Touchups

I recently revisited the drawings I described in another recent post. I decided my first panel needed to be a bit darker, in order to match the second panel better. So I did some additional shading of the background.

Countdown to Tulsa

At the end of the month, I am meeting my brother and my nephews so that we can all go to a Star Trek convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I have been informed that it's a good idea to bring something for the stars to sign, so I have been working on a comic-book style representation of one of my favorite episodes of "Star Trek: Voyager."

This is only one of several items I wanted to do in time for the convention. Sadly, not only is this the only one I have started, but I'm not even close to finishing it. I just have these two panels done. Red alert!

Before Six, there was Seven

The first few times I saw "Star Trek: Voyager," one of my impressions was that the beautiful Jeri Ryan was the weak link in the show. My complaints were that she seemed like the token "babe," she looks nothing like a Borg drone, and, while I am no expert on acting, I thought there was something overly stilted in her delivery. I also found it annoying that she pronounces the word "futile" in the American way, so that it rhymes more or less with "poodle" and doesn't sound very threatening.

I've now watched the series in its entirety, and my opinion has changed. I still don't like the way she says
"futile," but Seven is a really interesting character, and Ryan, while probably not the best actress on the show, does a fine and sometimes quite inspired job portraying the rescued drone. This is one of a few pleasant surprises I had while watching the last couple of seasons of "Voyager."

I began watching "Voyager" about two years ago — I never watched it when it was current — and in general it was a great surprise. I liked it almost as well as "The Next Generation," and perhaps would have even liked it better if the latter didn't score so many points for nostalgia. I enjoyed "Voyager" for its premise (of a ship lost in distant space, impossibly far away, trying to get home), for its darkness, and most of all for its characters. Of these, Seven is a standout.

The first time I wrote about "Voyager" on this blog, I had just reached the halfway point of the series, and Seven had just debuted, more or less replacing Kes, the "other" blonde female crew member. Kes (Jennifer Lien) was an Okampan — an alien — but personalitywise she was just as human as anyone else on the show. In fact, she served as a foil to several of the "less" human crew members, especially the Doctor, a hologram, and Tuvok, the Vulcan. Kes was sweet, she spoke in a soothing voice, and she shared a warm rapport with the maternal Captain Janeway.

By contrast, Seven is technically human but, because of her years in the Collective, unsure of what that means. She observes people with a fresh, logical eye, making observations that are sometimes biting and often hilarious. To some in the crew, Seven is an object of fascination and uneasiness. To others, she is a protégé, sometimes an unwilling one. She too has a close relationship with Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), but if Kes was the good daughter, Seven is the difficult, rebellious one, which, let's face it, makes for more interesting developments.

Some of my favorite Seven episodes are
"Someone to Watch Over Me," where the Doctor (Robert Picardo) tries to teach her to go out on a date, and "Child's Play," where she has to say goodbye to one of the children Voyager rescued from the Borg. In both shows, she is weirdly stiff, and yet you can relate to her quite a lot, which is the beauty of the character.

The show, which started out as an ensemble, actually comes to focus on Seven a bit. In some respects this is a downside — I would have liked to have seen more of other good characters, especially Tuvok (Tim Russ) and B'Elanna (Roxann Dawson). In the series' second half, B'Elanna's role is basically reduced to being one half of a rather annoying couple with Tom Paris (Robert Duncan MacNeill), though I did really like the episode where they got engaged ("Drive"), and I thought she was brilliant in the episode where she argues that her unborn baby's Klingon characteristics should be genetically modified before its birth ("Lineage").

The show scores wins other areas as well. For example, I was glad to see that in its second half, the series continues with its attention to visuals — space always looks beautiful from Voyager. On this show, a spatial anomaly isn't just an explanation for a plot twist, it's also something cool to look at. Perhaps this is because "Voyager" was produced in the age of the Hubble.

This respect for imagery carries over into the design of some of the alien worlds that Voyager visits. I especially liked the richly imagined city that was featured in the two-parter "Workforce." In this episode, Janeway, Seven, and others have their memories erased and are made to work in a vast factory, where the walkways look like wrenches.

Sadly, as often happens with long-running TV shows, some of the characters become inconsistent. This is especially true of Janeway. In most episodes, she's as perfect as Jean-Luc Picard, yet the latter half of the series has her occasionally veering off to Planet Inexplicable. In one episode, she recklessly endangers Voyager in order to pursue a rogue Starfleet captain ("Equinox"), and in another she ignores her duties as captain because of her own melancholy ("Night"). A season five episode has her cavalierly describe the Doctor, whose rights as an individual she previously had protected, to a system as insignificant as a replicator ("Latent Image"). In most of these cases, the seeds of Janeway's flaws are realistic, but the show's writers take them so far that they stop being believeable. In some ways, it's refreshing to see a Star Trek show feature a captain who is imperfect, but the approach should have been more measured. It's also slightly annoying that the franchise chose the first female captain to be the first with leadership flaws.

For me, the absolute worst episode in the series has nothing to do with character — it's just really bad. In "Threshold," Tom Paris evolves into a weird being that the Doctor pronounces a highly evolved form that humans will reach in the future (apparently he can either see the future or doesn't know that future evolution occurs based on yet-to-be-determined environmental factors). Janeway herself later evolves to this form, then both she and Tom roll back to a primative step on the evolutionary ladder, becoming lizardlike creatures who mate and have lizard babies before being restored to their properly evolved present-day selves, without the misplacement of a single hair in Janeway's auburn bob.

On the other end of the spectrum, one of my favorite episodes is "The Void," in which Voyager is sucked into a starless pocket of space, where there are no resources of any kind, and no exit — just other captive ships that troll about looking for people to prey upon. Like many of the best episodes, it's both creative and dark, and rather like another series I enjoyed — the reboot of "Battlestar Galactica." That program owes a bit to "Voyager," I think, both thematically and in some of its details, such as the use of hot pseudo-human characters with numbers for names. As I watched these last few "Voyager" installments, I found myself wondering more than once, could there really have been a Six without Seven?

Tom, get us out of here

Several years ago, a friend gave me a blank book that I never got around to using, probably because it's too small for writing comfortably in for long periods of time. But fortunately it was within grabbing distance a few months ago while I was watching an episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" that featured a line of dialogue so astonishingly cheesy, I had to record it right away. And so a tradition was born.

This book is now filled with only the most superlative dialogue from "Voyager" — the most melodramatic, the most pseudo-scientific, and, yes, the most actually eloquent.

I just finished watching the last season of "Voyager" and, in preparation for writing a review of the whole series to follow up on an earlier review I did, I am now going to list my favorite of these quotations.

My exercise started with "Demon" — a show from the fourth season, just a bit past the halfway mark of the series — so it won't include any gems you might have noticed from earlier episodes.

As a sidenote, you can tell from my list which characters ultimately became the focus of the series. Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) notwithstanding, the pseudo-humans were really highlighted, mainly Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), the part-cybernetic woman rescued from the Borg, and the Doctor (Robert Picardo), the hologram created in the image of a human. Vulcan Tuvok (Tim Russ), my favorite character, also had some good dialogue.

Here are the quotations:

"I'm having trouble with the nature of individuality." — Seven, to Janeway (from "Latent Image").

"Proposing the same flawed strategy over and over again will not make it more effective, Ensign." — Tuvok, to Harry Kim (from "Extreme Risk").

"With all of these new personalities floating around, it's a shame we can't find one for you." — The Doctor, to Tuvok (from "Infinite Regress").

"Remember the temporal prime directive. ... Try to avoid time travel." — Lieutenant Ducane, to Janeway (from "Relativity").

"Oh, the almighty temporal prime directive. Take my advice, it's less of a headache if you just ignore it." — Admiral Janeway, to her younger self (from "Endgame").

"I ended up stranded in the late 20th century. Have you ever been to that time frame? ... I don't recommend it." — Colonel Braxton, to Seven (from "Relativity").

"Dating is a poor means of interaction." — Seven, to the Doctor (from "Someone to Watch Over Me").

"Fortunately, I was able to create a chroniton-infused serum that brought you back into temporal alignment." — The Doctor, to Chakotay (from "Shattered").

"Like most time paradoxes, it's implausible, but not necessarily illogical." — Tuvok (from "Relativity").

"A soldier and a philosopher. Your intelligence file doesn't do you justice." — Janeway, to Chakotay (from "Shattered").

"I told Lieutenant Torres that your saxophone playing reminded me of a wounded targ. I should have put it more delicately!" — The Doctor to Harry Kim (from "Renaissance Man").

"I am familiar with human banter. Yours is crude and predictable." — Seven to Maxwell Burke (from "Equinox").

"Do you have any idea how inappropriate it is to follow your therapist on vacation?" — Deanna Troi, to Reg Barclay (from "Inside Man").

"It looks like a simple case of space sickness. ... It happens to everyone." — The Doctor, to Janeway (from "Relativity").

"Perhaps there is something to be said for assimilation after all." — Seven, on the merits of small talk and other human courtship rituals (from "Someone to Watch Over Me").

"You are an imposter. Admiral Janeway visits on Sunday. Today is Thursday. Logic dictates that you are not who you claim to be." — Tuvok, to Admiral Janeway (from "Endgame").

"As the Ferengi say, a good lie is easier to believe than the truth." — Janeway (from "Shattered").

"When you take me from the Borg, you're going to tell me that part of being human is learning to trust. Trust me, now." — Seven, to Janeway (from "Relativity").

"Did he ever stop being a doctor? ... I can't stop being a weapon." — The intelligent bomb, speaking through the Doctor's holomatrix, to Harry Kim (from "Warhead").

"My courage is insufficient." — Seven (from "Infinite Regress").

"Do what all good pragmatists do ... compromise." — The Borg Queen, to Admiral Janeway (from "Endgame").

"If you don't like the way I do things, I can leave you on the nearest habitable planet." — Janeway, to a Hirogen aboard Voyager (from "Flesh and Blood").

"Tom, get us out of here." — Janeway, to helmsman Tom Paris, in too many episodes to list!

"Computer, delete audience." — Tom Paris, referring to the other people in a holographic movie theater (from "Repression").

"Fun will now commence." — Seven, to a group of children she is teaching (from "Ashes to Ashes").

Taste is irrelevant

OK, so here's the dilemma: You're captaining a Starfleet ship lost in space, and two of your most valued crew members are mangled in a transporter accident. They've been merged into one new person, who retains some qualities of the original two but is a distinct individual with his own consciousness.

You spend a couple of weeks getting to know this person, and he starts enjoying life. Then you discover technology that can transform him back into the two people he originally was — the two people whom you need and want back. But of course, he doesn't want to be transformed.

This is a storyline from "Star Trek: Voyager," which I recently started watching on DVD. I'm about halfway through the series, so I figured this would be a good time to write about why it rocks.


First: A great ensemble cast, with cool characters and, in general, better acting than you see on "Next Generation" (the incomparable Patrick Stewart notwithstanding).

Second: An awesome premise. They're lost in an unknown region of space, far, far away. Forget Earth, forget Vulcan. This is real uncharted territory, which sort of harks back to the exploratory tone of the original series.

Third: Finally, a little darkness. Compared with the other "Star Trek" series that I've watched regularly (TOS and TNG), "Voyager" is a regular "Battlestar Galactica." They're not exactly throwing people out of airlocks, but the show isn't afraid to explore disturbing territory.

A good example is the episode I referred to above, the one with the transporter accident. This installment, called "Tuvix," forces Captain Kathryn Janeway (the fantastic Kate Mulgrew) to choose whom should get to live. A less challenging show would have had the new guy do some soul-searching and bravely submit to the procedure, or perhaps a fortuitous spatial anomoly would have just set things right. But "Voyager" forced Janeway to make the hard decision. I didn't agree with what she did, but I was impressed that the show made her choose.

Other examples: In "Meld," the Vulcan security chief, Tuvok, mind-melds with a murderer and discovers certain dark impulses within himself, some of which he enacts rather chillingly on the holodeck. In the creepy and claustrophic "The Thaw," one of the crew is trapped in a virtual world where an AI program presents fearful images derived from his subconscious, threatening to literally scare him to death. And in another great one, "Deadlock," Janeway discovers that the crew has been duplicated, and that the duplicate people are existing — and evolving — in a separate strand of space-time. Because of various environmental factors, only one of the crews can remain; the other has to be destroyed. It's a weird episode, one that raises interesting questions about identity. I actually thought the story was too big for an hour-long episode; I would have preferred to see it expanded, perhaps to include a better examination of the differences between the original people and their duplicates. Still, a great show.

Of course, in classic "Star Trek" tradition, there is also a fair amount of cheese, and the show takes bad science to a whole new level. (Don't get me started on the writers' clear confusion over what is meant by the term "evolution.") There are holodeck programs gone wild, an appearance by Amelia Earhart, and plenty of body-swapping. In one episode, a character actually utters the line, "Let me go after the shuttle. It is the only way we can get everybody back into the right body!"


But this is all part of that good old "Star Trek" charm, and the engaging "Voyager" characters make you forgive the series' flaws. One of my favorites is Tuvok, who, because he's a full Vulcan, is in many ways more interesting than Spock. His demeanor reminds me a little of the enchanted Stephen Black from the great novel "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." Another good one is B'Ellana: half-human, half-Klingon, she has the fire of a Klingon without being caught up in all the hokey rites, and she's one of many strong female characters on board. I also like the holographic doctor, particularly when he's exploring his identity with the telepath, Kes.

Speaking of Kes, I just got to the Kes/Seven changeover. If you don't know the series at all, Kes used to be the show's token "pretty girl." The character went away after the third season and was replaced by Seven of Nine, a Borg refugee played by the gorgeous Jeri Ryan. There's been a lot of speculation about why Kes was eliminated from the cast. Whatever the reasons, I thought she was a really good character, and the actress (Jennifer Lien) had a nice way about her. Her chemistry with the doctor and with several other characters was quite good. At the same time, with Seven of Nine, the show is able to explore some intriguing new avenues. Jeri Ryan is so beautiful that sometimes it's a little distracting, but overall she's not bad, and the writers give her some wonderful dialog. (The title of this post is a line she delivered, as an addendum to her admission that the cook had prepared a particularly foul meal.)

As I mourn the passing of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," I'm glad to have discovered this little gem of a series, the entirety of which is available from Netflix. If you're jonesing for some decent sci-fi in this current dearth, I suggest checking it out. Of course, it can't really replace the SCC, but it does feature Sarah Silverman, in a guest spot, calling a Vulcan a "freakasaurus." What other TV show can give you that?