Season 1 Episode 6: “The Cloud”

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Andy

Plot synopsis: A few weeks into its long homeward journey, Voyager pauses to investigate and gather fuel from what appears to be a massive nebula. But after entering the nebula and coming under attack by mysterious elements within it, the crew discovers that the nebula is actually a giant life form, and Voyager’s passage has wounded it. Being the goody-two-shoes Federation heroes that they are, Janeway and crew (particularly Torres and the Doctor) hatch a zany scheme to heal the wound by creating a technobabbly energy “suture” for it.

While this riveting episode of Space Doctors plays out, Janeway sets out to get to know her crew a bit more personally, leading to: a Native American religious experience, more appearances by Neelix than any episode needs, and a trip to that classic Star Trek hangout, the holodeck.

This is a subpar episode by any standard, but by Grabthar’s Hammer, we’re going to dive in and find some things to appreciate about it.

Pictured: not an alien life form.

Cosmic Boy (and Girl) Scouts: The basic premise of this episode is that Voyager is out exploring when it probably ought to be making a beeline for home. Shouldn’t they be taking their situation more seriously? These are good questions, and happily, this episode of Voyager asks them.

Watching Voyager now, it is impossible not to compare it to the 2004 Battlestar Galactica remake, which shares several major themes with Voyager: space travelers in truly desperate straits, fumbling toward a promised land while constantly hounded by enemies and plagued with resource shortages. Battlestar Galactica fully embraces this premise, centering many grim and gritty episodes around the brutal quest to stay alive while scrounging for fuel and supplies (and making painful moral compromises to do so).

Voyager, by contrast, regularly makes note of its dire circumstances but is nonetheless bright-eyed and even playful in tone. “The Cloud” is an episode in which, informed that Voyager has just lost 11% of its precious energy reserves, Janeway smirks at the camera and jokes that she might have to give up (replicated) coffee—and the credits roll. What gives?

One possibility is that Voyager is simply poorly executed, unable to commit to its central premise; and continually defaulting back to Next Generation-style stories. I suspect there is at least some truth in this. But “The Cloud” gives us another possible answer: you just can’t keep the Federation’s cheerful inquisitiveness down. Not even by stranding them on the other side of the galaxy.

In “The Cloud,” Janeway diverts Voyager from its homeward coarse to investigate the nebula because it’s there, and exploring cool space stuff is just what Federation ships do. Neelix, the voice of reason and audience-stand-in, demands to know why. Kes sums up the Federation in response:

“These people are natural born explorers, Neelix…. I think it’s wonderful. If I were captain, I’d open every crack in the universe and peek inside, just like Captain Janeway does.”

This is Star Trek, after all; and it’s worth noting that Voyager, following Deep Space Nine’s foray into the grittier corners of the Star Trek setting, is making an obvious effort to return to the franchise’s bold-space-explorers roots. And I’m actually glad “The Cloud” establishes this, because it will keep me from grumping too much in future episodes every time Voyager doesn’t seem to be trying that hard to get home. They’re 50% lost and desperate, and 50% having the time of their lives exploring uncharted territory.

The holodeck: the holodeck makes an appearance here, and in true Star Trek fashion, it’s used (by Paris) to recreate a dimly-lit bar populated by characters out of a Raymond Chandler novel. While this is not unexpected—Star Trek writers can’t get enough of this kind of setting, and to be sure, it’s fun—one can’t help but wonder why somebody doesn’t try using the holodeck to create more exotic settings and scenarios. At any rate, the holodeck scenes in “The Cloud” are pretty excrutiating, but it’s the holodeck. The holodeck is fun, and besides, we can’t be more than a few episodes away from the holodeck malfunctioning and trapping Tuvok and Paris in pretend 1943 Chicago and meeting FDR or something. That’s going to be great!

Star Trek and religion: I won’t go into all of the encounters Janeway has while trying to get to know the crew better, but there’s one I want to point out: Chakotay introduces Janeway to Native American religious practices by encouraging her to perform a ritual to seek out a spirit animal guide. I was genuinely unsure what to make of this scene in which Janeway sits down—with schoolgirlish excitement and none of the excessive gravitas that usually accompanies religious experience in sci-fi television—to experience the ritual.

There are some interesting things here, particularly Chakotay’s mention that modern science has figured out how to induce religious visions in the way that hallucinogenic substances once did. I’m not going to try and delve into Star Trek’s approach to religion in this episode recap. But let’s reserve this topic for a future conversation: Star Trek is kind of weird about religion. I am 100% certain future episodes will be weird about religion, so we’ll just look forward to exploring this subject more later.

Final verdict: Eh. Like many Star Trek plots, the main story of “The Cloud” has the core of a neat idea but winds up being a bit silly (the “let’s heal this nebula with some space stitches” sequence is not a high point in Star Trek storytelling). The rest of the episode is scattered, cheery filler material, with some scenes working and others not. But “The Cloud” does succeed in communicating the general timbre of Voyager.

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Season 1 Episode 5: “Phage”

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Andy

Well, well, well. I’ve returned from a five-year mission that called me away from both this blog and my over-ambitious Voyager viewing plans. Whether I revive this blog and project or not, we’ll have to see; but I was moved rather randomly the other day to watch some Star Trek with my kids—and I couldn’t resist checking back in on Voyager.

I watched this episode with my 5-year-old son, who was a few weeks old back in the heady days when it seemed like I’d actually be able to pull off this Voyager blog project. It was fun to cuddle up on the couch with my son and daughter and repeatedly explain that a) no, this wasn’t the Star Trek with LeVar Burton in it (my daughter’s question), and b) no, the aliens aren’t real (I actually saw the light in my son’s eyes dim when I told him this).

Plot synposis: While on an away team mission scouting for fuel, Neelix is attacked by an organ-harvesting alien that steals his lungs. Voyager’s medical facilities can’t replace his lungs, and can only keep him alive if he remains permanently immobilized in sickbay for the rest of his life. While Neelix and his friends try to process this, the rest of the Voyager crew tries to track down the alien in the hopes of retrieving the aforementioned lungs.

When Voyager finally catches up to the organ thieves, we learn that the aliens are afflicted by a destructive medical condition (the “phage”) that requires them to scavenge internal organs from others to keep their own decaying bodies alive. Neelix’s lungs can’t be restored to him, but in exchange for mercy, the medically-advanced aliens help transplant a donor lung (from Kes) into Neelix’s body, restoring him to health.

This goofy plot just barely manages to hold together long enough to reach the end credits. However, the real purpose this episode serves is to further establish roles and personalities for Voyager‘s minor characters: Neelix and Kes.

Neelix the cook

Neelix, ship’s cook.

Jobs for Neelix and Kes: These two characters, who aren’t part of Voyager‘s official crew, have felt somewhat purposeless so far compared to the rest of the Voyager cast, who all have clearly defined roles. In “Phage,” Neelix and Kes finally each get a job.

Neelix is going to be the ship’s cook—a role that sounds minor, but which I suspect will wind up being a central part of the show going forward. Eateries are a key location in Star Trek and other science fiction shows—Quark’s bar in Deep Space Nine and the Zocalo in Babylon 5 both provided space for critical off-the-record interaction and deal-making; and Quark’s role as bartender and information-trafficker became one of Deep Space Nine‘s most memorable elements. Whether Neelix and Voyager’s well-lit mess hall can fill similar narrative spaces remains to be seen. I’m skeptical. But then, I wouldn’t have guessed at the beginning of Deep Space Nine that Quark would wind up being one of the show’s best characters.

Kes, meanwhile, is going to be Voyager‘s new medical assistant, perhaps replacing Tom Paris. This is a pretty nebulous role. On the plus side, it’s vague enough that Kes could be plausibly incorporated into a wide range of future episodes and plotlines. However, I can’t shake the feeling that Voyager’s writers just don’t know what else to do with her.

He’s going to be fine: Much of “Phage” is spent watching Neelix come to terms with the possibility of being paralyzed for life. Unfortunately, there’s no real suspense here, because 1995 (when this episode first aired) was not a year in which serial TV shows brutally incapacitated their protagonists. This is, on paper, heavy (and uncomfortable) stuff: this is somebody trying to figure out if they want to go on living in circumstances that have seemingly stripped all joy and opportunity from life. But here’s the thing: we’re only a few episodes into a show that’s supposed to be about brave space explorers finding their way home. I’m not yet ready for a hospital-room drama episode about minor characters—let’s save that for season three or something.

There but for the grace of God: this episode’s most compelling moments take place in the final act, when Voyager finally captures the two organ-thief aliens and learns their tragic backstory: they’re the remnants of a once-great civilization that, when afflicted by the devastating “phage” plague, set aside all their humanitarian virtues and achievements in order to simply survive. This is familiar moral preaching of the It Could Happen Here! variety, warning Voyager‘s first-world viewers that deeply-held values can start looking like wasteful luxuries when real societal stress strikes.

In the context of Voyager’s situation, this is a particularly pointed and unsubtle warning. Voyager is far from home and at risk of food and supply shortages. How long will it be before the need to survive causes Janeway and her crew to start jettisoning their high-falutin’ Federation values? As viewers, we all know that’s not going to happen, because this is Star Trek. But it’s a moral dilemma that everyone on Voyager should expect they’ll eventually face. If Voyager can make me feel that tension in the seasons to come, I’ll be a happy viewer.

Janeway’s dilemma: Janeway has a very strong character moment while confronting the captured aliens. Torn between her Federation values (no capital punishment or vindictive retribution), Voyager’s practical circumstances (they can’t haul prisoners all the way back to Earth for a fair trial), and Janeway’s own desire for justice (the aliens just attacked her crew and will likely victimize others in the future), she chooses mercy—but not before literally pacing around the room, trying to find a solution. It’s an unsatisfying compromise, as it should be—the first of many that she can anticipate making, no doubt. This is somewhat (but not entirely) undercut when the aliens, grateful to be spared, agree to heal Neelix, neatly wrapping up the episode.

Final verdict: This is not only a very forgettable episode; it’s also a very strange one to place so early in Voyager’s first season. The pace is slow and it’s just generally uninspired. But what keeps me going is the occasional glimpse of the kind of show Voyager could be down the road: full of well-developed characters facing interesting choices and challenges. Please, Voyager—be that show. Don’t let me down.

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Season 1 Episode 4, “Time and Again”

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Andy

It wouldn’t be Star Trek without a time travel paradox. The various Star Trek shows have taken heat for too often falling back on time travel as a plot device. Intellectually, I might agree with this criticism. And perhaps it does not bode well that Voyager is breaking out a time travel plot exactly three episodes into the series. But I always try to listen to what my heart tells me, and what my heart tells me is that time travel paradoxes are awesome. So let’s get started.

Oh, before I forget: you should probably consider all of these episode recaps to have a “spoiler” warning attached.

Plot synopsis: Voyager encounters a planet that has very recently been wiped clean of life due to a massive detonation of nuclear polaric energy. When the bridge crew sensibly immediately beams down to check out the death planet, Janeway and Paris are transported one day back in time, to the final hours before the civilization-ending catastrophe takes place. Will they find a way to prevent the disaster and travel back to their own time? Or will Voyager come to a tragic end three episodes into its first season?

It turns out that this civilization was destroyed because polaric energy is actually super dangerous, and yet it was being used to power the entire planet. This made me initially take this episode for a morality tale about the perils of nuclear energy (Star Trek is known for its subtle social messages), but later in the episode, Janeway and Paris encounter a band of (thoroughly unconvincing) anti-polaric energy protestors/terrorists who shoot children, muddling the moral message. So I’m not sure what this episode is saying, beyond that powering your George Foreman Grill with the equivalent of liquid hydrogen is a poor idea.

Kes has psionic powers: Kes (whose psychic powers have been mentioned briefly before) plays a minor, and weirdly ineffectual, role in this episode. She senses the death of the planet when it first occurs (Obi-Wan Kenobi style), and later uses some form of telepathy to contact Janeway and Paris through space-time. Telepathy is not new to Star Trek, but this episode reminds me why I generally don’t like psychic powers as they are used in science fiction shows: the exact nature of the psychic power is left deliberately vague and employed largely as a lazy means of involving characters in a plot that they would otherwise have no business participating in. In this case, Kes tags along with the away team that is trying to rescue Janeway and Paris; but not much comes of it and the episode is resolved without her. This isn’t terrible—I imagine this is just an early precursor to the development of Kes’ psychic powers later in the show—but we’ll just have to see where they go with this.

The time travel paradox: the big reveal at the end of the episode is that Voyager itself has caused the polaric detonation, even though it arrived at the planet after the detonation occurred. (The effect-preceding-cause paradox was mentioned in “Parallax” as well.) Twelve Monkeys it ain’t, but I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, so I liked it. Sue me. Janeway and Paris get most of the meaningful screen time, and I continue to find Janeway appealingly direct. Sue me for that too.

The Prime Directive: Oh, the damn Prime Directive. Sure guarantor of instant moral dilemmas, the Prime Directive is invoked here by Janeway to explain why she does not intend to intervene to save an entire civilization from being wiped out by a preventable disaster. Look, we all get the concept behind the Prime Directive. But at some point, somebody back at the Federation should probably take notice of the fact that attempting to strictly adhere to it turns you into Space Hitler.

Also, there is the matter that exactly two episodes earlier, Janeway happily jettisoned the Prime Directive to save a much smaller civilization from a much less serious threat.

The away team: while Janeway and Paris are stuck in the past, the present-tense Voyager crew works hard to try and rescue them. I’ll confess that with all the technobabble involved, I never understood exactly what they were trying to do or how it was supposed to work. This sequence highlights another learn-to-love-it-or-it-will-drive-you-crazy element of Star Trek: characters in the show routinely make incredible technological breakthroughs (in this case, opening a time-travel portal to the past with a few hours’ work and some random parts that were laying around the starship) that would utterly change all life as we know it were anybody were to ever remember how it was done after the episode ended.

How long would you wait: “Time and Again” opens and closes with a short but welcome reference to Voyager‘s lost-in-space plight. Paris pressures Harry to go out on a double date with him and two of Voyager’s lovely ladies, but Harry hesitates and reveals that he’s got a girl back home. No revolutionary dialogue or acting here, but this is a matter that every person on Voyager should be considering: will my loved ones back home wait for me? Will they assume I’m dead and move on with life? Will my spouse remarry? Should I try to start a family here on Voyager? Will I raise my children within the walls of this ship? This scene treats the matter light-heartedly, but I hope we’ll see characters wrestling with these questions as the series goes on.

Final verdict: Time travel paradoxes are always fun, but there’s a lot of mediocre in this episode. I can’t get too excited about this one, nor is there anything to get especially riled up about.

Grade: Episode quality is proving too uneven to make it easy to assign a letter grade. So I’ll stick with just the written verdict for now.

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Season 1 Episode 3, “Parallax”

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Andy

With the series pilot and its long checklist of character introductions and background-setting behind us, we turn to “Parallax,” the first regular Voyager episode. Let’s dive right in.

Plot synposis: Voyager begins its long journey back home. Right away, tension is evident between the ship’s uptight Starfleet crew and the relatively undisciplined Maquis crew who have joined them. This tension is most evident in the character of Belana Torres, the half-Klingon Maquis engineer who must learn to fit in with her new Starfleet colleagues. As this and other personal dramas unfold, Voyager runs into a spacial anomaly (the first, I suspect, of a great many) and must find a way to escape a black hole.

If Voyager is to take its “far from home” premise seriously, there are a number of topics it will have to address. Among these are food, fuel, and other resource shortages (since there is no friendly starbase at which to resupply) and the inevitable crew issues that will crop up as people come to grips with their extreme isolation from home. One major crisis-in-the-making is the merger of Voyager‘s crew with that of the Maquis vessel (in “Caretaker”). I’m happy to see Voyager leap right into this subject.

“Parallax” breaks out the familiar A/B plot structure to which most Star Trek episodes adhere: two concurrent plotlines, one usually revolving around a threat or challenge to the ship as a whole, and the other around personal drama among the crew. In “Parallax,” the personal drama plotline is solid but the threat-to-the-ship plotline is intensely forgettable.

As the episode begins, Torres (half-Klingon, former Maquis) has lost her temper and gotten violent with the redshirts (actually yellowshirts) in engineering. I figured Torres for the token Feisty Female, but was pleasantly surprised at how feisty she gets; she really lets Janeway have it at points. Former Maquis commander Chakotay also has at it with Janeway as they negotiate a balance of authority on Voyager. By the end of the episode, everybody has learned a Very Important Lesson about respect; Torres and Janeway have done some girly giggling and bonding; Torres has (with astounding speed) mastered her Klingon rage and become chief engineer; and the immediate crisis of mutiny is past.

I was pretty pleased by this plotline, despite its overly neat conclusion. Crew tension is something I want to be periodically reminded about; but I don’t want it to dominate the series. As this episode ends, the two crews are getting along well enough that the show can continue, but there are certainly Federation-vs-Maquis plot seeds that can be exploited in future episodes. There are a few additional scenes involving the other main characters, notably the Doctor, who is featured in a running gag (his holographic form keeps shrinking) that is less funny than the show’s writers think it is.

Janeway has a chance to distinguish her character from both Picard and Sisko here; it turns out she’s downright excitable, almost giddy, when she’s in problem-solving mode. I like it.

Neelix, alas, is quite firmly ensconced in Very Annoying territory. Time will tell if he ever clambers his way out of that black pit of judgment.

Unfortunately, the other plotline—Voyager‘s encounter with a singularity—is less thrilling. It’s your bog-standard situation in which a Space Danger must be escaped through the clever employment of a techno-gibberish deus ex machina. It works like this: the ship is trapped by the spatial anomaly, and the crew sits around brainstorming technical solutions until they finally hit on one that works. The working solution is always something like “Wait—maybe I could recalibrate the warp field emitters to compensate for the gravimetric pulse!” followed by feverish typing at a data console and the swelling of dramatic music.

So when did it start becoming cool to call black holes singularities?

Voyager ultimately escapes the black hole’s gravity pull by, like, punching through a crack in the event horizon or something. I’m a liberal arts major whose only knowledge of black holes is derived from the 1979 documentary, and this sounds ludicrous even to me. Nonetheless, what is irksome about this (and other technobabble solutions) is that it undercuts the enjoyment you normally experience when the heroes solve a challenging puzzle. When a show puts its heroes in danger, it challenges you, the viewer, to imagine how they might escape from it—and when the heroes do escape, they hopefully do so in a clever but believable way that makes you say “Of course, why didn’t I think of that!” But instead of employing conventional problem-solving tactics that would let the viewer play along, Voyager here just asks you to wait until one of the crew comes up with the correct meaningless techno-phrase. I don’t know how you would escape from a black hole, but whatever you’re thinking would be more dramatically compelling than the Voyager strategy of flooding the event horizon with tachyon particles or self-replicating arglebargles or something.

Voyager shoots some stuff at the thing. Hooray, we're saved!

But hey, this is Star Trek, and I promise I’m not going to complain every time somebody saves the ship at the last minute by rerouting power through the auxiliary phase-array capacitors. I’ll just get that off my chest right here at the beginning and get back to enjoying the episode…

…which, despite my grousing, is not half bad. The cheesy technobabble plot is outweighed by the decent acting and interpersonal tension on display in the Torres/Maquis plot.

A few other miscellaneous notes: Voyager looks very prim and proper, with nary a scratch—so they’ve obviously been able to repair the damage they sustained in “Caretaker.” Fair enough, but one wonders how long they can keep up the ship repair and maintenance as the years grind on. I hope this topic is dealt with realistically and not just handwaved away. Likewise, “Parallax” hints at fuel and food shortages (the replicators are said to be not functioning, although I don’t know if that’s a permanent or temporary situation). Do warp engines eventually run out of fuel? Do replicators ever run out of raw material from which to fashion objects? We shall see.

Final verdict: a decent episode that favorably showcases Torres, Janeway, and Chakotay. The spatial anomaly plot is dull and everything still feels awfully casual for a ship that is supposed to be lost 75 years from home and running out of food; but the good outweighs the bad.

Grade: B

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Voyager Series Pilot (Episodes 1-2): “Caretaker”

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Andy

In the future I may find myself with enough time to subject this, and other, Voyager episodes to in-depth analysis. But it’s late and there’s a two-week-old baby upstairs who could wake up at any moment and demand a bottle, so time is of the essence. In lieu of a Serious Analysis, then, I offer a few random thoughts on “Caretaker,” the series pilot of Voyager.

The Caretaker. He's even less charming in his fiddle-playing old man form.

Quick plot overview: while hunting for a vanished terrorist starship, Voyager and its crew are transported to the other side of the galaxy. There they find the (similarly transported) Maquis ship and confront the godlike alien being who brought them here. They get involved with some annoying peaceful aliens and some ugly post-apocalypse-style scavenger aliens, lecture several different aliens about their religious beliefs and moral responsibilities, and make the tough moral choice to sacrifice their own sure route back home in order to Do the Right Thing/Violate the Prime Directive.

The opening sequence: “Caretaker” opens with a short battle sequence involving the Maquis (Bajoran terrorists/good-guys-gone-too-far who played a major role in Deep Space Nine), and I happen to know (from looking at the back of the Voyager Season 1 DVD set) that these Maquis crewmembers will be a permanent part of the Voyager cast. This is intriguing—the Maquis added a nice shade of moral gray to DS9, and I wouldn’t mind seeing some of that in Voyager as well.

Captain Janeway.

Captain Janeway: When Voyager first came out, most of the discussion among my Trekkie friends centered around how lame it was that Voyager had a female captain. Fortunately I do not fear girls quite as much as I once did, and do not react with visceral fear to Janeway’s authoritative female presence. Going purely by this pilot episode, I think she does fine. She’s given opportunities throughout the episode to evidence both the Gruff and Understanding sides of her character, and in doing so seems an acceptably stable central character for the show. If I had to guess, I’d say that “Caretaker” deliberately plays up her toughness/”masculine” side in an effort to fend off criticism from angry fans—she gets pleasingly no-nonsense with the aforementioned Space Scavengers, and intones the word “FIRE” with the appropriate gravitas. Because of both the role of captain and the narrative requirement that there be a mature authority figure at the center of each Star Trek series, it’s a challenge for Star Trek captains to also be compelling personalities. Time will tell if Janeway does something interesting with her adequate-but-somewhat generic captain role.

Star Trek Drama: Other shows could never get away with this nearly as much as the various Treks do, but right out of the gate, Voyager shows us it can create little dramatic sequences that consist entirely of incomprehensible technobabble. Early in the episode, Voyager has been damaged by its cross-galaxy journey, and we witness this:

dramatic music
Janeway: Unlock the magnetic constrictors.
music swells even more dramatically
Crewman: Constrictors unlocked.
colors shift on the random piece of equipment they are staring at
Janeway: Pressure?
Crewman: It’s working. 2500 kilopascals and holding.
music turns happy; Janeway looks relieved; scene ends

See? The drama is created by meaningless technobabble, and shortly thereafter resolved by it. I mock, but hey—this is part of the reason I watch this show.

You wouldn't guess it from out here, but on the inside it looks a lot like a Cracker Barrel.

On the Array: Man, all of the Star Trek shows seem to really love situations in which the high-tech, uniformed protagonists find themselves in rustic rural scenes. The down-home country characters in this scene are over the top even for Star Trek; but given that they actually are stereotypes manufactured for this purpose by the godlike alien, I guess I can accept it. Just this once.

The Ocampa: While I like the idea of a civilization driven underground by environmental catastrophe (and then threatened by marauding bands of scavengers on the planet surface!), the Ocampa end up as little more than a weak Moral Lesson. Their spokesman is a typical Star Trek even-tempered, soothing-voiced, platitude-speaking religious leader—and may I note here that in 30 years of attending weekly worship services, I have yet to encounter this archetype in real life. (Maybe I’m in the wrong religion?) At any rate, although we get a brief glimpse at internal strife within the Ocampa over their dependence on the Caretaker, we don’t see enough of them to get very invested in their plight. Not that I’m complaining; they seem rather dull.

Lecturing the Caretaker: Janeway’s lecture about allowing children the freedom to grow up does indeed seem like good parenting advice and I will take it into account as I raise my own kids. But scaling that advice to the planetary civilization level, she’s arguing that leaving the Ocampa to eke out a life on a hellish desert planet (starvation, water shortages, victimization by scavengers, etc.) is the right thing to do because it will build character. I know, I know, I get it. But this sort of condescending advice is why other factions in the universe don’t like the Federation.

Final battle: Nice to wrap up the episode with a space battle, although we don’t get to see much of it. I wonder if we’ll see more of this scavenger alien faction in episodes to come (as they promise), or if they’re just a villain of the week. This battle establishes that Voyager is not an all-powerful combat vessel, which should make the inevitable future encounters with hostile aliens interesting.

Warping away into the sunset: Hey, the warp nacelles fold up when Voyager goes into warp! Neat.

The Crew: One thing I’ve not touched on is the large cast of characters introduced in the pilot. As time allows I’d like to look at Voyager’s large cast of characters. Suffice it to say that this looks like an adequate, if not remarkable, motley crew of individuals about on par (as far as plot potential goes) with Deep Space Nine. The diversity of races, personalities, and outlooks on Voyager is meant to sow the seeds for all sorts of interesting storylines to come, and I’m sure it does—but at first glance, it also feels forced and overdone.

Verdict: “Caretaker” contains interesting elements but winds up feeling tepid and un-adventurous. It successfully introduces the cast, giving each crew member one or two plot hooks that we can expect to see explored in the years to come. The opening and closing sequences point to Voyager’s “lost far from home” promise, but honestly, the bulk of this plot could’ve been from a Next Generation episode and I wouldn’t have noticed. Despite the dire situation in which the ship finds itself, there is a strange lack of a sense of urgency throughout this episode. It isn’t a phenomenal series opener, but I’m interested enough that I want to see where it goes.

Grade: B-.

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My seven-year mission: watch Star Trek: Voyager

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Andy

Welcome! I’m Andy, and I’m an unabashed geek. As a child, I was immersed in Star Trek (the original series and movies), lived and breathed Star Wars, and re-read The Lord of the Rings so many times that I could hold a passable conversation in Quenya. Yet despite a childhood surrounded by so much science fiction and fantasy, I managed to miss out on all of the Next Generation-era Star Trek TV series when they were originally aired.

Even if the show does nothing else right, it did come up with a pretty cool-looking starship.

I’m rectifying that now, and I’m blogging my progress. I’ve picked Star Trek: Voyager to watch through over the coming months/years. It’s not considered the strongest of the Trek shows, and I’m sure the going will get pretty tough at points. But the idea behind Voyager has appealed to me from the time I first heard of it, and by Kahless, I’m going to give it a shot.

I hope you’ll join me, and perhaps even watch some of the show alongside me. I’ll write my thoughts and impressions of each episode as I watch; I don’t promise insightful analysis, but I’ll do my best to point out the bad while enjoying the good. I’m no expert on the Next Generation universe, and I’ll no doubt need plenty of correction as I plot along. Wish me luck.

Today is a good day to die.

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