Nate the Great fixes Voyager

[Nate the Great]

I guess I should explain. Let's say the Borg encounter Species X, who can technically be assimilated but in the process their biology alters enough to make a not very good drone. The Borg know that better assimilation is possible, perhaps a new strategy could be used: a disease that that can alter a species' DNA to be compatible with "complete assimilation". They go to the Vidiians and infect them with this disease. It's not The Phage yet, but the Vidiians had a genetic factor that the Borg couldn't expect. This assimilation virus mutates into The Phage, making organs less able to be assimilated instead of more able. Now the Borg can't even assimilate the Vidiians now, they wouldn't add to the perfection of the Collective. There aren't even any useful research results to help them with Species X. The Borg give up on the whole thing.

[Flying Gremlin]

No, I get it, I just have problems reconciling the Borg having any influence on Vidiians in that timeframe, when they had not assimilated enough technology to get that far. It's a long way outside of Borg territory in the 24th century, to say nothing about 4th century Borg.

[Nate the Great]

"The Cloud"


Janeway is conflicted about how close she can get to the crew.

A reasonable plot, although this seems like an odd point in the first season to be bringing this up. It should've either been much earlier as part of the necessary "how do we make one crew out of two" plotline that should've been more emphasized earlier, or pushed later in order to establish more about the Delta Quadrant races and political situation. Particularly we needed the Kazon to be much more fleshed out.

In a search for energy, Voyager wounds a lifeform that looks like a nebula.

I would be more incredulous about a gaseous lifeform, but we've seen plenty of such creatures in Trek before now. The big problem here is that the amount of screentime given to it isn't really a good amount. If the point of the episode was supposed to be character development, this plotline should've been had less screentime. If this nebula was supposed to be exciting and a voyage of discovery, the plotline needed to be fleshed out more.


A quick sidenote about the holodeck. I won't go into the full rant about holodeck power compatibility, but a good compromise would be to say that they're trying to only use simpler programs, one setting and at most one holocharacter (i.e. a bartender or waitress). I can think of plenty of simple programs used in other series that could be used in a "power-saving" holodeck setting: anbo-jitsu, a beach like the one Geordi made, a poker table, etc. As the series goes on the programs get more complex as Voyager got more power-efficient.



Neelix is frustrated about the dangerous explorations that the ship does.


While this is a reasonable argument from his perspective (I'm reminded of Andromeda for some reason), this isn't something that should be present this early. We need to like Neelix before the writers start making him seem unreasonable. His conversion to the Starfleet gospel needed to be more prominent, not something that happened in the background.