'Waking Moments'

Stardate: Unknown
Written By: Andre Bormanis
Directed By: Alexander Singer
Rating: *** (out of 5)

�Waking Moments� is admittedly fun, but that doesn�t make it a fantastic episode, not even for Chakotay who gets stuck with episodes like this.

An alien race that is always asleep; that had me going for a while.  How in the world does a species evolve to become stuck in the dreaming world?  They claim to be often harassed by people from the �Waking World� and yet they themselves must be of the waking world on occasion, otherwise how would they have created the sleeping technology and all that?

And how would their bodies survive?  Stupidly, this is an issue raised by one of the aliens, but talking about the Voyager crew.

I�d like to know why the aliens look so dumb-founded over how they are defeated.  Janeway had already resisted the Phaser and the alien asks a stupid question like �What makes you so sure you can succeed?�

And the ending was very rushed.  We see the alien looking extremely confused, than all of a sudden there is a fly-by of Voyager.  I imagine the aliens complied, but the way this was put across it looked as if the Doc had to fire, getting Chakotay out in time, or even killing him!

I enjoyed the cliched but fun element of not knowing when you�re asleep or awake, Chakotay repeatedly seeing his awakening sign, the Moon.

Some very amusing scenes taking advantage of Tuvok�s seriousness are great!  Forgetting to put his clothes on in his dream (and Janeway�s reaction!), Neelix�s �A Vulcan�s nightmare would be a place where the only form of communication is laughter!�

There where also a lot of great, but corny, lines, Janeway�s �We�ll turn this dream of theirs into a nightmare� and poising her phaser in a very Sigourney Weaver-like way!!  Plus Harry getting out of telling his dream in front of Seven and naturally Doc had some funny lines.

This was fun, but this fun isn�t enough to counter for the Stupid Alien of the Episode and pretty lame story that didn�t even end properly.  It�s okay to have fun, but at the expense of story telling and logic isn�t very, well . . . logical.