Customer Reviews

Star Trek Voyager - The Complete Fourth Season

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The 4th Season of Star Trek Voyager is the best yet. Kes' character moves on to a higer plain of existance in the 2nd episode and the new character Seven of Nine is introduced.

There are some great episodes in the 4th season which are as follows:

Scorpion Part II

After Janeway creates a temporary alliance with the Borg they work with Seven of Nine to develop a way to defeat their mutual enemy.

The Gift.
After Seven of Nine is cut off form the Borg collective, The Doctor begins to remove her implants while Kes undergoes many transformations

Day of Honor
After ejecting the warp core and Paris and Torres retrieve it, the reveal their love to each other.

Nemesis
After getting stranded on an alien planet, some of the locals coerce Chaoktay into helping them fight a war against their enemies.

Revulsion
Voyager recieves a distress call from an alien hologram. He reveales that his ship was infected with a virus. The hologram begins to go crazy.

The Raven
After Seven's Borg implants start to regenerate, She attempts to rejoin the Borg collective.

Scientific Method
When the crew of Voyager begin getting strange sicknesses, it is revealed that a cloaked alien ship is conducting medical experiments on them.

Year of Hell part I
Voyager is repeatedly attacked by a hostile alien ship with a temporal weapon. With half the ship destroyed, Janeway calls for
abandoning the ship

Year of Hell part II
After most of the crew has evacuated, the remaining crew try to stop the temporal weapon.

Random Thoughts
After Torres has hostile thoughts against an telepathic alien who bumps into her, she is arrested for having "violent thoughts" and is obligated to undergo a potentially damaging memory purge.

Concerning Flight
Some of Voyager's equipment is stolen and is tracked to a nearby planet. Janeway discovers that her Leonardo da Vinci holodeck program merged with the doctor's emmiter putting DaVinci's program on the planet

Mortal Coil
After Neelix is killed in a shuttle accident, Seven reveals knowledge of a procedure which can bring him back to life.

Waking Moments
After the crew starts having virtually identical nightmares, Chakotay learns that a sleeping alien race is causing it.

Message in a Bottle
Voyager discovers a Federation ship on the other side of the galaxy through a network of alien relay stations. When they send
the doctor's program to the ship to call for help, the doctor learns that Romulans have taken over the ship.

Hunters
After making sucessful contact with the Fedearation the crew starts recieving letters from their families. The aliens who own the relay stations, the Hirogen are furious at the fact that their stations are being used by Voyager and try to stop them.

Prey
After discovering a member of species 8472, the aliens who nearly destroyed the Borg, a member of Hirogen demands that he be allowed to continue hunting it.

Retrosepct
When Voyager is in trade negotiatons with a trader, Seven claims that he forcefully extracted Borg implants from her body.

The Killing Game part I
The Hirogen has captured Voyager's crew and repressed their memories and replaced new ones into them to creat a simulation of WWII with the Hirogen as the German army and Voyager's crew as the French resistance.

The Killing Game part II
The Doctor works to restore the memories of Voyager's crew while fending off the Hirogen.

Vis a Vis
An alien species uses Paris' DNA to turn herself into a duplicate of him.

The Omega Directive
Voyager's encounters an alien race manufacturing an extremely dangerous and supersecret molecule. Federation law requires them to destroy the molecules and all knowledge of their existance by any means necessary.

Unforgettable
A female alien is brought on board voyager and tells Chakotay that they used to be in love but has to erase his memories of it

Living Witness
700 years in the future, the doctor's program is reactivated in an alien museum which has rewritten history about Voyager.

Demon
Voyager discovers a fuel source on a "demon class" planet which is dangerous to even approach. They look for a way to get the fuel off the planet

One
Voyager encounters a large nebula that would take a year to go around and only month to go through. The problem is that only Seven is immune to the radiation in the nebula. The crew are put in stasis so they will be unaffected. Seven and the doctor are the only ones operating the ship.

Hope and Fear
A member of a highly intelligent alien race who was nearly wiped out by the Borg claims to be able to decrypt a message that Voyager recieved from Starfleet. The mesage says that they sent an experimental ship to an area near them which will enable to get them home in months. Though Seven suspects it may be a trap the alien set to get revenge on Voyager for helping the Borg.

There are special features on the DVD which have not yet been announced at the time of this review being submitted.

This is a season that one should not miss.

I love Star Trek, I have since it was first on in the 60's (my dad tells me I used to watch it in my playpen in 1966 when I was only a year old!). :) Anyway, I consider myself a pretty good Star Trek fan, I've been watching as long as I can remember.

Voyager never quite did it for me when it was new. I think part of the reason was that they removed themselves from the established Star Trek continuity. You didn't have all the familiar sights of the Federation and whatnot. However, over time, the show has grown on me, even moreso since it went off the air. I have several Star Trek season sets, but I don't buy all of them, mostly because of the price of the things, and the fact that I won't rewatch them a zillion times, the cost kind of keeps me from buying all of them.

Having said that, I felt that Season 4 was a must buy. The reason was the introduction of Seven of Nine. Her visual look aside, I felt Seven was a pretty complex character, and while Seven based stories seemed to dominate for awhile, I felt she was a good mix to the crew. The fact that Jeri Ryan was pleasing (a little TOO pleasing for some people) to the eye kind of made it difficult for some people to look past her breasts and see the good character there. A Borg as a crewmember? That was a pretty radical concept back when this was new. None of the fans really knew how it would turn out. It turned out pretty well, and in Season 4 you can see the genesis of the character.

Also, we lost Kes this season. The production staff was on record saying that they didn't know what to do with the character. Personally, I thought the character was fine. There were some wonderful Kes stories in the first three years of the show, and I liked that Kes was a character that didn't have these hidden agendas, didn't want to have a command of her own, etc.. She was just a "nice" character. And that was lost. Shame, as I thought Jennifer Lien was both cute and pulled off what they did try to do pretty well.

There's several REALLY good stories in Season 4. Obviously, the introuction of Seven in the first episode is great (that's one beef I have with these seasons sets; season ending cliffhangers are spread over two sets, and you don't get part 1 of this thing). Ones I liked a lot were "The Gift" (The departure of Kes), The Year of Hell Pts 1/2 (The crew evacuates Voyager and it takes some supreme beatings), Message in a Bottle (The Doctor is transported back to the Alpha Quadrant), The Killing Game Pts 1/2 (The crew is forced to play war games on the Holodeck), Living Witness (a fabulous story where the crew is depicted 700 years in the future in a soceity's museum; depicted wrong). Hope and Fear (Starfleet sends a ship to bring Voyager home?).

There's plenty more good stuff in this season, but I don't want to just sit here and list them all. There's a good episode guide over at startrek.com for all these episodes, go check it out.

I gave this review 4 stars out of 5 because of the fact that I don't much care for what Paramount has done with the extras on these sets. They need commentaries, they need deleted scenes, they need a whole lot more stuff than the few flimsy documentaries they have included. I'm also not a fan of the actual packaging used on the Voyager sets, it seems pretty "cheap" to me. The episodes are great, so that's where the high mark comes from, but I'm disappointed in Paramount for dropping the ball on creating what could be really GREAT season sets; they seem content on just doing some work on them. What concerns me more is Paramount's history of releasing minimal releases, and then later on re-releasing them with far more extensive versions. They did that with all the Star Trek movies, I sure hope they aren't planning the same wiht the various TV show sets.

Season four was totally awesome. I really never watched Voyager on a regular basis until season 4. There is no bad episodes!!! Even the weaker episodes are still good!

Season four had some major changes to it from the first couple of episodes in the season. Seven of Nine a half Borg/Human joined the cast, Kes left the series, Paris and Torres finally got together, the Doctor made contact with the Federation, the crew got a lot closer to home, and Voyager encountered the Borg, and many new and exciting enemies.

Season four will give you great episodes like "Scorpion, part II", "Year of Hell, parts I and II", "Message in a Bottle", and many more!!! The only problem with the season was a classic season cliffhanger to help bring in season five. This is no big deal since season four was the greastest of Voyager and one of the best of Trek.

Season 4: 9/28
Season 5: 11/2
Season 6: 12/7
Season 7: 12/21

Seven of Nine! This is where the series got to be excellent again. Voyager was one of those series that I watched only because I was an avid Trekky. If I missed an episode in the first three seasons, I wasn't exactly heartbroken...but when season four hit, I would cancel plans to be home to watch it. I never missed an episode.

Now...Seven of Nine was a great addition to the cast. Not to downplay Kes, but she bored me...it was just another telepath like Troi. It was done and needed to end. Seven of Nine alone made the show more interesting because of the dynamic she brought into the show. Using Borg innovation to gain an advantage with the many challenges of the Delta quadrant was a good move to revive the show. The Borg, are porbably one of the single best "villans" on television. Who doesn't know the line "Resistance is futile"??

I'm a nut about the Borg and reintroducing them was what made me want to watch. So while I say Seven of Nine are the three words that describe Season 4, I partially mean Jeri Ryan, but even more so, I was just psyched about reintroducing the Borg into the series. Even in Season Three, the two best episodes were Unity and Scorpion Part 1, primarily because of the Borg involvement.

Last...the Year of Hell episode is in this season. Next to the Series Finale, the Year of Hell was the best episode produced for the series. Can't wait to get this one!

Season 4 of Voyager commences with two of the series' most compelling episodes. Scorpion Pt. II resolves the cliffhanger of season 3 and introduces Seven of Nine, who is at first decidedly unattractive as a Borg drone. The Gift completes at least her physical transformation into a surly fembot. This season lavishes attention on the character of Seven, who quickly becomes both complex and likeable owing in large part to a well-crafted performance by Jeri Ryan. Her unapologetically sexy contribution to the Voyager ensemble still causes controvery among fans, but certainly Ryan gives it her all from the first time she appears until the end of the show's run.

The Gift also marks the unfortunate departure of Kes (excepting an even more unfortunate and misbegotten return for one episode in season 6), and although no other regular will disappear from the show completely, many will find themselves in the background this season given Seven's prominent place.

A number of solid episodes follow the season's impressive start: Day of Honor provides Torres and Paris a chance to float in space and explore their relationship, and Nemesis finds Chakotay with some young alien soldiers "glimpsing" among the "trunks." Revulsion introduces us to an obsessive-compulsive hologram, The Raven to Seven's (that is, Annika's) eccentric parents, and Scientific Method to some invisible alien contraptions that are torturing the Voyager crew. Following these is the two-part Year of Hell, a fantastic episode with a Captain Nemo-like villain and an increasingly Captain Ahab-like Janeway.

After this climax a few weaker episodes follow, including Random Thoughts, with Tuvok again playing detective (a role he first took on in season 1's Ex Post Facto); Mortail Coil, which gives us a view of Talaxian spirituality; and Waking Moments, with its sound and fury basically signifying nothing.

Things get good again with the hilarious, Niles-and-Frasier team-up of two EMHs in Message in a Bottle, which also puts Voyager back in contact with Starfleet and introduces the Hirogen, a towering hunter race also seen in Hunters, Prey, and the two-part Killing Game. This last is certainly imaginative, but like Concerning Flight it involves Janeway allowing aliens to make off with Voyager's technology. I wouldn't be so concerned about this if the captain hadn't been so determined in earlier seasons to keep Federation stuff out of Kazon hands.

Things get iffy from here on out in the season, although it certainly never descends to the level of the worst of season 2. Vis a Vis, Unforgettable, and Demon all seem unexceptional at best. Both the Omega Directive and One invite us into the inner workings amd motivations of Seven, and not for the last time. Living Witness, a standout, gives the Voyager crew a chance to wear grimaces and leather gloves and even makes an important point about history amidst the fun. Hope and Fear wraps up the season nicely if not spectacularly, with a brief return to where we started this segment of Voyager's journey, in Borg space.

The extras, along with Easter eggs, are about what we've become used to with the Voyager DVD sets, although Real Science has been omitted and a feature on matte painting added. In general this season provides some of the highest highs of Voyager and none of its lowest lows.

The fourth season of Voyager is one of the best. Season four marks the introduction of Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine in "Scorpion, part II" and Jennifer Lien's character Kes leaving in "The Gift." The two parter "Year of Hell" is by far the best Voyager episode(s) ever produced. Other excellent offerings are "Scientific Method," "Message in a Bottle," "The Killing Game," "Living Witness," and "Hope and Fear."

Voyager is my favorite Star Trek series, and the fourth season is a must have for any Voyager fan.

I am a Star Trek fan. I have watched the saga since age 5. When Voyager began I was so glad to see another updated vessel on a mission. Unlike some other fans I was bored with DS9. Voyager really takes off in season 4 with some excellent episodes. The season contains what is reported to be one of the cast's favorites - Killing Game I & II. Seven is probably the best Star Trek character EVER and this is where it began - SEASON 4. The writing and storyline improved and the character building was, I believe, better than any other Star Trek series. The character building was also excellent. Season 4 contains 2 fantastic 2 parters - Year of Hell - which is an excellent time based story and the already mentioned Killing Game - a great portrayal of sci-fi/realism that is plausible and entertaining. Season 4 and 5 are the BEST overall for Voyager.

It finally had to happen. There were clues from Season 3 that it was going to happen, there was going to be a run-in (or several) with the Borg in the Delta Quadrant. Once again, Janeway makes a bad mistake in her assessment of striking up an alliance with an alien race just to save her crew and get home. Her only saving grace this time was that they were taking on a more formidable adversary in Species 8472 from fluidic space (as if taking over this space was not good enough for the Borg) and that if she made this deal with the devil, the devil in turn would grant her and her crew safe passage through Borg Space. There would be more run-ins throughout the series, especially when the crew discovers how to use trans-warp coils and the conduits they open up to get through space even faster than just warp speed. Especially with the not-so-willing-at-first assistance from 7 Of 9, Tertiary Adjunct Of Unimatrix 01, the grown-up collectivized version of a human girl by the name of Annika Hansen, whose bohemian parents some years ago were pursuing an anthropological study of a mythical race of cyerbernetic organisms called the Borg some 20 years before.

But there's more to this season than just the Borg--the Year Of Hell, which started out as Kes' premonition in Season 3, became a reality for this crew--or did it? We may never know unless we have seen the episode. Kurtwood Smith from "That 70's Show" plays a scientist who discovers how to use time as his weapon to bring back his dead wife, only to discover that when he manipulates on part of the timeline, it screws up other parts of it--and then realizes that they would not be so screwed up if it weren't for the fact that Voyager is in the wrong place and that this wild variable seems to thwart the very results he is seeking. And so he undertakes to destroy Voyager only to find out that Voyager turns his weapon against him and in the end, we wonder whether or not the "Year Of Hell" really happened.

We are also introduced to the Hirojen, a race/tribe of hunters whose entire culture is predicated on the hunt and the pursuit of prey. They discover Voyager at this communications array that can relay information to the Alpha Quadrant and Janeway and her crew use it to successfully communicate a message to Starfleet. The Hirojen swoop in and destroy the array and then pursue Voyager. In the end, this hunt forever changes the Hirojen when they finally capture Voyager and discover the histories of Earth and Kronos as they force their hunters and the Voyager to relive these events.

Of course, the communications with Startfleet Command yield some continuing disappointments for the crew, when the Maquis learned that most of their comrades in the Alpha Quadrant were wiped out by the Dominion--something that the Cardassians could not do by themselves if you followed "DS9". It also yielded more bad news for the crew when they finally deciphered all of Starfleet's message back to them--that there was no way to get them back home quickly but if they find a way, they will let Voyager know. Just like "Basics", it hammers the fact into the Voyager crew that they still out there alone in the Delta Quadrant.

The season finalé was not a cliffhanger. If anything it was a reminder to Janeway about what the consequences were of assisting the Borg in their fight against Species 8472 and that the Borg were more than happy to use the weapon that Janeway helped them build against other species and peoples--whom they could not assimilate before because their DNA structures were too complex. This also would become an issue in later seasons until the Series Finalé when eventually she would have to make another that would either save her crew and deliver them home then-and-there or spend 16 more years trying to get them home the hard way.

Less than one year following the concluding season of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in 1994, executive producer/writer Rick Berman, along with Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor, created a fourth television series based upon the "Star Trek" universe originally created by Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) in the 1960's. This fourth television series, entitled "Voyager" (which is the name of the Federation of Planets starship used in the series), first aired in January 1995, and ran for seven seasons until it concluded in May, 2001. Because "Voyager" aired initially in the month of January (instead of the traditional September), only 16 episodes were filmed for the first season. The succeeding six other seasons had 26 episodes each, for a grand total of 172 episodes for the entire series.

Unlike the previous three "Star Trek" television series, which (for the most part) took place within the bounds of the Federation of Planets (or in nearby sovereign areas of space, such as the Klingon Empire or the Romulan Empire) in the Alpha Quadrant, the starship Voyager is hurled tens of thousands of light-years from home into the previously unknown and unexplored Delta Quadrant, which is located at the far side of the Milky Way Galaxy. Even while traveling at warp 8 (the fastest safe speed that a typical starship can travel), it would take Voyager several decades to return to Earth. Hence, the series focuses on the survival of Voyager's Starfleet crew, who are completely isolated and unable to even maintain normal communications with Earth, as well as the crew's ultimate desire to find a way home faster than their ship is capable of doing. Also, along the way, Voyager adopts a few Delta Quadrant natives.

The primary cast members of the fourth season of "Voyager" include Captain Catherine Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran), the half-Klingon Lt. B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson), Delta Quadrant native (Ocampan) Kes (Jennifer Lien, first two episodes only), Lt. Thomas Eugene Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill), Delta Quadrant native (Talaxian) Neelix (Ethan Phillips), the holographic Emergency Medical Holographic Program (a.k.a., "The Doctor", played by Robert Picardo), the Vulcan Lt. Cmdr. Tuvok (Tim Russ), Ensign Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) and the former Borg drone Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan). Voyager's fourth season begins with the second part (episode "Scorpion, Part 2") to the third season's cliffhanger about Voyager making an agreement with the Borg to aid in their war against the seemingly unstoppable species 8472.

With the departure of Kes in the second episode ("The Gift"), the fourth season of "Voyager" focuses much attention upon its newest crewmember, Seven of Nine, whom Captain Janeway chose to cut off from the Borg Collective at the end of episode "Scorpion, Part 2". She begins to relearn what it means to be human primarily from Captain Janeway, but also from the holographic doctor. Other stories during the fourth season include B'Elanna and her ongoing struggles with her Klingon half, a change in the relationship between Paris and B'Elanna, Cmdr. Chakotay becomes involved in an interspecies war in episode "Nemesis", the doctor encounters a psychopathic hologram (Leland Orser) in episode "Revulsion", the crew discovers the source of many physical problems afflicting the crew in episode "Scientific Method", Captain Janeway continues to enjoy time in the holodeck with Leonardo Da Vinci, Voyager's encounters the hunting Hirogen and Voyager encounters the most dangerous substance known to the Federation in episode "The Omega Directive". The best fourth-season episodes, in order of airdate, include "Scorpion, Part 2", "The Gift", "Day of Honor", "Nemesis", "Revulsion", "The Raven", "Scientific Method", "Year of Hell, Part 1 & 2", "Concerning Flight", "Waking Moments", "Message in a Bottle", "Prey", "The Omega Directive", "One" and "Hope and Fear".

Overall, I rate the fourth season of "Voyager" with 4.5 out of 5 stars, rounded to 5 stars. Thankfully, the Kazon are no longer around, but the Hirogen become slightly annoying and predictable over time. Though many "Voyager" fans regretted the loss of character Kes, the development of Seven of Nine's character was very good and only continued to get better in the succeeding seasons, as well as the further story development of the Borg collective itself.