Star Trek Voyager Reviews Written by Someone Who Actually LIKES the Show! -- Eye of the Needle

Hello there and welcome to another exciting Star Trek Voyager review! This time we're going to look at "Eye of the Needle." I'm going to be giving away tons of spoilers as well as my own personal opinion of the show I like so much. So if Romulans and wormholes and people who need their own space aren't your thing, why not go somewhere a bit more earth-bound?

For instance, the MSNBC News Index.

No dice? All right then...

INITIAL VIEWER EXPERIENCE
A wormhole that works would mean the end of the series, but this is all still pretty interesting...Yea! more on the Doctor!...even more on the Doctor!...More on the wormhole!...Aw, will Voyager's luck never improve?...Even more on the Doctor!

PLOT
Voyager has found signs of a possible wormhole and eagerly investigates, only to discover that the wormhole is very, very old and so has collapsed down to microscopic size. The Voyager's a mite too big, but Kim sends in a microscopic probe to see where the wormhole leads. Traveling through the collapsed currents, the probe gets stuck in a gravitational attraction and can't work its way out. That would seem to be it...except that something on the other side of the wormhole scans the probe. What can this mean?

Baxter, who looks too wimpy to be a security officer, gets treated for a pulled muscle by the Doctor. The guy doesn't speak directly to the Doctor, but directs comments about him to Kes. Baxter leaves and Kes worries about how people are treating her mentor.

Kim and Torres discuss going home. Kim can't wait to get back to his girlfriend, Libby, but Torres knows there's no one waiting for her anxiously back in the Alpha Quad.

Kes sees Janeway in her ready room and drinks some Godawful drink with spinach in it. Janeway's vegetable bouillon explains why she's such a rail. Anyway, Kes wants everyone to treat the Doctor better. Just because he's a program doesn't mean he should get no respect. Janeway thinks about it.

Kim and company manage to get a signal through to the person who scanned their probe. It's a Romulan! (Right quadrant, wrong neighborhood.) Janeway tries to get him to understand that they're stuck in the Delta Quadrant and have rigged up two dixie cups and a string through a microscopic wormhole. Nonsense, says the Romulan guy. They must be spies out to get him. Then he hangs up.

Janeway orders Kim to get him back and stomps off the bridge...to see the Doctor. When she points out that he's become a full-blown member of the crew, he worries that she's going to want to change his program. Instead, she asks if there's anything she can do to help him be the chief medical officer. He's got an answer for her right away, "What I'd like is to be turned off when people leave!" She offers him control over his own on-off switch, and suddenly new vistas of possibility open before his eyes. He says he'll get back to her on what else he'd like.

Janeway's night rest is interrupted by the Romulan guy, who won't give her his name. He thinks she may well be from the Delta Quadrant after all and wants to know what she wants. She says she just wants him to send the Federation the news that they're all alive, and transmit some personal messages from the crew. He says he'll ask permission from Romulus.

Voyager manages to establish a visual link over the probe's signal and our crew gets to lay eyes on the Romulan commander. Surprise! He's got a big forehead, bad hair, and shoulder pads Joan Crawford would have killed for. He says the Voyager's a type of ship he hasn't seen before, but he's been out in space for a good year or so. She says it's not classified, and the whole thing is really quite cordial. An excited Torres reveals that with a bit more work, Voyager could use the signal for a transporter beam. Janeway tells her to get right on it, as the probe will only last inside that wormhole another day or so before getting crushed.

Kes, who is doing very well with her medical studies since she has a photographic memory, relates much of this to the Doctor. He can't go with them, however, as his program is integrated into the ship's systems. She gives him a kiss on the cheek and says she'll always remember him. He asks her a favor. If they do leave, would she remember to turn him off?

The Romulan is super-impressed with Voyager's crew when he learns they might be able to transport over. They couldn't come to his ship or anything, but if it works he'll get a military ship in the area to pick them up. Torres beams over a test cylinder, though there's some strange trouble with a phase shift. They manage this cylinder thing several times, and the next thing they must do is transport a person. The Romulan commander volunteers and, once again with phase shifting difficulty, Torres manages to bring him over.

A triumphant Janeway orders the evacuation right before Tuvok drops the bad news. He asks the Romulan what the date is, and the response is twenty years ago. That phase shift Torres had so much trouble is actually a temporal shift.

In conference, the crew considers their options with the Romulan. He comes up with the idea of preventing Voyager's mission before it starts, but (apart from the fact that this wouldn't help the Maquis at all) Voyager's made quite an impact on this system and other people would be affected by this temporal tom-foolery. Finally Janeway asks him simply to relay the messages as they originally planned. He agrees, and gives them his name: Telek. When they make it back home, he says, please look him up.

Telek is successfully beamed back to his ship, and Janeway takes comfort that at least the messages were sent right before Tuvok drops the bad news. Telek died several years ago. Who knows what happened to those messages? Janeway orders a return to course.

The Doctor tells Baxter to talk to him, not Kes, and Baxter calls him "sir" before scooting out of there. The Doctor asks Kes to give his list of demands...er, requests to Janeway and then asks for one more thing: a name.