![\"4.5](\"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/universal-star-rating\/includes\/image.php?img=01.png&px=12&max=5&rat=4.5\")
). 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\u2019t have an enormous amount of patience for the supposedly amusing hijinks of Janeway\u2019s 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\u2019s rude to Naomi is up to no good.<\/p>\nAll 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 \u2013 Ron Moore, during his brief stay on Voyager, doing for the Borg what he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
VOY S06E03 Barge of the Dead <\/strong>( 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 \u201care you sure you aren\u2019t imaging it?\u201d 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\u2019leth, Neelix serving \u201clive\u201d gagh, Seven and the Doctor letting rip with drinking songs) but she doesn\u2019t appreciate the effort. Tim Russ, who has been good and quiet in the background for dozens of episodes, is particularly effective in his \u201ccounselling\u201d scene.<\/p>\n For lo, this is not Voyager but the mythical Barge of the Dead, taking B\u2019Elanna across the Klingon Styx \u2013 and no \u201ccomputer, end program,\u201d has no effect. Naturally, Ron Moore zeroes in on the show\u2019s 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\u2019m 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 \u2013 but it\u2019s telling that they portrayed life onboard Voyager as literal hell for Torres. Or maybe I\u2019m just seduced by the influences of Dennis Potter\u2019s masterpiece The Singing Detective which similarly blended fiction, dream, memory and reality in order to examine its hero\u2019s core beliefs. And Dawson is just fantastic.<\/p>\n VOY S06E04 Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy <\/strong>( Meanwhile, some fussbudget Sontarans have determined that Voyager is an \u201cunacceptable risk\u201d, 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\u2019s easy to stop nitpicking and enjoy the ride, especially when the Doc\u2019s 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\u2019s what makes this Star Trek.<\/p>\n VOY S06E05 Alice <\/strong>( VOY S06E06 Riddles <\/strong>( This week\u2019s Zagbars seem very generic, with arbitrary bumps and grooves from Michael Westmore and a studiedly bland performance from Mark Moses. He blames Tuvok\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s logical edifice is quite worthwhile, and as noted this is a wonderful vehicle for Tim Russ. Torres doesn\u2019t appear at all as Roxann Dawson was taking her first time behind the camera. It\u2019s the start of a fairly storied career for her, and a good start, which isn\u2019t at all typical for this franchise.<\/p>\n VOY S06E07 Dragon’s Teeth <\/strong>( Post number 100. My undying thanks if you\u2019ve 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\u2019t have an enormous amount of patience […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[19,79,528,538],"class_list":["post-3484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-reviews","tag-star-trek","tag-trekaday","tag-voyager"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-Uc","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3484"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3486,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3484\/revisions\/3486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"4](\"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/universal-star-rating\/includes\/image.php?img=01.png&px=12&max=5&rat=4\")
]). Like something out of Star Tours, B\u2019Elanna 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 \u201cLana\u201d as Janeway and her mother call her) risking her life to get it back. Maddeningly, we aren\u2019t told whether she succeeded or not (or what a multi-spatial probe is or does).<\/p>\n). The Doctor is inflicting his love of opera on the senior staff. This puts Neelix to sleep and triggers Tuvok\u2019s 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\u2019s Vic Fontaine or Our Man Bashir Holosuite escapades than Voyager\u2019s 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\u2019s manager (if he can stop thinking about his captain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n![\"1.5](\"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/universal-star-rating\/includes\/image.php?img=01.png&px=12&max=5&rat=1.5\")
). Voyager encounters a \u201cflotilla of hostile trash\u201d also known as Abaddon\u2019s 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 \u201clost cause\u201d girlfriend from his Academy days. Unlike its namesake, the spacefaring Alice can literally read Paris\u2019s mind and so his motor ends up falling in love with him too. He can resist everything but her endless stream of clich\u00e9s 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.<\/p>\n![\"3.5](\"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/universal-star-rating\/includes\/image.php?img=01.png&px=12&max=5&rat=3.5\")
). Neelix\u2019s grade-school puzzle for Tuvok raises awkward questions about just how the universal translator works, but also feels like a stupid person\u2019s 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\u2019s nice to see because although Tim Russ has been doing reliably good work, he\u2019s been under-served for about two years\u2019 worth of stories now.<\/p>\n![\"2](\"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/universal-star-rating\/includes\/image.php?img=01.png&px=12&max=5&rat=2\")
). Boom! Somebody somewhere is having a bad day, and we can only hope that the \u201cbio-pods\u201d whatever they may be survive the bombardment. I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve never seen before, and I\u2019m not convinced that \u2013 for all the CGI whizzbangery \u2013 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 \u2013 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\u2019s vaguely hinted that the Zoobles might be up to no good. None of this has anything to do with our people, it\u2019s not terribly interesting on its own terms, and what little adventure befalls Voyager\u2019s crew mainly looks like it was due to Janeway\u2019s lack of foresight. But there is a lot of pretty CGI whizzbangery. Janeway doubts she\u2019s seen the last of them, but I don\u2019t believe they ever featured again, which further contributes to a story which feels undercooked at best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"