Gravity

* (1 star out of 5)
Is it possible Season 5 is Voyager's rock bottom? I sincerely hope so. It's been so long since I've sat down to watch them that at this point I have to fight to remember whether I even LIKE this show.

So, yeah... in the B story flashback, Tuvok had the heart drummed out of him when he was a schoolboy with a crush. Uh, hooray? I guess worse things happen to horny church kids sent into seclusion with creepy priests. But this is just not how I pictured the Vulcan Birds and Bees. Vulcan love is portrayed as private, not NON-EXISTENT. My case in point: Tuvok throughout the series plainly misses his wife and kids.

Stranded down a time hole after the most recent regularly scheduled shuttle crash, it's balmy desert island adventure like that old Vulcan novel Robinson Cruvok. Tank Girl stabs spiders with forks. The desert-dweller Noss spews girlish gibberish and has the hots for teacher.

Tom, for no good reason, spends an unusual amount of time and effort trying to get Tuvok to cheat on his wife. Did he contract a rare, temporary but highly dangerous form of the Iago Virus? It manifests either in jealous urging of happily married black guys to destroy their marriages, or in turning into a parrot with a piercing Gilbert Gottfried voice.

"Gravity" is the most I ever hated Tom Paris. Cruising for a bruising, boozing, selling out, but I never disliked him more than when he was trying to talk a man into cheating on his wife. WHY? Just... WHY? Voyager is making astonishing time WAY ahead of the 75 year schedule. It's been less than five years and they've already come HALFWAY. Even if their luck turns completely, Tuvok is very, VERY likely to make it home before his wife moves on. What kind of twisted jerk tries to mess with true love?