LizstarTrek - Voyager Season 3 episodes 20-25

Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!

Rise - VOY 6/10

Voyager is helping some friendly aliens who’s planet is being harassed by a bunch of asteroids. They can’t blow them apart though, no matter what, the asteroids are reacting weirdly. If they can’t stop them, many might die. They get a call from a scientist from the surface who says the asteroids are “Not what they seem” before he’s cut off, so it’s time to visit him. On the way down, however, their shuttle crashes, which is the only thing I ever see these fucking shuttles do.

It’s now Neelix, Tuvok, an alien they brought with them, and the scientist and his friend who go and meet them at the crash site. They need to get back up to Voyager with the scientist, but how? The shuttle is fried. Luckily there’s an orbital tether nearby they can use to get up, though it’s damaged. Neelix offers to take control of the mission, basically, and takes responsibility for fixing the tether. He wants to prove to Neelix that he has what it takes to be on this team. They find a squatter who’s been hiding in the tether, who threatens Neelix with a knife, but he’s a pleasant guy so he convinces her to stand down and join them instead.

Meanwhile on Voyager, they determine that the asteroids have some kind of guidance system in them. Someone is TRYING to attack the planet.

Back in the tether, the scientist they picked up is being a dick. He tries to leave without them. He gets in a fight with others. One of them tries to throw him out of the thing, and Tuvok needs to stop him. So when he’s killed, seemingly by poison, there’s no immediate idea of who it could be. (Though it’s kinda obviously just from vibes) It’s a good setup and concept for a murder mystery… though the pacing, and as I said, vibes, are a biiit off. It’s not as good as it could be, I feel. The scientist gives a warning about something on the roof before dying, and Neelix decides that they have to go up to see what that is. Tuvok, being a condescending dickhead, disagrees, and Neelix RIPS into him in a scene I kinda love, about how yes, he has no feelings about Neelix, as he says, but that’s the problem. NO respect, at all, for the past three years.

Anyways Tuvok goes on the roof and gets thrown off by the traitor, who’s the guy they came down with, who was working with some aliens who are trying to genocide the planet and claim it for themselves. Neelix is injured, but manages to sneak Tuvok back into the shuttle, who beats the shit out of the traitor and throws him out in a HILARIOUS scene that looks like shit in a way I appreciate. He and Neelix have a heart to heart, and they make it back, using the scientist’s information to take out the aliens and save the day. Yay!

The actual episode part of the episode was just okay, though I did really like the Neelix and Tuvok parts

Favorite Son - VOY 4/10

As they fly around space, Kim is having some deja vu moments… including a moment where they meet a new alien species, he goes “I REMEMBER THIS, THEY’RE GOING TO FIRE”, then reroutes weapons to ops and opens fire on the random aliens. Well that’s fucked. Belanna gets second degree burns on her lungs in the ensuing battle. That’s VERY fucked. Harry feels bad cause oopsies he did a warcrime and almost did murder ):

He then has nightmares about it, and about being sick with chicken pox, and then wakes up with a weird-ass rash. The doctor can’t find anything wrong with him, he’s just… turning red in parts of his body.\

After some study, they find out yes, those aliens WERE about to shoot on them. So uh, turns out Harry’s hunches are a GOOD thing, in a way? Especially as they’re now being chased by more aliens. Harry leads them to a star system, where they are saved by people calling themselves Taresian, who explain that Harry is a Taresian, who’s finally made it back home.

The Taresians are almost all sexy women who are rubbing all over Harry, and it grosses me out. Thats intentional, for the record. The purpose of this episode was, quote, “a male fantasy piece with a dark twist”. Well, we’ll see the dark twist eventually. The Taresians explain that they go around to other planets and impregnate women with their babies, which is fucked beyond belief, and then those babies will try to find their way back to Taresian space. Hey cool, can you help get us back to Earth then??????? No? Okay.

The vibes here are rancid. They’ve got a lot of weird rituals that are… off, and they seem to be isolating Voyager from Kim. But it’s fine cause he’s about to be married to a bunch of hot women, that’s GREAT! Voyager finds out they implanted a virus that’s turning him into a Taresian. But for what reason? :o

This episode keeps trying to be sexy, but Kim has this permanent virginity energy about him that makes it uncomfortable, nad not in the way they’re TRYING to make it uncomfortable. He always has the energy that he’s trying to get away from these hot babes and get to the nearest D&D table.

Harry looks for the only other dude who has were, and find him, a dried husk. Oh my god they SUCKED HIM DRY. Yeah, they turn aliens into them, lead them there with implanted genetic memories, and then eat their genetic code. Voyager rescues him, and they leave. Eh.

Before and After - VOY 8/10

Fascinating cold open here. We see the Doctor, with hair, operating on people worried about their family member. He then tells the person that they were “the best friend they ever had”, and then used a “temporal bio-chanber” something or other on her, and then she wakes up and a boy is like “hello, Grandma Kes”. Ooh, some intrigue!

Kes is apparently 9 years old, so this is six years in the future. We see some interesting things, I always love seeing what Trek assumes it could be like in an alternate future. Kes has a kid with Paris, and their kid has another kid with… Kim. Kim, the fuck you doin’??? Janeway appears to be gone, and we’ve got Captain Choky, as we’re calling him. Kes appears to have no memories of anything, except for that first scene, and then she gets cold and wakes up in her room.

It appears to be that she’s living life in reverse. Everyone is thinking she might be delusional, but eventually she knows something she SHOULDN’T know, after going back in time again, so they’re like “okay, sOMETHING is up”

Apparently, B’Ellana and Janeway died in “THE YEAR OF HELL”. I’m sure that won’t be important. Paris rebounded with Kes, apparently.

The aliens they fought during THE YEAR OF HELL used temporal weapons, and they has caused chroniton radiation. And this, alongside the bio temporal chamber thingy are causing her to live life backwards, her first memories from her death. And eventually she might just… go back to her birth, or even before.

We have to watch Kes give birth. Whoof. This is DURING the YEAR OF HELL, and then we go back even further, to just the start of the YAR OF HELL. Okay I’m getting tired of writing it like that. It’s the YELL now. So at the start of YELL, Kes gets to meet Torres, who’s in a relationship with Paris, and then we watch her and Janeway die. Dammit. Kes is trying to use her future knowledge to help people, now not caring as much about fixing her problem, and worrying more about helping others. After she finds out she’s infected, though, she goes and finds out what the torpedo’s… variance was, so she can stop her backwards movement. She goes back one more time, 11 years before YELL, and they uh… throw some anti-chronitons at her. Did you know there’s anti-time??

It does work. She goes back to the start of Voyager, then to her childhood. This is horrifying. Her parent, or whoever it is, is kinda like “ohhh you’ve been on a starship, of course you have!” and she has NO way of fixing this issue. She goes back to being born… Then to being an embryo… then egg cells, and finally nothing. It’s black.

They maybe should have just stopped there, that would have been fucking NUTS, but no, now time is moving forward normally. She’s brought back, the anti-chronitons worked perfectly! She’s now back as a healthy 3 year and two month old. Kes now has all her memories, AND the future memories. And she’s keeping a lot of those secret… but she will warn them on the Krenim. I’m sure that won’t be important.

I actually really liked this episode. Really fun concept, done well, rather horrifying in a way

Real Life - VOY 9/10

We start with a Jetsons-ass 50s-ass family ready to see their husband/father off to work, as the Doctor comes back, and then transfers to Sickbay. Turns out he made a new Holodeck family, to see what its like to have a family. It’s kinda like something Data would do. In fact, he DID kinda do that once, though uh, hopefully this time it will end without me sobbing into my tea. He invited his friends over to meet his family, sounds cute.

Meanwhile, they are exploring space and find that some aliens blew up a scientific space station, and they need to find out who did it. These two concepts aren’t going to mesh well are they?

The holo-family keeps talking about how great the doctor is, and how he’s the best person and best doctor in the whoooole wide world. Torres, who has had a very, VERY not good family life, is EXTREMELY offended. This COULD be interesting! A plot that tries to show that the perfect neuclear family we are TAUGHT is the goal isn’t true or real, showsn through Torres’ fucked up familial history, sounds almost more MODERN than something from the 90s. I’m worried they’ll fuck it up though.

Torres “fixes” the problem by apparently adding randomness. Now one of the children is a brat who is very very needy, the mom is exhausted and belligerent, and the son is trans-Klingon. Torres programmed his life into a wacky sitcom. TOTALLY on purpose, too.

There’s a scene where Torres and Paris flirt with each other. I… WEIRDLY don’t hate it. So there’s a thing this episode is doing. Torres is kinda… a character. Not just an angry woman who does her job. She’s snarking back, reasonably annoyed but putting her frustrations to positive things…. she’s reading porn. In the mess hall.

“Doc, you’re acting like you’re trying to cure a disease. You can’t… CURE a family” - Paris. That line is…. very good.

“Dad! what are you doing here???” “I live here, Jeffery, in case you’ve forgotten.” That line is. Also good.

Jeffery gets in with some Bad Boys (Klingons), and we see a knife they call their dak’tag. I was like “that’s no Dak’tag. I’m guessing they fucked up?” Nope. It’s a Kut’luch knife, used in ritual violence to hurt someone innocent to become a warrior. That’s a… very dumb ritual. Why would they do that and then call it honorable? Anyways, it’s a good twist for Trek Nerds like me to go “WAIT NO.” Also, the Doctor’s daughter is injured playing Parese Squares and is probably going to die. Remember that sentence I said earlier about hopefully this won’t end with me crying in my tea? That might be ironic. The Ensign ends the problem, because holy SHIT, he cannot handle this.

Amazing scene with Paris and the Doctor. You can’t have the good times and ignore and throw away the bad. The good things that can grow from adversity. The whole point of having a family is being there for each other.

Yep. I teared up. It’s pretty fucking harsh. And we watch this girl die, on screen. Fuck you, me. Fuck you and your ironic joke about crying. WHY DO WE EVEN HAVE PARESE SQUARES? THAT SHIT SHOULD BE OUTLAWED.

This episode’s A plot was basically perfect and hit very, VERY hard. The B-plot was uninteresting and barely there. It really holds the episode back.

Distant Origin - VOY 9.5/10

We’ve got two scientists, Voth, a reptilian race. We’ve got Veer, and Gegen, who find a Voyager crewman who died a season ago, and determine that his DNA is actually shockingly similar to their’s, which supports Gegen’s theory: The Voth did not evolve here, but are from the Alpha Quadrant. Now they need to hunt down this ship and find out what they can about these people. When they go to get funding, however, the People In Charge are bothered, because this could upset the balance (namely, the fact that they claim they are the most superior people here, and disrupt their power, y’know how it is). They charge Gegen, so Gegen and Veer go to chase after this dead person’s vessel. They have a thing in his tech that says they’re chasing after something called… Voyager.

This is a VERY good and interesting setup.

They make it to Voyager, and sneak on board, cloaking to examing. It’s basically two nerds walking around and making biological commentary about humans. They’re not harmful or evil at all, just weird. And then they’re discovered. The Federation, understandably, think they might be dangerous. And they run away like “maaaybe we should explain outselves”, but when they’re shot at, and the younger one, Veer, shoots back, stunning Chakotay. Gegen kidnaps Chakotay, while Veer goes into hibernation out of fear.

Chakotay and Gegen kinda bond, because Gegen is a pleasant dude who just wants to learn about Humans, and Chakotay is white bread who can’t stay mad even when he’s kidnapped. Voyager discovers the connection between their species, that the Voth evolve from Dinosaurs… and then a Voth ship shows up. It’s huge. Like, HUGE. VERY, VERY BIG. Thousands of times bigger than Voyager. Voyager is literally beamed inside of the ship, and then the Voth invade, and COMPLETELY obliterates them. They can’t do SHIT.

Now Gegen gets a message. They have Voyager and will kill everyone if he doesn’t come to stand trial for heresy.

The last part of the episode is a trail. Gegen is on trial in a kangaroo court, Veer denounces him publicly, probably cause he was threatened. Gegen and Chakotay defend themselves, and science, against conservative ignorance. It’s very well written, though regretably it IS held back by Chakotay reading his lines with all the temerity of a guy reading the TV Guide out loud. The bigoted, conservative minister is going to lock EVERYONE in a detention colony unless Gegen publicly denounces his scientific claims. It’s PAINFUL watching him denounce it.

Gegen hopes that someday the truth comes out, but he wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the powers that be. Chakotay gives him a globe of Earth. He hopes, one day, he can see it, eyes open.

This episode was FANTASTIC. Almost perfect. I wish Chakotay and Janeway’s roles had been reversed, but like, it’s so well written in every other way.