Star Trek: Voyager - Season 6
Ahhhhh…that’s a little more like it. Following the muddled mess that was Star Trek: Voyager’s fifth season, season six is a breath of fresh air, and yet it still could’ve been so much more. Some of that regret comes in the form of the arrival and hasty departure of writer Ronald D. Moore. Fresh from his stint on the just-finished Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Moore wrote one episode (perhaps predictably - since he almost single-handedly spawned the operatic Klingon political epics of Next Generation - a Klingon-themed episode centered around B’Elanna) and co-wrote another, and then left the series after what was widely rumored to be a spat with Brannon Braga, who got his start as Moore’s co-writer in Next Generation’s fourth season and was now running the show with Rick Berman.
It’s hard to quantify something that didn’t happen, but Moore very likely could have helped Voyager a great deal; in any case, he instead went his own way, taking over the final season of Roswell and developing projects such as a new take on the ’70s SFTV classic Battlestar Galactica. But even despite Moore’s quick exit, the sixth season is a big improvement.
Part of that general upswing is the realization that this cast, and certain members of it in particular, could pull off some damn fine comedy. Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy is an almost surreal story built around Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor, with plenty of “I can’t believe they’re doing this on Star Trek” moments of near-self-parody for good measure. The Doctor is also at the heart of Virtuoso and Picardo turns in a bravura multiple-role performance in Life Line, one of two episodes this season to feature not just Dwight Schultz as neurotic former Enterprise engineer Barclay, but former Next Generation regular Marina Sirtis as Counselor Troi. There’s also the very amusing Live Fast And Prosper, in which con artists posing as Janeway and her crew have a good racket going by selling “Federation memberships” to struggling Delta Quadrant denizens and then leaving them high and dry.
There are also, as usual for any season of Voyager, some unintentionally funny shows. UPN hyped the hell out of Tsunkatse, not because it was a fantastic episode but because it guest starred wrestling star “The Rock” and thus gave the network a chance to cross-promote Voyager with UPN’s rising ratings star Smackdown. Meanwhile, Janeway becomes fixated on a holodeck-generated Irishman in two episodes, and while I’m not against romantic subplots (I appreciated the ongoing thread of Tom Paris and B’Elanna’s relationship this season), Fair Haven and Spirit Folk just couldn’t make me care about the story or characters in question. Equinox Part II is almost on the same miserable level, completely wasting the potential of the previous season’s cliffhanger and instead demonstrating that Seven of Nine can get you out of almost any situation, somehow. She was quickly becoming to Voyager was K-9 was to Doctor Who: a quick-fix deus ex machina.
Not that the character didn’t get a few good moments in: The Voyager Conspiracy is an interesting little number in which Seven becomes fascinated by conspiracy theories and all but dons a tin foil hat once she deduces that Voyager’s whole mission, and even the ill-fated mission of her parents into Borg space, has all been a plot that isn’t likely to end well for her. (There’s a joke waiting to be made about the wasted opportunity for an Art Bell guest starring role in here somewhere.) Collective marks the arrival of the young Borg drones who would continue to make appearances through the remainder of the series, helping to define an almost maternal role for Seven. And heck, even the character Seven replaced gets a long-overdue fair shake as Jennifer Lien returns to guest star as Kes in Fury. Other effective dramatic outings include Muse and One Small Step.
Unimatrix Zero closes the season with the dramatic twist of Borg assimilation of three of the show’s regulars, but it completely lacks the punch of Best Of Both Worlds, which aired almost exactly ten years before it. Picard’s assimilation and enslavement by the Borg was, more or less, a rape story. Unimatrix Zero’s assimilations are a carefully planned undercover operation which, since you know the show’s stars are returning, have no resonance or even risk. This might have made a fair mid-season two-parter (a damn sight better than The Killing Game a couple of seasons earlier, at any rate), but if you’re going to do a cliffhanger at the end of the season, make sure that the resolution isn’t visible from five months away.
There’s a decent round of extras, though I have to say my favorite is the rare “guest star” profile on Vaughn Armstrong, who most recently has been seen as Admiral Forrest on Star Trek: Enterprise but had previously essayed multiple alien characters in each of the previous Star Trek spinoffs, going all the way back to Next Generation’s first season. He demonstrates a lot of good humor about his unique place in Trek history, and even sings his self-penned blues tune about the various characters he’s played, also revealing how he came up with the song as a recurring convention gag. There’s a single-episode focus on One Small Step, which segues into a more general - but no less interesting - series of vignettes on various Star Trek actors’ involvement with different facets of the space program, especially Robert Picardo’s work with the Planetary Society.
Particularly interesting this time around are some of the “hidden” interview clips, with Jeff Combs (DS9’s Weyoun, Enterprise’s Shran) talking about his one-off guest shot in Voyager’s Tsunkatse episode, Tim Russ talking about going from Vulcan makeup to Vulcan-plus-Borg makeup for the season finale, and LeVar Burton talking about directing Voyager, whose sets were in exactly the same places as the sets from Next Generation.
Decent extras, and enough decent episodes to merit a three-star rating.