Reflections on Voyager
Apr. 12th, 2023 02:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorI've been (re)watching Voyager lately. Not as fastidiously as I (re)watched Deep Space Nine, but I've watched a fair bit of it lately, and started watching the borg alliance arc where they first encounter Seven of Nine. I never actually saw this whole arc the first time I watched the show, so the arc itself is new to me even though I'm familiar with all the characters including Seven. I first saw Voyager when it first aired on television and while I know the characters and have seen sporadic pieces of it, there was a lot I didn't see the first time around.
Anyway, Voyager is such a fascinating show because it combines some of the worst of Trek with some of the best. Voyager has some of the most wild concepts (a holographic doctor, two crew members fusing together, the ship itself getting sick, Federation team-up with the borg) and can ask some really deep questions. It also has an episode that canonically turns two crew members into lizards. It infamously employed a guy who had long been exposed as having falsely claimed Native American ancestry to advise on Chakotay's character. It's impossible to predict from the beginning of an episode or arc whether it will turn out amazing or absolutely squander all its potential.
I'm really enjoying watching the borg team-up arc. There's a lot of meta I could write on the borg and what I think their depiction says about American anxieties and insecurities re: individualism, but also just on all the fascinating in-universe questions they bring up, such as whether the Vidians, Caretakers, and Ocompa could account for why they largely left the area of space Voyager first entered the Delta quadrant in alone. They're also unintentionally a fascinating examination of assimilation and assimilationism, which is a prominent aspect of American culture, though employed differently than in say, French culture. But that's more than I have time to go into now, and I can find it difficult to articulate my thoughts on these kinds of things even in the best of times. So I'll just leave it at that for now.
Anyway, Voyager is such a fascinating show because it combines some of the worst of Trek with some of the best. Voyager has some of the most wild concepts (a holographic doctor, two crew members fusing together, the ship itself getting sick, Federation team-up with the borg) and can ask some really deep questions. It also has an episode that canonically turns two crew members into lizards. It infamously employed a guy who had long been exposed as having falsely claimed Native American ancestry to advise on Chakotay's character. It's impossible to predict from the beginning of an episode or arc whether it will turn out amazing or absolutely squander all its potential.
I'm really enjoying watching the borg team-up arc. There's a lot of meta I could write on the borg and what I think their depiction says about American anxieties and insecurities re: individualism, but also just on all the fascinating in-universe questions they bring up, such as whether the Vidians, Caretakers, and Ocompa could account for why they largely left the area of space Voyager first entered the Delta quadrant in alone. They're also unintentionally a fascinating examination of assimilation and assimilationism, which is a prominent aspect of American culture, though employed differently than in say, French culture. But that's more than I have time to go into now, and I can find it difficult to articulate my thoughts on these kinds of things even in the best of times. So I'll just leave it at that for now.