Captain’s log: stardate 49011

Brannon Braga pens this Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) -centric episode that first aired on 25 September, 1995. Harry wakes up in San Francisco, never having been assigned to U.S.S. Voyager which is listed by Starfleet as missing and presumed lost.

In San Francisco, Harry has been working on starship designs, but he’s sure there is something else happening.  He remembers being on Voyager, and yet, everything around him seems real enough.

His life seems pretty near perfect, he has a great position, a great apartment, and a beautiful fiance, Libby (Jennifer Gatti). Some investigation leads Harry to discover that Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) is still on Earth as well.

As Harry tries to convince Paris he’s from a different timeline and needs to get back to his Voyager.

One face keeps popping up over and over again as Harry’s investigation draws more and more attention to itself, a man named Cosimo (Louis Giambalvo).

The reveals come pretty quickly after that, and Harry has to come up with a way to get home, and he may get some help from some familiar faces. There is starship theft, a chase, temporal anomalies, and variations on friends that show that some friendships cross timelines.

For a Harry Kim adventure, never my favorite character in this series, this one is pretty good. And it’s always fun when we get to see alternate timelines.

Captain’s log: stardate 48945.8

Kenneth Biller pens the teleplay for this episode from a story by Arnold Rudnick and Rich Hosek. It first aired on 2 October, 1995, and though it comes after Non Sequiter the stardates suggest this story happened first.

While celebrating Kes’ (Jennifer Lien) birthday in the holodeck, the Voyager encounters a spatial phenomenon, an inversion field, that twists and distorts the starship, leaving the crew spread out across a ship that they can’t find their way through, because nothing is where it should be.

The crew can’t get to where they need to be, and the entire ship seems to be on the verge of being crushed out of existence as it is torn apart, and changed.

This one is the very definition of a bottle show, and while the idea is interesting, the episode actually seems really slow to me. But as I’ve said before they aren’t all going to be winners all the time. It’s not a terrible episode, it’s just a lethargic episode.

Next week the Human Adventure continues as things continue to develop on Deep Space Nine, and Voyager continues it’s journey home as I revel in The Complete Series on DVD from Paramount Pictures.