Thirty Days

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Tom Paris just can't help being a BAD BOY.  Janeway has demoted him and thrown him in the brig. With his devil-may-care attitude, tight t-shirt, and inviting lips he'd better watch out for his cellmate... Solitary? Well, STILL. Who could resist Paris? Not even PARIS.

Rather than go stir crazy or learn to play the harmonica, Ensign Paris settles on writing a long letter he doubts his disapproving father will ever receive.

Tom begins by mocking Harry for his crush on the wrong twin sister. The oft-mentioned Megan and Jenny Delaney, (playing the Twin Mistresses of Evil) have Kim's character Buster all tied up right where they want him.  But while Jenny's hot for Harry, Harry's only got eyes for Megan. (Or maybe it's the other way around, Tom can't be bothered to try to tell them apart.)

Anyway, that's not why he's in the doghouse. There's a stunning phenomenon- ahoy! Epochs ago, an advanced people constructed a globular ocean out in space by sucking the perfectly good ocean off some planet. It may never have served any purpose, but it sure is cool!  A race of stuck-up lemming/newts called the Moneans claimed the empty maritime long ago. (Well, empty except for the Gungans and Shrieking Eels.) Now the waters are evaporating. Only Seaman Tom and his mighty vessel can save their civilization! Of course, the Monean government would have to give their oxygen mining a little rest... OVER THEIR DEAD, BLOATED BODIES!

Tom, like Travolta in that song, spends his summer nights showing off, splashing around. And slightly bends the Prime Directive, possibly. "Thirty Days", eh? Keel-Hauling's too good for the likes of him! Blow me down!

Nothing Human

*** (3 stars out of 5)

When a pinkish leech creature latches onto Torres' chest and tries to drink her dry, it must have seemed familiar to some mothers, but baffles the Doctor.

The EMH has been driving the crew mad with his obsessive and tedious slide-shows now that he's a holo-photography shutterbug. But this hideous refugee from Stephen King's 'The Mist' has Tom mad with worry instead, and the only solution turns out to be a terrible idea.

Because his electronic brain crammed with hundreds of physicians' recorded experiences and a comprehensive Federation medical database are somehow not good enough to figure out how to get an unconvincing rubber mosquito loose, the EMH calls in a consultant. And with no sense of tact whatsoever, it's the Josef Mengele of Cardassia, Dr. Crell Moset. (Wasn't there a Dr. Greg House program in the database? And, if not, why isn't all this knowledge ALREADY part of the Doctor?)

Poor Ensign Tabor gets "tut tut" and "pooh pooh" from the unusually arch and unsympathetic EMH when the Bajoran declares Moset is the asshole who flayed his grandpa alive with nadion radiation. Even Torres would rather not have her life saved by a holographic version of a man who cured thousands from the fostossa virus by infecting hundreds WITH the virus.

Still, Moset is effective, so everyone uses his science anyway and just wrings their hands and feels bad about it afterwards. As you do. If you're alive to moralize, it must have all worked out.

"Nothing Human" is VERY human, and the final credited on-screen contribution from the woman who made Voyager possible, Jeri Taylor. Who is great. O.K., so I don't especially love this story, and Roxanne Dawson is little more than a glorified prop who deserved... I don't know... LINES. Still, it raises good questions about morality or something. Your experience may vary.

Covenant

*** (3 stars out of 5)
Not only are Kira and Odo a mixed species relationship, they don't have a religion in common, either. Doesn't stop me rooting for them, and gives me hope that love conquers church anyway. Well, we'll see.

Quick as you can say 'Friendly Angel, Come To Me' Dukat turns out to be the leader of the Pah-Wraith Cult. Lady Bajorans get a Free Half-Cardassian Bastard with every new membership!

These mixed nut bags have the best transporters around. They beam Kira across three light years to Empok Nor. Where did they GET this transporter?!? Even the Dominion can't do this, can they? If they could beam from system to system as casually as walking from room to room, wouldn't Earth already be kissing space lizard ass under Empress Changeling the First?

Vedek Fala, Kira's old friend and kidnapper, has joined the cult for all the right reasons: abstinence, poverty, huddling in the dark on the rickety, haunted space hotel Empok Nor. But when Dukat starts to look like a hypocrite, the former dictator passes out the poison pills faster than you can say 'Who wants Kool-Aid?'

"Covenant" is for anyone who's gotta have faith, faith, faith, ahhh. The need for a higher power is built right in to our genes, but use your common sense, too, o.k? Start with the assumption that the higher power is kind and good, work backwards to the notion that You Only Live Once. In conclusion: try and see if you can't be the last one to swallow poison for God...

Infinite Regress

** (2 stars out of 5)
Who's that up in the middle of the night to eat a meat cookie? Why, it's Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Constant Sorrow and Ruining It For Everyone.

Before you can say Sybil's Multiple Personality Disorder, the former drone has flipped her wig. She's a suddenly a horny Klingon, a cheerful child, a Vulcan called Lorot, a Ferengi called Torot, and a GoBot called GoBot.

It's all down to a Borg Mental Central Processor called a vinculum. Voyager stumbled across one: it was sabotaged with a virus to bring down the entire Borg fleet. Like a heart transplant gone bad, where the first victim falls dead in the street, coughs up the heart, and then the next person along picks up the bad heart for themselves to eat, gets sick, and so on in such a fashion until everyone has died.

The tormented culprits in this rickety, convoluted plan are ONCE AGAIN known only by their Borg designation. Seriously rude Janeway has stopped asking people what they'd like to be called altogether, and just numbers them for efficiency. For some reason, the Bug Men don't respond well to this.

Curing Seven is everyone's highest priority (except those jerk Bug Men, whatever the hell their problem is, and who cares- they're nearly extinct anyway) so while Janeway picks a fight with them, Tuvok dives right into crazy Seven's booby hatch. No, her head.

"Infinite Regress" ignores the previously established 'fact' that Borg ships DO NOT HAVE CENTRAL PROCESSORS. Also that the same trick DOES NOT WORK TWICE on Borg! Not the actors' fault, but it seems like a weak, tired story. Finally, while I'm kicking a dead horse, I read recently that many in the LGBT community felt let down by Star Trek's ability to ignore them completely in its otherwise all-inclusive, all-tolerant future. Case in point tonight: a woman has to be mentally unbalanced to love bite another woman, plus it's in no way consensual, plus the biter is really a man.

The Siege of AR-558

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Quark offers his two slips on the well-known Rule of Acquisition #34 "War is Good For Business"... but only from a distance. The Nagus wants a Ferengi-eye view of the front, so the luckless bartender enjoys a field trip with the Starship Doom-N-Gloom.

Here's some shell-shocked Starfleet soldiers now! Reese, the Steve McQueen of the gang. Even the Jem'Hadar don't want to meet this thug in a dark alley. Vargas, who won't change his bandages because they are all he has left of some jerk he didn't like. Oh, that's just the space gangrene talking! Kellin, the soft-spoken Enginerd. Descended from the great early galactic pioneers called the Space Family Robinson. Identical cousin to Lennier the ever-faithful Minbari aide. I'm trying to say the man likes Roly Poly fish heads. It's Bill Mumy! He's worth two stars just for showing up!

The enemy is using Houdini mines- deplorable, underhanded sneak attack weapons that appear without rhyme or reason from that domain of the demonic, subspace.  Their use is condemned by Starfleet types... mainly because they didn't have any before now.

If you ever got the impression that Nog was promoted too fast, then it should be noted that there's no better on-the-job training than a horrific interstellar war. No better for teaching people how to die in droves, with or without dignity. How to be maimed- Like a Man! You get the picture.

"The Siege of AR-558" went as badly as the earlier sieges at AR-557 and 556, and there aren't any lovely spaceships exploding serenely against the void. Just a bunch of scared, filthy people getting screwed up. Or deceased. For other mid-90s space war drama commemorating the 50th anniversary of the miserable debacle at Guadalcanal in 1942, please see the Space Above and Beyond episode with the more evocative title "Sugar Dirt". If you like. They're both good, just gloomy.

Timeless

***** (5 stars out of 5)

A couple of guys in parkas beam down to a Class L planet in Takara sector, on the Alpha Quadrant border. It's 2390 and they're still making Hoth jokes because it helps them to keep warm.

It's Kim and Chakotay, last survivors of Voyager, and they've found the wreck after 15 years frozen in a glacier, Captain America Style. (If they really wanted to ram the homage home, they should have brought a Vulcan in a green speedo and ankle wings to thaw it out for them.)

Chakotay is shagging a descendant of Donnie and/or Marie Osmond. Harry appears not have been shagging. So no change there.

They revive the EMH to have someone to be exposited at, play the cabbage, and dig things out of Seven of Nine's brain. No, NOT figuratively. One of her corpse's frozen doodads is a Chronometric Node, why not? Linked up with a stolen Borg Temporal Transmitter, it will send the right message back to the right time, and the whole calamity might unhappen.

Captain Geordi La Forge of Galaxy-class U.S.S. Challenger is hot on the trail of the selfless renegades, but he cannot be persuaded to overlook the Temporal Prime Directive for just one ship. If 150 people don't become Frozen Entrees, then the next thing you know, all of history might change and finally give them better looking uniforms.

Considering this is the third time the ship has been destroyed, the third time Harry has died, the SIXTH time Janeway has died, and the EIGHTH time they have a chance to get home and failed... it still feels pretty fresh and original. O.K., so it's kind of 'Non Sequitur' again. But I loved Non Sequitur and I love
"Timeless".

Even now, Voyager is capable of reminding me that I DO love it. Braga, Berman, and Menosky's time travel story is always enjoyable. And the folks at Foundation Imaging put together a starship crash that still holds up beautifully.

Once More Unto the Breach

*** (3 stars out of 5)

While yesterday's 'Once Upon A Time' urged us all to think like children, "Once More Unto the Breach" is a country for old men. Still, it teaches us to find the inner child: the cruel, teasing, vicious, taunting inner child. In other words, the Klingon child.

Martok's held a grudge ever since his youth in the Ke$ha Lowlands.  It seems Dax's blood brother Kor was the One Percenter who held him back. Martok was forced to wield a janitor's mop before he got to hold a bat'leth for his country, and it was all due to Master Kor's entitled sense of fuckery.

Worf doesn't exactly love Kor, but he figures everyone deserves to die honourably. Worf gets Kor a job on Martok's ship over Martok's more than strenuous objection.  Worf's sympathy caused him to overlook Kor's raging senility. Kor's senility caused him to overlook what century it is. Calling on his dead friends to destroy the Federation in the heat of battle, the drunken master narrowly misses Martok's knife in his face.

With no ice floes handy for Kor's retirement party, Martok mercilessly mocks his despised elder, perhaps in the hope of shaming him into suicide. If that was, indeed, the plan... then they both win. Kor steals Worf's command of a solo mission flying down the gun barrels of a Jem'Hadar fleet and passes from history into legend.

"Savour the fruit of life... But don't live too long. The taste turns bitter after a time." The final performance of John Colicos is indeed most worthy.