Jetrel

The first season of Voyager, to me, was not bad...per se. Often times, it came across as just boring. Here is this crew stranded thousands of lightyears from home...and they're doing the same stuff the other shows have already done: temporal anomalies, murder investigations, etc. It had a couple good moments, like "Eye of the Needle" (which actually has a good reason for why they can't use the MacGuffin to get home). Mostly, this season came across as wasted potential. However, of all the episodes, there's one that I found to be the most wasted: "Jetrel".

"Jetrel" is seen by some as an equal to DS9's "Duet". Both episodes deal with a particularly dark element of WWII. "Duet" dealt with the nature of Nazi occupation and the concentration camps. This episode deals with what ended the war: the atomic bomb. Does this explore all sides of a highly complex issue with multiple shades of grey? Let's find out!

The episode opens with Neelix playing pool with Tom and Tuvok on the holodeck. Yes. A ship that is stranded thousands of lightyears from the years base has enough power to run the holodeck of all things. Look, I can buy that the holodecks draw so much energy that they need their own generators, but who would design a starship where one part of the ship is incompatible with another part? Over on DS9, they have Federation, Cardassian, and Bajoran tech working perfectly (mostly). Later on, Voyager gets Borg tech and who knows what else working just fine. Now, some might say "it's a TV show! You're supposed to enjoy it!" However, if you don't think when you watch it, you don't know why you like the show or why you think it's horrible.

Anyway, Neelix is called to the bridge. Voyager's getting hailed by a Haakonian ship, a race which Neelix exposits was involved in a war with the Talaxians that ended in the latter's surrender. The pilot messages Voyager and asks for Neelix. He says he's Dr. Jetrel, and upon hearing the name, Neelix storms off the bridge. Hmm. Interesting character moment...about something that hasn't been established.

I'M ACTING AS MUCH AS I CAN!!!

After the opening credits (dear God, every time the credits play, I just put on the BSG theme), Neelix exposits more. He says that Jetrel is a scientist who developed a superweapon which detonated on his home colony. This triggered the Talaxians' surrender and some things which aren't explained. Already, we have a problem. We're not told anything about this war, only that the Talaxians lost. I have several questions: did the Talaxians start this war? What were the reasons for fighting? And why was Neelix a part of the defense forces?

Jetrel comes aboard to meet with Janeway, marveling at the transporter (that also gets me; why are the Borg and a couple other races the only ones with teleportation in the Delta Quadrant?) and explains why he's there. He says that people who went to the Talaxian colony right after the attack were exposed to space radiation and have developed deadly diseases. He wants to verify if Neelix has this. Well, Neelix does have something of a reason for refusing treatment. After all, a superweapon wipes out your home and who wouldn't get mad? Of course, the episode demands it and he agrees to be examined.

I'm going to skip a bit to discuss my thoughts on Neelix himself. My dislike for him is not as extreme as some other fans; it takes a lot for me to outright completely hate a character. Rather, I just find him annoying, like that desk mate you have at work who talks constantly about all the places he's been to. Now, don't get me wrong, the concept for Neelix was pretty good: someone who's from the Delta Quadrant would be incredibly useful on a starship stranded there. However, I gotta say, the writing is incredibly inconsistent. In the next episode, he proves to be so bad a cook that he makes the ship itself sick! Then, a few episodes later, he is someone who knows every little trait about the Kazon (oh God, I had to mention the Kazon...).

Laundry day...see you there...under things...tumbling...

In a TV Guide article released just prior to the premiere of the show, it was said that Neelix was to be like Quark, a "meddling scavenger predicted to be Voyager's breakout character". Besides the fact that those plans fell through (the only talking would be about how much people hated him), it's completely ill-advised to compare Neelix to be like Quark. Quark was at least written consistently, the slimy bartender who did have a conscience that was capable of shining through (like when he helped his Cardassian lover and Major Kira). He had layers to him, whereas Neelix has layer after layer of lies and anecdotes (and unlike Garak, he has no charm).

So, after finding that Neelix has science cancer, Janeway decides to make a detour to the Talaxian system. Interesting how they are able to make this detour. Must be lucky they were heading in the direction of the Talaxian system. For all we know, it's on the other side of the Ocampa home world. Jetrel and Neelix get to talking while Jetrel looks for the isotope of the space radiation. This scene mostly serves to show Jetrel as a mad scientist, the most eeeeeeeevil man the galaxy has known. All because he invented a deadly weapon that killed 300,000 people!

Unless you've yet to take fourth grade history, it is clear that this is an allusion to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let's be clear that it was a very tragic event if you were in either city on the day of the attacks. Hell, the survivors are so revered in Japan that they have a new word for them: hibakusha (explosion-affected people). It really is sad to think about those thousands of people who were vaporized in an instant, then the tens of thousands more who would die a slow and painful death thanks to radiation sickness. Upon seeing the first blast, Robert Oppenheimer said that he had become the destroyer of worlds.

You know, I'd like to describe the socio-political causes...
Sorry, you're a guest star. You don't get backstory.

BUT...let's also point out that some good came from the bombs, which actually killed (depending on which estimates you use) fewer people combined than the firebombing of Dresden. If the bombs had failed in their shock value, the alternative would have been to land troops in Japan. Allied strategists predicted that some 500,000 troops would be killed or wounded during the initial assault. I'm not sure if they even bothered estimating Japanese casualties, as they would have been so horrifically high. The atomic bombings helped save millions of lives, whereas Dresden is remembered as a war crime committed by the Allies. So, in the long-run, which is better: launching an invasion with millions killed as the war drags on, or wipe out 150,000 people instantly and end the war through shock and awe?

That's one reason this episode fails. We only get snippets from Jetrel's side, how his wife saw him as a monster and how the military determined the target. We get the bombing almost entirely from Neelix's POV, the survivor who saw thousands of his people die. It would have been much better if Jetrel had said that if his people didn't use the cascade, the war would have dragged on with the invasion of Talax. All history has dozens, often hundreds of sides to it; this is partly why I read things from the German side of things, but that's another discussion.

So, they arrive at Talax, Neelix goes on to describe the night of the bombing, and the episode goes from mediocre to just bad. It turns out Jetrel was lying and was actually trying to restore the victims. Yeah, I have no idea what the writers (who were not Brannon Braga and Jeri Taylor) were smoking when they came up with this. Newsflash: the point of a weapon is to kill as many people as possible! They aren't supposed to be reversible! Anyway, they fail, Jetrel dies because he had the science cancer, and Neelix forgives him. It would be a heartfelt moment, but sadly we only got him admitting he was a monster without hearing anything about what his side thought.

I often enjoy it when Trek takes an historical event and puts a sci-fi spin on it. This episode just fails to do that. As I said, the atomic bombings performed good in the long term; an invasion became unnecessary and the Japanese could begin climbing out of their suicide weapons (seriously, you have no idea the kinds of suicide machines they were developing). This episode could have been a good send-up for DS9's duet, but it falls short by providing nothing of the other side. In the end, it's less than average and a pretty sloppy attempt to get us to like Neelix.

Final Score: 4/10

Benjamin Sisko

I've decided to take a break from episodes to go into characters. To start this series off, I'm going into my favorite captain. The Captain of the USS Black Sheep of Star Trek: Benjamin Lafayette Sisko.

Voyager's gone?! Damn! If only Starfleet sent me instead!

Ever since the first black woman on Star Trek merely pushed buttons and said one line over and over, the franchise has had at least one black person in the main cast. Sometimes they were okay, like Geordi. Sometimes they were bloody annoying, like Travis. Sometimes you just forgot they even existed, like Jake. That being said, I knew from the moment I watched "Emissary" in its entirety that Sisko was going to be the best one.

The show opened with quite possibly the strongest characterization of any captain, far better than Picard saying "Keep me the hell away from children!" We see Sisko standing as first officer of a ship at the Battle of Wolf 359. It does not go well after one minute, and he's forced to evacuate his family. Though he finds his son alive, his wife, Jennifer, is dead. As Jake is carried away, Sisko literally has to be dragged off the ship, from the arms of his dead wife. Right then, I realized how underrated an actor Avery Brooks is.

Here are some more reason why I find him to be the best captain. Some more will be posted later, but for now:

1) He's not the "black" captain: Unlike Voyager, which took its first moments to tell us that Janeway is a woman, and the best, Sisko never was the "black captain" to me. Having seen every episode of DS9, I can come up with at most two instances in which his race was brought up. The first was in "The Search, Part I", where Sisko unpacks some African artifacts he had in storage on Earth. The second was in "Badda-Bing, Badda-Boom". Sisko said that his problem with Vic's holoprogram is that he believes it misrepresents the 1960s, a time in which black people would not be customers in a Las Vegas nightclub. Wow, you know it does say a bit that a black man in the 24th Century is still peeved by silly 20th Century racism (the Benny Russell episodes don't count, since it wasn't really Sisko). Still, in "Caretaker", Janeway said she didn't like being called "sir". Never in "Emissary" did Sisko say something about how he was "black" or something.

Had the Jem'Hadar seen this, they'd been running
back to the Gamma Quadrant.

2) Best suited for the job at hand: To me, the best captains were the ones who felt like they truly belonged there. Kirk was the swashbuckler, riding around the galaxy on his mast. Picard was the officer and a gentleman, the man who stands by his principles. The other two captains peeved me in this way: Janeway was a scientist selected for a counter-terrorism mission with no established combat training and Archer was an arrogant prick who got the center seat just because his dad's name was on the engine. In "Emissary", Picard established that Sisko spent three years at Utopia Planitia Shipyards. Thus, we learned he's a construction foreman, the man who builds. What better choice for the reconstruction of an entire world, and especially the space station in orbit?

3) A father to his men: This is best exemplified in "Rocks and Shoals". The crew gets stranded on a remote planet, where a Jem'Hadar patrol has also crashed. Sisko doesn't just have Dr. Baltar Bashir examine Jadzia when she gets injured. He takes part in a display of loyalty to his own soldiers, mostly by behaving like a busboy in a hotel. Nevertheless, it is a highly touching scene, showing just how much he cares for them. It also shows that, unlike Picard, who's the colonel that stays at his tent and looks at maps, Sisko is the line officer that gets down and dirty with his men. He leads the charge in all major battles of the Dominion War that we see and immensely despises his tenure at a desk for the first few episodes of Season Six.

Allow me to thank the Cardassian architect. They know
how to respect the commander.

4) A flawed leader: When I rewatched "Caretaker", I soon came to realize why I cannot stand Janeway: she's a perfect character. She is the best science officer in Starfleet and has a handsome fiance back home. In one of her first scenes, she stops a warp core breach (something that we've seen Scotty and Geordi stop a hundred times). In one of his first scenes, Sisko is barely able to control himself when he receives his briefing from Picard, as he indirectly killed his wife. We quickly see just how flawed he is. He lost his wife, he has to raise his son on his own now, he wants nothing more than to sit behind a desk and wait for his career to end, and suddenly the Bajorans proclaim that he's their Messiah. By the end of the pilot, he's managed to overcome a couple problems (mainly his dislike for Picard). Still, the death of his wife would come up a few more times in the series and more importantly, we see him gradually warm up to his role as the Emissary.

5) Dukat...you magnificent bastard, I read your BOOK!: The best protagonists are ones who have an equal, someone who is like them on almost every level. Unlike Q was to Picard, Dukat was a mortal man, just like Sisko (until of course he went insane and turned into the Anti-Christ, but that's something for later). Sisko had his opposite in Dukat. The moment he walked into his old office, I was aware that Dukat was someone who was on the level with Sisko; the way he just strolled around and gave the obvious hint that he wanted it back. In Season 2, we saw the two working together; Sisko was never able to tell if Dukat was being truthful. By the end of Season 5, they had reached a point in their status as adversaries that they could read each other's intentions. Dukat walked into the office and found Sisko's baseball still sitting there, a message that he would return. Yes, Dukat explained the motif, but, as my screenwriting professors said, viewers are idiots. Plus, it's television. What can you do? Back to Dukat, he was in many ways what Sisko could be: the Supreme Ruler of a galactic empire, a man who is feared. I read once that the Cardassians represent what humanity could become, rather than the idealized version.

Well, that's all I have for now. If I wrote any more reasons on how Sisko is possibly the best of the captains, I could publish my own book. Naturally, if you think Sisko was a piece of crap, that's your opinion. I disagree, but I shall read why you think so.

I'll go into the other captains later. This is Lieutenant Fedora, wishing you all a good day.