Next week, on Mad Space Nine…

Ever since Norm was too controversial and Colin Quinn too shitty, they'll never give it to just one person and let them run wild again. It's all two person update desks with no original sense of comedy between them. Meyers was the worst of both worlds: Bland Leno jokes with no one to bounce off of. But they days when…

Yup. On a show where there's already a black person who it's already established is pretty well magic, they add another magical black person to solve everyone else's problems.

I mean, it was always stupid that they spent all the money to get Michael J Fox and make it a centerpiece, then stick it at 9:30 PM. This is slightly less stupid, but still probably too little, too late.

Ahhh, yes. Voyager's first “Finally, in this one episode, we’re going to find the magic technology to get us home. We’re finally going to do it! “

SPOILERS

"There's a hole in our heart, as deep as a planet, for the poor little captain, now stranded indefinite…"

I do really like the tiny moment in Times Orphan when Odo cringes when Kira mentions she wants a child some day. Odo can’t procreate with her, and knows it, but the episode does a good job of not going out of its way hitting you over the head pointing it out.

My problem with all of the counselling in "The Sound of Her Voice" is that it's all tell, not show. The show’s good enough to deal with its characters coping with war and death and isolation—it doesn’t need to have them all tell magic captain lady about them. In other words: “Your lyrics lack subtlety! You can't just…

I'd say the problem with both this week's episodes are that they're very much TNG (or Voyager) high concept episodes on a show that by the end of Season 6 is a show built to do very different things than that. These are chock full of technobabble and time anomalies that you have to buy as interesting in order to buy…

Or, given the captain's name, Joan Cusack.

Of course, both these episodes have the same general Trek time technobabble problem: Why not slingshot the Defiant around the sun and send it back 300 years for Molly or 3 years for Cusack and her crew? . I know the Orb of Time is fickle, but there’s that other way we've had ever since TOS.

Next week, on Mad Space Nine…

Why wasn't that the sequel to Dirty Dancing?

Yeah, that's the thing. He's probably about the same age as them: He went off to the academy in Season 4, came back for a semester of field assignment in Season 5, and then once the war started was kept around because Starfleet needed all the officers it could get, getting promoted to Ensign and the regular uniform…

Though of course that was a jury rigged ship that could really only work under best conditions; a little battle stress and it broke. But in Star Trek II, it seems like the ship is Kirk, Spock, Sulu, Bones, Uhura and Scotty and a bunch of cadets, so having a cadet training cruise with minimal regular officers doesn't…

Also, for the fact that it creates a holodeck episode without throwing everyone in danger because of it. It knows it's a game, and beating a game can have its own reward without it destroying the ship.

Sorry this appears twice. Got double posted because Nudisqus Moderators didn't let it post for 6 hours…

Well, she had to suffer, so no wonder she got promoted to non-comm. That's how they roll.

Cuz then they'd have to pay the guy who wrote First Duty for every episode of Voyager. Though I appreciated how McNeil decided they were very different characters: Paris looks like a fuckup but is a good guy down deep, while Locarno seems like the perfect guy, but down deep is a monster.