I actually enjoy this weird episode a lot. Then again, one of my favourite VOY characters is Neelix, so what do I know? What’s your take on this bizarre episode?
The premise is interesting, and the mystery of “what’s happening to Tom” as he gets this weird body horror transformation is actually fairly well done. But any time that a scriptwriter types the word “evolution” into a keyboard there’s should be an automatic spray bottle that pops out of the computer that spritzes them in the face and shouts “No! Bad!” Because any sci-fi script that mentions evolution is inevitably going to completely fuck it up.
;D I love your idea of the pop up spray bottle.
I think it’s actually a pretty good episode up until the final few minutes when the questionably sentient lizards show up. How reviled the episode is says more about how people react to that than the overall episode, IMO.
I agree. The episode isn’t perfect but the first ~35 minutes are decent.
I’ll never understand why it’s considered to be the worst Star Trek episode. Yes, it has a weird ending but Star Trek had plenty of weird episodes (which aren’t considered bad). What I find much worse are episodes like TNGs Code of Honor that are insulting, or episodes that are downright boring like SNWs The Elysian Kingdom.
It’s a shame you didn’t like The Elysian Kingdom, I thought that was a great episode. But then I’m a sucker for episodes where the actors get to act out of character for a while, and a LARP episode was silly fun. I suppose it’s just a preference thing.
I can’t believe you compared it in the same breath as Code of Honor, though—lots of Trek is boring at times, but Code of Honor is straight up offensive, a true failure for Trek. If anything, Elysian Kingdom is more similar to Threshold in the “low quality” sense than to Code of Honor, which is actually an awful episode that shouldn’t have been made.
It won an Emmy.
The beginning is amazing and exciting, especially Tom spilling his guts arguing to Janeway to make the test flight.
I have a hard time getting over the thing where the story introduces some amazing new capability, and it’s never explored further. In this one it’s, “we found a way to get home instantly, but we’d have to do a thing in sick bay to reverse the side-effects.” A similar case is the episode with the planet of friendly hedonists with long range transporters that it turns out they can’t use because “the power systems are incompatible”.
I’m sure if I weren’t so uptight I’d enjoy these episodes more.
It was the first episode of Voyager I ever watched, at a friend’s recommendation. What a gift.
