464. Time and AgainFORMULA: Throw in every time travel Trek episode and set to BLEND.
WHY WE LIKE IT: Locations.
WHY WE DON'T: The kid.
REVIEW: For the second episode in a row, Voyager is off its principal mission, responding to an emergency situation as she were in the Alpha Quadrant touring the colonies. Throw in some perfectly human-looking aliens (a let-down given the series' mission statement) and you have what looks like one of TNG's left-over scripts. Plus, it has the added flaw of being the second episode in a row to use a temporal paradox as its guiding principle. Paris even has the exact same speech about paradoxes he did in Parallax. And the show's only 3 episodes old.
Janeway and Paris' little adventure into yesterday is nonetheless interesting, and the outdoor locations look good (though not what you expect from the 5th planet around a red dwarf star). There's plenty of twists to cause them problems, though I could really do without the screaming cub reporter whom Paris scares then befriends. The eco-terrorists are poorly drawn, apparently not wanting to blow up the power station, but perfectly content to shoot a small boy in the back. No, what sustains interest is the whole temporal dilemma and not the guest characters (though there's attention given to making their culture seem real).
But while there's suspense inherent in finding out how our heroes can get out of this scrape, the paradox really doesn't make sense as presented. If the rescue attempt causes the accident, then Janeway shouldn't be able to prevent it. Indeed, the episode's twist is that it loops back on itself and aside from Kes' intuition, it never actually happened. So the show's only really 2 episodes old then. And this undoes Kes finding out about her budding mental powers, though I suppose, not for long. She's in danger of becoming another Troi though, bawling her eyes out every time the ship passes some disaster.
Side-note: First mention of the Delaney sisters. We won't see them for some time, but they'll be the resident recurring gag for a while.
LESSON: What happens on the road, doesn't happen at all.
REWATCHABILITY - Very Medium: Skippable. In fact, it never even happened. I can't fault the production values, but doesn't this seem like Voyager's doing another series' stories?
Comments
And there you have one of the main problems with the series... the feeling that the writers all wished they were writing TNG. Whether you like DS9 or not, it at least tried to be different from it's partent show. Enterprise didn't suffer from this to the same extent as Voyager.