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.

Captive Pursuit and Q-Less (DS9)

Captive Pursuit

Why does it matter that there's a wormhole? That's a pretty good question to ask Deep Space Nine.

After all, there was no wormhole in TNG or TOS and they still met brand new aliens whenever the story needed them. The galaxy in Star Trek is beautifully and conveniently uncharted, even "close to home." But, since Deep Space 9 doesn't move, it can't be on the outskirts of the known space. A wormhole is a way, perhaps the only way, to bring the exploration aspect of other shows to the doorstep.

But the other thing a wormhole does is it lets us bring in the really alien aliens. I mean, we're pretty used to Klingons and Romulans and Vulcans, but what about some people who present some real ethical quandaries. Or language problems.

That's sort of the promise of "Captive Pursuit." The first brand new alien turns up from the Gamma Quadrant. He's acting shifty. He's on the run. He's not interested in cultural exchange of any kind. O'Brien befriends him, despite not getting much in the way of reciprocity.

It turns out Tosk, the alien, is the prey in a bloodsport, running from hunters that eventually find him on the station, penned up in the brig for trying to steal weapons. Sisko is the commander and therefore our resident Federation moralist, and he's impressively livid when he finds out what's happening. At the same time, he's not on secure moral ground. Tosk is really bred for the hunt. It's not fully clear whether it constitutes oppression, when that oppression is built not only into the culture but into a whole race's very DNA.

Sisko errs on the side of the prime directive, as good captains do, and lets the hunters take away Tosk. But O'Brien can't handle betraying his friend, so he busts him out, giving him the only thing he can give him, a fighting chance. And that's it. The aliens leave the station engaged in the same blood sport they began it in, DS9 has made no new allies, and Sisko lets O'Brien off with a stern warning and a slap on the wrist.

This is a good episode, I think, because it doesn't cheapen its own questions with easy answers. On one level it's a story about how we shouldn't automatically judge other cultures against our own moral standards. On the other hand, what should we do when we encounter something that looks so much like ritualized abuse?

It's also a story about how people can make big changes when systems can't. Sisko's hands are tied by the prime directive, but O'Brien's aren't. And O'Brien doesn't feel compelled to fix the system, only to help his friend. But we're left to wonder what exactly that help has bought Tosk. A few more days? Another year? Is it worth it?

We get lots of questions, but no answers, just a juicy taste of what's beyond that wormhole.

Q-Less

Some popular episodes beg for sequels. When Vash and Q disappeared for parts unknown at the end of "Qpid," it's no surprise fans wanted to see them again. And I can imagine the conversation in the writer's room that led to the idea that they would turn up not back on the Enterprise, but on Deep Space Nine.

It was a good theory. In practice, though, with no TNG regulars in the story - particularly no Jean-Luc Picard, the third man in their weird love triangle, Q and Vash are just two random people on the station. There's no particular reason for our heroes to be invested in them.

It's layers upon layers really. I've always found that when Q himself enters into a romance with a "normal," it's awkward. Q is supposed to be so much more advanced than humans that they're irrelevant bugs to him. It's pretty weird when he starts acting like a dumped high school boyfriend on one's account.

So we have Q and Vash's relationship, which is both inscrutable and irrelevant, in the spotlight of what ought to be an episode of Deep Space Nine.

It's not that Q doesn't work with the Deep Space Nine cast. It's that Q really doesn't have any reason to interact with the Deep Space Nine cast. He's just sort of there while they deal with a problem that doesn't have anything to do with him. And the problem is a big stupid MacGuffin - some artifact Vash brought back from the Gamma Quadrant is destroying the station because it's actually a giant space sting ray or something.

Q has a scene with Sisko and it's actually pretty good except for the part where its totally pointless. Neither of them actually needs anything from the other, so they're just characters interacting generically without motivation. It doesn't help that Q brings up the TNG cast, especially Picard, every chance he gets. I think that's one lesson the writers learned prior to Q's much more successful turns on Voyager.

Vash and Bashir actually have some potential as a plotline - what better to actually make Bashir seem like a lady's man than to get him with Jean-Luc Picard's girlfriend, right? And there's some chemistry there (not a lot, on account of Bashir's supply of impossibly cheesy lines.) But instead, Bashir is completely written out and forgotten about by a prank of Q's and returns only as a punchline. His plotline serves no purpose in the story.

Basically, the DS9 writers got two TNG guest stars and totally failed to write them into the show, instead writing them a trite and insipid solo adventure that happened to take place on Deep Space 9. It's the worst sort of crossover, satisfying no one.

Random Observations

- "Captive Pursuit" is our first O'Brien episode, and it shows Colm Meaney off nicely. His everyman charm provides a very relatable motivation to his actions in this episode.

- There's an effort to build an O'Brien-Quark relationship here with some animosity in it, but it doesn't work, I think because O'Brien comes off as too much of a jerk toward Quark. Their relationship through the rest of the show doesn't stand out to me as at all memorable, or even necessarily consistent.

- Why is it that when an object on Star Trek has mysterious properties it always ends up turning into a space jellyfish?

Lonely Among Us (TNG)

There goes our entire make-up budget for the season.

            If I could use one word to describe “Lonely Among Us”, it would be "playful". It’s not the episode doesn’t have high stakes or drama. But between Tasha and Riker’s absurd subplot and Data’s Sherlock Holmes obsession, it’s hard to take the serious threat to the ship that the saboteur imposes particularly seriously. I don’t think that makes the episode an all out failure. The show is trying to figure out exactly what its tone should be, and I think this episode just falls a little too far on the cheesy/silly side of the scale.

            Basically, there are two plots. They barely intersect. In the first, the Enterprise is transporting two delegations to a treaty negotiation – the furry, carnivorous Anticans and the Reptilian Selay. The trouble is, they absolutely loathe each other. They’re also rather obnoxious in their own right. The humor here comes from the obnoxious demands the delegates make, and the fact that no-nonsense Tasha has to deal with them. Also, the not-so-subtle implication that the Anticans would like to eat the Selay.

And next season...

            In many episodes, one sentient race eating another would be disturbing, or at the very least played up as some sort of nature vs. nurture debacle, but here its played almost entirely for laughs – as in, these are the wacky day-to-day problems you face when transporting interstellar diplomats. It works because the actors playing the aliens play them in such an animalistic way, and their make-up is uncharacteristically non-humanoid, so we don’t see them quite as much as human. It’s more like one of those Farside comics about the wolf trying to eat the sheep.

            Taking up more of the hour is another plotline. The Enterprise scans a mysterious nebula, and accidentally takes an alien life form onboard. The life form can possess both people and subsystems, and jumps from one to another, leaving gaps in people’s memories and interfering with ship’s systems. When navigation goes down (and generic chief engineer number 3 is mysteriously killed) Data, Geordi, Beverly and Tasha embark on a ship-wide investigation to find the saboteur. Data acquires a pipe and a deerstalker. But then the alien realizes it’s much easier to just possess Picard and order the ship back to the nebula.

Note to self: install circuit breakers on bridge consoles.

            Dr. Crusher and Riker try to relieve the captain of duty, but he throws it back in their faces with a “no, you’re possessed by an alien!” When they get to the nebula, the alien explains that he has in fact merged with Picard, and they are going into space together to be beings of pure energy. The crew can’t stop him, so off to the transporter room he goes.

            Shortly thereafter, Troi senses Picard out in the nebula, alone. He starts possessing ship’s systems too, and with his help their able to use the transporter to get him his body back. He remembers nothing of being possessed.

            Then Tasha rushes into the transporter room and reports that the Anticans have, in fact, eaten one of the Selay. LOLz.

Random Observations:

            There won’t be as many of these, since my notes all got deleted when my computer crashed.

            Riker has a model of the Galileo from TOS in his office.

            Doctor Crusher has a silly hat.

           

I'd like to say it gets better for you, chief...

            Worf is annoyed that he has to learn how to recalibrate the sensor arrays. Later we will see Worf take some pride in his knowledge of engineering and ship operations, even if security is his specialty.

            Gates McFadden is probably the most believable actress in terms of portraying being possessed by the alien. She really gets the whole “not quite familiar with this body” thing down. But then, she is a dancer, and they tend to be more aware of their physicality.

Minor Character Watch: Miles O’Brien appears again, as one of the security officers Tasha has assigned to see to the needs of the Selay delegates. As always, his job is thankless.

Strange New World (ENT)

In the first season of Enterprise, there's a spirit of "everything old is new again" that pervades the storytelling. Everything Kirk's crew did without even thinking - using the transporter, making first contact, exploring new planets - Archer's crew finds to be a thrilling, and daunting, adventure.

"Strange New World" has a lot of fun with this concept, starting with the "Lower Decks" style opening in the mess hall with several random crewmen and none of our intrepid heroes, discovering that the Enterprise has arrived on a new planet only when they see it out the window.

The writers had a lot of possibilities for what our heroes might find on their first M-Class planet, and I have to applaud their decision to make it ... nothing at all, except some mind-altering drugs.

The episode really did keep me guessing. And if this were any later than the third episode, I wouldn't have bought for a second that T'Pol could be conspiring against the crew. But it's so early in the show, and she's been so openly antagonistic, that it's not a hard sell she might be hiding something on behalf of Vulcan high command.

Between the tricky camera work and the use of light and shadow in the caves and windstorm, the episode made me want to believe there was a lifeform on the planet, even once it became pretty clear the away team was going crazy.

Furthermore, I even bought Trip's freakout, because buried beneath the effect of the drug was the very real fear every member of that crew must be dealing with. I think a lot of "crew goes crazy" episodes on Star Trek don't work because the crazy version of the character is so shallow. But Trip's paranoia is so obviously rooted in the character's real misgivings about the mission (and about T'Pol) that it played out as compelling drama. The crew of Enterprise may have been a bunch of pretty people, but they could also act.

Crewman Elizabeth Cutler is introduced here, to nice effect. The show's willingness to build an ensemble beyond the leads shows that the lessons of past shows are not entirely forgotten. Another good touch is the use of the Hoshi and the Vulcan language to get them out of the climactic showdown. Finding ways to keep a communications officer relevant is a bit of a balancing act, so it's nice to see the creativity.

The camping scenes, the ghost stories, the absurd conceit of bringing your dog on an away mission so he can get some fresh air all worked. The beginning of the series is also an important time to let your characters play a little, get the audience comfortable with them.

I liked this episode a lot. It didn't blow me a way with a great sci-fi concept or stunning effects, but it did entertain me and ingratiate its characters to me. It was good to see Archer work with first Phlox, than Reed, and than Hoshi to craft a solution to his crew's dilemma - the whole ensemble was used to good effect.

Random observations:

- I do believe Archer's lie about a "silicon-based lifeform" was a shout out.

- Cutler's appearances are a bit sad, also, to those of us who followed the show when it was on, as actress Kellie Waymire died unexpectedly in 2003, during the third season of Enterprise.

- Next week is (hopefully) double DS9, to get us back on track and finally make up for my missed Tuesday on Christmas. If we had done double DS9 last week, it would have perfectly lined up with the 20th anniversary of DS9's premier. Too bad I didn't know about that until just now.

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

Mudd's Women (TOS)

Last night my father and I rang in the New Year with the widely-panned 1998 Lost in Space movie. It was, all told, a lot worse than I remembered, which I guess comes from the fact that this time I wasn't 10.

One of the big problems with the attempt to reboot Lost In Space was that when you think about the show, when you think about the cultural touchstones it spawned, you think of the evil, cowardly ham Dr. Smith, the boy wonder Will Robinson, and the robot. Maybe the daring space ranger Major West and maybe the intrepid Captain Robinson.

But the womenfolk in the original show were an underwhelming lot. Maureen Robinson was a highly stereotypical 50s housewife, Judy was a love interest and a damsel in distress and Penny ... well, Penny was also there.

So the reboot had to more or less invent characterizations, meaningful roles, and acceptable 90s niches for the women of the cast, which makes it feel like a completely different show. I think it was the right choice, but it was a big hurdle.

What does all this have to do with Star Trek? Only this: Of all the ways in which 60s sci-fi ages badly, none is so hard to overcome as the casual sexism of the era. This is my experience with Heinlein's otherwise masterful Stranger in a Strange Land, too. What do women do in space? The same thing they do down on Earth: cook, clean, look pretty, and let the men work.

I cringe when I see it on Lost In Space, but when I see it on Star Trek, my home, the idealized future I choose to buy into on a weekly basis, it pains me. And that's how I feel about Mudd's Women. It's a sexist mess.

Of course, it's also the debut of one of the most celebrated peripheral players of the Original Series: Harcourt Fenton Mudd. And he's actually a pretty good, compelling character. Star Trek is not Star Wars, and it's never gotten a handle on the criminal element or the civilian spacefarer. Star Trek stories tend to be clashes of governments. What Joe the Plumber does in the 24th Century is just not in our purview. Episodes like TNG's "The Outrageous Okona" try to give us a Trek Han Solo and miss the mark.

But somehow Mudd works. He's funny without being grating and he's scheming without being villainous  He's a foil for Kirk's sense of law and order, which is an important quality in a Captain and one that can sometimes get lost up against Kirk's more well-known penchant for daring, risky maneuvers. But he doesn't suffer fools in his crew or on his ship, if he can help it.

The Enterprise ends up with Mudd as an unplanned passenger when they rescue him from his exploding ship (which he did not have a license to fly). He has a "cargo" of three beautiful women in tow (dressed more or less like Vanna White) and they have an almost hypnotic affect on the crew. The women, Mudd claims, are wives for space settlers and Mudd is basically their pimp.

There aren't really any twists after that. The Enterprise is running low on lithium crystals. (it seems like it ought to be dilithium, but this time, lithium. Just go with it.) They find a lithium mine in range, with three miners working in it. Mudd manages to contact the miners ahead of time, and when Kirk and crew arrive the miners won't exchange the dilithium for anything but the women.

This is sort of a lot like buying and selling people, but that point is never really addressed in the episode. Instead, the big Star Trek conceit is something called the Venus drug, which makes women more beautiful. See, these space bimbos aren't really beautiful at all. They're uggos! And Mudd is deceiving the innocent miners with drugs. I mean, yes, they're still smart, brave women, still skilled at cooking and cleaning, and not actually that bad looking, but they're NOT IMPOSSIBLY GORGEOUS and Mudd almost tricked these miners into marrying them. Isn't he evil?

The drug works kind of like make-up, actually. And I guess it also does their hair?

This is a case where the slight that the show is trying to sell us is so laughably dwarfed by the sexism the show ignores that it's all pretty dumb. Who cares if these women are taking drugs that makes them look prettier? Shouldn't we care that their only aspiration in life is to live on a desolate rock in space cooking and cleaning for skeezy space miners? (Where, of course, the Enterprise leaves them at the end, happily ever after.) And that's not even to mention the part where Kirk gives Eve a placebo and it works just like the Venus drug because it was self-confidence all along that made them pretty, apparently.

I liked Mudd. But that's about all there was to like here, for me. I'm not entirely sure what the show was swinging for, but I do think it missed. I'm looking forward to the other Mudd appearance, which, if I recall correctly, has less sexism but still some, and also robots.

Random Observations:

- Vanna White comments aside, the costume designers on TOS do nice work here.

- The women of the crew are barely in this episode, which is a shame because they provide a nice counterbalance as women with careers who aren't just in space to find husbands. Apparently a scene where Mudd tries to talk Uhura into taking the drug landed on the cutting room floor.

- For that matter, the crew is barely in this episode. There are several scenes that are just guest stars including a pretty long sequence between Eve and the miner. I think the episode suffers from the regulars being so badly sidelined.

- Because I took Christmas off, our schedule is sort of messed up; this ought to have been a Deep Space Nine week. Expect a double Tuesday or an extra mid-week review at some point to get us back on track.