“Parallax”
Written by Jim Trombetta and Brannon Braga
Directed by Kim Friedman
Season 1, Episode 2
Production episode 103
Original air date: January 23, 1995
Stardate: 48439.7
Captain’s log. Deputy Chief Engineer Joe Carey is in sickbay with a broken nose, having been punched in same by Torres. Carey is livid. Tuvok wishes to confine Torres to the brig, while Chakotay just has her confined to quarters for now. He wants to make Torres chief engineer, a notion that Tuvok is dubious about, but Chakotay orders Tuvok to let him handle it. Tuvok agrees, but will make a note in his security log.
Jarvin and Seska, two Maquis crew, say they’ll back Chakotay if he wants to take over the ship; Chakotay’s response is to say if he hears talk like again, he’ll toss them in the brig for mutiny.
Chakotay goes to Torres and explains that she has to behave herself if he’s going to make her chief engineer. Torres thinks this is a worse idea even than Tuvok thinks it is.
In a senior staff meeting, Janeway discusses power-consumption issues and repairs that need to be done despite the lack of a starbase, and also personnel issues. Because the EMH can’t leave sickbay, they need some kind of medical staff, and Janeway volunteers Paris and his two semesters of biochemistry to train as a field medic under the EMH. Meanwhile, Neelix and Kes crash the meeting, and Kes suggests a hydroponics bay be created so they can grow food, since the replicators are apparently down. Kim suggests Cargo Bay 2, and Janeway assigns a surprised Kes to handle it, since it was her idea.
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Janeway and Chakotay also discuss the issue of who will be chief engineer. Chakotay wants it to be Torres, while Janeway wants it to be Carey, as he’s next in line, and he knows Starfleet procedure. But Chakotay doesn’t want he himself to be the token Maquis officer, and Torres is the best engineer he’s ever seen.
Voyager gets shaken around by a nearby singularity, and pick up a distress call inside it. They head toward it to try to effect a rescue, but sensors can’t make out the configuration and there’s too much subspace interference to hear the distress signal. Chakotay asks Torres for a suggestion, and she recommends a subspace tractor beam, which takes a few hours to set up. Carey agrees it’s workable after Janeway asks for his input.
Kes goes to the EMH for some soil samples. She notices that the EMH is shorter now than he was.
They try to tractor the ship, but the emitters blow out. Janeway meets with Torres, reassures her that she’s not pissed about the tractor beam not working. She wants to get to know Torres better, given how highly Chakotay speaks of her. Torres eventually stomps out of the meeting saying she wants nothing to do with Starfleet (that’s why she quit the Academy after two years), and is only sorry she’s stuck with them now.
Janeway has taken Neelix’s advice and set course for a nearby planet that might be able to help, but then Voyager finds themselves back at the singularity. No matter where they go, they wind up back at it.
The singularity is having an adverse effect on several crew members, including Kim, who are suffering headaches and dizziness and nausea. In addition, the EMH’s emitters are malfunctioning and the doc keeps getting shorter, to the point where he won’t be able to reach his patients.
In a staff meeting, in which both Torres and Carey represent engineering, Janeway and Torres start nerding out over technobabble figuring out how to get out of the singularity, leaving everyone else in the room to just sort of sit there with their mouths hanging open.
Torres and Carey install a dampener around the deflector dish and manage to clean up the signal from the other ship: it’s Voyager! They’re sending the message that Janeway sent at the top of the episode. Torres and Janeway nerd out some more in fast-and-furious STEM-speak, with Kim tossing in some notions. There’s a crack in the event horizon that they need to expand so they can get the ship through. A dekyon beam would do it, but Voyager‘s own warp field would interfere with it, so they take a shuttle. Janeway and Torres head over.
En route, Janeway discusses Torres’s Academy career—Tuvok provided full dossiers on Chakotay’s entire Maquis cell as part of his infiltration—and she reveals to a surprised Torres that Professor Chapman would support her reenlisting in the Academy. Torres thought Chapman hated her, but Janeway explains that some professors like being challenged.
They use the dekyon beam to widen the fissure just enough for Voyager to get through, then they have to guess which of the two Voyagers they’re picking up is the right one. Janeway guesses right. (Torres says, “If you’re wrong, we’ll have plenty of time to debate it.”) Paris manages to get them through the fissure, and they’re home free.
Torres is given a field commission to lieutenant and made chief engineer. She tells Carey that she’ll be counting on him to backstop her, especially since she’s not up on Starfleet protocol or on the eccentricities of this particular warp engine. Carey welcomes her aboard and promises to never give any less than his best.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Neelix explains to Kes that an event horizon is a force field surrounding a singularity, which is so totally what it isn’t. This wouldn’t be so bad—I remember one person telling me years ago that this was just what Neelix thought it was and he was talking out his hat to Kes—but (a) none of the bridge officers correct him and (b) much more to the point, the rest of the episode treats the event horizon like a force field, when it is, in fact, just a “point of no return” orbiting a singularity that has no mass or shape.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway was a science officer at the lower ranks, and she and Torres quickly bond over technobabble, finishing each other’s sentences, and routinely passing the Bechdel Test.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok wants to put Torres in the brig and court-martial her for striking Carey. Chakotay talks him out of it.
Half and half. Torres is a brilliant engineer, but she’s not sure she’s suited to lead a team. She also hates Starfleet. What could possibly go wrong?
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH keeps getting shorter, and is frustrated at not being told things like the fact that they’re near a singularity, which would help him diagnose all the patients he’s been getting.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix crashes the senior staff meeting with Kes, as he figures he’s the senior Talaxian and she’s the senior Ocampa. For no compellingly good reason, Janeway lets them stay, though Kes is the only one who does anything useful.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Apparently holodeck power isn’t compatible with ship systems so holodeck power can’t be used to power the ship, a lame-ass handwave so they can keep doing holodeck episodes.
Do it.
“Am I making any sense here?”
“No, but that’s okay.”
–Paris speaking for the audience, and Janeway speaking for the writers.
Welcome aboard. Josh Clark is back as Joe Carey, who actually gets a name in this episode, and is also passed over as chief engineer by Torres. He will continue to recur throughout season one, and then make periodic reappearances here and there.
We meet two more Maquis crew, one the recurring role of Seska, played by Martha Hackett (last seen as the Romulan T’Rul in DS9‘s “The Search” Parts 1-2, and who will continue to recur throughout the first three seasons, and reappear again in an alternate timeline in season seven), the other Jarvin, played by Justin Williams, who only appears in this episode, but will be mentioned again in “The 37s.”
Trivial matters: The shuttlecraft Janeway and Torres take is the Tereshkova named after the cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.
Set a course for home. “This isn’t another singularity—it’s the same one!” Gene Roddenberry had always wanted Star Trek to at least be a vaguely believable future. Yes, there was plenty of made-up science, but he at least consulted with futurists, and tried to make things at least vaguely plausible in the original series. He didn’t always succeed, but he tried. By the later years of TNG, however, the technobabble had gotten a bit out of hand, with one bit of made-up science often used to solve another bit of made-up science.
This is far worse when they use real stuff and get it wrong, and the thing that drove me crazy about this episode two-and-a-half decades ago, and again now, is the portrayal of an event horizon of a singularity—which is a real scientific phenomena—is so totally wrong. It is not a force field!
Brannon Braga, who scripted this episode, is quoted in Cinefantastique as saying, “Though ‘a quantum singularity’ is a mouthful, I decided to use it anyway; but I literally could have called it ‘a quantum fissure,’ ‘a quantum sinkhole,’ anything. And who cares? Who really cares?” It’s honestly hard to believe that two decades after this, Braga would help shepherd a new version of Cosmos into being, given his cavalier attitude toward science here.
Having said all that, I love watching this episode anyhow, not because of the terrible science, which is spectacularly terrible, but because of what Braga has always been good at, going back to his time on TNG: character development. It was mentioned in “Caretaker” that Janeway was a science officer back in the day, and we explore that. One of the things I like about the various Trek spinoffs is that each captain has a different background, and Janeway’s being a science nerd is a fantastic thing, aided by her bonding with Torres. Science stuff in Trek has previously mostly been the purview of men (with the notable exception of Jadzia Dax), and it’s nice to see Janeway and Torres doing the same nerding that Spock and Scotty did on TOS and that Dax and O’Brien did on DS9 and La Forge and Data did on TNG.
We’re also promised some nice tension, and while the follow-through on that wasn’t great, the use of it here is superb. Chakotay’s speech to Janeway about how he refuses to be the token Maquis officer with the rest of his crew being subordinate is a good one. It’s not like they can afford to be that fussy, considering that the conn officer is a criminal and the ops officer is twelve years old…
Chakotay is well used here, doing what a first officer is supposed to be doing, which is speaking for the entire crew to the captain. Yes, he’s putting more emphasis on his Maquis crew, but it’s early days yet, and he needs to facilitate the integration or this is never going to work.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido has already done rewatches of Star Trek The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for this site. He’s also reviewed every episode of Star Trek: Discovery and Short Treks to date, and his review of “Remembrance,” the premiere episode of Star Trek: Picard went up this past Friday.
I read somewhere that this episode is adapted from a script about a submarine trapped under sea ice, which makes sense. In that aspect it reminds me of “Balance of Terror.” Too bad it’s such science nonsense. KRAD is being very fair to see the strengths of the show in the shaky first episodes, which I appreciate.
Yes, terrible science (what’s next, using the equator as a skipping rope?), but great Janeway-Torres scenes. I also loved to watch Janeway and Chakotay do human resource planning. It’s a joy to see sensible people work out their disagreements. That’s why there never was a serious Starfleet-Maquis rift – because they were both good at anticipating it and nipping it in the bud.
Janeway’s statement about “one of the nice things about being captain” reminded me of Kirk’s “one of the advantages of being a captain” in “Dagger of the Mind”. They do have things in common, don’t they?
Ahem, Paris does not say “it’s Voyager,” he says “it’s the Voyager,” which is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing about this episode…which is saying a lot for Yet Another Echo Ship episode.
If if weren’t for the character development, this episode would be forgettable at best. There’s only so many ways you can make an interesting plot out of getting stuck in a singularity.
Needless to say, second episodes are hard. And this is probably the weakest second episode out of all Trek shows. At least TNG’s Naked Now had some outrageous and outlandish behavior from the crew. Not that it was particularly good, but at least it left more of an impression.
Fortunately, Parallax does expand on Janeway, who wasn’t given much of an introduction in the pilot. Having someone rise from the science ranks is at least somewhat original. And even this early on, you can tell from the dialogue that Brannon Braga has a better grasp of Janeway and how to write for Mulgrew than Michael Piller.
And we get some nice insight into Torres, her academy days. And Roxann already has a firm handle on what’s on paper a fairly complicated character. And it’s one of the few times Chakotay gets used effectively. If only they’d followed through on the Maquis tension. Sadly, one pitfall of making Seska a Cardassian spy was it instantly defused any potential crew infighting since now everyone shared a common traitorous enemy. Food for thought when we get to State of Flux.
Honestly, the science here never bothered me too much. For one thing, they called it “Type 4 quantum singularity” rather than a black hole, specifically because it didn’t work like a real black hole. Second, I can understand why it’s easier to simplify the explanation of an event horizon in order to move on with the story; dramatically, all the audience needs to know is that it’s a barrier of some sort. Third, it’s not entirely nonsensical to call an event horizon an “energy field,” since from an outside observer’s perspective, all matter and energy falling into a black hole would be slowed in time until it froze completely on the event horizon. (Although it would look entirely different from within.)
And I liked the way the episode used black-hole physics well in a different way. If you were trapped inside an event horizon, then the light and radio signals and such that you emitted couldn’t get out, but would just loop around inside the horizon, essentially orbiting the singularity and eventually spiraling down into it. So it’s entirely plausible that you could detect the light and signals given off by your own ship a little earlier and think they were coming from something else.
Of course, that only works with speed-of-light signals, so subspace signals should’ve been able to get out, and for that matter, a ship traveling at warp should’ve had no trouble getting out, unless the black hole’s gravity prevented the warp field from forming in the first place, which it should have but didn’t here. But then, that’s where the “Type 4 quantum singularity” bit comes in. It’s not a normal black hole, it’s some kind of subspace thingy that’s analogous to one!
No, for me, the bit that drove me crazy was that they got out by firing “warp particles” at it. Excuse me? “Warp particles?” That’s the laziest bit of technobabble I’ve ever heard. What the hell is it supposed to mean? I tend to assume it means particles from the warp plasma, or perhaps the exhaust left over once the plasma has energized the warp coils. Or maybe it means the exotic particles like tetryons and verterons that prevent the warp field from collapsing. But it’s a very sloppy, vague way of describing them, inconsistent with how Trek technobabble worked in every other series from this era of Trek (TNG-ENT).
@4/Eduardo: “If if weren’t for the character development, this episode would be forgettable at best. There’s only so many ways you can make an interesting plot out of getting stuck in a singularity.”
I think that’s the point, really. After the pilot, they needed an opportunity to slow down and concentrate on developing the characters. Trapping them all aboard the ship provided the chance to do that (as well as letting them do a cheaper bottle episode after the expensive pilot).
“And even this early on, you can tell from the dialogue that Brannon Braga has a better grasp of Janeway and how to write for Mulgrew than Michael Piller.”
I was never that impressed with Braga’s writing of Janeway; in “Macrocosm” in particular, he seemed to think that the way to write a strong woman was to turn her into Rambo.
Of course, the writing credits don’t always reflect the writing of an episode accurately. The final draft of every episode is always written by the showrunner, to ensure consistency of character voices and such.
I, too, enjoy the emphasis on character development and interaction, stupid science notwithstanding. Thought it was interesting in the officer’s meeting when Neelix and Kes barge in, Paris gives up his seat for Kes, and you can see a quick “who’s dis guy?” glance by Neelix, foreshadowing “Jealous Neelix” who is even more annoying than regular Neelix.
I was okay with the nerding out scenes between Janeway and Torres, although Janeway really gets hyped up. The way they riff off of each other and end up face-to-face, I’m expecting a musical number to break out…
Meredith: to be fair, every other Trek ship used the definite article — the Enterprise, the Constellation, the Defiant, the Valiant, the Malinche, the Hood, etc., so you can understand why they had it that way in the early scripts, when people hadn’t said it out loud yet.
Once it was said out loud, the “the” was dropped cast into the cornfield with Vulcanian, Bajora, and Kling…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I don’t know who’d hate the episode more, the physicists or the human resources people. Torres may be a brilliant engineer, but she has no place being in charge of other people.
#8 that is a great point. The title is chief engineer, not best engineer.
# 8, it’d be like making Rom Chief of Operations. ;-)
@5/Christopher: Part of my dissatisfaction with Parallax is context-related. I just saw Enterprise’s Similitude for the first time last night, which was also a bottle show designed as a ship-based character piece. It plays much better than Parallax. And one of the reasons it does is because it doesn’t dwell on the technobabble behind Trip’s cloning process. The story flows beautifully as it portrays the tragic story of Sim/Trip.
Now, obviously the fact that Janeway and Torres bond over technobabble is a significant plot point as far as their arc is concerned. I won’t deny that. But it doesn’t help when much of the final act’s climax is driven by it. It was already an ongoing problem on TNG’s later seasons, and it continues here.
As for how Janeway is written, as much as the EP rewrites, I think there’s still enough of the writer’s voice in there. Plus, Piller was about to depart to develop Legend for UPN. When we get to Phage next week, it becomes noticeable in the way Janeway responds to her crew being in danger from the Vidiians. She has an edge on that episode that she usually doesn’t have in episodes not written by Braga. Phage Janeway is markedly different from The Cloud Janeway.
Given how many cooks were involved in conceiving Voyager (Piller coming and going; Taylor later retiring; Biller stepping to run later on; the needs of each episode’s plot requiring the characters to operate on a specific wavelength….), it’s no surprise Janeway gets inconsistently characterized. Macrocosm was Braga’s desire to do Ellen Ripley. He just happened to have a female captain in hand to mimick the role.
@8/garethwilson: But there’s also the aspect that they needed at least one other Maquis in a leadership position, and she was the best choice because she was a) a brilliant engineer and thus able to command respect and b) aware of her own shortcomings. It was a political promotion.
@5/CLB:
Actually, that’s not how event horizons work. “This is the radius at which the escape velocity is the speed of light” is the Newtonian model (*), but under general relativity, a black hole is characterized by the space and time axes swapping places, so that “futureward” is now “inward”; that is, once past the escape horizon, you can no more evade “falling” than you can evade “next week”. (For this, kudos to physicist Kip Thorne’s — no relation — The Science of Interstellar.)
Since warp travel is through ordinary spacetime — that’s why the navigational deflector is necessary — “going faster” is of no help. Now, the show’s technobabble regarding subspace signals isn’t entirely consistent, but it might involve “subspace domains” that are alternate universes (most obviously seen with the chittering cowled abductors in TNG’s “Schisms”) and hence unimpeded by the 4-space shape of the black hole.
So yeah, whatever a “type-4 quantum singularity” is, it’s a whole different animal than a black hole as conceptualized by 20cen general relativity.
The TOS-TNG crossover novel Federation involves some almost-plausible time-travel dynamics involving the ergosphere of a supermassive black hole, but even there, the Reeves-Stevens had to invent a separate “subspace event horizon” inside the lightspeed event horizon.
(*) Such a superdense object is called a “black star”.
I’m with Keith on both the science and the character stuff, although some of the early B’Elanna out of control dialog is rather cringe-worthy (as is Neelix barging into the staff meeting). That’s probably just me, though. That kind of stuff makes me very uncomfortable.
Last time, a lot of people said really nice things about the music and the score over the years. But there were times in both episodes where I found the music to be overly dramatic and obtrusive. Last time it was when only Harry and B’Elanna were in the shaft, this time when things got tense in the shuttle while they were opening the rift. On the whole, the music is good, but that’s twice in two episodes where it got in the way.
@8 That’s a good point. I’ve worked with technically brilliant people who got promoted into supervisory positions because of said technical brilliance. Sometimes it worked out OK; sometimes it really, really didn’t. At one time we called that the Peter Principle, and if I were in Janeway’s shoes that’s what I would be most worried about with Torres. If nothing else, once she’s a supervisor she has a lot less time to fix/rig/adapt stuff, which she’s demonstrably really good at. (In fact she’s arguably a lot better qualified on the “make do with what you’ve got” tasks than Carey).
Of course @12 is right too. In this situation there’s going to be a lot of tradeoffs made in job assignments.
S
@13/Philip Thorne: Of course it’s not about “going faster,” since warp propulsion doesn’t involve movement through space in a conventional way at all. It involves altering the topology of the spacetime around your ship so that your position changes relative to the universe. A warp field is an extremely distorted spacetime metric, and so is a black hole. Both metrics would affect each other’s topology, though I’m not sure which metric would “win.” But if an Alcubierre metric can let you achieve the equivalent of superluminal flight, it stands to reason that it would also be able to surmount an event horizon, because those are mathematically similar obstacles.
Yes, the light cones inside even a normal black hole are angled inward so that there is no worldline that can exit the event horizon once it enters, but FTL travel is outside the light cones by definition.
The moment they said an event horizon was a forcefield , I turned the TV off and didn’t watch another episode of VOY until 7 of 9 was brought on board. The explanation was SO egregious to me, I couldn’t see how, if they cared so little about 20th century science – stuff that Stephen Hawking explained to the general public years before this episode, how could I expect them to care about the rest of the production?
I wasn’t bothered much at all by the (laughably) inaccurate science seen here in this episode. It started off great with the Tuvok/Chakotay interchange over the clash between the Maquis Torres and Starfleet officer Carey, and then kept right on rolling with the heated exchange between Janeway/Chakotay. It had the promise of the Starfleet/Maquis tension being a part of things to come. I liked this episode then as much as I do now.
@5/ChristopherLBennett: I think that’s an accurate observation you made regarding that the setting of the show was specifically chosen to be able to concentrate on necessary character development.
@12/JanaJansen: I agree. Both of your points regarding Torres are on target.
Man, you think the technobabble is bad now? Just wait until you get to the entire rest of the series.
“They use the dekyon beam to widen the fissure just enough for Voyager to get through, then they have to guess which of the two Voyagers they’re picking up is the right one. Janeway guesses right.”
This part bugs me! The shuttle is under her own power, Voyager is under her own power. Just go through the rift! The Voyager that follows you is the real one and you can link up on the other side.
Shouldn’t we be using treknobabble? ;)
Agree with 8.
Why would anyone pick the agressive, technically competent person with zero people and soft skills to lead a team over someone who is technically probably less competent, but probably has better skills when working with his team? what sense does that take? Torres would be a perfect engineer nerd fiddling with the engine and someone could help her to build up her people skills (which happens throughout the series as she’s getting help from multiple people), but this seems too early and too risky for me.
The political choice suggested by 12. JanaJansen makes some sense, but i still see it as a poor decision. and knowing how Torres behaved throughout most of the series, i’d be interested to see how she worked with her team…
8/22, interesting points. I guess we never get to see how it actually develops, but a logical structure for this would be for Torres to delegate as much as the people managing to Carey, while setting an overall vision and doing the hardest technical tasks herself. I.e., rather than saying “Carey, do x, Smith do y, Jones do z,” she would just say, “Carey, these are the three things we need, you figure out the best way to assign crew to get them done.” So you get the advantages of the best engineer being in charge, but without the trainwreck Manager Torres would be.
@23/dunsel: Exactly! Additionally, such an officer in this position would be receiving counsel from the First Officer and likely also getting plenty of feedback from any personnel reviews, which would provide the officer with the necessary details on how to become more effective in their position. If memory serves there are instances of such conversations taking place in some series eps where Chakotay and/or Tuvok make mention of reviews (or something similar) to Janeway.
I minored in Astronomy and I don’t think I missed an episode of Voyager but the show drove me crazy with its science. I still remember the episode with their desperate search for deuterium, an isotope of the most common element in the universe, hydrogen.
@25/keithmo: Yes, “Demon.” That one drove me crazy. The frustrating thing is, it was actually written by the show’s science advisor, who wrote it as a search for dilithium. But the showrunners arbitrarily substituted deuterium because they thought it was funny to say the ship had “run out of gas.” Which just underlines that advisors can only advise, not dictate, and that showrunners can always overrule scriptwriters.
I must admit that when I first saw the pilot, I assumed Torres was already chief engineer at the end: It was her job on the Maquis ship, Voyager’s lost theirs, she’s the only person at the engineering station at the end and she’s on the opening titles. So I was a bit bewildered that they followed it up with a “B’Elanna becomes chief engineer” episode. It does make sense though that they wouldn’t have everyone slot into their jobs from the character bible in episode two and helps give a sense that things are still developing. (From the list of vacancies Janeway gives in the staff meeting, it seems they lost even more crew than were mentioned in the pilot.) Chakotay’s instant loyalty to Janeway is perhaps too good to be true, but necessary in the circumstances, and it’s still not smooth sailing, with him breaking protocol at least once. We also see the start of the tension between Chakotay and Tuvok which will run through the early episodes: Tuvok’s the career Starfleet officer who was next in line to be Janeway’s second-in-command but the person he was supposed to help arrest appointed over him. He and Carey should start a club. (My nitpick of the rewatch: I don’t think Chakotay says anything about Torres becoming chief engineer when he’s talking to Tuvok at the start, just that he’ll handle disciplining her. Tuvok doesn’t know about it until Chakotay brings it up in the staff meeting.)
As per the pilot, at this point there’s a lot being made of the fact that Janeway’s background is science. I’ll be trying to keep an eye on that as we go. As has been pointed out a lot, the episode gives her and Torres a chance to bond on geek level. It’s nice that they don’t go too far in making Carey out to be incompetent: He has a couple of jerk moments but is generally shown to be a capable engineer, just not in B’Elanna’s league, and has the maturity to accept her olive branch at the end.
Some people might share Paris’ view about the temporal paradox. I don’t really have a problem with it, but, looking ahead a bit, I do think it’s a shame that the show had two confusing temporal paradox episodes back to back. The cards really should have been shuffled more there.
I love that scene between the Doctor and Kes, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. At this point, her attitude towards him is in stark contrast to the rest of the crew. I think in many ways the Doctor becomes a person because Kes treats him like one and encourages others to do so. Unfortunately, the “Doctor malfunction” subplot wears out its welcome a long time before the end. Given that Janeway and Torres seem to work out a simple solution some way before the end of the episode, it’s ridiculous that no-one bothers to do anything for the sake of a cheap gag ending. Just how much time is meant to have passed between Voyager leaving the anomaly and Torres being made chief engineer? I’d say it’s the next day at least, more than enough time for someone to pop down there and give a simple tweak.
First mention of Neelix being a Talaxian. First appearance of Seska, a rather low key one that I completely missed on first watch. (I didn’t realise she was there until “Emanations”, possibly the first time she’s named.) Apparently her blue uniform here was a mistake. As has been pointed out, Paris, at one point, refers to the ship as the Voyager, which must be virtually unique. Chakotay makes a slightly barbed remark about Paris’ piloting skills at one point, one of the few relics of his initial disdain towards him.
The next time we’ll get such an inappropriate use of “Event Horizon” will be in Random Thoughts. Ha ha. Sorry.
I rather liked this episode, even more so than the premiere because: 1) the character development of Torres and Janeway was great; 2) I enjoy a genuine astronomical phenomenon type of mystery, especially one that puts the ship and crew at peril and they have to think their way out of it. It never bothered me at the time that the science was apparently crap, and still doesn’t bother me because it sounds real enough and I just don’t think it’s that relevant to one’s enjoyment of the episode. However, I fully understand that someone who is well-versed in astronomy or just appreciates scientific accuracy period would feel quite differently about it than myself.
Okay… in defense of the episode’s science, the term “event horizon” merely means a boundary beyond which no events can be observed. The EH of a black hole is one kind of EH, but it is not the only kind that can exist. Another type that exists in reality is the cosmic event horizon — the edge of the observable universe, 13.8 billion light-years away, beyond which we can observe no events because the universe is only 13.8 billion years old and so the light from further away hasn’t had time to reach us yet. Hypothetically, an object under constant, uniform acceleration toward the speed of light would have an apparent event horizon because the light from certain events would never catch up with it.
So there absolutely could be other kinds of event horizon beyond the ones we know about. It’s possible that the “energy field” around the Type 4 quantum singularity did, in fact, function as an event horizon, preventing observers outside the field from detecting events inside it. So the statement could have been accurate in-universe, even if it wasn’t the same kind of event horizon we associate with black holes. Again, the writers made a point of inventing a fictitious label for it to excuse its differences from a realistic black hole. (The same way Roddenberry replaced “laser” with the imaginary “phaser” after the first pilot, in order to make it easier to get away with giving the weapons abilities that lasers don’t have.)
I wonder if the most logical (Watsonian) explanation for the fluctuations in Captain Janeway’s character over the years is the simplest: she’s a fairly by-the-book officer in a position so far from the book that the locals haven’t even heard of a library (metaphorically speaking). It seems likely that the push-and-pull between these two extremes, coupled with what has to be the Extreme Stress of being Master after God without appeal, leaves Captain Janeway somewhat on the ragged edge.
Though she’s very good at carrying on anyway – as one would expect from an officer given independent command of a starship.
Carey doesn’t really show any signs of being better at managing than Torres, though. He’s just senior because he’s Starfleet; Torres was Chief Engineer on her (smaller) ship so I don’t think going by rank is that straightforward. And in the altercation where his nose got broken, he actually started the physicality by shoving her aside when he didn’t understand what she was doing. She immediately eclipsed his error with the punch, but her court martial wouldn’t have done his career much good. He’s probably more comfortable in the secondary position since being in charge was stressing him out. Or maybe that was being lost in the wrong side of the galaxy.
@32 you make some good points, but Carey didn’t shove Torres first. He asked her to step aside. She shoved him. He pushed back. Then she broke his nose, hitting him hard enough, according to Tuvok, that she nearly killed him. Carey’s no prize, and he has different deficiencies as far as his leadership skills, given how eager he was to belittle Torres when she was a subordinate, and for that reason I guess I’m okay with him not being in charge. It’s too bad the only other choice is Torres, who has demonstrated that she can go from zero to out-of-control instantly, I would rather not put that person in charge of anyone or anything on a Starship.
@3 and @& MeredithP and KRAD I’ve always wondered about the use or non-use of the definite article in starship names. It was clearly used in TOS, TNG, and DS9, but very clearly deliberately left out later in VOY and in ENT (haven’t noticed for sure, but I think it’s back in DISCO). Has anybody ever given a reason for why the writers did that?
@34/DonRudolphII: I think the shift in usage in Trek just reflects the shift in real life, with the use of the definite article before ship names becoming less common. It’s just the franchise advancing with the times.
@33 You are right, that’s his account, although I guess I found Carey’s story a bit implausible. It does sound like her first “push” was not moving when he tried to muscle through to the console. Which he had just ordered her to step away from. But yeah, was there no one else around to promote? Or was this how disputes were settled on the Maquis fleet. Maybe just in Engineering.
Of course, the real reason she punched him was so we could have the doctor in the scene where Carey complains.
@36/bethmitcham: Yeah, I had the same thought. If it were one of my kids telling me this story, I’d have questions. “So you told her to step aside, and then she pushed you away from the console? If you told her to step aside, surely she was standing at the console too? Where were you both standing, exactly, when all this happened?”
“Or was this how disputes were settled on the Maquis fleet. Maybe just in Engineering.”
It probably wasn’t a problem on the Maquis ship because Torres was in charge there. I agree that she was overreacting, but she was also alone among strangers, possibly hostile strangers, with no one acknowledging her expertise or her dedication. That’s a lot to take for a person who is both young and half Klingon.
@34: Maybe somebody finally got it through to the production team that correct naval parlance excludes the definite article.
@38/DemetriosX: I looked it up last night, and online sources seem to disagree over which usage is correct, but the consensus seems to be that using the article is still acceptable, just less commonly used today.
Although I seem to recall looking into it in the past and finding something that said you’d only use “the” if you include the “USS” at the start, because it’s “the United Starship Enterprise” and that would be ungrammatical without the article. So it’s more that the article goes with the prefix than the name. On the other hand, you’d never use it with a British ship, because then it would be “the His/Her Majesty’s Ship Beagle” or whatever, so it’s ungrammatical with the article.
@39/Christopher: What about The Voyage of the Beagle?
In German, ship names are used with the definite article. The feminine one. It has nothing to do with a prefix, as “ship” in German takes the neutral gender.
@39 CLB: I picked up that factoid from an old Navy man in TOS discussion elsewhere. I figured he must know what he’s talking about.
@40 Jana: I’m not sure that counts given the vagaries of German grammar. Heck, in half the dialects they use the definite article when referring to people by name.
@40/Jana: Again, it’s about the prefix. “The Beagle” is okay, but “The HMS Beagle” is not, because then it would be “the His Majesty’s Ship Beagle,” which is ungrammatical. So it would be either The Voyage of the Beagle or The Voyage of HMS Beagle, never The Voyage of the HMS Beagle.
What I read is that it’s the other way around with American ships, because it’s grammatical to say “captain of the United States Ship Lexington” or just “captain of Lexington,” but not to say “captain of United States Ship Lexington.” The prefix is an abbreviation of a descriptive phrase, not just random letters, so if you include it at the start of the name, then it affects the grammar of the sentence.
@42/Christopher: I haven’t seen your answer in time. I just edited my comment to add that at least in German, the identical naming convention isn’t about the prefix.
So it’s “die Enterprise”, but “das Raumschiff Enterprise”.
@43/Jana: That sounds like it is about the prefix, because adding it changes the article. It’s just not abbreviated.
@44/Christopher: Sorry. You’re right, of course. What I meant is that ships always take an article, whether there’s a prefix or not.
^Oh, I see.
Voyager itself tends to be referred to without the article, but on the few occasions we see other Federation starships in the series, they tend to have it: The Equinox, the Prometheus, the Rhode Island. As krad suggested, it may just be that someone decided late in the day that “the Voyager” sounded silly.
I don’t get why “the Voyager” sounds silly.
@48/MaGnUs: I think it’s largely because we’re not used to hearing it, but also the voiced “th” sound and the “V” sound are pretty similar, and it’s easier to say just “Voyager.”
I don’t hear it, really. But thanks.
And that pattern of behaviour is why he’s known elsewhere as der Scheißkopf.
Oh, and re Lt. Carey, the writers actually forgot they didn’t kill him off after a while. Hence why periodically was essentially for a few episodes before season 7’s end and then killing him off in a two days to retirement move.
PS sorry for the double post.
First, as far as Torres as chief engineer, I think there is a practical consideration: Carey is less likely to subscribe to the sort of creative solutions which will be required in such an unusual circumstance. As chief engineer, he would almost always reject Torres’s solutions for not fitting in with Starfleet protocol. However, by putting her in charge, Carey’s own sense of Starfleet protocol will force him to obey orders. Thus B’elana will be in a position to do what is needed to save the ship.
This episode is also a perfect example of the difference between writing for television vs writing hard science fiction for a market like Analog. If an Analog writer who is not an astronomer had the basic idea (the effects of a black hole causing a temporal distortion that creates a mirror image of a starship), they would immediately begin by researching black holes, including quantum black holes. If their initial idea is viable, they would research it further and write in a way in which their speculations at least don’t violate established known science (except the necessity for FTL, something that even the hardest hard science fiction is allowed to work with). However, your average Analog reader would be more likely to catch the errors than the average casual viewer watching Voyager. Yes, many diehard Trekkies are scientifically literate, but less than 10% (probably less than 1%) of the viewing audience are actual Trekkies. Assuming about 5 million viewers, they can’t bother to focus on the 500,000 or less who know that singularity means black hole and event horizon means point of no return. they have to stick to the cool-sounding dialog and move the story along.
I disagree that Star Trek did not use women in scientific roles much before this. Dr Crusher and Counselor Troi are both science officers. Crusher is an accomplished medical scientist and Troi has a background in psychology. Troi’s mental health background was not used nearly enough in the series, however. Her character was at its best when she diagnosed mental health problems and used her empathy to get to the bottom of people’s problems, but I feel the writers on the show did not do enough research into mental health science to make her as knowledgeable as she could have been.
Mental health science, especially in regards to the treatment of substance abuse, has come a very long way since the series was created in the mid 1980s. I believe if TNG is ever rebooted with new actors Troi’s character is the one who would benefit the most with our increased knowledge.
I enjoyed this episode despite the problematic science that I didn’t know was problomatic science until I read Krad’s review. Back in the day, the science made sense to me within the episode’s own rules. If the writers are going to use technobabble, the least they can do is make it understandable to mundane Trek fans like me, which they did.
I have to wonder, however, about Janeway’s line about sometimes having to punch your way through. Would phenomenon like this really act like a nail in a piece of wood? If there’s a hole in an energy field that’s only so big, would Voyager really punch through it and still have its nacelles intact? To quote Tom Paris: “Am I making any sense here?”
What infuriated me about this episode wasn’t the bad science (I had no clue) but that one moment: “she reveals to a surprised Torres that Professor Chapman would support her reenlisting in the Academy. Torres thought Chapman hated her, but Janeway explains that some professors like being challenged.” So where the hell was Chapman when Torres needed him? As I recall, KJ goes on to say something like “you had more friends than you knew”. No, see, Kate, that doesn’t count. A friend you don’t know you have is not a friend at all, and to find out later, after you’ve twisted in the wind all alone, that people quietly supported you only makes things worse. I may be speaking from experience in this.
@56/tracet:
It’s a good point, although I wonder if Torres may have bailed on the Acadamy abruptly and in a fit of rage, then quickly became unreachable having joined the Maquis.
(7/10) I’m a big fan of how this episode plays out, for the most part. I think a bottle episode that puts the crew in a tricky situation to test their reactions to various situations is perfect for the first season, and we get to see a lot of great character work. Unfortunately, the main drawback of this episode (excluding any science inaccuracies) is the extremely lack of tension in any situation. We know they escape because the show has more than 3 episodes, and we know B’Elanna is a main character while Carey is lucky he got a name. Carey being billed adjacent to B’Elanna for a while, as well as giving him more of an active role in the series pilot, would certainly help (as I mentioned last episode.)
The other change that I would make to this episode is having Janeway pick Carey as chief engineer in the end of the episode, citing B’Elanna’s temper as the only thing holding her back. This would reinforce the Maquis rift and set up room for more drama later; it would give B’Elanna a goal/motivation to improve, while simultaneously directly prodding her temper; and it would be much more interesting than slotting all of the main billed characters directly into the command crew of the ship, although eventually (4 or 5 episodes from now, or the season finale for some spice) you want Janeway to realize that Carey just isn’t as talented as B’Elanna, who has finally mellowed out just enough to justify switching them.
You may need to add a bit of supporting dialogue to help with these changes, but it could be as simple as having Carey confidently present solutions to escaping the singularity, only to repeatedly fail, while B’Elanna has better ideas but is too volatile with her words to explain them, up until she and Janeway have their nerd out moment and talk through it together. If you remove the completely unnecessary EMH subplot, there should be enough room to give Carey the focus for a scene or two as we need to see how he and B’Elanna are actually different, otherwise there is no reason for us to expect Janeway to pick him.
Two minor annoyances that I have not addressed. First is Neelix, and second is the fact that a portion of Tuvok’s dialogue in the first part of this episode is almost word-for-word lifted from the incredible TNG episode “Cause and Effect”, in the following line: “Distortions are emanating from a highly localized disturbance in the space time continuum, distance: 20,000 kilometers off the port bow.” What the hell was THAT choice, writers?
Doing something of a rewatch, not sure how commited I am yet. But I thought I might as well come ask y’all nerdfriends:
When they disagreed on which ship was a reflection, could they not signal the ship somehow and see which one blinked its lights? Were they so far from Voyager they couldn’t reach it by radio to say ‘hey flash your brights’?
The solid landing was very cool but I couldn’t quite figure why there was no way to solve this conundrum. Ask one of the Voyagers what the other one would say…
@59/jofesh: The more I think about it, the more I find the whole scenario kinda weird. You’d think a ship ready to receive a shuttlecraft would be sending out it’s own visual signal, letting the shuttle know it was ready for it to land. Or heck, the shuttlebay door should have already been opened if it was preparing to receive a shuttle.