Month: May 2012

A Klingon fleet visits the station, and a certain ex-Enterprise Klingon is called in to help. For the most part this is a really clunky course correction. It introduces a lot of new stuff, and brings back some Klingon plots not touched much in years. But the decision to introduce a new war between the…

Harry Kim finds himself back in San Francisco (and in nearly 400 years they *still* haven’t knocked down the hideous [Transamerica Pyramid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transamerica_Pyramid)). Voyager’s first ‘return to Earth’ (I’m betting there will be more yet) is ultimately a bit underwhelming. The how and why of getting there and getting back is all done through some pretty…

Kes goes through space-puberty. Probably one of those ideas better left alone. Accelerated puberty, like any accelerated ageing, is hard to pull off well. A couple of the characters run around going ‘am I ready to be a parent’ – such an old story, with nothing new done here. And then a cop out at…

The Doctor is left all alone on the ship. Apart from the actual explanation of what was going on in the last act (yuck, technobabble city), this was a pretty good piece of paranoid ‘what’s real here’ storytelling. It’s always an uphill battle in this type of story within an ongoing story, because the audience…

Chakotay gets caught up with a Kazon child going through his initiation rite. So far we’ve seen quite a bit of Chakotay’s spirituality. And it’s certainly a nice change for Star Trek to allow a character to have that side. But it all feels very shallow, like a Fisher Price religion. I don’t know very…

Voyager meets Amelia Earhardt. A strange episode that started out bad but somehow redeemed itself by having an interesting problem to resolve in the final act. The whole ‘finding ancient alien abductees’ thing has been done very often, and isn’t fundamentally a very interesting story. There’s way too much time spent on the ‘this is…

Ouch. Not a good season. There are a few pretty strong moments, such as the Romulan/Cardassian 2-parter, *Shakaar* and *Visionary*. But there is nothing close to the great episodes of the previous season. And against that there are some real stinkers – *Fascination* and *Meridian* are the two worst, but the surplus of Ferengi episodes…

A little trip on the Defiant turns paranoid when a changeling is found aboard. Another escalation in the cold war with the Dominion that has been running since the start of the season. Slow to get going, and a couple of drawn out sequences in the middle. But plenty of *The Thing* style paranoia, which…

Jadzia experiences her past selves. This kind of episode is a big opportunity for the actors to do something new. Most of them don’t do that much with it: Kira overacts, O’Brien is nebbish, Leeta is hard to distinguish from her normal self, Quark is a one note joke, and Bashir seems mostly like himself…

Voyager’s first year has some promise, but it hasn’t hit its straps yet. But it’s a lot better than I’d heard it was. There isn’t a single fantastic episode, but there’s also only one awful one (*Cathexis*, yuck). *Caretaker*, *Faces* and *State of Flux* all showed a lot of promise. But the stories have all…