I'm currently watching every single Star Trek episode in in-universe chronological order and posting my thoughts on every single one. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Currently in 2373 with DS9 season five/VOY season three. Do it!
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If I have a critique, it's that Martok's trauma-induced caution bordering on cowardice wasn't really established quite as strongly as it could have been. It's believable enough, but comes a bit out of nowhere. Overall, the writing is excellent. I also love it any time there's an actual Klingon song.
DS9 S5E21, “Soldiers of the Empire”: Worf serves as Martok's XO on a Klingon ship with a dangerously demoralized crew. This episode does a great job of subtle setup and payoff, which isn't easy in an exposition-heavy episode. It also does a really good job building the tension on the ship.
Still, if you think about it, the events of this episode are among the most important of the 24th century on Ferenginar, and set the stage for the greatest Ferengi economic, social, and political revolution in ten thousand years. Does that fact make this more fun to watch? I leave that up to you.
DS9 S5E20, “Ferengi Love Songs”: Quark finds out his mom is dating the Grand Nagus; meanwhile, Rom and Leeta deal with their own cultural differences. You have to have a pretty high tolerance for Ferengi shenanigans in general and Wallace Shawn's Zek voice in particular to make it through this one.
VOY S3E20, “Favorite Son”: Harry discovers that he's actually an alien from a planet of beautiful horny women. If that description gives you TOS vibes… yeah, this feels like a script that got lost on someone's desk for thirty years. And, of course, the women are Sex Vampires. Is that even a spoiler?
DS9 S5E19, “Ties of Blood and Water”: Tekeny Ghemor, a Cardassian dissident and friend of Kira's, comes to the station to die, stirring up some old memories for Kira. This is one of those episodes it's very hard to share coherent thoughts on in 300 character chunks. It's a hard but worthwhile watch.
There is a B-plot of sorts, but it's barely worth mentioning; Miles can't put baby Kirayoshi down without him crying, so he carries the baby everywhere for a week. It's just filler, with no real story to it at all. That's still probably slightly better than stretching out the A-plot to fit, though.
DS9 S5E18, “Business as Usual”: Quark gets into the weapons business. The episode does a pretty good job taking us down Quark's road of motivated reasoning without ever letting him become totally unsympathetic as a character. It works surprisingly well, all things considered.
All that said, it's a pretty big and gross power dynamic imbalance for a cop to have a relationship with someone in his protective custody. Don't do that. It is, admittedly, kind of a scène à faire for a noir, but still, it casts a pall over the episode.
DS9 S5E17, “A Simple Investigation”: Odo falls for a hacker femme fatale with a mysterious past. That's right, this isn't just any old Odo Noir, it's a cyberpunk Odo Noir! A real slow burn of an episode, heavy on the atmosphere, with a mostly satisfying twist ending.
VOY S3E19, “Rise”: Neelix and Tuvok must fix a broken space elevator to escape a planet being bombarded by asteroids. This is a very Neelix-heavy episode, in which we get more of his very sad backstory and see him stand up for himself against Tuvok. If you like Neelix and/or Tuvok, it's not bad.
We know from Enterprise that Denobulans actually do (or at least did) practice some forms of genetic engineering. For all we know, Phlox had his smile enhanced.
So we end up not really engaging with the actual issues around genetic engineering, like how it creates a eugenic arms race that threatens to eliminate diversity of all sorts as everyone must get the standard Upgraded Human archetype if they want to have a meaningful career. Just… Khan bad. Okay.
Anyway, the main story here is a pretty good one, but we go back to a problem I pointed out a hundred years ago when the same thing happened to Una on SNW: the Federation's stated reasons for banning genetic engineering are terrible. It's always Khan! There are way better reasons than just Khan bad!
DS9 S5E16, “Doctor Bashir, I Presume?”: Dr Zimmerman, creator of the EMH, wants to make a new version based on Julian, but the Bashir family has some secrets. Meanwhile, Rom can't get the courage up to ask Leeta out. Weirdly, the A/B plots do mesh up, thanks to the worst ship ever: Leeta/Zimmerman.
VOY S3E18, “Darkling”: The Doctor plays around with his program and accidentally gives himself an evil alter ego. Somehow, no one makes a Doctor Jekyll reference even once. A thoroughly skippable episode with little to recommend it.
The canon nerd in me does find this episode frustrating for another reason, that being that there shouldn't be a significant population of Human Borg. The cube that assimilated people at Wolf 359 was destroyed with all hands. It's a minor detail, but something a showrunner really should have caught.
And that's a shame, because the Cooperative is a pretty interesting element: a society supposedly built on a balance between collectivism and individualism, but with the ability to overrule an individual's autonomy in an emergency – and “emergency” is famously a rather nebulous and ill-defined term.
VOY S3E17, “Unity”: Chakotay is taken in by a group of ex-Borg who are attempting to establish a new Cooperative. One of the most frustrating aspects of Voyager is that, by its nature, it never sticks around. So we end this episode on “I wonder what the consequences will be” and then never find out.
“What I did, I did to make Cardassia strong again.” Wow, I sure am glad this show from 1997 is totally apolitical and didn't in any way presage events that would transpire a quarter century later!
DS9 S5E15, “By Inferno's Light”: The station braces for an imminent attack. This episode starts off giving some breathing room after the last one, but it turns right around and keeps the pressure up. I was genuinely surprised when the episode ended because 44 minutes passed so quickly.
DS9 S5E14, “In Purgatory's Shadow”: Garak receives a message from the Gamma Quadrant: Enabran Tain is alive. This episode is as ominous as its title suggests, as the plot keeps twisting and things steadily escalate right up until the “TO BE CONTINUED” comes on screen. Good stuff.
Whether you like it probably depends on whether you like Tom, and the good news is he's at his best self in this one; he firmly refuses to take advantage of B'Elanna's condition, which is laudable but unhelpful when she's actively dying of horniness. I think it works, but I can see why you wouldn't.
VOY S3E16, “Blood Fever”: One of the younger Vulcans on board is having his first pon farr, he's chosen B'Elanna as his mate… and it's contagious. Hijinks ensue. The Tom/B'Elanna pairing has been hinted at before, but this episode is where it stops being subtext.
VOY S3E15, “Coda”: Janeway has a near-death experience. This is a very confusing episode, but, in its defense, it is trying to be. I'm not sure how to feel about this one, tbh. It's not a must-watch by any means, but it's kind of fun if you're willing to just roll with it.
The best part about this episode is the scenes where they're trying to fly a barely functional Defiant and everyone is saying what they're doing out loud because the computers are down. It's fun. But I couldn't help noticing they kept forgetting which systems they'd said were offline.
The second reason I don't like this episode is that apparently using WMDs against civilian targets is yet another Thing That Won't Get You Kicked Out of Starfleet, since Sisko does the exact same thing. This is so much worse than “In the Pale Moonlight”, but the show doesn't treat it as such.
When he's not betraying his oath, burning his own people, or drawing fan art of a super muscled version of himself lifting a cart off an old peasant labeled “THE MAQUIS”, he's busy using WMDs against civilian targets, yet he thinks he's the hero of this story? I hate him so much! He sucks so bad!
DS9 S5E13, “For the Uniform”: Sisko pursues the man who betrayed him for the Maquis. I don't like this episode much for two reasons, the first being that… God, Michael Eddington is seriously just The Worst. Of COURSE he's a Victor Hugo fanboy. Goddamn I hate him so much.
For context, as part of my Trek watch through I'm keeping a spreadsheet where I track each episode across key metrics – social commentary, silliness, horniness, all the usual stuff you would want to track. S3 of SNW scored an overall quality rating equivalent to S2 of TNG. That's… pretty brutal.
My spouse pointed out that it felt a lot like a Doctor Who episode (not least because Pelia literally mentions hanging out with a time traveling doctor) and I'd have to agree with that. Not a great Doctor Who episode, either. It didn't feel all that much like Star Trek, that's for sure.
SNW S3E10, “New Life and New Civilizations”: The Vezda are back, and there's only one person who can stop them. Like season 3 itself, this episode had its good moments, but ultimately left me feeling unsatisfied. Plenty of spectacle, and a few good character beats, but not much of a story.
DS9 S5E13, “The Begotten”: Odo finds a sick baby Changeling and needs his estranged father-figure's help to raise it; meanwhile, Kira is giving birth to the O'Briens' baby. Some exceptional A/B plot synergy here, but it was the bittersweet conclusion of the main plot that got me a little misty-eyed.
A weird thing here, and indeed for the next several episodes, is that the last episode had the ship on the border of the Nekrit Expanse, but then we don't actually enter the Expanse until much later. The episodes are just… out of order? It's strange because this season has been big on continuity.
VOY S3E14, “Alter Ego”: That dominos meme where the little domino is “Harry falls for a holodeck character” and the big domino is “the ship is nearly destroyed” (and one of the middle dominos is “Potentially Lethal Holodeck Experience #13”). An odd, but oddly touching, little Tuvok-heavy episode.
But I do like Neelix, God help me, and, well, he didn't MEAN to do all those felonies, right? It could happen to anyone who's an absolute fucking nincompoop… and that does very much include me. Liking Neelix isn't always easy, but I do it partly to work on liking the part of me I see in him.
The episode somehow both dwells on and glosses over the consequences of Neelix's actions – which are, to be clear, drug trafficking, felony murder, and obstruction of justice – with an ending that seems more than a little easy, considering. If you don't like Neelix, you'll hate him after this.
VOY S3E13, “Fair Trade”: Neelix falls in with a dirtbag old friend, makes a series of terrible choices, and ends up accessorizing to murder. This is hard to watch, because he makes a lot of bad decisions and they're all driven by his brutal imposter syndrome. It's rough.
A little thing I like from the end of the episode: Janeway is shown relaxing after the travails of the episode, listening to jazz and working on a drawing or painting of some kind. And I really love that she's not, like, a hypercompetent artist. She's just enjoying making art. I think that's neat.
VOY S3E12, “Macrocosm”: The ship gets invaded by macroscopic viruses and Janeway must do her best Ellen Ripley cosplay to stop them. (Or is it Sarah Connor?) If you like your fun little action romps with a side of body horror, this is the episode for you.
A weird thing about this episode is that it barely mentions Shakaar himself. The safety of the guy who's the namesake of the cell, the First Minister of Bajor, and Kira's boyfriend literally never comes up. It's a very strange omission. I get they couldn't afford the actor, but not one line?
Yeah, if you can't tell, this show was made before 9/11. We kind of stopped getting proud self-described terrorists saying civilians were legitimate targets as protagonists after that, for some reason. (In fairness, it was pretty bold for 1997 too.)
DS9 S5E11, “The Darkness and the Light”: An assassin is hunting down the members of Kira's old Resistance cell. Best known for Kira's final speech: “I don't care whether you held a phaser in your hand or you ironed shirts for a living. You were all guilty and you were all legitimate targets!"
DS9 S5E10, “The Rapture”: After an accident, Ben hyperfixates on finding the ancient lost Bajoran city of B'Hala. Pretty relatable, honestly. This episode has some great moments across the cast, but particularly for Kai Winn, who shows us an unexpected vulnerable side.
Oh, and they totally ignore the plot of TNG “True-Q”, which is about a Q born 22 years before this episode to two Q parents. Not even a throwaway line. It's a very weird omission.
They do a reasonably good job explaining how Voyager in particular gets swept up in this, but what they don't do is give a good answer why Farpoint-Q doesn't just send them home at the end. Janeway has a line about “wanting to do it through hard work”, which is bullshit and makes no sense for her.
VOY S3E11, “The Q and the Grey”: The Q drag Voyager into the middle of their civil war. The choice of American Civil War iconography, complete with Janeway as a southern belle, was… definitely a choice, but at least the right side won again. Ignoring that, it's a decent, albeit silly, episode.
The B-plot, about Jake and Nog Odd Coupling it up as roommates, actually kind of echoes the A-plot – both are about complicated interspecies relationships with Ferengi. However, it ends really abruptly without any satisfying resolution; Ben basically just orders them to get along. Disappointing.
DS9 S5E9, “The Ascent”: Quark and Odo, stranded together on a desolate planet, must cooperate to carry a transmitter to the top of a mountain. Their relationship is the driving force of the episode, and it's a great dynamic that I definitely can't express in 300 characters. Leave it for the fanfic.
They have an entire library planet! Picard just didn't bother looking up “cyborgs, evil” in the Memory Alpha card catalog, apparently.
Oh, forgot to mention: this movie has Self-Stolen Ship #7, when Picard disobeys orders and takes the Enterprise to Earth, as well as Potentially Fatal Holodeck Experience #12.
Which is a shame, because this is actually a pretty good episode! They do a decent job making it believable that 22nd century Humans could defeat 24th century Borg under very specific circumstances. There are some loose ends that don't make sense, but all in all it works. And it's certainly intense.
The problem is that it just doesn't make sense that Starfleet would forget about the Borg. They had medical and tactical data on them for 200 years, including a treatment for assimilation, knew they were likely to come back, and none of that comes up in TNG? It strains credulity, to say the least.
ENT S2E23, “Regeneration”: Yeah, we're going back to Enterprise one more time! This episode is about the fates of a couple Borg drones from the sphere in “First Contact”, so we saved it. There's a pretty fundamental problem with this episode, and it's the same problem that plagues all prequels.
“Star Trek: First Contact”: The Borg attempt to time travel to prevent the first Human warp flight. Definitely the best of the TNG movies, though that's not the highest bar to clear. I was surprised by the lack of exposition; the movie assumes you're already familiar with TNG. Unusual, but welcome!
Jennifer Lien is great in this one, fully inhabiting both characters and making them clearly distinct. Plus, this episode ends the worst thing about both Kes and Neelix: their relationship. They could have easily reset that at the end of the show, but they didn't. We get actual lasting consequences!
Tieran/Kes goes one step further, becoming not just villainously bisexual but low key villainously genderfluid, changing demeanor and presentation from masc to fem as convenient. It's wild to watch. Yes, this is a harmful and bad trope we've mostly left behind in the 90s… but it is a FUN trope, ngl.
VOY S3E10, “Warlord”: Kes's body is taken over by a totalitarian despot. And as we all know, when women on Star Trek are taken over or replaced by evil versions of themselves, they inevitably a) put on a tight black bodysuit with a choker b) become heads of state and c) get super bisexual.
They make an effort at the end to tie in with TOS's depiction of the Gorn, which I appreciate even if it feels like too little too late. Without too much of a spoiler, I think I can say that the true antagonists of this episode are also a tie into TOS, and my opinion of them remains that they suck.
It's kind of wild that it took us this long to get an Ortegas episode, but I'm glad we finally did. She's a great point of view character – not least because she talks to herself a lot. She sells a story that's not particularly easy to sell. It wouldn't have worked as well with any other character.
SNW S3E9, “Terrarium”: Erica crash lands on a barren moon where her only hope of survival is a Gorn pilot. To say this episode is an improvement on the last two would be to damn it with faint praise – it's a good episode in its own right, not just in comparison. Still, comparison feels unavoidable.
I've said before that I am enjoying SNW because I've made the conscious choice to do so, knowing full well that if I decided not to like SNW it would be trivial to find reasons. The last two episodes really tested my commitment to that. I hear the next one is better. It would be hard to be worse.
I'm not used to bad acting on SNW, but boy howdy was the acting atrocious here. I'm more used to very shallow societal critique and biology = destiny nonsense on SNW, but this – La'an's story in particular – was egregiously bad. And it wasn't even funny! That would have at least made it watchable!
SNW S3E8, “Four and a Half Vulcans”: Pike, La'an, Uhura, and Chapel all get transformed into Vulcans; hijinks ensue. Is it the worst ever episode of Trek? No, because SNW already did that with “Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach”. It is, however, shockingly bad on almost every level.
This episode glosses over all that, focusing on his one great failure as if that's the only thing he should feel guilty for and not his many, many successes. It tries to add shades of grey to Odo's character while ignoring the real flood of grey paint. So it's kind of frustrating, to say the least.
It doesn't matter if three or thirty or zero innocent people were executed on his watch. Guilty people were also executed! That means Resistance members who broke laws that were themselves unjust and illegitimate. There is no role you can play in the Cardassian justice system that makes you a hero.
Kira hates collaborators with a passion, but she views collaboration as something you *think*, not something you *do*. Odo didn't particularly like the Cardassians, ergo he didn't collaborate. But he was a cog in the machinery of an evil system. No one cares what the cog thinks, as long as it turns.
According to the episode, Odo is celebrated as a hero by Kira and many other Bajorans, someone who was steadfastly neutral and even-handed in his application of justice. Another word for someone who remains neutral and just does his job during an occupation is, uh, “collaborator”.
DS9 S5E8, “Things Past”: Odo, Sisko, Dax, and Garak relive an experience from seven years ago, during the Bajoran Occupation. This episode is attempting to tackle something that's been a problem from episode one: Odo's role as chief of security under the Cardassians.
It's just a very muddled episode that ultimately passes off its attempt at critique of Starfleet as rooted in personal bias. There is a simple difference between Federation and Empire: enthusiastic consent. But to address that might risk a meaningful critique of the USA, which is dangerous in 2025.
And the final outcome is… okay, I guess, with the ultimate moral being “Starfleet is good because its people are good,” which is a terrible moral that ignores how actual institutions work. If Starfleet is inherently good, as it has consistently been shown to be for 60 years, we need a better reason.
SNW S3E7, “What Is Starfleet?”: This is Beto Ortegas's documentary, chronicling a morally dodgy and deeply confusing mission that I'm still only half sure I understand. I really just don't think Starfleet as it's been depicted to date would ever participate in this project. It feels more Section 31.
Let's talk about the Risians, though. They seem entirely devoted to providing pleasure to others. Is that some instinct in their species or a cultural trait? Is jamaharohn some kind of hierogamatic religious ritual? I'm not saying I'd watch an entire series about them, but I'm not NOT saying it.
DS9 S5E7, “Let He Who Is Without Sin”: Worf very maturely deals with the fact his girlfriend had sex before meeting him by joining a fascist terror cell and sabotaging vital planetary infrastructure, putting untold lives at risk. Don't worry, he faces no personal or professional consequences for it.
The end of the episode is a bit weird from a temporal paradox perspective – what exactly changed that allowed them to stop Starling? – but then again, it is a temporal paradox, so I guess they get some leeway. All in all, though, this is definitely one of Voyager's best episodes so far.
There's another nice bit of social comment in this episode, where the Arizona militiamen, with unintentional accuracy, describe the Voyager crew as representing collectivism in opposition to individualism. The villains in this episode are all radical individualists, and they all lose.
Sarah Silverman is… not being helped by the writing room. She's not a bad actor or anything, but her scenes do sometimes feel like they're from a different show. They were trying to write her as a comic character because they'd cast a comedian in the role, and it mostly doesn't land for me.
VOY S3E9, “Future's End, Part II”: Voyager works to save the 29th century from a 20th century tech bro who's nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Ed Begley Jr is pretty great in that role; he does amoral bastard surprisingly well, and he mostly succeeds at selling the idea he can outmaneuver Voyager.
This two-parter does a remarkable thing, which is that it reflects the real history of Boomer hippies turning into “fuck you got mine” libertarian tech moguls. It's a more incisive observation about contemporary society than I'd expect from Voyager, which was kept on a tight rein compared to DS9.
VOY S3E8, “Future's End, Part I”: Voyager is transported back to the distant era of 1996. The Spice Girls are on top of the charts, Bill Clinton is about to be reelected, and the crew of Voyager is dressed for the occasion. Hell yeah.
Special mention goes to the straight men of the episode, Dulmer and Lucsly of Temporal Investigations (yes, named after the leads of “The X-Files”). This episode really needs someone to take it all very seriously, and they're perfect at their job.
They for sure picked the right episode to go back to; the goofy charm of the original is a perfect match for the goofy charm of this revisit. The jokes all land, the pacing is spot on, and all in all it's very hard to watch this episode without a big ol' smile on your face the whole time.
DS9 S5E6, “Trials and Tribble-ations”: The Defiant travels back in time to Kirk's era right in time to experience the events of “The Trouble with Tribbles”. This is the other 30th anniversary episode, and it's amazing. Technically speaking it's flawless; it would be impressive today, 29 years later!
The real highlight of this episode is Rom, who's as delightful as ever here, but Rosalind Chao is also great as the Pah-Wraith inhabiting Keiko's body. She imbues the character with this raw menace that's distinctly different from Keiko – even when she's just eating some chocolates.
DS9 S5E5, “The Assignment”: Keiko gets Miles back for that time he got possessed and took her hostage. (If I had a nickel, I'd have two nickels, etc.) That makes this the seventh O'Brien Must Suffer episode by my count. It's also the introduction of the Pah-Wraiths, who will only get more important.
Jake's journey over the course of the story is powerful stuff, and the episode is well crafted to hit exactly the right plot beats at the right moments. And Ben's worries are all too real, as an anxious parent myself. It's a very engrossing episode, if a little less fun than the previous one.
DS9 S5E4, “Nor the Battle to the Strong”: When the cease fire with the Klingons breaks down, Jake and Bashir find themselves pinned down and under fire in a field hospital near the front lines. I've never been in combat, which is good news for everyone, but this episode certainly feels real.
Also, can I just say that there's no sex good enough to justify a compound fracture of the radius. I've never had one, but it seems Pretty Bad. Bones being on the outside – skeletal, I mean, not McCoy – is a definite mood-killer in my book.
This is also the beginning of the Worf/Dax romance – she's been angling for it for a while, but he's been oblivious – which I've never quite known how to feel about. I mean, they're both mostly happy and all, it just seems like Worf still has some shit to figure out for himself.
DS9 S5E3, “Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places”: Worf plays Cyrano for Quark – de Bergerac, I mean, not Jones – while Miles and Kira confuse intimacy with attraction. A very silly, very horny episode that's a lot of fun if you don't think too hard about how Quark is lying to Grilka for sex.
The Doctor's story works because of Kes, who I think I haven't done enough to appreciate, because she is a good character. Her positivity and protectiveness of the Doctor drive the plot, and the scenes of her caring for the Doctor while his memory fails him are poignant and heartbreaking.
VOY S3E4, “The Swarm”: The Doctor's program begins to degrade right as the ship crosses paths with a hostile species. Again, this feels like an episode named after its B-plot; the Doctor's is clearly the more interesting and important story. It's certainly the one I was invested in.
If you can get past the OoC nonsense, there's a story in here that's very sad (and very timely) about collective guilt through inaction and the importance of accurate history. It's just a shame they had to break B'Elanna to tell it.
B'Elanna is defined by her fierce independence, short temper, and lack of tolerance for being fucked with. You can't really swap her in for Troi without having her act wildly out of character. Even funnier, the person she goes to for counsel about her vivid sex dreams isn't Crusher, it's Chakotay.
VOY S3E6, “Remember”: B'Elanna starts having dreams so vivid they feel like memories right when a group of aliens with the ability to share memories telepathically are on board. What a coincidence! This was originally a Troi story idea and… you can tell. It does NOT make sense for B'Elanna.
VOY S3E3, “The Chute”: Tom and Harry are thrown in an alien prison with brain chips that make them hyperaggressive. Last season we had the Janeway/Chakotay episode; this is the Tom/Harry episode. It's very hurt/comfort, emphasis on the hurt. It's also a pretty good Harry episode!
It's not as good as the other 30th anniversary episode – “Trials and Tribble-ations” – but it's still good, and Sulu and Rand aren't in that one, so this was a nice way to ensure everyone got to be in an anniversary episode. And it's cool to get some deep Tuvok backstory.
VOY S3E2, “Flashback”: Tuvok suffers an acute PTSD attack, but it's related to a memory he's pretty sure never happened. The framing story is a pretty transparent excuse to flash back to the events of “Star Trek VI” in time for the 30th anniversary of the franchise, but I'm not mad about it.
VOY S3E5, “False Profits”: Voyager finds the Ferengi who came through the Barzan Wormhole back in TNG S3. A sort of fun episode, if you don't mind Ferengi being very Ferengi. After five seasons of increasingly deep characterizations of the DS9 Ferengi, though, these guys are tiring by comparison.
Janeway's spiritual voyage is a difficult story to tell, told about as well as it could be in the constraints of the medium. The ending, when Janeway seems shaken to hear a scientific explanation of what she went through, is a really great moment… that won't affect Janeway's future character at all.