“Concerning Flight”
Written by Jimmy Diggs and Joe Menosky
Directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño
Season 4, Episode 11
Production episode 179
Original air date: November 26, 1997
Stardate: 51386.4
Captain’s log. On the holodeck, Janeway returns from testing Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine, which crashed into the Arno River. Both captain and maestro are soaked, and being mocked by the citizens of Firenze. Leonardo’s ranting that he’s going to go to France where he’ll be properly appreciated is interrupted by Voyager being attacked.
Janeway leaves the holodeck and heads for the bridge, not bothering to shut down the program. The unidentified vessels attacking aren’t doing much damage, but they are able to punch a transporter beam of some kind through the shields and steal a whole bunch of stuff before buggering off. Their bounty includes the computer processor and the EMH’s mobile emitter, among many other items.
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Despite not having a working computer, Voyager manages, after ten days, to track down the culprits, mostly thanks to the enhanced sensors in astrometrics. They detect Starfleet signatures on two continents of the planet. Paris and Neelix go to one continent while Tuvok and Janeway go to another. The former two find a merchant wearing a Starfleet uniform under his armor and who has a phaser rifle and some other stuff to trade, but Chakotay just pumps him for information in exchange for getting to keep his stolen merchandise (which he bought from someone else). He tells them that Tau is the biggest, baddest merchant on the planet.
Janeway and Tuvok are stunned to encounter Leonardo on the planet, wearing a mobile emitter. The holodeck character believes he has found himself in the New World, assuming he was kidnapped by pirates and taken across the Atlantic to the Americas. He even has a patron—which turns out to be Tau. The Leonardo character was in the computer processor and Tau downloaded him into the mobile emitter.
They go to Leonardo’s workshop, where he is working on a number of items, some of which uses Voyager’s equipment. Janeway approaches Tau, leaving Tuvok to distract Leonardo with small talk, at which the Vulcan does not excel. Janeway pretends to be a merchant looking for a computer to run a colony, Tau says he has just the thing, and shows off the interface with Voyager’s computer processor.
Leonardo has mapped the continent very accurately, and between that and the astrometric sensors, Tuvok and Seven are able to create a sensor map of the continent and triangulate the location of the processor. However, there’s a dispersion field protecting the structure it’s in, so Janeway will have to go there and activate the processor so that it will give off enough of an energy signature to get a transporter lock.
Tau, however, figures out who and what Janeway is and holds her at gunpoint, taking her combadge. Leonardo smashes Tau on the head, fearing execution for hurting his patron, but not wanting to see his apprentice hurt. He reluctantly leads Janeway to where the processor is stored.
By the time they get inside, Janeway using her “compass” (tricorder) to wend their way through the labyrinthine corridors, Tau has sent his guards after them, as well as ships into orbit to fire on Voyager. Janeway activates the computer enough for Voyager to beam it back. Janeway uses a site-to-site transporter that Tau stole from Voyager to bring them out to the hills where Leonardo has constructed another flying machine, this one made out of more sturdy 24th-century material. They use it to fly away from the guards who are firing on them (and Leonardo is freaked out when the phaser beam goes through him), and eventually Voyager is able to beam them aboard.
Returned to his rightful place on the holodeck, Leonardo is again packing for France, wanting to show his friend the king the wonders he saw in the New World.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Voyager is able to detect their equipment via their “Starfleet signatures,” whatever that means. This reminds me of how they found B4 in Nemesis via the “positronic emissions,” which is rather like finding a dining room table from its “wood emissions.”
There’s coffee in that nebula! There’s a certain amount of fangoobering of Leonardo—even more so than in “Scorpion”—on the part of Janeway, and she’s obviously really enjoying getting to interact with him outside the holodeck. But she never loses sight of the mission to retrieve their stuff, either.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok cautions Janeway on relying too much on Leonardo, as he is not only a hologram, but an accurate re-creation of someone notoriously bad at finishing what he started, something Janeway herself dinged Leonardo for at the top of the episode. Tuvok also is really terrible at small talk.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Denied his mobile emitter, the EMH is frustrated by being once again trapped in sickbay. He pumps Seven for gossip on the crew while adjusting her optical interface, including the story of her fight with Torres in the mess hall.
Resistance is futile. Seven points out to Tuvok that it’s illogical to refer to a hologram the same way you would refer to a person.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kim goes to astrometrics to adjust the sensors only to find Seven already there working on the problem. The first thing she says when he enters is, “If you’re here to fraternize, I do not have the time.” This implies that they’ve “fraternized” before, which makes me wonder what was going on while they were setting up that lab between “Revulsion” and “Year of Hell.”
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. The episode opens and closes in Leonardo’s workshop, which we’ll only see once more, in “The Omega Directive.” Also in a nice touch, Janeway is soaking wet on the holodeck, but dry when she’s on the bridge, because of course that was holographic water…
Do it.
“No, I must understand! Catarina, to see objects disappear into thin air, to see lightning pass through my body—are we spirits? Catarina—am I dead?”
“Let me ask you something: if you were something other than a human being, if you were a different kind of animal, if you were a small bird, a sparrow—what would your world be like?”
“I should make my home in a tree, in the branch of an elm. I should hunt insects for food, straw for my nest, and in the springtime I should sing for a companion.”
“And you would know nothing of the politics of Florence, the cutting of marble or mathematics?”
“Of course not.”
“But why not?”
“My mind would be too small.”
“As a sparrow your mind would be too small? Even with the best of teachers?”
“If Aristotle himself were to perch on my branch and lecture till he fell off from exhaustion, still the limits of my mind would prevent me from understanding.”
“And as a man, can you accept that there may be certain realities beyond the limits of your comprehension?”
“I could not accept that. And I would be a fool.”
–Leonardo trying to understand the 24th century, and Janeway trying to explain it to him, the best conversation between the two characters in an episode full of great ones.
Welcome aboard. The great John Rhys-Davies makes his second and final appearance as Leonardo following “Scorpion.” John Vargas—who previously played the Genesis scientist who was killed by the Ceti-eel-possessed Captain Terrell in The Wrath of Khan—plays Tau.
Trivial matters: Jimmy Diggs’ original pitch was simply for the mobile emitter to be stolen, and it was Brannon Braga who suggested that it be Leonardo da Vinci running amuck on an alien world. Joe Menosky, a big fan of the Italian Renaissance, jumped at the chance to write the script. “Da Vinci’s Day Out” was one of the working titles of the episode.
Janeway mentions that James T. Kirk was said to have met Leonardo, though evidence of that meeting is “less than conclusive,” a reference to the original series episode “Requiem for Methuselah,” where the immortal Flint claimed to have been, among other folks, Leonardo. Of course, Kirk promised not to tell anyone about Flint in that episode—then again, there were four hundred-plus people on the Enterprise, and one of them may have blabbed…
Tim Russ wears the same outfit when he’s in civilian clothes on the planet that he wore as the Mirror Universe version of Tuvok in DS9’s “Through the Looking Glass.”
Leonardo mentions several times that the king of France is a friend of his. King Francis I of France was indeed a good friend to Leonardo, and when the maestro died in France in 1519, Francis was by his side. Leonardo really was a skilled cartographer, at a time when the art of map-making was nascent to say the least.
Set a course for home. “The great bird will take flight and bring glory to its nest.” I’m of two minds about this episode. I mean, it’s completely enjoyable because it has John Rhys-Davies doing a magnificent job of portraying the original Renaissance Man. And Joe Menosky’s script shows a superb understanding of a 15th-century person’s worldview in general and Leonardo’s interpretation of the future in particular. This makes both for some hilarious dialogue as well as some fascinating philosophical musings.
And this is a nice change from the usual interact-with-the-hologram stories that Trek has done, as the others have all been aware of their status as holograms: Minuet, Professor Moriarty, Vic Fontaine. But Leonardo isn’t aware of his photonic nature (at least until a phaser blast passes through him) nor of what century he’s in. Leonardo is able to adjust, in part because he’s reinterpreting everything around him through his own lens, but also because he’s so brilliant. And I love his conversations with Janeway on various subjects, especially her sparrow analogy to explain the technological marvels that even he cannot comprehend.
But the rest of the story doesn’t entirely gel. Everyone’s treating the wholesale theft of a ton of their equipment as a minor inconvenience rather than the major violation is truly is, and Chakotay just blithely letting the merchant wander off with a stolen phaser rifle is contrary to the ship that’s supposed to be upholding Starfleet ideals. For that matter, no effort is made to retrieve anything beyond the computer processor and the mobile emitter, which is—not good?
Also the parts of the episode that don’t involve Janeway, Leonardo, and Tuvok don’t really do much. For starters, Tau is a terrible villain. No charisma, no menace, no personality, and worst of all, no effectiveness. Anybody who lets a hologram get the drop on him with a blunt object to the head is not going to impress as a villain, and their inability to capture Janeway and Leonardo at the end is comical. It’s at odds with his ability to so thoroughly own Voyager at the top of the episode.
The EMH’s frustration at being back to stuck in sickbay is a nice touch, but aside from one complaint over a viewscreen in a briefing and one scene with Seven, not much is done with it, though Robert Picardo plays it wonderfully as ever. Meanwhile, the rhapsody in awkward between Seven and Kim just falls totally flat. (The later scene with Tuvok and Seven in the same lab works better, partly due to both Jeri Ryan and Tim Russ excelling at deadpan commentary.) And Tuvok’s attempt at small talk with Leonardo falls even flatter, as the same Tuvok who effortlessly went undercover as a telepathic thrill-seeker just last episode would not have any trouble talking to Leonardo.
It’s worth it for Rhys-Davies and Kate Mulgrew being amazing together, and the pair of them taking flight at the end is a crowning moment of awesome, but one really wishes for more from the rest of it.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be doing a panel on mythology in fiction as part of the ongoing virtual Shore Leave convention Saturday at 1pm Eastern time, alongside fellow Trek authors Greg Cox, Robert Greenberger, Lorraine Anderson, and Aaron Rosenberg, as well as author Christopher D. Abbott. Register at this link (registration is free, but you can’t attend without registering first).
I did an article on “Concerning Flight” for Star Trek Magazine‘s Jan/Feb 2012 issue, and here are a couple of excerpts:
“[T]he episode is a celebration of Leonardo himself. Joe Menosky is a student of history with a special interest in the Italian Renaissance, and in the script of “Concerning Flight” one can see the author taking this opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the greatest mind of the Renaissance, to interrogate him (through Janeway) about his perennial habit of leaving great works uncompleted, while ultimately giving him the fictional opportunity to bring one of his greatest imaginings to completion at last.
“As such, “Concerning Flight” is a backward-looking tale, not the kind of Star Trek episode that reflects or anticipates the trends of contemporary media and culture…. In many respects, “Concerning Flight” reflects the increasing tendency of Voyager to shy away from depth and introspection in favor of way-out, high-concept adventures with no lasting consequence and little cultural relevance….
“Yet… that does not make it a failure as a Star Trek episode. After all, it is a character study of Leonardo da Vinci, the quintessential Renaissance scientist, a genius who dabbled in everything – the archetype of such characters as Spock and Data, and of the Starfleet spirit of exploration and intellectual curiosity. It is a story that celebrates intelligence and curiosity and rewards it with the realized dream of flight. When Leonardo and Janeway take to the air in their “great bird,” even though it’s an achievement centuries behind the likes of the U.S.S. Voyager, it feels like a soaring moment of triumph. And that celebration of the human spirit taking flight through the power of science and hard work is at the core of what Star Trek is about.”
In short, I loved this one. A totally silly, contrived story, but the payoff is delightful.
“Voyager is able to detect their equipment via their “Starfleet signatures,” whatever that means.”
Seems obvious enough — spectrographic readings that correspond to the composition of Starfleet technology, and energy emissions whose patterns match Starfleet technology.
“This reminds me of how they found B4 in Nemesis via the “positronic emissions,” which is rather like finding a dining room table from its “wood emissions.””
Not at all. Detecting positronic emissions is a real thing — it’s what the “PE” stands for in a medical PET scanner. When positrons annihilate with electrons, they release gamma-ray photons at 511 keV, a very recognizable signature.
“For that matter, no effort is made to retrieve anything beyond the computer processor and the mobile emitter, which is—not good?”
There were two teams on the planet, and we only followed one. I assume the other team collected the rest of the stuff.
I like this episode, although I still think this and “Random Thoughts” would work better as follow-ups to “Year of Hell,” and it could have added some interest to Janeway, letting her work through some of her own reactions to those events in the “privacy” of talking with a hologram, rather than unburdening on the crew. I think the writers often shied away from exploring Janeway emotionally because they were worried about “ruining” the first female captain, but I think there were times, like here, where it would have been neat to show the audience that side of her, while seeing how she kept that away from her crew. But it’s a fun, silly romp with some great acting by John Rhys-Davies and Mulgrew.
I also chuckled at the idea of having a “search team” consisting of two people, whose job it is to search an entire continent.
@2/wildfyre: What are you talking about? Leonardo never mentions Galileo in this episode. Flint did say in “Requiem for Methuselah” that he’d personally known Galileo, but of course he was an immortal, so obviously he knew Galileo decades after he’d moved on from the Leonardo identity and become someone else.
@3 Huh, right you are. Don’t know what I was confusing it with.
I missed if they said how long it took them to track down the planet the thieves went to but it sure felt like Leonardo got set up on the planet really quickly
@5/John: As Keith said in the recap, it took Voyager ten days to track down the stolen tech.
Yeah, this one’s a favorite of mine from Season Four.
As KRAD said, it ain’t perfect, but I just love Davies’ encore performance as DaVinci, his on-screen chemistry with Mulgrew, and Menosky’s philosophical musings.
Also, because I can’t resist my recurring acknowledgment of the greatest hits of Chuck Sonnenburg over at SF Debris…
Chuck!Leonardo Da Vinci: “They’re all in love with that upstart Galileo. Everywhere, it’s Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, magnifico!”
@8 Ah! This is probably where I got the idea that Galileo was mentioned in this episode! Love SF Debris.
And that SF Debris review includes a disclaimer at the end about how Galileo lived long after Leonardo…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It’s not a hill i’m willing to die on and i know it’s just a convenient plot device for whatever the episode demands but i find the holodeck rules frustratingly inconsistent at times (join the queue, i know). Doesn’t Wesley fall into holodeck water during Encounter at Farpoint and then proceeds to leave the holodeck while still soaking wet? Maybe we can forgive that since it’s the first time it has been introduced but what about objects? I sort of always assumed the holodeck replicates certain things or are all interactable objects just photons held together by forcefields? We see characters many times recreating holodeck versions of tools like tricorders and such so if it’s replicated then no problem but a hard light projection sends you into interesting philosophical cul-de-sacs over whether it’s just as real as the real thing.
Anyway, what bothers me about this episode is the Da Vinci program drinking wine when on the planet and i assume he’s also eating food since he’s programmed to eat and drink. Holographic food and drink that is so i just can’t shake the thought from my mind that there’s a bunch of undigested food and drink swilling around in his holographic tummy – when he’s deactivated that’s a whole lot of mess someone is going to have to clean up and scenario most likely suited to Lower Decks.
@11/politeruin: According to the tech manuals, the holodeck does replicate inanimate objects that users interact with — and it’s hard to imagine how to simulate her clothes being soaked without actually putting water in them. But then, replicators can dematerialize things as well as materialize them. So maybe in the years since early TNG, holodecks have been upgraded so they beam away the water from soaked clothes, as an added convenience.
#12: Ah… that’s in the tech manuals huh? Neat. I might have picked that up from a deep dive into memory alpha or something but I’ve not read any tech manuals.
I do feel sorry for whichever poor, overworked employee has to muck out Quark’s holosuites when his customers have finished with them.
As far as whether one is wet on the Holodeck or not likely is determined by setting. If you want to white water raft on the Holodeck it likely doesn’t replicate it but take it from the ship’s water stores. OR it simply simulates water with force fields. On Voyager, a smaller ship than a Galaxy, water stores would be less, but also in Voyager’s situation it would be less practical, even if you take it by synthesizing water from deuterium stores and oxygen, that’s still things that are needed elsewhere, so holographic water would likely be the default.
When you grow up on John Rhys Davies’ voice, it becomes a nostalgic delight whenever you hear it for any reason. For that alone this episode is awesome. But the rapport between Da Vinci and Janeway is joyous.
“Earthquakes and idiots.”
This is actually quite charming. Basically, it’s all about the relationship between Janeway and Leonardo. Janeway is obviously loving the opportunity to team up with one of her heroes, even if he’s just a hologram. No-one really treats Tau like a serious threat, a fact underlined by the climax when his men can’t think of any way to deal with their quarry escaping by hang glider other than to gape at them. Their conversations about the situation they are in are well done.
I hadn’t realised how much Tuvok had to do during this period. I thought he’d been lost in the mix by now but he’s probably been one of the most prominent characters so far this season and is really starting to dish out the Spock-like humour, from his dry response to Janeway’s orders (Janeway: “Fire at will!” Tuvok: “I have the will put not the means, Captain.”) to the way he responds to Seven calling treating a hologram as alive illogical by just giving her a look that screams “Do not mess with me.”
The Doctor trying to get Seven to give him gossip after days stuck in sickbay is quite amusing and he’s someone else her sarcasm is lost on. Tuvok manages to freeze the Leonardo hologram just by pressing a couple of buttons on the mobile emitter: Does anyone ever do that to the Doctor? Janeway’s “James T. Kirk claimed he met him, although the evidence is less than conclusive” feels like a line added to stop people writing in. I’m not really buying it (if the evidence is good enough for Spock, it’s good enough for me) but points for trying.
With regards the other missing items, the inventory Chakotay reads out is “Five tricorders, three phaser rifles, a couple of photon torpedo casings, two anti-matter injectors, a month’s supply of emergency rations.” (Paris sounds as though he won’t miss the last one at all.) Annoying, but probably not the end of the world if they don’t get it back.
@11- It helps if you remember that, in the Federation at least, a lot of recreational holoprograms are probably created by amateurs as a labor of love. So water in a kayaking program might be all forcefields- until Lieutenant Wooton realizes that if he has the holodeck replicate a thin layer of actual water on top, he can get much more satisfying spray. And then all the holo-heads who read Wooton’s newsletter experiment with variations on that, and when Picard asks the computer to create a ship on water without further specifying how, it just uses the settings from the last perfectionist who really tinkered with it.
@13/politeruin: Lol. That same thought about who cleans up after the “mess” on the holodeck also applied to the Enterprise-D such as after Riker and Geordi and Barclay would use it. Riker in “Perfect Mate” being a prime example.
I’ve never seen this episode in first-run and I’m only partially through it now but being a Francophile I appreciate the episode’s historical accuracy. I was supposed to go on a vacation to the Loire Valley including the city of Amboise in France this past April and discovered in my research that da Vinci just happened to be buried in Amboise and his last home is preserved there as well so I was going to check those sites out. I’ve since rescheduled that trip for next August due to Covid.
Much like Scientific Method, this is another episode I could label as delightful. But this time, on a more fun, more whimsical sense. Concerning Flight is very much a celebration of Da Vinci and iluminism in general, which is very much one of Trek’s core foundations. Naturally, it was a job well suited to the one writer/producer who took a prolonged sabbatical to Italy. Only in a Menosky episode, you get Janeway pretending to use the Tricorder as a compass. Pure symbolism. Kudos to Menosky and Braga for coming up with that idea on top of Diggs’s original pitch.
Even the fact that Tau stole Voyager’s computer plays into this whimsical tone. It feels so effortless, so out there. No explosions, no damage. Just a pure caper where the Voyager crew is caught unawares that they’ve been robbed blind. Definitely not the usual TNG/Voyager-esque approach to plot complications. It’s closer in tone to Voyage Home. I’d agree that Tau isn’t much of a villain, but I think that’s kind of the point. The whole approach to this story is less than serious.
Of course, what really holds the episode together is the great John Rhys-Davies. Has there ever been a character played by him that hasn’t elevated the story? Sallah was a godsend on his two Indiana Jones films (his expression when Indy reunites with his father is pure joy), and Gimli is the heart and soul of the Fellowship. Rhys-Davies brings an innocence and willingness to explore to the Holo-Da Vinci that is instantly infectious. His banter with Janeway is so quotable, so delightful. The chemistry between him and Mulgrew could light any scene.
And the way I see it, this episode would never have been made under Michael Piller. One exception or two aside, most Piller episodes tended to focus on stories that affected the main characters. On a character level, Concerning Flight is about Da Vinci, front and center. Janeway and the others are just along for the ride. Their pitfalls are purely on a plot level.
And that final climax with the aircraft actually takes off? Joyful, fun, emotional. A moment of triumph, of achievement. This captures what Santos-Dumont and the Wright Bros. probably had to go through back in in the day. And a nice callback to the Phoenix’s takeoff on First Contact. I imagine Roddenberry would have applauded an episode like this one.
“Sallah, I said no camels, that’s six camels — can’t you count?”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Episode just made me remember of the early Voyager novel Violation (which was cemented by Keith’s use of the term during his review). Thank goodness this episode didn’t follow that novel’s direction else I may not have watched it fully.
Concerning Flight may not be my ‘go-to’ episode for Voyager, it is definitely a irregular viewing to tickle the fancies.
@19 / KRAD:
“Compensation for my brother-in-law’s car!” :D
Other thing I forgot to say: Whilst these days it seems to increasingly be used in the context of “They’re fraternising, nudge nudge, wink wink”, the original derivation simply meant “to treat like brother”, so Seven’s use of it isn’t necessarily salacious.
“We are not supposed to encourage fraternisation between the patients.”
“Oh, I’m not planning to fraternise with her, doc. Just the opposite.”
FYI, Rhys-Davies has a charming YouTube channel. Like listening to a kindly old professor.
@22/cap-mjb: Yup. “Fraternize” literally just means to socialize or be friendly with someone. At some point it broadened to refer to associating with a military or political enemy, being friendly with someone you shouldn’t be friendly with, and from there to engaging in any inappropriate or forbidden relationship, including a sexual one.
CONCERNING FLIGHT is one of those TREK episode where the cast & crew thought “Alright, we are a series that uses Science Fiction to address present difficulties and future possibilities, with a heaping helping of drama and a little bit of actual Science Fact – we have done our best to present an optimistic and progressive vision of what Humanity could be, without forgetting that Mankind can be the absolute worst.”
“Right kids, that’s the homework done, now it’s time to PLAY – Leonardo avante!”
This may very well be my very favourite sort of STAR TREK episode and this episode has Leonardo Da Vinci played by that precious natural resource & national treasure Mr John Rhys Davies; how could one NOT love it? (God help me, I’m almost convinced there’s a whole DOCTOR WHO-esque spin off in ‘Catarina’ and Leonardo running around the Galaxy having adventures with SCIENCE!).
… also, we’re all semi-convinced that the Enterprise chatterbox who spread some juicy gossip about Flint the Immortal (despite Captain Kirk’s promise not to) was one Leonard McCoy MD, eh? (Captain Kirk’s a man of his word and Spock keeps secrets more securely than a Ferengi keeps their latinum*, but Bones has such a garrulous mouth they ought to have called him ‘Lip’ instead!).
I mean come on, you’re telling me Bones would resist the impulse to try working out HOW THE HECK Flint lived so long with his fellow MDs?
*The mental image of James T. Kirk manfully smothering the impulse to strangle Mr Spock after the man drops yet another family member on his old chums with zero previous mention is only a little less amusing that imagining Doc McCoy rehearse his old “Well shucks ma’am, I’m just a little ol’ country doctor but I’m still the biggest ol’ smoothie on NCC-1701” routine on Michael Burnham (because we all know who the biggest flirt on the USS Enterprise was and it wasn’t Jim Kirk).
Others have already said it, but hot damn if this isn’t one of my favourite Voyager episodes. Even though I can see all the issues, it’s still just an absolute delight.
Da Vinci’s interpretation of everything in his own terms is marvellous, and I always love the line “a pistole that shoots, not a lead ball, but a bolt of lightning” chief among those. Plus the fact he says a plasma injector can “make mercury flow in 3 directions at once”. He’s doing things with this equipment that are possibly genuinely novel – or else they’re known to be a bad idea and he’s going to clog that one up pretty quickly.
On the subject of inconsistent holodeck logic, it’s interesting that Leonardo is aware of the ground shaking when the ship is fired upon. Often factors going on in the actual ship are insulated from the characters, but sometimes they’re not. Sometimes, the characters even get bothered by hearing a voice on the comm, though at least that doesn’t happen here.
Does it bug anyone else that all the items in Leonardo’s new workshop aren’t included in Chakotay’s report of the other missing items? He says phaser rifles and antimatter injectors are missing, then Leonardo has a phaser pistol and a plasma injector.
But I do like the way Chakotay handles himself with the other trader when he’s in charge. We don’t see moments like those very much, but he’s always got quite a different command style than Janeway, even as he’s happy to go along with her command style when he’s her XO. Although, it’s fairly subtle in this episode, but the way he talks to the man feels more like the Maquis Chakotay. Janeway would’ve been bothered by letting him keep a rifle, but as far as Chakotay’s concerned, they already have guns, so may as well not risk a confrontation trying to get one gun back.
Although, that brings me back to Chakotay’s incomplete missing items inventory – he made no mention of missing uniforms either. Hmmm.
I’m also rather fond of the more modern appearance of the planet. Especially in his “great fortress”, it’s very industrial. (And not just for Da Vinci’s praise of it as being built like veins and arteries, although that is yet another compelling line.) It’s probably just a real industrial location they covered any English signage, but it gives the impression of a more relatable, cutthroat world, on top of the illicitly obtained goods apparently being the basis of their economy. They’re obviously pumping or refining something on that world, where the Federation presumably uses replicators to handle most such tasks, or keeps them entirely separate from inhabited planets.
Not to mention the remote voice link with Voyager’s main computer – felt very Alexa-esque, even though that of course wasn’t a reality when they wrote the episode. But generally in Trek they use local computational power, rather than remotely accessing it, so it added to the feeling that this planet wasn’t as advanced, to me. They only have one of them, so they’re using it remotely. Not to mention he says it could coordinate an entire colony world, and it really drives home just how much compute power Starfleet ships are lugging around for the sake of fast analyses and holodecks, that a comparatively computationally impoverished society would view it as such a great find.
Plus, I don’t think it’s Voyager’s only computer, just that it’s their main one. At the least, the PADDs and tricorders have some compute of their own, even if they’re built mostly to uplink to the ship. And the consoles also have some local power, since there were many prior situations where a character uses a console to find out that main computer access/power has been cut off. They’re like a thin client in modern terminology.
Although it’s somewhat confusing that phasers are routed through it, while navigation isn’t? The holodeck is routed through it, but the EMH isn’t? The delineation of responsibilities seems to be made up purely for plot reasons. Although the EMH has been said to have an independent system to continue functioning in emergencies before, the other facets of what remains functioning and what doesn’t, do seem arbitrary. Tuvok can manually aim the phasers and fire them, so obviously the command to fire isn’t exclusively routed through the main processor. So why did he need to be told to manually aim after he determined he couldn’t get a lock?
Not to mention the prop looks a bit silly compared to earlier instances of being shown a ship’s “computer core”. When it’s beamed away, it looks to have just been sitting in the corner of a cargo bay! And, given what we’ve previously been told about Starfleet having triple redundancies, you’d have thought they’d have three of those processor units functioning in tandem and checking the results of the others by a voting process. So they really shouldn’t have been incapacitated as they were by the loss of one of them. Although of course they’d still have wanted to retrieve it.
And finally: I’ve always found the name “duranium alloy” to sound very silly, although it’s not necessarily unrealistic given the brand name “duralumin” for an aluminium alloy is real. But both sound silly to me.
@2 wyldfyrewarning When the Krenim ship was destroyed the timeline reset, so there was no “Year of Hell.” Has no one pointed that out yet? I’m usually the last person to notice things like that.
@28/Kathy: The case that wildfyre has been making across several review threads is that it would’ve been more interesting if “Year of Hell” hadn’t been erased, if it had actually spanned a season and had lasting consequences. See the comment here: https://www.tor.com/2020/10/29/star-trek-voyager-rewatch-year-of-hell-part-2/comment-page-1/#comment-889631
Now I’m thinking how cool it would have been add Leonardo to the crew…..
@29 ChristopherLBennett You are right, and so is wildfyre. TNG gave Tasha Yar a daughter after the events of “Yesterday’s Enterprise”. Surely someone could have come up with a creative reason for the events in “Year of Hell” to have some effect in the here and now. Maybe Seven’s Borg implants could have shown evidence of the altered timeline. Plenty of opportunities for good technobabble there.
@31,
Surely someone could have come up with a creative reason for the events in “Year of Hell” to have some effect in the here and now. Maybe Seven’s Borg implants could have shown evidence of the altered timeline. Plenty of opportunities for good technobabble there.
Yeah, I wish they’d done what Stargate SG-1 did with their Season Four episode “2010” and the Aschen.
Even though that episode’s future timeline was erased, they still found a neat way of following up on the consequences the following Season (“2001”).
But I’m glad that Kirsten Beyer followed up on the Krenim and “Year of Hell” in the VOY Relaunch’s A Pocket Full of Lies. It was nice to see Janeway and company finally discover what had happened and how their actions in the previous timeline were still having repercussions.
Why does Chakotay allow them to keep what they stole from Voyager? Remember how Janeway moved Heaven and Earth to get a transporter back from the Kazon? There’s nothing new about Starfleet technology having its own signature. In Encounter at Farpoint, Wesley was dripping water from the Holodeck into the corridor outside, but they hadn’t refined the rules of holotechnology then. I think that’s the longest quotation we’ve had from Krad yet.
I hadn’t noticed Tuvok’s outfit was the same one from Through the Looking Glass (which he only wears when he’s playing at being a rebel!). They may have got the idea for Concerning Flight from Adam Adamant Lives, about a Victorian aristocrat who winds up in the future. I thought Tuvok’s attempt at small talk was rather funny. The sight of Janeway and DaVinci on that glider, doing something the real DaVinci only dreamt of makes Concerning Flight worth the price of admission alone.
11: “A hard light projection” – is that like Rimmer in Red Dwarf? If DaVinci tried to eat or drink something for real, it would probably be similar to the story Odo told Kira in Meridian about what happens when a Changeling tries to – “messy”. 14: Wasn’t O’Brien also a bit wet after kayaking on one of the Enterprise’s Holodecks in Transfigurations?
15: It’s amusing to think that Starfleet officers in the 24th Century poke holes in Kirk’s legendary exploits and dismiss them as nothing more than legend. I can’t believe nobody thought to say “and a partridge in a pear tree” after Chakotay runs off a list of all the things that were stolen.
27: This isn’t the first time things outside the Holodeck are felt by the characters in it, like Twisted, when Torres and Kim initiate the shock pulse. I liked Concerning Flight for it’s more than usual location shooting, especially when Janeway and DaVinci are trying to track down the processor. One drawback is they do jar with the city itself built on standing sets, which look far more artificial.
I don’t think the processor is Voyager’s computer, but it does regulate most of the ship’s systems through the computer, which is why Voyager is so incapacitated after the processor is stolen, and why it seems smaller than the actual computer core. 30: It’s a shame then there’s only one mobile emitter.
@33/David Sim: “Why does Chakotay allow them to keep what they stole from Voyager? Remember how Janeway moved Heaven and Earth to get a transporter back from the Kazon?”
As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, Janeway’s refusal to share technology with the Kazon was about their backwardness and their hostility. The technology was too far ahead of their level and she couldn’t trust them to use it safely or non-exploitatively. It was not an absolute, universal policy. Remember, the Kazon were based on street gangs. Just because you wouldn’t sell potentially dangerous hardware to a street gang doesn’t mean you wouldn’t sell it to a legitimate government or research institution.
#33 – “A hard light projection” – is that like Rimmer in Red Dwarf?
That’s what I had in mind, yes. First introduced in Legion when his Light Bee was upgraded. Just seemed like convenient shorthand for a solid projection and I think it sounds kinda neat.
https://reddwarf.fandom.com/wiki/Light_Bee
This episode annoyed me from the moment Voyager didn’t return fire on the ships. Of course, TNG did this too. If they weren’t damaged by something initially they just took the punches and attempted contact until something bad happened. But it’s pretty darn stupid. And they would have been smart to fire on the ships when in orbit around the planet too, lest they decide to to steal something really vital, like life support.
And then there are our villains being horrible at aim and then deciding they should just run after Janeaway and Leo instead of, you know, shooting them. Then again, they can’t hit anything.
Also, Voyager took ten(?) days to find the planet. Leonardo did A LOT in ten days, even for a genius.
And while I’m grouchy, I have a problem with the emiter. If the hologram has no physicality, to the point phasers run right through them, what does the emiter stick to? And we do know it sticks because of SFX and the fact that when it’s detached (as seen in other episodes), it falls to the floor.
Sorry, nice performance from Leonardo, but it seemed a silly excuse for Janeway and Leo to run around together.
“If the hologram has no physicality, to the point phasers run right through them, what does the emiter stick to?”
Trek “holograms” are shaped force fields and light projections. The force fields are selectively permeable; we’ve seen that the Doctor can choose to let things pass through him, but is effectively solid the rest of the time.
Alternative explanation: Some forcefields are semi-permeable all the time, for instance, the shuttlebay fields that keep air in but let shuttles pass through. Presumably they’re momentum filters: they block things with low mass and velocity, like air molecules, but aren’t strong enough to contain something more massive like a shuttlecraft. Similarly, a hologram character’s forcefield could be strong enough to hold a mobile emitter or feel solid to the touch, but the high-energy nadion particles of a phaser beam could blast right through, the same way they can through normal flesh. It’s just that a hologram has nothing inside to be damaged by the beam.