Craggus’ Trek Trek: Now, Voyager! Vol 1
It’s Janeway or the highway as USS Voyager finds itself stranded in the Delta Quadrant with a bunch of character bios and Trek’s best ever premise. Welcome to Craggus’ Trek Trek: Now Voyager Vol 1.
Star Trek Voyager S1E02: Caretaker
Craggus’ Trek Trek: Now, Voyager Vol 1 opens with Caretaker, a solid, if unspectacular pilot episode despite lavish – perhaps too lavish – location filming. Introduces a dozen new ideas to Star Trek, most of which the series will discard or fail to develop over the next couple of seasons. Mulgrew makes an instant impression as do veteran character actors Picardo and Phillips but the rest of the cast struggle with flatly written interchangeable characters and a plot which is too convoluted and abstract to really work. It may do what it needs to do – strand the ship in the Delta quadrant – but it doesn’t have much fun doing it.
Star Trek Voyager S1E03: Parallax
Another solid episode which picks up some of the dangling character threads left over from the pilot and pairs it – not altogether successfully – with a hard science MacGuffin to introduce some peril to pressure the new crew. There’s a welcome tension to the show’s version of The Apprentice as Janeway mulls over the appointment of a Chief Engineer and Chakotay sets out his expectations of integration of the merged crew. It adds some layers and depth to the friction between the Starfleet crew and the Maquis while Torres specifically gets time to shine and, probably quicker than any other character, charts an arc that her character will follow throughout the whole series. It all still feels a little stiff and self-conscious, with the writers and actors still figuring out their characters and performances and while it may not be close to hitting warp speed yet, it’s a case of steady as you boldly go.
Star Trek Voyager S1E04: Time And Again
Wasting no time (pun intended), the series introduces a trope that will, unfortunately, come to typify its often cowardly and conservative approach to storytelling: the reset button. What starts promisingly as a cautionary eco-technological parable quickly gets bogged down in the ungainly character interactions that belie a writing staff still trying to find their rhythm and a cast that includes a number of them still grappling with their characters. The central idea – an explosion so severe that its effect propagates backwards in time – is a good one, but the execution is flat, and the make-up and wardrobe are egregiously bad, making even the location shooting look cheap and tacky. The pairing of Janeway and Paris, likewise, doesn’t really work especially at the moment where nobody seems sure who Tom Paris really is or is going to be. He’s being positioned to be some kind of roguish Riker-lite ladies’ man but his boast to Harry Kim that he already has “five [girlfriends] at home” takes on a lot of subtext when you remember he was in prison before boarding the ship.
Star Trek Voyager S1E05: Phage
In which Janeway is so angry at the loss of her private dining room that she rips Neelix’s lungs out. Okay, she doesn’t, but some gross-looking new aliens do. It’s absurd that Janeway has hoarded her private dining room for weeks after the ship was stranded in the Delta quadrant while lecturing the rest of the crew on the need to avoid wasting precious resources and find ways to make their limited reserves go further especially as the episode opens with her expressing her scepticism at Torres’ latest idea to cram a dilithium refinery onto the ship. Phage sees Voyager make its second attempt to introduce a new recurring alien enemy to the Star Trek pantheon, this time the creepy body-horror plague carriers: The Vidiians. Eager to go on his first every away mission, Neelix falls prey to a sci-fi update of an urban legend as he’s phaser-roofied and wakes up to find his lungs have been removed. Half medical procedural, half Cronenberg-lite first contact yarn, the end solution is as unsatisfying as it is convenient as Neelix is restored by a lung transplant from a species with a 9-year life span. As you’d expect, Neelix’s diminished lung capacity rarely comes up again. Do remember the look the Doctor gives Neelix when he asks if he’s programmed to sing, though. It’ll be relevant later.
Star Trek Voyager S1E06: The Cloud
What could have been a drab grab-bag of cutesy character moments dumped over another intriguing but underplayed sci-fi premise just about works thanks to the considerable talents of writer Michael Piller and his ability to stitch what feels like a collection of scenes excised from other episodes into a functional if uneven patchwork quilt. Low points are a first cliched foray into Chakotay’s spirit guide nativist mysticism and the first of horny Tom Paris’ sleazy holodeck programmes. The highlights are the continuing delight of Robert Picardo’s holographic curmudgeon and a main plot that feels decidedly TOS in its purity. Make a note of Janeway’s animal spirit guide – it almost counts as foreshadowing.
Star Trek Voyager S1E07: Eye Of The Needle
The strongest episode thus far of Voyager, Eye Of The Needle is also the first to address the obvious plot of ‘an opportunity to get home’ and does so in repeatedly heartbreaking fashion. It might seem a retrograde step to feature an existing adversary (The Romulans) so soon in a series trying to establish its “all-new” credentials, but it works superbly, especially in the gradual diplomacy of breaking down barriers of suspicion and mistrust between the Romulan scientist and Janeway. Short on action but laden with emotional drama and wonderful character moments it draws attention to the implications of the journey home to the crewmembers the ship has picked up along the way, particularly The Doctor, Neelix and Kes. The series of sucker-punch twists at the end really pack a punch and, as later episodes attest to, mean the episode has a decidedly downbeat but dramatically satisfying ending.
Star Trek Voyager S1E08: Ex Post Facto
Aiming for Sherlock Holmes and landing somewhere short of Murder, She Wrote, Ex Post Facto continues with the personality cul-de-sac of Tom Paris as a horny Kirk/ Riker knock-off. It doesn’t help that the episode also feels like a thinly disguised reprise of the TNG episode A Matter Of Perspective which similarly used false memories to cover up a murder. Director LeVar Burton at least injects some visual interest with a dash of film noir but it’s hard to escape the essentially theatrical feeling of much of the drama taking place on a stage set and Tuvok doesn’t really suit the role of the grand reveal-delivering detective.
Star Trek Voyager S1E09: Emanations
Craggus’ Trek Trek: Now Voyager Vol 1 concludes with an episode that’s Star Trek-by-the-numbers, this not altogether unsuccessful episode sets out to tackle several incredibly heavy topics only to find itself crushed beneath the weight of the themes it’s trying to carry. The existence of an afterlife, euthanasia and religious doctrine would individually be enough for a number of episodes and while this episode has some good ideas they get lost in the pile-up and the need to introduce some kind of peril to avoid the episode being overly talky. It does, at least, give Harry Kim a turn in the spotlight and Garrett Wang acquits himself well but it’s a cruel, cruel irony that the episode ends with Janeway giving him some advice on what will happen as his career progresses and he’s promoted up the ranks, something that would conspicuously fail to happen at any point under Janeway’s command.
That’s all for Craggus’ Trek Trek: Now, Voyager Vol 1 – but tune in for Vol 2 tomorrow!
