Treknobabble

Chakotay, Harry and Neelix find Voyager drifting within a nebula, derelict. They discover that the rest of the crew has left the ship and have apparently taken new jobs on an industrialized planet.

It's a new day and a new series of Star Trek, and joy of joys, it's actually....good? At least solid with the potential to be pretty good? There are pluses and minuses, but for its 21 minute runtime, the episode was pretty enjoyable and left neither of us outraged, so a definite step up.

When Voyager runs afoul of an Anomaly Of The Week, it is split between different time periods along its trek home to the alpha quadrant.

The Doctor's program is stolen and he is forced into working for a vast hospital ship where he fights to save the lives of people whose society has determined they aren't worth the resources.

Voyager encounters a strange, new world where time moves must faster. 

We're back with another Voyager episode and a crossover with two beloved TNG characters, Counselor Troi and Lieutenant Barclay. Barclay is hard at work trying to find a way to communicate with Voyager, but the stress is getting to him. He feels himself falling back on old habits and reaches out to Counselor Troi for help.

The Enterprise is summoned to a planet deep within a chatoic nebula inhabited by a peaceful people, the Ba'ku. But their idyllic village hides a dangerous secret, a verifiable fountain of youth. The crew must now protect these people from those would exploit this world, even if that includes Starfleet.

Voyager comes across another starship stranded in the Delta Quadrant - one whose crew made vastly different decisions than their own.

Seven of Nine must think on her feet when she is abducted by time travelers and charged with saving Voyager from destruction.

Just as Voyager encounter a seemingly unsolvable problem, the ship encounters a travelling think tank, solving impossible problems on a galactic scales, staffed by a diverse array of the most intelligent beings in the galaxy. They are willing to help, but for a hefty price --- Seven of Nine.

Captain Janeway has devised a daring plan to help the crew get home: steal a transwarp coil from the Borg. In addition to the more obvious dangers, the mission will also force Seven to confront the legacy of her parents work and the decisions that led her to be assimilated. A prdouction note: This got recorded during the midseason break for Discovery, so some of the conversation that inevitably bubbles up about Discovery may seem out of date.

Discovery has returned to the prime universe, only to discover that the Klingons have nearly won the war in their absence. On board the ship, the crew deals with the fallout of Tyler's betrayal in their own ways.

Mirror Lorca's plan comes to fruition with an all out assault on the emperor, with Burnham and Discovery caught in the middle.

Burnham comes face to face with the Terran Emperor while Saru tries to find a way to help Tyler and Stamets meets a familiar face in the mycelial network.

Burnham remains on the Mirror Universe Shenzhou searching for the information that will lead to a way home. Tyler struggles with his identity come closer to the surface at the worst possible time. And Saru and Tilly must find a way to save Stamets' life.

The ship is trapped in the Mirror Universe. Burnham devises a daring plan to get home, but it involves pretending to be her counterpart on this universe's Shenzhou. Meanwhile, Tyler's sanity appears to find its breaking point as he questions who and what he is.

Captain Janeway has hatched an audacious plan: to steal technology from the Borg in an attempt to get the crew home. But tangling with the Collective forces Seven to face the legacy of her parents work and the propsect of setting foot on a Borg ship again.

A race of photonic aliens mistake Tom's Captain Proton holodeck program for reality, and try to enter it. This causes a (admittedly predictable) malfunction. To solve it, the crew will have to defeat the villainous Chaotica in his own world. Will the safeties still work? Will the crew escape? Stay tuned for the next installment of Treknobabble!

In the midseason finale, the crew faces off against the Klingons and attempts to find a way to circumvent their cloaking device, but the daring plan places Burnham, Tyler, and Stamets in grave danger.

Burnham, Tyler, and Saru are sent on a sensitive mission with implication for the entire Federation war effort. Meanwhile, Admiral Cornwell is still in the clutches of the Klingons...Ed. note --- She better not be dead. I will be very angry at you, Discovery.

Harry Mudd is back and he is not happy. Possessed with a device that lets him repeat the same thirty minute loop infinitely, he is trying to figure out how to capture Discovery and sell it to the Klingons. Due to his genetic engineering to operate the spore drive, only Stamets remembers events from one loop to the next. Can he convince the crew to listen to him and formualte a plan to stop Mudd, all in less than thirty minutes?

Sarek is injured in a terrorist attack and Burnham may be his only hope. Meanwhile, Admiral Cornwall arrives on Discovery and is questioning Lorca's recent decisions and fitness to command.

Lorca is captured by Klingons while returning from a meeting with Starfleet, leaving Saru in charge. Burnham realizes the jumps are killing the Tardigrade. Can she allow another, even if it means saving their captain?

We continue our review of Voyager Season 5 with the series' 100th episode, and it's a doozy. The episode opens to find Voyager buried under a sheet of ice and a much older Chakotay and Harry Kim executed a daring plan to save it.Production note: Much like the TV series, sometimes things get produced and aired in different orders, so at the end of this we are flogging our then still pending review of Discovery's Context is for Kings, which obviously has been up for a couple of weeks by now. We're not crazy, just busy and before we knew it, more Discovery had aired and the Voyager review wasn't ready to publish. Thus is life. Enjoy!

An attack on a vital mining operation forces up the Discovery's timeline for getting its engines working. Burnham is tasked with learning what she can from the ships newest acquisition that can help their war effort. Today's triva: This, shockingly, is NOT the longest title in the history of the show. That honor goes to TOS' For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.

On her way to a prison colony, Burnham's shuttle is damaged and rescued by the USS Discovery. Her captain quickly conscripts Burnham to assist in a mysterious experiment. She is now surrounded by a crew that doesn't trust her, and working for a captain she doesn't entirely trust. What is the Discovery really working on, and more importantly, why is this show set 10 years before TOS and not 100 after VOY???

Welcome to the premiere review podcast for the first new Trek series in over a decade. Despite years of vague foreboding, we both felt there was a lot to like here and have mustered just enough cautious optimism to keep going! We're joined this week by fellow Trekkie and Klingon language expert, John Harness (@cartweel on Twitter).

Despite our joy (and apprehension) at the forthcoming Star Trek Discovery, we're going to keep working through the remaining VOY and ENT episodes that we have yet to review. This week, Voyager discovers an eerily accurate simulation of Earth and Starfleet Headquarters, right down to the gardener. Who built it, and why?

So, here we are. Seven years facing off against Bajoran separatists, possibly divine wormhole aliens, Cardassian, Klingons, the Dominion, and whatever scheme Quark is up to this week. How will our crew fare? Will the Federation win the war? Will they stop Dukat and Kai Winn from unleashing hell itself? What will it cost them, even if they do?

The Breen have attacked Earth. Damar has staged a rebellion. Dukat and Winn take a bloody step forward in their plan to release the pahwraiths. Ounce for ounce, this is one of the most exciting episodes of DS9 ever!

As DS9 enters the homestretch, it embarks on an amitious, and heretofore largely forbidden plot device: the serialized story. The Dominion War is drawing to a climax, and all the cast of DS9 both friend and foe will forced to make hard choices about its outcome. Is it chaotic and occasionally uneven? Sure. Would we trade it for anything? Nope.

So, is being the called the least awful of the Abrams movies a compliment? Probably not, but it's the best this 1984b of the franchise is going to get from us. The actors are really trying, and there is some tentative attempts to explore the themes that TOS and its movies did, but it still pretty much devolves into an excuse to get Chris Pine on a motorcycle.

We learn a lot in this episode. We learn that the Federation's multicultural values are not just talk as we see Nog excel not just as a Starfleet officer, but as a wheeling and dealing Ferengi. We learn that the Dominion is not the unified front that it tries to present. And if the title is anything to go by, we learn that the Oxford command does not survive to the 24th century.

We return to DS9 for its final season. When we last left the show, everyone and everything was in chaos. After Jadzia's (useless) death, Sisko has taken a leave of absence and the Prophets seem to have abandoned Bajor. We open the season to find Sisko trying to make sense of his losses in his father's restaurant. Meanwhile, Kira has been left in charge of the station, and her first challenge will be to navigate Romulan intrigue and Worf must find a way to honor the wife he lost.

Voyager gets some assistance from a new friend in decrypting Starfleet's message. The results appear to be a way home. Is it too good to be true? (Spoiler Alert: Yes, yes it is. Always)

The Doctor awakens to find himself centuries in the future and the only person left who can clear Voyager's name, as history has judged Janeway a genocidal monster and the crew her violent lackeys. The Doctor quickly learns, however, that setting the record straight will not be easy, not will it come without consequences.

An explosion has ripped through the holodeck and taken out several decks of the ship. But in the good news department, Janeway is Janeway again and that's always going to stack the odds in your favor. Get on your best black turtleneck and let's go take out some Nazis!

The crew has been captured by the Hirogen and is being forced to fight and die over and over again in holodeck simulations to give the Hirogen insight into Alpha Quadrant species  history and capability. Neelix is a Klingon. B'Elanna is very pregant. And Janeway is serving you Marlene Dietrich realness in a tuxedo ensemble that alone justifies this whole episode.

Voyager finds a network of apparently abandoned satellites that will allow them to communicate with Earth in real time. The catch (and of course there is one) is that the only transmission that would survive the trip is the Doctor's program. The Doctor is sent hurtling across the galaxy and finds himself on the USS Prometheus --- just after it has been hijacked by Romulans. (See what I mean with the catches?) His only ally is this ship's EMH, a cocky Mark II. Can the stalwart holograms save the ship?

Voyager is not in the best of shape. Down a nacelle and most of her crew, Janeway leads a skeleton crew trying to hold the ship together with spit and prayer, and the strain, particularly on Janeway, is beginning to show. Chakotay and Paris are still being held by Annorax and his obsession with correcting the timeline.

Voyager enters a region of space controlled by the Krenim, who at first seem to be a small, easily avoided regional power. Before the viewers eyes however, they are transformed to an advanced and belligerent nation and Voyager constantly faces destruction. The cause of this transformation is a Krenim scientist whose obsession with restoring his people and his family to him has let him to manipulate time itself.

The Federation is finally ready to go on the offensive. On the eve of battle, Sisko receives a dire warning from the Prophets that pits his obligations as the Emissary and a Starfleet captain against each other. Meanwhile, Dukat's plan comes to fruition, with dire consequences for our crew.

Jake and Nog's trip to Ferenginar is cut short by a Dominon attack. They are rescued in the nick of time by a ship they initially think is the Defiant, but is actually the USS Valiant. The Valiant is another Defiant-class ship, but this one was only meant to be a training vessel for the elite cadets on it. The commissioned officers were killed in action, leaving the group of cadets to run the ship. How will Jake and Nog handle life on the USS Lord of the Flies?

Dax, O'Brien, and Bashir are on a runabout exploring a spatial distortion that causes them to shrink. Meanwhile, the Defiant is attacked and captured by Jem'Hadar. The runabout is now the size of a housecat, and its crew about two inches tall, but somehow, they have to help the crew retake the ship.

Doctor Bashir takes over the care of four patients who were genetically engineered, like he was. Unlike him, though, their procedures did not go well. While all extraordinarily brilliant, each suffers a different kind of mental disability that makes them unable to live on their own in the outside world. Bashir is hoping to find a way to help them, and may have it in unleash their mental powers on the Dominion War effort.

The time has come to reclaim the station. They must do so before the Dominion can bring down the minefield and let the Dominion fleet through the wormhole. To compound things, Kira, Jake, and Ziyal have been arrested and Rom is set to be executed for their attempt to sabotage the station. 

Three months into the war finds things not going well for the Federation. Loss piles on top of loss. Sisko and his crew are given the Jem'Hadar ship they captured last year and a dangerous mission: to take out the ketracel white facility deep in Cardassian space, hobbling the Jem'Hadar. 

Voyager has finally entered Borg space. To the crew's surprise, the Collective seems to be preoccupied with a war with a new and terrifying species that poses a real threat to them. To navigate Borg space safely, Janeway might have to make a deal with the devil. Will it work, and will her crew stand behind her if she does?

Kes wakes up in Sickbay, apparently at the end of her life but no memory of how she got there. She begins jumping backward through time, finding she is married to Tom Paris with a child. Each jump backwards leaves her with more information but more questions. 

Janeway is injured and apparently killed in a shuttle accident. Then she wakes up in the shuttle to experience it again. And again. Eventually, she seems to be a ghost watching her crew mourn her death. Is Janeway really dead? Can she break out of this loop if she's not?

The Doctor is being held hostage. Voyager has been spotted by 20th century news cameras. Starling is still working to launch his timeship, further disrupting the timeline. Can Voyager find a way to stop him and get back to their own time?