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.

The Cloud (VOY)

       Most Star Trek episodes (post-TOS) have an A plot and a B plot – usually the A plot is something that the crew has to face, like a space anomaly or a race of aliens, and the B plot is something a particular character to contend with. In other words, the A plots consist of external conflict, while the B plots are all about internal conflict. Every so often, though, the internal, character-based conflict takes center stage, and the space anomaly feels like an afterthought. This is the case with “The Cloud”, and it turns it into a nice slice-of-life look at how everyone is handling being stranded in the Delta Quadrant.

Just a stroll.

      We open with a Captain’s log, and a wonderful sequence wherein we see the isolation Captain Janeway feels from her crew. Paris and Kim respond awkwardly to her attempts to make small talk, and when she comes to Engineering to “check in”, B’Elanna insists on treating the visit like a surprise inspection. Only Neelix seems willing to talk to her on a person-to-person level, and she’s annoyed with him for trying to talk her into giving up her beloved coffee – power is tight, and replicator use has to be strictly rationed.

      I love Janeway’s caffeine addiction, by the way. It fits her into the stereotype of the all-business business woman, but somehow it connects her to our age and our culture and makes her feel more human anyway. In this case, it also makes for one of the more quotable Voyager lines when she orders the ship into a mysterious Nebula which seems to have the particles Voyager needs to solve its power problems and get back the use of the replicators.

      The Nebula behaves strangely and turns out to be a living creature, which makes up the episode’s largely uninspired A plot. But how Voyager deals with the Nebula-creature takes up maybe 15 minutes of the episode total, and the rest is occupied by Janeway’s struggle to find a new way to relate to her crew, with a handful of scenes that seem a bit disconnected but lay the groundwork for future plotlines.

       In one such scene, Neelix and Kes argue about the value of exploration – Neelix thinks it’s crazy to risk your life and the life of your crew just to see what’s out there, and Kes thinks it’s crazy not to. It sort of reminds me of the famous “Root Beer” scene between Garak and Quark – two aliens giving their perspectives on the Federation. Later Neelix tries to abandon ship and Janeway talks him out of it.

Chakotay's medicine bundle.

       By far the most interesting diversion is Chakotay’s attempt to share his religion with the Captain. First off, Chakotay is to my knowledge the first Starfleet officer to observe any sort of spiritual practice or acknowledge a belief in a higher power at all (yes, tell me all about the Bajorans, but the ones we see in Starfleet, like Ro Laren and Sit Jaxa, are not the most devout of the bunch.)

       Chakotay doesn’t identify with any real life tribe (probably for fear of screwing up their research and offending said tribe) and I have no idea what his animal guide belief is based on, but it’s interesting the Janeway and B’Elanna don’t seem to regard it as a religion, even though that’s clearly what it is. They seem to consider it more of a meditation practice, like Yoga, and Chakotay himself is unphazed by this.

In the final vignette, Paris shows Kim the Holodeck program he’s written simulating a pool hall in Marseille where he used to spend a lot of time. This scene feels jarringly disconnected from everything in the episode, but the payoff comes in the final scene when Janeway joins them in the Pool hall and proceeds to hustle Tom. She ends her Captain’s log, saying that the distance between Captain and crew is important, but out here it might be necessary to relax these restrictions.

It’s an interesting choice – it took Picard seven years to join his senior staff for a game of poker. The message we’re getting is that this is a Captain who’s going to get much more attached to her crew. Perhaps it’s fitting for our first female Captain to be a little more nurturing, but I think it will behoove us to remember another stereotype – the female bear is much scarier than the male if you get between her and her cubs. Janeway will get her crew home, and she might have to break some rules Picard would never break in the process.

Solids.

Random Observations: 

 The camera work in the opening scene in Engineering really captures Janeway's sense of isolation. It's a very long shot for a Star Trek episode, and must have been tough to film, but it gives a beautiful effect.

 

The dialogue in the brief Neelix/Kes scene is really nice. My favorite bit is Kes's line:

"If I were Captain, I'd open every crack in the universe and peek inside, just like Captain Janeway does."

As I've said before, she embodies the spirit of Starfleet more than anyone else in the crew.

At one point, Chakotay says the ship only has 38 photon torpedos. You better believe we’re starting a photon torpedo count.

B’Elanna suggest the idea of giving the Doctor access to his own program – some serious foreshadowing, as she later does just that, and many plot hooks are created.

Speaking of the Doctor, the lack of respect with which the crew treats him is disgusting (Janeway muting him in the middle of a staff meeting, etc.) I guess if you’ve grown up with holograms that seem like real people it’s easy to compartmentalize and not treat a Hologram like a person, but by now they must be starting to realize he’s more than a sophisticated tricorder.

This train of thought raises some unfortunate implications with Tom’s treatment of holographic women.

Fatalities: 0

Shuttlecraft lost: 0

Torpedos remaining: 37

Time and Again (VOY)

            “It was all just a dream” is one of my least favorite endings ever for an installment in a serialized work. It means all the character development, everything we learn about these people over the course of the episode, is completely irrelevant. “It was all just an alternate Timeline”, i.e. the “Temporal Reset Button” is Voyager’s version of this trope, and “Time and Again” is its first victim. Which is a real shame, because other than that it’s a very solid episode, way more watchable and entertaining than anything in TNG’s first season.

            The episode opens with Tom and Harry discussing Voyager’s extremely limited pool of eligible young women, when Voyager is hit by a shockwave. At the same time, Kes feels a great disturbance in the force, as if a thousand voices cried out and were suddenly silenced. When they take a detour to investigate, they find a Polaric energy discharge has destroyed an entire prewarp civilization in a few minutes. Unfortunately, it’s also fractured the space-time continuum, leaving little time-travel pockets, one of which sucks Janeway and Tom into the past. About a day and a half in the past, to be precise.

Tom wants to try and prevent the disaster, while Janeway considers that a violation of the Prime Directive and just wants to try and get out before everything goes up in flames. Janeway doesn’t really have a good answer for Tom’s assertion that nothing they could do could screw things up more than the destruction of the entire planet, and honestly she comes off as kind of a cold-hearted bitch, especially when a cute little kid starts tailing them.

Alderaan! No!

Meanwhile, back on the ship, B’Elanna and Harry devise a method of opening the space-time fractures, but only for a few seconds at a time. They, along with Chakotay, Tuvok, and Kes, whose telepathic powers have been flaring up, go down to the planet to try and mount a rescue. You’d think they would leave one senior officer on the ship, but apparently not. Guess Neelix is in command.

It turns out this planet uses Polaric energy as a power-source, and many of the locals are aware of how dangerous it is and have been staging protests about it for years. Some are more extreme about this view than others, and Janeway and Tom are soon kidnapped by terrorists with a plot which Janeway thinks is what leads to the accident. They also kidnap the little kid.

Janeway changes her mind and decides to try and stop the explosion after all, and after some heroics where in Tom gets shot, she ends up in a standoff with the terrorists. The twist is that what really causes the explosion is Torres and Kim’s rescue attempt. Fortunately, Janeway manages to stop in by firing a disrupter into the fracture, and the entire timeline ceases to exist. There is no shockwave, so Voyager never comes to investigate, so the only part of the episode that’s canon is Tom and Harry talking about hitting on the Delaney sisters. The only one who has any inkling that this episode happened is Kes, because of her weird telepathic powers.

I sense great plot holes...

When I watch ensemble-based, episodic TV, I want to watch a group of characters overcoming adversity together and growing and developing in the process. Episodes that get aborted at the end don’t contribute to that feeling at all. I guess under the right circumstances it can be a cool twist ending for a sci-fi story. But in this case it just made the entire episode feel thoroughly pointless. 

Random Observations:

That Tom. Such a playa.

The opening exchange between Tom and Harry is hilarious –

            “I’ve got a girl back home!”

            “I’ve got five, who cares?”

The scene where the EMH gets upset because the proper paperwork wasn’t filled out when Kes was brought on board is also precious, but it seems kind of a strange oversight. Surely someone on the crew should have realized that having medical scans on file for Neelix and Kes is a good idea? I mean, what if they get injured and the doctor has to operate on them? Hopefully this gets addressed off-camera soon in the main timeline.

“Everyone should drink plenty of fluids.” 

Tom continues to be really dense about how Time Travel works.

Tom and Janeway are both really good at rolling with the punches and blending in with this totally unfamiliar civilization though. Almost unbelievably so.

It seems weird that Tuvok would be the most skeptical about Kes’s powers, given that Vulcans are also telepaths.

Recurring Character Watch: First mention of the Delaney sisters.

No shuttlecraft lost.

No fatalities.

Parallax (VOY)

Today we're pulling a little switch because Jonah didn't get his article done. Today's scheduled DS9 review will run Friday and Nathan's Voyager review will run today.

Star Trek has gotten us very used to seeing the Federation from one perspective – the inside. But The Federation isn’t paradise to everyone. To B’Elanna Torres it’s a stifling, oppressive system that bogs itself down with unnecessary protocols and regulations. She believes in settling disputes more organically. Unfortunately, she’s also half Klingon, so a small disagreement with acting chief engineer Carey lands the man in sickbay with a broken nose.

It’s a promising way to start a second episode, as news of the altercation reverberates throughout the ship, bringing Chakotay into conflict with Tuvok, B’Elanna, and finally the Captain. And it gets us right to the heart of what this crew is going to have to deal with. The Enterprise was a flagship staffed with the best and the brightest. Voyager can barely keep itself staffed at all.

The A-plot and B-plot are surprisingly well integrated in this episode, which is good because the A- plot, Voyager’s attempt to escape a quantum singularity, is pretty dumb. It’s an escalating series of technobabble that’s eventually solved by more technobabble. But the B-plot, Janeway and Chakotay’s power struggle and Janeway’s search for a Chief Engineer, is compelling enough to keep the episode afloat (The C-plot, a bit of physical humor involving the Doctor shrinking, is merely distracting most of the time.)

So on TNG, Riker would often challenge Picard’s decisions. But Picard knew that Riker always had his safety and the ship’s best interests at heart, and would always back down and follow orders if it came to that. Janeway has no such guarantees from Chakotay. For all she knows at this point, he could still be contemplating a mutiny. This adds a real tension to the scene in Janeway’s office when she calls out her new XO.

Chakotay is remembered in the long canon of Star Trek characters for being always either an obnoxious Native American stereotype or insufferably bland. But early on he’s not like that at all. He’s a rough and tumble Han Solo-type forced into having to adjust to military discipline, a microcosm of all the Maquis on the ship. My guess is the main reason this characterization disappears is that he was too much like Tom (and to some extent, B’Elanna.) The edgy rule-breakers are fun, but too many and the ship becomes total chaos.

As fun as it is to watch him not be boring, Chakotay is somewhat secondary to this episode. Mostly, it’s about B’Elanna and Janeway, and it really takes off when they connect while trying to solve the singularity problem. By the end of the episode, Janeway has decided that the volatile former Maquis has what it takes to be her chief Engineer. But they don’t explicitly trust each other – B’Elanna is still resentful of Janeway for stranding her in the Delta Quadrant, and Janeway is still extremely apprehensive about asking her officers to take orders from a Starfleet academy dropout. And unlike most of the conflicts Voyager sets up, this one won’t have evaporated by season two – B’Elanna remains a deeply conflicted character throughout the series.

I want to take a moment how cool it is for a network show in 1995 to be doing a plotline about two women that doesn’t involve romance at all. The feminism of Voyager is riddled with problems, and believe me, we will get into them, but for now, it’s nice to enjoy an episode that passes the Bechdel test more than just incidentally.

Random Observations:

We will be talking a lot about race, gender, and B’Elanna Torres – another time. Suffice it to say I once wrote a five-page paper on the subject, citing this episode, “Faces” and “Lineage”, and then adapted that paper into a panel I led at Connecticon this year. So it’s something I’ve thought a lot about.

Because she’s half-Klingon, almost no one remembers that B’Elanna’s human father is named Torres, and she’s portrayed by Hispanic actress Roxanne Dawson, making her the first Latina Star Trek regular. Interestingly enough, that honor was supposed to go to Tasha Yar, originally named Macha Hernandez before blonde, blue-eyed Denise Crosby got the part. Just something to mull over.

The C-story does feature a very sweet scene between the EMH and Kes, and they have fantastic chemistry. They’re both kind of naïve in their own ways – Kes is only two years old, after all and technically the EMH is only a few days. He has a lot of preprogrammed knowledge, but not much real experience.

Neelix has a story or an anecdote for everything.

In a rare bit of foresight, Harry Kim mentions that it’s impossible to reroute power from the Holodecks, explaining why they will be able to keep hanging out in French pool halls when they don’t have power to use the replicators.

Recurring character watch: Joe Carey, B’Elanna’s long suffering assistant, will be a familiar face for the next couple seasons. He’s a salt-of-the-Earth type, like O’Brien but less interesting.

Also, is that Seska in a blue uniform?

No new fatalities.

No shuttlecraft lost.