VOY: Season 5 “Night”

Date: December 6, 2020

Season 5, Episode 1

Musical Accompaniment: The last few songs that start with ‘G’, and they all have the words “good” or “green” in them.

Interstellar News: It’s the week my birthday is in and the sixth day of my birthday month, woo hoo!

TL;DR: Kim and Paris are recreating “Captain Proton” on the holodeck when the Doctor busts in because they’re eating into his time and then they overload the hologrid. Janeway has sealed herself off from the crew, she’s doubting her decision four years ago, and they’re traveling through a desolate region of space for at least the next two years they’ve nicknamed “The Void”. Voyager detects high levels of theta radiation, the ship drops out of warp and goes completely dark because of a dampening field. Three ships of aliens attack, one gets stuck in sickbay, and a Malon ship appears which sends the other ships in retreat. The Malon captain wants the creature, in exchange he’ll take them to a vortex that gets them out of the void, but is tight-lipped about why. The creature tells Janeway that the Malon have poisoned their space with their waste so Janeway offers to show them how to purify it, but they’re not interested. Janeway decides to collapse the vortex in order to save the creatures, but the crew won’t let her do it alone. They enter the vortex, destroy it so the Malon cannot use it any more, and come out the other side where they can see stars.

Favorite Quote:

Chakotay: Seven, I want good news. That’s an order.

Seven of Nine: Then I must disobey. I have no good news to report.

I absolutely love Seven.

“Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a few Borg cubes about now. Anything for a little distraction.”: Watching this episode during the time of Covid-19, it hits a little hard. Thankfully I have a job that has kept me very busy, but I can understand how soul crushing it can be when there is nothing to do. What bothers me the most, though, is that they didn’t plan to use this time to cross-train everyone. The Doctor could use someone other than Paris to help out in sickbay, everyone should know a bit of engineering for when they need to run repairs, Neelix can teach cooking classes, etc. Honestly, they should have been doing this the whole time. This is also a really key episode in understanding the repercussions of disposing toxic waste into the aether, because there is always something to disrupt and always someone who pays the price. The Malon were only interested in their profits, cough Ferengi cough, and had no love loss for the creatures of the void. The crew decides they need to do what’s good for them and the creatures, if they can, get through the void and blow up the vortex so the Malon can’t easily dump their waste. If all of the creatures are already infected, however, I’m not sure how much that will help… but they also can’t fix the entire quadrant. 6 butterscotch flavored hard candies for this episode, because there was the world’s worst mutiny.

TA Out!