“Basics, Part I”
Written by Michael Piller
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 2, Episode 26
Production episode 142
Original air date: May 20, 1996
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Tuvok visits with Suder in his quarters. The Betazoid has created a hybrid orchid that he wishes to name after Tuvok. Initially, the Vulcan demurs, though he eventually accedes. Suder also wishes to contribute more to the ship, possibly doing some work with the airponics. Tuvok promises to speak to Janeway about it.
A Kazon buoy sends Voyager a hail—it’s a frantic message from Seska, whose baby has been born. Seska says that Culluh is livid that the baby isn’t his (it appears both Cardassian and human), and he seems to attack Seska right before the message goes dark.
On the one hand, Chakotay can’t be certain that Seska and the Kazon aren’t luring them into a trap. On the other hand, Chakotay doesn’t want to just abandon his child. Janeway supports him whatever he decides, and Chakotay goes on a vision quest where he talks to his father, who tells him of children in their tribe that were the product of rape by European invaders, but were still welcomed into the family, as it were.
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To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Chakotay wants to go after his kid, so Voyager is heading into Kazon space. (Amazingly, said space is still proximate enough to be near a buoy, even though they’ve been moving away from the Ocampa homeworld for over a year now.) Neelix recommends contacting a Talaxian fleet that’s stationed at the Prema II colony, though they’ll be out of range when they enter Kazon space. Kim suggests sensor shadows that can appear to be additional ships, and the EMH expounds on that idea by suggesting holographic ships. They won’t fool the Kazon for long, but every little bit helps.
En route, Voyager encounters a Kazon shuttle that’s badly damaged with only one person on board: Teirna, a Kazon associate of Culluh’s (he was one of the ones who tortured Chakotay in “Maneuvers“). Teirna claims that Seska is dead, and the EMH after examining him says that if Voyager hadn’t picked him up, Teirna would’ve been dead in a couple of hours. The EMH also says he has a bad case of polycythemia, though he can’t determine the cause, nor cure it.
Teirna is willing to assist Voyager in going after Culluh, as his helping Seska has put him on the outs with the maje, even providing Voyager with Culluh’s command codes. Voyager encounters multiple Kazon ships, but manages to fight them all off. Every time they’re attacked, the Kazon ships focus on the starboard ventral, which takes out the secondary command processors. It’s a minor annoyance, but that they’re so focused on that is suspicious.
During a lull in the action, Janeway goes to see Suder with Tuvok, and his eagerness goes into overdrive, to the point of his old psychotic self seeming to come out. After Janeway leaves, Suder is upset with himself for letting his intense enthusiasm get the better of him.
Chakotay questions Teirna about why the Kazon are attacking the starboard ventral so much, but he has no answers. Red alert sounds, and there’s a big-ass attack.
Janeway takes the Kazon head on, and Kim and Torres’s tricks with deflectors and sensor ghosts and holograms works nicely to distract them.
In his quarters—which are right next to Suder’s—Teirna removes a toenail, which has a tiny needle in it. He injects it into himself and then explodes.
The damage from his suicide bombing takes out tons of ship’s systems, including the holographic ships and sensor ghosts. It also blows a hole in the bulkhead between Teirna’s and Suder’s quarters.
Paris offers to take a shuttle to fetch the Talaxians. Janeway lets him go. The Kazon fire on the shuttle about two seconds after it leaves Voyager, and they lose contact with it.
The Kazon board the ship. One officer on the bridge is killed. Janeway tries to set off the auto-destruct, but it can’t engage because the secondary command processors are down, and Janeway finally realizes why they were targeting the starboard ventral.
Culluh and Seska walk onto the bridge, the latter carrying her baby. It becomes clear that Seska told Culluh that Chakotay raped her. They take the ship to Hanon IV and land it. En route, they round up everyone in the cargo bay, but when they go to Suder’s quarters, they’re empty. One of Culluh’s soldiers reports two crew missing (Suder and Paris), as is a shuttle. Culluh says the shuttle was destroyed, but Seska insists that they verify that.
The Kazon put the crew off on Hanon IV without any technology, not even their combadges. Then they take off, leaving them to fend for themselves on the world.
To be continued…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently you need the secondary command processors to engage the auto-destruct. Oops.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok has been working with Suder on both botany and meditation, to good effect, though he still has a bit to go, as seen when he loses it with Janeway. Still, his progress is impressive.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. One of the holographic “ships” that Torres projects in space turns out to be the EMH himself, leaving the doctor floating in space for a bit.
He also can now deactivate himself for a set time, and does so as the Kazon board for specifically twelve hours.
Half and half. Torres insists that they don’t have time to do a final test on the holographic ships. After the EMH becomes one of the “ships” out in space, the doctor snidely comments that he said they should do more tests. (It’s not clear how they can get the EMH outside the ship but not outside sickbay, but whatever…)
Do it.
“A fitting end for a people who would not share their technology. Let’s see if you manage to survive without it.”
–Culluh’s final words to the Voyager crew before he abandons them to their fate on Hanon IV
Welcome aboard. It’s a whole passel of returning guests! Henry Darrow returns for his second and final appearance, following “Tattoo,” as Kolopak. John Gegenhuber, who last appeared as the Kazon Surat in “Maneuvers” and “Alliances,” is back as a different Kazon, Teirna. Back from “Alliances” is Anthony De Longis as Culluh, back from “Investigations” is Martha Hackett as Seska, and back from “Meld” is Brad Dourif as Suder. De Longis, Hackett, and Dourif will all be back for Part 2.
Trivial matters: This two-parter was Michael Piller’s final script for Voyager and penultimate script for Trek in general (his swansong being the movie Insurrection).
As part of the mind-meld in “Meld,” Suder has gained Tuvok’s appreciation of orchids (first seen in “Tattoo“), and even been creating hybrids that Tuvok had heretofore thought impossible.
Chakotay once again uses the technological medicine bag first seen in “Parallax” to get a vision of his old man.
Marvel Comics had the Star Trek comics license at this stage, as part of the “Paramount Comics” deal that Marvel had with the studio, which included ongoing monthly Deep Space Nine and Voyager comics (the two shows that were currently on the air) and a bimonthly Star Trek Unlimited that did TOS and TNG stories, plus a couple of original series (Starfleet Academy and Early Voyages, focusing on the Academy and Captain Pike, respectively), and several minseries and one-shots. Voyager comics scripter Laurie Sutton pitched a Voyager story to them that had the Kazon taking over Voyager that was nixed because this story was in development.
Another crewmember is killed on the bridge when the Kazon take over, which brings the number of people living on the ship to 146, though 145 of them are then put off the ship at the end, leaving only Suder behind. (The EMH isn’t counted as part of the running crew complement that I’ve been doing because it’s based on the number given in “The 37’s,” and that number wouldn’t have include the EMH because he wasn’t capable of leaving the ship. I’ll add him to the list of crew when he becomes independently mobile later in season three.)
Set a course for home. “Do you really think we’re going to be rescued, Captain?” When I started writing this rewatch entry, I honestly wasn’t sure what I was going to say about the episode, and how much would be good, and how much would be bad. My thoughts, however, coalesced when I realized I had absolutely nothing to say for the “There’s coffee in that nebula!” segment that chronicles Janeway’s part in an episode.
The entire crew is mostly useless in this one, to be honest. It’s a spectacular chronicle of incompetence from beginning to end, starting with everyone falling for Seska’s incredibly obvious trap. Mind you, to some extent, they have no choice. Leaving a baby that Chakotay thinks is his in the hands of the Kazon is, um, not good. But their contingency plans consist of cheap holographic tricks, not actually having the immediate help of the Talaxian fleet (because we have to save them for Part 2, I guess?), and completely not getting why the secondary command processors are being targeted.
That’s the part that really gets me. On this ship in particular, Torres and Janeway and Kim and the entire engineering staff should know the vessel inside and out. It’s been more than a year, and they’ve been living, eating, and breathing this ship, not to mention repairing it from near-catastrophic damage on more than one occasion. Plus, we’ve got a first officer and a chief engineer who are used to fighting guerilla warfare. They can’t do better than this? And they can’t figure out why the starboard ventral’s being targeted?
And then Paris goes off in the shuttle so he can save the day in Part 2. On any other show, it would probably be the first officer who does this, but he’s not a white guy, and as we know, only the white guys can go off and act heroic. Chakotay’s far too busy doing vision quests to be an action hero (never mind that he was the leader of the guerrilla forces on board and is much better qualified to sneak away in a shuttle and find reinforcements).
Yes, Voyager is outnumbered and outgunned, and the Kazon strategy of death-by-a-thousand-cuts is actually a good one, but Janeway should have known that and planned for it, and instead she just sits there and gets her ass kicked and gets her entire crew put off the ship and trapped on a hostile world. Oh, and they never actually searched Teirna with their super-sophisticated sensors, nor kept a security guard or at least some kind of surveillance on him at all times.
And then there’s the matter of how the Kazon can even operate Voyager, much less take it over. This would’ve been a much much much much better endgame for Jonas’ ongoing sabotage than the limp “Investigations,” having him work to transfer command codes for the ship to Culluh to lock the Starfleet and Maquis crew out of ship’s functions. Instead, we’re supposed to believe that any idiot can just walk on and control a starship that is loaded with weapons and defenses that can lay waste to a planet. (Yes, we’ve seen it before, from “Space Seed” to “By Any Other Name” to “Rascals.” It’s still frustratingly idiotic.) Plus, it’s, y’know, the Kazon. Sure, they’ve got Seska to feed them intel, but she’s been away from the ship for a long time, they should be able to defend against her knowledge, and, again, it’s the friggin Kazon. This is not a worthy foe who can match our Starfleet heroes wit for wit like, say, the Romulan Commander who looks like Sarek or Kor or Kang or Tomalak or Dukat. This is just a bunch of aliens with bad hairdos who were introduced to us as being too stupid to figure out how to get water.
The episode has good bits. For all that the vision quest stuff is stereotypical, Henry Darrow’s Kolopak is excellent, and his conversation with Chakotay is a good one. And Brad Dourif is once again superb as a Suder who is trying so hard to better himself and only partially succeeding.
The action is well directed (of course—Winrich Kolbe is one of the best TV directors ever), and the tension builds nicely, but ultimately this is an entire episode of failure in order to bring about a cliffhanger. It’s not as weak-kneed as, say, “Time’s Arrow,” but it doesn’t have the emotional wallop of “The Best of Both Worlds” or the last-minute reveals of “Redemption” and “Descent.” Like all of the above except “TBOBW,” it’s not enough of a cliffhanger to justify waiting three months to find out what happens. (Luckily, y’all just have to wait a week for us to talk about it.)
If the crew had actually scored one or two victories en route to defeat, I might find it forgivable, but ultimately this just makes the heroes we’re supposed to be rooting for out to be incompetents who deserve to lose to a gang of morons.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be interviewed live by fellow author Russ Colchamiro as part of Russ’ Rollickin’ Rollercoaster live over Zoom on Wednesday the 17th of June. Click here to register for this free event.
Hey Keith,
Enjoying the rewatch immensely, as usual for your various series. One question though, you said we “only have to wait a week” but up until now you’ve been doing 2 Voyager rewatch posts per week. Is that not happening this week due to the live interview on Wednesday?
It was nice to see a follow-up on Suder, both in terms of the show remembering “Oh, yeah, we’ve got a murderer confined to quarters,” and in exploring the long-term effects of the mind meld on him.
KalvinKingsley: No, there will be a post on Thursday, but it will be the second-season overview post. “Basics, Part II” will then be Monday.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The thing that always bothered me about this episode is that they make a big show of everyone getting their universal translators taken away…. and they all proceed to talk to each other without any problems. I get that the Starfleet people would likely be able to speak a common language (although it would have been interesting to see Tuvok or some of the Bajorans speaking their own language), but why the heck can they understand Kes and Neelix? They’ve both had universal translators present since the minute they came into contact with Voyager, and while I would *maybe* allow that Kes had learned a new language (since the Ocampa learn very quickly) there is no reason why Neelix should. It would have been neat to see that, this whole time, B’Elanna had been speaking Klingon, or Spanish! Or that Chakotay normally talks in a Native American language (although, considering how poorly the show handled his heritage, that might be for the best that we didn’t). It would have been a good twist to see them struggle to have to work together without a common language, and see how they do.
I love that they brought Suder back, though. Brad Dourif is an amazing actor, and boy oh boy do those Betazoid eyes really bring his creepiness to the next level! And I like that they answered the question of what he’s been doing this whole time, although I’m not sure why he can’t do hydroponics in his room. How are the supplies he needs for that different or more dangerous than the ones he is using to raise orchids? I wish they had kept him around longer, but it was a nice piece of continuity and great use of an amazing guest star. The idea of a Betazoid without Empathy and, uh, empathy, was such an interesting one, and it was always nice to see indications that alien races had some internal diversity.
This episode highlights one of my frustrations with Voyager, though it was my favorite Star Trek series back when it aired: how spectacularly bad they are at internal security when it suits the plot for them to be so. The Kazon are zero match for them, but take the ship over easily. And this is a running theme through all 7 seasons. Starfleet’s finest are woefully incompetent at keeping people off their ships.
Suder was a joy, though, I have to agree. Such a great character and well acted. Those creepy Betazoid eyes really make him all the more scary looking.
The one thing that annoyed me more than any other with this episode is the way it treats destroying the ship as not an option once Janeway discovers the auto-destruct isn’t working. Really, there’s no possibility of manual self-destruct? As a matter of fact, TNG established in a couple of episodes that it was possible to use a bomb or a phaser to blow up the intermix chamber and the whole ship.
The whole self destruct thing is absurd. Obviously the first question Janeway should ask is “What functions do the secondary command processors control?” But she doesn’t, because if she did, the answer would include the self destruct sequence and then it would be obvious to the audience what’s happening.
Mind you, to some extent, they have no choice. Leaving a baby that Chakotay thinks is his in the hands of the Kazon is, um, not good.
I think I’d like to push back at that notion a bit. Chakotay initially comes to the correct conclusion, that this is almost certainly a trap and they should just go. But, suppose for the sake of argument that it wasn’t a trap not a trap. Then the kid is already dead, by the time Voyager could possibly show up it’s been at least several days since Seska’s initial message. I know they’re eventually fed a story about how the kid is being relocated to some planet to be raised as a servant, but come on. If Seska’s story is true, do we really think Culluh let the kid live? Even if he did, do we really think we can fly into Kazon space to retrieve it and get back out?
Janeway absolutely should not have let Voyager go on this mission. There’s just no version of this where they actually rescue the baby, whether or not Seska is telling the truth.
What’s more, even the idea Chakotay floats– that he do it himself, by which he presumably means take a shuttlecraft– is unworkable because the PD implications of letting Seska and Friends get their hand on a shuttle are too immense.
Resuming course and forgetting about the baby would be a hard and unpopular choice, but that’s why Janeway is the captain, sometimes the captain has to make the choice that everybody else hates. To the show’s credit, they don’t have the crew pull off some “impossible” rescue, the bad decision does indeed get a bunch of people killed. Would probably be better if they came to the right decision, but found their attempt to leave Kazon space harried by raiders. Then the plot can unfold about the same, but at least make our crew look less incompetent.
“Oh, and they never actually searched Teirna with their super-sophisticated sensors, nor kept a security guard or at least some kind of surveillance on him at all times.”
To be fair, they did detect the explosive in Teirna’s bloodstream; they just mistook it for polycythemia (i.e. an excess of blood cells — presumably the explosive components were engineered blood cells or something that mimicked blood cells). No surprise that sensors couldn’t recognize a kind of bioweapon they’d never encountered before. Why they didn’t detect the pin in Teirna’s toenail is another matter, but maybe it was disguised as keratin in a similar way, or made of keratin.
And it never bugged me that they didn’t peg the reason for attacking the secondary processor. After all, the reason was to prevent self-destruction, and if you’re trying to figure out battle strategies for an enemy that’s attacking you, you’d be concentrating on how they might try to destroy you, rather than how they might try not to. And it can’t be that easy to get into the state of mind where you think “I want to make sure I have the option to kill myself and prevent anyone from stopping me.”
Besides, my impression is that the secondary command processors are involved in quite a few ship’s systems, sort of like a body’s parasympathetic nervous system, so it’d be hard to pin down a single function as the target from that alone. And since they’re considered nonessential systems, maybe it’s unusual for them to come under attack, and thus Starfleet never discovered the design flaw that prevented self-destruct from working if those processors were too badly damaged.
And I still say it’s not at all strange that Kazon space extends this far given that they’re a nomadic people. And it’s nothing compared to how widespread the equally nomadic (and far more ancient) Hirogen will be in later seasons. The only contrivance is that they keep running into Culluh and the Nistrim, as opposed to different Kazon sects. But then, he has been actively chasing them this whole time.
I’ve always like this one because the pacing was excellent and the action was unrelenting and competently handled. You really feel the despair of the crew as absolutely everything that can go wrong does. And then I personally felt that sense of despair magnified even further when the crew is abandoned on the desolate, hostile world and left to fend for themselves. Yes, of course the status quo would be resumed by the conclusion but I like to approach the story from the viewpoint of the characters so I felt really bad for them: suddenly their chances of ever getting home to the Alpha Quadrant has dropped to zero.
So on objective analysis I do see years later that there are a ton of flaws here, particularly in logic. And then as usual, Voyager gets taken over way to easily, all for the sake of moving the plot forward. So yeah, it’s all pretty dumb, but it’s at least thrilling to watch.
Did I miss any explanation on why the Kazon just left everyone on the planet? Obviously, it was so they could be rescued in the next episode but was there an in-show explanation?
@10 Previously unsuspected weakness on Culluh’s part for elaborate poetic justice?
@10/noblehunter: Culluh’s line was, “A fitting end for a people who would not share their technology. Let’s see if you manage to survive without it.” So basically his idea of poetic justice, as Benjamin said.
I tried to watch this episode the other day but I just couldn’t get through it – as Krad mentioned that the crew came across as incompetent and I felt it was cruel to the show to continue watching something so poor. Even if the crew couldn’t work it out themselves about the secondary processors surely they could have asked the computer? I get memories of ST: Generations of Picard asking everything that occurred when one star went nova… surely this list would have been slightly shorter if they also asked the computer in the context of a battle strategy.
@4 wildfyrewarning – I think the idea about communication problems would have been a brilliant idea for the second part.
@13 when I watched it for the first time I was convinced that was where they were going with it! They made such a show of taking their com badges away, and I thought to myself “Oh, this is going to be neat, all these people who probably speak different languages are now going to have to try to figure out how to communicate!” and… nope!
@13/JLP: As I said, something called the “secondary command processors” would clearly be involved in many different command functions as a backup or peripheral system. It’s not like there’s an obvious, unique straight line from the processors to the self-destruct system. By analogy, if someone, say, burst a water main so an entire city block lost its water supply, you’d have no way of knowing before the fact that it was part of a plan to commit insurance fraud by burning out one specific office in one specific building on that block. It’s just too general; the target is one of many different things that would be simultaneously affected.
@14/wildfyre: I’ve never bought the idea that the existence of universal translators means nobody would ever bother learning to speak the same language. I mean, it would be obvious to them that they couldn’t rely on having active translators in every possible situation; they’re just a substitute for actually knowing each other’s language, the training wheels you use until you can learn the real thing. Even the best computer translation would still be imperfect at conveying the nuances of what you actually said, so it wouldn’t be desirable to rely on it exclusively even if it were feasible to do so.
And yes, “Little Green Men” implied that the Ferengi never learned English, but as I said, I don’t think that makes sense. I tend to presume their translator malfunction just scrambled the English they heard so they couldn’t understand it.
@15, but even if everyone in Starfleet AND in the Maquis all spoke the same language, there is no reason that Kes and Neelix would. They’ve been on the ship for a little over a year, and the whole time they’ve been using the UT.
I’ve always remembered fondly the translators in Bruce Colville’s My Teacher Is an Alien series, which covered gestures as well as language and simultaneously provided several levels of translation, so that the human character knew that the reptilian alien’s salutation literally translated to “I hope I shall never have to eat your children,” but also that culturally it was just a standard parting well-wish
I wonder, with the Universal Translator in Star Trek, how well you have to know a language before it stops kicking in and giving you the official translation- or if even native speakers of a given language who haven’t bothered to deactivate theirs get a simultaneous transmission when they talk to each other.
Discovery has an episode where the Universal Translator malfunctions, so that everyone’s speech is randomly translated into different languages, but fortunately one crew member has learned enough different languages on his own to coordinate everyone to Do the Thing they needed to do that episode.
@16/wildfyre: Yes, Neelix and Kes have been aboard well over a year — probably at least 16 months, since previous time references have always aligned with the real-time broadcast intervals, at least up until the nearly four months that passed in the last two episodes, so we might be closer to 20 months at this point. That’s plenty of time to learn English, and there’s no reason to assume they couldn’t. Neelix has been an interstellar trader for decades and thus it’s plausible that he’s good at picking up languages. And Kes has adult-level knowledge at age 2, so obviously she learns very fast. And since they both expected to be living permanently on Voyager for quite possibly the rest of their lives, they would’ve had no reason not to want to learn its standard language.
The exploding Kazon episode! Yeah, honestly that’s the only thing that sticks in my mind about this one.
Quick aside: Since I can’t ask this on the actual articles, what’s up with Tor not allowing comments on Star Wars articles now? Is Star Wars now a sensitive topic? Did Disney buy them? I don’t get it.
@7:
The whole self destruct thing is absurd. Obviously the first question Janeway should ask is “What functions do the secondary command processors control?” But she doesn’t, because if she did, the answer would include the self destruct sequence and then it would be obvious to the audience what’s happening.
You know, more and more, I wonder if it would’ve worked better for VOY if Janeway hadn’t been the original Captain, but rather the XO or the Second Officer who got thrust into the center chair with the deaths of the ranking officers when the Caretaker yanked them out of the Badlands.
It would’ve allowed Janeway to be a balance of someone on the command track, yet lacking all the practical experience (added to having to navigate the wild frontier of the DQ). It also could’ve provided a built-in explanation for Janeway making rookies mistakes Kirk, Picard, or Sisko wouldn’t have made in her position.
I can’t access the ep from work, but don’t we learn that the secondary command processors are being targeted during multiple attacks from Janeway’s log entry? Like, it’s odd enough for her make a point about it in her log, but not to make an inquiry to the computer on what these systems control? And did everyone forget how Seska handed them their behinds the last time she orchestrated an attack against Voyager? Yes, the Kazon bomb dude told them she was dead, but there still had to be some suspicion that this was a frelling trap.
@21/treebee72: As I said, I think it’s pretty self-evident from the name “secondary command processors” that they play a role in all nonessential command and control functions, which is why they couldn’t tell which specific one Seska’s plan was aimed at. So it’s not that nobody asked what they controlled, it’s that they already knew they controlled a ton of nonessential stuff.
The “command processor” part suggests that the effect on the self-destruct was more to do with the software than the hardware. It had no effect on the physical mechanisms, but maybe disrupted something like the command passwords or some obscure step in the commands to shut down the warp core containment fields. Maybe the repeated attacks and repairs caused the system to reset over and over again, and Seska had discovered that if they reset a certain number of times, the password data would be wiped, or something like that.
So the idea was that it was your classic “for want of a nail” situation — that the damage affected something so minor that nobody would’ve seen it as critical, but it snowballed to have a major effect in an unanticipated way.
The Kason really don’t interest me. I’ve re-watched the second part on recapturing the ship in the past. Can’t understand how Voyager constantly kicks the Borgs Arse but can’t control the “almighty” Kason.
And we’re here. The Kazon take over Voyager , er , somehow, and the crew never puts together that this was Seska’s and their endgame.
“Chakotay, they’re going to take your son!”
The moment you hear that, you’re like, yeah this is another trap from Seska. If the kid is Chakotay’s, then they have to go after it. First thing you say is, how do we do this without Seska humiliating us again? The Voyager crew’s answer is, we don’t; we stand around and scratch our heads as Seska makes fools of us, again.
I did enjoy Chakotay’s talk with his father. (On a personal level, it put some things I’ve been struggling with into perspective). And Brad Dourif is still a creepy delight as Suder; glad we get one more go-round with him next episode.
I can’t help but wonder what plain, simple Garak would think of Seska, with the whole I-impregnated-myself-with-your-DNA to one side, and he totally raped me to the other side. Would Garak be intrigued, disgusted, disappointed that Seska wasted her skill with a group of morons like the Kazon, but impressed by her skill? I suspect the short answer is yes.
I’m gonna have to disagree a little, KRAD, regarding other takeovers of the ship. Khan, being genetically enhanced, had studied the technical schematics of the Enterprise and probably committed them to memory. He could have taught the other supermen how to run the ship or the ones we didn’t see directly working to take it over could have been studying the schematics and memorizing them in turn.
Then the Kelvans can be excused I think, because in initially having an intergalactic capable ship, I think it was probably no more difficult for them to run the Enterprise than it was for Kirk and co to run the USS Franklin in STB. Less so, even.
But that said, I wholeheartedly agree that the Kazon were shit villains. For all that was said of Roddenberry and the season 1 TNG staff, at least they figured out that the Ferengi were shit villains after only two episodes and not two seasons, ala the Voyager staff.
@25
But that said, I wholeheartedly agree that the Kazon were shit villains. For all that was said of Roddenberry and the season 1 TNG staff, at least they figured out that the Ferengi were shit villains after only two episodes and not two seasons, ala the Voyager staff.
Again, as I’ve said throughout the Rewatch, Jeri Taylor has conceded the execution of the Kazon didn’t really work and it was a mistake to use them as multi-Season villains:
“I think that we dwelt too much on the Kazon…and it was one of the things that didn’t work about [Season Tw]. The Kazon have never been particularly interesting as adversaries, and we just did them and did them and did them and did them. It created the curious implication that we are standing still in space, when our franchise is that we are going at incredible speeds toward the Alpha Quadrant – we keep running into the same people over and over again! It was just an oddity, and I don’t think the Kazon have served us well. And […] it is my intention to leave them behind and to find new and I hope more interesting aliens.”
@@@@@ CLB, yes it was a Secondary system & maybe it controlled a bunch of stuff so it would be hard to figure out what the end game was – but none of that is actually addressed on screen. And this isn’t a ‘random’ or seemingly non-related event that leads to unforeseen consequences, this was a targeted attack that happened multiple times out in the open. Everyone on the ship knew there had to be a reason – Chakotay confronts the Kazon bomb dude about it & finally! asks ‘why’ after the systems are damaged to the point of shutting down. Yet we still never see anyone trying to actually figure it out – even a half-assed line about how there are just too many systems it controls to determine what the point was.
And really, how the eff does Seska still know this ship better than anyone actually onboard???
@27/treebee72: “but none of that is actually addressed on screen.“
It’s right there in the name — “secondary command processors.” That tells you all you need to know about what kind of thing they are. You wouldn’t use a name like that for something that only affected a single system, certainly not the self-destruct. Just the fact that it’s plural tells you that. And the dialogue did explicitly state that the SCPs are a nonessential system, while the crew’s reactions to their damage told us clearly that it was seen more as a nuisance than an urgent concern. So yes, it was addressed on screen. Where do you think I got it? I deduced it from the evidence we were given. To coin a phrase, it’s elementary.
“And really, how the eff does Seska still know this ship better than anyone actually onboard???”
Because she was the only one actively looking for ways to sabotage it.
Voyager’s first season cliffhanger and first two-parter. I’m rather fond of this one although it’s got its flaws. In a way, it’s a lengthy shaggy dog story without a proper punchline, although much of that is the fault of the sudden swerve events take in Part II. The opening scenes set up a contemplative idea that never quite goes anywhere as Chakotay has to decide whether to accept Seska’s son as his and whether or not it’s worth risking the entire crew for. One thing I have noticed for the first time though is that, while he seems to be as much of a misogynist as usual, Cullah’s basically in the same position as Chakotay and makes the same choice. That is at least something to bear in mind next episode.
(I also notice that, even though the official spelling seems to be “Culluh” with a second U, the on-screen readout here writes it as “Cullah” with an A, which is how I’ve tended to spell it for the last 20-odd years. I feel vindicated.)
A big chunk of the episode is made up of a long battle sequence but it’s got more brains than many of them. Voyager’s crew come up with a number of tactics which might even have worked if they hadn’t had a suicide bomber on board, while the Kazon (or more likely Seska) have a carefully crafted plan that Janeway doesn’t fully understand until it’s too late. I’m with CLB on this one, the self-destruct is too specific to work it out in advance. And by the time they realise, the Kazon are literally at the door.
And the Doctor gets the lion’s share of the good material, from his gleefully accepting Janeway’s offer to share his opinions, to his exasperated “Not in my sickbay, please” when Chakotay tries to rough up Teirna in front of him, to his “Oh great” reaction on finding himself in space being fired at. (The explanation given in the episode is that they set up holo-projectors on the hull.) Him being able to deactivate himself with a predetermined reactivation time is a nice development of his desire for autonomy.
Oh, and there’s a great fluffed line when Kate Mulgrew gives the order “Work on the Doctor with it.” I assume it was meant to be “Work with the Doctor on it.”
I’m not sure if they had a plan for Suder that got nixed but there’s a feeling that some of his scenes are only there because they’ve hired Brad Dourif and need something for him to do, and because they need to remind us he still exists. Neelix serving him leola root soup has got to be against some sort of prisoner treatment regulations.
I’ve heard it suggested that Cullah stranding the crew instead of killing them is out of character, but it’s always been the technology that’s interested him and I can see him appreciating the irony of the situation. I also don’t have a problem with the Kazon being able to capture and operate Voyager: This is, after all, exactly how they got started, stealing the Trabe’s ships and technology and using it against them. Count me as apparently the only person who’s more annoyed than pleased at Jeri Taylor’s habit of sneering at decisions made before she was in charge: I actually find the Kazon arc a lot better planned than the “Bunch of disposable standalone episodes with poor continuity and then bring back the Borg for sweeps” approach of later seasons. But hey, there’s always one.
A shame that the budget isn’t up to depicting all 100+ crewmembers together: We only see about a third of the number there should be, although the camera angles are kept as tight as possible so we never see the exact number. (Maybe they’re in a very long line.) Really odd four-team split at the end, with the captain and first officer on the same team and Neelix seemingly given command of a quarter of the crew.
The plot coupons scattered to be picked up after the break are a bit obvious (Paris not being stranded with the others, the Doctor and Suder still aboard the ship) but it’s not going to be an easy ride back. But can we please not dismiss anything good Paris does with “It’s because he’s white”? The last two Vidiian episodes cast Tuvok and Kim respectively in the action hero role, and Chakotay had plenty of action hero stuff against the Kazon at the beginning of the season. It’s only fair Paris gets his turn too.
@30:
I’m not sure if they had a plan for Suder that got nixed but there’s a feeling that some of his scenes are only there because they’ve hired Brad Dourif and need something for him to do, and because they need to remind us he still exists. Neelix serving him leola root soup has got to be against some sort of prisoner treatment regulations.
Piller wrote Suder’s debut and he admitted working on “Meld” was an enjoyable creative experience. So with “Basics” set to be Piller’s Trek swansong (or at least at the time since Insurrection wasn’t on the drawing board yet), you probably can’t fault him for bringing the Betazoid back. Besides, Suder was a loose end that had to be addressed.
But if Piller did have any plans for Suder beyond “Basics”, they became moot once he left the show (and I’ll hold off on discussing Suder’s final fate until next time).
I think it was logical for Paris to leave with the shuttle. They are doing all this for Chakotay’s child so it makes sense that he is on the ship, e.g. if they negotiate with the Kazon, it makes sense that he is the one negotiating for his own son, or if they decide to give up at some point, he should be the one to decide it (since Janeway told him she will stand behind every decision he makes in this regard). With Chakotay out, it makes sense that the most experienced pilot will go.
Other than that, I agree with the people who said that the secondary command processors are probably responsible for too many things on the ship, so I didn’t think it was strange that they didn’t realize what the Kazon’s target was until the last moment.
@29/cap-mjb: “I’ve heard it suggested that Cullah stranding the crew instead of killing them is out of character, but it’s always been the technology that’s interested him and I can see him appreciating the irony of the situation.”
And it’s not really “instead of” in Culluh’s view. He stranded them on a dangerous planet without any of the technology they were so dependent on. He probably assumed they wouldn’t be able to live long without it. In his mind, it would’ve been just a slower, crueler execution.
krad, in all fairness the Voyager crew must have been so stunned by a display of genuine competence from the Kazon that they simply couldn’t get their act together in time to drive them off! (On a more serious note, it’s not impossible that the Voyager crew might simply have fallen into the trap of holding those reavers in contempt in much the same way audiences have – not without reason, perhaps, but still a dangerously complacent attitude with which to regard practiced pirates). (-;
@33, Since the Kazon were using some terrorist tactics, it strikes me that what the IRA said to Margaret Thatcher is true here; the Kazon only have to be lucky once, and Voyager has to be lucky always. The Kazon have tried to take on Voyager a dozen times without success, but they really on need one lucky break, and they got it here. They know the area, they presumably have places to re-group and re-fit after each attack, and they have a supply of new recruits. Voyager has none of those advantages, and while she might win 9 times out of 10, it’s that 10th time that really counts. Having Seska on their side is also a huge advantage. She knows the ship, she knows the crew, she is devious and smart by nature, and she knows which buttons to press, literally and metaphorically to cause trouble. In addition, she knows that, 1. she knows Chakotay, and knows he will show up even if it is obviously a trap, and 2. she knows that Janeway refuses to budge from her Starfleet principles and protocols. If you know how your enemy fights, and know they are unlikely to change how they fight, you’ve got a pretty big advantage, even if you are out-gunned. It’s really too bad Seska turned out to be a Cardassian, because she probably would have made a damn good Maquis if she really believed in their cuse.
@32 / CLB:
And it’s not really “instead of” in Culluh’s view. He stranded them on a dangerous planet without any of the technology they were so dependent on. He probably assumed they wouldn’t be able to live long without it. In his mind, it would’ve been just a slower, crueler execution.
You know, I’ve always wondered who came up with that particular idea in-story.
I can buy Seska pitching it as an ironic fate for her former ‘comrades’, but it also feels very much in character for Culluh, too.
Basics tries very hard to be Voyager’s equivalent to Best of Both Worlds. And fails miserably. A case study for anyone who thinks every season should end in a cliffhanger.
Of course, it’s well directed (Kolbe justifying his pay), and we get to spend some time with Suder. His scenes always shine.
But everything else? It fails at plot and it fails at character. Sure, Chakotay has every reason to rescue the child. But is that enough to risk the rest of the crew? Sure, we’re playing with the needs of the few outweighs the needs of the many trope from ST3, but at least try and come up with a well-thought plan of action. They can’t even do that, because we need to have a season-ending cliffhanger.
And you’d think this was a golden opportunity to show the Maquis and their different way of approaching such a crisis? But no. That would get in the way of the need for the plot to reach that cliffhanger.
The hologram projection is designed mainly for that pointless EMH in space gag, which is a poor use of Picardo’s talents. Meanwhile, the crew can’t seem to even try to avoid damage during the Kazon hit and runs, just so the convenient weak spot is hit every time. They knew they were being hit there. They knew it was an odd choice. How about changing battle maneuvers? The whole thing is set up and designed to leave Voyager vulnerable, in order to sell the cliffhanger.
But it’s not much of a cliffhanger if the script can’t even be bothered to try and disguise it as such. More often than not, you need a twist at the end. Best of Both Worlds had the image of Locutus; Redemption had the Sela reveal; Descent had Lore’s reveal; The Adversary had the Changeling’s reveal that they were everywhere; Even Broken Link, which aired weeks after this, had Odo’s discovery that Gowron could be a Changeling. And even without the twist, BOBW worked because there was a pervasive sense of dread and imminent doom, the Borg being an unstoppable force and all. By putting the Kazon in the Borg’s shoes, Michael Piller is asking an awful lot out of the viewer. Not once in two seasons, have I felt any dread or sense of doom in regards to the Kazon.
Also, why would the Kazon strand the entire crew? Why not leave som key personnel on board under armed guard? They need at least some experienced hand to operate the ship. But no. We need that expensive cliffhanger final shot of the crew stranded in a hostile world.
And that’s two VOY season finales striking out. The limp Learning Curve, and now this. Thankfully, we’ll finally get a good season ending cliffhanger next time around.
@30: As I understand, Piller was the only one on staff who championed Suder as a permanent character. Everyone else wanted to be rid of him. Since he was on his way out, Suder was already doomed. Interestingly enough, his death on part 2 reminded me a lot of Li Nalas’s own death on DS9 (in a three parter, also written by Piller), in that it felt arbitrary and caused an irreversible loss of potential future stories involving him.
Eduardo: In the cases of both Li Nalas and Lon Suder, though, there were also actor availability concerns. More so with Li, but both Richard Beymer and Brad Dourif were in demand a lot, and may not have been available to commit to a series.
Though, as we’ll see Monday, this is a particular loss for Voyager, especially since Suder is the best thing about Part 2.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The thing about the “Secondary command processors” is that the Kazon were going after them repeatedly in an obvious way.
Sure, if a terrorist blew up the city’s water main, it might not be an obvious tip-off that they mean to start a major fire downtown. But if your city is subjected to repeated small hit and run attacks over many days and weeks, always targeting the water supply, law enforcement better start think about hardening the water supply, and really should be thinking, “maybe all this is a distraction, what might they really be after?”
If the secondary command processors are really the vital backup for so many systems that it’s impossible to guess which system might be the target, that’s an even better argument that someone better get a move on both a) hardening the ship in that area, and b) reprogramming the computers to redistribute key processes to different nodes. (You know, sort of like how 300 years earlier DARPA invented the internet so wartime communications could not be disrupted by taking out a single Ma Bell switching center?)
Not to mention, they know Seska’s involved, and therefore should have been asking themselves, “hey, this is probably a trap, so what does Seska know about the secondary command processors that could be used to hurt us when they spring the trap?” Chakotay and Torres especially should have been thinking about possible asymmetric terrorist attacks since that’s supposedly what they were doing before being hurled across the galaxy by a space wedgie.
@36: I’ve never felt a sense of imminent doom or dread about the Kazon either. However, I did feel a sense of dread at the conclusion not due to the Kazon, but by the situation where the crew is stranded on a hostile planet, with no hope now of ever getting “home.” So I personally felt that was very effective and I felt bad for the Voyager crew.
@38: Also, another response Voyager could have used to the attacks on the same spot where the secondary command processors are, is to simply turn the ship away from the attacking vessels so that that vulnerable spot isn’t so exposed fo attack. Seems like a simple enough maneuver.
@39: By this point, Voyager was so used to resetting major events back to the status quo (Deadlock’s catastrophic shipwide damage nullified, for one) that I couldn’t muster any semblance of worry for the crew being left alone on that planet. After all, it was pretty much guaranteed it was all going to be resolved in a tidy manner the following season. Voyager was so reliant on imitating TNG’s structure, and abusing the reset button that there was no tension. You know exactly what’s going to happen with littl surprise in the path. And it certainly didn’t help when the writers phone it in with their cliffhanger season finale.
@36 and @37:
Re: Suder, yeah…I’ll talk more about this next time, but it goes back to one of the unforgivable sins of VOY: Its failure to seriously develop a recurring cast of characters from its stranded crew.
Piller at least saw the value of it, but once he was gone, they basically stropped even trying beyond token appearances of Chell, Vorik, the Wildmans, etc.
@38/Thomas: “Sure, if a terrorist blew up the city’s water main, it might not be an obvious tip-off that they mean to start a major fire downtown.”
You’re altering my scenario to fit your side of the argument. I didn’t say a major fire set by terrorists, I said a fire in one office in one building for insurance fraud. The point was to postulate an end goal too specific and niggly to allow extrapolating it from a general attack that would affect many other things simultaneously.
“If the secondary command processors are really the vital backup for so many systems”
Nobody said “vital backup” — more just a supplement. They are explicitly called “non-essential” in the episode. That is the point — that nobody expects them to affect anything vital.
I mean, it’s not like the self-destruct systems are routinely used. Damage to any regularly used system would become evident right away, but obviously the self-destruct is never going to be used until it has to be, so they wouldn’t discover it was affected until then.
And sure, if you’re determined to be argumentative, you can poke holes in the logic. But the same goes for countless other plot devices in countless other stories. It doesn’t have to be absolutely airtight, it just has to seem plausible enough in the moment that it doesn’t pull you out of the story. And I always got exactly what they were going for — that this was a peripheral system that wasn’t considered important enough to be worth targeting, and since self-destruct was so rarely used or even thought about, nobody caught on that it was one of the systems that would be impaired. I found that rather clever, and it was good enough for me.
I mean, it’s no worse than “We can blow up the Death Star by firing torpedoes into this tiny exhaust port on the surface.” That, too, was a peripheral system that nobody on board expected to be a critical weakness. It only seems obvious in hindsight.
@40/GarretH: “Also, another response Voyager could have used to the attacks on the same spot where the secondary command processors are, is to simply turn the ship away from the attacking vessels so that that vulnerable spot isn’t so exposed fo attack. Seems like a simple enough maneuver.”
Uhh, the other guys’ ships can maneuver too. Just because you try to keep part of your ship pointed away from them doesn’t mean they can’t circle around and hit it anyway. Especially if they have more ships than you do.
@41/Eduardo: “After all, it was pretty much guaranteed it was all going to be resolved in a tidy manner the following season.”
The same goes for most cliffhangers — indeed, for most fiction. We always knew Kirk and Spock would put history back on track after McCoy saved Edith Keeler. We always knew Data wouldn’t die in 19th-century San Francisco. We always knew the half of the universe that Thanos snapped away would be brought back. But we choose to suspend disbelief, to put ourselves in the heads of the characters who don’t know whether it’ll work out, so that we feel their suspense and anxiety as our own. So I’ve never understood this attitude that a story isn’t suspenseful unless you somehow actually believe the heroes may lose. How often, really, does that happen?
@43/Christopher: The point I was making is that even though we know it’s all going to be resolved in the end, the rest of the episode in question could at least try and make the effort to convey the idea that things might not work out so smoothly, and that events could take a sour turn. In essence, all I ask is for the story to sell me that it’s presenting real emotional stakes. This two parter fails to do that, and feels so perfunctory that it only makes the inevitable return to the status quo all that more obvious and transparent.
I’m willing to suspend disbelief if the story is strong enough to justify doing so. Basics is certainly not Avengers Infinity War.
You brought up Time’s Arrow, easily the weakest TNG two parter of them all, which came at a time when that show didn’t need yet another cliffhanger, and the fatigue shows throughout that story, with its loose focus on multiple threads that never really come together (Samuel Clemens, Data, mysterious cloaked harvesting aliens, and so on).
@43/CLB: “Uhh, the other guys’ ships can maneuver too.”
My point is, Voyager didn’t even try this maneuver. It just allowed itself to keep getting shot at in the same spot with no attempts at evasion. It’s a failure of strategy. It’s the same as if the ship’s shields are down in one quarter. You wouldn’t leave that section continuously exposed to an assault.
@@@@@Christopher @@@@@ 43 “So I’ve never understood this attitude that a story isn’t suspenseful unless you somehow actually believe the heroes may lose. How often, really, does that happen?”
Very rarely! I would distinguish, offhand, about three different questions that a cliffhanger might implicitly pose.
One: Will our heroes get out of this one? A relatively rare question, unless you’re dealing with a large ensemble cast, or creators with a particular penchant for killing ’em all- they usually will. (You have, of course, more wriggle room in genres where the stakes are less likely to be life or death- perhaps the accused criminal doesn’t manage to clear his name in the second part of the cliffhanger- thereby setting up an arc following him in prison, or perhaps the race to the airport doesn’t reunite the estranged lovers- these still leave you with stories to tell). In our specifc case, given the show is named after the ship, either the crew is going to regain the ship, or, in a remarkably bold creative decision, we’re now going to be following the adventures of Kazon pirates reveling in their new technological superiority.
Two: How will our heroes get out of this one? This is probably the classic mode of the cliffhanger- savvy readers/viewers/listeners/thoughtbeamers won’t suppose that there’s much chance of the heroes falling to their death at the bottom of the cliff, but are engaged enough to be interested in the details of how they avoid that grisly fate. Of course, the details of the resolution can be handled well or poorly- the Batman film’s sudden invoking of an unseen heroic porpoise throwing itself in front of a torpedo meant for Batman and Robin leaps to mind. On the other hand, in our specific example we’ve got a number of pieces in play- Suder and the Doctor undetected aboard Voyager, Paris off in the shuttle, and the stranded crew on their desolate planet, and it could certainly be interesting to see how all those pieces interact to reach the relatively foregone conclusion.
And three: At what cost will our heroes get out of this one. The strongest example that leaps to mind for this is Doctor Who under RTD. The question there was never so much “Will the Daleks successfully destroy the Doctor/Earth/humanity/all space and time, permanently, irrevocably, forever?” (They won’t!) or even “How will the Doctor stop them?” (A conveniently placed technobabble, or someone suddenly developing godlike powers, generally) but for all he was criticized for his use of reset buttons, all of Davies’s finales involved the Doctor regenerating (IE, undergoing a substantial personal transformation, one that often seems fairly traumatic for them and their companions) and/or parting ways with a companion.
I’ve enjoyed stories with all three types of cliffhangers, but the first and third tend to leave me more on the edge of my seat, as it were, wheras the second I tend to approach more as a puzzle where I try and guess what previously introduced elements will prove vital to the resolution and how they’ll interact. Different types of suspense, I suppose.
(Of course, if you’re not already familiar with a creator/creative team/property, it’s not always obvious what type of cliffhanger you’re dealing with until you’ve digested the conclusion).
@44/Eduardo: “This two parter fails to do that, and feels so perfunctory that it only makes the inevitable return to the status quo all that more obvious and transparent.”
It’s always obvious. What’s interesting is finding out how they get there. I think that stranding the whole crew on a primitive planet without their ship or any technology is a pretty effective cliffhanger. It’s the closest they ever came to the complete, irreversible failure of their mission to get home, short of the odd alternate timeline where they were all killed.
@46/Benjamin: “Of course, the details of the resolution can be handled well or poorly- the Batman film’s sudden invoking of an unseen heroic porpoise throwing itself in front of a torpedo meant for Batman and Robin leaps to mind.”
That doesn’t count, as it was a deliberate parody of contrived cliffhanger resolutions. Part of what led to the creation of that TV series was the re-release of the original 1943 Batman movie serial, which was widely mocked by ’60s audiences for its absurdity, giving the TV show’s producers the idea that a deadpan Batman show could be a wellspring of campy comedy. So putting the Dynamic Duo in absurd deathtraps and having them escape in absurd ways was an integral part of the humor.
@46 / CLB:
The same goes for most cliffhangers — indeed, for most fiction. We always knew Kirk and Spock would put history back on track after McCoy saved Edith Keeler. We always knew Data wouldn’t die in 19th-century San Francisco. We always knew the half of the universe that Thanos snapped away would be brought back. But we choose to suspend disbelief, to put ourselves in the heads of the characters who don’t know whether it’ll work out, so that we feel their suspense and anxiety as our own.
Yeah, the Dominion War was also the same. We knew the Feds would survive and win because the franchise mandates demanded that the sandbox remain intact for VOY and future TNG films.
But Sisko and the DS9 crew didn’t know that.
And with out how powerful the Founders were, there was at least the tension of wondering how the hell Starfleet was gonna find the light at the end of the tunnel. I’ll give kudos to Behr and company for trying to balance that pre-ordained victory with their explorations of the cost of war and violence and further character development.
@Christopher I’ll plead ignorance of the surrounding metacommentary, cede the point of ‘poorly executed’ and count myself lucky that I built myself an escape hatch in
(Of course, if you’re not already familiar with a creator/creative team/property, it’s not always obvious what type of cliffhanger you’re dealing with until you’ve digested the conclusion).
@45: That’s exactly what they do. Janeway says “Keep our port forequarter facing the line of attack, Mister Paris. Don’t let them see our starboard ventral..” And Paris replies “I’m doing my best.”
@50: Ah, thanks. I last watched this episode a few months ago and didn’t recall that particular dialogue. Obviously, Voyager was unsuccessful though!
Great season finale that leaves you wanting more. Voyager had a rocky second season but the finale and third season premiere wrap up the first two seasons arc with the Kazon nicely.
This episode is Voyagers turning point – season 3 felt more structured and knew where it was going.
The Basics Part 1 was a strong cliffhanger and the intention of the writers was to move on from the Kazon and they did that perfectly. Everything worked in this episode and you know that they will get off the planet but the cliffhanger is great and leaves you wanting more and wanting to see how the crew will adapt to living on the planet and how they get off that planet.
I can’t really disagree with anything KRAD says. And boy will I not miss the Kazon. But I have to add to the shout-out to Chakotay’s conversation with his father. I found it very moving on first airing; and I’ve become a father myself in the meantime, and that adds to the impact. Both from the perspective of your child always being your child, and for drawing on Chakotay’s Native background in a moving way that’s less hokey than the show usually managed. It’s absolutely right that he would be reminded of his ancestors’ painful history at that point, and it would affect how he sees the situation.
S
I also really liked how the crew rallies around Chakotay’s baby back with the assumption that it is his baby. But I do have issues with the 2nd part’s revelation of said baby’s actual parentage.
*I also really like how the crew rallies around Chakotay to help him get his baby back…
@54:
Yeah, I think that was a consequence of Piller’s original intentions with Seska’s child in “Part II” getting vetoed by Taylor and Berman just before shooting. Taylor especially seems to have been the driving force behind the hard resets of the next episode.
And to be fair, I get Taylor and Berman’s concerns on this particular score. But it’s another of those instances of one of the cardinal sins of Berman-era Trek: Playing it safe, pulling your punches, and being afraid to take storytelling risks.
@53, I liked those scenes, too. I always felt that Chakotay had the potential to be one of the most interesting characters on the show (running away from home to join Starfleet, only to be pulled back there when the Federation broke it’s promises to the colonists, becoming a terrorist, then being stranded so far from the home he fought for- it all has so much potential), and Beltran really shines in episodes that showcase his humanity. He reminds me a lot of Sisko in that way (I always thought some of Avery Brooks’ best work was when he was in his role as either a father to Jake or a son to Joseph- something about him just glows in those scenes), a person of deep feeling who is sometimes conflicted about what he feels he has to do. When he’s not stuck sitting in the Magic Meeting Room spitting out technobabble, he really becomes interesting (at least to me)
@57:
Yeah, as I’ve said throughout the Rewatch (and will keep saying), I’ve always felt bad for Robert Beltran.
There’s all that inherent potential of Beltran’s character and, like the show’s potential itself, it was ultimately squandered (especially after Chakotay’s role in the show’s hierarchy got hijacked by Seven’s arrival in Season Four).
As with Harry, Kirsten Beyer’s tenure on the VOY Relaunch did a lot to rehabilitate my perception of Chakotay and make him an interesting character again.
@58, That’s the funny thing about Voyager, isn’t it? That is had so much potential. Good actors, great premise, some pretty good writers… and they just kind of squandered it. I think one of the reasons I still enjoy watching it is because you do get these real glimpses of something great (for instance, I love “Living Witness,” “Equinox,” “Timeless,” and “Year of Hell) that keep me coming back. If the actors had been a little less engaging, or the premise just a little weaker, I probably would never thought of it again, but there was just enough there to always kind of keep it in the back of my mind.
@59:
Yeah, I’m also nostalgic about VOY because it’s 24th Century Trek and that’s the era of the franchise I grew up with. I’m more attached to Picard, Sisko, and Janeway than I am to Kirk, Archer, or Burnham.
But whenever I think of VOY, I always think of Q’s speech to Picard at the end of “Tapestry” — of playing it safe, never taking risks, and reaping the rewards of a safe, but ultimately sterile and unfulfilling existence.
@46: In the classic era Doctor Who, the Fifth Doctor tended to have some rough consequences getting out of danger as well. Adric was killed, Tegan left because traveling with the Doctor had become too violent and dangerous to be fun any more. One story involving Sea Devils left him having to choose to use a chemical on them that literally melted them alive, inflicting screaming, agonizing deaths on every invader in an undersea base. At the end he looks terrible, beat up and exhausted and horrified by his own actions. “There should have been another way,” he says shakily, as the end credits roll.
I think Christopher’s making a lot of sense about how foreseeable the Kazon plan should have been without the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and @@@@@34/wildfyrewarning makes a very good point about this being the one time out of how many a plan got the bit of luck it needed. Given Seska’s background and knowledge of Voyager it’s obvious that she would be directing strategies that the Kazon themselves could never have hoped to envision alone.
I’m also not sure how the trap was obvious. I can well imagine mid-season episode that opened up the same way but had Seska’s story be true, and the plot being about rescuing her and the child, bringing them aboard Voyager, and working out how to deal with the consequences. If that had happened no-one would have said “this is a ridiculous turn of events!”, so again it’s only with hindsight that it could be remotely certain it was a trap.
Equally, why is it so hard to believe that there’s a system without much water? I honestly don’t understand what the confusion is. Yes, it will be very common in the galaxy, but very common isn’t ubiquitous. If you’ve a system without much of it then keeping it supplied would be a major logistical feat with the technology the Kazon had. You’d be making round trips to fetch it that would easily take over a week and, given how much we humanoids need daily, each cargo’s worth (given the size of ships envisioned) wouldn’t last long for a colony of any size. 100 people need thousands of litres a week just for drinking, and that’s before you think of the many other vital uses it has. You’d need to treat it as a precious resource, using sparingly, and recycling carefully. If someone pitched up and made it appear out of thin air then it would be a heck of a thing!
@62/jmwhite: “Equally, why is it so hard to believe that there’s a system without much water? I honestly don’t understand what the confusion is. Yes, it will be very common in the galaxy, but very common isn’t ubiquitous.”
Every star in the galaxy was formed out of the same clouds of gas and dust, from the same ruins of older stars. So it would be extremely unlikely for any star system to be completely lacking in any substance common elsewhere (and it would essentially rule out another annoying sci-fi trope, the idea of alien life forms or artifacts being “made of elements not known on our periodic table”).
While it’s possible that the inner planets in a system could be exhausted of their water and volatiles by the heat and radiation from the primary star, such planets would never evolve life in the first place. The fact that Ocampa has native life proves that it has had water in geologically recent time, and therefore there must be plenty of water ice available in the system’s comets and outer moons. Even if, by some miracle, there weren’t, the planet still has an oxygen atmosphere and plenty of elemental oxygen in its minerals, and the star is made of hydrogen that could be collected from the stellar wind, if you didn’t just mine it from the system’s giant planets. So the ingredients to create water are abundant. And it doesn’t require any super-advanced technology to combine H and O into water — all you need is to burn the hydrogen and collect the resultant water vapor.
Then there’s the absurdity of the explanation for the surface drought. It wasn’t attributed to an absence of moisture, but to an absence of “nucleogenic particles” for the moisture to coalesce around and form rain. Not only is that a really stupid mistake of “nucleogenic” (created in nuclear reactions) for “nucleating” (serving as a core for raindrops to condense around), but it’s basically saying that the planet has no dust, which is absurd when the whole thing’s a desert.
You’re right about the nucleogenic bit – that was daft.
Ocampa clearly has oxygen, so hydrogen is evidently the thing that’s tricky to come by. We can assume it’s small enough so any in Ocampa’s atmosphere would be lost to space, and if whatever the Nacene did caused the planet’s water to split into its component atoms then the overwhelming majority of it will have been lost, and what was left in the atmosphere would be hard to capture.
Outer gas giants and comets could have been in unstable orbits of the cluster of stars Ocampa’s sun was born in was bound more tightly than is typical early on, or it had a close stellar pass at some point in its history. Perhaps it never had any.
Who knows, perhaps long ago Ocampa was terraformed long ago, and the Nacene accidentally returned it to its natural state?
Capturing hydrogen from the solar wind is in theory possible, but would be a hell of a feat of engineering. It’s ionised, so you’d have to capture equal numbers of electrons and combine them. You’d have to be setting down pretty permanent roots to build something like that rather than just have regular supply runs. Given the Kazon were just mining you’d imagine it would be more trouble than its worth to build such a structure.
Weirdly the cloud of dust isn’t the same for everyone – it changes over time. Older stars will have more atomic elements than younger stars as they are made up of atoms that could only be created in the core of stars from earlier generations. Plus different stars will blow away different elements from their planet-forming debris depending on their size. We will find plenty of variation once we start being able the analyse the chemical composition of extrasolar planets, there will be systems with little hydrogen other than in the star.
The two problems with your theory, jmwhite, are 1) hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, so the notion that it’s “hard to come by” is specious and 2) the Kazon have faster than light travel, so they can go to another solar system that has water, which is, y’know, most of them…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@65/krad: They wouldn’t even need to go that far. Surely the Ocampa star would have an Oort cloud of comets; I have a hard time believing any stellar flyby would have completely depleted such a large, diffuse cloud. And even if that were possible, interstellar space is now believed to have plenty of rogue objects of all sizes, from comets to gas giants.
@65 Krad: Of course you’re right about hydrogen being the most common element, but that’s won’t necessarily make it accessible in every system. Getting it out of a star will probably be impossible without transporters, I spoke about the difficulties of getting it from the solar wind. Small planets won’t have enough gravity to hold it in their atmosphere in free form, and we can’t be certain all systems have gas giants.
You’re also right about the Kazons being able to fetch it from other systems, that must be what they’re doing, but given the daily water needs of a colony of, say, a couple of hundred Kazon miners then those supply runs would have to be both large and regular. Like anything else, the value of it is determined by scarcity and the effort needed to supply it. Water would be an expensive resource in that system.
@66 CLB: We don’t know enough about Oort clouds to be certain every system has one – we aren’t even 100% certain we have one! (Though I’d wager everything I have we do. :) ) Their size though is on the order of 1000s of au, possibly reaching out to the scale of light-years. It’s perfectly possible that a star born in a particularly tight star cluster would have the larger orbits needed for Oort cloud formation be inherently unstable for a good chunk of its younger days.
Or maybe Ocampa is a non-circumbinary planet of a binary star system, which would preclude anything orbiting Ocampa’s main sun unless it’s comparatively close, with the 5th planet we see being towards the outer limit of orbital stability.
I’m not suggesting that water-scarce systems are typical, or even common, but even comparatively uncommon systems will happen plenty of times in a galaxy as big as the Milky Way. It’s good for Star Trek to show the exceptions from time to time.
@67/jmwhite: “You’re also right about the Kazons being able to fetch it from other systems, that must be what they’re doing, but given the daily water needs of a colony of, say, a couple of hundred Kazon miners then those supply runs would have to be both large and regular.”
Not really. Just find a fair-sized comet nearby, tractor it to the Ocampa system, stick it in orbit, and mine it for volatiles. We don’t know if Kazon ships can tow anything that large at warp, but depending on how long they’ve been around, they could’ve set it on course and let it coast at sublight for years until it arrived.
Anyway, according to “Caretaker,” it wasn’t just Ocampa that was lacking in water, it was the whole region. Neelix found Voyager‘s water supplies a rare luxury and a valuable trading commodity, and he said that different Kazon sects in the region trade for scarce resources: “Some have food, some have ore, some have water.” You might be able to justify a single system having a dearth of water, but a whole sector with multiple star systems?
Of course, the show wisely abandoned this nonsensical idea after “Caretaker.” We never heard about water being scarce in the region again, and it was just technology that the Kazon wanted.
Yeah, the “region” comment does stretch credulity. Maybe if the region is comprised of stars that were born together and are still quite a tightly bound cluster…but that’s a stretch. I suppose region could be retconned to mean “the vicinity of this star”, but that wasn’t the implication in the script.
Slingshotting interstellar comets is a cool idea, the trouble there might be finding them. Comets (at least ours) are very, very black. They’ve albedos around 0.05 at best. Plus they’re so tiny in the grand scheme of things. If the distance to the nearest star was the distance from the north to the south pole of Earth then the largest comet we’ve ever seen would be about three-hundredths of a mm across.
Finding something that black that small in space that vast…Even with the sensors we see on Star Trek l think you’d end up doing supply trips rather than go hunting for needles in haystacks.
@69/jmwhite: Stars born in the same cluster would’ve scattered all around the galaxy long before they could’ve ever evolved life. Bottom line, it was just a dumb idea that they eventually realized was a dumb idea and stopped using.
Showing the kazon as mysoginistic without getting any kind of reaction from our crew about it repeatedly struck me as weak.
Especially in this episode, were it´s combined with trivializing rape as a matter of giving Cullah some more motivation to hate Chakotay. I know it´s just an idea Seska uses, and perhaps it strikes a chord with the kazon. But treating it as a minor thingy, just mentioned once, without even hinting at possible consequences, clearly tells me that this is a mens point of view.
A promiscuous woman using her body and her child against men is, in this perspective, the perfect fit for a baddy, don´t you think? *eyesroll*
Culluh is laughing in the picture at the beginning of this review because of how ridiculously easy it was to take the ship from those incompetent Federations. I love it! It was a pretty pathetic performance by our “heroes” and they deserved to lose their ship.
I never found the rationale for going after the Kazon very convincing; simply because Seska said it was Chakotay’s child, doesn’t make it so. But that’s enough to risk the entire ship and crew? For someone who betrayed them from almost the beginning and has done nothing but try to take revenge on them since? Yeah, let’s worry about what happens to her. Very stupid. Janeway should have pulled her “Janeway or the highway,” thing and said “Nope, I’m not risking my ship AGAIN for a child that may or may not be yours, by someone who betrayed us all and keeps trying to harm us. Mr. Paris set course for Earth. Warp 8.” The Kazon don’t have shields or transporters (and hence replicators) but multiple phaser shots against the hull don’t do any damage. Plus 4 carrier vessels, when 1 carrier vessel in “Caretaker,” was MORE than a match for “Voyager,” and 7 of the pitiful raiders in “Maneuvers,” made it “tactically unwise,” vs. a single Intrepid-class starship. But sure, let’s take 4 huge carrier vessels that dwarf “Voyager,” to “rescue” a child who is not the crew’s responsibility and rescue someone who did nothing but betray and manipulate them for the last year and a half.This was like “Voyager’s” “Yesterday Enterprise,” or “The Best of Both Worlds,” but done cheaply and without the tension, rationale and plotting in the previous episodes.
@29 – cap-mjb: I find amazing that you’ve had many opportunities to write Culluh or Cullah in 20 years, given how frigging inconsequential the character is.
Teirna would have been dead from his injuries in an hour had Voyager not come along, not two hours Krad. We first saw Chakotay’s medicine bundle in The Cloud, not Parallax. Are you not counting the guard standing watch outside Teirna’s quarters, and didn’t he die as well when he was caught in the brunt of the explosion?
2: Yep, it’s good to see Suder’s rehabilitation is an ongoing process. 4: Suder could have turned his quarters into a hydroponics lab without ever having to leave it. 5: In S3, Voyager is taken by the Voth, the Nyrians and (if you like) holographic mutineers three episodes in a row.
6: That would mean the deaths of the entire crew if they did it by blowing up the intermix chamber. 7: Chakotay could have wiped the shuttle’s computer core but that sounds too similar to Manoeuvres and I think only two crewmen were killed in the attack.
8: Alliances was the last time Voyager encountered another Kazon sect but having the Nistrim as an ever present threat did become annoying. 15: Yep, it sounded like distorted English to me too. 18: Tuvix and Resolutions spent four months altogether? I think Macrocosm was the only time Neelix got to show his proficiency in another language with the Tak Tak.
29: I love Ethan Philips’ acting in the scene in Suder’s quarters – Neelix doesn’t want to stay there any longer than he has to. The Doctor getting to leave the ship for the first time is hilarious as long as you can ignore the fact he’s somehow audible in space. 43: The City on the Edge of Forever is not the S1 finale, that’s Operation: Annihilate.
52: I always thought there was something a bit shapeless about VGR’s early years and it was not until the inclusion of Seven of Nine that brought about some much needed direction. I wish it hadn’t taken them so long to realise the Kazon had run they’re course and focused more on the Vidiians instead, a far better antagonist (they could have got at least another year out of them).
53: When did they discover that Chakotay’s heritage was all built on lies? I think that’s why they started to cut back on it. 66: What is an Oort Cloud? 69: What are albedos? 71: I think it’s only Seska that does speak out against the Kazon’s misogyny.
@75/David Sim: The Oort cloud is the very wide, diffuse cloud of cometary bodies that’s theorized to surround our Sun at a very great distance, as the source of long-period comets that come only every few thousand years. Similar clouds would probably surround other stars as well.
Albedo is the reflectivity of an astronomical object, i.e. what percentage of sunlight it reflects. A lighter-colored object has a higher albedo.
@75/David Sim:
City was never claimed to be the season finale of season one by #43, it was simply an example of a story that we knew was going to return everything to the satus quo by the end of the episode.
For my money I found the Vidians take over of Voyager in Deadlock more believable than the way the Kazon did it here. Kudos for bringing back Brad Dourif, as Brad Dourif in anything is always a good thing but that’s about all that I liked about this one.. and thankfully only one more Kazon episode to go.. hang in there people,
S…….
Chakotay going instead of Paris makes no sense, just as it didn’t make sense that Seska would believe he was the spy/willing to help the Kazon take over Voyager in “Investigations.” It didn’t have to be “the white guy” (many people can pilot, even if Paris Solo is one of the best, along with Chakotay), but Chakotay not wanting to abandon his child is a major reason why this episode happens; they need to have him interact with Seska in Part 2. They could have just sent Neelix (and, say, Kim unless they needed to tease him dying/suffering a la O’Brien) in the shuttle before the battle in order to rendezvous with the Talaxian fleet instead of having Paris fly away after losing the battle.
Also, why haven’t they been in contact with more Talaxians this entire time? Even if Neelix is kind of persona non grata for draft dodging, it seems like he has contacts/connections with lots of other species but very few with his own (is this the only one other than the ship that takes on Paris in “Investigations”?) Why did they consider allying with the Kazon or the Trabe if the Talaxians are somewhat close?
Hackett gives a great performance, but Seska (at least so far) only seems smart because Voyager gets incredibly dumb around her. She did the “trick” of targeting the same spot in the ship last time when they stole the transporter module. Fool me once and all that.
Losing to Seska is one thing, but she is dragged down by the Kazon, so losing to them is just, sigh.
And doing an episode where they’re abandoned on a planet right after an episode where Janeway and Chakotay were left on a planet for 3 months?
I didn’t realize Picard may have be inspired by this episode with the scene for a bunch of holographic Agnes heads.
The Suder set-up is nice, and the action is fine. So much for not ending seasons on cliffhangers. Live, was it actually called “Basics, Part 1” (giving away that it would be a cliffhanger)?
“Live, was it actually called “Basics, Part 1” (giving away that it would be a cliffhanger)?”
Yes, it was:
