Voyager: Master of the Abrupt Ending?
Voyager: Master of the Abrupt Ending?
Mar 23Even though I was pretty meh on Voyager while it was actually airing, there are certain elements of the show that I’ve developed a strange affection for as the years have gone on. Like, the B’Elanna/Tom ‘ship kinda gives me the warm fuzzies now, particularly whenever I see Roxann D. or Robert Mc pop up as a director or producer on serialized television. I can’t totally explain it, but there it is.
It’s enough to make me wonder if I should give the show itself another shot, particularly now that we’re not being inundated with technobabble-laced, franchise-approved sci-fi every week. I’ve been trying to pinpoint what my problems were when the series was on. I remember feeling like a lot of the plots were tired, that certain characters were somewhat schizophrenically drawn. And I was always a DS9 girl, so my loyalties were elsewhere at the time.
Anyway, I caught a couple of reruns on Spike the other day and…they were fine. Flashes of goodness with lots of padding. The watered down feeling was definitely still there. There was one oddity, in particular, that both eppys shared, though: a weirdly abrupt ending. The first eppy was a standard body-switching affair: mean alien trades physiques with Tom, wackiness ensues. He’s supposed to be gaining a better appreciation for his life on Voyager and his relationship with B’Elanna throughout, so the final scene has him showing her the olde thymey car holodeck program he’s been working on. It’s sweet, but B is still kind of ultra-pissed the whole time, so it’s like: she’s pissed, she’s pissed…oh, now they get in the car and start making out. The End! I felt like there was a line or a shot or something missing. I was really unclear as to how B went from being pissed to being up for some Tom Paris make-out action.
In the other ep, there’s this covert mission type of thing and Seven of Nine has a sort of religious experience. The last scene is a Seven/Janeway bit focusing on spirituality. Janeway delivers a climactic line that’s something like, “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you just had your first religious experience!” This is pretty good in the context, but then we very quickly cut away to the patented “ship gliding through space” shot and that’s it. It should be a contemplative moment, a moment that breathes. But it happens so abruptly, it almost feels like Janeway’s sort of mocking poor ol’ Seven. Weird, right? (Quick sidenote on Seven: I know there was something blatantly pander-y about her be-catsuited presence, but I always thought she was a pretty good character, grappling with some interesting issues. Props to Jeri Ryan.)
Now as a final disclaimer, I will say that I know sometimes these eppys have to get edited for time when they re-run on cable and that could account for some of the weirdness. But the commonality of the odd, abrupt endings on both of these eps really struck me. Anyway. I think I would have to re-watch a lot more of the show in order to reach a truly informed opinion as to whether I now enjoy it more, less or about the same. We’ll see if that ever happens.
