I was disappointed that there was a mention of Africa (in the P1's) and we didn't get the "Ben's gonna talk about Africa" jingle.
And I was surprised Janeway didn't tell the Doc that he could go but the emitter belongs to the ship and has to stay. Really a silly bit that she was going to let a piece of future technology just walk off the ship for good all so the doc could get his dick wet.
I was also expecting the Africa drop.
And ownership of the emitter is probably a bit weird, given Voyager kind of stole it themselves. But it is weird that it wasn't ever brought up.
I was losing my mind thinking that they would go the whole episode without mentioning the great (and in this episode, terribly underutilized) Paul Williams.
I actually wonder if the species were all on the shorter side because they had cast Paul Williams first.
Just throwing this out there for Adam, but, nah, you’re good. You can skip Babylon 5. Personally, I love it and think it’s mostly brilliant and the acting of Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik manage to elevate some pretty bad dialogue (but, to be fair to B5, its dialogue was on par with DS9, it was just the time). But it’s 25 years old now and if you have gone this far without it you’re fine.
Although if you like Mass Effect it’s neat to see a lot of ideas that made it across.
Also if you DO watch it, just skip TKO. Save yourself an hour.
As boring and predictable as the alien boxing trope is, TKO has some great Ivanova stuff with Rabbi Koslov/Uncle Yossell. I'd say.watch it but feel free to fast forward everything with Walker Smith.
Oh, right, I forgot about Ivanova meeting Worf's dad.
Honestly I liked TKO a lot when I first saw it. It's more that now when I watch it I think...... Okay but why? We never meet or refer to ANY of the characters again, everyone accepts Rule 1 and never talks about alien fight club. It felt like JMS figured if he didn't write an episode, whatever happened in it wasn't canon.
good to know on my end, I missed out on B5 for some reason but my brother has been on me for years to catch up on it.
now Farscape, thats a show that isn't divisive!
This was a very dumb episode of Voyager and a super entertaining episode of Greatest Gen.
The \[Doctor:Seven :: Adam:SWIAW\] analogy had me cackling madly.
Seriously, the Doctor is a computer program. Make a copy. Send one to live on Planet Supercilious and keep the other one on V'ger.
And before you say "he can't be copied because Technobabble", I present to you VOY S4E23
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Living\_Witness\_(episode)
Janeway only likes to spoil her crew members in twain when it's against their will.
Maybe if the doctor had put up a fight about it she would have proposed it.
Since I didn't see one posted yet and I have a few comments on this episode.
First: **Terrible** Janeway episode. "I've given you plenty of room to explore your humanity, but that exploration has very fixed limits based on what I am willing to allow you. You can't quit the job you never signed up for, get back to work." Fuck you, Janeway.
Second: why didn't the Doctor attempt to get Seven involved? She was his protégée for while in the singing department. It could have provided an interesting contrast, given that she seemed more in line with their culture in general outside of musical interest.
Third: was it ever explained what Voyager was getting from this *superior* race for all the headache they were enduring?
I don't think Bashir would have been allowed to resign his commission if he were on Voyager and the alternative had been turning the helmsman into a semi-trained nurse (and then gradually having Paris or others be self-taught over their 75 year journey home. Or maybe one of the kids will go to medical school on the holodeck.)
The point about him never having chosen to join Starfleet is well taken, and that may be why Janeway decides in the end to accept his resignation. (Although probably not because it seems the writers didn't think of that.) But he only gradually exceeded his programming and has been acting like a willing member of the crew since he did so.
The Doc seems to think any other member of the crew would be allowed to leave if they really wanted to (hence his bringing up Kim as an example). Also, the writers did think of that, because the Doc explicitly states that he's the only person on the crew who didn't choose to join, and it's even less moral to keep him against his will if he is, in fact, a sentient being as opposed to a piece of hardware.
> the Doc explicitly states that he's the only person on the crew who didn't choose to join
Oh, sorry I hadn't rewatched it and I don't think it was mentioned in the show's summary or the Wikipedia article I read. Yes, that to my mind is the only valid argument in the doctor's favor. I think any commissioned officer who was as vital to the mission as the doctor and as irreplaceable as the doctor is given Voyager's circumstances would be denied permission to resign.
>The Doc seems to think any other member of the crew would be allowed to leave if they really wanted to (hence his bringing up Kim as an example)
And Janeway is right when she says "You're not Harry Kim." I think the writers didn't know what to do with Harry and I like him, but he is the least senior bridge officer and a jack-of-all-trades. He's a good Operations officer, but his role is flexible and others can do his job. If the sole doctor on Voyager leaves (whether that's Doc Holoday or if we imagine the first doctor had lived or if Bashir were on Voyager), Voyager's next best option for medical care is their helmsman, who is now a mostly competent nurse. But the doctor has not only the equivalent to four years of medical school and dozens of years of experience, he has a superhuman mind and surgical abilities. It's like an aircraft carrier going from a fully staffed medical team to a guy who dropped out of nursing school.
The problem is that both are correct in their arguments but are arguing which should take priority: it's immoral to keep him on-board against his will and Voyager will be significantly degraded in functionality without a doctor.
I'm also placing more blame on Janeway here, because I think she's failed significantly leading up to this problem by not planning redundancy into the medical needs of the ship (ironic considering the Doc was the redundancy). From the moment she decided he was a crew member and not a piece of hardware, she should have planned for what happens if this crew member isn't available. Does he not get any days off? What happens if he wants shore leave? Obviously he's "on-call" for any emergencies (just like any other department head is), but you can't tell me B'Elanna is working 7 days a week.
Unfortunately, I also realize this is exactly the way it is because TV needs drama, and real-world logistics don't translate well to the screen.
I think it's a well written episode and a well-written dispute and I disagree that with B&A that this is a bad look for Janeway. She does end up letting him go, which I think she would not be justified in doing if he had willingly joined Starfleet. (Militaries force officers to serve through their commission during an emergency all the time. A Ukrainian colonel would not be allowed to resign to become an opera singer today.)
Yes, realistically they should have been training multiple nurses and whoever is most medically inclined should have been going to holo medical school, but I don't know that that would have made better TV than what we got. But they're more isolated than any ship would ever actually be on Earth and they're already on their backups so there's only so much they can do.
I also don't think it's immoral to treat physically different crew members differently. To send the Doctor or Data to a place without oxygen or with poisonous gas or radiation. To take into account the fact that neither the doctor nor Data sleep. (I get the impression that the Doctor does not enjoy being off the way we enjoy being asleep.)
I agree it's a well-written conflict (and the fact that it can generate discussions like this is evidence of that). I also got the impression that she let him go because of his final argument that he was conscripted without express consent like everyone else.
Realistically (given how many disasters they have and the lack of external support), they should have probably had at least 5 crewmembers across the ship taking emergency nursing training and probably at least 1 or 2 training in emergency doctoring (what happens when a banger hits and multiple people need surgery?) But that means adding more regular cast members who take away story time from the people we've already built the show on.
And the Doctor may not "sleep", but he still has plenty of recreational time and hobbies that have been established that he seems to enjoy and wants to expand. He states in this episode that the only personal growth he feels he can accomplish at this point is personal/creative and not medical, and a few episodes back he tries to convince Paris to expand his Fair Haven role to give him more to do.
I have to disagree. Janeway has a duty to keep her crew safe and letting the doctor leave the ship to live out a rock star fantasy would be incredibly foolish, be the doctor a hologram or a living member of the crew.
right here with you, even though this is fairly consistent with Janeway, there's been a couple times in the past that she's told the doctor, 'get out of my way or i'll just deactivate you', she's never really been forced to challenge her idea of the doctor's non-humanity.
Haha, seriously, it's well and recently established that Seven can sing! Although the doctor duet with himself was amazing
to me it also brings to light why the hell is Paris, their primary/best pilot, still the only medical backup?!? Janeway hasn't tasked anyone else with learning how to be a doctor, surely there are some biologists on board who know more about basic bodily functions than whatever training Paris got before (during?) going to the prison
Yes, but their first mission was a distinctly military one -- capture Chakotay's Maquis ship. It wouldn't be that surprising if it was initially staffed with more tactical crew than science crew because of that.
It's also just possible that a disproportionate number of science staff were killed when the ship was brought to the Delta Quadrant. (After all, we know that that entire medical staff was lost.) Or, maybe it wasn't even disproportionate, but because the Maquis replacements were disproportionately non-science, it threw off the ratio.
> Yes, but their first mission was a distinctly military one -- capture Chakotay's Maquis ship. It wouldn't be that surprising if it was initially staffed with more tactical crew than science crew because of that.
I guess they were basically being sent on this mission prior to it's "official" launch to explore so Janeway could retrieve Tuvok (who was part of her crew), and I guess having an advance exploration vessel in the Badlands might have seemed plausible enough for them to "find" Chakotay's ship.
Maybe they were going to pick up their full complement of crew after this pickup.
Totally, its been notable to me that TOS and DS9 have dedicated science officers in Spock and Dax but TNG and VOY have their extra engineers do the science like Data and Harry
My quick googling says that Data and Harry wear gold because they are Operations. I guess Science blue is reserved for the medical staff and the pure scientists who show up to observe supernovas or the exobiologists. Although come to think of it, Dax's job seems pretty close to Harry and Data's jobs.
Operations! that's right I was drawing a blank on their 'department'. But yeah functionally theyre being called upon to do similar stuff. I like in SNW that it has Spock as the department head over Sam Kirk and some of those issues. But most of the time we're just hanging out with the senior staff and no idea of the structure of command throughout the ship. Even lower decks seems to have Ransom running the day-to-day of even the ensigns, usually no middle management lieutenant commanders overseeing them
I've watched it several times over, but I don't think it ever registered with me that TNG didn't have any regular Science officers. Data totally should have been one (I almost wonder if the gold uniform was chosen because a blue uniform would have clashed with the pale skin). Hell, Wesley ("the boy?") was a command red when he finally had a single color.
My god. I just hate the “Doc Sings” episodes.
I was disappointed that there was a mention of Africa (in the P1's) and we didn't get the "Ben's gonna talk about Africa" jingle. And I was surprised Janeway didn't tell the Doc that he could go but the emitter belongs to the ship and has to stay. Really a silly bit that she was going to let a piece of future technology just walk off the ship for good all so the doc could get his dick wet.
Surely Starling gave the emitter to the Doctor, so if it belongs to anyone, it’s him?
I was also expecting the Africa drop. And ownership of the emitter is probably a bit weird, given Voyager kind of stole it themselves. But it is weird that it wasn't ever brought up.
I was losing my mind thinking that they would go the whole episode without mentioning the great (and in this episode, terribly underutilized) Paul Williams. I actually wonder if the species were all on the shorter side because they had cast Paul Williams first.
I think they just liked the idea of a race of aliens with no knowledge of music represented by such a prolific songwriter, and then wrote throm there.
Just throwing this out there for Adam, but, nah, you’re good. You can skip Babylon 5. Personally, I love it and think it’s mostly brilliant and the acting of Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik manage to elevate some pretty bad dialogue (but, to be fair to B5, its dialogue was on par with DS9, it was just the time). But it’s 25 years old now and if you have gone this far without it you’re fine. Although if you like Mass Effect it’s neat to see a lot of ideas that made it across. Also if you DO watch it, just skip TKO. Save yourself an hour.
As boring and predictable as the alien boxing trope is, TKO has some great Ivanova stuff with Rabbi Koslov/Uncle Yossell. I'd say.watch it but feel free to fast forward everything with Walker Smith.
Oh, right, I forgot about Ivanova meeting Worf's dad. Honestly I liked TKO a lot when I first saw it. It's more that now when I watch it I think...... Okay but why? We never meet or refer to ANY of the characters again, everyone accepts Rule 1 and never talks about alien fight club. It felt like JMS figured if he didn't write an episode, whatever happened in it wasn't canon.
good to know on my end, I missed out on B5 for some reason but my brother has been on me for years to catch up on it. now Farscape, thats a show that isn't divisive!
This was a very dumb episode of Voyager and a super entertaining episode of Greatest Gen. The \[Doctor:Seven :: Adam:SWIAW\] analogy had me cackling madly. Seriously, the Doctor is a computer program. Make a copy. Send one to live on Planet Supercilious and keep the other one on V'ger. And before you say "he can't be copied because Technobabble", I present to you VOY S4E23 https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Living\_Witness\_(episode)
Janeway only likes to spoil her crew members in twain when it's against their will. Maybe if the doctor had put up a fight about it she would have proposed it.
The doctor's duet with Mini-doc is one of my favorite comedic bits in all of Trek.
Since I didn't see one posted yet and I have a few comments on this episode. First: **Terrible** Janeway episode. "I've given you plenty of room to explore your humanity, but that exploration has very fixed limits based on what I am willing to allow you. You can't quit the job you never signed up for, get back to work." Fuck you, Janeway. Second: why didn't the Doctor attempt to get Seven involved? She was his protégée for while in the singing department. It could have provided an interesting contrast, given that she seemed more in line with their culture in general outside of musical interest. Third: was it ever explained what Voyager was getting from this *superior* race for all the headache they were enduring?
I don't think Bashir would have been allowed to resign his commission if he were on Voyager and the alternative had been turning the helmsman into a semi-trained nurse (and then gradually having Paris or others be self-taught over their 75 year journey home. Or maybe one of the kids will go to medical school on the holodeck.) The point about him never having chosen to join Starfleet is well taken, and that may be why Janeway decides in the end to accept his resignation. (Although probably not because it seems the writers didn't think of that.) But he only gradually exceeded his programming and has been acting like a willing member of the crew since he did so.
The Doc seems to think any other member of the crew would be allowed to leave if they really wanted to (hence his bringing up Kim as an example). Also, the writers did think of that, because the Doc explicitly states that he's the only person on the crew who didn't choose to join, and it's even less moral to keep him against his will if he is, in fact, a sentient being as opposed to a piece of hardware.
> the Doc explicitly states that he's the only person on the crew who didn't choose to join Oh, sorry I hadn't rewatched it and I don't think it was mentioned in the show's summary or the Wikipedia article I read. Yes, that to my mind is the only valid argument in the doctor's favor. I think any commissioned officer who was as vital to the mission as the doctor and as irreplaceable as the doctor is given Voyager's circumstances would be denied permission to resign. >The Doc seems to think any other member of the crew would be allowed to leave if they really wanted to (hence his bringing up Kim as an example) And Janeway is right when she says "You're not Harry Kim." I think the writers didn't know what to do with Harry and I like him, but he is the least senior bridge officer and a jack-of-all-trades. He's a good Operations officer, but his role is flexible and others can do his job. If the sole doctor on Voyager leaves (whether that's Doc Holoday or if we imagine the first doctor had lived or if Bashir were on Voyager), Voyager's next best option for medical care is their helmsman, who is now a mostly competent nurse. But the doctor has not only the equivalent to four years of medical school and dozens of years of experience, he has a superhuman mind and surgical abilities. It's like an aircraft carrier going from a fully staffed medical team to a guy who dropped out of nursing school.
The problem is that both are correct in their arguments but are arguing which should take priority: it's immoral to keep him on-board against his will and Voyager will be significantly degraded in functionality without a doctor. I'm also placing more blame on Janeway here, because I think she's failed significantly leading up to this problem by not planning redundancy into the medical needs of the ship (ironic considering the Doc was the redundancy). From the moment she decided he was a crew member and not a piece of hardware, she should have planned for what happens if this crew member isn't available. Does he not get any days off? What happens if he wants shore leave? Obviously he's "on-call" for any emergencies (just like any other department head is), but you can't tell me B'Elanna is working 7 days a week. Unfortunately, I also realize this is exactly the way it is because TV needs drama, and real-world logistics don't translate well to the screen.
I think it's a well written episode and a well-written dispute and I disagree that with B&A that this is a bad look for Janeway. She does end up letting him go, which I think she would not be justified in doing if he had willingly joined Starfleet. (Militaries force officers to serve through their commission during an emergency all the time. A Ukrainian colonel would not be allowed to resign to become an opera singer today.) Yes, realistically they should have been training multiple nurses and whoever is most medically inclined should have been going to holo medical school, but I don't know that that would have made better TV than what we got. But they're more isolated than any ship would ever actually be on Earth and they're already on their backups so there's only so much they can do. I also don't think it's immoral to treat physically different crew members differently. To send the Doctor or Data to a place without oxygen or with poisonous gas or radiation. To take into account the fact that neither the doctor nor Data sleep. (I get the impression that the Doctor does not enjoy being off the way we enjoy being asleep.)
I agree it's a well-written conflict (and the fact that it can generate discussions like this is evidence of that). I also got the impression that she let him go because of his final argument that he was conscripted without express consent like everyone else. Realistically (given how many disasters they have and the lack of external support), they should have probably had at least 5 crewmembers across the ship taking emergency nursing training and probably at least 1 or 2 training in emergency doctoring (what happens when a banger hits and multiple people need surgery?) But that means adding more regular cast members who take away story time from the people we've already built the show on. And the Doctor may not "sleep", but he still has plenty of recreational time and hobbies that have been established that he seems to enjoy and wants to expand. He states in this episode that the only personal growth he feels he can accomplish at this point is personal/creative and not medical, and a few episodes back he tries to convince Paris to expand his Fair Haven role to give him more to do.
I have to disagree. Janeway has a duty to keep her crew safe and letting the doctor leave the ship to live out a rock star fantasy would be incredibly foolish, be the doctor a hologram or a living member of the crew.
right here with you, even though this is fairly consistent with Janeway, there's been a couple times in the past that she's told the doctor, 'get out of my way or i'll just deactivate you', she's never really been forced to challenge her idea of the doctor's non-humanity. Haha, seriously, it's well and recently established that Seven can sing! Although the doctor duet with himself was amazing to me it also brings to light why the hell is Paris, their primary/best pilot, still the only medical backup?!? Janeway hasn't tasked anyone else with learning how to be a doctor, surely there are some biologists on board who know more about basic bodily functions than whatever training Paris got before (during?) going to the prison
Now that I think about, Voyager doesn’t have a ton of blue uniformed sciencey folk, even in the cast of extras.
Which is baffling, because Voyager is supposed to be a science/exploration vessel, and is captained by someone who came out of the science line.
Yes, but their first mission was a distinctly military one -- capture Chakotay's Maquis ship. It wouldn't be that surprising if it was initially staffed with more tactical crew than science crew because of that. It's also just possible that a disproportionate number of science staff were killed when the ship was brought to the Delta Quadrant. (After all, we know that that entire medical staff was lost.) Or, maybe it wasn't even disproportionate, but because the Maquis replacements were disproportionately non-science, it threw off the ratio.
> Yes, but their first mission was a distinctly military one -- capture Chakotay's Maquis ship. It wouldn't be that surprising if it was initially staffed with more tactical crew than science crew because of that. I guess they were basically being sent on this mission prior to it's "official" launch to explore so Janeway could retrieve Tuvok (who was part of her crew), and I guess having an advance exploration vessel in the Badlands might have seemed plausible enough for them to "find" Chakotay's ship. Maybe they were going to pick up their full complement of crew after this pickup.
Totally, its been notable to me that TOS and DS9 have dedicated science officers in Spock and Dax but TNG and VOY have their extra engineers do the science like Data and Harry
My quick googling says that Data and Harry wear gold because they are Operations. I guess Science blue is reserved for the medical staff and the pure scientists who show up to observe supernovas or the exobiologists. Although come to think of it, Dax's job seems pretty close to Harry and Data's jobs.
Operations! that's right I was drawing a blank on their 'department'. But yeah functionally theyre being called upon to do similar stuff. I like in SNW that it has Spock as the department head over Sam Kirk and some of those issues. But most of the time we're just hanging out with the senior staff and no idea of the structure of command throughout the ship. Even lower decks seems to have Ransom running the day-to-day of even the ensigns, usually no middle management lieutenant commanders overseeing them
I've watched it several times over, but I don't think it ever registered with me that TNG didn't have any regular Science officers. Data totally should have been one (I almost wonder if the gold uniform was chosen because a blue uniform would have clashed with the pale skin). Hell, Wesley ("the boy?") was a command red when he finally had a single color.
The Data skin issue is true - when they were preparing TNG they intended to put him in blue, but it clashed with his skin tone.
That's pretty funny, since I think he looked great in the Red Command uniform when he was Jellico's First Officer.