Five-Minute "The Best of Both Girls, Part 2"

[Zeke]

Merry Christmas! Hope you all had, and are having, a good one (remember, it's twelve days long).

I've got many things on the go, but nothing was quite ready to make an update out of. Then my good friend Jim Wright did me a favour: he got sick! Illness at Christmastime is a rotten break, so I pondered whether I could do anything for him -- and suddenly remembered I had something specifically for him that I'd forgotten to post.

Jim, for those who don't know, runs the greatest Voyager site ever, Delta Blues. It's been largely dormant since the show ended, but back in the day it was the place to be (and its forum was the cradle in which 5MV was born). Along with his famously wordy synopses and reviews, Jim also wrote some fanfic, most notably an epic what-if story called The Best of Both Girls. He started writing this during the "Scorpion" season break as one possible direction the Borg storyline might go from there. It got bigger than he expected and took him a few years to finish -- by which time he'd actually seen his central premise appear on the show, though in a very different form.

Anyway, it's a great story, and back when Jim got married I fived the first chapter of it as a present. The VOY subsite has had a "Season B" ever since, but I never got around to doing more... until I recently noticed it had been ten years since the first one. High time that changed! Be on the lookout for cross-fiver references, since this chapter of BoBG intersects with several canon episodes.

Here's Five-Minute "The Best of Both Girls, Part 2", Jim. Feel better!

(Note: If you haven't checked out the Facebook page, you really should. Really. As in this isn't just casual shilling, there's something there that's not here.)

[Nate the Great]

The Delta Blues forum? I never knew that. More details, please.

[Zeke]

You're in luck -- I've actually been working on a detailed history of 5MV for a while. Here's the relevant part. (We called the forum Deltachat, DC for short.)

Summer 2000! It was a turbulent time. The world was slowly recovering from the ravages of Y2K. Conan O'Brien was deciding what to do with his "In the Year 2000" bit. And the domestication of the dog continued unabated. But for us at Deltachat, it was mostly a three-month gap with no new Voyager episodes. What to do?

I don't know precisely why this came to my mind, but back in Grade 10, when we were studying Twelfth Night, I had once noticed on the teacher's desk something another student had handed in. It was called "Five-Minute Twelfth Night", and it conveyed each scene in a couple of lines. I only got to read the first two scenes before the teacher yanked it away -- maybe it was classified or something. But those scenes stuck with me.

Good artists create; great artists steal. I decided to try this comedy format myself. So I reread Jim's "Caretaker" summary to refresh my memory, and then I wrote my first fiver.

Naturally I posted it at DC. It went over really well -- better than I expected. I wish I'd thought to save the thread. (DC at the time was a Vantagenet board which pruned at ten pages or so. Low-tech, but we remember it fondly.)

So I did the latest episode, "Unimatrix Zero I." That fiver was popular too, and so I wrote more. What had begun as a whim turned into a project almost instantly. I'd been toying with the idea of making a website, and suddenly I had something to do with one.

Thus it was that, with six fivers under my belt, I whipped up the first incarnation of Five-Minute Voyager.

[Nate the Great]

The first incarnation? I jumped aboard during the 3Sygma days, and that was the second incarnation, right?

[Flying Gremlin]

An excerpt from the 5MV History fiver:

When I first built the website, everyone said I was daft to build it. It sank into the Internet. So I built a second one. That sank into the Internet. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the Internet. But the fourth one stayed up!

I had to. Couldn't resist.

[NAHTMMM]

Captain's Log: The combined fleet has thoroughly Wolf 359ed the Gamma Quadrant. There's evidence that assimilation is continuing. EVERYTHING IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING. Even Commander Riker is clearly disturbed.
First Officer's Log: Man, I can't believe I missed ALL these cool battles!

[Katy Jane]

Wow it's been a long time since I've read any of Jim's synopses. I didn't start watching Voyager until season 7 and in the pre-netflix days it was how I caught up on the show.