Picking up the torch I left before going on my vacation trip...
Season Three3-01 Basics, Part IIIt was a foregone conclusion that
Basics, Part II would be about the retaking of Voyager. It was predictably set up like that in the first part, with the Doctor and Suder remaining on board and Paris having taken off in a shuttle to go find help from the Talaxians. The rest was just going through the motions of accomplishing the predetermined outcome, and thus the episode lacks any suspense.
But I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the Doctor and Lon Suder conspiring against the Kazons. And I loved how the Doctor sparred with Seska with his usual acerbic wit. The odd thing, from a storytelling point of view, is that you have secondary characters saving the day, while the ostensibly main characters just wait by the sidelines. Not that I mind since I don't care much for main characters like Janeway and Chakotay.
In fact, that whole sequence with the crew stranded on the planet, fighting off cavemen, giant eels and lava flows are just so tedious. They even have the clichéd plot about initially hostile aliens they befriend through a selfless act of heroism. Yawn! I seriously doubt the crew would have survived long under the inept leadership of Janeway and Chakotay. Chakotay summed up his own incompetence in the following sentence: "Trapped on a barren planet and you're stuck with the only Indian in the universe who can't make fire by rubbing two sticks together."
I didn't like the way Seska was killed, by some explosion. A stand-off between her and Chakotay, or even Janeway, would have served the purpose better. Apparently it was decided very late that she was going to be killed off. I can understand why the did it though, since they will be moving out of Kazon territory and there wouldn't be any plausible reasons for future encounters. In fact, this is the last time we see the Kazons as active adversaries, and I won't miss them. But I'll miss Seska.
Another cop-out was the revelation that Seska's baby isn't Chakotay's son after all. That's a neat way to tie up a loose end, but unfortunately it makes a mockery of the Seska plotline, and the rescue mission/trap utterly meaningless . Now Chakotay won't have to worry about having a baby in Maje Culluh's hands since it really is Culluh's son.
They also killed off Lon Suder, but at least he went away in a heroic fashion. I can't help but chuckle at the irony of having a sociopath saving the day. While his character was interesting - and again I have to laud Brad Dourif's performance - there just wasn't anywhere for him to go from here.
I'll give
Basics, Part II a grade of
6- out of 10. That's slightly less than the first part, and that mainly comes from having to endure the extended sequences down on the planet with Janeway and the crew.
3-02 FlashbackOf course
Flashback is a gimmick, and episode conjured up to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Trek, but what a fun and glorious gimmick it is (
Deep Space Nine made
Trials and Tribble-ations). The plot device of a brain parasite masquerading itself as a repressed memory of a falling girl is pretty nonsensical, but I didn't care. I got to see Captain Sulu (George Takei) at the helm of the USS Excelsior during the events of
Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. It also made me realise how much I miss the original series and movies.
The recreation of the Excelsior bridge was wonderful, and the scenes tied in perfectly with the movie. The interior scenes during the Praxis explosion had to be remade because some of the actors had, ehum, expanded in the intervening five years. But the exterior shockwave was lifted directly from the movie, as was the broken teacup (which was given to Sulu by a young Tuvok, much to this fan's delight). A lot of actors from the movie made it back to shoot this episode. I also loved the inclusion of Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) as Ensign Tuvok's superior. Even Kang the Klingon (played by Michael Ansara, from the original episode
Day of the Dove) made an appearance. He has also been on two episodes of
Deep Space Nine. I really appreciate that continuity and don't care if it's a fanwank.
The mind meld between Tuvok and Janeway was a great way to be able to have a flashback to an earlier time without resorting to either travelling back in time or back to the Alpha Quadrant. My only gripe is the idea of repressed memories, which dates this episode to the 1990s, when this was a fad among psychologists and therapists. Now it's a discredited idea for good reasons. It makes no evolutionary sense to repress traumatic memories. If we are to survive we must remember them so we can avoid situations when they might happen again, whether they're failing to help a falling girl or staying clear of lurking sabre-toothed sehlats.
At one time Janeway talks to Ensign Kim about what it was like in the old days: "Captain Sulu, Captain Kirk, Doctor McCoy. They all belonged to a different breed of Starfleet officers. Imagine the era they lived in: the Alpha Quadrant still largely unexplored... Humanity on the verge of war with the Klingons, Romulans hiding behind every nebula. Even the technology we take for granted was still in its early stages: no plasma weapons, no multi-phasic shields... Their ships were half as fast."
And she goes on: "Space must have seemed a whole lot bigger back then. It's not surprising they had to bend the rules a little. They were a little slower to invoke the Prime Directive, and a little quicker to pull their phasers. Of course, the whole bunch of them would be booted out of Starfleet today." This pretty much sums up why I like the 23rd century much better than the 24th (apart from
Deep Space Nine, which wasn't so rosy-tinted). It's sad but probably true that Kirk et al. actually would have been kicked out of Starfleet. They probably wouldn't even have been accepted into the Academy.
Surprisingly for a Tuvok-centred episode, his backstory takes a back seat to the rest. But I have to admit that it does give his character more depth, something he really needs.
Flashback gets a grade of
8- on my 10-graded scale.
3-03 The ChuteHow many Trek episodes have we had where some of the crewmembers get wrongly imprisoned by some hard-assed alien government for no good reason? Too many, I say. And
The Chute is one too many of those. I found it incredibly boring, drawn out and uninteresting as I was just waiting for the inevitable rescue.
It's a dark episode for
Voyager but it's not dark where the show should be dark according to its premise. It's dark because Harry Kim and Tom Paris are trapped in an unescapable prison with cruel inmates. I'll admit that Garrett Wang did a good job; it's just that I could never get invested in their predicament.
Visually, I found the revelation that the chute led out to a hatch directly into space rather neat, but that's all. I also found it ridiculous that the alien government didn't guard that entrance to keep outsiders, like Neelix's ship, from docking.
So I can only give an uninspired grade of
1+ to
The Chute.
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