The Q and the Grey: YES Q! His behavior is disgusting but his behavior is never not disgusting so I’m just looking past it because I’m just interested in what antics he’s getting up to.

Okay just kidding why the HELL is this show so fixated on impregnating people?!!! Jesus!

Oh the tattoo thing Q did is super offensive. Again, it’s something I’m trying not to dwell on but that moment was a really obvious reminder that this was made more than twenty years ago.

No Neelix, you’re not respectful. Have you seen the way you treat your girlfriend? God I’d like to shove one of my feminist studies readings at these two. I don’t remember Q being this awful on the other series. I do remember not liking him when I was young (he grew on me way later) but I guess the way he more or less flirted with Picard was less viscerally disgusting to me. This is honestly really bad, and I look forward to seeing what the actors have to say about it on the Delta Flyers. Honestly there’s no excuse for this. It’s not a product of its time, it’s awful. I don’t know why this one is bothering me so much, guys... Tom looked like he was gonna punch Q.

Oh but I liked the puppy.

Okay THIS sounds more like what I thought the Q was like. The extravagant, roundabout solution, dragging humans into continuom conflict. We should just delete the first ten minutes of this episode and start when Q drags Janeway into the civil war.

B’Elanna is excellent in this. Gotta love the civil war uniforms and weapons. That was super cool. I love when they appear back on the bridge after something like this and they all scatter perfectly to their stations with no confusion, stumbling, or bumping into each other. They just pivot and skip on back to where they go.

Macrocosm: if the crew was missing, the first thing I would look for would be the doctor. If anyone could tell you what happened, it’d be the hologram.

Also, gross. I did find it funny when Janeway says Neelix has fluid in his lungs and Neelix corrects it to lung, not lungs. Neelix just kinda got sucked into the void.

Oh GOD it got grosser. By a lot.

I liked this episode. The doctor wasn’t as funny as usual but still an excellent, strong character. Janeway was a badass. It was a fighty episode but not as simple as pew pew pew. It was interesting, and the race they met at the beginning came into play at the end. I love details like that. DS9 was really good at doing that, especially in Julian’s episode. You would have this one scene that seems unrelated until the very end, and that’s always exciting.

Anyone get a message out of this? My best guess is a reminder not to be too overeager. But honestly I just liked watching Janeway’s tenacity and her teamwork with the EMH. I love that he can get around the ship now. I also love that on the Delta Flyers, they always talk about the message of an episode because Star Trek is definitely like that. I’ve noticed that I often get something different out of it than they do, though, which I found odd, because some of them seem really obvious. I guess there is always another way to look at things. We also just seem to decide to focus on a different aspect of the episode.

Fair Trade: I didn’t write for the first half of this episode so I’ll get back to that in a minute but what on earth does Voyager need with biomimetic gel? Wasn’t that a crazy regulated substance on DS9?

When Neelix asked Tom what happened to get him in trouble and Tom said, “It comes down to one simple fact: I didn’t tell the truth.” My heart jumped out of my chest. I dunno what’s so emotional about that to me. I am a crazy honest person, to a fault, as it has been described.

Back to the beginning. This trope goes way beyond Star Trek, we see it quite frequently. We do something against our better judgement with good intentions, we lie, the lie snowballs. Only in this particular case somebody DIED. So I’d say Neelix did a real bad thing here. And then a bunch of other real bad things. The last time I remember liking something like this was on DS9. It wasn’t my favourite, this isn’t my favourite trope to begin with, but the outcome was so sweet I think I cried. It was the one where Nog and Jake try everything they can to get their dad a baseball card. These episodes just stress me out so much, my heart is pounding. I can’t live with the idea of dishonesty (aside from cute harmless surprises).

I don’t hate Neelix in this but I don’t love him. This would be so much easier if he just walked up to Chakotay and said something.

YES I LOVE THE SWEET SWEET CONSEQUENCES!