Star Trek: Voyager - Season 6
However, the sixth season pushes the idea even further, turning Reginald Barclay and Deanna Troi into recurring guest stars and clumsily name-dropping Captain Picard in both Pathfinder and Life Line. These episodes occasionally felt like long-lost episodes of The Next Generation that just happened to feature the cast of Voyager. Certainly, Pathfinder is a narrative focused around Barclay, a recurring character on The Next Generation who had only previously appeared as a hologram on Voyager. Both episodes strain to justify including the character of Deanna Troi, who is completely superfluous to the stories being told.
Star Trek: Voyager - Season 6
There is something incredibly morbid and depressing about the sixth season of Voyager, simmering beneath the polished exterior and the mediocre storytelling. Following the end of Deep Space Nine and the departure of Ronald D. Moore, it seems like the Berman era had received a terminal diagnosis. The future had evaporated. All that Voyager can do is to stare longingly at the past, occasionally seeking either to recapture the glories of The Next Generation or to rewrite its own internal history. Either way, Voyager was contemplating more than its own mortality.
This episode really let me down, it started slow and then got interesting when B'Elanna boards the Barge and then returns to reconcile things with her mother, but sadly it just takes a routine turn when she entersGre'thor. The Klingon Hell (looking quite impressive too with all its fire and brimstone), just turns out to be Voyager for B'Elanna, surely a cost-cutting measure, but geez, I don't think it was quite true that she had found the place to be any type of hell. Nothing so far in the series really was indicative of that either. There's a couple of nods to B'Elanna's relationship with Janeway, presented by having her own mother dress in Janeway's uniform, but the choice of Voyager and the crew to represent hell and B'Elanna's inner turmoil really ruined the episode. It didn't really focus on the relationship with Torres and her mother as much as it should've, the pair just bicker and that's it. It again employs the same technique only recently used in last seasons"The Fight" (and as mentioned, a technique used often in DS9) of having the crew just act 'evil' in a way, it's just a bland approach which leaves little resonance for me.
I will reiterate the problems in this episode. Yes, Chakotay and Janeway are all too ready to accept Seven's theories. Had this been a show more akin to the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, this would have made a much better episode, but within the context of this show, where everything is wrapped in cotton wool, where conflict was outlawed, where theMaquis "threat" was disposed of after 1 season, the fact that Chuckles and Janeway were suddenly so distrusting of one another to the point of carrying phasers on their persons does not make sense. 041b061a72