“We were heading into sweeps,” said Menosky.
#VOYAGER STAR TREK COMM BADGE STENCIL MOVIE#
According to interviews with Cinefantastique, the production team hoped to blend this television movie style with a cinematic movie sensibility: In fact, the production team explicitly approached Dark Frontier, Part I and Dark Frontier, Part II as an opportunity to really embrace that storytelling sensibility. It is telling that many of the most memorable episodes in this period are the sweeping two-parters, many of which feel like Star Trek television movies: Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II Year of Hell, Part I and Year of Hell, Part II The Killing Game, Part I and The Killing Game, Part II. From its third season, Voyager seemed to pitch itself as a television show telling miniature blockbusters on a weekly basis.
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Voyager embraced a very broad and sweeping blockbuster style, one that in many ways prefigures the approach of the JJ Abrams’ Star Trek films. Voyager used spectacle to tell the kind of stories that audiences associated with spectacle. Deep Space Nine used spectacle in service of a long-form story unfolding over years, an epic seasons-long war story. However, it was Voyager that really embraced these technical advances as a narrative opportunity. The space combat sequences in The Die is Cast and The Way of the Warrior really demonstrated what could be done on a television budget and a television schedule. Of course, Deep Space Nine also pushed the boat out in terms of scale and spectacle. As Voyager turns its gaze backwards, it discovers that it has no real history. However, that history is ultimately illusory, built around what feels like a misremembrance of one of the franchise’s most iconic alien species. This is a story built around an act of narrative archeology within the larger Star Trek universe, touching on the secret history of humanity’s true first encounter of the Borg. However, Dark Frontier, Part I and Dark Frontier, Part II also demonstrate the shallowness of Voyager‘s own internal memory.
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It is also a television movie that is very clearly patterned off the story for Star Trek: First Contact, borrowing key story beats and clear characters from that memorable Next Generation film. It is a two-parter consciously designed to recapture the success of broadcasting The Killing Game, Part I and The Killing Game, Part II on the same night in the late fourth season. There’s coffee… I mean transwarp coils in that there Borg Sphere.ĭark Frontier, Part I and Dark Frontier, Part II serve as an example of this nostalgic indulgence, both in form and plot. This is a show that was much closer to its end than to its beginning, and it still lacked any true sense of identity or self. It was very hard to turn the focus inwards when there wasn’t a lot unique or distinctive about Voyager.
#VOYAGER STAR TREK COMM BADGE STENCIL SERIES#
Voyager was a television series that had long struggled to define a unique identity, too often feeling like a half-hearted reheat of the leftovers from The Next Generation. However, there was a fundamental problem with all of this introspection. The scripts for the fifth season are surprisingly retro and nostalgic in tone Janeway’s reflections on the events of Caretaker in Night, the return of the Maquis and the Cardassians in Nothing Human, the indulgence of retro thirties sci-fi in Bride of Chaotica!, Tuvok’s childhood flashbacks in Gravity, the “telepathic pitcher plant” in Bliss, Seven’s trip back to the launch of Voyager in Relativity, Janeway’s investigation of her ancestor in 11:59. On the fifth season of Voyager, it seemed like the show turned inwards.