I already ranked my favorites least-to-most for each season. But how do the best of each season stack up against one another, you ask? If you had my spreadsheet you'd know the answer! One last time: let's go to the Delta Quadrant.
20.
The Doctor enters a holonovel initiated by Kim which has caused several crewmembers to disappear. By playing out the events of Beowulf and confronting the villain Grendel, actually an alien lifeform, he saves the day.
There's probably a few episodes not listed here that I enjoy more than "Heroes and Demons," but I wanted to find room for it. An early example of two things the series did fairly well: (1) utilize the holodeck and photonic life in creative ways, and (2) give Robert Picardo a script to work with and let him fly.
19.
In December 2000, one of Janeway's favorite ancestors must overcome one man's resistance to the building of the Millennium Gate on Earth.
In some ways, this episode is a little confused. It asks interesting questions - are we heroes? do we come from heroes? can we ever really know where we truly come from? where does "we" ultimately start and begin? if your cousin is a prize-winning chess program, does that make you ultimately related to Activision Chess? and so on - but arguably doesn't resolve them all in dramatic fashion. It basically leads to the speech on family at the end and then the slow zoom into the photograph of Sharon O'Donnel with her children and grandchildren around her.
And that really shouldn't work as the tie-the-room-together moment, and yet I get a lump in my throat each time I've seen it. Must be getting old. Regardless, it works as the parting image upon which to hang so many unknowable sentiments.
"Is this relevant to our present mission?"
"It's relevant to me."
"This ancestor of yours is fifteen generations removed. You only possess a small fraction of her genetic material. Insignificant."
"This isn't about chromosomes, Seven. It's about character. She had an influence on my imagination, on my goals."
18.
As Voyager enters a nebula, the ship goes to grey mode, and Neelix tells a ghost story to the Borg children whose regeneration cycles have been disrupted. He tells of a creature who once took over the ship in circumstances very similar to their own, but later admits that he made up the whole thing. Icheb, however, harbors doubts.
Great fun, great performances, writing, pace, atmosphere, all of it quite well done. It plays to Ethan Phillips's strengths and blends the concept plus traditional genre-scares well. It's more successful in this regard than both "Catspaw" and (arguably) "Wolf in the Fold," two TOS attempts at the very same, or TNG's "Sub Rosa", so that's a feather in the show's cap. It's quite a bit different than all three of the aforementioned, but that blend of genre, I mean.
Icheb is the proto-blogger here, the Trek viewer asking nitpick questions that hint at the absurdity of some of the franchise’s conventional wisdoms/ go-tos. And he even calls out Neelix's story as meta, so extra meta-points.
17.
When aliens steal technology from Voyager, Janeway works with a holographic Leonardo Da Vinci - who has also been stolen, by way of Doc's portable emitter - to find and salvage the computer processor.
This is a classy episode. Great performance by John Rhys-Davies as Da Vinci ("James Kirk claimed to have met him but the evidence is inconclusive." How did Kirk claim this? Didn't Spock mind-wipe him to mend his broken heart? Perhaps later Spock realized this was a lame thing to do, and un-wiped him, then Kirk went around telling everyone he met Da Vinci on one planet, Cochrane on another. No wonder he's where he was at the beginning of The Motion Picture; clearly the brass felt he'd gone space happy.) Excellent chemistry between him and Mulgrew as both characters and actors. It's too bad they never brought Da Vinci back a few more times. "Earthquakes... and idiots. Florence be damned."
16.
A Hirogen relay station allows Voyager to send the Doctor to the Alpha Quadrant, where he finds himself on an experimental shuttle that has been overtaken by Romulans. Working with that ship's EMH, he tries to defeat the enemy and get a message to Starfleet.
Heroic stuff from The Doctor here. I can't believe not only how much fun Andy Dick is in this episode but also how good his chemistry with Picardo is. Like I wrote about it previously, if you never saw, heard of, or read about the actor prior to watching him here, you'd never guess he had this whole other career as a jackass.
Everything about the experimental shuttle looks and sounds pretty cool. All the stuff around the edges (the Romulans snatching this secret Starfleet tech, the mysterious relay station, etc.) likewise.
15.
Learning that his inventor is dying, the Doctor has his program transmitted back to the Alpha Quadrant to try to save him. There he meets Troi and Barclay who, having already tried to convince Zimmerman to seek treatment, are doubtful about the chance of success from the Doctor.
Two beam-the-Doctor-to-the-Alpha-Quadrant episodes in a row - I didn't plan that.
The primary-matrix-degradation parallel is good, with the “I'm not defective, you’re defective!” projections. He’s bitter about what's happened to both himself and the mk-1s and then the Doctor shows up, a literal externalization of his failures, a mocking counterpoint to the end of his life. That he just wants to help makes it all worse. It says something about Picardo that he can make an arc like this feel like a satisfying breakthrough between two different people simply by talking to himself.
And I like the whole virtual Dad/son stuff, too; that last shot (above) is really earned.
14.
Voyager encounters a divergence field and splits into two identical ships, one damaged and one not. Janeway must work together with her counterpart from the other Voyager or both ships will be destroyed, if not by the anomaly then by the nearby Vidiians.
Okay, so, maybe we've seen this kind of thing in Trek before. Then again, have we? Infant death, major character dies only to be replaced by his (exact) duplicate from another universe? The actions of the ship out of slight phase with its duplicate causing mass destruction? (Okay, that we definitely have.)
Is it weird that Harry never mentions being from an alternate universe again? No throwaway remarks, no nurturing a conspiracy theory over his lack of promotion? Then again, maybe this is simply commonplace in the future. No one mentions it because who knows how many times they've swapped timelines or if they're really who they were when they started.
13.
The Doctor experiments with a daydreaming program, but when aliens tap into it and mistake his fantasy life for reality, it causes considerable problems - for both the Doctor and the aliens.
Hidden in this one is some Barclay-esque commentary on both the dangers and salvation of an active fantasy life, a topic I'd wager every Trek fan of a certain age knows all too well. Of any age, properly.
Beyond that, though, it's a great The Doctor episode. No secret here - most of the great Doctor episodes make my top 20.
12.
Neelix tries to rescue a colony of besieged Talaxians and decides to stay in the Delta Quadrant with his own species, serving as a long-distance ambassador for Starfleet.
My being able to overcome my anti-Neelixness was one of the great surprises of this rewatch. I started with it virtually as a guideline, even giving myself permission to skip Neelix-centric episodes (although I don't think I ever actually did). But somewhere along the way, Ethan Phillips's enthusiasm for the role won me over. Neelix is a good character damn it - if occasionally written as clumsily as anyone else on the show - and Ethan Phillips deserves a standing ovation everywhere he goes. I was wrong and happy to discover it.
Great send-off for the character, here. They need to do a Voyager sequel where The Doctor rounds up a holo-posse (Da Vinci, Moriarty, Chaotica) and goes back to the Delta Quadrant to help Neelix in some kind of Magnificent Seven scenario.
11.
When Voyager harbors telepathic refugees, a high-ranking alien investigator seeks to defect, and gets close to Janeway as they work to escape his former peers.
I never quite buy Kaskyk's defection, but as neither did Janeway and a great deal of the fun of this is holding this back and watch them seduce and parry with one another, that works in the episode's favor. Nice guest performance by Mark Harelik, good stuff from Kathryn Mulgrew, and from Mahler, too.
I like the dramatic idea of an anti-telepath zone, but one wonders how they could truly handle such a policy. Could they withstand only a couple of Talosians just outside their perimeter, projecting illusions within? Probably not. Of course, it wouldn't stop such a policy from being enacted, even if the Devore knew who the Talosians were. Maybe they're short-sighted people.
10.
The Doctor writes a holo-novel to be published in the Alpha Quadrant, featuring characters who closely resemble – but do not flatter – the crew.
You'd think there would be no more fresh storytelling angles on the Doctor's narcissism by season seven, but here we are. The hologram's narcissism is humanity's - oh the irony.
A couple of aspects on this episode don't hold up after repeat watchings. While the ending with the Zimmerman mk1s is initially pretty cool, one wonders how the wild exaggerations of the Doctor's story will do anything more than stir up resentment - likely against the Doctor himself. A kind of reverse "Life Line" could happen. Sort of a Nemesis vibe, there, too. Can you imagine if they made a big-screen Voyager movie out of nowhere and had it follow Nemesis pretty much beat for beat, but with this mk1 set-up instead of some never-before-seen Picard clones and Remans, etc.?
Another is the personhood/ authorship dilemma under Federation law. That might be too nitpicky to bring up. I'm not sure this episode is the case law on the matter that it perhaps might have been. But let's not hold that against it. It's always fun to see an established cast subvert their familiar personae. As it is in this next one:
9.
When aliens from another dimension infiltrate the ship and trigger a war in the Captain Proton holonovel, Janeway pretends to be Queen Arachnia to rescue her ship.
I was going to type that I didn't know anyone who doesn't love this episode. But I think my brother and his wife may have only liked it. What? How this doesn't depress every button on the mental Trek console to 'delightful' perplexes me. It's possible people simply grew tired of the holo-gimmicks. Understandable, I guess, but not a demographic that includes myself. I wish they'd gotten rid of half the episodes they did do and just fleshed out the Chaoticaverse to absurd, indulgent levels. Fair Haven, too. On some level of the Voyager Tower, there's a War Between Chaotica and Fair Haven and the Unnamed Aliens, and it lasted a whole season and changed the franchise forever.
The Doctor as the President of Earth and Tuvok's "Please, summarize the message" are favorite moments. Everything with Satan's Robot, as well.
8.
Hundreds of years in the future on a planet in the Delta Quadrant, the Doctor's backup module is recovered by a race which believes he can shed light on Voyager's devastating intervention with their planet's history.
It's kind of funny to watch this episode in 2019. This sort of examination might seem too furiously neutral, or disengaged. Are we supposed to empathize with the Doctor here? I think we should, or at least can, but I think 2019 would find such empathy problematic. I can hear the angry screeds fairly easily. An episode more like "Memorial" would be more suitable to such critics, I bet.
Their loss. This is great stuff and good for your mind. Why deprive yourself of a) any good The Doctor story/ Picardo performance for any reason? or b) the kind of thoughtful meditation on civilizational POV that used to animate the franchise? Not that just because something used to be the franchise's raison d'etre is reason to keep doing anything, but when it was a perfectly reasonable raison d'etre tossed aside in pursuit of something far slipperier, well. Do what works; avoid what doesn't.
Same goes for:
7.
Voyager rescues a critically ill Vidiian woman who is given a holographic body by the Doctor while he treats her. They begin to fall in love, but the woman must return to her diseased-ravaged body, and she tries to sabotage the Doctor's work because she thinks death would be preferable to such an existence.
Above and beyond work from both Susan Diol and Picardo here. The episode ends on a subtle note: the Doctor and Denara waltzing, no easy resolution, just a little more time together. It's the type of ending that trusts the viewer to come to his or her own emotional reconciliation - if any. Very true to life but theatrical at the same time. I love it.
 |
| Good on ya, Shmullus. |
I'm always an easy mark for these sort of man-who-wasn't-there meets woman-without-a-face (so to speak) stories.
6.
Voyager encounters another Starfleet spaceship, the USS Equinox, also stranded in the Delta Quadrant. Their divergent approaches on survival so far from Federation principles threaten to destroy them both.
I'm also an easy mark for the through-a-mirror-darkly/unexpected-redemption stories. Here's the only two-part season-wraparound that ever truly worked start to finish for me. The late-innings resumption of the Equinox captain to his Starfleet ethos, as brought to life by a very effective John Savage, elevates an already exciting story to a heroic one.
As with so many Voyager episodes you can see how these ideas changed into BSG-reboot episodes in the years to come. I've thought this many times over the years and was happy to see it confirmed in So Say We All: The Complete Uncensored Unauthorized Oral History of BSG by Mark Altman and Edward Gross. Not that they were reworked into BSG episodes, more like certain BSG episodes pointedly made contrary decisions to how similar scenarios would play out on Voyager.
5.
Torres crashes on an alien world and becomes the inspiration for an indigenous playwright who believes he's captured a literal muse. Torres works with him as she learns he uses his plays to inspire his patron to peace between the warring factions of his people. She helps him pull off the best play ever, then beams out.
Like Harry or Tom, B'Elanna was occasionally hampered by having to re-do the same story arc over and over. Here she takes center stage to the type of fantastic civilization musing (no pun intended, sincerely) that again once defined the franchise. I love this kind of crap. Its refreshing lack of excess edginess charms me, as well. It reminds me a little of TNG's "Thine Own Self" in that regard. The lesson that the episode imparts, while hardly opaque, is not necessarily spelled out in the dialogue, and that leaves the viewer room to ponder.
"Muse" asks what the relationship is between art and inspiration, between art and politics, art and commerce, etc. All questions that the writers' room must have felt keenly. I like everything that happens in this episode, although I do wonder what will happen to poor Kelis: they'll never be able to reproduce that transporter effect again. His patron - or some future patron - might grow angry at such a failure and cancel his career, perhaps his life.
Again, something the Trek writers knew a little something about.
4.
A Saurian scientist pursues Voyager in hopes of proving his theory that his species did not evolve in the Delta Quadrant, but evolved from dinosaurs on Earth. The scientist, who takes Chakotay first as a hostage and then as a willing witness, must convince his ruling council that his findings will not be disruptive to their society.
For my money, this (and "Living Witness" and even "Muse") was the kind of episode they should've done more of in the series, or at least several times a season: something from the perspective of aliens who know nothing of Starfleet, who've lived their whole lives in their own cosmologies deep in the Delta Quadrant. This one - one of the wackier ideas in the whole Trek canon - allows us to examine our own biases regarding evolution and our ideas of where we come from and who we are, as well as cheering Chakotay (arguably his finest moment in all seven seasons) as he aids and abets an alien Galileo (or Darwin/ Alfred Russell Wallace) to accomplish that which we, the viewer, know (well, "know") to be right.
Great stuff. "Warp Speed Dinosaurs" would've made a better title. While we're here, season four's "Prey" should've been named "If It Leaks A Quantum Signature, We Can Irregulate Its Isonarrative Subroutine!" Exclamation point and all. The show could've used a more TOS sensibility in some of its episode names. Trek suffers from this in general over the past few decades; the names are so generic and forgettable. This is decidedly not the case with our next selection:
3.
The bio-mimetic duplicate crew attempts to go about their merry way as Paris and Torres get married, but a horrible fate befalls them just as they find a quick way back to Earth.
The surprise of this one - spoiler alert: this ain't Voyager, it's the duplicate biomemetic lifeforms who only think they're Voyager from "Demon" - is pretty cool. The second surprise - everyone's degrading back to their original state and will all certainly die - is powerful. For all the times we see something like this - not exactly like this, but anything that underscores the basic tragedy of life: we live, we learn ideals and try to exemplify them, they don't save us, only animate our lives with meaning, we deteriorate, we die - it really hits me with "Course Oblivion."
I love the discussion of whether or not Starfleet ideals matter, even for people who are "faking" them. It's the type of "what is Trek?" discussion that is relevant for the franchise, its viewers, its country or origin, and all its citizens. And like the bio-mimetic crew, it doesn't matter whether we're doomed to fail or not; if we embody what we say we believe, our path is clear.
Powerful episode. I'd have preferred for my personal taste someone putting it together and honoring their memory at episode's end. One of those in the Captain's ready room codas that you know TNG would've had. "I've been examining the debris..." etc. Without that, maybe it is a touch too bleak. But bleakness aside, the theme (you are the one bearing witness to your life; your principles are what you do when no one is there to see you/ when you're falling apart) is something Voyager - and Trek - come back to again and again. I appreciate their not giving us the coda just this once. (Why no one makes an effort to collect this goop of bio-deuterium, which they went to great, life-threatening risks to collect back in "Demon", though, that suddenly appears in front of them, is an oopsie. If you have one episode where some element is crucial to the crew's survival, you don't show the crew shrugging at it in another one.)
2.
In order to pass through a dangerous nebula, the entire crew is put into stasis, leaving only Seven of Nine - who is immune to the deleterious effects - to fly the ship.
This was a big episode for Jeri Ryan's career. If she blew it here, her character might not have had the development she got in s5 - s7. Could she carry the episode by herself? Was she more than just a physical presence in a catsuit so tight production had to be shut down so she could go to the bathroom? Could a Seven-centric show carry the rest of the cast or teach us something about them, as well? Could we be moved by or find common cause with a Borg's struggle to be alone? The answer, happily for us, is yes on all counts.
Hard not to project some of that on-set drama between Ryan and her castmates (particularly, unfortunately, Kathryn Mulgrew) on Seven's paranoia, here. And the understated, haunted last last line ("Perhaps you dislike being alone") which could be read as her simply making conversation (which began the episode) with Paris, speaking of his claustrophobia. We-the-Viewer, having been on this journey with her in "One", understand the iceberg of emotion beneath the surface with that line. Delivered perfectly, directed perfectly.
Like the Doctor, Seven episodes kind of crowded out episodes with the rest of the cast in the seasons to come. Which is understandable when you have performers and characters of their caliber, and that's no slight to anyone else. It's show business, not show communism. (At least in theory.)
1.
Voyager becomes trapped in the orbit of a planet with an odd tachyon field. Time passes much differently on the planet's surface. Civilizations rise and fall in minutes, with Voyager's struggles to free itself a part of their evolving mythos and worldview. As they grow more sophisticated and the earthquakes the ship's presence causes more severe, they develop weapons that can destroy Voyager. Can peoples from two different time differentials communicate before it is too late?
And here we are at my favorite episode. Not just mine - a lot of Voyager fans. Lightning in a bottle this one, as precious to me as, Trek-wise, as "The Inner Light" or "Darmok." Everything about the franchise that I used to love is embodied here. (Also in "Return of the Archons," but I'll try and stay focused.)
The script makes some demands on the people who brought it to life. How do you represent the passage of centuries on the planet? The production designers chose to emphasize how one establishing shot of a hillside, populated first with only rocks and sheep and what not, eventually turns into an observatory and finally, a future-scape where the old Gotana-Retz watches Voyager fade away from the night sky forever. ("I feel like I'm saying goodbye to an old friend.") And we see them leap from superstition to the first hints of reason to societal organization (and commerce, with the "Sky Friends action figures") and finally, when their technology finally allows them to take decisive action against this god that's ignore them for centuries.
 |
| Great stuff. |
No less great: everything on the ship itself, from the discussions of their predicament to the Doctor's seconds-to-them/years-for-him adventure on the planet and all that entails. (Did he have a holo-baby down there? That may be taking Trek's whole hybrid-baby thing too far. But it's only alluded to.)
By the time Voyager makes it back to Earth, how many centuries would have passed for them? It'd be interesting to see some kind of sequel to this, maybe where some variation of Morlocks and Eloi are all that remains of Gotana-Retz and the gang.
~
But, we all but certainly won't be seeing any Voyager sequels of any kind, to "Blink of an Eye" or any of the what-ifs above. So it goes. If you care to read my season to season watch-throughs, click here and scroll down to Voyager. If not: thanks for reading and see you round the galaxy.
