TV #77 of 2021:
Star Trek: Voyager, season 2
Overall I would say that this season is a step down from the first, especially when you factor in a few real clunkers like “Tattoo,” “Threshold,” and “Elogium.” Luckily it also has bright spots along the lines of “Deadlock” and “Tuvix,” although the script of the latter doesn’t appear to realize how abhorrent it makes Captain Janeway. (Federation transporter technology absolutely could have let all three men live, and even if it couldn’t, separating the merged figure back into Tuvok and Neelix against his express wishes is straight-up murder. Fight me on it.)
My primary complaint about this program continues to be how unseriously it takes its own premise of a ship stranded far from anything familiar. Despite that logline, we keep seeing other denizens and artifacts originally of the Alpha Quadrant — including, sigh, Amelia Earhart of all people — and running into species such as the Q with the power to easily return Voyager there. As a result, a theoretically great source of tension is rendered quite lifeless, and any new episode carries the potential to immediate resolve the larger series plot. Those encounters with advanced civilizations are all weaker for the inevitable flimsy justifications of why they can’t / won’t help, too.
I’ll likewise quote from my review of the previous year, as it still applies word-for-word: “most of the individual episodic storylines are not taking advantage of the original canvas that the Delta Quadrant represents. Instead they generally seem as though only minimal rewrites would be necessary for them to have happened on a show like The Next Generation that’s exploring closer to home. We even get an hour where the main concern is a holodeck malfunction! Why bother sending the protagonists so far away if that detail has such little effective consequence?”
The story is at least getting a degree more serialized, but so far that’s mostly made up of recurring villains like Seska or the Vidiians who promise that this time they’re not going to double-cross our heroes, really! It’s all a bit tedious, and redeemed merely by the general competence that the franchise has established by this stage. On average, these installments are fine. I just know they could be a whole lot better.
★★★☆☆
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