Castle Magus

Man, fuck off with that horseshit.

The Vidiians sucked ass (aside from Danara Pel, which this article doesn't even mention), and "Phage" was, at least for me, the absolute nadir of Star Trek: Voyager, which I've said multiple times before.

Finished it. It's still pretty great. Instead of "reviewing" it or whatever, I'll just talk about what I want to see in the future (because it's good enough that I want to see more of it). One thing I want to see, no make that two things I want to see, in season 3 (after they resolve the "to be continued" cliffhanger at the end of season 2), the first is the Wesley "The Traveler" Crusher thing, which seems like a pretty sure thing.

The second thing I would like to see in season 3 (or at some point, at least) of Star Trek: Lower Decks...

Basically, I want to see something akin to the "Trials and Tribble-ations" episode of Deep Space Nine, where they went back in time to the Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." Except, in the case of Lower Decks, they'd be going back into an episode of The Animated Series in a similar fashion. I mean, it doesn't even have to be one episode. Could be "More Tribbles, More Trouble," could be "The Practical Joker," could be that one where they met the devil, or any combination of those and the rest. It would be interesting to see the Lower Decks crew trying to... um... let's say, emulate the animation style from TAS, in the same manner that the DS9 crew tried to emulate how things were in the Original Series era (like how Worf had to hide his forehead ridges due to Klingons not having them back then). It'd be worth it just to see Dr. T'Ana and M'Ress in a scene together, if absolutely nothing else (or maybe something happens to M'Ress that requires T'Ana to have to try and pretend to be M'Ress for a while or something). Oh and, of course, they'd totally need to bring back Mulder and Scully I mean Dulmur and Lucsly for this, too.

Hell, given that Wesley Crusher is a Time LordTraveler now, they could even combine the two things I want to see into one thing (or bring Wil Wheaton back again after the first thing for the second thing). Really, I wouldn't mind Wesley "The Traveler" Crusher becoming a semi-regular guest on Lower Decks in the same way that Q was on Next Generation (and DS9 and Voyager and Picard).

In the incredibly unlikely event that someone in charge of Star Trek: Lower Decks (or Wil Wheaton) happens to read this post, take this idea absolutely for free, I don't care. I just want to see it.

Just gonna copy/paste a couple of posts + comments I made on Facebook (edited for formatting and such).

( Post 1 + comments (originally posted on February 12, 2019) )

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( Post 2 (originally posted on April 24, 2019) )

I'm five episodes in now (if you count the two-parter first episode as two eps), and while I hear that it gets pretty bad later on, it's certainly off to a much, much better start than Voyager was by the same number of episodes in.

In the fifth episode of Enterprise, "Unexpected," they meet aliens with holodeck technology[1], Trip (a male character) gets pregnant, and a Klingon has a valid reason and opportunity to say "I can see my house from here." I genuinely enjoyed the episode, despite how ridiculously stupid it was, mostly because they knew this ep was silly and were kind of playing it up for the comedy, though not overly so. The ones that came before that were pretty good too.

The fifth episode of Voyager, by contrast, was "Phage," i.e. the episode that is at the very top of my personal "worst Voyager episodes ever" list and one that I've ranted about before (not only because it introduced the terribad Vidiians, which I have also ranted about quite a bit). It wasn't even "so bad, it's good" bad like the Enterprise ep was, mostly because they took the whole thing so seriously despite it being ludicrously "Spock's Brain"-level stupid. It was just bad, period, and the ones that came before were rather lackluster as well.

The only low marks I give Enterprise so far are for T'Pol being so... let's say overly antagonistic at times. Spock and Tuvok were never as bad as she has rather consistently been so far, even at their absolute Vulcan-y worst. Still, I guess I should cut her a bit of slack for being the first Vulcan to serve on a human ship. The worst thing about it, of course, is that T'Pol is usually 100% right. They'd have avoided whatever horrible problems that they encountered if they'd just listened to her, instead of being all "rah, rah, we're humans and we do things differently than Vulcans do, so screw your protocols and regulations." So I totally get why she'd be rather irritable, even for a Vulcan. Of course, the episodes would have been far less interesting if they had taken her advice, so... yeah. Still, it makes T'Pol look bad for being such a hardass, and it makes Archer and the others look stupid for just blatantly ignoring her concerns. I guess she's kind of like Worf in that respect, although Worf was rarely so "ugh, what are you stupid humans about to get us into this time" about it.

[1] - Two hundred or so years before the Federation gets it in TNG, though technically they did have something similar in Kirk's time, even if it was only ever seen in that one episode of the cartoon.

Copy/pasted from Facebook:

I'm four episodes into Star Trek Voyager (or only three if you count the two-part premiere as one big episode) and already *two* of them have involved time travel in some way. That's... I'm not sure what to make of that, actually. Hmm.

And... the next episode after those involves Neelix getting his lungs stolen all "Spock's Brain" style and having them temporarily replaced with holographic lungs. I mean... what. I do hope some of the ups start showing up soon rather than these downs, because Voyager as a whole has just been kind of meh at best, so far. >_>;

I'm going to stick with it though, because I know that TNG was pretty weak during its first season as well, so hopefully Voyager will similarly pick up as well.

New content beyond the above:

This episode. "Phage." It was hilariously terrible. I mean, really, Neelix's lungs are stolen by a couple of ghouls from Fallout (no, really) and are replaced by holograms. Voyager flies inside an asteroid which has a giant funhouse hall of mirrors kind of thing inside of it. Just... what. o_O

I started watching this series expecting to experience what TVTropes calls Critical Backlash, because I'd heard it was supposedly so bad, but I just figured that was the Internet being its typical, overly critical self, you know? But wow. So far, it has started out rather lackluster and has only gotten progressively worse with each episode. Seriously, though, this thing with "Phage" here has to be the nadir, right? It simply can't get much worse than that, can it? But then, just for the heck of it, I did a quick Google search for "worst Voyager episodes" and this "Phage" show doesn't even seem to register on the lists of bad episodes that I glanced at. Really, if this is any indicator at all of what is to come, I might just have to revise my stance and start watching it simply for the "so bad, it's good" eps (though I can't say that "Phage" rises to meet even that low standard) and just be pleasantly surprised by the ones that actually are good.

I mean, really, even as bad as TNG season 1 was, I don't remember anything being as ludicrous as "Phage," aside from maybe "Code of Honor." As for DS9, "The Storyteller" from season 1 is what I consider to be the worst episode from that series, but it is still head and shoulders above "Phage." I'll admit that "Phage" is not quite as blatantly ridiculous as some of the Original Series episodes I nitpicked before, but then those at least had "made in the 60s" as an excuse. >_>;

But really, I can't hear the holographic doctor saying "His lungs have been removed" without immediately thinking of this:


My reaction to "Phage" was pretty much the same as Kirk's reaction in the above clip.

"Good. I look forward to your report, Mr. Broccoli."

Added bonus in that scene: Data mispronounces metathesis.

Tangentially related, if I had to pick one and only one character from all of Star Trek as the one to whom I relate the most, it would most likely be Reginald Barclay, especially in his earlier appearances.

(All of this is fresh in my mind because I just watched this episode over the weekend.)

They had a U.S. flag. They had a Bible. They had a perfect copy of the U.S. Constitution. They were called "Yangs" aka Yankees (the white people) and they were fighting the "Kohms" aka Communists (the Asian people, or "yellows" as Kirk himself called them).

Really, Star Trek? I mean, just come on. I'm still trying to apply the MST3K Mantra here, I really am, and I know this was the sixties, back when television was just... different or whatever. And I totally get that these were just thinly veiled commentaries on the society at the time and all that good stuff. But even so, Star Trek, for me to seriously attempt to maintain a suspension of disbelief, it requires that you at least try, okay?

If it were just this one episode in isolation it would be one thing, but this one was only a few episodes after the one with the Nazis, which was itself only a few episodes after the one with the Chicago Mobsters, and before that came the one with the Roman Empire. I swallowed things like that because you at least tried to explain that the craziness in those was the result of contamination by Earth-men a hundred years in the past (or, you know, just six years in the case of the Nazi thing, which is itself kind of hard to swallow). But in this case, with the flag and the Constitution and all, you don't even do that much. It's just there. For no reason at all. Actually, come to think of it, you similarly didn't explain away the whole Roman thing either. Huh. I guess I bought that one simply because it was the modern Roman Empire (modern as of the sixties, anyway), and the novelty of Roman soldiers carrying machine guns or them doing their gladiatorial combat on a TV sound stage rather than in an actual arena. Or something. Well, whatever, I will give you this much though, Star Trek. All of that still isn't quite as bad as the first season episode I mentioned previously where you had that planet that was physically exactly like Earth.

I'm going to keep going, Star Trek, because I like you. I really do. It's still fun, despite the crazy nonsensical stuff like this. But even so, you've still gotta at least try. I have to say that I like you much better when you're defeating computers with illogic or fighting giant space amoebas, rather than when you're philosophizing about the Cold War and wars-by-proxy and stuff like that.

I've been watching TOS for the past couple of weeks or so. Just finished The Menagerie tonight, which is roughly the half-way point of season 1. After TOS, I plan to move on to TNG. That's all I have access to at the moment, though.

While looking up some stuff online pertaining to episodes I'd watched, I was using Memory Alpha, as indicated by the links above. Memory Alpha is the wiki for all canon Star Trek stuff. In addition to Memory Alpha, I also knew of the existence of Memory Beta. This is the wiki for all officially licensed, but non-canon Star Trek stuff.