Twovix

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (Twovix)

The start of a new season of this series should by now fill me with anticipation since I like the characters, love the clean animation style and appreciate the deep knowledge of those behind it, but I have to say I was unimpressed on first viewing this season opener and it's actually slightly lessened on second viewing. When I think of the Season 3 debut episode with its fun 'First Contact' theme and terrific guest star voice I'm disappointed on almost all counts with this attempt at a 'Voyager' throwback - it doesn't help that we know how well they can do these kinds of stories with James Cromwell coming back for 'Grounded' and the enjoyable recreation of DS9 for 'Hear All, Trust Nothing,' complete with both Nana Visitor and Armin Shimerman, so to set an episode on Voyager and not have a single member of the crew return to voice their character was a big missed opportunity and really lessens the impact of the episode. That wouldn't have been a problem if the story was enthralling, but we seem to have plummeted right back into 'the worst excesses' of this series as I too often have pointed out. The Voyager itself looks amazing, beautiful, wonderful, but if all you're going to do is throw around countless Trekferences (or should that be specifically Voyferences!), with little else of value then it's a real waste. I know 'LD' is supposed to be comedy, it's meant to be funny, poking fun at Trek and having a laugh about the obscure or bizarre, but I just found it to be lacking in anything deeper, and we know how good they can write these things, as shown by both previous seasons' finales.

Perhaps there is an element of modern Trek fatigue since the potential and quantity of what's currently being produced has gone right down, but that didn't affect my enjoyment of Seasons 2 and 3 - it does mean that when I see something that could be better I'm less inclined to support it since the whole ship is falling apart now. It's almost the way the old series' were perceived, with 'DS9' being successful and 'Voyager' a patchy follow-on, in the same way that 'Hear All, Trust Nothing' was lauded, while this one must surely be considered a lesser attempt at reviving an old series. The view of those two classic Treks is actually quite different - now 'DS9' is given credit, but then it wasn't considered very good, while 'Voyager' was the exciting ship-based series, the 'true successor' to 'TNG.' Both have been popular in more recent years and for me, both vied for title of greatest for some time until I came to see 'DS9' was most definitely the superior on repeated viewings, the reason I collected all the episodes on video, while only buying a few 'Voyager.' But we're not here to discuss old Trek, this is brand new and I should also say this is my first ever Blu-ray review, having finally upgraded to the higher definition media last year - in fact, I think the main reason was to be able to see this (and other new Trek that may or may not have been released only on BR, such as 'Prodigy' Season 2), and regardless of story quality, the visuals are pin-sharp and perfect, even on a non-HD screen I can see the difference, so that's one positive to take away!

While I didn't find the episode very funny, it is fun to see hybrid versions of some characters: Captain Doctor Frigleeman was the best name, a combination of Freeman and Migleemo, but Sh'Barnes (Bajoran Shaxs and Trill Barnes), and Swhale Whalens (Steve Stevens and Matt the whale), were also entertaining. Trouble is, this combining of personality and character had a lot of potential: 'Tuvix,' the episode this is all based on, spent an entire forty-five minutes (or whatever it was: maybe it was only forty-four, to be precise!), and barely scratched the surface of such potential. What if Tuvix had been allowed to live and they'd spent several episodes with him? What about other possibilities? It's a rich source of story potential, but it's just played for absolute ridiculousness and madcap tomfoolery - even the idea that Janeway murdered Tuvix, this being one of the more controversial decisions she made, is glossed over in the humour of calling Janeway a murderer. This time the solution has no bite because T'Lyn manages to combine all the 'Tuvix army' as T'Illups (Dr. T'Ana and Billups), starts calling them, into one giant blob, which Tendi conveniently describes as non-sentient so there's no ethical concern, apparently. I'm not suggesting the series should change its whole style and treat the subject matter seriously, the whole point of picking one of the 'Voyager' stories like that was to enjoy the silliness of it all, but maybe it would have been better to choose either one that had less potential to explore, or a more suitable target for mirth.

They had robotic recreations of the Janeway/Tom Paris salamander creatures, that's wacky enough (I wonder if they'd really have made an official record of such things...), and doesn't really make much sense since the ship had been outfitted with holoemitters throughout, but rather than being a greatest hits episode, they chucked in a load of Trekferences without anything more to them. They bring back the evil clown from 'The Thaw' (still the scariest episode of Trek), Michael Sullivan from the Irish holoprogram episodes, and Dr. Chaotica, but none of these were voiced by the original actors. I feel they would have been better served to do a proper, full-on Captain Proton story - maybe it would have been too much to bring Robert Duncan McNeill back again since he'd already appeared once on the series, and would again, but Harry Kim (who'd also go on to appear later), or the Doctor would've been good. All the stuff in Sickbay called out for the EMH to be activated - didn't even need to be the 'real' Doctor, could've been just another recreation of him, and that would have had its own ethical implications considering what happened to the Mark I EMH towards the end of 'Voyager.' Have Neil Rayner back as Chaotica and make him the star of the show, taking over Voyager mid-flight, I don't know, something more than just throwing a load of different elements at the wall (literally, since this is another of those sci-fi tropes of crewmembers being attached to walls or ceiling by alien gunk as it takes over their ship/station/facility!).

Let's move away from what might have been and consider what is: the 'Voyager' theme plays out gloriously, the ship is gorgeously rendered into 'LD'-vision... but would they really have clumsy 3D standees of the former crew? Especially when, as noted, the whole ship now has holoemitters! Don't forget, even Reg Barclay recreated Voyager and her crew in holo-form (and where is Dwight Schultz - his character seems ideal for this series). I think my biggest issue is with the sadness of the ship's status itself, 'decommissioned and preserved for future generations' as Freeman says in her log, which is just such a waste, it must be less then ten years old, or around that figure, and was brand new, cutting edge, top of the line at launch! That's one thing I don't think has been addressed very well in modern Trek, but to some extent in general - we did see another Intrepid-class ship on 'DS9' so they could use the 'Voyager' sets, and I loved that, but there was no sense of the new Intrepid-class' developments across the fleet, we didn't see them doing much in the Dominion War. True, we didn't get to see much of late-24th Century Starfleet after the war, and these ships were designed for long-range scientific and exploratory missions, not warships like the Defiant, but we were never given the developmental view of how things adjusted to bio-neural gel packs or other specifically 'Voyager' related upgrades, and obviously Trek post-'Enterprise' has had almost none of the natural design and generational changes Trek used to be so good at showing, because it largely hasn't cared about the details to the extent that even having a series that shows the USS Voyager is still fairly radical in itself!

Modern Trek was never, is never, likely to go back to the care, precision and fidelity of its carefully constructed future history, and in fact has done more and more damage to the legacy (after swinging away from that damage in 'DSC' in creating new series', but is now on the pendulum swing back again with 'SNW' being especially egregious), but that's one reason why seeing such strong links back to the past makes me think of how Trek used to be, and how I liked it to be. 'LD' has, as I've said many times before, people that know their Trek, but also surprise with their mistakes or misses: at the very start of this episode Boimler's assigned to Holodeck waste removal, and I know they've covered this before, but it still makes no sense whatsoever that any waste wouldn't be simply beamed away or auto-cleaned by the system itself. That's just a minor nitpick, and not a new one, but what about the oddity of T'Ana and Billups standing on Voyager's Transporter Pad and instead of having someone operate the controls, they contact the Cerritos and have them beam them back to the ship. Maybe it's happened before, but it just didn't seem right to me. If Cerritos is doing the beaming they could just collect them from anywhere, if Voyager then a technician would do it. And T'Lyn calling Voyager outdated? It's only a few years old, unless she means in comparison to Vulcan ships, but this is a big issue for me that it's rare to see actual Vulcan ships in the 24th Century and it always seemed more likely that they were part of Starfleet rather than their own fleet (with exceptions, like the Vulcan research vessel that goes into the Gamma Quadrant, in 'Vortex,' I think).

At least I could get on board with her superior olfactory sensitivity when she says it smells of Borg. I like to imagine they have a damp mushroom smell about them (apart from Seven of Nine - I'm sure she smells of roses!), and makes me think of when Bashir and O'Brien teased Worf about what his odour smells like! T'Lyn is very good, completely dispassionate as a Vulcan should be, and while it's a shame Gabrielle Ruiz didn't become a full cast member with her name in the main credits (it is Season 4, so they could have made a big thing of it since Michael Dorn joined 'DS9' that season, and the same for Jeri Ryan on 'Voyager'!), she does get plenty of screen time this season and this episode. Unfortunate Tendi doesn't seem to know better than to hug a Vulcan, but at least younger generations not having social norms of reserve and personal space is a true reflection on today's world I suppose you can say. T'Lyn doesn't try to disguise her meaning or do anything other than state bluntly what she has to say, she drinks water, room temperature, may be interested in seeing Tuvok's Quarters if they're austere, and her whole motive for being on the Cerritos is to prove she should be reinstated in the Vulcan fleet, so despite my problems with there being a Vulcan fleet, I like how they've set her up even if I'm not sure she was well enough used this season as a whole.

I don't know why she beamed all the hybrids (it's all a bit 'The Island of Dr. Moreau'), into a holding cell when she could just as easily have kept them in stasis in the Transporter buffer, but then we wouldn't have had them all combine into one, a sign the story takes precedent over logic (not good for a Vulcan!), and if they were trying to ridicule the pseudo-scientific solutions of the series they were tributing then they did a sterling job with the idea of being able to isolate the various personalities to be able to assist in separating them back into their individual bodies again since that made no sense. It might have been interesting to see some, if not all of the characters, exhibiting residual effects of the combining in subsequent episodes - perhaps T'Ana has a sudden yen to get into Engineering problems, and Billups medical problems. Maybe Shaxs starts remembering 'past lives' from Barnes' symbiont, that kind of thing. Instead, the ongoing arc of the season is another of those new Trek big canvas missteps. I won't go into the story of the season here, I'll wait until we get to it later, but I will say the resolution to that was back to the disappointing serialised failures that began with 'DSC' each season (ironically, their Season 4 had the best arc so far in their series, though that's not saying much!), but when I first saw it I was certainly intrigued, even if I suspected some kind of Romulan plot, perhaps because the intent to subconsciously introduce the idea of Romulan involvement comes up when they speculate on the classified mission the Cerritos is on, a subtle trick to make you think of them, especially when they did a similar thing in the final season of 'Enterprise' with the drone ship going around taking out various species' ships.

It's good to see Captain Ma'ah again, voiced by Jon Curry (and Kari Wahlgren's Key'lor, the female Klingon, also returns for what seems a brief reprisal), and the Klingon stuff is always fun as they go full trope with it, although I did question if someone would be needed to transcribe an old warrior's battle tales as surely the computer would be able to do that, unless it was a traditional ceremonial pastime that required another warrior to do the work, since the Klingons are nothing if not traditional! Talking of computers, there is a major, glaring omission in that we don't get to hear Majel Barrett as Voyager's computer voice, something that really feels missing. Obviously they can't get new recordings, but surely someone could've gone to the trouble of getting dialogue from past episodes, or even AI to pick out relevant quotes, or even if none of these options were possible, an actress doing an impression would have sufficed jus to show intent. They did it effectively on 'Picard' with the Enterprise-D, and you can't bring back such a classic ship and fail to have the old Federation computer voice, it just isn't right. It's because she did it for so long, across so many episodes and series' that she's really missed, and while I can do without it on some (like 'DSC,' since that already feels so far from Trek it would almost be a slight to have her there, in the same way it sounds so wrong whenever they use the USS Enterprise theme from the films and 'TNG,' when it's so specific to that ship), for classic ships it's an absolute necessity.

I'm not sure how much sense it is for Voyager to have cameras all over recording every image and sound. This has been a big background issue for a long time, the question of whether Starfleet records everything all the time. I've always come down on no, they don't, partly because there's a big ethical issue of privacy (which seems to be a decreasing right in the world as time goes on and technology becomes ever more powerful and tempting for governments), but also it would lessen so many dramatic stories if they could simply look up what was said or done in any room or area. Occasionally there have been forays into this question, the most obvious being 'Court Martial' on 'TOS' when Kirk was able to use some footage in the court case, or they showed what he did, I don't remember exactly. And I think it was in 'Visionary' on 'DS9' when it's either the Klingons or Romulans tampering with a Replicator in a corridor and Odo's security cameras pick it up, although that was slightly different since it was a Bajoran station and Odo was notoriously rigorous about such things, regardless of privacy 'rights,' more concerned with protecting the station at all cost (though even he didn't have surveillance everywhere). In this episode it's a throwaway concept with Ransom having seen Mariner and Boimler's conversation in the corridor, and in this case you can say it's another addition as part of turning the ship into a museum exhibition (shame we didn't get to see it going to the Starfleet Museum as we'd later see on 'Picard,' for continuity sake, but this was many years before that).

My other nitpick would be how there could possibly be one of the macroviruses behind a panel on the Bridge, we're getting into silly territory again, but then the whole episode is heavy on that emphasis so it's far from being the most troubling complaint. I suppose it was nice they threw in a reference to 'SNW' with Mariner saying something about 'the Pike thing we aren't supposed to talk about' being the crossover with 'SNW' Season 2 ('Those Old Scientists'). Mainly because it's relatively rare for the modern Treks to crossover or mention each other, which is quite strange when you think how much has been produced at the same time or in close proximity. Maybe that's the main reason: they're too scared of contradicting something or confusing the audience who may not have seen the other recent Treks, while if you know old Trek you're more likely to be aware of the things that are referenced, maybe that's a reason? In terms of change, we get a new addition to the battle in the opening titles with the Whale Probe from 'Star Trek IV'! See, that's funny, it's so incongruous and out of nowhere that each season you wonder what they'll throw in next, so it's a shame there'll only be one more season for me to watch. I wonder if they could have hired Tom Wright to voice T'Illups since he played Tuvix in 'Voyager' and that would have been a really fun connection, but it was actually only regular Nolan North who's done many characters on the series.

As for our characters, they do at least make a huge change by giving all but Rutherford promotion to Lieutenant, Junior Grade, or as Boimler describes it, the lowest of the middle-grade officers, they still do all the grunt work, but with none of the perks and are still lower decks. They had to reinforce that idea otherwise they'd be accused of changing the series beyond its premise. Because really, the point is that they have very little power and input into ship's life, but as 'DSC' found, you can't easily do that and still have good Trek drama and growth, unless you turn the character you're following into a superhero that's almost never wrong and all she touches turns to gold, thus destroying any real development (and we can date that wrongheadedness right back to the first Kelvin film with Kirk ludicrously promoted from Cadet to Captain!), but after three full seasons it's usually time for a series to shake things up a little and develop the characters in some new direction - leaving Rutherford to be the only one not promoted was a good idea for drama because now we're waiting for him to catch up, and of course Mariner's going to blanch at her promotion because she always wants to escape such things, but Ransom is either too dimwitted or overconfident to think he can be the one who makes sure she sticks at it this time.

On balance I'd have to say the promotion side of the story was much more satisfying and engaging than the welly-wanging of 'Voyager' faces, races and places around the ship - as much as I enjoyed seeing her in flight once again, and the excellent recreation of various sets from the series, there wasn't really anything to tie me in on that front. If I want to see Voyager I can watch the series, and will, so it's not enough on its own to justify excitement any more. I'd love it to have been up there with the 'DS9' tribute (and I believe they did something similar for 'Enterprise' in Season 5, which I've yet to see, and look forward to), but even 'Hear All, Trust Nothing' only just scraped into my affections for bringing back my favourite series and recreating it so lovingly. I didn't find this so loving, the holo-characters didn't carry the story at all (and if they had been voiced by the original actors it would have been a bit of a waste as written anyway), and they simply didn't explore the idea they were playing with, nor was it humorous enough with great in-jokes and detailed character knowledge - it's not like we even found out anything about the Voyager crew, but then, as so often is the case, they keep trying to allow for other series' to be filling in gaps in our knowledge in case they want to, but I wanted to know about these people's history post-series. There appeared to be another error with the Seven mannikin sporting the large Borg tech piece over her eyebrow when she'd moved to a smaller one by the end of the series (a mistake 'Picard' also made), but in this case she was in the silver catsuit so maybe it was period specific. The series is knockabout, but it's shown its potential on occasion and I just wish it had metamorphosed more into that regularly.

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