Star Trek: Voyager - Season 5 - Disc 2

Brikar · 12-16-2004, 10:55 AM

While I'm at it, I might as well get the first half of Disc 2 out of the way. I'll edit this later today when I've watched the rest of it. But I've got a final in a few hours...

5x05 "Once Upon a Time" - One of VOY's more intriguing and overlooked characters, Naomi Wildman, returns in a very family-friendly story about the dangers of children on a starship. Naomi's mother, Samantha, is on the Delta Flyer heading back from an away mission when the tiny ship is hit by an ion storm, and crash-lands on a nearby planet. Trapped under 300 tons of rock, the stranded crewmembers have little hope of rescue, knowing that Voyager will have a tough time scanning for them. On Voyager, Naomi frets that her mother hasn't called her in two days, and Neelix tries to hide the truth from her by distracting her with fun activities. The actress playing Naomi managed to impress me by avoiding the usual "child actor" problem of being cute, but not being any good. Instead, Naomi is cute but also well-played, and interesting to boot. Revisiting "Once Upon a Time" brought to light another revelation about my memories of VOY: Neelix isn't nearly as annoying as I remembered him being. Perhaps being exposed to Jar-Jar Binks in 1999 gives a new perspective on Ethan Phillips' "morale officer," much like how watching George Clooney try to be Batman gives us all a new, good feeling about Val Kilmer in the role. Still, the episode presents us with some cute children's story characters, Flotter and Treevus, and manages to be a good, family-friendly episode by focusing on Naomi rather than on the more adult-oriented plight of the stranded crash survivors.
Rating 3.5/5

5x06 "Timeless" - Ah, here we go... the dreaded time-travel episode! I was worried seeing previews for this one years ago. Time-travel had not fared well with me on VOY's previous efforts, like the trip to 1996 in "Future's End". But "Timeless" actually turned out to not only be my favorite episode of VOY's seven years, but also one of my favorite episodes of all of Star Trek. The episode flops back and forth between the present and some fifteen years in the future. In the present, the Voyager crew have developed their own version of the quantum slipstream, first introduced in 4x26 "Hope and Fear". Harry and Tom make a startling discovery as the rest of the crew celebrate their success: it ain't gonna work. Harry comes up with a risky plan to make it work, and the crew, anxious to go home, goes along with it. In the future, the whole thing went awry, and Chakotay and Harry have spent a very lonely 15 years searching for the corpses of the Voyager crew. "Timeless" is one ofHarry Kim's very best episodes, not only in story, but also in terms of Garrett Wang's performance as the character. The aged Harry Kim was a great turn, especially towards the end, when he's flipping out about not being able to save Voyager. With solid direction from Trek vet Levar Burton and some amazing special effects, "Timeless" is a ride from start to finish. I have so much fun with this episode, it's almost worth the price of the entire set.
Rating 5/5

5x07 "Infinite Regress" - This episode presents us with an interesting concept: The Borg claim to bring order to chaos. So what if the exact opposite happened to Seven of Nine? What if chaos was brought to order? A Borg "vinculum" is found in a debris field, and Seven begins to suffer from multiple personality disorder. It seems that the identities of people assimilated into the Borg collective are starting to manifest themselves randomly inside Seven's brain. Of course, the Voyager crew is faced with a moral quandry about shutting down the vinculum to treat Seven: since the vinculum is, in fact, a weapon against the Borg, do they have the right to keep that away from its makers to save her? Of course they do, and the final act of this episode is a fairly tense triple-confrontation. The Voyager must fend off a heavily armed foe, Torres must disable the vinculum that keeps adapting to her attacks, and Tuvok must keep Seven from being thrown into the abyss of oblivion in her own mind. The highlight of this episode is definitely Jeri Ryan's portrayals of the various people inside her. She does exceptionally well as a young girl that plays with Naomi Wildman, as well as the mother of a Starfleet officer killed aboard a ship at Wolf 359, and makes a pretty good Ferengi, and there's an interesting scene where the Klingon male in her takes a liking to Torres... Probably the weakest of her performances is that of a Vulcan, which seems far too much like the regular Seven to be that interesting. I didn't like the way the inside of Seven's mind was set up. It's interesting that it's a Borg ship, and that makes sense, especially when she nearly gets tossed into the abyss at the end. But the real problem is the way it was shot and edited. It's all warbly lenses to distort the image, which is just too cheesy for what could have been a really cool sequence where Seven and Tuvok have to fight off thousands of angry former personalities.
Rating 4/5

5x08 "Nothing Human" - In the season's 8th episode, Torres is stuck on a biobed with an injured alien creature using her body to save its own life. To help, the Doctor creates a new medical hologram in the form of Krell Moset, a Cardassian exobiologist. Things go smoothly until a Bajoran crewmember recognizes Moset as one of the worst mass murderers of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. The meat of the episode is given up to conversations between Moset and the Doctor about the ethics of using Moset's questionable research methods to save lives. Both actors give good performances, and have a good chemistry together. There's a great scene towards the end where the senior crew bicker about what to do. It's great to see the crew getting inflamed about how they feel. Too often on Star Trek it seems as though people have their emotions too well in check, and though it works a lot, there are times when it actually impedes the drama of what's going on. Here, an exchange between Paris and Chakotay has a certain freshness to it because they're willing to openly, and loudly, disagree with each other. The final scene between the Doctor and Moset is a good one, with some good lines delivered back and forth from both actors. That was a real plus for this episode, having a guest actor with such talent that he could work well and comfortably with VOY's best main character.
Rating 4/5

Disc Average 4/5

Brikar · 12-18-2004, 01:10 AM

In order to save board space, I'll put the other discs in this thread.

Disc 3
5x09 "Thirty Days" - Here we have a Tom Paris episode that delves into that character for some much needed exploration. "Thirty Days" is not only important because it presented one of Tom's best episodes, but it also gave us some actual lasting change, small though it may be, in Tom's degrading in rank from Lieutenant to Ensign. The structure of the episode is simple: Paris is put in the brig for thirty days after disobeying the captain's orders. While there, he starts a letter to his father to explain his actions, and to get his feelings out. We learn a lot about Tom's character in this episode, especially one powerful scene with Harry Kim about Tom's tendency not to finish things. "Thirty Days" also has a really interesting sci-fi concept as the backdrop for all of this drama: an ocean, suspended in space by a force field, with a submarine society mining it for oxygen. The episode also has some really great special effects, and an environmental theme similar to the running encounters Voyager keeps having with the Malons.
Rating 4.5/5

5x10 "Counterpoint" - In this episode, Voyager is ferrying refugees through a dangerous region of space belonging to a race of aliens that hunt down and imprison telepaths. It's an interesting concept, as Voyager is continually inspected and watched the entire time, and must keep putting the refugees into transporter suspension to escape detention. The episode twists when the commander of the alien forces defects, and Janeway starts to fall for him. "Counterpoint" is a fairly weak episode, though it presented lots of potential for a good one. The real failing here is in the performances of the guest stars, which is stilted. Not enough exploration of their race, especially why they really hate the telepaths so much, is present here. It didn't seem like they had that great of a reason for persecuting these telepaths as they do, but maybe I missed part of the episode. I was watching it with others, and a couple of times, we were interrupted by discussion. Still, there's some interesting twists in the plot as both sides try to outwit each other.
Rating 2.5/5

5x11 "Latent Image" - The Doctor has long been accepted as one of (if not the) Voyager's best characters, and Robert Picardo is definitely the best actor on the cast, and "Latent Image" is one of the reasons why. In it, the Doctor is presented with a moral quandry that ends up setting up a feedback loop in his program. Presented with two patients, each with an equal chance of survival, whom will he choose? The episode starts out as an intriguing mystery, with the Doctor trying to find out about a mysterious operation he seems to have performed on Harry Kim, but has no memory of. Things change around about halfway through, when the Doctor finds that it was Janeway that erased his memories, and she decides that the Doctor has grown enough in the past two years that he deserves to know what happened, and to work through the problem himself. At first, it seems a lot like that TNG episode where the crew had their memories erased, but the addition of the excellent ethical question to it all is what makes this episode stand apart. Add that to Picardo's excellent performance, and you've got a top-notch Voyager episode with some real good meat to it.
Rating 5/5

5x12 "Bride of Chaotica!" - Now HERE'S a fun one. Purely silly all the way through, "Bride of Chaotica!" is one of those rare Star Trek episodes (outside of DS9) that strove for comedy and actually made it. The world of Captain Proton is extremely cheesy, but extremely charming at the same time. The campy music, the cheesy special effects, and the tongue-in-cheek performances of the cast (especially Robert McNeill and Kate Mulgrew) all add up to a really great 40 minutes. You can really tell that the cast was all really into making this episode, they're clearly having lots of fun doing it. Captain Proton is definitely one of the most interesting holographic additions to the Star Trek Universe.
Rating 4.5/5

Arik · 12-18-2004, 02:16 AM

I think part of my dislike for Counterpoint comes from the fact that, here we are in the fifth season, and we really find out that Janeway likes classical music. Then, they never really returned to that. Part of why I enjoyed TNG, and DS9 (and really any other TV show I enjoy) was in watching characters that I was comfortable with. Counterpoint brought a facet of Janeway's personality out into the open in the fifth season, then hid it again.

Meh, that may have just been me.

I've always enjoyed Latent Image, though. The one thing that I think would have improved it was if we had seen the character before this episode. Like if she had been a reoccuring character over the course of the season.

Brikar · 12-18-2004, 03:04 AM

Voyager seemed to do that a few times, that is, kill off some guest crewmember and have it be really emotional for the cast... but since we never saw them before, it was really hard for the audience to relate. It's not like they never had the opportunity, since we often found the main cast going on away missions with Ensign du Jour. They could have developed five or six lower crewmembers, without sacrificing their obvious goal of not having story arcs. Then, it would have meant much more to the long-time viewers when something happened to one of them, and new viewers would have felt the way we do now.

I think the dead crewmember appeared again in an episode next season. I don't remember what it was called, but I'm fairly certain that Voyager came across a species that could reanimate the dead, and they'd found her floating photon tube and brought her back, and she sought out Voyager.

Arik · 12-18-2004, 03:11 AM

Yeah. I try to forget that episode. It's the episode that showed us that while Harry was madly in love with his fiancee, he secretly wanted this other woman. Or, as I remember it, the 500th Harry episode that featured him falling in love with the wrong woman.

I don't think it's the same person, though. I may be wrong.

Brikar · 12-18-2004, 03:15 AM

I could also be wrong, since I only vaguely remember the episode...

Cymro · 12-18-2004, 04:02 AM

Counterpoint was just too dull. I find that the Voyager and Enterprise people are really crap at casting guest stars, and writing their characters, especially compared to DS9, where a lot of the guest actors and characters were better than most of the main cast. There were exceptions of course, but most were awful in Voyager. The one that I REALLY fucking hated was the guy from "Hope and Fear", who was also in TNG "Who watches the Watchers?" The guy has an annoying voice to begin with, but on top of that he couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. Just thinking about him irritates me. Then, there was the guy from counterpoint, and also those semi-regulars from the first two seasons (Jonas, Seska, Mage Cullah, etc.). One of my favourite Voyager semi-reg was Suder, and I was really gutted when they Killed him off, though his part in Basics was really the highlight of the episode, and I wouldn't have had him die any other way. Maybe I'm just a sucker for those kinds of characters (when I was reading LOTR I was hoping that Gollum would see a happy ending).

Brikar · 12-18-2004, 04:17 AM

Suder definitely was awesome. I too, wish that he'd stuck around, since he could have become an even more interesting character. But the way they ended his story was quite good, so I'm happy with that.

I hated the episode "Hope and Fear". I haven't seen it in so long, but I remember hating practically everything about it, including the performance of the guest star. The guy in "Counterpoint" was pretty bad, too, and it dragged the whole episode down. It's easily the weakest episode I've watched on this fifth season set so far. I would give it a 2, but the concept was too intriguing to me. Still, 2.5 seems too high... I dunno. I'll leave it.

Brikar · 12-18-2004, 03:18 PM

Disc 4
5x13 "Gravity" - 5x13 presents us with a look at Tuvok's past, essentially the reason why he is the way he is. Intercut with a story involving Tuvok and Tom Paris crashlanding on a desert planet stuck inside a subspace sinkhole is a small series of flashbacks involving young Tuvok being sent away from home to study with a Vulcan master. On the planet, Tuvok and Tom strike up a friendship with an alien woman named Noss who has been stuck there for some 14 years. Noss begins to fall for Tuvok, and we have our character drama for the episode. Tuvok is unwilling to fall for Noss, even with the knowledge that his wife is thousands of lightyears away, and it is unlikely they will be rescued by Voyager. "Gravity" is probably the most interesting that Tuvok has ever been. Previous episodes had explored his capacity for violence, but here we see him struggling with love and passion. The only real drawback to the episode, really, is a poor performance by the teenage Tuvok. The boy just plain sucks. Beyond that, I don't feel that there are enough flashbacks, and what could have been a really interesting exploration of the young Tuvok is pushed aside in favor of exploring the resulting adult Tuvok. Still, "Gravity" is a good episode, with good performances from the main cast. Watching Tom and Tuvok bond is a joy, also.
Rating 3.5/5

5x14 "Bliss" - Voyager comes across a wormhole that leads directly into Earth orbit. At first, the crew thinks it's too good to be true. But soon, a preponderance of data suggests that this is the real deal, and everyone gets excited about going home... except Seven of Nine. Seven contacts an alien vessel, and the alien captain, Qatai, warns her that they are being deceived. It seems that there is a massive alien life form that eats starships by luring their crews in by telepathically showing them their desires. For the Voyager crew, it's a way home. "Bliss" looks at Seven's anxiety toward returning to Earth, and presents us with a good space adventure story to boot. With shades of "Moby Dick," and a bit of TNG's "The Game" thrown in, "Bliss" is an enjoyable ride loaded with some truly impressive special effects.
Rating 4.5/5

5x13 "Dark Frontier" - Here's where Season 5 gets a bit messy. What are we to make of "Dark Frontier"? I'm not certain. Originally, it was a decently exciting action/adventure episode loaded with continuity problems. The Borg look nothing like they did in the era of the Hansen's trip aboard the Raven. They didn't have transwarp technology, and no one, absolutely no one, had any idea that there was a Borg Queen. And yet all of these things are in "Dark Frontier," part of which takes place a solid decade before the Enterprise-D makes first contact in "Q Who?" But then you've got interesting things like a shipload of El Aurian refugees in "Star Trek Generations" who I find it hard to believe would not tell anyone of the evil race of machines that destroyed their world. And the biggest issue of them all: ENT's "Regeneration." So did "Regeneration" rewrite the timeline? Are "Dark Frontier"'s continuity issues even issues at all now? Either way, "Dark Frontier" really isn't that good of an episode. There are some good special effects, some decent suspense sequences, but nothing really that thrilling. The exchanges between the Borg Queen and Seven are essentially the same conversation over and over again, and they're essentially the same conversation the the Queen had with Data in "Star Trek First Contact". So "Dark Frontier" really doesn't tread new ground, except to show us Seven's past, but when it does that, it does it in a sloppy manner that gives this episode the negative reputation it deserves. Still, there are some good scenes here. Two that come immediately to mind are two that, interestingly, aren't on my VHS tape of the original broadcast - In the first part, after the scene where Janeway and Chakotay inspect the Borg wreckage, Harry and Tom go to the mess hall. Harry expresses regret that his torpedo idea ended up killing all the drones, and Tom tells him he shouldn't care about "mindless automatons". Seven overhears the conversation, and is offended. The other scene that was new to me is in Engineering: B'Elanna tells Janeway she went into Seven's personal database to figure out how to adapt the transwarp coil, and Janeway gets upset, telling her that there are protocols about personal privacy aboard the ship. They have an interesting discussion about whether or not Seven was really "one of our own".
Rating 2/5

Cymro · 12-18-2004, 04:29 PM

I don't know how you could give Bliss a 4.5, I found it to be rather dull.

12-16-2004, 10:55 AM	#1 (permalink)
Brikar The Dude Join Date: Dec 1969 Location: Massachusetts Posts: 3,606	Star Trek: Voyager - Season 5 - Disc 2, Disc 3 While I'm at it, I might as well get the first half of Disc 2 out of the way. I'll edit this later today when I've watched the rest of it. But I've got a final in a few hours... 5x05 "Once Upon a Time" - One of VOY's more intriguing and overlooked characters, Naomi Wildman, returns in a very family-friendly story about the dangers of children on a starship. Naomi's mother, Samantha, is on the Delta Flyer heading back from an away mission when the tiny ship is hit by an ion storm, and crash-lands on a nearby planet. Trapped under 300 tons of rock, the stranded crewmembers have little hope of rescue, knowing that Voyager will have a tough time scanning for them. On Voyager, Naomi frets that her mother hasn't called her in two days, and Neelix tries to hide the truth from her by distracting her with fun activities. The actress playing Naomi managed to impress me by avoiding the usual "child actor" problem of being cute, but not being any good. Instead, Naomi is cute but also well-played, and interesting to boot. Revisiting "Once Upon a Time" brought to light another revelation about my memories of VOY: Neelix isn't nearly as annoying as I remembered him being. Perhaps being exposed to Jar-Jar Binks in 1999 gives a new perspective on Ethan Phillips' "morale officer," much like how watching George Clooney try to be Batman gives us all a new, good feeling about Val Kilmer in the role. Still, the episode presents us with some cute children's story characters, Flotter and Treevus, and manages to be a good, family-friendly episode by focusing on Naomi rather than on the more adult-oriented plight of the stranded crash survivors. Rating 3.5/5 5x06 "Timeless" - Ah, here we go... the dreaded time-travel episode! I was worried seeing previews for this one years ago. Time-travel had not fared well with me on VOY's previous efforts, like the trip to 1996 in "Future's End". But "Timeless" actually turned out to not only be my favorite episode of VOY's seven years, but also one of my favorite episodes of all of Star Trek. The episode flops back and forth between the present and some fifteen years in the future. In the present, the Voyager crew have developed their own version of the quantum slipstream, first introduced in 4x26 "Hope and Fear". Harry and Tom make a startling discovery as the rest of the crew celebrate their success: it ain't gonna work. Harry comes up with a risky plan to make it work, and the crew, anxious to go home, goes along with it. In the future, the whole thing went awry, and Chakotay and Harry have spent a very lonely 15 years searching for the corpses of the Voyager crew. "Timeless" is one ofHarry Kim's very best episodes, not only in story, but also in terms of Garrett Wang's performance as the character. The aged Harry Kim was a great turn, especially towards the end, when he's flipping out about not being able to save Voyager. With solid direction from Trek vet Levar Burton and some amazing special effects, "Timeless" is a ride from start to finish. I have so much fun with this episode, it's almost worth the price of the entire set. Rating 5/5 5x07 "Infinite Regress" - This episode presents us with an interesting concept: The Borg claim to bring order to chaos. So what if the exact opposite happened to Seven of Nine? What if chaos was brought to order? A Borg "vinculum" is found in a debris field, and Seven begins to suffer from multiple personality disorder. It seems that the identities of people assimilated into the Borg collective are starting to manifest themselves randomly inside Seven's brain. Of course, the Voyager crew is faced with a moral quandry about shutting down the vinculum to treat Seven: since the vinculum is, in fact, a weapon against the Borg, do they have the right to keep that away from its makers to save her? Of course they do, and the final act of this episode is a fairly tense triple-confrontation. The Voyager must fend off a heavily armed foe, Torres must disable the vinculum that keeps adapting to her attacks, and Tuvok must keep Seven from being thrown into the abyss of oblivion in her own mind. The highlight of this episode is definitely Jeri Ryan's portrayals of the various people inside her. She does exceptionally well as a young girl that plays with Naomi Wildman, as well as the mother of a Starfleet officer killed aboard a ship at Wolf 359, and makes a pretty good Ferengi, and there's an interesting scene where the Klingon male in her takes a liking to Torres... Probably the weakest of her performances is that of a Vulcan, which seems far too much like the regular Seven to be that interesting. I didn't like the way the inside of Seven's mind was set up. It's interesting that it's a Borg ship, and that makes sense, especially when she nearly gets tossed into the abyss at the end. But the real problem is the way it was shot and edited. It's all warbly lenses to distort the image, which is just too cheesy for what could have been a really cool sequence where Seven and Tuvok have to fight off thousands of angry former personalities. Rating 4/5 5x08 "Nothing Human" - In the season's 8th episode, Torres is stuck on a biobed with an injured alien creature using her body to save its own life. To help, the Doctor creates a new medical hologram in the form of Krell Moset, a Cardassian exobiologist. Things go smoothly until a Bajoran crewmember recognizes Moset as one of the worst mass murderers of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. The meat of the episode is given up to conversations between Moset and the Doctor about the ethics of using Moset's questionable research methods to save lives. Both actors give good performances, and have a good chemistry together. There's a great scene towards the end where the senior crew bicker about what to do. It's great to see the crew getting inflamed about how they feel. Too often on Star Trek it seems as though people have their emotions too well in check, and though it works a lot, there are times when it actually impedes the drama of what's going on. Here, an exchange between Paris and Chakotay has a certain freshness to it because they're willing to openly, and loudly, disagree with each other. The final scene between the Doctor and Moset is a good one, with some good lines delivered back and forth from both actors. That was a real plus for this episode, having a guest actor with such talent that he could work well and comfortably with VOY's best main character. Rating 4/5 Disc Average 4/5 __________________ "A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown." http://olympusmans.blogspot.com http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

12-18-2004, 01:10 AM	#2 (permalink)
Brikar The Dude Join Date: Dec 1969 Location: Massachusetts Posts: 3,606	In order to save board space, I'll put the other discs in this thread. Disc 3 5x09 "Thirty Days" - Here we have a Tom Paris episode that delves into that character for some much needed exploration. "Thirty Days" is not only important because it presented one of Tom's best episodes, but it also gave us some actual lasting change, small though it may be, in Tom's degrading in rank from Lieutenant to Ensign. The structure of the episode is simple: Paris is put in the brig for thirty days after disobeying the captain's orders. While there, he starts a letter to his father to explain his actions, and to get his feelings out. We learn a lot about Tom's character in this episode, especially one powerful scene with Harry Kim about Tom's tendency not to finish things. "Thirty Days" also has a really interesting sci-fi concept as the backdrop for all of this drama: an ocean, suspended in space by a force field, with a submarine society mining it for oxygen. The episode also has some really great special effects, and an environmental theme similar to the running encounters Voyager keeps having with the Malons. Rating 4.5/5 5x10 "Counterpoint" - In this episode, Voyager is ferrying refugees through a dangerous region of space belonging to a race of aliens that hunt down and imprison telepaths. It's an interesting concept, as Voyager is continually inspected and watched the entire time, and must keep putting the refugees into transporter suspension to escape detention. The episode twists when the commander of the alien forces defects, and Janeway starts to fall for him. "Counterpoint" is a fairly weak episode, though it presented lots of potential for a good one. The real failing here is in the performances of the guest stars, which is stilted. Not enough exploration of their race, especially why they really hate the telepaths so much, is present here. It didn't seem like they had that great of a reason for persecuting these telepaths as they do, but maybe I missed part of the episode. I was watching it with others, and a couple of times, we were interrupted by discussion. Still, there's some interesting twists in the plot as both sides try to outwit each other. Rating 2.5/5 5x11 "Latent Image" - The Doctor has long been accepted as one of (if not the) Voyager's best characters, and Robert Picardo is definitely the best actor on the cast, and "Latent Image" is one of the reasons why. In it, the Doctor is presented with a moral quandry that ends up setting up a feedback loop in his program. Presented with two patients, each with an equal chance of survival, whom will he choose? The episode starts out as an intriguing mystery, with the Doctor trying to find out about a mysterious operation he seems to have performed on Harry Kim, but has no memory of. Things change around about halfway through, when the Doctor finds that it was Janeway that erased his memories, and she decides that the Doctor has grown enough in the past two years that he deserves to know what happened, and to work through the problem himself. At first, it seems a lot like that TNG episode where the crew had their memories erased, but the addition of the excellent ethical question to it all is what makes this episode stand apart. Add that to Picardo's excellent performance, and you've got a top-notch Voyager episode with some real good meat to it. Rating 5/5 5x12 "Bride of Chaotica!" - Now HERE'S a fun one. Purely silly all the way through, "Bride of Chaotica!" is one of those rare Star Trek episodes (outside of DS9) that strove for comedy and actually made it. The world of Captain Proton is extremely cheesy, but extremely charming at the same time. The campy music, the cheesy special effects, and the tongue-in-cheek performances of the cast (especially Robert McNeill and Kate Mulgrew) all add up to a really great 40 minutes. You can really tell that the cast was all really into making this episode, they're clearly having lots of fun doing it. Captain Proton is definitely one of the most interesting holographic additions to the Star Trek Universe. Rating 4.5/5 __________________ "A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown." http://olympusmans.blogspot.com http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

12-18-2004, 02:16 AM	#3 (permalink)
Arik Astro-Monkey Join Date: Jan 2010 Location: Here, dumbfuck! Posts: 2,304	I think part of my dislike for Counterpoint comes from the fact that, here we are in the fifth season, and we really find out that Janeway likes classical music. Then, they never really returned to that. Part of why I enjoyed TNG, and DS9 (and really any other TV show I enjoy) was in watching characters that I was comfortable with. Counterpoint brought a facet of Janeway's personality out into the open in the fifth season, then hid it again. Meh, that may have just been me. I've always enjoyed Latent Image, though. The one thing that I think would have improved it was if we had seen the character before this episode. Like if she had been a reoccuring character over the course of the season. __________________ The writers of this post apologize for you being too stupid to understand it.

12-18-2004, 03:04 AM	#4 (permalink)
Brikar The Dude Join Date: Dec 1969 Location: Massachusetts Posts: 3,606	Voyager seemed to do that a few times, that is, kill off some guest crewmember and have it be really emotional for the cast... but since we never saw them before, it was really hard for the audience to relate. It's not like they never had the opportunity, since we often found the main cast going on away missions with Ensign du Jour. They could have developed five or six lower crewmembers, without sacrificing their obvious goal of not having story arcs. Then, it would have meant much more to the long-time viewers when something happened to one of them, and new viewers would have felt the way we do now. I think the dead crewmember appeared again in an episode next season. I don't remember what it was called, but I'm fairly certain that Voyager came across a species that could reanimate the dead, and they'd found her floating photon tube and brought her back, and she sought out Voyager. __________________ "A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown." http://olympusmans.blogspot.com http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

12-18-2004, 03:11 AM	#5 (permalink)
Arik Astro-Monkey Join Date: Jan 2010 Location: Here, dumbfuck! Posts: 2,304	Yeah. I try to forget that episode. It's the episode that showed us that while Harry was madly in love with his fiancee, he secretly wanted this other woman. Or, as I remember it, the 500th Harry episode that featured him falling in love with the wrong woman. I don't think it's the same person, though. I may be wrong. __________________ The writers of this post apologize for you being too stupid to understand it.

12-18-2004, 03:15 AM	#6 (permalink)
Brikar The Dude Join Date: Dec 1969 Location: Massachusetts Posts: 3,606	I could also be wrong, since I only vaguely remember the episode... __________________ "A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown." http://olympusmans.blogspot.com http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

12-18-2004, 04:02 AM	#7 (permalink)
Cymro Religious Fanatic Join Date: Nov 1999 Location: Shitsville, CF63 Posts: 4,921	Counterpoint was just too dull. I find that the Voyager and Enterprise people are really crap at casting guest stars, and writing their characters, especially compared to DS9, where a lot of the guest actors and characters were better than most of the main cast. There were exceptions of course, but most were awful in Voyager. The one that I REALLY fucking hated was the guy from "Hope and Fear", who was also in TNG "Who watches the Watchers?" The guy has an annoying voice to begin with, but on top of that he couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. Just thinking about him irritates me. Then, there was the guy from counterpoint, and also those semi-regulars from the first two seasons (Jonas, Seska, Mage Cullah, etc.). One of my favourite Voyager semi-reg was Suder, and I was really gutted when they Killed him off, though his part in Basics was really the highlight of the episode, and I wouldn't have had him die any other way. Maybe I'm just a sucker for those kinds of characters (when I was reading LOTR I was hoping that Gollum would see a happy ending). __________________ "Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. "But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

12-18-2004, 04:17 AM	#8 (permalink)
Brikar The Dude Join Date: Dec 1969 Location: Massachusetts Posts: 3,606	Suder definitely was awesome. I too, wish that he'd stuck around, since he could have become an even more interesting character. But the way they ended his story was quite good, so I'm happy with that. I hated the episode "Hope and Fear". I haven't seen it in so long, but I remember hating practically everything about it, including the performance of the guest star. The guy in "Counterpoint" was pretty bad, too, and it dragged the whole episode down. It's easily the weakest episode I've watched on this fifth season set so far. I would give it a 2, but the concept was too intriguing to me. Still, 2.5 seems too high... I dunno. I'll leave it. __________________ "A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown." http://olympusmans.blogspot.com http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

12-18-2004, 03:18 PM	#9 (permalink)
Brikar The Dude Join Date: Dec 1969 Location: Massachusetts Posts: 3,606	Disc 4 5x13 "Gravity" - 5x13 presents us with a look at Tuvok's past, essentially the reason why he is the way he is. Intercut with a story involving Tuvok and Tom Paris crashlanding on a desert planet stuck inside a subspace sinkhole is a small series of flashbacks involving young Tuvok being sent away from home to study with a Vulcan master. On the planet, Tuvok and Tom strike up a friendship with an alien woman named Noss who has been stuck there for some 14 years. Noss begins to fall for Tuvok, and we have our character drama for the episode. Tuvok is unwilling to fall for Noss, even with the knowledge that his wife is thousands of lightyears away, and it is unlikely they will be rescued by Voyager. "Gravity" is probably the most interesting that Tuvok has ever been. Previous episodes had explored his capacity for violence, but here we see him struggling with love and passion. The only real drawback to the episode, really, is a poor performance by the teenage Tuvok. The boy just plain sucks. Beyond that, I don't feel that there are enough flashbacks, and what could have been a really interesting exploration of the young Tuvok is pushed aside in favor of exploring the resulting adult Tuvok. Still, "Gravity" is a good episode, with good performances from the main cast. Watching Tom and Tuvok bond is a joy, also. Rating 3.5/5 5x14 "Bliss" - Voyager comes across a wormhole that leads directly into Earth orbit. At first, the crew thinks it's too good to be true. But soon, a preponderance of data suggests that this is the real deal, and everyone gets excited about going home... except Seven of Nine. Seven contacts an alien vessel, and the alien captain, Qatai, warns her that they are being deceived. It seems that there is a massive alien life form that eats starships by luring their crews in by telepathically showing them their desires. For the Voyager crew, it's a way home. "Bliss" looks at Seven's anxiety toward returning to Earth, and presents us with a good space adventure story to boot. With shades of "Moby Dick," and a bit of TNG's "The Game" thrown in, "Bliss" is an enjoyable ride loaded with some truly impressive special effects. Rating 4.5/5 5x13 "Dark Frontier" - Here's where Season 5 gets a bit messy. What are we to make of "Dark Frontier"? I'm not certain. Originally, it was a decently exciting action/adventure episode loaded with continuity problems. The Borg look nothing like they did in the era of the Hansen's trip aboard the Raven. They didn't have transwarp technology, and no one, absolutely no one, had any idea that there was a Borg Queen. And yet all of these things are in "Dark Frontier," part of which takes place a solid decade before the Enterprise-D makes first contact in "Q Who?" But then you've got interesting things like a shipload of El Aurian refugees in "Star Trek Generations" who I find it hard to believe would not tell anyone of the evil race of machines that destroyed their world. And the biggest issue of them all: ENT's "Regeneration." So did "Regeneration" rewrite the timeline? Are "Dark Frontier"'s continuity issues even issues at all now? Either way, "Dark Frontier" really isn't that good of an episode. There are some good special effects, some decent suspense sequences, but nothing really that thrilling. The exchanges between the Borg Queen and Seven are essentially the same conversation over and over again, and they're essentially the same conversation the the Queen had with Data in "Star Trek First Contact". So "Dark Frontier" really doesn't tread new ground, except to show us Seven's past, but when it does that, it does it in a sloppy manner that gives this episode the negative reputation it deserves. Still, there are some good scenes here. Two that come immediately to mind are two that, interestingly, aren't on my VHS tape of the original broadcast - In the first part, after the scene where Janeway and Chakotay inspect the Borg wreckage, Harry and Tom go to the mess hall. Harry expresses regret that his torpedo idea ended up killing all the drones, and Tom tells him he shouldn't care about "mindless automatons". Seven overhears the conversation, and is offended. The other scene that was new to me is in Engineering: B'Elanna tells Janeway she went into Seven's personal database to figure out how to adapt the transwarp coil, and Janeway gets upset, telling her that there are protocols about personal privacy aboard the ship. They have an interesting discussion about whether or not Seven was really "one of our own". Rating 2/5 __________________ "A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown." http://olympusmans.blogspot.com http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

12-18-2004, 04:29 PM	#10 (permalink)
Cymro Religious Fanatic Join Date: Nov 1999 Location: Shitsville, CF63 Posts: 4,921	I don't know how you could give Bliss a 4.5, I found it to be rather dull. __________________ "Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. "But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

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