conuly

So, I thought Nemesis was the one where the warring society was actually just a war memorial, until I heard myself sardonically remarking "Well, that's one way to get new recruits!" and realized it's the other one, the one where it's all an elaborate exercise designed to train/radicalize new recruits.

I gotta say, the scenario that they put Chakotay through to make him join their military seems a little obvious to me and heavyhanded, but the Doctor suggests at the end that it's just the tip of the brainwashing iceberg and presumably the drugs and frantic pace keep people from stopping and saying "Hold on...."

Then we watched Revulsion. In the humorous A plot, a hologram murdered all six organic members of his crew because they wouldn't let him keep his pet fish. In the creepy B plot, Harry Kim sexually harasses Seven until she finally decides to sexually harass him right back. I'm never quite sure if she doesn't know what she's doing or if somewhere along the line the Borg assimilated Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and she absolutely does, but either way, being told to take off his clothes sure cures him in a hurry. (Chakotay definitely knows what was going on, though. Also - does Chakotay seriously have only one name? And is that racist if he does? Also, Torres and Paris are dating now, and their dialog suggests that these episodes are literally only days apart with no downtime, in which case - good job, Chakotay, glad to see there's no lingering trauma from your traumatic camping trip! Because god knows there's no therapy in space, or at least not on Voyager, so it's good you've made a full recovery already!)

Seven is herself cured of any lingering desire to return to the Borg after she has a series of traumatic flashbacks in The Raven. I barely noticed, though, because I was too busy staring in awe at Janeway's rolled eyes and sarcasm as she tried real hard to insinuate that the aliens who object to Voyager releasing a rogue Borg into their territory were somehow in the wrong, like, wtf.

And then there's Scientific Method, another one of those episodes that's great so long as you don't think about it too hard.

The trouble is that nothing in this episode displays any understanding of the scientific method. These people aren't going to learn shit from their work on Voyager because they've got sloppy, sloppy methodology. (And also because they very foolishly decided to flee Voyager at the last minute rather than take their chances with the binary pulsar. At that point, they would've been better off staying attached to the larger vessel.)

We're waiting on Year of Hell so we can watch both episodes together. It's the rare reset-button episode that I really, really like.

Man, Season 4 rocks.