“Mortal Coil”
Written by Bryan Fuller
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 4, Episode 12
Production episode 180
Original air date: December 17, 1997
Stardate: 51449.2
Captain’s log. We get to see Neelix in multiple modes: running the mess hall, providing Kim with a stimulating beverage and Seven with food that she finds pungent, but which he insists now has taste to it; as an apparent expert in protomatter, being asked to accompany Chakotay on a mission to obtain some from a nebula; as ship’s morale officer, getting ready for the annual celebration of the Talaxian family festival of Prixin; and as Naomi Wildman’s godfather, checking the Wildman cabin for monsters before the little girl goes to bed.
While tucking Naomi in, Neelix tells her about the great forest, which is the Talaxian afterlife where all your friends and family are waiting to greet you. This will probably be important later. (Neelix very cleverly avoids any mention of death when describing it to a one-year-old.)
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Chakotay, Paris, and Neelix board a shuttle, where Paris whines about Neelix not making pizza for him. When they beam aboard the protomatter, something goes wrong, and Neelix is struck by an energy discharge, killing him instantly.
By the time they make it back to Voyager, it’s eighteen hours later, and the EMH assures Paris that there was nothing he could have done. Seven comes to sickbay and announces that she can use Borg nanoprobes to revive Neelix. Janeway does not grab Seven by the shoulders and ask why she didn’t mention this when Ensign Luke died in “Scientific Method,” but instead orders her to go ahead and revive Neelix.
The voodoo ritual Borg process is a success, and Neelix is now a zombie revived. Neelix himself is rather taken aback.
Chakotay is going to re-create the accident on the holodeck to try to see what happened, especially since the protomatter destabilized when Neelix was killed. Neelix asks to join him, and while they’re watching the simulation, Neelix admits to being rather devastated. There was no great forest. One of the comforts of his life has been the knowledge that his sister, his family that were killed by the Metreon Cascade, his friends would all be waiting for him when he died. But there was nothing. He was just dead and then he wasn’t.
It’s time for Prixin, a Talaxian celebration of family. Neelix has asked Tuvok to provide the ritual salutation. Seven tries and fails to make small talk, and Neelix buggers off early to tuck Naomi in. However, Naomi asks again about the great forest, and Neelix has a much harder time talking about it.
Later, Seven checks up on the nanoprobes she injected into Neelix, and he explodes at her, bitter at his resurrection. Then he collapses. She brings him to sickbay where it seems his body is rejecting the nanoprobes. More extensive treatment will be required to keep him alive.
Neelix goes to Chakotay and asks if he can go on a vision quest. Chakotay agrees, but only if Neelix will discuss it with Chakotay afterward to work to interpret it. Neelix uses his artificial hallucinogen, and sees his sister in the Prixin celebration, and then in the great forest, where she tells him that life is meaningless and it all sucks and he should just kill himself.
Neelix says goodbyes to various crewmembers, and then tries to beam himself into the nebula. (Yes, they’re still hanging around the nebula for some reason.) Kim cuts him off long enough for Chakotay to go to the transporter room and talk him off the ledge—with the help of Wildman, who is looking for him to tuck Naomi in.
After tucking Naomi in, Neelix decides to continue living, while Naomi dreams of the great forest.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently Borg nanoprobes can resurrect the dead, an ability they have never had before, and never will be shown to have again.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway asks Neelix not to ferment the beverages for the first night of Prixin, as last year she got a little light-headed. She also instructs Seven on how to mingle at a party, which goes horribly horribly wrong.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok gives the salutation that kicks off Prixin. He is unable to get the crowd’s attention until Paris clinks a glass with a spoon. Given that Tuvok is an experienced teacher, and a security chief, I find it impossible to credit that he can’t quiet a room, but whatever. He also cuts short the rather lengthy list of family members who might be present at a typical Prixin, for which the crowd is grateful.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. We learn all about the Talaxian afterlife, with Neelix also finding out that it’s bullshit. Neelix apparently also worked with protomatter when he was a space junkyard salvager.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is rather taken aback at Seven’s ability to create a Neelix zombie raise the dead. He also notes that Seven’s bedside manner is even worse than his.
Resistance is futile. Seven confides in Tuvok that she doesn’t understand the obsession non-Borg have with death. In the Collective, you live on even after your body ceases, because everyone’s memories are stored in the Collective. Even now, separated from it as she is, her memories will still live on with the Borg. She finds that comforting.
Do it.
“I didn’t ask to be brought back!”
“You were dead at the time.”
–Neelix complaining about being made into a zombie brought back from the dead, and Seven pointing out the logical flaw in his statement
Welcome aboard. Nancy Hower is back for her sole fourth-season appearance as Wildman, with Brooke Stephens playing Naomi, in her only appearance in the role. Both Wildmans will next appear in the fifth season’s “Once Upon a Time,” with Scarlett Pomers taking over the role of Naomi. Robin Stapler plays the image of Alixia.
Trivial matters: Protomatter was first established in The Search for Spock as a very dangerous substance, the use of which in Project: Genesis was cause for pearl-clutching.
Chakotay’s technological vision quests were first seen in “The Cloud.”
Seven mentions the alveoli in Neelix’s lung, singular, as Neelix just has the one after the events of “Phage” (and that one’s a transplant from Kes).
Neelix mentions the death of his family in a war, referring to the Haakonian-Talaxian war that Neelix himself avoided fighting in. This background, including that the Metreon Cascade wiped his family out, was established in “Jetrel.” His sister Alixia was first mentioned by name in “Rise.”
We finally find out the name of Wildman’s daughter, born way back in “Deadlock,” in this episode. It’s also established that Ktarian children age very quickly, with Wildman commenting on how fast she’s growing, and also enabling a one-year-old to be played by a five-year-old.
The original plan was to have this focus on Wildman dying and being revived, but coming back “off,” and trying to kill Naomi so she can experience what she experienced. UPN and Rick Berman rejected the notion of a mother trying to kill her child, so they switched it to Chakotay, then to Neelix when they realized that they would be dealing with real religious beliefs and they didn’t want to mess with that.
Seven at one point tells Neelix that the Borg didn’t bother to assimilate the Kazon because they would have “detracted from perfection,” which was probably the writing staff admitting that the Kazon were stupid. (Even the Borg don’t want them!)
Set a course for home. “Duty calls!” Okay, before we talk about anything else, I’ve gotta deal with the 800-pound Borg gorilla in the room:
SEVEN OF NINE CAN TOTALLY RESURRECT PEOPLE FROM THE DEAD!
This should be revolutionary! This should change everything! Nobody on Voyager should ever die again!
Except, of course, this magical ability to resurrect the dead will never ever be referenced ever again.
It’s bad enough that Seven didn’t mention this magical ability back when a bridge officer died in “Scientific Method,” but waited until Neelix was the corpse, but no other crewmember gets the same consideration? There are going to be plenty more deaths on the ship, all the way to the final season, and the fact that none of them got the magical mystery nanoprobe cure is despicable. I’ve hammered on this point before, and I will go to my own grave continuing to hammer on it, but just because the people in the opening credits are the ones the viewers care about most doesn’t mean they’re the only ones the characters should care about. From Seven’s point of view, Ensign Luke is just as important as Neelix, if not more so because she’s a bridge officer instead of someone trying to feed her bad food. So the fact that she doesn’t offer this zombification death cure until now makes absolutely no sense.
Which is frustrating as hell to me, because I’d really much rather be talking about how effective this episode is as a meditation on the things sentient beings do to avoid the crushing fear of death: we create an afterlife. So many spiritualities include as part of them what happens to you after we die. And so it’s very jarring for Neelix to come back from the dead to find out that there was nothing there.
What I particularly like is that this resonates with what we know about Neelix. He’s a friendly, affable person who hates being alone, and yet when we met him he was a lone salvager. He lost his family in a horrible war, and his fear of death is ameliorated by the knowledge that he’ll be reunited with the people he’s lost in the great forest.
Except now he knows that it’s not so, and it frightens him to his very core.
Ethan Phillips knocks it out of the park here, and makes it all the more frustrating that the writers kept defaulting to “doofy comic relief” when writing him. There’s meat on those bones, if they chose to actually make use of it, and Phillips has always been up to the task when they’ve let him be an interesting character instead of an idiotic caricature (notably in “Jetrel” and “Fair Trade“).
There are other problematic details in the episode, too. I find it impossible to credit that on a ship full of Starfleet personnel, including a whole friggin team of engineers, not to mention an ex-Borg, that Neelix of all people is the expert on protomatter. I find it equally impossible to credit that a guy whose previous shipboard experience was on a clapped-out old cargo vessel and scale models of space elevators has the knowhow to manipulate a transporter that Starfleet engineers can’t work around.
This should’ve been a great episode, and in many ways it is—but I just can’t get past how the episode came about.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be doing a Q&A on superhero movies as one of the Dragon Con American Sci-Fi Classics “quarantine panels” Wednesday night at 9pm Eastern. Come ask him all about the thing he wrote about for this site for two-and-a-half years!
This is one of those episodes where it is really obvious that the problem with Neelix is the writing, and certainly not Ethan Phillip’s acting. He always gives it his all with Neelix, it is just that he is usually given absolutely nothing to work with (something I guess he has in common with Kim and Chakotay). An episode like this, which really gives him a lot to chew on, shows just what an interesting character Neelix could have, and should have been. He is always at his best when he is less of a guileless dope, and more of gritty character who could believably had been scrapping a life for himself out on the rough and tumble edges of the Delta Quadrant. I mean, the guy deserted from the army, lost all of his family, worked various rough jobs, his girlfriend was kidnapped, and he tricked Voyager into helping him get her back. That’s all the making of a fascinating character, and instead they decided he was going to be the annoying comic relief/ lethal chef 90% of the time.
There is also a lot to love about the ambiguity of this episode. I like the Chakotay stresses that the vision quests aren’t an easy fix-it button, nor are they always literal or easy to understand. He really presents it as a discipline, something that requires preparation, thought, and understanding. And while Neelix might not see the Great Forest, there are plenty of reasons why that might be (including that it simply wasn’t his time to die). It is nice to see Trek showing a crisis of faith in such a nuanced way. It also, for all the crap people have given Troi over the years (with some justification), a good example of why exactly there should be therapists on board, as Neelix is clearly in need of care that is a combination of physical, mental, and spiritual.
Because if you are going to use this ability once and only once, you would for sure use it on Neelix, of all people. Also- why was this even necessary? There was no reason they had to write Neelix as being dead for 18 hours, and no reason Borg necromancy had to be used on him (also, this is the second time someone has techno-magicked him back from the dead, after “Tuvix”). Voyager was the king of technobabble, and you’d think they could have found some other way to bring him back, if they hadn’t had him be dead for more than half a day already. What a bizarre choice.
Huh. Is that where Khan got his magic blood to make Zombie Tribbles (and Kirks, and little girls) in Star Trek:Rebooted?
I consider the resurrection thing a minor technical glitch in an otherwise very powerful episode. It’s an odd one, though. Usually in Trek, when they concoct some magic resurrection handwave, they throw in a line explaining why it’s a fluke that could only work in a specific situation and isn’t replicable. For some reason, this time they forgot that bit of bookkeeping.
I sort of got the idea, though, that the implication was that Neelix was so traumatized by his resurrection that it was shown to do more harm than good and they decided not to use it on anyone else because it would be too cruel. But the fact that he did ultimately adjust and went back to normal sort of works against that. And it doesn’t explain Luke.
People coming back from the dead (or persisting after death) is a recurring Bryan Fuller trope — see also Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies. The former was about grim reapers helping people reconcile with their deaths. The latter was about a guy who had the ability to resurrect the dead with a touch, but with a pretty huge catch (that he could never touch them again without killing them permanently) that became an ongoing source of angst when he resurrected the love of his life.
I’ll have to wait til I get home and can actually rewatch this to say for sure, but tentatively I don’t see a problem with the use of the nanoprobes to effect a one-time cure here. Death, per se, is as much a legal and philosophical concept as a scientific one, so Starfleet medical technology is able to resurrect people that 21st century medicine would consider irretrievably dead, and Borg nanoprobes are capable of resurrecting people beyond the reach of Starfleet technology. It doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re capable of resurrecting anyone from any sort of injury (again, unless they actually say that’s the case in the episode, in which case, point withdrawn).
I can imagine that it would be difficult to get them to do it without filling Neelix with cybernetic augments and patching him into the collective.
I thought this episode made the Borg even more terrifying. The Borg can bring people back from the dead – not just reanimate their corpses, but bring them back as the people they were.
And then, presumably, they assimilate them. You can’t even rely on death to get you away from them….
I watched an old episode of Benson from the ealry 80s over the weekend, a show that I loved when I was a little kid. I had forgotten that Ethan Phillips was part of the cast (so was Odo). He played an amiable doofus, pretty similar to Neelix. Makes me wonder if Phillips was typecast in the comic relief role back in the day.
@1: I think the 18 hours thing was a way to make sure Neelix was “dead enough” to ensure the crisis of faith. Like if ithad only been a few minutes then maybe they could say something like, well he didn’t have enough time to make it to the Great Forest or whatever, rather than, he’s been dead for hours and there’s no tree.
I generally agree with this review. I like how Trek deals with matters of faith (gaining/ exploring faith as well as losing) but the resurrection thing only happening once kinda bothered me. @3: our explanation makes the most sense. Like they saw what happened here and decided not to try that again. Don’t want anyone else trying to beam themselves into a nebula. I also didn’t like how the crises of faith was resolved so quickly. I get that it’s a 45 minute show but this is a deeply held belief that has shaped Neelix’s life and universe-view and he just kinda… gets over it. Seems like a missed opportunity to change and grow the character after this.
Also, at a Con several years back someone’s cosplay was Borg-Zombie Neelix inspired by this ep and it was HILARIOUS.
Why didn’t anyone suggest to Neelix that his upcoming resurrection may have kept him from entering the great forest at that time?
@8, it’s also at least in theory possible he actually was in the Great Forest but has no memory of it, for whatever spiritual or technobabble reason (the nanoprobes reset his memory to the moment of his death!). Which means, from the perspective of Neelix’s family, he finally popped into the afterlife to be with them, then vanished without an explanation! Rude.
@3- He also seems to have a bit of a thing about Paul Stamets. Too bad that “The Cloud,” had already established that Chakotay’s vision quests weren’t mediated by psychoactive fungus!
I haven’t commented in a long time, although I’ve been faithfully reading these reviews. Just wanted to say that I literally laughed out loud at your final paragraph under “Trivial Matters”:
“Seven at one point tells Neelix that the Borg didn’t bother to assimilate the Kazon because they would have “detracted from perfection,” which was probably the writing staff admitting that the Kazon were stupid. (Even the Borg don’t want them!)”
@9 – It seems like an obvious explanation. The spirit, if it exists, would be separate from the brain. It makes more sense to me that you wouldn’t have a memory of your experience.
Yeah, this one really presaged a lot of Fuller’s later work. (You’ve also got American Gods with the resurrected Laura Moon….)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think Neelix didn’t get to go to the Great Forest because he’s So. Bloody. Annoying. That the trees didn’t want his eternal company.
I hated Neelix when Voyager was first broadcast, I hated him on BBC2 repeats, and I hate him on Netflix. I’ll admit to now being able to at least respect Ethan Phillips for doing his best with absolutely terrible material, and no longer hold Neelix against him personally, but I absolutely hate Neelix. If they needed to get rid of a character at the end of series 3, how was he not the obvious choice? He was out of his area of knowledge, he could have had a heroic death saving the crew from the Borg in some way to redeem himself for his cowardice in the Haakonian war in his youth, and they’d have saved a ton of time and money on doing his make-up for every episode. And almost everyone I know hated him.
He was (apart from his really disturbing relationship with Kes) a potentially interesting and grey character that was put in a completely stupid role (I know, let’s make the person on the ship who knows nothing about human culture or tastes and insists on putting Talaxian spices in everything without asking people whether they like them the cook! What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like he could, deliberately or accidentally, poison the entire crew that way) and used for comic relief that simply wasn’t funny (want to improve morale, Neelix? GO AWAY). I never understood why any of the characters (apart from Captain Kathryn “Starfleet Principles In Human Form Except When It Might Inconvenience Me” Janeway) liked him, and I especially didn’t understand why none of the Maquis ever accidentally shoved him out of an airlock.
Definitely Fuller’s first draft for a lot of his later work dealing with death and afterlife. Personally, I don’t have much of a problem with Seven’s nanoprobes being used to jumpstart Neelix back to life. They could have been more specific about the inner workings of the process and how Seven’s successful attempt with Neelix wouldn’t necessarily work on other cases.
That aside, Mortal Coil is a favorite of mine. It’s a powerful Neelix vehicle (plus one of the rare times Kes gets a mention since she left). We’re also officially introduced to the first speaking iteration of Naomi Wildman – prior to Pomers’ casting – and her relationship to Neelix.
Neelix has been defined by loss and sorrow. The only thing that kept him going was his faith of meeting his sister and family one day somewhere beyond this universe. To have that faith broken makes for some truly harrowing scenes. It’s very much a no-holds barred 40 minute display of ongoing trauma. I think it works beautifully (some of Phillips’ best work to date), and would easily place it as top tier episode, right alongside the likes of The Gift, or season 2’s Resistance. It’s one of the last times we’d get meaty Neelix material for the remainder of Voyager’s run.
Also, and this is maybe the last time I’ll bring up “Tuvix,” I suppose Neelix doesn’t consider himself to have been dead during the existence of Tuvix. (Or every time he gets disintegrated and put back together by a transporter, but…)
@16/cuttlefish: Nope, any more than a Trill symbiont is dead when joined with a host, or vice-versa. It’s like mixing red paint and blue paint. All the original substance is still there, you just can’t separate one from the other anymore.
I haven’t rewatched the episode since it first aired, but I’m guessing the protomatter name-drop is supposed to connect Neelix’s resurrection with Spock’s? Is that why it’s a tool that can’t be used all the time.
I’ve always loved this episode for the terrific spiritual debate it brought to the table and hated the mechanism that brought it about. If you ignore the 800 pound gorilla, this is a good episode with no clear cut answers. I thought Chakotay was good here, too, advising Neelix, talking him off the ledge. He didn’t dismiss what Neelix saw on the quest, but encouraged him to work through the powerful images with him, not accept them as first seen. Also Seven trying to do small talk is always a delight and, IIRC, sets up Doc’s mentoring of her later in the show.
“You Borg think you can fix anything but you didn’t fix me!”
Ah yes, the episode where Neelix dies (yay!) and then gets better (…darn).
Our old rector recalled this episode during a sermon about the Biblical story of Lazarus and how there’s no record of anything ever asking him what death was like. (Our old rector did that sort of thing a lot. He once managed to spend a decent chunk of a pet service relating the plot of two Star Trek films just to get to a pertinent quote.) He couldn’t remember how the episode ended. I was left reflecting that it was probably just as well.
This is an enjoyable episode in many ways. It’s one of those episodes where they seem to make Neelix as grating as ever in the early scenes so we get the contrast with his shattered self later on, as his body is repaired at the possible loss of everything that he thinks makes his life worth living. And it’s an interesting one for Seven as well: Her chat with Tuvok about how the Borg dispose of dead drones starts off as another speech about how the Borg do things better, but then his questioning seems to bring her into areas she hasn’t thought about and doesn’t feel comfortable with. She says she finds the idea of living on in them comforting, but she doesn’t sound very convincing. I think it’s a nice little moment when Paris helps Tuvok get everyone’s attention and a good role for Chakotay, at least aside from his brainless moment where he doesn’t realise how insensitive it is to show Neelix a home video of his death.
But there’s no getting away from it: This episode raises an awful lot of questions, both spiritual and practical, that it isn’t capable of answering. There’s no way it’s going to definitively say there is or isn’t an afterlife. I’m not even sure it works as a way of making the viewer think: A humanist is just going to nod and say “Yeah, there’s nothing, get over it”, while I could come up with a number of theological reasons why Neelix can’t remember experiencing anything while dead (which Chakotay touches on). The vision quest is a nice idea but just muddies the water. If there really are spirits out there communicating with him, then it’s a bit contradictory to have them say “There’s nothing when we die, so I’ve come back from the dead to tell you that.” And if it’s just a manifestation of Neelix’s own fears, then how is that different to a normal dream? The episode isn’t really about exploring that but on exploring the effect losing his faith has on Neelix. All played out in 45 minutes, of course, with Neelix’s crisis never mentioned again (and neither, on a practical level, is the fact he apparently needs daily injections of nanoprobes to stay alive). The ending mostly comes down on the idea of him deciding that even if there isn’t an afterlife, being alive with his friends is still worth it. Or maybe he explores it like Chakotay suggests and reconciles his experience with his beliefs. Naomi still seems to believe, anyway. Up to the viewer to decide whether or not she’ll grow out of it.
And on the practical level…yeah. Announcing that Seven can bring people back from the dead is a pretty big thing to introduce and then never mention again. Because once you’ve done it once, in theory no-one on Voyager should ever die again. Just wait a few hours for the crisis to be over, then get Seven to patch them up. But not surprisingly, this doesn’t happen. Guess Seven’s advanced medical techniques only work on people who are in the main titles.
First appearance of the Wildmans since “Basics” and Naomi finally gets a first name nearly two years after she was born. (Curiously, spoilers for the episode claimed it would reveal Wildman’s daughter’s name to be Alixia, which is of course the name of Neelix’s sister, as previously mentioned in “Rise”. Presumably someone got confused.) Neelix shows a reluctance to make cheese when Paris requests pizza. Maybe he remembers that the last time he did that, he nearly destroyed the ship.
I’ve always found this episode’s dismissive attitude to the Kazon rather petty and not really consistent with the way Voyager normally portrays the Borg. If we were still in the TNG era of “The Borg assimilate cultures, not individuals”, then fair enough, but since Voyager’s Borg tend to grab small groups to turn into drones, why exactly are the Kazon unsuitable? They seem fairly physically strong, and brain power isn’t really an issue if they’re going to be converted into mindless drones anyway. It just feels like someone sniggering at other people’s work.
I think quite a few 24th century Trek pieces show protomatter being used perfectly fine, suggesting that the 23rd century types were just being overcautious and needed to study it more. (It’s not clear if Voyager ever gets any by the way, despite hanging around the nebula thinking about trying again.)
@18/Devin Clancy: No, there’s no mention of the protomatter having any connection to Neelix’s resurrection. Conceivably there could’ve been an earlier script draft in which it was a factor, but in the aired episode, the resurrection was entirely the result of Seven’s nanoprobes, hence Keith’s frustration at the implied idea that they could do this with anyone — at least, anyone who still had some trace of brain activity remaining beyond what Federation medical science could detect but within the realm of what nanoprobes could recover.
Incidentally, there is some validity to that idea. Medical science has found evidence that death is a more gradual and complicated process than it seems, and we’ve already extended the length of time after apparent death that revival is possible, beyond what used to be assumed. Early TNG (notably “Code of Honor”) posited that 24th-century medicine could revive people from death within a certain length of time, though this was forgotten later on. The idea that someone could have retrievable brain activity as much as 18 hours after clinical death is not entirely implausible given current thinking.
Quoth Eduardo: “They could have been more specific about the inner workings of the process and how Seven’s successful attempt with Neelix wouldn’t necessarily work on other cases.”
BUT THEY DIDN’T! In fact, they went out of their way to make it clear that Seven could do this with anyone. And they didn’t.
Quoth Christopher: “I sort of got the idea, though, that the implication was that Neelix was so traumatized by his resurrection that it was shown to do more harm than good and they decided not to use it on anyone else because it would be too cruel.”
Oh yeah, there’s a fun conversation to have with Joe Carey’s wife and kids when they get home in “Endgame.” “Well, you see, Abhaya, we could’ve used Seven to resurrect your husband, but we did it with Neelix and he suffered an existential crisis that he got over in a week, and we didn’t want to put Joe through that. So when’s the funeral?”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
And yes, I should’ve mentioned that this was a good vehicle for Chakotay, too. Once again Robert Beltran proves that he can bring it when given decent material to work with.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@22- Another argument for an Emergency Legal Hologram. “Ah, I see that we’ve taken aboard a refugee with access to some untested but potentially miraculous medical technology, which is likely to come with unforeseen physical and/or psychological side effects. I’ve taken the liberty of drafting an Advance Medical Directive questionnaire for the crew, and I’d appreciate it if you would instruct them to fill it out at their earliest convenience.”
Watching the episode again, I found the lack of reaction to Neelix’s death rather odd. Everyone seemed to mentally shrug it off. Heck, Janeway even cracked a joke as she was about to leave the sickbay (about how appropriate it would be to hold a service in the mess hall).
I really thought this was going to come back for Picard. It would have been a perfect bookend to Picard’s journey with the Borg — in the end, its Borg nanoprobes that save his life. Instead, they went with that non-sensical “let’s just turn Picard into a robot” approach.
All they needed to say was some tech no babble about Neelix’s species having some unique characteristic and, because of something equally unique in how he was killed, Seven could bring him back. But nobody else, including Neelix. It would be obvious they were making an excuse, but at least they would have made one.
Not only was this a (rare) good vehicle for Chakotay’s beliefs, but in hindsight I wish that Tuvok and B’Elanna would have weighed in more, as Vulcans have a very active spiritual life coupled with rigorous logic, which might have been able to guide Neelix further on the results of the vision quest, and B’Elanna will undergo a rather similar near-death experience (although with much different results) in “Barge of the Dead,” which clearly draws on her belief (or lack thereof) in Klingon spiritual practices. One of the things I always loved about DS9 was that spirituality and how it effects people and their actions was much more front-and-center (even human, Federation-citizen Cassidy Yates was apparently raised Christian!), be it through Worf and the Klingons, through the Bajorans and their Prophets, or even through Quark, who was shown more than once to be a rather devout follower of Ferengi religious beliefs. Being trapped almost 100 years from your home (and potential holy sites or people who share your beliefs) has to have a big impact on people, and it is too bad Voyager didn’t have more episodes like this and “Barge of the Dead” that dealt with them. I’d like to see how some of the Bajoran Maquis dealt with it, for instance.
@2 – It can be assumed that the Blood of Resurrection is a product on all the augments, not just Khan. So Starfleet has a warehouse full of ways to raise the dead and it’s self-replacing. Just feed them and they make more blood. Draw a unit or two. Raise the dead.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
It’s even better than the rings from Insurrection. There, the rings were destroyed when you drew off the energy. here, it can be replaced by a cheeseburger.
But Trek is full of miracles that are never mentioned again. Uhura had her brain drained and they got her back up to college level in a week and back on duty shortly after that. And with perfect recreation of her memories.
The list goes on. Never come up with a miracle cure in the Star Trek universe. They’ll use it one and never mention it again.
@29, Not to mention the spores in “This Side of Paradise,” which provide perfect health and happiness to the planet’s citizens, who MUST be “cured” of such a terrible fate by our heroes because humanity was meant to suffer and we are all but sinners in the hands of an angry god. Nevermind that you could just, you know, send people there who are sick and they could literally just re-grow organs, or be cured of depression.
@30/wildfyrewarning: As I pointed out in the comments for Keith’s rewatch of “This Side of Paradise,” there was a deleted scene in the script explaining that the spores were semi-intelligent, telepathic parasites that were basically enslaving the colonists as hosts, assimilating them much like the Borg. So it was a false paradise as insidious as Landru’s or Vaal’s, or the Talosians’ illusions — “perfect” happiness bought with the total surrender of freedom. Since that scene was included in the James Blish adaptation, I always interpreted the spores that way, and I never realized until reading the comments in the rewatch thread that the aired episode never comes outright and says it, so that it’s unclear how oppressive the situation is meant to be.
@@@@@27/Ellynne
“some tech no babble about Neelix’s species having some unique characteristic”
Upon rewatching the episode, the dialogue between Seven and the others in the sickbay actually hints that this is a Talaxian-specific procedure, even if she doesn’t say it outright.
That’s the obvious solution to the resurrection problem – it’s applied to the only Talaxian on the ship, hence, it’s only applied in this single instance. Perhaps the degradation is slower in Talaxians than in humans. After all, if Neelix was a CGI character and not played by a human actor, it would be virtually implied that his physical composition is not the same as of a human, and the 800-pound Borg gorilla would not have existed :-D
I really liked the spiritual discussion side of this story and I thought that it was a good use of Chakotay’s character as he is a very spiritual character. But it really bugged me that Chakotay let Neelix join him in the simulation to watch himself die… again. I’m an engineer and not a psychologist and even I know that it would be a bad idea to let someone who was just traumatized by dying and being brought back to life through dubious means participate in a faithful recreation of that death. And I know that they don’t have a counselor on board, but considering all the psychological trauma the crew has endured, you’d think they’d try to gin one up on the holodeck. Neelix was obviously not himself after his resurrection.
And I can’t believe that no one has said it, but maybe Neelix wasn’t all dead but just mostly dead?
Semi-off-topic:
Scientists 3D print microscopic Star Trek spaceship that moves on its own
@32/l0ud: “Upon rewatching the episode, the dialogue between Seven and the others in the sickbay actually hints that this is a Talaxian-specific procedure, even if she doesn’t say it outright.”
I don’t think that fits that dialogue. First, Seven says that Borg have used nanoprobes to reactivate drones as much as 73 hours after death. Later, she says she must adapt her nanoprobes to Neelix’s Talaxian physiology. That makes it pretty explicit that she’s saying the technique can be used on many species besides Talaxians.
The bit where Seven says “His function in the crew is diverse” is interesting. Maybe the reason Seven didn’t suggest it for the dead crew member in “Scientific Method” is that she didn’t think that person was as vital to the crew? But it’s an interesting bit of characterization, that Seven so readily recognizes Neelix’s value.
To be honest, I didn’t even notice that they forgot to include some technobabble to explain why the resurrection trick was never used again. Every time they introduce such a solution I just assume there is some reason this will not be used again, because of course the series won’t work if no one can ever die. So for me it doesn’t matter if they mumble something like “it only works on Talaxians” or not. I guess it’s lazy writing, but I liked the episode, so it didn’t bother me.
I may have said this before and might even say it again, but I have never ever understood what people find so hate-able in Mr Neelix; he’s not the coolest character on the ship, but I’ve always found him pleasantly Hobbit-ish and generally kindly (admittedly I’m also on of those fans who feel sorry for Jar-Jar Binks more than anything, so all this might be the sign of an indulgent & soft-hearted fellow).
Oh, and one wonders if the reluctance to deploy Borg resurrection is … well, would YOU want Borg nano machines in your system?
@37 It’s the comic-relief bits that drive the hatred I think. There are times when the show doesn’t take Neelix seriously and it can be really grating. He was also a major jerk when he’s dating Kes.
There’s also the fact that if nanoprobes can reverse actual necrosis, they can probably reverse aging, too. Not only have they discovered a rod of resurrection but also the fountain of youth.
@39/noblehunter: Well, that would explain why Seven of Nine still looks so fantastic in Picard. Wouldn’t explain how Jeri Ryan stays so ageless, though.
@40 – Great genes? Or maybe she really is Borg. She’s a couple of years younger than Salma Hayek, who also still looks absolutely incredible.
I think there must have just been some major advances in cosmetic surgery in recent decades — botox and stuff like that. Lots of actors and actresses seem to age less than they used to. The decline in smoking is probably a factor too.
Jeri Ryan has great genes. Salma Hayek has superior genes. Like Halle Berry. But I don’t think there’s surgery involved in these cases. Primarily because Jeri did age…she just didn’t age like normal people. Part of that is fitness, but part of that is genetics. I think a huge factor is staying out of the sun. Never seen her with a tan.
The reason I discount surgery is that surgeons are never that good. Surgeons can make someone look young, but they can’t make them look natural. Some people just do the age gracefully thing better than others, Helen Mirren I’m looking at you.
I always liked this episode and I also did a fill in the blank “this only works once”. The fact that they didn’t is jarring. All in all an excellent meditation on afterlife and how much of a need it can fill in someone’s psyche. I like that it wasn’t just Neelix being scared about the cessation of his existence, but rather the active goal of making it through life to reach all his loved ones at the end in the afterlife. I am surprised that at no point did anyone bring up a negative afterlife. Talaxians not having a hell, is a fascinating rabbit hole to go down. What if there are last rights and rituals that need to be observed to release the soul to the Great Forest and Neelix didn’t go because the crew didn’t know what they were? There’s a lot of ammo that they left in the magazine.
In the meantime, I’m over here waiting with baited breath for Scarlett Pomers brilliant appearance. Seven and the Doctor, and Seven and Tuvok, and Seven and Janeway get all the love, but I love Seven and Naomi.
@43/Mr. D: “I am surprised that at no point did anyone bring up a negative afterlife. Talaxians not having a hell, is a fascinating rabbit hole to go down.”
Not really. Hell is far from a universal belief in Earth religions. Judaism doesn’t dwell much on the afterlife in either direction. Hinduism and Buddhism traditionally have no Heaven or Hell, just the cycle of reincarnation or release from it, though there are sects with beliefs in heaven- or hell-like realms.
@44/ChristopherLBennett, Buddhism has gradients, the normal human world in the middle meshed with the animal world with more fantastical worlds above and worse existences below. But my point was more in drawing contrast with other belief systems to Neelix’s own as a question. Neelix’s people all go to The Great Forest as opposed to Sto’vo’kor and Gre’thor, heaven and hell, Nirvana, or Sheol. I wouldn’t have minded Neelix’s view on other afterlife systems where you are judged based on your life.
@45/Mr. D: Some varieties of Buddhism are like that. It’s not monolithic. And even Buddhist “hells” are not eternal, just a stage the soul passes through for a time.
Like someone else mentioned earlier, I actually didn’t realize that this episode failed to provide an explanation for why Borg nanoprobes could resurrect Neelix but not ever be used again. Star Trek has so many unique solutions being used for unique situations that I guess I just assume it’s a given that every week’s technomiracle is a one-time thing. Shows how thoroughly steeped in Trek I’ve been my whole life.
So anyway, because of that I was never bothered by the gorilla. I just enjoyed the episode a great deal. It’s one of the few times Neelix gets something interesting and difficult to do, and it’s a pretty powerful depiction of someone losing his faith and having to deal with that. I’m an entirely non-religious person with no spiritual belief system at all, but explorations of the beliefs of others can be very fascinating and rewarding to see, and I think this is a good one. In general Star Trek has a good track record with this. The conversations between Neelix and Chakotay are excellent, and I appreciate that there were no answers provided by the script, because that’s how it is in real life. We make our own answers about the beyond, because there are none here and it means something different to everyone. And indeed, Ethan Phillips was terribly underserved in this role; he could have done so much more if he wasn’t the designated dork in virtually every appearance.
@45/Mr.D: The early ancient Greeks did not have a split (good/bad) afterlife. The only person who is specifically mentioned as going to the Elysian Fields (a kind of heaven), is Menelaus, and we are told he will go there when he dies because he is married to Helen, not because he is especially good or heroic. The early Greeks believed the only way you lived on was through achieving everlasting fame through heroic deeds, although they did have a concept of an afterlife. It was a pretty depressing one, where the image of a person lived on and could talk to fellow images, but their existence was static and they lived in a giant empty cavern; they essentially remained exactly as they were the moment they died. They didn’t eat, or drink, or dance, or sing. Even the greatest heroes (and heroines) lived the same feeble existence in the afterlife. Many ancient near Eastern cultures had similar concepts of a joyless afterlife. Later Greek thought became more spiritual, but there is no evidence that they ever developed a theology that sent good people to a heaven and bad people to a hell.
I do agree that something as extraordinary as being able to raise someone from the dead (once) should be given a bit more care and attention in the script, but in general I find it so annoying when people say, “why didn’t they just include a sentence that explains (whatever was left out)”. Perhaps because they only have 45 minutes to write a show that is meant to be thoughtful and exciting entertainment and they think we can figure it out for ourselves? In fact, it seems like 99% of the time we do!
@49/vegblt
Well I’m generally opposed to Death of the Author myself, but the answer to that is that it is a break from the regular practice of establishing why this doesn’t happen regularly. A manner of casual resurrection can be damaging to dramatic tension. Can be, not necessarily is. Dragon Ball has the titular items which can grant a wish to resurrect someone, but only someone deceased within the last year, and only once. Then they upgraded the Dragon balls to grant more than one resurrection, but then you have people destroy the Dragon Balls (or otherwise render them inaccessible). Star Trek isn’t that fantastical a world that regularly ignoring death would improve storytelling. It would certainly raise the premium on vaporizing someone as a means of killing them though.
@46/ChristopherLBennett
I didn’t mean to imply it was eternal, even Christian Hell only lasts until Judgment Day. I appreciate the cosmological time scales some Buddhist systems use. The time it takes for a soul to burn off that karma is on the order of trillions of years depending. In some ways knowing the sentence is that long is worse than just eternity.
@51: Which makes me think of a Confession Dial….
I certainly do not claim to speak for all Christian sects. However, I can say under Catholic theology you are in error. In Catholic theology, Hell is forever. Everyone rises on Judgement Day, then goes where they are assigned. The condemned go back to Hell. The saved go to Heaven.
BTW, something of note that I noticed while rewatching the episode: Seven very specifically says to Neelix that she would have done the same for any member of the crew. So this wasn’t a one time thing, it wasn’t something that would only work in this situation, she explicitly said she’d have done it for anybody.
SO WHY THE HECK DIDN’T SHE?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@54/krad: For what it’s worth, Seven said nanoprobe “reactivation” would only work if the neural pathways were intact and it was within a maximum of 73 hours after death (implying it could be significantly less in many cases). So I guess the question is whether she would’ve had the opportunity in other cases. Is there a body? How intact is the brain and nervous system? How soon could Seven have access?
I checked Ex Astris Scientia’s casualty list for Voyager, then looked on Memory Alpha for details. The crew member from “Scientific Method,” the one the novel called Luke, died from the rupture of every blood vessel in her body, which presumably would’ve included the brain, so her neural pathways might not have been sufficiently intact. Lyndsay Ballard (“Ashes to Ashes”) died offscreen sometime in season 4, but Harry says she died before they could get back to Voyager and they buried her in space. That’s ambiguous; did they bury her right from the shuttle before returning to the ship? Or maybe it took too long getting back to the ship, but then, it wasn’t too long for the Kobali to revive Ballard.
There was at least one fatality in “The Killing Game,” but we can presume that Seven had no access due to being captive in the holodeck. In “Living Witness,” the Kyrians killed three engineering personnel under unknown circumstances, but it’s possible their weapons did too much neurological damage to repair, or maybe all three were disintegrated for all we know. A crewman in “One” was killed by subnucleonic radiation, which was “devastating to living tissue,” so again, maybe there was too much neural pathway damage. In “Equinox,” a few Voyager personnel were killed while Seven was captive aboard Equinox, so she had no access.
The one entry in the list I can’t think of an excuse for is Carey’s death in “Friendship One.” He’s shot in the heart and is beamed to sickbay immediately afterward. Good grief, under those circumstances, the Doctor himself should’ve been able to put Carey on life support and preserve his brain function until he could install an artificial heart. If Picard could survive after being stabbed in the heart, there’s no reason whatsoever that Carey couldn’t survive after being shot in the heart. So that one makes no damn sense, with or without Seven.
This is a rare Neelix episode I quite liked. But like the main review states the resurrection power of Seven never being mentioned again almost torpedoes everything else. But kudos to Ethan Phillips on this occasion for making me care for once about one of the most irritating characters of all time. A couple of other things I enjoyed in this were some humorous moments in the script, Tuvok getting bored with the list of ancestors, Seven’s conversation stoppers at the celebration, and best of all Seven’s hilariously accurate dismissal of the Kazon.
I lol’d in Neelix’s vision when Seven said he would be assimilated, and his response was he didn’t have time for that.
“Resistance is futile. Seven confides in Tuvok that she doesn’t understand the obsession non-Borg have with death. In the Collective, you live on even after your body ceases, because everyone’s memories are stored in the Collective. Even now, separated from it as she is, her memories will still live on with the Borg. She finds that comforting.”
Just reading the script may seem to support the last line, but Jeri Ryan’s acting in and preceding that scene suggests that Seven hadn’t really thought about how being separated from the collective affected her in case of her death and finds it somewhat unnerving (also pointed out by comment @20). Ryan is a fantastic actress and she conveyed so much through her expression in that scene that it’s possible to not get the nuance on a cursory watch.
@44 “Hinduism and Buddhism traditionally have no Heaven or Hell, just the cycle of reincarnation or release from it, though there are sects with beliefs in heaven- or hell-like realms.”
I don’t know about Buddhism but as a practising Hindu can tell you that we do believe in Heaven and Hell (‘Swarg’ and ‘Narak’, respectively), albeit kind of in the manner you described in @46. It is a pretty common belief though, not just limited to certain sects. As you said, the scriptures indicate that this is just a step in the death-rebirth cycle (dictated by the ‘Karm’ point system, which is decidedly more flexible and arbitrary than people believe it to be), and that the main spiritual goal is to attain ‘Moksha’, that is, escape from this cycle, which is achieved by detachment from earthy pursuits and essentially balancing your Karm.
Interestingly though, modern practice of mainstream Hinduism (at least in India) is now focused on getting to Swarg instead of attaining Moksha. In fact, here in India it drives the social and political landscapes and moral ideologies in much the same way the Christian (I speak generally, I can’t tell the churches/sects apart) concepts of Heaven and Hell drive the same in America. I guess there is always some divide between the theology and actual religious practice.
Even though I’m a born and raised Hindu I find the whole “death-and-rebirth cycle” concept scary, and since short of attaining Moksha there is no viable escape from this fate, I choose not to believe in such a (to me) existentially horrifying belief. I suppose there are others who may think of reincarnation as comforting, but I find comfort in believing that my consciousness would cease to exist after death (to be brief, my actual beliefs are a tad more complicated). I don’t want to be born again, or reach an afterlife (good or bad), or even ascend to another plane of existence, so I really liked this episode for showing me what a person with opposite views may feel if said views are tested (or dismantled, however you interpret what happens next). I wonder what I would have done in Neelix’s shoes if I came to know that an afterlife does exist and how it would have affected me. It was a bit disappointing that we didn’t get to see whether Neelix was ever able to regain his faith or not, and what powers him now that he has lost this driving force.
Overall, a very effective episode of Trek, though not without its fair share of problems regarding writing and Voyager-isms.
As a Neelix fan I found this to be a terrific episode, and I can ignore the fact that Borg resurrection is never brought up again because this is Voyager, and continuity is not a priority for this show.
I think it’s funny that Kes’s lung inside of Neelix didn’t evolve along with the rest of her. It’s also the only thing still left of her (at least in the physical sense). Yep, Seven has found a way to cure death, and yet… why is it never used again? The theme of whether or not there is an afterlife was first dealt with in Emanations – it might have been interesting to pair P’Tera with Neelix instead of Kes, since both characters go through a similar crisis of faith. And Mortal Coil is another example of how Ethan Phillips works much better with dramatic material than as comic relief. Good use of Chakotay too (Beltran does much better in a two-hander rather than being asked to carry an episode by himself).
1: VGR was often criticised for it’s quick fixes and it’s amusing that Chakotay frowns on them. 3: Seven never took into account Neelix’s spiritual beliefs because she doesn’t subscribe to any (although that will be contradicted in The Omega Directive). 5: Yep, it reminds me of Mal being tortured by Niska in Firefly. He kills him and then revives him only so he can torture him some more. 6: He played another doofus in Avenue 5. 7: “A Borg zombie Neelix” – sounds scary! 8: It does when Chakotay tells Neelix he’s not there yet. 9: Sounds like Buffy after she was resurrected in S6 and she wasn’t very grateful either. 12: Flatliners also had that idea but bungled it in the execution.
14: Neelix was the David Brent of VGR! 20: VGR loved dissing the Kazon because they’re a failed ST enemy just like the Ferengi, and they were both unintentionally funny! 25: In Delta Quadrant: A Guide to Voyager, the author surmised that Paris shot down every suggestion Chakotay makes to revive Neelix for the effect that would have on the crew’s morale! 28: Voyager is stranded 60 years from home, not 100. 33: I love the idea in Wes Craven’s Chiller, where a man frozen on the brink of breath returns to life without a soul. 38: Neelix says the same to Seven in the Mess Hall. 40-43-women like Jeri Ryan, Salma Hayek, Halle Berry and Helen Mirren were all blessed with a natural beauty.
43-46: There is a Talaxian hell, and Neelix discovers it’s Voyager after his resurrection. 48: Seven’s miracle cure can’t be used again because that would negate any risk in future episodes. 53: Does that include failed TV shows? 55: If Lindsay Ballard died in S4, how did she catch up to Voyager in S6? And Carey’s expendable, unlike Picard (you’d never get Star Trek: Carey, for instance). 58: I think the last scene implies that Neelix has rediscovered his faith, like Mel Gibson at the end of Signs and Lethal Weapon.
Obviously that should have been “frozen on the brink of death” in the third paragraph. It’s annoying when you proofread your work and still mistakes manage to creep in.
@60/David Sim: “I think it’s funny that Kes’s lung inside of Neelix didn’t evolve along with the rest of her.”
Why would it? It wasn’t part of her body anymore. If someone donates a kidney and then dies a year later, the kidney doesn’t die with them.
I’m more accepting of the nanoprobe death cure used in this episode, since Seven did specify that Neelix’s neural pathways needed to remain intact for it to work (and, for all we know, she did use it on some of the other crew members who died afterwards). In retrospect, though, it does make it pretty silly that poor Hugh managed to be killed by just having his throat slit.
My main problem with this one is the same as my problem with “The Mind’s Eye”, namely: a major character just had a transformatively traumatic experience and it never comes up again. It’s particularly jarring here, though, where there are no counsellors.
Watching this episode again, I have to say I disagree with KRAD’s assertion that this episode is about Neelix’s fear of death. I don’t think he ever comes off as having any kind of fear of death. When he thinks he’s discovered that there is no afterlife, he doesn’t appear afraid at all. He appears devastated, because the only thing that’s kept him going over the previous eleven years since he lost his family was the hope he’d see them again, and it’s the loss of that hope that consumes him to the point where, contrary to being afraid of death, he decides he cannot possibly live without it.