Tom Salinsky

VOY S03E08 Future’s End, Part I ([). Janeway’s new lockdown hobby is tennis. She’s discovering that she’s pretty bad at it, when yet again a Federation ship appears in their path – it’s a ship from the future determined to destroy Voyager now to prevent it from detonating Earth’s solar system 500 years from now. This is pretty much the usual Voyager timey-wimey nonsense, but the stakes are higher than usual by quite some way. For viewers watching in 1996, this would have been the second time travel Star Trek episode in three days. In the usual budget and research-saving measure, the crew from the future are in the time and place that the show was being made in, which makes this feel more like an episode of Law and Order or ER than Star Trek.

Sniffing around nineties LA, they discover that the captain who tried to shoot them down has been stuck there for three decades and has gone nuts in the interim. They also encounter Sarah Silverman’s spunky young radio astronomer who has picked up Voyager from orbit. It’s also perfectly jolly temporal-procedural stuff, but as usual our crew are strictly professional. Compare this to say, Past Tense (let alone The City on the Edge of Forever) and you can see the lack of ambition on show here. But this is complex, exciting, funny when it wants to be (mainly, the soap opera material is shopworn and irrelevant) and it ends with a cracking cliffhanger. I’ll take that.

It’s worth noting that Past Tense (and The Trouble with Tribbles) are both put-things-back-as-they-were stories, whereas this is a slightly weird combination of Red Queen’s Race (the 20th century computer boom is part of established history) and the Predestination Paradox so sneered-at in Tribble-ations (the computer boom of the 20th century creates Starfleet in the future, who sends the time ship which crashes in 1967, creating the computer boom – and so on).

Why the hell does Junior Ensign Kim have the conn? Lt Torres is surely a better bet, and there must be other bridge officers who aren’t in the opening titles.

DS9 S05E07 Let He Who Is Without Sin… (). Morn is bringing an ensign flowers, the old softie. And there’s love in the air. Worf and Dax are taking shore leave on Risa, accompanied – whether they want it or not – by Bashir and Leeta, and Quark too.

Former Miss America Vanessa Williams appears as Arandis who made sure that Curzon Dax died happy. While scowling at his bathing shorts, Worf receives a visit from a Make The Federation Great Again asshole who wants to shut the whole planet down. Alas, Worf swaps his shiny trunks for a tinfoil hat and falls down a puritanical conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Monte Markham lacks the loopy charisma which this kind of part really needs – he comes across as an earnest local government type rather than a firebrand orator.

This divides Worf and Dax and he tells her a sad, in fact murderous, story about his childhood, growing up with human children. I think it’s supposed to give us an insight into their relationship, but the context makes the whole thing feel like a 1970s sitcom with ultra-masculine jealous dad getting all worked up by what he sees as his out-of-control wife. Having got this story off his chest, Worf does an obedient about-face and even manages not to turn round and murder Fullerton when he gets slapped.

Bashir’s subplot in which he ritually breaks up with Leeta is mired in unspoken puritanism of its own, in which the mere idea of an open relationship is seen as utterly absurd, if not profoundly immoral. Seen by the writers as well as many of the characters.

Indoor hoverball is just wrong.

VOY S03E09 Future’s End, Part II (). After last week’s splendid cliffhanger with Ed Begley Jr gleefully chewing the scenery as he claimed “home field advantage” the teaser of Part II is pretty low-key and squanders a lot of momentum – it’s mainly admin and breakfast orders. But Sarah Silverman enlivens all of the scenes she’s in and her charm and chutzpah is endlessly watchable. There was some talk of her being a regular character and you can see why. Begley makes a great villain too, with enough understanding of 29th century tech to be a credible threat to our 24th century crew, but not so much that his defeat requires enormous amounts of luck or stupidity, and director Cliff Bole does what he can to keep things moving on a TV budget.

Briefly shunted off to a side plot, Chakotay and Torres are in a shuttle. Their memories of being at the Academy only serve to illustrate what a dull, bookish, flat character Maquis rebel Chakotay is, and how much more interesting his Klingon friend can be. They end up crash-landing and being held hostage by a couple of rednecks, but this is really just busywork.

I can just about swallow Begley having holo-emitters in his study, given his plundering of the time-ship’s tech. But given that the Doctor is program being run by Voyager’s computer, why does taking his combadge off him prevent him from contacting the Voyager computer and thus the ship’s comm systems? When Begley wants to bring him along, he clips a doohickey to his holographic arm, which seems like the tail wagging the dog to me. Brief mention is made of his catastrophic memory loss in The Swarm.

“Tell your new friends to come out or he dies,” says Bentley, gesturing at the Doctor. She doesn’t and the issue never comes up again, which undermines what should have been a much more suspenseful sequence. But lapses like this are occasional, and most of the time, this is a good strong, well-plotted episode. It’s decent Star Trek, but it could have come from any version of the show. It has nothing to do with Voyager’s unique predicament. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather have a story that works which doesn’t feel specific to the Delta Quadrant, than a story rooted in the premise of the show that doesn’t hang together. But is it too greedy to want the, er, best of both worlds?

Janeway’s new hairdo is a modest improvement. Let’s hope she keeps it.

DS9 S05E08 Things Past (). Is this actually a time-travel franchise? This is our fourth time-travel story in five episodes – and we have First Contact rapidly heading our way. Odo, Dax, Sisko and – hurrah – Garak are found slumped unconscious in a runabout on their way back to the station. They quickly find themselves mentally transported back to the time of the Cardassian occupation.

This is a very odd form of time travel. Not only have they travelled only in their minds, the other inhabitants of Terok Nor see them as Bajorans and they are wearing Bajoran clothes. When dream Garak gets punched in the face, his body lying in Bashir’s sickbay starts bleeding. And worse is to come – Odo recognizes that the identities they’re living as are three people who were (falsely) executed for the attempted assassination of Gul Dukat.

There’s a delicious ghostly atmosphere to this one, with Odo seeing familiar figures in the crowd, hallucinating bloody hands and so on, Garak seeing things from a whole new perspective, Dax becoming Dukat’s new “friend”. That adds a nice extra dimension to this unusual tale, which expertly blends science fiction mystery with DS9’s trademark politicking and double-dealing, as well as delving into Odo’s complicated relationship with the Founders, the Bajorans and the truth.

Because Odo knew what was happening all (or at least most) of the time, and because this is essentially a re-run of past indiscretions, it’s worthwhile for what it tells us about Odo, but it doesn’t push the story on in any meaningful way, and what it tells us about Odo is a minor variation on much we knew already. It’s well-handled though, Rene Auberjonois is as good as ever, and it’s nice to see that somebody has remembered that Nana Visitor is still on the payroll.

Kurtwood Smith (Boddicker in RoboCop) appears as Thrax, the Cardassian (or is he?).

VOY S03E10 Warlord (). Neelix is getting feedback on his Holodeck recreation of his favorite Talaxian holiday spot, and Paris and Kim can’t wait to screw it up for him. He frowns at all their changes before breaking into a huge grin in what I assume is meant to be a “funny bit”. And that’s it, that’s all we get before the titles. It’s handily one of the weakest, least inspiring teasers I’ve seen so far, and I’ve now seen well over 400 episodes of Star Trek.

Voyager comes to the rescue of a stricken ship, beaming its three occupants to sickbay, moments before the craft explodes. Two of them make, one does not. Kes becomes close with the survivors and Neelix reverts to his petty, jealous Season 1 characterization. But he has reason to be suspicious because when the Zagbarian High Commissioner beams on board, Kes phasers everyone in sight and beams off with the other two survivors. Credit where it’s due, Jennifer Lien is pretty great as badass Kes, who has of course been taken over by the dead guy’s katra.

We’re twice told that Kes has been essentially murdered through this process and she won’t be coming back. Hands up who believes that any such thing is possible onboard the USS Reset Button?

This all turns into a race against time to prevent Warlord Kes from getting what she wants – but why should we care about the petty squabbles on this never-before-seen world? This was an error which TNG kept making in the early days, but they quickly figured out that stories about our people were more interesting. Jennifer Lien is absolutely having the time of her life here, and that helps, but it would have be so much more interesting if she had been taking over Voyager and behaving like this towards Janeway, Tuvok and the rest. Frankly, the best ending I could hope for would be to make Evil Warlord Kes a recurring villain for the rest of the season. Given that we don’t look like we’re ever going to get anything of DS9’s depth and subtlety on this show, having great big operatic villains is far preferable to hearing the crew blandly recite technobabble at each other.