Yep, I fully agree. At the tail end of Sarek’s life we learn he loved Spock. He doesn’t tell or show Spock ever, which would qualify him as a terrible parent by human standards but he’s a Vulcan so maybe that’s not how he should be judged. What Sarek also doesn’t do is end his feud with Spock which I think is a perfectly good standard on which to judge a Vulcan parent. So while I love Sarek as a character he’s a bad dad.
Sarek is on there. Really. Sarek. The first one. Sarek was an awful dad to at minimum three children.
I actually think the episode itself is quite good. The framing of the episode, the part where the dinos left earth and ended up in the delta quadrant, is just awful and follows a long terrible tradition of Trek not even having a cursory understanding of evolution. But the storytelling is good. Learning about both the Voth and Voyager from the perspective of Voth scientists is good. Having them be much more advanced than Voyager and then actually showing that is a nice change of pace. The moralizing part is good too: respecting the journey for scientific truth even is important, though the message is a little muddled because the science of the episode is so hilariously wrong. A Chakotay heavy plot without any sky spirits is nice. The Voth were relatively good looking aliens for the time.
I think if it were rewritten just a little bit it’d be a top 10 Voyager episode.
I quite like StarSector too. It clearly owes a lot to the Escape Velocity series which I love.
StarSector’s focus on colony management is super fun though. The recent patch was also quite good and seemed to add more story elements which I appreciate. I appreciate the unique looking ships even though some of them end up looking very ugly.
I love working with the AIs. Smuggling them, integrating them into colonies, doing other spoilery things with them. I wish there were deeper mechanics there and more story too, but that could still happen.
I also think it’s fairly weak overall but there are some really great outstanding episodes. Blink of an Eye, Counterpoint, Scorpion, for some examples. And I also agree that the worst Voyagers are really very bad, but are they that much worse than other series’ follies? Is Threshold worse than Code of Honor? Sacred Ground worse than Turnabout Intruder? Fair Haven worse than Profit and Lace?