Broken Bow retconned a line by Picard in First Contact where he says "Centuries ago, a disastrous contact with the Klingon Empire led to decades of war. It was decided then we would do surveill
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The General Star Trek Thread of Earl Grey Tea, Baseball, and KHHHAAAANNNN
- Thread starter The Librarian
- Start date
firehawk12
Subete no aware
So season 7 of Voyager has a full on anime episode where the Doctor possesses Seven's body and proceeds to basically do the PG-version of anime-hijinks (no awkward "I'm a guy but now I have to shower with girls because I'm in a girl's body!" scene). It's probably also the only expression of queerness in the show since the Doctor is "turned on" by the massage he gets from the female alien while in Seven's body (but is of course, repulsed when a man kisses "him").
I can't believe Bryan Fuller worked on this show... yeesh. lol
I can't believe Bryan Fuller worked on this show... yeesh. lol
Yeah, I'm struck by how much interplay he actually has with the main characters for a glorified background recurring character. He gets to join in on the random banter in the room in "Booby Trap" for instance, where normally minor characters should be in "speak when spoken to" mode.
(On that note, I had forgotten how much fun they had with Picard going apeshit over getting to examine this ancient piece of history. "It belongs in a museum!" And then he just blows it up. More like Indiana Jones than I thought.
Henchmen21
Banned
To be fair, there was no way to retrieve it without getting caught in that trap again.
The Hamburglar
Banned
Watching another tng episode and riker is at it again. Guy gets laid more than than the federation combined.
Yeah, but sometimes he has to kill the girl instead of having sex with her. It's a hard life, man.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Speaking of Clip episodes, the season 7 VOY episode "Shattered" is actually a decent one. I'm surprised.
SolidSnakeUS
Member
I really enjoy that episode.
Henchmen21
Banned
Rewatched this earlier today and then got sad realizing how many of them are no longer with us since it aired
The Hamburglar
Banned
Lmao. That's exactly the episode I was watching.
Love that they call him out on his relentless single-mindedness in "Captain's Holiday".
"Have I mentioned how imaginative the Risian women are, Captain?"
"...Too often, Commander."
Rewatching it I guess you should give the show credit for treating women as sexual beings just like the men, however they constantly undercut themselves by having Troi be utterly passive and going for the slimiest moves known to man. I guess that could have been worked into her character and explored more, but it mostly seems like they just use it as a shortcut to drama and don't particularly care how creepy it comes off in repetition. Poor Beverly almost made it the entire series before she too was given a creeptastic love affair to "enjoy".
firehawk12
Subete no aware
To be fair, Picard gets the alien creeper treatment too.
HappenstanceUK
Member
Thats probably the best "clip show" episode I've ever seen. Such a clever way to recap a lot of whats happened in the show without making it feel cheap and useless.
Late-season Voyager had like two episodes a season where they reminded you how much consistently better the show would have been had they stayed on-target with their premise. As it was, "Shattered" still manages to work, and it's one of the few episodes I think that shows that when he's given something interesting to do Beltran can give a decent performance.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Yeah, and it even gave a glimpse into the future, which was kind of neat.
Yeah, like for some reason the Maquis storyline would pop up again even though it made no sense by the time the series was near the end.
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On the flip side, Endgame is such a terrible finale. It's sad that Neelix is the only character on the show that got a decent send-off, while everyone else is just left in limbo with a stupid Borg explosion.
"Terrible" Janeway rears her head again, and not only does she basically violate yet more Starfleet protocols (I suppose it's a nice touch that Harry Kim is the only one who tries to stop her, and he lets her go because he also used time travel to "cheat"), but she basically chooses Seven of Nine over the dozens of crewmembers that have died before Season 7.
On a story level, they tried to find a way to wrap up the Borg as well as get the crew home and they basically ruined both arcs. What a mess. I also can't believe that there was a time when the room debated having Voyager return home at all. I guess having the ship just fly around the Delta Quadrant without a real ending would have been the only way they could have screwed it up even more.
Oh well. Finale aside, I think the show is okay. It's not as terrible as I remember it being, but its faults are really apparent and just serve to remind you of the squandered opportunities. It's funny because every Trek basically went through a "reboot" of sorts in season 3, and for the most part every show came out ahead because of it. But somehow Voyager just sort of maintained course after the Borg, peaking at around season 5 and then just plateauing from there.
I'm debating starting Enterprise, because I remember hating it even more than Voyager - it's the only Trek where I skipped episodes.
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
Endgame is a guilty pleasure for me. It's everything that was wrong about Voyager in one episode. Janeway committing an unspeakably evil crime. Trying to asuade her guilt by saving 3 of her friends. She doesn't care about the rest of her crew who died. She doesn't care about people she wiped from existence (like Naomi's kid). Endgame is Janeway at her most diabolical.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Oh shit, I forgot about Naomi's kid. lol
What's doubly stupid is that they did the exact same story with Harry Kim, but at least his reason for wanting to change the timeline made more sense than Janeway's arbitrary decision. The fact that he was limited to changing that one single event also made some sense - ie, why he couldn't just stop Voyager from leaving in the first place.
What's doubly stupid is that they did the exact same story with Harry Kim, but at least his reason for wanting to change the timeline made more sense than Janeway's arbitrary decision. The fact that he was limited to changing that one single event also made some sense - ie, why he couldn't just stop Voyager from leaving in the first place.
Honestly you can forgive Janeway letting crew die, because she's still trying to walk that line of "screwing the timeline completely" and getting Voyager home, and so she tries to pick a time right before the convenient Borg transwarp corridor. You can say if you're going to rewrite history, go whole-hog, but I think it's a defendable point of view.
Where it falls apart somewhat is that they lost Lt. Carey basically three weeks before that, so it is a total "fuck you" to him. Nothing of any importance apparently happened between that point except for Neelix finding his home and Tom Paris getting a speeding ticket, so why show up when you did?
Where it falls apart somewhat is that they lost Lt. Carey basically three weeks before that, so it is a total "fuck you" to him. Nothing of any importance apparently happened between that point except for Neelix finding his home and Tom Paris getting a speeding ticket, so why show up when you did?
weemadarthur
Member
I love you guys. And you're all right about Endgame.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Haha, poor redshirt Carey. Yeah, I bet they didn't even think of that when they wrote up the episode. Then again that episode ended with Janeway saying that people shouldn't die in space exploration missions - which again, makes you wonder why she didn't prevent Voyager from leaving in the first place.
(Funny enough they bring back Vorik right at the end too.)
Yeah, and that's a spot where the loose continuity comes back to bite you. Honestly rewatching TNG there's a lot more connections between episodes than I remembered, they're just generally non-essential, and in the era of peak TV I find that pretty refreshing. But they couldn't do a show like Voyager in that manner without some sacrifices, and they just made a few too many.
Stallion Dan
Member
A third into S3 of Voyager, the loose continuity is so random, like in Future's End part 2 The Doctor mentions his memory loss from 5 episodes earlier in a brief line.
The biggest crime is forgetting about the Borg baby though. They bothered to show other Borg kids finding their parants but that baby is never seen or mentioned again.
The biggest crime is forgetting about the Borg baby though. They bothered to show other Borg kids finding their parants but that baby is never seen or mentioned again.
If Future Janeway had pushed the Temporal Prime Directive just a little bit harder and saved Lt. Carey as well her favorites like Seven and Tuvok, yes, his life would have been saved, but in exchange he would've had to endure three more weeks of life on Voyager. Future Janeway did him a mercy by letting him stay dead.
I dunno, I imagine that last few days after Neelix left everyone on board felt this massive release of tension.
Honestly as much as time travel can be a massive ball of hurt and weird conflict and confusion, in some ways I like the basic issue of people in "the past" changing the future, and how some of those futures are apparently tolerated. It'd be interesting to dig into the fact that the 29th century Starfleet is essentially fine with changing the timeline when it suits them, generally as long as they themselves aren't doing the changing. Obviously someone decided it was fine for future Janeway to go back and change things, or for Kirk to save the whales, et al.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
90% of the details have escaped my mind, but I really appreciated in one of the post-finale novels there was some threat that ended up becoming a much bigger problem than it should've because Endgame Admiral Janeway erased the part of the timeline where the Voyager crew's extended travels nipped it in the bud.
Stallion Dan
Member
I believe the 29th century time cops are all about stopping others with time altering technology like themselves, not time travel 'primitives' so to speak..
Someone calculated that given the number of species and populations in the Trek universe, how frequently individual ships changed the timeline (Feds and non-Feds alike) the universe is being erased and replaced every 4 seconds by timetravel douchery.
The Hamburglar
Banned
Is all Star Trek on Netflix 4:3?
JoshuaJSlone
Member
As far as the 29th century people are concerned, those events are for better or worse established history that lead to their reality, not something they'd want to meddle with without good reason. Now the DTI agents or whatever of Endgame Admiral Janeway's time--yeah, they blew it.
Escape Goat
Member
what happened to Wildman's kid? I forget.
Henchmen21
Banned
I don't know about Enterprise but everything from TOS-Voyager was 4:3 because that's how it was filmed.
And the best part is that unlike her past self she knows she is breaking the prime directive...but she just doesn't give a shit.
Past Janeway is like I will always uphold the Prime Directive unless I say otherwise but I when it's really needed I will decide against it because I am a federation captain.
I really don't think she broke it all that often, insofar that the Prime Directive is generally focused on preventing contamination of pre-warp civilizations with a side dish of "stay out of internal affairs if you can". Certainly she broke it less brazenly (regarding the prewarp civilizations) than Kirk.
Situations like the Hirogen and their holographic technology, or the Borg and Species 8472, are complete grey areas and I can't fault her character for any of those choices.
At the start of Endgame, Harry bumps into Naomi's kid at the Voyager reunion, and he's like "Wow, I can't believe how big you've grown!" (Naomi, being the kid who was born on Voyager, has her own kid now, to highlight how much time has passed.)
Harry talks to Janeway about how great it is to see the Voyager Family all back together again, and Janeway mopes about how "not everyone" made it. Tuvok is in a mental hospital because they didn't make it home soon enough and because made up Vulcan culture excuses, and Seven died on some random away mission causing Chakotay to die of lonely heart (because we all know how much epic chemistry Seven and Chakotay had).
Janeway decides to restore her Voyager Family by changing the timeline. In doing so she erases Naomi's kid, who Harry considered Voyager Family at the bare minimum, and doesn't bother to go back far enough to save Lt Carey, because he's not "Voyager Family". Janeway is very picky about whose lives she saves. Tuvok, Seven, Chakotay... those are the kind of family members that are worth saving. The rest can die in a fire.
To be fair, the times that Star Trek as a whole cares about the lives of minor characters can probably be summed up with fingers on your hands. TNG and DS9 managed to wring some pathos out of it, generally, but it's still "fuck the non-regular cast members."
I think the most egregious bit I remember is the guy who dies when they crash the Dominion ship, when Dax walks off basically the same injury later on in the series.
Stallion Dan
Member
Something Voyager does better than any other Trek imo, hostile monster aliens.
The Hamburglar
Banned
there is always some ridiculous solution with the main deflector though. that deflector dish can do anything.
Nah, they solve the giant viruses with an equally giant grenade.
Escape Goat
Member
Voyager solved so many things with "modifications" and nanoprobes.
Technobabble was taken to a whole new level on that show. One instance that I always hated was when B'lanna invented a whole new way to transport people through Borg shields in a matter of seconds. "I'll try locking onto the minerals in their bones." why is that going to work? How come nobody thought of it before? No time to solve this problem we've written ourselves into. We got to get the 2nd act wrapped up!
Technobabble was taken to a whole new level on that show. One instance that I always hated was when B'lanna invented a whole new way to transport people through Borg shields in a matter of seconds. "I'll try locking onto the minerals in their bones." why is that going to work? How come nobody thought of it before? No time to solve this problem we've written ourselves into. We got to get the 2nd act wrapped up!
Henchmen21
Banned
To be fair, as much as I love TNG, You start to see this happen late TNG (like season 6 or so).
And it's not the technobabble in and of itself, it's that it sounds so made up. Prior to that the technobabble at least sounded real. Like it had actual science behind it in some small form. The technobabble that would later arise in the shows sounded so phony like the kind of thing a 12yr old would make up.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Oh my god, Nanoprobes are Voyager's version of the magic Khan blood. Any time someone is about to die, nanoprobes.
Voyager was also a missed opportunity inasmuch as it would have been nice to see people choose to leave the ship without being evil. Like, why does Neelix choose to stay with Voyager and go to the Alpha quadrant? The ending he got, where he finds a random Talaxian colony, could have happened at any point during the series. I wonder what would have happened if they actually stuck to that plot where Tom Paris leaves Voyager to join the Talaxians and then either promoted a new character to the "main cast" from within the Voyager crew or just added a new alien character.
Funny the only transient characters that were on Voyager - people who were around for more than one episode - were the Borg children.
I really wish they had the balls to kill someone off on DS9. Not because of weird contract shenanigans, but because they planned for a character to die.
Voyager was also a missed opportunity inasmuch as it would have been nice to see people choose to leave the ship without being evil. Like, why does Neelix choose to stay with Voyager and go to the Alpha quadrant? The ending he got, where he finds a random Talaxian colony, could have happened at any point during the series. I wonder what would have happened if they actually stuck to that plot where Tom Paris leaves Voyager to join the Talaxians and then either promoted a new character to the "main cast" from within the Voyager crew or just added a new alien character.
Funny the only transient characters that were on Voyager - people who were around for more than one episode - were the Borg children.
To be fair, nanoprobes would be incredibly powerful.
And yeah, the problem isn't the technobabble but the fact that it was thrown out without making sense. Like isotons being a unit of measurement when that makes no sense given what iso means.
Stallion Dan
Member
If we're going there, then I need point out the entire idea of subspace is nonsense.
Yeah, but it's part of Star Trek. It already has faster-than-light travel, all it needs to do is be internally consistent and smart with the science that is actually applicable to what we know now.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Well, there's already fluidic space that apparently allows people to travel to other dimensions/galaxies (why they didn't ask 8472 to take them to Earth? who knows).
JoshuaJSlone
Member
One of the first episodes. Beamed out during a storm, dude gets stuff that was blowing around him stuck in him. Transporter wasn't ready for prime time.
The unreliability of those old transporters kept worrying me in Beyond, since Scotty was pushing them so far with some minor tinkering.
Yeah the "oh it was designed for single transport and cargo" to "eh I can beam dozens of people at a time" bothered me a little since there was nary a line about it.
VenomousCoffee
Member
So I've been watching Voyager today while doing some work, starting with Scorpion. I haven't watched any of these in years, and I was always more of a DS9 fan.
I remember Voyager as being ... serviceable at its best and sometimes actively bad. But these have been better than that, like maybe, pretty decent. At least by the standards of genre TV with 20+ episode seasons.
Edit: And the intro sequence is actually pretty great.
I remember Voyager as being ... serviceable at its best and sometimes actively bad. But these have been better than that, like maybe, pretty decent. At least by the standards of genre TV with 20+ episode seasons.
Edit: And the intro sequence is actually pretty great.