Craggus’ Trek Trek:
Now, Voyager! Vol 2
USS Voyager’s freshman season comes to an abrupt end as production shuffles deliver the shortest season of the classic Star Trek era in Craggus’ Trek Trek Now Voyager Vol 2.
Star Trek Voyager S1E10: Prime Factors
Craggus’ Trek Trek Now Voyager Vol 2 kicks off with a wonderful episode that takes one of Trek’s oldest, most tried and trusted of tropes and flips the script so that it’s the Starfleet crew that find themselves on the receiving end of a non-interference directive. The hedonistic, technologically advanced Sikarians are a wonderful creation and it’s a shame they end up being a ‘one and done’ antagonist after this introduction. There’s a delight in their gradual shift from friend to manipulative frenemy and the tension on board Voyager as the crew fractures over whether or not to pass up the opportunity to get home by ignoring the wishes of the Sikarian authorities is superbly played, even if the final explanation by Tuvok of why he took the action he did doesn’t quite satisfy.
Star Trek Voyager S1E11: State Of Flux
Something of a wasted opportunity and perhaps indicative of the changing nature of television but the idea of a viper in the nest is a fascinating one – and a really bold choice for a Star Trek series, especially if they’d had the courage to string it out into a multi-series arc. Although Seska continues as a recurring villain for the next season, her treachery and true nature are both hinted at and revealed in a single episode. Imagine how much more powerful it would have been for the audience to become aware of her duplicitous agenda in this show but for the crew to remain unaware for the next few seasons, even as suspicions increased? It would have given Voyager a dark edge to its more optimistic exploratory actions and created a focal point of ongoing conflict between Maquis and Starfleet which she could have covertly manipulated while maintaining her cover, even acting heroically at points as circumstances required. As it stands, she’s exposed and escapes from the ship in a single episode, throwing her lot in with a Kazon sect who continue to covet Voyager’s technology thanks to the Delta Quadrant’s bafflingly inconsistent awareness of replicator and transporter technology.
Star Trek Voyager S1E12: Heroes And Demons
It wouldn’t be Berman-era Star Trek without a holodeck malfunction story and, if you have a holographic character, how could you possibly have a holodeck malfunction story this early on that doesn’t focus on him? Unfortunately, this means that while Harry Kim gets another episode about him, it doesn’t actually feature him, as he goes missing during a playthrough of Beowulf. Enter The Doctor – still searching for a name for himself and making a name for himself in poignant circumstances. It’s a fun, slightly frivolous episode with Robert Picardo on form as a sardonic, reluctant swashbuckler. It really is a wonderful performance that brings a lot of subtle subtext to the Doctor’s first foray into an environment where he can not only interact with people but actually experience the little pleasures of existence such as eating, drinking and much, much more.
Star Trek Voyager S1E13: Cathexis
Opening with Janeway’s gothic holonovel which sees her taking the role of a Governess in a sinister English house, the episode thankfully quickly dispenses with it (as does the series after an episode or two more) in favour of its own creepy tale of hauntings and possession. This time it’s Robert Beltran’s Chakotay who gets to be centre stage for the episode but also gets nothing to do but lie in sickbay with his eyes closed as the crew try to solve the mystery of what happened on an away mission by retracing the away team’s steps while a mysterious force keeps trying to turn them back. It’s a fun watch, which makes up for the shortcomings in terms of storytelling clarity.
Star Trek Voyager S1E14: Faces
The Vidiians are back, and grislier than ever. Voyager’s first “redshirt”, Lieutenant Durst, bites the dust in this episode but in a fascinatingly macabre way as he immediately returns as the face of a Vidiian. This creates a disturbingly familiar yet unfamiliar antagonist and sees Star Trek venture further into pure horror territory than ever before. Even more horrifically, though, it also creates an alien bad guy who looks unnervingly like Ted Cruz. Sci-Fi Face/Off notwithstanding, this episode gives Roxanne Dawson the opportunity to showcase her skills as she gets the chance to play two distinctly different versions of B’Elanna Torres, the Klingon version and the Human version. It’s an episode that adds depth and pathos to not only Voyager’s chief engineer but also the Vidiians, even if Janeway doesn’t make good on her promise to respond with deadly force if she ever encountered them experimenting on her crew again.
Star Trek Voyager S1E15: Jetrel
Perhaps conscious of the fact that Neelix always walks a fine line of being a comic relief buffoon rather than a fully rounded character, Voyager quickly came to the conclusion that the only way to balance out Neelix’s gregarious bonhomie was to give him the most tragic back story and regularly put him through the wringer to ensure the trauma stayed fresh. That begins here with Jetrel, a thinly disguised parable riffing on the real-life moral angst of Robert Oppenheimer and the invention of the nuclear bomb. In lesser hands, this kind of episode could have degenerated into soapy melodrama bordering on parody, but Ethan Phillips is perhaps the most underrated actor of the Voyager troupe and he balances the light and dark of his character superbly here, playing perfectly off the softly-spoken performance of guest star (the always great) James Sloyan. It loses something by lacking the courage of its moral convictions and relying on a sci-fi MacGuffin side-plot to fill out the final act but there’s genuine power in Neelix’s moment of forgiveness. It’s just a shame the writers (and some of the fans) would turn out to be less forgiving to the character in future.
Star Trek Voyager S1E16: Learning Curve
Craggus Trek Trek Now Voyager Vol 2 sees season one come to an early unplanned close with a slightly underwhelming “bottle show” that serves as a season finale thanks to a production shuffle that saw four episodes moved to open season 2. Learning Curve features a perhaps overdue return to exploring the everyday implications of integrating a bunch of rebellious freedom fighters into a well-trained professional crew. The episode goes to great lengths to try to make Voyager’s use of bioneural gel packs interesting and important, but it starts a trend of episodes where every time the packs are mentioned, it’s in the context of them proving to be a vulnerability – this time to cheese of all things. Tuvok’s mentoring of four underperforming ex-Maquis crewmembers plays out in predictable fashion and again it feels like a missed opportunity that we never really get to encounter these guys again (with the exception of Chell the Bolian who appears once more and is referenced in a handful of other episodes) to see how they’ve grown (or not) from the experience.
Star Trek Voyager S2E01: The 37’s
And so Now Voyager Vol 2 end with the beginning of Season 2. What would have been a barnstorming season finale becomes an energetic and slightly over-eager season opener as the intrepid Voyager crew discover a 1937 pickup truck floating in space. A pickup truck, it turns out, carelessly discarded by a race known as the Briori who’d kidnapped three hundred humans from the year 1937 and brought them back to the Delta Quadrant to serve as slaves. The alien abduction idea is enlivened by the inclusion of real-life historical figure and mystery disappearer Emilia Earhart but there are just too many ideas for a single episode and it all ends up feeling a little rushed and superficial, especially the narrative handwaving to excuse the Briori from making an appearance or even becoming an enduring search target for a crew desperate to get home. It’s also the first time we get to see a Federation starship land on a planet, something that had been planned since the earliest days of TOS but had proved prohibitively expensive effects-wise at the time. It turns out to be a fun gimmick but ends up being used sparingly as it’s quite the drag on narrative pacing. Ultimately, though, the episode is redeemed by the series of vignettes of the crew pondering the invitation to stay and settle on this new, now-human world and Kate Mulgrew’s magnificent, wordless performance as Janeway arrives in the designated cargo bay to see who among her crew has decided to abandon ship.
That’s all for Craggus’ Trek Trek Now Voyager Vol 2 – but tune in next week for Volume 3!
