Andrew Bloom

VIP

9

[6.8/10] Some of the issues with Voyager are the fault of the creative team: a refusal to fully engage with the show’s premise, the lack of lasting consequences from encounters in the Delta Quadrant, underused (or overused) characters. But some of them stem simply from the fact that, by the final season, this era of Star Trek had been going on for fourteen years, and some of the tricks of the trade just didn’t have the same impact they once did.

The latter, I’m afraid, applies to Q. It’s been a good long while since we last did the customary waltz with the Continuum back in season 3’s “The Q and the Grey”, but it still feels like 1990s Trek went about as far they could with the character. It’s already a bit of a miracle that guest star John de Lancie had nearly as much chemistry with Kate Mulgrew as he did with Patrick Stewart, and that they found a playful-yet-pointed dynamic between Q and Janeway that was distinct but still fun. (He and Sisko had a good moment or two, but didn’t quite click the same way,.) By season 7, there wasn’t much juice left in the orange.

To the writers’ credit, they find a new angle on it. If there’s something to say in favor of “Q2”, it’s that it has the gumption to carry on from where things left off, with Q as a father and the Continuum’s fate resting in some ways on the shoulders of his child. Introducing a new Q Junior, one whose own recalcitrance makes Q have to rethink his own hijinks and manage the responsibilities of parenthood, is certainly something new. The premise of “Junior, stay with your Aunt Kathy until you learn to straighten up and flight right” has something to it.

There’s just a couple of problems, and the biggest one is simple -- there’s only one John de Lancie.

I can appreciate the stunt casting of enlisting Keegan de Lancie, John’s real life son, as Q’s fictional offspring. And the young actor certainly gives it his all, never seeming hesitant or as though he’s giving anything but one-hundred percent in every scene. But the simple truth is that the elder de Lancie’s joie de vivre as the puckish demigod is one-of-a-kind. There’s just something missing when even an actor with half his genes tries to do the same shtick, particularly when we were already hitting the point of diminishing returns on Q antics.

Some of it is that this episode is jumbled all to hell. First the crew is just dealing with the usual Q escapades with scads of exposition and throat-clearing to establish the sitcom-y “one week to shape up” setup. Then, Junior is acting up in the standard ways that Q acts up. Then, he’s turned a corner over the commercial break and is a model citizen. Then the whole story turns into an elaborate ruse to prove his mettle before a quick wrap-up.

None of these distinct segments really flows into the next. The episode’s tone shifts wildly from the usual Q irreverence to more down-to-earth sincerity, to over-the-top moral drama. There’s enough of a throughline that the story doesn't feel wholly unconstructed or anything, but the tone and pacing and plotting feels very by committee once the credits roll.

Last but not least, the one that's nobody’s fault really is that, despite the twist, so much of this plays like a retread. We’ve seen John’s Q misbehave regularly on both the Enterprise-D and Voyager. We’ve seen him joust with Janeway. Hell, we’ve even seen him become human and learn some altruism from them before.

Doing it with a different Q, and adding a misbehaving teen/exasperated parent angle to it does something. But the reality is that the fundamentals here have already been done; the Q routine is already a little tired; and poor Junior doesn’t quite have the panache to really elevate the hour with his presence alone. Frankly, something’s lost in the fun factor when Q goes from being a fly in the ointment to a bunch of stuffy Starfleeters to being a twerpy, disobedient teen.

So what does Q2 have going for it? Despite the unavailing shtick that saturates the hour, there’s some nice moments of sincerity that grab your attention. In an episode where Junior is pretty annoying for most of the runtime, his speech to Janeway about how much he feels the pressure of being expected to save his people from the time he was a baby is sympathetic. And the moment where Janeway tells him he’d have a home on Voyager if he chose to remain human is legitimately sweet.

And, as scrambled as the script feels in places, there’s a decent throughline for Junior. While Janeway and Q as bickering parents is hit or miss as a bit, there’s something to the motif of Junior needing to learn that there are consequences to his actions. His friendship with Icheb isn’t especially convincing, but does just enough for the audience to buy them as pals. So when his rebellious escapade results in harm to Icheb, you can buy the kid’s selflessness in willing to take responsibility and submit to whatever punishment is necessary to save his buddy’s life.

His transformation and sacrifice doesn't hit the heights of his father’s in “Deja Q” from The Next Generation, but it’s sturdy stuff nonetheless. Granted, Q Senior turning out to have engineered the whole thing takes a lot of the wind out of the episode’s sails, but I guess you can chalk that up to him having a mini-arc to become a more involved parent, at Janeway’s urging.

The real issue though is simply that we’ve seen this all before, in one form or another. Junior stripping Seven or sealing Neelix’s lips feels like cheap fanservice of both varieties, and doesn't quite compare to his father’s antics. Qs coming to Starfleet officers for help and learning a bit of humility in the process is a standard beat by now. And adding the highs and lows of parenting into the mix doesn’t do enough to freshen up the routine.

There’s an unkind metaphor at play here. Junior is Q’s offspring, and try as he might, he’s not quite his father, and many of his tricks are old hat. The same can be said for Voyager itself, spinning off from TNG and recreating its familiar rhythms to increasingly diminishing returns. “Q2” isn’t a bad episode by any means, but it is representative of the overfamiliarity problems that afflicted Voyager from the beginning and feel even more tiresome when the end is in sight.

[7.4/10] The knock on Voyager is that it is slavishly devoted to the reset button. By this point, savvy viewers can probably guess that the ship won’t make it home before the end of the series, if ever. Likewise, they can probably surmise that despite the grievous threat of the week, the ship will probably be fine and all of the main characters will probably survive. Maybe, in the final season, they’ll let a couple get married and even have a bun in the oven, but despite the endless possibilities of the premise, things mostly stay the same on Janeway’s ship.

Yet, if the setting is static, and the basic situation can't change, then the only thing that’s left to develop over time is the characters. Voyager is not exactly its sister show, Deep Space Nine, when it comes to character arcs, but there’s something there! The Captain loosens up a bit and becomes more daring and less doctrinaire. B’Elanna and Tom go from a hothead and a bad boy to a loving bastion of domesticity. Neelix goes from being an irksome tagalong to being a helpful ambassador and the heart of the crew. Even Harry the eternal ensign gets a little extra spunk and ambition over the years.

But the peak of change over time goes to the show’s two biggest outsiders to humanity: The Doctor and Seven. Doc has had a longer runway, but Voyager’s creative team is more devoted to Seven as a major player, charting her course over time and putting her at the center of the show’s bigger narratives. Her path from recovered drone who yearns to return to the Collective, to a critical member of the crew and vital part of its community, is one of the show’s best achievements.

Which is what gives an episode like “Human Error” power. For so long, we have seen Seven be a reluctant explorer of her own humanity. She slowly gives in to connection and acceptance and the sundry parts of being a n individual. But she holds on to her stoicism, her sense of order, her desire for perfection. The breakthroughs are meaningful because they don’t happen overnight. The show spoon-feeds them to it, a little at a time, with the scattered big moment to show how far she comes.

And then an episode like “Human error” comes along and we see something totally different, something that reflects how her perspective has changed in nearly four years board Voyager. Because now Seven is no longer a Borg drone who resents having to conform to Janeway’s “irrelevant” human mores. She’s an aspiring human who wishes she could jettison her Borg implants and yearns for the ease of manner and human connection she once had to be cajoled into even considering.

I love that idea. There is great pathos in Seven resenting the artifacts of her one time captivity. There is something relatable in her literally and figuratively aching for a bond with others that she struggles to make real. Seven is no longer a Borg forced into individuality, but an individual striving to shed the parts of her that are Borg.

And she does it through erotic friend fiction.

I’m being a little glib there. Anyone who’s practiced a conversation in their head ahead of time, or pictured what they might do or say as their best selves at a social event can relate to Seven using the holodeck to conjure up a version of Voyager where she’s Borg implant-free and able to express herself as easily as she’d like to. The way she programs her appearance without any sign of her Borg past, and scenarios where she feels comfortable thanking the captain for her guidance or coming up with sincere-yet-ribbing toasts for B’Elanna’s baby shower is sympathetic.

Who among us hasn’t wanted to step into a world where we looked the way we wanted, and felt confident and charming enough to fit in perfectly in any social situation? It’s a beautiful thing, and the contrast between stoic, self-conscious Seven in the real world and charismatic, confident Seven in her imaginary one calls to mind a similar dichotomy with Lt. Barclay in season 6’s [“Pathfinder”] and TNG’s “Hollow Pursuits”. Shaky crewmembers using the holodeck as a safe space to try escape and try on different personas is well-established territory.

Where I struggle, naturally, is the romance element of it.

On the one hand, I like the idea here. Speaking of showing change over time through the characters, as much as “Unimatrix Zero” fell flat for me, I like the notion that, even though Seven’s heretofore unknown relationship with Axum felt random in the moment, it sparked something in her. She wanted that feeling, that sense of connection, once more, and has been chasing it ever since.

I tend to think of love -- romantic, platonic, or familial -- as an essential part of being human. It’s natural and understandable that once Seven began to accept her humanity, she would yearn for it, and maybe even have a sort of strange approximation of it at first. Seeing her take those first baby steps, play pretend to try the idea on for size, is fascinating from a sociological angle, and sympathetic from a personal one.

On the other, though -- why Chakotay? I’ve said my piece on the character before, so I won’t keep beating a dead targ. But geeze, at this point the only female main character who hasn’t nursed a crush on Chakotay is Kes (and hell, maybe she just ran out of time). To paraphrase 10 Things I Hate About You, “What is it with this guy? Does he have beer-flavored nipples?” Voyager tries to make him a romantic lead again, and again and again, and it just. never. works. Maybe I’m just the wrong audience for it.

The show uses every tool in its cinematic tool box to try to evoke a sense of passion between his holographic counterpart and Seven. They’re blocked close together with the usual “flirt around the kitchen” routine. The film shoots them in close-ups and low lighting, setting a mood and a sense of intimacy. And the score here really sells the relationship, from the way the music recedes after their first tenuous kiss only to swell back with a vengeance once they go for it again with more certainty. I can't deny there’s a certain charged energy between them in the right moments.

But for the most part, it feels like a crack ship between one of Voyager’s most interesting characters and its resident dead fish. “Human Error” raises interesting ideas about Seven struggling to sacrifice her perfection and order in the name of human improvisation and connection. But they’re undermined by Robert Beltran giving facile speeches that overly underline the point in an unconvincingly shout-y tone.

In principle, I can understand why, in a vacuum, Seven would look to a noble authority figure like Chakotay as an idealized romantic partner. But I never really buy this hinky pairing, which is tough since it takes up most of the episode.

But even if the chemistry could paper over those issues, there is something quietly creepy about Seven conjuring up a version of one of her colleagues to kiss and flirt with and be implied to sleep with. The episode never quite explores that, treating it as harmless fantasy, and I get why. You can understand the impulse, especially for a character who reads as having a teenage mentality much of the time. (Her conversation with Janeway has a real “Mom almost found the diary where I fantasize about the boys I like” quality to it.)

Still, as with Leah Brahms in TNG’s “Galaxy’s Chikd”, there is something uncomfortable about taking a real person and putting them in your romance sim. The episode tees up Seven’s awkwardness over being discovered, but never really the ethics of her actions.

Admittedly, the episode isn’t really about that. It’s more about that nascent desire to explore in Seven and, more to the point, how these daydreams and “experiments” take her away from her usual steady performance of her duties. Voyager flying through an interstellar munitions range is mostly a perfunctory hurdle in a more character-focused episode. But it provides just enough risk and danger for Seven to need to tear herself away from her fantasies, nearly let her colleagues down because of her new fascinations, and ultimately decide to put her heart back into it.

There’s something softly tragic about that. The idea that Seven’s cortical implant specifically prevents her from being able to experience human emotion, lest her body be shut down by it, is a little too mechanical an excuse for what should be a personal issue to resolve. But her skipping regeneration sessions because she’s trying to be more human, only to reflexively return to them because she’s seen the impact love has on her work and self and would rather retreat to the comforts of what she knows is heartbreaking.

As heartening and interesting as it is to see Seven try to stretch her wings and become more human -- with her hair, her friends, her personal life -- it’s just as tragic to see her decide to clip them because it’s all too hard.

It puts her in line with another of the franchise’s great outsiders, Odo from Deep Space Nine, who similarly closed himself off from romance in the name of it being too difficult and too painful in “Crossfire”. “Human Error” doesn’t quite hit those heights. It’s slower, clumsier, less convincing in its central romance. But its heart is in the same place, and so is its heartbreak.

As much as I enjoy the way a great television show develops a character over time, I love it even more when the character’s arc is not a straight line. Life is messy. We rarely progress neatly from one piece of who we are to another. Acknowledging that, letting the internal path from here to there be an elliptical and uncertain one, is part of what elevates great series like Better Call Saul from their simpler brethren.

But sometimes it's painful. Seven changes, but not quite enough, or maybe too much, until she tries to go back to who she was before. The episode’s final moments suggest the attempted reversion might not fully take. Even so, there’s a way to make dramatic, character-focused hay from the enforced stasis of this era of network television. Make the return to the status quo a tragedy. Seeing Seven come so close, grab a piece of the humanity she wants in heart of hearts, only to let it go when it’s too hard to hold onto, is sad in the way it shows how far she’s come, and how far she still has left to go.

[7.7/10] Sometimes all it takes is the tug of a thread. A raving Vulcan gives a former Borg a brief glimpse of her old life. A young doctor starts to notice that a rare condition has been diagnosed twice in quick succession and realizes his patient might be right.. A brainwashed woman gets dribs and drabs of the life she made with her husband. An investigator begins to wonder if his raving suspect has a point. And a familiar fugitive tells a happy worker that she was, and still could be, the captain of a starship.

There is a lot going on in the second half of the “Workforce” duology. Too much, arguably. But if there’s something that unites the disparate odds and ends that coalesce into the payoff to this story, it’s that simple motif. Almost nothing here happens in one great epiphany. Instead, it’s a slow trickle, a steady realization, that at first seems small, but eventually can't be ignored.

It’s a nice idea to build the episode around. As is often the case of Star Trek, the ending isn’t quite as good as the beginning. It’s easier to spin mystery and intrigue than it is to come up with a satisfying conclusion. And “Workforce pt. 2” is certainly plottier than the first part was. More of the story is built around characters actively uncovering the mystery and building towards their escape as opposed to quieter character moments to reflect or just appreciate the texture.

Nonetheless, it’s a nice way to land the story. Everyone has something to do, and you can see this constellation of lives, spread out by malign forces, inextricably returning to the fold because they can't deny their connections to one another or their shared purpose. It nags at them, brings them home, in the same way the drive to return to the Alpha Quadrant does. And that's something.

Heck, we even get a solid, if somewhat underfed, conclusion to the Doctor and Harry jockeying for position aboard Voyager. The storytelling is slight, but you can see a skeptical Harry recognize the Doctor’s tactical prowess in a tough spot, and in turn, the ECH (née EMH) recognizes Harry’s ability to come up with new innovative strategies that aren’t in the database.

I wish the episode took more time to explore Doc’s desire to stay a command hologram. In an episode where no one can deny the impulse to return to their former existence, there’s thematic weight in someone who wants the exact opposite as a counterpoint. But in a crowded episode, there’s just no time.

Still, what we do get is sound and compelling. I appreciate the fact that not all of Quarran society is corrupt. The reveal here is that the physician who brainwashed our heroes is in league with the head of the power plant that employs them. That alone would be diabolical, removing people’s free will for a fee. But the idea that the government, the health ministry, and the police are all on it, gladly willing to kidnap and enslave if it means a functioning society, only makes it worse.

The senior doctor, Kadan’s, self-justifying speech is fascinating. If you set aside your good sense for a moment, you can see his argument. There’s something superficially compelling to his idea of a symbiotic relationship, where a society in need of labor to stay afloat finds it in people who are made happy and fulfilled by doing it. And then when you think about the overriding of people’s agency and the perverse incentives from Kadan’s compensation, the whole thing falls apart.

(To the point, I wonder if this episode is intended as an allegory for the abuses that come with migrant labor. The whole brainwashing deal makes the whole thing a little too fantastical to be a one-to-one comparison, but the idea of sacrificing human rights in the name of labor shortages resonates with the real life issues.)

But I also like that Kadan and the foreman and their governmental enablers don’t represent everyone. The young physician is rightfully aghast when he finds out what happens, despite relatable pressures put pon him by a superior. You have people steadily realizing the horrors that are being inflicted in the name of their people and acting to expose or stop it.

None more so than Yerid, the police detective sent to investigate B’Elanna’s disappearance who instead uncovers this giant conspiracy. If there’s a sense in which the second half of “Workforce” feels disconnected from the first, it’s the way we just get brand new characters who have to be developed and built into major players who weren’t really present in part one. (Plus Tom’s boss just disappears! No budget, I guess.) The results are a little rushed.

But they’re also good. I like that, at the end of the day, an ailing Chakotay puts a bug in Yerid’s ear. He starts recognizing the peculiarity of the orders to transfer Chakotay to the neuropsychology wing of the general hospital. He starts asking questions, impertinent ones, that get at the truth. And eventually, he becomes an ally to our heroes, helping them not only get to the bottom of what happened but also undo it.

It’s a recurring idea. Seven gets a simple flash of her time as a drone and starts to get the itch to uncover the truth. Suddenly she too is an enterprising gumshoe, sneaking in places and putting the pieces together. Tom starts to countenance small bits of whom he might be. B’Elanna immerses herself in her and Tom’s quarters and even his logs, until she becomes a walking reminder to Janeway that there’s something else out there waiting for the once-and-future captain.

The truth is that these scenes don’t have much time to breathe. There is a lot of plot to get through in forty-five minutes, which means that “Workforce” always moves at a good clip, but there’s rarely time to stop and smell the roses. And yet a few smaller scenes -- B’Elanna touching the bat’leth she hung on the wall in “Prophecy”, Seven finding someone who believes her, Janeway’s change in expression when she hears Chakotay call her “the captain” -- self the more personal dimension of these events.

That comes through most clearly in Kathryn’s story. “Workforce” is, in many ways, a referendum on the Captain’s life. And in the end, no matter what simple pleasures a quiet life as a core operator in a power plant brings, the verdict is that she wouldn’t give up her captaincy for the world. There’s something heartening about that, the idea that Janeway isn’t trapped in this sometimes lonely life, but when her free will is restored, would choose it once more. (Shades of “Shattered”.)

But I also appreciate the fact that it comes as a cost. By god, however quickfire or shallow the romance, Kathryn and Jaffen are cute together. I appreciate the fact that he is not, as I predicted, an agent of the enemy or a turncoat. (Though I’ll admit, him disappearing when the bad guys had Janeway cornered in the power plant had me suspicious.) When Janeway turns Chakotay in to the authorities (or is at least implied to have done so), you understand why she wouldn’t want to risk this beautiful life for a bleeding stranger spouting tall tales.

Not for nothing, the subtext of the episode isn’t just a choice for Janeway between Quarra and Voyager; it’s between Jaffen and Chakotay. The show smartly never makes it explicit, but in some ways, this is a battle for Kathryn’s heart: the life she made with one partner versus the life she made with another. There’s a charged quality to the scenes between both pairings, the kind the series had seemingly shied away from for a while before “Shattered” came around. And it heightens the sense that Kathryn is being pulled between two things she cares very deeply about.

Of course, we can't just have matters of the heart prevail. Amid the conspiracy unraveling there are hostages, and bad guys held at gunpoint, and daring escapes from police officers that involve grand leaps and device-smashing. The derring do of Harry and the Doctor above in fending off Quarran attack ships keeps up the space explosion quota, and Janeway and Jaffen evading laser fire to shut down the power plant, and with it, the planetary shield preventing their rescue, gives both some action-y to do with a sharply-written larger purpose.

Really, though, much of it feels inevitable. Ultimately, I’m more moved by the aftermath. The Quarran minister is aghast, pretending a tidy end to something that seemed more complicated and deeply rooted, but which at least shows our heroes’ efforts were worth it. B’Elanna kisses her husband, for recognizing an intrinsic need to care for her, even when he didn’t know who she was.

And Janeway bids farewell to Jaffen, unable to turn away from her life as a Starship Captain, or even to continue their relationship if he were to come on board, but also unable to ignore the deep feeling of connection and loss that comes from their joining and parting. The look of pain on Kathryn’s face when she hugs her beau one last time is heartbreaking, and the familiar sense of self-possessed certainty when she tells her work-husband, Chakotay, that there’s no other life she’d rather have, is inspiring.

I tend to roll my eyes at slippery slope arguments in general. But if you really want something, if it’s a deep and persistent need inside you, if there’s something that feels deeply wrong or, better yet, feels like home, sometimes a little push in the right direction is all it takes. In “Workforce” it’s enough to restore a life or change a society. And while it takes more than one little push, in Voyager, it’s also enough to spur a small but unshakable community to chart a course for home.

[8.3/10] I love the way “Workforce pt. 1” just throws you into the deep end. For the first third of the episode, there is no explanation, no exposition, no backstory. Instead, boom, Janeway is in some fancy alien factory. Seven is using her human name and is an efficiency expert. Tom is in a bar pleading for a job. B’Elanna is wandering in and just as quickly heading out. And Tuvok is laughing. Laughing! And nary a word of how or why they all got there.

It’s different. That's what I want from Voyager in season 7, and in the twenty-fifth season of Star Trek overall. Despite being in the Delta Quadrant, so often the series feels like the same old thing, rhythms we’ve seen for thirty-five years danced to once more. It becomes easy for the jaded viewer (read: me) to enjoy it but see the seams. And it makes episodes like this one, that go for something different in terms of setting and character and even the tone, feel like a breath of fresh air.

Some of that is the production and design and the direction. The Quarran factory is one of the show’s most ambitious sets, with multiple levels and a series of chaotic, wide open spaces that are a far cry from the usual caves and cardboard. The dark lighting and general wreckage of a beaten up Voyager helps sell the desperate circumstances of the ship and its skeleton crew and conveys that this is anything but business as usual.

Most notably, series veteran director Allan Kroeker shoots multiple scenes like this is The West Wing. In the factory setting in particular, there is a flurry of movement and energy, with walk-and-talks and swinging cameras that convey the factory floor as a hive of activity in ways the stately Starfleet vessel rarely is. So much of the first half of the “Workforce” duology is about communicating the ways in which our heroes’ lives have been turned upside down, and the show accomplishes that as much with its visual approach as it does with its storytelling.

In that spirit, there’s something fun about things being so different that you’re not totally sure what’s going on. The lack of exposition means we get to be disoriented by the change and given to wonder about what could lead the captain of a starship devoted to getting her people home to work in some giant industrial tangle. For a solid fifteen minutes, you just drink it in, which is intoxicating in its way. Hell, until Tuvok’s “radiation inoculation” flashback, I’d assumed this whole thing might be a spy mission to free the workers. It’s neat to be so wrong and to see the show craft such a genuine and engrossing mystery by diving right in!

The same goes for the business back on Voyager. There’s a certain thrill to seeing the Doctor as a one-man show, trying to repair an entire starship on his own. The return of Chakotay, Harry, and Neelix from an away mission to find their ship seemingly abandoned, forced to patrol it in EV suits, give the whole thing a creepy quality. (Shades of “The Tholian Web” from The Original Series.) There too, the audience is coaxed to wonder what could have happened to leave the ship in such a state, its crew missing and its systems devastated.

Then, of course, we find out. And as invigorating as those mysterious, energetic opening acts are, it’s a tribute to the overall quality of “Workforce pt. 1” that the show doesn’t lose its zing when we’re let in on what’s going down.

The plotting here is strong. The central premise -- of Voyager’s humanoid crew being boobytrapped, kidnapped, and brainwashed to happily work on a planet with a severe labor shortage -- has tons of potential. The concept comes with inherent social commentary, with a critique of the way that a demand for working bodies leads to ignoring agency and even human rights in some instances. That theme is more hinted at than explored in this opening hour, but it’s a strong undercurrent of the proceedings.

The pure beat-by-beat plot engines are strong too. Tuvok having an instinctual aversion to the injections, because they flash him back to his brainwashing, works as a nice catalyst for him as a fly in the Quarrans’ ointment. Tim Russ gives a strong performance as always, communicating the strangeness of a Vulcan laughing, the sense of something nagging at his brain when flashes of his true past come, and the disturbed desperation when he truly starts to realize what’s happened to him. It works as a meld (if you’ll pardon the pun) of character and story. Tuvok has an epiphany, at the same time his flashbacks reveal the truth to the audience, and his efforts to escape cause problems for others at the factory.

Similarly, there's plenty for those remaining on Voyager to do once they’re able to get Voyager up and running again. “Our people are trapped on the planet, and those of us still on the ship have to figure out a way to rescue them” is an old trope for Star Trek. But it’s given new life via the skeleton crew led by Chakotay who have to make do with two percent of the ship’s usual complement. The lack of manpower, the recalcitrance of the Quarran government, and a need to go undercover to get their friends out all pose exciting yet practical challenges to resolve the issues at hand.

But what I like most about this episode is that it’s a look at who our heroes are when that status quo is disrupted, for the characters who are brainwashed and even the ones who aren’t. Part of the thrill of “Workforce pt. 1” is getting to see The Doctor finally become the Emergency Command Hologram for real after his daydreams in “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy”. The way he gets the nod from Janeway as the crew is suffering from radiation sickness, directs the ship through an enemy attack with aplomb, and stands up to the brute on the other side of the viewscreen is a vindication of the potential he’s long shown.

He’s not the only member of the crew who’s aspired to more though. One of the deftest choices in the script is to create friction between Doc and Harry. Doc has been proving himself as the lone crewmember about Voyager for days. Harry has been angling for a promotion himself and commanding the bridge on the night shift. Both of them see this unfortunate incident as a chance to show what they’re capable of. The way they bristle against one another, each trying to assert themselves in the vacuum left by the others’ absences, speaks to how big dreams and big opportunities unfurling in parallel can lead to tension, even among friends.

Yet, the most compelling part of this one may be what bears out in our heroes even when they’ve had their minds wiped by some venal taskmasters who just want happy workers. (And by the way, my bet is that Umali the bartender is in on the hoodwink, and Jaffen too for that matter, but we’ll have to wait and see.) Even when her human name is returned and her Borg past is erased, Seven is still a brusque worker all but obsessed with efficiency. Even when made into a jovial worker, Tuvok looks at something as whimsical as humor through a logical lens.

And even when they’re entirely different people, Tom and B’Elanna manage to find each other.

That is a lovely idea. Given the brain erasure, neither Paris nor Torres knows that they’re in love, that they’re married, that they’re expecting a child together. The social mores of Quarran society seem to suggest that they’re incompatible: him a bar back who can't keep a job and her a single mother-to-be. THeir lives are in different places, and they can't exactly pick up where they left off.

Nevertheless, with all that smoke between them, their hearts still clear a path. The fact that even when romance is out of the question, Tom tries to help B’Elanna, connects her with our expectant parents to give her community and belonging, speaks to a compassion between them that wins out. And again, even when slipped into different personas, there’s chemistry between them that abides. The notion that the kind of care and affection between two people cannot be erased, that it persists despite technological and physiological subterfuge, is as heartening as anything you’ll find in Star Trek.

In that sense, “Workforce” works as the negative image of “The Killing Game”. There, the novelty was seeing our heroes out of character, thrust into roles that didn’t necessarily fit and reveling in the way they broke character with vestiges of who they really were peaking through the programming now and then. This story is a similar idea, but done differently.

Here, Tom is still Tom. B’Elanna is still B’Elanna. But they’re bent and twisted a little bit, just enough really, for the audience to see what parts of them persist when someone puts them in a different package. That's a fascinating method of character study, the kind that can only come to fruition in speculative fiction.

Which is why I love the Janeway story. We’ve seen the Captain delve into romances before, from passing dalliances to holodeck hotties to her ongoing unspoken bond with Chakotay. But as The Doctor pointed out in “Fair Haven”, Kathryn is in a precarious position for love. As the Captain of this crew, it would be inappropriate for her to “fraternize”, as she puts it here, with her subordinates, and the nature of their journey home means a more permanent connection with an outsider is a dicey proposition. Janeway can still love, but her position means she’s almost duty-bound to close herself off from love.

So while I’m not over the moon about Jaffen, her suitor-of-the-week and fellow worker in the Quarran factory, I am for the idea that, in an odd sense, this kidnapping and brainwashing frees Janeway from the shackles of her responsibilities and, in an odd way, lets her live her best life. Kathryn and Jaffen are cute enough together, with some nice playful moments and believable chemistry, even if it’s not the deepest love story there’s ever been.

What’s more compelling is this distinct vision of Kathryn Janeway: one who can be great at work without having the weight of the world on her shoulders, one who can be jovial and even flirty in a way we’re not accustomed to seeing, and most notably, one who has space in her life and in her heart for love when she doesn't have to put the needs of an entire starship first.

The Quarran homeworld is a trap, a place of abuse, a society where innocent bystanders have their autonomy surgically removed and are transformed into happy and complaint worker bees for a system that isn’t afraid to use them up and spit them out. And yet, in the midst of this unknown violation, our Captain is thriving, with a glimpse of the kind of life she might have led had fate and happenstance not intervened. Despite the quiet horrors of this place, one must imagine Janeway happy.

Who knows where things go from here. The writers do some deft weaving of these story threads together in the climax. Tuvok’s fleeting meld with Seven, B’Elanna being beamed back to Voyager against her will, Janeway moving in with Jaffen, and Chakotay being cornered by the authorities all froth to a boil at the exact same time, intercut in a way to evoke maximum drama before the “To Be Continued...” Despite all that, Star Trek two-parters have a habit of having better setups than payoffs.

If this is all we got though, it would be enough. A rich and engrossing mystery, a strong and intriguing plot, and most of all, a glimpse at who these characters are and might have been, if only things were a little bit different. I don’t know if that would mean much in Voyager’s first season. But here and now, after so long seeing the status quo tested and restored, it means a lot.

[8.5/10] There’s the occasional episode of Voyager that is both satisfying and frustrating: satisfying because it’s always a boon when the series is living up to its potential, and frustrating because it makes me ask, “Why isn’t the whole show like this?”

I don’t just mean in terms of quality. “The Void” sees Janeway and company sucked into the titular pocket of space, where they are trapped, starved for resources, and forced to fend off raiders from the minute they arrive. (Shades of “The Time Trap” from The Animated Series.) Their new circumstances force the Captain to make hard choices about who to trust, whether to bend the rules and seize opportunities wherever they find them amid this desperate situation or stick to their principles even if it could cost the crew their lives. Savvy watchers know our heroes will find their way out of this, but trapped in the Void, things feel genuinely desperate for once.

The results are glorious. The ship has to conserve resources at every turn, with deft choices to use low lighting to signify the way power is being rationed. The law of the jungle takes hold, with scavengers and brigands stealing Voyager’s supplies without provocation. And there is a genuine push-and-pull aboard the ship over whether they should forsake some of their Starfleet strictures in the name of necessity in a lawless and dangerous corner of space.

That's all well and good, and the show has great success in both setting the atmosphere (with veteran series director Mike Vejar doing stellar work as always) and in creating decision points large and small that elucidate the twin battles for survival and for the soul of Voyager taking place at the same time.

My only disappointment is that, as we embark on the series’ home stretch, I’m given to wonder why wasn’t this Voyager the whole time? Being stranded in the Delta Quadrant isn’t much different than being stranded in the Void. Janeway and company are still lacking in allies with plenty of risk that various local powers could try to rob or otherwise take advantage of the. Why we see a fairly comfortable, seedy journey as they make their way through this region of space, rather than being forced to consider the kind of practical compromises and pragmatic struggles presented here, is beyond me.

Still, I’m grateful for what we do get in “The Void”! The episode has the quality of a zombie movie, obviously not in the sense of having to fend off the undead (though the scavengers have a little of that vibe), and more in the sense of exploring how different groups respond when the rules for normal society have fallen away. Janeway’s balance of wanting to be smart and crafty in a realm where everyone seems to be out for themselves, while not tossing aside Federation values, leads to heaps of interesting interactions and tough calls that make for one of the character’s finest hours.

I don’t say that lightly. The Captain can be frustrating here. Much of “The Void” feels of a piece with early pre-Borg truce installments of Voyager, where Janeway could be maddeningly rigid about not disturbing so much as a blade of grass in the Delta Quadrant if it might violate the Prime Directive. Outings like “Alliances” from season 2 would see her start to relax that policy, only to affirm her strict devotion to the Federation’s founding ideals and Starfleet protocols, no matter what.

What I like about “The Void”, though, is that it’s not about blind fealty to rules or principles when you’re so far removed from the environment in which they were forged and make sense. It is, instead, the exact opposite -- a story about how those principles are, in many ways, their own kind of movable feast. And rather than that sense of idealism and trust being Voyager’s downfall, it is instead their salvation.

There’s something endlessly heartening about the idea that even thirty thousand lightyears from the Federation, what ultimately protects Voyager and gives it the resources and knowhow necessary to escape this godforsaken region of space, turns out to be building a miniature version of the Federation. Hewing to the ideals that make the UFP, and Star Trek, stand out -- tolerance, generosity, mutual cooperation -- are what preserve our heroes; not giving into lawless opportunism. You can't be a Trekkie for this long and not appreciate that at least a little.

It is, in many ways, Janeway’s biggest gamble yet. She shares food and medical supplies. She offers the moral strictures of Starfleet as the table stakes for participation in her mini-Federation; she opens her ship up to strangers who could just as easily take advantage of her. In short, she takes chances on compassion and trust, and it pays off.

Much as in “The Time Trap”, there’s a thrill from seeing representatives of various Delta Quadrant species united and working together given how they’ve all been thrown into this peculiar predicament. The common defense pact between Janeway and Captain Garon, the way the pooling of knowledge leads to efficient replicator use that helps them feed everyone, even the Hierarchy aliens using their spy tech to snoop on the alliance’s enemy are all encouraging displays of what this approach can do, even divorced from the Alpha Quadrant circumstances that birthed it.

I also appreciate the fact that not everything is hunky dory here. The Captain is decisive and commanding, in a way that makes you want to run through a wall for her, but there’s also dissent and doubt among the crew in ways we’ve rarely seen before. The antagonistic General Valen is unrepentant about nabbing Voyager’s supplies and isn’t afraid to kick our heroes when they’re down. Even the fact that he’s willing to make his own kinds of alliance to wreck Voyager and steal the mini-Federation’s resources shows how these good and noble ideas can be perverted for bad ends.

What I like most, though, is the fact that it’s not as though Janeway’s alliance is one big song of kumbaya, even once they get past its rocky early stages. (And the time jumps between commercial breaks helps cover for that, some.) Her one regret in all of this isn’t a failure to be more ruthless or pragmatic; it’s letting a group of bigots into the tent because she thought they might be useful, to where she ultimately has to kick them out for attacking and stealing rather than adhering to the alliance’s code to only trade and partner, no matter what helpful tech they might have. As much as the idea of the mini-Federation lifts Voyager, it also comes at a cost, which is as it should be.

The choice to protect the vulnerable and excommunicate the bigots comes with a certain poetic irony. The Doctor forges a bond with Fantome, a local alien played with expressive physicality by Hugh himself, Jonathan del Arco. It is a tribute to Janeway and the Doctor’s altruism that they take in these reviled denizens of the Void, give them food and learn to communicate with them. It speaks the exponential returns on compassion when the scavengers use their unique physiology to help Voyager escape their attackers.

And it is poetic that these “vermin” that brutes like General Valen and Captain Bosaal underestimate and revile, who have a language and a community deeper and more profound than their doubters would countenance, turn out to be the ones that provide for the baddies’ defeat and their good samaritans’ escape.

Of course, Janeway and her allies do eventually escape. The script smartly gives us a failed attempt in the early going to help make the later attempt seem that much more desperate and cathartic. The ticking clock of depleted resources and enemies at the gates adds to the thrill factor. And seeing our heroes finally make it into normal space, with their new comrades in tow, is rousing as all hell. Their success is a vindication of Janeway’s high-minded principles and the ingenuity of her approach.

One of the Star Trek lines that has stuck with me the longest is Deep Space Nine’s admonition that, “It’s easy to be a saint in paradise.” That series reached incredible narrative and thematic heights by exploring the ways in which Federation values don’t always travel. They may not mean much to those without the prodigious resources at Starfleet’s disposal. And the idea that even the leaders of the noble Federation bend the rules or sacrifice their ethics or turn a blind eye to the dirty work of civilization in the face of existential threats added a layer of complexity to the franchise and its exploration of humanity’s future that remains unmatched in Star Trek.

Yet, I love “The Void” as a representation of the opposite idea -- that those hopeful Federation values of altruism and tolerance and mutual aid can be the foundation of something greater in any scenario or setting. Captain Janeway has been rewarded a hundred-fold for forging similar “alliances” with a Talaxian trader, an Ocompan naif, a former Borg, and even a group of rebels from the Federation. She has made compromises but also drawn lines in the name of not forgetting who they are no matter how far from home they may be. And the results of that optimism and devotion is a ship that's already halfway home, and a crew that has forged the bonds needed to see them through the journey.

There is room within Star Trek for all of these perspectives. I continue to adore the deconstruction represented by Deep Space Nine’s larger project, but I will always have a place in my heart for the optimism at the core of Star Trek’s own founding principles. And I’m inspired by the idea that even if we’re not saints, with those ideals in tow, sometimes we can still make our own paradise.

[7.1/10[ “Prophecy” isn’t boring; I’ll give it that much. From the jump, we’re being attacked by Klingons, and then bunking with Klingons, and sparring with Klingons, and fending off a mutiny by Klingons. As silly as it is that Voyager keeps running into representatives from the Alpha Quadrant like this, the episode knows how to move, which honestly helps a good bit.

It’s also part of the problem. There are a ton of interesting ideas here! What does it mean to have to cohabitate with a culture that doesn't share your norms or values? (They dug into this a little bit just one episode prior in “Repentance”.) How much should you bend the truth in your interpretation of holy texts in the name of doing good for your people? What value can ritual and tradition and a connection to one’s heritage bring to those who may feel disconnected from it?

Most importantly, how much do you give in to something you don’t believe in or agree with for the greater good? The heart of “Prophecy” is the idea that a group of Klingon pilgrims, who’ve sojourned out to the Delta Quadrant to fulfill a scriptural prophecy, believe that B’Elanna’s baby is their messiah. What that means to B’Elanna, how much she’s willing to go along with the Klingon leader’s scheme, and whether the experience might awaken something in her, all raise thorny personal and cultural questions that could fuel the episode.

Strange New Worlds did an episode tackling a similar idea, about how much to allow for religious prophecy and culture differences when dealing with another civilization. And Deep Space Nine got multiple seasons’ worth of tension and meaning out of the, “These people think I’m their messiah, but I don’t necessarily want to be” game. Digging into what that means for B’Elanna in particular, who has a fraught history, to say the least, with Klingon culture and religion, could be a boon for Voyager.

Unfortunately, there’s just no time. No sooner do we run into the Klingons than they’ve destroyed their own ship and are aboard Voyager. No sooner do they arrive than they’re practically worshiping B’Elanna. No sooner does she become an object of adoration than it’s revealed that this is all a scheme by the sect’s leader, Kohlar, to get his people to stop wandering. No sooner does B’Elanna reluctantly agree to participate in that scheme, then Tom gets crosswise with the Klingon dissenter, T’Greth, and they’re duking it out in the holodeck.

No sooner are the two bros mixing it up with blunted bat’leths than it’s revealed that all these Klingons carry a deadly virus. No sooner does B’Elanna get the news that she and her child have been infected with the same than T’Greth stages a mutiny. And no sooner is phaser fire exchanged across Voyager then it turns out the fetus has special stem cells that can cure the Klingon sect of their maladies, and they agree to settle on the ship.

Frankly, you could take any pair of these plot points and build a good episode out of it. Klingons are forced to bunk on Voyager until intercultural tensions become too much and a mutiny breaks out? Could be great! B’Elanna grows closer to Klingon culture only to become wary when she catches an illness that threatens the life of her child? There’s a ton to explore there! Agreeing to help promote a prophecy you don’t believe for pragmatic reasons in only to discover that, in a roundabout way, it comes true? It’s a bit of a cliche, even limited to Star Trek, but you could do plenty with that idea.

But when you try to do all kajillion at once, the result is that every storyline feels underfed. There’s not enough time to really sit with the characters and see them process these experiences in a way that adds meaning to the story, because as soon as you hit one plot point, it’s off to the next. There’s disruptor blasters and fist fights and literal sparks flying to focus on instead!

And that's all before the pretty abominable and unnecessary B-plot in “Prophecy.” For starters, the episode promises us a Bert and Ernie routine between Tuvok and Neelix that we barely get to see! How dare you!

More to the point, I don’t derive a lot of laughs from poor Harry Kim being sexually harassed by a Klingon woman who won’t leave him alone, and the Doctor basically saying, “tough luck, you better go schtup her.” Context is everything, but geeze. Neelix finding Klingons unique and enchanting is worth something, but him playacting at roughing up Harry so he can garner the lust of Ch’Rega is more zany sitcom-level writing. Ethan Phillips plays it all well, but in an episode that's already struggling to find time for its legitimate storytelling, we didn't need a flop-sweat filled interspecies sex comedy in miniature to eat up real estate.

All of this in a shame, because when “Prophecy” isn’t racing from plot point to plot point, or devolving into American Pie-aping nonsense, it has moments that are downright lovely. My favorite scene in the whole damn episode comes when Kohlar asks her to join him in a prayer for the dead. She’s brushed most of this sect’s rigamarole off to this point, but suddenly she mouths along the words to this prayer, and you can see something wash over her: an appreciation, a fulfillment, a connection.

It capitalizes on the good work done in “Barge of the Dead” (and to a lesser extent, Lineage), to show B’Elanna coming to accept the Klingon side of her, and also to make peace with a culture she’s been resistant to up to this point. Becoming a parent, and feeling yourself more a part of that culture, a link in a chain, and getting comfort and meaning from it, is a beautiful thing.

Ultimately, I think that's what “Prophecy” wants to do the most. At the beginning of the episode, B’Elanna is a resistant tolerator of these people and their admiring gaze; by the end, she is bidding them farewell to their new home and hanging Kohlar’s family bat'leth in her home. The journey along the way -- of finding the value in a culture you rebelled from and using your place in it to do good for others -- is a moving one.

Or at least it would be, if the script gave it the time and space it deserved. For all the folderol over “Hey, the prophecy came true in an unorthodox way!” and “Oh no, the Klingons are being unruly somehow!” that makes up the bric-a-brac of the hour, there’s a real and compelling story to be told here. Five of them, frankly. I suppose it’s better to infuse your episode with too many good ideas than too few. Even so, despite the spirit of Klingon fierceness and bluster at play, in my culture (overly analytical nerds), a little more focus and balance remains highly valued.

[6.7/10[ This episode seemed deep and even profound to me when I was a kid. Here we are, talking about justice and forgiveness and rehabilitation and the death penalty, man! Star Trek has something to say about what’s right and wrong with criminal justice and capital punishment, everybody! Time to pull up a chair and listen.

And now, through the lens of adulthood, it feels almost hopelessly quaint, ham-handed, and in some instances completely wrongheaded.

That's not true for every Star Trek episode, or even every Voyager episode. Many of them are deeper and more masterful than I fully appreciated when I was young. (“Latent Image” comes to mind.) But some of this is an inevitable part of growing older and looking at things that once impressed you through the lens of a fuller experience of the world (or, less charitable, a more jaded perspective).

Whatever your vantage point, “Repentance” offers its viewers a diorama in which to explore every topic related to the death penalty in particular and the justice system in general than the writers can think to throw in. The distressed alien ship of the week turn out to be a prison ship, and Voyager must take on a crop of harsh warden and their death row inmates, with all the Prime Directive-mandated moral discomfort that entails.

Honestly, it’s not a bad setup. It’s one thing for*Voyager* to simply be duty-bound not to interfere with some alien goings on. It’s quite another for the crew to have to actively aid and abet members of a species whose core values seem much different than Starfleet’s. Watching Janeway and Tuvok have to balance the principles of tolerance with the principles of mercy, not to mention the practicality of diplomacy, is a good element to the episode.

And hey, I enjoy a good boardroom debate in Star Trek as much as anyone. There’s plenty of times where “Repentance” veers into “This should have just been an essay territory.” But having Seven and The Doctor debate mercy, or Neelix and Tom go back and forth on bias in the system, or to hear others examine victim’s rights in criminal cases is thought-provoking. The show gets a little caricatured in its abstractions here, with surviving family members of the slain getting to impose the death penalty unchecked and wealthy murderers being able to buy their way out of it. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of food for thought here.

The problem is that, at heart, “Repentance” is a character story, and the character arcs vary from the trite to the problematic.

On the trite end of the perspective, we have Seven developing a bond with Iko, the seemingly sociopathic killer who holds her hostage at the beginning of the episode. Both actors do a good job, and there’s some interesting, human moments for both players in the story, but the trajectory feels a little cliche. “Skeptical person visits dangerous prisoner, only for the skeptic to warm to the captive, and the dangerous one to reform” is both familiar and hokey. There’s no romance element here, thankfully, but “Repentance” does come with a certain Lifetime movie quality to it.

At the same time, though, it comes with some interesting ideas. While having someone cured of sociopathy through nanoprobes is a little too far-flung, I appreciate Iko’s story as a reflection of the idea that it’s wrong to execute people when their actions may be due to physiological factors beyond their control. We don’t have The Doctor’s ability to cure someone with a single injection, but even so, the notion that there may be biological reasons behind certain behaviors, ones we can understand even if we can't fix them, augurs against a retributivist approach to justice. Oddly enough, House M.D. told a similar story early in that show’s run.

More to the point, there’ s something interesting about a man who’s lived an unrepentant life of craven cruelty experiencing guilt and empathy for the first time, and all in one rush at that. Iko’s heartless bastard routine is a little cartoony for my tastes, but guest star Jeff Kober does a particularly good job at communicating the sense of someone haunted by what he’s done. You feel his pain, his desire to relieve himself of it, and his growing sense that he deserves his punishment now that he has the capacity to bear the weight of his actions.

There is a grand irony to that. The fact that Iko now feels like he deserves to be punished is one of the signs that it’s wrong to put him to death. The script does a good job of conveying this in ways big and small. Obviously his relationship with Seven is the meat of the episode, and his grand gesture to help rather than kill the brutal warden is the grand gesture that cements his change. But the simple act of donating his meal to the inmate he regularly stole food from is a small but powerful sign that Iko’s physiological transition has produced a psychological shift no less profound.

In truth, much of that change is realized through dramatic speeches and purple prose-filled exchanges that left me checking my watch. Despite some good performances, this is more of a “soaring oratory” episode than a “naturalistic dialogue”. Ideas come through rampant speechifying rather than normal conversations. As a result, even where I can appreciate the construction of a scene or a story, it’s harder for any of the proceedings to move me.

But the place where I’m most compelled is in Seven’s story. I love the idea that despite her initial callousness (or, more charity, matter-of-factness) about the death row inmates' circumstances, she finds common ground and, ultimately, investment in Iko because she sees herself in him. Fighting to prove that Iko deserves a second chance despite the blood on his hands, because he’s been freed from an affliction beyond his control, sees Seven subtly fighting to prove that she too deserves the same, despite the red on her ledger, because she too has been freed from an affliction.

That;s a powerful idea. The show gets too sappy or too obvious with it at points. But I am, at heart, a sucker for mother/duaghtere-sque stories with Seven and Janeway. And having Seven tell the captain that she’s trying to do for Iko what Kathryn did for her is a sign that Seven’s journey toward individuality is working, if only in the way she’s internalized the values of kindness and compassion and belief in the best of people from her mentor.

And then there’s the Neelix story. Sigh.

Part of me likes the Neelix story. If you’re going to have an episode where the ostensibly evil prisoner turns out to be good, there’s a certain amount of narrative balance in having the ostensibly good prisoner turn out to be a bit more dastardly. Making it so that every prisoner who’s a full character is good and noble and decent would feel too pollyanna, even for an optimistic show like Voyager.

And I like exploring the idea that people with rough intentions can take advantage of well-meaning, kindhearted individuals like Neelix. The ship’s resident “morale officer” isn’t wrong to offer kindness to the prisoners aboard the ship, to treat them like people, to ensure they’re fed well and even get to know them. Telling a story about the fuzzy line between showing compassion and being taken advantage of is the kind of gray area storytelling I expect from Deep Space Nine, but not really from Voyager, so it’s an interesting line to walk.

Seeing Neelix warm up to Joleg, help him get a letter to his brother, only for that letter to be a surreptitious signal to the sibling to come spring him from prison is an interesting development in the story. It dovetails nicely with Iko’s arc and illustrates how the best of intentions can sometimes lead to bad ends.

But by god, you are in real dicey territory to spend most of the storyline motivating Neelix through him learning about statistics for Joleg’s species that mirror the kind of racial disparities that exist in America’s criminal justice system, only to reveal that the POC prisoner was a lying con artist who was ready to kill again to gain his freedom.

You can read that development generously. There’s something to be said for the idea that what’s true for groups in general isn’t necessarily true for every person, and everyone must be judged, for good or for ill, as an individual. There’s something very true to the Star Trek ethos about that. And if you squint, you can maybe divine the idea that Joleg wasn’t necessarily always a murderer or even guilty of the crime for which he committed, but that being judged harshly for his species and brutalized in prison has turned him into someone willing to kill his tormentor to escape. But “Repentance” doesn’t really play it that way.

Instead, on the one hand, we have a white-coded sociopath who turns out to merely be sick, whom the story turns into a martyr for the ills of the death penalty and our legal system. And on the other, we have a sympathetic POC-coded soul, who’s warm and gracious with Neelix and claims to be a victim of systematic prejudice, only for him to turn out to be a manipulative bastard who’s willing to kill and ready to fake illness to get out. That sits really uneasily with me for an episode whose higher aims seem to be pointing out flaws in our system.

Still, that's the funny thing about my feeling differently about “Repentance” now than I did when I was a young man. I didn’t just go out and experience the world once I grew up. I read and studied and learned. I took classes on politics and philosophy and the principles that undergird our legal system.

But I did these things at least partly because I was inspired by stories like this one, that challenged me to consider these issues more deeply and open my mind to broader possibilities. Shows like Voyager influenced me to dive deeper into these areas than the show had time or space to cover in its precious forty-five minute chunks, and my level of understanding of the complexity and nuance at play grew. For my rating at least, “Repentance” is, oddly enough, a victim of its own past success.

[7.6/10] It was hard to watch Family Guy the same way after the second half of “Cartoon Wars” aired. The show still has its measure of laughs, and this episode goes to extremes in its depiction of Seth MacFarlane’s style of comedy. But once you’ve seen the formula laid bare like this, it’s hard to go back to turning your brain off and just enjoying the random irreverence without seeing the seams. For at least one dumb teenager in the audience, South Park made its point, and in an odd way, won the war.

In some ways, South Park won the war just by being funny. The scene where the town of South Park is debating who should be the one not to bury their head, only for a neve-rbefore-seen couple to reenact a scene out of an old school disaster movie and Garrison to cap it off with “Who the hell are those people?” is the kind of random humor that is more inspired by the likes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but also wouldn’t feel out of place on Family Guy. It’s just done to pitch perfection, with a kind of “fuck you” energy that practically feels like the show thumbing its nose at Peter Griffin.

And yet, some stuff is apolitical, and not random, but just rib-tickling. I have to tell you, there is something about Fox studios having a “high security’ barricade, and Cartman riding right under it in his big wheel, that cracked me up. The terrorist video ending with not just a “the end”, but a slow spun question mark feels like a silly throw in, but one that tickles the funny bone. I have to tell you, I don’t know why, but Cartman naming his Danish victim character “little Danny Pocket” is hilarious to me for reasons that elude me. And Kyle and Cartman’s “epic” confrontation coming down to an extended, characteristic elementary school slap fight is incredible.

Hell, as much as this episode takes greater aim at Family Guy in its spoof of the show’s creative process, there’s something so inherently absurd about a television show being written through a tank full of manatees and “idea balls” that it’s humorous even if you’ve never seen Family Guy. Even just Kyle’s plain bewilderment when people mention the show’s “writer’s room” without context brings the yuks. As much as the show wants to skewer its juvenile TV rivals and make a point about free speech, South Park doesn’t forget to just be funny here, which counts for a lot.

Still, it does take time to poke fun at its animated TV brethren. I gotta say, as an inveterate Simpsons fan, I was puzzled then, and I remain puzzled now, about what “Cartoon Wars” is trying to do with Bart Simpson here. There’s a bit of a recognition of the changing of the guard, with Cartman pointing out how much further he’s gone in his “pranks” than Bart has, much as Bart once did to Dennis the Menace. And there’s a pure novelty factor to seeing Bart done up in the South Park aesthetic, and teaming up with Cartman and Kyle.

But for the most part, he seems out of character and lacking much in the way of purpose beyond the “Hey! They crossed over another cartoon here!” and perhaps acknowledging that Simpsons fans and writers harbored some enmity for Family Guy as well. On that front, Trey Parker and Matt Stone offer their highest praise for Bigger Longer and Uncut guest star Mike Judge and King of the Hill, with the implication that his show is just chugging along nicely while everyone else dukes it out.

Still, as with part one, this is mostly focused on free speech, censorship, and terrorism. If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah of South Park here. They are laying their issues with network censorship bare and getting Comedy Central to air it (or most of it, anyway). They note their own squabbles through the trials and travails of Terrence and Phillip; they poke fun at their own show for being preachy and “up its own ass with messages,” and they outright make an appeal to the head of Comedy Central by name to have the courage to let them depict the Prophet Mohammad.

And they get censored in the process.

Honestly, it’s kind of better this way. I don’t just mean for the protection of the lives and well-being of the people who work on the show and for the network. But also because it makes their point for them. The fact that Comedy Central will review a sophomoric skit where people poop on: each other, the President of the United States, Jesus, and the American flag, and has no qualms about releasing it to airwaves, but refuses to air a neutral scene that includes Mohammad says more than any fictional story they might tell ever could.

So much of “Cartoon Wars” is about hypocrisy and courage and double standards. If I have a problem with how the episode is crafted, it’s that it’s almost too on the nose. Kyle’s often (though not always) the voice of reason on the show, and Cartman is almost always the voice of evil. So having Kyle voice what seems like the writers’ genuine perspective to a network president stand-in, while Cartman holds him at gunpoint and demands he gives into violence, is a little on the nose in my book. Maybe it’s just not being a teenager anymore, or recalling this episode from my youth and so knowing where they’re going and what they’re trying to say, but part two feels more heavy handed than I remembered.

In some ways, though, the real life events save the widow. You can disagree with Parker and Stone for how they lay out their takeaway here, but at the end of the day, they prove their point. The threat of violence wins. One religion’s sensitivities get prized over another. The true irony is that in not being allowed to depict Mohammad, South Park makes the point it’s more interested in expressing that much louder and clearer.

But here’s the funny thing. As someone who’s wasted far too much of his life watching TV, writing about TV, and thinking about TV -- I’m sympathetic to the idea that no episode of television is worth risking people’s lives. The threat against South Park was attenuated at best, and I’m hesitant about the other extreme -- of teaching extremists that violent threats work. But I at least think there’s a nuance here that's simpler than a good kid making a plea for free speech and a bad kid threatening a network executive with a gun.

More to the point, Kyle’s “Either it's all okay, or none of it is” perspective sits more uneasily with me in the present than it did in 2006. It is not easy to stand up to terrorism, but it is easy to take the position that sacrificing free speech to assuage terrorist threats is bad. When the people on the other side of the issue are extremist assholes who want to murder you over the mere fact of depiction, it’s not hard to feel like you’re fighting the good fight.

But these days, I am leery of the free speech absolutism that “Cartoon Wars” preaches here. I am leary if the “If you draw any line about what’s acceptable, you’ll just keep drawing lines into oblivion” slippery slope argument that South Park makes here. Just as the real life censorship proves Trey and Matt’s point to some degree here, the fact that they were censored, and yet South Park is still chugging along itself nearly twenty years later undermines their “one ounce of censorship is worth a pound of T.V. destruction” point.

More than that, in the modern day, the conflict over free expression du jour is not between raunchy but satirical provocateurs and religious extremists (be they of the Christian or Muslim variety). It is, instead, between people who think there ought to be some standard for respect or sensitivity in our culture and those who think that any interpersonal consequences they face for saying things that are racist, sexist, homophobia, etc. is “censorship” and a violation of free speech.

As the show itself acknowledged in season 20, we’re living in a world made, or at least influenced, by South Park. A generation of reformed (or unreconstructed) edgelords who once worshiped at the altar of Cartman, Eminem, and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin have come into an age where people conflate standing up to terrorist threats in the name of free expression with standing up to people who tell them to shut the hell up for using the n-word.

“Cartoon Wars” preaches a concern that showing a little restraint will lead to having to shut down anything with a perspective. The irony is that the reverse is true -- a demand that anything goes has created a world, or at least a contingent, who believe that even the mildest public disapproval of what they have to say is evil censorship, no matter how hateful it might be.

That is the most peculiar thing about revisiting this episode for me. It’s still funny. It’s still a strong time capsule and critique of the state of adult animated shows circa 2006. It still has something worthwhile, if myopic, to say about who and what network censor will give in to, and what they won’t.

But in the years since the episode aired, the world has changed dramatically, and the things South Park is railing against feel like they’ve swung the other direction, in a way that gives me pause over what was once one of my favorite shows is trying to say here. When I watched this episode originally, it changed how I felt about Family Guy. And the many years and unprecedented events that have cracked open the world since then, have changed how I feel about South Park.

[7.5/10] Here’s what I can tell you about “Cartoon Wars” -- it felt like the biggest deal in the world at the time. If you were an edgelord teenager, reared on raunchy cartoons your parents disapproved, the idea of South Park taking aim at Family Guy felt like a clash of the titans. I vividly remember getting to the end of the episode, realizing I wouldn’t get to see the ending for another week, and feeling like it may as well have been an eternity. For a certain set of idiot young adults like myself, this was a revelation.

What’s funny is that, in hindsight, “Cartoon Wars” isn’t really about that, particularly not in its first half. There is certainly some shade thrown Family Guy’s way. Cartman’s criticism of the show being filled with random, interchangeable jokes, and him balking at having his sense of humor compared to theirs feels like Trey Parker and Matt Stone venting their true frustrations. And lord knows their depiction of Family Guy’s “You think that's bad?” cutaways is far from flattering.

But the truth is that, in the first part of this at least, the Family Guy criticisms are a vehicle for a bigger kind of criticism. Hell South Park pokes fun at itself as much as it pokes fun at its Quahog neighbors. Despite dialogue disclaiming the similarities, the lines about Family Guy resorting to boundary pushing toilet humor are self-aware. The...homage to Peter Griffin and company is more of a means to an end than the point of the episode.

That end is to comment on censorship and violence, particularly the kind of fearful reaction to the real life loss of lives that emerged from the Charlie Hebdo attacks. And despite a certain bluntness to the story here, it’s a good look for South Park. I don’t necessarily agree with everything Parker and Stone have to say here, but in the spirit of the episode, I appreciate the way that show that had long courted controversy took a stand in favor of people’s freedom to court controversy in the face of those who mean to shut down free speech with violence.

Is it self-serving? Certainly. Trey and Matt are transparently defending their own right to skewer anything they set their mind to. But they’re also making a broader argument in favor of people more generally standing behind controversial art, or at a minimum, not succumbing to double standards about what we will and won’t tolerate based purely on lethal threats.

Of course, this being South Park, there is some satirizing of moral panics. The town panicking and going crazy in the face of Family Guy’s episode depicting Mohammed is in line with the rabble-rabble spirit of the locals, who’ll resort to chaos and pandemonium at the first opportunity.

But there’s also a side dish of taking aim at hypocrisy. You’d have to be naive to believe that Cartman has truly had a change of heart and cares about insensitive depictions of Muslims in Western media. But there is something even more pointed in the episode’s insinuation that there are people like Cartman out there, who don’t really care about the moral causes they pretend to take up the mantle of, but in reality simply dislike things they have personal objections to and will use whatever means at their disposal to take them down.

It makes sense for a series that was often targeted by the religious right, the Parents Television Council, and other pearl-clutchers of the 1990s and 2000s, to throw stones at people claiming they're looking out for the interests of innocents, when in reality they just have an ax to grind. It is, admittedly, somewhat pernicious to paint everyone (or at least many people) who harbored genuine concerns about whether the artistic integrity of displaying depictions of Mohammed was worth the potential body count disingenuous malcontents. But then again, the show rarely treats Cartman as a paragon of good or representative behavior.

To the point, you also have Kyle, who wants to get the episode pulled but for reasons of altruism and legitimate fear for his loved ones, as a counterpoint. The show often uses Cartman and Kyle as twin ends of the spectrum, and so there’s a natural dovetailing to have them be the avatars for the show’s major points. Eck, to the point of the dialogue, it creates genuine conflict and emotion to have Kyle be turned to a true believer based on Cartman’s rhetoric only to realize he’s being manipulated to ill ends.

Despite all that, the episode is just funny in places. Even if you didn’t follow all the cultural homages of the times, the mere fact that Kyle and Cartman have a “high speed” big wheel chase on the open road, that results in implausible explosions and high octane swerves is the right kind of absurd. Apart from the inter-show critiques, and the social commentary, you can almost sense South Park showing off here, not only its improved animation but the fact that apart from what it has to say, the series can still just be funny.

But it has something to say. That comes through most plainly in Stephen Stotch’s speech to the town assembly. He argues that free speech doesn't mean anything if you just fold at the first sing of trouble, that people have to stand up for even when it’s hard if that idea is going to mean anything. You can sense him as the mouthpiece for the writers’ genuine views. But you can also sense their cynicism when the town instantly decides that literally burying their heads in the sand is safer and easier.

Things can feel immense when you’re young in a way that softens with age. The “war” between South Park and Family Guy didn’t amount to much. Threats over the depiction of Mohammed feel pretty far down on the list of the world’s problems right now. The right to free speech in the United States continues on (more or less) to this day.

But for a moment in time, a bunch of stupid teenagers like me were on the edge of our seats, waiting to hear what our crude but courageous gods had to teach us. Sometimes it was the idea that being juvenile and edgy meant more than just pushing people’s buttons; it meant standing up for others’ rights to express themselves without fear. And sometimes it was fart jokes. All I can tell you is that, at the time, we were riveted.

[6.2/10[ Oh boy. I want to like this episode. The writers go after a lot of things I like. This is a classic Star Trek metaphor, where exploring what giving birth to a child who’s half-Klingon means to B’Elanna allows the show to explore broader contemporary questions of race and acceptance. It’s a small scale story, about people and their problems rather than a bigger adventure about the anomaly of the week or the usual enemy at the gates.

The problem is that it presents an engrossing, thought-provoking concept, wraps it in sitcom-y pregnancy shtick on one end and overblown melodrama on the other, and then ties it off with far too tidy a solution to what is a complex and deep-seated problem. (If this episode and “Extreme Risk” are any indication, it’s a recurring problem for B’Elanna-focused episodes.)

The kickoff for this one is the discovery that B’Elanna is pregnant. And hey, I like that as a storyline! Sure, we only have about half a season to explore it, but what it means to a couple of main characters to become parents for the first time, with all the hope and worry that comes with it, is a good throughline to pursue in the time the show has left. Voyager neglected Tom and B’Elanna for a while, so I can't fault the writers for making up for lost time.

Unfortunately, the way the show goes about exploring that concept is hokey as hell. As with the “Drive”, the last big Tom/B’Elanna episode, there’s a real Home Improvement vibe to the early going of this one. The first couple acts feature goofy gags where everyone’s heard the good news, and crewmates are jockeying to be named the godfather, and Torres and Paris themselves have the standard “I’m excited but don’t know if I’m ready for this” reactions. For a story shape that is surprisingly novel for Star Trek, the depiction here is disappointingly generic.

Eventually, though, “Lineage” pivots the standard new parent folderol into something more personal and piercing. When B’Elanna realizes her daughter will have ridges like her, it dredges up all the self-loathing and fears of ostracism about her own Klingon heritage that B’Elanna has had to work so hard to get past herself. (No matter how uneven the episodes examining that struggle have been.)

The core idea here is strong. We already know that B’Elanna carries a lot of baggage from her childhood. At a broad level, “Lineage” works as a metaphor for any unloved part of yourself you fear passing down to your children. Making past the challenges you faced is one thing, but envisioning an innocent life that you’ve brought into the world having to face those same challenges is quite another. B’Elanna is sympathetic, at least early on, in her baggage about how she felt alienated as a child and worries about the same for her child.

At a deeper level, though, this is a story about race. The episode almost lays it on too thick when B’Elanna is in the holodeck playing Designer Baby and inputs genetic changes that would give her daughter more traditionally Aryan features. What I appreciate about B’Elanna’s reaction to all of this is that it’s complicated, because damnit, the issue itself is complicated.

The idea of genetically altering a baby’s DNA to remove racial features feels abhorrent, and if there’s one heartening thing to take away from this mixed bag of an episode, it’s that Tom is firmly in the camp of “She’ll be wonderful just as she is, same as her mother” right from the start. That said, you understand where B’Elanna is coming from, having faced prejudice based on her Klingon inheritance both inside and out, and wanting to spare her daughter that hardship in a community that is predominantly human.

And at the same time, there is an undercurrent of internalized racism, where a lifetime of rough treatment because of what she is, rather than who he is, has made her ashamed of her Klingon heritage. That self-loathing would only be magnified when the racism comes from your own family, and even a parent. B’Elanna goes to some pretty big extremes here, and what she wants to do offends our (or at least my) sensibilities, but her reasons for wanting it are comprehensible, and often as sympathetic as they are regrettable, which is a sign of good character writing.

Even there, the depiction is a little broad. As with “Extreme Risk”, this whole outing has the tone of an After School Special, lacking a more grounded and intimate approach to these issues that might have elevated the hour. As thought-provoking as the philosophical line-drawing and medical debates are, at base this is a human story (if you’ll pardon the expression), so presenting the main players seem like over-the-top avatars for these ideas rather than more natural individuals in a tough situation weakens the effort.

So does the way everything goes so high volume. It’s not enough for B’Elanna and Tom to be at odds and wrestling with this issue. We need B’Elanna to go hormone crazy, reprogram The Doctor, and lock out the rest of the crew to “fix” this, apparently. We need her and Tom to have another shouting match that somehow solves their problems. We need people acting out across the board in melodramatic ways that sap the sense of realism to what should be a harrowing situation.

I recognize that at the end of the day, Voyager is still an action-adventure series. As heady as the franchise can be much of the time, there’s still the mandated quotient of high drama that producers like Rick Berman reportedly insist upon. I can excuse some of the character assassination of B’Elanna doing something so extreme in the name of old wounds mixed with new biology (though even that's a little problematic). But the soap opera-esque way that the creative team tackles the idea leaves the hour wanting.

More to the point, the solution to all of this is far too simple and straightforward. Compressing a lifetime of anti-Klingon prejudice to a single family camping trip would inevitably feel a little reductive. But you can understand it as a necessary concession to the needs of episodic storytelling, and maybe the worst instance B’Elanna is wrestling with, not the only instance.

Young B’Elanna being bullied by her cousin, and then overhearing her father express disdain over her burgeoning Klingon side is the kind of thing that would do a number on anyone. Again, the presentation of this isn’t great, with overmatched child actors and unavailing guest actors who can't sell the scene perfectly. But the idea itself is heartbreaking enough that you can't help but feel for B’Elanna past and present, and understand why she’d feel so strongly about erasing those unwanted parts of herself in her offspring, even if you think it’s the wrong thing to do.

But then, everything gets just plain facile. Suddenly, it’s not just the crowning achievement of internalized prejudice. It’s that B’Elanna told her father to leave, and he did, and she still blames herself for her parent’s absence. This isn’t just about bigotry; it’s about a fear of abandonment, which is a whole separate thing.

That reveal misses the mark in my book. It turns a more universal-yet-personal thing into a peculiar, particular situation. I don’t want to rag on that concept too much. Sometimes storytellers reach the universal through the specific. But here, it oversimplifies a more complex array of motivations and anxieties into one simple answer and source, which rubs me the wrong way.

Worse yet, all it takes is one big speech from Tom, who’s admittedly been a trooper through the entire episode, to make B’Elanna feel comfortable after a lifetime of harboring this fear of abandonment that's been newly dredged up with extra force. If you want to make this a deep sort of damage that B’Elanna’s been dealing with for her entire life, then you need to do the reveal sooner than the very end of the episode, so you can provide a more plausible, or at least more satisfying path to her overcoming it.

To some extent, all of these single-serving stories convey their points in shorthand. I don’t want to be churlish in my complaints. But we spend ninety percent of the episode on the problem and only ten percent on the solution. That makes the endpoint feel unearned.

All that aside, I’m not made of stone. I can appreciate the cleverness of Tom going to Icheb to make sense of B’Elanna’s genetic chicanery given Icheb’s own lineage.I can appreciate B’Elanna making up for her violation of The Doctor’s being by asking him to be her daughter’s godfather, and how touched he is by the request. And as often as Roxann Dawson overdoes it in an overblown episode, the way she underplays seeing an image of her daughter and recognizing the adorableness and hope she represents, in the child and in herself, for the first time is touching in a way I struggle to articulate.

Still, as noble and interesting as these concepts are, “Lineage” struggles to deliver them without resorting to cliche or melodrama. It’s nice to have a domestic story for once, and one that takes advantage of B’Elanna’s unique heritage at that. Once again, Voyager’s reach exceeds its grasp, even if the prospect of B’Elanna accepting her child, and in a roundabout way accepting herself in the process, remains a wonderful idea.

[7.4/10] “Shattered” has a great premise. As with many high concept Star Trek episodes, you have to turn your brain off a bit for it. But the idea of some sort of temporal shattering, to where the various different parts of the ship are all in different parts of the timeline, is a recipe for fun and excitement.

It’s a particularly apt story for a show in its final season. Chakotay’s time-jumping across Voyager is a nice way to take stock of how far so many of the characters have come, and even take a look toward the future. It’s the kind of episode you can do when you have more than one hundred and fifty episodes under your belt -- the kind of mileage that means you’ve covered ground worth looking back at.

My only problem is that, well, we’ve pretty much done this before. We did the time-jumping forward thing with Kes in “Before and After” and then the time-jumping backwards thing with Kes in “Fury”. We did Barclay imagining himself in the early Voyager era during “Pathfinder”. We had Seven go back in time across multiple Voyager eras in “Relativity”. There’s just not a ton of juice left in that orange at this point. Seeing glimpses of the show’s past doesn’t come with much novelty when the show’s already gone to that well multiple times.

Still, “Shattered” has a sturdy concept that makes up some of the difference. The effect of the anomaly comes with a mission for Chakotay -- to use the Doctor’s “chroniton serum” to inject the ship’s neural gel packs in order for him to be able to reverse the polarity or whatever and get Voyager back in sync. (Remember what I said about turning off your brain.)

That part is a pretty transparent bit of nonsense to make the plato work, but I don't mind because of the result. It turns “Shattered” into what is essentially a haunted house setup. Chakotay and Janeway move from room to room, encountering some new tableau and often a new threat in each new space they enter. That makes it easy to segment these different jaunts across the timeline, giving the audience a chance to wonder what’s around the next corner and creating a constant sense of anticipation.

The only issue with that approach is that the writers don’t pick many interesting places to go. Lord knows that after the dregs of [“Bride of Chaotica”[, I was not asking for more of the Captain Proton holoprogram. I didn’t really need to see the big goofy CGI macrovirus again. It hasn’t been that long since the pitcher plant episode or the dream aliens episode , and as Chakotay himself points out, Voyager encounters that sort of thing on a regular basis. So in terms of thumbing through the memory album here, “Shattered” doesn’t have a ton to show.

It’s also an interesting reminder that the Voyager faithful haven't changed visually a whole lot of seven years, to the point that you can see the show struggling a bit to try to signify that we’re at various points in the timeline. Lord knows we’ve seen Janeway back in the bun several times, but that's about it. They revert Seven to her full Borg getup and put B’Elanna in some Maquis duds I barely remember her wearing. But there’s not a ton of visual novelty to the flashbacks here, which can sometimes make “Shattered” feel like just another day at the office despite its fantastical premise.

Yet, the central theme of the episode is that the changes aboard Voyager have largely been internal ones, and it dramatizes that in a clever way: by pairing up season 7 Chakotay and season 1 Janeway.

I gripe about Chakotay-centric episodes, but he’s honestly the perfect protagonist for what is kind of a sample platter of an episode. The real showpiece here is the visits to each new time-displaced room, and making Chakotay the fulcrum for that means nothing going on with him outshines the gimmick. As Grampa Simpson once put it (by way of writer Don Payne): “In a world of thirty-one flavors, we're the cup of water they rinse the scoops in.” That may be Chakotay’s best type of role.

But it’s also nice getting some extended time with early Janeway experiencing the things that will come to pass when she’s only now beginning to realize the mission that's ahead of her. The show plays fast and loose with the temporal prime directive, but I don’t mind. There’s a fascinating tension between Janeway wanting to know what she’s up against and yet hesitant to learn too much. Kate Mulgrew, a pro as always, absolutely sells Janeway’s wide-eyed wonder at catching glimpses of all the incredible (although sometimes worrying) things that lie ahead.

That's good, because she’s the only one with a real arc here. She’s sharp about this, understandably skeptical when a leading Maquis agent strolls onto her bridge. She is both amazed and concerned when she learns about the people who've been lost and the people who’ve been gained during the course of her captaincy. And she is, not for nothing, flirtatious with Chakotay in a way we haven't seen in a while.

I like that! As much as I’m down on Chakotay, he and Kathryn’s courtly love is one of the few strong elements for the character. Seeing the two of them held close when a hostage situation requires it, or verbally joust in a playful manner as they go on this journey together, or straight p look into one another’s eyes and hint at whether they have a relationship, this is the most directly the show has addressed that part of the characters’ lives in a while. It’s nice to see one of those few parts of the early era of the show that worked brought back.

Which makes sense for the one bit of neat stunt casting that works here -- the return of Seska! Actor and writer Danny Strong once said, “Only on Buffy can you get killed and do three more episodes.” Turns out you can do the same on Voyager. We haven't seen Seksa since the end of season 3 in “Worst Case Scenario”, and to use some Buffy parlance, she was arguably the show’s Big Bad for a while. So unlike a lot of the hop backs in time, there’s some real juice to seeing her back and up to her old tricks again. Once again she makes a good villain, and in a mostly subtextual way, a romantic rival to Janeway.

So there’s a thrill when Seska seems to have Chakotay by the short hairs, only for the Captain to spring forth with the inter-temporal avengers from across the timeline. Current Tom, past Harry, Maquis B’Elanna, and more burst out to save the day. In a rousing moment, Bog Seven gets the Big Damn Heroes treatment. And there is something quite heartening to expend the show’s lone vision of the future on seeing Naomi Wildman and Icheb all grown up and running the ship, having come into their own. There is a collective of people here, all across time and space, who work together to save each other, knowing that it’s worth it.

That is the real thrust of this one. When seeing her dear friend Tuvok die, when realizing how many people’s lives have been affected by her decision back in “Caretaker”, Janeway rightfully wonders if she should have made a different choice. She is awed by what she witnesses teaming up with Chakotay, but she essentially asks the question: was this all worth it?

Of course, the answer is yes, and Chakotay makes an argument that tugs on the heartstrings. He argues that whatever’s been lost is made up for in what’s been gained, an improbable ship, on an incredible mission, that has resulted in discoveries, but also the type of personal growth and bonding and realization of potential that is more than worthwhile. As in “Night”, the choice to do this all again is a vindication of Janeway and of the show itself. Her affirming the path that led Chaktoay here, with friendly chefs and Borg proteges and angry rebels turned bosom friends, is also an affirmation of Voyager as a series.

It’s the kind of thing that works when a show is rounding the bend on its final stretch. I may not love every stop the writers choose to make as they skip around the timeline. But I like the central idea that motivates them, both the chance to revisit moments from Voyager’s history and the choice to use that conceit to honor the value of that journey and the stories that came with it. “Shattered” is a gimmick episode to be sure, but at heart, it’s a love letter to the last seven years. Even I, with all my compliments and criticisms over that stretch, can't help but be charmed by that.

[8.0/10] What’s funny is that I remember the Bob, Louise, and Rudy parts of this one clear as a bell, and with good reason! It’s a great storyline! It’s one of those early Bob’s Burgers episodes where the relationships hadn't been fully defined yet, and there was still some room to break tendencies and reveal new things. So the idea that Bob has more of a rebellious side, and that Louise has more of a softer side, and that they’re more alike than you might think, is a really neat place to go with “Carpe Museum.”

But what I forgot is that there are, conservatively, five story threads in this one! Some of them are just running gags, but still! This one has a quasi-season finale vibe, despite “The Unnatural” coming up next, just from the sense that everyone has something to do.

I think my favorite of them is the subplot where Linda feels separation anxiety from the kids and rushes to the museum to reunite with them, only to get caught up in the chants of the picketers outside. The notion that she just finds chants irresistible is kind of hilarious. Her chants escalating from the clever to the menacing to the weird and sexual is incredible. And my favorite moment in the whole episode may be her and Bob sprinting away from the museum for separate reasons, and yet knowing exactly why the other one is there and what they’re up to. It’s this kind of marriage telepathy that shows how well they know each other, and I love it.

The most mild of the storylines is probably Gene being paired up with Zeke. like both characters, but they’re a bit of an awkward pairing. A couple of young boys going on a “booby hunt” at the museum is on brand, and Gene not really getting it is worth a chuckle. For the most part, though, there’s just not much there.

The slightest of the storylines is Mr. Frond and the museum director flirting int he geekiest way possible. There too, there’s not much to it, but it’s both funny and low key kind of sweet, so I’ll take it.

I do like the storyline where Tina and Henry are paired up with one another for the field trip and each thinks the other is “the dork” that they need to fix. There’s something well-observed about this, both in the way that male stereotypes about dorkiness and female stereotypes about dorkiness don’t always intersect, but how each group still looks down on the other. There’s a sitcom-y but amusing sense of both kids thinking they’re “the cool one” only to realize they’re both considered dorky by everyone, so why gate-keep? And the pluralistic conclusion, that everyone’s a dork for something, is nicely wholesome.

But the crowning achievement of this one, the thing that brought me to the dance and cemented Bob’s Burgers as one of my favorite shows, is the Bob/Louise story.

I like it because it reveals, in a subtle way, that Bob was once more of a Louise. The idea that he found field trips boring and snuck away from the group and got into trouble shows that the now staid father of three had a bit of a mischief-making side once upon a time. Him enjoying the Amazon room, and indulging his daughter and her friends in a little out of bounds fun at the museum is a unique look for the character. He’s here to be a volunteer chaperone and is doing his best, but there's something wild at heart about the guy that we don’t often see.

The adventure itself is fun. I believe this was the first appearance of Regular Sized Rudy, and there wasn’t much to him at this stage. His mom is apparently no fun; he needs an inhaler, and that's about it. But even in the early going here, he’s a fun counterpart to Louise’s revelry, and the show makes great hay from the way he’s running out of breath but soldiering on in the name of fun.

That creates the stakes and the problem, as our heroes have to hide away from security guards and eventually rescue Rudy’s inhaler so they can rescue him. But it’s nice seeing Bob turn responsible and brave once a kid’s in danger, revealing that he now uses his wild side to look after the people who depend on him. That is sweet in a different way.

So is Louise’s reveal of a softer side. Not only does she look after Rudy as she’s bringing him into her fun, but the dialogue suggests that she genuinely admires her dad even if she protests the very suggestions as gross. The reveal that she envisions herself running the restaurant one day, and called Bob “daddy” until she was eight suggests that beneath the unsentimental, mischief-minded exterior of the bunny-eared kiddo, sits someone who look up to her father more than she’d admit.

Bob’s Burgers would lean more into that sort of sentiment over time, and hit higher heights. But in many ways, this is where the heart and wholesomeness beneath the endearing layers of quirk and weirdness, that would come to define the show, truly began. There’s more than I thought to “Carpe Museum”, and still a lot to like.

[7.7/10] In the same way that part one of the “Flesh and Blood” duology takes three big ideas that have been wending their way through Star Trek for ages, part two gives us three flavors of the same kind of character interaction. One of the Voyager faithful confronts an outsider with very specific expectations of them, only to discover that they are different, in many ways more, than our regular players might have imagined. It’s a good tack, and the episode uses it well, and in different ways, across the episode.

The simplest of them are the interactions between Captain Janeway and Donik, the Hirogen technician who programmed the holo-prey. In many ways, Janeway blames Donik for this situation much as she blames herself. Others on the ship write off Donik’s “just following orders” excuse, and point the finger at him for aiding and abetting the cruelly and loss of life that has been so present in this situation. There’s a simmering resentment under the surface.

Yet, Donik is not a butcher. He is an engineer, not unlike B’Elanna. And as much as Janeway is kicking herself for violating the prime directive and giving holodeck technology to the Hirogen, having seen how they perverted it, Donik is a walking talking reminder that good things came of her choice as well. If she hadn't, he would have been forced to have become a hunter like all his brethren. Thanks to her, he had an opportunity to expand what Hirogen society allowed its people to be, to do something that fit him rather than being crammed in a particular box, to develop a skill separate and apart from ritualized murder as sport. Janeway hoped to open up Hirogen society, and for at least one individual, she did.

I like that as the silver lining to a situation the Captain regrets. The fact that, at the end of things, Donik wants to stick with the holo-prey, to help them and support them, to make up for his sense of grim responsibility for what’s happened, shows that Janeway really did plant a seed in the Hirogen culture with her gift. I love that idea as a counterpoint to her self-doubt and self-flagellation. Some good came of this, and that's worth holding onto.

But my favorite character pairing in this one is B’Elanna’s interactions with Kejal, the holographic Cardassian aboard Iden’s ship. Their storyline stands on its own, with a familiar story shape of mutual mistrust blossoming into flipped expectations and mutual understanding. Still, oddly enough, this is another of the rare Voyager episodes like season 4’s “Hunters” that carries more weight if you’ve seen Deep Space Nine.

If so, you understand B’Elanna’s instinctive mistrust of a Cardassian. It may be a long time since Lt. Torres joined Voyager’s crew, but more than even Chakotay, she remains connected to her Maquis origins. She fears the sense of arrogance and militance we saw in the likes of Gul Dukat and his cronies. She fears the willingness to conquer and take other people’s homes as your own as they did with Bajor and the Demilitarized Zone. She fears a willingness to be cruel and lethal that stained the Cardassians’ legacy in the wake of the Occupation. If you wanted to get B’Elanna to trust these holograms, putting her with one in the package of her most hated enemy is less than ideal.

Yet, at the end of the day, Kejal isn’t a Cardassian. She is a hologram, one able to adapt and evolve and become something more than she was programmed to be. And while I assumed that the writers chose to have B’Elanna kidnapped simply because she makes the most sense as a hostage in this situation, there’s a deeper and defter use for her here. If anyone aboard Voyager understands wrestling with dual identities, being able to overcome a heritage you have mixed feelings about, and scratch out your own identity in the space, it’s B’Elanna. As much as she’s apt to resent Kejal, she’s also uniquely positioned to understand her.

I love that. The slow-developing trust and understanding between them, a realization that they’ve both exceeded their “programming” to follow their own path, makes sense both conceptually and on a scene-to-scene basis. It’s heartening to see B’Elanna go from angry hostage, to reluctant helper, to genuine ally and champion for Kejal. The turn happens a little quickly, but the bond between them helps justify Kejal’s “Not All Holograms” proof that she values the sanctity of life more than blind loyalty, when she helps B’Elanna and the Doctor neutralize Iden.

So when you reach the end, and Kejal and Donik go off to establish a homeworld for the holograms together, there is poetry in it. Donik is a creator of sorts, one who means to undo the harm he’s caused to a new form of life. And Kejal is a freedom fighter who’s overcome two sets of programming and dogma, one from the predators who chased her, and one from the fanatic who led her. That she finds her own path forward, buoyed by B’elanna’s friendship and encouragement, evokes one of Star Trek’s favorite themes: that every culture and community and even person contains multitudes, and that many are capable of far more than our snap judgments and prejudiced assumptions would suggest. There is nuance and complexity there that befits the franchise.

That is my major frustration with the third character pairing that takes an unexpected turn: the one between Iden and the Doctor.

“Flesh and Blood pt. II” offers some clever and even inspirational thinking from Iden. The notion that he wants to have his people settle on an inhospitable planet, because air and water and vegetation are immaterial to holograms, and it will keep their enemies away, is legitimately smart. His dreams and language for “a world of light” is lyrical and aspirational, in a way that a newly-formed people should be. And his idea of wanting a break from the cultures of the holograms’ enslavers, to forge something new and apart from it, raises interesting questions about liberation and assimilation and complicated heritage that are still being answered around the world today. There is complexity in that too.

And then “Flesh and Blood” just throws it out the window.

Sigh. It’s not enough that Iden be someone radicalized from his brutal treatment at the hands of the Hirogen who wants to free his people by any means necessary. No, instead he has to want to invent a new religion where he is a god. (And the Doctor too, in fairness.) And he has to unreasonably insist that simple basic holograms are no less oppressed than complex sapient ones and wantonly murder the strangers who’d utilize them. And he has to resort to blind vengeance and cruelty, hunting the Hirogen the same way that they once hunted him out of a need to turn the tables and inflict his bitterness and resentment on them even though it won’t accomplish anything.

Now, in more delicate hands, there could be complexity to this too. A freed slave going on a John Brown-esque liberation crusade, and how to reckon with the morality of harsh methods married to a just cause, could be riveting. The cycles of violence and abuse that emerge when one people brutalizes another, and then the children of that cruelty turn around and inflict the same brutality on those who wronged them, is an idea that has been with Star Trek for a long time. If the show meant to earnestly explore any of this, it could do well.

Instead, it plays like somebody just flipped the “evil” switch on Iden, and suddenly the Doctor has reason to be aghast at who he’s thrown his lot in with. There’s no nuance or complication to Iden once the show goes down that route.Instead, he's just a megalomaniacal villain, doing patently evil stuff along the way, in a way that flattens all the interesting ethical questions that “Flesh and Blood” set up in the first half of this two-parter.

Maybe I’m asking too much of this episode. What I was hoping for (and to be frank, what I thought “Flesh and Blood” was already doing) was to turn Iden into a single-serving version of Kira Nerys. There too, this installment plays with the expectations of viewers who’ve seen DS9. The idea of a religiously motivated Bajoran freedom fighter, who loathes the members of the culture that oppressed him with a mix of justified resentment and base prejudice, is a familiar archetype for venerable Trekkies. The writers could have made Iden extreme without making him a cartoon baddie, and the episode would have been better for it.

All that said, I like where the episode ends up. For one thing, as much as the chase and table-turning with Voyager and the holograms and the Hirogen feel a little obligatory for an action-akced two-partner, it's also exciting and well done. There are mechanical but well-staged and edited opportunities for Voyager to drift in the wake of the Hirogen, or for Doc to get a dry cool action line before eliminating the would-be folk hero he was seduced by. It’s not the headiest material in the episode, but it’s engaging enough to add some zing to the outing.

More to the point, the landing spot for all of this is good. The Doctor gets to demonstrate that his fealty to preserving life in all its forms means more to him than any loyalty to one people or another. Kejal and Donik set aside the prejudices of their peoples in the hopes of forging a sanctuary. Even good ol’ Neelix gets a moment in the sun, using his ambassador skills to convince the Hirogen Beta to leave things alone in the name of prompting a better story for him to tell to his comrades. The ending feels tidy and yet satisfying, which is a tough line to walk.

But the meat of it, the thing that stays with you, is the reunion between Captain Janeway and the Doctor.

I like a lot about their final scene together. I like that, to the end, Janeway assumed that Iden or someone else had tampered with the Doctor, because she couldn't believe Doc would willingly betray the crew like that. It speaks to how much she believed in him. I like that the Doctor doesn’t expect things to simply go back to normal, but rather offers himself up for punishment, from giving up his mobile emitter in lieu of the brig to eliminating his holodeck privileges to even reverting him to his original state. It speaks to how remorseful he is for his actions.

In the end though, the status quo is maintained. Perhaps that can be attributed to the standard entropy of network television in the year 2000. But I’d like to think there’s a deeper reason that Janeway ultimately lets Doc off the hook when she demoted and punished Tom Paris in circumstances that weren’t all that different.

Her grand lesson from all of this is that you can't try to undo or erase the choices that you’ve made in the past. If she could go back in time (and in fairness, she has), she might not give the Hirogen holographic technology, knowing what the consequences were. Regardless, though, those consequences are here. They’re staring her in the face. So now that she has a Hirogen engineer who wouldn’t exist but for her intervention, and a self-aware hologram who wants a home for her people, who is she to trample the autonomy and possibility she helped create? Once you’ve made those kinds of monumental choices, right or wrong, sometimes you have to live with them.

I’d like to think the same goes for the Doctor. He may have walked down a path that left Voyager damaged and put him on the wrong side. But Janeway has given him “extraordinary freedom”, allowed him to grow into his own person, given him values that come with a strong sense of right and wrong. How can you then blame him for following his holographic heart and doing what he thinks is right? It’s a little aspirational, a little inconsistent, but that idea works for me.

In the end, they’re the last character pairing, and the ultimate instance of each having expectations of the other, only to discover that there’s more within each of them than either one knew. That too helps to forge a new understanding, a recognition of decisions made and lives forged that can't be undone, sometimes for the worse, but in the Doctor’s case, sometimes very much for the better.

[8.2/10] The first part of “Flesh and Blood” is the culmination of three big ideas that have been running through Star Trek for a long time. The mix of them, and using The Doctor and Janeway as a lens through which to explore them, makes this one of the franchise’s more exciting beginnings for a two-partner.

The first is, naturally, the Prime Directive. This story isn’t just about the pros and cons of non-interference; it’s about responsibility and the law of unintended consequences. When Captain Janeway gave the Hirogen holodeck technology at the end of “The Killing Game”, it was a moment of hope. The idea that this tech was a means to spare the Hirogen from a cultural dead-end, a sign of generosity to an aggressor, in the hopes that they could use it to better themselves, spoke to the aspirational spirit of the Federation.

To then see it used to perpetuate, and even reinforce, the predator values of the Hirogen is both despiriting and arguably more realistic a potential result than this optimistic franchise usually countenances. I can remember my frustrations with early episodes like “Alliances” where Janeway steadfastly refused to share replicators with the Kazon out of a stubborn devotion to Starfleet protocol even if it meant listing toward destruction. But this reunion with the Hirogen is the counterpoint to that frustration -- an example of how sharing advanced tech with unknown species can lead to knock-on problems down the road you may not be able to foresee.

For Janeway, the fact that the Hirogen have created holographic training grounds for their hunters, resulting in many deaths and a small rebellion, is not just a sad result born of good intentions; it’s her mess to clean up. Her crewmates remind her that they’ve come a long way since those early days, and trading tech with alien races has been a necessity for survival. Still, to the Captain’s mind, she broke with her principles, and now there’s blood on her hands. That's a strong motivation for a leader who’s always had firm ethical lines even as she’s become more pragmatic during her time in the Delta Quadrant.

That said, the second big idea at play in “Flesh and Blood pt. 1” is one that may supersede any sense of utilitarian culpability Janeway feels for what’s happened with the Hirogen -- the hubris of tampering with holographic technology in ways that can outstrip your ability to control it.

In many ways, “Flesh and Blood” is a spiritual successor to “Elementary, Dear Data” from The Next Generation. There, Geordi asked the holodeck to create a challenge and adversary capable of beating Data, and the result was a self-aware holographic Dr. Moriarty with the drive and intellect to take over the real life starship. Here, the Hirogen aimed to craft holographic prey worthy of the hunt, and as a result, inadvertently create beings with the wherewithal to stage a rebellion, slay their overseers, and stage an escape.

The holodeck malfunction goes back as far as “The Practical Joker” from The Animated Series, but this is an order of magnitude greater. One of the great boons of the episode is it’s decision to center the plot on the notion of a whole race of Moriarties: erstwhile playthings inadvertently turned into self-aware souls who don’t want to be cabined or controlled. The choice creates practical challenges for all involved. But it also creates a philosophical debate on board Voyager, between whether Janeway is responsible for this situation by sharing the technology, or if the Hirogen are responsible for abusing it, and arguably perverting it, by choosing to misuse it in this way.

And yet, that's small potatoes compared to the major philosophical question at the heart of “Flesh and Blood”, which ties into the third big, longstanding idea driving this story -- what are the rights of artificial lifeforms?

It’s a question Star Trek took up famously (and arguably at its best), with TNG’s “The Measure of a Man”. Voyager took that baton early on with the Doctor, giving him opportunities to grow, to love, to face down his own trauma, and to decide where he wants to be like any other member of this crew. Those paths have not always been easy, and it seems like Janeway in particular has had to learn the “I’m a real boy!” lesson over and over again. But this episode eschews the narrow question of whether the Doctor is fully a person, with all that entails, and consider the broader question -- what if holograms, or at least a particular set of them, are fully a people?

(And her, for the sake of argument, let’s not fuss with the underwhelming grazing of this idea in “Bride of Chaotica” and pretend this is the first time Voyager’s addressed it.)

If Janeway is asking herself what responsibilities she has to neutralize a chain of events she started that resulted in death and conflict, the Doctor pushes her to ask the question of what responsibilities she may have to recognize and support a new form of life. He, more than anyone, is liable to sympathize with the growing holo-prey rebellion, and recognize their need to be treated as a full-fledged species like any other. That gives him a countervailing motivation that is no less potent, and no less understandable.

Sympathizing with the holo-prey is easy. Voyager smartly gives us characters to latch onto. Iden is their Bajoran leader, who prays to the Prophets, looks after his people, and recounts with harrowing frankness the horrors of his enslavement. Kejal is a softer figure for the Doctor to bond with, one aiming to heal her fellow holograms and taking her first steps down the path he’s walked down many times. The notion that the Hirogen didn’t just create these beings for their game, but made them to bleed, to suffer, to feel pain so that they could hunt and kill them over and over again, evokes a cruel waking nightmare. Who wouldn’t resist in the face of such torture?

The other side of the coin is that Iden and his crew are radicals, albeit understandable ones. Much like Dejaren in “Revulsion”, a lifetime of mistreatment and dismissal has led them to mistrust all “organics”, and view any bloodshed as righteous recompense for the brutal indignities visited upon them. Their disbelief that any organics could respect holographic life, despite Doc’s protestations, is born not only of their heartless treatment at the hands of the Hirogen, but the treatment of their kind they’ve seen elsewhere in the Delta Quadrant.

The upshot of all of this is that the Doctor once again finds himself torn between two worlds. On the one hand, he sees his homicidal holographic brethren, preaching hologram liberation and espousing the notion of a fundamental incompatibility between organics and themselves. (Shades of Laas in “Chimera” from Deep Space Nine.)

He tries to cool their tempers. Doc reassures them that not all organics are this way, that even if he doesn’t get dispensation to go off to some conference, he has rights and privileges aboard Voyager. Sure, he’s expected to tend to the wounded, and he doesn’t have separate quarters. But on Janeway’s watch, he’s been allowed to evolve, to be taken seriously as a person, and even to leave if that's what he truly wanted. His “not all organics” position stems from personal experience, and a broadening of the franchise of humanity within Starfleet that Trekkies have witnessed firsthand.

On the other hand, though, when he returns to Voyager to urge the Captain to help his holo-friends, he runs into, at best, a practicality from Janeway that sees their needs as less urgent given the exigencies of the situation, or at worst, a prejudice toward the holo-prey as less-than-equal, even disposable, in a way that their fleshy counterpart aren’t.

The boardroom scene among them is telling. It’s where the two perspectives come to clash: Janeway who fears her technological generosity has wrought deadly unintended consequences that must be rectified, and the Doctor, who fears that the enlightened friends he’s been bragging about are ready to marginalize, even sacrifice, an equally valid people whose personhood must be recognized.

Both positions are understandable. The Hirogen may be sexist brutes, but by violating protocol and interfering in their culture, Janeway feels duty bound to stop this catastrophe from worsening, let alone spreading. And the holo-prey may be radicals, but when the Doctor sees fellow souls who idolize him and are inspired by what he’s accomplished, who simply want to be able to achieve the same things he has and be free from torture and subjugation, it’s not hard for him to pick a different side in this conflict.

So he betrays Voyager in a more profound and personal way than we’ve ever seen before. As the Doctor’s evolved, he’s developed and been granted agency, autonomy, a growing right to choose his own path. The consequence of that is that sometimes, your colleagues, your friends, and indeed your children follow their own principles and values in ways that are no less sincere than yours, even if they lead them in opposite directions.

It is both rousing and sad to see the Doctor do what he feels he must here, even if it means thwarting the plans of his friends on Voyager, Janeway included, but only because he fears they do not see his friends as real people. Once again, it leads him to wonder if the allies he so vociferously defended similarly see him as lesser, another mere piece of technology that can be coopted or corralled.

Of course, this is still 1990s Trek, so what follows is a bunch of explosions, and brawl with the Hrigoen in the mess hall, and a reversing-of-the-polarity that leaves Voyager dead in the water. The skirmish gives Iden’s crew the opportunity to kidnap B’Elanna in the hopes that, after the Doctor’s praise, she can be impressed into service to repair them. (Shades of “Prototype”.) And in the midst of his grand change in allegiance, Doc has a look of “What have I done?”

In an odd way, the thing that separates the Doctor from Janeway is the thing that unites them. Much as the Captain did back in “The Killing Game”, the Doctor is violating rules and orders, but doing what he believes is, ultimately, not just the right thing, but the humane thing. It goes in directions he didn’t want, couldn't have predicted, and leaves him given to wonder if his empathy and good-intentions have been taken advantage of.

We’ll see where that takes us. If there’s a recurring theme in 1990s Trek more persistent than any other, it’s two-parters where the first half raises a ton of interesting ideas and the second half has no idea how to satisfyingly land all of them.

But if Janeway and the Doctor feels uncertain and out of sorts by the situation in front of them; they should. “Flesh and Blood” weaves together grand concepts that Star Trek has been wrestling with since at least 1989 and arguably as far back as 1966. Using them in new ways, building on episodes and choices the audiences has already seen, and realizing them through the personal drives of two of the show’s signature characters, gives Voyager the chance to explore one of the franchise’s most engrossing and challenging problems yet.

[8.1/10] Regular Sized Rudy episodes have come to be a real highlight for Bob’s Burgers. There’s something sympathetic about a kid navigating his parents’ respective relaunches after a divorce that you don’t really see much of on television. This show has the deftness and delicateness to make the situation legitimately hilarious, while also earnest and heartfelt, which is a tough line to walk.

So I like an episode like this one, centered on Rudy worrying about how his dad is coping with his mom’s new boyfriend. Rudy is relatable,resenting a genial stepparent for merely existing while wanting to defend his dad out of a fear that this new person will “step on his cocoon”. You can understand why a sensitive kid like Rudy would be protective of his dad and hesitant about his mom’s boyfriend.

The show does well to involve the Belcher kids and create a funny way to dramatize that notion, with enough low-level stakes to build the story around. Rudy’s plan to help his dad cheat at bowling to show up Paul, his mom’s beau, gives something for everyone to do. The show was fun with Rudy and Gene lucking Sylvester’s eyebrow, and Louise trying to get Paul to use his occupational therapist skills on Bob (who genuinely needs them!) to Tina convincing Sherri, Sylvester’s friend from curry class, to date him. The show finds the laughs in these goofy but grounded moments.

Along the way, there’s some good humor with Bob and Linda. The pair getting guilt-invited to Sylester’s bowling birthday is fodder for some nice situational laughs. Linda loving her bowling shoes is the kind of quirky humor I like from the show. And the throughline of Bob not remembering the first time Linda told him I love you has an appropriately demented but sweet ending.

But I especially like the climax here. The plan to cheat on Sylveerster’s behalf runs aground when Louise realizes that Sylvvester is fine, and RUdy’s the one who has a problem here. There’s a lot of amusing shenanigans to get to that point. But I appreciate how Louise is instantly on Rudy’s side in all of this, helping him rage against Paul without a second thought despite the guy’s general amiability in support of her friend. But at the end of the day, she’s also ready, willing and able to tell Rudy what he needs to hear. The realization that Sylerster isn't some delicate hothouse flower who needs to be protected, but rather is intentionally losing to Paul so as to not show him up, is a nice twist. And Louise using it as a sign to Rudy that his dad is fine, and that sticking with this plan is just going to make things weird for everyone, takes courage.

The episode lands in a nice place, with Sylverster reassuring Rudy that he’s fine, and stronger than his son thinks. Rudy relenting and trusting his dad (and, you know, talking to him) is sweet. And Sherri coming over to flirt with Sylvester, showing that he’s not so unlucky in love or incapable of attracting a partner, adds a nice win for the guy through it all.

I don't know that I want Bob’s Burgers to become the Regular Sized Rudy show or anything, but as we hit the latter stretch of this strike-addled fourteenth season, there’s a sense in which we’ve really explored the Belcher family through thick and thin. It’s not like there’s no more challenges for them to face or character traits for them to explore, but the writers have done a lot over the years.

Turning some of that spotlight over to Rudy, using it as a chance to not only explore a less-examined character, but spotlight the kind of experience you don’t see nearly as much of on television, is a win for everyone. If it results in more episodes like these -- full of laughs and full of heart -- then I say keep it coming.

[6.8/10] I owe the Voyager creative team something of an apology. My mental landmark for Harry Kim is that he’s largely unchanged over the course of the series. Part of my frustration with “The Disease” is that the script tries to make this big “I’m a man now, Mom!” point with Harry, gesturing towards a sort of growth we’d rarely, if ever on an episode-to-episode basis.

But hey! As the show moves towards its end game, they’re trying now! Jokes about Harry as a perpetual ensign aside, since “Warhead” the show has a small but significant throughline of the young man aiming to level up. Aspiration gives him a bit of character and purpose beyond “fresh-faced ensign who’s unlucky in love,” and that's all to the good.

That desire to climb the ranks and assert himself is, ostensibly, the thrust of “Nightingale”. Harry leads an away mission and seems to break protocol partly out of a sense of moral duty, but partly for the chance to get to do something cool and important while in command. He agreed to lead an alien ship on a secret mission, and jealously guards against any effort of others to interfere. This is his mission, his chance to prove himself as a captain-in-training, and by god, he wants to make the most of it.

The tack works for Harry. It’s far from the most iconic Game of Thrones line, but Jaime Lannister saying, “Young men with big jobs, they tend to overdo them” has stuck with me since I heard it. There’s something well-observed about the point, that young people thrust into areas of major responsibility often have something to prove that leads to doing too much. The blend of good intentions but a certain overeagerness is relatable, and helps make Harry’s own overzealousness both worthy of shaking your head and sympathetic.

On the one hand, it’s easy to root for the guy here. The jokes about him never getting a promotion are legion among fans, but in real life, it would be genuinely frustrating to be worthy of more but still be kept in the same place given the, shall we say, unique circumstances of your workplace. Him being tired of being Voyager’s “Buster Kincaid” is understandable, in-universe and in a meta sense. Despite some (admittedly bad) feature episodes, the character’s long felt like a member of the B-team. Wanting more than that, and reaching for it, are admirable qualities in the character.

At the same time, him leaning into the pageantry over the substance of being a captain is worthy of eye-rolls. The way he decorates his ready room, dubs a generic alien ship the titular Nightingale, and otherwise revels in the trappings of command make him seem like a kid play-acting as captain than someone actually taking the job seriously. In some ways, Harry is living his dream in miniature, and his reaction is both comprehensible and cringeworthy.

He’s not the only young man in “Nightingale” with delusions of grandeur, though. The B-story sees Icheb convinced that B’Elanna’s friendly mentorship is, in fact, a sign of romantic attraction. It’s a cute enough, lighter side comic subplot. Icheb’s feelings about B’Elanna have a real “schoolboy crush on my teacher” brand of misreading signals that is kind of sweet. And B’Elanna realizing that the young ex-Borg can't be reasoned with, and so leans into his “We simply can't keep seeing one another” conclusion is an amusing enough ending.

Here’s the funny thing, though -- between B’Elanna’s reaction when Icheb helped her solve a problem in Engineering, and the way she encouraged him to leave the cargo bay and hit up the mess hall and holodeck, I though she was being oddly flirty with him! I thought I was crazy!

I assume Roxann Dawson was just playing it up for the purpose of the storyline. But as intentionally ludicrous as it is for Icheb to think this grown, married woman is harboring a crush on him, the way Dawson played the scenes made me raise an eyebrow before I realized where the story was going, so it’s hard to blame Icheb for picking up something odd there too! Given Voyager’s...less-than-great history with May-December romances, I’m still glad they play Icheb’s misimpression for laughs.

I’m less enamored with how they play Harry’s predicament. I thought the show was setting up something trite but true in Harry’s overdoing it mixed with Seven’s chastening. It would have been a little sitcom-y, but solid if Harry turns out to be a micromanager who can't delegate, and eventually learns to trust his people and learn about leading instead of just doing when the situation forces him to reevaluate. The way he becomes a mentor to the alien crewman, guiding the young man the same way Janeway once guided him, would work as a vehicle for that.

Instead, we get a frankly kind of bizarre story, where Harry screws up royally, gets mutinied when he finds out the aliens’ secret plan, helps them anyway, and then maybe commits a war crime? You had me for a minute, Voyager, and then you throw it all the way.

Suffice it to say, the end game of “Nightingale” leaves a lot to be desired. The whole “I messed things up in my young officer hubris” lesson goes out the window when it turns out the aliens aboard the ship don’t turn on him because he’s a bad leader, but rather because he uncovered that they’re hauling cloaking technology for war rather than life-saving vaccines for an errand of mercy.

Now in fairness, I don’t mind that turn in the story. I thought “Nightingale” was going someplace interesting with that. Harry got involved in a local conflict when protocol dictated otherwise. He overlooked red flags because he wanted this mission. Not only does that choice come back to bite him personally, but it screws things up for Janeway being able to get deuterium injectors and dilithium from the civilization that Harry’s allies are warring with.

A lesson not to let your personal ambition cloud your good judgment, one that perhaps calls upon Harry to rely on Seven and his alien protege, rather than micromanage and order around both of them, could have been a great place for this episode to land.

Instead, we get some half-baked excuse that the aliens smuggling the cloaking technology need it to prevent their enemies from “choking” them to death, and boom, Harry’s convinced and on their side again. Look, I get it. When fellow star-traveler Ron Glass tells you something, it’s inherently convincing. But it’s baffling to me that Harry would nigh-instantly side with people who deceived both him and Janeway about their true intentions, and that we’re supposed to think they’re still the good guys despite their duplicitous behavior? The whole thing feels off, and Harry seems like a double dupe for continuing to go along with that.

(Hell, at one point, I kind of assumed the twist would be that Harry’s allies were the aggressors in the war, and the hated Inari were, in fact, the more amiable group in the conflict. But, uh, nope. I guess?)

If that weren’t enough, once Harry realigns himself with the Kraylor, his big move is to commit a false surrender. And look, I’m no expert in the laws of war. And Harry doesn’t attack the Inari post-surrender; he just escapes. But still, my understanding is that the whole false surrender thing is considered pretty egregious, if for no other reason than that it discourages warring parties from accepting or countenancing genuine offers of surrender in the future. So the big strategic move that's supposed to show Harry’s ready for the big chair is a war crime that instead seems to suggest that he needs a lot more seasoning.

Nonetheless, even if the trajectory here leaves a lot to be desired, it’s just nice for Harry to have a direction. In truth, I still don’t expect the character to change a ton between here and the end of the series. In fairness to the creative team, Garrett Wang isn’t the show’s best performer, and he’s a lot more plausible here as an overeager ensign than he is when called upon to do bigger emotions like anger and dejection.

But every player on Voyager has potential. Every actor can be used well. And providing Harry with a personal goal, one that the show seems to at least seems to remember from episode to episode, goes a long way toward finally developing him. He may never be a captain, but there’s still plenty of time left for Harry Kim to become a good character.

[7.8/10] Star Trek: Voyager is not a very thirsty show. I don’t mean that as a criticism exactly. It’s just not Voyager’s vibe. There’s plenty of romantic elements on the show, from Tom and B’Elanna’s engagement to the courtly love between Chakotay and Kathryn, to the Doctor’s crush on Seven. But for the most part, everything in the series is very chaste.

There are exceptions. Janeway had a charged courtship with a Sikarian back in “Prime Factors”, and Harry Kim caught the cupid’s arrow of venereal diseases in “The Disease”. These are few and far between though. Whether it’s the demands of network television in the late 1990s/early 2000s, or simply the stately sensibilities of Star Trek in this era, desire is just not a well the show went too very often.

That makes an episode like “Body and Soul”, which is practically overflowing with sexual energy, such an interesting anomaly. Tuvok is thirsty. The Doctor is thirsty. The alien captain of the week is thirsty. The Doctor is pretending to be Seven pretending to be thirsty for the alien captain. The whole episode isn’t a sex comedy exactly. There’s a little too much going on under the hood for that, if you’ll pardon the expression. But it’s not far off either.

That's fun! As Voyager makes headway into its seventh season, and Nineties Trek extends into its thirteenth year, it’s nice to get a kind of wild episode that breaks the formula and upends our expectations for what the show can be. Body-swap farce with a series of hidden identities, a smidgeon of earnestness and headiness, and a heap of, well, horniness, is a different look for Voyager. And after more than one-hundred and fifty episodes on the air, different is good!

The premise does a lot of the work here. Hologram-hating aliens who attack the Delta Flyer on an away mission make for a good excuse for the Doctor to have to find somewhere, anywhere to hide. If I have a major complaint with the episode, it’s that the show creates a really interesting concept with the holo-bigoted Lokirrim, that it doesn’t truly explore.

The notion of a holographic slave rebellion, where flesh-and-blood people are aghast that their house slaves would turn on them, little realizing that the meatbags are subjugators not victims, is a rich and fascinating one. Jaryn’s conversation about how her hologram was like a member of the family, until they weren’t, is engrossing in and of itself. There’s so much to dig into there (shades of everything from “Prototype” to TNG’s “The Measure of a Man”, and even The Orville), but the episode mostly uses it as an excuse for the Doctor to find any port in a storm with a touch of the usual “holograms are people too” moral.

Still, the decision to have the Doctor be forced to inhabit Seven’s body is absolutely inspired. The episode plays an odd sort of irony between him and Seven through the experience. The Doctor is well-met epicurean incapable of truly tasting, smelling, or feeling, and Seven is a flesh-and-blood human whose Borg-bound disposition keeps her from many of life’s pleasures. You have to turn your brain off a bit to buy the “holomatrix + Borg implants = body swap” conceit, but the fun, humanity, and perspective-flipping insights of the way Doc revels in his pleasures of the flesh and Seven recoils at him taking her body out for a bit of a cavalier joyride is more than worth it.

Not for nothing, I’d go so far as to say this is Jeri Ryan’s best performance in the series to date. We’ve seen Seven leave her stoicism behind a few times, and the results have been nothing to write home about. Her multiple personalities in “Infinite Regress” and her more “natural” state in the titular “Unimatrix Zero” weren’t especially convincing. Ryan has seemingly done better by injecting subtle bits of emotion amid her character’s usual Borg detachment, like the outstanding performance she gave just a few episodes back in “Imperfection”.

And yet, “Body and Soul” calls for a big performance from the actress, and she absolutely nails it. Not only does Ryan rise to the occasion nigh-effortlessly in taking on a much more expressive, emotive, and all around more exaggerated character, she is almost eerily convincing in conveying Robert Picardo’s affect and mannerisms as The Doctor. It would be so easy for this type of performance to come off like too much or, at worst, not believable. Instead, Ryan knocks it out of the park, to the point that at times, you forget that it’s Seven, not the actress, who’s inhabited by the Doctor’s personality, which speaks to the perfection of her approach to a challenging role.

She’s not the only performer on the show breaking tendencies in “Body and Soul”, though. As in “Meld”, there’s something inherently attention-grabbing about seeing the likewise typically stoic Tuvok barely holding it together. His subplot here is a much lower stakes follow-up to the pon farr-related issues with Ensign Vorik and B’Elanna from back in “Blood Fever”, one of the few other Voyager episodes to delve deeply into not just love but sexual desire.

I appreciate that! Tuvok is not a young man experiencing his first bout of hormones like Vorik was. He is, instead, a committedly centered and deeply private man who nevertheless experiences a physical condition he cannot hide or control. There’s some goofy moments about an oblivious Neelix trying to soothe his Vulcan friend with broth, or the holodeck having to be shut down right as he’s ready to sate his urges. But there’s also some sympathy and humanity to the story.

I appreciate the fact that, despite Tom’s frat house ribbing, he respects Tuvok’s privacy about a sensitive matter as both a medic and a friend. I appreciate that Janeway likewise recognizes what’s really going on, and tries to give her dear friend time off so as not to force him to gut this out, while keeping it under wraps. And most of all, I appreciate that for all his physical struggles, Tuvok is a married man and takes his vows seriously, wrestling not just with his urges but with a desire to stay faithful to his wife.

This isn’t exactly “Gravity” with the show balancing Tuvok’s loyalty with his immediate needs, but there’s a lot to be said for Tuvok only being able to grant himself relief if it comes in the form of a holographic recreation of his spouse. (Replete with sensual Vulcan finger-touching a la “The Enterprise Incident” from The Original Series!) You feel Tuvok’s frustration through this difficult experience, but also the loving soul beneath the emotionless exterior, who can't deny his sexual urges but who also refuses to feed them in a way that would dishonor the person he loves. The mix of the natural and noble there elevates the B-story to one of Tuvok’s nicest moments in the spotlight, despite the series squandering other opportunities.

If that were the only part of the episode centered on a character being almost terminally thirsty, you could write it off as a quirk of that particular story. But it’s also a major part of the Doctor/Seven A-plot.

As has been long (if not well) established, the Doctor is attracted to Seven. So when he blips into her body, there’s peculiar moments where he pretends to be her, waxing rhapsodic about how much she admires him that verges on a strange form of self-flattering fantasy. And if that weren’t enough, he’s attracted, and even aroused, by Jaryn, the ship’s lieutenant who’s not interested in Doc-as-Seven because he has the appearance of a woman. But then the EMH also has to fend off the advances of Ranek, the ship’s captain, who feels amorous toward Doc-as-Seven, but whom the EMH isn’t interested in (with implications that it’s because of gender). And if that weren’t enough, then he has to pretend to seduce Ranek while masquerading as Seven so he can slip the guy a sedative and call Voyager.

It’s kind of a mess, but in a fascinating sort of way. This isn’t the usual sex farce where a tangle of different vixens and lotharios have conflicting and intersecting crushes on one another with pursuits and disappointments galore. This is a mish-mash of attraction and gender and the new physical and the unexpected emotional elevates “Body and Soul” into something more than the usual romp. It’s a sci-fi twist, suffused with both desire and a breaching of new personal horizons, that feels like a more transcendent story that only speculative fiction can tell.

This is where I admit that I’m not necessarily fully qualified to judge this one. My knowledge of body-swap stories extends about as far as Freaky Friday and its progeny, and not much further. But I have enough nonbinary and transgender friends and acquaintances to know that magical/sci-fi gender-swapping stories, both amorous and otherwise, have a long history in that community.

They can serve as a canvas for exploration of feelings and notions that don’t always find purchase in the mainstream, and sometimes as an outlet for sexual desires to be explored in a safe guise. I don’t know enough to unpack everything going on with the Doctor in “Body and Soul”, but I know enough to recognize that there’s a number of those conceits and ideas at play here.

That's a neat thing for a show as staid as Voyager is much of the time. There’s a good “double-agent escapes captivity” story here, as Doc, Seven, and Harry scheme to contact their home vessel. There’s also a personal angle to the whole thing, with the Doctor having to play a role out of necessity only to discover that he likes it and didn’t know what he was missing. (Shades of Odo in “Facets” from Deep Space Nine, another body-swap episode that happens to feature a character who’s often read a trans allegory.)

But this is also an episode about a bunch of people having attractions to others where the person they’re after on the inside doesn’t naturally match what’s on the outside. This isn’t the first time Star Trek’s examined that kind of idea, but to mix and match desire and identity like that provides for a certain boldness that I don’t necessarily expect from Voyager.

In the end, of course, the Doctor and Seven save the day, partly as themselves and partly in their combined form. (Sorry, Tuvix.) But despite some touch-and-go moments, when it’s over, everyone’s better for the experience. Through the mismatched romantic carousel, the Doctor has a chance to point out that the people Ranek and Jaryn have been looking for are one another. And in their closing meal together, Seven takes the lesson to indulge a little, and the Doctor gets a chance to experience that sort of human pleasure vicariously with her.

Some of what the Doctor gets to experience is physical: taste, touch, sense, smell. Some of it is sexual, kissing and massages and even the stately waltz. But some of it is simply experiential, the chance to walk in someone else’s shoes, see the world from their vantage point, have your perspective widened from the opportunity. Neither Voyager nor Star Trek as a whole often goes for something this steamy, but both tend to go for the idea of seeing from another’s point of view. Mixing those two ideas -- empathy and desire -- makes for one of the show’s most rich and interesting hours yet, as the series breaks form in its last year on the air.

[8.0/10] Seven’s path toward individuality over the past three seasons has been a rocky one, but not a lonely one. Janeway, The Doctor, and scores of others (including even Naomi Wildman) have had a hand in bringing her along toward reasserting her humanity. She has friends on this ship. People care about her. Collectively, and individually, they want her to succeed, and they want her to get better.

And yet, when she faces a terminal illness, she can't see that. If anything, she strives to isolate herself from the others aboard Voyager. That is hard to watch in places, but it’s one of my favorite conceits in “Imperfection”, because it is so true to life for so many.

As in so much of the best of Star Trek, the premise is fantastical but the core of the experience is rooted in truth. Seven’s “cortical node”, a Borg device critical for regulating her vital systems, is malfunctioning. Without a working one, her body will shut down and die. No good substitutes are readily available, despite a dangerous salvage operation in a Borg debris field, and nothing The Doctor or B’Elanna can do will change that. On paper, that's one of those futuristic technology-specific problems that only exist in the world of speculative fiction.

Yet, at the heart of “Imperfection” is the experience of being grievously ill, both for the person diagnosed and for their friends and family. The presentation is a bit overly tidy in places, but the episode captures the desperate attempts by loved ones to comfort and care for someone sick. It captures the tangle of diagnoses and treatment options that can offer hope and disappointment in equal measure.

And most of all, it captures the way so many at the center of such situations strive not to be a burden, to preemptively cushion the blow of those they’re leaving behind, even if it’s the last thing those close to them would want or ask for. The truth at the heart of “Imperfection” is a palpable one, born of real experiences, and able to make the fantastical feel real.

Beyond that theme, the nuts and bolts of the episode are quality. The script establishes the problem with Seven early, steadily escalates it, and neatly weaves together emotional responses and progressive efforts to find a cure. The escape where Janeway scavenges a used cortical node and runs into the love children of the Klingons and the Kazon is a little perfunctory, but shows the character acting rationally to pursue the most obvious solution to the issue at hand. And the makeup and effects team shine here, with visual indicators of Seven’s degradation and a few Borg surgery scenes that catch the eyes.

But the core of this one is the emotional reaction of Seven and those around her to this news. The ailing ex-Borg’s response is particularly true-to-life. Her desire to get out of sick bay and return to her normal life, despite the need for rest and tests, will be familiar to anyone who’s tended to convalescing loved ones. (The reverse psychology scene with Neelix and his game of kadis-kot is especially on point there.) So is her denial that anything serious is wrong until the impact of the illness is undeniable. And the most piercing element of her experience is the way she begins to contemplate what her absence from this world will mean, for her and for those she’s felt responsible for and indebted to over several years.

That's why my favorite scene in the whole episode is between Seven and someone she’d hardly consider a friend. The relationship between Seven and B’Elanna has long been a frosty one. So there’s power in Lt. Torres harboring Seven, knowing what it’s like to want to break out from sickbay. You feel for the typically unsentimental Seven, asking her colleague what she thinks of the afterlife. You’re heartened when the Doctor tracks them down, and B’Elanna nets Seven a much-needed hall pass to help out in Engineering.

The mere fact that these testy coworkers are confiding in one another and showing each other kindness has more impact from the way this dire, unusual situation softens each toward the other.

But the most meaningful part comes when Seven contemplates the idea that if she dies, all that she’s achieved since breaking away from the Collective, all that she's become in her own right, will be lost to the sands of time. As harsh as the notion of the Borg hive mind, there is an intuitive comfort in the idea that your memories, some piece of who you were and your experiences, will live on in that collective consciousness. None of us know what that's like exactly, but the fear of being erased and forgotten in death is a relatable one, and it betrays some vulnerability and emotion from the typically stoic ex-Borg. (With some great subtle acting from Jeri Ryan to boot.)

The turn in the story’s themes come not from one of Seven’s closest friends or confidantes, but from someone she’s butted heads with time and again. B’Elanna reassures Seven that even if the cybernetic hive mind may not mark her growth over the past three years, the crew of Voyager will. Torres tells her ailing counterpart that she’s made an impact on everyone on the ship, which will carry on her memory in a different, but no less potent way.

The reassurance is all the stronger, all the more piercing, coming from someone who’s not exactly been warm with Seven to this point. That is the power in putting characters at odds with one another -- it makes it meaningful when the walls tumble down in a way more reassurance from close companions can't match in the same way. B’Elanna doesn’t have to say this. She’s not the type to just baselessly assuage Seven’s concerns. She does it because it’s true, and a benediction coming from her means more than one from almost anyone else.

In truth, I wish we got a few more of them. As much as The Doctor is a major part of this episode given the medical procedures at play, I wish he got a scene about preemptively missing Seven. Given how much her relationship with Naomi Wildman was a consistently charming part of the series over the last couple years, I wish the two got a moment together. But this episode is already trying to cover a lot of ground, and I understand not being able to insert these scenes without making the hour about that in some ways.

In that spirit though, there’s a continuing motif that Seven has forged connections with those aboard Voyager in a way even she doesn’t recognize. The show understandably jettisons three-fourths of the Borg babies (and it’s a shame to lose the spunky Mezoti, though she was a little redundant of Naomi), but closes with a touching hug among them. Seven’s surrogate mother, Janeway, and two of her crewmates, risk their lives to save the former Borg once again. Janeway’s even willing to violate her moral principles and harvest a node from a living drone if it means preserving the bonds her protege has formed.

Despite that, Seven misunderstands her relationship with her mentor. There’s something sad yet characteristic about how Seven thinks Janeway will be upset if she dies, but only because it will mean that Seven is an unfinished project. There’s pathos in worrying that you will be remembered for your failed potential, for failing to live long enough to live up to others’ expectations, than for who you are. Seven remembering the names of those lost in Voyager’s journey, and measuring herself as lesser in comparison, is a sad sort of personal reflection that nevertheless feels real.

Instead, of course, Janeway reassures her that she’s not fighting for Seven as a project, but as a friend. It is hard to accept that you mean something to people. It’s all too easy to believe that you only have instrumental value, some function you perform that will need to be substituted, rather than intrinsic value as a person who brings light into other lives. In a sense, Seven still sees herself as a drone, someone whose role within this collective will simply need to be filled. But eventually, she comes to see herself as a person, someone whose presence means more to the people in her life than any set of duties or mentoring objectives could match. The beauty of that, in realizing that you matter, not just what you achieve or accomplish, is profound.

Of course, the cinch of “Imperfection” is Icheb. And let’s get this out of the way -- Manu Intiraymi isn’t very good in the role. He was twenty-two at the time, so you can't offer the same “Being a young performer is hard” excuse you might offer for the useless Borg twins who depart the show here. He overplays most of his scenes, and fails to thread the needle between stoicism and sentiment that Jeri Ryan had nearly perfected by this point. It’s a drag for a character who’s crucial to this story.

Still, as on the page at least, I love the dynamic between him and Seven here. Once again, we see Seven take on a parental dynamic with Icheb. She doesn’t want to worry him with her illness, but does try to prepare him for life without her. She pushes him away, in asnese, in the guise of ihm needing tobecome more el-fsufficient, with the idea that it will help cushion the blow of her loss. The writers smartly illustrate that with her plan to to support his admission to a sort of Starfleet Academy remote program, but refusing to agree to tutor him in astrometrics. She is preemptively putting up walls in the hopes that it will make her loss easier for everyone.

Icheb is there to break those walls down. On the one hand, I can appreciate the clockwork nature of his plan to give her his cortical node. The script smartly sets up that only a living donor will do, so it works in terms of the immediate plot. Icheb’s point that he’s younger, hasn’t been as fully assimilated given being released from his maturation chamber early, and has found a genomic treatment that could allow him to recover accords with continuity from “Collective” and “Child’s Play”. And it ties into the real life instances of children donating organs to their parents, despite certain risks, out of a profound sense of love.

On the other, I appreciate that it’s only half the battle. The plot points are all sound, with The Doctor refusing and Icheb forcing everyone’s hand on his own initiative. But what I appreciate most is that it’s not just about finding a technical solution to a technical problem; it’s about helping Seven to see that she is not a burden, but part of a community of people who want to help her, and that accepting that help is a part of her journey.

There is dual resonance in that idea too. It works within the notion that the spirit of Janeway’s ship is one of mutual cooperation nd support, where people sacrifice for one another in the same of care and connection. But it also speaks to our reluctance to impse on others when we’re ill, to want to take on everything ourselves, when sometimes what we need the most is to be open to others doing what they can for us.

When Seven hears the wisdom from the mouths of babes and relents to the procedure, it’s a wonderful, heartwarming moment of letting go and trusting those who care about you. Of course it works out. Of course Seven recovers, and Icheb suffers some, but is on the road to wellness too. This is, at heart, an optimistic show. But “Imperfection” earns that happy ending, with true to life roadblocks both practical and personal, and an emotional breakthrough that's as important as any technical innovation.

In the end, it feeds into the great irony of Seven’s journey to this point. The path from er time as a drone to her gradually asserting herself as an individual has been one of steadily shedding the Collective’s mindset. Figuring out what she wants, what she needs, who she is apart from the cacophony of voices in her head, has been the essential struggle from where she started to where she is now.

“Imperfection” reverses that. Having forged a separate and distinct identity for herself aboard Voyager, the episode underscores that the next great step is to realize that she is not alone or apart, but once again bonded, in a more honest and chosen fashion, to others within a larger community who are no less connected or dependent on one another than the Borg are.

To open yourself to that idea -- that you need other people and they need you -- is a vulnerable one. Seven’s genuine tear at Icheb’s sacrifice, and the realization that she’ll be around to watch her child grow up, speak to that. And it is a sign as far as Seven’s come, as much as she’s achieved to carve out a place for her own identity out of the monolith of the Borg, accepting that she’s once again part of something greater than herself, full of people who love her for who she is, may be her biggest step toward humanity yet.

[7.7/10] I’m glad that Voyager made sustained contact with the Alpha Quadrant, but I’m also glad it didn’t happen until the final phase of the series. The occasional missive from home letting our heroes know their friends are still there isn’t bad. But making it a regular thing would cheapen the sense of Janeway and company being stranded with no one to rely on. The show already shied away from its premise more than enough; diminishing the sense of their connections to home having been severed would have been no good.

But giving us an anchor in the Alpha Quadrant -- in the form of Lt. Barclay, Counselor Troi, Admiral Paris, and Commander Harkins -- allows Voyager to tell a different kind of story. Establishing that corner of the universe means that both Janeway’s team and Barclay’s can be working on the problem: of missing holograms and geodesic folds and possible traitors in their midst. But the “one data stream per month” limitation means that they’re each attacking the problem without the other’s help. We get to see two devoted, clever crews, working hard on what neither of them realizes is two sides of the same issue.

So Janeway and her crew sidle up to a holographic version of Barclay dubbed “Reg” who seems on the up-and-up, but harbors a few irregularities that give folks like The Doctor pause, even if he can't prove anything. And the flesh-and-blood Barclay puzzles over the fact that his attempt to send a hologram to Voyager hasn’t worked for two months in a row, and he suspects something nefarious is afoot, even if he can't prove anything.

That's what ties the two halves of “Inside Man” together. This is as much an episode about psychology as it is the machinations of venal Ferengis or false hope for getting home or portals between giant stars. On both sides of the galaxy, something seems off, and the writers are as interested in exploring those instincts and insecurities as they are in bringing a simmering plot to a boil.

I like it! On the U.S.S. Voyager side of things, the episode toys with the idea that this is too good to be true. A holographic rendition of Voyager’s best friend in the Alpha Quadrant shows up with a plan to get them home by the end of the week? Where have we heard that before?

I appreciate an in-universe acknowledgment of that. The show has played with “Lucy with the football” game with its audience for a long time now. Having Harry harbor hopes for returning home is sympathetic, although Tom being skeptical after their misadventure with Arturis and interstellar pitcher plants and other false starts is even more understandable. There’s a bit of a meta quality to this, with the show winking at its own tropes and structure, and I appreciate the acknowledgement of that reality in an episode that plays with many of the same tropes.

That extends to the sense that much of what Reg has to offer and the presence he cuts aboard the ship smacks of wish-fulfillment. He’s not quite as bad as the pitcher plant, but the promise of coming home, his easy manner with the crew, his declaration of Voyager as the “miracle ship” seem like the actions of a conman more than an honest broker working on the ship’s return.

Thankfully, the show puts a fig leaf on Reg’s presence, for the crew and for the audience, so Janeway and her compatriots don’t seem like dopes for falling for it. Sure, Reg seems a little too slick, but he also feels very much like the confident, genial version of Barclay we saw in the Voyager holodeck simulation back in “Pathfinder”. It’s easy to buy this uber-competent hologram as Barclay programming his imagined best self.

Likewise, there’s a meta quality to this. We know that Barclay’s Voyager’s biggest fan, to an obsessive degree, so it’s natural that his holographic counterpart would be an enthusiastic cheerleader for them. And the writing of his character mirrors fan reactions, with excitement for the ship and the crew as characters on a pedestal as much as for real people.

That extends to Seven. The idea that she is the “star” for folks back home has a winking quality to the characters’ popularity among viewers. But it also speaks to the sense that Reg is telling people what they want to hear, what will convince them to cooperate, what will charm them, so that when the Doctor questions the effectiveness of the radiation innoculations or Seven doubts the fortitude of the shields, they’ll be too wowed and flattered to really push back.

It makes for an interesting tension. The show offers breadcrumbs on the Voyager side nicely, with enough reason for doubt and enough vetting and urgency from the crew to make their buy-in plausible. But “Inside Man” does a nice job of making Doc the doubter, mixing legitimate reasons for him to become skeptical of Reg with more petty grievances like hogging the mobile emitter and spending time with the Doctor’s crush. By that point in the story, we know what’s happening. But there’s enough dust in the air there, quite deliberately, to give Janeway a “trust but verify” approach that leads to an outright apology from the EMH.

The ambiguity there makes for an interesting motif here. Both the Doctor and Barclay sense something is wrong, but question their own intuitions, wondering if it may be their own personal failings rather than something legitimately wrong. For each of them, though, the broken friendship they’re inclined to pin on their own bruised egos are, instead, a genuine sign that something nefarious is under way.

I’m not sure what the moral is exactly. Believe your worst impulses about people you feel something hinky from, I guess? Regardless, the way Barclay and Doc’s experiences mirror each other in a way shows that, even when separated by tens of thousands of lightyears, the essential human problems remain strikingly similar.

Barclay’s position is a little different. He’s been had, and in the “No guys, I think that stripper really likes me” sort of way. Things get a little wacky back in the Alpha Quadrant, between Barclay invading Troi vacation, and him being tricked by a shifty dabo girl, and Deanna using her Betazoid powers to interrogate the lascivious grifter.

There is, nonetheless. Something real at the heart of the story. Barclay was riding high on the success of the Pathfinder project. He’d gotten an attaboy from Geordi. He’d built something to help his friends across the galaxy. And he even had a girlfriend. The self-blame when it all goes to pot is sympathetic. He doesn’t want to admit or accept that the downfall of his project could be from him being so flattered himself that he didn’t see the con being wreaked upon him. In a strange way, he’s just like Harry, finding something too good to be true but wanting to believe in it hard enough that you let yourself get tricked.

In truth, I don’t love the answer to the mystery. Outside of “False Profits”, Voyager has been far less devoted to Some Ferengi Nonsense:tm: than either The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine. So frankly, the addition of the well-lobed antagonists feels a little tonally dissonant. Still, there’s a certain logic to them commandeering Starfleet’s transmissions to Voyager and devising a way home whose only downside is that it’ll kill everyone on board, which doesn’t matter when all you’re interested in is nanoprobes.

As outlandish as the Ferengi’s involvement is, there’s some sound plotting to the whole thing. The geodesic fold is plausible enough as a method of return, with a hook for the Ferengi that prompts them not to care about the risks or consequences. After so many instances of false hopes and tricks, Janeway is appropriately enthusiastic but measured about the whole thing. And Barclay isn’t the lone man with a dream again, but rather someone who has to endure some personal humiliation in the name of a greater good to show his theory is right.

I like the solution on both ends. Barclay posing as “Reg” to the Ferengi, fibbing to convince them to close the fold and save Voyager, is a nice way for him to prove his worth once again and get back at the people who wronged him. And on the Voyager side, Seven’s suspicions and Jaenway’s quick thinking manage to ultimately outsmart the people trying to hoodwink her and her crew. Neither side knows about the other’s heroics (or at least won’t for another month), but each is unwittingly working together to thwart the same enemy.

That's a neat approach, and one we couldn't really get until recently in the show. The risk of finding this link back home is that it could turn Voyager into “The Adventures Back in the Alpha Quadrant.” Frankly, in the few Barclay episode’s we’ve had since the show first forged that connection, it does feel like Janeway’s set takes a backseat to the familiar characters from TNG, which wouldn’t be great as a week-to-week thing.

But as an occasional treat, where we get to see two sets of officers, unable to coordinate, nevertheless working in sync against a common enemy, makes for a great story. As Voyager heads toward its endgame, the show brings them closer and closer to home in spirit, even if there remains a great distance still to travel.

[7.4/10] Maybe I’m just scarred by The Wire and Broadchurch, but I instinctively roll my eyes when a T.V. show gets on the high horse of “news coverage ain’t what it used to be.” And I think that's partly the point Babylon Berlin wants to make here. When Katelbach grouses that we used to have “readers” and now we just have “lookers”, it’s the sort of “man, I miss the good old days” observation that seems especially trite when it’s in a story set nearly a century ago.

But there’s a point when the blustery newspaper editor makes the point that people want drama, jealousy, intrigue, revenge on the front page. And a splashy murder of a starlet fits the bill, while the more serious and substantive story of a major company supporting a military coup takes a backseat because it doesn’t have good enough pictures to go with it. We’re encouraged to tsk tsk at a fickle, shallow society more interested in silver screen blood spatter than major world events. And it comes with the subtle implication that this kind of superficial distraction is part of what allowed this society to slip into the grip of the Third Reich.

And yet, it’s hard not to feel the same way about this episode as a whole. In truth, when Rath and Charlotte are skulking around the movie set, it feels like a different show. Gone is the true political element and the story of recovering from war and the other lived-in corners of Berlin society that have come to the fore. In their place is a pulpy story of mob violence and backstabbing actresses and a black clad slasher who’s practically out of Halloween. (Hell, the closing score is pretty close to that movie’s famous musical motif.)

It’s almost as though Babylon Berlin is daring us to do the same. In truth, I can't pretend I’m super invested in the on-set mystery. I’m sure the answer will surprise us, but for now, I don’t really care about the various actors and directors and producers and costumers and techies and the like who are flitting about this new ecosystem. They’re a bit onenote, and even when one starlet is Weinstraub’s mistress, and a costuming assistant is friends with the lighting tech who was killed, it doesn’t do much for me.

But there’s something to be said fo the visual verve of it. As silly as I find the person dressed up in the Demon of Passion” getup who’s going around killing people, the imagery of it is striking. So are the musical numbers and screen tests we get to see, which ably represent that era of German cinema. And the pressure on set, where one person is trying to make art, and the other is just trying to make money, with the threat of violence and ruin hanging over them both, gives it a particular flavor. There’s flash to all of this, and it’s hard to deny that, even if it feels comparatively hollow relative to some of the show’s meatier storylines.

There are a few human moments though. Something about the producer and Edgar’s wife bonding and commiserating over what to do makes for an oddly sweet moment. You do feel for the producer, wrapped up in all of this through (seemingly) no fault of his own. But he also went in with the mob to try to fund his artistic dream. That's equally noble and stupid, and so him scrambling to make this ramshackle production work and keep his life at the same time does have a human dimension.

(Some pure speculation on my part: My semi-random guess is that Edgar’s wife is behind the deaths in the production. She holds a grudge against the producer and her husband, and could maybe want to ruin him so she can collect the estate or lie off her brother or maybe just get Edgar out of the way so she can shack up with Weintraub. Shot in the dark, but it would be a twist, and the way they focus on her here feels like foreshadowing.

Still, the stuff away from the murder investigation is more striking. I’m still not exactly over the moon for Greta, but man, something about Wendt using her baby as leverage so she’ll change her story and implicate the Communists is so heartless and full of pathos that you can't help but feel for the girl. You also feel for Helga, who rightfully all but begs Gereon to tell her what’s wrong, and is de facto pushed out of his life instead. I get that Gereon is riddled with guilt now for what happened with his brother, but however hard it is, Helga deserves better from him than this, if only an outright admission and apology that he’s not capable of continuing.

I’m still not crazy about her shacking up with Nyssen, but I guess we’ll see where that goes. As someone who lived through the Great Recession (and enjoys The Big Short), it’s interesting to see both a montage of a private eye uncovering how scores of common people are overleveraged in their investments with the idea that the stock market will continue to rise indefinitely, and how for all his seemingly poor instincts for business, Nyssen foresees the crash. The guy has new dimensions we get to see; I’ll give him that.

Otherwise, it is interesting to see Katelbach get his secret plans from an informant through slick means, which hopefully means something to the paper. And I like how the uptight forensic specialists is initially excited at his findings in the Betty WInter case, but through Rath’s personal issues and the chief’s outright dressing down, he feels marginalized in his job and would rather make money or do something illicit with his break in the case than use it to help his fellow policeman. The contrast between the chief’s insistence that the system only works with structure, while the forensic specialist is an object lesson in how overly-rigid, dehumanizing systems fail when they fail to recognize the people they cram into boxes, is potent.

Otherwise, I like the idea that this murder makes for strange bedfellows. Gereon and Edgar are united in common purpose, not just a mutual indebtedness to the man who helped heal their PTSD, but a mutual desire to know who would want to wreck this production. That too is a little pulpy, but it’s also compelling, and full of potential based on both plot and character. When it’s done right, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of flash, so long as we’re not missing out on the substance.

[6.3/10] There’s a small but recurring category of Star Trek episodes that you could label, “This should have been an essay.” If the writers wanted to criticize the American healthcare industry circa the year 2000, they had plenty of fodder for it. But “Critical Care” is so high-handed and cartoonish in its fantastical depiction of that system that the whole thing starts to feel like a Chick Tract. This is less a story than a thinly-veiled jeremiad about hospitals and HMOs of the time, and the blend between message and story is about as natural as a duck playing the piano.

The episode does have some strong core observations. The sometimes maddening allocation of medical resources remains a problem. Many byzantine systems to determine care and cost persist to this day. Instances where various players have to game the system to stay solvent or provide adequate care or both continue in many places. Trying to dramatize that through the lens of science fiction is by no means wrong-headed.

But my god, everything is so goofy here. The comical distance between the pristine “blue level” where important people get age-defying treatments and the “red level” where unfortunate schmucks can't get life-saving treatments put too big a thumb on the scale. Bright-eyed, aspiring medical students who are left to die because they’ve already received their allotment of medicine comes off too polemical. And the bulbous, callous administrator is the story’s mustache-twirling villain, devoid of any shading to give him dimension beyond being a flat antagonist.

It’s frustrating when you agree with the core of critique -- the flaws “Critical Care” is getting at here are real -- but lowkey loathe the way a show tries to go about illustrating it. Seeing such a caricatured rendition of healthcare system doesn’t light a fire for change; it elicits eyerolls by giving its broken healthcare system all the subtlety of a G.I. Joe PSA.

Oddly enough, “Critical Care” works better less as an indictment of the medical industry, and better as a character story for The Doctor. The plot has the same flavor of “The Most Toys” from The Next Generation. In both episodes, one of our favorite artificial lifeforms is kidnapped and forced to struggle between their ethical programming and an antagonist whose amoral attitude provokes them to push the limits of their own morality in the name of a greater good.

I like that! For one thing, it’s neat to see The Doctor scheme here. The way he subtly and genially tries to convinces his captors and fellow healers to contact Voyager shows a certain slickness from him. His ploy to nab the treatment du jour from the privileged hospital wing and use it in the disregarded wing is both clever and noble. And the way he convinces the head of medicine to bless his scheme by noting that ordering less resources now will result in being granted fewer later both demonstrates the EMH’s sharpness in such matters, and the perverse incentives this system creates.

For another, seeing him test the limits of his ethical programming here gives as a deeper insight into his growth and evolution. At a basic level, you can understand him not wanting to cooperate with the people who bought him as stolen goods, while also being unable to ignore the sick and infirmed. The way that creating equity in medical treatment prompts him to lie, cheat, and steal in order to give people the care they deserve also shows a recognition that true justice often means more than blind fealty to the rules of whomever happens to be in charge.

And as cheesy a power fantasy it is for the Doctor to inject the evil administrator with a terrible illness so that he has to suffer what it’s like to be one of the “peons” he so heartlessly dismisses, it speaks to Doc’s growth as a character that he recognizes there’s a greater “needs of the many” type of ethic at play here beyond the “first, do no harm” principle that has been his lodestone to this point. You can read it as him being corrupted in a way by a corrupt system, or as him rising above it through whatever means are necessary in the name of the greater good. Either way, it reflects an interesting new personal evolution from a character whose medical ethics have been near-rock solid to this point.

Still, the best part of “Critical Care” may be the comparatively light B-story. For all the serious blather in this episode, the most entertaining part of this one is Janeway chasing the trail of the con artist who stole the EMH, with each turn being more droll and trying for her than the last. It’s kind of whimsical, small stakes problem that brought the laughs the last time Janeway chased down a grifter in “Live Fast and Prosper”, and it brings them now.

(Plus hey! There’s Jim O’Heir! And he’s basically playing a proto version of Jerry from Parks and Recreation!)

Despite the low stakes and lighter energy of the piece, it’s a surprisingly good outing for good ol’ Neelix. Him feeling bad about cooking food that sent the con artist to sick bay, potentially giving him the idea to steal the EMH, is sympathetic. Him intruding on an interrogation to feed the now-prisoner lunch in a chipper manner fits what you’d expect from the eternally amiable Talaxian. And him basically poisoning the guy (with gas pains, admittedly) to convince him to tell them where the Doctor is located is another quietly badass moment from Neelix. It’s a small arc, but an effective one. Don’t mess with Neelix’s friends, folks!

Don’t mess with the Doctor’s either, I suppose. One of the big problems with “Critical Care” is that every major player in the episode is one-dimensional. The administrator is an uncomplicated villain. The head of medicine has a change of heart on a dime. The dying patient with big aspirations is a walking cliche. And the overworked doctor who tries to do his best within the system and eventually decides to bend the rules isn’t much better. All of these characters feel like cheap props and easy stand-ins for points the writers want to make rather than living, breathing people within a lived-in world that conveys that message organically.

It’s a shame, because there’s interesting things to explore in this premise. The idea that the administrator isn’t necessarily cruel, but rather someone who has to make tough decisions based on limited resources and a society in need is hinted at before it’s washed away in mustache-twirling harshness. The unjust allocation of those resources, and how good, otherwise rule-abiding people feel compelled to violate regulations and norms in the name of healing people is worth examining. And the Doctor’s own attempts to work within the system, before deciding there’s no other way but to take matters into his own hands is a worthwhile place to take the character.

Sadly, too much here scans as a veritable haunted house for the medical industry than a more grounded look at its flaws and needed reforms. There are plenty of real life horror stories in healthcare these days, to where making a medical scenario that seems too outlandish to feel real is almost impressive.

But in trying so hard to criticize the practice of medicine of its time in such an overblown tone and terms, “Critical Care” comes of like it’s tilting at windmills, or at least straw men, rather than taking aim at the realer and more grounded problems reformers have been trying to address then and now. And if your story ends up being a flimsy vehicle for your message rather than a worthwhile tale in and of itself, you’re better off just telling people what you think outright rather than trying to dress the moral up in such transparent scrubs.

[7.4/10] Oddly enough, this episode feels less like a spiritual cousin of The Simpsons and more like a precursor to Arrested Development. The sense in which everybody here is making jerky/self-centered choices, until their storylines all intersect and their plans fall to ruin, is familiar to anyone who enjoyed Michael Hurwitz’s seminal show years after Mission Hill sadly departed the airwaves.

Andy pretending to be a good and upstanding brother to impress Kevin’s teacher is a bit of an old sitcom plot, but the show has fun with it. This one largely works on the basis of the side characters. I kind of love how depraved Kevin’s one balding, checked out teacher is. And Toby’s mom is a hoot on the other end of the spectrum, with her enthusiasm over the PTA and the “Jolly Boys”.

Kevin’s in rare form too, as a proto Jeff Winger from Community trying to convince a possible paramour that he’s not terrible in as half-assed a way as possible. Seeing all his shallow attempts to play the noble brother come crashing down, replete with him seemingly trying to buy Kevin the services of a sex worker and getting kids drunk, is some nice comical karma.

The B-story, with Kevin getting obsessed with an Everquest-style game only to create a blood feud with his friend Toby has a lot of laughs in it. Having lived through that era, I particularly enjoy George’s misadventures trying to get his late 1990s computer to run the game properly. And Kevin and Toby’s mutual vendetta over cutthroat in-game decisions has some good humor from the distance between how little is at stake and how seriously they both take it. Their street race to their computers is a little over the top, but enjoyable.

The C-story, with crunchy hippie Posey turning out to be a cutthroat capitalist in her dealings with Howard is worth a few yuks. The gross-out humor with Gus and Howard’s respective vegetable offerings doesn't do much for me. But as uncomfortable as the stereotype of Howard is, the humor of the locals getting upset at this humble shop owner for clearing out Posey’s wares and calling him “the man” wrings humor out of the situation nicely. And the fact that he spends the exorbitant funds on Posey’s veggies, only for Toby to crash into the display, is some nice clockwork storytelling.

There’s not the same firm note of sweetness at the end of this one there was in the pilot. Andy carrying Kevin despite having no one to impress, and Kevin telling his brother that he appreciates it is a nice enough grace note, but feels like a bit of a meager balm after a lot of terribleness from Andy in this one.

Still, there’s plenty of good laughs here, some nice comic escalation, and a superb crescendo where all three stories come together. A nice outing for the show.

[5.0/10] As we reach Voyager’s final season, I think it’s fair to call Tuvok the series’ most underutilized character. Plenty of other players don’t get their fair share of the spotlight, but Tuvok is the one with the most unrealized potential.

He’s Captain Janeway’s closest friend on the ship. He has a contentious but secretly complex relationship with Neelix. He was a mentor to Kes. He is a kindred spirit to Seven. He betrayed the Maquis members of the crew to Starfleet. He is the only main character with a spouse and children whom he deeply misses back home. And not for nothing, Tim Russ is one of the better actors on the show, with superb timing and a sharp ability to convey sentiment despite a staid exterior.

Every once in a while, Voyager capitalizes on these features. In the past couple of seasons alone, “Gravity” and “Riddles” have shown what the character is capable of when given room to run. But more often than not, he’s a subsidiary player on the show, there to tsk tsk at the more colorful characters and spout the usual reams of technobabble from the tactical station, without much more.

Ostensibly, “Repression” is a chance to correct that. This is very much a Tuvok episode, with the character investigating a mystery in the first half, becoming a dangerous madman in the second half, and driving the action in both sections. But it’s a boring, empty episode, that doesn't enhance the character, and barely takes advantage of what’s good and intriguing about him.

The whodunnit he investigates in the first half of the episode is random and uninvolving. Here’s where I admit that I remembered this one from childhood. So maybe if you don’t know where this is heading, there’s more suspense in play. I can't say for sure.

But I’m doubtful. The problem with a would-be killer going around knocking out former Maquis is that there’s no one with a real motive in the main cast. That means the options are: (a.) it’s some character we’ve never heard of who has to be built up over the course of forty-five minutes (b.) it’s a character we know with some secret grudge/plan that makes no sense, or (c.) it’s some random outside force.

The real answer is kind of a combination of (b.) and (c.), with Tuvok in a Manchurian Candidate situation a la Geordi in TNG’s “The Mind’s Eye”. But the difference is that there, we knew LaForge had been turned without his knowledge, so the tension came in the distance between what he was doing and what he was aware of.

“Repression” tries to maintain the mystery, but all available answers are some combination of implausible and unsatisfying, which makes it hard to be invested in the whodunnit. And to the point, even when you know that Tuvok is the culprit, the episode falls flat in its clumsy attempt to throw out breadcrumbs and create inner conflict for the Vulcan. It’s as though the writers decided on a plot of “Tuvok investigates a crime where, unbeknownst to him, he’s the culprit” and thought the twist was cool enough on its own that they never bothered to build the premise out from there.

Heck, the only interesting idea here is the one suggested by B’Elanna’s Bolian buddy -- that after making contact with the Federation, Starfleet decided to neutralize the Maquis rather than tolerate them. It doesn't make much sense, and Janeway would never stand for it, but it would at least be interesting. Maybe you could have it so that Section 31 reprogrammed The Doctor back in “Life Line”, but Voyager’s not the same kind of show Deep Space NIne was, either in its worldview or its willingness to examine the dark edges of Starfleet.

The bigger point, though, is the one that multiple characters make explicitly in dialogue -- tension between the Starfleet crew and the Maquis has long been a settled issue, so reviving it now has very little juice.

Even in the second half, once the jig is up, the results are uninspired. On a very basic level, “Repression” is simply a boring episode. Once the cat is out of the bag, the creative team resorts to overextended, stolid scenes of Janeway and others gabbing with Tuvok, and they just drag and drag and drag. For an episode centered on a Vulcan losing control and being made into a weapon, this is a surprisingly inert outing for the show.

More than that though, the answers to the “what and why” of the story are at best, uninteresting, and at worst, outright dumb. The culprit is Teero, a Bajoran fanatic who secretly did mind control experiments on Tuvok back in the old days. Okay? Sure, I guess.

What does he want? At a big picture level, to revive the Maquis rebellion with the only members of the resistance still living, I guess. But again, as Janeway herself points out in dialogue, they’re lightyears and lightyears away from the Alpha Quadrant. What does he hope to accomplish? Takeover one Starfleet ship? Get the minorest of minor revenge against people largely uninvolved in the conflict? There’s nothing to be gained here, when the Maquis are gone, the conflict with the Cardassians is largely resolved, and even if it weren’t Voyager can't do anything to change that for decades.

That means, at best, all you have is a guy who’s just fanatical and low key crazy without a greater purpose or achievable goal. (It doesn't help that the guest star who plays Teero is awful, spouting the script’s horrid purple prose with all the subtlety of direct action flatulence.) And look, those people exist in real life! But a character whose only motivation and objective is “I’m nuts” isn’t really interesting from a storytelling perspective.

Plus, the fact that he uses mind control to turn the Maquis crew members into rebels again means that this says nothing about them as characters. They may as well be strangers since they have no control over their choices. I suppose there’s some minor stakes in the fact that they might hurt the other members of the crew or strand the Starfleet officers, but it’s doubtful at best that the series would go through with any of that, which weakens the proceedings.

There’s only a few positive things to say about the episode. For one, Russ gives another superb performance. While he veers a little bit into “too much” territory once the scales have fallen, he does a great job when Tuvok has a “hunch” and is displaying some discomfort and anger over the small psychic vestiges of the memories he’s repressing. The way he uses his jaw in the Harry Kim interrogation scene in particular is a masterclass in an actor using physicality to convey something roiling under a theoretically calm surface.

For another, you can at least say there’s a unity of purpose with the audience being perplexed and frustrated at there being no satisfying answer to the mystery with Tuvok himself sharing the same confusion and frustration. Though frankly, I’m not sure it’s even intentional.

Last but not least, the episode does try to rest Tuvok’s recovery on his connection to Captain Janeway. It’s not particularly well done, relying on meditation sessions between them we’ve never seen and tepid scenes that inelegantly try to convey that something’s switched in Tuvok at the last minute. But at a minimum, it uses the friendship between these two officers to return him to his true self.

Yet, at the end of the day, what is all of this about? What have we learned about Tuvok from any of it? That he and Janeway trust one another? We already knew that, and the dramatization of it here isn’t particularly compelling. That he relies on instinct sometimes? I guess that's a takeaway, albeit a pretty unremarkable one. That he can be scary when let off the Vulcan leash? We saw a much better rendition of that in “Meld”, and this installment adds nothing to that one.

All we get is another rare chance to let Tuvok take center stage wasted. I like Janeway and Seven and The Doctor too. I get wanting to put the focus on characters who worked from the jump with performances to back your stories up. But Tuvok is just sitting there, uttering stray lines in ninety percent of the episode but rarely being given the opportunity to live up to the character’s potential. Instead, he’s wasted in dead-end stories like this one, which say nothing, entertain no one, and squander Voyager’s most unsung character yet again.

[7.4/10] “Drive” is the type of episode that proves the old adage that the story is in the telling. On paper, this episode should be trash. The character story between Tom and B’Elanna is basically an episode of Home Improvement in space, replete with a tenor of “He cares more about his cars than he does about me!” The main plot is right out of a cornball high school sports movie, full of the usual “thrill of competition” cliches. In theory, this one should be a dud.

But under the pen of Michael Taylor, this one punches above its weight on both fronts. Despite the eye roll-worthy catalyst of Tom being so consumed by a simple shuttle race that B’Elanna fears he’ll never prioritize her in his life, the script manages to humanize both characters through their relationship troubles. This is a sitcom plot, but not a sitcom-level execution. The gentle humanity on display between the two of them rescues what could otherwise be the feeblest kind of hokum.

As broad as the romantic tiff story is, both characters behave like adults. When Tom realizes that in his excitement about the rally race, he forgot about he and B’Elanna’s weekend away, he immediately tells her he’ll call the race off. And when she demurs without making a fuss, recognizing how much this means to him, he promises to make it up to her.
Then, rather than just stewing or smarting over it, despite being rightfully discouraged by the situation, B’Elanna resolves to take an interest in her partner’s hobbies, trying to be a part of his two-person crew to meet him where he lives. And even then, when things get somewhat more dramatic, it focuses on understandable, small-scale reactions from both of them. There’s no over-the-top blowups or cartoonish jealousy; just two mature adults making understandable choices and having adult conversations about their relationship.

That’s honestly refreshing, not just for Voyager but for Star Trek and television as a whole. (Shades of the mature relationship that Riker and Troi showed on The Next Generation!) Even episodes with less cheesy setups often fail on that front, and it’s a good sign of how sometimes just anchoring exaggerated or cliched situations around genuine, grown-up responses can make them feel honest and authentic in a way that takes the edge off.

The crisp, engaging dialogue helps a lot here too. Neelix’s “If you love him, work on the relationship” pitch should come off as another hoary chestnut. But B’Elanna wondering if love isn’t enough, if she and Tom’s lives and priorities just don’t fit together no matter how much they might care about each other, is a realistic and quietly heartbreaking sentiment, expressed with the kind of vulnerability we don’t always see from Lt. Torres.

I feel like I’ve said this a lot lately, but “Drive” is another high-water mark for Roxann Dawson as a performer. Whereas an episode like “Barge of the Dead” requires her to deliver some big emotions, this one calls for her to underplay a lot of scenes, remaining compelling and accessible as a performer despite operating at a lower volume. Dawson nails it, with a number of softer, more somber scenes that nevertheless crack you open by the amount of pathos and quiet heartache she conveys.

Of course, it can't all be quiet introspection and lived-in heart-to-hearts. We also have to...have a big rally race in outer space.
Look, the whole thing admittedly feels kind of silly. It’s telling that a lot of kids' shows go the “We have to get ready for the big race!” premise. (Nearly every animated Star Wars series has done it.) And the show definitely goes broad with it. Janeway getting so into the spirit of the thing that she neglects her duties; Neelix turning into a radio announcer in calling the race, and practically the entire crew crowding into astrometrics to keep up with who’s in first plays like something out of a Disney Channel show. Throw in another corny “Harry crushes on the girl of the week” subplot, and this one could easily fall apart on cheesiness alone.

But Taylor and company tell a sound story with a political intrigue using the race as a backdrop. The concept of sport as a substitute for war and conflict is an old one, and creates tension, meaning, and stakes beyond mere glory for the competition. That concept gives Janeway a diplomatic in and justification for getting so into the race (alongside the chance to give the crew a much-needed break.) And we get just enough of a flavor of Irina the erstwhile ally, Assan the erstwhile rival, and organizer Ambassador O’Zaal to give the competitors personality beyond the colorfully dressed extras flitting about the ship.

That lends itself to the literal-and-figurative twists and turns at play here. The tensions between the different players adds character to the race. When one of the racers has an accident, it can be attributed to friendly gamesmanship, pointed rivalry, or political sabotage. And when it turns out that Irina is a terrorist, wanting to use the event as a chance to violently disrupt this fragile peace out of a disdain for, well, race-mixing -- it’s a satisfying twist that has impact for Harry as a character, meaning from the political themes of the episode, and a practical challenge for Tom and B’Elanna to overcome.

I appreciate the clockwork nature of how the nigh-literal roadblock in the race connects to the more emotional roadblock for Tom and B’Elanna. The show gets there honestly, with an impromptu conversation amongst the couple that inadvertently reveals the fault line between them. B’Elanna idly waxing about how nice it is to see Harry aglow, about how easy his relationship seems, when some people have to work to make it work, is revealing, to us and to Tom. She’s not trying to start a fight or even spill her guts – just speaking elliptically about something on her mind in a way that inadvertently shows her true feelings, in the way real life idle comments do.

What happens next is arguably the cheesiest thing in the episode. Tom essentially hits the parking brake in the middle of the race so they can talk about what’s bothering her. It’s the kind of big dramatic gesture that’s more the province of Hallmark movies than of Star Trek. (Shades of “11:59”.) But in an episode whose central dilemma is a worry from B’Elanna that her beau will never put first, Tom sacrificing the lead in a race that’s taken precedence because what’s going on between them matters that much more to him has power.

The ensuing crisis is a little silly, with the inevitable ticking clock and innocent bystanders who must be saved matched with a marriage proposal. Yet, there’s a nice weaving together of the personal and the plot-heavy there, as Harry’s standoff and the terrorist plot intrude upon the peace of a couple resolving their differences, albeit in a minorly contrived way. And while Tom proposing win the throes of possible destruction is corny, the scene where Tom confesses he didn’t think B’Elanna wanted the “mushy stuff” given her hardened exterior, and B’Elanna shows her vulnerability and even a softness beneath it, provides for a new level of understanding and openness between the newly-minted fiancées that justifies the engagement.

Of course, the day is saved. The race is undisturbed. The lovebirds pop champagne in peace. The happy ending feels almost mandated by the tone, but it is warm and winning nonetheless. A vacation delayed and a relationship in quiet peril becomes a celebration of love renewed.

As much as the sports movie tropes seem goofy in the abstract, “Drive” has fun with them within a sound story structure and gives them just enough weight and spice with the terrorism plot. And as much as the romance story hits some overfamiliar beats, it does so with a kind of authenticity amid the cheese that helps you recognize the human sentiments and connections at play.

The funny thing about Voyager is that after the story of Tom and B’Elanna coming together became one of the show’s early successes, the series kind of forgot about them. It’s not like we wouldn’t get the occasional episode where the show would acknowledge the relationship or some attachment between the two of them would add extra juice to some danger-of-the-week. But we rarely got stories about the relationship between the two of them.

“Drive” is a tonic to that. However hokey its setup may be, it grounds the rocky-but-invigorating partnership between them and remembers that whatever the faults of the characters as constructed, the two actors have chemistry that covers for a lot.
You could be forgiven for reading the synopsis, or even watching the first act of this one, and rolling your eyes at the hokeyness of the premise. I know I did. But at base, despite the interstellar rally and TGIF premarital dispute, “Drive” is, at base, a character story. If there’s one thing Michael Taylor has proven himself skilled at, it’s writing those lived-in character scenes that add depth and humanity to the larger-than-life stories that have purchase in the world of Star Trek. With that approach, “Drive” isn’t an all-timer by any stretch, but it’s better than it has any right to be.

[6.2/10] The idea of a Borg civil war is cool. It is, in many ways, the culmination of the idea introduced in the “Descent” two-parter from The Next Generation, with drones recovering their individuality and starting to break off from the Collective. What it would mean to see that sense of independence take hold, to have drones rebel, and consider how the Queen would respond, is rich territory. I can see why the creative team behind “Unimatrix Zero” wanted to go for it.

Frankly, it’s the most interesting part of the episode. The stand-off between Janeway and the Queen is a particular highlight. Janeway is willing to risk her own life to give the drones a chance. The Queen recognizes Janeway’s respect for life and aims to use it against her, willingly destroying tens of thousands of her own drones in order to weed out the ones in the resistance. And in one of her most badass moments, Janeway basically says “Do it, you’ll wreck your own forces” and stands steely against threats and intimidation. As un-Borg as the whole concept of the Queen is, seeing her and Janeway negotiate in the throes of civil war is captivating.

Likewise, there’s some rousing moments here. Korok the Klingon springing into action to help Voyager in the real world, after assisting Seven and her allies in the dreamland, is a cheery-worthy part of the episode’s climax. Apart from the threats, the queen wanting to use Janeway as a negotiator with the rebels makes for an interesting look at Borg diplomacy. And the scene where the Queen herself steps into Unimatrix Zero, explaining her point of view to a child and looking down on this “primitive” paradise, adds dimension to the antagonist. There is intrigue to this conflict, and once we’re in the throes of it, this duology truly finds a second gear.

But it’s a rocky, often stupid road to get there.

Sigh, I’m not a nitpicker. Characters in nearly every story make choices that are narratively convenient sometimes. Continuity gets snarled. It’s no big deal. All I ask is that you tell me a good story.

But some of “Unimatrix Zero”’s foundational plot points fail to pass the smell test in a way that makes it hard to take anything else here seriously. Case in point, how the hell do Janeway, B’Elanna, and Tuvok make it far enough once assimilated to put the virus in the “central plexus”. (Even more subjective opinion -- that's a silly name.) I can buy that with a “neural suppressant” from the Doctor, they may not be part of the hive mind. But surely, since all the Borg are connected, the drones who assimilate them would immediately alert the Queen, who’d bring them in for interrogation or brainwave extraction or god knows what else. The fact that they can just wander around a cube despite being public enemy number one for the Queen feels cheap.

There’s still some neat moments in it. Tuvok trying to hold onto his identity by remembering the details of his life, only to be ultimately overcome by the Collective’s influence is compelling on a personal level and true to the Borg’s zombie subgenre roots. The fact that once Tuvok is overtaken, the Borg cube knows Voyager’s tactical codes and can wreck them is a nice touch. But even then, that doesn't seem to be a problem when the ship goes back on the attack later in the episode, where it should presumably be a simple matter for the cube to again devastate our heroes.

Hell, to be honest, this is kind of a stupid plan, or at best, an incredibly risky one. The best you can say is that despite her mission, Janeway is willing to sacrifice her life and her crew in order to strike a blow against the Borg that the cybernetic baddies may never recover from. You can also say she’s adhering to the altruism and demand to come to the aid of other lifeforms that are within Starfleet’s values. But geeze, cool set piece or no, neural suppressant or no, having her and two of her top officers saunter around a Borg ship and deliberately be assimilated, knowing that if it wears off the Borg could know everything there is to know about Voyager and obliterate is, generously, pretty cavalier.

Granted, the three of them being off the ship does give us a pretty unique setup back at the ranch. Seeing Chakotay in command with Tom as acting first officer is more compelling than I might have expected given how meh both characters are both of the time. Seeing a unique bridge crew (which includes Neelix for some reason), where Tom has to balance his natural impulse to speak up with the need to be aligned with his acting captain makes for a neat dynamic. The show kind of forgot about it after, uh, the first episode, but originally Tom and Chakotay has a history and a particular kind of back-and-forth between them. It’s interesting to see the show go back there when they’re each in a tough command situation.

It’s far less interesting to see so much of that tough command situation give way to one of the sappiest, soggiest romances Star Trek has ever offered, which is saying something. I get the desire to add some personal stakes and a sense of tragedy to this situation. On paper, Seven having someone she cares about in Unimatrix Zero, recovering her connection to them, and then losing it just as suddenly could be a tragic way to give a character-focused dimension to this mostly abstract refuge.

But in practice, Seven and Axum have negative chemistry, and the script does them no favors. Trying to pack in six years’ worth of romance the audience hasn’t seen would be a trick under the best of circumstances. Cornball slap-slap-kiss dialogue when Seven gets caught in a net, or cliche romantic exchanges overlooking a vista do nothing to make up for the difficulty. Ironically, Seven’s conversation with the Doctor is the sweetest one, with his selfless encouragement and even pride in Seven for opening herself up to matters of the heart proves the best part of the subplot.

Still, at the end of the day, the sappy romance centered on two performers who don’t spark with one another leaves the personal passions and tragedies that are supposed to animate this otherwise plot-focused story feeling lifeless and unconvincing.

Really though, too much of “Unimatrix Zero” is unsatisfying as a whole. There are neat individual pieces like the scene with Seven and the Doctor, or between Janeway and the Queen. But the episode is rife with really chintzy-looking green screen compositing that breaks immersion. The team’s plans seem to work by fiat rather than by any truly clever ruse or smart decisionmaking. And worst of all, despite two episodes’ worth of story set there, I couldn't give less of a damn about Unimatrix Zero itself.

Why should I care? Theoretically, this place is a community, but it’s populated with like three one-note characters and a bunch of extras. Theoretically, Seven’s romance and history there should give it meaning, but both were sloppily imported and retconned. Theoretically, the Borg invading it should be scary, but again, it’s not all clear how the place works or what it’s limits are, to where the audience has any intuitive understanding about how drones in the space can assimilate people, or Seven can introduce a new virus there to break the space down, or what type of threat the attacker and defenders do and don’t pose in a quasi-physical space that isn’t actually real. It’s all just empty fluff.

The central concept of a Borg Civil War is cool. The central concept of a magical space where some Borg are free in their minds sometimes is, if not silly, then at best a premise that's fit for a small scale, committed character exploration rather than an explosive and dramatic rebellion story. As Voyager kicks off its final season, it delivers an installment full of action and high drama, but does very little to give the audience a good reason to care about any of it.

[5.5/10] I’ve said my piece on the Borg. I won’t belabor it here. Suffice it to say, once upon they were terrifying. Steadily, they have been nerfed and softened and made ever more human in their disposition, to where now they’re not an unstoppable enemy; they’re any other villain of the weak.

Not all of that is Voyager’s fault. “Unimatrix Zero” shares many of its flaws with “‘Descent”, The Next Generation’s own disappointing, Borg-centered two-partner. The franchise as a whole has demystified the Borg and made them less and less frightening over time, a tradition that, sadly, continues into the modern era of Trek.

But you know what? I’ve made my piece with that. I can sympathize with the Star Trek writers’ rooms. Penning scripts about nameless, faceless drones must make for challenging and/or boring writing. You have to find new wrinkles, and if I’m frank, new cheats, to try to make them interesting beyond their initial premise. As originally conceived, the Borg were basically a force of nature. That's a tougher well to keep coming back to than making them into, well, characters.

The catch is that just about every novel thing in “Unimatrix Zero” feels unearned. Certain rare drones have a secret dreamscape where they can be individuals while regenerating? Sure, I guess. We’ve never had any hint of that before, but I guess it’s not impossible. But wait, they forget their dream lives when they awaken as drones? Well, that's pretty convenient, but whatever, it’s part of the dream metaphor that's at the center of the episode, so maybe you can give it a pass.

Oh wait, it just so happens that the Borg Queen is zeroing in on the drones who have this unique mutation and she’s just about to invade their dream space to prevent this “disease” of individuality? Well, drama is often built on coincidental timing, so you can forgive it as a conceit of the genre I suppose. But...uh...Janeway just discovered this liminal place too? Well...now we’re getting awfully convenient in terms of how all of this times out. And Voyager just so happens to have the knowhow to ensure that the drones won’t forget their lucid lives when they wake up, and Janeway can access it through a three-way mind meld technique we’ve never heard of and that Tuvok himself has never performed? I mean, come on.

“Unimatrix Zero” stacks implausibility on top of implausibility. I don’t really care about realism in Star Trek. Despite its technobabble, the “science” has always served the plot more so than the other way around. But the episode just introduces all these heretofore unknown concepts and deploys them in a way that feels completely contrived rather than built to organically. This feels off for the Borg, off for Voyager, and off for good storytelling in general.

And that's before you get to all the retcons with Seven, which really irk me. A character having an important secret history that even they don’t know about is such a cheap twist. I get that Seven having a boring, soulless life during her time with the Borg isn’t necessarily exciting to write about, but that's the point! She’d been assimilated! Had her humanity stripped away! Janeway and company helped her bring it back after it had been staunched into dormancy! Making it so that she had this whole hidden, vibrant life that she wasn’t aware of for all that time undermines the significance of her transformation here and now.

Nevermind that importing this giant burst of backstory comes off as cheap. And of course she makes contact with her old friends right when they need her help. Of course she starts finding the ability to dream right when it’s narratively convenient. Of course it turns out she had a longtime relationship with Axum, the ringleader of the dream warriors.

Don’t get me started on that. Why is Seven so upset to discover that she and Axum were an item? If you squint, you can argue that she’s just distressed to discover all this new information about herself, and she finds the one way ratchet of feelings of closeness off-putting. But I don’t even think that's really in the subtext. It feels like a random reaction to create maximum drama for later, even as Seven starts to soften inside the dreamscape.

That is the one thing “Unimatrix Zero” has going for it. The concept of the titular mental refuge, a place where even drones can be free together, is neat, even if I wish the show had done more to establish it. And while still requiring some willing suspension of disbelief in an episode that already asks for a lot of it, the vision of Seven gradually becoming more like “Anika” the longer she spends in the titular space shows us a different side of the franchise’s most notable ex-Borg.

But even then, there are really no rules to Unimatrix Zero. If someone dies there, they just go back to the real world. That wouldn’t matter if the crux of the episode didn’t involve Borg boogeymen invading the area and chasing down dreamers through the same forest setup Trekkies have seen countless times. What are the physical limitations here? What boundaries exist on strength and speed and geography that prevent our heroes from just dreaming up an infinite defense? Why does a drone catching someone in the dream space expose them in the real world? The script doesn’t bother to establish any of this, so everything that happens in the titular realm comes off weightless.

The episode does have a few merits on its ledger. From a pure visual standpoint, watching the Borg Queen put drones’ heads on pikes and dissect them is creepy but striking. Janeway and Chakotay debating whether to help these quasi-rebellious Borg is a nice reflection of their conversation in “Scorpion”. Tuvok and B’Elanna wanting to join in the raid of the Borg cube to protect their captain is noble and heartening. And the hour does have a nice sense of escalation, with the Queen’s incursions getting closer and more severe the longer the proceedings go on.

But that's about it. Even if you can sweep aside the implausibilities, this season finale is largely a desultory bit of the usual Voyager action. Susanna Thompson is oddly serene and subdued as the Borg Queen, lacking the panache of Alice Krige from First Contact. The ship blasting its way around a big wiry cube is old hat by this point of the show. So is evading drones in the green-tinted haunted house the cybernetic baddies reside in. Even the show’s most striking image -- three of Voyager’s senior staff assimilated -- lacks much in the way of impact since you just know it’s going to be undone like clockwork in the next episode without so much as a headache.

The whole thing feels like the writers said “Borg dreams? Borg Civil War? Those sound cool!” and left it at that. Nothing here comes off like a story where the creative team did the work to earn either these new twists on the Borg’s existence or the impact it has on our main characters.

The Borg didn’t have to be this way. There’s ways you could make them scary, sympathetic, even tragic without resorting to flimsy attempts at world-building and beaucoup retcons to try to spackle it all together. Instead, we get Voyager leaning into its most over-the-top, unearned mode, where plenty of things happen, and many of them theoretically come with drama and explosions, but the path to get there was random and contrived, so none of it is satisfying. The best I can say is this -- sometimes dreams themselves make no sense; maybe that's what Voyager’s creative team was going for.

[7.5/10] You can draw a line between “scary’ and “spooky” on screen. Scary is the stuff that legitimately unnerves you. At its height, it can even provoke a fight or flight response from the eeriness or intensity of the presentation. Star Trek can do scary, from the haunted house vibe of “The Tholian Web” from the 1960s series, to Deep Space Nine’s rendition of a slasher flick in “Empok Nor”, to Voyager’s homage to The Shining in “One”.

But “spooky” is a little different. Think Nightmare Before Christmas, where you have the trappings of horror, but the approach is gentler, often a little more outlandish, and and having more fun with its hair-raising atmosphere than any genuine horrorshow. There’s room for both flavors of fright-focused films. And better yet, it’s reason to appreciate an episode like “The Haunting of Deck Twelve”, that aims pretty squarely on the spooky side of the ledger.

Much of that comes from the fact that this episode is, in effect, a campfire story Neelix tells to keep the Borglings occupied during a blackout trip through a funky nebula. I like that frame story. It gives us Neelix as an unreliable narrator, allowing the show to poke fun at the tropes of horror stories in general, but also allows the writers to add a bit of whimsy to the proceedings. Having Icheb as the nitpicker-in-chief, or watching Neelix deflect and improvise at the height of some erstwhile terrifying moment keeps the audience at the some remove from the terror that the kids are.

THe approach works with the general theme of the episode, about how scary stories allow us to confront our fears in a safe place, and corral them through the lens of fiction and imagination that makes them easier to face down. The story-within-the-story is Neelix confronting his own phobia of the J-class nebula lurking outside Voyager’s windows. But the real story is him helping the Borg Babies overcome a fear of the dark or the unknown and unfamiliar that comes when the ship has to go low power to make it through a real life spatial phenomenon.

I like that idea. The creative team brings an incisive view of why we're drawn to those kinds of ghost stories when we’re younger and when you’re older. There is something exhilarating about being frightened, but knowing the danger isn’t real makes it easier to get our arms around it. Giving the nebulous (no pun intended) things we’re afraid of a face and a name and story helps make them easier to reckon with, and eventually overcome. We’re only a few episodes removed from “Muse”, but I don’t mind another episode that is effectively about how good stories don’t just thrill us, but can help and even comfort us.

Plus hey, I like the story itself! The episode is essentially Poltergeist or, true to the title, The Haunting of Hill House, except in space, and makes hay from that blend. Voyager cruising through an unusual nebula, only to be struck by a peculiar brand of EM pulse that causes peculiar things to start happening across the ship is a great way to mix sci-fi and horror tropes for the purposes of Neelix’s yarn. And the appropriately Trekkian twist on the “ghost”, in fact, being a unique electromagnetic life form that is merely lost and thus “possessing” the ship by mistake gives the fright fest an appropriate science fiction sheen.

The story itself has the right twists and sense of progression. What starts as simple replicator malfunctions escalated into unreliable turbolifts and eventually active attacks from overloaded systems. The sense of the “haunting” worsening the longer it goes on adds to the urgency of the situation. And while the episode telegraphs the reveal a bit too heavily, I love the conceit of the EM creature eventually figuring out how to communicate using the ship’s computer audio files. Hearing it threaten and barter with Janeway via Majel Barrett’s computerized monotone adds to the unique atmosphere of the piece relative to normal Voyager outings.

Speaking of atmosphere, that's half the fun of this one! As in “The Tholian Web” there’s a certain charge to seeing the usual set draped in darkness and lit with a spooky edge. While a little cheesy, the depiction of the multicolored nebula with a creepy face in it brings some visual panache to the fore.

Most of all, Director David Livingston and his team do a particularly impressive job here adding to both the fairytale and horrorshow vibes of the tale with the shot selection and cinematography. Unique framings like our seeing Janeway’s ready room from the replicator’s perspective, or unique angles on the bridge that emphasize empty space, or the wild energy of an unbroken shot where Janeway and then Neelix and Tuvok burst into Engineering only for everyone to immediately evacuate helps convey that this is not business by disrupting the show’s usual visual grammar.

Alongside the neat imagery here, the script does well to divide and conquer. On the one hand, you have Janeway and the rest of the crew solving the problem as usual. That means command decisions and urgent strategizing in the throes of perilous circumstances. Kate Mulgrew again goes hard here, coming off startling and convincing in her willingness to bargain with her own life to get the electromagnetic visitor to realize the predicament it’s creating for one and all. This is, again, Janeway at her most steely, sharp, and determined, which is a treat, even if it’s in an imaginary story. (Aren’t they all?)

Likewise, this is a personal story for Neelix. As we saw in “Night”, the Talaxian has a history of being unnerved by what’s outside the porthole. So the prospect of him being freaked by the fluctuations in power and light that afflict the ship, but powering through them to save his dear friend (er, workplace proximity associate) helps us understand where he’s coming from and what he’s overcoming in the name of courage and altruism.

The added layer comes when it becomes clear that Neelix is using himself as a stand-in for the kids. As we saw back in “Investigations”, Neelix himself is something of a big kid. WIth that in mind, he’s a natural avatar for the Borglings, to put themselves in the shoes of someone else afraid of the dark who pushes past their fears to do the right thing. It’s an example of how scary stories aren’t just to spook kids into behaving, but in good and kind hands like Neelix’s, to model certain laudable behavior, and impart lessons through this unique medium.

It’s hard to learn a lesson when you’re terrified. Fear may sharpen the senses in places, but it can also cloud the mind. But when you have a story that's enough to give you goosebumps without chilling your spine, there’s a sweet spot of accessibility. It’s easy for us to imagine ourselves in Neelix’s shoes, or Janeway’s chair, and imagine what we would do if we had to come face-to-face with a fearsome foe like this.

None of it’s real, of course, in-universe or out. But that's the joy of the spooky. It’s fun to dip into these creepy but thrill-filled worlds for an hour or two without having to chatter your teeth for too long. It’s instructive, in a weird way, to see fictional characters combatting larger than life representations of deep-seated fears from afar. And it’s comforting, not only to watch them beat back the frightening threat du jour, but to know that when it’s all over and the credit’s roll, it’s all just another spooky story.

[7.3/10] As someone who writes about writing, I can appreciate an episode like “Muse” where stalwart Star Trek scribe Joe Menosky writes an episode about writing. (Which leaves me, your humble reviewer, writing about writing about writing.) There is an undeniably meta quality to this installment. B’Elanna’s crash-landing on a planet at roughly the developmental stage of Greek drama allows Menosky and company to reimagine Voyager’s adventures through that lens, and in the process, comment on the creative process behind the series itself.

I’m a sucker for the recursive nature of such things. Shows within shows that aly the creative team’s hopes and frustrations bear feel like letting the audience peak behind the curtain. You don’t spend time watching and writing about these shows if you’re not at least a little fascinated by that. So I appreciate how the back and forth between B’Elanna and Kelis, a local playwright, provides Menosky and company a chance to convey their thoughts and experiences about writing for Voyager to the audience in characteristically creative terms.

The thing is, “Muse” works better as a kind of navel-gazing reflection on what it is to translate real life experience into stories fit for public consumption than it works as, well, a story. B’Elanna is never in much danger. The stakes of the escapades down on the planet never feel terribly significant. And for savvy viewers, her and Harry’s rescue seems inevitable. Ironically, an episode about the profundity and pitfalls of storytelling doesn’t necessarily tell the best story.

Still, it’s often entertaining, amusing, and insightful about what it means to tell a story, and that's worth the price of admission on its own.

One of my favorite choices in the episode is the way “Muse” juxtaposes the real life events o Voyager as the crew searches for Harry and B’Elanna, with the dramatizations Kelis has penned for an excited audience. The way a quiet, human moment of sympathy and support between Tuvok and Neelix turns into a dramatic soliloquy in Kelis’ play, or a piercing but professional moment between Janeway and Chakotay on the ship is played up for romantic passion in the theater says something about the distance between reality and fiction.

If you’re lucky to live long enough, you see the way real human moments are often magnified and caricatured for the added sparks of television, or real life events you’ve lived through are manicured and exaggerated for the needs of Hollywood. There’s nothing wrong with interpreting events for greater drama or the needs of a storyteller, but it’s interesting to see a show acknowledge it in such a clever way.

In the same vein, I appreciated B’Elanna and Kelis’ debates about what makes for a good story. There’s an implicit critique of contemporary screenwriting baked in, where the wizened old actor lionizes the days when truth in art was paramount, while Kelis says that modern audiences demand twists and secret identities to keep their interest and excitement. In that, “Muse” is of a piece with the debate over Tuvok’s Maquis mutiny simulation in “Worst Case Scenario”.

Ironically enough, in that episode, B’Elanna argued the story needed more passion, whereas here she argues there’s more of a balm in mercy than there is love (or, if you will, kissing). In the same way, here, you can see writers’ room debates and gripes with expectations of studios and producers realized through disagreements among the characters. The question of what makes good art is an eternal one, and seeing it play out between an engineer who’s lived these adventures and a poet who wants to render them in the dramatic form has a great deal of merit.

Despite her qualms with Kelis’ approach, and her only interest in his work seeming to be to trade stories for parts, her B’Elanna’s arc in “Muse” is going from disdaining the play as an annoyance to delaying her own rescue to give it a better ending. There’s something to that, both in the way her beaming away plays to the “deus ex machina” roots of the Greek drama, and in the suggestion that even for those doubters, art can move and change you.

That's the real message behind the episode -- art has power. Kelis does not just write for the hell of it, or even to earn his daily bread. He writes because he thinks his plays can change the world for the better. He wants to amuse his patron enough that the man keeps providing lucre for his hungry actors, but also to avert war, disaster, and death. He offers B’Elanna an interesting parable about how their theater used to be a temple with a sacrificial altar. Until the bloodletting gave way to a no less potent catharsis through artistic recreation.

Menosky and company offer a strong idea there. The transporting quality of shows like voyager allow us to play out things like war, tragedy, and sacrifice, without the real life stakes. As Robert Ebert famously described them, movies are empathy machines. They help us to experience these things vicariously without anyone needing to sully their hands, let alone bloody them.

So there is power when Kelis’ patron witnesses the play’s climactic final scene, where Janeway could go in for the kill on the Borg queen, and instead shows her mercy in the name of a sustainable peace in lieu of perpetual war. By importing what’s real from B’Elanna’s experiences, with her help, Kelis reaches his benefactor, with the implication that turning the heart of the ruler will spare his players, and his audience, from death and destruction.

It is aspirational, in the way that Star Trek often is, but also comes with a certain truth. It’s rarely that clean or that simple, but art does affect us, sometimes in ways we don’t know until we go revisit shows like Voyager that we watched as children and recognize the small but indelible marks it left on us.

“Muse” is self-indulgent or silly in some places. While the Greek drama homages are novel, sometimes the presentation of Star Trek hijinks through that lens is a little too cute by half. The rescue story is fairly perfunctory. And the jealous actress girlfriend plotline is pretty feeble as a fly in the ointment for B’Elanna and Kelis.

Nevertheless, there is something inspiring about a longtime Star Trek writer, using an episode of the show, to speak about hopes of making the world a better place through their art. The meta-ness of the episode is fun, but with the benefit of hindsight, we can also see the way that the aspirations of Joe Menosky and so many others were realized in the years that followed.

In 2015, astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti shared a quote from Janeway and a photo of herself on the International Space Station in a Voyager-style uniform. Real life political leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams have spoken publicly about what an inspiration seeing a female captain on this series was for them. And as someone who grew up mainlining 1990s Trek, it’s striking to me now as I revisit it how much of my worldview, my hopes, my ethics, have been influenced by these fictional heroes who nevertheless give us a glimpse of what humanity could, and still can, be.

It’s too much to ask of a humble television show, or even a venerable decades-old franchise, to save the Earth from war and spare us from destruction. But in the right hands, it can still move our hearts, and help us to envision a better world. “Muse” is about that vision, the work and thought and hope that goes into it. And even if I don’t love every story, I still love the vision.

[7.7/10] Unique daddy issues have been a surprisingly durable catalyst for storytelling within Star Trek. From Spock and Sarek, to Data and Noonien Soong, to Odo and Mora Pol, the franchise has gotten a ton of mileage out of the non-human members of the cast not only reckoning with their identities in relation to their crewmates, but in the men who raised them.

“Life Line” is a solid entry in that unofficial pantheon. The Doctor travels to the Alpha Quadrant, much as he did “Message in a Bottle”, with a mission to help cure his creator. Dr. Lewis Zimmerman is terminally ill, and it’s made him grouchy and irritable. Doc thinks he has a cure, a combination of Vidiian research and Borg regeneration techniques, and wants to honor the man who, in a sense, gave him life, by trying to return the favor.

That's a strong motivation for The Doctor/ The show spends a scene going over the morality and practicality of using one of those new monthly data exchanges between Voyager and Starfleet to send the EMH across the stars, which I appreciate. This is asking a lot of a crew that's been isolated from their homes for years. Doc acknowledges the sacrifice he’s asking for, but also argues that in some ways, Dr. Zimmerman is the reason he’s been able to protect all their lives, so that they, and he, owe it to the EMH’s creator to help save his.

There’s something compelling about that idea, both from a moral standpoint and from a personal one. This isn’t just doing right by a man who’s helped Voyager immensely even if he’s only faintly aware of them. (It’s amusing and telling when Dr. Z is dismissive of the Pathfinder project and refers to the ship as the “Pioneer”.) It’s also the Doctor aiming to pay back the man who created him, who made all of his growth and evolution possible. That's understandable, for a hologram aiming to help the closest thing he has to a father, and also relatable, for those with the impulse to look after our parents the way that they once looked after us.

Of course, it isn't so simple. This is, ultimately, a story about father and son reconciling despite a literal and figurative distance between them. For that to mean something, there has to be struggle, disagreement, things that make reconciliation and pride not so simple. That's relatable to, in the ways that kind gestures to loved ones aren’t always well-received, nor do they always evoke the sense of gratitude or pride we hope for.

For a story centered on something as fantastical as a hologram traveling lightyears to use cybernetic technology to heal his creator, there’s something very real about the complicated dynamic between the EMH and Dr. Zimmerman, in the way that real parent-child relationships are often complicated. It’s the heart of “Life Line”, and the thing that makes this story worthwhile.

There’s a few elements that keep it from reaching greatness, though. One, I’m sorry to say, is that Robert Picardo overdoes it a little. I’m loath to gripe too much, because he’s long been one of the best actors in the show. But for an episode that delves into as much intense psychological material as this one, Picardo’s delivery aims for the broad.

Some of that is expected. Doc can often be a more comical character, and the grouchy old scientist can be an entertaining trope. I don’t mind the episode or the actors leaning a little into the camp when, say, Zimmerman discovers that his shapely masseuse turns out to be Doc in disguise. But even for the more personal moments, like Counselor Troi trying to help them reconcile their differences, there’s a big, showy quality to the performances that detracts from what “Life Line” means to accomplish.

Troi is part of the other big issue here -- a lot of this feels like fanservice. Doc meeting his creator in the Alpha Quadrant, or interacting with Lt. Barclay, or getting help from Counselor Troi could each be worthwhile and valid approaches to an episode. Heck, doing two of them could probably pass muster without feeling cheesy. But something about doing all three at once feels like a bridge too far. The focus starts to drift from the core relationship at the center of the episode, and starts to devolve into “Hey, look at the character you already know doing stuff!” territory.

Still, when the episode cuts through the crap and gets down to the heart of that relationship, “Life Line” still soars. Despite the fact that Dr. Zimmerman seems to have aged a lot in a short amount of time (which can be handwaved due to his illness), I like the fact that he’s not exactly the inspiring, admirable visionary Doc imagined.

We know from the appearance of Dr. Z’s holographic equivalent in “The Swarm” and the real thing’s visit to Deep Space Nine in “Doctor Bashir, I Presume?” that the man can be prickly, pompous, something of a horndog, and unsentimental about his own holograms. So there’s not just power, but consistency, when the EMH discovers that the idealized father figure he imagined turns out to be kind of a jerk, one whose testiness is only heightened by his sickness.

Granted, the episode gets a little sitcom-y in dramatizing that. Something about Zimmerman’s over-the-top perturbations and the Doctor’s increasingly ridiculous methods to try to scan his quasi-papa get fairly cartoony. For an installment that seems to want us to take this family tiff seriously, it does go for the cheap seats in places.

But I appreciate the kernel of truth at the center of this. The Doctor is hoping to elicit pride from his creator. He doesn't just want to cure D.r Zimmerman; he wants to show his surrogate dad how much he’s grown, how much he’s accomplished, how much he’s the worthy fruit of Dr. Z’s labors. To then risk life and limb, only to find that the man who designed and built you treats you like an out-of-date appliance would be devastating, even if the episode doesn’t necessarily squeeze all the juice from that orange in favor of broad comic relief. I appreciate the exploration anyway.

I also appreciate the true reason behind Dr. Z’s disdain. It’s not that he doesn’t care about his creations; it’s that he put his heart and soul and, most importantly, self into the EMH Mark I, and Starfleet rejected it. When he looks at The Doctor, he doesn't just see his great failure; he sees a personal rejection. The flaws in his creation -- the poor bedside manner and other personal limitations -- are the same limitations of the man who made them, who’s created more friends than he’s made and seen his life’s work reduced to waste-scrubbers.

Zimmerman is a real asshole in this one, to the Doctor especially. But we also see enough soft spots -- for his holographic assistant, Haley, and for Barclay -- that we know he’s not a monster. And we also come to understand what’s made him bitter, hopeless, even resentful of his own attempt at greatness. There’s real meat and strong psychology here, and I wish we spent more time on that and less time on outsized gesticulations and wacky hijinks.

Still, I like the solution here. When Doc malfunctions, Dr. Z himself must step in to fix him, and a closeness and mutual understanding forms. It’s a little simple, to be sure, but it’s also true to life. There’s some bad parents out there, to be sure, but there’s also some who step up when their child is in distress or even danger. Dr. Zimmerman doing the same when Doc is in peril and needs fixing, and opening up to his surrogate son about his own struggles, comes with the right kind of catharsis.

The ending is a bit tidy. The exchange convincing Zimmerman to let the Doctor administer his treatment is a little quick. And the reveal that Barclay, Troi, and Haley deliberately schemed to mess up the Doctor’s program so that Dr. Z would have to fix him again feels like the Star Trek equivalent of a plot point from Full House.

But at heart, there’s a strong breakthrough here. Zimmerman thinks he’s failed, that the creation forged not just in his likeness but in his personality was rent asunder because of his personal and professional flaws. And yet, in the presence of his new liefrom, the model that started his downfall, stands the realization that against all odds, here stands his greatest success. As all parents hope for, his child has done a little better, and the worthy pieces of himself he worries will be lost to the world when he perishes live on in a kind and decent soul who makes the best of them. The Doctor alone is proof of the value of Dr. Zimmerman’s work, and in a way, of the man himself.

That is a powerful iea. Star Trek traffics in those with great success time and again when it comes to fathers and sons. Realizing them through the abstraction of science fiction, we can get at those personal, near-universal ideas in unexpected, yet piercing ways. With a final photo together, parent and child are reunited, not just physically but emotionally, giving both what they need. That's an ending offered on television more often than in real life, but one that remains heartening, and timeless, nonetheless.

[7.7/10] Here’s my dirty little secret -- I think Star Trek as a franchise has far fewer hits than misses when it comes to straight comedy. Trek humor tends to go in one of two directions: witty asides in the midst of otherwise dramatic situations or goofy, sitcom-esque outings that take up the full episode. The former tend to be fun, and the latter tend to be cheesy and aimed at the cheap seats.

“Live Fast and Prosper” is the rare episode that threads the needle perfectly. It’s a little silly. What story about a pack of grifters pretending to be our heroes in order to swindle people wouldn’t be? But it also has just enough intrigue, just enough fun, and just enough wry diversion to be a real winner of a humorous Star Trek outing.

There’s three big elements that make the episode work in the humor department. One is the simple glee of seeing alien con artists Dala, Mobar, and Zar pretend to be Janeway, Tuvok, and Chakotay respectively. Some of it’s just the charm of the guest performers, who do a good job of inhabiting both their roles and their roles-within-their-roles. But there’s also something just plain rib-tickling about seeing a pack of grifters twist the high-minded presentation of Janeway and company into a front for a scam. Using altruism, protocol, and the Federation as a smokescreen for wealth extraction is a fun way to turn the usual Starfleet idealism on its ear.

There’s also something lowkey hilarious about watching the real Janeway have to go around cleaning up these messes. Going into each new system, only to find the locals upset that you’ve cheated them, and having to explain “No, I’m not that Janeway. No we’re not backing up the people who swindled you” puts the Captain in a polite but “boy am I tired of having to suffer fools” mode that brings a more wry type of comedy to the fore. The sort mild exasperation she has at having to trudge through someone else’s mudge, tracked onto the carpet in her name, tickles my funny bone as well.

And last but not least, god help me, Neelix and Tom worrying that they’ve lost their savvy is a surprisingly amusing and endearing note for the onetime rivals to play. Tom was an incarcerated bad boy. Neelix was a wheeler-and-dealer himself. The concern that they’ve both been so softened by six years about the compassionate confines of Voyager that they were easy prey for fake clerics with a sob story about orphans is a hoot. The patter between them is worth a laugh on its own, and the duo getting outsmarted by The Doctor at the ol’ shell game is the demoralizing icing on the cake.

Throw it all together, and you have the rare outing that will keep you smiling the whole way through. “Live Fast and Prosper” manages its tone to perfection, to where things are just serious enough to have stakes for both the reputation of the ship and for the self-esteem of the character, but light enough that the proceedings remain an enjoyable ride the whole way through. And hey, after multiple episodes where Voyager had a reputation for being a “ship of death”, it’s fun to see all contingents here have to deal with a reputation for being a ship of dirty tricks.

Still, beyond the pure comedy of it, “Live Fast and Prosper” makes for a nice cat and mouse game before the real Voyager crew and the fake one. You have the moves and countermoves. Janeway negotiates with some hoodwinked aliens to get info on her impostors’ whereabouts. The grift gang gets the hell out of dodge before they’re caught. The sense of the two groups circling one another adds a sense of anticipation to the whole thing.

And briefly, the episode even gets sincere (more or less). We never get a “This was the plan the whole time” confession from the Voyager faithful, but you get the sense that Janeway and company’s plan here is similar to the one from “Counterpoint”. If Dala wanted to take the Captain’s offer to make restitution and be free to go, you get the sense that Janeway would have honored it. But Janeway’s not naive enough to expect that, so she, and her confederates, have a back-up plan.

But not before Neelix makes a seemingly sincere entreaty. Who knows, maybe it was all part of their counter-ploy. But you buy Neelix’s pitch to Dala. He too was a smuggler and scoundrel of sorts once. He too thought only of himself and what he could get out of the deal. But over time, he not only learned how to exist within a community that depended on trust and loyalty over self-interest, but also how rewarding and fulfilling it can be. Maybe he’s just trying to present himself as another sucker to Dala so she’ll take the bait and steal the shuttle, but at a minimum, their scene together plays like Neelix using the truth to fuel his deception.

Whether or not his intentions are pure, Neelix isn’t wrong about his journey on Voyager, or the ideals that are valued there, or the kindness and belief in others’ ability to reach those ideals that convinces Kathryn Janeway to take in Maquis rebels, Talaxian traders, Ocampan naifs, Borg refugees and more.

Of course, apart from those aspirations, there is something downright fun about seeing the “let’s scam the scammers” game play out. I’ll admit, writer Robin Burger got me too! When Dala blasts her way out of the brig and starts making her way to the Flyer despite Neelix alerting security, my first thought was, “Why the hell didn’t they just trap her in a force field along the way?” I chalked it up to lazy writing.

Joke’s on me! I love the idea that Janeway and company wanted her to steal the shuttle, with Tom and the EMH embedded inside it, so they could locate her comrades and her stash. The mix of Tom as a stealthy sotaway, and Doc giving Dala a taste of her own medicine by impersonating her for once shows that even those who've been flim-flammed by these scam artists still have a few tricks up their sleeve. The reveals are fun, the return of all the stolen goods is satisfying, and Tom and Neelix getting their sly groove back adds a nice character note to all these shenanigans.

Even then, my favorite part of the finish may be pure comedy. I can't tell you how much I laughed at Mobar getting more and more into character as Tuvok. His nearly screwing up the deal in the opener from playing things too straight, to suggesting that they turn themselves in given how merciful the Federation is, to looking on in quiet awe when he’s face-to-face with the real Tuvok, Mobar’s blurring the lines of his fake persona and his real life is the comic gift that keeps on giving.

What more can you ask for? I don’t know if I’d call season 6 Voyager’s darkest season ever. It has its share of grim outings, from the standoff with the Equinox to the PTSD flashbacks of “Memorial” to multiple prodigal daughters who can't quite return home . But it also has a goofy Irish holo-haven, an episode where the Doctor becomes a famous opera singer, and not for nothing, the crew’s clearest contact with the Alpha Quadrant yet.

Still, an outing like “Live Fast and Prosper” -- one that's neither so broad and goofy that it provokes eyerolls, nor so stark and serious that it’s no fun -- is a rare thing in the Star Trek universe. These episodes are precious, even if you have to beg, borrow, and steal to get them.