TV #4 of 2023:
Star Trek: Voyager, season 6
Right now in my Star Trek watch-through, I am alternating a season of Voyager with a season of Enterprise, which provides an interesting and productive contrast. While this will never be my favorite iteration of the franchise, and I have to say that this penultimate year makes a few particularly frustrating creative decisions, it has a certain baseline competence, a compelling overall plot, and a well-fleshed out main cast, which are all qualities that that other series has been majorly lacking, at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far. Like its predecessors, I am giving this run of Voyager three-out-of-five stars as a solid piece of science-fiction that nevertheless leaves me wishing it would lean more into its strengths and avoid a few obvious blunders.
As for those missteps: the producers were apparently not content with the one junior member of the crew already roaming the ship, and so Naomi Wildman is now joined by four essentially indistinguishable Borg children, with Seven of Nine tasked to be their teacher / surrogate mother. It feels like a desperate grab for ratings in a younger demographic, but the juvenile subplots in practice continue to land poorly and distract from the adult concerns at hand (as they have since the early days of Wesley Crusher on TNG). In another minor bit of continuity, we are introduced to an Irish holo-village that seems like the latest attempt at establishing a sociological ‘third place’ between work and home for the characters, following the tropical resort program and Captain Proton scenario of seasons past. If the show could stick with one of these concepts long-term it could perhaps acquire deeper significance, but for some reason, they instead each tend to put in a few appearances and then get discarded. Here, for instance, Fair Haven mostly serves for the requisite Holodeck-run-amock episode — and to showcase Janeway’s ruthlessness, although as ever, I’m not sure that’s entirely intentional in the scripts.
Let’s review. In exploring this digital environment — on a series that has always emphasized the personhood and dignity of its holographic Doctor — the captain sees a person that she likes and proceeds to edit him shamelessly in ways large and small to suit her even better. She even deletes his wife from existence, a fact that never comes up again, even after he gains sentience and she promises honesty later on! To be clear, I’m not saying these character choices represent bad writing, any more so than the heroine’s decision to pull another Tuvix in 6×6 “Riddles” and kill off the new version of Tuvok’s consciousness that’s begging her not to. On the contrary, the idea of a Starfleet officer far from home exercising terrible deadly judgment that no one can question or countermand has real teeth to it. But the writers don’t actually appear to recognize and fault the woman for any of this, which is an unfortunate missed opportunity.
In terms of who does get faulted, former co-star Kes gets a head-scratcher of a return for an hour, randomly evil and then redeemed by being reminded that she used to be nicer (in a time-travel solution that also frustratingly suggests Janeway has known about three years of developments like Seven joining the crew before they happened). And rounding out the big cameos, Deanna Troi and Reg Barclay of all people pop up a few times, reestablishing contact with the Alpha Quadrant once more despite how that weakens the basic narrative tension of the show. It’s all so unnecessary… and yet it’s still better than Enterprise, at least.
★★★☆☆
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