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Equinox, Part II is the conclusion to Season 5's "cliffhanger," in which the captain and surviving officers of the Starfleet science vessel Equinox take off with the Voyager's shield generator, leaving the Voyagers at the mercy of alien beings (representative pictured here with Harry Kim) who are royally pissed about their people being used as fuel in an experimental, supercharged warp engine. This is all very understandable. What makes this episode unusual is the irony that, as soon as Captain Ransom comes to his senses and decides to surrender to Janeway, his first officer stages a mutiny and takes over command; while, back on Voyager, Chakotay tells his captain that she is going insane (and she is, she really is), but peacefully submits to being relieved of his duties. "It's not about rules and regulations," Chakotay tells her. "It's about right and wrong." Such as the difference in priorities between pursuing the Equinox and talking the aliens into stopping their attacks. In the end, after the dust settles, we find Chakotay suddenly reinstated and we wonder how things are ever going to be the same between him and the captain. But we're forgetting: this is Star Trek. By next week, it will be back to business as usual!
Survival Instinct features 4-time Trek guests Bertila Damas and Tim Kelleher, plus umpty-ump-timer Vaughn Armstrong, as three ex-Borg drones who track down former collective-mate Seven of Nine at a big, bustling space station. But they aren't there just to catch up on the good old days. They believe Seven holds the key to the telepathic link that has made the three of them a mini-collective, within or without the Borg, and (most importantly) the key to breaking it so they can live as individuals again. At first, none of them can quite remember what happened to make these three people share a group consciousness; only that it happened sometime after the four of them (including Seven) survived a crash landing eight years earlier and were temporarily severed from the collective. It turns out that while the three crewmates, who were assimilated as adults, began to recover their adult personalities, Seven responded like the frightened child she was when the Borg assimilated her; and, in a panic, she forced the mind-sharing deal on them in order to keep the world as she knew it from falling apart. Sadly, the only way to help these people, short of returning them to the Borg, will leave them with only a month or so to live. So the question of the day is: What is more important? Survival or living?
Barge of the Dead is the one where B'Elanna comes back from a near-death experience, having seen the Klingon afterlife—specifically, the boat that ferries the dishonored dead to Gre'thor, the Klingon version of hell. It's upsetting enough to discover that there may actually be something to the mythology her mother tried to teach her. What's worse is meeting her mother on the barge, apparently having just died, and realizing that Miral (B'Elanna's mummy) is damned because of her daughter's sins. B'Elanna insists on being put back into a near-death state so that she can trade her soul for her mother's. How she gets this by her friends on Voyager (who never have any intention of letting her die), to say nothing of the bargeman (who sees it coming from a parsec away), is really not clear at the end of the episode. Nor is it clear that her mother is really dead, or whether any of this happened outside of B'Elanna's oxygen-starved brain. But no season of Voyager would be complete without the obligatory episode showing B'Elanna having trouble coping with her Klingonness, so... The guest cast includes Karen Austin (previously seen on DS9) and
Alien Nation alum Eric Pierpoint in one of 5 characters he played in 8 episodes between all 4 Trek spinoffs.
Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy showcases the Doctor's singing talent (which seems to get more airplay this season than it really deserves) in an opening gag involving Tuvok being suddenly seized by Pon Farr madness. The scene is so ridiculous that the big reveal (that the Doc is daydreaming) doesn't come as much of a surprise, except, well, the fact that the Doctor is daydreaming. The poor hologram has been trying to stretch himself, with the usual unfortunate side-effects, and his attempt to add a daydreaming subroutine triggers disaster on so many levels that it probably sets a record for multi-level disaster-causing. For one thing, the Doc's fantasy life begins to interfere with his perceptions of reality, to say nothing of his duties, and in fixing the problem, his crewmates get an eyeful of his embarrassing inner life. But his pet dream—being programmed as an "Emergency Command Hologram" who can take over in case the captain is incapacitated—brings about even bigger problems when it muddles up the surveillance of a crew of chubby aliens who are trying to decide whether or not to mug the Voyager. The misunderstanding forces Janeway to let the Doctor sit in her chair and play captain for a supremely silly climactic confrontation. Picture Robert Picardo shaking his finger and saying, "I don't want to fire the weapons, but..." Fans of Enterprise may be interested to note that the alien surveillance dude is named Phlox.
Alice is the name Tom Paris gives to a sexy spaceship he discovers, all scratched and grimy and broken down, in a space junkyard run by a dude named Abaddon (which should have been warning enough), played by frequent Trek guest John Fleck. At first Alice is just a DIY project for the hot-rod enthusiast, but it moves on to obsession and beyond(!) when the little ship's neuro-technobabble starts messing with Tom's mind. The ship has a mind of its own, personified by a curvy female of its current pilot's species, visible only to said pilot. And Alice has an agenda which puts Tom's career, his relationship with B'Elanna, and even his life in danger. I never thought I would write these words: This episode succeeds largely on the basis of Robbie McNeill's acting ability. He plays the mentally enslaved Paris as a quivering mess of vulnerable, confused, and painful feelings: worlds away from the usual cocky, arrogant Tom.
Riddles, on the other hand, focuses on Tim Russ's acting chops as Tuvok gets his harddrive wiped and is forced to start over, like a child in a middle-aged body. Luckily he has Neelix to lean on. Their friendship grows as Neelix tries first to rehabilitate "Mr. Vulcan," then helps him to accept the new (and much more fun-loving) person he has become, albeit without the skills that had made Tuvok such a valued officer. All this is the doing of a race of invisible, tentacly aliens who go to great lengths to keep their existence hidden. Tuvok's only hope of becoming his old self again is to find these elusive critters and persuade them to share details of what they zapped him with. But to do that, an alien who has staked his career on proving the B'Nath really exist must surrender the evidence he has found, and (more touchingly) Tuvok and Neelix must lose the close bond they have formed. Playing Naroq is Mark Moses, who also played Capt. Archer's father in the pilot for Enterprise.
Dragon's Teeth, named after the thingummies that, mythologically speaking, cause warriors to sprout of the ground, is the episode in which the Voyagers are caught between the Turei and the Vaadwaur. The former claim ownership of the "underspace," a system of subspace tunnels connecting a network of worlds throughout the Delta Quadrant. The latter, awakened from a 900-year slumber by an impulsive Seven of Nine, are the last few hundred survivors of the underspace's previous management, who only meant to sleep for five years while their enemies bombarded their planet. At first Janeway tries to befriend the Vaadwaur, offering to help them reestablish themselves in exchange for help getting past the well-armed and aggressive Turei. But when the Vaadwaur try to take the Voyager for themselves, the tables are turned. The spectacular space battles in this episode probably wiped out several episodes' effects budget, but equally enjoyable is the atmosphere of mystery and menace surrounding this race whose memory has grown dim, yet remains disturbing. Guest stars include Robert Knepper, who previously played Deanna Troi's intended in TNG's "Haven," and Jeff Allin, who also played father to the little girl whose alien buddy made "Imaginary Friend" arguably the Worst Episode of TNG.
One Small Step is the one in which Chakotay, Tom, and Seven fly the Delta Flyer into the eye of a "graviton ellipse" (Gesundheit), becoming the first known explorers to survey the vacuum-cleaner-bag of what may be the galaxy's oldest known spacial anomaly. Well, the first to survive the trip, anyway. A 21st-century space capsule, manned by one Lt. John Kelly, was actually the one who went where no man had gone before, but he didn't make it out again. His ship disappeared from Mars orbit in 2032, so we've got 20 years to get on this, people! It was assumed that he died instantly, but when Seven goes aboard the capsule to cannibalize some very, very spare parts needed to get the Delta Flyer out of the ellipse, she discovers log entries proving that Kelly survived for several days, finally sacrificing the last of his life-support to capture a few more hours of telemetry for future generations to study. The experience teaches Seven something about the value of exploration for its own sake, while Chakotay learns (one would hope) the limits of said value when his passion for paleontology nearly gets the Delta Flyers killed. Guest actor Phil Morris, here playing the unlucky Lt. Kelly, completed his fifth of five Trek roles, including one of the children in the early TOS episode "Miri."
The Voyager Conspiracy exposes the risks of taking shortcuts in your studies. It begins when Seven of Nine invents a gizmo allowing her to download vast amounts of data while she regenerates, and starts to assimilate the ship's logs in her sleep. Unfortunately, the information overload causes her to develop a different paranoid theory every time she wakes up. With each conspiracy she recruits different crewmates, including the Captain and Chakotay, using seemingly airtight logical argument to convince them that the others are up to no good. Soon everybody is jumping at the slightest noise, suspecting each other of conspiring with the Cardassians, the Caretaker, the Borg, and any number of other alien races, for one nefarious purpose or another. On the brighter side, the alien pictured here (played by three-time Trek guest and sometime choreographer Albie Selznick) successfully tests a gravimetric slingshot that successfully shaves a few years off the Voyagers' trip home. But not before Janeway must talk Seven down off the deep-space equivalent of a seventh-floor window ledge.
Pathfinder features TNG crossover guests Marina Sirtis (as Counselor Troi) and Dwight Schultz (as Reginald Barclay) in a story focusing on the Earth-based efforts to bring Voyager home. The galaxy's most brilliant neurotic risks his career, not to mention a relapse into holo-addiction, brainstorming a way to get a message to Voyager. As he confesses to Deanna, he has become so obsessed with Voyager that he lives almost around the clock in a holo-simulation of the ship, where animated caricatures of the crew have become his closest friends. While Barclay struggles to overcome his insecurities, his commanding officers—including Tom Paris's admiral father—wonder what to do with him. Luckily, just when Barclay has crossed the final line and risks imprisonment to bounce a technobabble off another technobabble, his message gets through to Voyager and all is forgiven. And so, touchingly, Admiral Paris is able to send smoochies to his son, and let Janeway and her crew know their homeworld is pulling for them at the other end. Guest stars include Richard Herd (late of
V and
SeaQuest DSV) in his second Trek role, two-time Trek guest Richard McGonagle, and four-time ditto Victor Bevine.
Fair Haven is the first of two episodes this season focusing on Tom Paris's latest holodeck masterpiece, an early 20th-century Irish village by the same name, which he opens up to the crew for offshore shore leave while the ship rides out an ion storm. Neelix practices old-world cookery at the Ox and Lamb, the Doctor dons a cassock and escapes into the priesthood, Harry pursues a local maid, and Tom gets his giggles drinking ale and playing rings at Sullivan's pub. It is Sullivan himself who charms the Captain when she comes to call, but she decides that if he's going to be her holographic boy toy, a few things about him are going to change. The result is a low-key but intriguing exploration of the question: If you could change everything about a person to make him or her exactly the way you like them, would they be worth loving? Or maybe the question is: How long do you keep the lights on in a simulated village when you need all the ship's power to survive a grandmother ion storm? The guest cast includes Richard Riehle, whose three roles in five Trek episodes include the touching character of Batai in TNG's Hugo-winning episode "The Inner Light."
Blink of an Eye features Daniel Dae Kim, who later played a space marine in three episodes of Enterprise and is currently a regular on the reborn
Hawaii Five-O. Here Kim plays an astronaut from a world where time passes much faster than the rest of the galaxy, toward the end of an ordeal in which the Voyager is trapped in orbit and, in return, causes devastating earthquakes on the planet below. And so the crew helplessly observes a whole civilization developing in response to the light in the sky that shakes the ground; sometimes worshiping them, sometimes inspired by them technologically and culturally, and eventually brandishing hostile weapons at them, before finally helping them escape orbit. It's a thoughtful and sensitive essay on what happens when you are helpless to control how your influence affects someone else's development. The guest cast also includes two-time Trek guest Obi Ndefo, who had a recurring role on
Stargate SG-1; fellow two-timer Daniel Zacapa, best known for his role in
Se7en; and 1970s
Doctor Who alum Olaf Pooley, whose wife Gabrielle Beaumont directed this episode.
Virtuoso is the one in which the Doctor says, "Screw this," and decides to leave Voyager for a planet where he can expect to be worshiped for his singing ability. As you would expect, no one on said planet has ever heard music before. The at first rude and smugly self-satisfied Qomar, a vertically inferior but technologically superior race that understands no art form other than higher mathematics, suddenly change their tune (so to speak) when they overhear the Doctor humming "I've been working on the railroad." Soon the doctor has become a worldwide sensation, though nobody seems at all interested in other musical phenomena (such as Harry Kim's jazz band). Believing that a local beauty loves him for his mind, the Doc browbeats the Captain into letting him go his own way, makes a complete ass of himself in front of all his friends, and has all but packed his bags to leave the ship forever when he learns that his supposed girlfriend has programmed an upgrade of his program, adding the ability to perform heretofore unsingable musical fractals while subtracting pesky subroutines such as conscious thought and personality. The disillusioned Doctor/virtuoso returns to the ship with his tails tucked between his legs. Ironically, the actor playing the Prelate of the Qomar, these people who have never even conceived of the existence of music, is singer-songwriter Paul Williams.
Memorial raises the question whether it is right for a memorial to victims of a war crime to make visitors feel guilty about atrocities they had nothing to do with. In this case, we're talking about more than a vaguely unsettled feeling. Chakotay, Neelix, Tom, and Harry come back from a survey mission experiencing hallunications, anxiety attacks, and eventually full-blown memories of having taken part in the slaughter of 82 unarmed colonists and the subsequent cover-up. Similar memories start to emerge among other crewmen who weren't even on the away mission and couldn't possibly have done the things they remember doing. It looks like the ship may fall victim to an epidemic of paralyzing, if not suicidal, remorse. But it all turns out to be the effect of a beacon on a planet the survey mission scanned, a beacon that broadcasts telepathic technobabble into the surrounding star system and turns all chance visitors into surprising recipients of a virtual-reality, high-definition, all-expense-paid guilt trip. The beacon's power source has begun to fail after umpty-seven years, and so a debate arises as to whether the Voyagers should destroy it or destroy the hell out of it. Janeway, however, thinks they should recharge it so that it can give passersby the heebie-jeebies for umpty-seven more years. The only way to prevent things like this from happening in the future, Janeway reasons, is never to forget what happened in the past.
Tsunkatse features two guest actors whose Trek appearances were so numerous that I am sick of repeating them: Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun, Brunt, Shran, etc.) and J. G. Hertzler (Martok, etc., etc.) as, respectively, the impresario and one of the champions in a space-age death sport exhibited in holographic arenas throughout the Nocradian sector. Nevertheless, fans who watched the show when it was first broadcast will probably remember it as the one featuring then-pro wrestling sensation The Rock, a.k.a. Dwayne Johnson, complete with his trademark eyebrow lift, in one of his early acting roles (though, obviously, one not far from his WWE roots). Here we see him laying a smackdown on Seven of Nine, who has been shanghaied by the villainous Penk (Combs) to fight in his high-tech gladiatorial contests. Seven consents to fight in order to save the life of badly injured fellow abductee Tuvok, and after being initially beaten in a nonlethal "blue match" against the Rock, undergoes a rigorous training under a veteran Hirogen champion (Hertzler) to prepare for a to-the-death "red match." Naturally, Seven's opponent in the red match proves to be her Hirogen trainer, who after years of captivity has begun to long for an adversary worthy to kill him. Does Seven have it in her to close for the kill on someone she regards as a fatherly friend? Thanks to a last-moment intervention by the Voyager, she never has to find out. Hot tip: When attacking a Tsunkatse arena, aim for the broadcast antennas. Nothing does more damage to Norcadian gamesters than taking out their audience!
Collective is the episode that introduces Star Trek's most successful attempt to depict a loving family. And to think that it starts on a Borg cube! The Delta Flyer and its crew are taken aboard the cube, but for some reason remain unassimilated by the time Seven beams aboard to negotiate(!!!) with their captors. Evidently five youngsters, prematurely released from their maturation chambers, are all that survive of a... um... "crew" isn't the right word... collective? That's it!... all that survive of a collective that has been wiped out by a mysterious pathogen. Well, they and a Borg baby. These poor waifs don't even know how to assimilate somebody without killing them. But they're willing to try it on their hostages unless Janeway coughs up the Voyager's deflector dish, so they can phone home. What Seven needs to break to them, but gently, is that the Borg have already heard their distress call and have written off the five bitty Borg as an acceptable loss. Unfortunately the most charismatic of the five, known as "First," is the least willing to accept his collective's inevitable embracing of their own individuality, so he takes a lethal charge of technobabble for the team and leaves Icheb (Manu Intiraymi), Mezoti (Marley McClean), Azan and Rebi (Kurt and Cody Wetherill) to become the latest additions to the show's recurring cast.
Spirit Folk is the sequel to "Fair Haven," in which the denizens of the open-door holodeck Irish village begin to suspect that the Voyagers are demons, or faerie folk, capable of supernatural doings. The Doctor is spotted disappearing; the Captain saves a child from drowning in a well and denies that it happened; Tom is observed magicking a damaged tire onto his jalopy and, later, turning a local beauty into a prize cow. The Voyagers realize that leaving the program running day and night, allowing numerous crewmen to come and go as they please, and capriciously changing the program as they do so, have led to the holodeck's perceptual technobabble being thrown out of whack. While trying to throw it back into whack, Tom and Harry (later joined by the Doctor) are captured by the townsfolk and put on trial for witchcraft, or worse. With the holodeck safeties off (don't ask), anything could happen; for example, the Doctor could let himself be hypnotized, and Michael Sullivan (the captain's holo-boytoy) figures out how to use his mobile emitter to explore the ship. Luckily, the Voyagers are able to talk the villagers down from a tense standoff before something really sensible happens, like turning the damn thing off. Besides cast members reprising their roles from "Fair Haven," this episode features the second Trek appearance by
Seinfeld alum Ian Abercrombie, and a local doctor played by horror film maven Ian Patrick Williams.
Ashes to Ashes proposes the existence of an alien race, the Kobali, who reproduce by reanimating the corpses of other alien races and using gene-replacement therapy to convert their physiology into that of the Kobali. The implications, for example, for family dynamics in a society where re-engineered people are placed in families who, nevertheless, love each other as parents, children, and siblings, would be fascinating to explore. But what this episode explores is the rare exception in which a fresh-off-the-slab Kobali suffers from lingering memories of the previous owner of their body. This happens in the case of Jhet'leya, who thinks she is Ensign Lyndsay Ballard, a Voyager crewwoman and close friend of Harry Kim who was killed by the Hirogen a year or two back, and who now catches up with her former crewmen, desperate to belong in spite of her alien appearance. Unfortunately, she really has become a different person, and cosmetic alterations making her look human again cannot disguise that fact. Plus, the Kobali—who find human burial customs as strange and creepy as we find their reproductive values—have come back to reclaim their runaway, well armed and not taking "No" for an answer. It is finally Lyndsay/Jhet'leya who must decide where she really belongs. It's an episode that does what the best Star Trek episodes do: it touches us personally while blowing our minds.
Child's Play shows how far Seven of Nine's maternal instincts have developed since she took charge of four Borg foundlings only a few episodes back. Even more recently, she had begged Chakotay to relieve her of this duty because of how difficult it is to maintain order where children are concerned. This time, however, Seven is having trouble letting go when Icheb, the oldest and most brilliantly promising of her charges, is reunited with his Brunali parents. She is suspicious of Leucon and Yifay from the first, and not only because the former is played by Mark A. Sheppard (son of W. Morgan ditto), who has a
Backpfeifengesicht if anyone ever did. But Seven soon uncovers even more disturbing reasons to distrust the couple, beginning with the fact that they lied about how Icheb was assimilated by the Borg. It turns out that the lad has been genetically engineered as a walking bioweapon against any Borg sphere or cube that happens to emerge from the transwarp conduit near their planet. In fact, Icheb was the case-zero carrier of the plague that wiped out the cube on which Seven found him. And now they're sending him back again... But not if Momma Seven has anything to say about it! This episode makes an important step toward making Icheb and the other young drones a beloved part of the Voyager family. I especially like the line in which an exasperated Icheb, concealing a smile, threatens to cram his younger cargobaymates into a cargo container and transport them back to the Borg. Or maybe it's his response to the Doctor's diagnosis of butterflies in the stomach: "I never assimilated butterflies!"
Good Shepherd gets its title from a Biblical analogy to the shepherd who goes out to search for his lost sheep. In this case, the shepherd is Captain Janeway, and the three misfit crewmen she selects for a Delta Flyer survey of a stellar nursery are the stray sheep she wants to gather into her flock. Unfortunately, she wasn't planning on being attacked by a wolf, in the guise of a swarm of alien lifeforms composed of dark matter. Luckily, if she's going to have three incompetent bozos with her in such a serious situation, she happens to have chosen the right bozos: an intellectually limited Bajoran sensor analyst who nevertheless has a wide streak of gutsy loyalty; a hypochondriac who overcomes having an actual alien inside his body with surprising courage; and a theoretical cosmologist who hates getting his hands dirty in the practical field, but who finally puts himself in harm's way to give his shipmates a chance. In a sense the whole mission is a failure, but the guest cast makes it fun to watch, and we can only suppose that the adventure forms a bond between them. Playing Harren (the cosmologist) is Jay Underwood, best known for his youthful performance as an autistic child in
The Boy Who Could Fly. Michael Reisz, playing Telfer (the hypochondriac), has worked mostly as a voice actor and as a Peabody-winning writer for such shows as
Boston Legal. And Zoe McClellan, here playing the Bajoran crewman, once played a character named Bajoran on
The Mentalist, and was a regular cast member on
JAG.
Live Fast and Prosper
Muse
Fury
Life Line
The Haunting of Deck Twelve
Unimatrix Zero
For more on spaceship-based TV series, see my reviews of Star Trek: TOS seasons
one,
two, and
three; of TNG seasons
one,
two,
three,
four,
five,
six, and
seven; of DS9 seasons
one,
two,
three,
four,
five,
six, and
seven; of Voyager seasons
one,
two,
three,
four, and
five; and of Enterprise seasons
one and
two. See also my review of Farscape seasons
one,
two,
three, and
four; of
Firefly; and of Babylon 5 seasons
one,
two,
three,
four, and
five.
This week at the neighborhood Lutheran Church of the Tacky Church Sign:
DOUG: No way. My ma's cooking was so bad, she could burn delivery pizza.
DOUG: My brother and I played a trick on our ma one time. We swapped the labels on all the jars in her pantry. Sugar, salt, baking soda, flour... But it backfired. Her cooking improved. 
STAN: So? What does that have to do with anything?
Actually, today is no more special than any other Sunday. The Divine Service for this Sunday has a name—Cantate—but that’s only because the Introit begins with the words Cantate Domino, “Sing to the Lord a new song.” This Sunday doesn’t celebrate any person or happening, other than the regular, every-Sunday celebration of Christ and His rising from the dead. Mother’s Day isn’t until next week. So what is it about today that’s worth getting up and dragging yourself to church? The answer is: The word of God.
Let’s consider first what Jesus has to say. It’s the night of Jesus’ betrayal and arrest. He has been talking to His disciples about going away for a while, then coming back again. The disciples are too disturbed by these sayings to ask any intelligent questions. So Jesus says, “But now I go away to Him who sent Me, and none of you asks Me, ‘Where are You going?’ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.” 
And what is the Helper supposed to do? Jesus says: “He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” That sounds impressive, but how many of you understand it? Not to worry; Jesus explains: “Of sin, because they do not believe in Me; of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more; of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.” Oh, thank you! That is so much more clear! 
Likewise, by the message of the Gospel the Holy Spirit must convict you of righteousness. Why? Because the righteousness of the crucified and risen Christ covers your sins and makes you righteous in God’s sight. This is a gift that you can only receive through faith in Christ. And yet this is such a foolish message that no one would accept it without a Holy Spirit-powered miracle in the heart. So the message itself creates in you the ability to believe what the message promises: forgiveness of all your sins, for Jesus’s sake. When the Spirit does this miracle in you, He convicts you of righteousness.
So we know three things, and we know them only through the help of the Helper: Sin, because of which we can do nothing without Christ; Righteousness, our new status before God, which is a gift purchased in Jesus’ blood; and Judgment, because God expects us to live from now on as though freed from sin and growing in righteousness—and yet because of our weakness we need to be constantly assured that our Judge’s final verdict has been locked in since Jesus raised his voice on the cross and cried, “It is finished!”
The Holy Spirit works to create these convictions not only through the spoken Word, but also through the sacraments, which I may be forgiven for calling “God’s sign language.” I’m not saying the sacraments are only signs. God’s word clearly reveals that Baptism washes away sins and causes us to be born again. God’s word teaches that when we receive the Lord’s Supper, our mouths are really eating and drinking Jesus’ body and blood, and so we receive a medicine for sin and death that operates on our bodies as well as our souls. The Sacraments are not only signs; but like the message preached and taught, they are a kind of language that God uses to convict us of sin, righteousness, and judgment—and so the Sacraments are also vessels of the Holy Spirit.
There’s a peculiar slander that Pentecostal Christians like to hurl at Lutherans. It’s implied by a poster I recently saw, showing a blown-up image of an electrical plug and the words: “The Christian who neglects the Holy Spirit is like a lamp that’s not plugged in.” The implied question is: “How can you think you’ve got Christianity right when you neglect the Holy Spirit?” This type of question had led a lot of Lutherans to be seduced into Pentecostalism. Is it true, though? It is true that our focus is centered on Christ, on His cross and resurrection, on His word and sacraments, and on His promises, chiefly the forgiveness of sins. It is true that, unlike many Pentecostals, we do not dwell at length on so-called spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues, interpreting tongues, prophecy, faith-healing, and so on. But does this make us guilty of neglecting the Holy Spirit? 
Here Jesus tells His disciples they are not ready to be told every detail of what the church will believe, teach, and confess. But He adds: The Helper, who is the Holy Spirit, will lead them to understand the whole truth. Mind you, this Spirit will teach them nothing new. This “whole truth” will be lifted directly from what Jesus taught, just as everything Jesus taught was grounded in Old Testament Scripture. Everything that is of God belongs to Jesus. Everything that the Holy Spirit gives will come from Jesus. All Scripture points to Jesus. And all truth comes to us by interpreting Scripture through the lens of Jesus. 
James the elder writes: “Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.” In other words, don’t focus on the exceptions to the rule. When Jesus says that one cannot enter the kingdom of heaven without being born again by water and the Spirit, or without eating and drinking His body and blood, we immediately spring up, like a knee that jerks when your doctor hits it, and exclaim: “What about the thief on the cross? What about all those who came to faith before they were baptized, or who died before they could be baptized, etc.?” 
James writes further: “Of His own will He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures. So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak… Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” It could not be clearer than this. We have not come forth like volunteer herbs in your kitchen garden. We did not plant ourselves. We are spiritually alive because God planted us, or rather He planted in us His word of truth. He has grown us, and is still growing us, so that we bear fruit. And it isn’t because we prayed a sinner’s prayer or decided to accept Him. It’s because Christ gave Himself for us while we were still unrighteous, wrathful, filthy, and overflowing with wickedness. He made us righteous by His blood. He applies that righteousness to us through faith. And even that faith is His gift, planted in us through the living and imperishable seed of His Word.
First, be it known that the Xindi civilization comprises not one but five species. Representing the Xindi-Reptilian species is Commander Dolim, pictured here. Played in eight episodes by Scott MacDonald, whose four previous Trek roles included a Romulan and a Jem'Hadar, Dolim is a war hawk who tirelessly pushes for the (ahem) coldblooded annihilation of the human race. 
Next, there are the Xindi-Arboreals, the descendants of some kind of macaque, and the least warlike of the five species. Their representative on the Council is Jannar, pictured here. In spite of his peaceful inclinations, Jannar is at first willing to see Earth destroyed if it will save future generations of Xindi. Later, he begins to have doubts. Rick Worthy, whose five previous Trek roles included a Klingon and two different androids appearing in one episode, puts in ten appearances as Jannar. 
Also appearing in ten episodes is Xindi-Primate (i.e., humanoid) scientist Degra, pictured here. He is played by Randy Oglesby, whose previous six Trek roles included a pair of twins and an insane Cardassian. Though he is the one who actually designs the super-weapon for the purpose of destroying Earth, Degra later becomes the first Xindi leader to switch sides, ultimately giving his life for his efforts to save mankind. Meanwhile, previous DS9 guest Tucker Smallwood, late of Space: Above and Beyond, plays the unnamed Primate Councilor in nine episodes.
Meanwhile, on the Enterprise side of things, Season 3 benefits from five appearances by Stephen Culp (who played RFK in Thirteen Days and had recurring roles on JAG and Desperate Housewives) as MACO Major Hayes. Also, previous Voyager guest Daniel Dae Kim, also known for his roles in 24, Lost, and the B5 spinoff Crusade, appears in three episodes as Corporal Chang. Previous DS9 guest Nathan Anderson appears in the first two episodes of the season as Sergeant Kemper, the guy whose Duluth upbringing Hoshi detects in his vocal inflections. And one Sean McGowan makes four appearances as the ill-fated Corporal Hawkins.
The Xindi kicks off the new season with a glimpse into the Xindi Council chamber, as well as the Enterprise's new Situation Room, where both sides of the Xindi-Earth conflict are planning their next move. Besides introducing these new standing sets and most of the recurring characters named above, the episode mainly depicts Archer leading his people on the trail of any information they can find about the Xindi, who at this point are largely a mystery to the earthlings. For example, the Enterprises are only just now learning that the Xindi race encompasses multiple species. The character pictured here is not, however, one of them. What he or his species is called, we don't know; only that he is the foreman of a facility that mines a blue ore that (as we eventually learn) is the key to insulating a starship against the space anomalies that have turned previous visitors to the Expanse literally inside out. The foreman, one of the most flamboyantly disgusting characters ever depicted on Star Trek, is played by the same Stephen McHattie whose Romulan character on DS9 made the words "It's a faaaake!" a versicle in the fan cultus. And playing the Xindi humanoid who wades through sewage with Archer and Trip is three-time Trek guest Richard Lineback.
Anomaly features Babylon 5 co-star Robert Rusler (pictured here) as one of a band of marauders who rob the Enterprise blind while its crew is coping with its first taste of the Expanse's wacky scientific bylaws. Our guys also have their first encounter with a Xindi ship, though its crew is already dead due to their own brush with an anomaly. But by far their coolest discovery, made while pursuing the marauders, is a gigantic sphere (sort of like the Death Star) constructed inside a cloaking device whose distortion field is so powerful that a starship can get lost in it. It seems the marauders have been parking their booty inside the sphere, but after all the shots have been fired, questions remain unanswered as to who built the sphere, and why, and how...
Extinction brings Archer, Hoshi, and Malcolm as close as any human could ever get to completely understanding an alien race: namely, they become the aliens. At first it seems like the kind of thing that can happen at any time in a realm of space where natural laws are woefully under-enforced. But later it turns out that they have fallen victim to a virus left behind by a species that became extinct millennia ago. The denizens of Urquat (as they call their now-ruined city) wanted to keep their civilization going, so they booby-trapped their planet with a microbe that almost instantly changes any alien visitor into a member of the old gang. Together with a homing instinct hardwired into their new genes, this virus has proven so effective that a neighboring civilization was almost wiped out, and now these aliens are so worried about the chances of the bug spreading again that their policy is to shoot flame-throwers at anybody who gets infected, just to be sure. Even as Phlox rushes to formulate a cure based on the immunity in T'Pol's Vulcan blood, it's going to be a close race to save Archer and Hoshi from being toasted. Roger Cross of 24 fame guest-stars.
Rajiin is the name of the alien sex slave who, in spite of Starfleet's wise policy against owning people, successfully appeals to Archer to take her away from this dump of a planet (pictured). At first she seems like a nice enough girl, as out-of-work sex slaves go, but then she turns out to be a spy who uses a combination of deep-scanning gizmos and memory-wiping technology to plunder the Enterprises of information certain members of the Xindi Council think could help them build a bio-weapon, which might step up the timetable for their important destroying-Earth project. When the Xindi Reptilians and Insectoids show up to reclaim their (ahem) asset, an impressive amount of carnage and destruction results. Meanwhile, T'Pol and Trip try to synthesize that Trellium-D stuff which is supposed to protect ships from Delphic Expanse anomalies, but their first batch proves almost as destructive as the Xindi attack. Good times. The merchant who sells Trip the formula for Trellium-D is played by previous TNG guest Dell Yount.
Impulse brings the Enterprises into contact with a Vulcan ship that disappeared into the Expanse years ago on a mission to rescue another Vulcan ship that had disappeared in the Expanse. The crew of the Seleya turns out to be alive, but not well. In fact, they have all gone batshit crazy and spend the Enterprises' entire visit trying to put a zombie smackdown on Archer, T'Pol, Malcolm, and Corporal Hawkins (the MACO equivalent of a red shirt whose survival at the end of the episode violates all the conventions of Star Trek script writing). While T'Pol begins to suffer the same fate (due to the freaky side effects of that all-important trellium on Vulcan brains), Trip and Travis pilot a shuttlepod into a tricky asteroid field where the laws of motion are off bubble. The episode ends with a scary nightmare sequence, emphasizing how close T'Pol came to not getting off the Seleya on time.
Exile features this beauty contestant: an enigmatic alien named Tarquin, who first makes contact with the Enterprises through a psychic connection with Hoshi. Exiled due to his mental powers to an alpine fortress on an otherwise uninhabited planet, Tarquin hopes to persuade Hoshi to become the latest in a succession of companions he has sought out with the aid of a device (also in the picture) which extends the range of his powers. He's a lonely guy, especially since his long lifespan has led him to outlive each of his previous companions. In return for a chance to mess with Hoshi's mind during an extended stay in his fortress of solitude, Tarquin offers to help the Enterprises learn more about the Xindi weapon. In the end Tarquin does not prove very helpful, but nor does he play the role of a villain with full conviction, and it is Hoshi who comes off looking a bit cold. It's a Bluebeardesque episode with a certain "Original Series" feel to it, albeit with a disappointing lack of sexy chemistry and a general shortage of stuff happening. Still, it bears noting that it was the first Star Trek episode to be broadcast in High Definition.
The Shipment features three-time Trek guest John Cothran, Jr., as a Xindi Arboreal technician who runs a lab specializing in the refinement of kemocite, a maguffin substance that seems to play a key role in his people's projected Doomsday Weapon strike against Earth. Archer and his team kidnap Gralik and try to wrangle the secrets of the super-weapon out of him, but he knows so little about it that he is actually appalled to learn what his work-product is being used for. So, eventually, he sabotages the shipment right under the noses of Degra and the Reptilians, who have arrived ahead of schedule to pick it up. This gives Archer an alternative to blowing the facility up, which, in turn, enables the Enterprises to continue chasing the super-weapon without showing their hand to the Xindi.
Twilight starts out on a bit of a downer, with an obviously disoriented Archer learning that he has been relieved of command, then forcing his way onto the bridge just in time to see the Xindi weapon destroy Earth. From this bleak beginning, the story jumps ahead twelve years to find Archer waking up every morning with no memory of the day before, and living in a refugee camp with the last surviving 6,000 or so humans, defended by the scarce handful of starships that have so far survived the ongoing Xindi campaign of genocide against the human race. T'Pol has sacrificed her career to serve as Archer's live-in nurse, obligated by her sensibility that her former captain got the brain injury that made him this way while saving her life. Phlox, meanwhile, has dedicated his career to finding a cure for the captain's condition, which an early test shows to be surprisingly effective. You see, the technobabble parasites that have burrowed into Archer's brain are not only killed by Phlox's treatment regimen, but are actually erased from history... So, if they can finish the treatment regimen, the captain's memory problem will have never happened, the events leading up to the destruction of Earth will have unfolded differently, and mankind may get a second chance. Unfortunately, the Xindi have followed Phlox to the refugee planet, so we get to see every main character on the show killed in the final battle to determine whether the Enterprise will blow up before, after, or (gulp) during the Captain's cure. Uh-oh... Could it be the last one they ever made?
North Star finds the Enterprises incognito on a planet where a small colony of humans live an Old West lifestyle, along with an oppressed minority of aliens called Skagarrans (or, to those who are oppressing them, Skags for short). Evidently these Skags, or rather their ancestors, abducted the ancestors of the human colonists from Earth in the 1800s and forced them to work in their mines. The humans resisted so effectively, and so ruthlessly, that the few Skags who survive are totally cowed by a code of laws that bar them from marrying, going to school, owning property, and anything else that could conceivably lead to their gaining power over humans ever again. Even after Archer reveals to the local sheriff that he comes from a much more advanced Earth, where racial intolerance is no longer tolerated, the Enterprises face tough opposition from a band of yahoos and vigilantes. The episode features five-time Trek guest Glenn Morshower (best known as the sheriff on CSI) as the sheriff, and two-time Enterprise guest James Parks (who played a deputy in Kill Bill) as the corrupt deputy.
Similitude is the Emmy-winning (for music) episode which begins with what appears to be a funeral service for Trip. Then it skips back in time to reveal how Trip was gravely injured, and the Doctor's only idea for saving him is a controversial procedure involving a giant alien grub that, when injected with a DNA sample, grows into a fast-maturing, sentient clone of Trip. "Sim," as they call the youngster, remembers all of Trip's memories at the same apparent age, while experiencing childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in eight days flat. He saves the ship, declares his love to T'Pol, and comes to terms with the fact that even if he wasn't going to be sacrificed to provide donor brain tissue to save the real Trip's life, he wouldn't live above fifteen days anyway. It's an episode full of disturbing implications for medical ethics, but also a very touching story which gives a new dimension to the T'Pol-Trip relationship. Among the three young actors who briefly appeared as early stages in Sim's development is Shane Sweet (pictured), who as a much younger child played a recurring character named Seven on Married... With Children.
Carpenter Street is the one in which time cop Daniels sends Archer and T'Pol back to 2004 Detroit to stop the Xindi Reptilians from unleashing a bio-weapon on 21st-century Earth. There they find a blood-bank tech, played by four-time Trek guest Leland Orser, drugging and abducting representatives of different blood-types so that the Xindi can calibrate their weapon to attack a wider slice of the human pie graph. If you have seen Orser's other Trek roles, you may find it hard to believe, but it's true: His character in this episode is as disgusting as they get, perhaps surpassed only by Stephen McHattie's foreman character in the season opener. Also guesting in this episode is Jeffrey Dean Morgan of Watchmen fame, here unrecognizable under Xindi Reptilian makeup that reportedly almost drove him to quit acting.
Chosen Realm stars three-time Trek guest Conor O'Farrell, also known for his recurring role as a villainous undersheriff on CSI, as the leader of an extreme sect of a religion that worships the makers of those mysterious spheres the Enterprise keeps finding all over the Expanse. With a homicidal intolerance of the tiniest dissent from their wacky beliefs, and with their very bodies armed as biochemical bombs, D'Jamat and his followers take advantage of being rescued by the technologically superior Enterprises and quickly seize control of the ship. They then plan to use the ship's fast engines and powerful weapons to annihilate the opposing sects on their home planet. A canny Archer manages to fake his death and work from behind the scenes, taking back the ship just in time to show D'Jamat that his planet has already been wiped out, so make that your last battlefield, sucka!
Stratagem
Harbinger
Doctor's Orders
Hatchery
Azati Prime
Damage
The Forgotten
E²
The Council
Countdown
Zero Hour
Equinox, Part II is the conclusion to Season 5's "cliffhanger," in which the captain and surviving officers of the Starfleet science vessel Equinox take off with the Voyager's shield generator, leaving the Voyagers at the mercy of alien beings (representative pictured here with Harry Kim) who are royally pissed about their people being used as fuel in an experimental, supercharged warp engine. This is all very understandable. What makes this episode unusual is the irony that, as soon as Captain Ransom comes to his senses and decides to surrender to Janeway, his first officer stages a mutiny and takes over command; while, back on Voyager, Chakotay tells his captain that she is going insane (and she is, she really is), but peacefully submits to being relieved of his duties. "It's not about rules and regulations," Chakotay tells her. "It's about right and wrong." Such as the difference in priorities between pursuing the Equinox and talking the aliens into stopping their attacks. In the end, after the dust settles, we find Chakotay suddenly reinstated and we wonder how things are ever going to be the same between him and the captain. But we're forgetting: this is Star Trek. By next week, it will be back to business as usual!
Survival Instinct features 4-time Trek guests Bertila Damas and Tim Kelleher, plus umpty-ump-timer Vaughn Armstrong, as three ex-Borg drones who track down former collective-mate Seven of Nine at a big, bustling space station. But they aren't there just to catch up on the good old days. They believe Seven holds the key to the telepathic link that has made the three of them a mini-collective, within or without the Borg, and (most importantly) the key to breaking it so they can live as individuals again. At first, none of them can quite remember what happened to make these three people share a group consciousness; only that it happened sometime after the four of them (including Seven) survived a crash landing eight years earlier and were temporarily severed from the collective. It turns out that while the three crewmates, who were assimilated as adults, began to recover their adult personalities, Seven responded like the frightened child she was when the Borg assimilated her; and, in a panic, she forced the mind-sharing deal on them in order to keep the world as she knew it from falling apart. Sadly, the only way to help these people, short of returning them to the Borg, will leave them with only a month or so to live. So the question of the day is: What is more important? Survival or living?
Barge of the Dead is the one where B'Elanna comes back from a near-death experience, having seen the Klingon afterlife—specifically, the boat that ferries the dishonored dead to Gre'thor, the Klingon version of hell. It's upsetting enough to discover that there may actually be something to the mythology her mother tried to teach her. What's worse is meeting her mother on the barge, apparently having just died, and realizing that Miral (B'Elanna's mummy) is damned because of her daughter's sins. B'Elanna insists on being put back into a near-death state so that she can trade her soul for her mother's. How she gets this by her friends on Voyager (who never have any intention of letting her die), to say nothing of the bargeman (who sees it coming from a parsec away), is really not clear at the end of the episode. Nor is it clear that her mother is really dead, or whether any of this happened outside of B'Elanna's oxygen-starved brain. But no season of Voyager would be complete without the obligatory episode showing B'Elanna having trouble coping with her Klingonness, so... The guest cast includes Karen Austin (previously seen on DS9) and Alien Nation alum Eric Pierpoint in one of 5 characters he played in 8 episodes between all 4 Trek spinoffs.
Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy showcases the Doctor's singing talent (which seems to get more airplay this season than it really deserves) in an opening gag involving Tuvok being suddenly seized by Pon Farr madness. The scene is so ridiculous that the big reveal (that the Doc is daydreaming) doesn't come as much of a surprise, except, well, the fact that the Doctor is daydreaming. The poor hologram has been trying to stretch himself, with the usual unfortunate side-effects, and his attempt to add a daydreaming subroutine triggers disaster on so many levels that it probably sets a record for multi-level disaster-causing. For one thing, the Doc's fantasy life begins to interfere with his perceptions of reality, to say nothing of his duties, and in fixing the problem, his crewmates get an eyeful of his embarrassing inner life. But his pet dream—being programmed as an "Emergency Command Hologram" who can take over in case the captain is incapacitated—brings about even bigger problems when it muddles up the surveillance of a crew of chubby aliens who are trying to decide whether or not to mug the Voyager. The misunderstanding forces Janeway to let the Doctor sit in her chair and play captain for a supremely silly climactic confrontation. Picture Robert Picardo shaking his finger and saying, "I don't want to fire the weapons, but..." Fans of Enterprise may be interested to note that the alien surveillance dude is named Phlox.
Alice is the name Tom Paris gives to a sexy spaceship he discovers, all scratched and grimy and broken down, in a space junkyard run by a dude named Abaddon (which should have been warning enough), played by frequent Trek guest John Fleck. At first Alice is just a DIY project for the hot-rod enthusiast, but it moves on to obsession and beyond(!) when the little ship's neuro-technobabble starts messing with Tom's mind. The ship has a mind of its own, personified by a curvy female of its current pilot's species, visible only to said pilot. And Alice has an agenda which puts Tom's career, his relationship with B'Elanna, and even his life in danger. I never thought I would write these words: This episode succeeds largely on the basis of Robbie McNeill's acting ability. He plays the mentally enslaved Paris as a quivering mess of vulnerable, confused, and painful feelings: worlds away from the usual cocky, arrogant Tom.
Riddles, on the other hand, focuses on Tim Russ's acting chops as Tuvok gets his harddrive wiped and is forced to start over, like a child in a middle-aged body. Luckily he has Neelix to lean on. Their friendship grows as Neelix tries first to rehabilitate "Mr. Vulcan," then helps him to accept the new (and much more fun-loving) person he has become, albeit without the skills that had made Tuvok such a valued officer. All this is the doing of a race of invisible, tentacly aliens who go to great lengths to keep their existence hidden. Tuvok's only hope of becoming his old self again is to find these elusive critters and persuade them to share details of what they zapped him with. But to do that, an alien who has staked his career on proving the B'Nath really exist must surrender the evidence he has found, and (more touchingly) Tuvok and Neelix must lose the close bond they have formed. Playing Naroq is Mark Moses, who also played Capt. Archer's father in the pilot for Enterprise.
Dragon's Teeth, named after the thingummies that, mythologically speaking, cause warriors to sprout of the ground, is the episode in which the Voyagers are caught between the Turei and the Vaadwaur. The former claim ownership of the "underspace," a system of subspace tunnels connecting a network of worlds throughout the Delta Quadrant. The latter, awakened from a 900-year slumber by an impulsive Seven of Nine, are the last few hundred survivors of the underspace's previous management, who only meant to sleep for five years while their enemies bombarded their planet. At first Janeway tries to befriend the Vaadwaur, offering to help them reestablish themselves in exchange for help getting past the well-armed and aggressive Turei. But when the Vaadwaur try to take the Voyager for themselves, the tables are turned. The spectacular space battles in this episode probably wiped out several episodes' effects budget, but equally enjoyable is the atmosphere of mystery and menace surrounding this race whose memory has grown dim, yet remains disturbing. Guest stars include Robert Knepper, who previously played Deanna Troi's intended in TNG's "Haven," and Jeff Allin, who also played father to the little girl whose alien buddy made "Imaginary Friend" arguably the Worst Episode of TNG.
One Small Step is the one in which Chakotay, Tom, and Seven fly the Delta Flyer into the eye of a "graviton ellipse" (Gesundheit), becoming the first known explorers to survey the vacuum-cleaner-bag of what may be the galaxy's oldest known spacial anomaly. Well, the first to survive the trip, anyway. A 21st-century space capsule, manned by one Lt. John Kelly, was actually the one who went where no man had gone before, but he didn't make it out again. His ship disappeared from Mars orbit in 2032, so we've got 20 years to get on this, people! It was assumed that he died instantly, but when Seven goes aboard the capsule to cannibalize some very, very spare parts needed to get the Delta Flyer out of the ellipse, she discovers log entries proving that Kelly survived for several days, finally sacrificing the last of his life-support to capture a few more hours of telemetry for future generations to study. The experience teaches Seven something about the value of exploration for its own sake, while Chakotay learns (one would hope) the limits of said value when his passion for paleontology nearly gets the Delta Flyers killed. Guest actor Phil Morris, here playing the unlucky Lt. Kelly, completed his fifth of five Trek roles, including one of the children in the early TOS episode "Miri."
The Voyager Conspiracy exposes the risks of taking shortcuts in your studies. It begins when Seven of Nine invents a gizmo allowing her to download vast amounts of data while she regenerates, and starts to assimilate the ship's logs in her sleep. Unfortunately, the information overload causes her to develop a different paranoid theory every time she wakes up. With each conspiracy she recruits different crewmates, including the Captain and Chakotay, using seemingly airtight logical argument to convince them that the others are up to no good. Soon everybody is jumping at the slightest noise, suspecting each other of conspiring with the Cardassians, the Caretaker, the Borg, and any number of other alien races, for one nefarious purpose or another. On the brighter side, the alien pictured here (played by three-time Trek guest and sometime choreographer Albie Selznick) successfully tests a gravimetric slingshot that successfully shaves a few years off the Voyagers' trip home. But not before Janeway must talk Seven down off the deep-space equivalent of a seventh-floor window ledge.
Pathfinder features TNG crossover guests Marina Sirtis (as Counselor Troi) and Dwight Schultz (as Reginald Barclay) in a story focusing on the Earth-based efforts to bring Voyager home. The galaxy's most brilliant neurotic risks his career, not to mention a relapse into holo-addiction, brainstorming a way to get a message to Voyager. As he confesses to Deanna, he has become so obsessed with Voyager that he lives almost around the clock in a holo-simulation of the ship, where animated caricatures of the crew have become his closest friends. While Barclay struggles to overcome his insecurities, his commanding officers—including Tom Paris's admiral father—wonder what to do with him. Luckily, just when Barclay has crossed the final line and risks imprisonment to bounce a technobabble off another technobabble, his message gets through to Voyager and all is forgiven. And so, touchingly, Admiral Paris is able to send smoochies to his son, and let Janeway and her crew know their homeworld is pulling for them at the other end. Guest stars include Richard Herd (late of V and SeaQuest DSV) in his second Trek role, two-time Trek guest Richard McGonagle, and four-time ditto Victor Bevine.
Fair Haven is the first of two episodes this season focusing on Tom Paris's latest holodeck masterpiece, an early 20th-century Irish village by the same name, which he opens up to the crew for offshore shore leave while the ship rides out an ion storm. Neelix practices old-world cookery at the Ox and Lamb, the Doctor dons a cassock and escapes into the priesthood, Harry pursues a local maid, and Tom gets his giggles drinking ale and playing rings at Sullivan's pub. It is Sullivan himself who charms the Captain when she comes to call, but she decides that if he's going to be her holographic boy toy, a few things about him are going to change. The result is a low-key but intriguing exploration of the question: If you could change everything about a person to make him or her exactly the way you like them, would they be worth loving? Or maybe the question is: How long do you keep the lights on in a simulated village when you need all the ship's power to survive a grandmother ion storm? The guest cast includes Richard Riehle, whose three roles in five Trek episodes include the touching character of Batai in TNG's Hugo-winning episode "The Inner Light."
Blink of an Eye features Daniel Dae Kim, who later played a space marine in three episodes of Enterprise and is currently a regular on the reborn Hawaii Five-O. Here Kim plays an astronaut from a world where time passes much faster than the rest of the galaxy, toward the end of an ordeal in which the Voyager is trapped in orbit and, in return, causes devastating earthquakes on the planet below. And so the crew helplessly observes a whole civilization developing in response to the light in the sky that shakes the ground; sometimes worshiping them, sometimes inspired by them technologically and culturally, and eventually brandishing hostile weapons at them, before finally helping them escape orbit. It's a thoughtful and sensitive essay on what happens when you are helpless to control how your influence affects someone else's development. The guest cast also includes two-time Trek guest Obi Ndefo, who had a recurring role on Stargate SG-1; fellow two-timer Daniel Zacapa, best known for his role in Se7en; and 1970s Doctor Who alum Olaf Pooley, whose wife Gabrielle Beaumont directed this episode.
Virtuoso is the one in which the Doctor says, "Screw this," and decides to leave Voyager for a planet where he can expect to be worshiped for his singing ability. As you would expect, no one on said planet has ever heard music before. The at first rude and smugly self-satisfied Qomar, a vertically inferior but technologically superior race that understands no art form other than higher mathematics, suddenly change their tune (so to speak) when they overhear the Doctor humming "I've been working on the railroad." Soon the doctor has become a worldwide sensation, though nobody seems at all interested in other musical phenomena (such as Harry Kim's jazz band). Believing that a local beauty loves him for his mind, the Doc browbeats the Captain into letting him go his own way, makes a complete ass of himself in front of all his friends, and has all but packed his bags to leave the ship forever when he learns that his supposed girlfriend has programmed an upgrade of his program, adding the ability to perform heretofore unsingable musical fractals while subtracting pesky subroutines such as conscious thought and personality. The disillusioned Doctor/virtuoso returns to the ship with his tails tucked between his legs. Ironically, the actor playing the Prelate of the Qomar, these people who have never even conceived of the existence of music, is singer-songwriter Paul Williams.
Memorial raises the question whether it is right for a memorial to victims of a war crime to make visitors feel guilty about atrocities they had nothing to do with. In this case, we're talking about more than a vaguely unsettled feeling. Chakotay, Neelix, Tom, and Harry come back from a survey mission experiencing hallunications, anxiety attacks, and eventually full-blown memories of having taken part in the slaughter of 82 unarmed colonists and the subsequent cover-up. Similar memories start to emerge among other crewmen who weren't even on the away mission and couldn't possibly have done the things they remember doing. It looks like the ship may fall victim to an epidemic of paralyzing, if not suicidal, remorse. But it all turns out to be the effect of a beacon on a planet the survey mission scanned, a beacon that broadcasts telepathic technobabble into the surrounding star system and turns all chance visitors into surprising recipients of a virtual-reality, high-definition, all-expense-paid guilt trip. The beacon's power source has begun to fail after umpty-seven years, and so a debate arises as to whether the Voyagers should destroy it or destroy the hell out of it. Janeway, however, thinks they should recharge it so that it can give passersby the heebie-jeebies for umpty-seven more years. The only way to prevent things like this from happening in the future, Janeway reasons, is never to forget what happened in the past.
Tsunkatse features two guest actors whose Trek appearances were so numerous that I am sick of repeating them: Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun, Brunt, Shran, etc.) and J. G. Hertzler (Martok, etc., etc.) as, respectively, the impresario and one of the champions in a space-age death sport exhibited in holographic arenas throughout the Nocradian sector. Nevertheless, fans who watched the show when it was first broadcast will probably remember it as the one featuring then-pro wrestling sensation The Rock, a.k.a. Dwayne Johnson, complete with his trademark eyebrow lift, in one of his early acting roles (though, obviously, one not far from his WWE roots). Here we see him laying a smackdown on Seven of Nine, who has been shanghaied by the villainous Penk (Combs) to fight in his high-tech gladiatorial contests. Seven consents to fight in order to save the life of badly injured fellow abductee Tuvok, and after being initially beaten in a nonlethal "blue match" against the Rock, undergoes a rigorous training under a veteran Hirogen champion (Hertzler) to prepare for a to-the-death "red match." Naturally, Seven's opponent in the red match proves to be her Hirogen trainer, who after years of captivity has begun to long for an adversary worthy to kill him. Does Seven have it in her to close for the kill on someone she regards as a fatherly friend? Thanks to a last-moment intervention by the Voyager, she never has to find out. Hot tip: When attacking a Tsunkatse arena, aim for the broadcast antennas. Nothing does more damage to Norcadian gamesters than taking out their audience!
Collective is the episode that introduces Star Trek's most successful attempt to depict a loving family. And to think that it starts on a Borg cube! The Delta Flyer and its crew are taken aboard the cube, but for some reason remain unassimilated by the time Seven beams aboard to negotiate(!!!) with their captors. Evidently five youngsters, prematurely released from their maturation chambers, are all that survive of a... um... "crew" isn't the right word... collective? That's it!... all that survive of a collective that has been wiped out by a mysterious pathogen. Well, they and a Borg baby. These poor waifs don't even know how to assimilate somebody without killing them. But they're willing to try it on their hostages unless Janeway coughs up the Voyager's deflector dish, so they can phone home. What Seven needs to break to them, but gently, is that the Borg have already heard their distress call and have written off the five bitty Borg as an acceptable loss. Unfortunately the most charismatic of the five, known as "First," is the least willing to accept his collective's inevitable embracing of their own individuality, so he takes a lethal charge of technobabble for the team and leaves Icheb (Manu Intiraymi), Mezoti (Marley McClean), Azan and Rebi (Kurt and Cody Wetherill) to become the latest additions to the show's recurring cast.
Spirit Folk is the sequel to "Fair Haven," in which the denizens of the open-door holodeck Irish village begin to suspect that the Voyagers are demons, or faerie folk, capable of supernatural doings. The Doctor is spotted disappearing; the Captain saves a child from drowning in a well and denies that it happened; Tom is observed magicking a damaged tire onto his jalopy and, later, turning a local beauty into a prize cow. The Voyagers realize that leaving the program running day and night, allowing numerous crewmen to come and go as they please, and capriciously changing the program as they do so, have led to the holodeck's perceptual technobabble being thrown out of whack. While trying to throw it back into whack, Tom and Harry (later joined by the Doctor) are captured by the townsfolk and put on trial for witchcraft, or worse. With the holodeck safeties off (don't ask), anything could happen; for example, the Doctor could let himself be hypnotized, and Michael Sullivan (the captain's holo-boytoy) figures out how to use his mobile emitter to explore the ship. Luckily, the Voyagers are able to talk the villagers down from a tense standoff before something really sensible happens, like turning the damn thing off. Besides cast members reprising their roles from "Fair Haven," this episode features the second Trek appearance by Seinfeld alum Ian Abercrombie, and a local doctor played by horror film maven Ian Patrick Williams.
Ashes to Ashes proposes the existence of an alien race, the Kobali, who reproduce by reanimating the corpses of other alien races and using gene-replacement therapy to convert their physiology into that of the Kobali. The implications, for example, for family dynamics in a society where re-engineered people are placed in families who, nevertheless, love each other as parents, children, and siblings, would be fascinating to explore. But what this episode explores is the rare exception in which a fresh-off-the-slab Kobali suffers from lingering memories of the previous owner of their body. This happens in the case of Jhet'leya, who thinks she is Ensign Lyndsay Ballard, a Voyager crewwoman and close friend of Harry Kim who was killed by the Hirogen a year or two back, and who now catches up with her former crewmen, desperate to belong in spite of her alien appearance. Unfortunately, she really has become a different person, and cosmetic alterations making her look human again cannot disguise that fact. Plus, the Kobali—who find human burial customs as strange and creepy as we find their reproductive values—have come back to reclaim their runaway, well armed and not taking "No" for an answer. It is finally Lyndsay/Jhet'leya who must decide where she really belongs. It's an episode that does what the best Star Trek episodes do: it touches us personally while blowing our minds.
Child's Play shows how far Seven of Nine's maternal instincts have developed since she took charge of four Borg foundlings only a few episodes back. Even more recently, she had begged Chakotay to relieve her of this duty because of how difficult it is to maintain order where children are concerned. This time, however, Seven is having trouble letting go when Icheb, the oldest and most brilliantly promising of her charges, is reunited with his Brunali parents. She is suspicious of Leucon and Yifay from the first, and not only because the former is played by Mark A. Sheppard (son of W. Morgan ditto), who has a Backpfeifengesicht if anyone ever did. But Seven soon uncovers even more disturbing reasons to distrust the couple, beginning with the fact that they lied about how Icheb was assimilated by the Borg. It turns out that the lad has been genetically engineered as a walking bioweapon against any Borg sphere or cube that happens to emerge from the transwarp conduit near their planet. In fact, Icheb was the case-zero carrier of the plague that wiped out the cube on which Seven found him. And now they're sending him back again... But not if Momma Seven has anything to say about it! This episode makes an important step toward making Icheb and the other young drones a beloved part of the Voyager family. I especially like the line in which an exasperated Icheb, concealing a smile, threatens to cram his younger cargobaymates into a cargo container and transport them back to the Borg. Or maybe it's his response to the Doctor's diagnosis of butterflies in the stomach: "I never assimilated butterflies!"
Good Shepherd gets its title from a Biblical analogy to the shepherd who goes out to search for his lost sheep. In this case, the shepherd is Captain Janeway, and the three misfit crewmen she selects for a Delta Flyer survey of a stellar nursery are the stray sheep she wants to gather into her flock. Unfortunately, she wasn't planning on being attacked by a wolf, in the guise of a swarm of alien lifeforms composed of dark matter. Luckily, if she's going to have three incompetent bozos with her in such a serious situation, she happens to have chosen the right bozos: an intellectually limited Bajoran sensor analyst who nevertheless has a wide streak of gutsy loyalty; a hypochondriac who overcomes having an actual alien inside his body with surprising courage; and a theoretical cosmologist who hates getting his hands dirty in the practical field, but who finally puts himself in harm's way to give his shipmates a chance. In a sense the whole mission is a failure, but the guest cast makes it fun to watch, and we can only suppose that the adventure forms a bond between them. Playing Harren (the cosmologist) is Jay Underwood, best known for his youthful performance as an autistic child in The Boy Who Could Fly. Michael Reisz, playing Telfer (the hypochondriac), has worked mostly as a voice actor and as a Peabody-winning writer for such shows as Boston Legal. And Zoe McClellan, here playing the Bajoran crewman, once played a character named Bajoran on The Mentalist, and was a regular cast member on JAG.
Live Fast and Prosper
Muse
Fury
Life Line
The Haunting of Deck Twelve
Unimatrix Zero
