When I think of Voyager, what comes to mind is "wasted potential". A crew is stranded thousands of lightyears from home and at maximum warp, it will take 70 years to get back (luckily, Janeway factored in all the stars, planets, and supernovae that would distract her). I was a big fan of LOST, another show with roughly the same idea and you cannot count how many times they shook up the status quo. Voyager wasted all those opportunities: from Chakotay relieving her of command to settling down somewhere before being driven off. To me, that was its greatest flaw: always being reset to how it was at the start of those 40 minutes. Little to no character development and the only thing that changed was how close they were to Earth.
The episode opens with, get this, Tom and Torres getting married. The last wedding on Star Trek was Klingon, so even though Torres is half-Klingon, they're forgoing the "painsticks" (which...we didn't even see the last time we saw a Klingon get married). The Doctor takes pics, Seven of Boobs catches the bouquet, and Harry gets to play his clarinet. Everyone is so happy and throwing rice, I'm sure nothing can POSSIBLY go wrong! But, as the oh-so-subtle scaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaary sloooooooooooooooooo-mooooooooooooooo shows us, the ship is getting warped for some reason. We see this by witnessing rice that was thrown falling through the floor. In their state of euphoria, no one notices this. Yep, the crew of Voyager, who cannot literally identify manure without a tricorder, do not notice that the floor is suddenly completely clean.
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| The iCam, it's a film camera and can hold fifty songs! |
Captain's Log: It's been five years since I made the stupid decision to strand everyone here, and put down that off-screen uprising. Thanks to some techno-stuff, we have a new warp drive that will get us home in two years. I wish the crew would stop asking how this device was never brought up until right now.
So, Captain KATHRYN Janeway and Chakotay discuss their plan to get home. At speeds they're going, they can drop by the center of the galaxy and meet God...oh wait, there was no fifth film. Anyway, Neelix (oh crap, Neelix) tries to sell off one of his holoprograms to Tom for the honeymoon, a feeble attempt to make him seem like Quark. At least Quark had class. Tom then says he's going to take his honeymoon on Earth, because it has the absolute best vacation sites in the galaxy. You know, Tom, Neelix may be an idiot, but he kind of has a point in trying something exotic before getting back to the real thing. Congrats, Neelix! You have one point!
Torres then goes to leave Seven of Boobs in charge of the engine room. Of course, the "oh crap" light goes off, and the two go down to investigate. As Seven caught the bouquet, Torres goes in to ask who the lucky guy is. Interesting, how Seven spent her entire young life in the Borg, possessing the entire knowledge of the collective, and does not even seem to know the tradition of catching the bouquet. They see that the Jeffries tubes are being warped. Someone sound the "Holy SHIT!" alarm!
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| Who let Neelix into the weapon of mass destruction locker? |
So, Torres eventually comes down with a case of Dying Syndrome. As it turns out, the entire crew seems to be infected and will soon die off. Duh-duh-DUUUUUUUUH!!! However, in another of-out-character moment, Neelix states that everything that was brought on board Voyager over the last few weeks, including plants and trilithium (which can destroy stars), is perfectly fine. Chakotay and Tuvok, who are the most competent people on the ship, begin to backtrack Voyager's route over the last year. To do this, they go to Voyager's War Room, I mean Astrometrics.
Paris continues to stand over his dying wife. Tom goes into a bunch of tear-jerking facts about their Roarin' 20s honeymoon. I'm sorry, but I find it a bit unrealistic that someone from the 24th Century would know this much about a period 400 years ago. There's also the matter that they refer to the 20th Century as part of "ancient Earth", but that's a discussion for another time. The "she's dying!" meter goes off and the Doctor is unable to save Torres. Not even his sonic screwdriver could save her. Unlike in Threshold, he will begin an autopsy immediately to figure out what happened.
I'm impressed. For the first time, we're seeing a high level of competence in the Voyager crew. And all it took was a few of them to die off...
And then we get the twist...uh, midpoint? Chakotay and Tuvok had backtracked Voyager to the Demon planet, from Demon. After some exposition on an episode from the previous year, they go to sickbay and tell the Doctor to inject Torres' corpse with something, after finding that she is essentially comprised of starship fuel. As it turns out, the entire crew and the ship itself are the duplicates from Demon.
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| Friend Bear, the Caring Meter is down! |
Like most captains, Not-Captain KATHRYN Janeway asks her officers to put all options out on the table. Not-Chakotay says that there is only one option: head back to the Demon planet. With that, even Not-Chakotay shows that he is a more competent leader. Sadly, Not-Janeway decides that the best thing to do is to suck it up and continue to head for Earth, a planet that is still two years away and the ship is coming apart at such a rate it won't even survive the next twenty minutes.
Let me discuss Janeway a bit. A friend of mine is a devoted follower of her, and claims that my low opinion of her resides in "deep-rooted misogynistic feelings" at the idea of a woman having authority over men. Of course, every single woman who was an officer, or even an NCO, in the history of Star Trek had authority over at least half the ship, regardless of gender. Now, my problem with Janeway is that she doesn't think everything through. Not-Janeway insists the best course is to continue heading in a direction that will most likely result in killing them all, instead of turning around and have a chance at survival. Even the real Janeway is like this: when they installed a slipstream drive that propelled them 20,000ly but was highly dangerous, she orders it disassembled rather than conducting further study to see if they can make it safer. That's like completely scrapping the space program after a few rockets blew up!
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| How do these Death Panels work again? |
So, Not-Janeway decides to look for a Demon planet and reverse the damage, instead of going back. They come across one planet, but as we all know, the Delta Quadrant is extremely picky about its planets. It takes the death of Not-Chakotay to convince Not-Janeway to head back to where they came from. Congrats, Not-Janeway! Had you followed the advice of your executive officer, he may still be alive.
With that, things get from screwed to fraked. The Not-Doctor is off-line, so Not-Janeway makes the Not-Kitchen FΓΌhrer the new medical officer. After a problem with the nav-deflector (ah, the nav-deflector, what CAN'T it do?), Not-Neelix proceeds to celebrate, only to find that Not-Janeway is dead. And there was much rejoicing.
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| Who would have though Harry, of all people, would be Last Man Standing? |
You know why this episode failed? Because we just couldn't care about them. We just get one episode with the duplicates and discussion of events we never even saw. You know what COULD have been a thrilling twist? Have half the season follow these duplicates, and have the big reveal in the last five minutes like a good Twilight Zone episode. But, alas, Voyager rarely made use of its good ideas.
How does this episode rate? Slightly-below average.
Good start, Ph- ahem, Mr Fedora (eyeroll).
ReplyDeleteI hear your opinion, Mr Fedora, and respect it, but I don't agree with it.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking personally, I did care about these duplicates. Even though we find out that they're not the real crew, the fact that they care about each other, and stay true to their (original's) personalities was very captivating. To me, anyway.
Janeway's grief over the death of Chakotay, and her remorse for not listening to him earlier, was quite real. The whole time she's wasting away, essentially dying, she's trying to find ways to keep her ship and crew intact long enough to make it to the Demon Planet, from beefing up the warp core with nanites to preparing a time capsule so that who they were, would be remembered by someone.
And the last statement she gives in the conference room: "None of you deserves to be forgotten." brought a tear to my eye. Maybe she did screw up, but she did what she could to atone for it, right up until her death. How many other people can say that after making a mistake?
I give this episode a B. It would've been an A if the time capsule made it to the real Voyager.
I agree overall with your general point, but I think the true waste of potential in this episode ties back t0 the general reset button hit on every episode more than a lack of connection to the duplicates - they could easily have BEEN the crew on screen for half the peisdodes between Demon and this one, for all the impact one had on almost any opthers. Likewise, the utter lack of impact of this episode on any other due to it being made explicit that no record or intelligible information was found by the real Voyager crew, is what makes Course Oblivion a waste. How would the real crew have reacted to finding out about their copies' fates? Could they have made use of the new warp drive safely? Maybe run into some aliens that the copy Voyager had come into contact with, for good for for ill, and have to deal with the aftermath? At least get some decent supplies for the kitchen? No. Of course, no. Course: No, even. The Prime Time Directive forbids interfering with the continu8ity of non-multipart episodes. And that is the real tragedy.
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