Prime Factors (VOY)

            Most of the time, when aliens are really ridiculously friendly and also pretty and only want to help the crew, it is because they are secretly trying to eat us or involved in some kind of mind-control plot. “Prime Factors” subverts that expected twist – the Salcarans genuinely are as nice as they say they are, pretty much. Ultimately, though, Voyager’s crew gets greedy and screws things up, and in the process B’Elanna finds her loyalty tested.

Lunch room gossip.

            The opening of this episode really captures that “family” feeling that made late TNG so watchable. Tom, B’Elanna, and ascended redshirt Lt. Seska are teasing Harry about a disastrous date he had with Jenny Delaney. Seska calls out that “there are no secrets on a ship this small” and we are happy to see a lighter side of life in the Delta Quadrant. Eavesdropping from a nearby table, Janeway and Tuvok are happy to see Starfleet and Maquis crew members finally coming together.

            Which of course cues us in that that bond is about to be challenged. It’s smart to make Harry and B’Elanna the focus of this episode, because their relationship has been a symbol of the integration of the crews thus far. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Voyager receives a personal invitation from the overwhelming hospital but hedonistic (and inexplicably French) Salcarans. The Salcarans offer the crew shore leave, edible plants for their hydroponics bay, new clothes, etc. They even throw a big party for the crew, and it  looks like  both Harry and the Captain are about to get lucky. But then Harry ruins everyone’s sexytimes when he discovers that the Salcarans have the technology to send Voyager halfway home.

Remember the Prime Directive? The one where we don’t interfere with the development of other civilizations? Where we’re not allowed to share technology? Turns out the Salcarans have it too, and as Janeway points out, it’s not so fun to be on the other side. Still, Janeway is not about to get her crew home by violating the laws of another civilization, so she sets about trying to change the Salcarans’ minds.

The person most likely to screw up Harry Kim's love life.

Which brings us back to our two Junior officers, both of whom face temptation. Harry, the young, impressionable rules-follower, is also the one who most desperately wants to get back to his family. Also, his new Salcaran girlfriend happens to have the black market connections that could get him the technology. B’Elanna, who was all for screwing over the Ocampa to get home back in “Caretaker”, is now in a position of leadership and doesn’t want to betray her Captain’s trust. But she, along with Seska and Joe Carey, has the engineering knowledge to use it.

            It’s great to see these characters conflicted on so many axis – desire to get home, duty to their Captain, observance of Starfleet principles – and their decisions are all in-character and believable. The real twist comes when Tuvok discovers the plot and, rather than turning the mutineers in, covers for them. His rationale – that he knew Janeway wouldn’t be able to defy her principles so he was saving her the decision – is rationale. It’s actually very Vulcan, to be willing to bend principle when it makes logical sense to do so, and his final scene with Janeway works because of the relationship that’s built up between the two.

The dressing down.

            Lots of characters barely appear in this episode – Paris, Kes, The EMH, and CHakotay are all mostly absent. But that gave the writers a chance to really let Janeway, Tuvok, B’Elanna and Harry work through this problem in their own ways. And that’s where this episode shines. Voyager is more full of strong personalities than the Enterprise ever was, and it’s at its strongest when those personalities get to clash a little. Janeway is a mother to her crew, but sometimes you disagree with your mother and you act out, and then you have to deal with the fact that you betrayed someone who cares about you. Janeway sees Tuvok as a mentor. She sees Harry as a son. She’s not sure whether to see B’Elanna as both a pupil or an antagonist, but Kate Mulgrew and Roxanne Dawson have great chemistry so I want to see those sparks fly over and over again.

The ending – we steal the technology, but it’s not compatible with ours and doesn’t work – is a bit of a cop-out. It’s the Gilligan’s Island principle, of course, in that if Voyager gets home there’s no show. But I don’t think the episode is undermined. On the contrary, I think it’s the strongest episode yet – it has a compelling conflict, the tension builds effectively, and the characters actually develop.

Random Observations:

Minor Character Watch:

Seska gets a name and a brother back home who’s birthday she’s missing.

Joe Carey has a wife and kids back home himself, and he’s more ethically flexible than we thought. He also seems to be adjusting well to being B’Elanna’s subordinate.

Jenny Delaney gets name-dropped again as the girl Harry will never make it with.

I love the fact that the Salcarans use stories as currency.

The Salcaran ship does not look like a recycled model. The set of their ballroom, on the other hand, is definitely a redress of the Professor’s house from Ex Posto Facto.

Discussion question: Is Harry Kim Wesley Crusher done right?

That climax sure had a lot of technobabble in it.

I’m gonna go ahead and guess that the reason Tom Paris wasn’t involved in the episode after the first scene is that he was out there nailing as many Salcaran chicks as possible.

Emanations (VOY)

It's been a busy week, so we're switching around the schedule. Jonah's next DS9 review will run on Friday.

            On the whole, I have been enjoying season one of Voyager more than season one of TNG. First seasons are pretty much always awkward, and it’s much harder to tell good stories before you’re familiar with the cast and the world you’re working in. But Voyager has mostly been aware of the kinds of stories you save for when you’ve got a pretty good handle on things and the stories that help you get to that point. On that level, “Emanations” is kind of a miss.

            The beginning shows a lot of promise. Voyager discovers an asteroid field with a naturally-occurring compound that has all sorts of amazing properties and could revolutionize something. When they get to the surface, though, it becomes clear that the asteroid belt is a burial ground of some sort. Chakotay is adamant about not disturbing it, which is a little bit of a stereotype, but consistent with his character. Janeway ultimately agrees, and they’re about to go on their way when subspace vacuoles start to open up all over the asteroid, and Harry Kim gets sucked into one. Meanwhile, a dead alien gets beamed to Voyager in his place.

She's not dead, Jim.

            The alien just died, and B’Elanna realizes she could still be resurrected, so the Captain orders it done, over Chakotay’s objections. I’m reasonably certain this violates the Prime Directive, and it’s a huge about face for Janeway from her position five minutes ago, but she is very protective of her crew, and I think Harry Kim especially she feels responsible for, so its not a huge stretch that she’d be willing to bend the rules if it meant some hope of finding him.

            Speaking of Harry, he wakes up in a coffin on an alien world. It turns out the Vhnari send their sick through the subspace vacuoles just before the moment of death, and their religion tells them they are reborn in the “Next Emanation”. Without physical bodies to make them question it, the Unari’s belief about death is taken more factually than any human religion. In fact, their culture often kills people it otherwise wouldn’t, like Hatil, who has been disabled in an accident. Since everyone is so certain about the “Next Emanation”, moving on early isn’t considered suicide.

            Harry is horrified by this practice, and the Vhnari are terrified of him, because his report, that the Vhnari who come through the vacuoles stay dead, threatens to destroy the fabric of their society. It’s unclear whether the Vhnari have warp travel, but it takes Harry a good ten minutes to realize he’s trampling all over the big PD. To his credit, he figures it out before Janeway does.

            Janeway opts to revive the alien woman, Ptera, who is shocked to find herself not in heaven and quickly undergoes a perfectly reasonable existential crisis. Kes is detailed to help her get a handle on things, which is a smart move on Janeway’s part, given the Ocampa’s unfailing optimism and rare gift for actually thinking of the person she’s talking to as an actual person with feelings.

Harry and Hatil have a heart to heart.

            B’Elanna comes up with a plan to get Ptera home and maybe get Harry back, but of course it doesn’t work, and Ptera ends up conveniently dead. It’s unclear whether she would have survived if she’d wanted to. Meanwhile, Harry and the doomed Hatil realize they can solve both their problems – Hatil can run away and start a new life, while Harry get in his coffin transporter and beams back to the asteroid belt. Harry has to die for a few minutes, but it works and the crew goes on their merry way, having wrestled with moral quandaries but never actually having been forced to face any.

            And therein lies the essential problem of the episode. It’s afraid of its premise. It wants to ask a lot of big questions – about what happens when we die, about when it’s okay to interfere with another culture, about how much of a role religion is allowed to play in our moral systems – but it’s scared of the answers, so it skirts around them. TNG, in its prime, isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty. If Voyager wants to succeed, it has to start doing the same.

The other problem here, and it’s related, is one of focus. Like “Justice”, “Emanations” sets up several interesting concepts without taking the time to explore them. It could be about euthanasia, but it never really delves into that. It could have been a great character piece for Chakotay, if the conflict between his religious beliefs and Janeway’s pragmatic course of action had been more at the forefront, but that whole angle melts away halfway through the episode. The core of the plot is Voyager’s need to rescue Harry/ Harry’s need to get home, but the philosophical and emotional heart of the episode is missing. It makes a lot of promises, but fails to deliver on any of them in a satisfying way.

Random Observations:

I continue to love the B’Elanna/ Chakotay relationship. B’Elanna and Harry are starting to develop decent friend chemistry, but the writers have finally figured out that this is not where romantic sparks are going to fly.

Paris and Tuvok, having been in the spotlight last week, basically take the week off. Neelix does not appear at all. I didn’t really miss him.

Hatil and Ptera are both very well cast, and their actors do a great job making us empathize with them under all the make-up.

Most humans in Starfleet are portrayed as being atheists, but Harry seems to be more of an agnostic. He doesn't discount the possibility of God or souls or heaven he just doesn't see a reason to believe in them. Janeway, on the other hand, is a straight up atheist.

Speaking of Harry and Janeway, their mentor to student/ mother to son relationship is very sweet, and I like that the episode ends on it.

Minor Character Watch: Lt. Seska is back, now working in the transporter room. She still hasn’t gotten a name or much of a backstory.

The make-up on the Unari is mostly uninspired, but I love the extra nostrils.

Harry Kim Death Count: 1 (Trust me, we’ll need this.)

Eye of the Needle (VOY)

            Like “The Cloud”, “Eye of the Needle” seems interested in telling both an internal and an external story, and it doesn’t do the work to knit them together very well. This doesn’t exactly bother me yet, but I think these A-plot/ B-plot structures work better when there’s some thematic connection between them, and in this episode I found that lacking. Still, the A-plot of “Eye of the Needle” has a lot more substance than the storyline of “The Cloud”, and both plots lay a lot of groundwork for future episodes.

           

            The A-plot is admirably full of twists and turns, but it never really puts Voyager in any danger. There’s still plenty of tension, but it’s driven by hope, rather than fear. For the first time since “Caretaker”, our heroes see a possible way to get home. They will have their hopes raised many more times before this is over, but the first time offers unique opportunities to explore some of the relationships in the ensemble – not everyone wants this to the same extent, and some are more willing to make sacrifices than others.

           

Teeny Tiny Wormhole.

            The whole episode is a big game of good news/ bad news – “Good News - We found a wormhole to the Alpha Quadrant!” “Bad news – it’s too small to fit Voyager through.” “Good News – There’s someone on the other side we can talk to.” “Bad News – he’s a paranoid Romulan.” “Good News – we can beam through the wormhole and go home.” “Bad news – we’d end up 20 years in the past.”

           

            Ultimately, of course, the potential damage to the timeline is non-negotiable, despite Harry Kim’s protests. They do leave messages with the Romulan, but have no way of knowing if they were ever sent. For now Voyager is still alone, the isolation felt all the more acutely for being so close to home.

            The B-plot continues what I think is the most promising sub-plot, the Doctor’s self-actualization. Fittingly, it is Kes who confronts the Captain about how the crew treats him, and Janeway reacts as if someone had just told her that the toaster was feeling left out since you started making waffles all the time. This response is fascinating to me. It may be because I just watched “The Measure of a Man,” where Picard talks about humanity being judged on how it treats its technological creations, and now I feel as I’m watching his prophecy unfold. The Doctor is just as human as Data, more human in many ways, but while Data was always embraced as a member of the Enterprise crew, everyone on Voyager still views the Doc as a glorified tricorder.

This includes the Doctor himself, who has no thoughts about agitating for his rights – when Janeway asks him if there’s anything she can do for him, all he asks is for the ability to turn himself off or back on. He doesn’t see any reason to think of himself as anything other than a machine designed to perform a specific task, yet he clearly has emotional needs that could be met.

Here’s where it gets creepy. We know, from Deep Space Nine, that plenty of people use holograms for sexual fantasies, and from every show that people use holodecks to play out violent fantasies. The Doctor is not the first Hologram to achieve sentience, and he won’t be the last. Now while most likely Tom Paris’s holo-bimbos from the French pool-hall simulation don’t have complex enough programs to be considered people, where the heck do you draw that line? It’ incredibly difficult to pick a point where you can say “These holoprograms are sentient and should have rights” and “These holoprogams can be used as our playthings.”

We’re going to get into these ethical issues eventually. I hope sooner rather than later, because the way the crew treats the Doctor makes me not like the crew much at all.

Random Observations:

No Neelix this episode (or very little at least.)

Kes has an eidetic memory, which makes sense given the Ocampa lifespan. This is how they can master enough skills in such a short time and have a functioning society.

We learn that B’Elanna is estranged from her parents and hasn’t seen her human dad since she was five. I guess if you walk out on a Klingon coming back would be pretty scary.

This episode definitely puts Harry at the forefront, but we don’t really learn much about him except that he really wants to get home.

B’Elanna still calls Harry Starfleet, and the writers still haven’t caught on to their relative lack of chemistry.

Janeway answers Telek Remor's (audio only) communique in her pink slip with her hair down.  It's not super sexualized, but its a little off-putting.

Telek Remor might actually be a cargo ship captain, but given what we know about the Romulans circa 2151, it’s equally likely he’s a Tal Shiar operative. Either way, the Romulans were a good choice for this episode – their distrustfulness helps racket up the tension even more.

The scene where the Doctor worries about being left on after everyone has abandoned ship is actually a little heart-breaking.