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.)

The Battle (TNG)

Picard encounters ghosts from his past. Literally.

            

We aren’t to “good” yet.

 
             I don’t know what the first “good” episode of TNG is. I have a feeling the first excellent episode is “The Measure of a Man”, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised before then. “The Battle” is not cringe-inducing. Like so much first season TNG, it reeks of unused potential. I will say, however, that “The Battle” is an episode that experiments with a lot of elements that are necessary for TNG to become the good show we know it will eventually become.

            We open with a captain’s log, and the promise of a new encounter with the Ferengi. At this point, they’re still supposed to be Picard’s main adversary, and I guess “The Last Outpost” wasn’t bad enough to discourage the writers from this plan, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to bring them back for another go. Given that the Klingons served as a sort of an allegory for Cold War Russia in TOS, I have to actually admire Roddenberry for trying to make the flagship villains of the new series a caricature of American-style capitalism. Combine this with their extreme misogyny, and we can’t shake the idea that the conflict of the Federation vs. the Ferengi is a conflict between humanity’s better nature and society as it is now.

There was no money in the budget for a background for him.

            That conflict isn’t at the center of this episode, though, because Daimon Bok doesn’t have any problem with the Federation. His beef is with Picard himself, and his motivations have nothing to do with Ferengi worldview or philosophy. Picard killed his son – and he wants revenge.

            This is the first potentially awesome thing this episode does – it delves into Picard’s past, giving us a glimpse of how he got to be the man he is today. Many of the best episodes of TNG and Star Trek in general rely on developing a character’s backstory, and this is TNG’s first foray into that. The story is that he lost his first command, the Stargazer, in battle with an unidentified ship. Though his ship was lost, he managed to destroy the alien vessel before abandoning ship. Unfortunately, the vessel was Ferengi, and its Captain Daimon Bok’s son.

            But Bok does not swear revenge on Picard right away. Instead, he offers the “Hero of Maxia” a gift – much to the chagrin of his own first officer, who wonders why they are not trying to make a profit off the exchange. The gift is Stargazer herself, recovered after the battle by Ferengi patrols.

            After that the plot sort of stumbles around for a while. Data discovers sensor logs suggesting that rather than acting in self-defense, Picard fired on the Ferengi ship unprovoked. Riker debates the merits of turning his Captain in, but before he really has to wrestle with that decision Data and Geordi discover that the logs are a forgery. It feels like filler, but it’s not bad filler, and Riker does get a cute scene with the Ferengi first officer where they try to piece together what’s going on.

            The most glaring plot hole in this episode is how trusting the crew is of the Ferengi’s good intentions. Everything we know about these people says that wooden horse is probably full of soldiers, but they happily drag it through the gates anyway. In fact, even though Picard is acting increasingly weird, it’s not until boy genius Wesley Crusher notices some odd sensor readings that they start to suspect something is wrong.

This goofy-looking thing.

            By then Picard has already been driven thoroughly batty by Daimon Bok’s “thought-maker”, and he beams himself aboard the old ship, believing he is back at the Battle of Maxia and the alien ship is the Enterprise. Riker and Data have to devise a way to defeat their old Captain without killing him, which is just an excuse to give us a space battle, because we haven’t had nearly enough of those in the first eight episodes.

            I think the inconsistencies in the character’s behavior combined with the terrible pacing of the second act keep this from being a solid script, but the attempt to glimpse into our main character’s past is appreciated, and trying to give him a connection to the show’s new villains is a good idea. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Bok isn’t charismatic enough to make a compelling recurring villain, and the Ferengi are too goofy to be particularly intimidating. But the seeds of greatness continue to be planted, and I’m excited for where I know we’ll get eventually.

Random Observations:

Apparently by the 24^th century the common cold and headaches are a think of the past. I’m pretty sure later in the series people complain of headaches and it’s not nearly as big a deal.

This episode blatantly contradicts the rest of the series in that Troi can read Daimon Bok’s mind. The rest of the time, Ferengi are immune to telepathy.

Kazago says that he’s “all ears”. Suppose it was only a matter of time.

Patrick Stewart’s acting goes a long way towards selling the weaker aspects of the script. I’m amazed he didn’t get fed up and quit halfway through season one.

Picard has a much larger fish tank in his quarters. It occurs to me that taking care of tropical fish is a lot of work and we never see or hear about him attending to them. I wonder if they’re holographic?

The scenes with the ghost officers are really cheesy, but I kind of like them.

This is the third time Picard has been possessed or otherwise mentally compromised. Beverly needs to learn to trust her judgement about her old friend/ Captain a little better. She could save the ship a lot of trouble.

I really wish those weird sensor readings had been detected by Geordi or Data or Worf or anyone but Wesley. He keeps saving the ship, and its not so much that, but he’s just getting so damn smug about it.

Unexpected (ENT)

This is the episode where Trip gets pregnant. I have to admit, it was less obnoxious about that premise than I remembered it being. It's too bad that the premise itself is pretty obnoxious.

The problem is that's not really the premise of the episode. The episode doesn't deal with gender roles or pregnancy or parenthood. Trip doesn't deal with any of those things in a serious way. The situation isn't an allegory for much of anything, since the way Trip ends up pregnant is a cultural misunderstanding, not analogous to either rape or consensual sex, and the the alien inside him is never treated particularly like a baby or a living thing, more like an inconvenient growth.

So even though "Trip gets pregnant" is the tagline (and it was certainly the trailer line) it's not what the episode is about. So what IS the episode about?

The Enterprise is experiencing some weird malfunctions and power fluctuations -- mud instead of seltzer water, no gravity in the showers, things randomly catching fire in engineering, the kind of stuff that can really screw up your Monday morning.

Somehow they figure out that the problems are being caused by a tiny cloaked parasite ship that's eating their ... um ... subspace wake, or something? So they do the Starfleet boy scout thing and offer assistance. Trip travels to the ship, which has grass and fish and different air and is pretty much a world of pure imagination. But after a nap he comes to love it there and he hangs out with a young alien woman in a holodeck and they put their hands in a bowl of pebbles that lets them read each others' thoughts.

And then he fixes the ship and goes home, and everything is fine for the rest of the episode. Except that Trip's pregnant, and rather than deal critically with questions about abortion they hop into hot pursuit of the tiny invisible ship, which is not the easiest thing to do.

But they do track the ship down, and it's back at its old parasitic ways, eating the subspace wake of a Klingon ship. I think this is the first time we've seen the Klingons since the pilot. They're not very smart or honorable Klingons, and the scene where our heroes talk them into sparing the ship (and letting Trip go along when they decide to board it and steal its technology) is ... it feels like watching a nerd talk a dumb bully out of beating him up in a high school movie. It sort of weakens the image of the Klingons for me; they're both too dumb and too easily talked down.

So Trip goes over to the alien ship, fixes it for real, and it turns out that the baby is really easy to transfer to another host, and has none of Trip's DNA, so there'll be actually no consequences for him. Guess he learned a lot about pregnancy and what it's like for women, huh?

It's just not a very ambitious episode, is what it comes down to. It doesn't have any Star Trek story about the human experience it's trying to tell and it doesn't commit to the premise it does adopt. Like too many episodes of Enterprise, it just seems like a bunch of things that happen.

I may have to adjust my mindset for these reviews and stop expecting Enterprise to behave like Star Trek, with a message and a moral at the heart of every story. I know there are some people who find that a relief, who consider the moralizing of Star Trek pedantic and grating. But I think, without that, Star Trek has a bad tendency to just become Star Wars done badly.

Random Observations:

-- It's always a bit of a suspension of disbelief how easily Starfleet engineers in all the shows can fix other people's ships. But here it's especially implausible. What is so special about Trip that he can fix these people's ship better than anyone on board it, despite the technology being thoroughly alien? Trip is not, as far as we know it, a savant.

-- Enterprise has a tech creep problem. Ok, the timeline of the invention of the holodeck is problematic in and of itself: in "Encounter at Farpoint" and "10010010101" it's implied that holodeck technology is fairly new at the start of that show, but Jack Crusher was able to make Wesley holo-recordings when he was a baby. But, all that aside, holodeck technology is way too widespread during Enterprise for it to have taken another 200 years for the Federation to adopt/develop it. It's like the creators wanted to have their cake and eat it to, from a prequel-making perspective.

Ex Post Facto (VOY)

            So, out of sheer coincidence, both TNG and Voyager’s seventh episodes revolve around a crew member being put on trial on an alien world. Fortunately for me, Voyager manages to make a solid, entertaining hour of television from that premise, while TNG made “Justice”.

            Tuvok has been a background character for a while now, and while “Ex Post Facto” doesn’t give us a huge amount of insight into who he is as a person, it does at least give him an opportunity to do his job as a security chief, and show that while he’s no Odo, he’s at least a much better cop than Worf. When you think about it, investigator is such a totally natural role for a Vulcan, it’s a wonder it’s taken us this long to see one in it (though the role did fall to Spock a few times, notably in The Undiscovered Country.)

            Tom gets the secondary focus in the episode, and while his impulsiveness and relative lack of discipline continue to cause problems for Captain Janeway, ultimately his role in this episode is mostly as the damsel in distress, which doesn’t give him a lot of time to shine. My biggest regret is that the episode didn’t spend just a little more time reflecting on the nastiness of the Benean’s penalty for murder (an implant that makes the perpetrator relive the victims last few minutes every fourteen hours.) It would have given the episode a little more of a sci-fi bent and given Tom more of a chance to do some acting. As it is, he manages to make his romance with Lidel at least a little bit believable, and we get a nice last scene between him and Tuvok.

            But the episode is intended as a whodunit, and in that vein, it succeeds better than most Star Trek episodes that share that premise. Tuvok, like Sherlock Holmes, is a master of logic and deduction, and like a Sherlock Holmes story, the episode gives us enough hints to try and solve it ourselves. The twist at the end, that Tom wasn’t the target at all and all of this was just a complicated way of smuggling some data to the Numiri, is a little bit of a stretch, but not enough to break my suspension of disbelief.

Along the way, the threat of the Numeri provides the opportunity for a couple space battles, which gives B’Elanna and Chakotay a chance to shine. It's a nice reminder that even though the crews have integrated, the Maquis still aren't afraid to break the rules to get things done. This, combined with Kes and the Doctor’s efforts to slow down Paris’s brain deterioration, gives pretty much the entire supporting cast something to do – no small task on a show with seven regulars. All in all, a solid, fun, exciting hour of Star Trek.

Random Observations:

I admire the costuming department for giving the Beneans a little more of a unique feel than the typical alien civvies Star Trek is so fond of, especially Lidell’s 1920’s style cigarette holder, which evoked a kind of retro sexiness. Little details like that really help sell the world the episode establishes.

The banter between Janeway and Chakotay during the space battles is cute! I don’t think I’ve seen those two have chemistry before.

Kes attempting to convince the Doctor he has free will is a really great scene. They remain my two favorite characters right now.

Tuvok is over a hundred years old. He must feel like he’s on a ship full of children. It’s a miracle he lets the Doctor (who’s technically a few months old) talk down to him.

Janeway’s mama bear attitude whenever one of her crew is threatened is becoming her defining characteristic. Her bluffing the Numiri patrols was incredibly badass, though.

Harry's main role in this episode is to get tortured - if Jonah's theory about Sulu is correct, Star Trek really doesn't like Asian people.

No fatalities.

No shuttlecraft lost (they were ready to blow one up, though.)

Photon torpedo count – still 37. They got out of that battle without firing any.