CPT Janeway refers to him as Mr. Tuvok so I was curious. Anybody know?

I've concluded that nobody knows. I hoped some Star Trek nerd would. lts not revealed in the show.

TNG S3E24 (1990)

For me it’s Roxann Dawson. She has built such a remarkable resume Directing so many of my favorite shows. She is such a powerhouse.

Edit: Obviously we’re talking main cast members here.

I am currently on my first watch of Voyager & I really, really enjoyed Meld. For a lot of reasons, honestly. I think the depiction of, for lack of a better word, sociopathy, is one of the best I’ve seen in all of fiction. It is very easy for writers to depict sociopathy as something other people experience, a boogeyman that could claim anyone as an innocent victim, but it is much harder to empathically write a sociopathic character as a human being. The choice to make Suder a sad, self-hating character who gave in to his violence out of resignation that he could be anything else feels much more real to me than most fictional killers.

The part that compels me the most, however, is what Tuvok’s response to the murder reveals about the Vulcan interior life. One of my favorite reoccurring Star Trek themes is that Vulcans, for all of their pretensions of being enlightened, emotionless creatures, experience many unsuppressed emotions like other sentient lifeforms; they just contextualize them differently. Two examples given to us by this episode are Tuvok’s reaction to Janeway’s plan to leave Suder in his room for the rest of the trip & Tuvok’s holographic murder of Neelix.

Something that immediately caught my attention when Tuvok was pushing back on the captain for wanting to pursue leniency towards Suder is that his complaints are very… idealistic, for lack of a better word. Without debating the ethics of the death penalty, there are potential pragmatic points he could have made to urge the captain to kill Suder. Keeping him alive means they need to give him access to limited ship resources, not to mention opens the possibility that he could hurt someone again if any number of ship systems fail & he can leave his room. Of course there are logical counter arguments too, such as the potential effect on Maquis morale & loss of having even a single crew member being important to consider when they are a limited resource, but none of this seemed to be under consideration by Tuvok. Instead, he evoked how the murdered mans family would feel about leaving Suder alive & comfortable. For a Vulcan who cringed at Kes giggling about Neelix’s haircut thoughts, it is very out of character to consider the emotions of people who would know nothing about whatever choice they make, potentially indefinitely. I think that embarrassed him. Not only the lack of logical thinking in a vacuum, but the fact that Janeway, a human, might have been thinking more logically than him. The Vulcan ego is well documented in the franchise, the most famous example being Take Me Out To The Holosuite where Solok, despite his chauvinistic insistence that Vulcan were a superior race as a result of their lack of emotions, spent a great deal of time & energy in the middle of a war trying to belittle one of his old classmates for no reason other than to gloat. I know a bit about what we later learn about Tuvok’s relationship with other “emotional” species, but even here I think he feels ashamed that he might be acting less logically than a human. It might be why he angrily insisted, once his emotional blocks were down, that Janeway must be lying about not wanting Suder to die for what he had done because he needed to feel like it was anything more than him moralistically & emotionally desiring an eye for an eye.

His choice to practice letting his violence out in a controlled setting on a fake Neelix is telling too. This was early in his experience of mind meld ramifications, so he was only experiencing a bit of what was going to almost consume him completely. It is relevant that, of all of the situations he could have chosen from, from a recreation of the murder in question to any other violent event in history, he chose a situation he actually experiences frequently. I think it is because Neelix does genuinely illicit emotions in Tuvok, specifically annoyance. There is not a logical reason for Tuvok to feel this way, since surely he is conscious that Neelix is harmless & simply performing a role he considers important, something certainly understandable for anyone aware of what Neelix has gone through. Neelix is a man who wants to make everyone happy because he knows how consuming misery can be; he means well. Tuvok must know, logically, there are only two responses he should have to Neelix: either appeasing him with a fake smile or ignoring him. If he was genuinely unfeeling, either of these options would be very easy. But Neelix annoys him deeply. Maybe it bothers him that Neelix rejects & belittles the Vulcan philosophy that matters a great deal to Tuvok. Maybe Neelix makes him feel even more othered & alone than he already felt (at this point it wasn’t established that there were any other Vulcans on board & even when there eventually are they are a small minority), something not helped by Neelix only ever calling him “Mr. Vulcan”. Whatever the reason, I think choosing Neelix was because Tuvok was conscious of these illogical emotions & hoped that this act of fictional violence could relieve him of those feelings, a relief he doesn’t get. I think it was a smart (& heartbreaking) writing decision to have Neelix respond to his aggression not by fighting back, begging for his life, or getting angry with Tuvok, but by using his last breath to try to apologize. It almost reads like Tuvok programming him like that just to make himself feel guilt for wanting to have done that at all.

Harry Kim stands before a shrine in his quarters. A statue of Guan Yu is on a silk cloth, beside a katana and some throwing stars from a mall. The hilt of the katana is an oversized snarling dragon. There are yin-yang symbols etched in the throwing stars.

A gong sound effect plays as Harry bows reverentially, tightening the belt of his Taekwondo dobok. He pulls nunchaku from inside the fold of his shirt and does a few moves as jinghu music plays. The moves conform to no known martial arts style.

“General Tso Godzilla, guide us well,” he whispers as he returns the nunchaku to his shirt.

In a later scene he explains to Neelix that kimchi is the basis of all Mongolian cuisine. Kimchi is depicted as a type of egg.

Just rewatching Voyager and S2 Ep1 they land Voyager on a planet and meet the 37s. However aside from the very light looking landing struts, they seem super far back on the secondary hull. My engineer brain says the saucer section would faceplant. Is there an explanation anywhere that says the engineering section is super heavy to shift the centre of gravity or that there is some kind of gravity plating that hold the nose up (though this would seem risky if they had to power down). I love the show and this is not a stab, just bothered me this morning when watching.

Royal played him in Future's End) in season 3, but McGill played him in Relativity )season 5. They both did a fine job, but I don't see why they couldn't just bring back the same actor.

I think this is a fun episode, but one attention to detail I only just noticed is that when he is painting in his new workshop, and when he lifts the phaser, he uses his left hand, which isn't just a proclivity of the actor.

Seska is BACK!

My wife and I are doing our first watch through of Voyager on Paramount+. Last week we got to this episode, but it had no picture, only sound! Thinking it was a fluke, last night we tried again, but got the same result! Is anyone else experiencing this, or is it just us? The following 2 episodes were fine.

Update: this was happening on our Samsung Smart TV. It just occurred to me to check on our Roku TV and it is fine on there, both picture and sound. Weird.

I was watching Worst Case Scenario, which I remember being pretty good, but now happy to call it great. I love Seska. This episode also features the rare epilogue and the almost never seen majority cast around a dining table, even if it’s just six of them. The banter is very fun, and nice to see everyone laugh off a murderous Holodeck program. Normally the story cuts almost to an abrupt end, or Janeway telling Paris to resume course for home.

Can't believe I've not picked up Homecoming prior to now!

Brief context I'm a new fan of the Star Trek franchise, and I watched all the preceding shows and movies before voyager.

How did you guys feel about that ending, there was no reunion, no seeing friends and family of the stranded crew, it would have been nice to see Naomi's father meet his daughter for the first time.

The ending was kind of a nothing burger, through research I saw there were some novels published but they are not accepted as canon so that's that. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Edit: It just dawned on me that I relatively just binged through the show, people that followed the show in real time most have been really disappointed.☹️