Review: Voyager 2.21: Deadlock

Alternate!Harry and Alternate!Naomi are brought over to
replace their counterparts. From Trekcore

Star Trek Voyager - Season Two, Episode Twenty-One - Deadlock
Written 15/10/13. "Mr. Kim, we're Starfleet officers. Weird is part of the job."

Deadlock puts me into a state of great disquiet. It holds quite an important position in this season, as it sees the birth of Naomi Wildman, a character who would later go on to act as a funny sidekick to both Neelix and Seven of Nine. It's a big point of canon, is what I'm saying. And aside from that point of canon, this episode is about as batshit crazy as Voyager gets, with temporal-spacial duplication, the return of the Vidiians, another miraculous reset button and the third death of Harry Kim, for good this time. (Don't worry, Garrett Wang wasn't out of a job. Not yet, at least.) This of course means that I can initiate Kim Death Count - 3. Hurrah.
      Voyager is caught in an Anomaly Of The Week and their fuel reserves cut in half. While preparing to analyse the problem, Voyager seems to come under attack from an unknown source, leading to a series of complications including the death of Ensign Wildman's baby post-birth and the unfortunate loss of Harry Kim to the cold void of space, minus the expected cartoon-like explosive decompression which in hindsight would have made it even funnier. Kes wanders through a portal and finds a second Voyager, almost identical to her own, except that their analysis has been causing the "attacks". The two Voyagers attempt to work together, but the "good" Voyager is attacked by a ship full of Vidiians and the "good" Janeway is forced to send her Harry Kim and Naomi Wildman through the portal so that the damaged Voyager can escape unscathed.
     The birth of Naomi Wildman feels very oddly placed, and the dilemma of the two Voyagers places a rather awkward and somewhat black-humoured spin on the entire episode. Long-story short, a baby dies. Despite all of the awesome medical tech of the future, Star Trek has to make up new conditions, and one of these conditions killed that baby dead. Ensign Wildman? She's just experienced something ridiculously traumatic, something that I don't think a show like Voyager is equipped to deal with. The way that the baby is brought back from the other ship and the whole death thing was just glossed over made me feel very uncomfortable, because despite the fact that these quantum doubles are very useful, there's still a god-damn corpse in sickbay, the corpse of Ensign Wildman's real daughter. That's a bit sick.

The two Voyagers seperate. From StarTrek.com

     That said, the idea of two "quantum" Voyagers existing in the same space at the same time was quite a fun one, and the practical aspects were executed well enough, even if the split screening for the two Janeways looked incredibly tacky, and I'm talking about a franchise which does duplicates more than it does same-sex romances. This proficiency is the execution of the concept did give the writers an excuse to throw in some of Voyager's astounding technobabble along the way. Luckily David Livingston's direction keeps it all together and despite a yard of extra material that had to be bolted onto the episode, the pace is fairly well-done. There are no points in the episode that I could call boring.
     And that's the thing, do I get to harp on an episode like this? Early Voyager has an atmosphere that takes getting used to, and right now I'm a few months out of the loop. Was this episode boring? Did it do anything to really annoy me beyond a few problematic elements? Not really. And that's why Deadlock gets me a little rattled, because I do enjoy it, even though its silliness and the sheer oddity of its premise stinks to high heaven of things that I've berated Voyager for in the past. And that makes it, if not entirely perfect, certainly memorable.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK; Tuvok gets some lessons in parenthood when he fights for the Innocence of three alien children.

Review: Voyager 1.12: Heroes And Demons

The Doctor hits it off with Freya the Sheild Maiden.

Star Trek Voyager - Season One, Episode Twelve - Heroes and Demons
Written 14/6/13

This week delivers us a double whammy - a Doctor-centric episode and a holodeck episode. Holodeck episodes are generally cool because the holodeck allows the show to explore locales and characters that would otherwise be impossible in its futuristic sci-fi setting. While the cliche of "something going wrong on the Holodeck" is ever-present, this episode's use of The Doctor (for this episode calling himself Dr. Schweitzer) keeps things lively with Robert Picardo's sense of comic timing.
     Harry Kim goes missing on the Holodeck (ahem, Kim Death Count - 2) and is followed by Chakotay and Tuvok after they investigate. When it is discovered that they've been converted from matter to energy by the Holodeck's systems, The Doctor is sent into Kim's Beowulf program to attempt to discover where they've gone. Along the way he meets and forms a relationship with holodeck character Freya, and uses his hologram powers to appear like an invulnerable warrior. The Doctor discovers Grendel, the beast in the story, to have been replaced by a technobabble life-form angry at the fact that the energy it's made from has been scooped up by Voyager. The Doctor releases the life-forms, Freya sacrificing her life in the process, and the three crew members are reconstituted.
     A lot of the episode's humour comes from The Doctor's relative dryness. A later Doctor would be a lot more enthusiastic about getting in the Viking mood, but as we're in the early stages of his character development he reacts to the world of Norse legend with a kind of matter-of-factness that is mostly quite charming. The relationship with Freya, while a little too reminiscent of a hidden Women In Refrigerators for me, was at least a continuation of the feelings he appeared to share with Kes in Eye of the Needle. It was nice to see him out and about doing things instead of in his normal, claustrophobic surroundings. That I suppose is the problem with early Doctor episodes - they're mostly set in the same grey-lined set. (Most sets in Star Trek are grey; the weird architecture in Deep Space Nine is one of the reasons I love that series too.)

The Doctor is badass in order to avenge Freya's death.
(Even though by rights it's a holoprogram and he could
just switch her back on if he wanted.)

     Other than that... the episode was a tad linear. I understood that it was probably an episode used to let the main cast get on with filming some other episodes, filming the on-location scenes with Picardo at the same time as other episodes' ship scenes, but it felt a little straightforward. The problem with stories like Beowulf in the modern era is that we're used to something a little more complex than the hero arriving, getting the girl and defeating the monster. Heck, the original Beowulf is more complex than that, it's all about temptation and regret and the story ends with him killing his son who happens to be a dragon.
     I never throught I'd be criticising Heroes and Demons for that, though. Because I think I enjoy the Doctor enough that despite the relative calling-it-in nature of the plot, Picardo's natural charm and some stellar writing for The Doctor's interactions with that world made it really quite captivating. I liked that Star Trek got a chance to be all olde-worlde and that pretty much everyone involved in the Holodeck scenario got to do old-timey-times overacting, which from experience is the most fun kind of acting there is. Indeed.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Who's possessing people? How many people are getting possessed? Who will save Chakotay? We ask these questions and more in Cathexis.

Review: Voyager 1.9: Emanations

Harry awakens on the Vhnori homeworld.

Star Trek Voyager - Season One, Episode Nine - Emanations
Written 1/6/13

Star Trek was founded on somewhat uniquely humanist philosophies, with Gene Roddenberry's secularism translating to a future without religion. The 24th Century series (TNG, DS9 and VOY) have since found ways to explore religious themes in varying levels of agreement with the show's original brief. This episode is surprisingly serious for Voyager, and your interpretation as to whether it follows Roddenberry's original intentions is very much left up to you.
     Having found a new element (THAT'S NOT HOW CHEMISTRY WORKS), the crew find what appears to be an alien cemetary in a graveyard. A magic space whatsit appears and Ensign Kim is swapped with a fresh corpse, transported to the homeworld of the Vhnori, a people who have come to believe that the space whatsits take you to a luxury afterlife. They get understandably distressed when Harry reveals that they just sorta die and decompose, which leads to him having to team up with doubting corpse-to-be Hatil, who swaps places with him in order to let Kim go home.
     As a secularist myself, I find the episode to act as a perfect demonstration as to why faith is fundamentally damaging, not just on a personal level but on a societal one. The Vhnori culture has become stagnated and is more obsessed with creating technology to euthanise people than it is in actually treating them, and people treat Death as an enlightening promotion prospect instead of the end of a life. Hatil's death is chosen by his family without him having any say in the matter, and the woman who gets swapped with Harry is unable to continue living there because of her trauma over there being no afterlife. Death is the end - there's no question about that, no need to quibble, because the human consciousness is the hologramatic output from millions of electrochemical signals, and once they're gone, you just don't exist any more.
     Although, that apparently wasn't the intention. Apparently this episode was supposed to be a commentary on Euthanasia. The eagerness to die in their society isn't the main part of the problem, it's the fact that they're doing it based on faith and not a scientific certainty - all they know is that pockets appear in space that whisk them away, they have nothing to say it's an afterlife. Euthanasia in a scenario where the afterlife was a certainty isn't necessarily a bad thing if said afterlife exists, but there's no evidence for the Vhnori to believe that there is and yet they do it anyway.

Funny forehead aliens with little concept of reason.

    Movng away from the political debate, I will thus declare this Kim Death Count - 1. This is a Harry Kim episode, alright, and for the first time the character gets to do something besides look amazed and say damn weird shit. (He remembers being in his mother's womb, apparently.) His reaction to the culture of the Vhnori was a little lily-livered and I wish that he'd had an overall reaction that wasn't just a regurgiation of everything the audience was supposed to be thinking, but I did like that he chose to risk permenant death in order to get home and allow Hatil to escape from his painfully overbearing family.
     Emanations may not cover a lot of its issues with the required tact and grace, but it is an episode that makes you think, and that is what all good sci-fi should do. Harry Kim got a good airing for once, and despite a few points of contention here or there, this episode did cover a great many philosophical rguments regarding death, faith and the afterlife that makes it really stand out in the otherwise humdrum first season.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Janeway turns down an offer to get home because reasons. Tuvok is the Vulcan equivalent of pissed, helps lead a rebellion. It's Prime Factors.