Tom Salinsky

Post number 100. My undying thanks if you’ve been reading this regularly, or even occasionally.

VOY S06E02 Survival Instinct (). Borg! The Marconian Outpost is a pretty nice CGI city-in-space, but the teaser has already promised us flashback adventures with Seven still in her drone form, so I don’t have an enormous amount of patience for the supposedly amusing hijinks of Janeway’s ready room awash with gifts. Re-establishing Seven as thoroughly house-trained, she is playing nurse maid to little Naomi, albeit in her own sometimes abrasive manner. One of the visitors bearing gifts hands Seven a bunch of synaptic relays, and it turns out that this creepy dude who’s rude to Naomi is up to no good.

All of this early shipbound stuff is pretty rote and predictable, but the flashback material which examines the state of mind of Borg cut off from the Collective is rather more interesting – Ron Moore, during his brief stay on Voyager, doing for the Borg what he’d previously done for the Klingons. The debates between the telepathic badguys mirrors the squabbling between the fraying drones in a neat move which foreshadows the eventual reveal without giving it away. Thus the routinely creepy badguys turn out to be a desperate trio who are suffering in unimaginable ways, and what looked like being a silly adventure turns into something much richer and deeper, with a little of the DS9 bleakness providing a refreshing squeeze of lime over the usual Voyager running and shooting.

VOY S06E03 Barge of the Dead (]). Like something out of Star Tours, B’Elanna Torres comes crashing back into Voyager on a battered shuttle. While Voyager treats shuttles like they come free with packets of Weetabix, the ship only has one multi-spatial probe and that fact justifies Torres (or “Lana” as Janeway and her mother call her) risking her life to get it back. Maddeningly, we aren’t told whether she succeeded or not (or what a multi-spatial probe is or does).

Her shuttle is found to have a chunk of Klingon ship stuck in its side, and pretty soon it seems to Torres to be wailing and leaking blood. Kim puts it down to concussion. Tuvok to self-loathing. TNG had an extremely good track-record at avoiding the “are you sure you aren’t imaging it?” trope, which tends to do little except waste time while waiting for the plot to kick in. Suddenly Torres finds herself on a very pro-Klingon ship (Tuvok passionately talking up the bat’leth, Neelix serving “live” gagh, Seven and the Doctor letting rip with drinking songs) but she doesn’t appreciate the effort. Tim Russ, who has been good and quiet in the background for dozens of episodes, is particularly effective in his “counselling” scene.

For lo, this is not Voyager but the mythical Barge of the Dead, taking B’Elanna across the Klingon Styx – and no “computer, end program,” has no effect. Naturally, Ron Moore zeroes in on the show’s resident Klingon, the result is an atmospheric tale of life, loss and belief. Everything is undone by arbitrary technobabble fairly quickly of course, but until then we get the chance to see Roxann Dawson at the centre of a narrative with some kind of meaning to it, and I’m all for that. Bryan Fuller collaborated with Moore on the script, and also left the show very shortly after writing this episode, in part because he was disappointed by how it came out. Maybe I liked it better than they did – but it’s telling that they portrayed life onboard Voyager as literal hell for Torres. Or maybe I’m just seduced by the influences of Dennis Potter’s masterpiece The Singing Detective which similarly blended fiction, dream, memory and reality in order to examine its hero’s core beliefs. And Dawson is just fantastic.

VOY S06E04 Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy (). The Doctor is inflicting his love of opera on the senior staff. This puts Neelix to sleep and triggers Tuvok’s pon-farr, which the EMH is able to resolve without missing a literal beat. The self-aggrandising fantasy is little more than a daydream, which is a pretty lowkey revelation to send us into the opening titles. This kind of delusion feels much more akin to Deep Space Nine’s Vic Fontaine or Our Man Bashir Holosuite escapades than Voyager’s own Bride of Chaotica, but the important thing is that the bundle of force fields and subroutines down in sickbay has needs and desires, and he wants to see Janeway’s manager (if he can stop thinking about his captain’s backside). He claims that his program can be expanded without limit and yet he seems saddled with a completely hetero libido, with none of the good-looking boys onboard able to get his algorithms twitching.

Meanwhile, some fussbudget Sontarans have determined that Voyager is an “unacceptable risk”, until their own chain of command issues cause that determination to be reversed. Their monitoring of the ship via the Doctor causes them to believe that his absurd daydreams are actual occurrences. Worse still, the Doctor starts to become unable to determine fantasy from reality. This is all pretty much nonsense, where things happen just because they need to in order for the plot to work, but Robert Picardo is just so winning, that it’s easy to stop nitpicking and enjoy the ride, especially when the Doc’s Amigos have to go along for the ride and make his fantasies convincing. What elevates this potentially thin material for me is the humiliation which the Doctor feels at his private Walter Mitty life being made public, and the compassion which Janeway shows, even when those same imaginings objectify her. That’s what makes this Star Trek.

VOY S06E05 Alice (). Voyager encounters a “flotilla of hostile trash” also known as Abaddon’s Repository of Lost Treasures. The title promises Wonderland, but this falls more like Ali Baba to me (and turns out to be channelling Stephen King). In fact it turns out to be more hot-rodding as Paris falls in love with a clapped out old flyer and names it after a “lost cause” girlfriend from his Academy days. Unlike its namesake, the spacefaring Alice can literally read Paris’s mind and so his motor ends up falling in love with him too. He can resist everything but her endless stream of clichés it seems. Even by Voyager standards this is pretty silly stuff, but with no emotional centre to hold it together, the wheels come off pretty rapidly. Roxann Dawson does what she can but Torres is stuck in the role of irrationally jealous girlfriend.

VOY S06E06 Riddles (). Neelix’s grade-school puzzle for Tuvok raises awkward questions about just how the universal translator works, but also feels like a stupid person’s idea of how a smart person would engage with a riddle. Making Tuvok blind to puns is a very limited rendering of Vulcans in general and him in particular, and this episode (eventually) does a little to open that window a little wider. That’s nice to see because although Tim Russ has been doing reliably good work, he’s been under-served for about two years’ worth of stories now.

This week’s Zagbars seem very generic, with arbitrary bumps and grooves from Michael Westmore and a studiedly bland performance from Mark Moses. He blames Tuvok’s condition on the mysterious Zoobles of whom legend speaks in hushed tones. While he and Janeway investigate, the Doctor suggests that Neelix try and irritate Tuvok out of his coma. It works, but this is not the same old Tuvok, and now it’s up to Neelix to try and rehabilitate him. Once again, it is necessary to pretend that Tuvix never happened, but provided you can do that, the slow rebuilding of the Vulcan’s logical edifice is quite worthwhile, and as noted this is a wonderful vehicle for Tim Russ. Torres doesn’t appear at all as Roxann Dawson was taking her first time behind the camera. It’s the start of a fairly storied career for her, and a good start, which isn’t at all typical for this franchise.

VOY S06E07 Dragon’s Teeth (). Boom! Somebody somewhere is having a bad day, and we can only hope that the “bio-pods” whatever they may be survive the bombardment. I’ve noted before how tricky it can be in an ongoing series to suddenly ask the audience to get invested in a bunch of brand new characters we’ve never seen before, and I’m not convinced that – for all the CGI whizzbangery – this is the kind of teaser most likely to hook a channel-flipping audience. Voyager has its own problems. The ship has been pulled into a maze of subspace corridors full of debris. This looks like it could be a route home but the resident Zagbars are all – get stuffed, this is our maze. Popping down to a nearby planet to hide, Janeway and Tuvok find the aforementioned bio-pods which have sustained a couple of Zoobles for almost a millennium, following a planetary nuclear war. The deal to exchange information about the hyperspace bypass for help getting the Zoobles to safety seems fair enough, and much of the middle of the episode is little but admin related to this agreement, while it’s vaguely hinted that the Zoobles might be up to no good. None of this has anything to do with our people, it’s not terribly interesting on its own terms, and what little adventure befalls Voyager’s crew mainly looks like it was due to Janeway’s lack of foresight. But there is a lot of pretty CGI whizzbangery. Janeway doubts she’s seen the last of them, but I don’t believe they ever featured again, which further contributes to a story which feels undercooked at best.