What are your three worst episodes from Voyager Season One? Cheat sheet below:
1.1&2 — “Caretaker”
1.3 — “Parallax”
1.4 — “Time and Again”
1.5 — “Phage”
1.6 — “The Cloud”
1.7 — “Eye of the Needle”
1.8 — “Ex Post Facto”
1.9 — “Emanations”
1.10 — “Prime Factors”
1.11 — “State of Flux”
1.12 — “Heroes and Demons”
1.13 — “Cathexis”
1.14 — “Faces”
1.15 — “Jetrel”
1.16 — “Learning Curve”
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This is hard. I gave six out of fifteen episodes a rating of 2 or below. These episodes were all disappointing and underwhelming, but for the most part watchable. It’s hard to say which were the most terrible. I’ll go with:
“Faces.” B’Elanna Torres is split into human and Klingon halves in a highly illogical episode which seems to equate Klingons (at this point highly associated with African Americans) with animals.
“Phage.” But for the queasy racial dynamics of “Faces,” I would have said there was no lower point this season than the theft of Neelix’s lungs, or retread of “Spock’s Brain” without the camp value.
“Caretaker.” Yes, the series premiere. “Caretaker” offers compelling visuals and a few promising character introductions, but plotwise is a muddled mess of nonsense.
Dishonorable mentions: “Time and Again,” “Ex Post Facto,” “Cathexis.”
I am curious what’s so horrible about Time and Again. Maybe I blurred it out of my memory.
Cathexis: Because WHAT THE WHAT???? How does anything in this episode make sense?
Caretaker: Because… yawn.
Emanations: Because I just can’t watch Harry Kim for that long.
I thought Faces was annoying in the way you describe but was at least trying to do something interesting, although in the end not ambitious enough. And Phage put Janeway in an interesting position trying to figure out what to do about Neelix’s lungs being stolen and unable to be returned. As captain and as an ethical human, how does she handle it?
Agreed though that in general all the episodes of this first season are not spectacular… the only one that I honestly wouldn’t change was “Heroes and Demons”.
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