Hey guys I accidentally posted yesterday’s blog on my profile somehow, I didn’t even know that was possible. So click on my username to get the first part of Year of Hell and some of the other fun stuff from yesterday! Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Trigger warning for mentions of suicide

Year of Hell Part Two: Why do I get the feeling you guys probably liked this and the last episode more than I did? If it helps you make sense of this write up I wrote as I watched, so you see my thoughts come together through the episode.

The captain is going to collapse at an inconvenient time, isn’t she?

Tom and Chakotay look well, at least.

I love that Seven is technically bridge crew now. It is inappropriate to contradict the captain in front of the crew.

I can’t tell if Chakotay is bluffing. Harry looks like he’s about to lose it. His hair is so funny. I can’t tell if Tuvok is still blind. And they are not messing around with the burn makeup, are they?

Something happened to Chakotay- he just suggested he dukes it out with Tom.

I might have to watch this again after you guys explain it to me because I’m honestly a little confused. But the scene with Janeway and Tuvok saying goodbye was cute.

Okay let’s be honest that was a complete copout. Sometimes I like the copout solutions but this was extreme and confusing and we got nothing out of it. Although someone want to tell me why Janeway didn’t decide to go around it IN THE FIRST PLACE? And what the heck changed to make her change her mind the second time? They clearly don’t remember what just happened. This was unsatisfying to me. Chakotay felt out of character, Tom was boring. B’Elanna was underused, Tuvok’s blindness was interesting but went nowhere. Seven had some funny lines, the Doctor was weak in his enforcement, and Harry finally got some screentime and was good but everything else was not great to me.

The real interesting thing to me was going to be how on earth do they rebuild after they get out of this situation. But we didn’t have to find out, because they didn’t have to do it.

Random Thoughts: Voyager needs a PR team. Also B’Elanna definitely over reacted, even just as a passing thought.

I like the concept of this. Black market for violent thoughts. I personally would love to never have a stray violent thought. Even in a self defense situation, I’d rather learn to evade and escape than to fight back. So the part this episode was missing is an explanation as to why they were so desperate to trade in violent thoughts.

Also Voyager’s favourite word seems to be “engram.”

The scene with 7 and the captain was funny. She doesn’t have a rank so nobody seems sure what to do with her when she speaks out.

Concerning flight: I’m surprised it took them this long to get pirated. I don’t love the DaVinci character, but watching Tuvok small talk with him was pretty funny. So was the doctor trying to get gossip out of 7 was pretty awesome. He can deactivate himself if he’s that bored.

This is an episode where, had I watched it when it aired live, I think I would have liked it a lot better. It was an objectively solid episode, well structured, easy to follow, the characters felt natural. I just didn’t get caught up in Janeway’s thrill to work with her old mentor. I almost felt jaded with the airplanes, and while I try not to take our modern technology/technological imagination for granted, I definitely did. I couldn’t get swept into Janeway’s/DaVinci’d optimism here. It had everything I typically like in an episode (except I don’t usually like when the holodeck characters break out) but I just wasn’t into it. I think I’m too caught up in 7 being funny and wanting to see Tom and B’Elanna together all the time now to get into these other episodes. But again, I 100% think it’s also an issue of timing. If I were watching this on the couch with my father after school, a week after I had seen the last episode, I think the magnitude would have reached me a little better.

Mortal Coil: As much as I don’t love Neelix, I do appreciate that he is integral to the crew. He isn’t my favourite scifi character but he is part of a family and I recognize that.

I love Chakotay’s focus in the shuttle. He gave Tom suggestions, tried to help him revive Neelix, and when Tom couldn’t do that, he pulled Tom right back and focused on flying the shuttle. I just have so much respect for Chakotay.

I also loved Seven of Nine walking in on dead Neelix and going “No seriously shut up and let me fix him.” I love that she has so many talents. I was also fascinated by her discussion with Tuvok and I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on it. Voyager really likes to ask “what happens when we die” but this is the first time I was actually interested in how they did it. When 7 tells Tuvok that her memories and experiences will always be part of the Borg, he tells her that this must be a relief. But I don’t feel that desire. I’m alright that there’s nothing. I’m here because the alternative is not being here and I’m perfectly happy with that.

I’m sorry guys does nobody else find it a little strange that Neelix told a little girl to imagine being dead as a bedtime story?

I understand all of Neelix’s perspective here. After 18 hours, I’d argue that this was an extraordinary means of maintaining life. At that point, in my opinion, it’s no longer a question of whether or not we can save him. It’s a question of whether or not he would genuinely want to be saved by those methods. They put Borg tech in his body without his consent. That’s huge! That’s a huge, potentially awful thing to do to someone.

They lost me at the vision quest thing for a number of problematic, annoying, and boring reasons. Also I can’t believe the conclusion he got from that was to kill himself and NOW I have to put a trigger warning on this post.

I see what they’re trying to do here, I wish that they didn’t because I think it was done poorly. Neelix is very troubled and we KNOW that but we don’t see it enough to actually have a valuable discussion about it. It’s the same reason Jetrel didn’t work. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, we find out that Neelix lost his entire family in a massive genocide attempt. What concerns me about this episode is someone who watches it, connects to Neelix, but when they have their own standing-on-the-transporter-pad moment, may not look up and find a strong support system there. And that’s dangerous.

For any of you who have been reading this since the DS9 blog, you may remember the episode where Mile’s tried to kill himself because he couldn’t live with what he had done to his prison mate in the prison sentence in his head. I think they did it better in that I got way more emotion out of it. The emotional build up was way more intense, and the equivalent scene was much more emotional to me. That said, I didn’t like that episode either. It was completely brutal, and I was pretty upset afterwards (to which people in the comments told me to “stop watching if I hate it so much”). I want to be clear that I don’t hate this or its DS9 equivalent episode. I certainly don’t hate either series but this is just one kind of episode that I don’t think they should make. I think it comes across as insensitive in some aspects, and I think it’s dangerous to bring up these conversations with such catch all resolutions (DS9’s was less bad with the resolution but then they never talk about it again and pretend everything is normal but nothing is normal after something like this happens).

If they had put a trigger warning in the title or the beginning of the episode (which I recognize was not commonplace at the time but I’m watching this on amazon and all it gave me was “rated 13 for violence, which they all are) I wouldn’t have watched it. Just to clarify I’m not in any way shape or form at risk of harming myself. But I’ll put it out there that wish I hadn’t watched this, and I could have told you that from the start.