Gravity

I don't like this episode. Tom tries way too hard to talk Tuvok into loving a woman he doesn't 't want to love. Tom acts like a jerk and obviously he cannot think of anything else than women, feelings and love. And he still neither understands Tuvok and Vulcans in general, nor does he respect Tuvok's wishes and the fact that he is a married man and doesn't want to interact romantically with other women.

The first speech Tom makes, after they were just stranded for a short while, was pathetic. He wants Tuvok not only to abandon all hope of being saved but basically forces him to fall in love with that woman finally and build himself a new life with her. Tom is such a dick in this episode.

And this woman? First, she wears some leather clothes on a deserted and hot planet. And second, she speaks and acts like a child. She throws herself at Tuvok and also forces him to love her! Imagine this episode would have been made in 2024 and it would have been reversed: A stranded male just offensively kisses a woman and begs her to return his feelings and love her. This would have caused an outcry, a man forcing his feelings onto a woman and pushing her into returning them. Toxic masculinity. Really, really bad.

I felt zero chemistry between Tuvok and Noss. Nada. It all boils down to this woman being lonely on a planet for years. And the second best man she sees stirs up feelings in her and she can't help herself but jump right onto him although she must have realized by that time already, that Tuvok has no feelings at all and thus no feelings for her. I didn't feel any sympathy for this woman or compassion that Tuvok rejected her.

The only redeeming factor of this episode is the backstory of Tuvok and how he learned to suppress his emotions. The rest is utter garbage and if I were Tuvok, I would refuse to ever go on away missions with Tom again to avoid being stuck in another lecture about Vulcans and emotions. I'd rather pick Neelix and listen to his stories about the importance of leola roots in Talaxian cuisine than to Tom's lessons about love.

The shuttle with Tuvok, Paris and the Doctor crashes due to some odd anomaly in space. They cannot get out and find that this barren planet is full of the crews from other ships that have also gotten stuck there. They make friends with a woman named Noss (Lori Petty) who helps them learn to adapt to life there. In the meantime, Voyager naturally searches for them but things are confounded since time is greatly accelerated within the anomaly. During the time on the planet, Noss inexplicably falls in love with Tuvok but Tuvok is Tuvok!

I thought that this was a decent episode but all the flashbacks about Tuvok as a teen on Vulcan seemed more of a distraction than to help understand the story. Tuvok EASILY could have just explained all the flashbacks in a paragraph to Paris. Average.

I guess I must be part Vulcan, because this episode didn't stir any emotion in me whatsoever. I dislike the episodes where they try so hard to create emotional responses. I just don't get sentimental about sci-fi or find romance necessary or interesting. There was no chemistry between Tuvok and Noss, maybe because Noss looked and sounded like she was 12 years old. Contrary to popular opinion, I dislike Lori Petty and don't think she's a very good actress. The flashbacks were tiresome and didn't really add much to the continuity of the story. Overall, it was just long, drawn-out and boring......

Voyager crew members Tuvok and Paris are returning from an away mission. While en route these Starfleet officers and their shuttle craft is caught in a mysterious vortex in deep space. The two and their spacecraft are drawn forcefully into the astronomical phenomenon that has suddenly appeared. An ally, in Chattanooga, Tennessee native Lori Petty, Robin Williams' kooky Cadillac Man girlfriend, offers stoic Tuvok a chance to revisit his early Vulcan training. Always suspicious Captain Janeway searches diligently for the missing spacecraft. But, the discovery of the phenomenon does not necessarily mean the rescue of the crew.

As with every Trek series since the original series, this episode uses elements from TOS, in this particular case TOS S3/E23 All Our Yesterdays (Vulcan has emotional walls broken down by an alien female), TOS S3/E11 Wink Of An Eye (time displacement) and the near obligatory reference to IDIC (infinite diversity in infinite combinations) from TOS S3/E5 Is There No Truth In Beauty, New elements are thrown in, of course (Tuvok flashbacks as backstory support, updated sci fi tech babble etc.) and Tuvok does not begin regress to the Vulcan barbarism and violent tendencies of his Vulcan ancestors as Spock did in the original. Overall, a decent but not a standout episode of Voyager.