The People v. Star Trek: Voyager

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends, it’s a sentient personification of fear manifesting as a murderous Cirque du Soleil, come inside, come inside! Michael McKean guest stars alongside a truckload of nightmare fuel as Ensign Kim finds himself hostage inside a computer-generated paradise gone horribly, colorfully wrong. Will Voyager’s crew overcome their fears and conquer this arm...

Did you enjoy “Kindergarten Cop?” You didn’t? What’s wrong with you? Well, maybe you’ll like this episode anyway, even though it also features a gruff-but-likeable tough guy foisted unexpectedly into the role of caretaker for a bunch of scared kids. Will hilarity ensue? Will the weird space kids help Tuvok sort out his own grief over being separated from his presumably non-weird space kids? Can Ch...

Two times the Voyagers! Two times the Janeways! Two times the action, which, as it turns out, might be too much action because it takes up room they should have used for narrative clarification! Is Voyager’s exciting, confusing run-in with a spatial scission fun enough to justify the unresolved, unexamined, baby-related plot points? Can the Space Court accept Harry Kim suddenly being pushed as a b...

Teachers, please turn on your classroom TVs and tune them to channel 3. Morning Announcements with Neelix is about to air-- and he’s got the real scoop on Resident Bad Boy Tom Paris! Will Crewman Smerm Jermajerm’s plot come crashing down around him? Will the story payoff be enough to justify three weeks of Tom being a total a-hole? Will Janeway jettison Neelix’s broadcast career right out the airl...

A Vidiian gets a second chance at life and the Doctor gets a first chance at romance in Trek’s first tale of hologram love NOT involving the things that Riker does in between bridge shifts. Will the Doctor still love her if she rejoins her race of marauding organ pirates? Will anyone ever mention to the Doctor that dating a patient-- especially one that is, uh, technically comatose-- is an egregio...

Voyager continues its long, baffling, and slightly disturbing multi-episode examination of the moral implications! Can the combined power of two Qs find the fun in amid the gloomy philosophical grind? Is John de Lancie enough to sway the court’s ruling? Is “Death Wish” (not the Charles Bronson movie) good… or is it garbage?

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! The Delta Quadrant will shake as Torres faces off against THE DREADNOUGHHHHHT in a no-rules battle for intellectual supremacy! WIN... and nothing happens! LOSE... and a random planet of reasonably friendly aliens goes UP. IN. FLAAAAAAAAMES [cue pyro effect]. Only ten slips of gold-pressed latinum for adults, five slips for kids and seniors! You’ll pay for the whole seat, bu...

The wacky legal warriors of Judge Midnighhhhttgg::::SUBSPACE ANOMALY DETECTE::D::DDD@#’’’ALL HAIL THE EMPRESS. GLORY TO THE TERRAN EMPIRE. The galaxy’s one true arbiter of justice and decency convenes to punish another suspect cultural offering. A foolish Vulcan uses the powers of his pitiful mind to better understand the soul of a killer, but STRENGTH IS THE ONLY PATH TO TRUE UNDERSTANDING. Will...

The courtroom is rocked by the impact of Voyager’s most infamously bizarre and patently awful episode, and the bounds of sanity and judicial procedure will be tested like never before. A judge recused! A desperate legal defense employed! Will the system hold? Can the Herculean acting of Robert Duncan McNeill salvage anything from the drug-addled catastrophe? Is “Threshold” garbage… or is it super...

It’s cowboy diplomacy time as Voyager learns the hard way that they aren’t quite badass enough to go it alone! Hunted and harried by a band of hyper-violent psychopaths, Janeway reaches out to form a defense pact with a band of hyper-violent psychopaths. Could anything possibly go wrong? Will Chakotay and Seska like actually talk about the fact that she impregnated herself with his stolen DNA? How...

The crew finds a 1960s-era cyberman floating in space, leading Torres to discover and then savagely murder the joy of creation. Will this episode construct a positive verdict from its various spare parts, or will it get owned as hard as Voyager does in that starship battle that takes place around the halfway mark? Will the basement of Torres’ subconscious have enough room for all the complicated f...

Janeway meets the guy who played the Emcee in Cabaret and joins an underground revolution in order to save his wife and daughter from a prison that they aren’t actually in because they are dead. Can Janeway prevail without her state-of-the-art ship and mediocre crew to back her up? Will a thoughtful analysis and commentary give way under an avalanche of obvious musical theatre reference jokes? Is...

An old foe pulls a straight-up smash n’ grab on Voyager’s complacent crew, making off with some valuable Federation tech and forcing Chakotay into ill-advised and insubordinate action! Will the faithful servants of the Space Court be sufficiently thrilled by his daring and kind of stupid exploits? Will Voyager capitalize on its first recurring villain, or will Seska Space Fresca and the Chakotay n...

Voyager finds the long-foreshadowed Other Caretaker, the only known being with the power to send them back to the Alpha Quadrant! One slight hitch: She’s a murderous, quasi-omnipotent monster with a telepathic army of Okampa cultists. Will Kes focus her psychokinetic rage powers long enough to save the crew? Will the Judge Later’s courtroom be completely overrun by stray references to the Dark Pho...

The Voyager writers room succumbs to the dark temptation of a flashback episode, subjecting viewers to the tale of Surly Teen Chakotay and the Sky Spirits as told through the soft-focused lens of character memory. Also, the Doctor subjects himself to digital flu in an effort to prove that non-photonic lifeforms are a bunch of whiny babies when sickness is involved. Will the Doctor recover in time...

An overworked Janeway retreats into a romantic holonovel about a hologuy with crappy holokids and a holodead wife in the holoattic, but her holostaycation is cut short when the entire ship falls under telepathic attack! Will [mostly Janeway but also a little Kes there at the end] rally in time to save the crew and the ship? Will the viewers recover from the Chakotorres (B’Elotay?) makeout scene in...

The Great Jonathan Frakes brings you “Two Men and a Dino Baby,” the screwball family comedy you had no idea that you wanted, or maybe that you don’t actually want at all! As Voyager hovers over the actually-not-that-bad Hell World, Paris and Neelix must harness the power of friendship (or polite tolerance, at least) to survive the hazards of the surface below! Will they finally bury their longstan...

Voyager finds itself smack in the middle of a ship-threatening spatial phenomenomenomenomenon! The court finds itself smack in the middle of a sanity-threatening realization that the best scene in Toy Story 3 is a rip-off of a Voyager episode from 1997! Can justice find its way in a world where space and direction have no meaning? Is it weird that Kes has memorized the entire crew’s rooming assign...

A benevolent transporter accident reunites Ensign Kim with the great love of his life! His girlfriend is there, too. Fate may have granted Harry a reprieve from his deep-space exile, but will Judge Later’s court show similar mercy to this episode? Will Kim bravely escape the clutches of the people who love him and return to the clutches of the people who tolerate him? Will Cosimo ditch the Vulcan...

Things get weird as Voyager drifts into a swarm of hyper-affectionate space worms, kicking Kes’ Okampan physiology into straight-up “birds-and-bees” mode. Will Neelix shirk from the idea of fatherhood, or will he place his reproductive future into Kes’ love-spackled hands? Will the space worms ever learn to respect Voyager’s personal space bubble? Will the members of space court return this episod...

The Doctor awakens to a strange and terrifying world in which he is a person who willingly socializes with Reg Barclay (also, Voyager has been attacked and most of the crew has been spirited off to their presumptive doom). Mystery! Suspense! A C-list NextGen cameo! Will the Doctor un-Inception himself back into reality, or will Voyager become a sitcom featuring the Doctor and Kes as a hard-working...

Aron Eisenberg guest spots as Angry Kazon Nog to teach Chakotay a lesson about the dangers of attempting to mentor random people in space. The court reels at the revelation that Chakotay is at least casually opposed to the notion of killing children, but will that startling and endearing moment of character development be enough to save this episode from being metaphorically honor-murdered by Judg...

The writers of Star Trek: Voyager charge into season 2 by heroically tackling one of history’s most famous mysteries! The Talkers of The People vs. Star Trek: Voyager charge into season 2 by examining how that mystery is handled and heroically deciding that they aren’t entirely sure how they feel about it! The season 1 safety protocols have been disengaged-- can the de facto season 2 premiere hold...

16 episodes. Three hosts. One courtroom. And one chance to save a season… or condemn it. It’s the Season 1 finale of The People vs. Star Trek: Voyager, and the stakes will never be this high again! Unless we make it to the Season 2 finale, in which case the stakes will be equally as high! Extra drama! Extra backstory for Bliff the Bailiff! Final arguments presented through the majesty of original...

Drill Sergeant Tuvok sets out to whip some lazy Maquis into fighting shape in Voyager’s accidental season 1 finale, but Vulcan discipline might not be enough to get this episode over the wall. Also: Crewman Dalby makes a strong argument for having Voyager’s most punchable face, and Chakotay agrees. Can the Maquis find a place among a Starfleet crew? Will Tuvok learn the art of compromise? Or will...