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Star Trek Voyager - The Complete Third Season

Star Trek Voyager - The Complete Third Season

List Price: $129.99
Your Price: $97.49
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good character development-a worthwhile season!
Review: This season of Voyager has some excellent writing and starts to ask some more challenging
ethical questions. The actors work together in an ensemble that begins to build some contrast
and sexual tension between the characters. I particularly liked an episode that utilized the Vulcan
mating season, the pon farr, to reveal more about some of the major characters in the series, as
well as reveal some of the psychological dynamics of Vulcans. The addition of the Borg as an
antagonist brings a pleasing level of tension to the storyline. I look forward to the next season.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Voyager's third season an improvement from the second.
Review: After a mediocre second season,Star Trek Voyager's third season was an improvement. Although being the flagship series of the still new UPN network,it carried the burden of being a non Trekker friendly show,thus becoming Trek-lite to hardcore fans.
While it's sister show which was currently airing at the time, Deep Space Nine, was emerging as Trek's greatest series with it's ambitious multi-layered storytelling, Voyager was becoming a very mundane show as it played it safe with viewers, despite it's concept of two oppoising crews(Starfleet and Maquis) working to ensure survival as they find a way home from a distant part of the galaxy.
Using gimmicks such as guest appearences from Original series era stars (Flashback which included Captain Sulu during Star Trek VI),Time Travel (Futures End which the crew goes back to 20th century earth only to end up back in the Delta Quadrent at the end.HELLO, Slingshot effect!!!),as well as appearences by Ferengi and The Borg.One very insulting moment happened during the teaser to Warlord which shows a possessed Kes about to kiss another woman in a scintellating preview.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Season 3 hangs in there..
Review: Ah, season 3 of Voyager... well, it continued to show signs of how good it could be, but generally it was a flat year. "Basics Part II" was a good start (but somehow solutions in Voyager are always too easy!!), but soon the season slipped into stories that were just not really intersting or involving. "Flashback" was a weak story for the anniversary and was totally out of whack with continuity. "Future's End" was fun but light-weight, and "The Q and the Grey" was a dumb story and a poor excuse to get Q back. Kathy continues to go off her trolly as the each season progresses e.g. "Macrocosms" turns her into Bruce Willis (and it's similar to TNG's "Starship Mine" episode). Kes finally has some good acting to do in "Warlord" and it's a shame that she was wasted. Why didn't Neelix get the boot? "Scorpion" was a good way to end the season, but after that, it all went down hill with recycled stories and technobable solutions and weak characterisation... shame, it had such potential!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Still better than Enterprise
Review: As bad as people say Star Trek Voyager was, even the worst Voyager is better than any episode of Star Trek Enterprise. I don't see what people's problem with Voyager is, it wasn't that bad. Season three had some very good episodes. The botton line is, if people like the show, they are going to buy the DVDs, if not, they won't. Writing reviews saying you think the show sucks, or argueing about the Borg episodes isn't going to change anyone's minds.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One of the best seasons
Review: Basics, part 2- 9/10
Flashback- 2/10
The Chute- 4/10
The Swarm- don't remember

False Profits- 2/10
Remember- 9/10
Sacred Ground- 9/10
Future's End Part 1- 8/10

Future's End Part 2- 8/10
Warlord- 4/10
The Q and the Grey- 7/10
Macrocosm- don't remember

Fair Trade- 5/10
Alter Ego- 2/10
Coda- 8/10
Blood Fever- 9/10

Unity- 3/10
Darkling- 4/10
Rise- 4/10
Favorite Son- 7/10

Before and After- 10/10
Real Life- 3/10
Distant Origin- 2/10
Displaced- 9/10

Worst Case Scenario- 10/10
Scorpion, part 1- 8/10

1-10, 1 being the worst, 10 being terrific



The best episodes are: Before and After, Blood Fever, Worst Case Scenario, Basics, part 2, Displaced, Remember, Sacred Ground

The worst episodes are: False Profits, Flashback, Alter Ego, Distant Origin, Real Life, Unity

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Strong Season
Review: For my money, season three is one of the very best of Voyager. It's clearly a transitional year, from what I feel was a very weak season two to a more action-oriented, meaty, and fun season four.

The most superb episode of the season, and one of the best of Trek, is Scorpion Part 1, which introduces Species 8472. I remember watching this when it was originally broadcast. Back then the idea of a species "more powerful than the Borg" was almost unimaginable. The introduction of this alien race really injected some life into Voyager villainy, which had been mired for two seasons in the tired and rehashed Kazon story arc. Just look at the foreheads of those guys and tell me that they're not just a cross between Cardassians and Klingons. And we never met a Kazon female!

The other standouts in the third year of Voyager are Future's End, though the first installment is much more interesting and tightly scripted than the second; the engaging Distant Origin, which very cleverly presented its first couple of acts from the perspective of the dinosaur aliens; and Before and After. Not many praise that episode, but it does showcase some of Jennifer Lien's best acting, especially when she's a very confused 9-yr.-old at the episode's beginning. The backwards plot movement makes us wonder what happens next--meaning what happened before--along with Kes. We get at least a glimpse of what Kes might have developed into over the seven-year run of the show, are introduced to the Krenem, and the episode moves along the Torres-Paris romance subplot. We even get a passing reference to Kes' one lung (she donated the other to Neelix in season one). What's not to like?

Solid episodes in season three are many: There's the strong Basics Part 2, which nicely wraps up the Kazon, Seska, and Suder story lines, and The Swarm, where we finally get to meet, sort of, the Doctor's creator. There's False Profits, which finds a clever way to bring the Ferengi into the Delta Quadrant, simply by pointing out that two have been there already for a few years. I like very much both Remember and Sacred Ground, though by the end of the season Janeway seems to forget the lesson in spirituality she learned in the latter episode. When in Scorpion Leonardo suggests that she pray, Janeway rejects the suggestion pretty much immediately. Also solid are The Q and the Grey, though this gets derailed by the end, and Macrocosm, with its famous, or infamous, scenes of Kate Mulgrew looking fantastic in her tank top. I also like Blood Fever very much, as well as Unity, Displaced, Worst Case Scenario, and Real Life. This last I long thought poorly of because the Klingon friends of the Doctor's holographic son struck me as a negative racial stereotype. But perhaps I was being oversensitive.

Weaker, but still good, episodes include Flashback, which could have been great, The Chute, Alter Ego, Coda, and Warlord, which could have been really silly if not for Lien's intense performance. I know a lot of people hate Favorite Son and Harry Kim episodes generally, but this episode does have that sense of campiness that made the original series so much fun. Demon women pounding big wooden sticks on the floor just really appeals to me, I guess.

Two episodes I would rate the season's worst. First, Rise, which tries to be pulse-pounding but ends up being just dumb, and second, Darkling, which even that superb thespian Robert Picardo can't save. I was also annoyed that this episode assumes that the romance of Neelix and Kes has already ended. The problem is that the "break up" between the two in Warlord occurs when Kes is being possessed by an alien. So did they ever really break up? Did they ever talk about it ro resolve the relationship? We're just left hanging on this score. The relationship between these two characters always felt weird, though, so it's good that it ended somehow, I suppose.

After basically suffering through rewatchings of many season two episodes, the season three DVD set provided a pretty exhilarating experience. The extra stuff is generally good, though the "Braving the Unknown" segment seems much shorter than for seasons 1 and 2, and the "Easter Egg" ostensible surprises are pretty lame. Three-fourths of most of them consist of clips from episodes that you could just watch yourself, interspersed with a few comments by one actor or another. Certainly these extras are better than nothing, but it would be great to see more interviews with well-known guest actors.

In sum: every Voyager fan must own this, and Star Trek and sci fi fans more generally should give it a try, starting perhaps with the last two discs.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Getting better all the time
Review: George Takei reprises his role as Sulu in "Flashback"..one of the best episodes ever on "Voyager". Watch for Jeri Ryan (7 of 9) in the final episode. HOT!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Memorable episodes of a mediocre series...
Review: I have been in love with Star Trek for as long as I can remember, and I have faithfully watched every series from start to finish. Given the great stuff being done in recent years with TNG and DS9, I really expected to like Voyager. I thought the first two seasons were a lot of fun; not the best Trek I'd ever seen, but pretty solid stuff. Interesting plots, colorful characters, it really seemed like the show was going places. Then came along season 3. That's not to say this season is bad; actually, there are a lot of good episodes from this year. One of my personal favorites was the episode with Sulu, which was just a blast to see. The season also had a great beginning and end, wrapping up the Kazon arc (finally) and bringing in the Borg (finally). "Scorpion" is one of the show's best episodes, not only bringing back one of Star Trek's most compelling races, the Borg, but also introducing the creepy Species 8472 (It's a pity the subsequent Borg episodes in later seasons never measured up to this one). All that said, however, the beginning of the series' downward spiral can be seen here. Without the Kazon as an ever-present threat (and they were never that compelling as villains, anyway), the show bounces from one alien race to the next week to week, trying to find a new recurring enemy, a pattern it basically repeats for the rest of its run. The interesting character of Kes, who was never developed to her potential, ends her stay on the show with this season, and is replaced in season 4 by the insufferable Seven of Nine, perhaps the most blatantly sexist character in Star Trek history. Some of the episodes take a turn for the comedic, too, such as the one where a bunch of microbes grow to giant size and take over the ship. Granted, Voyager isn't alone in this; a lot of the Original Series' episodes were pretty out there, and some of DS9's early shows were fairly hokey, but somehow, the sight of a bunch of giant microbe-virus things attacking that resort on the holodeck made it a lot harder for me to take this show seriously. Then the episode where Belana gets somehow infected with Vulcan pon-farr is pretty far-fetched, too. It's entertaining, certainly, but really doesn't make any logical (no pun intended) sense, and seems sort of like a way for the writers to just throw in some meaningles sex to boost the ratings. Still, the season does have its moments, and is (in my opinion, anyway) probably the last good season of Voyager that aired. If you're interested in Star Trek, though, I'd go with one of the other series first.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good... yet... somewhat incomplete.
Review: I jumped in on this series only recently, forming a new appreciation for the details that makes it unique-- i.e. the crew interaction and character development that sets it apart from The Next Generation and gives the series a flavor of its own. The overall fast-paced, high-speed inertia that viewers were thrust into early in on the series is continued in this season. Stories continued to be both intruiging and amazing.. however.. in some ways, I felt slightly unsatisfied at the end of many episodes.

While the stories slightly helped develop each character a little more deeply... it seems like there was a little less attention to detail in this season. Some parts seemed forced and rushed (especially some deaths early on in the season, which left me somewhat unsatisfied because I felt many of those characters deserved a little more detail in the end than what they were given). Some episodes seemed to leave out minor details or skip over things that could have been explored even further. Some even left me thinking, "Wait... is that it? It can't be.. there HAS to be more!"

However, as far as strengths go, this season continued to build my admiration in Janeway as a (fictional) superb leader who I wish I could have known and worked for. And some of the other major details (especially some that linked the series to previous movies and series) were extremely enjoyable, especially since they brought back to light things I may have thought about while watching Star Trek in the past.

Besides, seeing Sulu in Star Trek is always cool. =)

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Transition Season
Review: I suppose this mostly a transition season as te voyager moves away from Kazon and Phadean space and enter into the necried expanse which isn't to well charted by anyone. The ship runs trouble and enemies, anyway. Toward the last part of the season the ship starts to run into Borg space. The first time a Borg is seen is when the voyager tries to mine a material to help voyagers flight and come across a species which the Borg had over run 70 years previous and only a few survivors remain. At the end of the episode a dead Borg s found and Voyager finds who the invaders were to that world. Then Chakotay ends up on a planet that has species of the Alpha quadrant some united and some fighting with one another...Humans, Kligons, Romualans, and Cardassians. Chakotay finds out they were once assimilated by the BORG and are still using some the transmittors to try to stop the fighting. They implant a Borg transmtter into Chakotay to heal him from near fatal wounds. The one's not fighting want to unite the everyone on the planet by patially reactvating a disbaled Borg ship off the planet. Captain Janeway disagrees but the one's trying to unite the fighting factions on the planet use the transmitter to influence Chakotay to turn on thr reciever...he does so but it also reactvates some of the Borg on the vessel bt the community just uses it long enough to unte the planet and self the newly reactivated Borg ship. In the last episode, Voyger runs into the Borg only to find several ships have been destroyed. The Borg started a war with another species in another quantam part of space and are being overwhelmed by them losing the war Because the aliens DNA is to complex. This leads Janeway to form a shaky alliance with the Borg in order to cross their space freely n exchange for the weapon that could destroy the aliens(who are just as malevolent as the Borg and are plannng on destroying the whole galaxy because of it's imperfections). I suppose there are some weak episodes in ths season but there are some good ones too and it leads to the reintroduction of the bad guys of the galaxy the Borg.


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