VOY - Prey

[9ansean]

It's true that Voyager does tend to favor action over drama much of the time, but at least with the Hirogen the kept the threat building for a good chunk of the season and eventual built it to a major climax in the Killing Game. Heck in the episode they're already preparing for the Hirogen's possible return by buying new weapons.

Unfortunately that following episode was Retrospect. Now I've made my issues with that episode very clear and hate to come off sounding like a broken record but that never stopped Chuck from reminding us why he won't let go of Dear Doctor...so screw it. I'm fine with Prey for the most part, but because the conflict between Janeway and Seven builds into Retrospect it makes this episode harder to enjoy for two reasons.

First is that it makes Seven's argument that Janeway can't handle me becoming my own kind of person not only seem accurate, but alarmingly so. After the captain and the medic have been repeatedly telling Seven how she has to be more accommodating while somehow still think for herself, we finally see first hand how dangerous that kind of pressure can be. As even her own memories (never-mind reasoning) are suddenly treated as unreliable. She goes from confused, to frightened, to angry, and ultimately guilt ridden in the course of just a day for something she had no control over and is expected to just tough it out!

Consequently all Janeway's talk in Prey about compassion comes off like patronizing crap! Since two weeks in a row now she shows more compassion for hostile strangers than a member of her own crew who badly needs her guidance.

It honestly makes the paranoid breakdown Seven would later have in The Voyager Conspiracy a little easier to buy in hindsight. Since it must be very hard for anyone to know who to trust when your very identity is depend to a "collective" who can't even agree on the own single agenda at times and all of whom have some reason to doubt your own individual thinking ability that THEY unleashed in the first place.

[9ansean]

I'm also going to disagree on the Stupid Neelix Moment. While I'd need to rewatch the episode, I feel like the SNM should be reserved for bits where he actually did something stupid. In this case, him just being told "I need more security personnel" and him going "Got it." isn't enough. While Neelix can be a terrible character, I feel like he shouldn't be ragged on when he's not actually doing anything stupid. That being said, one wonders what he's doing in the mess hall during a situation like this, especially when all the lights are off. Feels like he should be either assisting in repairwork or sitting in his quarters away from the action.

[/quote]

All true, but this is hardly the first time Chuck gave the SNM to something that really wasn't his fault. Tv tropes had a whole list of them on his recap page. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/SFDebris

One I didn't find was Darkling where it was just Neelix standing between holo Lord Byron and Gandhi debating the role of sex. Simple because thinking about Neelix and sex made him nauseous. Then there was Imperfection, where he flat out admitted gave it wasn't what Neelix did so much as the implication of bringing flowers from the Airponics Bay. Because the crew would have better off replicating food supplies, even though that wasn't Neelix's call to make and others had admitted to growing flowers before.

[PerrySimm]

The all time champion Stupid Neelix Moment is still "Life Line" - honestly, they're better when they're a stretch. It's not even hard to see what could go wrong with Neelix in the security team.

What seems to be lost in the fray here, is the novelty of Tuvok asking Neelix for help. Totally out of character!

[CmdrKing]

I have the mental image of a mushroom cloud but actually it's just an impenetrable swarm of scorpions now and it's lovely and terrifying.

[PapaPalpatine]

This is one of those situations where Seven makes a good point; always assuming they were somehow able to send the 8472 back to the ooze dimension without a bunch of his buddies coming through and wrecking shop, there's still the matter of those eight ships full of bad Predator rip-offs who would at that juncture want to hunt down and kill the entire Voyager crew and mount their heads on their wall. Janeway didn't sound like she had a solid game plan in mind for that, so if Seven hadn't done what she did, they'd all be royally fucked.

[CrypticMirror]

Did the Hirogen shrink? I'm sure I remembered them as being bigger than this, with lots of forced perspective shots that made Tuvok look like a hobbit or something in their first appearance. Is that why they hate 8472 so much, hey blasted the Hirogen with a shrink ray?

That CGI for Species 8472 hasn't aged well. It looks so primitive in today's standards.

All effects look hokey eventually My youngest nephew recently watched Jurassic Park for the first time and said it all looked silly and fake. I mean, Jurassic "photo realistic T-Rex" Park, fake!?

[9ansean]

Did the Hirogen shrink? I'm sure I remembered them as being bigger than this, with lots of forced perspective shots that made Tuvok look like a hobbit or something in their first appearance. Is that why they hate 8472 so much, hey blasted the Hirogen with a shrink ray?

That CGI for Species 8472 hasn't aged well. It looks so primitive in today's standards.

All effects look hokey eventually My youngest nephew recently watched Jurassic Park for the first time and said it all looked silly and fake. I mean, Jurassic "photo realistic T-Rex" Park, fake!?

Heck it's like fans old enough to remember TOS when first aired are going to argue most of there effects have held up well.

What's funny to me about the Jurassic Park comparison is that back in 1999 Roger Ebert had an amusing special on the evolving state of animation where he sited that movie as about the moment where special effects were getting TOO REAL. While admitting too enjoying the lifelike creature in Jurassic he confessed to still liking the creaky stop motion figures of older movies like the first King Kong or Jason and the Argonauts.

It's was one of the first times I had heard the argument for limitations in CGI. Specially he suggestion that computer animated should only be called animated if they looked unreal or else it should be called a special effect. I take that to mean animated character should feel like they come from another world than the other characters. The difference between say Eddie interacting with Jessica Rabbit versus Frodo fighting with Gollum. Not how well that rule could apply to Species 8472 though. Since they seemed to go for something with the physical elements of this universe yet somehow can't quit fit in with it.

Looking back I'd probably put them in same class of 90s CGI as the Changeling in the Great Link. Their fluid construct seemed to justified them being somewhat more on the animated side of things.

[clearspira]

What is all this talk about 8472 being from another universe? I heard it in the review and now here!

edit: Ah, it's like subspace or something.

Fluidic Space. Although a throwaway line in Unimatrix Zero clearly states that it has border, we also have to concede that Unimatrix Zero was written by idiots.

[Deledrius]

That CGI for Species 8472 hasn't aged well. It looks so primitive in today's standards.

It looked pretty bad then, too, in my recollection. It was TV budget CG and it showed.

Did the Hirogen shrink? I'm sure I remembered them as being bigger than this, with lots of forced perspective shots that made Tuvok look like a hobbit or something in their first appearance. Is that why they hate 8472 so much, hey blasted the Hirogen with a shrink ray?

I'm pretty sure they did. Guess it was too much work, which is a shame because it was at least something different for Trek.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I don't remember the Hirogen differentiating in size.