Category: Trekathon

The Doctor writes the great Holo-Novel. There’s a lot of different plot going on here! First, the Doctor turns out to be a terrible writer, who is lucky that defamation law appears to have been weakened in the future. Second, we have a ‘is the Doctor a person’ legal dispute that harks back to some…

Q’s back, looking for some baby sitting. Q must be the most unreliable plot device in Trek. Some episodes are great (*All Good Things* in particular), some are quite bad (*Qpid*). This episode recapitulates that in microcosm – it veers from good (Q’s final test of his son) to dull (the extended training montage) and…

Seven tries to learn how to be a real girl. Or, to put it another way, Seven of Nine does exactly the same thing that Barclay got in so much trouble for (making holographic replicas of crew members). Except this time rather than freaking out, the Doctor encourages her to keep her holodeck program. Seems…

The Voyager crew stumbles towards rescue. The idea of using the aliens to drive the action in this half of the episode was a good one. But it’s a decision that makes it more difficult for us to really care about what’s going on, as everyone pretty much gets rescued without having to do very…

Almost all the crew is kidnapped and brainwashed to work in a factory. I’m a sucker for ‘[in media res](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res)’. This episode has a great mysterious start, with Janeway, Seven, Tuvok and Tom all working in a strange alien factory, with a good 10 minutes before any explanations start. The truth, it turns out, is…

Voyager gets stuck in a hole. The plot’s nothing to write home about, but well delivered. In short, Voyager finds itself in a bad situation, and Janeway builds an alliance that allows them to escape. Along the way there’s the unreliable ally, the implacable foe, and the misunderstood aliens. It’s a little sad that this…

In a refreshing change of pace, rather than B’Elanna coming to terms with her Klingon heritage, Klingons come to terms with B’Elanna. Well, not refreshing. More ‘not as bad’. It’s mainly Klingon warriors wandering around shouting ‘Grraah’, along with a small touch of ‘mysterious prophecy people are manipulating turns out to strangely true’. And the…

The Voyager runs into a strained death penalty story. The episode was off to a bad start when the writer forgot what the Prime Directive is. Hint: it doesn’t apply to races who have their own warp-capable ships… As for the rest – I suppose it was a reasonable attempt at a SF story, in…

B’Elanna comes to terms with her Klingon side. Again. As my summary suggests, I’m not exactly jumping for joy to return to such a well-trod well. We’ve had about four episodes about B’Elanna coming to terms with her Klingon side. This is the worst yet, suggesting that it’s actually all been about a standard adolescent…

Chakotay and Janeway go on a tour of episodes past. It’s very hard to watch this episode without thinking about *Before and After*. That episode had an incredibly similar structure, with Kes in that instance travelling through the history of Voyager. But while that episode was a great way of understanding a character, this one…