So this is most surely my favorite episode of Voyager, for several reasons.
One, much like a lot of Voyager and late DS9, it's just trippy as hell, and I'm a big fan of trippy Star Trek.
Which ended somewhere around the last disastrous episode of Voyager or when Enterprise jumped the shark by not only going back in time to fight the Nazis but by copying a virtually identical double episode of Voyager. What the f were they on then? The world may never know but it can't be good and TV Trek never truly recovered.
Two is that this entire episode is clearly an allusion to Dante's journey through "The Inferno" circa the thirteenth century. Surely any modern art form that manages to faithfully pay tribute to another published 700 years previous is worthy of preservation in the Library of Congress.
Unfortunately this would surely be lost on 95% of TV audiences when the episode aired in 1999 and 99% as of 2018. So this episode is at the same time a commentary on humanity's past, present, and future, by analogy to B'Elanna's Klingon past, present, and future, though clearly lost on most viewers so the producers really snuck one by Paramount's executive and test audience teams and for that I commend them.
Few things in Trek OR film or TV history ever came close to this feat of production, and for that, I shall petition the LOC to include this episode in its collection of culturally significant American works of art.
To MartinHafer I disagree 100%. Many people with spiritual traditions either derived from or similar to Native American spiritual traditions hold exactly the same beliefs, that one can both have a spiritual experience and accept that it did not occur within our familiar (at least) four dimensional physical or mathematical realm that we know as "reality."
To many people, including myself though I am not of Native American heritage, what people recognise as "reality" is subjective, and this episode at least seems to me to explore the boundaries between objective and subjective reality to an extent only ever performed on U.S. network TV perhaps in TNG's "The Inner Light" or DS9's "Extreme Measures" the latter of which coincidentally or maybe not aired in 1999 as well. Too bad it was all downhill from there as far as "Trek", Science fiction, and Television in general are all concerned.
"Wars" never came close in at least 41 years. Good luck DIS. This episode will probably enter the public domain long before Mickey Mouse by some sort of further unconstitutional legal manoeuvering ever will
One, much like a lot of Voyager and late DS9, it's just trippy as hell, and I'm a big fan of trippy Star Trek.
Which ended somewhere around the last disastrous episode of Voyager or when Enterprise jumped the shark by not only going back in time to fight the Nazis but by copying a virtually identical double episode of Voyager. What the f were they on then? The world may never know but it can't be good and TV Trek never truly recovered.
Two is that this entire episode is clearly an allusion to Dante's journey through "The Inferno" circa the thirteenth century. Surely any modern art form that manages to faithfully pay tribute to another published 700 years previous is worthy of preservation in the Library of Congress.
Unfortunately this would surely be lost on 95% of TV audiences when the episode aired in 1999 and 99% as of 2018. So this episode is at the same time a commentary on humanity's past, present, and future, by analogy to B'Elanna's Klingon past, present, and future, though clearly lost on most viewers so the producers really snuck one by Paramount's executive and test audience teams and for that I commend them.
Few things in Trek OR film or TV history ever came close to this feat of production, and for that, I shall petition the LOC to include this episode in its collection of culturally significant American works of art.
To MartinHafer I disagree 100%. Many people with spiritual traditions either derived from or similar to Native American spiritual traditions hold exactly the same beliefs, that one can both have a spiritual experience and accept that it did not occur within our familiar (at least) four dimensional physical or mathematical realm that we know as "reality."
To many people, including myself though I am not of Native American heritage, what people recognise as "reality" is subjective, and this episode at least seems to me to explore the boundaries between objective and subjective reality to an extent only ever performed on U.S. network TV perhaps in TNG's "The Inner Light" or DS9's "Extreme Measures" the latter of which coincidentally or maybe not aired in 1999 as well. Too bad it was all downhill from there as far as "Trek", Science fiction, and Television in general are all concerned.
"Wars" never came close in at least 41 years. Good luck DIS. This episode will probably enter the public domain long before Mickey Mouse by some sort of further unconstitutional legal manoeuvering ever will