From MadCap's Couch - "Star Trek: Voyager" (7 Worst Episodes)

So here we are again, after the best that Voyager had to offer, let's get into the worst.

This is...the 7 worst episodes (by season).

Like with DS9, there are no runners up (expect for Season 6, but I'll get to that). This list was significantly easier to compile than the Best list.

Season 1: "The Cloud"

"Entering the glory hole..."

Okay, so...the crew of Voyager was advised by a man named Jamis Highwater on how to make Chakotay's portrayal of a Native American "authentic". For the record, Robert Beltran claims some Native American ancestry, but is otherwise Latino in pretty much every other respect. Just to let you know that. Jamis Highwater, on the other hand, had been outed as a conman even before being hired on to help with Voyager. I said "What the hell, Rick Berman?" a few times in my best of list, and it is worth repeating here...and probably will be repeated a few more times before we're done.

So, needless to say, I have nothing but respect for Native Americans and feel that they deserve a great deal better than the Lone Ranger treatment, which is essentially all Jamis Highwater knew about them.

Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat said...

Janeway hits upon the idea of the crew using their spirit guides to help them navigate their way out of the Delta Quadrant after it comes up in conversation with Chakotay. Besides making some rather derogatory...okay, let's just call it what it is, hilariously bad racist stereotype assumptions about Chakotay...the fact that Janeway has the crew waste time on this in a time when humanity is supposed to have largely moved on from superstition and mysticism and where their main priority should be getting the hell home...is really kind of baffling.

Also, there's coffee in that nebula. That's it. You'll forget everything else in this episode besides the meme and the blatant racism. I guarantee it.

This was so bad that it once inspired me to begin a string of memes commemorating some of the more insane moments in Voyager's run as being a result of Chakotay and his crippling peyote addiction.

No, I'm not joking. It was that level of bad.

One shining moment is where Neelix tells Janeway she can't have coffee from the replicator and she gives him a look that looks like she's trying to kill him with her eyeballs. You probably won't remember after seeing this episode, I didn't until I started writing this.

Season 2: "Threshold"

"OHMYGAWD! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOUR FAAAAAAAAAAAAACE?!"

Yeah, you knew this one was coming. An episode where Tom Paris (Robert Duncan MacNeill if you remember from last time) is attempting to break the warp barrier and achieve Warp 10, which means infinite speed and that Voyager can get home much earlier than the 70 years that were predicted at the beginning of the series.

Unfortunately, going Warp 10 apparently mutates/super evolve you into a lizard thing, convinces you to capture other people and mutate/super evolve them into lizard things, and then vigorously mate to produce a bunch more lizard things. As Paris does to Janeway (Kate Mulgrew). They are both fixed by the Doctor soon after and nobody ever mentions any of this ever again.

This includes the production team, who are very adamant that this entire episode is non-canon. Just think about that, all the absolutely insane and stupid things that we've seen in Star Trek:

• That time Spock's brain was stolen by a race of infantile women with pain bracelets and belts. 
• That one where Quark had a sex-change operation to fool a Ferengi businessman.
• That time Doctor Crusher fell in love with a ghost who had been banging her female relatives to death for centuries.
• That one where Archer's dog almost dying made him experience sexual desire for T'Pol for reasons that are never adequately explained.
• That one time Tasha Yar got captured by a bunch of horrifically racist stereotypes and Gene Roddenberry was somehow still employed after.
• That episode where Wesley Crusher got the death penalty...and they didn't have the decency to just off him before anyone could object.
• That time when Riker was in a coma because they needed a clip show for no adequately explored reason.
• That time Kes came back for no good reason and it got undone in a way where it might as well not have happened at all.
• The series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise.
• The entire runtime of Star Trek: Picard.
• And many more really, really stupid things I could think of if I had the time and patience.

But Threshold was what broke the camel's back. This was so bad, the people who made it have outright banished it from canon.

It has the bare bones of an idea here that could work, but it absolutely fails hilariously in the execution. This is especially funny considering it won an Emmy for Best Makeup.

Funny, funny world we live in.

Season 3: "False Profits"

"My ears are bigger."

A pair of Ferengi from a TNG episode are now on a planet in the Delta Quadrant being worshiped as Gods. Janeway violates the Prime Directive to stop them, ignoring an opportunity to get her group home via a wormhole. Considering all the depth and complexity (if only just) that Deep Space Nine gave to the Ferengi, seeing them reverting back to the campiness of their TNG appearances is just really kind of dull at this point. They didn't work really well as anything but comic relief back in TNG, kind of being a weird throwback to Harry Mudd from the original series in the garish demeanor and buckets of misogyny.

Vaguely quaint in 1987 as a throwback to the Original Series, really, really boring by 1996.

I'm really not a big fan of non-DS9 Ferengi episodes anyway, and this is no exception. Might just be a personal hang up for me, but it is my list.

Season 4: "Nemesis"

"Your arm's bleeding."
"I ain't got time to bleed!"

Season 4 was actually a little hard to pick for, as none of the episodes were bad per se. Not a lot of great ones, but fairly passable alongside the utterly spectacular Year of Hell as we discussed last week. Nemesis is a Chakotay-focused episode, and I am really not a fan of Chakotay focused episodes for reasons already brought up in my Season 1 pic.

Chakotay ends up on a planet where he aids in fighting a war between the Vori and the Kadin. However, this all turns out to be a ruse as Chakotay is being mindscrewed by technology. He gets released from it and yet still holds some anger in his heart against the Kadin (who the simulation had conditioned him to hate)...which is never brought up again.

Maybe it would have been something meaningful, but as it stands...nope.

Robert Beltran really doesn't help much either. I really don't want to rag on the guy too much seeing as, like everyone on Voyager, he played the hand he was dealt for seven seasons. He just is so very bland and not at all interesting to watch. Chakotay lacks the charisma of Commander Riker, the sensibility of Mr. Spock, or the intricate story arc and character development of Major Kira Nerys. He's just...there. And there is not interesting to watch, much less see get several episodes devoted to how not interesting it is.

I'm also not really fond of Chakotay for reasons of (What the hell?) Rick Berman, but we'll get into that in my Season 7 pick.

Season 5: "11:59"

"Wow! Look at all those post-atomic horrors happening just off-screen!"

This is one of the few episodes of Voyager and indeed Star Trek in it's entirety that I can genuinely say that I hate.

It's a flashback episode...to people who are not members of Voyager and are not really relevant to anything or anyone in the present. Beyond bloodline relations to Janeway. I can forgive it, being set in the year 2000, ignoring Trek canon what with the Eugenics Wars happening in 1996 and the atomic horrors that followed into the 2050's largely being ignored. I can forgive a lot of things, but I cannot forgive putting a goddamn Hallmark movie in my Star Trek.

Basic point, Janeway finds out that an ancestor of hers that she revered throughout her childhood isn't who she thought. That's it. That's the plot. The flashbacks show some B.S. about the owner of a bookstore (also Janeway's ancestor) not wanting to close his bookstore because of reasons. Kate Mulgrew also plays Janeway's ancestor Shannon O'Donnel because that's how genetics work. Also, because Rick Berman thought the audience might be too stupid to realize they were supposed to be related.

I'm kidding, but would it surprise you if that were true? He's the same guy who didn't think Voyager going back to 1996 and it basically being modern 1996 would be in any way a problem because of Voyager's demographic.

Some people say this episode is good. Some people insist that it's well-made. Some can shut their mouths and go away.

Also, finding out later that this was spun-off from an idea about a Guinan episode makes me very sad indeed, because at the very least Whoopi Goldberg would have been vague entertaining.

Season 6: "Collective"

This is the episode where Icheb and the Borg children who you don't even remember the names of are introduced in Seven's mini-arc in being a surrogate mother. Given that all of them except Icheb will be gone following "Imperfection" in Season 7, they're irrelevant.

Also, Borg children. Seriously. Just...why? Was there are massive demographic of under 18's watching Voyager that I'm not familiar with...besides myself, but even as a kid I found this ridiculous. It's kind of like the Justin in Power Rangers Turbo problem: kids have no real interest in seeing other kids do the things we see adults doing.

I mean, except maybe that guy who wrote the Melissa Picard fanfics...

...yeah, look 'em up. They're wild. It's like the My Immortal of Trek fanfiction.

And finally we come to...

Season 7: "Human Error"

I don't even have a joke here. I've seen wooden chairs with more chemistry than these two.

Seven starts dating virtual Chakotay here. Why? No idea. He wasn't on her list in Someone To Watch Over Me and she never expressed any interest in him before.

Okay, this was kind of the starting point for the Chakotay/Seven relationship that went nowhere, had no chemistry, and one of the few saving graces of Star Trek: Picard was that it was clearly over by that point.

Granted, they threw out pretty much everything else about Seven's character to do that and do the same thing again but with a woman, but never mind.

Human Error has Seven getting Reginald Barclay-esque Holodeck issues, so much so that they interfere with her duties and nearly get Voyager damaged in a major encounter. It causes her a great deal of pain and stress as she fights to separate her real life from her holodeck life and in the end she just walks away from all of it in a moment that's supposed to be sad but just comes off as forced and ridiculous.

However, it is important in that it was the starting point for her relationship with Chakotay...which is one of the most forced things in all of Trek. Jeri Ryan is a talented actress, but even she can't do anything with an actor she has no chemistry with. Her scenes with Robert Picardo and even Garrett Wang are some of the best scenes in Voyager, largely because they have chemistry. Romantic chemistry, not necessarily, but they have several good scenes together and it works. It would have worked far better than this.

Robert Beltran and Jeri Ryan? Not so much. The fact that this also only happened because Robert Beltran was complaining about having nothing to do and so they threw Jeri Ryan at him. Maybe it would have helped if they'd done something with this before three episodes before the end of the series. It's not as if Seven hadn't been on the ship since the beginning of Season 4 and there had been three years they could have done something like this.

But, much like her hooking up with Raffi in Picard, there is nothing even resembling build up. At the very least, you could say Chakotay and Seven at least shared scenes together! Mind you, they flitted between outright disdain or curt professionalism between one another until literally Endgame, but still. It's not like they didn't have the time where they could have made this work...but they never used it. Tom and B'Elenna's relationship was set up so well and developed well over the seasons up to them getting married and having a daughter together. It's probably one of the best developed relationships in all of Trek...and it's next door neighbor is this forced pile of steaming hot garbage.

It's just a mess and Human Error was where it began and Human Error is my pick for the worst episode of Season 7 because of that and because of Seven just being weirdly out of character for most of it, immediately cutting herself off from the holodeck, and it all never getting mentioned again except for that forced relationship. My second pick was Drive for this one, but Tom Paris finding a sentient spacecraft that's even hornier than he is was somehow a more appealing episode than this one. Think that over.

With that, the book is closed on Voyager and we have completed all necessary commentary from me on half of the Berman-helmed Trek series. I'll probably make a best and worst list for TNG, Enterprise, and the Original Trek at some point in the future. For now, though, I'm done. Beam me up, Scotty!

...oh, right. 2020 technology. Anyway, I'm done being negative. Have a meme!

And no, I didn't like Tuvix, but I found it less objectionable than Threshold. Eat me.

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