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Kathryn Janeway - Kate Mulgrew Chakotay - Robert Beltran Tom Paris - Robert Duncan McNiell Neelix - Ethan Phillips Seven Of Nine - Jeri Ryan Tuvok - Tim Russ B'Elanna Torres - Roxann Biggs Dawson Harry Kim - Garrett Wang The Doctor - Robert Picardo 
OTHER SEASONS Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 5 Season 6 Season 7 OTHER STAR TREK SHOWS Star Trek The Next Generation Deep Space Nine Enterprise OTHER TREKS THROUGH SPACE Babylon 5 The new Battlestar Galactica 
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Scorpion - Part 2With alien species 8472 ravaging through Borg space destroying everything in its path, an alliance is forged between Voyager and the Borg. Janeway is caught in an explosion as the Borg sacrifice themselves for Voyager and Chakotay takes over, breaking the alliance agreement. The Borg take drastic steps, and Chakotay fights back, learning in the process that the Borg started the war with the aliens themselves. When Janeway recovers, she and Chakotay have to find a way to put aside their differences to overcome both the Borg and Species 8472. There's a lot of plot to get through in this opening episode of Season 4, which means that the episode is played at a breathless pace, but not so fast that there isn't time for character moments (we won't call them development because they're not that significant). The rift between Chakotay and Janeway opens and closes in double quick time and the speed with which the crew come up with the ultimate weapon to save the day is utterly ridiculous. Spreading this story over a couple of more episodes would have been better than rushing through it in such an unseemly manner. Still, it's way better than anything in seasons 1 & 2 and a lot of Season 3, so this new season is off to good start. TopThe GiftSeven of Nine, the Borg representative who helped and hindered the Voyager through Scorpion-Part2 is now stranded on the ship and cut off from the Collective. As her human side re-emerges from under the Borg implants, she struggles to find a sense of identity. Meanwhile, Kes is also going through changes that could threaten the ship. Well now isn't that just typical? The moment that Kes becomes the most interesting and fun character on the series she gets kicked off it to go in search of some unformed, vague destiny somewhere thanks to her increasing psychic abilities. Jeri Ryan (see also later episode of DARK SKIES comes in to take her place as the improbably proportioned Borg Seven of Nine. That awesome physique is showcased in an unnecessarily tight Borg costume followed by an unnecessarily tight jumpsuit. It's a nice idea juxtaposing Seven of Nine's struggle with becoming more human with Kes's turning into something alien even to herself, but there is more talking that action and it does drag a bit in places. TopDay of HonorIt's the Klingon Day of Honor in which a warrior puts their year's achievement up against the yardstick of honour to see if they have been worthy. It's also B'Elanna's worst day ever. Not only is she forced to dump the warp core, but the shuttle she's in explodes and ion interference leaves her stranded with Tom Paris with only a half hour of air. It's hard to know what to make of this episode as the narrative seems to be an excuse to give B'Elanna more and more screwups to fail to deal with. Initially that's fine, but it gets a bit ridiculous by the time that she and Tom are floating about expressing undying love (just before dying, of course). This is the episode, however, where we finally get to see a warp core ejected in detail and aliens with just about the worst fitting masks on the show. Poor Jeri Ryan, on the other hand, is stitched into a ridiculous lycra jumpsuit that makes the most of her assets, but makes no sense at all in terms of character or story. TopNemesisChakotay is shot down over a strange planet and finds himself caught up in a war. The enemy are evil monsters, ugly beasts who torture, maim and kill the old and children equally without abandon. His old Maquis leanings come out and he takes up arms to help the side of good and right. On Voyager, however, they hold a different view of the conflict. The set up to the war here is done well enough with the strange use of language and characters that are atually established before being killed in order to make Chakotay feel enraged and all warlike. It never rings true, however, so when the twist ending is revealed it's not that much of a twist. TopRevulsionA cry for help from a stranded hologram takes the Doctor and B'Elanna onto his ship only to find out that he is a homicidal maniac likely to kill them both at any moment. Harry Kim is in just as much danger working with Seven of Nine as he develops a crush on her and she offers him 'copulation'. Since we know that the hologram is a psycho killer right from the start (and no attempt is made to hide the fact) there is supposed a certain amount of tension waiting for him to erupt, but he's such an obvious threat that the audience is left wondering why B'Elanna doesn't just switch him off a whole lot sooner. Harry Kim's time spent with Seven isn't a great deal better, but does redeem itself with the scene in which she coolly lays out for him the fact that he is attracted to her and that she is willing to explore her sexuality with him if he will just take off his clothes. Now there's an offer he'll come to regret not taking. TopThe RavenSeven of Nine suffers a series of hallucinations that lead her to believe that she has been contacted by the Borg through a homing signal that will take her to a Borg cube and reunite her with the Collective. This causes her Borg attributes to reactivate and she steals a shuttle to head into alien territory. Whilst the crew of the Voyager struggle to bring her back into the fold, they come under attack from the aliens whose territory has been violated. Coming face to face with your past is always a traumatic experience, but when it's a past that you never knew you had it's even worse. Jeri Ryan does the soulless Borg routine better than she does the reawakening human routine, so it's quite nice to see her strutting through the ship's security personnel like they weren't even there. The eventual source of the signal and the effect that it has on her is underwhelming (it really could have been a Borg ship) and the lengths to which Janeway goes to gain just a couple of months headway on their decades long journey home never seem worth it. TopScientific MethodThe crew start to behave in erratic fashion and nobody seems immune. When some start to show dangerous side effects, the Doctor discovers that their DNA is being manipulated on a subatomic level by alien beings as experiments. Seven of Nine is the only person on the ship who can see the aliens and efforts to make them stop prove ineffective, leaving Janeway no alternative but to take drastic action. We've been here before, many times. Invisible aliens, phase shifts, experimentation. It's all too familiar to anyone who has watched other shows in the franchise. That said, it plays out well enough and makes a solid episode. Seeing Janeway falling apart is quite shocking, but the audience is left wondering why the aliens didn't pick up Seven's attempts to stop them earlier since the rest of the crew seemed to be under almost continuous scrutiny. Tuvok also seemed unaffected and yet Seven never attempted to bring him on the secret. TopYear of Hell - Part 1The Voyager encounters a race of beings that warn them to stay out of an area of space that they claim, but since the ship is small and weak, they ignore the message. A temporal shockwave changes space around them and suddenly the alien ship is huge and powerful. For the next few months, Voyager fights for its life, coming apart at the seams slowly. Tuvok is blinded, B'Elanna injured, Tom and Chakotay kidnapped. Finally Captain Janeway is forced to send the crew out in the escape pods. Briefly mentioned in The Gift, this is a story that sets about destroying the ship and crew, knowing full well that because it is a temporal story the reset button can be hit at the end and all will return to the way that it was. Even so, seeing the ship outnumbered, outgunned and generally being ripped to shreds does have its interesting moments and the idea of using a time weapon to bring back a dead empire is, at least, a neat one. TopYear of Hell - Part 2On board the timeship, Chakotay comes to understand, if not appreciate, what the ship's captain is trying to do by altering the time line to wipe out entire races. Tom Paris doesn't care, he just wants to stop it. On a badly damaged Voyager, Captain Janeway prepares a small fleet of allies to go up against the time ship in one final, desperate battle. As expected, the big reset button was pressed at the end of the story to return everything to the way it was at the start, well even before the start. The destination was never in doubt, but was the journey worth it? Chakotay and Paris's story aboard the time ship is taken straight from Jules Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA with Chakotay as the Arronax character, interested and finally beguiled by his host and Paris in the Ned Land role wanting only to get free and destroy his captor. Borrowing from such a quality source at least gives the villain a bit more depth than at first appearance. The story on Voyager, though, is probably the more interesting. As the ship continues to disintegrate, the remaining crew become more fragmented until finally they are ordered off the ship and Janeway makes a stand alone, going down with her ship. Her speech to Tuvok as to why the ship is more than just a collection of power couplings and relays could be one the show's finest moments. Of course, with history reset, she never said it. TopRandom ThoughtsVoyager visits a planet of telepaths where crime has been almost completely eradicated. A sudden attack, however, leads back to an errant thought of violence on the part of B'Elanna Torres and she is convicted of a thought crime. Captain Janeway refuses to accept the verdict and Tuvok's investigation uncovers a disturbing undercurrent to the apparently idyllic society. People love danger, risk and even violence. Take that away from them and they will find ways of getting it back. That's the depressing conclusion of this story, a conclusion that is probably accurate and certainly a comment on current drug problems. The drug in question is violence and whilst the analogy is blunt, it doesn't get rammed home too hard and upset the balance of the story, which is mainly about the uncovering of the mystery. TopConcerning FlightSmall ships attack Voyager and steal many advanced components, including the ship's main computer core. Limping along behind, they locate their property, but in order to get it back they are going to have to go undercover, a task that is made both easier and more difficult by the fact that Janeway's holographic representation of Leonardo da Vinci is working for the thief. Don't give up on dreams just because others don't share them or ridicule your failures. If you don't get the moral of the story early on then you won't have to worry because it is hammered home long and hard throughout this initially entertaining story that becomes ridiculous through the presence of Leonardo da Vinci. It is impossible to take things seriously and when Janeway takes to the air in the maestro's flying machine it is just to silly for words. TopMortal CoilNeelix is killed in a shuttlecraft accident, but Seven of Nine's technological knowhow brings him back. Since he was dead for such a long time, he comes to realise that all of his beliefs about the afterlife, beliefs that underpinned the whole meaning of his life, were wrong. And when all life has no meaning then what is the point of living at all? This episode looks at one character in detail and gives him some weighty subjects to ponder. It's character drama and we're all for that, but it's character drama concerning one of the least interesting characters in the crew. It also doesn't go deep enough to make Neelix less two-dimensional. It ought to be better. It isn't. TopWaking MomentsThe crew suffer from nightmares, but some of them don't wake up. All of the dreams contain an alien and it becomes clear that the dreams are being used to attack the crew. Chakotay attempts to control his dream in order to discover what the aliens want, only to find that what they want is to destroy the ship. What starts off intriguingly as the mismatched dreams of the crew soon descends into a simple story of alien attack through dreams. It is kept bubbling along, though, by the playing around with perceptions of what is real and what is dream state. It's not one of the classics, but it's fun enough and the dream that ensign Kim has about the Borg threat that 'Resistance is futile' is a great moment. TopMessage in a BottleThe Voyager finds an array of communications systems stretching all the way back to the Alpha Quadrant where a deep space Federation ship is in range. The only signal that they can get through, however, is the holographic signal of the Doctor. When he arrives on the Starfleet vessel, however, he finds that the Romulans are in charge. The Doctor as commando? This story has been done before with various crew members having to save the day when all the others have been dealt with, so it's nothing new at all, but it is fun and well-played by Robert Picardo, especially when he comes into contact with his replacement holographic doctor. TopHuntersMessages coming from Starfleet through the alien communications array gets the crew excited. It also excites the aliens whose communications are being used to the point where they take Tuvok and Seven of Nine prisoner. Letters from home don't prove to be amazingly exciting subjects for this episode. Janeway discovers that she is a free agent again after her fiance writes that he's married now, Tom tries to make peace with his father through an unfinished letter and Chakotay learns that the Cardassians have wiped out the Maquis. The arrival of the aliens on the scene isn't enough to save things. TopPreyThe Voyager encounters a damaged ship containing a survivor of the Hirogen race, the hunters that have been causing so much trouble of late. The hunters' prey turns out to be a member of Species 8472 and Captain Janeway finds herself caught in conflict between hunter, prey and Seven of Nine. This is a pleasantly densely plotted story that has more levels than the usual. There is the hunter/prey dynamic of Hirogen's mission, the attack of Species 8472 and Janeway's surprising plans for it, the conflict with Seven of Nine and the attack by supporting Hirogen ships. The blending of action and character is nicely balanced and provides satisfaction on both counts. This is one of Season 4's better episodes and both the Hirogens and Species 8472 are becoming more interesting alien races. TopRetrospectVoyager is trading for enhanced weaponry when Seven of Nine starts acting strangely. The Doctor discovers repressed memories and tries to bring them out, learning that the trader they are bargaining with assaulted Seven and stole Borg technology from her body. He proclaims innocence, but the investigations show otherwise. Rape is an ugly crime and one of the most difficult to prove. It often comes down to one word against another. The subject has been treated before in other STAR TREK franchises and usually with better results than here. The episode isn't bad, it's actually quite a solid one, but it focusses on the crime and the investigation rather than on the effects on Seven. It even abandons the subject altogether towards the end to become a story about the harrassment of a potentially innocent man, a shift that undermines its intentions. TopThe Killing Game - Part OneThe Hirogen have taken over Voyager and are using the holodeck to create new hunting grounds and prey as an alternative to their homeless existence. One of their number is attempting to weld a society out of the shiftless hunters, but in order to do so he is subjecting the crew to injury after injury in various scenarios. During World War 2, however, Ensign Kim and the Doctor begin to fight back. There's no explanation as to how the Hirogen took over Voyager, or even what they are up to at first, so thiings are a little disorientating at first. Later, however, it all becomes clear and turns into a rather poor pastiche of World War 2 cliches that look like a bad episode of 'Allo, Allo. TopThe Killing Game - Part TwoWith the holodeck programme breaking down, full scale war has broken out between the Hirogen Nazis and the Starfleet allies. Neither side is going to get out of it without serious casualties unless Janeway can find a way to broker a peace deal. No WWII cliche is left unturned as this silly story continues, but at least the Hirogen plan turns out to have some real ideas behind it that make them more three-dimensional. It doesn't make up for the ludicrous scene with a holographic nazi giving a stirring speech about German perfection to rally a conflicted Hirogen's loyalties back to the hunt that is the low point and just plain stupid. TopVis A VisTom Paris is finding the confines of both the ship and his relationship with B'Elanna a strain, so when a happy go lucky alien arrives test piloting and advanced starship, he is jealous of the man's freedom. He is less jealous when the alien hijacks his body and takes over his role on the ship, a role that he messes up very quickly. Aliens bodyswapping into starfleet crew bodies and trying to pass themselves off as the officer in question? Not exactly the most original storyline and made even more banal by a script that wallows in Tom Paris's relationship issues - issues that have come out of nowhere and will no doubt disappear back into nowhere before the next episode. There was a potentially more interesting story in the coaxial warp drive that might have give Voyager more of a help in getting home. TopThe Omega DirectiveAn automated alarm shuts down the entire ship and summons Captain Janeway. She immediately initiates the Omega Directive, an order so secret that only starship captains are entrusted with it. There exists a particle so powerful that it can wipe out subspace for a whole quadrant, ending warp travel forever. Janeway must decide whether to trust her crew with the information and is faced with Seven of Nine who considers the particle as an almost godlike substance. There are hints of really interesting ideas here, but they are bogged down in a story that descends all too quickly into just another STAR TREK plot involving arriving aliens and technological problems. It's a shame because the idea of the particle being the perfection that the Borg seek is so much more interesting and the fear that it strikes into the heart of Starfleet and Janeway so much more worthy of study than the banal plot that we are eventually presented with. TopUnforgettableA ship appears with a woman who claims to be Chakotay's lover. The fact that he doesn't know her from Eve she explains by being from a race that is inherently forgettable. Once they are gone, they are forgotten in days. She has come back because she loves Chakotay and sets about making him love her again, but what about the rest of her race, for whom she is not forgotten? Flashbacks to a romance? The personal lives of the crew have never been the most fertile ground for good episodes and so proves to be the case here. It feels artificial from the start and the twist of circumstances towards the end is predictable in the extreme. TopLiving WitnessIn a museum dedicated to a race subjugated for 700 years, the curator discovers an artefact that is going to throw new light onto the cause of his race's slavery. The artefact is a backup generator for the Doctor and the cause of the slavery is the Warship Voyager. The initial view of a Starship Voyager that is actually warlike, commanded by a cold and ruthless murderer and crewed by vicious misfits is an intriguing one, but as soon as the cause for this alternative view of reality is revealed, the story goes downhill rapidly. Added to this is the fact that these themes of revisionist history have already been covered in Distant Origin, another less than successful episode, and interest rapidly wanes. The lead historian swings between belief and outrage too quickly and too often, riots break out with barely a reason and the postscript twist pulls the rug out from under the whole thing anyway. TopDemonThe Voyager runs out of deuterium, but a rich source is located on a nearby planetoid. The problem is that the planetoid is classification Y, or demon class. So inimical to life is it that nobody can survive there for long. How is then that Tom Paris and Harry Kim can wander around the surface with no ill effects and no spacesuits. Considering that this episode is based around a planetoid that is the ultimate in bad places to live, the background seems to be quite pleasant compared to others that the franchise has thrown up. OK, the atmosphere is poisonous and it's a bit hot, but there aren't any firestorms, no eruptions, no earthquakes, no large beasties trying to eat your head. As a result, the script is undermined and gets sillier by the minute. At the beginning we are told that nothing can survive there, not even a shuttlecraft and the by the end Voyager herself has landed. Nonsense. TopOneThe Voyager encounters a nebula that blocks their entire planet and kills all human tissue within minutes. The diversion around it will take more than a year. The only alternative is for the entire crew to go into stasis and the ship to be controlled by the Doctor and Seven of Nine. How is a drone who is used to being connected to thousands of minds going to be able to cope with being alone? This is Jeri Ryan's episode without a doubt. For one thing, she is the only character appearing for a good part of the episode. This allows for many shots of her wandering statuesquely through empty corridors chasing hallucinations, but the situation is well-handled, her loneliness becoming genuinely oppressive, her hallucinations disturbing and the failing of the propulsion system with the end in sight a cruel irony. This is one of the best episodes of the season. TopHope and FearAn alien with a gift for languages holds the key to a Starfleet message that was intercepted by Voyager, but which has consistently resisted translation. The message guides them to an advanced starfleet vessel that can get them home in months once they figure out how it works, but is everything really as it seems? Ray Wise (TWIN PEAKS, REAPER) appears as the alien at the heart of this story, but since it is obvious from the start that the ship is not really starfleet, there is a certain frustration in the length of time that it takes the characters to work it out. The conflict between Seven of Nine's desire to be human and fear of being amongst humans is more interesting, but is hammered home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. This is not the way that a season should be ended, no cliffhanger in sight and a story that doesn't scintillate. Top |
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