A Unified Theory of Star Trek: Voyager, Part 4
See the first part for answers to questions like "Why am I doing this?". But once again, here's the rubric I'm applying with my emoji rating system of VOY episodes.
- The Must-Watch Mango (🥭) is applied to episodes of Voyager that must be watched. Maybe they're very good; maybe they're just central to the show's overall paratextual mythos (Like the season 6 outing Tsunkatse, which is an infamous tie-in with WWE); maybe they are one of the few episodes of Voyager that come up later somehow and/or come up in the Delta Rising expansion to Star Trek Online.
- The Ogre of Madness (👹) is applied to episodes of Voyager that are insane. Those are often the very best episodes of Voyager.
- The Leaf on the Wind of Running Away (🍃) is applied to episodes of Voyager that conform to the "running away from itself" theme; they take place in alternate timelines, dreams, holodeck simulations, or don't feature the crew of the Voyager at all.
- A special sub-category is the Wasteful Hourglass (⏳), applied to episodes that take place in aborted timelines. These are the most skippable episodes of Voyager in the sense that they literally didn't happen at all.
- The Melting Man (🫠) is applied to episodes featuring plot elements that seem like they could be reused or reapplied, but never recur.
- The Stupid Hat (🎩) is applied to episodes featuring Stupid Hat Societies – alien cultures whose entire Deal is fundamentally stupid. This is a major recurring theme in VOY.
This part covers Voyager's seventh and final season.
- 1 "Unimatrix Zero" 🥭
- 2 "Imperfection" At this point in its run Voyager really is turning into the Seven of Nine show, but this is still a pretty good episode. Icheb is here.
- 3 "Drive" 🥭 A critically important part of the Harry Kim's Virginity arc and the Paris/Torres arc, so both blowjob brethren are here with their respectively sex-having and non-sex-having ways. Also, the cool Delta Flyer racing uniforms from this episode are an outfit you can get in Star Trek Online, so this is critically essential viewing.
- 4 "Repression"
- 5 "Critical Care": This episode is notable primarily because it says that Starfleet medical ethics are canonically compatible with giving an HMO administrator poison to coerce him into allowing poor patients to receive adequate care.
- 6 "Inside Man": Oh BARCLAY is here. Don't you love BARCLAY? Don't you little piggies love BARCLAY? Isn't he just like you, piggies? That's right, eat your slop. Eat your BARCLAY SLOP!
- 7 "Body and Soul" 🎩 The stupid hat aliens in this episode are characterized by how they're losing a civil war to holograms. They're one of few Delta Quadrant civilizations whose stupid garbage scow spaceships can't easily overpower Voyager, which signals how far down the totem pole they are even among stupid hat societies. As they never show up in Star Trek Online – in fact I don't think they appear in any licensed media at all – this episode is utterly inessential. People who find the Seven/Doctor dynamic – or god forbid, ship – fun instead of aggravating might enjoy this one in a typically perverse way.
- 8 "Nightingale": Harry Kim episode that's not part of the Harry Kim's Virginity arc. What is even the point.
- 9 and 10, "Flesh and Blood" and "Flesh and Blood Part 2" 🎩 This is the big flashy two-parter for this season but I can't even bring myself to give it a mango. Almost defiantly inconsequential, it's the conclusion to the Hirogen arc which finishes by thoroughly reinstating every possible status quo. This episode really highlights how Voyager put more effort into building up the Hirogen than any of their other recurring antagonists, but they ultimately only come off as terminally stupid.
- 11 "Shattered" 🥭⏳🫠 Voyager is a show about events that didn't happen and storylines that get left behind, and this is the most perfect encapsulation of its nature: a sort of dark ride tour through abandoned storylines, all of it encapsulated in an aborted timeline.
- 12 "Lineage" 🥭 Voyager is largely absent the sort of socially conscious storytelling that had always been a pillar of Star Trek, but this pair of season seven episodes try to make up for lost time. "Lineage" deals with race, trauma, and self-loathing; it's less fun than it sounds. The reason it is essential required viewing though is that it concerns the conception and gestation of her daughter Miral Paris, who will feature briefly alongside her father Tom in the Delta Rising expansion to Star Trek Online.
- 13 "Repentance" 🎩 This one is about mass incarceration and the death penalty, and it embeds what is essentially an allegorical critique of the American justice system. Now, Voyager is incredibly clumsy in handling those themes, of course, but it's a surprise that they tried at all.
- 14 "Prophecy" 🥭🎩 Voyager's greatest failure is its inability to ever deliver any new setting ideas that are as compelling as the recurring concepts from other Trek shows – there's nothing as rich here as TNG's Romulans or DS9's Bajorans. So every time one of those familiar setting elements from the Alpha Quadrant shows up on VOY it's like water in the desert. "Prophecy" is the one true Klingon episode of Voyager. Of course, this being Voyager, these are Klingons in stupid hats who are part of a remote cult lost in the Delta Quadrant, but still. Now, all of the missions in Star Trek Online that reference Miral Paris' status as the Klingon messiah have since been removed in several of the many reworkings of the game's campaign structure, but in my humble opinion this only makes this episode more essential. This episode is also part of the Harry Kim's Virginity Arc.
- 15 "The Void": Completely unremarkable "ship gets stuck in space sandtrap" story.
- 16 and 17, "Workforce" and "Workforce, Part II" 🍃 You might assume that the next-to-last two-parter of Voyager is in some way laying the groundwork for the series finale or closing out long-standing storylines. But this is Voyager, so not only is it not that, it spends almost all of its runtime with the cast playing amnesiac versions of themselves. This is the rare episode of VOY that's just a conventional sci-fi script played straight, with pretty average results.
- 18 "Human Error": The rare episode of Voyager that has an A/B plot, which on this show usually feels like two scripts that were too thin being uncomfortably mashed together. This one concerns Seven's further adventures being socially inept, and like many a character-focused episode of VOY, it doesn't do anything good for her character.
- 19 "Q2" 🥭 The final Qpisode of Voyager, and the last appearance of John de Lancie as Q (until 20 years later with Star Trek: Picard). It's a fun enough outing, even if by this time the character is wearing pretty thin. This episode also closes out the "Q civil war" story arc that runs through all three of VOY's Qpisodes.
- 20 "Author, Author" 🥭🍃 The first half of this is, functionally, a mirror universe episode – a lot of it is spent exploring evil versions of the main cast. Except instead of the actual mirror universe, it's the Doctor's deranged self-insert fanfic in which everyone is mean to him. The back half of this is... well it's Measure of a Man again, done worse. As a unit the entire thing doesn't really gel, but worth it for Evil Tuvok.
- 21 "Friendship One": This is a completely fine, average episode of Star Trek; but by this point in VOY's run, I wish I could expect more of it.
- 22 "Natural Law"
- 23 "Homestead" 🥭 This pretty mid episode of Voyager is mandatory viewing because it explains how Neelix met his wife, Dexa, who has a brief non-speaking role in the Star Trek Online: Delta Rising campaign mission "Reunion".
- 24 "Renaissance Man" 🥭👹 Voyager at this point is trying to milk the Doctor and Seven as much as possible to diminishing returns, but this last Doctor episode is actually pretty good.
- 25 and 26, "Endgame" and "Endgame, Part II" 🫠⏳🥭👹 Of course this fucking show ends on a time travel two-parter involving a paradox, gleeful violation of the Temporal Prime Directive, and everyone's favorite: aborted timelines. Of course it leaves itself no time for any sort of epilogue or to address the consequences of the USS Voyager returning in the way that it did. Of course Barclay is here.
God. Fucking Voyager. Why did I do this.
Final character status:
- Janeway: Ambiguously involved in a time loop she presumably won't complete. She does get promoted to admiral (this is canon because she briefly appears in Nemesis).
- Chakotay: Oh god who cares
- Tuvok: Tuvok
- Paris: Married to the ol' ball and chain
- Torres: The ol' ball and chain
- Kim: V-card resolutely unpunched
- Neelix: The dad who stepped up
- Kes: Exploded or something I forget
- Seven: Dating Chakotay. God, who thought that was a good idea.
- The Doctor: Condemned to appear on Starfleet Academy.