Star Trek: Voyager 06x01 - Equinox (part 2)

The conclusion to last season’s cliffhanger.

Impression

I truly hated the first part of this two-parter. It represented everything I don’t want on my Trek: humanity being what they are, not what they can be. Part II starts just as miserable. Everyone is armed, and there are fights everywhere. Yep, not a great outlook at that point.

But with each passing scene we gain more and more of hope. Jenway is, once again, put in a position no other Trek captain has ever seen. She is, without a shroud of doubt, the toughest captain of all the Treks I’ve seen before. Sisco may have committed a genocide, but it was much less personal. Jenway is forced to make the hardest decisions about people she knows. Lucky for her, Checkotay is here as her consciousness. He may not add much more to the crew, but I’ll be damned if this wasn’t enough. If it wasn’t for him, Voyager would be as evil as the crew of Equinox.

On the other side of the war, Doctor is torturing Seven. I found this plot to be as exciting as the primary one, but much more interesting. Doctor, who we all grew to love, who developed personality and, dare I say it? Humanity, is still a simulation. Everything he is, can be removed within a blink of an eye by resetting his program. And this is what we get here - after he is taken aboard Equinox, he is stripped of everything that made him The Doctor. His relation with Seven of Nine is thrown out the window when he is forced to extract information from her using a scalpel. It ended well, but can we still treat the Doctor as a person? I hope authors will revisit this problem.

Lastly, we’ve got the redemption of the Equinox crew. This is what I found the most important, as this is what keeps me watching Star Trek. No one is evil for the sake of being evil, but the conditions we find ourselves in force us to act, not how we would like. But, deep inside, we are good creatures.

As much as I hated Part 1, the complete Equinox is nothing short of amazing. It is saved by the latter half, as without it, we would have some Expanse (which I found to be a disgusting series). I was afraid that Voyager may have reached the point, where authors would abandon everything they’ve built since the 1960s. I am happy to report that this was not the case.

Doctor factor

Well, I didn’t like Doctor in this episode, but it made it so much more interesting. One of the greatest Doctor factors yet!