The Blogs Left Behind

End of another year, heck, end of the decade. I managed forty blogs in 2019, but there were more than a few left by the wayside. Let's have a look at some of the ones left behind. (I experimented with a few different things to call this post, by the way, the-blogs-that-might-have-been, the-blogs-that-time-forgot, the-blogs-nobody-blogged, or my personal favorite of the not-chosen: The Blogs They Carried.) I did something similar a few years back. 

Ideally I'll whittle down all blogmaking activity into one What If...? type post at the end of every year. It'd save time for both of us. Until I unlock this achievement level, here's the 2019 tour of the Island of Misfit Blogs.

TV

I had planned:

- Most recently, to blog up a bunch of 80s TV Christmas Episodes. I picked five or six with plans to do a second round focusing on sitcoms. Problem was, I never got out of the first round, which included Knight Rider, Quantum Leap, Tour of Duty, Hill Street Blues, and Magnum PI. Some of the episodes ("Green Christmas," Tour of Duty especially) were good, but the others, while not bad (okay, the Knight Rider one is bad) just weren't that interesting, visually or conceptually, to justify blogging up. So the project kind of fizzled. 

- A Top Ten Magnum, PI Episodes post. I finished a "re-watch" of the show more than a few months ago, re-watch in air quotes because I only kind of half-watched a lot of it. But I enjoyed a surprising bit of what I did watch, I just didn't really think of it as something to blog about until I was five seasons into it. I keep meaning to go back and rewatch those episodes that made the most impression on me, but my energies drifted elsewhere, perhaps caught in the Molokai Express, bound for Alaska. So with a certain amount of regret that I never utilized it, I removed this bookmark from my computer. 

In case you're wondering: 

10. "Operation: Silent Night" s4, e10.

9. "A Little Bit of Luck, A Little Bit of Grief" s6, e20

8. "Round and Round" s6, e6

7. "Flashback" s3, e7

6. "Witness" s4, e21

5. "Fragments" s5, e6

4. "The Kona Winds" s6, e6

3. "Death and Taxes" s7, e6

2. "Limbo" s7, e22

1. "Home from the Sea" s4, e1

Number three is fairly or unfairly known as the Miami Vice episode on account of its prominent use of Phil-Collins-sung material ("Mama" by Genesis), night scenes, and Thomas's wardrobe being Sonny Crockett-esque at several points. 

"Home from the Sea" made a big impression on me as a kid. I was happy that revisiting it - several times as it turned out, once with my eldest who ended up watching it twice almost all the way through - deepened my appreciation of it. Particularly one aspect: the way these scenes are cut against each other is way ahead of its time. I remember when Lost was making a splash there was much chatter on how the scripts seemed very influenced (as they turned out to be) by Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Watchmen, particular the way flashbacks intercut with the main story and scenes segued via ironic continuations of dialogue out of context or what not. The same technique is used - and quite well - here. I've never heard anyone describe this technique as Bellisario-esque, but perhaps they should. He wrote a lot of filler, but "Home from the Sea" is an A+ script.

- I had an idea for a little series called:

These would've been screencaps from Dawson's Creek, season 4 (the senior year season). The idea was along the lines of James Van Der Memes, but, I didn't get very far. I discovered that here in the wilderness of my mid-forties, I didn't have the patience or bemusement with the project required to pull it off properly. This strikes me as the kind of realization that Red Foreman would hit me upside the head for having shared.

- An overview of Pan Am (2011-2012) a beautifully designed show with a great cast. Had it come out only a year or two later in the streaming-age, it'd probably still be on the air, but its lack of real-time viewers led ABC to cancel it. I ran into an immediate problem, though, in trying to screencap it. It was designed, visually, to maximize the photogenic nature of its cast. Not in a salacious way, more in an unavoidable way, just as part of every shot.

In plain English - and the above is less than one third of the first three episodes for Pete's sake - there was no way for me to present a visual account of the show without appearing to document a sort of fetish journal for 60s-era stewardesses. And/or Margot Robbie and Kelli Garner. I'm not knocking such things, I just felt a little awkward doing it / not what I set out to do. 

COMICS

The same thing happened to me with a planned series on Frank Thorne's:

This one I had some idea going into that it would probably be a bit over the top. I thought I could find a way to present the sword and sorcery metal without necessarily being overpowered by the softcore she-devil mayhem.

I was wrong about that.

I was keeping a folder called "She-Devil on a Horse" which started off as kind of funny but then made me feel a little uncomfortable as they got more and more pornographic. Why I don't feel uncomfortable doing so for a "Hey I Never Really Blogged It Up" post is unknown. 

I don't mean to suggest it's just softcore she-devil stuff. It's all quite metal and a bona-fide classic of Bronze Age Marvel. It's one of those things that had it been written and drawn by Camille Paglia people would celebrate it as proto-feminist fable. Perhaps it's unfair to not extend to Frank Thorne the same kudos. As with Pan Am, though, I started to feel like maybe I wasn't the right guy to be chronicling Sonja's adventures. The two series couldn't be more different in tone or approach but presented the same dilemma to me, their would-be-blogger.

A pity. Here's some leftover screencaps.

- Earlier this year, after The Heck Ya Mean posts, I'd planned to continue some Scenic Routes for selected series. Among them Kirby's Fourth World (which had a bit more than that, some Kamandi and Eternals, too):

- Another on Walt Simonson, from various titles over the years:

Did Walt refashion Jean Grey after his wife Louise? She is a telekinetic telepath, after all. (Louise, I mean.)

 

- And another on Alex Toth:

That is a serious floor.

This guy needs to stop.

but they all fizzled out for one reason or another. Mostly laziness. I also chose particularly prolific illustrators, each of whom deserved more time and attention than I could give him.

BOOKS

Man, do I miss my old commute. Even the increased crime on the CTA in the few years since I switched jobs, negating the need for the commute - forty-five minutes in each direction, which gave me oodles of blog-reading time - wouldn't deter me from picking it up again, solely for the enforced reading time. I try to sneak it in wherever I can - making my tea, doing the laundry, inspecting the commode, baby-watching (when possible) - but it's a lot harder to wipe out reading projects these days. 

- Take for example this idea I had for a series of posts called The Blog Offices of Boulle, Ludlum, MacDonald, and Wyndham. 

That likely would've been shortened to just "Boulle, Ludlum, MacDonald" or "Boulle, Ludlum, and Wyndham" depending on which author I finished first. I bought all these books used and still plan to read them all someday. But yeah, thought it'd be fun to make my way through them all in an organized way and blog them all up as I go, and I liked the law office-sounding name. (There's a pet supplies story near my wife's old apartment named "The Paw Offices of Barker and Meowski," which I always thought was a damn fine name.) Each would have had some kind of "Have you been hurt in an accident? Are you in a structured settlement and need cash now?" sort of intro but tailored to the plot at hand.

Part of what killed the project was I read The Ostermann Weekend and it started strong but ended weakly. And the movie was kind of a mess. Though in an interesting way. That started things off a little sluggishly and I just never found my way back to it. I brought some Wyndham with me on a work trip to California and ended up reading something else. Still mean to! But as a blogging project, probably not going to happen. 

- Finally, for this section, I'd planned a holiday post earlier this month called Ten Books for the Conservative on Your Shopping List.

Not necessarily these books. But some of them, sure. 

You might have a person with differing political views on your holiday list. If that person is left-of-center, you'll have little trouble shopping for them. If that person is right-of-center, though, chances are they don't necessarily want some coffee mug with "Liberal Tears" printed on the side. (Although they might - in which case, case closed.) So I thought I'd make an annotated list of ten to fifteen books that a conservative, male or female, gay or straight, white or black, Vulcan or Terran, might actually want to read. 

But: nothing I wrote - even the above - was coming out right. And then it came too close to the holiday to make an effective list of suggestions. So here's an abridged version of the list; print it out and keep it handy for any birthdays to come for your proverbial conservative uncle or aunt. 

For the military history buff: SOG by James Plasser. (Every chapter of this needs to be four or five movies. Riveting read. Tour of Duty season three seems to have lifted some story ideas from here, but this is much more in-depth.) 

Or this one that I bought my Dad, who is not a conservative at all, but just while we're doing military history. Or Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, though chances are they've got that one already.

For the history buff: Garibaldi by Jasper Ridley. (Incredible read. I wish I had time to read it again and take proper notes. One day!) Or Coolidge by Amity Shlaes. (Ditto.) Or Truman by David McCullough, which covers a wide swath of pivotal American events of the twentieth century. It's not like conservatives just want to read about conservative people. Most of them, anyway. 

For anyone who wants the culture war explained to them by someone who a) didn't vote for Trump, b) understands why he won, and c) understands the what, whence, and how of Trump Derangement Syndrome and why it is to be avoided:

For the political biography buff: No Higher Honor by Condoleeza Rice, With No Apologies by Barry Goldwater, or McCarthy by Arthur Hermann. 

For promising spy thriller stuff: Between Two Scorpions by Jim Geraghty. 

For carefully footnoted ragefuel: Justice on Trial by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino, Ball of Collusion by Andrew McCarthy, The Smallest Minority by Kevin Williamson, or, if they want to take the longer view on the twentieth century (and have a sense of humor):

I would also recommend anything by William F. Buckley, Jr. particularly any of those collections of his editorials and commentaries from the 60s and 70s, like Executioner's Eve or The Governor Listeth. But you have to know your audience on that one; Buckley's style isn't for everyone. 

MUSIC

I'd started and taken some substantial notes for a couple of overviews that didn't materialize. One on Genesis (the entirety of which I will summarize by linking only to one song: "Keep It Dark") and another on Budgie (and likewise, "Stranded". Cued up to this spirited finish here.) Both bands deserved a better overview than I had time for in 2019, but I do enjoy the two playlists I created so hey, personal victory there. 

That about covers them, I think.

BUT WAIT!

Here are some pre-emptive cancellations for 2020!

- Roy Thomas at DC
- Doctor Strange in the 80s

I'd gotten a little ways into blogging up the Doctor Strange. I had all my preliminary work done:

I had a friend generously donate digital copies of the Defenders issues I didn't have, I bought the Marvel Fanfare Doctor Strange appearances I was missing, and I'd screencapped about five or six issues, including the Amazing Spider-Man and X-Men annuals, both of which held up quite nicely. 

But I just don't see myself having the time to really do it. These kind of things are fun if they don't linger on too long, and it would likely take me two to three years. Ditto for Roy Thomas at DC, which was a lot of material. These seemed like fun and worthwhile projects, but having done a few of those read/blog-every-appearance-over-a-decade projects, I know the time and reading involved. One for the robot body if it ever gets delivered from North Central Positronics. 

One reading project I still plan to do though not on any timetable is:

I won a couple of eBay auctions for Hard Case Crime lots, and I have just about fifty. So it seemed like a fun idea to read them all and blog them up as case reports. This one will happen - and I'll have to come up with a better header than that one above - I just didn't want to tie it to 2020. It might take the whole decade, who knows. Looking forward to it - bless you, Charles Ardai. 

~

I write this on December 25th at ten of nine pm, so it's still Christmas for a few hours more. Happy Holidays, folks. 

Star Trek: Voyager - The Essential 20 Episodes

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.