The Swarm – Janeway et al attempt to maneuver Voyage through a space packed with a swarm of small ships, but it’s Robert Picardo who deservedly gets the quality screen time. Kim’s sad attempts to act the aggressive badass are thankfully outweighed by a neat twist or two.
The Chute – With no knowledge of how they arrived, Paris and Kim find themselves in a prison straight out of Escape from New York. Flashback – In Voyager’s version of “Trials and Tribble-ations,” Tuvok and Janeway mentally travel back to Tuvok’s time on the Excelsior, which awesomely intersects with the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and gives Captain Sulu an opportunity to kick a little ass. O yeah, Seska dies and the baby for which Janeway and Chakotay were willing to sacrifice ship and crew is never heard about again. Basics, Part II – Talk about your pat resolutions: The Voyager crew survives in Stone Age conditions for about six hours of so and befriends a shaman while Paris, with the assistance of the Doctor, rounds up some galactic cavalry and Voyager is returned with nary a scratch. The crew experiences trippy time paradoxes in “Coda” and “Before and After”, while the entire ship visits the 1990s a la Star Trek IV in “Future’s End.” The holodeck, well more used in Voyager than in any other ST series, is done extremely effectively in the ripping yarn “Worst Case Scenario” and the surprisingly interesting “Real Life.” (To be fair, however, there is “Alter Ego”…)ġ. Voyager season 3 is still fairly uneven in quality, but some good old ST staples still get some good use in this season. Anchored by a charismatic performance by Brad Dourif, as the sociopath, Suder even gets a chance at redemption, returning in the two-parter Basics (season 2, episode 26), when he helps to retake the ship from the Kazon.The slo-o-o-o-ow evolutionary progress of Star Trek: Voyager continues in season 3, as the show finally starts to more closely resemble, you know, Star Trek.
Needless to say, Tuvok experiences adverse effects from the meld in this study of extreme violence, and grapples with the ethics of appropriate punishment. Tuvok mind melds with Suder in order to better understand him. Attempting to establish motive, the logical Tuvok is baffled when the murderer, the crewman Suder, replies that he committed the crime for “no reason”. The resident Vulcan and Chief Security Officer, Tuvok (Tim Russ), is charged with solving the case. But in season two, we were treated to an episode of high drama that didn’t rely on alien battles. The early seasons of Voyager were patchy as the crew took time to establish chemistry, while antagonists such as the Kazon were uninspiring. Perhaps that’s why it’s so liberating” – Suder’s chilling words to Tuvok. “You live on the edge of every moment, and yet, in its own way, violence is attractive, too.
And, it also included some very fine writing, as this list demonstrates (note: spoilers for individual episodes and the series follow, and two-parters will count as one episode for the purposes of this list). Most significantly perhaps, it centered, for the first time, on a woman captain – one who commanded with utmost confidence, inspiring the love and loyalty of her crew, helping to pave the way for the gender-breaking 2017 series Discovery. It was a somewhat uneven show and didn’t fully hit its stride until season four, but it still provided plenty of memorable moments.Īlthough Voyager never quite reached the heights of cast alchemy and narrative depth of its immediate forebear, the iconic The Next Generation, it broke new ground. It explored emotional and ethical quandaries, such as hologram sentience and reformed drone Seven of Nine’s dating life, and along the way had fun with rogue Klingons and Q. During its seven seasons and 172 episodes, Voyager introduced new species, like the Hirogen and the bane of the Borg, Species 8472.