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2005-06-08 Entry: "Some Voyager (Season 3)"

Trying to catch up, but I've been feeling pretty run down all week, so it's hard enough cataloguing what I watched, let alone writing synopses of it all... but Wednesday saw me picking Voyager back up again, and we're mired in the middle of season 3.

We start with "False Profits" and we pick up a thread from a Next Generation episode where two Ferengi get sucked through the Barzan Wormhole. Unfortunately they end up in the Delta Quadrant and set themselves up as gods on a backwards planet. Of course, Voyager decides to blunder in to the middle and put a stop to their exploitation, and possibly open the wormhole long enough to get home. A comedy episode not helped by Neelix having to play the Grand Proxy...

"Remember" sees a telepathic species on board Voyager to help out with something, but while they're there, B'Elanna starts having vivid dreams of a political upheaval on a planet and her and her boyfriend's involvement in it. Not the greatest episode...

"Sacred Ground" continues the mediocre episodes, when Kes gets zapped by some forcefield, and Janeway has to go through some silly religious ritual to find out how to save her.

Fortunately, the series picks up a little in the first of a two-parter, "Future's End Pt 1" when a timeship from the 29th Century appears and tries to destroy Voyager for a disaster that they haven't yet caused. Fighting back they manage to send the timeship, and themselves, to 20th Century Earth, where they have to stop a crazy man by the name of Starling from using the timeship.

Thursday continues with more Voyager: "Future's End Pt 2" picks up where part 1 left off, with Starling having probed the Voyager database and knowing a great deal about them, and having captured the Doctor (although he does get a mobile emitter out of this, so he can finally venture off the holodeck and out of Sickbay).

"Warlord" is a Kes episode. She gets possessed by the spirit of an evil warlord, who transfers from his previous host when that one dies. Unfortunately for him, Kes' telepathic abilities make keeping control a difficult proposition. It's a reasonably good episode, that allows Jennifer Lien to play against type... although she's not entirely convincing at it...

"The Q And The Grey" is a fun episode, when Q turns up wanting Janeway to bear his child. It seems Quinn's suicide in Death Wish has led to some unfortunate consequences and now the Continuum are having a Civil War over whether the Q should be allowed to die or not. Q has decided that having a child would be the best way to shake the Continuum out of its malaise... but his ex-partner has something to say about the matter.

"Macrocosm" is a really, really dumb episode - Neelix (nuff said) and Janeway return to the ship after some diplomatic mission to find everyone unconscious or missing, and giant creatures roaming the corridors... it seems the ship has been taken over by a macro-virus, which is using the crew to reproduce. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb!

I finished the evening with "That's Carry On" - the next film in the Carry On boxset - but it's a clip show... and although it's nice to see a few shots from the early films that aren't in this set, the clips aren't all that funny...

On Friday he watched more Voyager... yes, it dragged on a bit...

"Fair Trade" sees Neelix being irritating. Then the ship encounters the Necrid Expanse, which sounds suitably ominous, so hopefully Neelix will shut up now! Nope, it is a Neelix episode. He meets an old criminal friend, helps him with a trade, and then tries to cover it up... and he's constantly annoying while doing it.

"Alter Ego" sees Harry falling in love with a holodeck character called Morena, and asking Tuvok to help him eliminate his feelings... and isn't this a recycled TNG script with Commander Riker? 11001001?

"Coda" isn't much better - Janeway gets stuck in a temporal loop with Chakotay. Or does she? Did she really die on the planet they crashed on? And who's this guy claiming to be her father (wasn't he one of the ones infected by the parasite in the TNG episode Infection?)? Ah, she's not really dead, she's being talked to by an alien who wants to eat her... while the crew frantically try to save her on the planet. Dumb...

"Blood Fever" ends well - we've got a destroyed colony, and they find the remains of one of those who destroyed it... hold it... this is impossible... there wouldn't be remains... okay, ignoring the continuity error, they find a Borg skeleton. But there's a lot else to like in this episode - a Vulcan engineer starts to undergo his first Pon Farr, and decides to bond with B'Elanna. Unfortunately he doesn't realise he's done it, and she starts getting violent and erratic (and desperate to mate with Paris apparently).

"Unity" picks up the Borg theme introduced in the previous episode when Chakotay crashes on a planet after following a Federation distress signal. After his random compatriot gets killed in the firefight on arrival, he's saved and nursed back to health by a love interest... oh, okay, a human woman who wants to help him... but the only way to save him is to hook him up to their collective - they used to be Borg drones but were freed when the nearby cube was disabled and now they want Voyager's help to reactivate the collective amongst the people on the planet to prevent the continuing fueding.

"Darkling" is a pretty silly Doctor episode, but there's some good hints of Kes' future here. The Doctor has decided to improve his programming by adding personality subroutines from famous people throughout history. Unfortunately, these traits have a bad effect on him when their interactions cause him to manifest an evil alter-ego that is determined to stop Kes from leaving with some explorer and to escape Voyager with her.