Tom Salinsky

VOY S06E14 Memorial (). Harry Kim is bitching about his shipmates’ domestic habits. Since he has no known personality traits, except “is young”, why not cast him as the parent to Paris, Chakotay and Neelix, the better to further muddle his characterisation? When arrive back on Voyager, Torres has created an antique television set as a gift for her boyfriend. She even does the hoary old “I’ll say something shocking to demonstrate you aren’t listening” but. The reassuring jollity of these early scenes makes a nonsense of the “trapped on the other side of the galaxy with no hope of rescue” premise, but I suppose I should be over that by now. It’s just so insistent here, that I find it more than usually maddening.

It’s the television set which initially seems to be the plot engine of the episode, since it appears to have the power to transport Paris into the old war movies it shows, and pretty soon other members of the crew are succumbing to dreams/memories/hallucinations of combat atrocities. So this is pretty familiar stuff – mainly “uh-oh something on the ship is sending everyone bonkers” mixed in with “I’ve always been fascinated by twentieth century Earth history”. But the suppressed memories of war crimes have a little more weight than usual, and if the insight that “war is hell” is scarcely new (not even to Star Trek) then at least it gives the cast a chance to flex their acting muscles a bit – Paris’s big breakdown is very impressive and Roxann Dawson wisely plays a calm compassionate contrast to his garment-rending hysteria.

Sadly, the solution is another riff on The Inner Light (evoked only a couple of episodes ago) and so the cast has just been experiencing second-hand memories which have nothing to do with who they are – even though several of them have lived through wars – making this a puzzle to be solved rather than a moral choice for the characters (at least not until the very end). But the journey is more worthwhile than usual, with Robert Duncan McNeill’s big scene and a less hysterical but even more effective Neelix/Seven scene notching this up to four.

VOY S06E15 Tsunkatse (). In a gladiatorial arena, a lycra-clad Zagbar is athletically kicking hell out of a similarly-attired Zooble, with Chakotay and Torres merrily applauding the victor. Before the titles, this is played as “what the hell is going on here!?” But after the titles, it’s played as “of course enlightened Federation officers will enjoy recreational bare knuckle boxing if they have nothing else to do”. Discussion of this makes up much of rather a formless and dull first act which also has time for Neelix’s sunburn, Seven’s packing habits vs those of B’Elanna Torres and whether or not a given silence might be described as “awkward”.

This last exchange is between Seven and Tuvok, two characters whose lineage goes all the way back to Gene Roddenberry’s idea for Number One in the original pilot. Tuvok’s character development stalled somewhere in Season 2 and poor Tim Russ has been reduced almost entirely to trotting out his Leonard Nimoy impersonation at the rate of three lines of dialogue per episode. Seven, having assimilated fully into the Voyager crew has recently only been called upon to summon superior officers to the astrometrics lab without explanation. Putting these two in a shuttle together isn’t a bad idea, as they could each use the story space, and as they are so similar in many ways, this might force the writing staff to focus on their differences.

But despite the presence of JG Hertzler and Jeffrey Combs, this is not Deep Space Nine, and the purpose of the expedition is not to give two characters time to talk during a long journey, it’s to re-enact Spartacus/Ben-Hur/Gladiator (you know like Kirk and the Gorn) with friends forced to fight each other to the death (you know like Kirk and Spock). Tuvok is just along for the ride as it’s her Hirogen trainer that Seven is forced to face in the arena. The whole thing is all pretty by-the-numbers, and was apparently devised to cross-promote a UPN wrestling show.

VOY S06E16 Collective (). How about this for a very TNG-flavoured teaser? A poker game interrupted by the arrival of a Borg cube. In minutes, the Delta Flyer is taken onboard the vessel and Paris, Kim, Chakotay and Neelix are in for a Very Bad Time. But when Voyager catches up, the Borg want to swap their prisoners for Voyager’s main deflector. I’m not one for poring over made-up schematics and I don’t care one jot which room is meant to be on which deck, but I do note that something called a “deflector”, which is presumably meant to deflect things, is going to be used by the Borg as a radio antenna, and its purpose on Voyager is to help get us to warp speed. Huh…?

Seven pays a visit to obtain proof of life and finds more messed up humanoids of various ages (including a rather upsetting Borg foetus). These are immature Borg drones who haven’t had long enough in their maturation chambers, and these five individuals, cut off from the collective, are all that are left on this cube. All of this talk of immature Borg I think is meant to be grisly David Cronenberg-esque body horror, but it comes off as a university drama group cos-playing rather than a new insight into what it’s like to be Borg. We end up with four Borg kids on Voyager which is an unexpected, if not exactly unprecedented, development. Surely they won’t vanish into the background the way that the Equinox lot did.

VOY S06E17 Spirit Folk (). Among the things I don’t enjoy about Voyager, some include: the crew treating being stranded halfway across the galaxy as a pleasure cruise, shenanigans on the Holodeck in the place of an exciting plot, Tom Paris’s obsession with cars, stories involving fairies or magic, everything about the recent episode Fair Haven. So in this episode, Tom Paris goes for a relaxing drive in the Holodeck fantasy town of Fair Heaven and is mistaken for a fairy.

VOY S06E18 Ashes to Ashes (). Action! Adventure! Alien chick spouting gibberish whose ship is under attack! For once, we get a tangible sense that the Gamma Quadrant is a dangerous and unpredictable place for our people to be, and not three weeks in the Azores with twice-nightly cabaret. Also – hey! Those Borg kids are still on board. I genuinely didn’t expect to ever see them again, and it’s incredibly encouraging to see them, especially as none of them strike me as overly moppetty.

The alien chick claims to be the late Ensign Lindsay Ballard, a member of Voyager’s crew who died during an earlier (off-screen) mission. With plenty of episodes having included the deaths of various crewmembers, it’s odd that none of them was chosen for a return visit – especially in the same instalment which remembers the Borg Brood from two weeks ago. On the other hand, I always like it when characters reel off a list of all the things which might solve the mystery, but don’t this time. Kim Rhodes is very appealing in the part, and there’s some welcome specificity in the script, but the it’s hard to believe that this will end with Ballard returning to her duties. If anything, I’m more interested in the other new arrivals, under the stern but benevolent gaze of Seven of Nine, who lets them know that playtime has begun by commanding “fun will now commence”.

Kim’s new personality trait of “is tidy” seems to be here to stay, regardless of how little sense it makes of what little else we know about him.

VOY S06E19 Child’s Play (). The progression of Voyager away from barely-lashed together lifeboat to luxurious pleasure cruise is essentially complete now, with the Borg children participating in Voyager’s first annual science fair. However, while the writing staff has remembered that the Borg children exist, we last saw them as stubborn, wilful and refusing to submit to Seven’s authority. A week later, they are docile, obedient and studious – and in the case of the eldest about to be reunited with long-lost family, as improbable as that sounds. Rather sweetly, Seven can’t bring herself to bring up the subject with the spiky young man, and she goes full bear-mama when she doesn’t think his biological parents are good enough for him. This issue of biology vs upbringing has come up before, and it’s great to see it used as fodder for another of these Janeway/Seven slanging matches which are always such fun – and we really probe Seven’s make-up here in a very exciting way. That’s Mark Sheppard as Icheb’s dad – basically science fiction royalty as he’s had roles in The X Files, Sliders, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Supernatural and many others.

VOY S06E20 Good Shepherd (). Seven of Nine has been doing a time-and-motion study onboard Voyager (which barely scrapes a passing grade). A feckless Ensign has to walk a PADD with some specifications or other to Torres (presumably the WiFi is playing up). Via the medium of this device passing from hand to hand we meet our guest crew members for tonight – Mortimer Harren, William Telfer and Tal Celes – who are all falling short and who are punished by having to endure a team building session with Janeway. Having to build the narrative around who these screwups are means that they have a little more dimension that almost anyone else onboard, which makes this a touch richer than usual, but massively shows up the regular cast, even given that none of these three is another Spock, Picard, Garak or for that matter Seven. This character development then comes to a sudden halt as the episode gets wrapped up in thirty seconds flat with no follow up for any of the three misfits. Bajorans put the family name first, but Tal Celes is mysteriously referred to as “Celes” throughout the episode.