LizstarTrek - Voyager Season 4 episodes 6 - 10

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!

The Raven - VOY 7/10

Our episode starts with Janeway and So9 on a date in the holodeck, sculpting some clay. So9 doesn’t really get it, but Janeway wants to teach her how to relax. Unfortunately, during the date, she gets a PTSD flashback of when she was assimilated, and a raven comes swooping at her.

Meanwhile, they need to get through some xenophobic alien’s space, which would carve 4 months off their jouney. The aliens agree, but only if they go warp 3, and follow a fucked up path that will keep them away from populated zones. This path would take like, 3 months to go through. So I…. GUESS better?

Seven of Nine needs to eat solid food. She introduces this to Neelix with the phrase “My physiology has asserted the need to consume solid nutrients in order to survive”, which is how I will be explaining I’m hungry for the rest of time. We then get a kind of cute scene where Neelix tries to ease her gently into eating food. Unfortunately she has another PTSD episode, some thing pops out of her skin, and she declares that she’s going to assimilate them. She then goes on a rampage, wandering the halls. All of her Borg Tech seems to be active again. She takes a shuttle and bursts out of the hull.

The aliens they’re meeting with are NOT happy about this, and immediately call off any negotiations. They were harboring a BORG? It makes sense tbh. They also explain they will destroy So9, who entered their borders, and if Voyager follows, they will be blown up too.

They try to chase her, and after fighting Tuvok, she seems to come back to her senses, but she’s clear that she’s being called back to the Borg by a “resonance signal”, and intends to return to the Collective. She doesn’t ACTUALLY want to assimilate anyone though, and wants to thank Janeway for trying to help her. That’s…. not very Borg of her, Tuvok notes. Meanwhile, back on Voyager, they read some of her logs to find out that she’s seeing visions of a “Raven”… Janeway knows whats going on, and goes into enemy territory to help them.

They find that the signal is from a half assimilated ship, The Raven. It was Seven’s ship when she was a kid. She has one more panic attack, and then is rescued from the aliens trying to kill her by Voyager, and they run off. Seven feels a new connection to Humanity, and we continue on.

This one was pretty alright. Maybe a BIT soon with such strong character development for Seven? But not bad at all.

Scientific Method - VOY 8/10

Our epiusode starts with Torres and So9 being kinda catty at each other about stepping over each other’s jobs… So9 is 100% at fault though let’s be real. And then Paris shows up and gives her flowers and then they make out.

And then THIS happens.

Some kinda thing scans them, and we get to see their skulls as they make out. Sexy. Torres feels she’s being watched… But she’s just kind of anxious about the whole dating thing. THey get caught later by Tuvok, and she’s embarassed and wants to be more cautious about the whole making out thing. To be fair, they probably should not have been making out ON the warp core. Janeway tells them to stop being so adolescent about it. They can fuck, but maybe not during working hours??? She’s VERY tired, kind of overwhelmed by stuff thats going on.

Random things start happening on the ship… Chakotay suddenly starts freaking out and his hair falls out. His “DNA is hyperstimulated”, which means he’s aging rapidly. Neelix suddenly transforms into a “Mylean”, because his grandfather was mylean, apparently. While Torres and the Doctor try and examine it, they find barcodes on their DNA. While they try to scan for whats going on, the Doctor is erased, and Belanna’s lungs suddenly stop working. Luckily, the Doctor transferred himself into the ship, hiding from whatever is trying to hurt them, and talks to Seven of Nine covertly through her implants. Pretty good. Smart work, Doctor. He edits her visual implants to allow her to see whoever is… doing this.

Some invisible aliens are wandering the ship, experimenting on people. There are a LOT of them. And they’re on top of a LOT of people. Even the captain. Everyone is compromised, and Seven of Nine has to walk around and try to undermine them. Eventually, once Tuvok catches up to her, she has to shoot at one of the aliens, capturing her. The alien explains they’re doing scientific research. It helps them with medical stuff. SURELY Janeway can udnerstand? Well, they’ve been doing tests on her to make her more angry, kept her awake for four days straight with massive headaches. So no, she’s not happy. And when one of the crewmembers dies HORRIBLY, she’s had enough. She goes straight to the bridge, locks the controls to only her, and then drives the thing directly into some binary stars. The aliens freak the hell out at these nutjobs, and fly away (one of them explodes, hell yea), and they make it out the other side alive. It’s a badass Janeway moment.

This was a pretty fun and intense episode.

The Year of Hell Part 1 - VOY 9/10

Time for a biggie.

We are introduced to the Krenim. We actually heard about them before, in the episode where Kes was aging backwards. They mentioned going through the Krenim’s space in “The Year of Hell” that killed a lot of the crew, including Janeway and Torres. Here they are, fighting a speciescalled the Zahl. Well not, fighting them… They’re going through time and erasing them from the timeline. Making them cease to exist. That’s dark as shit.

While proceding on their course, Voyager is attacked by some Krenim, who claim that this is NOT Zahl space, like they think it is, it’s Krenim territory, and they’re nto allowed there. They’re very aggressive and angry. “NO TALKING, NO COMPROMISES.” While talking to some Zahl, who are very pleasant, suddenly a temporal shockwave hits them, aaaand suddenly the Zahl do not exist. Now they’re deep in Krenim territory and being attacked, the Krenim intend to kill them all.

This is Red Forman. Red is in charge of the weapon ship that erased the Zahl. But Red is not happy… it only brought things back to 98% of what they should be, but they didn’t restore a SPECIFIC colony that Red wanted restored. But they’re seperated from space time. They have all the time they want.

Day 33. Things are not going well for Voyager. THey’re BARELY surviving every confrontation. People are dying, every single time. Chokie’s plan is to split the ship apart, send everyone out in shuttles and escape pods to try and at least have some survive. That’s a TERRIBLE idea Chokie what the fuck. Janeway agrees. As long as Voyager is in one piece, they stay.

We get to see the crew trying to survive as things get worse and worse. Keeping each other entertained and optimistic. Designing new weapons and defenses. We also see some horrifying stuff. The doctor tries to save as many as he can, but he has to close a hatch and lock people out as a deck collapses. He watches two people die, basically. He kind of feels like HE killed them. But if he hadn’t clocked the hatch, EVERYONE would have died. This shit is heavy. Tuvok also gets injured and becomes blind.

As they’re fighting a Krenim warship, they’re suddenly hit by another temporal wave. This time, they’ve developed some temporal shielding, which keeps them in the timeline that the Krenim made…. which seems to have a much weaker, pre-warp Krenim. Red Forman discovers that this happened, and believes it happened BECAUSE of Voyager. THey go hunt down Voyager, while Voyager tries to hunt THEM down to figure out whats going on.

Red and Janeway meet each other. He’s the first Krenim who is NOT aggressive. He’s actually… saddened. He doesn’t WANT to erase Voyager, but well, he has to. It’s his mission, so, goodbye. They manage to escape, but have to leave behind Chakotay and Paris on a planet. Day 73…. they managed to escape, but Voyager has fallen apart. It can’t sustain the crew anymore. So everyone leaves on escape pods, while the top brass stay behind to try and fix things up, save Paris and Chokie, and then resave their escape pod peoples.

To be continued.

The Year of Hell Part 2 - VOY 10/10

Hey, we’re continuing!! It’s neat to have a part 2 in the middle of a season. In this era, the end of season part 1s are always written with no plan for part 2. Just a “eh, we’ll figure that out when we get to it” situation for some reason. So here we can tell a FULL story. I hope.

There are only seven crew members on board. Janeway is pushing herself to her limits, just like the ship is being pushed to ITS limits. It’s hot as fuck. She’s so cool in these episodes. This is peak Janeway.

Paris and Chakotay are having dinner with Red. He explains that he doesn’t want them dead, and if they work with him, he can restore Voyager to how it was BEFORE all of this. Paris is disgusted. Yeah sure, restore us, and aii it’ll take is killing ANOTHER species. Chakotay is more reticent. Which is worrying. Look, I kinda like this villain. He’s evil as shit, he’s doing VERY evil things, but he’s very likable. It helps he’s Red Forman, but I like him. He’s still evil and Chakotay should NOT be working with him. Though Chakotay is like “Can we do this WITHOUT killing people?” Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. He teacheS Chakotay some Temporal Shenanigans. And he explains that when they first made this weapon to fight an enemy that was going to destroy them, it worked great. Unfortunately, every change to the timeline has effects you can’t easily judge. People died on an illness because of him, and he’s been trying to fix his mistakes ever since, basically. He’s been at this for 200 years, to him. That’s…. depressing.

Manwhile, back on Voyager, Janeway throws her way into a firey room with a fucking SHIELD to try and save the ship. It works. It’s badass as shit. This all is getting to her, though. This has been going on for half a year. The doctor thinks she’s not mentally fit for command. But when he tries to relieve her of command….. how? Who’d do that? There are seven people on board, and Tuvok has no security team. There’s no brig. No force fields. Good luck keeping her confined.

We were hoping that Chakotay was playing this with some kind of plan but uh, he’s not. He’s bought into Red’s bullshit. And then when Red erases some other civilizatiion from the timeline, FINALLY, Chakotay is like “okay maybe this is bad”. YOU THINK?! HE LITERALLY SHOWED YOU HIS COLLECTION OF SHIT FROM DEAD CIVILIZATIONS THAT NEVER EXISTED. I like him, he’s a VERY good villain, but he’s fucking EVIL, and Chakotay you are a god damn mother fucking IDIOT. And he STILL is like “oh I can get through to his and stop him from killing people. You don’t know what he’s been through!” DUDE. FINALLY Paris gets through to him. Paris has been the voice of reason here which is very upsetting, but eventually they agree to send a message to Voyager. If she attacks with them fighting from the inside, they can maybe stop this.

Janeway is basically going to run Voyager by herself and do a suicide run on the Weapon Ship. The others scrounge up some ships as well. There’s a very touching scene with Tuvok and Janeway hugging that I liked a lot.

Chokie and Paris manage to deactivate the weapon ship from inside, bringing it into normal space time so it can be hit, but the fight is still hard. They fire back. Everything is going poorly…. and there’s a single chance. Janeway sets Voyager on a collision course with the Weapon Ship, and sacrifices herself, with one badass line. “TIMES UP.”

The weapon’s ship gone, the timeline fixes itself. They’re now in disputed Krenim space, but not immediately fired upon. Everything is nice.

And even Red gets a happy ending.

I liked this a lot.

Random Thoughts - VOY 4/10

Voyager is at an alien planet that’s very nice and pleasant. They are a race of peaceful telepaths. Tuvok and the only police officer on the planet, basically, get along quite well. Her name is Nimira. While in the market square, a man rudely bumps into Torres, who gets annoyed but moves on with her life. Later, they find that man getting the shit beat out of him.

Torres is arrested for having violent thoughts. Those thoughts forced the man to attack this guy. They’re like “Maybe it was someone else???” No, of course not. Our people aren’t BARBARIANS like you, we are enlightened. We have no violent thoughts. Don’t be silly. But since they’re not barbarians, they won’t jail her or anything. No, they’ll just labotomize them. Jesus.

These aliens have big “The Good Place” energy

Paris wants to IMMEDIATELY break her out. I mean, they’re pacifists, what can they do? Chakotay accepts it MIGHT come to that, but let Tuvok and Janeway try to investigate first. THey have one day to poke holes in their testimonies. Tuvok is pretty Tuvok about this, but as he explores this more, holes are cracking. The guy who did the attack has been arrested before for violent thoughts. But CLEARLY they fixed that! THey erased his brain!!

More attacks happen. A friend Neelix had made gets stabbed and killed. Now that it’s a MURDER, Nimira is more willing to cooperate. They have to stop this violent thought from passing around more, which it shouldn’t be able to do. Tuvok mind melds with Torres, and recalls the original bump. Torres was working with a marchant, Guill, to get some goods, then got bumped, got upset, Guill comforted her, and something about it gave her the creeps. He was doing something…. telepathic with her. Tuvok needs to investigate this Guill. Guill has MASSIVE serial killer energy. After Tuvok tails him a bit, he finds out that he’s trading in violent thoughts, like some kind of drug deal. Tuvok is like “Oh I can trade you some violent thoughts, deep in my subconscious. Yeah let’s do that.” Tuvok plays this guy like a fucking fiddle. He’s like, a weird violence pervert.

This is straight up some Cyberpunk shit. It’s like those snuff film memories.

The deal goes south once Tuvok finds out the truth about this guy taking Belanna’s violent thought and then selling it. He tries to arrest Tuvok, but he and some of his junkies overpower Tuvok. That’s the least believable thing about this episode. This is a species who never do violence, and they overwhelm A VULCAN? Nope.

If Tuvok shows him some of his OWN violent thoughts, he agrees to let him go. So Tuvok mind melds with him. And it COMPLETELY destroys him. Guill is OVERWHELMED by the violent thoughts hidden below the surface of a Vulcan. Tuvok uses this moment to overwhelm him and get him to confess. Nimira is CONFOUNDED by the idea of her perfect, civilized people having a black market of violent thoughts, but Guill is quite willing to confess right now.

The episode ends with a conversation between Seven and Janeway that feels a bit out of place. Seven: “If you just ignored everything and didn’t explore, we’d get home sooner and more safely.” Janeway: “Well that would be a boring ride home.” I dunno if that QUITE fits, but it’s funny?

I found this episode EXTREMELY dumb, but I actually really enjoyed it for some reason. It’s just really dumb science fiction, and it’s trying to say so much, but it’s very goofy in a way that completely derails it. It also feels like a “very special episode” but they replaced drugs with violent thoughts.