Star Trek Voyager Season 2 is the second season of the fourth live-action Star Trek television series. Captain Kathryn Janeway (played by Kate Mulgrew). She leads her crew through the Delta Quadrant, 70,000 light years from Earth, where they were pulled by an alien looking for a mate.
The first episode, “The 37s”, has the crew surprised when they find several humans in cryostasis on a planet, and one of them turns out to be Amelia Earhart (boy, did she ever go off course!). Janeway and her crew have to decide whether to continue their journey home or stay with the humans on this planet. I especially liked Sharon Lawrence’s portrayal of Earhart.
Other episodes I enjoyed the most in this season were “Projections”, “Tattoo”, and “Death Wish”. In “Projections”, the Doctor (Robert Picardo) finds he can feel pain and that he is not a hologram, but actually Lewis Zimmerman, the man who created the Emergency Medical Hologram (EMH) program. However, Chakotay (Robert Beltran) tells him that he is simply stuck in the holodeck and the crew is trying to get him out of there. I thought Picardo did an admirable job in showing the Doctor trying to figure out what is real and who to believe.
The episode “Tattoo” in Star Trek Voyager Season 2 is an interesting exploration of Chakotay’s heritage. After discovering in a cave markings which match some he remembers from his youth, he and the crew of Voyager find a planet which seems to be working against them as they try to land and further investigate. Henry Darrow was excellent as Chakotay’s father in the flashbacks.
We revisit the Q Continuum in “Death Wish”, where one of the Q (but not the Q we know from previous encounters) wants to die. The discussion of having a purpose in life, and what someone might do with unlimited power and knowledge, was very interesting. While I found the writers’ version of what immortality would be like to be quite limited, the story was still engaging. They hit right on the key to having an interesting eternal life: you need a purpose to keep you going.
The transwarp barrier has been discussed in multiple episodes in multiple Star Trek series. Parris (Robert Duncan McNeill) succeeds in breaking that barrier in “Threshold”, but then experiences all kinds of strange transformations as he begins to change into something else. The beginning of the episode had all kinds of promise, but the ending just didn’t work. However, I thought the ending was delightfully funny (even though I don’t think they intended it that way).
As a whole, Star Trek Voyager Season 2 was similarly average to the first season. I thought the series was still stumbling quite a bit in this season. It had enough good episodes, though, to bump it above average, but only just.
Original Air Dates: August 28, 1995 – May 20, 1996 (USA)
TV Parental Guidelines Rating: TV-PG
Network: UPN (United Paramount Network)
Language: English
MySF Rating: Three point zero stars
Family Friendliness: 90%
Alcohol/Drugs: 1 (some social drinking)
Language: 1 (occasional minor and deity)
Nudity: 0
Sexuality: 1 (implied amphibian sex, some steamy romantic relationships)
Violence: 2 (regular science fiction fighting, space battles, deaths, nothing very graphic)
Buy this:
