The Lost World

There were a lot of things that went wrong with Voyager and I'm not even bringing Genvieve What's-her-face into it. This makes it tough. On one hand, I love Star Trek. On the other hand, sometimes you just look at the TV and go, "Really????"

I think Wil Wheaton must do that a lot.

But I digress.

My three year old cousin once said to me, "Auntie, do you still love me when I'm being bad?" She was intent on testing the limits of my love that day, running in circles and screaming when we were trying to eat and sticking nails in power outlets.

"I love you good and I love you bad," I told her. She frowned. "But how can you love something that's bad?"

Out of the mouths of babes.

Remember The Lost World? What a big fat annoying donut hole that was for our troubles? How disappointing and frustrating and sad that movie was (and Sam Neil hadn't even sold out yet).

Remember the Voyager that came with it?

The worst part is that I can't even play The Voyager Game with this one, which is the only props I can give them. It's bad, but at least it's original. Sort of. Except they were clearly trying to do a piece on Evolution vs. Creationism.

Now I'm not gonna touch that one, probably mostly because I don't actually care. I figure we're here, and since no one could write when we were being created I doubt either record is entirely accurate. If you need a description of how accurate paleontology can be, look at this episode. They make some interesting observations about the crew from the scientific standpoint.

Two things bug me. First, since when do we let the computer do our thinking for us (*cough* Janeway *cough*) and second, what happened to the line? You know the one. The one that kept Shatner's monster at the end of 5 from being Satan? (You know it would have been better if it was.) That line. The one where we don't talk about religion in the future, unless you count McCoy's "Goddammit, Jim!" Or we're on DS9, but that's another story. For a show that didn't take risks, they sure tried to here.

And failed because they fought the wrong battle. This isn't an evolution story at all, I realized. It's Galileo. The establishment censoring the man who uses science to find his answers because they don't want to lose their control.

From that standpoint, and without the dinosaurs, we might have an episode.