Probably one of those ideas better left alone. Accelerated puberty, like any accelerated ageing, is hard to pull off well. A couple of the characters run around going ‘am I ready to be a parent’ – such an old story, with nothing new done here. And then a cop out at the end to reset everything.

And the B-plot, with the aliens who want to ‘mate’ with Voyager, is pretty silly as well. Just not much to like here.

Great/terrible line: “It appears we have lost our sex appeal, Captain.”

379 down, 368 to go.

Apart from the actual explanation of what was going on in the last act (yuck, technobabble city), this was a pretty good piece of paranoid ‘what’s real here’ storytelling. It’s always an uphill battle in this type of story within an ongoing story, because the audience ‘knows’ what reality should be. But this episode manages it well.

It’s also good to see Barclay make a reappearance, and he and the Doctor work well together. None of the other crew-members really get very much time on screen at all, though.

378 down, 369 to go.

So far we’ve seen quite a bit of Chakotay’s spirituality. And it’s certainly a nice change for Star Trek to allow a character to have that side. But it all feels very shallow, like a Fisher Price religion. I don’t know very much about animistic religions, but I’m pretty sure there’s more depth than we get to see here.

The Kazon are a pretty dull one-note culture of the type that Star Trek is far too guilty of. All X’s are Y’s. It’s ultimately an incredibly racist view of the world, as it suggests that races or species can ever be summarised in that way. And in reality there’s always a lot more going on that that.

(Oh hey, the actual episode – OK, but not great. Just pressed a couple of my buttons).

377 down, 360 to go.

A strange episode that started out bad but somehow redeemed itself by having an interesting problem to resolve in the final act. The whole ‘finding ancient alien abductees’ thing has been done very often, and isn’t fundamentally a very interesting story. There’s way too much time spent on the ‘this is what happened since you were abducted’ history, which everyone in the audience already knows. And without even the aliens who did the abducting there’s little drama.

But at the end of the episode the twist into ‘who will stay’ makes the episode worthwhile, and addresses a useful development point for the main characters and the rest of the crew.

376 down, 361 to go.

There seems to have been a deliberate attempt to reboot the show in a few respects, such as adding the Defiant. But there seems to be a lot of missed opportunities. The best stuff in this season has been when the ongoing plots of the Dominion, the Cardassians and Bajoran politics are used. But instead we spend too long with the Ferengi, and too long with generic episodes that could be in any series.

One trend I did like was the few quieter episodes, such as Explorers and Facets, where character stuff was allowed to happen without big threatening situations. Some more of that would be good, although the attempts so far haven’t bought in enough character to compensate for the loss of action.

Overall this is the weakest season since TNG’s second, and right now the trajectory of quality is not looking good.

So now we have the master list as:

• TNG Season 6
• DS9 Season 2
• TNG Season 3
• TNG Season 5
• TOS Season 2
• TNG Season 4
• TOS Season 1
• DS9 Season 1
• VOY Season 1
• TNG Season 7
• DS9 Season 3
• TNG Season 2
• TAS Season 1
• TOS Season 3
• TAS Season 2
• TNG Season 1

That’s 375 watched, 16,811 minutes, and 51.55% complete. 59,103 words written. 362 to go.

Another escalation in the cold war with the Dominion that has been running since the start of the season. Slow to get going, and a couple of drawn out sequences in the middle. But plenty of The Thing style paranoia, which while not new is at least well done and appropriate. I just wish the potential conflict was with an alien race we’d heard of before, and not this ‘introduced for one episode only long-term threat and past source of conflict’ race. Surely we’d have heard of them before.

This really seems like an awfully elaborate plot for a changeling. I’m pretty sure that there would be an easier way to start a war than this. And there’s a clearly a lot to be learnt about ‘Changeling on the loose’ security. O’Brien turns up with an unconscious Dax, and no one even questions if he’s still O’Brien? Sloppy. A lot of the pairs split up for little good reason. And no one ever suggests a second changeling either.

375 down, 362 to go.

This kind of episode is a big opportunity for the actors to do something new. Most of them don’t do that much with it: Kira overacts, O’Brien is nebbish, Leeta is hard to distinguish from her normal self, Quark is a one note joke, and Bashir seems mostly like himself with a more American accent. Sisko does well with Joran, although personally I would have liked a bit more ‘Hannibal Lecter’ creepiness. The main focus is the Odo/Curzon combination, and fortunately that works really well.

There isn’t a lot of excitement in the episode, everything develops slowly. I would have preferred having all the different past selves out, and interacting with each other as well as Jadzia. It ends up being very ‘bitty’.

374 down, 363 to go.

There isn’t a single fantastic episode, but there’s also only one awful one (Cathexis, yuck). Caretaker, Faces and State of Flux all showed a lot of promise.

But the stories have all felt a bit generic. There’s a lot of promise in the setup (far from home, a split crew), but many of the stories could have been done in any of the other series. The most interesting stories have always come from character, and the stories have only intermittently given us more information about the characters here.

Still, overall I think it was a good year. Not as strong as DS9′s first year (which did a lot of good ongoing story building), but a lot better than TNG’s first year. Or last year, for that matter.

Let’s have a look at the big board:

• TNG Season 6
• DS9 Season 2
• TNG Season 3
• TNG Season 5
• TOS Season 2
• TNG Season 4
• TOS Season 1
• DS9 Season 1
• VOY Season 1
• TNG Season 7
• TNG Season 2
• TAS Season 1
• TOS Season 3
• TAS Season 2
• TNG Season 1

Two more episodes to finish DS9′s third season.

Not exactly a groundbreaking story, but still well told. It was a bit hard to believe that Tuvok was a good teacher though – I suspect that the other lecturers at the academy were fixing a lot of his mistakes. But the ‘come together as a team’ moment at the end didn’t seem too forced, and it was nice to see Tuvok struggle with something he can’t do.

Strong contender for worst line of all time: “Get that cheese to sickbay”.

373 down, 364 to go.

Several episodes so far have followed a pretty similar ‘escalation’ pattern to this one. Things start out nice and simple, and kind of spiral out of control as the episode goes on. DS9 is pretty good at it, but I worry that it’s getting a bit cliche. But it works this time.

There’s a very creepy moment in the middle of the episode where Kai Winn steps from ‘machiavellian’ to ‘messianic’. It doesn’t really go anywhere in this episode, but it’s another bit of foreshadowing.

The B-plot though is a waste of space. The acting was so bad when O’Brien has his injury that I thought it was some elaborate scheme to get Quark. It just served no purpose.

372 down, 365 to go. One year left.

This is pretty heavy handed stuff. The number of not-so-veiled allusions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki got really annoying fast. And too much of the weight of the episode rests on Neelix being serious – possible, but a big ask given how he’s only been given comic relief and exposition roles to this point.

But it works. Just. Risk taking is good, and making a war criminal a potentially redeemable person is definitely a risk. Unfortunately the last few minutes descend into a bit of a technobabble farce, but at least they avoid the temptation of the implausibly happy ending.

371 down, 366 to go.

Grading on the ‘Ferengi episode’ curve this was pretty good. That means it comes out slightly above ‘mediocre’ on the normal scale. My main problem in enjoying this is just the sheer offensiveness of Ferengi culture’s treatment of women. But the story works in the end, and other than one really horrible slapstick scene avoids most of the normal pitfalls of these episodes.

(My other problem with this is the idea of the ‘Ferengi Commerce Authority’ – why would a hyper-capitalist society have a commerce regulator? Sure, they seem to be doing cultural, not economic, stuff in this episode. But it still feels wrong).

370 down, 367 to go.

From the summary line I was expecting to hate this episode a lot, but it turned out to be really really good. The story is able to teach us a lot about one character, while managing to avoid the deep dive into technobabble that’s been hurting a lot of episodes lately.

The acting of the two ‘halves’ of Torres is incredible. The actress manages to make both of them recognisably part of Torres’ normal personality, but also shows the clear difference in them. It’s very clever, and very well done.

369 down, 368 to go. And that’s halfway by episode count.

A strangely quieter episode, the trickiest thing here is adjusting to the suddenly slower pace than the episodes around it. It’s a good story, well told in a way that builds useful character elements, it’s just a bit of a whiplash in change of pace from the ‘Romulans trying to defeat the Domninion’ scope of the previous episode.

Even the Bashir B-plot was nicely done. It built his relationship with O’Brien, painted a good picture of his insecurities and concerns, and had a nice payoff at the end. Nothing deeply consequential, jut moving the character forward another notch.

368 down, 369 to go.

How would you make a really bad episode?

• Stupid Holodeck opening sequence with no point other than using up a few minutes.

• Ridiculous technobabble explanation for the main inciting incident.

• Painfully long ‘oh, he’s native american’ sequence with a medicine wheel.

• Kes having strange psychic visions that seem to bring on blurry camerawork.

That’s the first 12 minutes. The silly ghost story and ‘Who’s the Alien’ rubbish of the remainder is Voyager’s first journey into truly awful.

367 down, 370 to go.

A bit of ‘two parter’ syndrome at play here, but still a pretty good story. The best part is Garak’s mental journey. Initially I was a bit unclear about whether he was just faking or not, but the torture scenes made that very clear, and his reaction to his path.

A very big thing happened here and hardly anyone noticed yet. The undercover Founder not only showed some very active interest, but a willingness to take specific action to achieve their goals. So far no one’s very excited about that, but that’ll change…

366 down, 371 to go.

The first 15 minutes is a strange combination of bizarre technobabble and bad period drama. It’s quite simply not very good. The decision to use the Doctor as the main character is a good one, as it turns a pretty standard story we’ve seen before into a bit of a fish out of water tale.

But there’s still too much chaff around the story, and far too much ‘Viking Hall’ stuff. The characters there aren’t very interesting, and as that’s the only interaction the Doctor has the episode just doesn’t have a lot of meat to it.

365 down, 372 to go.

Another one of those ‘so good I don’t have much to say’ episodes. This is the payoff to a lot of parts laid through the season and before – the secret Cardassian fleet from Defiant, the Romulan intelligence exchange from Visionary, finding the Founders in The Search, Garak’s Obsidian Order history from The Wire. It’s a perfect example of laying groundwork for something big.

But now to see if there’s enough payoff next time…

364 down, 373 to go.

Something just felt a bit off about this one. Perhaps it was as simple as the terrible costume design for Jennifer Sisko, which just looked wrong every time I looked at it. I appreciate what they were going for, but somehow it just didn’t work. Other than that, the pacing felt a bit stale, and the story overall was a bit forced with many jumps in logic.

The episode is mainly just a lot of fun for the regular crew, with everyone getting a chance to chew the scenery a bit and play an alternate version of themselves. Jadzia and Bashir are particularly good. Kira is still cover-your-eyes awful, just too over the top and vampy. An example of taking it too far.

(PS: Change your passwords! Especially if you’re worried about mirror universes)

363 down, 374 to go.

A nice episode that uses up what could have been a really interesting ongoing plot with a bit more work. The idea of a traitor in the crew is a good one, but it gets bought up and resolved in a single episode. We’ve now got a good basis for a recurring villain, but I think at least a few more episodes of ‘is there a traitor?’ could have worked.

The real highlight is when Seska decides to give up the charade and become her true self. It’s a nice turn into a different character, and really sells the idea of her as an undercover Cardassian agent. But I just don’t buy that the physioloogy is so similar that a scan would be anything other than a complete giveaway.

362 down, 375 to go.