[TV] Talk about the last TV you watched, the catchall thread

Since Voyager is the Star Trek series I've watched the least (never all at once in one chronological order for example). I've started watching Voyager. I thought Enterprise leaned on shitty time travel stories too much (and it did, Star Trek time travel sucks). 3 out of the first 8 episodes involve time travel somehow. Jesus Voyager, step on the brakes a little.
 
Since Voyager is the Star Trek series I've watched the least (never all at once in one chronological order for example). I've started watching Voyager. I thought Enterprise leaned on shitty time travel stories too much (and it did, Star Trek time travel sucks). 3 out of the first 8 episodes involve time travel somehow. Jesus Voyager, step on the brakes a little.
Voyager has a pretty bad history of relying on Time Travel episodes; if a time travel episode isn't just outright bad, the implications of what just happened will frustrate you. That said, "Blink of an Eye" is easily Top 3/Top 5 episodes of the series. I'd even put it in the Top Ten of all Trek episodes.
 
Voyager has a pretty bad history of relying on Time Travel episodes; if a time travel episode isn't just outright bad, the implications of what just happened will frustrate you. That said, "Blink of an Eye" is easily Top 3/Top 5 episodes of the series. I'd even put it in the Top Ten of all Trek episodes.
Yeah, the episode where they prevent a planet destroying accident in the past made absolutely no sense, even for Star Trek time travel.
 
What the fuck Tuvok? Demanding a bajoran remove their earrings? That's some discriminatory shit.
It was also completely out of line; Starfleet makes reasonable accommodations for religious wear, explicitly because of Bajorans joining up with both during and after the Occupation.
 
Didn't make Riker a fuss over Ro Larens earring?
Pre-Sisko, there were maybe a few dozen Bajorans in Star Fleet. They didn't have the rule then; it wasn't until the Emissary arrived that Bajorans started looking at Starfleet seriously as an organization and more than a few joined to emulate the path he took in his life. Once it became an issue, they made a rule as a good faith gesture to the Bajoran Temple when they were still trying to get Bajor into the Federation.

The only reason I can think that Tuvok would be doing it is that they didn't make the new rule until after Voyager was lost in the Delta Quadrant, which is possible because DS9 and Voyager ran concurrently.
 
Wow, so, I've never cared here nor there about Neelix. Now, watching through a bunch of episodes of Voyager, I have begun to fucking loathe him.

Kes is like 1 year old you gross, jealous rat monster. Holy shit, we get it. STOP FUCKING COMPLAINING ABOUT EVERYTHING. I remember him being the upbeat cheerful character. He's AWFUL. The only time I've been on his side of anything was when Janeway invited a guy he basically called the Talaxian version of Mengele onboard and convinced him to deal with him directly. "Captain, this guy turned my entire family and 300,000 others into psuedo alive planetary goo and turned a paradise moon into a smoldering crater." "NEELIX, please, just listen to him, we invited him onboard to hang out." "Captain, I literally sat with a little girl who's body was burned black by his weapon while she died. She was so terrifying to me I almost ran away from her." "NEELIX, just let him examine you!" Holy fuck Voyager writers.

Also, when the DISGUSTING organ stealing aliens were experimenting on your crew and harvesting organs, including the face of one of your crew, from other sentient species. After you exposed their little base and rescued your crew members you just left them and buggered off, leaving anyone else still alive there for dead, including a talaxian that tried to help you? You're the fucking worst Voyager. Belana talking in that stilted Klingon accent in that episode was also the silliest God damn thing.

That species should be shoot on site for any other sentient race. Harsh, but they're literally amorally broken, organ vampires. They can't survive without preying on everyone they come across. They need to be exterminated.
 
Wow, so, I've never cared here nor there about Neelix. Now, watching through a bunch of episodes of Voyager, I have begun to fucking loathe him.

Kes is like 1 year old you gross, jealous rat monster. Holy shit, we get it. STOP FUCKING COMPLAINING ABOUT EVERYTHING. I remember him being the upbeat cheerful character. He's AWFUL. The only time I've been on his side of anything was when Janeway invited a guy he basically called the Talaxian version of Mengele onboard and convinced him to deal with him directly. "Captain, this guy turned my entire family and 300,000 others into psuedo alive planetary goo and turned a paradise moon into a smoldering crater." "NEELIX, please, just listen to him, we invited him onboard to hang out." "Captain, I literally sat with a little girl who's body was burned black by his weapon while she died. She was so terrifying to me I almost ran away from her." "NEELIX, just let him examine you!" Holy fuck Voyager writers.

Also, when the DISGUSTING organ stealing aliens were experimenting on your crew and harvesting organs, including the face of one of your crew, from other sentient species. After you exposed their little base and rescued your crew members you just left them and buggered off, leaving anyone else still alive there for dead, including a talaxian that tried to help you? You're the fucking worst Voyager. Belana talking in that stilted Klingon accent in that episode was also the silliest God damn thing.

That species should be shoot on site for any other sentient race. Harsh, but they're literally amorally broken, organ vampires. They can't survive without preying on everyone they come across. They need to be exterminated.
THANK YOU.

Hey, remember that time Neelix poisoned the entire ship? Not just the crew, but somehow the actual systems of the ship itself, from his fucking macaroni and cheese.

Not to mention he literally started a war five minutes after coming on board. He should have been thrown out the airlock.

Voyager was fucking insane. Especially once they discovered that Robert Beltran had the emotional range of a particle-board armoire, and had him repeat some variation of the same phrase almost every episode, and not in a way that made sense. Picard saying "Make it so" or "Engage" when giving orders made sense. Oakyacht saying "I've always had an interest in (something that has never been discussed before)..." so he can be shoehorned into a situation for some reason was just awful.

And Belana. What a fucking terrible character. They kept trying to sell her as tough or badass, but she never came off as badass, just kind of bitchy and unpleasant.
 
Ok, so, I started to get curious why Voyager's native content was so....awkward. I'll use awkward to describe it. Looking into it only slightly, it's funny to find out their native American consultant was a con-artist that spent years lying about his ancestry. No wonder.
 
I can't remember a particularly good episode of Voyager but I can think of a few really bonkers ones.

> Jayneway and Paris turn into worms because science
> Belana goes to Klingon hell to save her mom
> The hunter aliens think Nazis were pretty cool
> Harry Kim dates a _____


There was one that had a good destination but the road to get there was just so dumb. The doctor discovers that basically everyone has had a portion of their memory erased, including him but not Janeway. He thinks it's a big conspiracy and almost goes nuts because of it. Turns out that a while back he had been presented with a situation where Kim and a redshirt we're both equally injured and had equal chances of survival. Normally the doctors programming would determine who he should focus on in a situation like this but he had to make a genuinely gut decision. He thinks he chose Harry Kim because they're pals and that throws him into a loop. The solution? Surgery on everyone to erase the memory of the redshirt who died and erase all mention of her from the computer. Then erase the doctors memory of the event.

I think there was an additional twist of this not being the first time they had to do it.
 
> Harry Kim dates a _____.
...could you narrow this down just a little? At least to Animal/Vegetable/Mineral?

I know Voyager gets a lot of laughs/hate, and I agree it's probably the weakest of the Treks, but I think a lot of this is just due to the writers not taking the series seriously, or else the management not taking the writers seriously, or really just someone not caring enough to put in the effort to do it justice. I don't blame the actors for this (except maybe Jennifer), and I still find the series entertaining despite the rampant inconsistency and, for a ship who is ostensibly fighting to find their way home, the plot's lack of consistent direction.

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
And voyager's series finale was the icing on the cake

No closure. No answered questions. Just Boop, there's earth! Roll credits! Did Janeway's man wait for her? How would the situation with the Maquis crew members be resolved? What was the aftermath of... EVERYTHING? Nope, nothing, series over, bye bye.
 
And voyager's series finale was the icing on the cake

No closure. No answered questions. Just Boop, there's earth! Roll credits! Did Janeway's man wait for her? How would the situation with the Maquis crew members be resolved? What was the aftermath of... EVERYTHING? Nope, nothing, series over, bye bye.
These questions were partly explained in the episode they got letters from home. Janeways fiance remarried and I think the Maquis got a pardon.
 
And voyager's series finale was the icing on the cake
No closure. No answered questions. Just Boop, there's earth! Roll credits! Did Janeway's man wait for her? How would the situation with the Maquis crew members be resolved? What was the aftermath of... EVERYTHING? Nope, nothing, series over, bye bye.
I think the word you're looking for is "squandered."
They had the opportunity to do ANYTHING with the series. They pushed half-heartedly at that barrier a few times, but yeah then it was "...I don't give a crap about this any more they lived happily ever after The End."

--Patrick
 
I will say this in favor of B'elanna: she made young teenage me feel things I hadn't felt since Deanna Troi :awesome:
But a good Klingon character with consistent traits and motifs, she was not.

And Neelix was an idiot and a terrible character. They tried to combine Guinan's wisdom, the comic relief, and some sort of guide/local thing together as one character, and failed at all of those. Even Kes was more likeable.

That said, a lot of the Voyager episodes that don't involve the Borg, time travel, or Neelix (and his buddies, all through the first season) do actually work, albeit in a bit of a vacuum. Plenty of their planets of hats wouldn't be out of place in a TNG episode and some of the issues raised were actually interesting. The answers given often weren't, but ah well.
 
I don't really mind Kes. She's a bit Wesley Crusher wunderkind, but she's not unlikable. That she's literally a 2 year old being that Tom Paris wants to fuck is icky as shit though. That she's MATURE FOR HER AGE (Elvis picture here) doesn't change the fact that she's still only got the life experience of a child.
 
My thoughts on Voyager...

- Most of it is terrible, but it does have some truly great episodes that can stand up to some of the stronger episodes of other series. "Blink of an Eye" is one, I think "Muse" is pretty good too despite being a B'elanna episode.
- The Klingon Hell episode is kinda shit... but it gives way to one of the best arcs in Star Trek Online, where KDF members get to storm Klingon Hell with the clone of Kahless and fight the Fek'lhr by inspiring the dishonored on the Barge of the Dead. It's absolutely the most Klingon thing ever.
- Neelix is kind of god awful, but he's oddly at his best when he's being an abject asshole or he's dealing with kids. The whole "This guy killed EVERYONE on my Planet" episode is actually pretty good and I do think he works as "Godfather" whenever he needs to be.
- The Kes stuff... yes, it's fucked up that Neelix is kind of with her when she's 2? But they only live to be 9ish to begin with. I'm more concerned with the writers who MADE Kes than Neelix, who is probably treating it as sensitively as anyone could in the situation. Fuck, I think Paris skeeving on her is way, way worse than Neelix because at least Neelix has had some contact with her species before. And she's still better than Seven because the show doesn't fucking stop to focus on her every god damn episode.
- "Threshold" (the aforementioned Warp 10 episode) is discanon within the show for just being the DUMBEST thing ever.

As for Enterprise... the general opinion of it with the fan community seems to be that the last 2-3 seasons were actually good and the show had finally found it's voice when it was cancelled. I tend to agree; the founding of the Federation and Earthlings as the outsiders who made it happen by basically telling everyone they would settle things, whatever it cost, is frankly amazing to watch. The Temporal Cold War stuff is also pretty great.
 
I don't really mind Kes. She's a bit Wesley Crusher wunderkind, but she's not unlikable. That she's literally a 2 year old being that Tom Paris wants to fuck is icky as shit though. That she's MATURE FOR HER AGE (Elvis picture here) doesn't change the fact that she's still only got the life experience of a child.
Ehhhh....Yes and no. It's portrayed as her species simply having a shorter life expectancy (8? 10?) and her being mature for her species. Yes, her experience may be only that of someone who has lived for a year, but it's unfair to compare it to a 1-year-old human. She's probably more-or-less supposed to be 16-18ish.

Compare-and-contrast to Elves (and, to a lesser extent, dwarves) in all kinds of fantasy who are supposed to live for hundreds of years and don't achieve adulthood 'till they're well into their hundreds, but still fall in love with the protagonist or the Ranger King of Gondor (movies only) or whoever. I'm not saying it isn't somewhat icky, but I don't think it's fair to write it off too quickly as just pedophilia-but-it's-ok-'cause-she-looks-mature.
 
The episode with the female caretaker...what?

YOU KILLED MY MATE!

No we didn't.

OK THEN.

/Worst CG ever

Episode ends.
 
How come [you singled out Jennifer]?
Lien's performance of Kes was one of the weakest of the cast. [IMHO] She was supposed to be our Galahad among the crew, a constant source of childlike wonder & innocence and a convenient excuse for exposition for those of us watching at home. Instead she played a sort of surrogate Guinan/Deanna Troi role, the character whose role it is to make people say, "I never thought of it like that." She always plays the character's voice, bearing, attitude, and cadence the way I would expect of someone older and much more mature/experienced than her character should've (ostensibly) behaved, and that's even after I "subtract" for her (character's) alleged precocity. Heck, even Dawson did a better job of portraying vulnerability than Lien.

Also on another note, "The Thaw" was amazing, and deserves more recognition.

--Patrick
 
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Wow, to go from Threshold to Meld, the episode with Brad Douriff as a serial killer on the crew is abrupt. That's some real highs and lows shit.

It doesn't hurt that Neelix is "murdered" in this episode.
 
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Wow, to go from Threshold to Meld, the episode with Brad Douriff as a serial killer on the crew is abrupt. That's some real highs and lows shit.

It doesn't hurt that Neelix is "murdered" in this episode.
Brad Douriff as Lon Suder is one of my favorite guest star roles in this series. He does a great job.
 
And right back into dumbness. Voyager, you're telling us that the Cardassians built a missile so advanced that it's nigh invulnerable to weapons fire from all alpha quadrant powers and can vaporize any nearby threats to it? It just so happens that B'Elanna programmed it and it ALSO went to the delta quadrant.

Holy shit, this show man.

Meld was a rare high point for these first two seasons.
 
And right back into dumbness. Voyager, you're telling us that the Cardassians built a missile so advanced that it's nigh invulnerable to weapons fire from all alpha quadrant powers and can vaporize any nearby threats to it? It just so happens that B'Elanna programmed it and it ALSO went to the delta quadrant.

Holy shit, this show man.

Meld was a rare high point for these first two seasons.
This was actually a plot point in a DS9 episode; Starfleet found a transmission indicating that the Maquis had launched stolen Cardassian missiles at Cardassia and a bunch of other planets, in what was basically a "Fuck all of you" attack that coincided with the death of the movement.

Sisko brings Eddington into the mix and is promptly lead on a wild goose chase that reveals the missile launch was actually fake and the announcement was to let other Maquis know that the last safe house had been overrun and to not come for them. Eddington basically used Sisko to go on a rescue mission.

Point is, this is on the DS9 writes as much as the VOY ones.
 
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