“Investigations”
Written by Jeff Schnaufer & Ed Bond and Jeri Taylor
Directed by Les Landaur
Season 2, Episode 20
Production episode 135
Original air date: March 13, 1996
Stardate: 49485.2
Captain’s log. Neelix’s latest endeavor as morale officer is to provide a news program for the crew called A Briefing with Neelix. He insists that he will only have good news on the program, which is probably wise, though also a challenge for a ship that’s stuck 70,000 light-years from home, but whatever.
After finishing the day’s recording, Neelix gets a message from a Talaxian buddy who’s now working on a convoy. He says that someone from Voyager is leaving the ship to join his crew, news that stuns Neelix.
He goes straight to Janeway, and she and Tuvok reveal that the crewmember who’s leaving is Paris—last seen being hauled off to the brig after shoving Chakotay on the bridge. Neelix then goes to Paris, concerned that Paris is leaving because of Neelix himself (because it’s always all about Neelix), but Paris says it’s only about Neelix insofar as Paris is better suited to a life like the one Neelix had before he joined Voyager: an itinerant drifter, going from job to job, not the regimented life of Starfleet.
Neelix records a moving tribute to Paris on the next A Briefing with Neelix while Paris himself says his goodbyes to everyone, with Kim, Kes, and Neelix seeing him off in the transporter room.
Buy the Book
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
A staff meeting is interrupted by Jonas, who contacts Torres to inform her that there’s a plasma overload in the warp core. Neelix follows Torres to engineering, thinking there might be a story in it. Torres, Jonas, Hogan, and the rest of the engineering crew stop the overload, but Jonas and two other engineers are badly injured. Their warp coils are also damaged, and they need verterium cortenide to repair them. Neelix says the closest source of such is in the Hemikek system.
As they set course for Hemikek, Voyager receives a distress call from the Talaxian convoy. The Kazon-Nistrim attacked them, kidnapped Paris, but didn’t take their cargo. They knew Paris was on board and only wanted him.
Seska interrogates Paris on the Kazon ship. She wants his help to take over Voyager. He refuses, and she inexplicably leaves him alone in a room with a computer console—and apparently didn’t search him, either, as he pulls a device out of his sleeve that he uses to try to access communications logs.
Neelix talks to Kes about the kidnapping of Paris. The Kazon must have found out that Paris was going to be on that convoy, and Neelix is concerned that there’s a spy on board. With Hogan’s help, he starts to access the communications logs, and he notices some odd gaps. Jonas sees what he’s doing and comes up with a bullshit excuse related to the warp-core overload they had earlier, but Jonas is obviously scared. He even picks up a tool to attack Neelix with, but then Neelix is called away by the EMH.
Taking his concerns to Tuvok, Neelix is surprised that the security chief basically blows him off, and also tells him to cease his inquiries into this matter, as it’s a security concern, not a journalistic one. Never one to take no for an answer, Neelix continues investigating anyhow. He asks Torres for help, but she’s busy, so she fobs him off on Hogan. Hogan thinks it’s a waste of time, but then he sees some more anomalies—communications that were hidden in the power grid. He traces them to Paris’s quarters.
The next A Briefing with Neelix is an exposé of Tom Paris, Evil Kazon Spy. Janeway and Tuvok then summon Neelix and Chakotay to a meeting. Tuvok had already investigated the communications logs before Neelix came to him—the “evidence” that Neelix found was not there then, which means it was planted after Neelix started digging around.
Janeway and Tuvok finally let the other shoe drop: Paris isn’t the spy, he’s been trying to find the spy. Tuvok discovered that covert communications were being sent to Culluh’s ship, but he couldn’t trace them to a specific crewmember. So Janeway and Tuvok got Paris to act out so that it would be convincing that he would leave the ship and then get kidnapped by the Kazon. Chakotay is livid that he was kept out of the loop, but Tuvok was worried that a former Maquis might be the spy, and it would put Chakotay in an awkward position—besides, him not knowing helped sell Paris’s deception.
Paris cleans up the comm logs on the Kazon ship enough to learn that Jonas is the traitor—and also that Voyager’s going to a trap on Hemikek. He manages to escape his captors by turning his widget into a bomb, and stealing a shuttle.
Through a very contrived set of circumstances, Neelix and Jonas wind up alone in engineering, and when Paris’s shuttle approaches, Janeway orders Jonas to boost transporter power. Instead, Jonas sabotages the transporter, and also the tactical systems. Neelix tries to stop him, but Jonas has him trapped behind a force field.
Janeway sends Tuvok to engineering once Paris reveals that Jonas is the traitor. Jonas has knocked Neelix unconscious and removed both his and Neelix’s combadges. (An attempt to beam Jonas out of engineering results in the combadge only being beamed out.)
The Kazon are now firing on Voyager and a plasma conduit ruptures from a weapons hit. Voyager can’t fight back thanks to Jonas’s sabotage. Neelix comes to and attacks Jonas. They grapple and then Jonas falls over the railing into the plasma stream from the ruptured conduit, where he’s incinerated. Neelix gets the weapons back online, and Voyager is able to fight back and get away.
The next A Briefing with Neelix is an interview with Paris explaining what happened and apologizing to everyone.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Jonas is apparently a talented enough engineer that he can sabotage the warp drive in such a way that the ship will need supplies from Hemekik, and nobody notices the sabotage at all for, like, ages.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway thought it was a good idea to keep her first officer in the dark about a spy on board the ship, but it was perfectly okay to tell the ex-con dudebro pilot who should be the first on anyone’s suspect list about it.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is able to find out that there’s a spy on board, but he has to rely on Paris’s ability to get captured by people so stupid they leave a never-searched prisoner in a room with a computer console and no guards, and also on Neelix’s heretofore nonexistent journalistic skills.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Neelix approaches the EMH about doing a health segment, but then keeps postponing his segment.
Forever an ensign. Kim was apparently a student journalist at the Academy and did a story on the Maquis that was very well received. He thinks Neelix shouldn’t limit himself to just shiny happy stories, but should also do more investigative and opinionated reporting.
Kim insists on not replacing Paris officially in case he comes back, making me wonder who he thinks should be flying the ship during alpha shift, exactly…
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix thinks that having to listen to him talk every morning about how wonderful things are on Voyager will improve morale, which calls into question why Janeway continues to allow him to be morale officer.
Do it.
“I know that I’ve been acting like a jerk for the last couple of months. Unfortunately, I had to behave that way if the spy was going to believe that I really wanted to leave the ship. So, I’d like to apologize to anyone that I might have offended—especially Commander Chakotay. I gave him a pretty hard time—not that it wasn’t a certain amount of fun, mind you…”
–Paris taking a stab at apologizing, but unable to resist still being a jackass at the end.
Welcome aboard. Jerry Sroka plays Laxeth, while the other guest stars are recurring regulars: Martha Hackett as Seska, Raphael Sbarge as Jonas, and Simon Billig as Hogan. It’s Sbarge’s last appearance as Jonas, though the character’s voice will be heard in “Worst Case Scenario” in season three. Billig will next be in “Deadlock,” while Hackett will return for the season-spanning “Basics” two-parter.
Trivial matters: The original conception of this episode was that it would be entirely from Neelix’s perspective. It was the executives at Paramount who pointed out that this meant we didn’t see any of Paris’s heroic actions, which made the revelation that he’d been faking his insubordination all this time less effective. Let this serve as a reminder that not all studio notes are bad ones.
Janeway mentions Baytart and Hamilton as possible replacements for Paris as alpha-shift conn officer. Baytart is also mentioned during A Briefing with Neelix as a talented juggler, and he was also mentioned in “Parturition” as one of the other pilots on board. Hamilton has never been referenced before or since.
Jonas’s death means that Voyager is now down eight crew from the 154 they started with in the Delta Quadrant. Of the other seven, five have died (Durst, Darwin, Bendera, and two others who are unnamed), one left (Seksa), and one is confined to quarters (Suder).
Neelix’s news show will only be seen one more time, in the third season’s “Macrocosm,” where it’s established that he changed the title to Good Morning, Voyager.
Abdullah bin al-Hussein, at the time prince of Jordan, and now king, has a cameo as a crewmember in the sciences division in the teaser. The appearance was a huge thrill for King Abdullah, who is a huge Star Trek fan, and who only expected to visit the set, not be on camera.
Jonas’s sabotage of the warp core, and the need for Voyager to go to Hemikek, was set up in “Lifesigns,” the previous episode.
Set a course for home. “You never know what might be featured on A Briefing with Neelix!” If you’re going to spend several episodes setting up a storyline, you really need to think through the conclusion a little better than they manage here.
What could have been a promising subplot about Paris’s discontent on the ship, one that could even be established as post-traumatic stress from his experiences in “Threshold,” instead turns out to be a stupid con game that only works due to several phenomenal bits of dumb luck. For starters, what if the spy never bothered to tell the Kazon about Paris’s defection? Or what if the Kazon decided, not to kidnap Paris, but to kill him? Or what if the Kazon searched Paris and found the doodad he had up his sleeve (I mean, seriously, it was literally up his sleeve)? Or what if the Kazon didn’t imprison their valuable kidnap victim in a room with a computer console, or even if they did something that stupid, they put a friggin’ guard on him?
Any of those things happen, and Tuvok and Janeway’s plan is shit out of luck.
Chakotay’s authority as first officer is completely undermined, as two of his subordinates are engaged in a covert mission behind his back, with the full support of his captain. And it makes no sense for it to be Paris who does this anyhow. Think about this for a second. One the one hand, you’ve got a Starfleet commander who left Starfleet of his own accord and became a talented enough Maquis cell leader that an entire ship was sent just after him. On the other hand, you’ve got a Starfleet washout whose history involves getting people killed and getting his sorry ass caught and imprisoned.
Which of those two do you think would make a better stalking horse for the spy on board? I’ll give you a hint: he has a tattoo on his face. But, once again, the show is far too invested in making sure that the white guy gets to do all the cool stuff.
On top of that, the Jonas arc ends with a pathetic whimper, because at no point do we find out why Jonas did what he did. Why does he want to go against his crewmates to help Seska—who betrayed all of them—and the Kazon—who are assholes? Of course, given all the engineering feats he pulled off, maybe he’s pissed that Torres got the chief engineer nod over him. Or maybe he has the hots for Seska. Or maybe the writers were too damn lazy to come up with a good reason and threw him into a plasma leak to save themselves from having to bother.
I haven’t even gotten to the worst element of the episode, which is that it decides to turn Neelix into a journalist. If this was played for laughs, à la the MASH Notes newspaper that Corporal Klinger started in the “Depressing News” episode of M*A*S*H, it might have worked, but we’re supposed to believe that this mediocre-scavenger-turned-mediocre-cook-and-moderately-useful-local-guide is also a journalist? And that he actually breaks the case open where Tuvok couldn’t? Oy.
Thank goodness that the suits at Paramount curbed the idiotic excesses of the writing staff and kept them from doing the entire show from Neelix’s POV, as that would’ve been disastrous. Not that the final version is anything to write home about, either.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be attending KAG Kon 2020: Home Invasion, an online event focusing on Klingon related stuff this coming weekend. Keith will be doing a reading, which will be available throughout the weekend, and also doing panel discussions on his Klingon fiction and Klingon religion. Here’s his schedule.
I’m not surprised I didn’t remember any of the insubordinate Paris plot. I was expecting Jonas to reach out to Paris to try and establish a cabal or something. Having Paris leave the ship and get kidnapped only to discover Jonas’ communications so quickly makes the whole thing very uninteresting.
Way too many plot holes for this episode to be entertaining. The two that really had me shaking my head were 1) Despite all the sabotaging Jonas was doing in Engineering at the end, Janeway doesn’t realize he’s the traitor until Paris tells her; 2) Jonas inexplicably tosses himself into plasma stream by running straight at Neelix, who performs the simplest side step. I’ve seen better acting in fake wrestling.
Yeah, once again, I can only imagine what VOY would’ve looked like in later Seasons if the Kazon-Seska-Jonas arcs hadn’t been so badly executed and received.
Maybe UPN would’ve been more open to embracing a DS9 approach instead of a hellbent ‘TNG-era Planet of the Week’ formula and approach.
Then again, given the network paradigm and markets at the time, I don’t think they’d have been open regardless.
(An attempt to beam Jonas out of engineering results in the combadge only being beamed out.)
This sequence drives me crazy. The transporters work and they beam people without combadges all the time. Lock on to the human lifesign and beam it out. Or beam Tuvok and his security team in. Or beam knockout gas in, then beam in engineers after the gas clears. They really went out of their way to make sure the episode climaxed in a lame fistfight. The crazy thing is, they already established that a forcefield was up. Just say it’s blocking the transporter too. Sure, that makes Voyager look even more preposterously easy to sabotage, but I’d rather have a competent crew with a lemon of a starship than an inept crew with a slightly less defective ship.
I think it made more sense for Paris than Chakotay to be the plant to snuff out the spy, ironically for the very reasons that Keith thinks he should not have been. Yes he’s an ex-con, with a history of insubordination and being difficult to get along with. I’d be much less likely to suspect a motivation behind his insolence and ultimate decision to leave the ship then chakotay, who despite all his Maquis mystique has really been mostly a straight arrow since joining Voyager.
I actually kinda liked the journalism angle, since it’s not something we see a lot of in Star Trek, and it gave Neelix something new to do. The fact that he’s not an experienced journalist is the whole point — he goes into it thinking it should just be a nice fluffy morale thing, but quickly learns it carries greater responsibilities. That’s something far too many TV news personalities these days never learn.
The hugest, worst, most obnoxious plot hole is one Keith doesn’t even mention. The sabotage basically destroys the warp coils. Torres explicitly says “the warp engines are useless until we can rebuild them.” The trap was designed so that they’d have to go to the Hemikek system for the necessary repair materials, which means it was the only possible source in range at impulse power. And yet Hemikek turned out to be a trap and they never got the materials. At the end of the episode, the warp coils are still destroyed and their only chance at repairing them has been lost. So how the hell are the warp engines fixed and working perfectly again in the very next damn episode???????? This show always had its problems with continuity, but this is the single most massive, inexplicable reset button in the entire series.
I suppose it’s possible that they could’ve used shuttlecraft to travel at warp to some other system with verterium and cortenum, then brought it back to Voyager and repaired the coils. Or the Talaxian convoy could’ve found a legit source to trade with and obtained some for Voyager. But it’s a huge oversight that the show never explained any of this. They left the ship and crew completely, hopelessly stranded at the end of one episode and picked up with them totally fine and on the road again in the next, without a single word of explanation. This is very bad writing.
This episode and its execution of the Jonas/Paris arc is so stupid and lazy and implausible that it retroactively makes all of the build-up a waste and all of those one-off scenes about the arc in prior episodes, some of them good, as annoying filler.
I was most offended by the whole keeping Chakotay in the dark thing. Way to have trust in your First Officer! The way Janeway so casually waves off his indignation about this revelation is shocking to the audience and I were Chakotay I would have gone off on her right then and there, chain of command be damned!
That’s cool about the king of Jordan cameo. I recall reading about it decades ago. Maybe Star Trek: Discovery having filmed its first episode in Jordan has something to do with the king’s love of the franchise. I think he may have had a cameo in the first X-Men movie too although that may be another foreign dignitary I’m misremembering.
Having a character behave badly over several episodes and eventually get fired, but having it be a long con to spy on his enemies, is something we hadn’t seen in Star Trek before. So points for originality at least, even if the payoff wasn’t great. Brooklyn 99 had a similar plot with Jake twenty years later, but I can’t think of a earlier use of it.
Keith, not sure if I’m reading your bio correctly. You have a Klingon religion or you will just be discussing Klingon religion?
@8/garethwilson: I think Jeri Taylor said afterward that she realized in retrospect that it had been a mistake to try to base their serialized arc on an external factor — the Kazon recruiting a spy and prompting Paris’s con to root him out — rather than having it emerge from the characters and their relationships. Maybe that’s why the only real arcs we had going forward were character-driven, like the Paris-Torres romance and Seven of Nine’s rediscovery of her humanity.
Austin: discussing Klingon religion.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@8 The same sort of plot device/thread was used in NUMB3RS (anyone here watch that?!) which slots in between the B99 use and Voyager. The NUMB3RS version played out in s2/3ish back in about 2005/6. And for a much older example, check out the backstory for the character of Burnside from the British police soap The Bill – that one’s from back in the mid-80s! In both NUMB3RS and The Bill there was fallout (and particularly in The Bill, there were other characters on the show who never believed/forgave Burnside.)
As for this episode, I tend to agree with Keith that Chakotay would have (probably) been a better actual operative, but Paris’ history makes his defection/disaffection work – at least as a concept, for me. Reading the review really does drive home how badly the whole thread was executed, though!
@11 – I thought so! It said “his” just before the religion part, so it threw me for a loop.
Completely anti-climatic ending to what had been an interesting continuing sub-plot….it resolves very little other than ending the life of the traitor. The demise of Jonas was SO frustrating in that it results in no follow-up: why did he do it? What brought him to become involved in some sort of pact with Seska (who was a traitor to the Maquis – so, yeah, you gotta wonder why does he even engage with her?) and making himself a ‘tool’ for the all too obvious untrustworthy Kazon??? We never do get answers to those questions…nor do we see any convincing proof or indication that Jonas was only acting on his own and no other Voyager crew members may also be in league with him. Previous eps of the show do seem to establish that he is acting alone, but a more thorough investigation to make certain would have been the next natural step.
I too thought it was ridiculous to have First Officer Chakotay left out of the plan to root out the traitor. But then there’s just so much more here that is deserving of ridicule, most especially the Kazon leaving Paris unguarded in a room with computer and communication access – and apparently they didn’t even bother to search him when they captured him? Yeah, right….
Having Neelix play an ‘investigative reporter’ doesn’t bother me so much – but it shouldn’t have been that easy for him to uncover the hidden transmissions. What if, after Neelix visits Tuvok in his quarters and brings the transmissions logs to his attention, Tuvok had simply contacted Torres and instructed her and the Engineering staff to cease assisting Neelix in looking at transmissions logs? Or….how about if Tuvok had isolated them within the computer and encrypted the logs to keep them secure?? It would certainly seem like a good security measure since he had a plan in place to root out a spy. Any further investigation into them would seriously risk unraveling what part(s) of the plan has transpired so far. Of course, taking either of those actions might very well tip off the spy too….so there’s that to consider….or, how about if Tuvok set it up so that each time the transmissions logs were accessed he’d be alerted??
Anyway, there’s just too many plot holes here to overlook to make this episode work well at all. And, mercifully, we won’t be subjected to seeing anymore of A Briefing With Neelix until a short cameo of one next season.
Awwww . . . all this hate for the plot holes (some of the biggest I’ve ever seen) has obscured how much fun they had with the EMH and all his ridiculous segments for Neelix’s show that were constantly being preempted.
Meanwhile, *raises hand* me, me! I loved Numb3rs. Even though the math plots became more and more outrageous—even I could tell, and I failed high school algebra—I loved the ensemble of real family and found family and all their interactions. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed any of the actors (male and female) as much in anything they’ve done since.
I liked Numb3rs too. I remember a forensic scientist proudly saying how accurate a fingerprint match was, and the mathematician giving her the horrendous number of false matches that implied. I must have missed the spy plot on it. As for this episode, I actually misremembered what Paris’ plan was. Rather than just getting kidnapped, I thought he actually defected and inserted himself as a double agent in the Kazon leadership. The spy on Voyager would confirm he had a grudge against Janeway. Maybe that would have been a better payoff.
I watched Numb3rs sporadically. I’m a big fan of David Krumholtz, Rob Morrow, and especially Judd Hirsch. It was a fun show.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
You know, this one has its flaws but I rather like it. It’s got an unpromising beginning with a pre-credit sequence showing Neelix at his most irritating but he settles down after that and it becomes one of the better Neelix-centric episodes. And of course it brings our two story arcs to a close.
It was apparently obvious to everyone else, but when I first watched these episodes, I had no idea Paris was acting under orders, so it was a great relief to find that he hasn’t really become That Guy. I mean, I doubt that anyone expected his leaving the ship to stick, but I thought he was for real and his experience with the Kazon would cause him to give Voyager another go, only for it to turn out he’s been on the side of the angels all along. His farewell scene with Neelix showed how far they’ve both come since “Parturition” and he gets hugs from Kes and Harry out of it. Still, as he suggests at the end, being ordered to be rude to Chakotay probably didn’t cause him too many problems. Tuvok’s justification for keeping his superior out of the loop is extremely weak. Janeway’s is a bit better.
Not sure what to say about Jonas here. After his brief attempt at squeamishness last episode, he seems to have turned into a homicidal maniac now, being quite willing to kill Neelix (and how was he going to explain that one?) before being interrupted, and ending up pretty much trying to wreck the ship. I guess he’d decided that he’d gone too far, there was no way he was going to escape exposure and his only hope was to help the Kazon win. He’s not particularly competent as a villain but everyone else seems to have lost a few IQ points as well. Why put a force field in place that locks Neelix in with him rather than shutting him out? And when the crew work out he’s the traitor, they try and beam him out but only get his combadge. As has been said, that’s fine, but then why not just lock onto the only human lifesign in Engineering and beam that out? The forcefield can’t be blocking the transporter or they wouldn’t have got the combadge. It’s made even more absurd when they’ve just beamed Paris in without a combadge!
Seska makes a reappearance but curiously no mention of Culluh, who you’d expect to be right in at the kill during an attempt to ambush Voyager. I’ve read reviews saying Paris should have killed Seska when he had the chance, but that’s not very Starfleet. Baytart gets a first name and a line but still doesn’t appear on screen. There’s an anonymous crewmember in medical uniform helping treat the wounded from Engineering: Usually the Doctor and Kes are portrayed as the entire medical staff. (When they were both out of action in “Cathexis”, Paris had to take over as medic, but of course he’s not on board here.) Interesting that the Doctor already likes the idea of being a star, as per his reaction to appearing on Neelix’s show. Ironically, although Paris’ warning saves Voyager from the trap, Neelix takes Jonas down without hearing his information. (As CLB said, no mention of where Voyager gets the materials from with Hemikek out of the picture, of course.)
This episode just shows that Janeway really wants Tuvok to be first officer. She trusts him more, seeks his counsel, and doesn’t seem to look to or listen to Chakotay at all. At this point Chakotay should have just said, “Thanks, I’m out of here,” and gone to work in engineering or somewhere. Granted, putting Chakotay as first officer was a political move to unite the crew, but it’a a decision that she doesn’t seem to really own, considering how many times she undercuts him in favor of Tuvok. He deserved better.
When I watched this season for the first time a couple of years ago, I didn’t realize Paris being a jerk was a storyline for the season.
I just thought, you know, the character is a jerk. Still do.
The best way I can figure Jonas’s actions making sense is if Seska had already suborned him pre-Voyager, as part of her infiltration of the cell for Cardassia, and was now blackmailing him by threatening to reveal that fact to his Maquis comrades. But that requires assuming a bunch of facts not yet in evidence, and would also mean that Chakotay’s cell included three spies.
(Do we have an idea how large Chakotay’s crew was pre-Voyager?)
@21/Cuttlefish: Jonas’s motives were basically established back at the start in “Alliances,” although it’s pretty indirect. Hogan is the one who speaks up at Bendera’s memorial and later in engineering, saying that it would be better to share technology with the Kazon in exchange for their protection rather than clinging to Starfleet principles, but in both scenes, Jonas is next to Hogan, listening and thinking. So implicitly he agrees with Hogan, but while Hogan respects the chain of command enough to back down and obey orders he disagrees with, Jonas is the one who actually goes through with it.
Still, it’s a weak way to establish the arc, since you have to pay attention to the guy just standing there and listening while Hogan argues, though Jonas does get closeups in the engineering scene when Hogan suggests to Torres that they should contact Seska through back channels and make a deal with her. It would’ve helped if Jonas had been the one making the argument instead of Hogan, or if we’d seen an actual conversation between him and Hogan to establish Jonas’s attitudes more clearly. It’s as if they were trying to go for a red-herring thing, to make us suspicious of Hogan at first, but then they just showed us Jonas contacting the Kazon straight out, so there was no misdirection. What, then, was the point of having one character who made the argument and a different one who acted on it?
@19 It’s not always the case, however. I haven’t watched Voyager in its entirety, but it sure seems that Janeway and Chakotay’s relationship and trust grow well as the show progresses, to the point where Janeway looks to him more and undercuts him in favor of Tuvok less. Episodes such as “The Omega Directive,” and “Unimatrix Zero” come to mind (although, granted, in the latter, she does waver for a moment.) It doesn’t hurt that Chakotay isn’t afraid to speak up and tell her when she’s making a mistake.
Not that everything is perfect between them, of course. In the episode “Scorpion,” I absolutely despise how Janeway treats Chakotay, but at least it’s implied that she’s happy that Chakotay is her first officer. And in the episode “Timeless,” she makes her decision, but at least invites Chakotay, not Tuvok, to dinner and says “I’m determined to do this…are you with me?”
This is one of those episodes I always thought really showed the many missed opportunities of Voyager. Martha Hackett was so good as Seska, and I always thought it would have been better if they had nixed the whole “Cardassian infiltrator” (seriously, the Maquis had to be like, 25% spies and infiltrators at this point, it’s amazing they ever accomplished as much as they did) plot, and had her stay on board and be the nexus of Maquis discontent. As time went on, and more and more opportunities to get home turned into nothing, you could even see some Starfleet people starting to be turned to her point of view.
At the very least, it would have been interesting to see Paris (unintentionally, obviously) end up attracting some other malcontents- but genuine ones where he is just pretending.
I suspect that whether or not you like this episode, warts and all, comes down to whether you’re prepared to like Mister Neelix (warts and all), which I suspect rendered its chances of a passing grade from krad dead on arrival …
One would also like to add myself to the list of those who think it makes perfect sense NOT to employ Mr Chakotay as the false defector; his competence as a leader completely failed him in matters of espionage to the extent of missing not one, but TWO moles in his own crew and his previous relationship with Seska makes it difficult to imagine Raj Kullah being willing to take a hand’s off approach with the commander (I suspect that we don’t see Kullah in this episode because he’s both busy bossing his gang AND could care less about one Tom Paris to boot – being perfectly happy to leave the whole business to his eminence gris).
I do agree that leaving Commander Chakotay completely in the dark was, if nothing else, deeply discourteous (even if the best way to keep a secret, especially in the spy game, is to make sure as few people as possible are in the know).
Once again, as too-often is the case with this overall awesome franchise, the acting had to sell me ridiculous premises and concepts.
Oh by the way, Kim: What the crew of your ship needs is not fucking hard-hitting journalism in the middle of what amounts to a constant crisis.
-An Anonymous Nerd
@23,
I’ve also always seen “Scorpion” as the last real hurrah for the Janeway-Chakotay dynamic. For better and worse, Seven’s introduction in Season Four very much usurped Chakotay’s role in the show (and Robert Beltran, from what I understand, was unsurprisingly not happy).
@27 – Yeah, well, I’m not sure how many people on the show were happy with Seven’s introduction, except maybe the producers. I imagine an ensemble show has to be hard on the ego.
@27 If I read correctly, Kate Mulgrew wasn’t too happy about Seven coming on board either.
@28 I actually liked Seven’s introduction, but if she was indeed introduced to attract more males to the show, that’s not the reason I like her introduction. I generally had fun seeing an ex-drone as part of the crew, and I like seeing her friendship with Janeway and the Doctor.
If only she had replaced Neelix and not Kes.
@29. I said it before and I’ll say it again, if you would have told me after the first few episodes that I would have Neelix’s back later in the series, I would have been very surprised. But I actually liked the progression of his character throughout the seven seasons. I was never a big Kes fan, primarily because her soft-spoken, maddeningly even-toned voice kinda creeped me out. :)
@30 I will say this much, I wasn’t too disappointed to see Kes gone either, though I don’t blame Jennifier Lien any more than I blame Ethan Phillips. Actually, originally it was Kim who was going to be replaced, but then it was switched to Kes.
@29 – That was pretty much the only reason she was added and was the antithesis of what Mulgrew wanted for the show. And Mulgrew most certainly was not happy. She has discussed this pretty extensively and is regretful of how she treated Jeri Ryan, which, according to Jeri and other accounts, was pretty horribly.
@25 ” I suspect that whether or not you like this episode, warts and all, comes down to whether you’re prepared to like Mister Neelix (warts and all), which I suspect rendered its chances of a passing grade from krad dead on arrival … “
Let’s not forget that “Jetrel,” an episode where Neelix is one of the stars, was rated a perfect 10 out of 10 by krad.
I personally never had much of a problem with Neelix. Once he moved past being the jealous, overprotective (and dismissive) boyfriend of Kes phase, he became a much more palatable character. Idiosyncratic, yes, and his attempts at poking Tuvok’s vulcan facade could get tiresome. But he was still a better character than people like Chakotay and Kim.
I even like the idea of him pursuing journalism and doing a weekly column. It feels cliché to a certain degree, but it makes good use of him as a character. There was a potentially good story in this. It’s just too bad they had to waste it by anchoring it to this abysmal excuse of a long-term story arc.
This Paris/Jonas arc was so misguided and poorly thought out that it soured the writers on ever attempting external serialized stories again. The closest thing we get afterwards is the Hirogen arc in season 4, which barely qualifies as serialized, and it still performs MUCH better than this.
And it all comes down to half-assed character motivations. How does Jonas go from questioning his captain to selling classified intel to the Kazon, to being willing to MURDER a fellow crewmember? No wonder Jeri Taylor threw him at the power core. Who would want to provide the motivations behind this irreconcilable amount of contradictions that passes itself as a character?
And then there’s Tom Paris. The previous episodes did such a woeful job establishing a pattern of newfound rebellion that they might as well paint a neon sign that reads PLOT DEVICE on top of his head.
And then the solution to his rebellion is to approve his transfer to another vessel? Allowing a single crewmember – who was in probation, mind you, for Maquis crimes – to venture off into the unknown? Isn’t there a starfleet regulation that would put a lid on this? How would they know he wouldn’t violate half a dozen directives afterwards, including the Prime Directive, potentially contaminating the Delta Quadrant? If this were a real situation where Paris was really acting out, you couldn’t do the transfer option. At best, you could confine him to quarters the way they already did with Suder.
Or maybe maroon him on an uninhabited world the way Spock did to Kirk (but then again, the less said about that decision on Trek 09 the better).
And we’re forced to believe that this transfer will flush out the spy. Janeway and Tuvok should be stripped of rank and position after this, and that’s not even counting the fact they left Chakotay out of the loop.
And the rest of the episode is a series of plot contrivances. They’re asking us to buy the idea that the same Seska who was able to sneak off the ship would leave Paris alone actual shipboard equipment in range.
No wonder the Basics two parter is a deliberate attempt to walk back all of this Seska/Kazon/Paris/Jonas nonsense.
Not is Investigations one of the weakest Voyager episodes, it also indirectly sullies a lot of good episodes around it, thanks to the poorly thought out nature of this spy story arc. This is why I hold season 2 in such low regards. And this is why Taylor and Braga would consciously move away from this type of story, focusing more on standalone TNG-esque fare and blockbuster adventurous two parters and event shows.
*Not only
Aw I really loved this episode!!!
@29: “If I read correctly, Kate Mulgrew wasn’t too happy about Seven coming on board either.”
That is an understatement! Jeri Ryan described Mulgrew’s treatment of her as making her very uncomfortable but as soon as Ryan began a relationship with the Brannon Braga, the series co-creator, Mulgrew cut it out. Talk about your behind-the-scenes drama! It’s a testament to the great acting of both actresses though that you never see that tension between the two in their scenes together (which is often in a mentor/mentee dynamic) unless the particular scenes called for dramatic tension. It’ll be interesting to get Garrett Wang Robert Duncan McNeill’s take one the matter once their podcast gets up to Jeri Ryan’s debut. But Wang has already spoken out previously, including at a convention with Ryan, in which he spoke of trying to broker a peace between the two ladies.
Regarding adding Ryan to bring in more male viewers, that ended up being a failure too. Yes, there was a big spike in viewers for the debut of her character, more viewers than any episode in the prior season. And the episode after that where she makes her more human sexified look did lower but still solid numbers. But after that, viewership for the rest of the season and the series in general was in free fall. Still, she was a great actress and a great character that led to some excellent stories, and became a bit of a pop culture icon too. And now she’s on Star Trek: Picard so I’d say things worked out pretty good for the actress and the character.
@/34: I’m sorry, what? It seems like if Starfleet’s got a crewmember who’s not working out, letting them resign and get a job elsewhere seems like an obvious solution, as well as a basic right of sentient beings. Assuming Chakotay wasn’t pressing assault charges (and to be fair, he manhandled Paris first), then the only real issue is the fact that Paris had basically been paroled into Janeway’s custody, but we’re a year into the journey and Paris had been released in the alternate timeline from “Non-Sequitur”, so possibly his sentence was over by now anyway.
Voyager writers seem strangely obsessed with Paris. Did Chakotay ever get a story that wasn’t directly related to his cultural roots and practices? He seems to have been the show’s wooden Indian.
@39/roxana: “Did Chakotay ever get a story that wasn’t directly related to his cultural roots and practices?”
Yes, that aspect was much more downplayed after the first couple of seasons.
@38: The issue of basic rights in this case apply to civilians. Paris is a military officer who swore an oath. And they’re in the Delta Quadrant. Almost 70.000 light years from home. If they were back in the Alpha Quadrant, Paris would likely have to answer a board of inquiry at Starfleet HQ before being expelled and stripped of rank and position.
But in the Delta Quadrant, Janeway cannot afford to simply expel an officer and let him go his/her own way unattended. This is uncharted territory. Starfleet was never supposed to be there this soon. Any Starfleet officer, current or former, is in the position of establishing first contact with any number of unknown societies. Who’s to say Paris wouldn’t do the exact same as Seska and contaminate another less advanced society and use them to prey upon Voyager?
(not that that would actually happen, but we have to cover all bases)
Less than five episodes ago, they made the choice to confine Suder to quarters because throwing him off the ship simply wasn’t an option.
And then there’s the fact that Paris is in fact under probation for past crimes. While current Federation law enforcement guidelines seem to accept a year’s imprisonment as fair punishment – as seen with Kasidy Yates on DS9 – the fact is that Voyager has current no way of contacting Starfleet HQ. Therefore if Janeway were to maintain the Starfleet ideals she holds so dear, the only course of action would be to find a way to reestablish comm link with headquarters (which we know will take another several seasons and a few multi-light year jumps). If there were open communications with Starfleet, I’m certain they would forbid Janeway from allowing Paris to go.
@41/Eduardo: I think you’re overlooking the fact that Paris’s “transfer” was never real, it was part of the sting operation to expose the traitor working with the Kazon. So it isn’t a reflection of what Janeway would do in a genuine situation like that.
Anyway, Janeway was willing to let crewmembers stay behind in “The 37s.” Once they left Starfleet, they wouldn’t be subject to military rules anymore and she couldn’t stop them from sharing technology if that was what they chose to do. So clearly the policy is not as zero-tolerance as you suggest.
@42/Christopher: Maybe not, but even so, Jonas still had to believe it was real. And that character wasn’t nearly well established enough – we don’t know how versed he was in Starfleet regulations (we know he’s an engineering and communications wiz when the plot requires), but I’m assuming he had full knowledge of the rulebook and could easily figure whether he was being baited. He was already a spy, after all.
Or maybe he wasn’t that smart, but we didn’t know him as a character well enough to be sure. And it’s possible that being a former Maquis, he never bothered to read the full set of rules, but then Janeway and Tuvok would have to concoct this Paris transfer plan on the hopes that their spy would in fact be a rebellious Maquis (politically and socially profiling an entire subset of crewmembers in the process).
To me, this only reinforces how poorly this plot arc was implemented.
@41: Even Starfleet officers have some basic rights. Including the right to resign their commission whenever they want. Starfleet had to try and deny Data was sentient in order to deny him that right, and I don’t think anyone’s saying that about Paris. He wouldn’t be the first officer to be allowed to resign quietly in order to avoid a dishonourable discharge. It’d just be skipping straight ahead to losing his rank and position. It’s a bit of a stretch to compare a relatively minor assault on a superior officer (which probably would result in nothing more than being sent on his merry way, maybe with a token sentence of a few weeks in jail thrown in) to an unprovoked murder (which would usually result in long-term incarceration).
Starfleet only isn’t “supposed” to be in the Delta Quadrant if you take Q’s word as gospel. They are in the Delta Quadrant. Janeway doesn’t have the right to hold her crew prisoner and this isn’t the first or only time that the issue of someone choosing to leave the ship comes up. (I notice you avoided answering CLB’s reminder of “The 37s”.) Paris was taking a position with a warp-capable species that Voyager was already in contact with, not asking to be dropped off on a pre-industrial world with enough paraphernalia to declare himself their god. You can’t keep someone in custody because of they might theoretically commit a crime at some point in the future.
And I’m pretty sure Starfleet has regulations for a captain being allowed to act on their own initiative in circumstances where they’re out of contact with the upper echelons long-term. As I said, we don’t know how long Paris’ sentence was and they can’t exactly wait 75 years to get permission to formally release him. If he’s served his time, then he’s a free man.
@44: As I recall, the society depicted in The 37’s was technologically advanced, but I don’t recall whether they had any kind of spacefaring technology. I certainly don’t recall any ships. They destroyed the Briori ship, we know that much.
Janeway allowing crewmembers to live their lives on that particular world wouldn’t have deeper consequences for the Delta Quadrant, because they’d be stuck there, unable to travel to other worlds – despite living fulfilling free lives there. It wouldn’t be so different from Picard’s mandate for his crewmembers during First Contact to find a quiet spot in North America and stay out of history’s path – after self-destructing the Ent-E on that film.
Paris, on the other hand, would have ample freedom of travel across the quadrant. The only difference, in a practical sense, is that he would never do what Seska did. But on a hypothetical one, someone like Jonas might think twice and see through the facade.
@45/Eduardo: I don’t accept the premise that Janeway would’ve left them to be stranded forever. We’ll see four episodes from now in “Resolutions” that the protocol for leaving crew behind on a planet does not entail depriving them of the means to travel in space or make subspace contact with other civilizations. It would really be pretty cruel to condemn people who grew up in an interstellar civilization to a life stranded on a single planet.
You’ll also see going forward that the Prime Directive is not as rigid and absolutist with spacefaring civilizations as it is with pre-warp civilizations in the 24th century. There are times ahead in Voyager where Janeway does share Starfleet technology or assets with DQ civilizations. She didn’t share tech with the Kazon because she judged they were too irresponsible and belligerent to be trusted with it, not because there was some absolute ban on any exchange whatsoever. The analogy to First Contact doesn’t work because that was about time travel and not altering the recorded past. The Delta Quadrant as a whole doesn’t have some fixed, predestined rate of allowable progress. Like any other part of the galaxy, it has a lot of different civilizations at different levels of development, and some degree of interaction and change is perfectly natural.
The Prime Directive is not meant to say that any interaction between cultures is evil, just that the more powerful member in an interaction should take care not to force their will on the less powerful member. If an exchange happens freely on both sides, then it’s healthy. The reason for not sharing tech with the Kazon is that they would’ve used it to force their will on others. It wasn’t about the tech, or about Starfleet’s actions. It was about what the Kazon would do with what they got from Starfleet, and how it would harm others.
@46/Christopher: But on Resolutions, we’re dealing with Janeway and Chakotay being infected by a virus. They haven’t really abandoned their Starfleet comission. She’s still the Captain. He’s still the First Officer. They’re still committed to fight the virus and do anything to stay alive, as long as they honor their Starfleet ideals. Same with The 37’s. The crew who would have left the ship would live on free from their former duties, but still honoring those same ideals to protect, respect and court friendly relations with other cultures. There’s no issue there in regards to their freedom of travel, untethered by Voyager’s mission. Of course they would be free to travel.
But in Paris’s case, we’re dealing with someone who assaulted a senior officer. And it’s also predicted on the hopes that Jonas will buy into this ruse. Wouldn’t he assume Paris got off a little too easy for insubordination? If Paris was given free rein of the quadrant, wouldn’t Jonas suspect something was wrong? That’s my issue.
If I’m supposed to buy the story that an officer committed insubordination, I wouldn’t buy he was just let go off on his own this easy. That’s why I wondered about how PD guidelines might apply to a disohonorably discharged officer.
@/45 and @/47: I’d say that when you’re dealing with a discharged officer, assuming that there’s no additional punishment which seems to be the case here, they’re as free to do whatever they like as anyone else who’s left Starfleet. I don’t see why turning Paris loose in the Delta Quadrant is any different to doing it in the Alpha Quadrant. A disgraced former Starfleet officer back home could also hook up with a hostile power and give them Federation secrets, but that doesn’t mean you can legally keep them in Starfleet or in custody because of something they might do.
Star Trek is somewhat inconsistent as to whether the Prime Directive applies to Starfleet or the whole of the Federation: There are a few episodes, like “Angel One”, which suggest the former, but more that indicate the latter going back at least as far as “Patterns of Force”. So, I guess, assuming he hasn’t also renounced Federation citizenship, it could be argued Paris would still be bound by the Prime Directive, but taking a job as a pilot with the Talaxians doesn’t seem to violate it (remember when Worf was considering doing something similar in “The Way of the Warrior”?) and again you can’t go around locking people up because they might commit a crime.
@48/cap-mjb: “I don’t see why turning Paris loose in the Delta Quadrant is any different to doing it in the Alpha Quadrant.”
Yes, this is the crux of it. Star Trek‘s tendency to use “quadrants” as astrographical categories is pretty ridiculous, because it’s the equivalent of giving GPS directions based on hemispheres of the Earth. It’s just too huge a territory to be meaningfully descriptive. Sure, the specific teeny-tiny sliver of the Delta Quadrant that Voyager arrived in had a number of spacegoing civilizations that were maybe a few decades, a few generations less advanced than the Federation, but it also had its share of hyper-advanced civilizations like the Vidiians, Sikarians, and Botha, or far less advanced cultures like the Stone Age people we’ll see in “Basics.” And we’d continue to see a similar mix as time went on, with the idea of the quadrant overall being less advanced than Starfleet being completely dropped, as it logically would once they moved out of the particular area they started in.
So it makes no sense to talk about the quadrant‘s level of advancement, or to talk about one quarter-segment of the entire galaxy as if it were fundamentally different in some way from another 25% of the whole. Both quadrants have the exact same mix of primitive, advanced, and godlike beings. And even in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, the Federation occupies only a few hundred worlds out of hundreds of billions. Anyone in the UFP can easily go to a planet at a Stone Age level of tech and sell them antimatter reactors, as long as they’re outside of the infinitesimal fraction of the galaxy actually controlled by the UFP. Defining it by “Quadrant” is utterly meaningless.
krad, I think you’re being unfair to Paris… by this point, he’s a trusted member of the crew, not “first on anyone’s suspect list”; much less to any of the main cast. I also disagree that Chakotay made more sense as a traitor plant, since he was adamantly against Seska in every single one of their interactions post her reveal.
I’m surprised this episode got a 4 from Krad. Nothing in this episode works.
Neelix the journalist?! Give me Jake Sisko any day!
It’s a shame Neelix doesn’t realise that there’s no news like bad news and that’s probably the reason why this idea of Neelix providing the crew with nothing but good news was dropped. The best thing I can say about Investigations is that it draws to a close this unwelcome story arc and sidelines the Kazon for at least until season’s end.
Did Paris say his goodbyes to everyone since only three people came to see him off? Neelix managed to effect repairs to Voyager a lot faster than Torres ever did. Does anyone think Jerry Sroker would have made a much better Neelix?
6: The warp engines were working by the end of the episode and that’s a major plot hole as to where they got the materials while stuck at impulse. And I always thought Year of Hell was VGR’s most audacious use of the reset button. 18: Paris probably didn’t want to kill Seska’s unborn child. 22: Torres already went behind Janeway’s back in S1 and was threatened with permanent removal from service if she ever tried that again.
25: His name is Maje Culluh. 30: I always find Jennifer Lien’s voice rather soothing when compared with Kate Mulgrew’s. 34: If Paris was no longer a member of the crew, then he’s no longer bound by the Prime Directive. 38: I think manhandled is a little extreme. 44: Was Paris only a few months away from the end of his sentence? 46: Resolutions is five episodes away, not four.
Jonas can never be forgiven for his heinous act of not killing off Nelix
@53/chadefallstar:
As long as Jonas threw himself into the plasma fire after he killed off Neelix, I’d be fine with that
I enjoyed this episode, but that’s probably because I love Neelix. I have admittedly terrible taste in characters, though. I’m also a Jar Jar Binks apologist.
Seska interrogates Paris on the Kazon ship. She wants his help to take over Voyager. He refuses, and she inexplicably leaves him alone in a room with a computer console—and apparently didn’t search him, either, as he pulls a device out of his sleeve that he uses to try to access communications logs.
I didn’t think it was that inexplicable, it seemed obvious to me she’d left him alone there to see what he’d do. Like most villains she overestimated the capacity of her henchmen and believed that once he revealed his true colours they would be able to handle any problems arising if he was not a genuine malcontent who would go along with her plans.
rwmg: If she left him in there to see what he’d do, once he did what he did, she should have been able to stop him from doing anything that would hurt her. But she didn’t.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido