Are you ready for 3 days of Voyager in one post?

Pathfinder: GUYS IT’S BARCLAY! And they’re wearing the new DS9 uniforms. They were in Message in a Bottle as well but I’m just making up for entirely missing it in DS9.

Oh my God is Tom finally going to talk to his dad? Admiral Paris is visiting Barclay’s station, while he’s trying to contact them.

It’s funny in his simulation that Chakotay and B’Elanna are wearing Maquis clothes. I couldn’t see if Tom had two pips or just one. (Update: Nope, he’s got both!)

This was a TNG episode. I mean obviously it wasn’t but it might as well have been. It would have made more sense. Also I forgot how uncomfortable Barclay makes me. But I really liked Paris’s dad and I liked the moment Paris heard his dad over the com. His dad was trying to be professional, and trying not to give this project favouritism, but that’s his son. And I think we’re seeing some development where as Tom spends time away from his dad, he starts to wonder if everything was as bad as he remembered it. In the One Small Step episode Tom talked about his first flight. I see a lot of growth there but it’s slow and subtle and makes me miss home a little which is hard to do.

Barclay still very clearly has addiction problems and just because he was right doesn’t make any of that okay. Or any of the whole breaking into a government lab and using equipment to shoot particles into a wormhole. And guys, there are so many wormholes in Voyager. Microwormholes, unstable wormholes, wormholes that move at one end, you name it. So many supposedly rare phenomena and they all seem to connect the alpha quadrant and the delta quadrant and we have some oddly certain way of figuring that out. I’m just sayin’...

Not my favourite episode, kind of awkward and creepy, 4/10.

Fair Haven: I heard that people didn’t like this episode. Now, I don’t know anything Irish culture but I recognize that this was probably a massive misappropriation of it. Certainly, the Doctor’s use of religion was insensitive. But that said, when you get past this, the episode was a joy to watch. The doctor was funny and light, there was a science fiction story behind Janeway’s love story, and I liked the message. She realized that it was unfair for her to make changes to design a perfect lover because no human would ever not have flaws. Just to be clear, that doesn’t excuse cultural appropriation. They could have easily told this same story using a man from a far off planet. Neelix could have helped Tom write the protocol for some vacation planet he had been to once.

The doctor’s conversation with Janeway was quite beautiful. And the fight in the bar when Tom realized what had happened was pretty funny. I know some of us had a conversation about power dynamics and how it’s difficult for the doctor to form a romantic relationship with the crew because their lives actively depend on him. I suppose the same applies to Janeway. I actually personally don’t see a problem with her getting together with someone like Chakotay or Tuvok- I don’t think the power dynamics of the ship would change much and I don’t think either is the type to say, “You just agree because you’re sleeping together.” But it would be much more complicated with pretty much any other crewman.

Blink of an Eye: if Voyager can’t break orbit how the hell would a rocket make it Voyager? Not to mention they’re going to have WAY worse problems when they get there but they don’t know that. I bet their technology is going to be shockingly compatible, isn’t it? Yep they docked right to Voyager and the door popped right open.

Well, honestly that’s not any of the problems I thought they were going to have.

I liked this episode a lot. I loved the idea of watching a space race. I wish Chakotay had been a little more involved. But the concept was so sweet. The sky ship was both worshiped and feared, divided a population, and drove their development. Of course it was the ultimate cultural interference. But it was an accident, and it was also a lovely little shove in the right direction.

Virtuoso: awe can the doctor sing for them? This is so sweet! It’s his dream.

I love listening to him do opera. Do you guys know if he did all his own singing? It’s genuinely beautiful. I didn’t love his rendition of “I’ve Been Working On the Railroad,” but his opera is phenomenal. His recital is adorable and then we got Harry Kim and the Kim Tones which was a low effort name but I’m smiling so much. I liked the jazz too.

“I’m an engineer, not a costume designer.” I liked Torres a lot in this scene. I thought she had a good personality without going over the top or being too aggressive.

“This isn’t sabotage, Seven. It fan mail.”

This was the right amount of awkward for me. It wasn’t as grandiose as the episode where the doctor imagines being a command hologram. It was mildly uncomfortable, he was clearly making a mistake, but it wasn’t so unbelievably conceited he had girls fighting over him. He just wanted to do what he loved and the attention went to his head. We got some lovely singing, some great strict Janeway, and some humor.

Memorial: interesting choice to see Seven comforting Neelix. It’s cute to continue to see the parallels between her and Naomi.

Awe B’Elanna was finally being all cute and sweet and not the other way around and Tom was having a straight up bad time. Also can we just take a minute to acknowledge that Tom was a COMPLETE ASS before he was even affected by the memories? GOD. You have a lifetime to watch Tv. You can take two seconds to catch up with your girlfriend after she missed you for two weeks.

The cave they’re crawling in looks like one of those cutaways in a museum to show how rocks form.

Uh... why send the members of the crew who are most affected by this down to the planet’s surface? 39 crew members are affected. That means that over 100 aren’t. Including 7! Did anyone stop to think about how dangerous that was for a second?

I disagree with the final decision here. Janeway decided to process this grief in her own way. But the way she did that forced all other 38 affected crewmembers to attempt to process it her way, too, and you guys know where I’m going with this- that’s not her decision to make. I personally think they should have done nothing, maybe put up a warning buoy if anything. There are so many other ways for a story to live on. It is in their memories now, and their logs. Surely other ships have passed by in the last three hundred years. It’s not for us to decide that they even WANTED it to last longer. Surely they knew it wouldn’t go on forever. I wish they had discussed some of those other ways people can remember things. And I disagree with Janeway’s argument that this is like any other battlefield memorial. It is not. You don’t relive the battle of Gettysburg when you visit. You don’t play the role of someone committing war crimes while you’re there. And you don’t go if you don’t have the mental health to handle it. This was compulsory because they happened to be passing through. It led Neelix to hold a little girl hostage with a phaser. Harry nearly stopped breathing in a Jeffries tube. Janeway hallucinated for two hours. It has the potential for real physical harm. If something happens to the warning buoy that Voyager put out there, people are going to experience the full force of what happened there...

Tsunkatse: The play fight between Tom and Harry was adorable. That whole scene was a lot of fun.

I think the doctor needs to stop treating social learning as school. At first it made sense. It doesn’t anymore. Now there should be more of Seven doing what she wants to and not worrying about doing everything perfectly right.

Guys I would have gone to see the alien bugs, just for the record.

OH MY GOD THAT’S DWANE JOHNSON.

I wanted to see Tuvok coaching her from his bed. He’s a martial arts expert. I like to see character details like that reiterated and replayed.

Seven’s hair is gorgeous in this episode. I don’t love her super tight french twist. I like the wispies. I have learned how to do one of Janeway’s simpler styles but with less volume. I did her french twists down into a half up low ponytail thing with a clip. Cheers to anyone who knows which one I’m talking about from that weird little tangent.

Chakotay just said, “Tom,” when he wanted Tom to man the security team and expected Tom to know what that meant.

This was a fun episode. I liked Seven’s struggle and I liked Tuvok’s lesson for her at the end. I also think it added another layer of complexity that Seven got a situation where the person she was supposed to kill wanted her to. That’s a whole other argument in itself. What if Voyager hadn’t rescued them?