I was just noticing last night that season 2 of Voyger seem’s to be quite a bit better in quality, relatively speaking, than the 2nd seasons of it’s older siblings TNG and DS9. Mostly GREAT episodes, this included. Except for episode 15. We don’t talk about episode 15.
Edit: I did the math and DS9 edges out Voyager when you compare each show’s season 1 to season 2, but they’re both statistically higher than TNG.
The season opener with Amelia Earhart isn’t great either, but nothing compared to… that.
I loved The 37’s though. If any of the VOY writers had been classic Trekkies, they could have called back to Miri and The Paradise Syndrome with the Preservers.
Fun (or maybe not so fun) fact about that episode is that it was actually intended to be the finale of season 1. Brannon Braga wanted to make it a two-parter leading into season 2, but nobody else on the staff felt that ending their first season with a cliffhanger would be a good idea. So, instead, they compressed it down and made it a regular episode. Braga really wanted to explore this story more though.
That is referring to Paris and Janeway?
I said we don’t talk about it!
My biggest issue with that episode was simply the fact that they retconned the warp speed scale. Before this, the Enterprise had exceeded warp ten multiple times without its crew becoming salamanders or anything.
Pretty sure TNG did it way before with the traveller episode
It’s a mess throughout the series.
Warp factor 15. In 2267, the Nomad probe was armed with a weapon system capable of firing energy bolts that traveled at the speed of warp 15. (TOS: “The Changeling”)
Warp factor 36. In 2270, the Enterprise encountered Karla Five’s vessel as it was about to enter the Beta Niobe nova. At maximum speed, the ship was traveling at approximately warp 36. (TAS: “The Counter-Clock Incident”)
The in-universe explanation for part of this is that Starfleet re-factored the warp scale sometime between the 23rd and 24th century. As for the Enterprise, idk blame Q or The Traveler. I don’t think they ever exceeded warp 9.x with conventional warp engines though.
There were always silly sci-fi shenanigans that had led to the 10+ warp speeds in earlier episodes, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t make the salamander thing any less of a retcon. The way that it was explained in that episode, any object moving at a speed of warp 10 is everywhere at once or whatever. How that object achieved that speed (be it a standard warp drive or the efforts of an alien) makes no difference. If an object is moving that fast somehow, it’s salamander time.
He was experimenting with transwarp technology used by the Borg. I mentioned this in another comment but I think the reason he lizard-ified was because he didn’t have a Borg transwarp conduit to reduce the infinite probability down to a finite point in space. Thats how the Borg were able to travel nearly instantaneously across entire quadrants of space without turning into mecha-lizards. Like you said, it’s silly if you try to think about it too much.
I always figured the scale had be refactored more than once. Like warp 5 of ENT would be slower than TNG’s warp 3.
Yeah for sure. Just re-read the MA page on warp factor and, apparently, warp 10 is also the transwarp threshold. I wonder if this is why the Borg need transwarp conduits to reduce that infinite probability down to a single point in space.
Hell, I’m pretty sure between the “current” time from All Good Things and the “future” resulted in another tweaking of the warp scale, to account for Warp 13
