As Deep Space Nine concludes its run, Star Trek becomes all Janeway all the time.
Or does it?
Season 6 sees a gradual shift from Voyager being an ensemble show to focusing on Janeway, the Doctor, and Seven of Nine mostly. It’s broken up by the odd episode focused on Tom and B’Elanna’s marriage and their subsequent child (born during the finale as–Spoiler alert!—Voyager reaches Earth.)
Season 5 ended with Equinox, a two-parter featuring another starship stranded in the Delta Quadrant. It didn’t fare as well as Voyager, and Janeway herself crosses a bunch of lines to defeat a crew who should have been allies. Captain Ransom is one of those tragic villains Trek does so well. You get why he’s willing to kill to get his crew home, but his actions are irredeemable until the very end. Janeway takes on the remnant of the crew as she also tries to repair the bond within her own. She makes it clear to the new members they’re no longer officers. They’re not even yeomen. She sends them all the way to the bottom, making it clear any damaged relations aboard Voyager can, at least partially, be blamed on them. It doesn’t skimp on consequences between Janeway and Chakotay, either. The two awkwardly begin patching up their break because both know they’re not always going to agree on what doing what’s right means.
“Night” is the one episode that brings home the loneliness and despair of being decades from home. The trip has been reduced to 30,000 light-years, but that’s still 30 years out from Earth. Some communication is possible now with Starfleet. And this is where interference from UPN, Paramount’s short-lived television network, starts showing. Contact between Voyager and Starfleet gives rise to episodes focusing on Reginald Barclay, the popular socially inept engineer from The Next Generation with special appearances by Deanna Troi. The cast were annoyed, prompting artistic director Michael Okuda and his wife to label a control on the bridge “Get Me Off This Show,” an in-joke aimed at Robert Beltran (Chakotay), who kept demanding more money to get himself fired. (The bastards fattened his paycheck instead. Those cruel taskmasters!)
Probably the biggest of Season 7’s sins is the force-fit romance that blooms between Seven and Chakotay. It’s somewhat logical, but in terms of acting, Beltran has already checked out after being given less and less to do. Jeri Ryan is a brilliant actress with a terrific range, but she and Beltran don’t really have chemistry, and you can tell they’re both uncomfortable with how the story arc is handled. It’s crammed into the final four episodes, almost like a neglected subplot from Game of Thrones‘ final season.
Sunday, Monday, Happy Days!
There are, of course, some thought-provoking episodes. “Workforce,” a two-parter whose second half is directed by Roxanne Dawson (and could we please get her and Robert Duncan McNeil back to do some episodes of Starfleet Academy and, dare I say it, Legacy?) The crew is taken out of their element as they are kidnapped, their memories altered, so a villainous Don Most (Yes, Ralph from Happy Days. He’s still got it!) can convince them they are happy workers on a planet with a severe labor shortage. Janeway even gets a boyfriend. Here, Robert Picardo as the sole remaining crew member, activates the Emergency Command Hologram (Him with a set of command subroutines) to keep Voyager intact. Chakotay and Harry save the day when they come aboard and restore power. The trio proceed to liberate the crew and expose Most’s scheming doctor.
“Friendship One,” which has some surprising Enterprise overtones (The show would debut the following year.), shows how clumsy humans were in their early first contact efforts. The early humans, excited about achieving warp, send out probes ahead of crews actually moving among the stars, complete with technological data to facilitate contact with Earth. What Voyager finds is a planet in nuclear winter who blame humans for their destruction. And it’s a prejudice they do not let go. They find Neelix puzzling because he’s not human nor is he a captive. Janeway manages to reverse the damage, but with Earth within reach now, it will take a long time to find the people a new normal.
“Author, Author” is a silly story with a serious question. Here, Reginald Barclay is not force-fit but rather is an advocate for the doctor. He creates a rather unflattering holonovel. based on the crew. After fellow holo-novelist Tom Paris convinces him to send revisions, the Doc runs afoul of his publisher in the Alpha Quadrant. When the publisher distributes it anyway, they use the excuse of his holographic nature to say, “Well, he doesn’t have any rights.” The judge, after hearing the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Doctor’s tenure as a full crew member, he decides the Doctor’s personhood needs to be decided when they can hear arguments for more than 11 minutes a day, but he is the artist, and therefore, the publisher is in the wrong. It’s “Measure of a Man” done as comedy.
“Endgame” is an exciting finale with a couple of flaws. First, the Seven-Chakotay romance seems shoe-horned in, like a plotline from the final season of Game of Thrones. Second, we don’t really see Voyager come home. We see them a light-year out from Earth at the very end, but what happens to Janeway? Seven? The Maquis, including Chakotay and B’Elanna? What about Tom Paris, who was paroled just to go looking for Chakotay’s ship? We basically get, “Um… Hi.”
But the lead-up to this is very worthy of a Trek finale. Certainly a damn sight better than Enterprise‘s holodeck-generated final story. Other than Reg Barclay(a recurring character, so he has to be in it), there’s no TNG or TOS cameo, no walk-on-and-wave by members of the DS9 cast. It’s a self-contained story about Voyager. The alternate future is fun. Harry’s finally a captain. Tom and the Doctor (whose name is finally “Joe.”) are holo-novelists swapping shop talk. Reg is strong and confident, scaring the bejesus out of young minds like a good Starfleet veteran among cadets. And the idea of Janeway confronting her older self as the latter breaks every rule she holds dear is compelling. Still, it’s a little bit of a come-down after Star Trek VI, “All Good Things,” and “What You Leave Behind,” but very much worthy of what’s called Legacy Trek these days.
Nemesis
We do, at least, get a glimpse of Admiral Janeway a year after Voyager‘s return. Unfortunately, it’s in Nemesis, the worst of the Trek movies. And yes, I say this when you also have Into Darkness and Star Trek V. In the former, though, was a swing and a miss trying to recall The Wrath of Khan. The latter is at least fun, and the cast are having a blast, mainly because Shatner as director kept the studio off the set and let them be themselves.
Nemesis should have been a great movie. However, Paramount went with Stuart Baird, a brilliant editor who had never directed before. Or since. Baird bragged he had never watched Star Trek and had his own vision. It shows in some of his directorial choices and the plot holes left open. I’ve often said Star Trek VI rides roughshod over its own plot, but the storyline holds together because Nick Meyer understood that cast perfectly. Nemesis comes off as a series of spectacular shots overlaid on a thin storyline. The premise: The Remans, led by the human Shinzon, overthrow the Romulan Senate (basically by turning them all to powder, a la “The Omega Glory.”) His Romulan collaborators are overjoyed. Now they can take his powder-people-to-death ray and go invade Earth. Only Shinzon wants something: Jean-Luc Picard. It seems Shinzon was created by the Tal Shiar as a clone of Picard and was intended to replace him. Now he’s deteriorating. Kidnapping Picard will giive him a steady supply of genetic material to keep him alive for years to come. Additionally, Shinzon digs up B-4, the older, less smart brother to Lore and Data. He uses this befuddled twin of Data as a mole on the Enterprise. Data turns the tables and beams aboard Shinzon’s ship as B-4 just as Picard is abducted.
There’s a lot to like here, but none of it’s coherent, least of all, Data’s sacrifice at the end. In Frakes’s hands, possibly with a Bryan Fuller or Ron Moore to script doctor the film, this could have been a spectacular movie. But everything seems off: The music, the dialog. The cast isn’t given much to work with, nor does Baird seem to realize the Romulans have already been allies of the Federation. Insurrection might have been a weak movie, but it was most definitely a TNG story. This just comes off as an excuse for explosions and violence. The pacing is awful, too. While it’s great to see Riker and Troi finally marry, the wedding takes too long. Even then, Wesley Crusher is aboard in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. We never meet Riker’s replacement on the bridge, despite the scene being filmed. Picard and Discovery have made creative hay out of Nemesis, but then Strange New Worlds hinted at the backstory for Sybok we never got. Nemesis really doesn’t pay off until 2009’s Star Trek, when the thawed relations between the Federation and Romulans turns into a desperate attempt to save the latter from a supernova. It’s a muddled mess with a lot of unnecessary scenes, including pulling Riker off the bridge so Data can take command.
This movie was the franchise killer. It got Enterprise canceled. It left a seven-year gap between movies. It forced JJ Abrams to reinvent Star Trek in a way not everyone is happy with. (That said, there is a lot of clamor for one more Kelvin movie.) True, Star Trek was tired at this point, but it deserved a better finale before letting the field lay fallow.