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Star
Trek Voyager - The Complete First Season
Amazon.com
Star Trek: Voyager began life in 1995 with
some truly fascinating prospects in its two-hour
pilot episode. Opening in the 24th century, a
setting contemporary with that of Star
Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine and carrying over story
elements from each of those series, "Caretaker"
finds Starfleet Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate
Mulgrew) stepping into the middle of Federation
troubles with the Maquis, an army of rebels
violently resisting the interplanetary
organization's treaty with the brutal Cardassians.
In the process, both Voyager and the
Maquis ship under surveillance are accidentally
catapulted out of the galaxy's Alpha Quadrant (the
familiar stomping grounds of Starfleet personnel)
by a benign but dying being called the Caretaker.
Voyager ends up in the unexplored Delta
Quadrant, some 70,000 light years away.
So much seemed dramatically promising in this
debut, especially the unwieldy alliance of
Starfleet regulars and hostile Maquis, and the
likelihood that a lifetime spent in isolation,
trying to get home, would lead to the development
of a self-contained society on the ship, yet Voyager
never entirely made up its mind what it was
supposed to be about. The curiously cheesy sets
and fascinating, progressive management style of
Janeway (half mommy, half taskmaster) were also
new developments in Star Trek culture. As
the 16-episode season continued, character
backstories were developed in such episodes as
"The Cloud" (arguably the best episode
of the season), "Eye of the Needle" (underscoring
Janeway and the crew's sadness), "State of
Flux" (in which a search for a traitor
reveals a past romance between Commander
Chakotay, played by Robert Beltran, and sexy
Bajoran engineer Seska, played by Martha Hackett),
and "Jetrel" (which explores the
character of Neelix, the Talaxian played by Ethan
Phillips, during a parable about scientific
ethics and moral responsibility).
Among other notable episodes, "Phage"
strikes a nice balance among character
development, story hook, and moral and emotional
conflict when Neelix is literally robbed of his
lungs by the Vidiians, a once-civilized people
who are combating a deadly disease called the
Phage by stealing organs. (The disease would
return in "Faces," a fine showcase for
Roxann Biggs-Dawson as Chief Engineer B'Elanna
Torres.) "Emanations" stirred
controversy among the series' producers and some
fans for its philosophical look at death, and
"Time and Again" is a unique time-travel
story in which Janeway and Tom Paris (Robert
Duncan McNeill) get caught in a subspace fracture
that places them just hours before they know a
planet is going to be destroyed. In "Prime
Factors," latent tensions among Voyager
personnel erupts into serious conflict, an issue
revisited in the season finale, "Learning
Curve." Despite a pat ending that resolves
the Maquis conflict much too easily, the episode
drives home the fact that Voyager and its
crew are all alone, making the most of a
difficult predicament. --Tom Keogh and Jeff
Shannon
DVD features
There's a rare treat in the first-season set of Star
Trek: Voyager: scenes from the pilot episode
featuring the original captain Janeway, played by
Genevieve Bujold. She was quickly replaced, and
with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see
that she lacked sufficient presence for the role.
That segment is part of the set's 78 minutes of
bonus features, including a spotlight on the
eventual captain Janeway, Kate Mulgrew (mostly
comprised of 1994 and 2003 interviews); a season
overview; reflections by the cast; and spotlights
on visual effects, location, Startrek.com, and
the science behind the show (wormholes, time
travel). The basic format of the discs is the
same as The Next Generation and Deep
Space Nine: full screen, 5.1 and 2.0 surround
sound, English subtitles, and easy-to-find Easter
eggs. The discs are housed in a nicely compact
Digistak case like DS9, though with a
bolder color scheme and a plastic outer casing
that fits together awkwardly. But unlike any
previous Star Trek DVD series, the opening
credits of every episode come at the very end of
track 1, making it easy to skip past them. --David
Horiuchi |