First broadcast on Monday 11 October 1993
and Monday 18 October 1993
Unless you’re Gene Roddenberry, you’ll undoubtedly love a good swashbuckling Star Trek romp, full of action, wit, violence and camp. But there’s not much of that in this week’s lacklustre blockbuster, where we’re mostly scanning things and bypassing the aft plasma couplings, and only occasionally donning a funny hat or a genre-appropriate leather harness. Patrick, Brent and Jonathan are having some fun though, and on some days that’s almost enough.
Two of Voyager’s more likeable characters succumb to a Large Braga Asshole Field in an episode beset by rudimentary effects and sluggish action sequences, while Joe and Nathan imagine what might have been.
A high-concept Star Trek episode about quantum fluctuations gives way to a human story about what we owe to each other, a story about time, love, identity and self-sacrifice, where solving this week’s intractable space problem matters so much less than simply doing the right thing.
This week, Enterprise is beset once again by the Temporal Cold War, in the form of two guys who won’t stop talking about the Temporal Cold War, a conflict so subtle and urgent that no one can explain what it is or why anyone should care about it. And in a breathtaking B-plot, a bunch of be-latexed men drop by for a religious ceremony audacious in both its meaninglessness and its orthogonality to everything else in the episode.
An experimental quantum probability field causes the entire Enterprise crew to completely forget what humour is and how to do it. An agonising forty-five minutes, only relieved by the sight of beautiful Billy Campbell wandering through the corridors dressed as a pirate. (It’s just possible that the same field has caused the writers to forget how human behaviour works as well.)
