Radiation from a black hole turns the crew into a shipful of obsessives in Enterprise S2E9, “Singularity.” Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler ask whether you can really build a whole plot on a pun.
https://youtu.be/xs8WyG6dPs0
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A powerful alien entity invades Voyager’s minds and gives each crew member exactly what they secretly want: **Janeway** gets a visit from the fiancé she left behind on Earth. **B’Elanna Torres** gets Chakotay. **Tuvok** gets Vulcan. And Kes gets a nightmare version of Neelix to fight her way through in engineering. When it’s over, the alien vanishes without explanation, the Bothan ships disappear, and no one can account for what just happened. Voyager moves on.
[**Dom Bettinelli**](https://sqpn.com/team_member/domenico-bettinelli-jr/) and [**Jimmy Akin**](https://sqpn.com/team_member/jimmy-akin/) unpack “Persistence of Vision,” Season 2, Episode 8 of *Star Trek: Voyager* (originally aired October 30, 1995), written by executive producer **Jeri Taylor**.
The episode is built like a Twilight Zone psychological slow-burn — hallucinations bleeding from Janeway’s holonovel into the real ship, the crew picking up fragments of other people’s fantasies, the tension ratcheting up as one by one the bridge falls. Jimmy grants the build works. But he argues the episode is ultimately all style and no substance: it leads viewers to expect a Star Trek resolution and then yanks the rug out without ever having established that no resolution was the point. Unlike a well-constructed mystery-box ending, the show gives no early signal that we shouldn’t expect answers.
The alien’s implied power level only makes the silence more baffling. Reading the minds of an entire crew and tailoring individualized fantasies simultaneously — Jimmy compares it to an omega-level telepath from Marvel — and then simply vanishing? Dom wonders if this is Q-level territory. The questions pile up: Was he working with the Bothans? Was he even in engineering? How did any of this work?
The conversation detours into holonovels — Jimmy still can’t figure out how they’re supposed to work. Unlimited freedom? A set plot? Some middle ground? Dom argues the writers were theater kids who never reckoned with the fact that what they’re describing is an RPG, not a novel. The episode also marks the final appearance of Janeway’s Victorian holonovel, which writer Jeri Taylor had planned to continue and resolve; fan indifference ended it.
A more sobering thread runs through the episode: Jimmy’s research into why **Jennifer Lien** left the show. The official explanation — the writers ran out of stories for Kes — wasn’t the real one. Lien was dealing with schizophrenia, mirroring the situation of *Babylon 5*’s **Michael O’Hare**, who left that show after his paranoid symptoms were aggravated by a storyline about government agents torturing his character. Jimmy notes the parallel grimly: an episode built around a telepath suffering body-horror and psychological assault may have been the last thing Jennifer Lien needed to film.
Guest star **Carolyn Seymour** (Mrs. Templeton, knife in hand) gets her due: a British actress of Estonian and Irish heritage who has played cold, menacing roles across multiple Star Trek series.
https://youtu.be/E-xR2tM9ics
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A separatist leader kidnaps Beverly Crusher and makes arguments the Enterprise crew can’t quite answer. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler on TNG’s toughest terrorism episode: “The High Ground” (S3E12).
https://youtu.be/KtWBrErw_go
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An alien observer who detaches his own body parts puts Kirk and Spock through their paces in TAS S2E2. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler weigh whether “Bem” earns its strange premise — and how this episode named James Tiberius Kirk.
https://youtu.be/G3J8foKreaA
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No Christmas special. No showrunner. No production partner. The BBC has put Doctor Who out to competitive tender, and Dom Bettinelli and Jimmy Akin weigh what the shake-up means for Billie Piper, the Timeless Child, and the show’s next era.
https://youtu.be/QvrY3HaSLv0
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A giant green hand grabs the Enterprise — and the Greek god Apollo demands worship. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler weigh TOS S2E2’s ancient-aliens premise, Kirk’s defiance, and the ending that was filmed but never aired.
https://youtu.be/iQD8FXozlGc
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A lost communicator on a war-torn pre-warp world forces Archer and Reed to risk their lives over an ethic the Prime Directive hasn’t invented yet. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler take on Enterprise S2E8, “The Communicator.”
https://youtu.be/E-48OtfIdw4
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When pirates beam away Voyager’s computer core and the Doctor’s mobile emitter, Janeway ends up chasing them to an alien world where her holographic Leonardo da Vinci — now powered by the stolen emitter — believes he’s been kidnapped to America. The man who has the computer core? Leonardo’s new patron. His name is Tau.
Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler go through “Concerning Flight,” the 11th episode of Voyager Season 4, and the verdict is unanimous: this is a middle-of-the-road episode saved entirely by **John Rhys-Davies**. They dig into the behind-the-scenes story, in which the episode’s writer wanted a Leonardo-centric adventure and was overruled — a decision that reportedly made the writer hate the final product.
The plot holes are significant. Voyager’s computer core was apparently unencrypted and unpassword-protected. There was no backup. And yet the ship somehow navigates vast distances of space for 10 days while “almost none of the ship’s crucial systems work.” The panel has thoughts.
Beyond the plot holes, the conversation goes wide. There’s a close read of the Doctor’s characterization here (not good — he’s more interested in ship gossip than the emergency). A look at Tuvok’s stiff but effective attempt at small talk with Leonardo. The Requiem for Methuselah callback — Janeway’s aside that James T. Kirk claimed to have met Leonardo da Vinci. And the parallel to the TNG Moriarty two-parter, where a beloved literary figure escapes the holodeck.
The episode also sparks a long digression on the science of human skin pigmentation — why did melanin decrease as humans migrated to higher latitudes, how long did it take, and why this makes Tuvok the least plausible Scandinavian on the ship.
One detail worth catching: the villain’s name is Tau — the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, as Jimmy notes — not the philosophical principle.
https://youtu.be/YZDC7BsojNY
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The Circle falls, but the price is one hero’s life. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler close the DS9 opening trilogy: duty vs. family, a holosuite trap, and the politics that end a coup.
https://youtu.be/4QMNmlF5o7M
A legend built on a lie. Or is it?
DS9’s second season opens with “The Homecoming,” the first episode of Star Trek’s first real three-parter, and a story that could only exist on Deep Space Nine. **Dom Bettinelli**, **Jimmy Akin**, and **Fr. Jason Tyler** break it all down.
**Major Kira** learns that **Li Nalas**, the legendary Bajoran resistance hero, is alive and imprisoned on Cardassia IV. She borrows a runabout, brings Chief O’Brien along for the ride, and pulls off a brazen rescue involving an improvised infiltration ruse that immediately raises questions about their prior experience together. Li Nalas arrives back on DS9 to a hero’s welcome, and almost immediately tries to flee on a freight ship.
His secret: the legend isn’t real. He killed an unarmed, embarrassed Cardassian who was bathing in a stream, and never corrected the story that grew up around it. His friends built a myth; the myth built a movement. Sisko tells him it doesn’t matter. Bajor needs a symbol, not a man. The panel notes the episode’s one missed beat: Sisko is the Emissary, a symbol himself. That parallel never gets drawn out loud.
Meanwhile, **the Circle** — a Bajoran supremacist group under the slogan “Bajor for the Bajorans” — escalates from graffiti to something uglier. They break into Quark’s bar and brand him on the forehead. The panel reads this clearly: it’s the equivalent of cross-burning, a targeted act meant to drive non-Bajorans out. The Circle vanishes from the series after this three-parter, which the panel considers one of DS9’s more significant missed opportunities.
A quieter moment lands the hardest. Jake’s date cancels because her father won’t allow her to date a human. Sisko walks in, asks about the evening, and Jake tells him. Sisko’s response — “I’m sorry you’ve become a victim of these things. You don’t deserve it. Nobody does” — is delivered with total restraint. The panel notes that Avery Brooks and Cirroc Lofton being Black adds a layer to that scene that white actors couldn’t carry in the same way.
**Frank Langella** plays Minister Jaro Essa uncredited, a favor to his Star Trek fan kids. **Richard Beymer** (Tony in West Side Story, Ben Horne in Twin Peaks) plays Li Nalas.
And for the first time in DS9’s run: Morn doesn’t appear. The panel wants to know how he gets paid for episodes he skips.
https://youtu.be/e5Ov_QE0zRU
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