Bonus tip: NEVER TRUST THE MAYOR OF SUNNYDALE.Ĩ-9. Okay, maybe I just have a great fondness for daffy, cryptic monastics, but I was entertained. Oh, right, the weird Holocaust metaphor episode.ħ. Worst Ferengi episode ever? Could be! …In fact, this hauling out of dumb charicatures is especially offensive in light of all the more nuanced Ferengi stuff that DS9 was doing at the exact same time.Ħ. I do not remember seeing this one the first time around, but maybe it’s because I blocked it from my memory. (In fact, there are episodes later that make reference to things that happened to the Doctor during those years in which he appears to remember them, so … maybe he had good backups?) END OF SPOILERS.ĥ. …And then this is barely mentioned again, nor does it impact anything that comes after. SPOILERS AHEAD, but at the end of this one, the Doctor basically gets his entire personality reset to where he was when they activated him - the last two years of growth, experience, and development, gone. The Doctor has such a lovely singing voice! But this is where the resistance to continuity starts to rear its ugly head. This episode is one that makes me wish I shipped Harry/Tom, but they’re just too boring for that.Ĥ. The McGuffin that makes this all possible is dumb, but it’s hard to get mad at a McGuffin.ģ. And Tuvok makes a whole bunch of really good points about how egocentric humans are, which I always like. It’s okay to be Takei! More than okay, really - it’s awesome. Or change from caring about a baby to not caring about a baby just because of the baby’s revealed parentage.Ģ. Like kill off several interesting recurring characters and be the last of the Kazon episodes because the creators didn’t think they could do anything else interesting with either. But be prepared for it to do some stupid stuff. Like those three episodes in the middle there. Some things, however, are better left by the wayside. When things change on the show, they do so despite the show’s best efforts, not because of them. Little bits of earlier events pop up here and there, but more as throw-away lines than as anything of consequence. Voyager is by its very nature a cumulative show - it has a finite, non-auto-restocking cast that’s planning to be together for the next half-century at least, so you expect certain changes and events will have lasting effects. Season three is where the show’s lack of short-term memory really starts to show. If you go read around on Memory Alpha, you see tons of instances where Voyager‘s cast and crewĪlike make mention of this, usually grumbling all the way. Deep Space Nine, in fact, got on the wrong side of its production company more than once when it made plotlines that stretched over several episodes.
Sure, there were certain shows that demanded strict continuity (see: Twin Peaks), but Star Trek series weren’t supposed to be among them. The syndication model meant that shows had to be airable in whatever order the local broadcasters wanted to air them in, which didn’t lend well to embedded cumulative plots. It seems weird now that it’s pretty much the norm, but serialization is actually something that television - and Star Trek in particular - used to hate. Guys, if the marvelous Whitney Bishop is gonna keep telling you which episodes of “Star Trek: Voyager” to skip/watch, then I’m gonna keep publishing them.