Once more unto the breach, dear friends ....
In Parallax, Voyager encounters a black hole. Also, Belanna is bickered over as the head of engineering, and Janeway finally gives in because they have an idea at the same times. This means she's obviously better equipped for the job than the trained Starfleet officer. Oh, and some Maquis members of the ship threaten mutiny. And the doctor is nearly destroyed, but it's kind of funny, even though he's the ship's only trained physician. Ha ha. And, um, yeah. That's about it.
Michael T Bradley is joined in this outing by Christopher Alderman, stage actor and fellow MST3K fan.
Contains both an NTSC and PAL version
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Comments
Ice on Mars managed to survive riffing the first episode of ST:Voyager, so he went right into riffing the second one. For this one, Michael T Bradley has a different guest-riffer in Christopher Alderman. He also introduces a new sync character, the telepathic (and apparently bloodthirsty) plant named "Frondy". They also repeat another helpful sync-ing trick that was used in riffing the first episode, where they sing along to the theme-music that plays during the opening credits of the show. ___p___
When it comes to sci-fi, one genre of stories that I (personally) hate is anything with time travel because they almost never make sense. So ST:Voyager starts right up with a time-travel episode, and encourages me to hate it from the very beginning of the series. The script is full of technobabble to justify the pretense that they have any understanding of time-travel, and that technobabble generally boils down to "We know this script won't make sense, but we're going to claim that it's scientific fact that time travel will result in nonsense, so you'll just have to listen to our crappy script". ___p___
But to get back to the riffing, this Ice on Mars team again comes up with plenty of riffs which help to distract the viewer with the absurdity of the script. They've got voice impressions of some actors, jokes about misunderstanding the names of characters (like "guess" or "KISS" for Kes). The one thing I liked the most in the first season of Voyager is the acting of Robert Picardo, so I was amused when Michael said he wanted "to give Picardo credit for stealing the scene, but stealing a scene on Voyager is like punching a baby". They get in a few more "wrong kind of indian" jokes (which is a line that the writers of Voyager used a few times in the first episode). And they notice that the characters in Voyager are often happy to stop and give long, serious speeches on how "TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE HERE!!" -- instead of just *DOING* what needs to get done. Nothing like wasting time to tell everyone how important time is. ___p___
On to the technical details, Ice on Mars again did a good job with recording the audio. As I did with the first episode, I bought this episode of Voyager off of the iTunes store. This time I had a bit more trouble with keeping the riff in sync, but I don't know if that's an issue with the show as it came from iTunes. It seemed that I would be sync'ed up perfectly fine, and then every time the episode had a break-for-commercials I'd find that the riffing-audio would be several seconds ahead of the video. But then, the video would have several seconds of blank screen at that break-for-commercials, so I think the problem is with how the video was done at the iTunes store. I don't have any DVD's of the show, so I don't know if those would work better. ___p___
I'll give this another 5-star rating, particularly for fans of earlier Star Trek series who can't stand Voyager....
I thoroughly Enjoyed this one! Looking forward to your future works - RVR II
Very funny and the ONLY way I recommend anyone watch Voyager.