Jetrel (VOY)

Double TNG Next Week!

This week, Voyager takes a dark turn. Neelix has always had echoes of the sad clown, but now we discover the tragedy at the heart of his character - his entire family was killed in what was basically Hiroshima, and he was among the first to witness the devastation first-hand. "Jetrel" brings Neelix face to face with the scientist who invented the weapon.

It feels more like a Deep Space Nine story, with Jetrel telling lies upon lies to mask his true intentions, and perhaps the Deep Space Nine writing staff could have handled it better. As it is, the writing lacks the depth it needs to fully explore its premise. It asks some interesting questions that have been percolating in science fiction since the deployment of the A-Bombs - what is the moral responsibility of scientists? Is a blast that kills millions justifiable if it ends a war that would have killed billions? But it doesn't take full advantage of science fiction's ability to explore these questions divorced from their real world contexts.

While it largely fails as an exploration of morality, technology, and war, the piece succeeds as a
character piece for Neelix, revealing his tragic past and really bringing the character's essential conflicts into focus. While Kes has thrown herself wholeheartedly into life on Voyager, Neelix has always held the crew at arms length, ready to strike out on his own at the first sign of trouble. But his reluctance to form a family bond makes total sense from someone who lost his entire family, and his joviality is more believable as a facade he forces on himself to protect his psyche from the terrible darkness of the things he's seen than it is as just sheer optimism.

Ethan Phillips, Jennifer Lien, and Star Trek Veteran James Sloyan all really pull their acting weight, which sort of rescues the episode from the mediocre writing that plagues its more dramatic sequences. I can definitely see that the writers struggled with how best to tell this story. I just don't think they ended up with something totally cohesive. The ending in particular seems like it was thrown in for the sake of having a twist, and puts forth a lot of questions it doesn't even try to answer (using Voyager's transporter's to resurrect an entire dead colony surely must violate the Prime Directive somehow.)

Ultimately, this episode is about survivor guilt - its about Neelix forgiving himself for not dying with his family. The final scene, where he forgives Jetrel, doesn't feel earned at all, because the dramatic scenes haven't done the work of bringing him to that point. It definitely puts me in mind of Deep Space Nine's "Duet", but it doesn't achieve anywhere near the nuance of that episode.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on a first season episode from what is generally considered a weaker series. But mediocre episodes always bother me most when I can see the potential in them, and this may have been the most potential-full Voyager plot to date. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't nearly as good as it might have been.

Random Observations:

The pool scene at the beginning was a nice way of keeping us in the world and quickly reestablishing Neelix - light-hearted, but shrewd.

Nice to keep reminding us of Kes's abbreviated lifespan - conveniently timed with how long a Star Trek show runs. I wonder what their plans were for the character?

Janeway's ready to take a big detour for Neelix's sake. We're never getting home at this rate.

James Sloyer is no stranger to doing heavy drama in heavier make-up. He previously played Odo's "father" Mora Pel on DS9 and K'mpec on TNG's "Firstborn".

The Phage (VOY)

            Voyager is an adventure show. It toys with the more cerebral preoccupations of TNG, but ultimately, it’s about swashbuckling and having a good time, and not caring if your villains come off a bit cheesy. In this way, I think it’s telling that they chose the fourth episode to introduce the Vidians, a villain whose major preoccupation is stealing people’s internal organs.

            Note that Spock’s Brain is often considered the worst episode of the Original Star Trek, so internal-organ-snatching shenanigans are not something with proven popularity. But “The Phage” manages to be quite an enjoyable hour of television, balancing character development and tension, even if at times some of the plot details come across a bit contrived.

Neelix learns the hard way why you don't split the party.

            We open with the Voyager experiencing the first of many resource shortages – in this case, dilithium reserves are extremely low. With Neelix’s help, though, the crew has found an asteroid rich in the mineral. Determined to prove his usefulness to the Captain, the Talaxian Jack-of-All-Trades beams down with the survey team, and is promptly shot when he wonders off on his own.

            It turns out whoever shot him beamed his lungs out of his body. To make matters worse, the asteroid has no dilithium at all, it was all a ruse by the organ snatchers, who escape on their own ship with Voyager in hot pursuit. The Doctor manages to rig up some holographic lungs for Neelix, but the means he can’t leave sickbay or move from his bed at all.

            The rest of the episode is split between a kind of silly sci-fi chase where Voyager follows the ship into a giant asteroid filled with fun-house mirrors (not the most effective tension—building device) and scenes in sickbay, where both Neelix and the Doctor try to adapt to their new situations. Neelix has to confront the possibility of never leaving the biobed, and the Doctor has to confront the reality that he is not just a short term replacement anymore, and Kes is trying to help both of them come to terms with these facts. These scenes are well-written and show a lot of promise for the characters.

They get so much creepier once they start stealing faces.

            Janeways plot stays pretty cheesy and silly until she finally captures the two aliens, called Vidians, and tries to get Neelix’s lungs back. Unfortunately, the lungs were urgently needed and have already been implanted in one of the aliens. It turns out the Vidian race has struggled for thousands of years with an untreatable illness called The Phage, which causes systematic organ failure. To survive, they take organs from other species.

            Ultimately, the Vidians agree to use their superior biotech to give Neelix one of Kes’s lungs, since they’re used to modifying organs for safer transplant. Janeway warns them that if any of their people try to take organs from Voyager again, there will be hell to pay, but oddly enough lets them go on their way. As she points out, though, she hardly has a choice –  there are no authorities to turn them over to, and they can’t sit in Voyager’s brig indefinitely, so it’s ether kill them or let them go, and she’s not about to go around executing people. But this is a dilemma that isn’t going to go away.

Random Observations:

Kes is the first member of the crew to see the Doctor as a person with needs, and that includes the Doctor. Kes’s naiveté is a flaw, but it also seems to lead to her seeing things everyone else overlooks. And through her patronage, the Doc is starting to question his own identity.

There is a Neelix/Paris/Kes love triangle, and as these things go I think it’s kind of fun.

Voyager being much smaller than the Enterprise opens up new opportunities for action sequences, as the asteroid chase demonstrates.

This is the first we see of Neelix’s culinary obsession (though we hear about it before.)

The Vidian make-up is wonderfully ugly. Visually, it does a lot towards making their rather stretched premise believable.

On that note, wouldn’t a culture as advanced as the Vidians have figured out how to grow replacement organs by now? We’re almost there now.

I find it a little hard to swallow that this early in the series Janeway is already risking the whole ship for Neelix. He’s just joined their crew, and hasn’t even proven himself particularly useful yet. Tuvok might have something to say about the needs of the many…

The Vidian facility is obviously the same corridor as the Power Plant in “Time and Again”. It’s too distinctive to keep reusing.

Vidian: According to my readings, you are not here.

Doctor: Believe me, I wish I weren’t.

Minor Character Watch: Seska is now in Engineering Yellow, as she will be from now on.

Shuttles lost: 0

Fatalities: 0