Voyager | the m0vie blog

Star Trek: Voyager – Projections (Review)

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Darren

This September and October, we’re taking a look at the jam-packed 1994 to 1995 season of Star Trek, including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. Check back daily for the latest review.

Projections is really the first episode of Star Trek: Voyager that feels like it is the right script coming from the right staff writer. At the start of the show’s first season, it seemed like writing assignments were handed out almost at random, with no real acknowledgement of the relative strength of any of the writers involved.

Brannon Braga is one of the best science-fiction high-concept writers in the history of franchise, but he was assigned the character-driven second episode Parallax and the issue-driven Emanations; Michael Piller’s personal strengths were always more firmly aligned with character development, so it felt strange to see him writing the time travel adventure Time and Again and the anomaly of the week in The Cloud.

All by myself…

Pushing the boundaries of a writing staff is something worth doing – forcing various members of the team to ease themselves out of their comfort zone – but it felt counter-productive to do this during the first season of a new Star Trek show. After all, the first season is about putting the best foot forward, and many of the early scripts for the show feel like they were handed to the wrong writers during the development process.

With Projections, it feels like Brannon Braga finally has a Voyager script that plays entirely to his strengths as a writer. It is arguably his most character-driven script on the franchise to date, but it also anchored in a pretty fascinating existential dilemma. In many respects, it is a spiritual companion to Frame of Mind, a sixth season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generationpreoccupied with questions about what reality actually might be.

Everything falls apart…

Following on from Heroes and Demons, Projections is only the second episode of Voyager to focus on the character of the Doctor. However, much like Heroes and Demons, it demonstrates the versatility of the character and the range of the actor. Projections is a very clever script that relies on its central character to really carry it across the line. At this point in Voyager‘s run, Robert Picardo seems to be one of the few members of the ensemble who could really pull it off.

The result is one of the (if not the) strongest episode of the show’s first two seasons – somewhat appropriate, given the way the show straddles the gap between the first and second seasons.

He’s not all there…

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: barclay, Brannon Braga, doctor, emh, Holodeck, Philip K. Dick, projections, reality, robert picardo, star trek, star trek: voyager, Television, voyager | 5 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Initiations (Review)

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Darren

Broadcast as the second episode of the second season, Initiations was the first episode produced as part of the second season of Star Trek: Voyager. As three of the four shows carried over from the first season – Projections, Elogium and Twisted – were essentially budget-saving bottle shows, the plan was to shuffle some location-heavy episodes into the broadcast order to offer something a bit more exciting and engaging.

Initiations also marked the return of producer Michael Piller to the fold. Piller had left Voyager mid-way through the first season to work on another science-fiction show for UPN. After Legend was cancelled, Piller returned to work on Voyager and found himself presiding over a very troubled second season. The second season of Voyager would be the last time that Piller was actively involved in a season of Star Trek, and so it feels like a pretty momentous occasion for the franchise.

While not spectacular, and suffering from some lingering Kazon-related problems, Initiations is still an effective forty-five minutes of television.

Stargazing…

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: chakotay, initiations, Jeri Taylor, kar, kazon, kazon oogla, kenneth biller, legend, Michael Piller, star trek, star trek: voyager, voyager | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Voyager – The 37’s (Review)

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Darren

The 37’s did not close out the first broadcast season of Star Trek: Voyager, as the producers had intended. The last episode produced in the first season run, it was held back in the schedule into the second season – a decision made by UPN to allow Voyager to get an early start the following autumn. Still, the decision to reposition The 37‘s as the premiere of the broadcast season is quite telling.

Airing ahead of the three episodes produced before it, and ahead of any episodes produced specifically for the second season, there’s a sense that the production team intend The 37’s to be an important episode. After all, the season premiere is just as important as the season finalé in the basic structure of a broadcast season. The finalé serves as a capstone for what has come before, while (hopefully) indicating what might follow. The premiere is a way of setting up what is yet to come.

We have lift-off…

So the positioning on The 37’s is interesting, because it indicates just how much the production team had invested in the episode. This is a big episode of Voyager, this is an important episode of Star Trek. As such, it makes for a completely unsatisfying experience. The 37’s isn’t a bad episode by any measure – it has a few interesting ideas and a few memorable elements – but it’s not ambitious. It doesn’t radically change Voyager, but it also doesn’t distil it. It doesn’t offer the sense of purpose lacking for morst of the first season.

The 37’s just sort of is. It’s an episode that would be functional shuffled into the middle of a season – a few episodes earlier or later than broadcast. However, it simply doesn’t work when scheduled into a high-profile slot, particular when it has been moved so consciously and so purposefully.

A second pilot?

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: 1937, amelia earhart, Brannon Braga, captain janeway, janeway, Jeri Taylor, kathryn janeway, nostalgia, science fiction, star trek, star trek: voyager, the 37s, thirties, upn, voy, voyager | 8 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Learning Curve (Review)

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Darren

So, Learning Curve is the last episode broadcast as part of Star Trek: Voyager‘s first season. It’s hard to get too excited about – or be too disappointed by – that.

Learning Curve is a bit of limp finalé to a mediocre season. Like a lot of the season before it, it’s a passable execution of what should have been a fantastic concept. (Boy, that really is Voyager in a nutshell, isn’t it?)

Is the show finally starting to gel?

Learning Curve‘s position in the broadcast order was apparently a bit of blind luck. It was actually the fifth-last episode produced of the show’s first season. It just found itself broadcast in the “season finalé” slot when UPN decided to hold back the remaining four episodes of the season until the Fall, to broadcast leading into the second season.

However, despite this, Learning Curve seems as good a choice as any to close out the first season – and certainly a better choice than Brannon Braga and Jeri Taylor’s preferred candidate, The 37’s. It returns to the conflict between Starfleet and the Maquis promised in Caretaker, but only fleetingly acknowledged in episodes like Parallax or State of Flux. Although the execution leaves a lot to be desired, it does create a sense that the show has come something of a full circle.

It’s Chakotay or the high way…

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: delta quadrant, learning curve, Maquis, military, Season finale, star trek, star trek: voyager, Starfleet, tuvok, voyager | 12 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Jetrel (Review)

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Darren

Jetrel is an interesting episode for a number of reasons. It’s another example of how the first season of Star Trek: Voyager seems anchored in the aftermath of the Second World War. The episode exists primarily as a meditation on guilt over the use of atomic weapon, with the Metreon Cascade attack on Rinax standing in for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Negaska in 1945. Jetrel aired three months shy of the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing, and amid a national period of reflection about the morality of Harry S. Truman’s actions.

Whatever the context of Jetrel in 1995, it serves as another example of how Voyager seems like a relic from a bygone age, a snapshot of atomic age science-fiction. Cathexis was the show doing Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Faces was an old-fashioned monster movie. Jetrel wasn’t even the first time that the first season had traded in atomic imagery. The aftermath of the polaric detonation in Time and Again was very clearly designed to evoke the aftermath of an atomic blast.

The devil in the pale moonlight…

Even without all this baggage, Jetrel still feels like a mess of an episode. The heart of the story finds a member of the ensemble confronting a former war criminal while dealing with issues of war guilt and responsibility – a structure that evokes Duet the penultimate episode of the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. While that episode worked brilliantly, there’s a sense that Jetrel is burdened a little bit trying to offer a two-hander about guilt while tackling the issue of the atomic bomb.

The problem is compounded by a somewhat messy final act that eschews all the episode’s heavy character-based drama in favour of a contrived techno-babble climax that involves a lot of characters spouting nonsense while playing with light-emitting diodes. Jetrel begins as the strongest and boldest episode of the show’s first season, but ends as one of the prime examples of Voyager‘s preference for techno-babble over character work.

Burn with me…

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: atomic age, delta quadrant, jetrel, kennedy, metreon cascade, NASA, neelix, new frontier, nineties, oppenheimer, science fiction, sixties, space, space race, star trek: voyager, voyager | 10 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Faces (Review)

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Darren

One of the more interesting aspects of the first season of Star Trek: Voyager is just how much of a throwback the show seems to be. In many ways, the show seems anchored in a very fifties mindset. While Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has embraced multiculturalism and the wake of the Cold War, the first season of Star Trek: Voyager seems to be dealing with anxieties carried over from the end of the Second World War.

Caretaker reconnected with the “Wild West in outer space” mentality of the classic Star Trek. Episodes like Time and Again and Jetrel are concerned with the splitting of the atom. Cathexis played out a decidedly Cold War paranoia thriller. Good old-fashioned technological espionage – like the leaking of nuclear secrets – was at the heart of State of Flux. There’s a sense that Voyager may have been a piece of fifties Americana that had the misfortune to arrive forty years too late.

Faces is perhaps the most obvious example of this. Splitting a bi-racial character into two halves as part of a science experiment, evoking classic monster movies, and even the decision to define the Vidiians as stand-ins for the Nazis, all give the episode a delightfully pulpy feel. This is Voyager doing a cheesy fifties b-movie. And doing it quite well at that.

He has you now, his pretty!

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: AIDS, b'elanna torres, concentration camp, face/off, faces, HIV, i'm going to take his face off, illness, mining, Nazi Germany, review, sickness, star trek: voyager, sulan, torres, transporter accident, vidiians, voyager | 19 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Cathexis (Review)

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Darren

Cathexis has a vaguely interesting premise, but it gets a little bit too caught up in science-fiction high concepts and New Age mysticism.

Once again, there’s a sense that the wrong writer has been assigned the wrong brief. The New Age spirituality elements of Chakotay’s character were largely championed by Michael Piller; the “romantic period mystery” story for Janeway clearly comes from Jeri Taylor. The only part of Cathexis that clearly comes from credited writer Brannon Braga is the somewhat generic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers“ plot line – and, as such, it seems to be the only thread in which Braga is particularly interested.

So we get a bunch of half-hearted New Age stuff unfolding, with Chakotay’s wandering spirit represented by a camera with a blurry filter swooping through familiar sets. Once again, Chakotay’s Native American heritage becomes a launching pad for some ill-advised mysticism and exoticism, which Cathexis never even bothers trying to explain.

Frankly, I’m surprised Tuvok put up with this for so long…

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: Brannon Braga, Brian Markinson, cathexis, chakotay, durst, faces, Holodeck, medicine wheel, Michael Piller, native americans, new age, peter durst, possession, racism, red scare, sexism, star trek, star trek: voyager, voyager | 12 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Heroes and Demons (Review)

Posted on October 13, 2014 by Darren

In many ways, Heroes and Demons is a watershed moment for Star Trek: Voyager. The two previous episodes, Prime Factors and State of Flux, may have been far from perfect, but they did at least hint at a direction for the show. They suggested that maybe Voyager might be interested in engaging in some of the big philosophical questions raised by the crew’s unique situation. Stranded seventy thousand light-years from home, the ship was cut off from the Federation. It was isolated and alone. That meant that tough choices at least had to be debated.

While neither Prime Factors nor State of Flux made for particularly exciting television, they were episodes that felt specific to Voyager in a way that a lot of the first season really doesn’t. Unfortunately, Heroes and Demons represents a step backwards. Far from telling a story specific to Star Trek: Voyager, this feels like a script that could easily have been recycled from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Can the Doctor hack it?

It’s written by veteran Next Generation writer Naren Shankar, who had also served on the staff of Deep Space Nine. He wrote Heroes and Demons as a freelancer, pitching the idea very early in the development cycle. Perhaps what is most remarkable is how little of Shankar’s script was adapted or edited from that first draft. In fact he described it to The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine as “the best experience I’ve ever had as a writer, in terms of writing something as a first draft and then seeing those exact words on screen.”

There’s a sense that Heroes and Demons is a fun story that could have really worked in any context, and doesn’t fit particularly well into the mould of Voyager‘s first season. This should be the year where Voyager is trying to find its own voice, rather than simply imitating that of its older siblings.

Only mostly armless…

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: delta quadrant, emh, ensign kim, Holodeck, holodeck malfunction, Michael Piller, naren shankar, reset button, star trek, star trek: voyager, the doctor, Vikings, voyager | 3 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – State of Flux (Review)

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Darren

Prime Factors and State of Flux form something of a duology in the middle of the first season of Star Trek: Voyager. The two episodes might be far from perfect, but they seem to be the closest that the first season of Voyager comes to outlining its vision and ambitions. Taken together, they offer a demonstration that life in the Delta Quadrant might be significantly more complicated than life in the Alpha Quadrant – that everything might not be as it appears to be, that Voyager might not be the perfect Federation vessel.

While both episodes are flawed, they do demonstrate a willingness to take advantage of the basic premise of Voyager to tell stories that simply wouldn’t be possible on Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In that respect, they stand apart from surrounding stories like Ex Post Facto or Heroes and Demons, both of which feel like re-worked stories from an aborted eighth season of The Next Generation. These are adventurous and ambitious episodes. They lack the skill necessary to completely realise that vision; but that skill could come in time.

Unfortunately, these two episodes wind up feeling like exceptions – a flash of what might have been, rather than what would be.

Kazon development has hit a wall…

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: delta quadrant, kazon, Prime Directive, seska, star trek: voyager, state of flux, voyager | 12 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Prime Factors (Review)

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Darren

Prime Factors has some great ideas, but blunders awkwardly in the execution. In that respect, it genuinely feels like a first season episode of a new show in the same way that The Cloud did – there’s a sense that the series is trying to expand its own comfort zone in a way that offers potential for future storytelling opportunities. Prime Factors might make a few pretty serious missteps along the way, and often seems a little too timid to commit to its bolder ideas directly, but at least it feels more ambitious than Time and Again or Ex Post Facto.