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!

[evay]

How is dear Unca Jim? I've been rewatching the odd VOY ep on Amazon Prime and I tend to recall his recaps along with the episode as it unspools, which is highly entertaining.

ETA hey, when did you change member titles?

[Wowbagger]

So, I had to actually read the first two parts of TBoBG to get this, but it was worth it: I laughed. Can totally see Sisko saying, "Let's DO this!"

That said, the pedant in me immediately started screaming:

Let he who is without sin throw--

Throw? Throw? What hippie post-conciliar Bible translation is this?

(In fairness, there are a number of hippie post-conciliar Bible translations that use "throw", but none that lead in with the traditional "let h[im] who is without sin...")

I did chuckle at the DS9 reference, though. Once I got done searching BibleHub.

Ah, 3sygma. Those were the times. Those were the times.

[Zeke]

Riker was of course quoting from the New Revised Federation Version, which has been carefully edited to modernize the language and also remove anything judgmental or problematic. This is the only thing Jesus says in it.

Originally Posted by evay

How is dear Unca Jim? I've been rewatching the odd VOY ep on Amazon Prime and I tend to recall his recaps along with the episode as it unspools, which is highly entertaining.

Oh, he's fine aside from this recent illness. We talk quite often on Facebook (which I may have mentioned now has a 5MV page which you should SERIOUSLY LOOK AT COME ON).

And yeah, nothing quite completes a VOY viewing like reading his synopses. (Completes or even substitutes for. There are a few episodes which to this day I haven't seen, but I still feel like I have.) I fondly recall waiting for each new review to come out. To a kid who didn't understand why the rest of the internet seemed to hate Voyager, Jim was welcome reinforcement. More than that, he was to VOY reviewers what Batman Begins was to superhero films -- the one that took the subject seriously, and by doing so, proved that it deserved it.

If I had to pick a favourite Delta Blues review, it would be "Scorpion II", which not only came after a very long summer for Trek fans, but had several predictions from the first part's review to follow up on. Jim addressed all the major points and analyzed Janeway and Chakotay's actions in detail, but at the end he asked something I never would have thought was a separate question: was the episode any good? I was still young (15!) and felt like an episode with that much to chew on was necessarily a good episode. That review taught me the importance of not just succeeding, but succeeding on the right level.

(Second favourite would be "Year of Hell II", where he gets really mad at Paris despite agreeing with him, and then returns to the intro scene in a particularly moving way. As a chaser, his "brother Tito" also reviews the episode -- I won't spoil the joke if you haven't read it, but suffice to say it's short.)

ETA hey, when did you change member titles?

Just a week or so ago. I was inspired to change Nate's by an incident in Misc and then I did the rest while I was in there. Personally, I don't feel like I'm quite done with arm blades, but by now the rest of you probably are.

Originally Posted by Nate

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

Yep. The first was on Angelfire, made using their WYSIWYG editor (though I learned HTML and switched to hand-coding pretty quickly). Most of the free hosting services from back then are gone now -- Geocities was probably the biggest -- but Angelfire's still around, and I've even used the old site as a backup on occasion when this site's been down. I can still type the url really fast.

Gremlin: Cute. But for the record, we're talking about evolution here, not a string of failures. Your Bulbasaur does not sink into the swamp when it becomes an Ivysaur.

[Flying Gremlin]

Originally Posted by Zeke

Gremlin: Cute. But for the record, we're talking about evolution here, not a string of failures. Your Bulbasaur does not sink into the swamp when it becomes an Ivysaur.

Hey, come on, someone had to do a less popular Holy Grail quote.

And you know that if you ever write a history for the site, it'll be fived. I'm just giving that future person a head start.

And wait a minute... who uses Bulbasaur? Come on, you're not even trying with any of the good starters! It's Charmander or Squirtle!

[NAHTMMM]

Bulbasaur has its good points, with Leech Seed and immunity to poison. I'm more of a Squirtle fan though.

[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.

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Just a week or so ago. I was inspired to change Nate's by an incident in Misc and then I did the rest while I was in there. Personally, I don't feel like I'm quite done with arm blades, but by now the rest of you probably are.

*reads member title*

We're doomed.

[Flying Gremlin]

Originally Posted by Sa'ar Chasm

*reads member title*

We're doomed.

I think the term you're searching for is: "It failed."

[Zeke]

Only to become our last best hope for victory, which I have on good authority is something greater! Geez. Buncha pessimists.

And hey, it's KJ and Sa'ar! Good to see you again. Stick around, I'm posting stuff.

Re: starters, Pokemon is only easy when you know the game mechanics -- the real ones that the game never bothers explaining. (Above all, physical vs. special.) I went back years later knowing all that stuff and even got all 151 Pokemon, but when I was a kid, with nothing to go on but the very incomplete in-game explanations, having an advantage against the first two gyms made a huge difference. I also just find Bulbasaur the most interesting of the original trio -- water-types are a dime a dozen and while it's definitely nice to have access to fire early on, Bulbasaur makes up for it in versatility.

[NAHTMMM]

Originally Posted by Zeke

water-types are a dime a dozen

But they're all so cuuuute!

I agree with you about Bulbasaur's strategic utility, though. The Fire type just never really resonated with me for some reason. It's like the Fighting type: you think it'll be awesome to just destroy everything with, but really it's only great against a few types and meanwhile there are all these other types ganging up on it. I tended to go with Squirtle - Pidgey - Geodude for the core of my party.