Episode 170: Endgame

Well here we are, at last, the end,
But wait, I’ve this finale to still comprehend,
To do this I'll use the power of rhyme
And show how the writers once again have Janeway travel in time
We start twenty years in the future and they’ve made it to Earth,
Tuvok’s insane, the Doctor’s married, but Harry’s a captain for all that’s worth,
Giving lessons to students on the Borg is Barclay
Oh and with special guest Admiral Janeway
A student asks her about Seven Of Nine
But to answer that she does decline
Then Janeway wants drugs to protect against radiation of time
From the Doctor for no particular reason or rhyme
Oh and the Doctor has now decided his name is Joe
But still he’s doing better than Chakotay who’s six feet below
Meanwhile in the “present” Seven is Chakotay’s romantic squeeze
And Tuvok has a secret chronic Vulcan disease
I guess Seven abandoned her search for perfection
Well its no more stupid than everything else on reflection
Seven detects hundreds of wormholes in a nebula they’ve come upon
While in the future Janeway’s getting some mysterious technology from a Klingon
Barclay breaks down and tells this to Doctor Joe
To bring her back, Captain Harry does go
The fact he’s a Captain in 2402
Just shows StarFleet ain’t got a clue
Present and the nebula is filled with a Borg fleet
So Captain Janeway does order a retreat
In future, Admiral Janeway to Harry explains
That her past decision needs to be changed
I know it’s a woman’s prerogative to think again
But even I didn’t think she’d go to that much pain
Harry of course let’s her go to the present cos he’s a quitter
In the past there are two Janeways, could this get any shitter?
The Borg Queen is thrilled to hear about this development
I on the other hand could not care in this event
They then argue because they like to make a scene
While Seven is communicated by the Borg Queen
She says she’ll spare the ship if away from the nebula they jet
But future Janeway has brought technology so the Borg are no threat.
Back in the nebula the Borg are useless
As the Borg Queen’s cubes are in some distress
Then they find the transwarp hub which the Borg use to get about
Admiral Janeway wants to bring Voyager back with this route
The crew decide to destroy the hub and take the long way instead
Bet the Admiral had wished she’d stopped in bed
She tells Captain Janeway that Seven’s dead if this she allows
Man, she’s turned into such an old gossip now
A way is found to destroy the hub and get home with little fuss
By tricking the Borg Queen and giving the Borg a virus
With the Borg destroyed, to the Alpha Quadrant Voyager does return
As they arrived back so did Paris and Torres’ daughter we do learn
So yeah, they pretty much remade TNG’s All Good Things.
And so ends my various Voyager summings.
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Episode 169: Renaissance Man

 

Two seasons worth I’ve had to wait but finally there’s a good episode, just before the finale. Of course, it heavily features the Doctor.

Janeway and the Doctor are off in the Delta Flyer to some conference or other, when they detect a plasma surge. Cut to Janeway telling Chakotay about it in her ready room. It seems that a race of aliens owns this entire region of space and doesn’t allow warp so they’ll have to hand the drive over. Janeway then talks to Torres about towing the drive away. Suspicious Chakotay is suspicious however and asks the Doctor to examine Janeway but of course she doesn’t like physicals. Just once I’d love to see a Captain who did. It turns out that she’s being held prisoner by the potato people (or Hierarchy as they’re called). They want Voyager’s warp drive or they’ll kill her, so the Doctor assumed her identity to get it. I’ll ignore that warp drive > captain. One of the fictitious aliens appears on the view screen to hurry them along. Suspicious Chakotay is still suspicious so the Doctor knocks him out, puts him in a drawer and assumes his identity. This followed by doing the same to Harry, though he doesn’t assume his identity, I mean, why would you? While he is in the guise of Torres, Paris with great timing, picks now to be romantic to his “wife”. After all this he relaxes listening to a classical music piece. Tuvok though ruins it all by finding out what’s going on, so the Doctor goes on the run, making duplicates in the holodeck. With the entire ship out looking for him he finds it quite easy to eject the core, escape in the Flyer and take it to the potato people. Unfortunately they take the drive and him into the bargain. Of course, he’s taken this into account however and left a clue in the piece of music which plays throughout Voyager. They send a shuttle to rescue him, the Captain and the drive intact. The Doctor - 48453. Delta Quadrant - 0.

So the writers have finally realised that the best way to make Voyager good is to have the Doctor play everyone.

Episode 168: Homestead

 

The crew is having a party in the messhall to celebrate the anniversary of Vulcans saying “Hi there” to the people of the Earth. But before you can say “Please Neelix don’t dance” he does. Fortunately Chakotay stops him with the news they’ve located Talaxians ahead (his people, not Chakotay’s, Neelix’s). Paris, Tuvok and Neelix go in the Flyer to see them a they’re in an asteroid field. The ship gets damaged in a mining explosion and Neelix wakes inside on of the asteroids with a Talaxian woman, Dexa, tending to him. She tells him they avoid contact with outsiders, that went well then. She also says she shouldn’t be speaking to him, that’s gone equally as well. They used abandoned technology in the asteroids to make a home for themselves. Wouldn’t it be easier to live on, I dunno, a planet?! According to Star Trek you can’t move for uninhabited M class planets Dexa has a young son and is a widow, so obviously Neelix falls in love with her. Another race then turns up who look like Pinhead without the pins (Head, I guess?) stating they own the asteroids. Neelix tries to negotiate with them but being nasty alien types they don’t care. The Talaxians have to move to a nearby planet (See!) but still aren’t happy. Neelix has a talk with Tuvok involves hypotheticals and decides to help the Talaxians to defend their home in the rocks. Janeway in turn isn’t happy now but lets him go. They succeed in their defence with Voyager’s help and Neelix returns to Voyager. Naomi Wildman (last appearance!) is too busy to play games with him since she has Chakotay’s Palaeontology class in the morning. Boy, I bet that’s an interesting lesson. Eventually he decides what we’ve all known since the start and he leaves to become the Federation ambassador to the Delta Quadrant.

Aside from the first scene I actually didn’t find Neelix all that annoying in this episode. True he’s nearly always irritating but his leaving scenes felt right for the character who’s been with the show since the start. Indeed the Neelix/Tuvok dynamic was handled the best it’s ever been in this one. Pity the actual story was the usual bland mix of cliched plots.

Episode 167: Natural Law

 

Chakotay and Seven are going to some conference on a planet when he decides to show her some of the scenery. Which is all fine apart from Seven is completely bored of it all, oh and he crashes the shuttle into an energy barrier. Not to worry, plenty more where that came from. So that means she’s then trapped with Mr Outdoors on the forested planet surface. Fun times for all! What we need is an exciting B tale to lift this episode. Paris? In another shuttle story? Guess I’ll have to hope one, just one, of the remaining three is good. Anyway, Paris is being a pilot jerk and is given a dressing down from the planet authorities. He seems to think that because he didn’t know about the laws of the planet, that’s fine. Yep, because that’s how it is when it’s the human is the criminal. He’s ordered to undergo flight training which Janeway agrees with. I assume to get him out of her hair for a while. That’s where he lives you see. In her hair. With all of Seven’s nanoprobes. What? Fine, back to the episode. On the planet below, Seven and Chakotay find some alien Native American types. Yes, his people. Despite Seven’s protests, Chakotay, totally by accident of course, communicates with them. While Seven gets lost and finds her own Indian woman to guide her in the ways of the world. Not like that you perverts. Paris’ flight teacher is of course old and wants to take his time over everything, which Harry and Torres find hilarious. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Speaking of the wood, back on the planet, Chakotay finds that Seven was right as the natives copy his tattoo design. Poor bastards. The tester asks Paris at one point if he’s familiar with professional pride, well the writers sure aren’t. Chakotay and Seven eventually find each other again and bring down the barrier from within. Turns out the barrier was put up by another race of aliens years before to protect the natives. Sure enough as soon as it’s down, the other planet inhabitants want to build on it. Probably a casino. So Janeway puts the barrier up again, thanks to Paris’ flying ability. Well we’ve got to have the two stories linking up in some way don’t we?

Episode 166: Friendship One

We start with Janeway on the space phone to StarFleet and telling them about the Distant Origins episode. Not surprising really if you think about it. “No really, we had some times we didn’t see spatial anomalies”. She’s given a mission to find a probe powered by antimatter that went missing in the area 300 years ago. The mission will take them slightly out of there way. Does StarFleet actually want them to come back? The human bridge crew all reminisce about how they had to learn about it in school. Even Neelix is getting bored by it. They eventually find the irradiated planet it’s on and have to send an away team in a shuttle. The away team consists of Chakotay, Harry, Neelix, Paris and Ensign Ricky. Sorry, I mean Carey. He might as well be two days away from retirement too. Which if you were, you’d be mightily annoyed you were in the Delta Quadrant. On the planet, they find pieces of the probe before everyone but Chakotay and Harry are captured. They make it back in the Flyer with a stowaway. On Voyager the Doctor uses Seven’s amazing fix all Nanoprobes (Order now and get this free pen!) to heal the stowaway’s radiation sickness. On the planet it transpires that when the probe crashed there people used the antimatter to fashion weapons and destroy each other, which is apparently the humans fault. They want transport off the planet to a more hospitable one, but that would take years. I’m sure StarFleet wouldn’t mind. Neelix tries to empathise with them by saying they’re better once you get to know them because he thought they were arrogant at first. He did? Don’t remember that at all. All the aliens on the planet seem to be warming to them except the leader because that’s how it works. Minority leaders is the in thing in the Delta Quadrant. Oh and Carey died. Eventually the hostages are freed by using the Doctor which I honestly didn’t see coming. Janeway modifies a few of the plentiful photon torpedoes on the atmosphere and shally me gally me zoop everything’s fine again! Thus ends their second StarFleet mission in seven years. The first they get thrown across the galaxy and this one a crewman dies, they don’t have much luck do they?

Episode 165: Author, Author

So Voyager now has two way communication with the Alpha Quadrant with no delay but I can’t get internet on the train. Barclay is the first person they see and so he has now been in more Voyager than TNG episodes. The crew all get allotted time to call home for three minutes and Harry’s going to call his mum. He wants to know who everyone else is going to call. They’re going to call your mum too Harry *wink*. Anyway, all this is so that the Doctor can speak to his literary agent for he has written a holonovel which has the crew in it being evil dicks. Isn’t that just Living Witness? Nah, that was good. Well  I say the crew, there are subtle changes.  Lt Marseilles instead of Lt Paris, get it?!  The novel itself is about being an oppressed hologram but the crew are more annoyed about being portrayed in a bad light. Wait, until they hear about Paramount. Meanwhile, Torres talks to her father via the TransGalactic Super Highway despite the fact they both look the same age albeit one has 5 o’clock shadow to look older. The father has facial hair too. Ah, comedy. The Doctor eventually agrees to make the changes after he is shown a version where he is portrayed in a similar manner, well more so. His agent though, releases the old version anyway. Agents eh? Apparently the Doctor doesn’t have any rights as a person so a Federation Arbitrator is to decide. That’s right, it’s Star Trek Court Room TimeTM! During this Janeway compares the Doctor's struggle to the Civil Rights Movement and the Suffragettes of the 20th century. Good to see she's kept her perspective.  The Arbitrator rules that he’s not a person, though he is an artist. So like Prince?

Overall with this episode a couple of amusing performances and a tacked on sub TNG: Measure Of A Man ending do not a good episode make.  Also apparently the Doctor is a unique hologram.  Does that mean the holograms of Fair Haven and that battled the Hirogen didn't exist?  I can never unwatch them though.

Episode 164: Q2

Icheb bores Janeway by giving her a 35 chapter presentation on Kirk. Q then appears along with his son (played by John DeLancie’s son) and leaves him with Janeway to babysit him. Look, he’s chewing gum, see, he doesn’t play by the rules! Standby for madcap hilarity! *audience laughter* Q2 begins by asking Janeway when is Voyager going to do something interesting and then fuses Neelix’ jaw shut. Okay, I’m liking this guy. Disappear Harry from the space-time continuum and I’ll start a church based on him. Of course, he then brings the Borg to them. That’s so 2365. Q comes back to see how they’re all getting on and finds Janeway in a bubble bath. We’ll not dwell on that suffice to say, so much for water recycling on Voyager. To make Q2 more compliant the Q Continuum remove his powers. And that’s so 2366! What is this, Q’s Greatest Hits? He’ll be risking himself to save someone else’s life next. Chakotay oversees Q2 dealing with a diplomacy holodeck programme, but Q2 reprogrammes the HoloDiplomat’s personalities. Janeway’s not too happy at this, she doesn’t like it when she’s not the one doing it. Evidently thanks to the boring influence of Icheb, Q2 settles down and becomes a model citizen. Until that is, his daddy issues flare up again and he creates a wormhole to visit the Chokuzon and attack them. Icheb is injured by an unknown weapon so the Doctor can’t save him. Icheb goes back to Chokuzon space at risk to himself and find out, so Icheb can be saved. There we go! Shortly afterwards they visit the Q Continuum which is situated cheaply and conveniently enough in the mess hall. The Continuum decide against turning him into an amoeba but give him the next worst face, being on Voyager... or human, I forget which. Q himself gives concessions though, so everyone can get their powers back who should have them, including Clark Kent in Superman II. And that ladies and gentlemen is the final appearance of Q in Star Trek.