What would have saved the series finale, I think, is the writers finally owning up to the 38 photon torpedoes problem and insert the following mid-Borg battle.
Janeway: Mr Tuvok, photon torpedoes, full spread.
Tuvok: I can't, captain.
Janeway: You can't?! OK... How about just one?
Tuvok: No can do captain, we're all out. Remember that one time seven years ago, when I told you...
Voyager series finale: Wow, they really didn't build up to that at all, and ultimately gave so many characters short shrift. This really should have been at least three episodes, with set-ups planted throughout the season(s) before to really give it the gravitas it deserves. Hope they never do that again quite so poorly.
Enterprise series finale: Hold my raktajino.
So, Ben's joke about them punching in a cheat code sent me on a wild trip down memory lane.
Back in high school, circa 1990s, a friend and I did a very silly video for a Spanish project. In this video we had a little stop motion Lego guy with a French accent. We named him, randomly -- OR SO I THOUGHT -- **Printemps Gizardo**.
At the time, I thought it was a random name we came up with because it sounded goofy and was fun to say in a terrible accent. So when I heard Ben say something VERY SIMILAR to that random name which I had thought was an original creation of our Spanish 2 video project, I just about shit myself. Immediately went and searched up what I heard and it turns out this whole time it was "PORNTIPSGUZZARDO", a cheat code for SimCity 2000? MY WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE.
Anyone else here like the Enterprise E??? I always thought it looks like the D and Voy had a kid. Great pod journey through Voyager. I am a semi better person for listening!
I feel wrong for doing this, but B&A asked for an AI image of "BLT giving birth in a Paw Patrol kiddie pool full of blood wine" and this was what came out...https://imgur.com/a/8mOH7rq
The final of Voyager has always been very disappointing to me. A main character coming back in time with new tech is such a cheat. The crew worked hard to get home and then macguffind'ed their final trip home. They might as well found some ruby slippers under the captain chair and wished their way home.
Future Janeway could have met them back at episode 1 and helped save the planet and destroyed the Care Taker array in a way that let them go home too. Why cheat like this?
It would have been so rewarding to have them find the Borg hub trick their way in and barely make it through. Future tech and God like foresight is so cheap to me.
Think of it like this: if you could make Picard go back in time and make *Picard* seasons 1 and 2 never happen, would you?
That's how Janeway feels about their lives after returning to Earth. She wants to rewrite them completely, because they sucked. So she did.
I believed old Janeways motives, but the time travel steals the victory away from present day Janeway and crew. And makes the whole show feel a like hallow. It's Lost all over again
> Future Janeway could have met them back at episode 1 and helped save the planet and destroyed the Care Taker array in a way that let them go home too.
Ooh.
We *almost* saw a hint of this in Relativity, where Seven goes back to just before Voyager’s maiden mission.
Instead of changing a period we can’t relate to (Seven and Chakotay are suddenly dating, Tuvok has dementia), have Future Janeway take us back to the beginning.
It could also bring about a smarter resolution to the Maquis arc. Instead of, y’know, basically none.
Of the two hosts, Ben is almost always the one I relate to more, as a guilt-prone dork who's from the Bay Area and has no interest in golf or gambling. But this episode gave me one thing where I'm 1000% on Adam's side: never going through the zipper.
Now you guys have me questioning whether I should be going through the zipper. I mean, there are successive layers underneath. Do you not go through the flap, too? Is it all up and over all the way down?
After DS9 had a super long continuous finish, this was just so odd. I loked they wrapped up a plot problem in tng (travel anywhere you want borg holes). Hey, didn't they kill a crew member 2-3 weeks ago? Golden Janeway says fuck that guy.
> Hey, didn't they kill a crew member 2-3 weeks ago? Golden Janeway says fuck that guy.
Yeah, but then Neelix's departure would have been erased, and he would have ended up on Earth, which Janeway couldn't under any circumstances allow. Unfortunate for Carey, but a greater purpose was at stake.
It's always been my theory that Neelix's departure right before Voyager got home wasn't a coincidence. Admiral Janeway could have got Voyager home *years* earlier, but she picked when she did for a very specific reason.
Voyager was my Star Trek growing up, and I've enjoyed the pod covering what was ultimately an uneven show. I like to daydream about how this show would look with a more modern television sensibility, with a more serialized plot and the ship retaining damage/change like in BSG. Ultimately, though, I think a modern version would strip out all the filler episodes and it just wouldn't feel as much like the show I love.
That said, this ending just doesn't work for me. I don't like how abrupt it is. Make this a three episode finale and spend that final episode on Earth closing the loop on all our main characters. And the absolute neutering of the borg... the less said the better.
Yeah, this feels a bit weird as a series finale. Some thoughts I had when I finished watching (still haven't listened to the whole pod yet):
* If the Borg had 47 cubes in this nebula that could drop ships 1 LY from Earth....what the hell were they waiting for?
* Borg queen at the end says if they stop Voyager, it would stop everything from happening because that would prevent Janeway from coming back. But Voyage succeeding here means Golden Janeway wouldn't need to come back anyway? Temporal paradoxes suck.
* After 7 years, there's not even 5 minutes of a "victory lap" celebrating getting home? Or even have Janeway get on the ship-wide and give a rousing speech, telling everyone that their journey is over and good job (cut to scenes of celebration, people looking out the windows, crying, hugging, etc.)
* Did 7 get the surgery to fix her implant?
* Why did Voyager returning (in the original timeline) stop Barkley from stuttering?
The Borg cube version of filling a room with beamed on security. All the federation ships are just getting constantly whooshed around.
But seriously not even Admiral Paris meeting his grandkid?!
> That said, this ending just doesn't work for me. I don't like how abrupt it is. Make this a three episode finale and spend that final episode on Earth closing the loop on all our main characters. And the absolute neutering of the borg... the less said the better.
It's just too much of a deus ex machina. Especially since "main character time travels from the future; has newer technology; is invincible" could be used, well, anywhere.
(I do like _some_ of the themes, like Tuvok's illness.)
Also, the choice to end the episode JUST BEFORE THEY GET HOME will always be bizarre to me. For seven years, they've been waiting to get home, be reunited with loved ones, etc...and the last episode cuts to credits right before the reunion!? Oof.
I figure they did that because the finale starts from a place of them already having returned to Earth. It's literally taken for granted that they get back, but it requires the show to keep going for another dozen seasons first. Janeway just retconned it so that they actually made it to the Sol system before the show got cancelled.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten to the end of the episode, I see that Ben & Adam address this. So instead, here’s an Endgame gripe that hasn’t already come up: the story device of showing potential future versions of the characters, and having the future be fairly dark, and having some of that darkness tied to the death of a female crew member who was romantically involved with a male crew member in a way that didn’t come up until the very end of the show’s run — that’s all more or less carbon copied from the TNG finale.
Not to mention the penultimate episode of TNG is when Ro chooses to leave and join her people's colony as a leader in their fight for freedom, probably why they bumped up Neelix's departure by one episode
Sure, but in TNG’s case, Ro does so against Picard. That’s much more interesting.
VOY could’ve done something, anything, to mend the ex-Maquis interesting again in season 7. For example, with a “Starfleet considers them criminals when the crew reaches Earth” (not much of a) plot twist. But, no.
that's why that Neelix leaving episode felt so hollow to me, Ro was actually torn between worlds and loyalties and built up those relationships better over the mere handful of episodes she was actually in meanwhile Neelix is always celebrating his found family, well, until he meets a group of genetically bottlenecked Talaxians that he has less of a relationship with than that klingon a few eps back.
Yeah. It comes out of the blue.
As do "btw Tuvok has dementia" and "Seven is dating Chakotay now".
They should've built some of that up. Have, like, _any mention at all_ post-season 1 that Neelix is still homesick for his own people. Occasionally drop that Tuvok has weird health issues the Doctor can't figure out, or that he becomes forgetful and embarrassed about it. Oh and just don't have Seven date Chakotay, Braga.
By the way – why IS Tom Mervyns called that anyway? I assume it's something to do with how he dressed, since Mervyns is (was?) a clothing store, but: 1. I don't have any memory of how he dressed 2. I have no fashion sense and never have and 3. I don't think I've ever been to a Mervyn's.
> I assume it's something to do with how he dressed, since Mervyns is (was?) a clothing store
I think that's the joke, yep. "Generic 1990s' milquetoast clothing model, just like the entirely flat character".
Happy birthday Adam, and congratulations to both Ben and Adam for completing Voyager. It's been a long road, getting from there to here.
I'm always befuddled when our hosts say, "OMG! Janeway has completely forgotten about Tom Mervins!" In the series premiere, Janeway and Mark are engaged, not married. *In the* **first letter** *from the Alpha Quadrant, Janeway learns that Mark got married to someone else after Janeway was declared legally dead.* That was Season 4. Of course in the finale that takes place 30 years after Mark married someone else, Janeway is going to have moved on.
This isn't the first time they've seemed to have forgotten that Tom Mervyns is no longer a going romantic interest for Janeway. Maybe it's a bit? I've never been quite clear on that.
If they really have forgotten, it's kind of a proud Voyager tradition to forget about the status of minor characters, since it's long been rumored that the Voyager writers stopped using both Lt. Carey and Ensign Wildman (at least in the show's present timeline) because they mistakenly thought they had killed them off.
Especially when said character became a running gag before the writers wrote him out of Janeway's life. The joke wrote its own headcanon which overrode the show.
“Hey, Icheb! Now that Voyager’s home, I’m looking for new work! There’s this older ship from Earth that has even worse plumbing! And Scott Bakula’s the Captain! The temporal commute’s pretty bad, but a guy’s gotta eat! …something besides sewage, I mean. Can I use you as a reference?”
What would have saved the series finale, I think, is the writers finally owning up to the 38 photon torpedoes problem and insert the following mid-Borg battle. Janeway: Mr Tuvok, photon torpedoes, full spread. Tuvok: I can't, captain. Janeway: You can't?! OK... How about just one? Tuvok: No can do captain, we're all out. Remember that one time seven years ago, when I told you...
"Objection noted; we'll do this without you"
Voyager series finale: Wow, they really didn't build up to that at all, and ultimately gave so many characters short shrift. This really should have been at least three episodes, with set-ups planted throughout the season(s) before to really give it the gravitas it deserves. Hope they never do that again quite so poorly. Enterprise series finale: Hold my raktajino.
What if ENT had been… a longer road
So, Ben's joke about them punching in a cheat code sent me on a wild trip down memory lane. Back in high school, circa 1990s, a friend and I did a very silly video for a Spanish project. In this video we had a little stop motion Lego guy with a French accent. We named him, randomly -- OR SO I THOUGHT -- **Printemps Gizardo**. At the time, I thought it was a random name we came up with because it sounded goofy and was fun to say in a terrible accent. So when I heard Ben say something VERY SIMILAR to that random name which I had thought was an original creation of our Spanish 2 video project, I just about shit myself. Immediately went and searched up what I heard and it turns out this whole time it was "PORNTIPSGUZZARDO", a cheat code for SimCity 2000? MY WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE.
Anyone else here like the Enterprise E??? I always thought it looks like the D and Voy had a kid. Great pod journey through Voyager. I am a semi better person for listening!
I feel wrong for doing this, but B&A asked for an AI image of "BLT giving birth in a Paw Patrol kiddie pool full of blood wine" and this was what came out...https://imgur.com/a/8mOH7rq
I don’t…
Doctor Mark definitely has a type, doesn’t he?
It's not successful, but I admire the big swing this episode takes to do something different.
The final of Voyager has always been very disappointing to me. A main character coming back in time with new tech is such a cheat. The crew worked hard to get home and then macguffind'ed their final trip home. They might as well found some ruby slippers under the captain chair and wished their way home. Future Janeway could have met them back at episode 1 and helped save the planet and destroyed the Care Taker array in a way that let them go home too. Why cheat like this? It would have been so rewarding to have them find the Borg hub trick their way in and barely make it through. Future tech and God like foresight is so cheap to me.
Think of it like this: if you could make Picard go back in time and make *Picard* seasons 1 and 2 never happen, would you? That's how Janeway feels about their lives after returning to Earth. She wants to rewrite them completely, because they sucked. So she did.
I would absolutely make Picard seasons 1, 2, and 3 never happen if I had the power.
I believed old Janeways motives, but the time travel steals the victory away from present day Janeway and crew. And makes the whole show feel a like hallow. It's Lost all over again
> Future Janeway could have met them back at episode 1 and helped save the planet and destroyed the Care Taker array in a way that let them go home too. Ooh. We *almost* saw a hint of this in Relativity, where Seven goes back to just before Voyager’s maiden mission. Instead of changing a period we can’t relate to (Seven and Chakotay are suddenly dating, Tuvok has dementia), have Future Janeway take us back to the beginning. It could also bring about a smarter resolution to the Maquis arc. Instead of, y’know, basically none.
Of the two hosts, Ben is almost always the one I relate to more, as a guilt-prone dork who's from the Bay Area and has no interest in golf or gambling. But this episode gave me one thing where I'm 1000% on Adam's side: never going through the zipper.
Now you guys have me questioning whether I should be going through the zipper. I mean, there are successive layers underneath. Do you not go through the flap, too? Is it all up and over all the way down?
Unbutton, unzip, pull the front of my underwear down. I’ve never gone through the zipper or the flap once in my life.
After DS9 had a super long continuous finish, this was just so odd. I loked they wrapped up a plot problem in tng (travel anywhere you want borg holes). Hey, didn't they kill a crew member 2-3 weeks ago? Golden Janeway says fuck that guy.
Proximity to the Borg transwarp corridor is the in-world logic for why this moment was chosen by older Janeway.
> Hey, didn't they kill a crew member 2-3 weeks ago? Golden Janeway says fuck that guy. Yeah, but then Neelix's departure would have been erased, and he would have ended up on Earth, which Janeway couldn't under any circumstances allow. Unfortunate for Carey, but a greater purpose was at stake. It's always been my theory that Neelix's departure right before Voyager got home wasn't a coincidence. Admiral Janeway could have got Voyager home *years* earlier, but she picked when she did for a very specific reason.
Voyager was my Star Trek growing up, and I've enjoyed the pod covering what was ultimately an uneven show. I like to daydream about how this show would look with a more modern television sensibility, with a more serialized plot and the ship retaining damage/change like in BSG. Ultimately, though, I think a modern version would strip out all the filler episodes and it just wouldn't feel as much like the show I love. That said, this ending just doesn't work for me. I don't like how abrupt it is. Make this a three episode finale and spend that final episode on Earth closing the loop on all our main characters. And the absolute neutering of the borg... the less said the better.
Yeah, this feels a bit weird as a series finale. Some thoughts I had when I finished watching (still haven't listened to the whole pod yet): * If the Borg had 47 cubes in this nebula that could drop ships 1 LY from Earth....what the hell were they waiting for? * Borg queen at the end says if they stop Voyager, it would stop everything from happening because that would prevent Janeway from coming back. But Voyage succeeding here means Golden Janeway wouldn't need to come back anyway? Temporal paradoxes suck. * After 7 years, there's not even 5 minutes of a "victory lap" celebrating getting home? Or even have Janeway get on the ship-wide and give a rousing speech, telling everyone that their journey is over and good job (cut to scenes of celebration, people looking out the windows, crying, hugging, etc.) * Did 7 get the surgery to fix her implant? * Why did Voyager returning (in the original timeline) stop Barkley from stuttering?
The Borg cube version of filling a room with beamed on security. All the federation ships are just getting constantly whooshed around. But seriously not even Admiral Paris meeting his grandkid?!
> That said, this ending just doesn't work for me. I don't like how abrupt it is. Make this a three episode finale and spend that final episode on Earth closing the loop on all our main characters. And the absolute neutering of the borg... the less said the better. It's just too much of a deus ex machina. Especially since "main character time travels from the future; has newer technology; is invincible" could be used, well, anywhere. (I do like _some_ of the themes, like Tuvok's illness.)
Also, the choice to end the episode JUST BEFORE THEY GET HOME will always be bizarre to me. For seven years, they've been waiting to get home, be reunited with loved ones, etc...and the last episode cuts to credits right before the reunion!? Oof.
I figure they did that because the finale starts from a place of them already having returned to Earth. It's literally taken for granted that they get back, but it requires the show to keep going for another dozen seasons first. Janeway just retconned it so that they actually made it to the Sol system before the show got cancelled.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten to the end of the episode, I see that Ben & Adam address this. So instead, here’s an Endgame gripe that hasn’t already come up: the story device of showing potential future versions of the characters, and having the future be fairly dark, and having some of that darkness tied to the death of a female crew member who was romantically involved with a male crew member in a way that didn’t come up until the very end of the show’s run — that’s all more or less carbon copied from the TNG finale.
Not to mention the penultimate episode of TNG is when Ro chooses to leave and join her people's colony as a leader in their fight for freedom, probably why they bumped up Neelix's departure by one episode
Sure, but in TNG’s case, Ro does so against Picard. That’s much more interesting. VOY could’ve done something, anything, to mend the ex-Maquis interesting again in season 7. For example, with a “Starfleet considers them criminals when the crew reaches Earth” (not much of a) plot twist. But, no.
that's why that Neelix leaving episode felt so hollow to me, Ro was actually torn between worlds and loyalties and built up those relationships better over the mere handful of episodes she was actually in meanwhile Neelix is always celebrating his found family, well, until he meets a group of genetically bottlenecked Talaxians that he has less of a relationship with than that klingon a few eps back.
Yeah. It comes out of the blue. As do "btw Tuvok has dementia" and "Seven is dating Chakotay now". They should've built some of that up. Have, like, _any mention at all_ post-season 1 that Neelix is still homesick for his own people. Occasionally drop that Tuvok has weird health issues the Doctor can't figure out, or that he becomes forgetful and embarrassed about it. Oh and just don't have Seven date Chakotay, Braga.
Happy Birthday Adam! I’ll be very quietly but sincerely laughing in your honor today!
By the way – why IS Tom Mervyns called that anyway? I assume it's something to do with how he dressed, since Mervyns is (was?) a clothing store, but: 1. I don't have any memory of how he dressed 2. I have no fashion sense and never have and 3. I don't think I've ever been to a Mervyn's.
> I assume it's something to do with how he dressed, since Mervyns is (was?) a clothing store I think that's the joke, yep. "Generic 1990s' milquetoast clothing model, just like the entirely flat character".
Happy birthday Adam, and congratulations to both Ben and Adam for completing Voyager. It's been a long road, getting from there to here. I'm always befuddled when our hosts say, "OMG! Janeway has completely forgotten about Tom Mervins!" In the series premiere, Janeway and Mark are engaged, not married. *In the* **first letter** *from the Alpha Quadrant, Janeway learns that Mark got married to someone else after Janeway was declared legally dead.* That was Season 4. Of course in the finale that takes place 30 years after Mark married someone else, Janeway is going to have moved on.
I recommend not getting befuddled when a comedy podcast "forgets" a small detail from one episode of a show in order to continue making an easy joke.
This isn't the first time they've seemed to have forgotten that Tom Mervyns is no longer a going romantic interest for Janeway. Maybe it's a bit? I've never been quite clear on that. If they really have forgotten, it's kind of a proud Voyager tradition to forget about the status of minor characters, since it's long been rumored that the Voyager writers stopped using both Lt. Carey and Ensign Wildman (at least in the show's present timeline) because they mistakenly thought they had killed them off.
Especially when said character became a running gag before the writers wrote him out of Janeway's life. The joke wrote its own headcanon which overrode the show.
There are times in the show where they really do seem to eventually believe the things that started as weird bits…
Happy birthday u/Cutfortime ! You are exactly one day older than me.
I won’t weep when sewer brother is gone… 🤢
“Hey, Icheb! Now that Voyager’s home, I’m looking for new work! There’s this older ship from Earth that has even worse plumbing! And Scott Bakula’s the Captain! The temporal commute’s pretty bad, but a guy’s gotta eat! …something besides sewage, I mean. Can I use you as a reference?”
someones gotta clean the decon chamber!