Bad: Neelix, Chakotay, Kes (unless possesed by an alien dictator and strutting round in a leather cat suit) frakking Fair Haven
Personal faves Future’s End (the one with Sarah Silverman), Counterpoint unusually subtle (though I’ve forgotten the exact plot I think there’s a double bluff or something)
Cable channel One/Virgin is running series five at the moment and there’s been a run of decent episodes - Thirty Days, Counterpoint, Bride of Chaotica, Gravity
Alongside that they are also showing series one of TNG a lot of which is just plain embarassing.
Honorable mention for worst goes to any episode involving Janeway’s holodeck Gothic Romance novel. You have the first alpha-role female captain in the franchise and you make her hobby pretending to be a Regency-era Mary Poppins?
I agree - easily the best was Year in Hell, and easily the worst was the slug-breeding Chakot… nah, I can’t even type it out in full, the whole thing’s just so disgusting.
The Tvix episode is up there with the worst, but that’s mainly because Neelix was in it so much. Also, I hated that there was always so much emphasis on getting Tuvok to be emotional; he’s a bloody Vulcan, let him be!
Any Seven-centred episodes seemed to bring out the best in the writers. I liked the one where she decided to date Harry Kim.
I watched Death Wish today. Overall I liked it, but now I can see why people seem to hate Janeway. Not only was she still in the Delta Quadrant, but she now had a dead Q in sickbay.
A lot of fans wanted to keep the Tuvix character and dump Neelix/Tuvok. He was actually more interesting.
I personally have issues with the decision to terminate/murder Tuvix. Like it or not he was a distinict individual. A new life created by an accident. I’m not sure it was right to kill him to “save” Neelix/Tuvok.
Hard to judge because I admit I largely lost interest by s03, but I’ve caught most of the others in syndication.
Best: *Tuvix, Year of Hell, Meld, * and the two-part season finale to s02. (I can’t believe it’s been cited as one of the worst up above! Brad Dourif’s performance when, after finding peace from his homicidal instincts, he’s forced to kill again? Heartbreaking.) Writer Michael Piller’s leaving was a big loss to the show, I think.
Worst: Oh, I dunno, too many to judge. Let’s say Threshold or the Earhardt one or Janeway’s romps with Leonardo da-freakin’-Vinci. OH or what about the one where Janeway tortures that prisoner? She was particularly vile in that ep (but what else is new). Really you can take your pick.
It’s hard to care about episodes when you don’t care about the characters, and I didn’t. I grew to hate Janeway so very very much, and was bored by the Seven of Nine / Doctor show, and the other characters like Torres and Chakotay were nothing but meh from the get-go. Torres just felt like a wannabe Ro / Kira. Paris was marginally interesting, especially when going undercover as a would-be mole during the Seska arc, but in general the character writing on the show was so phlegmatic that I just couldn’t give a damn about any of the main cast, except for the Doctor and Kes.
I liked “The Voyager Conspiracy”, where Seven of Nine goes crazy and comes up with this elaborate conspiracy theory about Voyager, and “Pathfinder”, because, hey, Barclay. I also liked Jetrel, which was one of the few Neelix episodes I liked.
I also liked Nothing Human, even though it was really more of a DS9 episode.
Agreed, this was excellent - the show was always at its best when it went dark, and this was very dark indeed. People who basically were the crew of Voyager dying, in pain and afraid, very far from home - it was precisely the worst fear of the “original” Voyager crew made real.
It was also fantastic in that it was a case where a decision Janeway had made - to allow her crew to be duplicated - turned out to have absolutely horrible consequences, and she never even knew it. Janeway was, in many ways, a very bad CO, and occasionally the show flirted with letting us know that.
Agreed. The Federation is a society without the death penalty, and here is Janeway sending a Security team to march an innocent man to his death. The thing that adds a layer of tragedy to the horror is that the innocent man is also a genuinely good guy - he understands the calculus that Janeway is making, and part of him even agrees with it, but he still wants to live. So he walks to his death with a modicum of dignity, but he’s still frightened and saddened by the last walk.
I agree.
It also included the great line, “I’m a Doctor, not a counter insurgent!”
And I’ll remind y’all that folks who hate Janeway have issues with their Mothers.
Just Voyager? If someone told me there’s a worse episode of any other Star Trek series, I’d call him a damned dirty liar. Even that TOS ep with the space hippies.
