All In The Family

STAR TREK: VOYAGER
SEASON FIVE

Reviewed by Matt Brown
November 2 2004

Season Five of Star Trek: Voyager rebounds significantly from the creative morass that befell Season Four, pumping out a number of episodes that are not only ranked among the best of this series, but must - in a few surprising cases - be listed among the best and most interesting Trek of any of the series thus far. That's a rare achievement for Voyager, and if it isn't anywhere near enough to redeem the series as a whole, it still makes Season Five a far more watchable year than the two seasons prior, and the two after.

A creative surfeit is found in the season premiere, in great part because it is one of the very few premieres in any of the Trek series not to be beholden to a cliffhanger from the season before. Season Four actually wrapped itself up (!), so Season Five gets to start with a fantastic stand-alone episode, "Night." The run-and-jump science fiction plotline tacked on to the later acts is fairly hopeless, but no matter; there's some great stuff in here, as we watch the toll taken on the Voyager crew by a 2-year expanse of utter darkness. Janeway, particularly, goes down the road of depression and self-doubt, isolating herself from the crew and calling into question her reasoning for ever stranding Voyager in the first place. It's an interesting reversal of the franchise's usual "everything is always okay" approach to its lead characters.

Janeway's depression leaves Chakotay in command, and it's one of Robert Beltran's better moments on the series. Of course, the biggest problem with whinypants Beltran is that he just hated being on Voyager, and he spoke of his dislike frequently and loudly. He's not actually a good enough actor to successfully cloak his contempt for the franchise, so Chakotay is often a tremendously unappealing character, with a thin veil of smug arrogance that just doesn't work at all. This is exacerbated by the innumerable episodes shoved down our throats by the producers, who liked to segue into Chakotay's la-la-land every once in a while to find out what it's really like to be an Indian.

It's the 24th century, folks. Being an Indian ain't like being a Klingon. To think that humans would still have racial preoccupations so ill-formed by this point in history is not only silly, it's fairly counter-productive to Gene Roddenberry's whole notion regarding the future of mankind. Chakotay sticks out like a sore thumb in the Voyager ensemble. If Beltran disliked the show so much, the writers should have just killed him off at the end of Season Two and been done with it. Tuvok would have made a far better first officer anyway.

Though many of the Season Five episodes aren't fantastic, they display a willingness to tell stories (even if only on Voyager's dopey terms), rather than the gormless drama or art-school pretensions that came before. "Drone" is a good example, a well-plotted episode dealing with a Borg from the future and his relationship with Seven of Nine, that should be hokey as all hell, but remains effective thanks to some good performances and great action scenes. Similarly, "Timeless," the 100th episode of the series, isn't fantastic, but it's got enough chutzpah to come up with some startling visuals (Voyager smash-o-crashing into an ice planet; Kim and Chakotay picking over the ship's Titanic-like bones in the distant future) to really commemorate the event. "Thirty Days" is also a fairly thin story told in a conventional flashback style, but I have to admit, the water planet effects are lovely and give the story a scope that Trek doesn't usually enjoy.

The season's big event is the "Dark Frontier" TV movie, which centers around - of course - the Borg Babe, Seven of Nine. It reintroduces the character of the Borg Queen, the only good part of First Contact, as a counterpoint for Janeway. Sadly, Alice Krige was unavailable for the episodes, so for most of her Voyager apperances, Queen Borg is played adequately by Susannah Thompson, who also appeared in Deep Space Nine's outstanding fourth season lesbian kiss episode, "Rejoined."

As an episode, "Dark Frontier" ain't bad; I prefer the time-swapping antics of the late-season "Relativity" for my Borg Babe fun. It's part of a strong close to the season, which is helped along further by "11:59," a decent Y2K episode dealing exclusively with a 21st century ancestor of Janeway, which makes for a nice detour for the show. And in a further surprise, Voyager actually trots out a well-played morality episode (rather than the heavy-handed dreck usually featured) in "Nothing Human," which deals with medical ethics in a surprisingly fresh and complicated way, by introducing a Cardassian war criminal - and hologram - who just may have the secret that could save B'Elanna's life.

Of course, as with any season of Voyager, Season Five features more than its fair share of utter crap. "Bride of Chaotica!" misses the mark of its Flash Gordon parody completely, and is just bloody annoying. Ditto for "The Fight," a Chakotay-centric boxing episode that's too weird for its own good. The grand turkey award probably goes to "Think Tank," which features a spaced-out Jason Alexander as the head of the eponymous group of space-borne consultants. They're just as annoying as real consultants.

The season closes with the beginning of my favourite two-parter of the whole series, "Equinox." This episode, and its follow-up at the beginning of Season Six, are such a step above the usual Voyager fare that they almost don't seem to be part of the same series. In my mind, it's almost possible to say that it's okay for the entire show to suck as bad as it does, given that it lays the groundwork for these two episodes and everything that happens there.

"Equinox" is the major payoff on the entire covert question of the Voyager scenario: can a human crew stick to human morality when lost in the heart of darkness? The answer for our heroes, of course, is yes; the answer for Captain Ransom (a fantastic performance by John Savage) and the crew of the Equinox is an unequivocal no. This is dark, dark Star Trek, and for these brief shining moments, Voyager seemed to be what it should have been all along: a great series.

"All in the Family" has been an ongoing review of all seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, and the third and final part of my TV Trek reviews over the past three years. The complete Voyager series is now available on DVD.

You can access the complete series of reviews on the left.