Star Trek Voyager Reviews Written by Someone Who Actually LIKES the Show! -- Flashback

All right then, this is a review containing many spoilers of the Star Trek Voyager episode, "Flashback." It is intended solely for the nostalgic enjoyment of Voyager, Sulu, and Janice Rand fans. Those who don't like watching worlds collide or serrilium ignite are encouraged to find their jollies elsewhere.

How about Animated Greeting Cards?

No? Okay then...

INITIAL VIEWER EXPERIENCE
"Trials and Tibble-ations" this ain't, but it's fun to see Sulu and Rand and get a tangent story to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Profit...How odd it would be to live so long, Vulcan or not....The idea of the virus is really cool.

PLOT
Neelix starts his day the usual way, annoying the heck out of Tuvok, who really just wants something that won't make him sick. Janeway calls them both to the bridge because the ship has found a nebula that contains a highly prized energy source, serillium. Tuvok takes one look at this nebula and feels even worse than he would have from Neelix's breakfast. He goes to Sickbay, but is assaulted by a strange childhood memory of holding a screaming girl over a precipice. "Don't let me go, Tuvok!" she screams. Little Tuvok tries, but she slips from his hands and screams on the way down. Big Tuvok collapses in Sickbay from the realization he's just reenacted Stallone's role in Cliffhanger.

The Doctor says it's a panic attack, and since Vulcans aren't prone to fainting spells, he puts a cortical monitor on Tuvok's head. Tuvok meditates for hours while building a kithira, which is basically a Vulcan house of cards that leads to inner peace. Kes thinks it looks cool, but it doesn't seem to help him much.

The next day, Tuvok's fine until he spots that nebula again and talks of Klingons before having another attack. This time the monitor makes it clear that he is suffering from a repressed memory that's trying to get out. Now, if it were you or I, we could just go see Troi on the holodeck [future episode idea??], but repressed memories go against Vulcan mental discipline and therefore can become fatal if not dealt with. Janeway agrees to mind-meld with Tuvok, since she's the closest thing to family he's got on Voyager. With his hands on her face he tries to remember the little girl.

Instead, we go to the bridge of the Excelsior and meet Captain Sulu and Lieutenant Rand as they were eighty years ago. (You remember this from Star Trek VI, right?) Praxis has just exploded and Sulu rides the wave and Kirk is captured and all that. Tim Russ is actually in the movie, too, which makes this all pretty cool if you just ignore the fact that in the film his ears are round.

Anyway, Tuvok can't explain why they are here to Janeway, who appears with him in this flashback [hence the title], but can only be seen by him. While Tuvok makes tea for Sulu and then endures numerous jokes about brown-nosing, he also explains to Janeway that this was his first assignment, though the records have been fudged a bit. He was twenty-nine and not very fond of Starfleet. His parents pushed him into it.

He's so uptight back then, in fact, that when Sulu orders a course through the Azure Nebula to rescue Kirk and McCoy, Tuvok objects. That's the least of his worries, however, for when he catches a glimpse of this Azure Nebula, he sees that little screaming girl go over the cliff again, and the mind-meld breaks up.

The doctor tells Janeway that Tuvok better get this all sorted out soon or he'll be brain dead. Kim compares the two nebulae and tells the captain they have nothing other than a visual similarity. Perhaps, they speculate, that's all that's going on here: some sort of visual trigger to Tuvok's memories.

Janeway and Kim nostalgically discuss the old days and ways of Starfleet.

Tuvok and Janeway try again, and again we are on the Excelsior. Tuvok's bunkmate, Dimitri Valtane, is killed by an explosion at his console, and Tuvok stands over him as he dies. Out comes that little girl and the cliff again. This hurts Tuvok's mind some more, so his memories start becoming real to him. Janeway becomes visible to the other people on the bridge as we basically get a mind-meld version of an hallucination. Sulu has security take her off the bridge.

Janeway doesn't want to leave Tuvok when they're so close to figuring out the connection between Valtane's death and the little falling girl, so they steal Rand's outfit (which really hangs on Janeway!) so she can observe without getting arrested by Sulu's thugs again.

Meanwhile, the damaged mind-meld is causing risk to Janeway, so the Doctor tries to break up the link with thoron radiation. Unexpectedly, this reveals the presence of an ingram which is neither Janeway nor Tuvok's memory ingram. It looks instead to be some sort of virus which is only masquerading as an ingram, kind of like the way Republicans sometimes disguise themselves as Democrats so they can go to the really cool parties. The Doctor pours on the radiation to kill the virus, and it jumps into Janeway's brain instead.

Back on the Excelsior bridge, little Tuvok, and then little Janeway (well, not so little, actually) lose their grip on the falling girl. The Doctor applies radiation to both their brains and we see the virus start to die. The girl falls from some little Eskimo boy's hand, then some alien girl's hand, then some more United Colors of Bennington hands, until, finally, the pesky but PC virus is dead at last.

With Tuvok restored, the Doctor explains that this strange new virus does indeed masquerade as a memory to hide from the body's immune system. It also chooses an unpleasant memory so that the brain will bury the virus deep in the unconscious, where it can roost.

Tuvok wraps up the Star Trek VI plot without ruining the ending for those who haven't seen the video. Tuvok tells Janeway he was glad to have been a part of those times of Kirk and the rest, and Janeway say she feel now like she was a part of them too.