Month: May 2012

Chakotay meets his ancestors’ sky spirits. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like the ‘native american spirituality’ stuff here. It just doesn’t feel real or deep enough, it’s a very simplistic approach to a culture. I’m also not a big fan of ‘ancient astronaut’ stuff in science fiction, so the combination of the two was…

The crew of the Defiant performs a tribute to the great submarine movies. With the exception of three quibbles, this was a pretty well put together episode. There was good action, good tension, good character development, and a resolution that depended on brains rather than on technobabble. The initial setup required to get into the…

A new alien species gives everyone nightmares. Finally, a decent use for the terrible holo-novel that Janeway has used several times. Here it finally pays off as it gives a good segue into the general horror theme of the episode. Horror is tricky to pull off, particularly when you know that (a) everyone;’s going to…

A past lover returns to Dax’s life. It’s almost hard to believe that this episode was incredibly controversial back when it first aired, due to the same-sex kiss between Jadzia and Lenara. A lot has changed since then, and it simply doesn’t have the shock value it once did. Fortunately the episode never really relied…

Kira and Dukat go looking for a ship that crashed during the Occupation. Let’s get the bad out of the way first – the Sisko/Kassidy plot was such by-the-numbers sitcom rubbish I was surprised. GIrl wants to move in, guy has problems with things moving too fast. It’s an old story, and there’s absolutely nothing…

O’Brien and Bashir are captured by Jem’Hadar looking for a way to escape their addiction. The setup takes a while, but the final conflict between Bashir’s desire to heal and O’Brien’s pragmatic survival plan is a nice piece of conflict. The Jem’Hadar setting doesn’t work quite as well as we don’t know them well enough,…

Paris and Neelix work out their problems with each other while on an away mission. Another episode that is largely based on Neelix’s insane jealousy. Oh goody. That’s worked well so far. Well, I suppose it isn’t that bad. It’s very low calorie, just not much substance to it. And the puppet for the baby…

Sisko dies, and Jake is obsessed with bringing him home. This is the best episode of Star Trek I’ve seen in a very long time. Quite possibly ever. It’s not a big, galaxy wide story. It’s a small, personal story, but a deeply affecting and incredibly well written one. The performance of the adult Jake…

Voyager becomes a lot harder to navigate. So, a quick summary of the episode: weird things start happening, weird things get worse, everyone turns maudlin and despairs, then everything turns out all right without any intervention. So, this one jumped off the rails for me when Torres ended up in the Transporter room, but never…

The Klingons go to war, and Sisko is in the middle. This episode moves so fast I got whiplash. We go from everything happening at a safe remove to Klingons invading the station inside of about 20 minutes, adding on to the Klingons only having been the bad guys for about 20 minutes more. It’s…