Tom Salinsky

VOY S07E08 Nightingale (). A very impressive effects shot of Voyager beached on a rocky planet opens this episode which for once treats the titular ship as a lifeboat and not as a pleasure cruiser. Meanwhile, Kim inserts himself into the middle of a local skirmish and struggles to help a stricken ship where the only survivors are clueless passengers. He proceeds to demonstrate comprehensively why he has never been promoted, until Seven – Seven! – gives him a lesson in people management. Ron Glass, now better known as Book in Firefly, is the main guest star on the friendly side – who notably have much less prosthetic makeup than the badguys. Oh, god, and the remaining Borg teen wants the Doctor explain why nice girls don’t like him. Give me strength.

VOY S07E09-10 Flesh and Blood (). This is the last of the Voyager mid-season “event” double-length episodes, and it focuses on the Hirogen who have so far gone through three of the four standard stages of Star Trek antagonistic alien races. They were introduced spouting typical pulp sci-Fi cliches, they began to develop a bit more specificity and interest, they were neutered when we started to understand them and empathise with them, but they haven’t yet turned into a fully distinguishable array of characters, rather they’re still being pressed out of the same rather rigid template. Also, they were once defined by their enormous height, towering over their co-stars in a very impressive way, but it seems those were exceptions to the usual rule, as this lot seem positively stumpy (and very easily killable).

On board an apparently lifeless Hirogen vessel, Chakotay’s away team discovers what seems like an arboreal environment, strewn with Hirogen bodies and Alpha Quadrant weapons. In what’s pretty much a re-run of In the Flesh from Season 5, we’re on a Starfleet inspired training facility. The not uninteresting twist is that their holographic prey seized the means of projection and turned on their fleshy overlords. It’s just a shame that – in a bumper-sized episode – we have to hear about this second-hand instead of watching it unravel. Like Geordi and Moriarty, the Hirogen made the mistake of asking the Holodeck to create a worthy adversary. And while we’re ticking off things we’ve seen in past episodes, the Hologram squad kidnap the Doctor before hightailing it out of the system.

There’s some hand-waving in the direction or moral complexity here, with holograms presented as a subjugated slave race, but nothing we haven’t seen before and treated with more nuance. Of more interest is the fact that Janeway’s hard nosed attitude towards the photonics aggressors pits her against the Doctor who switches sides in the face of her intransigence. Quite what compassionate, science-minded Janeway is doing automatically siding with fleshy Hirogens against insubstantial holograms is anyone’s guess. It’s a far cry from Picard’s passionate defence of Data’s personhood in Measure of a Man.

Because it’s a bumper two-part episode, Voyager, which is usually presented as completely outclassing everything else in the quadrant, is left crippled at the halfway point, and the downtrodden prey-turned hunters add Torres to their collection of prisoners. But this doesn’t turn into a particularly life-threatening race-against-time requiring desperate measures to resolve an impossible situation. Rather it just feels as if our people are arbitrarily involved in a local skirmish. For organics read Zagbars and for holograms read Zoobles.

Meanwhile the fact that this all started with the Hirogen becomes less and less relevant as time goes on. Even the fact that the antagonists are holograms seems to get forgotten about ultimately. The chief badguy assumes that all holograms are self-aware when in fact these are exceptional cases – and remember when the Doctor’s mobile emitter was a precious and poorly-understood piece of technology and without it, he couldn’t leave sickbay? Now these beings made of light and forcefields seem to be able to go anywhere they like, whenever they like, with only a cursor nod in the direction of holo-emitters.

VOY S07E11 Shattered (). A visual effect zaps the ship and Chakotay suddenly looks like he’s done twenty years of sunbathing always facing the same way (he gets better). The Doctor has never even heard of a mobile emitter, suggesting we’ve gone back in time, and when he reaches the bridge, Chakotay is arrested by a Janeway who’s never met him before. Even more delightfully, engineering is in a time zone when Seska is in command of the ship (for which I’m awarding an extra half a star). Putting Chakotay at the centre of this story makes sense – it would be pointless to see different versions of his character since he doesn’t have one – but it does mean that once again this is a spangly bauble with a hollow centre. There’s good stuff for Janeway, but the structure of the story means that any character development she gets will have to be reset before the credits roll. Also, the details don’t make sense. Chakotay is the only one who can pass from one time zone to another, but in that case why do non-inoculated people disappear when they pass through the boundaries? Surely they should be unaffected. And it’s awfully convenient that every one of the 37 different segments seems to contain different crewmembers. Plus, Chakotay seems to have entirely forgotten about the Temporal Prime Directive as his method for solving the problem seems to be to tell everybody absolutely everything he knows, unprompted. The scene with grown-up Icheb and Naomi is rather sweet, but the extra mention of the contraband cider is butter on bacon. As if the one memory which Icheb carried with him for 17 years would be the exact thing which happened minutes before the temporal accident. C’mon now.

VOY S07E12 Lineage (). Torres’s uncharacteristic sunny optimism is undone when it’s discovered that she is pregnant. “Let’s keep this to ourselves,” she suggests, heedless of the fact that Icheb, Seven, Tom and the Doctor already know, which means the whole ship does. The Doctor is able to use DNA analysis to create a 3D model of their baby. It doesn’t sounds like this is a standard technique, but if it isn’t then the Emergency Medical Hologram has created in mere seconds a brand new procedure which countless parents-to-be would benefit from, which hardly seems credible. In a clumsy metaphor for racial self-hatred, Torres is shocked that her offspring will have forehead ridges and begins a self-administered personal eugenics programme. On the one hand, it’s refreshing that the personal story isn’t diluted by any spatial anomalies, marauding aliens or time travel shenanigans. But on the other, any of those might have been more fun, as this doesn’t really work either as social commentary or character drama.

VOY S07E13 Repentance (). The injured occupants of the stricken ship which Voyager encounters turn out to be convicted murderers under guard, and the all the action teaser turns out to be scene-setter for handwringing ethics class based on the fact that the prisoners are due to be executed when they get back home. Torres, who last week was so scarred by her childhood experiences of racism that she mind-raped the Doctor in order to advance her own personal eugenics programme, is sceptical when told by Neelix that the persecuted underclass of the society they’re visiting might be getting a raw deal. The Doctor and Seven determine that they keep getting arrested because congenital brain defects make them violent psychopaths, which is a pretty shocking detail to include in this kind of allegory. Only Jeri Ryan makes this at all watchable.

VOY S07E14 Prophecy (). The title makes me think this is going to be some species of Red Queen’s Race time travel story but this turns out to be – of all things – a Klingon mythology story. Once again, Voyager’s straight line path from the Caretaker’s array to Federation space turns out to include all sorts of craft with special connections to this particular crew. In this case, it’s a generational Klingon ship which hasn’t heard that the Federation and the Klingon Empire are allies now (mostly). Once you get past this absurdity, the scene is set for a potentially interesting culture clash, reminiscent of Riker’s officer-swap, but instead we have to deal with a lot of nonsense about how Torres’s baby is actually a hither-to-unmentioned Klingon-space-Jesus-foretold. The motivation of the chief Klingon is impossible to determine. He goes from “I believe in these scrolls so much I’m willing to blow up my entire ship, on which I was born, and my parents before me,” to not ten minutes later saying “Who knows who wrote these scrolls or what they mean. Could be nothing. Let’s make up whatever we feel like.”

VOY S07E15 The Void (). Trapped in a mysterious void, Voyager is raided by piratical ships which beam food and fuel off without permission. They’re essentially stuck in space quicksand, competing for resources with 150 other equally desperate crews. This is very much a “competent team solves made-up problem” story, but the details of the problem are well worked out and it’s nice that “making friends” is as much a part of the solution as “decompensating the phase inverter” or whatever. Jonathan del Arco (Hugh Borg) does well as the mute Fantone and director Mike Vejar has fun turning the lights down.