Season One, Episode Nine: Prime Factors

It’s Gossip Girl meets Voyager as B’Elanna and Sesca try to determine whether Harry Kim is sleeping with one of the vaunted Delaney sisters. This being Voyager, B’Elanna just asks Harry by yelling at him from across the cafeteria. He protests feebly that nothing happened on their holodeck trip to Venice. Except that he accidentally fell off the gondola. Everybody laughs at him. Even Janeway. She’s happy because both crews are finally bonding over the common ground of mocking Ensign Kim.

This merriment is interrupted by a distress call, and everyone goes to the bridge. The distress call is coming from a guy with a French accent who tells them that he’s not in distress; Voyager is.

lol u mad bro?

Because Janeway’s not an asshole, she invites him aboard the ship, where he introduces himself as Gak (I think) and offers to make lunch and thereby pisses off Neelix. I’m liking this guy already. He offers them a chance to get off the ship and take a vacation on his home planet, Sicaris (I don’t know how to spell it and I’m not looking it up because I waste enough time doing this already).

So everybody gets off the ship and Janeway does some shopping, although she’d rather “organize teams to collect seeds and plants.” I bet she’s really fun to party with. Harry flirts with a girl playing some kind of aeronautic space harp that tells the weather forecast.

He's thinking: Ohmygod a girl is touching me whatdoIdowhatdoIdo"

Everybody seems to be having a good time. Especially Harry. The girl he was flirting with is impressed by his stories. Like, really impressed. She tells him she can take him to a private place where he can “tell her all his stories.” Then she teleports him to another planet. While trying not to cream his pants, Harry realizes that the planet she’s taken him to is over 40,000 light years away from where they were.

Must...remember...math...

Harry runs back to tell Janeway about the technology that transported them there. It operates on “space folding,” and Janeway wants to know if they can use the technology to get them closer to home. Turns out, the one thing these super-hospitable aliens won’t share is their technology.

Harry thinks he could bargain with them by sharing all of Voyager’s “stories.” Janeway tries to sweet-talk Gak the magistrate over some pecan pie. Gak agrees to try to talk to the other magistrates.

Nobody says "literature" like Janeway when she wants something

Meanwhile, B’Elanna and her team go behind Janeway’s back to try to figure out how the space-folder works, and Harry’s new girlfriend takes him to a secret meeting. Like a back-alley drug deal, some of the Sicariis want to make a trade with Harry – the trajector matrix in exchange for stories. They tell him Gak won’t come through, and this is the only way he’ll ever get 40,000 miles closer to home.

I like how the chick is standing lookout. Voyager's big on authenticity.

Of course Harry tells Janeway, and now we’re faced with the show’s usual moral dilemma. Principles or practicality? When Gak proves less than helpful, Janeway’s insistence annoys him and he asks them to leave immediately. It’s not looking too good for Voyager.

B’Elanna and Sesca decide to go behind Janeway’s back and make the trade with the drug dealer. Except Tuvok walks in on them. Awkward. Only – Tuvok wants to be the one to do the dirty deed.

From some technobabble, we learn that the trajector relies on the planet itself to work, which means if they leave orbit, the device is useless.

Sesca has a great "ohhhh shit" face

They try the device anyway and it almost causes a warp core breach. Awkward. B’Elanna has to destory the matrix with her phaser to save the ship. B’Elanna puts on her stoic face and admits to Janeway that she was bad. Tuvok puts on his regular everyday face and admits that he was also bad. They both get a lecture from Janeway, but Tuvok gets off easy because he tells Janeway he did it to save her the ethical dilemma. The End.

It's okay, Janeway. At least the Doctor wasn't in this episode!

Cheesy dialogue award: “You are hostile and vicious and will infect the joyousness of our lives.”

W.T.F. Award:

W.T.F.? Are they meeting in the lobby of the Honolulu Hilton?

 

Season 1, Episode 8: Emanations

The Voyager crew may have found a new element in an asteroid belt. They fly down to investigate a cavern full of spiderwebs, where they find a mummy. And then another mummy. Lots and lots of mummies.

 

I think they have wandered into the Halloween Party Outlet down the street from me

The new element is emanating from the mummies. Chakotay wants to leave them undisturbed but Ensign Kim wants to plunder them for all they’re worth. Chakotay puts on his “token spiritual Indian” hat and lectures them about burial rituals before shit starts to get weird. When they beam back to the ship, B’Elanna and Chakotay show up with a mummy and no Ensign Kim. They decide to revive the mummy in the hope that it can give them some answers. I guess they forgot about that whole respecting the dead thing.

Kim, meanwhile, crashes a burial ceremony for a race who believes they are sending their dead into “the next emanation,” which sounds like real life but cooler. Kim makes a grand entrance by banging to be let out from inside the coffin. I hope that happens at my funeral.

Actually I think the guy in the background is wearing the "token spiritual Indian" hat.

In 3 seconds of conversation with these guys Harry manages to destroy their religion by casually mentioning that where he came from he saw dead bodies.

Voyager is doing the same thing by waking up the mummy, who is crushed to discover that she’s not in the afterlife, just Voyager.

"You're saying we just...decompose on an asteroid?"

 

"Weeeelllll...yeah. Yeah, pretty much."

This tender exchange is interrupted by some banging around and then B’Elanna finds another mummy just hanging out in engineering. Somehow, Voyager has become the new depository for the planet’s dead bodies.

Harry has a heartfelt conversation with an alien preparing to die. The upshot of this is that nobody knows what happens after anybody dies, death is a great mystery, death is just another part of life, und so weiter. When Harry finds out that this alien is electing to die because his family found his disability too much of a burden, he tells the alien, “It’s not my place to judge your culture” and then proceeds to judge the f*ck out of his culture.

Voyager’s warp core keeps attracting bodies like moths to a bug zapper. B’Elanna has an idea – maybe they can send their alien back and exchange him for Harry. Also: Janeway touches Chakotay a lot in this episode. Like, enough that I’m noticing it.

Look at his face. Tell me they're not making secret love in cargo bay 3

They try to send the alien back through one of the subspace vacules, but it doesn’t work, and the alien dies. Meanwhile, her people won’t let Harry try to get himself home. That’s when he gets an idea – maybe he can trade places with the alien preparing to die, and thus get sent back to the asteroid Voyager is orbiting. Sure, he’ll die during the process, but NBD, the Doctor will just revive him. Probably.

Remember back in episode 1 when I picked a scene that set the bar for weirdness in future episode? The weirdness bar has just been raised.

Just as Voyager is considering leaving to avoid becoming a morgue, Harry’s capsule lands on Deck 12 and the Doctor revives him and all is well that ends well and Janeway and Chakotay can focus on the more important business of banging each other senseless. Oh, and Harry gets two days off from work to reflect on his experience. The end.

Harry contemplates his mortality.

Best Line: “No artifacts, no inscriptions, just naked bodies.”

W.T.F. Award:

W.T.F. is up with his body proportions?

Body Count: 2 if you count Harry. Okay, maybe 1.5

For only 21 bucks, this could be yours

Season 1, Episode 7: Ex Post Facto

I don’t even know where to start with this one. It wants to be film noir or something. It’s not. Tom Paris is viewing a black-and-white uber-dramatic retelling of the crime he’s been accused of: banging the wife of some alien, and then killing him. His sentence is to relive the last moments of his victim’s life every 14 hours until the end of time. Creative, no?

I don't know that reliving this would be so terrible

In far less dramatic news, the Doctor wants a name. Show of hands for anyone who cares. His whining is interrupted by the return of a shuttle carrying Harry, who reports to Janeway that Paris was left behind, accused of murdering an engineering scientist they were working with. Janeway decides to go to the Banean homeworld to find out what exactly happened to Paris. Neelix tells her that the Baneans are at war with another race called the Numerians. They must tread carefully.

Janeway and Tuvok meet with a Banean where they find out that Tom has already been convicted and punished, but it’s hard to concentrate on anything being said because his hairstyle is like something Lady Gaga would wear to piss off PETA.

Even he keeps getting distracted by the dead bird on his head

They are taken to see Paris, who swears that he didn’t do it, even though the victim’s own memory seems to implicate him. Under Tuvok’s withering gaze, however, he does eventually admit that something happened with the dead alien’s wife. Before he can tell them, he passes out from viewing the memory again, and they are allowed to take him back to Voyager to have the Doctor look at him.

The Doctor confirms that the memory cycle is damaging Paris’s brain. Janeway wonders if they can use this as the basis for proving Paris’s innocence. Tuvok gets all CSI and points out that though Tom claims he’s innocent, the victim has identified Tom from the grave and his wife testified against him in court. He makes the brilliant observation that “someone is obviously lying.”

Sloooow clap for Tuvok

Tuvok goes back to the planet to investigate. Honestly, this is just ten minutes of Tuvok asking the alien’s wife questions and being “dispassionate.” We are treated to a scene of the alien’s wife and Paris making out in the rain. Aside from Tom being hot, this about the most boring thing Voyager has ever aired. I would rather watch Neelix and the Doctor compete to see who can be more annoying.

When Tuvok gets back the Numerii start attacking Voyager. Chakotay and B’Elanna use an old Maquis trick to stave them off. I think this scene was solely inserted to break up the monotony of listening to Tuvok try to solve this case. He decides he needs to mind-meld with Paris to experience the memory of the murder himself.

During the meld, with lots of dramatic eye rolling on Tuvok’s part, he determines that he needs to talk to Harry again and study the alien’s research. He thinks he knows what’s going on. The Numerii zoom in on the shuttle carrying Tom and Harry back to the planet and capture them.

I think they also stole these uniforms from NSYNC circa 1998

But Janeway has a trick up her sleeve – the shuttle is rigged to explode. The aliens release it. Somehow this proves to Tuvok that Paris is innocent. To everyone, he reveals that the “engrams” from the aliens brain were altered to replace the real murderer with Paris; he knows this because the killer knew Banean anatomy, and Paris did not. The real murderer is the alien’s wife and the Banean doctor who implanted the memory into Tom. This is proved because the alien’s dog, who barks at strangers, does not bark at the doctor. End. Of. Story.

Janeway is worried that the show is going to be cancelled after this clunker.

Horrible Dialogue Award: “Maybe I kill myself slowly because I don’t have the courage to do it quickly.”

W.T.F. Award:

W.T.F.? Did the casting people specifically look for a chihuahua with mange?

Body Count: 2. The alien scientist, and my wasted evening.

Season 1, Episode 6: Eye of the Needle

Harry Kim might have found a wormhole and everyone’s excited. Paris suggests they name it “The Harry Kim Wormhole,” coincidentally the name of my next cheap vodka cocktail. Then they get there and discover it’s the smallest wormhole ever – virtually microscopic. Insert your joke about the size of Harry Kim’s wormhole here.

Even Janeway is kind of embarrassed for him

They still might be able to send a message through it – if they can figure out where it will end up. They launch a probe into it, but the probe gets stuck. However, someone on the other side of that wormhole is scanning it, so they decide to try to send a message to whomever that is. Harry is in charge of the project, and he is really super excited about it. He tells B’Elanna that he used to call his parents once a week, even when he was on his training missions. Awwwwww.

He's so excited he has to go put on his big-boy pants

The test is successful and whoever is at the other end of the wormhole sends a signal back. Tuvok determines that it was sent from the Alpha Quadrant. Harry thinks he can set up a way to Skype through the wormhole.

Meanwhile, Kes is on a crusade to get the crew to treat the Doctor better. Janeway points out to her that most people complain to her about the Doctor being an asshole, and that she was thinking of reprogramming him. Kes’s doey eyes make Janeway feel guilty for not thinking of the Doctor as a person.

Voyager is able to communicate through the wormhole. Unfortunately, the wormhole connects them directly to the biggest asshole in the Alpha Quadrant, who refuses to believe that a starship from the Delta Quadrant could be communicating with him. I guess he’s never heard of the internet.

They keep trying to get him back, and when they do we get a glimpse of Janeway’s night life – and her night hair.

If she dressed like this all the time Voyager might have gotten better ratings.

She sweet talks the Romulan into considering a video chat session so he can see that she’s not lying about who they are. She definitely guilt trips him into sending their messages along by asking him about his family back home. B’Elanna interrupts with some exciting news: she thinks she can transport the entire crew over to the Romulan ship. Talk about house-crashing. Just in case you couldn’t see the lasers of hope beaming out of Janeway’s eyes, she looks longingly at a picture of her boyfriend and pregnant dog.

ACTING!

Kes is cramming the entirety of med school into her brain in about six hours. I’m sure she’s super competent. When she tells the doctor there may be a way to get to the Alpha Quadrant he whines some more about how no one tells him anything and he’ll be left behind.

They do the test transport with something that looks like a Klingon sex toy (B’Elanna’s, perhaps? It does “simulate most known organic compounds” according to Tuvok). The test transport is successful. Maybe everybody is going home!

"Do you guys mind if I keep this? I'd like to, ah, run some tests."

They do another test to transport the Romulan to Voyager with a troop ship to take Voyager back. It works. Everybody is pretty much packed and ready to go home. But Tuvok, who shits on happiness, feels the need to take a big ole’ dump on everyone’s hopes and dreams when he reveals that the Romulan might be from the Alpha Quadrant, but it’s the Alpha Quadrant from 20 years ago. So no one’s going home. The Romulan, in a better mood now that he has the “test cylinder” offers to take their messages home and deliver them 20 years in his future. So at least there’s that.

Oh, wait. No there’s not. Tuvok tells everybody that he checked the database and that Romulan scientist died four years before Voyager left earth. So the episode was a total waste of time and everybody on Voyager is devastated.

Except this asshole

Technobabble Award: “I’ll try extrapolating the vertiron X-effector.”

W.T.F. Award:

W.T.F. is Janeway doing with a Gramaphone? I am as confused as she is.

Season 1, Episode 5: The Cloud

Janeway blogs about how hard her job is in light of the fact that she’s basically doomed her crew to wandering in space for the rest of their lives. She decides to fix it by talking to the crew more. It’s awkward. Also, Neelix won’t give her coffee. He’s such a bitch.

When Janeway tells Chakotay about her worries, he tells her that he relaxes by talking to animals. Yes, animals. Spirit guides. Janeway wants to learn how. Chakotay offers to teach her. Meanwhile, the ship is traveling into a nebula that might have particles they can use for energy. Harry geeks out and says he’s never seen anything like it before and Tuvok shoots him down.

Hey, Harry. Your noob is showing.

An energy barrier prevents them from getting to their particles. When they barrel through it, Janeway asks Tuvok what he sees, and he tells her he’s never seen anything like it before.

Tuvok is such an asshole sometimes

Whatever the hell is in the nebula starts bombarding the ship and draining it off its energy. They have to blast themselves out of it with a torpedo.

Paris wakes Harry from sleep to see something and as they are walking down the corridors Harry tells Paris that he wears a sleep mask because it reminds him of being in the womb. Their conversation needs to be shared:

Paris: Harry, in order to be reminded of something you have to -”

Harry: I remember being in my mother’s womb. I do. (Pause). So, what is it you have to show me?

Paris: Nothing that’s going to compare to that memory of your mother’s womb.

What Paris has to show him is a holodeck program modeled after a French bistro. We learn that Paris has probably had a threesome and that wine gives Harry acid reflux. They play pool. It’s riveting.

"Gee, Tom, thanks for teaching me how to be a baller."

Elsewhere, Chakotay starts teaching Janeway how to contact her spirit animal. They do a guided meditation together and she discovers that her spirit animal is a gecko.

He is going to help her save money on her car insurance

They get interrupted by B’Elanna, who informs them that this nebula is actually alive. They try to analyze it to figure out if they harmed it. The Doctor gets uppity so Janeway mutes him. Ten points for Janeway. They decide to go back into the nebula to fix the damage they did. Neelix is not happy about this, because he’s annoying, so he goes to whine to Janeway about taking unnecessary risks. She dresses him down. Ten more points for Janeway.

They go back into the nebula. They get caught in the creature’s natural defense systems and briefly lose control of the ship.

If Harry really does remember being in the womb, he would not have said he'd never seen anything like this before.

They get into the creature’s circulatory system to “surf back” to the wound they entered from. Neelix shows up on the bridge with food to whine some more. He’s appointed himself morale officer.

The Doctor suggests that they “suture” the wound by using the ship’s energy to stimulate the creature’s natural healing process. They distract it with a “microprobe” so they can get into the wound. They fix it. Voyager still needs fuel. Everybody goes to Paris’s bar to hang out, including Janeway. The end.

Tuvok hopes they fire the guy who wrote this script

Best Line Award: “Ive never kissed anyone inside a nebula before.”

W.T.F. Award:

W.T.F. is Chakotay's medicine bundle made of?

 

Season 1, Episode 4: Phage

Voyager is low on dilithium, and Neelix thinks he knows the place to get it – a rogue planetoid (just what is a rogue planetoid, anyway? Does it not follow planet laws?). Neelix is also being really annoying. He converted Janeway’s private dining room into a galley without asking her, and he insists on going along with the away team to mine the dilithium. Then he doesn’t listen to Chakotay and an alien steals his lungs. Yes, you read that correctly.

"The Lung Stealers" would make an okay band name. That's the extent of my caring about this.

Soooo, Janeway takes some people back down to the planet to get Neelix’s lungs back. They find a hidden tunnel and investigate. Meanwhile, the Doctor things he can make a pair of holographic lungs for Neelix to use. When Paris points out that holograms are not actually made of matter, the Doctor slaps him like an angry ex-girlfriend.There is conveniently no time to explain the science behind any of this, of course.

Kes looks the way I would look if someone suggested a holographic lung transplant for my boyfriend

Janeway and crew discover that the tunnel leads to the place where the alien keeps the organs he’s stolen. They chase the alien but he gets on his ship and leaves before they can catch him. The holographic lungs the Doctor created for Neelix work, but he can’t move more than two microns in any direction. Neelix’s biggest concern is that Paris might be hitting on Kes, though. Neelix describes him as “one big hormone walking around the ship.” I concur.

Tuvok and B’Elanna explain to Janeway that the alien’s weapon is a super-sophisticated medical scanning device that can also magically remove organs. It looks like Batman.

No, really. It looks like Batman.

Voyager follows the alien ship to an asteroid. Janeway decides they’re going in, and the walking hormone maneuvers the ship through a giant crater. Neelix starts freaking out because he can’t move, and the Doctor has to sedate him. We’re all grateful for that. But the Doctor takes the opportunity to whine some more to Kes about how terrible his holographic life is. Kes could point out that some people on the ship currently DON’T HAVE LUNGS, but she’s nice, so she tries to boost his ego instead.

The crater leads to a freakish hall of mirrors:

"Harry Kim and the Chamber of Low Production Value"

It also starts draining power from the ship. Chakotay figures out they could use their phasers to scan the interior of the cavern and find the real alien ship. When they find it, they beam the two aliens aboard. They are not pretty.

Nobody ever told me about Retin-A

They tell Janeway they are a race called the Videans and that they steal organs because they are afflicted with a phage that destroys theirs. Janeway feels sorry for them, but not enough to let them keep Neelix’s lungs. Personally, I think the aliens are a lot less annoying than Neelix, but I guess she’s got to be loyal to her crew. But one of the aliens is currently using Neelix’s lungs so she would have to kill him to save Neelix.

The moral quandary stresses Janeway out and she yells at the Videans for awhile. The Videan with Neelix’s lungs is grateful to her for not killing him, so he volunteers to take a look at Neelix to see if he can help. In what is the most satisfying moment of the episode, they one-up the whiny Doctor (who is really super annoying in this episode) by telling him they can just transplant one of Kes’s lungs to save Neelix. So it’s a happy ending. Except Neelix is still alive.

The Batman Device can smell your fear

Technobabble Award: “From what we can tell, it uses a neuro-resonator to stun the victim while a quantum imaging scanner begins a microcellular analysis of the entire body.”

Best Line Award: “We don’t know how it happened, but someone has surgically removed his lungs.”

W.T.F. Award:

What. Is. That.

Body Count: Sadly, none.

Season 1, Episode 3: Time and Again

Lieutenant Tom Paris has a mission. And that mission is banging one of the Delaney sisters. He’s trying to talk Harry into banging the other one. Harry is more interested in doing his job and pining after his old girlfriend back home. What a lame-o.

Harry is considering not being lame. But only considering.

Then Voyager gets hit by a huge shock wave. It looks like it  was from a huge explosion on a nearby planet. Janeway and her peeps beam down to investigate. It’s unspoken, but we can assume Paris is disappointed that this tragedy interrupted his plans to get it on with some hot twins.

On the planet they discover that an entire civilization has been wiped out by the explosion, which seems to have come from their power source. Weirder: back on the ship, Kes is crying her eyes out because she says she saw it happen. Turns out, Kes might be telepathic. Like a good supportive boyfriend, Neelix doesn’t believe her.

The planet is messing with the away team, too. “Subspace fractures floating like icebergs across the planet’s surface” (uh-huh) are sucking them in and out of the present and the past. Janeway and Paris find themselves trapped in the past, in a square full of people in rainbow suits. A little kid sees them appear and freaks the hell out.

He's never seen hair like Janeway's before

A creepy dude comes and comforts the kid. Janeway tells a dirty lie about just coming around the corner, and soon she and Paris are pretending they’re just out-of-towners on vacation. The locals look at them like they’re wearing Hawaiian shirts on Nantucket.

Somewhere this guy has a van with blacked out windows

Back on Voyager, there’s a whole lot of technobabble about subspace fractures and subspace beacons but nobody knows how the hell to get Janeway  and Paris back. Kes goes to have the Doctor check her out and he uses it as an excuse to whine some more about how nobody takes him seriously. He’s mad because no one told him she was new so that he could put her brain in the database. The number of jobs in which I would be comfortable allowing them to scan my brain would be exactly zero, BTW.

Janeway and Paris are trying to fit in with the planet’s society and figure out a way to get home. The little kid who saw them appear is not having it. He even called the transport officer to confirm that they didn’t come in that way. He’s all  “the only people who came in had a kid with them.” So Paris tells him that they ate the kid. No, I am not making that up.

Janeway changed her hair so as not to scare the natives. Paris got a man purse cause he's always wanted one.

Back on Voyager, Kim and B’Elanna invent something that looks like a bug zapper. They claim it will allow them to get Janeway and Paris back to real-time. So Chakotay, Tuvok, Kim, B’Elanna, and Kes beam back down to the planet. Kes says she can reach out and touch dead people. No one cares.

Janeway and Paris get involved in a scuffle outside a local power plant, which lands them in trouble with the rainbow dudes. The rainbow dudes think that the two of them are spies, and interrogate them. Then that annoying little kid shows up again to whine some more. His plan backfires because he gets stuck next to Paris.

This kid is so afraid Paris is going to eat him

The interview is going really badly, so Janeway decides to f*ck the Prime Directive and tells them everything, including that they are probably going to cause a giant explosion that kills everybody on their whole planet. They don’t believe her. The bug zapper almost finds them, but the rainbow dudes herd them out of the room to the power plant before this episode could mercifully end fifteen minutes early.

The weirdest thing about Voyager is how balls-to-the-wall it goes when an episode deals with time travel. This is no exception. Janeway tells Tom that the reason she decided to tell them everything is that she realized the two of them are responsible for the explosion. Tom doesn’t get it, and neither do I. Anyway, there’s a gun battle in front of the power plant. Tom winds up taking a bullet for the bratty little kid.

This is point where I noticed that EVERYBODY on this planet has a man purse, not just Tom

Janeway follows the rebels into the power plant to stop them from causing the explosion. In real-time, creepy telepathic Kes reports that Janeway died in the explosion. B’Elanna thinks they can use the bug zapper to get them out just before the explosion happens. In my favorite moment of the episode, Tuvok points out that there’s no logic in the plan whatsoever, but basically says, “but I don’t have a better idea, so f*ck it.”

OOPS! Turns out that illogical rescue plan is what causes the explosion in the first place. Janeway clues into that just in time to stop it with her phaser. And somehow, this magically causes everybody to disappear and go back to Voyager and Tom is arguing with Harry about banging some twins and its the beginning of the episode, guys, minus the horrible explosion. Only Kes remembers. And the viewers. The explanation for all of this is…there isn’t one.

This is when the director told the actors the plot

Best Line: “So? Where’s the child?”

“We ate him. Because we are demons, and we eat children. And I haven’t had my supper yet.”

W.T.F. Award:

W.T.F. is up with these purses?

Body Count: Like 6 billion. Or none. I’m still mad about this time travel thing.

Season 1, Episode 2: Parallax

The drama llamas are all over Voyager in this one. B’Elanna was having a bad day at work, so she did what most of us do when we’re having a bad day at work: she punched her boss and broke his nose in three places. No big deal. Except to Tuvok. He wants to put her in the brig. And the other Maquis, who want to revolt. And Chakotay, who wanted her to be Chief Engineer before she threw a tantrum. It’s a Bad Day for B’Elanna.

Janeway meets with her senior staff to discuss things like power, food, and replacing all the people that died horribly in the first episode. Neelix and Kes awkwardly crash the party.

Tom is texting Harry about how awkward he feels

In the middle of this meeting all hell breaks loose. The ship gets hit by something with a “gravometric flux density of over two thousand percent.” Janeway says that if she’s not mistaken it’s a Type 4 quantum singularity. I really wouldn’t know if she was mistaken. It seems like there’s a ship trapped in the event horizon. B’Elanna thinks she knows how to get it out.

Janeway and Chakotay have a lover’s quarrel about integrating the Maquis crew into officer positions. The Doctor whines to Kes about how he’s the embodiment of modern medicine and doesn’t feel like treating pimples. Kes interrupts his pity party to point out that he’s growing shorter. Ensign Kim is too busy to fix it because Voyager is getting sucked into the quantum singularity. The Doctor whines some more and shrinks some more.

The singularity wreaks all sorts of havoc. People are getting sick, the Doctor is becoming miniscule, and when they try to leave they keep returning to their previous coordinates.

The Doctor is becoming a conehead

When B’Elanna figures out a way to decode the message from the ship they saw earlier, they realize that the other ship is…wait for it…Voyager. That’s right. They’re talking to themselves. Janeway and B’Elanna geek out when they realize they are seeing a reflection of themselves from the future. Or something. No one else really cares about anything but leaving it.

Chakotay is like, "Can you believe these nerds?"

Janeway and B’Elanna take a shuttle to the crack in the singularity to make it bigger so Voyager can get out. In telling you this I am skipping over 20 minutes of technobabble about decaion beams and warp particles. Things get even weirder when they have to choose which Voyager is the real Voyager and which one is just a reflection.

Yo dawg, I heard you like Voyaging

They figure it out and Voyager barrels its way out of the singularity and B’Elanna becomes the new head of engineering and everybody is happy. Except the Doctor, because nobody is paying attention to him. Nobody cares, though. All in all, this is not one of Voyager’s better episodes.

My sentiments exactly

Best Line #1: “Now I know how Hippocrates felt when the king needed him to trim a hangnail.”

Jeeze, Doctor. Somebody call the Whambulance.

Best Line #2: “We found the crack. That’s all that matters right now.”

Season 1, Episode 1: The Caretaker, Part Two

We start with Janeway blogging about finding a ship in a debris field. The ship contains Neelix. Neelix contains knowledge about the dude who abducted them. The Okampa call him the Caretaker, and he has been beaming in random ships and stealing their crew members thousands…maybe hundreds…well, no, maybe like fifty times in the last few months. Neelix is willing to help Janeway if she’ll pay him with…water. He drives a hard bargain, that Neelix.

Meanwhile, B’Elanna wakes up in the Mayo Clinic and starts fighting with Harry, whom she calls “Starfleet.” They are interrupted by an Okampa, who takes them out for a look around the city. He tells them that the Caretaker has been…well, taking care of them in their subterranean society for hundreds of generations. He also tells them, “BTW, you’re probably going to die from this disease. That’s why the Caretaker sent you here.” So that’s good to know.

Neelix is being super helpful

After a smorgasboard and a bubble bath, Neelix takes Janeway & Co. to the surface of the Okampa planet to rescue Harry and B’Elanna. First they have to sweet-talk some other aliens, the Kazon, with more water. After seeing the containers of water Janeway beams down from the ship, the Kazon chief practically wants to have her babies. I guess you could say he was floored by Janeway’s jugs. (I’m sorry. I had to).

They have never seen a Nalgene before

Anyway, while they’re there Neelix tries to bargain for an Okampa slave girl. When the Kazon are not having it, Neelix pulls out his phaser and shit gets tense for a minute before Voyager beams everybody back. Neelix reveals that the Okampa is actually his girlfriend, Kes, and that she escaped from the Okampa underworld through a secret tunnel that probably doesn’t exist anymore. Around then the Doctor gets uppity to Janeway so she turns him off. Kes offers to take them back to her planet to try to get their missing crew members back.

Harry and B’Elanna are busy trying to find a secret tunnel of their own. And no, that is not a euphemism. But Harry is holding them back because he’s whining about he trained for Starfleet his whole life and now he’s going to die on his very first mission.

Kes leads the Voyager crew to the Central Clinic when everybody notices that the energy pulses from the Caretaker’s array are getting faster.

The Central Clinic looks a lot like Neiman Marcus

Then the array starts firing a weapon to seal the energy conduits (whatever that means) and Tuvok decides this means that the Caretaker is getting ready to croak. Things start getting crazy. Voyager can’t beam out the away team. Tom and Neelix find Harry and B’Elanna and everybody starts racing towards the breach in the security barrier.

Tom, Neelix, Kes, Harry, and B’Elanna make it to the surface. Tom and Neelix go back to help Janeway, Tuvok, and Chakotay, who now has a broken leg. Tom saves his life. Yada yada. This is actually super boring for an action sequence. Just a dude carrying another dude.

Back on the ship everybody’s fine and the mysterious disease that was going to kill Harry and B’Elanna has magically gone away. But the Kazon don’t want to let Voyager leave because they can’t stand the thought of losing Janeway and her precious jugs…of water.

Janeway goes to talk to the Caretaker again. He reveals to her that his species was toying around with their technology and did the equivalent of sending a baseball through the club house window to the Okampa planet. He’s been pulling ships and stealing people because he’s trying to find a mate, who can give him a kid, who can keep caring for the Okampa after he dies.

Nobody ever told me about Match.com

The Kazon start attacking Voyager. They seem pretty advanced for a civilization that doesn’t know how to make liquid. Chakotay drives his ship into the Kazon ship to save the day. The Caretaker tells Janeway he’s already in self-destruct mode. He tells Janeway she must not let the Kazon get control of the array. Then he dies. It’s undramatic.

His body looks like what you pull out of a lint trap

Janeway realizes that if she uses the array to get Voyager back home, she’ll be dooming an entire race. So she blows it up, thus dooming her ship and crew to a 75+year trip back home. But it’s all good because Chakotay is first officer and Tom is the pilot and Neelix and Kes are tagging along. There are seven seasons of fun ahead, you guys. Are you excited yet?

Tuvok is not excited

Ridiculous Line Award: “On the other hand, if I save your butt, your life belongs to me. Isn’t that some sort of Indian custom?”

W.T.F. Award:

W.T.F. is up with that turtleneck?

Body Count: 1. The Caretaker.