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

Babel (DS9)

After a solid pilot and a few great character episode, "Babel" is an ensemble show truly in the mode of The Next Generation. The crew getting infected with a disease is a trope that show used far too many times, including in their second episode.

But "Babel" does the disease story better. And it's not TNG's fault. Really good disease stories follow the mode of classic movies like The Andromeda Strain, where the disease threatened to spread and wipe out all life on Earth. The highest stakes TNG could manage were that everyone on the ship would die.

But Deep Space Nine, this episode reminds us, is a port. There are civilians and unaffiliated ships docked, and a disease threatens everyone. And if an infected ship leaves port, the disease could threaten the whole quadrant.

"Babel" features a disease with slightly silly symptoms but deadly serious import. It affects characters we really care about, and gets dangerously close to taking them all out before a handful of immune characters manage to save the day. The stakes rise appropriately to create a drama-filled hour: not bad for episode 4.

The "day in the life of OBrien" motif that starts the episode is delightful, but also drives home some of the themes of the pilot - how, while other crews have been in harmony with their ships, the DS9 crew is constantly wrestling with Deep Space Nine - and O'Brien is their champion in that fight.

When O'Brien falls ill, the spotlight shifts to Bashir, as we get to see him do what he does best: researching under pressure, researching frantically to cure a deadly disease. When Bashir succumbs, the focus shifts again to Kira, and we get to see what she does best: playing outside the rules and circumventing Bajoran politics.

While the merry-go-round of expertise is doing it's thing, the show is showing its hand by pairing up odd-couple Odo and Quark, though not for the last time. The producers are already discovering the level of delight that can come from Armin Shimmerman and Rene Auberjonois sharing a plotline, as they first play a cat and mouse game over Quark's illicit replicator use, and then are forced to team up as Odo runs out of unaffected potential deputees. We start to see that Quark is, or can be, one of our heroes, when push comes to shove - an important, if perilous, direction for the show to move in.

This is still DS9 trying to be TNG, but it's a notable episode because it's DS9 trying to be TNG and, in many ways, doing better at it. The frontier situation, the intercast conflicts, the consequences of being parked, all come into play in positive ways to raise the stakes of this outbreak story. DS9 has proved it can leverage it's strengths to tell an old story with some oomph.

Observation

- Odo's reason for catching Quark at his replicator shenanigan's - that Rom "couldn't fix a straw if it was bent" - is totally wrong, it turns out. Odo prides himself on being observant, so I'll leave you to ponder whether he truly misread Rom, or whether he was playing a larger game with Quark.

The Last Outpost (TNG)

            I’m trying to watch this show as if I were just discovering this world and these characters, and have no idea how things will grow or develop. Sometimes this is harder than others. In the 20 seasons of Trek that follow this one, the Ferengi quickly became the punch lines of the Alpha Quadrant. But here, in their first ever appearance, we are asked to take them quite seriously. And I find that very difficult.

            As the episode opens, the Enterprise is chasing a Ferengi Marauder which stole an expensive piece of equipment from a Federation outpost. Data compares the alien culture to “Yankee Traders” in their insatiable lust for profit. That continues to be true throughout the various series’, but Deep Space Nine’s Ferengi would never resort to this kind of blatant looting. This is not to say the Ferengi are more principled later on. It’s just that later on, they’re portrayed as absolute cowards, who would never even conceivably risk a conflict with a Galaxy class starship. Here they seem to have at least a bit of a spine.

           

            But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Enterprise finds itself trapped in a forcefield which is slowly draining its power. Assuming the Ferengi are the source of this attack, the open hailing frequencies saying they are “prepared to discuss surrender”. The Ferengi, caught in the same trap and thinking the Enterprise to be the source of it, assume they are being asked to surrender, and promptly do so. This turns everyone’s attention to the planet.

            The planet, it turns out was once an outpost of a huge interstellar empire, called the TKon Empire, which died off when their sun went Nova, never mind that no one seems to understand that “interstellar” sort of intrinsically implies… well, never mind, it’s not important.

LASER WHIPS.

            Riker, Yar, Data, Worf, and Geordi all beam down to the planet, but the transporter scatters everyone so it takes them a while to reunite, then an away team of Ferengi ambushes them with LASER WHIPS. Fortunately, Yar is not with them, and is able to rescue them and bring the whole thing to a standoff. In the midst of this, a weird, robed alien materializes. It is the Portal to the TKon Empire, and asks the “barbarians” to petition for entry.

            Now the Ferengi become more like the Ferengi we will come to know, groveling, scheming, and trying to gain advantage with the powerful aliens. Unfortunately for them, the Portal can read minds, and seeing through their deception, asks one to come forward and be tested. Worf tries to volunteer, assuming the test will be martial, but Riker stops him, quoting Sun Tzu. “He will triumph who knows when to fight, and when not to.”

            Honestly, I didn’t really get the ending. It’s not an awful episode, but its one that seems to lack any sort of thematic center – while it has obvious parallels to the TOS classics “Day of the Dove” and “Errand of Mercy”, it doesn’t seem to bring up their antiwar message, and the the Ferengi are never threatening enough to effectively build much tension.

The gems of this episode are all in little character interaction and the way in which the cast seems to be building chemistry. But the art of telling a fully contained story with themes and ideas running through it is an area where TNG’s writers have yet to catch up even to TOS.

Random Observations:

The Data/ Geordi dynamic continues to grow, but as Jonah points out its reminiscent of Chekov and Sulu’s peanut gallery discussions of TOS days.

Speaking of Geordi, he’s acting like the chief engineer now, but he’s still wearing red. Also, despite LeVar Burton’s easy-going charisma, he’s still coming off extremely bland.

Wesley Crusher does not appear in this episode.

There’s a really out of place Crusher/ Picard shipping scene while the away team is down on the planet and they contemplate the possibility that they are about to die. One assumes these conversations happen less as the show goes on because the characters realize that they are kind of constantly about to die.

I think part of the reason Yar is on her way out is that she and Worf are too much like each other. And Worf is the more interesting character.

Betazoids can’t read Ferengi. This is consistently maintained throughout the show, and is super convenient as the Ferengi become the galaxy’s con men.

Armin Shimmerman plays the Ferengi first officer. He plays it very different than Quark, but with an unrestrained, nervous physicality. It’s silly, but he makes it work.

The misogyny of the Ferengi is presented through the lens of “cultural values”, which I find irksome. The Ferengi are disgusted that the Federation clothes their women and lets them serve on starships (despite the fact that most cultures they’ve encountered presumably have clothed women.)

I get that its a metaphor, but Data should be able to break out of a Chinese finger trap without "figuring it out." He's like ten times as strong as a human.

This is an ensemble piece, but I’m calling it a Riker episode because it feels like one? Riker is the one who is tested, and it’s Riker we learn something about.

Fight or Flight (ENT)

Fight or Flight is a smart second episode for Enterprise. When the show committed itself to filling in the gaps between today and Star Trek, to showing the early days of Starfleet, it committed to a scary galaxy. The Enterprise is always the only ship in range. Everything is new, a lot of it is scary, and the only friends they'll have are the ones they make.

It's smart to focus this story on Hoshi Sato, too. She's the first communications officer in the main cast since Uhura, and Uhura's character was woefully underdeveloped. (Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest is essentially a parody of that reality.) By contrast, Hoshi is at this point probably the most relatable character on the Enterprise after Captain Archer. And she's not a space cowboy like everyone else on board. She's excited about the academic opportunities and very very good at her job as a linguist, but being a linguist doesn't usually involve being shot at or interacting with dead bodies or climbing into a claustrophobic EV suit.

Hoshi Sato is most of us, if we found ourselves being asked to go on an interstellar exploration mission. She's terrified and she's in way over her head. But in the end, she finds her mettle and proves that Starfleet didn't make a mistake putting her on the mission.

Around the story of Hoshi Sato, which is really the emotional meat of the story, is a lot of storytelling that builds up the background of the show and sets trends for the future - basically solid second episode stock.
So Fight or Flight finds the crew itching for first contact, upset that the only alien life form they've met yet is a slug, and it's about to die.

When they drop out of warp to do some target practice, their dreams come true: they encounter an alien ship. Unfortunately, instead of being full of aliens, it's full of alien corpses whose blood is being drained out through tubes.

A classic Archer-T'Pol debate ensues. Archer wants to hang around and try to lend aid, attempting to contact the dead aliens' homeworld. T'Pol wants to get the hell out of dodge before the fluid-stealing aliens return. They both make good points, but T'Pol turns out to be right and the aliens come back, scan the Enterprise, and discover that human fluids are equally delicious.

Luckily, the dead aliens' compatriots arrive at about the same time. But only Hoshi Sato's language skills can convince them to save the Enterprise.

The day saved, the Enterprise stops off to drop Sluggo the slug off on a planet similar to, but not the same as the one they found him on, to be a metaphor for humans struggling out in the larger universe. But also, very possibly, to irrevocably damage an alien biosphere.

At the end of this episode, I find myself excited about this show and its potential. Looking forward to delving more deeply into some of the other characters.

Random observations:

- Pretty great scene between Phlox and Trip in the mess hall, and some cute Archer/Hoshi scenes. The difference between how Kirk interacts one on one with female subordinates and how Archer does shows us that, if nothing else, sexism has become less overt since the 60s. On the other hand, T'Pol's catsuit and decon gel.

- Speaking of comparisons to classic Trek, this episode's basic "whoa space is scary" conceit is quite reminiscent of "The Corbomite Maneuver." Pretty solid episode 2 fare, I guess.

- Meanwhile, Hoshi's stars are going the wrong way and Archer's floor is squeaky. Isn't spaceboard life wacky?

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.

A Man Alone (DS9)

So, I failed in doing my research. "A Man Alone" was intended to be the actual second episode of the show, not "Past Prologue." And I think it works a little better as a second episode, actually. It's slower paced than the other and tries a little harder to give us a slice of life on Deep Space Nine. The second scene of the episode establishes this nicely, using the huge set of the promenade to full advantage and staging three simultaneous conversations on the various levels, which set up the different threads of the story.

More on that in a second; I want to hit the first scene of the episode first. You could make a case that the Dax-Bashir nonrelationship kind of sums up everything that's wrong with the first two seasons of Deep Space Nine. The big problem with it is that the writers haven't really figured out Dax OR Bashir yet, and they're basically the two shallowest characters on the show at the outset. Bashir's characterization is that he's booksmart and streetdumb, young, and overeager. Dax's characterization is that she has a worm inside her that makes her wise beyond her years.

And that's it. At this point, that's all there is to these characters. The "locals" - Odo, Kira, Quark - all have occupation backstories tied to the plot. O'Brien has imported backstory from TNG. Sisko's backstory takes up a good chunk of the pilot, and is also tied into the plot. Alone in the main cast, Bashir and Dax just work here. So when you have two characters sorely in need of more depth, the smart move is not to throw them into a relationship with one another. It might seem good on the surface, but what you get is a relationship between two types, not two characters. Bashir hits on Dax inexpertly, cause he's all clueless and stuff. She rejects him, cause she's all old and stuff. That's it. Never mind that later we'll find out that what Dax says about Trills avoiding relationships is a complete lie.

Ok, digression over. In Quark's, Quark and Odo are at the bar watching two conversations across the room: Miles and Keiko O'Brien fighting because, basically, Keiko hates it on Deep Space Nine and feels useless, and Sisko and Dax catching up. Like I said, it's a smart use of the sets. The promenade is more open than any set on TNG or Voyager, where a starship necessitates tight corridors. And Deep Space Nine is a place where a lot of things happen at once, not just a single mission of the week that everyone's wrapped up in.

Quark and Odo's gossip session is interrupted by the arrival Ibu Dan, a Bajoran criminal Odo is not happy to see. Odo would like to just throw him off the station, but Sisko tells him Starfleet's kind of into due process and individual rights and Odo needs to get on board with that. Still, Odo makes his dislike of Ibu Dan pretty obvious, which is a big problem when the dude turns up dead locked in his quarters. All signs point to Odo as the murderer and the restless Bajorans on the station start to go full on pitchfork mob as he (with Bashir's help) rushes to solve the case and clear his name.

That A-plot is solid stuff: It helps define Odo's somewhat ambiguous social role and professional function on Deep Space Nine. Odo's outsider status meshes pretty nicely with his job - cops often feel like outsiders, since they might find themselves arresting anyone, and all close bonds are, in some sense, potential liabilities. When Quark says that being Odo's enemy makes him the closest thing Odo has to a friend, it's not a silly line. It has some real resonance. That's the essence of Odo's character: A Man Alone.

Meanwhile, over in the B-plot, Keiko is starting a school on the station. A big challenge is convincing Rom to send Nog to the school. Rom is rather jarring here, lacking all of the markers that made him into the beloved character he would become. Here he's just another Ferengi, and nearly a villain. There's not too much to say about the school plot, as it just feels very much like a setup, a loose end that didn't fit into the pilot. We've got these kids on board and Keiko, what do we do with them?

Odo's plot ends with a convoluted and sightly troubling clone-related twist, complete with a Scooby Doo-style rubber face mask ending. (Probably the most awkward part is when Sisko reveals in a voice over that the clone Bashir was growing "Woke up and began a new life.") Cloning is a pretty lofty issue with a lot of ethical nuance and grey area, and TNG did at least one episode all about the subject, so to see it turn up here as a technological MacGuffin with no discussion or ethics or repercussions is a little jarring. And the premise is a tinge convoluted.

So the episode succeeds in being meaningful and interesting throughout, but fails to stick the landing, in my opinion. In terms of establishing the tone and style of the series to come, though, it's a solid sophomore outing.

Random Observations:

- Morn, everybody's favorite barfly, is in Odo's lynchmob. This is kind of strange, though it's possible he was just swept up in the crowd, I guess.

- For more about Bashir's prowess with women, this is a highly recommended read.

-This episode features another forgettable Bajoran dude, whose name I am not going to bother to look up.