Change Your Image
Alex-594-514783
Reviews
Star Trek: Voyager: Meld (1996)
I love this episode but Tuvok's confusion is odd.
Tuvok is smart and he knows how flawed minds can be, even Vulcan minds. Suder not having a motive for killing really shouldn't have been all that perplexing to Tuvok. Suder is clearly mentally ill. That should have been a logical enough explanation but instead Tuvok acts like there is no logic about it and has an existential crisis. It's not a black mark against the episode or anything, especially since he really starts to fall apart after melding with Suder, giving Tuvok a taste of the crazy.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Force of Nature (1993)
Dr. Serova is even dumber than they intended to portray her.
The premise of this episode is one that hinges on the stupidity of a character. Dr. Serova is already portrayed as irresponsible but we're also meant to take away that she's a genius who can see something nobody else can. She forces a warp core breach and sacrifices her life in the explosion to prove that massive amounts of warp energy will disrupt subspace and cause a rift that would prevent warp. She does this because the effect is supposedly cumulative and traditional warp engine energy is only a tiny fraction of the amount required to cause a rift. If that's the case then eventually it would become pretty obvious she was right as ship traffic continues over the years to come. She'd have been proven right eventually and likely with plenty of time to do something about it; all without her having to kill herself like a dummy. There was no reason to do what she did at all.
Star Trek: Voyager: Nothing Human (1998)
I've seen worse but this one is pretty bad.
This episode takes a lot of illogical leaps. Remember the time they sent the doctor to the alpha quadrant and Harry and Tom tried to create a new EMH in case he never came back? They set the precedent in that episode that creating an interactive hologram with a giant database is REALLY hard. Well in this episode they just ask the computer to do it, tweak a couple things, and they've not only created an interactive database but a full-fledged Cardassian individual for the Maquis on-board to loathe. There was zero reason to recreate the guy. Seems to me they could have just dumped the same medical data into the doctor's program. In fact, that could have been far more interesting to watch Picardo struggle with the morality of what he learns from the data and whether or not to use the data to save Torres.
Another issue I had was, if you can scan the creature in sick bay thoroughly enough to recreate it entirely on the holodeck with such accuracy that you can even cut the hologram open and see totally accurate internal workings of the creature, then why do you even need to perform fake surgery on the hologram? Can't you just ask the computer to simulate whatever procedure you wanted to try instead of wasting time? Clearly they have detailed scans that allow a perfect recreation of the creature's anatomy so what is the point of even recreating it?
Lastly, I'm sure this could expand into a giant philosophical debate but on the surface the moral issue seems rather simple to me. By not using the data to save Torres they are making all the Bajoran Deaths that much more pointless. The fact that this data came at a great evil cost should definitely be remembered and mourned, but clearly that data was already in their database somehow and nobody seemed to care? Deleting it is just ignorant and self-righteous in my opinion because they're only doing it to make themselves feel better rather than having any positive practical effect on anything. Their moral stance of deleting the data without using it to save their crew member isn't going to stop psychopaths from doing the same evil stuff in the future and they themselves aren't the ones that are ever going to do anything so morally bankrupt. One could argue that using the research to save lives is actually the moral thing to do and pays at least some homage to those who died.
Star Trek: Voyager: Future's End, Part II (1996)
One of the best Voyager episodes.
This two-parter is one of the best Voyager has to offer. It's right up there with Year Of Hell. Sarah Silverman is a riot and the juxtaposition of Tuvok and the rest of the Voyager crew against the 20th century setting is pretty entertaining. I enjoyed Henry Starling's character as well because he seemed to sell the plausibility of his technical prowess quite convincingly. It also helps that he had like 30 years to study the technology so props to the writers for that detail.
There's just one little issue I have with the whole thing. Captain Braxton is a moron. He comes to the 24th century and just straight up tells Voyager his mission is to destroy them and is then surprised when they resist. For a 29th century dude he sure is dim XD
Oh and the dudes that are afraid of "the beast" (meaning the government) were way too over the top. And that's saying something considering they are portraying a stereotype of irrational conspiracy theorists.
I Am a Killer: Means to an End (2018)
The editing in this is so bad it's hilarious.
I've only seen the first episode so far but this first episode is slow and makes some questionable, albeit hilarious editing decisions. They have a lot of people talk about the case. For the most part the settings and shots they go with are pretty inconsequential but some of them are just absolute hilarity and completely unrelated to the subject matter.
I just could not hold in my laughter about half way through the first episode when they're interviewing an attorney about the case. For some reason they decided to have him driving his expensive boat down a fancy river in the middle of a fancy neighborhood while he talks about the case. The whole thing consists of like 15 different angles of this attorney in his preppy sweater just cruising this river in his boat named "The Defense Rests" while he talks over the top of this footage about the prisoner's insistence on the death penalty. Maybe it's because I'm slightly doped up on cough medicine but I was crying with laughter as the lengthy scene continued on. But it didn't end there! Throughout the rest of the episode we come back to shots of him at his fancy house by that same river, cleaning out his pool. I half expected to see the next segments of him talking to the camera in his fancy den with random close-ups of his bank statements.
I can only imagine the conversation between the director and this attorney.
Director: "Okay, for this part of the show we want you to talk about his insistence on making it to death row."
Attorney: "Alright, but do you think I could leisurely cruise this river behind my house while we do it? Then afterward maybe you could get me cleaning out my pool or swimming through my vault of gold like Scrooge McDuck?"
My sides XD
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Field of Fire (1999)
I've seen worse but this one's pretty bad.
All the stuff with Ezri performing the right of emergence to bring about an image of Joran (a previous host who was a murderer) so she could get into the killer's head is cliche and boring but that's not what brings my score to a lowly three stars. This episode has a bad case of amazing-tech-itis. There are plenty of episodes across many sci-fi shows where they get their hands on some amazing tech or knowledge and then conveniently forget about it for the rest of the series. This is one of those episodes.
A micro-transporter on the barrel of a gun that fires titanium bullets is already a hard swallow but okay. We do have other evidence of precision transporting in Trek such as when they beam a baby out of the womb in Voyager or when they beam a tiny spy device into a bulkhead in an earlier DS9 episode, etc. But we can't stop there because how is our killer going to see what he's shooting at? I know! Magic X-ray googles!
Not only can these magic goggles see through solid matter like bulkheads or people, but they can be zoomed so they DON'T see through objects at a certain distance. If they saw through all matter then surely you'd be looking through the entirety of the station into the blackness of space. So of course we need to be able to zoom the goggles. Is someone standing in front of a monitor you need to look at? Just zoom in through their body and there you go! Now you somehow have a magic invisible floating camera between that person in your way and the monitor in front of them.
It's just ridiculous and thankfully they ignore this tech exists in every other part of Trek. If it did exist they'd be as common as phasers and would be used CONSTANTLY. How many plots would be foiled by just one pair of these goggles? What if a ship had this technology on a larger scale and could just peer inside Starfleet Headquarters when they suspect alien corruption and immediately see the nefarious things unfolding there? This plot device tech is just plain horrendous and they should not have thought it was okay to casually introduce it with a bit of technobabble.
Star Trek: Voyager: Unimatrix Zero (2000)
Very fun two-part episode but it jumps the shark.
This is one of those action-packed episodes that is super fun to watch. Mostly I like Star Trek for how it makes you think but sometimes it's nice to take a load off and just have some fun. The whole idea of Unimatrix Zero is cool and unique and Voyager wanting to help preserve it is a great premise. Not to mention I always love Borg episodes that involve Janeway and the Borg Queen.
What I don't really love is the way they jump the shark toward the end when part of Janeway's plan is to have her and her away team actually become Borg drones with some sort of inhibitor from the doctor to keep the voices of the collective out of their heads. When Picard got assimilated in TNG it was a huge deal. Bringing him back was treated as no small task and he had to suffer with their implants in him for pretty much the rest of his life. Seven of Nine reinforces this notion that leaving the collective is a life-long process even if we're only talking about the superficial mechanical components and ignoring the mental journey.
They brush off this over the top plan by feeding the audience some hand-waving explanation about them not being Borg for too long so they can be totally reverted back to normal. This flies in the face of Locutus who was a Borg for less than a day and struggles the rest of his life because of it.
Ultimately it's still a fun episode. I just wish the writers could have thought a little harder about a clever Janeway plan that didn't involve trivializing assimilation, which up until then was a much scarier consequence than this episode makes it seem.
Star Trek: Voyager: Message in a Bottle (1998)
This episode is super fun but sending the doctor is stupid.
Ignoring the technobabble about why a simple message degrades on the alien network but a more complex holographic signal somehow doesn't, we already know they can quickly create throw away holo characters. It would make way more sense to whip up a throw away character with a message to give once it gets to the alpha quadrant than to send their only talented physician. Despite that the episode is still a fun little goofy adventure.
Star Trek: Voyager: Sacred Ground (1996)
Worst episode of Trek ever. Yes, worse than Sub Rosa.
I'd rather watch Beverly have sex with a ghost than watch this episode of nonsense again. The pandering to religious garbage is a taint on the entire Trek universe. The stupidest part is that at the end they depict the doctor actually having a scientific understanding of the effects from the shrine because they were finally able to scan the shrine while the captain was taking Kes into it. The entire episode is trying to say that science doesn't have all the answers, yet the same episode admits that the only reason they didn't have the answers was because the idiots wouldn't let them just scan the shrine after Kes' accident.
Listening to the elderly "spirits" sit there and belittle Janeway's "blind faith" in science was excruciating. The very point of science is that you don't need faith, let alone blind faith. You can follow a scientific argument from start to finish and it should have empirical data to back up all observations. The entirety of science is built around actively trying to disprove the things we think we know. The only way a scientific theory survives is if it can withstand attempt after attempt to falsify it until we just have to say "well, we can't seem to prove this theory wrong yet". It becomes the best theory we have until a better one comes along to expand on it or a better attempt to falsify it comes along and finally pokes a hole in it.
Star Trek is one of the only science fiction shows to ever truly appreciate the scientific process. Sure it's not always perfect but until Sacred Ground you could at least say they were trying their best to depict science for what it really is. This episode flies in the face of everything Gene Roddenberry envisioned for Trek.
I love Voyager. It's one of my favorite Trek series despite this blight of an episode. Thankfully the story writer for this one did not contribute anything else to Star Trek. I've never been so disgusted by an episode of Star Trek. Even the lowest quality episodes of Trek with nonsensical plots were more entertaining than this piece of cringeworthy trash.