“The Chute”
Written by Clayvon C. Harris and Kenneth Biller
Directed by Les Landau
Season 3, Episode 3
Production episode 147
Original air date: September 18, 1996
Stardate: 50156.2
Captain’s log. A bunch of Akritirian prisoners gather around a chute that opens up to dump in a new prisoner: said prisoner is Kim, and they all start beating him up. He gets tossed from assailant to assailant, until he winds up in Paris’s arms. Kim is relieved right up to the part where Paris punches him in the stomach.
Paris claims that Kim is his—that Kim was his partner in the bombing that they were imprisoned for, and Kim betrayed him, and he wants his revenge. The other prisoners accept this for now.
Kim and Paris compare stories. Turns out both were interrogated for days and were told that the other one confessed to the bombing and each was therefore guilty. Obviously jurisprudence on Akritiri isn’t all that great, since neither of them had anything to do with the bombing.
They haven’t been fed in days, and have very little water. All the prisoners have neural attachments on their scalps called “the clamp,” which seems to make everybody a little aggressive and crazy. The chute itself also delivers bars of food every once in a while, but it’s also protected by a force field. Kim is determined to find a way past that force field.
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When the food is delivered, Kim and Paris never get close enough before it’s all gone, and one other prisoner is killed for his food.
On Voyager, Janeway demands to know where her people are, and Ambassador Liria explains that they’ve been imprisoned. The bombing was done with trilithium, and was an act of the Open Sky, a terrorist organization that has offworld support. Since Voyager is powered by dilithium, and since trilithium doesn’t occur naturally in their system, Liria believes Voyager is responsible. He tries to impound the ship, but Janeway declines the honor of being boarded, and buggers off rather than engage in battle, since destroying Akritirian ships and personnel will not help get Kim and Paris back.
During a senior staff meeting, Torres points out that paralithium can also be used to create trilithium. They search for ships that have paralithium.
Kim’s first attempt to circumvent the force field is unsuccessful. His actions cause suspicion, and a fight breaks out. Paris jumps in, and gets stabbed for his trouble. Kim wildly swings to get people away from Paris, which strangely works, and they go back to their shelter—except someone else has taken it over, and they’re in no position to fight for it.
Zio, a prisoner who’s abnormally calm by the standards of this prison, offers to take them in in exchange for Paris’s boots. Zio also points out that Paris is a dead man, it’s just a matter of time. There’s no medical attention for the prisoners, so he’ll either bleed out or die of an infection.
However, Zio is fascinated by Kim’s confidence in his ability to remove the force field. Zio also is less affected by the clamp than others, because he has found a way to calm himself. He has also written a manifesto on the subject, as he believes the clamp is an experiment on live subjects.
Voyager tracks four ships that were in orbit during the bombing that use paralithium power sources. One of the ships, run by the brother-sister team of Piri and Vel, turn out to be the guilty parties, which they admit after about four seconds of questioning. (Real talented terrorists, these…) Vel begs Janeway not to turn in his sister, to let her go free, but Janeway needs to bargain with both of them in the hopes of exchanging them for Kim and Paris. However, she does tell Tuvok to give them a bath and a good meal.
Kim manages to disable the force field, because he’s just that awesome, but when he climbs to the top of the chute, he finds that they’re not underground, as they were told: they’re in orbit. The prison is a space station. There’s no escape.
Between the clamp and his wounds, Paris is completely delusional, and at one point he and Kim get into a fight. Zio insists that Kim kill Paris, as he’s a drain on resources, but Kim refuses. Zio kicks them out. Kim makes it clear that he will defend Paris from anyone who tries to hurt him.
Janeway brings Piri, Vel, and their ship to Liria. However, Akritirian justice has no mechanism in place for releasing a prisoner if new evidence is uncovered. Once someone is found guilty, that’s it, they’re in the prison until they die, period. Janeway is appalled, and ceases communication.
Then the captain makes Vel an offer: give her the means to access the station and free her people, and she’ll let them go. If not, she’ll turn them over to Liria. Vel takes door number one. Since Voyager showing up in Akritirian space will make them a target, they instead take Neelix’s ship.
The chute opens, and everyone thinks it’s a new prisoner. Instead, it’s Janeway, Tuvok, and a security detail, all heavily armed. The prisoners’ improvised blades are no match for phasers, and Kim and Paris are easily rescued, and Neelix flies them away while under fire from the Akritirians.
The EMH treats Paris and gets rid of the clamp for both of them. They go off to blow a week’s replicator rations on a sumptuous dinner. Kim tries to apologize for hurting Paris, but all Paris remembers is Kim defending him.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The clamp encourages the production of acetylcholine in the brain, increasing the subject’s aggressiveness. This makes it very difficult for prisoners to do things like organize or escape.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway threads the needle very elegantly in this episode. She doesn’t use Voyager’s firepower, which might get Kim and Paris back, but with potentially a huge loss of life. Instead, she uses her ship’s technology and her crew’s cleverness to get at the truth of the bombing and use various diplomatic angles, some successful (Vel), some not (Liria).
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok brings a team to rescue Paris and Kim, and they waste no time in getting the prisoners in line.
Half and half. Kim and Paris are convicted in part due to the bomb being trilithium, which doesn’t occur naturally in Akritiri. It’s Torres who points out that paralithium can also be used to make trilithium, which proves she’s smarter than Akritiri authorities.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix gets to use his bullshitting skills and his piloting skills all at the same time during the rescue of Kim and Paris.
Forever an ensign. Kim is able to bring down the force field, for all the good that it does, and he spends the entire episode fighting against the clamp and trying to save him and Paris.
Do it.
“Right now, I’m so hungry I could eat a bowl of Neelix’s leola root stew.”
“Me, too. Never thought I’d say that.”
–Kim and Paris showing the depths of their hunger while imprisoned.
Welcome aboard. Don McManus plays Zio, Ed Trotta plays Pit, and the delightfully named Beans Morocco plays Rib. James Parks and Rosemary Morgan play the terrorists (it was Morgan’s first TV role; Parks will later appear on Enterprise’s “North Star”).
But the big guest is longtime character actor Robert Pine—father of Christopher Pine, who played Captain Kirk in the three Bad Robot films—as Liria. Pine will be back on Enterprise’s “Fusion” as a Vulcan captain.
Trivial matters: Neelix’s ship is seen for the first time since they brought him on board in “Caretaker.”
Trilithium was first mentioned in TNG’s “Starship Mine,” and also seen as an explosive in Generations and DS9’s “For the Uniform.” This is the first and only mention of paralithium.
The script originally called for only one terrorist, a young girl, but UPN was very uncomfortable with having a child speak the lines required, so they changed it to a brother-sister combo, with all the nasty lines being given to the elder brother.
This was the first episode that was filmed during the third season’s production period, since “Basics, Part II,” “Flashback,” and the forthcoming “Sacred Ground” and “False Profits” were filmed as part of the second season’s filming schedule for budget reasons.
Set a course for home. “This man is my friend—nobody touches him.” Ah, yes, the prison episode. It seems like every science fiction show has to have their episode in which the characters are thrown into an alien prison of some kind.
This one doesn’t really rise above the pack to stand out much. Indeed, it has less oomph than it might, because whatever pathos might be generated by Kim and Paris being forced to be extra-violent and nasty to survive is ruined by the presence of the clamp. This isn’t Kim having to tap into his violent side in order to survive, this is his violent side being forced on him by technology.
As a result, the scenes in the prison lose their bite, because everyone’s mean and nasty and ugly and rotten in this prison, so it doesn’t give us a chance to illuminate Paris or Kim’s character, it just shows them being artificially nastier than before. Yawn.
I am amused that Paris was able to assimilate into the prison culture more easily than Kim—but then, Paris has actually been in a prison before, albeit the much more gilded cage of a Federation penal facility.
But what redeems this episode is the stuff back on Voyager, because I absolutely love the way Janeway handles the situation. She shows an impressive amount of restraint, a considerable amount of cleverness, and a superlative ability to adapt. I love that she doesn’t just try to blast her way into the situations, preferring to use diplomacy and science—and, in the end, trickery, making use of Neelix’s ship to sneak into Akritirian space.
Credit to Les Landau, always one of Trek’s better directors, for using handheld cameras to add to the claustrophobic feel of the prison, and also to the set designers for making the prison an ugly, brutal, filthy, dark, dank place.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido reminds folks that he did a brief revival of “4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch” in June, covering Bloodshot, Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), and Faust: Love of the Damned. Go check them out!
I know that Zio thinks this is an experiment, but if you have a device that can change the level of aggression in prisoners, wouldn’t you turn it *down*? It seems like they could have just basically lobotomized them through use of the clamp, making them too numb and apathetic to cause problems. Even the explanation that it prevents them from working together doesn’t make any sense to me- they are in space. Even if they *do* work together, where the hell are they going to go? Paris and Kim only escaped because a hugely powerful warship was looking for them and had the resources to bust them out- hardly the kind of thing most prisoners would be able to swing. Considering that there is nothing for them to “take over,” since there are no guards, no communications, and no way to move the thing, putting the prisoners there without the clamp would get the same result, with less mess. And if they are just that sadistic, why not just execute the prisoners in some gruesome way? Why waste resources on them? To me, it would have made sense if this was a situation like Firefly had on Miranda- a device that was supposed to calm prisoners down, and mostly did, but made a small group incredibly violent.
That said, calling it a “clamp” a great move- something about it just makes me shudder every time I hear it, and I’m glad they didn’t go for some techno-babbly “neural implant” or something. “Clamp” is just… visceral. And agree on Janeway being awesome, here.
ETA: Do Starfleet ships have legal representatives on them? My Battalion has a paralegal, and my Brigade has actual lawyers, as well as a Provost Marshall, to deal with legal issues. Does Voyager have one? I can’t remember seeing legal representation on Star Trek that didn’t happen on a Starbase, and considering how often their officers seem to get themselves in legal trouble, you’d think ships would at least have *someone* whose job was law on board their ships. Even the Courts Martial we see don’t seem to have a legal rep, and sometimes a random officer is tagged to help (like Riker in the hearing in “The Drumhead”). Considering that Voyager’s initial mission was to apprehend criminals, it would make even more sense for them to have someone on board to make sure the paperwork and chain of custody was done properly. If the original Enterprise had a historian, you’d think they’d have someone in the legal profession, too.
Despite its flaws, I enjoyed this. For my money, the best Harry Kim episode by far is Timeless, which really explored the more confident side of the character rather than just being Tom Paris’s Robin. And there’s a little bit of that here too, which is why I enjoyed it.
And yes, it’s the obligatory prison episode, but I thought it was done fairly well. The dank atmosphere of the prison was palpable, and that scene where Harry finds himself looking out into space rather than freedom was a pretty powerful moment.
Somewhere I read something about Garrett Wang having badmouthed the Voyager writers at some point during the series run, which led to Harry being somewhat emasculated as retribution. I don’t know whether it’s true, but it would explain things. At least he was treated better than Travis on Enterprise, who may be the most blank, faceless series regular in all of Trek history.
Reminds one of “Borders of Infinity”
I recall this being a pretty middle-of-the-road episode. The main thing of note was that we finally got to see Neelix’s ship, which we didn’t even see an exterior shot of in “Caretaker” when it debuted. I don’t think it was made clear until this episode that Neelix even still had the ship, although it raises the question of why we’ve never seen it used until now.
“As a result, the scenes in the prison lose their bite, because everyone’s mean and nasty and ugly and rotten in this prison, so it doesn’t give us a chance to illuminate Paris or Kim’s character, it just shows them being artificially nastier than before. Yawn.”
I don’t think I’d go that far, since it’s how they react to the pressure to become more aggressive that illuminates their character, much like Kirk and Spock’s characters were illuminated by how they resisted the Psi 2000 virus in “The Naked Time.” Harry standing up for Tom, remembering their friendship despite the rage within him, is an effective moment.
Since this is the first episode actually produced for season 3, I think it’s time to bring up the letter I got with my pitch packet when I had an opportunity to pitch stories for the show. It was signed by Jeri Taylor and put forth some guidelines of what the producers were looking for, specifically some “conceptual shifts” they had in mind for season 3. I’ve brought this up before, but I wanted to quote it in more depth:
It went on to offer some of the more usual guidelines that weren’t changed — don’t pitch stories about familiar Alpha Quadrant races; no sequels to episodes from other Trek series; center the conflict on one of the main characters rather than a guest star or a clash of civilizations (I have a feeling Michael Piller wrote or at least advised on that paragraph); keep budgetary and production limitations in mind; avoid “on-the-nose stories about the issues in today’s headlines” that could be done on any other show, unless there’s an oblique sci-fi twist that makes it fresh; and stories “must have credibility, a basis in scientific fact (or at least be made to appear so).”
Plus there’s an instruction about keeping pitches brief and not going into excessive detail, which is the part I never got the hang of. The final paragraph expressed hope that pitchers could provide the show with “stories that are dynamic, compelling, and wondrous.”
As we proceed through the season, it might be worth our while to keep the above paragraphs in mind and see how well the show does in living up to them (keeping in mind that restrictions on what freelancers should pitch are not binding on show staffers, since newcomers have to prove they can follow rules that proven veterans are freer to break). Certainly the bit about avoiding search-for-home stories was maintained for nearly the full season, as “False Profits” was a leftover from season 2. I’ve said before how strange I find it that they reversed course on this so completely with “Scorpion,” after making it literally part of the show’s mission statement for season 3. As for the rest… we’ll see.
I’m not really a fan of the acting skills of Wang or McNeill. So to get a double dose of them for an entire episode makes this one of the worst episodes for me. Though what really tops it off for me is Kim fending off a bunch of toughs by wildly waving around a short pipe. Sure.
@4
I find that amusing, considering that a sizable minority of the crew never, in fact, “joined Starfleet in the first place.” I guess all the Maquis have the same passion for charting nebulae as the Starfleet officers do.
@6/wildfyre: Keep in mind that Taylor was talking about the main cast, not guest stars. All three Maquis members in the main cast, Chakotay, Torres, and Paris, joined Starfleet before they joined the Maquis, although Torres dropped out of the Academy.
Christopher: that memo perfectly encapsulates the issue I brought up in the first season overview of not embracing the premise. The entire show is based on being 70,000 ly from home, and also on a crew that isn’t entirely Starfleet. And Taylor’s memo pretty much says, “We’re sorry we did that, let’s just pretend the show is about something else.” But it’s not about something else.
Just so damn frustrating.
Also, “False Profits” wasn’t “left over” from season two, it was always intended for season three, as were “Flashback,” “Basics Part 2,” and “Sacred Ground.” They were just filmed early to save money.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@7 Huh, I never thought of Torres as having “been Starfleet” anymore than I would think of someone who dropped out of West Point as “having been in the Army.” I guess it’s technically true, though.
@8, yea, I wonder why they were so resistant to their own premise. It’s a good idea, and clearly one that was deliberately “different” from TOS and TNG, and yet they all seemed to hate it, and eventually basically disregarded it until season 7.
wildfyrewarning is correct. Torres was not part of Starfleet.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who has someone in his extended family who did not complete Navy SEAL training yet claims to be an ex-SEAL, and, um, no
Ah, yes, another dystopian prison. As systems of incarcerations go, this one perhaps beats out the one O’Brien got dumped into in “Hard Time,”, and there might be an allegory in here somewhere about systems that, intentionally or otherwise, wind up encouraging aggressive and anti-social behavior in those subjected to them. Certainly rehabilitation doesn’t seem to be a priority here. But if you’re going to artificially alter your prisoners’ neurochemistry to make them easier to manage, it seems odd to go for aggression rather than docility.
@krad Oh god, one of *those* people! lol
Traditionally, I was never a fan of prison stories. I’m one of the few people to criticize Shawshank Redemption because of that (even though it’s an objectively superb film). I find them inherently boring and slow paced. Stuck on the same location with little to no development or action. My biggest worry on VOY’s The Chute was that it was going to be even worse on that regard.
Thankfully, the episode cuts to the ship on occasion, giving it some levity. The Janeway scenes keep it moving and keep things fun and entertaining. Plus, I like it that Landau and the writers were willing to craft very violent scenes by Star Trek standards. It keeps the prison scenes a bit more tense and interesting.
Having said that, it feels too obvious to place Paris in this setting. While Kim is in the classic fish out of water scenario, it doesn’t carry that much urgency with the clamp MacGuffin. I’d argue putting Tuvok in their place would have made for a far more interesting story. At least it would give a plausible way for him to lose control of his emotions.
My only other problem is the fact that the Akritirians get no real development beyond being cruel and unusual fascists who mistreat their prisoners because ‘reasons’. By keeping the focus on Paris and Kim, we never really get an explanation why the Akritirians are the way they are, which makes them no better than token villains. Thankfully we were about to get a much better example of a fascist alien race with the upcoming Remember.
Otherwise, The Chute is a middle of the road episode saved by a great visual effect to convey a major story point.
It’s ironic that my favorite part of the episode has nothing to do with the characters, but rather the CGI. I really appreciated that long revealing shot of the prison’s exterior. Not only it gives Kim an extra reason to despair, but as far as I know, it was also the first extensive use of CGI on that level on the show. I believe it was the first episode to employ Ron Thornton’s Foundation Imaging company to do them, previously know for their superlative work on Babylon 5’s first three seasons. They would continue to craft some ambitious and spectacular shots in the upcoming Voyager seasons (the Borg/8472 battle in Scorpion, the water planet in 30 Days, Voyager crashing on the ice world in Timeless).
Plus there’s an instruction about keeping pitches brief and not going into excessive detail, which is the part I never got the hang of.
@4/Christopher: I know that all too well. Pitching is a delicate art. Keeping log lines to a minimum. I recall the DS9 Companion. The writing team that pitched DS9’s Bar Association basically pitched a single brief line: Rom starts a union. That line impressed Behr enough for them to sell that story.
So last week in Flashback we get a wonderfully patronizing speech from Janeway that was in reaction to Sulu attempting a rescue mission and this week we get Janeway pulling off a rescue mission… I just can’t at times with this show.
@8/krad: I see it the other way around. When the show was first announced, a lot of fans (myself included) had problems with the concept, fearing it would just be another Lost in Space or Gilligan’s Island and would lose sight of Star Trek‘s core mission of boldly seeking out the unknown rather than running away from it. So before the show even premiered, the producers gave interviews assuring people that it wouldn’t just be seven years of failed attempts to get home. Stranding the ship far from the UFP was meant to be just the catalyst, a way to put the crew in a situation where they could have TOS-style adventures where they were alone on the frontier without being able to call Starfleet for instructions. The stated intent from the beginning was that the crew would eventually get over missing home as they became entranced by the wonders of exploring a whole new quadrant.
So it came as a surprise to me that it took two years before they even started trying to live up to that intent. I was glad to read that letter in the pitch packet, because I was tired of waiting for the show to stop being “How do we get off the island this week?” and become “explore strange new worlds” as we were promised. And I was very disappointed when “Scorpion” happened and forced the show back into an even more relentless obsession with getting home.
I think a better option than just “Let’s stop doing getting-home episodes” would’ve been to resolve that plot thread — have the crew establish long-range communication with Starfleet in early season 3 rather than season 6 or 7, and let them use the holodeck for telepresence “in-person” interactions with their loved ones. Maybe even devise some kind of long-range beaming for occasional physical visits home. Then they could’ve been officially assigned by Starfleet to a proper mission of exploring the quadrant and building alliances. They could even have dealt with the Maquis personnel’s outlaw status and any legal action the Federation chose to pursue against them.
And yes, of course I’m aware that those four episodes were always slated to be aired in season 3. But they were still written during season 2, so I would imagine the creative direction for season 3 hadn’t been settled on yet — which is probably why they include “False Profits,” the only search-for-home episode of the season prior to “Scorpion,” and “Sacred Ground,” a story built around the kind of intellectual/philosophical dilemma that Taylor’s letter advised pitchers to avoid.
@11/CuttlefishBenjamin: “But if you’re going to artificially alter your prisoners’ neurochemistry to make them easier to manage, it seems odd to go for aggression rather than docility.”
They probably intended to let the inmates kill each other off. After all, they were off in a space station, so there wasn’t any real need to “manage” them, just dump them out of the way and forget them.
@16 Christopher
That’s true- and I live in a culture where prisoners doing awful things to each other is so accepted as an aspect of punishment that it’s a common punchline, so I can’t call it unrealistic.
It does smack a little bit of intellectual dishonesty. “We’re not executing them, but if they kill each other while incarcerated, well, you know what these people are like,” but again, I can’t really call that unrealistic.
Why the pretense of a prison, though? That’s what I don’t understand. So they put these “clamps” on their heads, shove them down a hole, and then…what? What’s the point? Why not just execute them? I mean, the clamp thing would make sense if it was some sort of entertainment. Maybe some rich people come and watch and place bets, etc. The zen guy theorized it was an experiment, but where’s the scientists to observe? This type of prison just seems pointless.
Wait a minute, Mr Chris Pine’s father is not only a character actor, he’s a character actor who has appeared on STAR TREK? (The line “I dare you to do better” from STAR TREK ’09 takes on an entirely new wrinkle in light of that). (-:
Thank You for providing today’s most entertaining “You learn something new every day” moment krad!
@18 It seems pointless to me, too. Like I noted in my first comment, there doesn’t even seem to be any reason why they *need* to have the clamps. They are on a “station” in the middle of space, with no supervision, no communications and seemingly no method of propulsion, so even if they all get along, what is the difference to the people back home? It would make more sense if the clamps were *supposed* to make them calmer and more docile, and had backfired, somehow, but there doesn’t seem to be any indication of that. As it is, we are just left with a 1-dimensional race that does this to their prisoners for seemingly no practical reason. At least when O’Brien was brought up on trial over on DS9 the Cardassians had a semblance of a motive, and enough development for the audience to understand the “logic” behind their “everyone is guilty but we are having the trial anyway,” justice system. Here we just have to accept that the reasons for this are myriad and mysterious, no matter how bizarre.
@18/Austin: “Why the pretense of a prison, though? That’s what I don’t understand. So they put these “clamps” on their heads, shove them down a hole, and then…what? What’s the point? Why not just execute them?”
See Benjamin‘s comment just before yours — I think it’s just as he says. It lets you pretend to be more moral if you can make it look like they’re killing each other.
Also, it’s just the way authoritarian regimes work. The cruelty is the point. Making people suffer makes the people in charge feel powerful and dominant.
Christopher: Yeah, if the show had actually been something like what Stargate Atlantis did: have them have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the Delta Quadrant — a wormhole that would only be open for a day or something — and have everyone actually volunteer for it, then you can justify focusing on exploring strange new worlds.
But the premise of the show wasn’t just a Starfleet ship lost in space but a mixed Starfleet-Maquis crew trapped in another region of space against their will. With that as the premise, any attempt to try to ignore the 70,000-light-year elephant in the room is damn near impossible, especially since there are a significant number of people on board who did not sign up to explore strange new worlds, and have been ripped away from a fight for their homes that they’re extremely passionate about. A fight that the two previous shows spent five hours’ worth of storytelling time to emphasize the importance of for the sole point of setting up this show. The Maquis only even existed because of Voyager.
Your solution, Christopher, would’ve been a great one, to have “Pathfinder” happen three or four years sooner.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@19
You might remember Pine as Sergeant Getraer on CHIPS back in the 70s-80s, if you’re old enough. He was Ponch and Jon’s boss. Michael (“Worf”) Dorn was also on that show for several seasons.
I finally remembered to ask a question that’s been bugging me! This episode had another generic “forehead alien.” Since we have some behind-the-scenes people here, who was in charge of designing the various alien races? I had to come to terms back then that this type of show simply didn’t have the budget for full-scale alien designs (at least, I’m assuming they didn’t), but the different combinations of forehead ridges just seems lazy and tired to me. I remember being somewhat impressed that the pilot episode had a being of energy as an alien, which was rather nice.
Thank goodness today’s TV shows seem better equipped for alien races, even if it’s CGI.
I like the way confessing shows guilt, except when a series regular does it…
@24, Seriously, you’d think they could at least go old school and paint the actors an interesting color or something. I’d rather see an alien that is bright yellow or red than see any more of the tiny strips of silly putty attached to actor’s foreheads. I get that it is cheap (the same reason that non-corporeal beings in Star Trek tend to be evil- because the cheapest way to show them is to have them possess a character, and possessing someone isn’t usually something benevolent creatures do), but seriously- use some puppets or masks or something.
The reasons for their very bad justice system do make sense in terms of a totalitarian regime. Dictators want to be seen as unassailable and effective. They need people to believe that any attempt to resist is useless. So, publicly punishing someone for an act of terrorism is much more important than getting the right person.
Paris and Kim are also near perfect. They’re outsiders, so the government can embrace the PR that all their people are happy with the system. It’s these evil aliens, who hate their little Eden for being so Edenic, who want to hurt them.
They’re also outsiders associated with a reasonably powerful enemy (Voyager) but one with no real allies or influence. So, it doesn’t make them look weak for Voyager to have successfully launched a terrorism attack, but they also don’t risk antagonizing any powerful neighbors.
They even get the extra bonus of saying the explosive was made from dilitium, something that only Voyager seems to use in this area, instead of a something more common and easier to get a hold of.
A pair of orphans with limited resources aren’t a powerful enemy and raise questions about what little people can do. Since they have some legitimate reasons to hate the powers that be, they’re also PR fodder for neighbors and possibly locals who oppose the current system.
Compared to that, Kim and Harry couldn’t have been better choices if they’d come in a Christmas stocking wrapped with bows.
As a side thing, I’m apparently the only sad that they left everyone else in the prison behind. I realize they didn’t seem the sort to invite to tea parties, but a lot of their behavior can be blamed on the clamp. Also, from what we say, the odds are a lot of them are also innocent–and, even if they’re guilty, those prison conditions are not justifiable. The ship they used had limited space and limited capacity to defend itself compared to Voyager. I get why they had to get in and out. But, I’m still not happy.
@22/krad: I agree there was a mismatch between the initial concept and the execution, but I consider that a flaw in the concept, so I don’t think being truer to it would’ve made things any better. Shows about characters pursuing a single goal are intrinsically limited and formulaic because they can never fulfill that goal. Which was why Stargate Atlantis was so smart to wrap up that initial arc in a single season and then move on to other goals.
Really, it might’ve served the Starfleet/Maquis tensions better if the Starfleet crew had decided to embrace exploration, or been assigned to do so on regaining contact with Starfleet Command, while the Maquis had resisted that and pushed to get back to finding a way home. That clash between the desire to probe further into the unknown and the desire to return home could’ve driven a fair amount of interpersonal conflict, if the producers had been willing to make fuller use of the Maquis premise.
@24/Austin: “who was in charge of designing the various alien races?”
That was makeup supervisor Michael Westmore, of the great Westmore dynasty of Hollywood makeup artists (and the nephew of TOS’s hairstylist Pat Westmore).
The Trek shows did have the budget to do elaborate aliens from time to time, but it was a creative dictum by Roddenberry (as of TNG) that every alien should have a recognizably human aspect. And with the sheer time demands on the show, it was simpler to go with humanoid aliens with limited appliances a lot of the time, especially in episodes with a large number of alien guest stars.
“Thank goodness today’s TV shows seem better equipped for alien races, even if it’s CGI.”
I don’t see much difference. If anything, we have more SFTV shows these days that are set in human-only universes so as to avoid alien makeups altogether. And there are still plenty of shows and movies with humanoid alien makeups even simpler than what the Michael Westmore Trek shows had. Look at Syfy’s Defiance, where the alien makeups tended to be very simple — one species just had very pale skin and hair, one had a vaguely leonine brow appliance, one was bald with a sort of golf-ball texture to the skin, etc. Or look at the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and Captain Marvel, where a lot of the aliens are just humans with bright green or purple or blue skin, like something out of ’60s TV. Syfy’s recently cancelled Vagrant Queen had a ton of wild prosthetic alien makeups — there was literally only one Earth-human character in the entire series — but the main characters mostly had pretty simple makeup, just pointed ears or spots or both. The time demands on prosthetic makeup application are much the same today as they were 60 years ago, maybe just a little more streamlined. There’s only so much technology can do to improve the process of gluing rubber onto human skin.
You really don’t see a lot of CGI aliens on TV, certainly not as speaking characters. CGI doesn’t look very realistic unless a lot of time and money is put into it, so making fully CGI creatures work as characters is more the stuff of big-budget movies. Supergirl tends to use CGI for its Martian characters, but only for brief shots, keeping them in human disguise the rest of the time, because they don’t have the time or budget to make the CGI really lifelike and save it more for action shots. The nonhumanoid aliens on Star Trek Discovery, like Linus the Saurian, are usually prosthetic/animatronic creature effects.
Ellynne: I don’t see how Voyager could just free everyone without knowing the story. This isn’t like “Faces” where everyone there was kidnapped and enslaved for no other reason than because they had viable organs. The Akritirian situation was much more complicated.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@27, I always wished they had rescued them, too! Whatever their crime (if any), was, they have clearly paid for it a thousand times over, and are now just being actively tortured. Heck, one or two of them might even have chosen to stay with the ship! Voyager needs personnel, and it would have been a neat bit of continuity (and a nod to how desperate the situation is) to see a couple of them in the background of future episodes. It’s hard to imagine their crimes could have been much worse than what most of the Maquis have done, after all.
“The Chute.” Sounds dirty. Ah, sometimes I have an adolescent mind. But I did like this one, and felt it was above average. I liked that it was a fish-out-of-water story for Harry and he’s forced to protect his best buddy Tom in a dire situation. I admit, my mind did drift to shipping Tom and Harry as prison lovers where they admit their love for each other but this isn’t HBO’s Oz, this was ‘90s Star Trek so that wasn’t ever gonna happen. Even if the clamp was an artificial means for aggression, it still produced affecting drama in how Harry had to not let it get the best of him. The scene where he nearly kills Tom is pretty moving, deep stuff I think. This is some of Garrett Wang’s best acting in my opinion, right up there with “Timeless.” You just have to give him something that’s actually interesting to play.
I guess Neelix’s shuttle has been kept aboard all this time apparently not taking up too much valuable space.
And count me in as someone learning something new today: Christopher Pine’s dad is also an actor AND was an actor on a couple of Star Trek series himself?!? GET OUT!!!
@23. grenadier: I must admit to not being old enough to remember that particular series – I’m also not sure it ever aired in my neck of the woods – but the fact that Cap’n Pine’s old man starred in a series about a Highway Patrol adds another element of hilarity to the characterisation of 2009s Captain Kirk (or rather pre-Captain James T. Kirk, with his inclination to joyride under provocation).
“The only part I remember is someone saying ‘This man is my friend. No-one touches him.’ I’ll remember that for a long time.”
I once heard someone describe this as a canon slash fic and there are times when Tom and Harry’s scenes do seem to be getting a bit homoerotic. But subtext aside, it’s about the bond between them that’s been a key part of their characters ever since the pilot. And boy, do they need it, because this is about as dark as Voyager gets. Stuck in a pretty hellish hellhole prison, where prisoners are dumped with brain implants that leave them constantly angry and paranoid and left to kill each other, they only have each other to count on and at times it seems like they might not even have that.
This one seems to break all the rules of Star Trek, and again it manages it because our characters are removed from the comfy security of having the Federation to back them up and there’s only a limit to what they can do. Janeway tries to do things the Federation way but this is one occasion where it doesn’t work. “That’s not the way we do things round here,”she says when Piri first offers to help with a jailbreak, but faced with an intractable justice system, she quickly changes her mind and concludes that doing a deal with terrorists and murderers is the only way to help her crew. Harry tries to handle this the way Kirk or Picard would, making a big speech about how they all need to work together, and only gets heckled and jeered at. There really isn’t any way they can do anything about the situation on a larger scale: The crew can only save themselves and get out of there.
Even though she doesn’t get much to do, Torres’ concern for Tom and Harry is evident. Neelix gets a decently heroic part as he obfuscates with the Akritirians. And, because he’s on the main titles, Paris manages to survive an awfully long time with a hole in his stomach and no medical treatment apart from a few bandages.
Two memorable images stand out: The despairing moment where Kim reaches the top of the chute and finds out they’re in space, and the punch-the-air moment where Janeway slides down the chute and kicks bottom.
I do remember the publicity for this season made a big deal about “Embrace the adventure.” Neelix’s ship has been referenced a few times since the pilot. In “The Cloud”, he wanted to take the ship and Kes and wait things out from a safe distance but Janeway made it clear he was either all in or all out. In “Parturition”, the Bothan posing as Neelix made a similar offer to Kes. I guess it’s less sophisticated than Starfleet shuttles, so a situation like this where they want to be incognito is the only time it comes in useful.
@33/cap: That’s an excellent analysis, and it increases my respect for the episode. It’s a good point that their situation didn’t allow them to swoop in and save all the prisoners. They don’t have the moral, diplomatic, and military weight of a whole civilization behind them; they’re alone and have no real power to change oppressive societies, even if they didn’t have the Prime Directive. Enterprise took that path sometimes too, acknowledging that one lone ship and crew could only do so much to make a difference.
@04 / CLB:
I don’t think it was made clear until this episode that Neelix even still had the ship, although it raises the question of why we’ve never seen it used until now.
Yeah, weirdly enough, I’ve always wondered about the Baxial too.
VOY is full of countless missed storytelling opportunities, but while Neelix’s ship isn’t a major one, it’s definitely a strange instance of this. It was no Millennium Falcon obviously, but given Neelix’s scavenging career and staying ahead of the Kazon raiders, you’d figure he’d have some tricks installed that would’ve made it valuable for VOY during the early days.
It could’ve easily filled that specialized support ship niche during the days before the Delta Flyer when its Shuttles were getting trashed as often as Uchiyamada’s Cresta in Great Teacher Onizuka. But instead, we won’t even see the Baxial again until Season Seven.
@2/fullyfunctional: Regarding Garrett Wang, I believe he had badmouthed how his character was written or the direction of the show to the press, and Rick Berman was none too pleased with this. Add that to the fact Wang would show up late to set more than once which delays production and he was actually on the chopping block for season 4 when Seven was going to added making the cast too crowded. But as Wang himself explains it, his being anointed one of People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People in that annual issue that year ended up saving him from being fired and poor ‘ol Jennifer Lien ended up being booted instead. Still Wang was punished in numerous other ways: unlike many other Trek actors before him, he was the first to be denied the opportunity to direct on the show; he didn’t even get a single episode where he was the focus in the 4th season; Kim would be continually unlucky in love (well as far as I know since I haven’t watched every “Harry Kim episode”; and perhaps most infamously, Harry was never promoted in rank during the course of the series despite his vocal protestations of that fact when the series was in production. Wang and Robert Duncan McNeill have a pretty entertaining (and free) podcast called The Delta Flyers which is currently in the middle of the first season of Voyager for their own rewatch. Wang hasn’t addressed any of those controversies yet but perhaps he will as the podcast progresses into the third season of the rewatch and beyond.
@2:
At least he was treated better than Travis on Enterprise, who may be the most blank, faceless series regular in all of Trek history.
Yeah, I’ve said this before earlier in the VOY Rewatch, but I’ve always felt bad for Anthony Montgomery. The whole concept of the Space Boomer was such a great idea with lots of storytelling potential…and ENT squandered it and reduced him to a glorified extra, for all intents.
Fantastic review as always, Keith.
Tiny bit of nitpicking, because I am that guy.
Paralithium was mentioned in the Discovery Episode “Will You Take My Hand?”, as a component of Nausicaan disruptor pistols.
Um, I’m slightly confused about one thing: I’m fairly convinced that the episode is an allegory about the US prison system (locking people up to forget about them, increasing their aggression and turning them against each other); why does everybody in this thread call it authoritarian or totalitarian? Am I missing something?
@40/Torvald_Nom: There’s no inconsistency there. There’s been a growing authoritarian strain in American governance and law enforcement for decades, culminating in the current state of affairs. Political practices aren’t simple on-off switches; a single government or culture can have multiple overlapping or competing threads within it, shifting in their balance over time until one displaces the other as predominant. America is a country founded on liberty and slavery at the same time, so it’s always been full of contradictions.
To address Keith vs Christopher on “Voyager should be about going home” vs “Voyager should have been about embracing the journey of a lifetime” there’s not just the fact that the Maquis officers didn’t sign up for this, but a lot of times Starfleet enlisted personnel also aren’t folks who signed up for some grand adventure either. Mortimer Harren is introduced in s6 as someone who just need Starfleet on his resume so he could get a prestigious research post. You undoubtedly have folks like Chief O’Brien who undoubtedly signed up under the assumption they’d be able to find a posting where they could bring their families along or quit once they wanted to raise a family. The idea that anyone but the most devout Starfleet officers would just happily embrace the idea of never seeing home or loved ones again is a bit much.
SKO: Exactly, especially since Voyager‘s mission when it got lost was a simple trip to the Badlands to find a Maquis cell. There was an element of danger, but also not what you’d call a long-term assignment…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@42, Yea, even if you *were* someone who was down for a grand adventure, these are people who told their families and friends that they’d be gone for 3 weeks to look for a ship in the Badlands. They know that their family back home has *no idea* what happened to them, and at this point are likely starting to come to terms with the fact that they won’t ever see them again. They didn’t get to say a proper good-bye, they didn’t get to set their affairs in order, they didn’t get to ask permission to bring their pets and complete personal belongings with them. Just because I’d love to take a year and live abroad doesn’t mean I’d be thrilled if I woke up one morning in Mongolia with no way to talk to my family, and no way to get home except to start walking. That’s an enormous mental burden to have on you, all day, every day, even before you start to add the pressures of trying to survive in the Delta Quadrant.
If that is the story that Voyager wanted to tell, they’d have been better off ditching the Maquis story line all together, and just have sent the crew through the Bajoran wormhole for a 5 year cruise. Heck, you could even had them get beyond Dominion space, and then be cut off from communication with Starfleet because of that, if you wanted to keep the whole “lost in space” angle. It is downright bizarre that, not only do none of the Starfleet personnel seem to mind that they are slow-rolling their way home so they can poke around at nebulae, none of the *literal terrorists* seem to mind that they have been press-ganged into service as a science crew. (One of the reasons I always wish the Maquis were more easily identifiable is that I’m super curious where they work. I’d imagine a lot of them are qualified to be security officers, but you only need so many of those, and you probably don’t want your whole security team to be composed of terrorists, no matter how much you trust them.) The only person in the whole Voyager crew who seems to be in a hurry to get home, and angry that they aren’t, was Seska. Either the Maquis, or the Starfleet personnel should be really eager to get home, but having neither group (and very few individuals in general) be in any rush to get back is just unrealistic.
@42/SKO: “The idea that anyone but the most devout Starfleet officers would just happily embrace the idea of never seeing home or loved ones again is a bit much.”
It probably depends on the mission. One of the early concepts behind TNG that was soon lost in the creative shuffle of the early seasons is that the Galaxy class was designed to function in deep space for up to 15 years at a time without returning to a home port. That’s the whole reason it had families and civilians onboard, why it was huge enough to be a self-sustaining community. So yes, anyone who chose that kind of mission would be okay with it. That’s why it’s dramatically interesting to have that situation thrust on people who didn’t choose it, who thought they were signed up for a quick mission to the Badlands.
However, as I said, there were concerns about whether a “quest for home” narrative could be sustained for seven seasons. As I said, that kind of story of constant failure to achieve a single goal gets repetitive. Really, it would’ve been better if they’d never pretended there was any realistic chance of getting home in the crew’s lifetime. 70 years was the most optimistic assessment, and it should’ve gone out the window once they realized how often they were stopped or sidelined by the crisis of the week. After the first season or so, they should’ve resigned themselves to the inevitability that the Delta Quadrant was their home now and they needed to focus on building a life there, rather than clinging fanatically to the pipe dream of getting back to their old lives. That’s a story worth telling too. You can only lament what you’ve lost for so long before it becomes unhealthy (and dramatically uninteresting). Eventually you need to start building something for the future. Voyager‘s refusal to take that step led to the crew’s growth being arrested after this season, with everyone but Tom and B’Elanna (and Seven) becoming frozen in their lives and relationships because they were waiting, waiting, waiting incessantly for a way home rather than living their lives in the present. It drove me crazy. (That’s why I wrote my alternate-timeline novel Myriad Universes: Place of Exile, where Voyager was irreparably crippled early in “Scorpion” and the crew had no choice but to make new lives in Delta.)
@44/wildfyre: “If that is the story that Voyager wanted to tell, they’d have been better off ditching the Maquis story line all together, and just have sent the crew through the Bajoran wormhole for a 5 year cruise.”
When DS9 premiered, I thought that was what TNG should do — assign the Enterprise to a long-term Gamma Quadrant survey. It would’ve let them get back to the original purpose of the Galaxy class, and it would’ve been an organic way to set up periodic crossovers when the ship came back to touch base with its command post at DS9 or needed to call for help.
“Heck, you could even had them get beyond Dominion space”
No need for that. People tend to forget that the Dominion is nowhere near the wormhole — it was a year or more before explorers from our side of the galaxy first started hearing hints of the Dominion’s existence, and months longer before any direct contacts with confirmed Dominion members were made. So “beyond” isn’t necessary. There’s a lot of non-Dominion space around the wormhole — just go in a different direction than the one that leads there.
@CLB
I honestly think it didn’t have to be an either/or proposition. They should have had the overarching goal of getting back to earth but the “get home quick schemes that fail” episode should have been few and far between and not a recurring gimmick. Starfleet officers are miracle workers by trade and we’ve seen things like the Traveler getting the Enterprise to and from another galaxy in seconds/Q/the wormhole so I don’t think it’s unrealistic that they would have remained optimistic about a shortcut for at least a few years, honestly probably more than 5 or 6 before it really set in.
The problem is that they rejected any kind of serialization or really just character arcs in general. I don’t think they needed to carry the same story forward constantly when they were supposedly on the move, hence the failure of the Kazon Arc, but they should have had you invested in character growth and change the entire time. Without character growth or development to look forward to or longform storytelling, they were reduced to TNG style one-and-dones that were incongruent with the idea of being stranded and trying to get home.
@46:
The problem is that they rejected any kind of serialization or really just character arcs in general. I don’t think they needed to carry the same story forward constantly when they were supposedly on the move, hence the failure of the Kazon Arc, but they should have had you invested in character growth and change the entire time. Without character growth or development to look forward to or longform storytelling, they were reduced to TNG style one-and-dones that were incongruent with the idea of being stranded and trying to get home.
Yeah, as I’ve said in previous VOY Re-watch threads, I can’t help wondering how the show might’ve fared not just if it hadn’t been UPN’s flagship, but if it had premiered a decade later when serialization and story arcs had started becoming more prevalent in mainstream American TV.
@46/SKO: As I’ve said before, even with a long-term goal of finding a way home, it was the stupidest possible short-term plan to just point their nose toward the Federation and hit the gas. What they should’ve done was prioritized their immediate survival and security by establishing a home base and making allies in the region. Once they had that security, support, and resources, then they could’ve started exploring the quadrant in search of shortcuts home, as part of a larger project of exploring for the sake of knowledge or recruiting more allies.
After all, it’s idiotic to have only one plan and no fallback. They must have known that there was no guarantee they’d get home, that there was a very real chance that they’d have to live in Delta for the rest of their lives. Any competent plan would’ve had options for both contingencies. And starting off by establishing a secure home base was a good first step for both options. Just saying “Set a course for home and go” ruled out one option entirely and was unlikely to achieve the other.
Basically, the whole series premise was a bad idea on multiple levels. There were some good individual episodes, of course, but the core concept was flawed at the foundation.
The one thing i remember about this episode is the big reveal that the prison was on a space ship, i actually bust out laughing because it didn’t even occur to be that it wasn’t maybe that was silly of me but star trek is set in space so not much of a shocker.
@46:
I honestly think it didn’t have to be an either/or proposition. They should have had the overarching goal of getting back to earth but the “get home quick schemes that fail” episode should have been few and far between and not a recurring gimmick.
Yeah, even Stargate Atlantis realized that, which is why they only did three ‘Get Home Quick’ stories throughout the first Season before re-establishing contact with Earth. And even, they at least didn’t make it an ideal two-way transit method for a while (until the Intergalactic Gate Bridge).
That being said, reestablishing contact early in the show’s run was arguably a production-related necessary evil. At that point, Wright, Cooper, and the others all thought SG-1 would finally be ending its run with Season Eight. That meant that Atlantis would carry the torch forward and they needed to address Earth in some capacity (and of course give them the opportunity for more, heh, ratings-driven character crossovers).
I think that’s probably one reason VOY also finally had them achieve semi-regular contact with Earth in the last two Seasons. Not only did it make sense given they were that much closer to the AQ, but with DS9 having ended and Nemesis still 3 years away, they had to at least touch on what was going on back on Earth (and in typical VOY fashion, heh, wasted it).
@46, in hindsight, it really bothers me how little character development was done, especially with the Maquis. B’Elanna gets “Extreme Risk” to work through some of her issues, but everyone else just kind of…forgets they were terrorists unless they are having their minds messed with or need to bring up some technobabbly “old Maquis trick”. DS9 spent *years* exploring the aftermath of Kira being a terrorist- what it cost her, how it shaped her, how hard it was for her to let go, how easy it was to slip back into the role- both with her former cell and later with Damar and the Cardassians. Every aspect of her life and personality had been effected by those experiences, and it showed. Even with the Maquis, DS9 is careful to show them as complicated people, whose decision to fight for this cause clearly comes from somewhere deep inside them (Tom Riker wants to be a hero, Calvin Hudson is clearly repulsed by what he sees as the Federation betraying it’s own citizens, even Eddington sees himself as a righteous victim fighting a bad system), and the other characters on the station have varying degrees of sympathy for them. Chakotay might as well have come straight from teaching at Starfleet, for all his experiences seem to effect him after the pilot and maybe “Nemesis”. In other episodes he rambles on about how land doesn’t belong to anyone and how violence never solves anything, as if he hadn’t left his life and career behind to join a terrorist group that is explicitly fighting to keep their homes, without ever showing the audience why he did that 180. There is *so much* character development to be mined from that kind of internal struggle, and it is largely just ignored. Even if the writers and showrunners didn’t want to put the Starfleet-Maquis struggle at the center of the show, there was a lot of material there, set up for them brilliantly by TNG and DS9, and they just squander it.
@48/Christopher: Indeed, one of Picard’s opening lines on Farpoint establishes as the station being located in the farthest reaches of their known exploration charts. Early TNG focuses a lot on exploring the more distant away regions of space, far from Federation bases and support. The episode The Battle has Riker mentioning that it’ll take a full day for a subspace message to reach Starfleet HQ. That sense of exploration was front and center in the early seasons.
I’d argue TNG season 4 was a turning point in that the writers turned their attention inwards, more into Alpha Quadrant politics. It was the season that deepened the Klingon/Romulan arc, introduced the first hints of issues within the Federation itself (The Drumhead), and also introduced the Cardassians for the first time (The Wounded). Pure exploration was no longer the driving force for new stories. Season 5 compounded that by giving us the Bajorans. In a way, this approach was what allowed for the appearance of DS9 at all.
While Voyager was a conscious attempt to go back to stories focused more on exploration (and the network’s desire to have a starship based show following on TNG’s footsteps), you can tell the Maquis was a conscious attempt to maintain that aspect of politics and internal conflict that defined much of DS9. In a sense, there were two warring visions for the show, which explains Taylor’s desire to go back to episodic adventures, moving away from the political and internal conflict baggage from those first two seasons (which were mostly poorly executed, as it were).
@52/Eduardo: Heck, TNG abandoned the idea of probing into “the great unexplored mass of the galaxy” immediately after “Encounter at Farpoint.” The second episode was about answering a distress call from a Starfleet ship; the third episode was about delivering a vaccine to a Federation planet; the fourth episode (in production order) was about Deanna meeting her mother for a wedding at a popular resort planet; and the fifth episode was about bringing on a Starfleet team to test an experimental engine upgrade, with the ship ending up deep in uncharted realms by accident. It was only after that run of episodes that we started to get frontier stories again, though “The Last Outpost” was borderline (perhaps literally), and they continued to be interspersed with stories set in known territory.
@51:
I’ll hold off discussing my thoughts on “Extreme Risk” until we get there in the Rewatch.
For now, it’s simultaneously one of my favorite episodes of Season 5 and one that drives me crazy to this day a lot of the reasons you noted.
In my mind, the main problems with Voyager were A) story and character consistency and B) the cruise being a little too comfortable. Especially that second one. For example, they never should’ve had working holodecks. They should’ve had to seek out such luxuries from aliens and get into trouble in the process. Same goes for food, water, clothes, medicine, other technology, etc.
Hell, strip the ship of all essentials and see how they cope. As mentioned in the film Master and Commander, when a sailing ship broke a mast far from a friendly port, the crew would have to venture into a jungle, chop down a tree, and build a new one. So, do the 24th century version of that with warp drive. Deconstruct everything about Starfleet and their tech-heavy, high-minded society and see what happens.
Even Farpoint wasn’t all that far out there. We had mention of Deneb and the Denbian Slime Devil in TOS. Are we supposed to think that Kirk’s era went that far and not one step further?
@2/ Somewhere I read something about Garrett Wang having badmouthed the Voyager writers at some point during the series run, which led to Harry being somewhat emasculated as retribution. I don’t know whether it’s true, but it would explain things.
Garret Wang started acting the diva, turning up late for shooting days and got suspended for a few days around the end of season three. He claims to this day he was on thin ice by then and if People hadn’t proclaimed him one of the most beautiful people in the world in an article around then, he would have got the boot instead of Jennifer Lien.
I think he did become a bit vocal towards the end of the run, but not to the extent to which Robert Beltran did. He thinks it cost him a director slot.
Robert Pine also appeared on one of my “conceptually” favorite episodes of Lost In Space, “Visit to a Hostile Planet” in which the Jupiter 2 goes back in time to 1940’s Earth. Pine plays one of the locals who phones the authorities telling them these alien invaders arrived in “yeah, I guess you could call it a flying saucer.”
Mostly played for laughs, it had a few good scenes including Professor Robinson trying to explain the 1st moon landing in 1970 ( pretty close guess!—perhaps based on JFK’s speech?) & threatening to level the town with lasers if the local posse doesn’t return his son. The ending is abysmal with the Robinsons & Dr. Smith leaving the planet and NOT returning to their timeline, thus technically leaving them lost in space in the 1940’s for the remainder of the series. Oh well….still love that show
@58 – That actually would have been a pretty cool way to end LiS. You could have had the Robinsons stay on Earth, disposing of the Jupiter II in some way. The last scene would have been in 1997 (?) with the launch of the Jupiter II and a final shot showing the now aged Robinsons watching their younger selves heading off to become Lost in Space.
@59 that’s a wonderful idea, as that episode appeared in their final season, and would’ve been great for syndication: once you get to that final episode, the whole thing starts over again with episode 1!
Another fun thing about that ep is that it uses the full size Jupiter 2 with landing gear outside on the 20th Century Fox studio lot, redressed to be a lumber mill.
@60/owlly72: “that’s a wonderful idea, as that episode appeared in their final season, and would’ve been great for syndication: once you get to that final episode, the whole thing starts over again with episode 1!”
That actually is how Land of the Giants was meant to end. “Wild Journey” used the same premise as LiS’s “The Time Merchant,” taking the characters back to their original launch and having them cause it in trying to prevent it (and explaining a number of oddities in the initial concept, like why there were so few passengers on an international flight), and it was meant to be the last episode, looping back to the start. Unfortunately, it ended up being aired second-last instead. Also, it contradicted the pilot on the date of the launch. So it didn’t work quite as smoothly as it was meant to.
I just love that Kim is the hero in this episode and Paris the load. It’s good that the white boy didn’t save the day – again. Is it me or does Paris really get more likable as the series goes on?
I thought of ‘Borders of Infinity’ too. It’s a Miles Vorkosigan short story where he’s tossed into a prison where everybody’s gone feral because of the conditions. Being Miles he changes that.
@61 now that you mention it, I believe that is how they ended another Irwin Allen series, The Time Tunnel, with the characters of Doug & Tony returning to the Titanic in the final episode ( which is where they started in ep 1). But I was never sure if that’s the way it ended during it’s initial run or something they tagged on during syndication.
@63/owlly72: Yes and no. The final episode did end with a preview for a rerun of the pilot episode, but it wasn’t meant to be the direct followup from the preceding story. It wasn’t presented and edited the same way. Their usual cliffhanger teasers would just be the first scene or two from the next episode, but this was more of an extended trailer with a sampling of scenes from throughout the pilot. It was just “Here’s what’s coming up next week” rather than “Time has looped back on itself.”
For that matter, the cliffhanger tags on Time Tunnel episodes were almost never presented as direct continuations of the previous events, with characters specifically mentioning events that had just happened. The episodes were often run out of production order, so they were designed to be self-contained, and the tags were filmed for the next episode and edited onto the current one once the broadcast order had been decided. So there was often a noticeable narrative break between the end of the main episode and the beginning of the cliffhanger tag — for instance, a character who’s injured at the end of the main episode is perfectly fine in the tag, or damage that the Tik Tok complex sustained in the main episode is immediately fixed in the tag. So there’s no reason to assume the episodes actually happened consecutively in the order shown. The tags are more just teaser scenes, like when you get to the end of a book and there are preview pages of the next book in the series at the end.
@64 Thanks for the clarification. When I was a kid, we watched Star Trek, LIS, and Irwin Allen’s other 3 series over & over in syndication. All the episodes at that time were mostly self-contained rather than serialized so it was a treat when you’d get an episode like “Time Merchant” or “The Haunted Lighthouse” that actually referred to events that previously transpired in the series. I remember it was always good fortune on the rare occasion when the first 6 eps of LIS ( that were serialized with footage from the pilot) would come into rotation and the stories actually connected from one to another.
As is often being discussed in this rewatch, there is a way to do a series that isn’t completely serialized, yet doesn’t ignore what happened in the previous episodes. And “Hill Street Blues”, in my memory, launched that method many years ago and did it superbly.
@65/owlly: “I remember it was always good fortune on the rare occasion when the first 6 eps of LIS ( that were serialized with footage from the pilot) would come into rotation and the stories actually connected from one to another.”
I know what you mean — those are my favorites too. However, it was only the first five episodes. Episode 6 was “Welcome, Stranger,” the first standalone episode.
“As is often being discussed in this rewatch, there is a way to do a series that isn’t completely serialized, yet doesn’t ignore what happened in the previous episodes. And “Hill Street Blues”, in my memory, launched that method many years ago and did it superbly.”
It wasn’t the first show ever to do that — heck, Battlestar Galactica and even Galactica 1980 did it to an extent a few years earlier — but its success popularized the format.
@65:”And “Hill Street Blues”, in my memory, launched that method many years ago and did it superbly.”
I think I’m culturally obliged at this juncture to point out that Blake’s 7 did it before that, although more in the first two seasons than the other two. In fact, Survivors did it before that: Thinking about it, out of 38 episodes across three seasons, there’s only two that could be moved from their place in transmission order without causing a continuity problem, and even then there’s only a limited number of places you could move them to.
Suddenly J Michael Straczynski’s claim that he was following Terry Nation’s lead seems a lot more accurate.
@67/cap-mjb: We’re talking about American prime-time TV, though. There’s always been serialized storytelling, but in America it was usually the province of daytime soap operas and was thus looked down on as a cheesy format. Hill Street didn’t invent it, it just began the process of earning it greater respectability and acceptance beyond the soap opera format.
@15/CLB: I really like your idea that they should have established limited contact with Starfleet far earlier than they did. Also, I think they should have gotten home in season 6. Season 7 could have been an opportunity to show the aftermath of the return home. Some really juicy opportunities could have been milked with regards to the Maquis members of the crew, Seven’s return to earth, the Doctor’s status, etc.
I agree with the majority that this was an average outing, but there were a few things I liked. It was nice to see Neelix get to do something constructive for a change. I was also taken by surprise when Kim reached the top of the chute and discovered where they actually were. I probably should have seen it coming, but it was effective in how it was depicted, regardless. Last of all, I loved when the away team emerged from the chute to save the day. It was pretty badass.
Unfortunately, we should get over what we wish the show was because it wasn’t; they did recycled TNG plots in the D.Q. We should evaluate the episodes based on those merits. Some of my favorite episodes were actually toward the end of season 1, like “The Cloud,” “Faces,” “Cathexis.” I much prefer Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor’s handle on Janeway as a maternal type of figure to the crew, which she was until season 4 when she became mentor/frenemy to Seven (and occasionally the Doctor) and the rest of the crew virtually ceased to exist.
I know that many people think the Kazon should have been left behind long before they were but remember that space is vast and until season 4, “Voyager,” seemed to be progressing very slowly, as the Doctor put it in “The Cloud:” ” Investigating.” That’s all we do around here. Why pretend we’re going home at all? All we’re going to do is investigate every cubic millimeter of this quadrant, aren’t we?” So I don’t think it was entirely unrealistic that “Voyager,” would run into the same Kazon over and over, though it might have been better if they had run into them a bit less and maybe the Vidiians more, since 1. The Vidiians were a bit sympathetic, trying to survive the best they could, even if their methods were horrific and ethically as well as materially unacceptable. 2. They had been at one time like “Voyager,” much more than the Kazon: Explorers, scientists, until the Phage forced them into making moral compromises for survival. Eventually, Janeway would do the same thing but rather than be forced into it for survival, she would simply claim it was the Janeway or the highway and relieve anyone of duty or have procedures done on them against their consent if they disagreed. It’s one reason I detest the Braga/Biller era of VGR.
It wasn’t until season 4 that they began to make large jumps to get home.
@70/SethC:
Oh how I try to judge the episodes on their own merit, but it’s hard sometimes, haha! I’ve said before that I thought Voyager was a good show, just not a great one. The continuity problem was accentuated by the fact that this was not the Federation and it made no sense for Voyager to be all pristine a week after an episode where it had suffered catastrophic damage. In the same vein, The Shuttle Crash™ cliche really gave a sense of a lack of imagination from the writers. Also the weekly ‘Space Battle’ served to detach Voyager from Trek’s largely positive outlook and from genuine storytelling. I’m not saying there actually was a space battle every week, but there sure were a lot of them that gave a sense of manufactured jeopardy. And then there was the technobabble that was out of control at times. I actually can’t believe I’m saying that because I was rightfully taken to task on these message boards on my opinion that “technobabble” does not have to be based in reality whatsoever. Offhand example from TNG: The RNA nonsense from Rascals, vs. the realistic depiction of momentum in Booby Trap. Even though these are pretty basic examples, I can definitely see now where realism has its appeal. But as I said, Voyager really took the technobabble to an extreme.
Sorry, this as become an unintentional rant which I’m sure is actually proving your point, haha. Anyway, I just think personally that Voyager could have done better and not pointing out things that don’t make sense, eliminates half the fun of debating Star Trek on these boards.
With all that being said, I don’t hate Voyager and I will re-emphasize that I think it was a good show. At the very least, it was not bad. I did buy the DVDs way back when, after all; I don’t intend to stop rewatching them.
To follow-up on a previous comment I made in @36, I was listening to the Delta Flyers podcast for “The 37’s” and Garrett Wang says that while he did get in trouble on the set in season 3 all of the other rumors about him nearly getting fired and the People magazine issue saving him aren’t true. He said he’d get into the actual details when he does the recap for the particular 3rd season episode (which he didn’t name) in which he had the bad incident on set. So that’ll be interesting to finally get the truth about. And I guess apparently I’ve been guilty all of these years of repeating the same false rumors about him.
I enjoyed this episode, even though it could have been part of any other Trek show.
Neat information tidbit: Rosemary Morgan’s mother, Julie Cobb, was a guest actress in a TOS episode. She played Yeoman Leslie Thompson in “By Any Other Name”. Plus, Cobb was married to James “Zephram Cochrane” Crowmell, so Morgan was his stepdaughter for a time.
@30 – wildfyrewarning: Their crimes might be worse than any of the Maquis’. There might be rapists, child molesters, etc.
@53 – Chris: A nice mix of unexplored space and Federation frontier is possible since borders in space (as you well know) are not “we reach this kilometer marker and everything beyond it is outside the Federation”: the 3D nature of space makes it possible for the Enterprise to bob and weave in an out of Federation territory. Of course, turning inward to do Klingon and Romulan storylines did away with that.
@73/MaGnUs: “borders in space (as you well know) are not “we reach this kilometer marker and everything beyond it is outside the Federation”: the 3D nature of space makes it possible for the Enterprise to bob and weave in an out of Federation territory.”
In general, perhaps, but “Encounter at Farpoint” made it quite explicit that Farpoint Station was, well, the farthest point the Federation had ever reached — and that the Enterprise‘s mission was to go beyond it. So by that standard, there should’ve been no “bob and weave.” The ship was overtly supposed to be leaving 100% of Federation territory behind it.
But then, this seems to be a habit for Trek, given that both TOS’s second pilot and TAS’s first aired episode (both written by Samuel Peeples) showed the Enterprise traveling beyond the outermost limit of the galaxy, Where No Man Has Gone Before and Beyond the Farthest Star and all that. So in both of those cases, as well as TNG, they pretty much had to turn back afterward. It’s a weird pattern, now that I notice it.
Technically, DS9 also starts with the characters expanding a new horizon, by opening the wormhole, but the main characters not moving forward from there is built into the premise, at least. And, of course, Voyager breaks a new frontier with every episode……….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@75/krad: In order to fit the pattern, DS9 would’ve needed to end “Emissary” with the crew going through the wormhole in a ship and pledging to move on from there to explore the other side… and then next week being back on this side without explanation.
“On second thought, let’s not go to the Gamma Quadrant. ‘Tis a silly place.”
Did Zio get Paris’s boots because Pit wanted them right before Kim and Paris were rescued. I was expecting the reversal, Krad – that you would prefer the scenes in the prison to those aboard Voyager. Is Les Landau one of Trek’s or one of VGR’s better directors?
4: Neelix mentioned his ship in The Cloud. He wanted to wait aboard with Kes while Voyager went into the nebula but Janeway shot that idea down which is probably why he never suggested it again. I think VGR had a lot more restrictions than TNG or DS9 because it had a network (UPN) to answer to while they were allowed to be they’re own agent.
8: Do you ever get the impression they like to pretend those first two seasons never happened and is that attitude true of most Trek shows? 10: Yep, Torres never made it through the Academy like Paris and Chakotay so she isn’t Starfleet. That’s why I never understood why Chakotay didn’t have pips on his collar like Paris once they’re ranks were reinstated – instead, he wears rank insignia like the other ex-Maquis.
11: The Akritirians probably figure marooning them in space negates any risk. 13: B5’s CGI never seemed that convincing to me, not compared to the sterling work on TNG and DS9. 15: I like the idea that Voyager gets home before the end of the series and the last few episodes tackles the crew readjusting to a vastly different AQ.
23: He always gets typecast as obnoxious characters. 24: With those ridges, you fear this to be another Kazon episode until The Chute becomes something much more interesting. 33: That was Persistence of Vision. 35: Is Baxial it’s name? 36: What about Demon? Kim was a strong focus of that episode.
44: Kim was always in a hurry to get home, he even said so in Endgame. 46: VGR attempted serialisation in S2 and it didn’t work because the Kazon were such a terrible antagonist. B5 and DS9 both proved that serialisation in episodic television is possible.
56: I don’t think they’re connected – for example, Voyager encounters two races called the Komar (just with different spellings) along its journey. 57: I think Kim was expected to die after Scorpion but People magazine saved his hide. 62 Paris (and Neelix) didn’t so much become more likeable, it was more like less annoying.
64: TikTok or Tick-Tock? 66: Were all Irwin Allen’s TV shows about stranded people trying to find they’re way back home? 69: I didn’t realise until I read your comment how far off topic we’d gone. 70: The Cloud, Faces and Cathexis – none of these were towards the end of VGR’s first season.
72: I don’t know if Wang was telling the truth there. 73: The best Trek episodes are those specific to that show. Vel and Piri both seem much too unconvincing for anything like that. 74: It is weird that the Enterprise takes a leap into the unknown at the end of Encounter at Farpoint and then finds itself back in Federation space in The Naked Now.
I saw this episode and The Mandalorean – The Prisoner episode on the same day, as it happened. Both feature prison spaceships ostensibly inhabited only by prisoners. And both apparently have artificial gravity. Seems it would be much more punishing without the gravity.
In TOS – Space Seed, Spock calls out how wasteful a penal spaceship would be. That seems to have been ignored.
Also, why do some prisoners think that they’re deep underground? Didn’t they all fall through the chute from spaceships?
@78/BeeGee: “In TOS – Space Seed, Spock calls out how wasteful a penal spaceship would be. That seems to have been ignored.”
Spock was referring to penal transportation, the practice of shipping prisoners to penal colonies on other lands; the Botany Bay was named after a famous penal colony in Australia, where the British Empire shipped its prisoners to ease prison overcrowding and simultaneously gain a workforce for settling the new continent. What Spock said was that post-Eugenics Wars Earth society was so devastated that it wouldn’t have had the resources to waste one of its few cutting-edge spacecraft on penal transportation. It wasn’t about the ship itself, it was about the impoverished status of the society.
Besides, that was a ship; this is a space station. Those are two entirely different things, the difference between a car and a building, or a boat and a drilling platform.
“Also, why do some prisoners think that they’re deep underground? Didn’t they all fall through the chute from spaceships?”
Tom said he was drugged after being interrogated, then woke up at the bottom of the chute. So he had no idea where he was or how he got there. Harry had the same experience, and presumably so did all the other prisoners.
Thanks for the quick reply. The artificial gravity would sell the illusion of being under ground in the inmates’ minds, for whatever that illusion is worth.
This episode was crazy. Voyager just kidnapps 2 people and foces them, at gun point, to do their bidding, or they will be turned over to their clearly facist evil government. They dont treat the freedom fighters like people. Shocking abuse of power.
81 – Just watched it. That was my first response as well. But on reflection I think Janeway just made the practical decision (and she didn’t even attempt to justify it using the prime directive or anything, which was honest of her). What else could she do? I suppose the Maquis might have been more sympathetic and someone might have spoken out on that point, but she didn’t give them the chance. Very wise.
If anything her risk was the freedom fighter might have just called her bluff (I doubt she’d have handed them over, what would be the point); but she judged his character correctly and he thought he had no choice but to help her.
Shocking lack of competence on the part of the prison guard ships though. Some strange ship docks at their prison chute entrance and they just faff around until it escapes with prisoners?