Tom Salinsky

VOY S03E06 Remember (). Janeway is running a taxi service for a bunch of people with latticework hairdos, who have paid for the ride in technobabble, and who seem to have a liking for Harry Kim (I guess it’s nice that someone does). But even though she sends Kim and his new girlfriend off for some alone time, it’s B’Elanna who starts having One Of Those Dreams – so much so that she oversleeps. So, it seems B’Elanna is the Troi of Voyager, upon whom weird sex dreams, psychic intrusions and romantic trauma will be heaped. Can’t wait.

Unlike Picard (or Riker – or Sisko), Chakotay allows himself to be brushed off by the chief engineer’s insistence that everything is fine. Everyone’s in mufti for Neelix’s celebration of their guests’ culture, and pretty soon one of the older gentlemen is cracking on to the Captain and invading her thoughts. Again, nobody sees that anything is amiss, which is pretty frustrating plotting. Meanwhile B’Elanna’s sex dreams have turned into bad soap opera.

What’s also frustrating is how hard Roxann Dawson sells all this. She’s required to play all kinds of nonsensical scenes and she delivers every mouthful of gibberish and every predictable jump-scare with complete commitment and effortless naturalism. She’s rapidly becoming my favourite actor on the show – but when will she get some better material to work with?

Finally, a third of the way through the episode, it dawns on the first officer that the engineer’s loopy fantasies and the presence on board of a race of telepaths might possibly be connected. Part of the problem is that the main plot feels like it’s running on rails. But we also have to deal with the fact that the dream/memories which are haunting B’Elanna are horrifyingly dull and clichéd – and the punchline is the same as The Inner Light. That’s a Star Trek episode you invoke at your peril.

And then, unexpectedly, the last act does contain a refreshing squeeze of vinegar. The doomed love story is actually a tale of genocide. With the scant information we have, it’s hard to tell if this was justified at all, but it was, you know, genocide, so probably disproportionate at best, even if the non-conformists were a genuine threat to the safety and stability of the community (which they probably weren’t). But telling this story at one remove robs it of power, making us wait to the end doesn’t help and the only reason any of this works at all, is because Roxann Dawson is so amazing.

Speaking of memories, you remember how the Doctor had his mind wiped a couple of episodes ago? He seems fine now.

DS9 S05E03 Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places (). Worf is thunderstruck by the ravishing beauty of the Klingon woman Grilka, whom Quark had reason to marry in the largely successful episode The House of Quark. Now Quark seeks to help her again by doing some light bookkeeping. Hoping to impress the foxy Grilka, Worf picks a fight with Morn and switches his usual human prune juice for more traditional blood wine. But Worf’s dishonour (yawn) prevents Grilka from expressing any interest in his as a mate. (He also seems to have forgotten about K’Ehleyr when he asserts that he has never persued a Klingon woman romantically.)

But Quark still holds a candle for Grilka and is fretting about what he’s supposed to say to her during their private dinner, but he ends up having to fight for her love. This sets the stage for a Cyrano de Bergerac-style routine where Worf is able to puppeteer Quark like something out of Ratatouille. Even by the standards of Deep Space Nine “comedy” episodes, this is pretty fluffy and trivial and I understand that it’s some people’s favourite and some people can’t stand it. I appreciated the Worf/Quark double act – each set of traditions shines a clear light on the other, making it seem both amusing and convincing. And that helps get us past the usual Star Trek sex and romance blind spot. Plus, Michael Dorn, Armin Shimerman, Terry Farrell and Mary Kay Adams are all doing wonderful work. It ends with Dax and Worf’s sparring taking on a rather more intimate quality (to Bashir’s intense disquiet). It certainly makes more sense than Worf and Troi.

In the B-plot, medical ethics expert Dr Bashir is listening at keyholes (with rather less success than Quark, whose Ferengi physiognomy gives him a distinct advantage), but O’Brien claims that his domestic arrangements, which involve helping Kira out of the bath and giving her massages (all while Keiko watches) present no problems. Odo knows better, of course – it’s clear that becoming a solid hasn’t made him any less perceptive (or any less of a dick).

DS9 S05E04 …Nor the Battle to the Strong (). It’s a standard move for this show to stick a mis-matched pair in a runabout and have them encounter a crisis, distress call or spatial anomaly. Jake Sisko and Julian Bashir are a novel combo though, and while Bashir is given the usual not-quite-funny-enough self-involved babbling, Jake’s wry impatience rings true – Cirroc Lofton is maturing very nicely as an actor, and beginning to develop some layers to his Generic Teen characterisation.

In true DS9 style, when they answer the distress call, the boy journalist who was eagerly looking forward to swapping the Doctor’s dry academia for something with a bit more human interest, now finds himself scrubbing up, helping out, wrist deep in guts and watching people die. None of this is especially new or insightful, but it’s new to Jake and that helps give it meaning for us.

Particularly giving Jake the heebie-jeebies is a young man who seemingly phasered himself in the foot to get away from the front line. Then, on a mission to get a back-up generator from the Paramount backlot, Jake and Bashir come under fire and Jake finds himself in a version of All Quiet on the Klingon Front, clambering over corpses of Federation and Klingons alike and trying to tend to a wounded man. Because this is Deep Space Nine, the poor bastard dies in front of him. It’s tough stuff, but not particularly novel or arresting.

Back on the station, poor Odo is still forgetting to remember that he isn’t a changeling anymore (rather like the Kakapo parrot of New Zealand which has seemingly forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly). While I do vaguely remember that Odo regains his shapeshifting powers at some point, I’m impressed at how long they’re keeping him in this form.

DS9 S05E05 The Assignment (). Suddenly, Deep Space Nine remembers that it’s a Star Trek show and this feels like something right out of The Original Series, except that there weren’t any family relationships on the 1960s Enterprise. Having Keiko’s body taken over by a malevolent alien to manipulate her husband is pure pulp science fiction, which makes zero sense – O’Brien even asks why the entity didn’t take him over instead, but they get distracted before she can answer. But the show leans into the bonkers plotting and Colm Meaney plays it with a sort of Frank Drebin earnestness, which works brilliantly against Rosalind Chao’s delicious scenery-chewing. It’s all a load of nonsense, so I can’t give it five stars, or even four, but it’s tremendously enjoyable.

VOY S03E07 Sacred Ground (). Plan a) is put on hold yet again as Janeway decides that what this crew needs more than anything is some shore leave. Naturally, this means that one or more of our regulars is going to be infected by a disease / sent back in time / accused of a crime / blasted by some pixels / eaten by a dinosaur shortly before the opening titles. It’s option four and worse than that, it’s Kes (but don’t worry, she’s unconscious for most of the episode).

The particular pixels which blasted her turn out to be part of a religious relic, which means Janeway is in talking-to-the-magistrate mode (something which she seems to do a great deal of on this show). The set-up here makes frighteningly little sense. The Zagbars welcome the crew and allow them to roam around the caves barely supervised. Kes blunders into a dangerous temple and is zapped and the Zagbars don’t even say “Oh, yeah. We probably should have warned you about The Temple Of Certain Death, not one of our most popular tourist traps.”

The solution turns out to be making Janeway solve a kind of Crystal Maze style puzzle journey, accompanied by a very chipper spiritual advisor, and this cliched cave-of-traps sequence takes up the bulk of this rather uninteresting instalment. There’s an opportunity to use this process to dig into Janeway a little more, but what little we find out isn’t all that interesting, and we keep cutting away from her so that Robert Picardo can recite more technobabble. Even Michael Westmore can’t be bothered with this one, as the Zagbars just have a token bit of putty on the bridge of the nose.

It’s all solved by some science-isn’t-real, just-have-to-believe, use-the-Force-Luke bullshit which is about as far away from Star Trek in general and Janeway in particular as it’s possible to get. None of this is to take away from Kate Mulgrew who is perhaps better than she’s ever been here. Both of the two stars above are for her. Spending four days being ritually tortured isn’t my idea of shore leave. Given that they have unlimited use of the Holodeck, which will operate just fine while they make tracks to the Alpha Quadrant at Warp Eight, that might be a better use of available resources.

Robert Duncan McNeill directs, so this is the usual hazing procedure – giving the season’s worst scripts to the actors who want to direct to see if they leave licking their wounds or if they do the best they can and come back for more. McNeill now works primarily as a director, so it didn’t work in this case.

DS9 S05E06 Trials and Tribble-ations (). Sisko is confronted in his office by a pair of internet nitpickers who hate predestination paradoxes (and jokes). The story he tells them is one of the more absurd things ever to have happened to this particular crew but it’s deliriously entertaining, even coming from someone who wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of The Trouble with Tribbles. On a pretty thin pretext, we all have to go back in time, disguise ourselves as Kirk’s shipmates and sneak about putting history back the way it was, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part II.

For some reason, I have scarcely any memory of most DS9 stories except this one, and once watching TOS, I recognized a scene, not because I’d seen that story before, but because it gets repurposed for this story (which includes footage not just from Tribbles but also from Mirror Mirror).

This is full of good jokes (“We do not discuss it with outsiders”), warmly poking fun at the old series, while never mocking or belittling it. Plus, we get to see Kirk, Spock, McCoy, the old Enterprise – inside and out. It’s a brilliant coup, and very hard to do with the resources available to a TV show in the 1996. Just like the original episode, it’s a very smart blend of gags, engaging story and just enough stakes to not let it feel pointless, but never enough to spoil the prevailing party mood. Voyager’s celebration of thirty years of Trek (broadcast a bit closer to the right day) was fun I suppose. This is glorious. The only fault I can find is – yet again, there’s nothing of interest for Kira to do.