And now S05E06, Timeless. Voyager might not be as loved as TOS or TNG but the episodes I’ve been watching have been knocking it out of the park. That episode managed to be really fucking tense even if I knew how it would inevitably end. First a good episode centered around a child actor and now a good episode about time travel. Who’d have thought? This might be my new favorite Star Trek episode from any of the shows.
I had gotten frustrated with the show and stopped watching. Then I caught an episode called Before and After in the 3rd season where Kes experiences time backwards that was really well done and got me watching again. It is still my favorite time travel episode of all the series.
Voyager is a lot like TNG in that it has a lot of really outstanding episodes but the ones that suck suck hard. Death Wish in particular is among my all-time favorite Treks of any series.
(I like the whole Q Civil War arc, but not everyone agrees.)
The Doctor in particular has some really excellent character episodes. Author, Author echoes Measure of a Man and has the unique distinction of being a holodeck episode that’s actually awesome. In the same light, there’s Bride of Chaotica (and all the other Captain Proton stuff.)
Not so much the Voyager plots, it was the characters. I always felt my hand twitching for the remote when Neelix appeared. I mean, come on! And Janeway after Patrick Stewart’s Picard was warm beer after champagne, flat and insipid. The Doc was great though.
I remember one of the actors (I think Garrett Wang) saying that at one of the first all-cast read-throughs, Rick Berman told all the actors playing humans that they had to underplay their characters as much as possible to make the aliens more believable, or something. If true, it’s one of the worst decisions made by any showrunner ever, and explains a lot about why Voyager always felt so inert.
Have you ever seen the clips with the original Janeway? It could have been so much worse: First Captain Janeway Complete - YouTube
I agree with Skald - the show lacked the courage to follow through with its premise. As they lost supplies, had damage they couldn’t repair, and lost hope then we could have seen a Star Trek with some real emotions.
One of the main writers at the beginning of Voyager was Ronald D. Moore and he took all of those ideas to Battlestar Galactica. That’s the show Voyager was supposed to be.
And now another great episode, Infinite Regress. Jesus, I feel like I’m really due for a stinker after such a high concentration of good episodes during the back half of season 4 and the beginning of season 5. Suffice it to say that I disagree with the assertion that these characters fall flat. I haven’t binge-watched a show like this in a while.
A few of the episodes have been pretty poor, though. The last one was probably Day of Honor back at the start of the previous season and even it wasn’t all that bad, I just tend to think that Star Trek never really handles romance well at all. I was kind of bored during the Killing Game two-parter as well.
On the other hand, BSG started out amazing and ended in the crapper. Most Treks tend to maintain a fairly consistent level of quality throughout their run, with the possible exception of TNG season one. (Even that isn’t as bad as people remember, though.)
Amen, Brother!
I agree. It’s baffling that she managed to last 7 years (& several decades in the original timeline) without getting chucked out an airlock, or stranded on a random M-class planet. That one dream sequence where the Doctor was euthanizing her was pretty hilarious.
Just curious, why on earth would you binge watch something you hate?
Watched Nothing Human and Thirty Days. The former was an alright episode. I liked the idea of an alien who attaches itself to a person in order to use their systems to support itself and I liked the arguments regarding medical ethics. But I found the stuff involving the creation of a holographic assistant for the doctor to be contrary to what’s already been established in quite recent episodes featuring Harry trying doing the same thing (back in Message in a Bottle, I think it was). Thirty Days was an excellent episode. I like how in many of these episodes they change around the pacing and framing structure. Moving on to Counterpoint.
I agree with you Clockwork in the sense that most of the individual episodes are good to great, and when they are terrible they really aren’t that bad. I disagree that the characters in VOY could stand up to the cast of TNG and TOS though, in terms of complexity, being interesting, wanting to care about them, etc.
I also have heard that bit before about the director/producer/whoever telling them all to under-act, and only allowing Doctor, Seven of Nine, etc to have any real character, so that explains a lot.
And yeah, we definitely dodged a bullet with that original actress for Janeway. I really like Janeway and of course she doesn’t stack up to Kirk or Picard in many ways, but she defeated the Borg so there is that.
I think an episode like Once Upon A Time shows how much character the people like Neelix and Tuvok have. I’ve just finished Counterpoint and Latent Image. The former was a good episode in which we explore Janeway and a potential romance between her and what initially seems to be a redeemed space Nazi. Latent Image nearly brought my bitch ass to tears by the end. What a great fucking episode. I get the feeling that if they’d cut the number of episodes they shot in half and just kept these amazing ones people would put Voyager up there with TNG.
So no bad episode since the early 4th season. Certainly nothing like the godawful second season episode Threshold in quite a while. I don’t know how much longer my luck will hold out. I know that I’ve got an awful Seven of Nine/Chakotay romance in my future but that’s a couple of seasons from now.
Well, after Threshold the next worst episode in my opinion is the one where the “Time Continuum police guys” (or whatever they’re called.) recruit Seven on some sort of crazy mission to repair the timeline.
Now I know writing stories with time travel can be a little sketchy sometimes. And the viewer has to put in a little extra effort to suspend disbelief, but this particular episode goes so far beyond the pale, it comical.
I’m fairly certain the writers of that script started off with something they thought was a good idea but then pretty much gave up towards the end when they couldn’t think of a tidy way to wrap things up. This is evidenced by Janeway saying something to the effect towards the end of the show [said to the time continuum guys]: “So wait a minute, you had to go back in time to… uh… Oh never mind, forget it!”
Lol. Great, looking forward to it.
Meanwhile, Bride of Chaotica is shaping up to be another good one.
Janeway: “Let me get this straight: Trans-dimensional aliens have mistaken your Captain Proton simulation for reality.”
Paris: “Yes, ma’am.”
Janeway: “And now an armed conflict has broken out between these aliens and Chaotica’s holographic army.”
Paris: “Yes, ma’am. His army of evil.”
Also true. I remember being very excited during the pilot episode when they stated how many photon torpedoes they had. Great, I thought, we can keep count, and now every time they’re forced to fire one, we can decrement the number they have left! That’ll be incredibly dramatic! Yeah, no.
[quote=“Chronos, post:37, topic:686473”]
Also true. I remember being very excited during the pilot episode when they stated how many photon torpedoes they had. Great, I thought, we can keep count, and now every time they’re forced to fire one, we can decrement the number they have left! That’ll be incredibly dramatic! Yeah, no.
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I recommend watching the whole thing, it gets increasingly hilarious.
I was watching the entire Star Trek franchise over several months and Voyager was part of that. I don’t hate the ENTIRE series; I just hate the majority of the episodes of that series.
It had been years since I had seen Voyager (during its initial run,in fact) and I had forgotten the major details and shortcomings of many of the episodes
That was absolutely hilarious. Thank you so much for sharing. How did you find this?