by two fat guys, only one of whom is even any kind of threat. You don’t see Kirk or Picard or Sisko remaining imprisoned for long under these circumstances. But they seem to manage to produce complete chaos on Voyager. This is more than a little reminscent of Janeway’s embarassing struggle with two Ferengi.

On the Voyager end, though, the Doctor outwitting and even physically defeating most of the Voyager crew is certainly entertaining. The ECH once again makes a case for his abilities as he outwits Tuvok and then defeats him in hand to hand combat. He poses as three different officers, fends off Paris’s romantic overtures and knocks out Chakotay and Kim and stows them in the overhead compartment. He takes over and runs Voyager and watching him do it is fun, even if his complete capitulation to the kidnapper’s demands is a little odd. He may be fearful for Janeway’s safety but the ECH’s tactical scenarios should have told him that the best way to assaure a hostage’s safety doesn’t rest in complete compliance with a kidnapper’s demands. The constant monitoring is an important tool for reinforcing the plausibility of his actions but it’s not quite enough.

Indeed, much of this episode seems to be setting up material for the series finale. That may be appropriate as Renaissance Man is the last episode before the finale but it seems weak and misplaced because the Doctor’s behavior and Janeway’s attitudes both seem a little odd. This is why arcs help set up changes in character behavior, instead of sudden changes occuring in the context of an episode. But it does serve to cap off the Doctor’s character development.

The EMH proclaims that he’s happy to be a hologram and doesn’t want to be human. He confesses his love for Seven and begins developing a friendship with Janeway. He demonstrates his ability to do just about anything and even gets to sing again. And considering that the reality is that the Doctor was always Voyager’s breakout character, far more so than Seven of Nine, and its main character as well, it’s only appropriate that he be assigned the next to last Voyager episode. Voyager’s Renaissance Man.

Next week: Voyager’s series finale. Hey, it made Mulgrew cry.

Summary: Neelix is inserted into a standard Western of a surrogate father, a family in risk of losing its homestead and a wandering man finding his destiny.

Star Trek has often been tagged with the somewhat inaccurate “Wagon Train to the Stars” label but generally the incidence of Western motifs has dramatically decreased along with Roddenberry’s presence in the franchise. Janeway’s gothic novel holodeck scenario was originally meant to be a Western in order to reflect Voyager’s dilemma, but apparently someone thought Bronte would appeal to the viewers more. So Homestead is one of the stronger reworked Voyager Westerns in some time. “Destiny” was even its original title.

There’s the insular community whose homes are about to be destroyed by the greedy mining company; the woman he’s attracted to and the child who views him as a father figure, which makes this a not particularly unpredictable story but LeVar Burton’s clean and strong visual direction and Ethan Phillips’s heartfelt performance compensated for that. More importantly, this Voyager episode had what few Voyager’s possessed since the early seasons, actual changes to the show resulting as a consequence of the events in the episode. Namely Neelix’s departure.

And the departure is managed far more smoothly and ably than one would expect. Homestead manages to bring the interplay between Neelix and Tuvok as close as possible while bringing Tuvok as close to Spock as he’s ever been. It’s no real coincidence that this episode begins with an invocation of the original first contact (a nice piece of continuity and development) between humans and vulcans. Or that it ends with Tuvok acknowledging the affirmative value of the non-Vulcan and Neelix, Voyager’s Delta Quadrant alien, rejoining his people as a Federation ambassador.

Unlike Kes’s departure, Neelix’s departure is unforced and reasonable. Every single scene from the tour with the aliens pointing out the ambiguous nature of his position on Voyager, his candle-lit dinner with the Talaxian female that causes him to realize how much he’s missed the company of his own people, and finally finding a child for whom he could be an actual father, instead of a babysitter. One could complain that it’s odd that these issues haven’t really been addressed before this, but that’s a general complaint about the show rather than this episode in particular.

The presence of the Talaxians all the way out here is questionable. It took Voyager seven years to make it to this point with several super-human assists. Even assuming that this generation of Talaxians left as children, the Haakonian conquest occurred 15 years from Voyager’s arrival at Talax which means that considering their detours and attempts at colonization, they would have had twenty years to make this trip. Considering that in that time they probably couldn’t have traveled more than 20,000 light years and Kes’s acceleration alone threw Voyager 10,000 LY ahead. Fan estimates placed Voyager as having traveled over 50,000 light years by Season 5 alone. Clearly the Talaxian presence is pretty hard to explain and some sort of explanation for a Delta Quadrant species in the Beta Quadrant should have been made.

For once, a Voyager episode manages to have a species’ xenophobia err on the side of caution, instead of being taken too far as in Friendship One, to the point where the aliens become completely unsympathetic. The Talaxian’s story about the death of her husband is just complex and detailed enough to serve as a nice touch. The details of the Talaxian’s technology is another nice touch, that kind of in-depth look at the technology of a wandering group of starships and an asteroid colony instead of just presenting CGI pictures is another nice departure from ordinary Voyager procedure. It helps make the reality of the colony and Neelix’s task more plausible and effective.

It would have been nice, though, if Neelix had shown more leadership and hadn’t needed to be bailed out at the end by the Delta Flyer. We already know the Voyager crew “can do anything”, this scene was needed to establish Neelix’s capabilities. After all, Voyager won’t be around when he has to deal with the same aliens again. But then Voyager is still saddled with the same paranoia of showing Janeway as being less than perfect at anything. The entire discussion of the Prime Directive is again ridiculous and out of place. The PD applies to pre-warp species. It does not apply to warp civilizations out of their solar systems, otherwise the Federation would be unable to do much of anything. Also the rights of ownership for the asteroid belt were not established.

If the alien miners indeed had a claim on the property, then Voyager might have been wrong to interfere once the aliens agreed to give the Talaxians enough time to evacuate. The Talaxians insist it’s their home but they may just be squatters. Just because someone chooses to live in your backyard, doesn’t mean it’s their property. We have two scenes that highlight the casual brutality of the aliens in question and they’re put in makeup that makes them look like hideous evil monsters but that’s just a lazy way of establishing rights and wrongs. We might as well put them in Dracula masks and have them chant “We are evil” over and over again to prove the same point. This might not have been so much of a problem if Voyager had only limited itself to mediation but once the Delta Flyer participates in the battle it would seem that Janeway has used armed force to take a side and it’s unclear if the side is really right or not.

The special effects look pretty good again demonstrating that if nothing else, Series V will probably have amazing visual effects. Tuvok’s dance step is played in just the right subtle way and so is Janeway’s offer to allow Neelix to leave and rejoin his people disguised as a practical ambassadorship. And we’re not burdened with a pointless B story about Paris forgetting how to tie his shoes or Kim losing his stuffed bunny in a turbo lift. Homestead may not be Voyager’s greatest episode but unlike Natural Law, it does belong as one of the series’ final episodes. Neelix may not be Voyager’s best character, but he needed a sendoff and Homestead is about the best one he could have gotten.

Next week: Another Doctor playing secret agent? Is this an occupational hazard?

Summary: Another day, another shuttlecraft. Half the Voyager special effects budget is blown on one of the worst episodes of the season.

The poet has said, “The saddest words of tongue or pen are these: ‘It might have been’.” On Voyager the saddest words are, “What was the point of making this episode in the first place?” And all too often when this question is asked, there is no answer except another bad episode from a show that already has far too many bad episodes to begin with.

The first half of Natural Law has all the dramatic and intellectual excitement of a half hour of static and noise. For those few fans hoping for a romance between Chakotay and 7 of 9, the opening classic fanfic hurt/comfort scenario might have suggested some possibilities but as awful as that possibility might have been, it’s better than what we actually got; which was nothing. Or technically speaking, worse than nothing. There are plenty of FX dollars which might have been put to better use on “Void”, but were expended on a B-story that has Paris going to alien driver’s ed.

One could ask why we need this storyline. One could also ask why we need the Ebola virus. It accomplishes nothing useful except for a weak attempt at humor whose payoff only comes in the final few minutes of this episode. After “Author, Author” had tried to make such a point of how Paris had matured since we first met him, this storyline makes a strong case for Paris being the same developmentally disabled adolescent he always was. The instructor may not be particularly flexible but instead of approaching the problem in a mature manner, Paris tried to lie to, wheedle and manipulate the instructor thereby proving the instructor’s worst notions about him to be true.

You have to wonder if there isn’t any character, any story on Voyager that needed to be told more than this one. I could think of half a dozen and so could most fans, especially considering that we’re a few episodes away from the finale which means this is all the character development we’re going to get. In light of this and in light of the fact that Paris has been on a solid fatherhood character development path for a while now, what was the point?

But as bad as the “Paris goes to driver’s ed” storyline may be, the first half hour of the “Seven of Nine learns the value of other cultures” story is even worse. Here, the writers attempt to avoid the possibility of having a bad story, by having no story at all. Instead Chakotay hurts his leg, Seven of Nine breaks a heel and loses her tricorder (why is she wandering around a forest in high heels anyway?) and they discover some friendly natives. Why are the natives so friendly and ready to give our characters the shirts off their backs, literally?

Well, there are no explanations given except that for lazy writers this is the cheapest and dirtiest way of shouting how wonderful and special a people the natives are, from the highest tower. As with the Ba’ku in Star Trek Insurrection, we’re supposed to believe that these people have amazing spiritual or cultural values that make them truly amazing. The writers fail to specify what these values are but they seem to involve smiling a lot, using sign language and giving lots of presents. And so of course Chakotay soon trusts the aliens absolutely.

This is a bit odd considering that he doesn’t know anything about their culture, species or whether or not their gestures mean “stay for dinner and we’ll cook you a nice meal” or “stay for dinner and we’ll cook you into a nice meal.” As friendly as they appear, leaving yourself at the mercy of a primitive society can be a bad idea, yet none of them actually take any precautions. But then the aliens aren’t real and neither is their culture, they’re two dimensional caricatures intended to make a political point. There’s no complexity or contradictions here. It’s not a primitive culture, it’s a primitive culture theme park courtesy of Disney where nothing can actually hurt you.

But this “noble savage” aspect of the natives drives what little in the way of a story this episode has. Which is that the natives are better off being cut off by the barrier from the rest of the universe. The episode denigrates the research team for arrogantly thinking they know what’s best for the natives and Chakotay challenges Seven demanding to know how she can think she knows what’s best for the natives. This is nice except that Natural Law is dedicated to the premise that the Voyager crew know what’s better for the natives more than anyone elsem, including the natives’ advanced cousins and the natives themselves!

The barrier was a piece of alien artificial technology. The result was to isolate the natives trapping them in a static, unchanging, primitive society for centuries. After a surface encounter with the native culture, Chakotay and Seven arrogantly assume that they have perfect knowledge of them and can make decisions for them. They praise the wonders of the native lifestyle ignoring the fact that this lifestyle is artificial and imposed by the barrier. And one wonders what the average lifespan is for the natives right now. Undoubtedly, a fraction of Chakotay’s or that of the writers so ready to praise such a lifestyle and so unready to adopt it. It’s almost amusing to see how many simple-living tales come out of Hollywood, a place as synonymous with simple living as the People’s Republic of China is with human rights.

Janeway, then, bizarrely presents the aliens with an ultimatum– ordering them to leave a planet in their own solar system. Of course she expects them to obey, as the Federation would no doubt obey if the Vulcans stopped by Earth and ordered them to leave the American continent. Unsurprisingly, they attack Voyager instead in a very restrained manner, indeed showing far more restrain than Janeway has. She and Chakotay claim to be doing it in the best interest of the natives but beyond a passing glance of their culture and a few words of their language, they know nothing of that culture. The natives themselves don’t get consulted on the subject. Their curiosity, their desire for knowledge and their fascination with Voyager’s technology are dismissed as aberrations that would interfere with their primitive way of life. Yet just about every action of the aliens suggests that they want more, yet is ignored as being counterproductive to maintaining their own primitive way of life; because the Voyager crew of course knows what is better for the natives than the natives know themselves. This is the ultimate arrogance, the ultimate colonialism, as the Voyager crew reduce the natives to children who can’t think or choose or decide for themselves.

Next week: Neelix finally goes to join his own people.

Summary: A well meaning but predictable and uninspiring rehash of standard Star Trek material.

Between the Vidiians and the Maalon, the disfigured race preying on other species and using their problems as justification has become a staple of Voyager. But where the Vidiians were compelling as both monsters and victims, the alien species of Friendship One are merely a series of victims. The episode repeatedly suggests that they’re our victims and that Voyager should somehow feel guilty for their conditions, but Voyager had nothing to do with the launching of the probe and all the probe did was provide them with advanced technology meant to serve beneficial purposes. Their inability to properly use that technology was their own fault and responsibility.

That leaves us with the same Star Trek setup we’ve seen a thousand times before. There’s the bad ruthless alien, the potentially good but uncertain alien and the human interest female. Our crew attempts to convey our humanity to the aliens through personal exchanges which humanize them. The good alien helps Voyager thwart the schemes of the bad alien. There’s the red shirt whose off the cuff conversations about family make it certain that he’ll die before the episode is over. We’ve seen the same material used - more innovatively - before; and without any standout performances or dialogue, the show has little to contribute except the irony of Friendship One itself as a defense of the importance Prime Directive.

Though it doesn’t really accomplish this either since the problem wasn’t so much that the technology was given out but that it was given out blindly and without supervision. And they’re only saved by more interference from the Federation. This isn’t a very convincing criticism of Starfleet or exploration. And Janeway’s final statement about exploration not being worth the lives lost sounds ridiculous and bizarre since exploration, like it or not, runs precisely on those who gave their lives to see over into the next horizon. Star Trek has always acknowledged this and paid tribute to it, as recently as the far superior Voyager episode, One Small Step. Indeed Janeway’s entire policy has been to conduct exploration rather than a straight route home.

Friendship One had the potential to construct an intricate commentary on Starfleet and Voyager’s own mission using the trial of Friendship One, but One Small Step did a better job of handling that material. So all that was left was a lesson about helping people, but as in Insurrection that lesson was buried by the generic undistinguished nature of the people who needed to be helped, as well as their persistent whining about “nobody understanding how hard it is for them” which was more than a little reminiscent of the Baku’s touting their advanced spiritual values. Except where the Baku’s sense of superiority seemed to actually come from sort of accomplishments no matter how questionable, the FO species accomplishment was to be murderous, miserable and diseased.

Janeway’s initial incompetence e.g. failing to detect both an alien civilization and the people living there, even though Voyager had encountered a close cousin of this same state of affairs in Dragon’s Teeth, and then attempting to push Brin into giving up the hostages instead of demonstrating their good faith first finally and unexpectedly gives way to good command skills when she actually does the sane, practical thing and shockingly enough pulls off a successful rescue mission to release the hostages. Unfortunately by this point the hostages have developed Stockholm Syndrome and demonstrating very little regard for the fact that one of their friends and crewmembers was just murdered (Paris argues that it was only one man who did it, conveniently overlooking that it was their leader and that no one else found the act objectionable in the least) jostle Janeway into risking Voyager to clean up the planet’s atmosphere.

Considering that these people have anti-matter weapons and anti-matter missiles, it seems odd that Janeway doesn’t just propose giving them instructions for constructing their own ships and evacuating themselves. Or for that matter since it was doubtful that they could have produced anti-matter without leaving their planetary orbit, they should have had their own starships. Not that doing so would be a very smart idea, since the last thing the Delta Quadrant needs is another set of Vidians murdering and torturing people while whining about how hard their lives are. Voyager was quite ready to accept the Vidiians justifications for their actions and certainly has no trouble accepting the Friendship One species sense of self-righteous victimization. Wonder if it’ll make Lt. Carey’s family feel any better that his killers had “a bad childhood” ?

But this is characteristic of Friendship One as a paint-by-the numbers episode that relies on reusing Star Trek formulas to produce a predictable episode whose values are barely skin deep. After VGR of STTMP, the Mars spacecraft of One Small Step, the old American ship of Casino Royale and now Friendship One it seems a few too many old Earth space program vehicles have gone a lot further than they were supposed to go and it really strains all credulity that two of these would have ended up in the Delta Quadrant. Reusing this notion cheapens One Small Step and has no real purpose since this episode would have worked just as well if the aliens had found any advanced technology which they misused and blame all aliens for their own foolishness.

In part it seems Friendship One is introduced as a possible buildup for Series V. The entire fairly extraneous conversation about the timetable for the probe’s launch and Tuvok’s comment about its launch “preceding Starfleet” seems like it might have been planted as possible background for Series V. Or at the very least it may have been informed by the Series V premise. And I suppose it is a measure of how little Friendship One has to offer that its most intriguing aspect involves sifting a minor piece of dialogue for clues to the premise of the next series. And it may well be a clue as to how little Voyager’s seventh season has to offer as well.

Summary: A strong episode that addresses some important issues but its reach far exceeds its grasp.

The issue of the Doctor’s holographic rights has been Voyager’s most consistent and longest running arc and now finally seems to be at a close at about the same that Voyager itself is ending. Unfortunately the deadline seems to have caused the writers to try and do too much in too little time. Like the Void, another strong recent Voyager episode, Author Author is at times clever, imaginative, and finally, addresses the substantive issues but it is overstuffed with material that far outstrips the forty minutes available to deal with it.

While Voyager early on displayed great facility with the Kazon arc, running it as a B-story in unrelated episodes very effectively, the later Voyager seems to prefer stuffing its return-to-Earth arc into large single pieces placed throughout individual episodes. So Author, Author has to spend time dealing with Voyager’s first regular connection to Earth AND the issue of the Doctor’s holographic rights brought to contest AND the issue of the Doctor’s relations with the Voyager crew. Each of these would have made a good episode. Together stuffed into one single episode, none of them has the time to be fully developed into a natural storyline.

And so, The Doctor’s humanity arguments are reduced to a several-minute footnote towards the end of the episode. The Voyager crew’s phone-calls are well handled but this sort of thing should have been shown to have more impact on the crew than a few quickly edited scenes of ‘phoning home’. It’s odd that at a time when the Voyager crew have the first semi-permanent connection to their families, the main topic of conversation is The Doctor’s insulting holo-program. This should have really changed things, followed up on the promise of scenes like Barclay’s “gift” of the live shot of Earth. After all, this is what Voyager has been working for all these years; it should have meant and mattered more.

For once, Seven’s family scenes were tastefully and very effectively handled with the stimulus towards change coming more from her, than from scenes with Janeway or The Doctor lecturing her on getting to know her family. Having Seven come towards the incentive to “phone home” by acting as a silent observer while Kim and Torres get in touch with their families is the kind of subtlety that the Seven arc could’ve used more of. Kim’s scenes are used for their comic potential but Wang underplays the material so that it works, instead of being an over-the-top Asian family joke as it was written. Torres’s scenes with her father also do a good job of following up on prior material–continunity is one thing Author, Author demonstrates abundantly.

The entire holonovel material, though, feels unnecessary. Instead of the entire circus of alternate universe doubles, we could simply have had the crew read off a few of the same lines from a PADD and spend the time on the arguments over the EMH’s humanity or the actual issues involved. After all, the comic potential and the whole concept of distorted perception\mirror universe Voyager crew members was handled far better in Living Witness. There was no real need to do it again except as an attempt at a gag, which only distracted from the actual issue of the Doctor’s political advocacy and feelings.

It would’ve been far more effective, however, if The Doctor had made the Voyager crewmembers more true to life, but distorted in subtle ways so as to put a negative spin on their actual conduct and behavior. This would have brought home the notion that The Doctor might view the crew’s behavior differently than they themselves or the viewer do. Instead, The Doctor produces ridiculous caricatures that make him look ridiculous and the crew look petty for taking offense at such ridiculous and patently unrealistic distortions.

Certainly, literary works of political advocacy don’t tend to be very subtle and with The Doctor drafting his own Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he couldn’t have likely produced a quiet masterpiece. Still, the problem remains that most of the Voyager crew’s carciatures are excessively and inhumanly psychotic and evil while works of political commentary are more effective if they address actual, everyday evils as they appear. Political advocacy of evils as practiced by demented cartoon characters doesn’t make people re-examine their own behaviors and participate with their victims in the healing process; it just distances the problem and makes it seem unrealistic. More so, a lot of the Voyager “evil crew” are evil in ways that have nothing to do with holographic rights. They’re simply crazed and demented. Janeway phasering a wounded crewmember has nothing to do with holographic rights. Her treatment of the EMH by contrast seems almost merciful.

The plot twist of having the publisher of the EMH’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” work exploit him as a hologram with no rights is smart and politically sophisticated, while being quite true to life. Having the test of the EMH’s humanity be copyright law is also ingenuious and unexpected, even though the publisher has no chance of victory. If the EMH were a thing rather than a person, than he and all his works are property of Starfleet, which has sole authority over them. The problem is that much of this comes as an afterthought. In TNG’s Measure of a Man, the arguments over Data’s humanity forced the crew to really reconsider their feelings about Data, the arguments hit home and the answer was in actual doubt. Picard had a point but so did Riker. Here there is zero doubt.

The crew has fully acknolweged the EMH’s humanity and they’re ready to tell stories about it all day and all night. The use of The Doctor’s betrayal of Voyager as a point in favor of his humanity is a smart touch of continuity. But there is no real challenge anymore. Only the Federation doubts the EMH’s humanity and the Federation isn’t actually here, they’re far away listening-in. The final scene of the holograms breaking the proverbial rock in the dilithium mines, spreading the word about freedom, is a wonderfully inspirational final thought and the episode is full of so many similar nice moments. Unfortunately, this episode could have been put to better use if it had done a better job of connecting all these instances into a more seamless, cohesive story.

Summary: Q2 indulges in Deja Q, revisiting a far superior TNG episode with a weak and clumsy imitation centered around a character with none of Q’s charisma.

The first problem with Q2 is that essentially it delivers exactly what its title suggests it does, an episode not about Q but about a second Q. The problem of course is that the second Q isn’t all that interesting of a character. Q works mostly because of de Lancie’s charisma and over the top personality that allows him to dominate a scene with a single look. This allows for the kind of over-the-top material and dialogue that make the Q episodes entertaining to begin with. Corbin Bernsen as Q wasn’t quite his equal but had a certain amount of presence and so did the actress who formerly played K’helyar returning as Worf’s mate. The actor playing Q2 on the other hand is competent enough but completely uninteresting in that sort of way.

Q2 (the episode) revisits Deja Q, the far superior TNG episode that featured Q stripped of his powers by the Continuum for abusing them and left in a human shell to function on a Stafleet vessel and then prove his worth by offering to sacrifice his life to save his human pals at which point his powers are restored. Sound familiar? Well it’s essentially a workable synopsis of Q2. Without even addressing the lack of originality behind the episode (bemoaning the lack of originality behind recent franchise material is as useful and as commomplace as complaining about the weather, those with sharp eyes will note that DS9’s entire Pah Raih arc sprang from a single TNG episode just recently rerun), Q2 fails simply because once again Voyager tries to redo a TNG episode without understanding the facts that made that episode work.

By the point of Deja Q, Q was a malign, greedy, childish God. He was all those things but he was also superior and omnipotent in more than just powers. Q Who demonstrated that he had something to teach humanity and so did TNG’s own finale, All Good Things… In other words, he was a true antagonist to the TNG crew and to Picard. He was also dangerous. Rather than the benign wish-granting, amusing genie he later became, Q was quite capable of killing the crew. He genuinely disliked and felt contempt for humanity. This made his transformation into human form all the more dangerous and his sacrifice meaningful. The chilling scene that features Guinan stabbing Q with a fork to prove his humanity is genuinely disturbing. The only thing Q2 has to offer is Q2 removing Neelix’s vocal cords (an action most people agree with anyway) and all is quickly forgotten and forgiven. And that’s the trouble with Q2; Q2 far too quickly becomes a model human and Starfleet officer.

With Q having been thoroughly contaminated by TNG and Voyager episodes that have weakened and diluted him as thoroughly as the dreadnought Borg he introduced, introducing Q2 as a new Q with all the edge and darkness the original Q had lost was not a bad idea but instead the new Q is an even weaker model than the old. But this was only to be expected. Voyager has focused its Q episodes on having Q come to Janeway and have her help him with Q problems. Where Picard and Q struggled over human issues, Voyager was too insecure to allow Q to challenge Janeway in that manner and so Q quickly ran for help to her every time there were problems in the Continium. So of course it’s not likely Voyager would allow the new Q to challenge Janeway, anymore than the old Q could.

And so stripped of any edgy or challenging material, Voyager’s version of Deja Q quite literally becomes a babysitting episode with Q2 learning to be a better person thanks to the Voyager crew. His transformation is pretty meaningless since he never had the darkness of Q. He’s just a kid and Q’s description of him is apt, he means well and you just have to get to know him. This is ultimately quite true but it also gurantees that the episode will lack any dramatic or comedic value.

Furthermore, where original TNG episodes like Deja Q were laser-guided and focused on what they wanted to achieve, Q2 stumbles as if it’s not quite clear on what it wants to accomplish or how it wants to get there. Voyager’s writers believe the Q are funny and popular but as with so much else of the ST franchise, they don’t quite understand why and so they go to the equivalent of having the Q doing juggling tricks. They try one thing and then another and throughout it all they have the distinct feeling that something is not right and not working just right. And so the focus is lost and the result is yet another poorly thought out episode. The writers clearly believed that simply having a kiddy Q would be entertaining by its very nature, failing to understand that like the Borg, nothing is entertaining by its very nature. It requires work. It requires understanding the essentials of the original and building on it.

This can also be read as a summation of the reasons for the failure of the Voyager franchise itself.

Next Week: Evil Voyager characters in the HoloDoc’s novel. Now that should be entertaining.

Summary: Another sleazy UPN promo serves as a misleading introduction to a nice and poetic if not particularly outstanding episode. Seven goes Barclay and Chakotay gets more action as a hologram than he ever has as a human being.

The gap between who we want to be and who we are has always been an effective source of human drama. And Seven is a character inserted on Voyager with a progressive self-improvement arc that at times makes Voyager seem like a self-improvement tape. And indeed a lot of the Seven episodes have fit neatly into that package. At the start of the episode Seven demonstrates how close to the Borg and far from humanity she is, events happen during the episode which cause her to grow closer to some aspect of humanity and with Janeway’s guidance and pithy speeches, by the time the final 90 seconds come around, Seven is one step closer to being human. The problem with this approach is that of course it’s mechanical and crude as if becoming more human is an assembly line process and some machine attaches human qualities one by one as part of a drawn out process. It’s also meant that a good deal of the “Seven learns to be human” episodes have been dull, predictable and ultimately uninspired affairs. Even the better episodes like One and One Small Step, which deserve to be called classics by Voyager and perhaps even Star Trek standards, follow this same formula.

It’s all the more shocking then that Human Error actually dares to turn the entire formula on which the Seven development arc has been based from day one completely on its head. As we begin the episode Seven is running a holographic simulation in which she’s doing a good job of mimicking a human being and by the end of the episode she’s a Borg again having turned her back on her humanity. Instead of another mechanistic grinder in which Captain Janeway and Co. lecture Seven on what it means to be human, the entire crew ignore her altogether except for acting annoyed when she doesn’t perform up to Borg efficiency standards. Beyond making token attempts to invite her to parties, none of the crew cares very much about her exploration of humanity, they just want her to stay Borg, show up on time and solve everybody’s problems. And so the actual exploration is left to Seven, as it always should have been. Of course being a product of the most technological society conceivable, Seven explores an experiment in humanity through a holodeck simulation as the EMH himself suggested she do in “One”.

More to the point “Human Error” spends less time talking about what being human means and spends more time showing the impact and feeling of being human. It’s all very well for Janeway to deliver another nauseating lecture on what being human means according to the Federation charter but instead Human Error shows Seven actually trying to bridge the gap between who she is and who she could be. And it’s the transitions from the potential to the reality that causes the viewer to care about whether she does choose humanity or not. For these past years when we’ve seen Seven we’ve seen a two-dimensional neurotic superhuman being who seemed to be stuck that way, in Human Error’s holodeck simulations we see an interesting character who combines both the human and inhuman qualities of Seven in a more complex and three dimensional way and that character was far more interesting than the version 1.0 of Seven we’ve been stuck with for several years now. A character who could interact with the rest of the crew on a more complex level than preset roles like Student, Teacher, Efficiency Expert or Rude Outsider. And so for the first time in Seven’s Pilgrim Progress something is actually at risk and finally at stake. And when Human Error dares to let Seven lose and disposes of that character, it finally brings the element of risk and suspense to the “Seven learns to be human” arc that should have been there all along.

In “One” Seven was faced with the bleak reality of isolation. In “Human Error”, Seven is faced with actually choosing her future. She can remain an exotic Ex-Borg and maintain the level of contact she has with people or try and actually become human removing the entire Ex-Borg thing from the table altogether. She runs a simulation to decide choosing to oscillate like the metronome of the simulated piano (standing in as a lovely metaphor for the Borg aspect of her nature) between Ex-Borg and human. But experiencing doses of humanity makes the metronome oscillate unpredictably and out of step with the order of her life. And it turns out that her Borg implants have their own built in metronome swinging back and forth insider her head. A metronome that will allow her to be the Ex-Borg Seven of Nine who lives by routines, avoids most social contact and is an outsider looking in at humanity. It won’t however allow her to be Annika Hansen, human being who can have deep complex feelings, intimate relationships and act out of accord with the things that are rationally correct. But ultimately Seven still has the final choice to remove the metronome or keep it, choosing between being fully human or ex-Borg.

By using musical expression as a metaphor for human expression, “Human Error” hints at the richer and deeper aspects of being human that no television program or pithy Janeway speech could actually convey. Instead of delivering its ideas about humanity merely as character speeches, the episode uses metaphor and imagery to convey humanity. By rejecting her humanity, she’s rejecting not merely the music but the ability to create the music. She’ll always be able to listen to the music as an outsider but without any real understanding of it beyond the mechanical. She can even perform pieces in that same polished and perfect but completely soulless way. As in the early parts of her simulation she may in time perfect her mimicry of human beings to the point where she can actually pass for one, but it will remain an inhuman performance in which she can mime humanity but never feel it. On the other hand, she can commit to imperfection and humanity and actually live life as a human being from the inside.

A subplot in which Voyager stumbles unprepared into an alien equivalent of an artillery testing range provides a somewhat original and plausible crisis to lend intensity to her choice as well as reinforcing the underlying themes of the Seven story. Also, after “Shattered”, “Workforce” parts 1 and 2 and now “Human Error” Robert Beltran gets plenty of material. He even gets to participate in one of Voyager’s more plausible relationships, albeit as a hologram. A while back Barclay was still struggling between real humanity and simulated humanity. Where Barclay always ended an episode supposedly improving but never really improving because by the time the next episode came around he still seemed to be suffering from the same exact problems. On the other hand, by raising the idea of removing her Borg implants and by having Seven reject her humanity, “Human Error” suggests that this matter will indeed be resolved. Paradoxically when an episode ends on a negative note, this makes it far more likely that it will be followed up and significant changes will follow than one that ends on a positive note. And this material is worth following up, too bad it wasn’t followed up a year or two ago.

Next week: Reruns return again with Flesh and Blood.

Summary: Season 7 presents us with a kinder gentler Voyager two parter. A view from the Isle of the Lotus. And for once working within the system works out.

Traditionally the Star Trek two parters have been action heavy special effects extravaganzas specializing in epic confrontations and terrible disasters. Episodes like Basics, Year of Hell, Scorpion, The Killing Game, Dark Frontier, Unimatrix Zero certainly fit that bill. Three of them involved the Borg, two of them featured the crew and the ship being taken prisoner and one of them featured the destruction of Voyager itself. But this season under new management, Voyager has featured a kinder and gentler two parter. Flesh and Blood had the essential trappings of the standard Voyager two parter but it was a much more character oriented show than any of the prior two parters. Workforce is essentially more in the tradition of episodes like One and Memorial and has far more in common with them than it does with Scorpion or Unimatrix Zero..

Normally Workforce might have run as a one hour episode with the Paris\Torres and Seven subplots trimmed along with most of the special effects sequences and some of the action scenes and would have ended with the usual abrupt “30 seconds before closing time” ending that essentially occurs because the show has run out of time. And that would have been a shame and a waste because an effective if not particularly mind-blowing two part episode would have been replaced by another Prophecy or another Shattered, a poorly thought out and unfocused episode that possibly had potential but never got anywhere. The extra space of a two parter however allows the story to really be developed, it allows for the insertion of all those little subplots that round out an episode. And what special effects exist are mainly focused on establishing shots including some absolutely stunning and complex shots of the alien city and some striking footage of Voyager resting at the bottom of a crater. The space battles that occur are few and far between and not really the focus of the story.

But this doesn’t mean that Workforce isn’t a major and essential part of Voyager’s story. Voyager’s journey home has been modeled after Homer’s Odyssey. Voyager was thrown of course into the Delta Quadrant by the 24th century equivalent of a God. In Scorpion Voyager has found itself trapped between Scylla and Charbodis, represented by Species 8472 and the Borg. Which particular alien encounters in Voyager’s history could be said to represent the Cyclops, the Laestrygons or the Sirens is left as an excercise to the reader. But Workforce of course is linked to the Isle of the Lotus. For seven years Voyager has been on an obsessive quest for Earth, for home. More specifically it’s been Janeway’s obsessive quest but the real test of any quest is to present the hero with a way of surrendering the quest that in some ways is equal or even superior to continuing the quest. A chance to give up and enjoy some sort of illusory happiness.

Now it might not be all that shocking to see Chakotay or Paris and Torres partake of the lotus, after all they’re essentially people with short attention spans that focus on goals of some personal importance. They can be happy and do what they want just about anywhere. If the Voyager mission hadn’t come along, they would have found some other niche or gotten themselves killed in some other way. Janeway though is a bureaucrat and a bureaucrat is second cousin to a machine. She thinks only in terms of goals and purposes, which generally have nothing to do with her. What little happiness she gets out of life comes from merging her own identity with that of her position and mission until she can’t tell the difference between herself and her command. This has led her into completely sociopathic behavior but it also makes her virtually inflexible when it comes to accomplishing her goals. And this is why having her taste the lotus is far more shocking than for it to happen to any of the other crew members.

And yet here brainwashed and enslaved on an alien planet, for the first time in seven years of voyaging Janeway gets to be a human being. She has a job she enjoys, a relationship with real intimacy and a home of sorts. Though it may be based on false memories, it’s also more real than anything she’d done since leaving the Alpha Quadrant. The obsessive martyr complex, the sense of responsibility and the inability to tell where Kathryn Janeway ends and Captain Janeway begins are gone. In its place is a human being. And that tends to be a hero’s ultimate test, the choice to give in to human needs or to choose self-sacrifice and fight on for greater goals. Tuvok may not quite be able to adapt, despite his comprehension of humor “Yes it is funny because he did not understand how your species reproduces”, but just how easily Janeway adapts is shocking and that is what drives the episode. The seduction of the Lotus and the inability of Voyager’s crew members to be themselves.

We know that in the end, despite the odds, any episode involving the crew will end with them successful, surviving and possibly victorious. The inability of the crew to fail is practically a reflex by this point. It’s been a long time since there was a Star Trek episode with any real ambiguity about whether or not the crew will make it out or whether the ending will even be what they wanted. Voyager managed a few genuinely dark endings early on with Basics 2 and The Chute but since then we may not know what an upcoming episode will be about but we can usually take a good guess as to what the last 5 minutes will be, sight unseen. Workforce though takes away the crew’s identities and along with that allows for the suspension of disbelief and the possibility that the crew will fail and even that failure might not be such a terrible thing.

Contrary to the claims of the Borg Queen, being assimilated is not fun, but being part of the Workforce might not be such a bad thing. The end result is a fairly decent life and in the case of Janeway possibly even a better life than the one she had before. The rest of the crew doesn’t seem to be doing all that badly either. Paris was together with Torres again and would no doubt have married her (again) in due time. Seven had found the job she was born to do. This was a Brave New World and a world without Starfleet uniforms or the Federation Starfleet certainty in the optimistic outcome. For once the crew were just people like us, living from day to day and just doing their jobs with no higher goals or sense of invulnerability. With hard work and some terrible risks they pull off a happy ending but they’re not particularly confident or self-assured while doing it. They’re just people put in a bad situation, which in TOS was all that the crews were.

For those who expected Tuvok to just tell Seven what’s going on, then to have Seven communicate with the rest of the crew, set up a device to restore their memories and then have the crew working in tandem with Voyager try to escape; or in other words the conventional Voyager plot we certainly would have seen if this had aired as a one hour episode, here we instead got the exact opposite. Seven is confused and is on the trail of something and even ironically enough views the Workforce area as the interior of a Borg cube for one moment thereby experiencing the paradox of being reassimilated; but she’s a long way from knowing who exactly she is. Janeway has a few moments of bonding with Chakotay but when the test comes between her relationship, her life here on the Isle of the Lotus and her life on Voyager with Chakotay; she chooses the Lotus and betrays Chakotay in a flash.

Indeed none of the Voyager crew, except when B’Elanna as the original sailors of the Odyssey are forcibly dragged away, recover their original memories and identities until they’re back on Voyager. In fact once Chakotay is out of the game, most of the work of uncovering the conspiracy is actually done by a native junior psychiatrist and the equivalent of a police detective. Up until Janeway disables the chief generator, it’s they who uncover most of the dirt and really prod the chief psychiatrist into desperation. Seven encourages them to do what they do but in the end it’s not even the Voyager crew that saves the Voyager crew. Chakotay helps rescue B’Elanna and sows suspicion in Janeway but then is successfully brainwashed. Neelix does nothing particularly useful. The ECH and Kim have several running gun battles with enemy vessels and stay alive but don’t really accomplish very much. Janeway betrays Chakotay and then only really acts when the entire picture has been laid out in front of her at the very end. Paris glowers at people. Seven puzzles out a lot of the necessary information but it’s the classic detective suspended from the force for learning too much who actually moves things along. Unlike their Voyager personalities, none of them are really prepared to take charge and get things done and that is what makes the possibility of their success so ambiguous. Like Janeway they’re capable of doing more, but are too uncertain to take the challenge.

So contrary to the expected cliche we might have thought we’d get from the first part about the evil alien species that kidnaps and brainwashes people, we instead see a complex system that has both good and bad in it. And a system that in some ways mirrors the Federation. The people in charge, even the bad ones, have high ideals. There is the interspecies integration, a system that despite abducting and brainwashing workers also appears to run on merit and to provide a decent place to live at least by the standards of 95 percent of the world as it is today. There is corruption and abuse of power but we’ve also seen the same thing in the Federation. The Chief Psychiatrist who insists that his actions were all justifiable and for the greater good seems to mirror Admiral Dougherty from Star Trek Insurrection who insists that his forced evacuation of the Baku and alliance with criminals was for the greater good of the Federation. Indeed it’s easy enough to see the Chief Psychiatrist holding down a job with Section 31, possibly working on designing the changeling virus. Instead of giving us another alien of the week, Workforce presents an alternate Federation or quite possibly the Federation as it might have looked 200 years ago. Before there were transporters and replicators and white gleaming surfaces everywhere, post WW3 earth at the Birth of the Federation might have looked a lot like the Quaren homeworld with the same positive and negative aspects that would be carried along into its future.

And this only makes this particular Isle of the Lotus only more compelling as a potential alternative home to Earth because it’s not just some alien planet, in many ways it is an analogue of the Federation and home itself. The writers might have pushed their analogy further by giving it the sheen and clean look of 24th century earth but as it is the point comes across. And as in the Federation there are also higher powers who can correct the errors of the system, whereas with the usual aliens of the week, Voyager has to browbeat them into accepting the Federation solution. The Quarren already have a system in place and it is the Quarren who do most of the work in uncovering their own crimes. It’s also what makes it all the more disturbing. One of the horrors of the Borg focused on how close to home it hit, the Quarren homeworld also hits close to home because our world is currently closer to theirs than it is to the Borg. It’s also close enough to the Federation and us to have people both good and evil, all driven by ideals we can relate to. This makes a scene in which Roxann Dawson cuts from the sharp instruments lying on an operating table table to be used on their victim to the supposedly free and open corporate society of the bar into which the Doctor’s phrase “We’ll help him” follows seem all the more disturbing and downright chilling. “We’ll help him” has always been the Star Trek ideal and the implications of how that can be perverted and how vulnerable the Federation is to such a perversion makes the Quarren society problematic in a way that defies any easy resolution.

And Roxann Dawson’s direction indeed carries on from the Kroeker directed Part 1 very nicely and smoothly. She manages to combine the talent for filming character oriented scenes she showed in Riddles with the work a peak Trek director is expected to do on a more epic episode like Workforce. Handing over the payoff for a two part episode to an amateur like Dawson was a definite risk but it clearly pays off. From the very effective use of shadows in the Janeway\Chakotay confrontation and especially the dermal regeneration scene (which also cleverly manages to save FX dollars and still look better than the FX scene would have) to the camera work on the quieter moments between her and Neelix; this is surprisingly professional work. It’s almost as shocking to see her be this good behind the camera as it was to see Avery Brooks turn out be better as a director than he was as an actor. It’s nice to see that in concord with TOS’s Leonard Nimoy, TNG’s Jonathan Frakes and DS9’s Avery Brooks; Voyager has produced its own professional director from among its cast.

So all in all, Voyager season seven has taken plenty of risks that didn’t pan out. Workforce however has taken a large number of risks that have. First setting a two part episode around a storyline that focused more on the characters and much less on the action and FX quotient. Secondly by putting much of the resolution of the story into the hands of the aliens and making them more complex than your usual Hirogen. Thirdly by actually letting Janeway be a human being ever so briefly and tempting her with the opportunity to step off the cross and into life (and of course letting the ECH demonstrate that Voyager would have done just as well without her.) And finally by avoiding most of the obvious and easy plot gimmicks and let the characters actually struggle to work things out, something we rarely see on Voyager. Appropriate enough in an episode entitled Workforce.

Next week: Seven of Nine as UPN’s obnoxious promo department has always wanted you to see her.

Summary: A nicely arranged setup for an as yet unseen payoff.

It’s always hard to review the first part of a two part episode. Fortunately Voyager has gotten into the habit of airing both parts in one night. Workforce though is the exception and the task of reviewing it is made all the more difficult by the fact that Part 1 is mostly setup giving us the basics of the situation and shows us how it’s beginning to unravel. By this same point The Killing Game had already gone well into payoff territory but Workforce is playing out a more drawn out and complicated character oriented story and so it takes all this time just to set up the basics of the situation.

The limitations and complexity do, however, produce a certain amount of creativity in the style of the episode. As in The Killing Game, we skip over the attack to begin with a scene that features the crew already in their altered reality but unlike Killing Game’s gratuitous “Janeway as Klingon warrior” scene, Workforce begins with a gorgeous opening shot of the alien city and a lift ride into the depths of a factory that’s there only to give us a sense of the setting. This is a smart move because it makes the entire situation feel deeper and more real, instead of just the Voyager crew wandering around some redressed alien sets. Also unlike Killing Game, the crew doesn’t have either their memories or personalities suppressed but instead are the same people they are but with twisted memories and a view of the world colored by those memories. The result is all the more disturbing because they’re the people we know but yet they aren’t, in an ‘of the Body Snatchers’ sort of way.

This is clearly a Janeway story and so Janeway finally gets a relationship and a setup for the choice that will come. Janeway has always complained about being overburdened and has spent seven years walking around with a martyr complex. In Workforce she gets the chance to put that complexity aside and function as an ordinary person. While the happiness of the rest of the crew seems artificial and Stepford empty, it seems as if Janeway’s happiness might have a certain dose of reality and depth to it. Perhaps she really is better off and certainly happier not being in command. The entire Paris storyline does seem a bit hollow and a waste of time, on the contrary. Paris finds work in a bar, frankly who really cares. Torres seems lonely and the two reconnect. I’m not even sure that counts as character development. The scenes on the ship with the ECH are a nice piece of continuity with Tinker Tailor and only add to the tension of the episode. And the other touches of continuity including Janeway’s cooking and her conversations with terminals fit it nicely as well.

Tuvok has some nicely eerie scenes, for once his breakdown is correctly handled and the decision to intercut scenes of him being brainwashed with Janeway and Co.’s daily routines and happy evenings makes for a decidedly creepy effect which turns up the already disturbing atmosphere up a few notches. The constantly vigilant guards patrolling in pairs, socialist realism posters and grey 21st century urban feel contrasted with the worker’s faux happiness are very effective. Allan Kroeker is one of Star Trek’s best directors, and in an episode mostly running on atmosphere, he does an amazing job of turning what could have been a fairly bland script into a dark and suspenseful episode. Between the brain washing disguised as immunizations and the happy multi-species work environment in which all workers are valued and the employers “really” care about their workers, this episode feels like a version of Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ updated for corporate America.

But it’s the human conventional touches rather than the SciFi stuff like the Minister’s view of the whole thing as a means of obtaining skilled labor and inability to comprehend Chakotay’s objections as anything except an attempt to obtain skilled labor for his own vessel that really makes this environment mirror the Borg circa TNG. But where the Borg concept put a lot of distance between us and them, Workforce hits disturbingly close to home. Where the Borg simply chose to represent the subservience of the individual to the group by completely erasing individuals and turning them into drones, the Workforce government instead chooses to sabotage the ships, pick up the refugees and brainwash them into believing they’re happy workers. In a sense they, like the Borg, are using similar tactics for a similar goal but they have no greater goals or greater inhuman ruthlessness; just petty mortal goals and the refusal to acknowledge the rights or even needs of the individuals they destroy. Like the Borg they insist the people are happier this way, like the Borg they refuse to see the evil of their actions but unlike the Borg they lack the excuse of being a cybernetic collective, instead they’re all too real and all too human and it’s difficult to describe which seems more horrific.

And so Part 2 will depend on keeping up this atmosphere, something fairly amateur director Roxann Dawson will hopefully manage to do, and keep the focus on the general system instead of mistakenly selecting individual villains to be lecturers as Critical Care did. The way Janeway’s choice is handled will also be important as well as the way the transition of the crew back to their older memories occurs.

Having Seven act as the instigator is clumsy and overlooks the fun of having her as the antagonistic efficiency expert, plus it mirrors the Killing Game storyline a bit too closely. But after Seven’s mind meld it also seems pretty inevitable. Chakotay and Tuvok doing all the work would be more interesting but ultimately the suspense only exists for about as long as the crew are in their new lives. Once they’re back to being the Voyager crew and “The Heroes”, most of the suspense and tension will collapse back to nothingness. And a final hope that the Kim\EMH command bickering will be kept to a minimum. Despite Kim’s actions in Nightingale and the EMH’s occasional self-absorption it’s ridiculous to think that either of them would use this situation to bicker over who’s in command. And considering Kim’s behavior in Nightingale it’s almost certain that he would come looking out of this more childish than ever and with only a few episodes left until the end of Voyager he won’t have much time to grow up.

Next week: Part 2. Robert Beltran has fun with makeup, Voyager blows up alien ships, Janeway has to choose between an adult relationship and her martyr complex.

Summary: One of this season’s and Voyager’s best. Trapped and desperate Voyager has to choose between the ideals of the Federation and the predatory nature of the prisoners of the Void.

Along with the decline in quality and storytelling, one of the notable declines of the Berman created Star Trek spinoffs has been a decline in moral logic, in the ability to understand the ethics of a situation and make moral choices while showing both sides of the argument. Voyager itself has far too often relied on shrill rhetoric completely disconnected from reality and Janeway’s set jaw to insist that X is the right choice without ever actually having a clear understanding of the issues. The result is a kind of tone deaf morality in which the heroes are right because they have a neat slogan and because they say they’re right. The problems themselves have no complexity or texture and there’s rarely any real doubt as to what the right choice is.

So The Void is even more suprising, not just because it accomplishes in one episode what Voyager never quite managed to pull off in its first two seasons, namely to show a Starship and crew in dangerous, unknown and hostile territory with their backs up against the wall and with the situation verging on real desperation. Not just because it’s one of the clear and outstanding winners of a mediocre season and not even because it manages to show and state in 40 minutes the key factors in building a Federation type alliance that Andromeda hasn’t managed to nail ever, despite this exact thing being the show’s premise. The Void is genuinely surprising because Voyager actually manages to pull off an episode without any soap opera histrionics and mimninal personal storylines and instead just delivers a solid story that stands on its own. Even the generic Janeway\Chakotay arguments are cut short and the usual storyline clutter that appears in nearly every Voyager episode is also gone. Thus pared to the bone, Voyager manages to produce an inteligent, compelling episode set around space travel in the style of the Roddenberry Star Trek.

Voyager has done no shortage of anomaly episodes which is why we would expect that when Voyager is sucked into an anomaly that there would be some crew friction and then Seven and Co. would come up with some new technological trick and they would be out of there just in time for the credits. Instead, Void focuses not on the technological tricks but on survival because the ultimate solution to the Void doesn’t lie in technology but in cooperation and returning to the ideals of the Federation. For far too many episodes of the Berman Treks, our heroes encounter some aliens who don’t like our heroes and they clash. It can go on for years as on DS9 or for 40 minutes an episode as on Voyager but it’s ultimately just a throw away plot with one flavor of blackhats or another who have to be taught a lesson. Very rarely do we get an examination of the underlying conflict and application of Star Trek’s ideals to it (as in TOS’s Arena) in a situation that can’t just be resolved by a technolobabble gimmick. Instead, a moral choice has to be made, between the harder principled path or the predatory ends-justifies the-means solution.

And what is unique enough about Void is that this is one of the rare times in Star Trek where the principled choice actually makes more sense than the unprincipled one. All too often Berman era Star Trek presents the moral decision as a burden, a hairshirt that has to be worn to prove the sainthood of our heroes. This is an attitude that comes from the complete incomprehension of Star Trek’s actual ideals. Kirk and Picard certainly weren’t saints, they were flawed men struggling for a better cause. This better cause wasn’t some Quixotic quest for the holy grail but the implementation and defense of a system that fostered mutual cooperation for common goals. A system that was both practical and capable. In the Void Janeway’s alliance is a much more practical and sane choice than the pirate choice namely because if Voyager turns predator that would just mean being trapped in the void and fighting a losing battle for survival. It might lenghten their survival rate by a week or a month or maybe even a year but the final result would still be inevitable. Every predator is eventually eaten by something else. The alliance solution on the other hand was a gamble and a definite risk in the beginning but in the long run it was the only realistic option for survival since it would boost Voyager’s resources with far less attrition and provide a realistic hope of escape.

There are times when the Federation seems naive, foolishly optimistic and just a weak system waiting to be taken advantage of and there are certainly times when Starfleet Captains have come off that way; but The Void reminds us what makes the Federation strong in the first place. The Klingons may make better warriors, the Cardassians may have better order and the Romulans better covert operations, the Borg may have larger numbers and more advanced technology but the Federation’s strength comes as a pooling of resources to create a greater union. From a predatory standpoint the Federation may seem weak and inefficent and its diplomatic and peaceful agenda proof of its weakness, but these things are the focal points of its strength and Void does an excellent job of demonstrating just how that works in a way that not even TOS or TNG have quite managed. The idea that Federation and Starfleet ideals are outmoded and need to be dropped to survive in a “harsher reality” has become common currency among a certain faction of fandom and it was the premise of DS9’s final seasons, The Void shows that it is in those harsher realities that the Federation needs its ideals the most.

While Janeway studying the Federation charter for loopholes as opposed to Starfleet regulations seems odd (would a Navy Captain study the Constitution in a crisis), it is a demonstration that the solution to the crisis came not from the regulations but from the very idealistic principles on which the Federation stands. Where Chakotay usually serves as the voice of reason trying to argue Janeway out of a short term blunder brought on by her melagomania and lack of basic common sense, in this case Janeway is arguing for long term survival and Chakotay arguing for short term survival. Tuvok’s position here seems a bit odd since despite his fascist leanings, you’d still expect a Vulcan and a security officer so attached to the letter of the regulations to stay on the side of principle. The addition of the Void creatures is a bit of a weak plot point and detracts from other possible stronger storylines. At least Void doesn’t make them the solution to Voyager’s problems, while they do repay the crew’s kindness and come in handy in the resolution; they’re not that crucial to it either. More time spent on the various races and personalities would have been preferrable but fortunately, this time out, Seven’s “growth as a human being” material is so thin it was either mostly left on the cutting room floor or never really written in the first place. All in all, Void would have worked better as a two parter like Year of Hell giving time for the situation to really sink in and allowing more time to be spent on the different races and their integration into Voyager’s alliance. As it is, a lot of the material ends up being glossed over too quickly and we never really feel that Voyager’s situation is as desperate as it was in Year of Hell.

Mike Vejar’s direction is stunning as usual, though the special effects are noticeably weak. The anomaly effect looks like it could have come from TNG, the alien ships are not very memorable, and indistinct– all blending together. The final escape is also not very impressive. Janeway’s declaration about bigotry also rings false. After all, she was building an alliance with, as she put it, murderers and thieves. Does dislike of a parastic native species covered in filth who are unable to communicate really convey how evil someone is? Too much of this episode is also borrowed from Night including the strange species which live in a dark starless space and the moral choice. Finally, while Neelix’s speech sounds very noble, he really has little in the way of resources and he essentially became Voyager’s all purpose errand boy, native guide and comic relief; not the best example of Voyager’s alliance. But then there’s no such thing as a flawless episode anyway.

Next week: Voyager’s crew get assimilated… but not by the Borg [for once].

Summary: An uninspired patchwork episode composed of weak gags and an unfocused plot that goes nowhere and serves mainly as an excuse to show off some Klingon costumes in time for sweeps. The diagnosis is now clear, 7th season syndrome.

The saddest words ever said are, what might have been. And at times what might have been begins to look like it might become Voyager’s eulogy. The post-Repentance watching party consisting of sour bread and chlorine water is definitely one of those times. It’s not that Star Trek in general doesn’t screw up their payoffs more often than not. Certainly every Star Trek fan can name half a dozen two parters in which the first part was far superior to the concluding second part. But Voyager just seems to have a special talent for it and a talent for doing it in the clumsiest way possible.

Voyager’s entire premise has rested on it being lost in the Delta Quadrant and completely cut off from Starfleet and the Alpha Quadrant species. So when it came time for the big sweeps episode in which Voyager contacts Starfleet that all the fans and viewers were looking forwards to; Voyager’s writers of course gave us a comedy routine co-starring Andy Dick that featured two EMH’s trying to figure out where the controls are. Now in retrospect Message in a Bottle had some funny bits in it, but with that episode Voyager’s writers turned their entire premise into a joke. If you’re expected to take Voyager’s plight seriously and their struggle to reach Earth at the centerpiece of the whole platter; then a payoff episode that takes this into account would have helped shore up Voyager’s already rickety premise.

But when all is said and done it’s a whole lot easier to justify Message in a Bottle than it is to justify the horrendously dreary Prophecy whose plot has about exactly 5 seconds worth of sense and even less time devoted to material that can actually hold your interest. It is as if the writers put some old Klingon episode videotapes into the VCR, took notes on what happened in those episode, tore off those notes and put them into a hat, picked them randomly out of a hat and turned that into an episode. And indeed the story and script credits for Prophecy, which feature more writers than the average UPN show has on staff, seems to bear that out. There’s the obligatory Klingon drinking scene, the obligatory duel, the obligatory nasty Klingon, the obligatory Klingons sitting in shadows and plotting scene. It’s like a Klingon clip show and like a clip show, Prophecy has no purpose except to kill 40 minutes without actually coming up with original material.

It’s always tough to come up with sweeps episodes and since Voyager has never featured real Klingons, the producers decided that since it’s the 7th season they can cash in their Klingon chit and do a Klingon episode. Unfortunately their attempt fell into the “overdrawn story check” category– this is when Star Trek writers churn out an uninteresting story which they think will work if it stars an important Trek alien. Essentially, they believe that an awful script will be liked by the viewers if instead of the Alien of the Week, it features Romulans, Vulcans, Borg or Klingons. And worst of all, the writers think that viewers are entertained just by having Klingons come on screen and do Klingon things, which avoids the need for actually having real drama or conflict in the episode. Just toss off some Klingon words, show Klingons getting drunk, talk vaguely about honor and show some Klingons getting into a fight.

The only flaw in the “overdrawn story check” is that it really is overdrawn. What turned the Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans and Co. into epic Star Trek aliens were the actors who played them and the stories they were featured in. Putting pointy ears on some guy and sending him out to talk tonelessly about logic or putting another guy into a Klingon costume and have him bellow about honor is great for conventions. It’s a cute touch to put in an episode or two but it never substitutes for a real story. It certainly won’t save an episode that doesn’t have a good story to begin with. And so when the writers attempt to cash an “overdrawn story check”, it bounces and the result is a weak episode. Worse, overuse of the same aliens in this same way will eventually lead to the point where no one wants to see any of these aliens again because they’ve become associated with some very bad material. And if there is one single Star Trek species that has been endlessly abused in this way, it’s the Klingons.

So of course when it comes time for sweeps, the producers note that they’ve never featured real Klingons and so they decide, with network prompting, to do an episode featuring real Klingons. Of course there’s only so much money to go around, a Klingon episode would be perfect. But it has to take place on Voyager because shooting Klingon interiors could get expensive very quickly. It can’t involve battles because special effects are expensive, so we limit it to a short cheap battle at the beginning. So now that the story has to be on Voyager, we have to find a reason for the Klingons to be on Voyager all the time. What if they’re refugees? But why would refugees travel all the way to the Delta Quadrant and still keep going. Let’s say they’re dissatisfied with the current Klingon way of life and they’re on a quest for something. Maybe it’s religious. Something Voyager has what they want. This introduces the motivation and the reason for them to be on Voyager. But what does Voyager have that they want? Technology is too simple and easy. No it has to be something Voyager can’t give up or replicate. Say what about tying B’Elanna and her pregnancy into this. Remember that old episode idea pitch we were kicking around about aliens who listen to Chakotay’s teaching and think he’s like Jesus and remember that Dragon’s Teeth episode and we just combine the two. Let’s say the Klingons think the baby is their golden child and there are debates over faith and eventually some of them try and take over Voyager while B’Elanna reinforces her connection to her Klingon heritage. Perfect, it’s a winner. And let’s have a B story about Kim being sexually harassed by a Klingon woman and Neelix and Tuvok bunking together just like in college. It’ll be completely hysterical…and they say we don’t know Star Trek!

And so we take a story that no one would have paid attention to twice if it had involved the aliens of the week, add some Klingon uniforms and presto, a sweeps episode. But best of all, a cheap sweeps episode. Best of all a confused and unfocused episode pasted together from half a dozen story ideas that lumbers around from scene to scene like one of the photonic drunks from Fair Haven never having the faintest idea where it’s going. As a script Prophecy is at best a first draft, a script version that still doesn’t come together, where the stitching is obvious and a lot of work still needs to be done. Unfortunately if there’s one thing all the Star Trek series spin-offs 7th seasons have in common, is the dreaded 7th season syndrome. Prophecy may feature the Klingons suffering from a fatal disease, but the episode and the season itself suffers from a much more fatal disease. TNG had it, DS9 had it and now Voyager has it. The symptoms involve poorly thought out scripts, episodes that look like fanfic somebody accidentally filmed, episodes where everyone is completely out of character and episodes that have no point whatsoever. Basically this comes down to writer’s fatigue.

In a normal working day, you get up and go to work. In the early portions of your day, you’re still getting settled in, midway through you get comfortable and do your best work and towards the end you’re tried and just want to get out of here and do whatever it is you plan to do after hours. Now imagine that you still have to work after that until about midnight without any real supervision or quality control. Now that is essentially what Star Trek’s 7th seasons tend to look like. Shoddy work done by tired people who just want to get it over with. In this state of mind Lineage, Prophecy and driving your car off a cliff can seem like good ideas. In this state of mind a script doesn’t have to have any coherency, one scene doesn’t have to lead into another and symmetry is the first thing to go out the window. The key theme is just to get things done quickly with the first idea that comes to mind. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to fill the void. And so this is where an episode that features Dr. Crusher being haunted by an erotic alien ghost that sucks away her energy, or the episodes that feature Dukat rampaging around with glowing red eyes or some of this season’s Voyager episodes come from.

And so this week Klingons stumble into Voyager. They announce that they’re searching for their messiah who will rebuild the empire, yet their goal appears to be to meet and greet the messiah’s mommy and then go settle a planet decades away from the Empire while twice abandoning their only means of returning back home to the Empire and abandoning their messiah as well. Then it turns out they have a lethal virus gets past Voyager’s biofilters and the Doctor pronounces incurable and which the Doctor is then able to cure completely in a few hours. But of course they’re really here to serve as source material for gags and funny Klingon moments. Remember that joke about Kim being unlucky with women, well it gets even funnier when a Klingon woman pursues him. Remember that same joke on TNG, well it’s even funnier here. Oh and of course the always hysterical Neelix gets into the act. You haven’t lost all desire for food until you’ve seen Neelix making out with a Klingon woman three times his size. And the jokes just keep on coming. Too bad they even manage to make Message in a Bottle look like a comedic masterpiece.

But back to the plot, what is the plot again? Oh that’s right these Klingons think Torres’s unborn 3/4rs human fetus is the Messiah so naturally they blow up their ship and board Voyager for a short trip to a planet they can settle in the Delta Quadrant. Despite believing that the Federation is their sworn enemy, the Captain in no time at all risks all his crew’s lives on the assumption that Janeway will save them and once on Voyager puts his lives and their lives in her hands. Even the TNG Klingons wouldn’t trust Picard a fraction of that much. But on Voyager, the Klingons, like Q and the Borg bow before the self-importance of Janeway and humble themselves before her.

Then it turns out they have a virus for no particular reason. Then Paris agrees to fight a Klingon in a battle to the death, even though there’s no reason to believe he would be so stupid. Then Paris with a few days training turns out to be able to handle a trained Klingon warrior. Then that same warrior takes over the transporter room and nearly takes over Voyager by beaming its entire crew to the surface. If it was this easy to take over Voyager, why didn’t Neelix do it last week? Of course it all gets settled and the Klingons settle down on a planet decades away from home to which they can now never return. Of course this all means we won’t see them next week, which indeed is what really drives this plot. Sure actually having consequences to actions that occur in an episode and having some logic to it might be a nice idea. But hey who needs plot logic when you have Klingons. And next week there’s a spatial anomaly, I can’t wait. Can you?

Next week: There’s a spatial anomaly and ships firing on Voyager. Are they indeed up to no good? Will Voyager escape the anomaly or stay in there for the last 10 remaining episodes of the series. No one knows.

Editor’s Note: Sorry for the delay with this review, I had neglected to inform Deus as to a change of my email address and only now checked the old one to find the review waiting for several hours.

Summary: A surprisingly quiet and reflective episode on crime and punishment with a truly misleading UPN network promo.

The death penalty is an issue that has come into play more and more in recent years especially what with our new president never having met a method of execution he didn’t love and the debate over its validity and associated issues is only likely to keep on growing. The problem of course is that usually when Voyager or Star Trek in general tries to address a “timely” issue, the results often come out looking like last week’s Lineage. In other words, well-meaning and sincere but fairly one-sided and not really thought out. And while Repentance certainly suffers from these problems, its core success is as a series of quiet character pieces rotating around the implications of the difficulties of making both moral and just choices.

When Repentance drags out Jeff Kober to play yet another in a seemingly endless strings of psychotic criminals, brings in the criminals as a security problem and introduces the innocent man convicted only because of his race, it’s seemingly set on an inevitable course. The criminals will escape, the evil psycho will escape and the innocent man will be seriously wounded or die trying to stop him thereby commenting on the cruelty of the system. And while with a few adjustments that is the actual plot, this is not an episode where the action drives the story but where the character work drives the action which is at best a very minor point of the episode. The breakout, when it finally comes, is anti-climactic and only a way to focus the ideas into demonstrative action. The expected good and bad roles are gradually reversed with the transition being so slight it’s almost invisible.

Where most Voyager episodes are goal oriented, there’s a problem, e.g. the ship ruptured into different timelines; the characters become aware of the problem, work together to solve the problem, overcome obstacles both within and without and the problem is solved, there’s a goodbye scene and the episode is over. Even great Voyager classics like Living Witness, Memorial, Deadlock or Muse tend to work that way. Repentance though never really begins or ends, the goals themselves are mostly irrelevant and the problem can never be solved. Rather than giving us 90 seconds of cute banter between the bridge crew at peace who are then suddenly confronted with the beginnings of the crisis, Repentance jumps right into the mess with everyone hurrying about their duties as if this were NYPD Blue. It’s far more professional and a nice break from the cloying “Voyager family” routines that have sometimes come to verge on the nauseating.

Once the dillemma is set out, Repentance banks for a while. For some reason the prisoners are kept in special facilities instead of Voyager’s brig. Sure they’re dangerous criminals and all, but shouldn’t Voyager’s brig be designed to be unbreakable, intended not just for its crew but enemy warriors and what not. Indeed the advantages of the cargo bay prison is a little bit confusing. Beyond putting chicken wire on top of the cages and a hole in the force field so food can be passed through, the system provides few advantages and putting strong metal gates on the cages as a failsafe so even if the force fields fail, the prisoners still won’t be able to get out, is an idiot whose time on Star Trek has not yet come. More to the point, Tuvok’s insistence that only Starfleet guards be allowed inside the cargo bay is morally right but since we know there’s going to be an escape attempt and that therefore it’s going to happen on his watch, it makes his moral stance look foolish and incompetent. And indeed when the breakout does happen, the security personnel are easily disposed of and only the warden and Iko prevent the prisoners from escaping.

Picardo and Phillips turn in nice underplayed performances as the EMH and Neelix argue for the prisoners’ plight but the terms of the story cause them to be uninvolved. Ultimately, at the end of the day they’re still outsiders, case workers who shake their heads in dismay but whose words come off as hollow because this just has very little to do with them. Where TOS and TNG attempted to force the characters into the problem in order to comment on social issues, in episodes like Critical Care and Repentance, Voyager has trouble really getting the characters involved in what’s going on so that they seem like benevolent stick figures lecturing on matters that don’t really involve them. It would have been interesting to use Paris’s prison time for correlative experiences with Federation prisons, how does the Federation really handle its prisoners and what are the outcomes, the moral issues? Instead it’s assumed that the Federation is comprehensively benevolent and can therefore just lecture the stand-ins for 20th century America on how to do things.

And so to forge a link, Voyager falls back on its standard, Seven of Nine who can be involved in the problem because she’s a Borg. The analogy between her and Iko is debatable since while Iko wasn’t really sane or in control of himself before, he did make decisions in his own way and execute them. Seven was just the drone, a limb of a vast collective, who made no decisions and had no mind of her own period. Still, Seven seeking absolution through Iko indicates that Seven has modeled quite a bit of her human character on Janeway. After all, Janeway used Seven as absolution for stranding her crew in the Delta Quadrant and Seven is just following in her footsteps with a series of prototypes that seemingly ended with Icheb. But Jeri Ryan’s performance is the weak point in Repentance. She was never a great actress, but here she just seems to be phoning in her Seven repertoire. Watch Seven as cold but defensive, Seven involved and vulnerable and the result is that she never actually seems to be interacting with the rest of the actors, let alone Jeff Kober.

Fortunately Seven is only one of several characters being focused on in Repentance and all the rest do excellent jobs. Kober does his usual good run through of the psycho and then the ex-con trying to go straight. He’s done both on television many times but he still manages to do solid work even while buried underneath some gruesome makeup and stilted dialogue. The actor playing the Ikanian prisoner manages to be perfectly sincere all the way up to the end. With the clumsy use of makeup, facial mobility is practically frozen and the actor has to do virtually all his work using just his eyes to convey sincerity and then guile. Janeway is thankfully mostly uninvolved though her continued insistence on the Prime Directive is mildly odd since the civilization in question is an advanced spacefaring culture and there’s certainly nothing about the Prime Directive that says she can’t grant asylum to an alien from an advanced spacefaring culture. If there were, the Romulan defector from “The Defector” should have been tossed back to the Romulans and Worf should have never been raised by humans.

The Warden never really gets a chance to articulate his position, instead he’s forced to speak in nasty cliches that make him out to be the bad guy at least early on. Part of this ties into the writers difficulty with presenting the tough-on-crime approach side of the argument in the first half of the episode, which leaves the warden looking sadistic and mindlessly mean. The second half of the episode with its reversals allows him to play a more complex role but while Repentance can recognize the validity of the victims perspective, it has trouble doing the same for law enforcement. Are we really supposed to buy him making a complete turn merely because Iko aided him in a prison escape? A cynical man might even conclude that Iko knew he wasn’t going anywhere and that the ship to rescue him and was simply hedging his bets for a pardon.

But that is a key fault in the use of Repentance as a vehicle for social commentary because no one thinks anything through beyond skin deep and as a result, the ideas don’t really go much deeper than the letters section of USA Today. The Doctor declares that all killing is wrong even though he’s on a starship equipped with huge phasers and photon torpedoes; Seven takes a utilitarian approach until she gets to know the prisoner and forms an emotional bond with him; Neelix never really grasps the issues but has a sense that things are unfair and need to be dealt with; Janeway as the bureaucratic offical is mildly sympathetic but it’s not really her problem and she’s not prepeared to make it her problem. These are a very effective sketch of character portraits and speak to the complexity of finding a moral and just solution to problems of crime and punishment but they’re not much use as a commentary on social policy except to essentially say “well these things are complicated” and while that’s certainly true it’s in part because no one really tries.

The characters hold ideas but no one really pushes them to the limits. Repentance has no beginning or ending as I said, its start and finish is really just a few ordinary moments in the lives of Voyager. The prisoners themselves are just passing through Voyager and the crew knows that. They may cause complexities but there’s a certainity in the air that those complexities won’t endure and won’t really sink their hooks into the crew. While this does articulate the tragedy of the condemned, it doesn’t really connect with the material. The EMH is unabashedly for the prisoners because of his programming and Neelix is just a sympatethic and naturally kind person, Seven has an ulterior motive that has less to do with her being a sympathetic outsider and more to do with her looking for redemption by using other people as receptacles for her kindness. This is a more cynical and plausible approach that grounds the relationship in a kind of reality and produces the only plausible connection for an emotional bond in which the Voyager crewmember recieves something, instead of being the patronizing philanthrophist and just giving. As a result, the prisoners in Repetance come to seem much more real than the Voyager crew; while the Voyager crew will go on to new adventures next week, the condemned lives have come to an end and all the crew can use that for is material for a life lesson.

Unlike Critical Care, Repentance is an effective look at the social issue. It offers different perspectives, an intriguing notion about repentance via brain micro-surgery, a dilemma that has no real resolution and for those not very well versed in the issues, a quick grounding in the basics. Like Critical Care though, it never manages to make the Voyager crew really connect with the issues, but it succeeds by dumping Critical Care’s goal-oriented “Gosh isn’t this awful” sanctimonious tone and instead presents a series of character portraits and really develops the “prisoners” so that they can stand on their own rather than the patients and the Docs of Critical Care who only existed in relation to their relationship with the EMH. Ironically enough for a show that often drones on monotonously about the miracle of the “Voyager family”, Repentance for the most part presents its characters in isolation, drifting apart from each other and each gnawing on just one edge of the dilemma; allowing it to succeed by going against the grain.

Next week: Klingons, Klingons, Klingons and more Klingons. “There will be no peace with the Federation as long as Janeway lives.”

Summary: B’Elanna is infected with a parasitic lifeform, namely a baby and learns to overcome feelings of Klingon inadequacy. Nothing much else happens until next week.

There are Voyager episodes that are criticized for poor writing and weak acting, but Lineage certainly won’t be one of them. It’s a well written and finely acted episode that knows what it wants to say and gets it across with no problems. Dawson, Picardo and McNeil do their usual nice work and even the minor moments with Tuvok, Chakotay and Neelix are nice sentimental touches. There are major errors or gaping flaws here that need to be addressed and if you love those marriage episodes and couldn’t get enough of O’Brien’s baby problem arc on DS9, you’ll love this episode. But all in all it feels less like a Star Trek episode and more like an episode of Providence or Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman.

That is to say it’s a Voyager episode that really doesn’t involve “Voyager the Starship” or Voyager’s mission but “Voyager the close knit family” that Captain Janeway every now and then sings hymns to. And it focuses claustrophobically on the relationship of two people who aren’t all that interesting of a couple to begin with, dealing with a problem that felt uninvolving and ultimately trivial. This may just be a matter of personal opinion since after all I’m the kind of person who avoids medical dramas like the plague. I’m probably the only living American who’s never watched a complete episode of ER and I just can’t summon up much interest in these emotional melodramas over medical problems.

And Lineage has little innate complexity to recommend itself. Essentially 10 minutes into the show we know that B’Elanna is wrong and Paris is right. There’s no collision of ideas or struggle over ethics as the promos suggested but a “What’s bugging B’Elanna Torres” psychological production ensues. So the rest of the time then is inevitably dedicated to Paris struggling to prove to her that she’s wrong and to understand why she’s trying to do what she’s trying to do. And the resulting answer is based around childhood neurosis making it look pretty childish and making Voyager’s chief engineer look pretty childish by extension.

Like Far Beyond the Stars or Ties of Blood and Water, Lineage plays out like a stage play but unlike these episodes there’s little drama or real darkness here or useable character development. Even tonight’s Voyager rerun of Extreme Risk, a commonly overlooked major Torres character development episode, has the genuine edge and character growth that gives us a new understanding of Torres. But ultimately what does Lineage tell us about her, that she’s afraid humans are going to leave her because she’s half Klingon? This does little for the character and is a character development worthy of Wesley Crusher and not of one of Voyager’s strongest personalities who’s actually shown a strong set of values and understanding of responsibility.

So much of this episode ultimately comes down to responsibility and the lack of any real sense of responsibility on the part of most of the players in this little melodrama. Torres drives half the crew nuts with her obsession over the welfare of her child but her real focus is predictably enough on her own problems, for which she’s willing to alter her child’s genes so she can feel better. Worse the ending combined with her last camping trip flashback can lead to the sexist and offensive interpretation that she was trying to edit her child’s genes in order to keep her man. More bizarrely she tampers with the EMH’s program, subverts Voyager’s security and violates orders and all is forgotten and forgiven. Her biology may have unhinged her mental state a bit but it’s not much of a defense. Certainly there should have been some sort of restriction to quarters, demotion or at least a note in the official file, but then responsibility is obviously not the theme of the episode. Emotional healing is. Self-validation, self-esteem and just plain feeling good about yourself, responsibility be damned.

Paris and Torres decide to start a family which is cute and heartwarming as heck but not very smart. After all Naomi Wildman was conceived aboard Deep Space Nine while Voyager was still in the Alpha Quadrant. This is the Delta Quadrant, an unpredictable place where Voyager, a starship shorthanded on crew, constantly faced danger and menace. And Paris is its chief engineer, Paris is its helmsman and chief medic. Together they comprise three crucial jobs Voyager can’t go without. Ensign Wildman’s job is pretty minor and no one would really miss her if she took plenty of time off, on the other hand what happens when the warp core is overloading, a dozen hostile alien warships are firing on Voyager and casualties are filling up the triage center in the mess hall…but the new parents are unavailable. Sure there are replacements but they’re substitutes and not as good as the people whose full time job this is supposed to be.

In the past Paris and Torres were so overworked they barely saw each other. Under this state of affairs something is going to have to give, family or work. So we either end up with Paris and Torres taking a leave of absence which is impossible or the baby being raised by Neelix which isn’t particularly wonderful parenting. It would made a lot more sense to wait till they were back home on earth to start a family and to take precautions until then, so they didn’t accidentally start one prematurely. It would have also demonstrated a lot more responsibility to their child and their jobs as Starfleet Officers. Furthermore it’s odd that no one in this episode from Janeway to Chakotay to Tuvok raise this simple objection. As heartless as it may seem, Voyager is a quasi-military vessel and the middle of a constant struggle to survive is a poor time and place for two of the people without whom this starship might not survive to be setting up a family circle.

But then this episode doesn’t allow anything to interfere with its theme of “Voyager, Happy Family” even it makes little realistic sense. And being a happy family, everyone must be assimilated into the happy family so it’s fitting that Lineage hinges on the linked and equally trivial and saccharine theme of having Torres learn to accept being accepted. It’s almost like a Hallmark Gold Crown store threw up on Ken Biller’s I-Mac. Consider how the far superior Jeri Taylor episode “One” handled the same material with 7 of 9 by showing the horrors and madness of isolation and the need to rely on other people for inner strength. Lineage meanwhile torments us with horrifying scenes from the family picnic that look like drunken outtakes from Lassie the Movie. And then there are the twelve minutes of Dawson looking worriedly at the camera while sitting in a darkened room. God knows its impossible to get enough of that. I can’t wait for the DVD edition for bonus footage of more staring. If only UPN could give back Voyager that extra three minutes, we could have had 180 more seconds of Dawson anxiously contemplating a wall.

As much as I usually object to irrelevant or annoying B stories, this is one episode that could have used them. A contrast with some member of an alien civilization or even more of the brief Tuvok moment we had. A relief from the claustrophobic focus of “What’s bothering B’Elanna.” Indeed some outside perspective on this whole psychological mess might have made this seem more like a Star Trek episode and less like a Lifetime movie of the week. Instead in order to produce this week’s required dose of UPN action, we have the artificial crisis scene in sickbay that completely clashes with everything the rest of the episode is doing. It’s a shame too because the concept of genetic alterations of fetuses had no shortage of potential for moral controversy and the ethical questions to be debated could have really made this a standout episode. But that would have been thinking big and using science fiction to explore ideas instead of domestic problems. That would have been Star Trek, instead we got a well written, well acted episode of Providence in Space.

Next week: Voyager does Con Air. Unfortunately it looks like John Malkovich will sit this one out.

Summary: Lots of Trek favorites return as Chakotay goes on a National Geographic tour into Voyager’s past.

In one sense Shattered is an amazing accomplishment, it’s proof that you can make a clip show episode without using actual clips. As Voyager nears the end of its run, Shattered is an attempt at a self-congratulatory home movie from a show that sees little enough congratulations from the outside. And so we have a mild romp through Voyager’s past, we meet some old favorites, see crucial events in the past as Chakotay struggles to complete a task it seems Harry Kim could pull off without blinking twice. This might not have been a bad idea if the majority of the audience really had a strong emotional attachments to Voyager and its past as might have been the cast with TOS or TNG. But Shattered shares the same problem as the series it commemorates, it has some merits but it doesn’t inspire much emotion or feeling in its audience beyond a raised eyebrow or two.

DS9 understood this when it decided to journey into TOS’s past with its Tribbles episode, rather than into its own past. TNG, DS9 and Voyager compensated during their own voyages in All Good Things, The Visitor and Before and After, by linking the journey into the pasts and futures with a personal crisis on the part of a charachter we relate to and an urgent task that must be completed. Shattered though only offers a lackadaisical journey into Voyager’s past, glacially paced and with little real enthusiasm and less sense to the plot than one would find in an episode of Andromeda.

Finding himself in a temporally fractured starship, Chakotay for some reason decides he needs an ally and the best one he can think of is a version of Janeway from a period where they’re enemies and who knows nothing at all about their current state of affairs. He then gives her as much information about the future of Voyager as he can and then halfway through invokes the Temporal Prime Directive. Janeway willingly accompanies a man who kidnapped and attacked her and becomes best friends with him within fifteen minutes, even though she’s the type of person who holds on to grudges forever and never tolerates any abridgement of her authority. The Borg drone version of Seven willingly follows Janeway and Chakotay’s orders without once considering the Borg’s priorities or delivering the demands of the Borg as she did in Scorpion 2.

Virtually everyone behaves in a way completely out of character and even though there’s a new crisis every 5 minutes, none of the crisis feel particularly urgent or critical. It all just seems like a National Geographic expedition. Follow your guide Chakotay as he takes you 3 years into Voyager’s past. Meet the Kazon and Seska. Next follow him into the cargo bay and meet some Borg drones. Don’t worry, they’re friendly drones and really great at parties. Stop by the corridor and get chased by a Macrovirus and then see the Maquis in their leather outfits. It’s cute but only the Captain Proton sequence manages to be funny and only the Seska sequence evokes any tension. Both Martin Rayner and Martha Hackett use their last chanche to return to Voyager as an opportunity to chew as much scenery as possible and so Dr. Chaotica and Seska can’t help making an impression. Dr. Chaotica declaims his speeches in a timbre that makes wannabe Shakesperean actor, Robert Beltran flinch while Seska plays devious, manipulative and ruthless as if she knows she has only 5 minutes of screentime available.

If they had gotten the whole episode themselves or maybe gotten a chanche to unite, pool their talents for evil together (imagine Seksa and Dr. Chaotica together prepearing to fire the Death Ray at Voyager) this episode might have had a focus. But they’re just pit stops on Chakotay’s tour of Voyager, a tour aimed at Janeway and the audience. The clumsy goal of this tour is to show Janeway what wonderfull things await her and to show us what wonderfull things have happened but Shattered never produces a sense of wonder, rather a sense of boredom since most of the things we’re being shown were more interesting in their original episodes. Basics, Scorpion and Caretaker were much better episodes than Shattered and what made them work can’t be contained in a few minutes. And while some of Janeway’s early responses are amusing, she adapts too quickly and too easily to functioning in this environment.

Once she does ponder keeping Voyager in the Alpha Quadrant and is easily talked out of it by Chakotay’s impassioned speech about the wonders of Voyager. His speech though doesn’t make very much sense. Voyager has acquired new crewmembers but Neelix would exist whether or not he joined Voyager’s crew, Naomi would have been born on DS9. Seven and Icheb would have remained with the Borg but was it worth to have Voyager lose dozens of crewmembers including Janeway’s actual first officer and Doctor just so Voyager can have some neat adventures in the Alpha Quadrant? There are plenty of adventures in the Alpha Quadrant too. The Enterprise D has managed to go where no man has gone before without spending 7 years on the other side of the galaxy, Voyager could have too. What exactly is so special about the Delta Quadrant? What has Voyager accomplished here that it could not have accomplished anywhere else?

Shattered has no answer and so Shattered ultimately comes off like a customer who made a bad purchase trying to convince himself what a great deal he got. It tries to praise Voyager but finds that there isn’t that much to praise. And so it limits itself to repeating “Look, see what a great time we had” over and over again in the hopes that somebody will actually believe it. Still Shattered does manage to accomplish one thing, it finally gives Robert Beltran a Chakotay episode and makes it so that episode is about everyone and everything but Chakotay. He must be shattered.

Summary: Borg, Klingons, Romulans, Jem’Haddar, Breen and Starfleet…Oh My.

Voyager’s last November Sweeps episode is a two parter that with the combination of Nightingale manages to bring this portion of the season to a more dignified and weighty end. The ep is filled with space battles, every prominent Alpha Quadrant species, and the Hirogen who were themselves the subject of a previous two parter and a moral dillema. What is unusual about Flesh and Blood is that it is ultimately a Doctor character development story, rather than a threat to Voyager story or a Seven of Nine conflict story as most of the recent two parters have been. Since the Doctor is Voyager’s strongest character and Robert Picardo Voyager’s strongest actor, this is a major step in the right direction.

In the average episode, so many of the little touches, the bits of dialogue and the subplots get cut away to fill UPN’s bottomless greed for commercial time, but a standard episode like Flesh and Blood stretched out to the length of a two parter leaves plenty of room for all that stuff which lets F&B feel more like a usual Star Trek episode, instead of the rushed affairs Voyager episodes have become under their reduced screen time. The Hirogen get the chance to have their moments of reaction time to Voyager’s actions, which is nice since an enemy which doesn’t react to what you’re doing especially if you’re blowing their ship to bits isn’t very interesting. B’Elanna’s interactions with the Cardassian holographic engineer are kept in, otherwise her behavior at the end would have been as confusing as the end of Dragon’s Teeth. Part of the problem though is that sometimes F&B seems like Dragon’s Teeth with Holograms or taking up the plot of the two parter that never got made and Dragon’s Teeth indeed would have made a much better two parter than F&B did.

The space battles are interesting and well done. The nebula is once again an annoying trick, especially now as even Trek retreads like Andromeda have borrowed that bag of tricks. But this seems like something we’ll be seeing over and over again for the next twenty years so there’s little point in complaining. Picardo’s acting is top notch and even the usually abysmal Mulgrew shares some suprisingly effective scenes with him. Surprisingly little use is made of the Starfleet holograms. Considering that the Bajoran hologram retained a whole lot of Bajoran elements to his psyche, it might have been very interesting to pit Starfleet holograms operating from a Starfleet point of view against Janeway. Bizarrely enough this never happens and instead we focus on the overused Bajoran “I’m an oppressed but spirtual victim routine” as if that hadn’t gotten tried after only one year of DS9, let alone seven.

The Bajoran did have the potential to be a stronger character with his extinguishing the flames for those he killed, but in service of the cliched plot he’s suddenly turned into a raving lunatic. This character might have been stronger if played by a stronger actor. Next week’s rerun features two DS9 actors, might have been nice if they’d saved one of them to play the Bajoran leader or brought over Mark Alaimo or Andrew Robinson for the job. B’Elanna’s Cardassian rant is intriguing because it feels as if something may be being set up here for when Voyager is closer to the Alpha Quadrant.

Quiet, careful direction sets off a story flawed by the same rot that has been eating into Voyager for seven years now and the name of that rot is Kathryn Janeway. Scorpion, Dark Frontier and Equinox were all driven by some bizarre irrational obsession Janeway got into her head and dragged the crew along for wreaking unecessary havoc and causing complications that would never have been spawned by the decision-making of a sane Starfleet Captain. Unfortunately Flesh and Blood is no different. Like its predecessors Scorpion, Frontier and Equinox it manages to salvage a lot of good from the rot producing strong and memorable episodes but the Janeway Factor confines its storylines and plot to fairly predictable parameters and like a wrecked ship trapped and orbiting an insane planet, the laws of physics that govern Voyager demand an ending featuring Janeway wearing a halo and the rest of the story has to be crushed into shape to fit.

The bizarre Janeway obsession that governs Flesh and Blood is Janeway’s notion that she is responsible for giving the holodeck technology to the Hirogen, hence she has to hunt down and finish off the holograms. Now in the previous Hirogen episode, The Killing Game, the Hirogen took over Voyager and killed and maimed its crew for sport. As a peacekeeping gesture, Janeway gave them the technology so that they could relieve their hunting instincts without using humans or associated sentient aliens as targets. Logically if Janeway should be feeling guilty for anything, it’s that she handed over a piece of Starfleet technology that has the potential to produce sentient beings, including one such individual already existing on her own ship, to predators who would hunt them and torture them for sport. That this technology also included templates of Starfleet officers is truly sickening. Yet historically Janeway rarely feels sorry for the victims in a situation but tends to side with their oppressors and so obviously her concern is that the Hirogen are being killed by the holograms. (One wonders if her response would have been any different, if her non-sentient Irish bartender boyfriend had been in the mix.)

Despite the Hirogen making it clear several times that they don’t want her help, Janeway insists on butting in anyway and ending the bloodshed, namely the killing of the Hirogen by their former slaves, thereby trying to save the Hirogen species for themselves. The fact that the Hirogen are big boys with lots of firepower, a big fleet and actually captured Voyager the last time Janeway got on their bad side doesn’t seem to cross her mind. Neither does the possibility that since neither side has asked for her help, that she should just stay out of the conflict. To Janeway apparently feeling moral responsibility for something, means she has undisputed authority over it and the right to shove everyone else into line and into agreeing with her solution to the problem. This is a very understandable perspective for a lunatic completely out of touch with reality, but a questionable one for a Starfleet Captain to operate under. Fortunately since her Stepford crew tends to fall in line, except for the Maquis and 7 of 9, this isn’t really a problem.

A professional Captain might have checked the Hirogen’s story before joining them in the hunt. After all Janeway’s failure to check the Borg’s story in Scorpion kept the Borg alive causing the genocide of hundreds of Delta Quadrant species. But then again how can you not trust the veracity of good honest people like the Borg Collective or the Hirogen Hunters? A professional Captain might have put some effort into getting in touch with the Holograms before trying to finish them off. After all escaping, stealing a ship and fighting space battles are pretty calculated acts suggesting intelligence and purpose. Furthermore, last season in Fair Haven Janeway risked her crew rather than shut down a holodeck full of non-sentient Irish villagers. A professional Captain would have guessed that confining a few dozen Hirogen warriors in the mess hall with little beyond Neelix in the way of security is an awful idea.

Finally, a professional Captain would have recognized that there was indeed a conflict and tried to resolve it by working with both sides, instead of taking the side of your own enemies and those of the slave owners and trying to enforce your will by force. Janeway’s failure to do this forces the Doctor into the role of traitor. But since the Doctor can’t be allowed to leave Voyager and Janeway can’t admit that she was wrong, this leaves us with the inevitable option that it is the holograms who must be discredited. Along with the borrowed Breen and Jem’Haddar, F&B borrows a page from DS9’s disposal of Dukat by turning their leader into a irrational religious fanatic thus forcing the Doctor to turn traitor second time and make a groveling apology to Janeway. Janeway then bizarrely completely dismisses the entire issue as an error in judgement.

Now it’s nice that F&B does actually address the issue of the Doctor’s betrayal in the episode, unlike DS9’s first war arc which ignored Odo’s betrayal of DS9. But really, the Doctor’s actions caused some serious injuries among the crew and almost blew up the ship killing everyone on board. This isn’t just a violation of protocol, it’s treason, mutiny and a whole range of other level one charges. Admittedly the Doctor was right in opposing Janeway and Janeway is the real traitor, but in the context of the show it would be hard to imagine the majority of the crew who don’t have B’Elanna’s Starfleet\Maquis understanding of multiple allegiances ever trusting him again. From their perspective what exactly seperates the EMH from Mike Jonas, after all Jonas was just manipulated and led into error by Seska too. Spock\Data characters have always had a lot of immunity from consenquences often breaking down or being driven by strange possessions, but on Voyager both Seven and the Doc seem to have a certain condescending immunity attached to their actions as if they’re too stupid to be responsible for the outcomes of their own choices.

The real divide in F&B doesn’t come about because of the Doctor’s actions. He’s merely the pawn of a predictable plot caught between two different sides. The Hirogen who want to enjoy the fun of torturing and killing their holographic slaves; the slaves who want freedom and a good dose of payback. Neither side much wants peace at this point and Voyager has no real role in this conflict beyond the fact that both sides hate Voyager. Janeway coming in on the side of the slavemasters forces the Doctor to do what he feels is the right thing. The problem is that the slaves themselves are far from the Starfleet saints the EMH wants them to be. F&B castigates them for this but it seems that they’re behaving very realisticially. They’re rebels fighting a war behind the lines against those they consider their oppressors, they’re not nice guys but neither are the Hirogen.

Starfleet morality is a very noble thing, but if you’re powerless, on the run and hunted by ruthless predators the only thing Starfleet morality will get you is a quick death. Like all codes of government Starfleet and Federation morality is meant to restrain the great powers of government and the military that the Federation posseses. They’re not necessarily meant to be foisted on everyone at gunpoint and certainly forcing the holograms to abide by Federation morality, while making no such demands on the Hirogen is absolute lunacy. It’s like asking one side in a war to disarm, while letting the other side keep on doing what they’ve been doing before.

Janeway claims a moral responsibility for giving the Hirogen the dangerous technology they used to get themselves killed. Except of course as the saner members of the crew point out, it’s not the technology that’s evil but its application. If Janeway had given the Hirogen toaster ovens, they no doubt would have managed to kill each other using them too. Worse Janeway is taking responsibility for the choices of sentient adult beings as technologically advanced as her who are in fact older than humanity itself, she takes this to a head by then taking responsibility for the Doctor’s choice. In Good Shepherd, Janeway recites a parable that casts her in the role of Jesus. Now she seems to be taking the godhood thing seriously and treating everyone else as outgrowths of her own will. Worst of all despite all her moral posturing, Janeway shows no concern about leaving the same technology that produced a few hundred sentient beings to be tortured and mutilated, back in the hands of the Hirogen.

Although hologram rights are the underlying issue here, Janeway refuses to address it denying the holograms, equal sentient status without actually opening up the issue to debate. If holograms can’t by nature be sentient beings then why does the Doctor have any rights and autonomy on Voyager at all? And if Holograms are indeed family pets then just what was Janeway sleeping with in Spirt Folk exactly? And if the Doctor really is an equal member of the crew and the bartender a valid companion, then on what basis does Janeway deny the Hirogen holograms themselves based on the Doctor, equal rights?

But then again Janeway’s morality is no more rational than any of her decisions. She will time and time again ignore logic and reason in favor of emotional appeals. She time and time again claims that Voyager is a family, but Voyager is not a family it’s a Starfleet vessel filled with crew which is ordered to abide by Starfleet regulations. It is not her own private domain. Situations such as this should be governed by Starfleet regulations or by reasoned decisions based on Starfleet principles. Instead Janeway’s moral reasoning seems to consist of high pitched self-serving rhetoric coming out of the childish notion that if she can just find the right slogan and say it just the right way, that magically this will make her decisions right. While this works for a certain portion of the audience in a TV drama, Star Trek has the fandom it does not because its Captains were men who repeated the right slogans but because they were people you could respect. Captains like Kirk and Spock who genuinely searched for the right thing to do, questioned their own actions and listened to their first officers.

These are all ideas foreign to Janeway who wants nothing more than to be a martyr. To sit back in her chair and sigh about how hard her job is, how much she carries on her shoulders all the while climbing further up on her own self-made pedestal positioned well above her crew. To her, commanding a Starship is a form of omnipotence which allows her to excercise absolute judgement and her pips like a pope’s hat renders her judgement infallible. And this is why she needs her crew’s mistakes, so that she can absolve them of their sins against her and confirm her superiority. She’s not part of a team or in charge so much as the head of a matriarchal family. As the Doctor learned when he programmed his own holographic family, having a real family is hard. But Janeway’s fake family are professionals paid and trained to obey her orders and if there’s any trouble well she can always blow up Voyager… again.

Next week: Reruns…well aren’t all Voyager episodes reruns anyway?

Summary: Kim finally gets his own command and turns into mini-Janeway.

Kim has always wanted his own command. This part of his character development went part of the way in Warhead and now in Nightingale he has the chance to go all the way by commanding his own starship. And after a barrage of lightweight episodes early on in this season, a serious, well-written episode like Nightingale is exactly what Voyager needed. While it might not have stood out as obviously during Voyager’s consistently better 6th season, in the anemic 7th season it is a godsend. Not only does Nightingale not feature leading performances by Seven, Janeway or the EMH, but it actually addresses continuity issues and contributes some much needed character development to a generally overlooked character. It has a logical plot that does not focus on Voyager being put into peril and is resolved through a clever and easy to follow tactical maneuver.

Nightingale does begin with a scene that Voyager has managed to turn into a cliche in only two years, the crew relaxing on the Delta Flyer just before alien trouble strikes. Still, once the trouble begins, Kim is faced with a tough dilemma Voyager hasn’t addressed in some time. Aid the medical ship that’s about to be destroyed even though he doesn’t know the nature of their conflict or follow Starfleet rules and continue on his way. The dilemma would be less gripping with an experienced officer who would know better than to make rush judgements based on casual perception, but Kim isn’t an experienced officer; just an overdue ensign eager for his own command. And once he arrives on the medical ship he discovers that they’ve lost their commander and are even more incompetent than the Voyager crew. With Kim behaving as the very model of Starfleet efficiency, it’s no wonder that they soon decide they want him in command.

Unfortunately Kim’s only model for Captain is Janeway and Janeway is a very bad role model. On his first return to Janeway, Kim justifies his actions by saying that it’s what Janeway herself would have done, and as such, Captain Kim does what Janeway would do. The result is that in no time at all Kim turns into mini-Janeway, taking over people’s consoles, dismissing their ideas and giving out insane orders. The difference is that unlike the Voyager Stepford crew which will follow any order Janeway gives until she’s knocked unconscious by her own stupidity and Chakotay can take over and try putting things right, the Nightingale crew is just using Kim to get home safely. They have no mythical devotion to him and think for themselves. So when Kim’s mini-Janeway routine reaches its insane height by ordering members of the ship’s crew to go against their own race and agenda by going back to Voyager, the only thing that would have been better than seeing the shock on Kim’s face when he realizes that “Captain” is just a title and not a superpower, would be for Janeway to be there absorbing the lesson with him.

But unlike Janeway, Kim can learn from his mistakes. And indeed Nightingale would have been a stronger episode if Kim really had been allowed to ponder what he did wrong and learn from it on his own, without 7 of 9 delivering pat lectures on command to him. Indeed what exactly is the basis for casting Seven as a command guru anyway. Are TPTB so truly desperate to give her a role in every episode that they have a civilian who’s been human and on board Voyager for less time than Naomi, lecturing a Starfleet officer on command techniques? And for that matter, why during a crucial time for Voyager when so many systems need to be repaired, does Janeway send Seven away on a relatively frivolous mission she’s not particularly qualified for? If Itcheb is invaluable on Voyager, Seven must be far more so. As he himself suggested, Paris would have been a much better fit for this mission and he’s a lot less needed on Voyager than Seven is.

Kim’s biggest error centers around the same plot point where the episode’s biggest problem lies. The cloaking device. Kim never bothers to wonder why a medical ship is equipped with a cloaking device. Once their crew make it clear to both Janeway and Kim that they require their services, neither makes the obvious request for the specifications of the cloaking device. Certainly a cloak would make Voyager’s trip home a whole lot easier and it never even seem to be under consideration. A line stating that the cloak wouldn’t function with Voyager’s systems would have come in handy at this point.

Still, the crisis of the Nightingale manages a very effective and even exciting resolution, certainly a more effective and exciting resolution than Voyager’s usual response to a crisis. In true Captain style, Kim is prepared to go down with his ship, but unlike Janeway he actually has a Plan B and manages to outsmart the enemy without gloating about it all the while and even borrowing part of Kirk’s tactic for escaping Khan in Wrath of Khan to do it. Kim’s final scene with Neelix is an effective way of closing off this chapter of Kim’s character development and the use of soup ordering as defining command style is the kind of clever characterization Voyager desperately needs more of.

Nightingale’s B story is a pretty silly and cliched bit about Itcheb imagining that Lt. Torres is attracted to him. Still Manu Intraymi once again manages to do a decent job with mediocre material, a very valuable quality for an actor on a show like Voyager. For better or worse, it’s managed to contribute to Treknology the idea that love can be detected with a tricorder, courtesy of the Doc. Still it’s a shame that the producers have decided to devote as much screen time to Itcheb getting crossed signals from Torres and Paris, as they did to Tuvok going through Pon Farr.

The two alien species never get a chance to be fleshed out in any way but there was clearly no time in the episode for that. A little more time could also have been used to flesh out the credibility of Kim’s return to take command of the Nightingale’s bridge. The aliens seem to accept him back all too easily. A scene featuring Kim confronting the alien scientist and coming to terms with the fact that he dislikes the mission but can’t turn back now and will fulfill it regardless, would have enhanced the episode. Indeed having him learn those lessons of command from the alien scientist, instead of Seven to begin with might have taken Nightingale to a whole new level and would have turned the alien scientist from a faceless minor character, into someone more vital and memorable.

Still, all in all Nightingale is a good episode and a good lead in to the upcoming Holograms vs. Hirogen fest.

Next week: When Holograms attack Hirogen hunters.

Summary: Sex on a Starship. Ryan does a bad Picardo imitation, aliens of the week menace the Delta Flyer again, Tuvok goes through Pon Farr in 5 minutes.

To begin with, it’s hard to figure out why this episode was made. Could the producers really have taken a look at the 7th season so far and thought, “what we need here are more light episodes”? As it is, Body and Soul is an episode that swallows two interesting plot ideas inside a one-shot gimmick that manages to be passably entertaining for a Wednesday night. While UPN promos for Voyager have been historically deceptive, B&S’s promo nails the episode pretty well. If you’ve seen the promo for Body and Soul, you’ll find that there’s not much to the episode you haven’t seen.

Body and Soul starts out, as quite a few recent Voyager episodes have, with an uneventful journey aboard the Delta Flyer. Shockingly enough, the Delta Flyer is attacked by aliens who in the episode’s one and only twist are after photonic lifeforms like the Doctor. Using a weapon that disrupts photonic beings they nearly destroy the Doc before 7 transfers him into her own circuitry. The EMH takes control of 7’s body and hilarity ensues. It’s not particularly implausible that the Doctor would behave so badly and clumsily in a crisis, considering that Tinker Tailor showed that he’s not quite ready for prime time. But it does get old fast. Ryan doing a bad imitation of Picardo and acting drunk can be amusing but it just seems as if Body spends two thirds of its time on what is at best a five minute joke.

By contrast Seven’s scenes with the tactical officer in sickbay are out of tune with the style of the rest of the episode and really don’t matter since the episode isn’t ready to treat the entire situation seriously to begin with. Worse, we barely just recovered from the Doctor using his medical skills to try and heal a screwed up civilization a few episodes ago in Critical Care, and we had the Doctor as earnest comic relief in Inside Man. Voyager does have other characters besides Seven and the Doctor after all, it might be nice if they had something to do as well. It would be nice if Kim had something to do in this episode except spout technobabble and fake a seizure (doesn’t one naturally lead to the other anyway?)

And fans have been anticipating Tuvok’s Pon Farr for seven years now. Even those people who weren’t on board with some of the weirder solutions for Tuvok’s dilemma wanted more than using it as an aborted B story in which Tuvok mediates, medicates, groans, uses the holodeck and is back to work before anyone notices that he was even gone. Indeed from the character growth perspective, if you compare the utility of having Tuvok suffer through Pon Farr or Seven realize she needs to experience more sensations, it’s hard to see the Pon Farr story as being more disposable.

A well written Tuvok Pon Farr story could have finally done for Tuvok what Wire did for Garak on DS9. The few scenes with Paris did show potential for some good Kirk\Spock interplay. Even a badly written one could have had a lot more comedic and dramatic possibilities than a 5 minute skit about the Doc inside 7’s body. During the height of Braga’s supervision the 6th season managed to do some of Voyager’s strongest stories, but now with Braga working on Series V, Voyager is back to ripping off Disney movies. Even Jeri Taylor’s stepson\Vorik got himself an entire episode (ironically enough directed by Andrew Robison) to deal with his Pon Farr; but Tuvok who according to Body and Soul would experience a much stronger version of Pon Farr resolves his problems with a holodeck program, even though Blood Fever itself showed that this wouldn’t work.

Finally, we have the bizarre and ridiculous line of “It isn’t cheating if the hologram looks like your wife.” Admittedly Voyager has some awful history in the ethical dilemmas department and tends to think moral dilemmas can be solved by having Janeway hit the right pitch of outrage with her rhetoric, but this is just bad. It’s halfway plausible for Paris to propose such a thing, even though he’s moved well beyond that kind of thing. It’s completely ridiculous for Tuvok in a halfway sane state of mind to agree. What indeed does the appearance of the hologram have to do with anything? If there’s anything that should have been hammered home after 4 Star Trek series each of which featured the required dozen “alien possession” shows, is that identity and not appearance is what matters.

The rebellion of photonic servants is certainly an interesting possible plot and the tactical officer’s recitation of how she doesn’t understand why her holodoc rebelled and its similarity to both the justifications for slavery and how Janeway and the Voyager crew condescendingly describe the Doctor as “part of the family” could have had some potentially very disturbing implications for Voyager. Instead the Doctor shrugs her off with a few banalities and focuses on his central goal of flirting with her instead. The Doctor may be a bit overstimulated and clumsy but he’s not completely thoughtless or stupid either. This piece of dialog seems like it belonged in a different episode, an episode that actually had something to say.

Instead, Voyager bases an episode around ripping off a cliche so cliched no one even bothers ripping it off anymore, tips a hat to TOS’s worst episode Turnabout and leaves two potentially interesting stories lying in the dust. And God knows if there’s anything Voyager needs this season it’s an interesting story.

Summary: An Evil Barclay hologram stalks Seven of Nine, Good Barclay Human stalks Troi. Continuity stalks Voyager. Barclay is still oppressed by the man.

Ever since Reginald Barclay came to identify with Voyager’s isolation and loneliness in Pathfinder, he’s been obsessed with Voyager and with ending Voyager’s isolation as a way of ending his own by proxy. Of course, Reg having a little trouble interacting with people, even Voyager crew people, he created a holodeck version of Voyager in which he’s suave, sophisticated and worshipped by all. In Inside Man he turns the tables by sending an enhanced holographic version of himself to the real Voyager. Where before Barclay was content to create holographic worlds for himself where he was all powerful, he has since come to realize that these worlds are actually fake. So of course now he’s turned to creating superior holographic versions of himself to interact with the real world.

The EHB (Enhanced or Evil Holographic Barclay) is everything that Barclay isn’t, or that Barclay thinks he isn’t and would like to be. Charming, a natural leader and the life of the party is what Barclay seems to have been aiming for, but when crossed with a Ferengi amoral con artist reprogramming job, what comes out the other end looks like a psychopath running for political office. The EHB sports a fixed demented grin and spews out ridiculous platitudes to the crew. He calls Voyager a “Miracle ship” and tells Neelix he has the most important job of them all and in a not so subtle in-joke tells Seven of Nine that she’s actually the most popular crew member of them all.

Properly directed and balanced with the scenes from the real Barclay’s life this might actually have been pretty funny and dark stuff as Mike Vejar managed to make it in the original Pathfinder. Unfortunately the direction is too aimless in the first half and by the time the strong Barclay storyline begins, the EHB’s storyline has almost ended. And the EHB scenes aren’t so much funny as confusing. Considering that the EHB does everything but hum melodies while sharpening a butcher knife, it’s hard to understand how the Voyager crew is stupid enough to fall for everything he says. As Tom Paris points out in a nice touch of continuity early on, Voyager’s attempts to get home have ended in disaster and the EHB’s routine is about as sophisticated as Quark’s.

Inside Man only becomes interesting when it snaps back to Barclay’s life, which ironically enough despite its supposed boredom is a lot more interesting and textured than the “Voyager gets screwed once again but saved in time by a technogizmo factor.” Barclay’s plot isn’t that much more original than Voyager’s, but he is so screwed up, off balance and lost in a giant universe that it actually seems plausible that his story might not have a happy ending. And for all of Voyager’s travels, Barclay’s move from Starfleet to the beach and back seems to have more scale and scope than anything Voyager has done this season.

Maybe it’s the moody lighting, but even Barclay trying to do comedy is a whole lot darker than Imperfection or Unimatrix Zero. After all, Barclay doesn’t have to draw on Post-Borg angst or Half-Klingon angst or I’m-the-Commander-and-I-have-to-get-my-crew home-angst. He’s just the only imperfect, neurotic person in all of Starfleet and it and the few sets of the research labs and the beach are just so much more watchable than more filler from the Delta Quadrant follies. This is bad news for Voyager’s lackluster final season, but good news for any potential Starfleet HQ show or any version of Series V that will include more characters like Barclay and less characters like Janeway or 7 of 9.

One of the advantages of the Barclay side of the story is also the fact that Barclay is dealing with a conspiracy that might have plausibly gone unnoticed. The method of Barclay’s exploitation and how clueless he was about it is very plausible and ties in perfectly with Barclay’s backstory and character, while the method of the Voyager side of the conspiracy wouldn’t have fooled a child. Basically on the word of a hologram who’s really charming, Janeway nearly kills her entire crew without actually verifying the information with Starfleet itself. Janeway, who is usually paranoid and sensing conspiracies where there are none, is never remotely suspicious of the EHB until the EMH’s pettiness (in a plot point recycled so often it’s practically turned to mulch) raises her suspicisions. Barclay is supposed to be gullible and easily taken advantage of, Janeway isn’t.

Still unlike the two previous Barclay episodes, Inside Man actually provides something useful for Troi to do. Where in Pathfinder she was just someone for Barclay to talk to, here she actually takes a leading role in some of the events. The interrogation scenes are priceless with every single actor from Admiral Paris down shining in however much screentime they get. This is the only time IM succesfully combines the dark and light touches that made Pahtfinder so succesful and it alone is worth the price of admission. As in Tinker Tailor, the humor works because it’s grounded in reality and in genuine human pain, while on the Voyager side the funniest bit is just the sight gag involving the Doctor’s golfing costume.

Of course the producers use Troi’s scenes to inject as many references to absent TNG crewmembers as possible. Troi vacations with Will on the beach but he isn’t due to arrive yet (possible reference to the TNG pilot), Barclay sings a duet with Data and discusses his holographic matrix with Geordi. These references fall somewhere between cute and grating. Considering Voyager’s current lackluster state, the reminders of a better show now deceased end up generating more nostalgia than annoyance at the painfully obvious tactics for trying to cash in on TNG’s popularity.

The final ending of the show is buried in technobabble but since it occupies little enough time and there’s not much suspense left by this point, it’s less of an issue than it might normally be. Best of all, by the end of the episode Voyager’s crew have not been clued in to all the events and are just as ignorant, meanwhile Barclay has produced an updated EHB that’s practically designed to terrify the Voyager crew as soon as it arrives. So despite a weak beginning and a not-really-there Voyager story, Inside Man has enough good moments, good humor and Barclay to make it pleasant and offbeat viewing.

Summary: The EMH battles an alien HMO.

This season has been plauged by an array of episodes that are technically well made, with excellent direction, spectacular production values, good concepts and good acting but seem to end up amounting to very little in the end anyway. Critical Care is such an episode in that it hits all the right notes but ends up having very little content and nothing that really stays with you once the show is over and the ten o’clock evening news comes on. Critical Care is a fairly good episode on its own terms. The problem is that its terms aren’t particularly wide or ambitious. It is not much more than meets the eye. In a word, the episode is obvious, its crisis, its moral dillema and its resolution are obvious and ultimately not very interesting or convincing.

Critical Care makes the right choice by instantly leaping into the story from the first second. Rather than featuring scenes of the Doctor’s abduction, CC reconstructs pieces of it for us as the crew works to trace back the EMH and the thief who stole him. But then, it doesn’t have much choice as this is an episode pressed for time. As with last week’s installment, there are minor holes in the plot that can be traced back to the extra minutes UPN cuts out of Voyager to allow for more commercials. With that said, the addition of the “Voyager deals with amusing con artists” bit–which stops being funny about halfway through–is completely unecessary and more than a little inexplicable. Not only does this feel like a faded retread of Live Fast & Prosper from last season but the humor of the piece skews the dark tone of the episode so that neither the comedy nor the drama work very well.

Certainly the rest of the cast needs their screen time but if they really wanted a smuggler comedy episode so badly another one could have been written while the crew could have been tasked with a more serious storyline than Tuvok\Neelix routines (the Neelix food\big routine is also borrowed from Live Fast & Prosper) or better yet, the screen time could have been given to the main storyline. The absence of an active Voyager search for him might have made his isolation and his conflict a whole lot more plausible, while the current version makes it clear to the audience that he will be rescued as soon as Voyager untangles the MIB rejects cluttering its viewscreen.

Far worse, though, is the fact that CC wastes the two strong actors it hired to play the hospital administrators in favor of the two weak and virtually indistinguishable actors playing the doctor and the patient. While in medical melodramas the drama may come from doctors lingering over their patients, in Star Trek the drama comes from confronting villains and alternate points of view. But in CC we hear little from the administrators except some vauge references to famine and ecological problems and get nothing in the way of background for the society and culture. There is very little plausible explanation for the second administrator’s shift to supporting the EMH in a conspiracy to assault and nearly murder his superior. His dialog suggests that there may have been a scene or two with him that was cut in favor of more scenes of the EMH with the dying young man, scenes that have all the dramatic impact of pizza commercials.

This is a big mistake and demonstrates the failure of post-Roddenberry Trek to discuss moral issues in any real way. And so CC feels that it has accomplished all the moral dialog it needs just by showing suffering people and a scene or two of callous administrators. It never deals with the core choices being made here. Are the admninistrators and the entire system really completely callous and corrupt or is there some practical basis for such a viscious triage system. By never dealing with the issue, the episode essentially bases its entire moral code on suffering people and the need to cure them. This may be enough for the Doctor and his oath but it does not satisfactorily address the issue.

Finally, the Doctor’s “solution” is manufactured and depends on asking the audience to swallow the premise that his actions have caused 3 out of 4 members of this system to rebel against it and that by the time he’s departed, a solution is already in place. To swallow the idea that this really is a solution we need to shut down our minds and go with the episode’s unstated idea that the only reason the administratior was denying treatment was because of a lack of empathy and that once he experiences being a patient, he’ll change his ways. This would be ridiculously idealistic even by TOS or Earth Final Conflict standards; on Voyager it’s completely implausible. In this way CC is reminiscent of David Gerrold’s TOS episode, The Cloud Minders which has Kirk forcing the elite to work in the mines at phaser point. CC’s only real superiority to Cloud Minders is that Kirk’s actions occured under the influence of toxic gases, while the EMH has the episode’s most powerful and effective scene back on Voyager in which he ponders the morality of his actions.

Unfortunately the fact that the episode’s most effective scene takes place not in the episode’s expensive alien setting but back on Voyager speaks quite clearly to certain essential failures in the episode. It’s nice that Voyager is addressing contemporary moral issues, it would be nicer if they put some more thought into it next time.