Star Trek: Voyager Sixth Season
Original air dates: September 1999 – May 2000
Executive Producers: Rick Berman, Brannon Braga
Captain’s log. By the sixth season, Voyager had settled into its role as the spiritual successor to The Next Generation. While the general backstory of trying to get back to Earth was always there, the actual day-to-day adventures that they had were mostly unrelated to that, instead focusing on two catch-phrases that have been associated with Trek for ages: “to seek out new life and new civilizations” and “the human adventure is just beginning.”
When the crew aren’t making contact with new alien species (“Survival Instinct,” “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy,” “Alice,” “Dragon’s Teeth,” “Blink of an Eye,” “Virtuoso,” “Memorial,” “Tsunkatse,” “Ashes to Ashes,” “Child’s Play,” “Muse,” “The Haunting of Deck Twelve”), they’re exploring their own characters and learning about themselves (“Equinox, Part II,” “Barge of the Dead,” “Riddles,” “The Voyager Conspiracy,” “Fury,” and again “Virtuoso” and “Memorial”).
There’s also contact with the Alpha Quadrant, both direct (“Pathfinder,” “Life Line”) and indirect (“One Small Step”). The former is particularly important, as real-time communication is finally reestablished with the folks back home, and will remain so from this point to the end of the series.
Plus, of course, there’s continued issues with the Borg. They come across three ex-Borg who have managed to pull away from the Collective. They discover a ravaged Cube with only five very young survivors, four of whom are de-Borgified and made part of the Voyager community (“Collective”). They encounter the Borg twice more, including the origin of the devastation of the kiddos’ Cube (“Child’s Play”), and then discover a haven for drones who are regenerating that the crew helps make the base of a Borg rebellion (“Unimatrix Zero”).
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Seven and the EMH do garner the lion’s share of the attention, as they get several spotlight episodes each (“Survival Instinct,” “The Voyager Conspiracy,” “Tsunkatse,” “Collective,” and “Child’s Play” for Seven, “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy,” “Virtuoso,” and “Life Line” for the EMH). Having said that, Janeway (“Good Shepherd”), Torres (“Barge of the Dead,” “Muse”), Tuvok (“Riddles”), Paris (“Alice”), Kim (“Ashes to Ashes”), and Neelix (“The Haunting of Deck Twelve”) get their moments in the sun, too.
Highest-rated episode: A five-way tie, as “Survival Instinct,” “One Small Step,” “Pathfinder,” “Memorial,” and “Live Fast and Prosper” all were rated a 9.
Lowest-rated episode: Another tie, as both “Fair Haven” and “Spirit Folk” got a much-deserved 0.
Most comments (as of this writing): “Spirit Folk” with 91. Why such a terrible episode got so many comments is beyond me.
Fewest comments (as of this writing): Another tie, as both “The Voyager Conspiracy” and “Collective” only got 29 comments for some reason.
Favorite Can’t we just reverse the polarity? From “Ashes to Ashes”: Despite the dozens of times we’ve seen medical professionals do cosmetic surgery on people to make them appear like a different species (from simple stuff like what we saw in the original series’ “The Enterprise Incident” to more complex stuff in TNG’s “Homeward” and DS9’s “Apocalypse Rising“), it’s not at all clear why the EMH can’t do that with Ballard, instead being forced to resort to injections of stuff.
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Favorite There’s coffee in that nebula!: From “Alice”: Janeway saves the day by coming up with the notion of putting a second voice in Paris’ head. This makes up for her totally not noticing that her alpha-shift conn officer—who, it must be reiterated, sits right in front of her for eight hours a day—is a bit of a mess.
Favorite Mr. Vulcan: From “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy”: Poor Tuvok gets the short end of the stick throughout: In the EMH’s fantasies, first he suffers pon farr in the middle of a concert, then he gets turned into a Borg and is downed by the EMH giving him a Vulcan neck pinch. Then in the real world, he has to pretend to arm a weapon that doesn’t exist, a course of action he is very obviously not thrilled with. (The contempt with which he says, “Activating the photon cannon—sir” is epic.)
Favorite Half and half: From “Collective”: Torres is at ops for the entire episode, because the chief engineer has nothing better to do than run a bridge station instead of her engine room, and because the producers have given up on even pretending that there’s anyone in the crew beyond the opening-credits regulars.
Favorite Forever an ensign: From “Spirit Folk”: Kim kisses a cow. It was funnier when Tex Avery did it.
Favorite Everybody comes to Neelix’s: From “Good Shepherd”: The Delta Flyer’s replicator includes a pasta soup that is listed as Neeilx 651, and I shudder to think what Neelix has done to pasta soup…
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Favorite Please state the nature of the medical emergency: From “Spirit Folk”: The EMH gives a fiery sermon on being excellent to each other and partying on, dudes, and then later is hypnotized, er, somehow. Amusingly, when they ask him what his real name is, he says he hasn’t decided yet…
Favorite Resistance is futile. From “Life Line”: When Seven observes that the EMH and Zimmerman “bear a striking resemblance,” the EMH replies that it’s so a doctor will inspire confidence in his patients. “Compassionate eyes and a strong chin can go a long way.” Seven’s look of massive dubiousness in response to this is epic.
Favorite What happens on the holodeck, stays on the holodeck: From “Pathfinder”: I know I’ve complained a lot about the entire notion of holodeck safeties that can be disengaged, so let me point out that the safeties work just fine in this episode, and it’s very funny to see the holographic Torres shoot the security guards and absolutely nothing happens to them.
Favorite No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: From “Fair Haven”: Janeway knocks boots with a hologram, and she acts like it’s some kind of weird thing when you know that that’s how most people use the holodeck, really…
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Favorite Welcome aboard: Whatever else one might say about this season, holy crap did they have an impressive roster of guest stars, starting with Dwight Schultz and Marina Sirtis reprising their TNG roles of Barclay and Troi, respectively, in both “Pathfinder” and “Life Line.” Jennifer Lien also returns to her formerly starring role of Kes in “Fury.”
The Borg kiddos, Manu Intiraymi (Icheb), Marley McClean (Mezoti), and Kurt & Cody Wetherill (Azan and Rebi), join the cast as new recurring regulars starting with “Collective.” We have recurring regulars Scarlett Pomers as Naomi in several episodes, as well as Richard Herd as Owen Paris and Richard McGonagle as Harkins (“Pathfinder”), Nancy Hower as Wildman and Josh Clark as Carey (“Fury”), Jack Shearer as Admiral Hayes (“Life Line”), and Susanna Thompson as the Borg Queen (“Unimatrix Zero”). Also Robert Picardo once again does double duty as Dr. Lewis Zimmerman in “Life Line.”
Buy the Book
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Past and future Trek actors Rick Worthy (Lessing in “Equinox, Part II”), Bertila Damas and Tim Kelleher (Marika and P’Chan in “Survival Instinct”), Eric Pierpoint and Karen Austin (Kortar and Miral in “Barge of the Dead”), John Fleck (Abaddon in “Alice”), Jeff Allin (Gedrin in “Dragon’s Teeth”), the great Phil Morris (John Kelly in “One Small Step”), Albie Selznick (Tash in “The Voyager Conspiracy”), Daniel Dae Kim and Obi Ndefo (Gotana-Retz and a protector in “Blink of an Eye”), Kaitlin Hopkins and Francis Guinan (grifters in “Live Fast and Prosper”), John Schuck and Joseph Will and Kellie Waymire and Kathleen Garrett (various actors in “Muse”), and Mark Deakins and Tony Sears (two of the Borg in “Unimatrix Zero”) all show up at various points. Plus, Vaughn Armstrong plays two of his dozen Trek roles this season, appearing as Lansor in “Survival Instinct” and the Vidiian captain in “Fury.”
Other excellent guests include John Savage and Titus Welliver and Olivia Birkelund (various Equinox folk in “Equinox, Part II”), Jay M. Leggett and Googy Gress and Robert Greenberg (the Hierarchy members in “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy”), Olaf Pooley (the scholar in “Blink of an Eye”), the great Paul Williams (Koru in “Virtuoso”), Jay Underwood and Michael Reisz (Harren and Telfer in “Good Shepherd”), Gregg Daniel (Mobar in “Live Fast and Prosper”), Stoney Westmoreland and Jack Axelrod (the sponsor and one of the chorus in “Muse”), and Tamara Craig Thomas (Haley in “Life Line”). There’s also a delightful cameo by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine in “Good Shepherd.”
For reasons passing understanding, we twice have to put up with Irish stereotypes and bad Irish accents, as Richard Riehle, Fintan McKeown, Henriette Ivanans, Duffie McIntire, Ian Abercrombie, Ian Patrick Williams, Bairbre Dowling, and Jan Claire all torment us in “Fair Haven” and/or “Spirit Folk.”
We’ve got a mess of Robert Knepper moments, including Claire Rankin (“Alice”), the great Kim Rhodes (“Ashes to Ashes”), Mark A. Sheppard (“Child’s Play”), Zoe McLellan (“Good Shepherd” and “The Haunting of Deck Twelve”), and Tony Amendola (“Muse”), not to mention the actual Robert Knepper (“Dragon’s Teeth”)!
But the highlight of the season has to be “Tsunkatse,” in which two of DS9’s finest, J.G. Hertzler and Jeffrey Combs, show up to knock it out of the park as, respectively, a Hirogen and a slimy fight promoter, with the added bonus of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson making his debut as a dramatic actor as a Pendaran fighter.
Favorite Do it: From “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy”:
“Tuvok, I understand.
You are a Vulcan man.
You have just gone without
For seven years about.Paris, please find a way
To load a hypospray.
I will give you the sign.
Just aim for his behind.Hormones are raging, synapses blazing,
It’s all so very illogical! Illogical! Illogical!”
–The EMH’s new lyrics to “La donna è mobile.”
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Favorite Trivial matter: Probably the one for “Survival Instinct,” just because there was so much of it.
Set a course for home. “Snacks are irrelevant!” When this season has a good episode, it’s really really good.
“Survival Instinct” is a brilliant examination of life after Borg, and giving us a hint of what might have been had Ronald D. Moore stayed in the writer’s room.
“Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy,” “Virtuoso,” and “Life Line” are all phenomenal vehicles for the great Robert Picardo and all of which truly develop both the EMH and his creator in interesting ways.
“Dragon’s Teeth” is a superlative first-contact story, visually striking, strongly acted, and cleverly written.
“One Small Step” is a tear-jerker of an episode, one that magnificently embodies Trek’s ethos, through a great guest performance by Phil Morris, a passionate performance by Robert Beltran, and a subtle dawning of understanding from Jeri Ryan.
“Pathfinder” is a perfect melding of TNG and Voyager, bringing back two great characters in Barclay and Troi and giving us a major milestone in the titular ship’s journey home.
Both “Blink of an Eye” and “Muse” do a superb job of creating an alien world, in the former giving us a world’s entire history in an hour, in the latter showing us one moment in the world’s history. In both cases, we get pathos and impressive complexity, plus superb guest performances that help invest the viewer in these aliens.
“Memorial” is a complex and brutal look at history and remembrance and the price of violence, one that very smartly pulls few punches.
For all that “Tsunkatse” is The Arena Fight Episode that everyone has done (including Trek twice before), it’s elevated by fantastic performances by Ryan, Tim Russ, and guests J.G. Hertzler and Jeffrey Combs.
“Good Shepherd” gives us Voyager’s version of “Lower Decks,” and while it’s not anywhere near what it could have been, it’s still a welcome change.
And “Live Fast and Prosper” is just a fun little caper story.
But man, when it’s bad, it’s just awful. “Equinox, Part II” mangles the character of Captain Janeway for no compellingly good reason, and is just a terrible resolution to what was already a terrible first part at the end of the prior season, wasting four great guest actors in John Savage, Titus Welliver, Rick Worthy, and Olivia Birkelund, and completely ruining a great concept. Not to mention the massively blown opportunity of never seeing the four Equinox folk who become part of the crew ever again.
Speaking of ruining a great concept and blown opportunities, we have “Barge of the Dead,” which takes what should be a great journey for Torres and instead makes it scientific reality that being put into a coma will send you to the afterlife your mother believes in. Yeeeeeeeeah.
Not to mention the nonsensical idiocy of “The Voyager Conspiracy,” which is actually fun until you think about it for a nanosecond; the wasted potential of “Collective,” which gives us four wonderful new characters, but fails to actually tell an interesting story; and the continued defanging of the Borg in “Unimatrix Zero.”
Both “Ashes to Ashes” and “Child’s Play” take good concepts and botch them, while “The Haunting of Deck Twelve” tries and fails to take a terrible concept and save it.
Plus we have three of the biggest embarrassments in Trek’s entire five-decade-plus history, the insult to the character of Kes that is “Fury” and the sheer unbridled awfulness of “Fair Haven” and “Spirit Folk,” which is made a billion times worse by the utterly baffling decision to do Irish Stereotype Theatre, not once, but twice.
This sixth year is all peaks and valleys, a roller coaster of a season, which really is the perfect metaphor, because it’s at once incredibly thrilling and makes you want to throw up.
Warp factor rating for the season: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at GalaxyCon Raleigh at the Raleigh Convention Center in North Carolina this weekend. He’ll be spending most of his time at the Bard’s Tower booth (#500) alongside several other authors. Other guests at the convention include fellow Star Trek scribes Melinda M. Snodgrass and Peter David, as well as Trek actors William Shatner and Carlos Ferro. He’s also doing panels—his schedule can be found here.
Well, that just about sums it up! And frankly, if I wanted to watch TNG, well, I could just watch TNG. At this point it’s not hard to see why the future was getting short for Voyager. There are some good episodes, although none that make my list of favorites for the show. Season 6 is prime oatmeal territory- it’s a fine thing to have when you are laying on the coach not feeling well, but it isn’t your favorite treat, and it isn’t something that is going to challenge you in any way. Season 7 will kind of rally a bit in my opinion, with a couple of my favorite episodes being from there (and with a sudden and almost bizarre affection for continuity, at least by Voyager standards), but yea, we are definitely on the downward slope.
The summary of this season is a good way to describe how my brain always thinks of Voyager – brilliant highs and abominable lows. I had forgotten just how many ups and downs this season had in particular, though; it was really was roller coaster. I really do love Voyager, but getting this far without skipping any episodes can be rough.
Also, as great as Jeri Ryan and Robert Picardo are, Voyager leaned a bit too heavily on them IMO; by this point it was starting to wear a little thin, even if the episodes themselves were good.
@2,
Yeah, the Doctor is my favorite VOY character and one of my main reasons for watching the show. But now that I’m older, I’ll concede his focus (and Seven’s) was at cost of the rest of the Cast’s share of the spotlight.
It’s not dissimilar to Stargate Atlantis leaning too heavily on David Hewlett as its run got going.
Rodney, like the Doctor, was always my favorite SGA character — and I love him, but even I was getting tired of the plethora of Rodney-centric episodes by the end.
Surely the fact her conn officer is TOM PARIS at least partially mitigates this? (Given the shenanigans young Tom gets up to, one suspects ‘… is a bit of a mess’ rather comes with the territory).
ED: Like I said in the rewatch for “Alice,” Paris was wearing the shiny silver outfit and going unshaven all the time, and you’d really think Janeway would notice that…………………..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@3/Mr. Magic: “But now that I’m older, I’ll concede his focus (and Seven’s) was at cost of the rest of the Cast’s share of the spotlight.”
I still say the cause and effect was the other way around. It’s not that the attention on Seven and the Doctor took deserved attention away from the rest of the cast — it’s that the writers failed to make the rest of the cast interesting enough to be worth equal attention. Most of the characters’ story drivers had been resolved years ago at this point, and the only new, continuing storyline they managed to come up with for any of them was the Paris-Torres romance. All the storylines driven by Alpha Quadrant stuff were long resolved or abandoned. Starfleet-Maquis tensions were long-gone, as was the Janeway-Chakotay romantic tension. They’d dropped Chakotay’s “token Native American” characterization and failed to replace it with much of anything. And so on. Seven and the Doctor were the only characters who still had a lot of potential for growth and conflict, so they were naturally the focus of the majority of the stories by default, since there was so little left to say about any of the others.
@4/ED: Except that Tom being “a mess” was one of those character threads that had been left well behind by this point. The Tom Paris of season 6 is a wholesome family man and a responsible officer. He’s not a bad boy anymore, he’s just a settled-down guy with nerdy hobbies.
I’ve found that it’s much more fun to tear apart a bad episode, especially ones as bad as “Spirit Folk,” so that might help explain why it received so many comments. I mean, there are only so many ways to heap praise on an episode that is generally well-liked, and sometimes, mediocre episodes can be hard to generate comments, but something that’s pretty much universally disliked is a fountain of commentary.
Keith, I’ve been a long running fan of your hatred of the disengagement of safety-protocols for four different Trek rewatches now. I’ve finally engaged in the comment section for my own selfish interests. I accept this is a long shot; you made a Red Dwarf reference an episode or two ago, and it got me itching for an RD rewatch done in this format.
Regardless, thanks for the insights over the run man, was good to reacquaint myself with Trek’s highs and lows.
The absolute bollix of “Fairhaven”.
Sadly, it was a big failure on the writers part for both TNG and VOY to make the human characters on those shows interesting (with the exception of the captains because they all had gravitas, were paternal/maternal figures, and generally given interesting things to do; and everyone on Enterprise was boring). It was a complete lack of imagination that the writers on DS9 didn’t suffer from. I always thought Bashir was a prime example of doing something interesting with a human character. He was made genetically engineered, became a mentor to other genetically engineered individuals, and had his whole spy game business with Section 31. O’Brien had the potential to be boring but he does his everyman and family man qualities so well. He also was the go to guy by the writers to be the one that suffers and he was compelling as the long suffering guy. Plus, he and Bashir had my favorite bromance of any Trek series, especially because they were like opposites and started off so rocky. Even Jake Sisko got interesting stuff to do as an aspiring writer/journalist and his capers with Nog. Getting back to Voyager, if they weren’t going to make Harry an alien as initially suggested make him a clone or a sleeper agent out to steal Starfleet secrets. Give Chakotay an incurable disease where he could die the next day or in 10 years. It would totally change his outlook on life and his relationships with the other characters. If I can come up with ideas like these why couldn’t the writers? I think it’s lazy to just give the interesting stuff to only the aliens and artificial lifeforms.
Season six’s quality was surely was all over the place. Admittedly, pulling off 22-26 episodes a year is a stressful undertaking and it’s like a small miracle when a season is majority good like TNG’s third, fourth, and sixth seasons. Today’s TV writing staffs have it so good only having to work on 10-13 episode a season.
@1/wildfyrewarning: The future was getting short for VOY not because of the dip in the quality but because it was already pre-ordained that it would only run 7 seasons like it’s predecessors before the cast becomes too expensive to make continuing the series worth it. And Enterprise was already being developed to supplant it.
@9/garreth: “I think it’s lazy to just give the interesting stuff to only the aliens and artificial lifeforms.”
I don’t think it breaks down on species lines. For one thing, Seven of Nine is human, not alien. And Paris (along with Torres) got to go through a whole multi-season arc from flirtation to love to marriage to parenthood, whereas Neelix and Tuvok were in the same category as Janeway, Chakotay, and Kim, just coasting along without any changes to their status quo that lasted longer than a single episode.