“Parturition”
Written by Tom Szollosi
Directed by Jonathan Frakes
Season 2, Episode 7
Production episode 123
Original air date: October 9, 1995
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Paris is training Kes in how to fly a shuttlecraft on the holodeck. At one point, the shuttle comes under attack, and Kes falls into Paris’s lap, which she finds amusing and he finds awkward. They leave the holodeck laughing together, neither noticing Neelix lurking in the corridor looking pissed.
Janeway is concerned about their dwindling food supply. Chakotay says they’ve found a Class-M planet that has amino acid and protein readings, but the atmospheric interference is such that they can’t tell any more than that—and it’s a day out of the way. Janeway says it’s necessary, and they change course.
Paris visits Kim, despondent. He has fallen in love with Kes, and he can’t act on it, out of respect for Neelix (respect for Kes is never mentioned). Meanwhile, Kes and Neelix have what should be a romantic dinner, but it’s made awkward by Neelix’s seething jealousy of Paris.
Voyager arrives at the planet. The atmosphere is full of trigemic vapor that make transport impossible. Chakotay tasks Torres with finding a way to beam through the vapor, but while she does that, Janeway’s going to send a shuttlecraft down.
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Kim and Paris go to the mess hall, only to see Kes eating by herself. Paris doesn’t want to sit with her and annoy Neelix, so the two of them sit alone away from her—but then Chakotay summons Kim to the bridge to help Torres with her transporter task. Kes, recognizing the awkwardness for Paris, leaves the mess hall, at which point Neelix confronts Paris and they dump food on each other.
Before Bluto can show up and scream, “Food fight!” they’re both summoned to the captain’s ready room right away, giving them no time to clean up. So they meet with Janeway covered in hair pasta food stains. Janeway wants them to take a shuttle down to the planet to find foodstuffs. Neelix is the ship’s expert on how to turn local flora into food, and Paris is the ship’s best pilot.
They head down, Neelix acting like a complete asshole the entire time. The shuttle then crashes, though Paris is able to crash smoothly enough that neither of them is hurt. The trigemic vapor is also causing skin rashes, so they take refuge in a cave and seal the entrance to keep the vapor out. At no point in their journey across the planet’s surface do they see anything that could be used as food.
Voyager tries to find the away team, but sensors can’t penetrate the atmospheric soup. Torres and Kim keep working on the transporter. And then a ship shows up and challenges them, eventually moving into orbit between Voyager and the planet.
Neelix and Paris come across a bunch of eggs. They didn’t register as life forms on the tricorder, though they do explain the amino acid and protein readings. One of the eggs hatches. Suddenly, Neelix and Paris find themselves the caretakers of a baby alien.
There are openings in the EM interference, but even then, it’s hard to discern the away team’s combadges. Torres suggests they enter the planet’s atmosphere at the next window—but that means getting past the alien ship.
Kes goes to sickbay and is distraught. The EMH asks after her, and she explains about the tension between Paris and Neelix. She always assumed her relationship with Paris was platonic.
The baby starts doing poorly, and Paris and Neelix belatedly realize that the infant needs the trigemic vapor for whatever reason. Neelix considers giving the kid cordrazine, but Paris thinks drugging an alien baby is, perhaps, not the best idea. But he uses the hypospray to pull some trigemic vapor from a gap in the rocks blocking the cave, and hits the kid with it. The kid starts feeling much better.
Voyager manages to get past the alien ship with minimal damage, and then the alien also goes down into the atmosphere. Janeway is able to contact Paris and Neelix, but they ask to hold off on beaming them out until they know for sure the infant is safe.
Sure enough, as the away team guessed once Janeway mentioned an alien ship, Mommy comes by to pick up the baby. Neelix and Paris stay just long enough to make sure that Mommy doesn’t abandon the kid. Then they beam home.
The experience has brought them closer together, and the episode ends with Neelix, Paris, and Kes happily walking down the corridor, Neelix’s arms around both of them, sharing laughter and stories. At no point does anyone mention that they went a day out of their way for nothing and they still have a food crisis…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Trigemic vapor can apparently really irritate the skin—and that’s it. It’s refreshing to see a Trek Atmospheric Anomaly that only has minor deleterious effects on people, though it does also mess with transporters and sensors.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is rather nonplussed when Paris and Neelix report to her covered in food stains. Although she has clearly stated professional reasons for assigning the two of them to the away team, it’s obvious that she’s hoping working together will have a positive effect on their personal relationship, as indeed it does.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok does some nifty firing of phasers to neutralize the alien ship as a threat.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH has been eavesdropping on conversations on the bridge, which is part of the EMH program, and he barges in to recommend a treatment for the irritation caused by the trigemic vapors. Janeway thanks him and then tells him to stop eavesdropping, please. (“I’m a doctor, not a voyeur.”)
Half and half. Torres, aided by Kim, is able to punch through the interference from the trigemic vapors to allow communication and transport.
Forever an ensign. Probably inspired by his trip to a changed timeline where he was back home, Kim replicates a new clarinet for himself. We see him playing bits of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix’s toxic jealousy comes to a head here, as his response to his anger over the friendship between Paris and Kes is, not to talk about it like a rational adult, but to be pissy at Kes and throw food at Paris. Meanwhile, Paris decides not to have lunch with Kes so as not to annoy Neelix, thus annoying Kes, instead, who leaves the mess hall in a huff, pissed that Paris is treating her badly. Of course, the man’s toxic jealousy must be catered to at the expense of the innocent woman’s feelings.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kes reveals that the Ocampa tend to simply find one mate for life. (Given that that life is only an average of nine years, there’s not much time for aught else, relationship-wise, though it seems to me that a short-lived species would have multiple mates in order to procreate enough to keep the population viable. Of course, that ship sailed in “Elogium“…)
Do it.
“You should consider it a high compliment. Throughout history, men have fought over the love of a woman. Why, I can quote you autopsy reports from duels as far back as 1538.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s not meant to be—you’ve always been interested in autopsies.”
–The EMH’s doubly unintentionally hilarious response to being told by Kes that Paris and Neelix had a food fight over her.
Welcome aboard. No billed guests in this one, and indeed the only people who appear who aren’t in the opening credits are Majel Barrett in her usual role of the Starfleet computer voice and Allan Shaw covered in latex as the alien’s Mom.
Trivial matters: There are two stated motivators for this episode. One was Michael Piller’s desire to move forward from Neelix’s jealousy, which was growing tiresome, inspired particularly by “Twisted.” In addition, two different magazine articles published in 1995 and 1996 stated that the producers also felt that Paris was underused in season one and needed a focus, which flies in the face of the actual first season, in which there was, if anything, too much Paris.
The ships that fire on Kes in the simulation are Jem’Hadar ships from Deep Space Nine.
“Planet Hell” is the nickname the crew of The Next Generation had for the sound stage that had the generic rocky planet set, and that nickname stuck through TNG, DS9, and Voyager. This is the first time the term has been used on camera, however.
Voyager loses its third shuttlecraft, following “Initiations” and “Non Sequitur.”
Set a course for home. “If you hear muffled screams, consider that a request for beam-out.” On the one hand, I’m grateful to this episode for addressing several issues with the show to date. Neelix’s jealousy grew tiresome pretty much the first time we saw it, and it never got any better, to the point where it was unclear why Kes still stayed with this piece of garbage. (His gaslighting her in “Twisted,” accusing her of having a terrible sense of direction rather than accept that something was wrong with the ship, should’ve been the last straw, honestly.) And Paris’s flirting with Kes always felt skeevy even by Paris’s low standards.
To this episode’s credit, the latter is addressed by both Paris and Kim, as Paris himself admits that he shouldn’t be flirting with Kes and also admitting that he’s fallen for her. That makes the relationship a bit more complex, especially in a closed system like Voyager. Paris is trying to better himself, and he’s not sure how to do that here.
The problem, of course, is that no one actually talks to each other about it. The only person Paris talks to is Kim, not either of the other two people involved. Neelix just stews in his own juices and acts out toward Kes, and eventually finally also at Paris. And poor Kes is left to be ignored by Paris and bitched at by Neelix because nobody can have a mature conversation on the subject.
So I’m glad that this whole mishegoss is done with by the end of the episode. Neelix and Paris bond over raising the cute alien baby (who, I gotta say, reminds me so much of the baby from Dinosaurs that I was just waiting for it to cry out, “Not the Mama!“), and in the end all three of them are friends.
On the other hand, in order to get there, we have to suffer through an hour of my two least favorite characters on the show. It boggled my mind to read that the episode was prompted by a belief that Paris was underused in season one, as it flies in the face of the season one that I just watched. (Hell, he was pretty much the POV character and lead protagonist of “Caretaker” and “Heroes and Demons” portrayed him as if he were in charge of the damn ship.)
I appreciate that Paris is trying to improve himself, and he will over the course of the series, but the show is way more invested in it than I am, and I mostly find the character unpleasant. Neelix can be a strong, complex character—”Jetrel” proved that—but the writers have proven to be less interested in showing that than in having him be a tired caricature, a mix of Scrappy Doo and a 1950s male sitcom protagonist.
Having said that, I like the bits with the alien baby, which are clichéd, but fun anyhow. This is a desperately needed moving forward for the characters, with a standard sci-fi plot to keep things moving.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest work is an essay in ZLONK! ZOK! ZOWIE!: The Subterranean Blue Grotto Guide to Batman ’66—Season One, in which he discusses the episode “Fine Feathered Finks”/”The Penguin’s a Jinx.” Each essay is about a story in the Adam West TV show of five decades past, and you can order it now from Amazon in trade or eBook form.
I was trying to remember where I knew writer Tom Szollosi’s name from. Turns out that, as Thomas E. Szollosi, he was Richard Christian Matheson’s writing partner in a lot of ’70s and ’80s TV, including The Incredible Hulk and The A-Team (on which they were story editors in its first season). Matheson is the son of science fiction legend Richard Matheson (TOS: “The Enemy Within”), so it’s ironic that it was the other member of the duo who ended up writing for Voyager (he also did “The Cloud” in season 1).
This episode is noteworthy as the first time we see Janeway with short hair, although it’s inexplicably back to its full length the following week. I wonder why they let Mulgrew skip the wig this time and only this time.
The Star Trek Encyclopedia referred to the alien species in this episode as “reptohumanoids.” Thank goodness they never used that idiotic word onscreen.
Dang it, Keith, you beat me to the Dinosaurs bit! That’s pretty much I all got for this episode. Glad to see them address the Neelix issue but it was tough watching for me.
How many shuttlecraft did Voyager leave littered across the Delta Quadrant anyway?
Seems like that would be a small problem for a ship with limited resources, but presumably they just kept making replacements on the holodeck, what with its endless supply of handwaveocron particles.
Kyle: My intent is to track all the lost shuttles. You know, for science….
It’ll be in the Trivial Matters section because honestly? It is trivial. But also amusing.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Kes has apparently been a little slow to get the problem, forgivable given her youth and inexperience. But now that she does know what the trouble is it’s time to pull a full Rayna Kapec: I decide who I’m going to be with! And that’s you, Neelix, if that ever changes I will say so, so stuff the jealousy! Paris, I like you as a friend. Settle for that or keep your distance. Got it? Good!
And the idea that Paris was under used is risible. What is the fascination with this Bad Boy?
princessroxana: Yeah, an actual conversation among the three of them would’ve been awesome. Sigh. And I don’t get the fascination, either….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@3/Kyle: “How many shuttlecraft did Voyager leave littered across the Delta Quadrant anyway?”
Not to steal Keith’s thunder, but the full Voyager shuttle count is covered here:
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/inconsistencies-voy.htm
It’s actually less than people claim, only 10 certain losses and 7 or so probable ones over 7 seasons, or an average of 2.4 per year — though there were zero losses in the first season (by either definition), so that’s just under 3/yr for the last 6 years.
“Seems like that would be a small problem for a ship with limited resources, but presumably they just kept making replacements on the holodeck, what with its endless supply of handwaveocron particles.”
They have replicators. As long as they have raw materials and energy, they can create any replacement component they need. Yes, their power and replicator usage were rationed in the first 2-3 seasons, but they only lost a handful of shuttles in those seasons, and by the time they started losing shuttles frequently, you rarely heard about shortages or rationing anymore. And we were literally shown in “Extreme Risk” how they built new shuttles.
“And the idea that Paris was under used is risible. What is the fascination with this Bad Boy?”
It may have had something to do with the fact that he was the only young white male in the regular cast. There have always been plenty of Hollywood executives who couldn’t deal with the idea of a young white male not being centered by default. Not that Berman or Piller or anyone else on VGR’s staff thought that way, but they were probably under pressure from other executives who did.
I hate that the resolution of the ‘triangle’ (for lack of a better word right now) is resolved without the involvement of Kes AT ALL.
“hair pasta food stains”
Angel hair? Or is “hair pasta” something else?
treebee72: Agreed.
grenadier: No, it really is hair pasta. The Voyager writers were determined to make all of Neelix’s dishes sound as revolting as possible for cheap humor.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@10 – And probably because the food looked like your standard Earth dishes…
But the ingredients are actually funny alien ingredients! Eh, guys? Put that in the script!
Genius!
When Voyager started, I noted with pleasure that the “flirtatious male” character kept getting downgraded in rank in each series, from Kirk, to Riker, to Bashir, to Paris. Didn’t stop the writers to wanting to write those stories, though.
At least we’re done with this stupid love triangle. That was a good call from Piller. But Parturition still lost me in the food fight bit. Plus, doing the standard cliché of putting two antagonists together in an extreme situation has been done to death and far better than here. Even Frakes can’t salvage this one. The plotting is as lazy as it gets. Token hostile alien threatens Voyager. Convenient atmosphere blocks sensors. Shuttle crashes for unknown reason. All designed to trap Paris and Neelix together. Been there, done that.
And I just don’t buy the idea that Paris is suddenly falling in love with Kes. We’re only 23 episodes in. It doesn’t feel remotely earned. They haven’t spent nearly enough time together as it is, and the show rarely addresses Kes’ own feelings over the situation. It’s a cheap plot device designed to elicit Neelix’s usual reaction.
I’m not the biggest Paris/Torres shipper, and that pairing has enough issues with their own melodrama, but at least they started in a more leisurely and organic manner. Can’t say the same for Paris/Kes (at least we get an interesting possible scenario later on, with season 3’s Before and After).
As for the disposable shuttle issue, even the writers were aware of that problem to a degree, which is why they somewhat addressed it with the Delta Flyer in the 5th season.
@12/Brian: Technically, Paris and Bashir had the same rank. Of course, Paris would get that demotion later on….
I think Neelix would have a lot more enjoyable and interesting as a character if the overwhelming jealousy wasn’t there from the beginning and say, he was more open-minded and even free-loving. Maybe a polyamorous alien like Dr. Phlox. So for instance, if Kes were to catch on that Paris liked her and even felt a mutual interest, she could inform Neelix and he would encourage it and even invite them all back to his cabin for a three-way tryst. That could have made for some fun storytelling anyway.
Kes tells the Doctor how Ocampa mate for life but I guess she breaks that rule when she later breaks up with Neelix (which itself comes about in an interesting manner). But good for her anyway.
I didn’t recall that Janeway literally let hair down this early in the series’ run. But it appears to be a one-off thing for now. I did prefer the hair down look that she would have in later seasons.
I too assumed that the show’s fixation on Tom Paris had to be because the show runners or powers that be assumed that young white males were their main audience or at least their coveted demographic. Perhaps that also had a major influence on who we got as captain when Star Trek: Enterprise came around.
@13: I think Paris, though he’s calling it “love”, is really just referring to lust or a crush. I myself have fallen in lust or had a deep crush on multiple individuals after knowing them for relatively short spans of times. So I personally think that that’s what’s actually going on with Paris because it’s far more relatable and natural that that is his actual situation then his falling in love with Kes so relatively quickly.
@14/Eduardo: I’ll allow myself some hand-waving on this one. Bashir was a lieutenant (jg) when he arrived on DS9, and Paris’ rank was also lieutenant (jg) after “Caretaker.” Bashir was CMO of a Starbase, and was eventually promoted, whereas Paris had a provisional rank. On paper, they’re the same (and probably in the eyes of a lot of fans), but I think Bashir had a higher standing within the show than Paris did.
@8, Treebee, I entirely agree with you. It is irritating to see Kes depicted as a passive prize. That’s why I want her to go Rayna Kapec and tell the men this is HER decision. Here is what she wants. Live with it!
I could forgive the show’s obsession with Paris’s redemption story if they had just committed to the idea of using the actual Nic Locarno character. By scrapping that tie-in, and making up some brand new guy with a very similar background story but more sympathetic, the redemption part just loses a lot of weight.
I would have been a lot more invested in all the expansive coverage of his story and turnaround, if the first introduction to him had been that indefensible squad leader from TNG. They already gave him enough gray-area as a character when he saved the rest of the team from expulsion, they could have built on that, and maybe worked in how being the son of an egomaniac distant father gave him poor moral examples early on but that he can grow beyond. Its also a nice hopeful message that its never too late to turn your life around.
@16/GarretH: Falling in love “relatively quickly?” He’s known her nearly a year by this point. Presumably he’s been falling in love the whole time and didn’t fully realize it until now.
“Trigemic vapor can apparently really irritate the skin—and that’s it.”
Keith, please don’t understate the seriousness of the situation.This is Trigemic vapour we’re talking about here.That’s gotta be 50% worse than Bigemic vapour.
@20: I was responding to @13’s assertion that Paris and Kes haven’t spent that much time together, not as in actual calendar time from the first time they met up until this point in the timeline. So I could have met someone 5 years ago but if I suddenly started hanging out with that individual in the last few months then it’s really at that point that a real relationship is potentially blossoming. As I recall, Tom’s affections for Kes only become readily apparent in “Twisted” or around that time anyway.
@22/GarretH: Just because we haven’t seen Tom and Kes spending time together during the roughly 15-odd hours of onscreen content so far, that doesn’t mean they haven’t spent time together between episodes in the previous 9 months they’ve been in the quadrant (not nearly a year as I said before — I remembered that “Cold Fire” three episodes from now will say it’s been 10 months).
“As I recall, Tom’s affections for Kes only become readily apparent in “Twisted” or around that time anyway.”
It’s only in the screwed-up broadcast order that “Twisted” and “Parturition” are consecutive. In the correct order, they’re four episodes apart, so we can assume about a month passed between them (since the 10 months specified in “Cold Fire” corresponds to the real-time interval since the show premiered). And in the intervening episodes (“The 37s,” “Initiations,” and “Non Sequitur”), we don’t see any interaction between Tom and Kes at all, so there’s nothing to rule out a growing depth of feeling on his part over that month.
“Set a course for Planet Hell, Commander.”
Some aspects of this feel a bit disingenuous. I don’t for a moment think that Paris has actually been trying to break up Neelix and Kes, but I’d have said it was a given that he was attracted to her, so it seems odd to have him confiding in Kim as if he’s only just realised it. (In fact, the episode doesn’t even seem to be consistent on that one, since the Doctor says later on that it’s obvious to anyone that he is. Of course, judging by the comments on here about it coming out of nowhere, apparently I’m the only other one to think it’s been obvious. Personally, I’d say Paris has been being obviously attentive towards Kes at least as far back as “Phage”, arguably as far back as “Parallax”, and they’ve always come across as good friends.) To continue my role as Tom Paris’ chief defender, I’m not sure it’s a case of him putting Neelix’s feelings ahead of Kes’: He doesn’t even mention Neelix during his chat with Kim. Yes, he could go up to Kes and say “So, do you fancy dumping Neelix for me?” or words to that effect, but it seems more reasonable for him to assume that Kes is in a relationship with Neelix because she wants to be, not because she’s slumming it until she gets a better offer, and respect that. I think him avoiding her in the mess hall is mainly because he wants to avoid an intimate situation with her that could cause more unwanted feelings to surface.
But anyway, after half an episode of Neelix at his doucheyest, they finally get to talk and clear the air and put the whole jealousy thing to bed. I’m not entirely convinced this is the end of Neelix being possessive about Kes, I think he behaves in a way that could charitably be described as overprotective for the rest of their relationship, but it’s a definite step forward and from this point he and Paris actually become good friends. And he does demonstrate his basic decency by being the one most concerned about the fate of the baby alien.
I do like the Paris/Kim boys’ talk scene near the start, with Kim again questioning Paris’ habit of going for unattainable women and Paris telling him not to knock it until he tries it. (He will.) It seems a bit odd to have Kes absent from the senior staff meeting so she can pace the corridor waiting for an awkward encounter instead. And I find the Doctor/Kes scene that provided the episode quote delightful: The Doctor definitely seems to have progressed over the last few episodes to the point where he can give her decent advice even if he’s not always entirely socially aware.
I feel obliged to point out that it’s actually the trigemic vapour that’s the source of the proteins and amino acids, and the alien babies are capable of ingesting the necessary nutrients from it.
This was one of the first three episodes of Voyager I saw and one of the first I got on video. And therefore, whenever I watch it, I can’t help but notice that reused shot near the end that means Paris raises his phaser twice…
I’m always slightly annoyed when Neelix hopes Paris got a passing grade in the Starfleet survival course, Paris says he got a B- and Neelix says that’s not promising. Surely a B- is a passing grade? Goodness knows how he’d have reacted if Paris had got a C…
Three proper Season Two episodes and three shuttlecraft lost: They’re definitely making up for getting through the first season with a full complement. Somewhere on Voyager there’s an engineering crew working overtime building replacements for the shuttles the senior staff keep getting trashed.
First mention of Ensign Baytart, the oft-mentioned-but-never-seen relief helmsman. First time we see Chakotay taking the helm…well, it gives him something to do. (He does manage to pre-empt Tuvok’s cunning plan to disable the alien ship in a mildly amusing moment.) And I suddenly realise the Doctor’s starting doing “I’m a doctor, not a-” gags and I didn’t notice. Was the one in “Twisted” the first?
@17: To be pedantic, Paris doesn’t have a provisional rank, he has a field commission. He has the same rank insignia as the rest of the Starfleet crew, not those little oblongs that the Maquis have. (Also, in terms of the ship’s chain of command, he seems to be at least as high as Bashir, possibly higher after Worf got added in above him.) Of course, shortly we’ll get Enterprise and Tucker, which definitely bucks the trend…
EDIT: Oh yes, another bit of trivia. I wouldn’t have said Paris was particularly underused in the first season either but apparently CIC Video did, since they waited until the volume this episode is on to include a profile of him on the interior sleeve. All the other main cast got one in Season One (that’s the intended 19-episode Season One, ten tapes)!
@24/cap-mjb: “I’d have said it was a given that he was attracted to her, so it seems odd to have him confiding in Kim as if he’s only just realised it.”
There’s a very big difference between finding someone attractive and being in love with them. A womanizer like Paris finds many women attractive, but his interest is casual and mainly physical. Falling in love is a much more intense fixation, and much more unusual for a womanizer.
“I’m always slightly annoyed when Neelix hopes Paris got a passing grade in the Starfleet survival course, Paris says he got a B- and Neelix says that’s not promising. Surely a B- is a passing grade?”
It’s a passing grade, but a mediocre one.
Quoth cap-mjb: “First time we see Chakotay taking the helm…well, it gives him something to do.”
The second, actually — third if you count the fact that he piloted his Maquis ship in “Caretaker.” But he also was the pilot in “Ex Post Facto” showing off some nifty maneuvers.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@6/Krad: Fourth. Initiations had him inside a shuttlecraft all by himself.
@19; Sometimes, I try and picture Voyager with Locarno. One of the things I liked about TNG’s The First Duty was the way McNeill inhabited that character. As inexcusable as Locarno’s actions were, McNeill really sells the character as someone that inspires a lot of people around him. Every single one of those cadets – Wesley included – would look up to him, which is his best quality and also his most dangerous aspect. They’d fall off a cliff for him because he shows affection and attachment for every single companion on that squadron.
@25: “There’s a very big difference between finding someone attractive and being in love with them.” That’s a fair point, I guess I kind of got blind-sided by him saying he thought they were just good buddies, but it’s not as inconsistent as I initially thought. (I would say though that by this point it’s clear Paris’ womanising is very much an informed ability: “Ex Post Facto” aside, he’s only got physical with holograms until now; he basically isn’t involved with anyone at all in season two (unless you count Frog Janeway); in season three I think he has precisely one guest star love interest, then he’s involved with B’Elanna until the show’s end. I think it’s more accurate to say that he tends to be very flirtatious around women he’s attracted to but it doesn’t seem to go any further than that.)
@26: Doh! I’d completely forgotten about that but as soon as I checked the transcript it came back to me. I think the fact that we didn’t get Janeway’s “Chakotay, take the helm” instruction meant it passed me by.
@27: The series should have just used Nick Locarno instead as was initially intended but the creators of Voyager were being cheap. They didn’t want to pay the writer who originated the character, Ron Moore, essentially every time that character would be used which would have been just about every episode of the series.
It would have been great to see Locarno earn his redemption.
Well… so clearly this episode wasn’t as good on the execution as I remembered. I AM glad that Jealous!Neelix is gone, but I could have sworn it involved, you know, some conversation with Kes to get there.
@7 – “They have replicators. As long as they have raw materials and energy, they can create any replacement component they need. “
We have seen that there are materials that cannot be replicated, lanthanum for example. It would have been better if they were shown having to locate the rare materials needed to replace the shuttles. Also, the crew are on replicator rations so there’s obviously some problem with simply replicating your problems away.
@11 – Perhaps hair pasta is actually the hair of some sort of animal, You boil it up and it turns into a semi reasonable replacement for regular pasta.
@15 – “and even invite them all back to his cabin for a three-way tryst. “
This is the same Star Trek tat wouldn’t even acknowledge that gay people exist until well into the 21st century. A three-way would probably make TPTBs heads explode.
@garreth: There is no way, in the mid 1990s, that a PG-rated show in the USA would depict a ménage-à-trois (off-screen) or a polyamorous relationship. This episode aired about a year-and-a-half before Ellen Degeneres’s character came out of the closet on her sitcom, and I remember that was considered breaking a major barrier in 1997 when it happened. It was also very controversial at the time with many religious activists trying to pressure advertisers into withdrawing their sponsorship of the show. It is hard to believe it was only a little over 20 years ago that happened, and now there are plenty of characters on prime-time television who are in different kinds of relationships, with “Modern Family” and “Brothers and Sisters” being two famous examples.
@32/rms81: I realize such a thing would never have happened in that era. I’m just saying that creatively, I think it would have been much more satisfying than the actual character and his personality traits that we ended up with, in my opinion.
@11/@31 – it is indeed – from the follicles of the mature Alfarian, collected during shedding season. Presumably then ground up and used as flour, rather than being cooked in the natural state – either that of the alfarian has a really, really large hair width because it looks like normal width spaghetti or similar to me!
Starfleet seems to have some very lenient standards of conduct. Two crewmen get into a food fight in the cafeteria, and we do not see any sort of discipline for it? In most workplaces, that would get you fired. They couldn’t remove them from the ship but they could still be relieved of their duties.
@35: Neelix isn’t really an official officer anyway, but Neelix and Paris literally went right from the food fight to being requested by the captain for the away mission because they were both the best at the particular skills they were needed for (Paris for piloting and Neelix for scouting for food). Janeway couldn’t relieve them of duties even if she really wanted to in this particular situation.
Really? They’re complaining about having to go one day out of their way on a journey that is supposed to last 70 years?
@35 – Spock assaulted Starfleet officers, kidnapped Pike, stole the Enterprise as well as sent false orders to the ship to start the whole thing in motion and didn’t get so much as a slap on the wrist.
Kirk was charged with numerous offences and was demoted back to the job he really wanted in the first place.
He also ordered Scotty to kill the entire population of a planet because he was taken hostage.
And Sarek of all people plotted planetary genocide and would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for his meddling kid.
Yeah, Starfleet and the Federation are pretty light on punishment.
So I decided to try to start keeping up with the rewatch. And this episode was up first.
And my 13 year old daughter, who has never seen a full episode of star trek, joined me to watch it…her impressions below:
“Wow, there’s more romance here than I thought Star Trek would have”
“Neelix is really annoying”
“Why would Kes want either of these guys? One is ugly and annoying and the other is just dumb” – This is after Paris says they go out into the vapors
“The alien baby is really weird and freaking me out”
“Not as science-y as I expected”
Interestingly, she is open to watching more.
Nealh, I totally see your daughter’s point, why would Kes want either of these guys? I gather she and Neelix have a fraught history of survival together but really their love seems to be more an informed characteristic than something we actually see. As for Paris…. Well I can see being friends with him but he’s not my type either. Frankly Kes is the most interesting of the three. I can see the naive Ocampan girl being horrified by the Doctor’s little joke. ‘Neelix and Paris might kill each other and I’m supposed be flattered????’ and greeting them on their return with a passionate mixture of relief and anger informing them in no uncertain terms that she is not having this! No more fighting. Ever! Do you hear me?! And the men having to sooth her down and promise that they’ll behave from now on. Look, we’re friends! You don’t have to worry!
Also forgot to mention – it looks as though Garrett / Harry can actually play the clarinet?
nealh: I don’t know if Garrett can actually play the clarinet or not, but he seemed to be faking it pretty well, at the very least, as his fingering appeared to match the notes…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It stands to reason that if a character is given some random talent for music or dance or whatever, there’s a good chance it’s a skill that the actor already possesses and that was written into the character so the actor could show it off.
This has been a rather rough patch of episodes to get through these past few weeks. Apparently quite a few of you like this episode much better than I do. (I think that I may even [*gulp*] like ‘Twisted’ better than this….but I digress)
I remember not much caring for ‘Parturition’ when it originally aired, saw it once more in reruns a few months after that and, feeling the same about it then, I’ve just continually skipped past it since when watching Voyager reruns. After viewing it once again after several years I still haven’t learned to like it any better. I do like the line from Janeway in the opening (“Set a course for Planet Hell, commander.”) and I also like the moment when Tuvok is explaining how he will subdue the alien ship’s ability to fire upon them – but before he can finish what he’s saying, Chakotay steals his thunder by intuiting the same plan of attack. An act which seems to annoy Tuvok, although as would be expected, he does quite adequately suppress that feeling…but there’s enough of a hint that we can pick up on it. Other than that it was a slog to get through.
Speaking of keeping track of things: How many times did they have someone respond to one of Janeway’s orders with, “Yes, ma’am!” with extra emphasis on “ma’am”.
I’m guessing Tom Paris is running in first place
Didn’t Janeway make it known she preferred to be addressed as Captain? Or maybe it was supposed to be a running gag that so many people said ma’am instead of Captain…and I just missed it?
@45/owlly72: In “Caretaker,” she said “Ma’am is acceptable in a crunch, but I prefer Captain,” and when Harry then called her “Ma’am,” she said, “It’s not crunch time yet, Mr. Kim. I’ll let you know when.” So that set up the idea that people call her “ma’am” when things get serious.
“Neelix is the ship’s expert on how to turn local flora into food”
Because there are no actual science officers on the ship…
@1 – Chris: RE: Janeway’s hair… we don’t need an explanation, it’s just those nifty hairdressing doohickeys Roddenberry assumed women had in the future.
The shivering of the cold blooded alien baby is kinda weird, man.
According to Wang he does not play the clarinet, however he had a coach help him with the fingering so it looked like he was actually playing.
It’s so obvious! The hair pasta is Janeway’s hair! Apparently the dish was a flop, so the Doctor grafted it back onto Janeway’s short hairdo which explains why her hair was long again by the next episode
I’m surprised more of Neelix’s food doesn’t wind up with hair in it what with the length of his whiskers.
This is the only episode where I had to break out my dictionary to figure out what the title meant.
@52/bgsu98: I had to look up “Cathexis” too. And ENT: “Vox Sola.” (I thought it was “Voice of the Sun,” but it means “A Lone Voice.”)
You know, you’re right; I’d forgotten about “Cathexis” and that was another word whose definition I didn’t know. Thinking back, the difference was I just went with “Cathexis” as the title and was never compelled to look it up. I remember seeing the definition later in some article or forum about the episode. But with “Parturition,” I was compelled to actually pull out the dictionary. I suppose building my vocabulary was just about the only positive outcome from this otherwise terrible episode.