Star Trek: Voyager-Season 5 (1999)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Star Trek	Main Menu Introduction Main Menu Audio & Animation Featurette-Braving The Unknown: Season 5 Featurette-Voyager Time Capsule: B'Elanna Torres Featurette-Voyager Time Capsule: Tom Paris Featurette-The Borg Queen Speaks Trailer-Star Trek Original Series Trailer-Star Trek: The Next Generation Featurette-Ships Of The Delta Quadrant Trailer-Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Featurette-Delta Quadrant Make-Up Magic Gallery-Photo Easter Egg-5
Rating	?
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	1144:39
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered Multi Disc Set (7)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Gabrielle Beaumont Kenneth Biller Cliff Bole John Bruno
Studio Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Kate Mulgrew Robert Beltran Roxann Dawson Jennifer Lien Robert Duncan McNeill Ethan Phillips Robert Picardo Tim Russ Jeri Ryan Garrett Wang Scarlett Pomers Martha Hackett Manu Intiraymi
Case	?
RPI	$150.80	Music	Paul Baillargeon David Bell Jay Chattaway

    With no cliffhanger between Season 4 and Season 5 of Star Trek: Voyager, there was some loss of impetus between the seasons. Season 4 had to date been the best of the series, providing two of the best two-parter episodes the series had seen – Year Of Hell: Part I & II and The Killing Game: Part I & II, not to mention the addition of a brand new member of the crew. So with no idea where the ship was heading next, the producers boldly ventured on with Season 5, and in doing so brought us fans one of the finest series of Star Trek to date.

    The whole crew are back – in the big chair we have Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), with Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran) backing her up and taking the hits on the away missions. Still in the pilot’s chair we have Lt. Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill), whose relationship with the half-Klingon Chief Engineer B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) is racing along at warp speed. Keeping it real with the phaser banks and photon torpedoes is the logical Vulcan Lt. Tuvok (Tim Russ), and Ensign Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) is bucking for a promotion as the science officer who takes the big chair on the night shift.

    Just to round out the crew, we have the holographic Doctor (Robert Picardo) trying to teach the ex-Borg drone Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) how to be more human than human, and the Telaxian Neelix (Ethan Phillips) keeping morale on the ship from sinking into a black hole.

    The fifth season of the adventures of the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager continues as follows:

Disc 1

1. Night (44:05)

    Stuck in an expanse of darkness where the stars cannot be seen, Voyager comes under attack from a group of aliens that can drain the power right out of the ship’s warp core. I hope you’re not afraid of the dark...

2. Drone (44:08)

    A long range transport leaves the Doctor’s portable holographic matrix infected with Borg technology which samples the DNA of a crew member and creates a new life form.

3. Extreme Risk (44:07)

    When a group of galactic polluters come across one of Voyager’s probes enhanced with Borg technology, there is a race against time to recover it before it falls into alien hands.

4. In The Flesh (44:08)

    Something is not quite as it seems when the crew find a full recreation of Starfleet Academy in the Delta Quadrant.

Disc 2

5. Once Upon A Time (44:02)

    Neelix takes on the role of keeping young Naomi Wildman occupied while Voyager searches for her lost mother.

6. Timeless (44:05)

    Decades in the future, Harry Kim and Chakotay must use Borg technology to save Voyager from coming to an end, crashed on the surface of an ice planet.

7. Infinite Regress (44:03)

    After encountering a destroyed Borg vessel, Seven begins exhibiting the personalities of the various people she has assimilated.

8. Nothing Human (44:08)

    When an alien latches onto B’Elanna for life support, the doctor must decide whether he will use medical knowledge gained from experiments done on Bajorans during the Cardassian Occupation.

Disc 3

9. Thirty Days (44:00)

    Why has Ensign Paris been demoted and thrown in the brig for thirty days of solitary confinement?

10. Counterpoint (44:08)

    While travelling through a region of space populated by a powerful species with a hatred of telepaths, Janeway must decide whether an offer by a high ranking military officer to defect is real.

11. Latent Image (44:05)

    When the Doctor starts doing holographic files of the crew, he discovers that he has performed surgery on Ensign Kim which he does not remember performing.

12. Bride Of Chaotica! (44:05)

    When a group of holographic aliens intersect with Voyager they believe Tom Paris’s Captain Proton holonovel to be a real universe. But when Proton’s nemesis, the evil Doctor Chaotica, wages war on the aliens it is up to the beautiful Arachnia to save the day.

Disc 4

13. Gravity (44:02)

    Tom and Tuvok crash land in a layer of space created by a gravity well where time passes faster than their normal universe. Can Voyager find them before they perish?

14. Bliss (44:07)

    Seven returns to the ship to discover that the crew have found a wormhole leading right to Earth. But why is she not as enthused as the others?

15. & 16 Dark Frontier: Part I & II (88:01)

    An encounter with the Borg requires Seven of Nine to delve into her childhood and the work her parents did in an effort to help the crew steal transwarp technology from a damaged Borg vessel.

Disc 5

17. The Disease (44:02)

    When Ensign Kim unwittingly begins a relationship with a spacefaring alien he finds that he gets more than he bargained for in a moment of intimacy.

18. Course: Oblivion (44:01)

    When Voyager starts coming apart at the seams, the doctor makes a startling discovery about the origin of the crew.

19. The Fight (44:04)

    While stuck in a region of space where the laws of physics are turned upside down, Chakotay finds himself experiencing a strange dementia in which he must fight a powerful alien in a boxing ring.

20. Think Tank (44:06)

    When Voyager is besieged by a group of alien bounty hunters an offer comes from a group of alien problem solvers to help the crew out. But can Voyager live with the price?

Disc 6

21. Juggernaut (44:00)

    A Malon freighter packed with radioactive waste is running out of control across the sector and it is up to Voyager to stop her before hundreds of innocent people die.

22. Someone To Watch Over Me (44:05)

    The Doctor takes it upon himself to try and teach Seven about the joys of dating.

23. 11:59 (44:01)

    How do family stories inspire us? And how much is truth or myth? While trading stories of family members, Janeway unintentionally sets Seven on a research expedition into one of her ancestors who turns out to be slightly different than she intended.

24. Relativity (44:01)

    What is Seven doing at Utopia Planetia while Voyager is undergoing construction? And what does this have to do with the time ship U.S.S. Relativity?

Disc 7

25. Warhead (44:03)

    When the Doctor beams aboard an artificial life form, the crew discover it is a smart bomb. But when they try to shut it down it commandeers Voyager and set out to complete its mission.

26. Equinox: Part I (44:02)

    When Voyager finds another Federation starship under attack in the Delta Quadrant, at first there is cause to celebrate. But soon Janeway begins to believe that the crew of the U.S.S. Equinox are not as principled as she is.

    It has been some time since I have seen these episodes now, but Star Trek: Voyager – Season 5 has always held a special place in my collection. It was a joy to watch them fully remastered on DVD.

    Unlike other seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, the fifth season had a maturity and a consistency to it that previous seasons lacked, and which was quickly done away with in the early part of the sixth season (although that season certainly picked up again towards the end). That’s not to say that previous seasons were not good – they were. But up until this point Star Trek: Voyager had always been the relatively light-hearted and throwaway cousin of the other Star Trek series.

    Episodes like Thirty Days and Latent Image went to the core of particular characters and exposed difficult questions about bureaucracy and resistance to change in the first instance, and about living with the choices we make in the latter instance. Indeed, both those episodes really gave the two Roberts (Robert Duncan McNeill and Robert Picardo) a chance to show they were talented actors capable of carrying a whole show pretty much on their own. We also have the stunning Timeless, with its taut plotting and excellent acting, the amazing Counterpoint, with all of its fun plot twists, the utterly hilarious homage to the old black & white sci-fi serials Bride Of Chaotica!, and the return of the Borg Queen in Dark Frontier: Part I & II. In fact, it is hard to find a truly bad episode in here, with Once Upon A Time as the only real contender for mediocrity.

    With only two seasons to go, Star Trek: Voyager – Season 5 was really the pinnacle of the show, and while it wasn’t downhill from here, there was a certain plateau and there were few episodes that came after this which exceeded the quality of this season as a whole. If you are a fan of this show, you’ll want to watch these episodes again the moment you are done. If you were ever a fan of Star Trek but did not get on the Voyager bandwagon, I defy you to watch these episodes and not enjoy them.

Video

    In a word: immaculate. Finally, the quality of transfer I have been waiting for, and Paramount Home Entertainment have delivered at last. I guess somebody reads these reviews after all.

    Presented in its original broadcast ratio of 1.33:1, Full Frame, this is a richly detailed, highly saturated and overall amazing transfer.

    The graininess and cross-colouration present on previous seasons are all gone. There is no low-level noise. The picture is smooth and glossy. Only in certain FX shots where there is digital overlay can you detect some minor graininess (for example the scene in Janeway’s cabin with Chakotay in the middle of Relativity).

    Colour and detail are shockingly good. Textures that you cannot see on the old VHS prints are suddenly visible – everything from the pillows on the bio-beds to the grain in Seven of Nine’s costume.

    There were no MPEG artefacts and only the faintest of background aliasing in the way of film-to-video/video-to-DVD transfer artefacts. Unless you look really closely for them, though, you won’t see them.

    Film artefacts are pretty much non-existent. If you strain your eyes you might find one, but you’ll be trying hard which sort of defies the point.

    As with all the Star Trek DVD releases, we provided with a multitude of subtitle options: English for the Hearing Impaired, regular English, Danish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish. They appear as white with a grey/black border, are easy to read, and convey the meaning of the dialogue without verbatim reproduction.

    The dual-layer pause is between the episodes, with two episodes per layer, where it remains cloaked from sensors.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Paramount have again remastered the original English 2.0 Dolby Surround of this show into a cinematic 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround field. How does it stand up?

    Overall, this is pretty good. Turn it up loud and you’ll feel the hit of a photon torpedo or a phaser blast, the rumble of the ship travelling at warp, the pulse of the warp core and the rattle of a bulkhead blowing out shaking you a little in your chair. Beware, though – you are likely to upset your neighbours.

    Dialogue is faultlessly reproduced, and I detected no audio sync faults that were not also glitches in the source (check your videos on those little background ADR sync issues).

    The music is finally brought up a notch, and is put to great effect in episodes such as 11:59 and Bride Of Chaotica! (although the scores are radically contrasted, but this just shows the flexibility of the Paramount orchestra).

    There is plenty of surround information, although it is still just a little more front driven than the soundfields of some of the later Star Trek movies.

    There is good although not exceptional subwoofer use, but certainly above average for a small screen production done several years ago.

    We are also provided with soundtracks in German 5.1 Dolby Digital, and Spanish, French and Italian in 2.0 Dolby Surround overdub. These are a little thinner than the English mix, but will serve your purpose if you want a foreign language track.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    Paramount Home Entertainment have decked out the 7th disc with a number of special features, all presented in 1.33:1, Full Frame, with 2.0 Dolby Surround audio, unless otherwise specified. Interviews are in 1.85:1, letterboxed within the 1.33:1 frame.

Menus

    All menus are presented in 1.33:1 Full Frame. The main menus are a CGI recreation of the Delta Flyer travelling through space and finishing up at four different angles representing the four episodes on the disc. The episode menus have an ambient 2.0 Dolby Stereo track and are static until you hit Launch and then the ship takes off with a nice directional audio cue. All other sub-menus are static and silent.

Booklet

    Voyager – Season 5 will be packaged with a booklet summarising the episodes. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy so I cannot give you a precise run down of the contents of this booklet.

Disc 7

Featurette – “Braving The Unknown: Season Five” (20:02)

    Another good season overview, including interviews with cast and crew, and looking at the various production decisions that led to the final three seasons.

Featurette – “Voyager Time Capsule: B’Elanna Torres” (6:32)

    A look at the character of B’Elanna Torres played by Roxann Dawson, including a series of interviews with her across the years.

Featurette – “Voyager Time Capsule: Tom Paris” (14:55)

    A look at the character of Tom Paris, including a series of interviews with Robert Duncan McNeill who played Paris for those seven years of the show.

Featurette – “The Borg Queen Speaks” (6:43)

    An interview with Susanna Thompson, who got the role of the Borg Queen for Dark Frontier: Part I & II and Unimatrix Zero: Part I & II, although Alice Krige reprised the role for the finale Endgame: Part I & II.

Trailer – Star Trek: The Original Series on DVD (1:43)

    A funky trailer for the DVD release of Star Trek: The Original Series. Hilarious.

Trailer – Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD (1:10)

    A short promo for the DVD release of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Featurette – “Ships Of The Delta Quadrant” (12:09)

    A cool featurette looking at the designs of various other vessels found in the Delta Quadrant, and includes an interview with illustrator Rick Sternback.

Trailer – Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on DVD (4:48)

    A far more in-depth promo regarding the release of Deep Space Nine on DVD.

Featurette – “Delta Quadrant Make-Up Magic” (19:24)

    A look at all the make-up design used to create various aliens in the Delta Quadrant, including an interview with make-up designer Michael Westmore.

Photo Gallery

    Another series of 40 inset stills from the production of this season of the show.

Lost Transmissions from The Delta Quadrant (Hidden Files)

    There are 5 Lost Transmissions, which are easy enough to find by just playing around with your remote until you highlight one of the inset panels on the Delta Flyer:

• Transmission 01 (1:38) is a look at the episode Counterpoint and includes an interview with Kate Mulgrew.
• Transmission 02 (2:35) looks at the episode The Disease and includes an interview with Garrett Wang.
• Transmission 03 (4:04) takes a look at the episode Infinite Regress and includes an interview with director David Livingston.
• Transmission 04 (1:38) looks at the episode Night and includes another interview with David Livingston.
• Transmission 05 (4:45) looks at the character of Boothby, the groundskeeper at Starfleet Academy, who features in the episode In The Flesh, and an anecdote from the set as recounted by Tim Russ.

    From what I can tell, the R1 release does not have:

• a booklet providing episode summaries;
• hard plastic case packaging;
• Featurette – “Ships Of The Delta Quadrant”;
• Trailer – Star Trek: The Original Series on DVD;
• Trailer – Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD;
• Trailer – Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on DVD;
• Subtitles in multiple foreign languages;
• German 5.1 Dolby Digital audio;
• Spanish, French and Italian 2.0 Dolby Surround audio;

    Otherwise, these would appear to be identical.

    I think R4 has come out slightly ahead in this race, although we miss out on the original English 2.0 Dolby Surround track that the R1 release has.

    Star Trek: Voyager – Season 5 is one of the finest seasons of Star Trek, not just for this series, but for the entire canon. Highly recommended for fans and non-fans alike.

    The video is crystal clear and highly detailed – nice work.

    The 5.1 Dolby Digital remix is great, but still need some more of that bass action.

    There are a good assortment of extras, particularly the time capsules, though a text commentary or two on some of the pivotal episodes would have been nice.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall