Inexplicable TV Review: Star Trek TNG and uncomfortably sexual moments

Warning: Spoilers follow for random episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Mostly the gross ones, though.

Lately, I’ve been watching two things in my free time – Gilmore Girls, as most followers of this blog know, and Star Trek: The Next Generation, which you probably could have guessed, given my past entries on Voyager.

Here is the thing I didn’t realize about TNG until bingeing upon it – There is a whole lotta uncomfortable sex stuff. Like, Riker is out there banging half the galaxy. As he mentions in his awesome Random Roles interview at The AV Club, about him and Counselor Troi, “They wanted to free us up, obviously, to have relationships with alien lovers.”

And, boy, does he ever! In “The Game,” Riker and everyone else is making these weird, orgasmic sounds when playing a VR game. We covered it in our Emmy show on Your Parents Basement, but it’s an uncomfortable episode. It doesn’t help that Ashley Judd(!) is a guest star, and she’s makin’ time with Wil Wheaton! Riker basically serves as the bearded sex god of TNG, there to bone any attractive alien with breasts. “A colony of statuesque blondes in a female-dominated society? Sign me up! A retribution-obsessed servant gal? Sure!”

Troi serves the opposite role for the male aliens. This is normally much, much, MUCH creepier, like the telepathic aliens who mind molest her. There is also the time she randomly gets pregnant.

However, the person who has it the absolute worst when it comes to “romance” on TNG is Dr. Beverly Crusher. First off, the show starts off with her husband being dead, which isn’t so great for her, obviously.

But then, things get worse because she falls in love with a ghost. Or as Wikipedia describes it, “Dr. Crusher attends her grandmother’s funeral, and spends time in her grandmother’s haunted house, romanced by her grandmother’s non-corporeal lover.” Well, that sounds great! It’s on the list of Tech Republic’s five worst TNG episodes, with good reason.

Another noteworthy “romance” for the good doctor involves her falling in love with a parasite in a symbiotic species relationship. He starts bound to a male alien, then jumps to Riker, before finally ending up in a female alien. It’s all kind of weird and uncomfortable.

So, anyway. TNG has a lot of weird sex stuff going on. Beyond the stuff I mentioned, there is also “fun” aspects like Tasha Yar’s dubious-consent child becoming a villain, or the fact that Tasha and her sister had “rape gangs” on their home planet. But outside of those episodes, it’s a perfectly fine show! The series introduces us to the Borg and the Q continuum, and they’re both bad ass. They’ve got that going for them, which is nice.

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Inexplicable TV Review – Voyager’s answer to everything? A time machine did it!

Warning: Spoilers follow for the last few seasons and ending of Star Trek: Voyager.

Ultimately, I liked my trip through the seven seasons and 172 episodes (!) of Star Trek: Voyager, although things do start to get awfffulllyyy creaky toward the end because of a strong emphasis on time travel as a quick fix. I couldn’t tell if the show simply got cancelled abruptly, and they needed to wrap things up with a two-part episode, or if the writing simply faltered a bit in the final season.

On TV Tropes, there is a concept called A Wizard Did It, which originates from The Simpsons as all great concepts do. On Voyager, this could be modified into A Time Machine Did It, as this is the main plot rescue device for too many episodes in the last couple of seasons, including the two-part series finale.

Because the plot device is used so much, it unfortunately hurts the show – it makes Voyager being stranded in the Delta Quadrant feel more like an artificial plot contrivance. The show finally ends with Janeway from 26 years in the future using a time machine to travel back, to help the crew through a Borg transwarp hub wormhole thing.  

It’s frustrating because it’s a plot they could have done without relying on time travel yet again. Just have the crew stumble across that big ole Borg ship, and realize they can use it to travel back to Earth. Future Janeway makes a heroic sacrifice to allow the crew to achieve the trip, but they could have figured out a way around it, or have one of Voyager’s actual crewmembers do it. Because we know it’s Future Janeway, who will be “killed” anyway with a timeline change, her sacrifice means less.

The time traveling is so extensive in the final two seasons that we’re exposed to actual things like the Temporal Prime Directive, and a squad of time traveling Starfleet officers who don’t allow deviation from the timeline. The latter is especially confusing, as is the Future Janeway’s ability to somewhat easily steal a time travel device. It’s implied that time traveling is somewhat regular in the future of the show, and as a viewer, it just seemed odd to me that something REALLY catastrophic hadn’t happened as a result.

Outside of the emphasis on time travel, the biggest flaw with the final six episodes or so is a hasty romance plot between Seven of Nine and Chakotay. There isn’t a ton of setup for it, and Future Janeway reveals that the two get married. Since the previous seasons mostly teased at Chakotay-Janeway and Doctor-Seven of Nine flings, it feels weird that they pivot strongly away from both.

Anyway, some other random odds and ends:

- My Voyager Character Power Rankings: The Doctor, Seven, Naomi Wildman, gap, Janeway, Tuvok, Torres, Paris, Harry Kim, gap, Chakotay, gap, Neelix, huge gap, Troi and Reginald Barclay. While Seven has more “high” moments than The Doctor, I have to give him a smidge more credit for being the most compelling character of the course of the entire series.

- Naomi Wildman just kills it pretty much every scene she’s in. She adds good levity to the show, and helps humanize Seven of Nine in a great way, whereas much of the other “humor” of Voyager falls flat. I usually find the Cute Kid characters insufferable, but she’s a rare exception to the rule. She’s so great that her mother, Samantha Wildman, basically gets demoted to extra.

- Neelix gets offloaded a couple episodes before the finale, which I was fine with. I never really warmed up to his character, although thankfully, his more comedic aspects are downplayed once Kes gets jettisoned off the ship. He was more interesting once he was portrayed as a competent ambassador for the ship.

- Reginald Barclay guest “stars” in a couple episodes, as a Starfleet officer obsessively trying to make contact with Voyager. He was in Next Generation and basically serves as a stand-in for sci-fi crazed fans, and he’s highly annoying.

The pandering feels worse because he’s accompanied briefly in most episodes by Deanna Troi. You can really see the seams on these episodes. “Well, we can only get Marina Sirtis to agree to a couple scenes, but the guy who plays Barclay, he just wants to know when he’ll get his check.”

- I’m now done with Voyager, and I’m currently making my way through Next Generation. I had thought I had seen all of the episodes, but Netflix tells me that I actually, bizarrely watched the first two seasons and the last season, leaving a ton of the middle episodes untouched. Whoops.

From there, my buddy and Trek superfan Bob recommended that I go in the order of Deep Space Nine, the old Star Trek movies, Enterprise, then the new Star Trek movies. I’m also still catching up on Gilmore Girls with Karen, and I need to watch Luke Cage at some point too, but there is something oddly easy about watching Trek vs. “new” content. They had a sort of relaxed cadence that makes them perfect for background watching, as I’m writing or doing other things.

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Inexplicable TV Review – Star Trek: Voyager S4 (a.k.a. The Seven of Nine season)

The DVD cover for S4, which is cool retro.

Warning: Spoilers follow for the second, third and fourth season of Star Trek: Voyager, and a tiny bit of season five. Also, Steve is still making his way through the show, so he’d appreciate it if you kept spoilers to a minimum.

To get something procedural out of the way – The second and third seasons of Voyager are kind of boring, probably because I’ve assimilated to modern television. And hey, get it? I’ve assimilated – ha ha ha! But, the episodic nature of an older show like Voyager really shows its seams in contrast to the more modern narratives. It’s hard to feel like the stakes are high when you’re watching on Netflix and see that you have another 20 episodes to go – in a season, never mind the show’s actual run.

As a result, the second and third seasons kind of plod along. The show struggles to find a decent villain alien, and we get some decent Crew Bonding moments here and there. It all feels a bit aimless, like Voyager’s journey through the Delta Quadrant.

Finding a non-lurid photo of Jeri Ryan is tough.

However, things almost immediately pick up in the fourth season with the introduction of the Borg, Seven of Nine and Species 8472. While the Borg got a bit too overused in various Star Trek media after their introduction in The Next Generation, they’re still pretty bad ass in Voyager… Until you find out about Species 8472, which are to biological evolution as the Borg are to technology-based evolution. They provide a decent balancing power to the Borg.

Pretty much every episode of season four is devoted to Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) adjusting to life aboard Voyager, excluding a small story arc about Kes. Seven was assimilated into the Borg collective as a little baby girl, and she’s severed from it by the Voyager crew. There is the predictable adjustment curve, with the dry acting of Ryan providing some appropriate laughs and drama, depending on the situation. She’s not a Starfleet officer, and goes against their directive at times, and tends to make things quite a bit more interesting.

Her development seemingly comes at the expense of Kes, who vanishes from the show in the second episode of the fourth season. According to the Interwebs, actress Jennifer Lien didn’t have her contract renewed, so that they could bring on Ryan. I probably would have told Neelix to hit the bricks before Kes, but, it kind of works for the show, since Kes was only supposed to have a lifespan of a couple years. She literally vanishes, as she turns into some sort of corporeal being that helps Voyager get out of Borg space. (Real-life has not gone so well for Lien, by the way.)

Other items for discussion:

- Janeway’s hair radically changes style from episode to episode. I’m not sure why, since this isn’t a thing with any of the other male or female cast members. Janeway just seemingly has more flare than those others captains.

- The unquestionably worst episode of the fourth season is the one where Seven of Nine kind of, sort of gets raped, but not by the innocent guy who dies from her accusations. It’s just nihilistic, depressing dreck. Trekkie Feminist has a good write-up on it here. It was co-written by Bryan Fuller of NBC’s Hannibal, but at least according to the Star Trek Wiki, he considers it the weakest of the episodes he’s written.

- Thanks to Seven, Voyager manages to make contact with Earth at one point in season four, which was good stuff. So far, that small episode run is the only contact they have with Earth, which oddly helps to preserve the isolationist feel of the show. While they’ve made usage of some space jumps and Plot Loopholes here and there to get closer to the Alpha Quadrant, the show mostly plays it straight with Voyager being stranded deep in the Delta Quadrant.

- One exception to the previous note: Time travel. At one point, it looks like Voyager goes through a disaster that kills everyone, at least according to the cold open. However, things are undone by… time travel. Or at least, being able to send messages back in time. Ugh. I’m not sure why that episode bugged me so much. Maybe because the time traveling is presented somewhat casually? In past Trek mediums, time traveling is seen as a Big Effing Deal, and produces from of the best movies and episodes. On Voyager, not so much.

- Some of the better episodes: “In The Flesh,” when Voyager manages to make peace with Species 8472. “The Raven,” which gets into Seven’s human origins and backstory. And “Living Witness,” according to the Internets, is considered the best Voyager episode, and I’d concur. You can watch it independent of almost all of the other ones.

- Voyager main cast character power rankings: Seven, The Doctor, gap, Tuvok, gap, Paris, Torres, gap, Janeway, gap, Harry Kim, Chakotay, huge gap, Neelix. In that listing, Janeway is right on the border of good/bad.

Anyway! According to Wikipedia, I have about 70 episodes left to go. I’m usually burning through about two to four when I’m home, so it’ll probably be another month before I’m through them all.

The picture of Seven and Janeway is from here.

Want to support Steve’s blogging? Then purchase something via the Amazon clickthru link for Your Parents Basement, Steve’s other project! To read all of Steve’s past Inexplicable Movie Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable TV Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable Video Game Reviews, click here! And for Inexplicable Book Reviews, go here!