Rating: 
Summary: Stellar Season of Television
Review: Voyager's second season combined everything we like about Star Trek and took it to new heights. This season is, in my mind, the show's best; it is certainly the last one where the writers had any kind of focus as to what was going to happen on the show. One great episode after another is what this season delivered, along with a deeper sense of the crew of this little ship, not to mention fantastic science-fiction. What more could a fan ask for?This season pulls off all of the exposition that the truncated first season did not. We only gleaned general facts about the crew from the first year, but everyone had an episode to shine here. My favorite episode here is "Projections." I'm a sucker for those "what-is-real?" storylines. It is a solid episode, with the Doctor being more than just smug and surly (although I love it, it can only go so far). Robert Picardo plays disturbed and confused, and Reg Barclay makes a guest appearance. Next is "Non Sequitur," a high-concept episode in which we see an alternate reality where Harry is an engineer on Earth and Tom is a billiards-shooting loser. Like the season that it is a part of, it is a great synthesis of sci-fi storytelling and character exposition. I also loved "Meld," a great Tuvok episode that guest-starred Brad Dourif as a psychopathic killer that Tuvok is obsessed with understanding. The episode examined the enigma of sociopathic killings and it did it in a very effective way. Dourif is one of the highest-caliber guest actors ever to appear on any Trek show, and he is able to be so completely menacing and convincingly psychotic, yet at the same time calm and rational, his performance is reminiscent or Anthony Hopkins' turn as Hannibal Lecter. He is completely mesmerizing. "The Thaw" metaphorically looked at how people allow fear to control their lives, with a surreal, Kafka-esque perspective that made it distinctive. "Resistance" added more dimension to Janeway by showing how far she was willing to go to save her crew, plus a genuinely potent emotional payoff at the end. The Kazon remain a persistent enemy, leading to the best Star Trek cliffhanger ever (Basics, Part I) that makes things really look hopeless for the crew. There was also a visit from Q in "Death Wish" to round out the season. In addition, there was lots of science fiction here, rather than the sprawling space opera the show would turn into later. Now, don't get me wrong, I love space opera, but not of the sprawling variety. The sci-fi episodes included "Twisted," with Voyager being reconfigured by an unknown force, "Prototype," a look at cyber ethics, "Threshold," which had Tom breaking a seemingly impossible barrier, with disastrous results. "Tuvix" is one of the most powerful episodes of the season, and although the setup sounds cheesy, even ridiculous, it is a fine morality play of the highest order. Basically, Neelix and Tuvok get infused due to a transporter accident, giving birth to a new, fully realized and sentient creature. The bulk of the episode's portent has to do with Janeway's decision: can she deny this new entity existence, effectively kill it, just to save her crewmen, and if not, will she be killing them? I hope it is obvious that this would bring up all sorts of moral questions that the episode sets out to answer. Although the ending is obvious, it actually makes the whole episode more agonizing. In the end, though, what impressed me the most was that there wasn't an ending where everyone was happy, or where they were even sure that they had done the right thing. This was (unfortunately) a rarity in TNG and TOS, where a Deus ex machina would often present itself at the last second, leaving the captain not to have to make a difficult and costly choice. It was here that I began to think that Voyager might become an equal to Deep Space Nine: it had here the maturity to allow its characters to have to make the hard choices, no tricks, no Q to rescue the planet from disaster, no Ensign Wesley to save the ship, no pressing the old reset button and turning back the clock, no easy way out. And for the time being, it did.
Rating: 
Summary: Voyager From A Guy Who Saw It As It Was Actually Happening
Review: What I used to find typical of every Star Trek Series since TNG was that the first two seasons seem to be very klunky and disjointed. It isn't until the third season that everything seems to come together: the writing, the plot lines, the acting even gets better as the actors get more familiar and more comfortable with their roles. Star Trek-Voyager in this regard has quite a few memorable moments that need to be highlighted here. It was pretty much the ugly stepchild of DS9, which at this time had far better resources devoted to it than Voyager did. However, those few memorable moments really stuck out whereas in DS9, it was focused on the central plot of the Emissary and his relation to Bajor and the growing threat of the Dominion looming over the Alpha Quadrant. Voyager's memorable 2nd season episodes include some of my favorite episodes of all time: "Death Wish". This is the story of an exiled Q Continuum member who wants to die and was banished for wanting that. Voyager encounters this being and then encounters the other that we are more familiar with and they take Janeway on a tour through the Continuum, which seems to resemble everything and yet nothing at the same time. No other series ever went to great lengths to explain or depict the Continuum the way Voyager did. We would revisit this again in the Third season as it is depicted as a US Civil War Battle. "The Thaw" is also another episode of note. Voyager answers a distress call from a planet that suffered an environmental catastrophe and the survivors went underground and slept through this in suspended animation, only to be held hostage by their manifestation and personification of their fears, which was brilliantly played by Michael McKean, of "Laverne & Shirley" and "Saturday Night Live" fame. His depiction of fear personified was so over the top that you focus on him and on what he is going to do next rather than on Janeway and her crew, who are desparately running out of time. "Tuvix" is another episode that stands out when two characters who barely got along with each other as it was get merged together with a plant through a transporter accident and become a fourth entity that wants to fight for its existence at the expense of the other three. This issue puts the crew and Janeway into an ethical dilemma: do we accept this new entity or do we get Tuvok and Neelix back. The ongoing plot lines with the Kazon, the Treib and the Vidiians also show up here. But these seem to sputter out and exhaust themselves by the end of the second season, when we find Janeway and her crew in a worse situation than being stuck out in the Delta Quadrant--that's when they are thrown off their own ship, left with only the clothes on their backs and stranded on a planet. I watched this series from beginning to end and saw it improve with age. Like TNG before it, the second season episodes depict a show finding itself and by the end of it, we find the show always going back to its main premise, an Alpha Quadrant ship stranded in some far-flung corner of the galaxy with its crew sometimes fighting each other and the many enemies they made while trying to get home.
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