Star Trek: Voyager - Season 3
Depending on where you stand, the third season of Star Trek: Voyager is either where this show started coming together…or started coming apart at the seams.
There’s actually much to like here, with The Swarm introducing a most promising new enemy (which we never hear from again), False Profits following up on the Next Generation episode The Price (which stranded two Ferengi on a wormhole-exploring mission in the Delta Quadrant as a throwaway gag), and some outstanding standalone shows like Distant Origin and the engrossing Worst Case Scenario, two of my favorites in the entire series.
But there are also episodes that are at best forgettable, and at worst just lamentable. The Chute tries to be a bold experiment in picking up in the middle of a story designed to deepen and challenge the friendship between Tom Paris and Harry Kim, but the audience gets left out of the whole “understanding what the hell is going on” part of the equation. Remember tries to go where The Inner Light has already taken us back in the Next Generation days, only by now the alternate-life-timeline-that-only-happened-in-someone’s-mind gag has been worn so thin that you can more or less tell what will happen. Darkling tries to staple a dark side onto the Holographic Doctor’s personality, but it ends up being a tiring throwaway. And the less said about The Q And The Grey, the better, for I try to keep my site free of the kind needless profanity inspired by any discussion I try to embark on where that episode is concerned. These episodes can be skipped with little or no consequence.
By far the best-represented category of Voyager storytelling in season three can be summed up in one word: “meh.” Neither great nor awful, but somehow falling below the average that we’d come to expect by this time. (It could also be a very relative assessment - Deep Space Nine’s fifth season was kicking ass at the same time these Voyager episodes were originally airing.) Falling into this category is, tragically, the shoulda-been-a-classic Flashback, guest starring George Takei as Sulu and Grace Lee Whitney as Rand, and tying in strongly to the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It’s a wonderful opportunity, sparked by the 30th anniversary of the original Star Trek, to revisit the classic era and find out about Tuvok’s part in it, but it’s all for naught, serving as a distraction as the crew tries to chase down a pseudo-scientific B-plot of rather questionable credibility. It would’ve been better to drop the B-plot and just have Tuvok tell the story. Would that have been so bad? Do we always have to have some crazy-ass macguffin going on in the background, taking time away from character development?
Since we’re talking about Voyager, the answer is yes. Macrocosm hails the arrival of former Babylon 5 special FX house Foundation Imaging with an Aliens-derived story about Janeway trying to repel “macro viruses” that have taken over the ship while she and Neelix were away on a mission. There’s precious little plot, but damned if there isn’t plenty of CGI to show off - a first for Voyager, so it was evidently a big deal to them. Unity marks another arrival in Voyager’s history, that of the Borg, in a story that, while interesting, has gaping plot holes (one of the primary characters was assimilated at Wolf 359…despite the fact that the Borg ship that decimated a 39-ship Starfleet assault group at Wolf 359 then went on to be destroyed by the Enterprise at Earth; see The Best Of Both Worlds Part II).
The Borg come back in the appealing, but strangely flat, cliffhanger episode Scorpion, which paves the way for the arrival of Seven of Nine in season four. But that’s a whole other story altogether.
The extras are somehow a little less exciting this time around than they were for the season 2 DVD set, with many of the interview segments returning to typical form as the writers and producers congratulate themselves on what they felt was their best season yet. It may be telling that the most interesting featurette deals with the special effects, specifically Kate Mulgrew coming to grips with the Ripley routine in Macrocosm, staging vicious life-or-death fights with airborne critters that aren’t actually there. The characters and cast members profiled this time around are Ethan Phillips/Neelix and Jennifer Lien/Kes. It’s very disappointing that Jennifer Lien opted not to offer any new interview material for these items, as it would’ve been nice to hear her insights. Perhaps, considering that Kes was written out of the show two episodes into the following season only to fade into obscurity as - as one friend of mine has put it - “the blonde chick who was there before Seven of Nine”…it’s hard to blame her.
Season three of Star Trek: Voyager may well be where my big disillusionment began with the series, and it’s quite a mixed bag to watch all over again.