Star Trek: Voyager Second Season
Original air dates: September 1995 – May 1996
Executive Producers: Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor
Captain’s log. In its second year, Voyager had settled into a routine of being a ship of Starfleet personnel that were trying to get home, but also doing the usual seeking out of new life and new civilizations and all that jazz. The Starfleet-Maquis conflict was barely even acknowledged, and while there were still some supply issues, they were never particularly overwhelming, simply one of many problems to be occasionally dealt with.
Two of the three recurring antagonists created in the first season continued to be thorns in the ship’s side. One was the Kazon, from the Ogla attacking Chakotay’s shuttle in “Initiations” to the Nistrim taking over the ship in “Basics, Part I,” with lots of drama in between, what with Seska working with the Nistrim and Jonas working covertly on the Kazon’s behalf on board ship.
The other was the Vidiians, who continued to be antagonistic in “Deadlock” and “Resolutions,” but showed some signs of friendship in “Lifesigns.” (The third was the Sikarians from “Prime Factors,” who were deemed ineffective, despite that being the best episode of the first season.)
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On top of that, the crew encountered Suspiria, the Caretaker’s mate, mentioned way back in the pilot episode, but she’s not willing to send them home (“Cold Fire”).
Each of the main characters got at least one episode that gave them a spotlight: Janeway in “Resistance” and “Resolutions,” Chakotay in “Initiations,” “Tattoo,” and “Resolutions,” Tuvok in “Innocence” and “Meld,” Torres in “Prototype” and “Dreadnought,” Paris in “Parturition,” “Threshold,” and “Investigations,” Kim in “Non Sequitur,” Neelix in “Parturition” and “Investigations,” the EMH in “Projections” and “Lifesigns,” and Kes in “Elogium” and “Cold Fire.” Plus the ship has its first new arrival: Samantha Wildman announces in “Elogium” that she’s pregnant, and she gives birth to a girl in “Deadlock.”
While there was very little by way of “oooh, can we get home this way?” episodes, there were plenty of touchstones to the Alpha Quadrant, including two planets containing people who’d visited Earth (“The 37’s,” “Tattoo“), Kim living an alternate timeline on Earth (“Non Sequitur“), many crewmembers hallucinating people they left behind (“Persistence of Vision“), the EMH imagining he’s at Jupiter Station (“Projections“), Torres dealing with a smart missile of the Maquis’ that also fell down the Caretaker’s rabbit hole (“Dreadnought“), and the appearance of members of the Q-Continuum, as well as three humans from Earth, including William T. Riker his own self (“Death Wish“).
Highest-rated episode: It’s our first-ever five-way tie for first place! That’s right, five episodes earned a 9 this season: “Resistance,” “Dreadnought,” “Lifesigns,” “The Thaw,” and “Resolutions.”
Lowest-rated episode: Another tie, but only two-way: both the incredibly boring “Twisted” and the incredibly terrible “Threshold” got a 1.
Most comments (as of this writing): “Tuvix” with 138, and it’s not even a contest. The moral dilemma of Janeway and her solution to the melding of Tuvok and Neelix was fodder for a ton of conversation when the episode aired two-and-a-half decades ago, and it remains so now.
Fewest comments (as of this writing): Yet another tie: “Dreadnought” and “Lifesigns“—two of the highest-rated episodes—only got 31 comments each.
Favorite Can’t we just reverse the polarity? From “Maneuvers“: Apparently, simple possession of a transporter module, a piece of technology never mentioned before or since, allows one to utilize transporter technology, and the destruction of that module—which can be sitting out in the open when you’re using it, it would seem—will eliminate that ability. Sure.
Also, Voyager uses the transporter during the climax while shields are up, er, somehow.
Favorite There’s coffee in that nebula!: From “Deadlock“: Both Janeways are determined to make sure that at least one of the two Voyagers makes it out alive, and both are willing to self-sacrifice to save the other.
She’s also the one who’s familiar with the scientific theory that they’ve put to unexpected practical use. I must admit to loving when they go the Janeway-as-science-nerd route…
Favorite Mr. Vulcan: From “Alliances“: Tuvok mentions the controversial notion proposed by Spock in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to ally with the Klingon Empire. Tuvok himself said he spoke out against the idea because of the Klingons’ history of brutal conquest—but the Federation-Klingon alliance has been a cornerstone of the Alpha Quadrant for the better part of a century.
(The punchline, of course, is that, unbeknownst to Tuvok, back home that alliance has fractured and the Klingons and Federation are at war again…)
Favorite Half and half: From “Lifesigns“: After her experiences in “Faces,” Torres is extremely reluctant to help Pel, as she still has nightmares about the experience. Pel’s rather heartfelt apology and explanation of how desperate and awful Vidiians’ lives have become mitigates her anger, and she eventually agrees to it. (Torres never actually mentions that the Vidiians also murdered one of their crewmates, but he wasn’t an opening-credits regular, so it’s not like he’s important or anything.)
Favorite Forever an ensign: From “Non Sequitur“: Apparently Kim believes he’s meant to be lost in the Delta Quadrant and miserable and alone, rather than be a successful member of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers on the verge of promotion while living with the love of his life whom he’s about to marry. Sure.
Favorite Everybody comes to Neelix’s: From “Meld“: When Tuvok needs to test his emotional control, he uses the most annoying person on the ship to test it. We don’t know that it’s a holodeck program until after Tuvok has choked Neelix to death, so our hopes are raised that we’re finally rid of Neelix, but those hopes are then dashed when Tuvok calls for the program to end.
Favorite Please state the nature of the medical emergency: From “Dreadnought“: The EMH is still trying to find a name that suits him, and he and Wildman and Kes talk at length on the subject. Kes is surprised to realize that he’s open to non-human names.
Janeway also totally forgot about him when she gave the order to abandon ship, which annoys him (not without reason).
Favorite What happens on the holodeck, stays on the holodeck: From “Persistence of Vision“: This is the last we see of the Gothic holonovel. So we’ll never know what’s on the fourth floor. (Okay, so it’s totally Lady Burleigh still alive and playing the piano. Still it would’ve been nice to see that…)
Favorite No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: From “Resolutions“: When this episode first aired, the woman I was married to at the time said that you could put a match between Janeway and Chakotay in this episode and it would light on its own. We see them holding hands and giving each other significant looks, and then next time we see them it’s six weeks later, and you just know they were fucking like bunnies the whole time…
Favorite Welcome aboard: Some truly spectacular guest stars in this season. We’ve got a bunch of very well-known actors taking their turn on Trek and being absolutely brilliant: Sharon Lawrence in “The 37’s,” Joel Grey in “Resistance,” and Michael McKean in “The Thaw.”
The show provides seven new recurring characters this season: Nancy Hower as Samantha Wildman, Simon Billig as Hogan, Raphael Sbarge as Jonas, Marva Hicks as T’Pel, Henry Darrow as Kolopak, Susan Diol as Denara Pel, and Samantha & Emily Leibovitch as Wildman’s infant baby (who will eventually be named Naomi, and later be played by Brooke Stephens and Scarlett Pomer). We also get more of past recurring folk: Martha Hackett as Seska, Anthony De Longis as Culluh, Tom Virtue as Baxter, Stan Ivar as Mark, Judy Geeson as Sandrine, Larry A. Hankin as Gaunt Gary, Angela Dohrmann as Ricky, Michael Cumpsty as Lord Burleigh, Carolyn Seymour as Mrs. Templeton, Thomas Dekker as Henry, and Lindsay Haun as Beatrice.
We’ve got some of the great character actors of the era, as well: Mel Winkler, David Graf, James Saito, John Rubinstein (“The 37’s“), Louis Giambalvo (“Non Sequitur“), Patrick Kerr (“Persistence of Vision“), Gerritt Graham, Maury Ginsberg (“Death Wish“), and Patty Maloney (“The Thaw“).
Various regular Trek guests show up, too, including Tim DeZarn (“Initiations“), Jennifer Gatti, Jack Shearer (“Non Sequitur“), Gary Graham, Norman Large (“Cold Fire“), Alan Scarfe, Glenn Morshower (“Resistance“), Rick Worthy (“Prototype“), Charles O. Lucia (“Alliances”), Marnie McPhail (“Innocence“), Thomas Kopache, and Carel Struycken (“The Thaw“).
Some excellent performances by one-time guests: Dan Kern is superlative as a world leader in “Dreadnought,” child actors Tiffany Taubman, Sarah Rayne, and Tahj D. Mowry are excellent in “Innocence,” and Tom Wright does a spectacular job channeling both Tim Russ and Ethan Phillips in “Tuvix.”
Three TNG regulars turn up, as well: Dwight Schultz as Barclay (“Projections“), John deLancie as Q, and Jonathan Frakes as Riker (“Death Wish“). Schultz and deLancie will both return more than once.
But the two best guests are the late great Aron Eisenberg, wandering across the lot from DS9 to give us arguably the only actually interesting Kazon in “Initiations,” and Brad Dourif being amazingly nuanced and complex as the sociopathic Lon Suder in “Meld” and “Basics, Part I.”
Favorite Do it: From “Threshold“:
“Can you wake him?”
“I don’t see why not. WAKE UP, LIEUTENANT!”
–Janeway requesting that Paris be revived, and the EMH not wanting to waste a perfectly good stimulant.
Favorite Trivial matter: Probably the one for “Resistance,” ’cause I got to talk about my buddies Mike & Kevin.
Set a course for home. “Serving as your captain has been the most extraordinary experience of my life.” This season was a frustrating mix of peaks and valleys.
On the one hand, you had several episodes that were brilliant, mainly because they colored within the lines, as it were. UPN and Rick Berman were determined to keep the show standalone and to avoid long-term consequences, and keep the recurring elements to a minimum, so the episodes that worked best were the ones that worked within those boundaries. All of the ones I rated a 7 or higher were stories that were complete within the hour, with everything back to normal at the end, the story completed. Yes, some of them could have had more long-term consequences, but still, in those cases, there is a satisfying resolution. The strong character study of the Kazon in “Initiations” (which sadly was not properly followed up on—those Kazon would’ve made for interesting antagonists, but they proceeded to make them less interesting after that), the EMH’s mindfuck in “Projections,” the heartbreaking images of home in “Persistence of Vision,” the absolute brilliance of all aspects of “Resistance,” the strong science-fictional adventures of “Prototype” and “Dreadnought,” the beautifully played telepathic insanity of “Meld,” the magnificent love story of “Lifesigns,” the wacky sci-fi goofiness of “Deadlock,” the excellent-despite-the-surprise-reveal-which-was-dumb Tuvok spotlight of “Innocence,” the horror-movie insanity and brilliant guest performance by Michael McKean of “The Thaw,” and the eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too Janeway/Chakotay romance in “Resolutions” (that one a particularly clever way to indulge a particular desire without spoiling the standalone nature of the show).
But there were also far too many episodes that had a scope beyond the 42 minutes of the episode, but were unable to address that scope because the reset button had to be jumped on at the end. So we can’t have anyone staying behind in “The 37’s,” nor can any of the 37’s join the crew (even though the notion that Amelia Earhart would turn down a chance to fly through space is completely unconvincingly absurd). So there’s no long-term (or even short-term!) damage to the ship after it gets all “Twisted.” So Kes’s telepathy charge-up suddenly stops because Suspiria isn’t around anymore even though there’s no reason why it should be that way in “Cold Fire.” So there’s absolutely no impact on Paris and Janeway even though they were turned into salamanders, and they leave their offspring behind to probably die on an alien world in “Threshold.” So Q inexplicably doesn’t send Voyager home even though he can do it with a snap of his fingers in “Death Wish.” So Janeway has to make an awful choice in “Tuvix,” and we see zero of the fallout from that choice.
On top of that, the ship—which has absolutely no proper repair facilities and limited resources—somehow is perfectly fine after suffering catastrophic damage. The worst offenders are “Investigations” (where Jonas cripples the warp drive and their repair station is an ambush site) and “Deadlock” (when Voyager gets the absolute shit kicked out of it).
And their attempt to do an ongoing subplot was a disaster. It started promising, with Paris’s insubordination and Jonas’s betrayal, but the reason for the former is disappointing and the reason for the latter is never given, and the whole thing ends with a massive whimper. Plus, they missed their chance to make it consequential by having it tie into the slambang season finale by having the Kazon’s takeover of the ship be Jonas’s endgame instead of a lame-ass ambush at a repair station.
There are also way too many strong premises that are then utterly botched in execution: “Non Sequitur,” “Elogium,” “Twisted,” “Cold Fire,” “Maneuvers,” “Alliances,” “Death Wish,” “Investigations,” “Tuvix,” and the disappointing finale of “Basics, Part I.” (I thought about listing “Tattoo” and “Threshold” here, but, no, those two were DOA thanks to the spectacular ignorance of the writing staff going in, the former with regard to their fake Indian guide, the latter with regard to a completely lack of any kind of understanding of science.)
I said after the first season that my biggest frustration with Voyager was that it didn’t embrace its premise. My biggest frustration with the second season is that they only embraced their externally imposed nature about half the time. It’s unfortunate that their attempts to be ambitious were either badly executed, ruined by the show’s standalone nature, or both, but when they worked within those constraints, it gave us some great stuff.
Warp factor rating for the season: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido has two collaborative novels coming out in 2020: To Hell and Regroup with David Sherman, the final book in a military science fiction trilogy, and Animal with Dr. Munish K. Batra, a thriller about a serial killer who targets people who harm animals.
In a sense, by going in the exact opposite direction of Deep Space Nine, where their anchored position meant that developments about Bajor, the wormhole, and the nearby Cardassians would provide ongoing elements for the show to engage with, the Voyager premise makes for the ultimate in episodic form- “We’re headed to the Alpha Quadrant, full steam ahead. Neither we nor anyone we know will ever visit this system ever again, so everyone wrap up your subplots before we head out.”
But as you point out, many stories just don’t fit in the timeframe of a single episode- or at least, they didn’t manage to make them fit.
“Dreadnought” is one of my favorite Voyager episodes! I always loved B’Elanna. Most of the very smart characters in Star Trek are also a little staid, and it was nice to see someone who was both very ingenuous AND someone who wasn’t an ideal Starfleet prim and proper kind of person. I always liked that B’Elanna was so rough around the edges. Even as the Maquis plot became basically obsolete, she always remained (to me, at least) someone who was believable as a fighter. Suder helped that this season, too.
And I’m glad that knock-off Bronte holodeck story is done. I never really liked those period pieces, in any of the various shows. Too often it just felt like the writers trying to show they could write something other than sci-fi, and the fact that they had to use stories that were in the public domain (or knock offs of stories in the public domain) always made them boring to me. It also contributed to the feeling (along with most of the music played in-universe being either public domain or explicitly from an alien culture) that the arts in the future are oddly stuck in the past. With the exception of some bits of poetry in TOS, and Dr. Crusher’s play in TNG we hardly ever see or hear any art contemporary to the story’s setting, which wouldn’t be a big deal except that (especially in TNG) art is brought up *all the time.* Those episodes mostly seemed to me like an excuse to dress the characters up in different costumes and settings, instead of genuinely revealing anything about them (although shout-out to “Hollow Pursuits,” which does just that extremely well), and frankly if I wanted to watch a period piece, there are a lot better ones out there.
@1,
Yeah, as I’ll keep saying throughout the Rewatch, hat’s part of the enduring frustration of VOY: They could’ve had their cake and ate it.
They had the perfect setup and format for continuing Trek‘s stated mission of exploring strange new worlds while balancing it with ongoing story arcs and built-in driving engines. But multiple factors (UPN being hellbent on replicating TNG’s ratings, Berman’s incompetence) torpedoed all that and left us with the weakest, most stillborn iteration of the 24th Century.
@2/wildfyrewarning: “Too often it just felt like the writers trying to show they could write something other than sci-fi”
More likely it was just to save money, since it’s less expensive to recycle leftover props, costumes, etc. from period films/shows than to design and create exotic alien worlds. It’s the same reason TOS had so many Earth-parallel planets.
Every season has its ups and downs. I obviously wouldn’t write off season 2 completely. It did have Resistance, after all, which I consider to be one of the best hours of Trek made in the 1990’s. With episodic storytelling, and 26 episodes a season, you expect a season to have some of the best and some of the worst. TNG season 4 had both Reunion and Devil’s Due. The Outcast aired the same year they did Darmok and The Inner Light. Even DS9 produces something like Melora within the same month they come up with a top tier episode like Necessary Evil. It’s part of the process. I can accept that, even on Voyager.
But even so, my problem with VOY season 2 has less to do with the ratio of poor to great episodes than it does with the missed potential and outright disregard for the finer points of serialized storytelling. And much of it has to do with the Kazon and misfires like the Jonas/Paris arc, not to mention the ignored catastrophic shipwide damage from episode to episode (and the completely lack of followthrough on the Tuvix outcome).
For all intents, this is the first ‘second’ season in a Berman era Trek show to produce worse results than the first one. TNG season 2 had its poor entries, but was more consistent and refined than season 1. DS9 season 2 was a major improvement over that first year. Even Enterprise‘s second season, which begins with a serious downward trend (culminating with the atrocious Precious Cargo) ultimately rebounds and delivers six rock solid episodes during its final stretch, which makes it a significant improvement over their first season also. Second seasons are usually where you refine what went wrong during that first trial year and thus finally get to make the best, most classic shows. This season had some classics, but ultimately fizzled thanks to its other egregious faults.
Easily Voyager’s weakest year (even more so than seasons 6 and 7).
@5:
But even so, my problem with VOY season 2 has less to do with the ratio of poor to great episodes than it does with the missed potential and outright disregard for the finer points of serialized storytelling. And much of it has to do with the Kazon and misfires like the Jonas/Paris arc, not to mention the ignored catastrophic shipwide damage from episode to episode (and the completely lack of followthrough on the Tuvix outcome).
To be fair to the 1990s-era Trek writers, the American TV market’s changed so much in the last 25 years.
We take serialization and story arc-driven TV storytelling for granted now and it’s easy to forget it was basically non-existent on mainstream, prime time American TV. It’s part of why Babylon 5 was of course so groundbreaking (and ironically why it seems less innovative to newer audiences with the passage of time).
Hell, Ira Behr, Ronald D. Moore, and the other DS9 Writers have even admitted that the opening and close arcs of the Dominion War were very difficult to execute even with how story arc-driven DS9 had gotten by the time of Season Six. It very much a learning curve in figuring out how to do that kind of serialization not only in Genre TV, but Trek as well (and Moore of course took those lessons over to Battlestar Galactica afterwards).
So even if VOY hadn’t bungled their early attempts at serialization due to UPN and Berman, I think the VOY Writers Room would’ve still struggled regardless. But as I’ve said before, the catch-22 is had the Kazon/Seska arcs worked better, might UPN have been more open to ditching the episodic format as time went on?
I don’t think the problem with Voyager is lack of arcs, so much as it is a lack of acknowledging that things were going to be rough on the way home. They could have portrayed Voyager as a ship that always had something breaking on it (it got roughed up by the Array, after all), supplies running low, and the crew being in tension with each other without tying it to a specific arc. That could have just been the premise of the show: “Castaway, in space!”
Instead of focusing so much on the Kazon (who they really, really should have left behind by now) it would have been interesting to see how Federation citizens get on in non-Federation space. How do they buy supplies when they have no money? Where can they find some friendly people that might be able to help them with repairs? What technology are they willing to share or not (instead of the answer always being “none of it”)? What moral compromises do you have to make when you have no other choice? What does someone on the ship who signed on as say, a scientist *do* when the ship is short staffed and they don’t need anyone to run an analysis on a pulsar or something? What does having a group of terrorists press-ganged into service on your ship mean for how it is running? The Maquis presented a fascinating opportunity for the Starfleet officers to learn from people used to scraping by to make things work without endless technology to help them. It would have been interesting to see the Starfleet people come to accept the Maquis *because* they have an ability to survive situation like this, instead of “well, the Captain and the script said we all get along, so I guess we do.” They didn’t need an “arc” a la the Dominion War to make the show work, just an acknowledgement that this *wasn’t* TNG, and they weren’t out in the Delta Quadrant to make friends and chart nebulae. If something on the ship is always going wrong, it doesn’t need to be tied into the previous episode explicitly, and they could keep the more episodic structure. Also- they really should have kept the Maquis in civilian clothes, IMHO. At least then there would have been a visual reminder that these people existed outside of B’Elanna and Chakotay (and Ayala, I guess) and made up a significant part of the crew.
Well, serialization is just another form of storytelling. It doesn’t always guarantee it will make a series better necessarily. DS9 had plenty of stinker episodes within its big arcs. And just look at Discovery and Picard. They’re modern heavily serialized series and they often feel every bit as goofy and nonsensical as episodic Voyager.
@7:
I don’t think the problem with Voyager is lack of arcs, so much as it is a lack of acknowledging that things were going to be rough on the way home. They could have portrayed Voyager as a ship that always had something breaking on it (it got roughed up by the Array, after all), supplies running low, and the crew being in tension with each other without tying it to a specific arc. That could have just been the premise of the show: “Castaway, in space!”
Yeah.
To go back to Ronald D. Moore, Battlestar in many ways felt like a deliberate rebuke of VOY and what it should’ve been during its run.
Moore’s on the record about his frustrations with the show before from afar while still on DS9 and during those tumultuous weeks when he joined and then subsequently abandoned the Writers Room.
So I think that was always reflected in BSG, from the supply logistics, Galactica being an aging vessel that racked up the damage (especially after New Caprica), and the questions about trying to stay true to their bygone culture while havign to face the realitys and mandate to adapt and change.
I’m willing to bet that “Tuvix” ends up having the highest comment count of this entire rewatch, outside of the pilot and the finale.
This rewatch has made me realize that I don’t hate Seska nearly as much as I thought I did. I just hated the Kazon-related storylines, and unfortunately she was always tied to those. Maybe if she had been aligned with a more interesting or more competent antagonistic species, she would have gone down as one of the great recurring villains of Star Trek. Or she could have stayed on Voyager as the lone Cardassian and we could have had an interesting outsider character from the beginning of Voyager, instead of having to wait until Seven shows up. What we ended up with was way too many Kazon episodes and a terrible pregnancy plot. It’s no wonder that the only Seska episode I really enjoy is next season’s “Worst Case Scenario”, where she’s free from both the Kazon and her tiresome obsession with Chakotay.
@5/Eduardo: Wow, we disagree about Enterprise‘s first two seasons. I felt the first season held together well with a subtle overall arc that made it feel purposeful, whereas season 2 was meandering and had no sense of what it was about, and was a slog to get through overall.
@6/Mr. Magic: You’re making a very common modern mistake: equating serialization with continuity. Those are two different things. Serialization is when a single story is continued across multiple episodes, or when several parallel storylines are. Continuity is simply when the events of one story have a lasting effect on subsequent stories and character arcs. And continuity in episodic television absolutely was commonplace by the time Voyager came along. And serialization wasn’t as unprecedented as you say — Hill Street Blues broke that ground long before Babylon 5 came along, and there were plenty of prime-time soap operas like Dallas and Knots Landing. Plenty of Voyager‘s predecessors and contemporaries had solid inter-episode continuity and evolving character arcs and subplots — you can see that in TNG and DS9, and in plenty of other shows from the period.
As someone who was watching Voyager in first run, I can assure you that a large part of what made it such a frustrating show at the time was that it was not at all typical of its day, but was a throwback to the weak continuity of pre-’90s, even pre-’80s shows. There were plenty of other shows at the time that did a better job maintaining continuity between episodes and developing recurring plot and character arcs. Something like a ship being utterly crippled at the end of one episode and then back in perfect shape without a word of explanation in the next — that’s more typical of ’60s TV than ’90s. It had nothing to do with writer inexperience, and everything to do with executive mandates.
@10, I loved Martha Hackett, and I always thought the “she was secretly a Cardassian!” plot was stupid. For starters, it meant that like, a quarter of Chakotay’s cell were actually non-Maquis spies, but it also just seemed too easy to make her the villain. It would have been nice to keep her on the show (I thought she and B’Elanna had great chemistry, and it would have been nice for them to continue to be friends), and just make her a pebble in Janeway’s shoe. I can’t imagine Seska taking kindly to being told by Tuvok to take her earring off, for example. She could have been a nice counterpoint to the “don’t we all get along so well?” narrative, and she would have been the only semi-regular character who was part of the Maquis, but had no connection to Starfleet. I always thought her talents were wasted with the Kazon (although she can pull off a wonderfully evil character). She could also have been the person who continued to hold a real grudge against Paris- after all, she was a Bajoran who had suffered under Cardassians her whole life and fought them, and he was just some guy who dropped in when he needed somewhere to go and bailed when it got tough- and been the one who advocated for being more practical and less “by the book.” Maybe I just have a fondness for female Bajoran characters, but it seemed (like so much on Voyager) to be a missed chance to do something cool.
I think a 5 for the season is just right. VOY season 2 reminds me a lot of TNG season 2: a bunch of highs, plenty of lows, and a good chunk of mediocre. Still, even though Krad also gives VOY season 1 a score of 5, I think season 2 is an improvement. Season 3 will continue the improvement trend. Bring it on!
@11/Christopher: Enterprise‘s first season has its moments and ambitions. Doing episodes like Breaking the Ice and Dear Doctor show a willingness to anchor those shows in character moments rather than having a major plot drive the action. That was a welcome change. And Shuttlepod One is a very mature, very bold bottle show as well. But overall, the first season feels like the show’s spinning its gears, not really embracing the potential inherent in being a prequel to the entire franchise. And the back half seems to abandon much of the prior experimentation also.
And at first, it seems as if the second season is poised to double down on season 1’s worst impulses. And they do. The Shockwave two parter is emblematic of the misguided Temporal Cold War. A Night in Sickbay is a serious misfire in its attempts to replicate Shuttlepod One. Carbon Creek is a stilted vulcan-centric episode that doesn’t really bring us anything new or interesting. And the less said about Precious Cargo the better.
But season 2’s back half – aside from the egregioius Bounty – is far more consistent and better thought out. Judgement doesn’t rely on ST6 nostalgia alone. It also gives us a surprisingly fresh take on Klingon society and foreshadows the inevitable decay of the empire. Horizon isn’t particularly memorable, but it’s serviceable. Not really offensive or atrocious. Just uninspired. The Breach is a superb Phlox vehicle, giving us racism, resentment and not shying away from any of it.
Cogenitor is one of Trek’s most daring episodes to date. Challenging and nauseating at the same time, showing how messy things can get when a decent well-meaning officer still meddles with another society, with tragic consequences. It’s a case study on how to do The Outcast right.
Then there’s Regeneration. The episode that rehabilitated the Borg, giving them some real teeth and making them a serious threat once more, while still honoring the First Contact timeline as well as managing to avoid contradicting Q Who. First Flight is an honest, thoughtful look into the culture behind humanity’s first experiments in achieving Warp flight, as well as giving us some insight into Archer. And finally, that stunning finale, The Expanse – driven very much by network demands to revamp the show, but still delivering a worthy cliffhanger to be paid off on a promising and ulitmately fulfilling third season.
@11 / CLB:
As someone who was watching Voyager in first run, I can assure you that a large part of what made it such a frustrating show at the time was that it was not at all typical of its day, but was a throwback to the weak continuity of pre-’90s, even pre-’80s shows. There were plenty of other shows at the time that did a better job maintaining continuity between episodes and developing recurring plot and character arcs. Something like a ship being utterly crippled at the end of one episode and then back in perfect shape without a word of explanation in the next — that’s more typical of ’60s TV than ’90s. It had nothing to do with writer inexperience, and everything to do with executive mandates.
Ironic, isn’t it? Berman didn’t like TOS, but he essentially made VOY a 1990s update of TOS.
And, yeah, that’s a fair point about serialization and continuity’s differences.
VOY’s hatred of continuity was just so bizzare even by Trek standards. It’s especially jarring in hindsight with looking at DS9 at the same time and seeing how even late in the series, the show was still being haunted by the repercussions of stuff from earlier years (ex. the deaths of Opaka and Bareil, the emergence of the Maquis, Tain’s failed Obsidian Order-Tal Shiar alliance, etc.).
@14
Good to see some love for Regeneration. I watched that one again a few weeks ago, and I think it might be better than any of the Borg episodes Voyager did. The majority of them anyway.
@10/Fry08: Yeah, I agree that outside of the series premiere and series finale, “Tuvix” will probably still have elicited the most reaction from re-watchers by the end of the rewatch although I’m sure there will be a lot of comments timed to the arrival of Jeri Ryan, the departure of Jennifer Lien, and the one-off, dumb and insulting return of Kes episode.
@14/Eduardo: “But overall, the first season feels like the show’s spinning its gears, not really embracing the potential inherent in being a prequel to the entire franchise.”
That’s how I see the second season. The first season may not have gone for the blatant continuity porn that season 4 did, but I felt it did a great, understated job portraying the sense of a humanity that was new on the interstellar stage and figuring things out as it went, taking the first steps with things that were well-established and routine by TOS. And it did lay in subtle continuity-building threads throughout the season, like the early interactions with the Andorians, the first questions raised about the ethics of interference, etc. (Plus there were some deep-cut TOS continuity nods — Axanar, Maluria, Coridan, the Horizon.) There was a unifying thread of Enterprise‘s crew trying to prove humanity’s worth as a player on the interstellar stage, which developed throughout the season and came to a resolution in “Shockwave, Part 2.” So it felt like it was laying the foundations for the future we knew from the other shows, just not as overtly as season 4’s “Let’s set up this specific TOS episode” approach. Less about the superficial indulgence of connecting continuity dots and more about fundamental worldbuilding and a sense of history.
But season 2 failed to build on any of that, just meandering from story to story without any unifying theme or direction. So that’s the season that felt to me like it was spinning its wheels and wasting the potential of a prequel. Although it did give us “Judgment,” which did the best thing a prequel can do — not just foreshadow the Klingons’ future we already know, but reveal things about the Klingons’ past that we didn’t already know. (Which is what season 1 had done so well with the Vulcans, though season 2 did some decent work expanding on that here and there.)
And I honestly think “A Night in Sickbay” is underrated. It has its excesses, but I respect it for doing a pure character story and not trying to throw in a gratuitous ship-in-danger action subplot, and I can’t hate a story that’s about a guy being an emotional wreck because he really loves his dog.
I agree about “The Breach” (though I can never remember what episode it is from the title alone), but I think “Cogenitor” is overrated. It’s one of those Prime Directive stories like “Homeward” where you can see the writer’s hand arbitrarily forcing a tragedy to happen in order to sell the premise that interference is always bad. It just doesn’t feel earned to me.
@CLB: ‘continuity porn’. Thank you for giving a concise name to one of the aspects of ENT and other prequels that drives me bonkers.
S
This is a good a time as any to say that it’s fairly likely that, once I’m done with Voyager, I’m going to do an Enterprise Rewatch as well, if for no other reason than to be complete. After I finish “Endgame,” I’ll have written about every single episode of the original and animated Star Trek, of The Next Generation, of Deep Space Nine, of Voyager, of Discovery, of Short Treks, and of Picard. It would be silly to then not cover the only series left.
So yeah. :)
(I only say “fairly likely” because it’ll be late 2021 or early 2022 or so by the time I get there, and a lot can happen in that time, but that, at least, is the current plan.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I rarely comment, but have been watching these on Amazon and following along. Great job this season as always.
I was quite amused by how Amazon summarizes season 2 of the show:
“In Season 2, the crew suffers from hallucinations and ferrets out a traitor on board.”
I never thought of it that way, but they’re right, there sure were a lot of hallucinations this season!
@16,
Yeah, “Regeneration” is a really underrated ENT episode.
And it also has one of the best post-Ron Jones scores of the Berman-era courtesy of guest composer Brian Tyler.
@20
Good news! Might as well finish this marathon.
@22
Yep, it is a good score. And kind of a clever idea placing the Borg within the framework of The Thing. Enterprise did horror stories pretty well, if memory serves.
@23:
That’s a good point. I didn’t see The Thing until 2015, so “Regeneration” doing a Trek spin on Carptenter’s film was completely lost on me back in 2003.
Yeah, it’s too bad Tyler’s graduated to feature scoring because between “Regeneration” and his work on Transformers Prime, he did some nice TV orchestral work.
What I also liked about “Regeneration” was, while it was obviously a ratings stunt, it was a justified follow-up because of the events of First Contact and the plausible fate of the debris from the destroyed Borg Sphere.
Really? That’s the favorite “Do it”? I don’t think it gets better than the doctor asking Paris for advice because of his vast experience being rejected by women.
Oh man, ENT. I always felt that whole show was a really good idea on paper, but it just didn’t work in execution for some reason. It was a frustrating feeling, I always really liked the idea of what they were trying to do, so I wanted to like the show. I suppose the rewatch will give me a directed reason to watch it again and examine what I think of it.
@18/Christopher: The way I see it, for the first 12-14 episodes, season 2 of ENT feels very much like a case of the writers running low on fresh ideas, and very much trying to just spin the gears.
But it feels to me that those last 8 episodes are the result of a sudden wake-up call happening on the writers’ room, who were now aware of Nemesis‘ problematic box office returns, which prompted them to shift gears and put more of an effort. I don’t think season 2 is necessarily that better, but that last third has that jolt of an effort. An effort that was present in the early season 1 efforts, but fell by the wayside as that season went on.
Season 1 seemed to go back and forth in terms of scope. The very good Breaking the Ice was followed by the generic Civilization. Dear Doctor was followed by the anemic Sleeping Dogs. The Andorian episodes certainly stood out, and it helped to have Shran played by Combs, but those semi-serialized efforts were undermined by the Temporal Cold War material. And even very early on, we had Unexpected and Terra Nova, both subpar entries (Terra Nova felt like a remake of Voyager’s Friendship One).
It’s hard to judge the seasons apart because this shift in story development happens halfway through both. To me, this period of loss of focus and inspiration goes from season 1’s Rogue Planet to season 2’s Stigma. So it affects both seasons. Regardless, the storytelling approach for early Enterprise was still very much rooted in TNG season 3, and it was starting to show its age.
Also, I’m looking forward to 2021 already. An ENT rewatch will be welcome, as that show will by then be celebrating 20 years since it first aired.
@26:
The Andorian episodes certainly stood out, and it helped to have Shran played by Combs, but those semi-serialized efforts were undermined by the Temporal Cold War material.
In fairness to Berman and Braga, the Temporal Cold War wasn’t their fault…or not entirely.
Braga’s confirmed that while they did conceive the idea, it was born out of a mandate from the Paramount and UPN suits to do something that would make ENT ‘more futuristic’
(And given show was going to be set 150 years into the god***** future…yeah, I don’t understand that logic either).
@27/Mr. Magic: They meant “futuristic” relative to TNG/DS9/VGR. As I understand it, they were uneasy with going backward and wanted to hedge by including elements further forward in the timeline from the previous shows. That’s also why they pushed for including familiar elements like transporters, Klingons, etc.
It’s kind of hard to either review the season as a whole or respond to this post but I feel obliged to give it a go. So…yes. There are some decent episodes in here and, in an era where shows seem to think they only need to come up with one storyline a year and then drag it out for hour after hour, there is something refreshing about rewatching the days when they had to come up with a new idea every week and actually told stories. There are more hits than misses this year, and even one of the biggest misses (“Threshold”) is oddly watchable if you turn your brain off.
I continue to be the only person willing to say a few good words about the Kazon, although I accept that it was probably sensible to move on after this season and not have the Nistrim pursuing Voyager for seven years. When I sat down to think about Seska though I was left to conclude that they don’t quite know what to do with her. The whole shaggy dog pregnancy leaves the impression that she’s obsessed with Chakotay, but in fact, after “Manoeuvres” we only ever see them together for a few seconds in “Basics”. So that does seem like a rather elaborate way of going “Nyah-nyah.”
And I kind of want to talk about Tom Paris, who at times seems to have a reputation on a par with the Kazon in these discussions. It’s occurred to me that I like him because he’s the show’s everyman, the one who talks like normal people do. Where the other characters just give the facts or react stoically, he tends to be the one that makes a wry comment that simultaneously breaks the tension and highlights it. That bridge would be a much duller place without him.
Looking forward to the Enterprise rewatch but want to chime in that I agree that the first season is superior to the second. The first season has solid episodes, decent characterisation and a sense that it knew where the ongoing storylines were going. (It didn’t, but it managed to seem like it did.) The second season was so dull and formulaic that it had several episodes that I remembered almost nothing about when I came to rewatch them on DVD and still have trouble with now. I take the point that it improved a bit towards the end, perhaps pointing the way to the superior last two seasons. But I’m afraid I don’t get much enthusiasm for “Judgement”, an episode which seems to forget the beginning and end and just give us an awful lot of middle. (Archer and Reed just walking out of the most secure prison in the Klingon Empire has to be one of the most insulting endings in history.) “Cogenitor” has some good points but fails the landing, where it’s quite clear both sides were wrong but we’re apparently expected to nod in agreement as Archer puts all the blame on Tucker.
Just had a thought… It might’ve been cool if the arc villains in the back half of the season had not been the Kazon, but the Trabe. After introducing the Trabe as the Kazon’s oppressors in “Alliances,” the focus could’ve shifted more toward them as Voyager moved out of Kazon territory into Trabe space, and it could’ve been an escalation from the Kazon as a relatively minor nuisance to the Trabe as a bigger and badder threat. Seska could still have been involved, deciding to ditch the backward Kazon because she’d be better off with the more advanced and powerful Trabe. (Trabing up, as it were.) It would’ve required some adjustments to the Trabe’s situation as presented in “Alliances,” but it might’ve worked better than what we got, as well as averting all the questions of “Why do they keep running into the Kazon?”
The Trabe would have certainly made more sense as antagonists in the long run. And more of a credible threat for Voyager’s continued survival. After all, unlike the disorganized Kazon, they were once a major power, capable of tracking a lone ship like Voyager and putting them against a wall.
But I’d argue the Kazon could have continued to be present, and would have even benefitted from this switch, since it ties back to their roots as opressed beings. It could have easily made them a more nuanced, three-dimensional alien race, possibly even willing to ally with Voyager, forsaking past sins, while still retaining their tribal ways and their seething hatred. And their nomadic nature could easily justify their continued presence.
It wouldn’t be so different from what happened on DS9, when Starfleet and the Bajorans embraced Damar’s rebellion against the Dominion and sent Kira to teach them terrorist tactics. It’s always better when an antagonistic alien race transcends that simple conflict and become something more. It worked with the Cardassians, the Romulans and the Klingons. It could have easily worked with the Kazon. The Trabe would have been the perfect way to achieve that.
Then again, given the whole race was based on a simplistic assumption of street gangs, maybe that would be too much of a stretch. And such an approach would still have required long-term thinking and more of a focus on serialized storytelling. And Jeri Taylor wasn’t really going to go for it.
@30 and 31:
In hindsight, yeah, the Trabe would’ve made an interesting follow-up villain as they exited Kazon-Nistrim territory (and especially after the ‘betrayal’ of “Alliances”).
It’s got me thinking again of a regret about the realignment of Trek literature due to Picard — specifically that effect on the VOY Relaunch and whrther it’ll continue after To Lose the Earth.
Since Kirsten Beyer’s had the Full Circle fleet following up on First Contacts Janeway made during the original sojourn through the DQ, I was looking forward to seeing what happened if and when the Full Circle fleet returned to Kazon space. Ah, well.
CLB @30:
OK, that was awesome.
And I’m definitely excited for the ENT rewatch. I lost interest after a few episodes but have always meant to go back and watch the series (for the sake of completeness, as krad put it). At the very least, that will inspire me to finally go through with the plan.
I’m definitely looking forward to your take on Enterprise, krad. I have a completionist streak, too; it’s why I watched TNG and VGR and the TNG movies during the DS9 rewatch a few years back. Enterprise is still the only Trek series whose episodes I can’t remember by title, even with Discovery and Picard out now.
I’m probably not going to watch Nemesis during Enterprise season 2. Nope, make that definite.
I might watch First Contact when we get to the appropriate point next season, however.
Watching Voyager on it’s own for the first time, well ever, has given me a greater appreciation for the series. And season 2 is a roller coaster ride, but it’s a good one. For every “Threshold” or “Twisted”, there’s “Prototype” and “Dreadnought.” I also watched Voyager in first run, and always recall season 2 fondly, mainly for the one-off episodes, yes. Season 3 awaits, and it only gets better from here, IMHO.
Yay for Enterprise rewatch :) This was the first Trek show I ever watched (asides from single TNG episodes on TV). So I was able to enjoy it as a standalone show, without thinking “oh, they are setting up this and that event from the other series”. Only after I finished it I watched TOS, TNG, DS9 and now I’m watching Voyager. So I guess it would be fun to re-watch it now with the knowledge why these semi-robotic aliens they encountered on Earth were so important or what’s the deal with this Mirror universe :)
@20/Krad: Yay, for coming around on finally probably doing Enterprise! And just think, by late 2021/early 2022, you’ll have finished rewatching Voyager, another season of both Discovery and Picard, the premiere seasons of Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, the untitled Nickelodeon Trek kids show, and maybe even the first season of the Section 31 spin-off, not to mention more Short Treks. That’s a lot to look forward too (and a lot more writing on your part)!
With ENT, I remember the initial excitement I felt for it just because it was a new Trek series and it at least sounded different. I was still in college by that time, but at this point my small college town no longer had a local UPN affiliate to show their programming so it was usually hard for me to keep up with the new series. But whenever I was able to catch an episode I just remember being bored by it. I didn’t find the characters all that interesting, I didn’t take a shine to the Vulcan-hating captain, I didn’t like the focus on the “Big Three” leads to the detriment of the other actors/characters, the sexified decon chamber scenes were obvious pandering to a certain demographic of the audience, and most annoying of all, I found the casting very regressive: so in the “Big Three” we have three white leads including a return to a white male captain, a return to only two females in the cast, and then what I call token Black guy character and token Asian lady character who often don’t get anything meaty to do. Lastly, it was yet another missed opportunity to finally include a gay character after much vocal fan petitioning, so that also really irked me. So I thought the makeup of the cast was a big step back after Voyager. Anyway, hopefully with this upcoming rewatch it’ll finally force me to sit through all of ENT because I’ve pretty much skipped around to a handful of what were considered the best episodes and also tried to watch in order from the beginning before giving up during the first season.
@31/Eduardo: “But I’d argue the Kazon could have continued to be present”
Sure, but in a more plausible way as a nomadic population scattered throughout the region, rather than a single recurring villain who implausibly kept showing up throughout the season. Have the recurring villain aligned with Seska be a Trabe, and bring in various different Kazon characters as needed, shifting them to a more sympathetic role as you suggest. But I see them being in a secondary role, since it would’ve helped to establish that the show would periodically move on from a given region of space and its denizens. It would’ve been nice to establish a pattern of gradual shifts as one recurring villain group declined in prominence and a new one began to emerge, reflecting the ship moving out of one’s zone of influence into the other’s, with a degree of overlap between them.
@37:
It would’ve been nice to establish a pattern of gradual shifts as one recurring villain group declined in prominence and a new one began to emerge, reflecting the ship moving out of one’s zone of influence into the other’s, with a degree of overlap between them.
Yeah, it’s not unlike what Stargate Universe did with its antagonists during its brief run when the Destiny left one galaxy and entered another one (and seemed poised to do again if we’d hit Season Three).
@38/Mr. Magic: Ooh, that bit really bugged me. The Stargate TV franchise tended to be relatively good with the science up to a point, and Universe was the best at it, because it had SF novelist John Scalzi as a consultant. But they dropped the ball with that plot point, because galaxies are not right next door to each other, and even at Destiny‘s extraordinary speeds, it should’ve taken weeks to cross between galaxies. But they treated it as if it took no time at all. It reminded me of the original Battlestar Galactica, which treated crossing between “galaxies” as if it were akin to crossing a state line, just an arbitrary border between two adjacent, indistinguishable regions of starry space.
@39,
Heh, whoops. Bad Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper, bad!
Actually, looking back, I wonder if they’d intended to keep Destiny in the void longer during the Season One crossing or if they had to limit it to only one episode due to dramatic license and the storytelling demands as they approached the Season finale.
@39/CLB:
On average they’re widely separated. But maybe that particular segment of Destiny’s cosmological transect was between a parent galaxy and a satellite dwarf, or between two galaxies in the process of merging which were nearly in contact (whatever “in contact” means when you account for the diffuse population of halo stars). Presumably Destiny’s Ancient-written navigational software would account for such situations: “This two-lobed star-island is two spirals with distinct nuclei, so I’ll arbitrarily separate them at the midpoint and label the maps accordingly.”
@41/phillip: Sure, it can be explained after the fact, but if the audience has to handwave it later, that’s still a failure of the story itself to address it. If you make a point of saying “The ship is leaving one galaxy for another,” if you specifically put that out there for the audience, then it’s incumbent on you to do something with the idea. If you’re just going to pick up the next episode as normal, with no acknowledgment of a gap between galaxies having been crossed, then there’s no point in even including the premise to begin with.
At the time, I had the contact info of the editor of the Stargate tie-in novel line, and I had thoughts about pitching a Universe novel that was set in the gap between those two episodes and covered the intergalactic journey the show glossed over, maybe explaining that they found a way to accelerate the ship and complete the journey faster. But they never did any novels beyond the pilot novelization.
@42:
But they never did any novels beyond the pilot novelization.
Yeah, that’s certainty true, isn’t it? The Stargate tie-in novels in the years since have all been either SG-1 or Atlantis or anthologies focusing on the first two shows.
I get they’re the bread and butter of the franchise, but it just irks me that SGU’s gone on to become the forgotten stepchild (or misblamed for the franchise’s collapse when it was a combination of factors).
Fandemonium would have had to pay for a separate Universe license (beyond the novelization of “Air”), and that one book they did produce did not do well enough to justify the extra money they would have had to shell out for it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@44,
Ah, good to know.
Thanks, KRAD.
Under “Favorite Welcome Aboard” the actor who played Lord Burleigh was Michael Cumpsty, not Mark Cumpsty. (And it’s Cumpsty, not Cumptsy.)
richf: ARGH! Thank you. It’s been fixed.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, ever-grateful for edit-function ass-saving
@28 / CLB:
They meant “futuristic” relative to TNG/DS9/VGR. As I understand it, they were uneasy with going backward and wanted to hedge by including elements further forward in the timeline from the previous shows. That’s also why they pushed for including familiar elements like transporters, Klingons, etc.
Ah.
Yeah, that makes sense. And in fairness to UPN, I can get where they were coming from because it was arguably a Kobayashi Maru for them.
If you abandon the familiar trappings of Trek to try something new, the fanbase will go apes***. If you don’t abandon the trappings and don’t try something new, they’ll still go apes****. And with the Network’s ratings in serious trouble in 2001, you can’t blame them for trying to play it safe.
Incidentally, speaking of the Klingons, I know I’ve praised your Rise of the Federation novels in multiple talkback threads. But I did especially love in…I think it was Live by the Code…how you cleverly wrote out the Klingons from the galactic political stage and set up their eventual return by the time of TOS, or at least the early 23rd Centyrt.
Given how active the Empire was during Archer’s voyages, it nicely explained why they hadn’t clashed with UFP during its formative stages and why it woulnd’t happen until Pike and Kirk’s eras.
@48/Mr. Magic: “Incidentally, speaking of the Klingons, I know I’ve praised your Rise of the Federation novels in multiple talkback threads. But I did especially love in…I think it was Live by the Code…how you cleverly wrote out the Klingons from the galactic political stage and set up their eventual return by the time of TOS, or at least the early 23rd Centyrt.”
Thanks — but to give credit where it’s due, Michael A. Martin basically established that at the end of The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm. But I had one more Klingon story to tell, and so I found a way to bring them back into play for a bit and then tie off that thread again.
And I think Mike and I were both building on the references in TAS: “The Infinite Vulcan” and The Wrath of Khan to the Federation being at peace for a hundred years, although Discovery season 1 subsequently rendered that moot.
@7. wildfyrewarning I’m not sure how “rough” Voyager’s journey should have been. You’ve replicators and 140+ crew members – given the twin resources of technology and people-hours capacity being in the thousands a day I think the physical situations we see the ship get into could all be easily cleaned up in the time between episodes. Given they happen on average about once a fortnight it’s realistic to imagine that some take place weeks after the last. Replicators that can replicate replicators if needs be, given that 140+ people with nothing more pressing to do could achieve a lot in a few weeks.
I think Voyager was always less realistic when it tried to show scarcity where there should be none. How was hydroponics a more efficient way of converting energy to food than the mess-hall replicators? Photosynthesis doesn’t happen without the photons. We know that one system (the one we live in) contains abundance after abundance of all the elements Voyager could ever need. I headcanon that the magic substance they need this week is from the island of stability, and is a bit rarer, but if I think about that too much it raises more questions than answers.
Plus I never understood the obsessions with arcs. They can of themselves make for good storytelling, but they aren’t necessary for it. Trek at the time had one series on a station that didn’t move, and another racing through space in a straight line as fast as they could. Arcs which were a natural fit on the former would always feel unrealistic on the latter.
I wish Voyager had limited themselves to relatively self-contained stories (like the great ones Krad listed above), ignored the daft idea that a starship is hardship, and just embraced the adventure. That’s when it was always at its best.
@50/jmwhite: It’s not about plot arcs, just about continuity — the events of an episode having consequences in later episodes rather than being erased as if they never happened. As I said recently in another conversation, continuity and serialization are two very different things, despite the modern tendency to treat them as equivalent. You can have continuity and consequences without ongoing story arcs, like Worf’s relationship with K’Ehleyr in “The Emissary” leading to the consequence of his becoming a father in later seasons, or Kira’s encouter with Marritza in “Duet” leading to the consequence that her hatred of Cardassians was dulled later on.
Complaining that the warp engines were completely crippled with no hope of repairs at the end of “Investigations,” yet completely intact again at the start of “Deadlock” without a word of explanation, is not about story arcs. It’s just about the narrative playing straight with the audience. If you set up a seemingly insurmountable problem, you owe it to the audience to provide a solution as well. If you just erase the problem by ignoring that it happened in the first place, that’s cheating. It’s bad writing for reasons that have nothing to do with our modern pathological obsession with arcs and serialization. Even by the standards of episodic storytelling, it’s an abuse of the format. If your story paradigm is to have a reset button and restore the status quo at the end, then you have to show the audience how the status quo is restored, how they get out of the insoluble problem. Otherwise the episode lacks closure and is a failure on its own self-contained terms.
I agree with you about the end of “Investigations”, and there may be other specific instances, but in general I don’t think “Voyager always looked like new” is a fair criticism of the show any more than “they always replaced shuttles” is. They had time on their hands, technology, and could go get resources. What else, apart from keeping the ship looking like new, do people think the majority of the crew were doing every day?
I also agree about the important distinction between continuity and arcs. But I think Star Trek’s reset button is more true to real life than dramas that insist characters should “grow” and change every year. People mostly don’t change that much once they’re adults. They experience events and press their own reset button.
The current coronavirus crisis has forced a huge change on all our lives, has caused stress and distress and heartbreak to many. Our short term has radically altered, yet within a year of it being over we’ll all be back to normal. Eating crisps, spending time with loved ones, hating Monday’s alarm, meeting friends for Friday pints, and having a giggle with all this far from our mind. Someone will occasionally say “how weird was that covid thing!”, and we’ll laugh and the conversation will move on. If it was drama some would insist we should all learn and grow from this profound event. In real life it’ll be back to the crisps and pints and giggles.
@52/jmwhite: Oh, yes, I’m with you there — it makes no sense to question why a starship with replicator capability is able to repair and replace its components fairly easily. But that’s not a question about story arcs or serialization. And I wasn’t making a general point, but a specific one about “Investigations.”
“But I think Star Trek’s reset button is more true to real life than dramas that insist characters should “grow” and change every year. People mostly don’t change that much once they’re adults. They experience events and press their own reset button.”
That’s probably true of real life, but if fiction were exactly like real life, what would be the point of it? We turn to fiction because it’s about things that are more interesting and unusual than everyday life. Characters growing and changing is interesting. Also, fiction is aspirational and instructive. It shows characters learning lessons and improving themselves as an expression of what we should all try to do in our lives, even if we don’t always succeed.
Besides, some people do go through real, lasting changes, such as falling in love and getting married. Voyager‘s one successful long-term character arc, besides the growth arcs of the Doctor and Seven of Nine, was the romance between Tom and B’Elanna, which began in season 3 and continued to evolve all the way through the end of the series. Jeri Taylor said after season 2 that their mistake was trying to base a story arc on external plot drivers rather than internal character development, and apparently they learned that lesson and applied it going forward. (Although I wish they’d found ways to do so with more characters than just those four. I wouldn’t say that Janeway, Chakotay, Tuvok, Kim, or Neelix had any real long-term character arcs for most of the series, having pretty much resolved their major conflicts and issues in the first season or two. If anything, Chakotay lost most of his characterization.)
Quoth jmwhite: “yet within a year of it being over we’ll all be back to normal”
Not “all.” The people who died from the virus, the loved ones of those dead people, the people whose jobs and livelihoods have been lost, the businesses that will fail — nothing will be “normal” for them…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Krad that’s absolutely a fair point. By “it being over” I should stress I mean the economy recovering too. Realistically we’re looking at the repercussions of this being felt for the medium term.
In terms of the losses of loved ones of course people will be devastated by tragedies like that and be mourning greatly. But as a species we have a remarkable ability to move on even if that pain has never quite leaves us.
Coincidentally it’s 5 years to the day of the funeral of a truly beloved Aunt. Our family group WhatsApp chat has buzzed with sorry. I mourned her greatly then and I feel her loss still. But 5 years ago my work colleagues would have seen me back to “normal” quite quickly. My friends would have noticed it took a little longer. But soon I was back having giggles and good times, and life was getting back to my new normal. She wouldn’t like to think we were doing any other. Even if our lives aren’t quite the same we still come out of these things as ourselves.
Christopher I don’t think I’m a million miles from agreeing with you. If Voyager had to have arcs I would have much prefered them to have been internal character ones. Voyager’s premise would have been well suited to that, with the chance to have shows that were naturally set entirely aboard ship, putting some flesh on the bones of their characters as they sail uninterrupted on a straight course between stops.
But Star Trek doesn’t rely on that type of drama. Whilst DS9 was doing long arcs Voyager could have pitched itself more high-concept. Just had standalone episodes that were designed to challenge and make the viewer think just as much if not more than its characters. Examine our own culture whilst witnessing fictional ones. At its best I think it lived up to that.
@Mr Magic/5:
The statement that serialized prime time TV in the 1990s was unheard of is incorrect. Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place both started a year before DS9 and were heavily serialized. Dynasty started even earlier in 1981. Dallas began in 1978. They were both also very heavily serialized and were extremely popular shows in their day.
Moonlighting was another popular show from the 1980s that had many serialized elements.
@56/RMS81: You’re quite right. To quote myself from the TNG: “Lower Decks” Rewatch comments:
The thing to remember is that there’s always been serialized storytelling, going back to the earliest radio soap operas and before that to magazine serials like those written by Charles Dickens. But in the early days of TV, serialization was the stuff of cheesy daytime soaps, while the classy, sophisticated shows were the play anthologies like Playhouse 90 and Desilu Playhouse. So anthologies were considered the more intelligent form of storytelling, and thus even continuing series aspired to an anthology model with minimal continuity between episodes. This also made sense in the context of the time, since they had no home video or Internet streams, no VCRs or DVRs, and even syndicated reruns were less common at the time. So there’d be little chance to get your memory of old episodes refreshed, and if you missed an episode of a show, you might never see it at all. Thus, it made sense to prioritize telling a complete, self-contained drama every week above telling an ongoing, interconnected narrative.
But in the ’70s, syndicated reruns became more commonplace (partly due to the great success of Star Trek in syndication), and then home video came along, as well as early cable networks which relied on reruns for the bulk of their programming. So it became easier to get to know a series as a unified whole rather than a bunch of independent episodes, and so the serialization that had been concentrated only in certain genres began to emerge in others. It wasn’t a new invention when TNG came along; it was just starting to become more popular as tastes evolved.
@1 – CuttlefishBenjamin: While no recurring adversaries or external plots might have been a good way to take advantage of the premise; no internal ongoing subplots would have been very, very wrong. Tuvix’s lack of fallout shows that.
@7 – wildfyrewarning: That’s just it, they pretty much crapped on their premise of “a ship alone” and “mixed crew in conflict” from the get-go.
@10 – Fry08: Don’t bet on Tuvix taking the cake, you never know what weird, outrageously tangent discussions can stem from an episode rewatch.
Looking back at this season, it seems to me to be Chakotay’s season as he’s the character that got the most to do: from “Initiations” to “Tattoo” to “Resolutions” all being his episodes to a significant focus on his character in “Maneuvers” and “Basics, Part 1.” And most of these are good to great episodes and prove Beltran can act so it’s a shame Chakotay was basically shuffled off to the side for the most part in the latter half of the series.
I never thought of the Sikarians as a recurring antagonist. Despite they’re ability to travel vast distances, they were only ever seen once, and although you say Prime Factors was the best S1 episode, you gave that a 9 but Jetrel got a 10, Krad. Another S2 episode where Chakotay got the spotlight was Manoeuvres.
I realised while reading this review that Janeway’s holonovel was the closest thing to a recurring program, besides Sandrines, during the first two seasons. And the only reason I can think of for Jonas’s betrayal is that he became disillusioned with Janeway’s command style like Seska, but in both cases it’s a murky issue.
2: It is odd that there are no contemporary art forms in the 24th century and I think Booby Trap reveals a lot about LaForge’s character! 6: People have forgotten what a game changer Babylon 5 was. It was way ahead of its time, just like DS9. 7: Lost (the TV show) in space. 10: Yep, 179 and counting. Maybe Seska could have become the VGR equivalent of Garak. 12: Why would Seska’s presence make most of Chakotay’s Maquis cell spies?
13: I’m not sure S3 is a vast improvement but at least it tries to do something different – it’s a transition between what the series had been and what the series would become, like DS9’s third season.
28: To me, Star Trek is about looking forward which is why I’ve never completely taken to Enterprise. Picard almost said as much at the end of TNG’s first season. 30: By this point, has Seska given up on getting back to the Alpha Quadrant? What is her overall plan now that she’s taken Voyager?
51: They got the engines working by the end of Investigations, which is even more implausible. 52: The ship never shows any signs of lasting damage, even though Voyager is cut off from Federation support. And with the vaccine, we’ll soon see. 53: When Joss Whedon first created Angel, he assumed the series would be about the guest stars but he changed it to the regulars instead.
54: Here here, Krad! 56: Moonlighting eventually had to work around Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd because they found it so difficult to work together. 59: Beltran has a more limited range than Tim Russ or Robert Picardo but episodes like Nemesis or The Fight shows that he can rise to material, if need be.
David Sim: The Sikarians were intended to be a recurring antagonist when they were created, but they decided not to use them again.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
62: Thanks Krad. It was probably for the best as I can’t see a race of gracious pleasure-seekers working out any better as an enemy than the Kazon did.
12: Paris didn’t bail on the Maquis, he was caught by Starfleet during his first assignment. 29: If the Kazon had dogged Voyager for seven years, it would’ve felt like they weren’t going home at all. 31: Would the Bajorans have wound up like the Kazon after the Occupation had they not had their faith? 44: “Fandemonium” – that’s a good one Krad!
51: When they made Worf a father, it was never a regular thing. Alexander would disappear for episodes at a time (probably because they were as uncomfortable as Worf with this development). I don’t like when they write themselves into a cul-de-sac. 52: VGR is in love with the reset button, far more than the other Trek shows. 55: Yep, I agree with Krad. Covid is much more than just an interruption to our lives between pints and giggles.
David Sim: Fandemonium isn’t a “good one,” it’s the actual name of the publishing company that publishes Stargate fiction.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The first half of this season was really up and down for me in terms of quality, reaching its nadir with Threshold, but I feel like it turned a corner after that. From Meld onward there weren’t any episodes I disliked and only two that I thought were mediocre (though the finale was unfortunately one of them). Still, overall it felt like a step down from the first season, which I liked a lot, and it doesn’t benefit from the comparison with DS9’s 4th season, which I’m watching alongside it.