“Bliss”
Written by Bill Prady and Robert J. Doherty
Directed by Cliff Bole
Season 5, Episode 14
Production episode 209
Original air date: February 10, 1999
Stardate: 52542.3
Captain’s log. A small one-person ship, commanded by an alien named Qatai, flies straight into a maelstrom, with Qatai taunting the maelstrom.
Tuvok and Kim report that sensors have picked up a wormhole, one that leads directly to Sector 001. Janeway is skeptical to say the least, but she orders a probe sent in.
Seven, Paris, and Naomi return to Voyager from a mission on the Delta Flyer in search of deuterium because this writer’s room still labors under the delusion that deuterium is some rare element. Sigh.
When they return to Voyager, Seven is surprised to learn about the wormhole, especially since, given its proximity, they should have detected it sooner. However, the crew is completely giddy about the prospect of returning home, as the probe has shown that it really does go right to Earth, and they’ve received communiqués from Starfleet and everything.
Seven is concerned that it showed up on sensors so late, and so runs a diagnostic—however, sensors are functioning fine. She scans the wormhole and finds neutrino fluctuations. She reports this to Janeway, but the captain dismisses the concerns, as Starfleet Command has informed them that the fluctuations are nothing to be concerned about. Janeway postulates that Seven is frightened about the prospect of going to Earth.
What Seven is more concerned about is the crew’s total lack of concern regarding this gift horse that they insist on shoving their heads into the mouth of. She hacks into the computer to read Janeway’s logs, and sees that she went from a healthy and sensible skepticism about the convenience of the wormhole to complete and total unquestioning acceptance of it.
The crew has been receiving letters from the wormhole. Janeway has been informed that Mark Johnson has ended his relationship, Chakotay has been told that he’s been pardoned and will be offered an anthropology position at Starfleet Academy, Paris has been offered a position as a test pilot, and even Neelix has been offered a diplomatic post. Seven herself has a letter from a Claudia Hansen, who says she is Annika Hansen’s father’s sister.
Seven finds the complete acceptance of all this good news disquieting, and she goes to sickbay and activates the EMH—who, it turns out, hasn’t even been informed of the wormhole. He promises to check on the crew under the guise of routine medical exams.
Buy the Book
Fugitive Telemetry
Seven is summoned to the bridge to see the probe’s first images from the other side of the wormhole: Earth. The crew is goofily giddy over this notion.
Returning to astrometrics, Seven runs several scans, but they all read the wormhole as a standard class-one phenomenon. However, she sees a ship in the scanning field, though sensors aren’t reading it. She contacts the ship, and Qatai appears on the screen, urging Voyager to turn around. “You’re being deceived.” However, the communication then cuts off, after which power to astrometrics is shut down. Tuvok arrives to inform Seven that they’re depowering astrometrics in order to divert more power to the navigational deflector to help get through the wormhole. Seven tries to appeal to Tuvok’s sense of logic that this is all too good to be true. Unfortunately, Tuvok doesn’t believe that she spoke to Qatai, since there is no record of any such communication.
Returning to Cargo Bay 2, Seven finds Naomi hiding behind a cargo container, clutching her Flotter stuffie for dear life. She says that everyone’s acting weird, including her mother. Seven realizes that she and Naomi are the only two people on board who are not excited about the notion of returning to the Alpha Quadrant—Seven because of the fear of how she’d be received as a former Borg, Naomi because Voyager is the only home she’s ever known.
Seven tells Naomi to stay in the cargo bay. She goes to sickbay only to find that the EMH has been taken offline because the wormhole will interfere with his holographic matrix. Chakotay then approaches Seven to inform her that they will need to put her in stasis while they go through the wormhole because it will pass through a subspace region that the Borg monitor, and they can’t risk them picking up Seven’s neural transceiver.
Pretending to agree to being put in stasis, Seven leads Chakotay and the security detail he brought with him to Cargo Bay 2. Under the cover of adjusting her alcove’s settings, she instead imprisons Chakotay and the security detail in a force field. Leaving instructions with Naomi on how to keep Tuvok from shutting the force field down, Seven beams to engineering, stunning the officers on duty (including Torres), erects a force field around engineering, and tries to take control of the ship. Janeway sends an EM burst through the console she’s using, rendering her unconscious.
Voyager goes into what they think is the wormhole, but is, in fact, the maelstrom we saw in the teaser, which is the outer portion of a massive living being that swallows the ship.
The crew is now entirely unconscious, thinking they’re on Earth; Neelix meets with some Starfleet admirals, while Tuvok is reunited with T’Pel. The only conscious one is Naomi, who somehow knows to go to engineering, where she yells at Seven to wake up and turn off the force field.
Seven wants Naomi to go to her quarters and wait, but she doesn’t want to be alone. So she accompanies Seven to astrometrics, pausing to freak out over Neelix being unconscious.
According to scans, the hull’s being demolecularized. Seven is able to find Qatai’s ship and contact him. He eventually agrees to be beamed over, and when he arrives he explains that they’re in the belly of a massive living creature that lures ships in by telepathically fooling them into thinking that flying down its gullet will be the road to their greatest desire. The demolecularization Seven detected is the creature beginning the digestion process. Qatai has been hunting this thing for forty years, and he still sometimes succumbs to the creature’s telepathic manipulations. Qatai was on a colony ship that was lured into the creature’s maw; they were all wiped out, with only Qatai remaining, and dedicating his life to destroying it.
They go to sickbay and activate the EMH. While the doctor runs scans of the crew to figure out how to block the creature’s telepathy, Qatai examines Voyager’s weaponry. The EMH’s attempts to block the creature’s illusions with a cortical stimulator fail.
Qatai wants to blow it up with a photon torpedo, but the EMH would rather not commit murder. (That whole “do no harm” thing.) He recommends making the creature suffer from some manner of indigestion so that it will expel both ships back out into space.
Yes, the EMH recommends making the creature puke the ships out.
(Or maybe belch them out. But puke is funnier.)
Qatai’s weapons are tetryon-based. If he fires at a burst of antimatter, it would cause an electrolytic discharge that should give the creature a tummyache.
The first attempt seems to succeed, but it soon becomes clear that the creature is making Seven think it worked. However, the EMH is immune, and Qatai is partly immune, so they convince her that it didn’t work.
They try again, and this time the creature barfs Voyager and Qatai’s ship out into space.
The crew wakes up, incredibly confused. Seven says that the EMH will explain everything, she’s going to take a nap. (Well, regenerate, but whatever.)
Later, Seven finds Naomi in astrometrics. Her mother sent her there to learn more about Earth, but Naomi doesn’t see what the big deal is. Neither does Seven, but they figure they should probably learn more just in case they do get to the Alpha Quadrant.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Voyager is still searching for deuterium because they’re apparently all too dumb to know how to find an isotope of the most common element in the universe.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway’s initial skepticism about the wormhole includes some truly magnificent sarcasm. So when she accepts the wormhole after Act 1 with a vapid smile, it gives the viewer the heebie-jeebies.
Mr. Vulcan. Seven tries really really hard to appeal to Tuvok’s sense of logic, going so far as to make him realize that he’s actually feeling enthusiasm regarding seeing T’Pel again, but it still doesn’t help him break out of the creature’s telepathic hold.
Half and half. The EMH tests the cortical stimulator as a method of breaking the telepathic hold on Torres, but it totally doesn’t work, as Torres wakes up in sickbay and sees, not the EMH and Qatai, but her fellow Maquis alive and well contrary to what she was told in “Hunters.”
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix believes he is going to be made ambassador to the Lan’tuana sector, which is apparently inhabited by quadrupeds.
Resistance is futile. Seven has completely morphed into Naomi’s weird aunt. It’s kind of adorable. They’re also the only two on board who have no interest in going to the Alpha Quadrant.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. At one point, Qatai—impressed with the range of capabilities the EMH has—offers him a place on his ship. The EMH politely declines the notion of being Ishmael to Qatai’s Ahab, a reference the alien totally doesn’t get.
Do it.
“My scans indicate that your shields will fail in approximately fifteen minutes. Join us, or you can remain on your vessel secure in the knowledge that you were not deceived. But that knowledge will do you little good when you are dead. Decide now.”
–Seven being incredibly blunt even by her standards with Qatai.
Welcome aboard. The big guest is the late great W. Morgan Sheppard in his third of four roles on Trek as Qatai. He also played Ira Graves in TNG’s “The Schizoid Man,” the head of Rura Penthe in The Undiscovered Country, and a Vulcan science minister in the 2009 Star Trek.
Uncredited extra Kimber Lee Renay plays T’Pel. The role was previously played by Marva Hicks in “Persistence of Vision,” and Hicks will play the role again in “Body and Soul.”
Plus we have recurring regular Scarlett Pomers as Naomi.
Trivial matters: Bill Prady’s original pitch was that Voyager was lured in by a giant pitcher plant. That particular plant type was kept in as a metaphor for the creature in the final product.
One of the false letters that the crew is fooled into thinking they’re sent from Earth is from Claudia Hansen, Seven’s paternal aunt. It will be revealed in “Author, Author” in season seven that Seven’s father did indeed have a sister, though she is named Irene.
Janeway found out that Mark Johnson married another woman in “Hunters,” the same episode in which Chakotay and Torres found out that the Maquis were wiped out. (Janeway’s fake letter says that Mark’s engagement is off, but Mark was established as having been married, not engaged.)
Samantha Wildman is mentioned several times, but Nancy Hower does not appear in the episode.
Naomi still has the Flotter stuffie that Kim replicated for her in “Once Upon a Time.”
Set a course for home. “And who might you be, the local monster expert?” This episode was very obviously an excuse to give the spotlight to Seven and the EMH, with some Naomi Wildman adorableness thrown in for good measure.
Still the episode feels bizarrely inconsequential. Seeing the Stepford crew of Voyager gleefully barreling toward this fake wormhole is cute for about a minute, but it drags on far too long. By so totally falling for the creature’s deception, it makes the crew look incredibly ineffectual. It would’ve been nice to see some confusion or resistance—from Tuvok, if nothing else, given his Vulcan suppression of his emotions and his Vulcan telepathy.
There are several head-scratching moments. Seven says that Qatai’s shields will fail in fifteen minutes. He’s then on Voyager for way more than fifteen minutes (the EMH has time to find Torres, bring her to sickbay, work out a treatment, and test that treatment, all after Seven, Qatai, and Naomi spent several minutes bantering in astrometrics, walking to sickbay, and activating and filling in the EMH; no way all that was less than a quarter of an hour), but his ship is still intact. Naomi wakes up in Cargo Bay 2 and then wanders to engineering, somehow magically knowing that Seven is there. And then there’s the EMH and Qatai having to convince Seven that they didn’t really get puked out by the creature, but the EMH is (a) the ranking officer and (b) capable of shooting out the antimatter himself. Why doesn’t he just go ahead do it without taking the time to convince Seven that she’s hallucinating?
Biggest of all, though, is that Naomi’s father is back home in the Alpha Quadrant. Not on Earth (the focus on Earth as someplace everyone wants to go to makes very little sense, as not everyone on board is even from that planet, but whatever), but the point is, the subject of finally getting to finally meet her father never even comes up. Seems to me that that’s something that should, at the very least, be discussed.
The episode is fun to watch, especially the second half with Robert Picardo, Jeri Ryan, Scarlett Pomers, and W. Morgan Sheppard babbling at each other to try to figure out how to escape, and I approve of any solution that involves making the bad guy puke. But the episode ultimately is kind of nowhere.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written several works of Voyager fiction, the vast majority of which doesn’t take place in the Delta Quadrant. The Voyager portion of his two-book series The Brave and the Bold takes place prior to “Caretaker.” His short story “Letting Go” in the Distant Shores anthology focuses on the family and friends of the crew left behind in the Alpha Quadrant. He’s also written two alternate universe versions of Voyager, one in the Mirror Universe (the short novel The Mirror-Scaled Serpent in the Obsidian Alliances trade paperback, which involves the Terran Rebellion against the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance), the other in a timeline where the Maquis were never formed and so Voyager remains in the Alpha Quadrant (the short novel A Gutted World in the Myriad Universes: Echoes and Refractions trade paperback). He’s also written Janeway after Voyager returned home in Q & A and Articles of the Federation(the EMH also appeared in the latter).
This is one of those ones I like more in theory than in execution. I will say that I was glad that Seven wasn’t immune to the pitcher plant because of her Borg implants (they go to that well FAR too often for my taste) but for emotional reasons. I also did enjoy the creepiness of everyone smiling along as they attempt to put Seven to sleep and turn off the EMH- I’ve always liked that kind of Stepford-esque vibe, and Starfleet is actually a great place to do that kind of thing.
Have the Maquis (and Paris) all been guaranteed amnesty when we weren’t looking or something? Because if not there should at least be one or two of them who aren’t jonsing to get home (and if they were, you think they might have mentioned that at some point). B’Elanna and Tom both are usually portrayed as not really having all that much to get home to (heck, B’Elanna was in a depressive episode not that long ago because almost everything she cared about in the Alpha quadrant had been wiped out), and Tom will later say in “Endgame” that Voyager *is* his home and he isn’t all that concerned about finding a shortcut. I know the pitcher plant made Chakotay think he’d had his slate wiped clean, but I find it hard to believe that *all* of the Maquis are so confident that the pitcher plant dupes them, but not Naomi Wildman who, as KRAD correctly points out, has a father she’s never met waiting for her in the Alpha Quadrant. And yea, only focusing on earth is part of the longer tradition of having humanity be the bright shining center of the Federation, to the detriment of developing the other members.
All that aside, Starfleet really needs to hire better people to do on-board security (sorry, Tuvok). The amount of times one or two people manage to take over the entire ship is just embarrassing, at this point. I know it worked out for them, this time, but a child, a hologram, and someone who isn’t even in Starfleet shouldn’t be able to even partially hijack your ship from you, or be able to operate it successfully once you’ve all fallen asleep.
As far as Naomi knowing to find Seven in Engineering, wasn’t she there doing the magic to keep the forcefield up when Seven initiated her site-to-site transport, where she clearly said “Main Engineering?”
Naomi struggled to her feet and looked around the cargo bay. She could see Chakotay and the security detail unconscious on the floor, but there was no sign of Seven
‘Computer, locate Seven of None.’
‘Seven of Nine is in Engineering.’
Naomi headed for the cargo bay doors. She knew she didn’t want to be alone.
There.
It’s an OK episode, obviously highly influenced by Moby Dick. My thinking about the shield failure on Qatai’s ship is that it would create a lethal environment to occupants but not necessarily destroy the ship just yet. It also works as an interesting contrast to Season 4’s “One”, where Seven is also trying to hold things together by herself, and again makes contact with somebody; the one difference is that Qatai is no figment of her imagination.
Besides, who would miss W. Morgan Sheppard, most familiar to me through Max Headroom?
Well, nowhere is kind of the point of a trap, yes? ;-)
Was really hoping to see Tuvok fight it off. I mean, every single crew member? Not one had mixed feelings about going home?
Yup, never liked this one. Naomi is awesome, but I never liked this one. Even W. Morgan Sheppard couldn’t save it — casting him as Space Captain Ahab just made it feel campy, like a Lost in Space episode.
I love these episodes with giant space megafauna, especially when they are big sinister beasts. I know they aren’t to everybody’s tastes, but I still love them nonetheless.
@7/kayom: I literally wrote the book on Star Trek space megafauna, but I still didn’t like this episode.
This one is somewhat similar to a 90s Outer Limits episode “Tempests” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667959/) that was broadcast two years earlier. It’s quite a bit grimmer though and features a character who switches in and out of the “bliss” state.[edit] I always remembered this one because cat sized spiders are my nightmare fuel.[edit]
@8 Never read it, still like this episode. Thank you.
As always, I think SF Debris summed up my thoughts on this episode with this gem from Chuck Sonnenburg’s review:
Seven: The odds of finding such a phenomenon are infinitesimal.
Janeway: Never bet against the house.
Chuck Seven: What? Then you should assume it’s fake.
Chuck Janeway: The universe is a slot machine and I’m counting cards tonight!
Chuck Seven: You’re not making any sense!
Chuck Janeway: Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Captain Gives-a-s**t!
I actually have always enjoyed this episode and find it above average. I guess I usually like a story where everyone goes all Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a few unaffected individuals have to figure out what’s going on while running for their lives. TNG’s “The Game” and DS9’s “Whispers” both had that same creepy vibe. You can’t go wrong when Seven and the EMH as your focus leads and W. Morgan Sheppard guesting was excellent as well. I was actually surprised he was in this episode. I know it’s silly, but when his character in “The Schizoid Man” died, in my mind it was like the actor had died too because he seemed kind of old there already and this VOY episode was 10 years later so I hadn’t even given him any thought that I’d ever see him in anything else. So it was a pleasant surprise to see him in this episode and obviously he acted well beyond 1998 as well. I had no idea he was in ST VI much less Star Trek (2009). Very cool.
But yes, there are plenty of things in this story that don’t make sense or are inconsistent. I don’t think Torres should be all that excited to get back to Earth either. Yes, in more recent times she was all devastated by what happened to the Maquis but I still always point back to the first season, I believe in “Eye of the Needle”, where she and Harry have a conversation on getting home, and she states that there’s really nothing there for her and the people she cares most about are on Voyager or something to that effect. Still, I look over all of these nitpicks because overall the episode is still a fun ride.
Austin: Keep in mind that the creature didn’t just offer them a way home, but in every case we got the specifics of, the pot was sweetened, as it were: Janeway also was told that Mark was available again, Chakotay also got a full pardon and an anthopology professorship, Torres also saw her fellow Maquis alive and well, Paris also got a position as a test pilot, and so on.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@1: Do you really think any of the Maquis members are facing the prospect of doing any prison time after all this? The Federation justice system isn’t exactly punitive to begin with (remember Garak only got a 6 month sentence for attempting to sabotage the Defiant to commit genocide), and given that the Maquis members have arguably been in Janeway’s custody this whole time (and under extremely hazardous conditions no less), and that Janeway will certainly vouch for their heroic service and good character, they would at worst receive a “time served” sentence (if they aren’t just pardoned outright.)
garreth: Sheppard was only 56 when he played Ira Graves. He died two years ago at age 86.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@11/Mr. Magic: Haha! That’s too funny! I’ll have to watch that review (or watch it again since I may have seen it already).
Also, another analogy for the space organism expelling the ships is it taking a dump after having its stomach irritated. But puking works too.
@15/Krad: Right, prior to posting I looked up Sheppard’s bio on Wikipedia and he was still relatively young when he did his TNG role. I think it was him doing an excellent job of portraying someone older/infirm, the makeup job, and again, the silly notion in my head as a kid that if this old character had died, the actual actor was pretty old too and wasn’t long for this world. So that’s why it was a pleasant surprise to see that he actually had a very long career well beyond that TNG episode and only passed away a couple of years ago. And I also had no idea until I just went to Wikipedia that his son is actor Mark Sheppard who I recognize most from Ron Moore’ Battlestar Galactica. Small world!
@14 I certainly think it might be possible, but since the show hasn’t bothered to tell us what their status is now that they have re-established contact with the Alpha Quadrant, I think it should still be a concern for them. It doesn’t help that we don’t really know what they would be charged with. Sedition? Treason? Murder? We don’t really know, which makes it hard to determine what they can expect when they get back. Tom Paris was already 18 months into a prison sentence for being in the Maquis, and he got captured on his first mission- presumably before he had a chance to do much damage. Whatever remained on his sentence was clearly long enough that taking Janeway’s offer was tempting, so it seems reasonable to me that it was at least 2-3 years, possibly more.
Given that Starfleet thought Chakotay’s cell was worth planting an undercover operative in (and the Cardassians clearly also thought so), I always assumed that the Maquis we see on Voyager were in the thick of things back in the Alpha Quadrant, and therefore might have been involved in some fairly gruesome stuff. As MAJ Kira pointed out over on DS9, being a terrorist means being willing to do some pretty terrible things, and she was explicitly OK with Cardassian civilians being blown up, and her advice to Damar implies she thought that even Bajoran collateral damage was acceptable in the pursuit of her goals. If the Maquis were anything like her (and they do seem to have been influenced fairly heavily by the Bajoran struggle for freedom, and seemingly have lots of Bajorans in their ranks), they could be facing some pretty serious charges that 5 years (at this point) might not cover. It is also possible that the Federation wouldn’t consider serving on Voyager, with the same ranks and privileges as any other Starfleet officer, to be a punishment that would be commensurate to time served.
@17 – Mark Sheppard’s also Icheb’s dad. Very small world (Mark Sheppard’s been in pretty much every major sci-fi/fantasy TV franchise in the last two decades).
@19: Yes! I watched that episode recently and was wondering why that actor, the dad, looked so familiar. I like his voice. It’s pretty distinctive.
@18: I don’t know. The Maquis didn’t become truly radicalized and start attacking civilian populations until Eddington took charge (which was long after Voyager got stranded in the Delta Quadrant.) Prior to that whenever we saw or heard about them carrying out an attack it always seemed to involve them hitting military targets or civilian ships carrying military supplies. And certainly I would expect that it would have been mentioned at some point in the show if Chakotay’s cell had carried out any particularly egregious actions. Nor does Starfleet (and the Cardassians) wanting to infiltrate Chakotay’s cell necessarily mean it was committing atrocities. Starfleet and the Cardassians could have just considered Chakotay a threat that needed to be neutralized because he was a tactically effective insurgent commander. (So basically Chakotay as Nathaniel Greene rather than Osama Bin Laden.)
And even if Chakotay’s people could be charged with a serious crime like murder or piracy or treason, the problem is the Federation doesn’t believe in punishing people just for being bad. The Federation justice system instead seems to be based on rehabilitation as the moral justification for confinement, and that makes it really difficult for the Feds to justify incarcerating the Maquis crewmembers since, with them having five years of good and honorable service (under extremely difficult conditions) onboard Voyager, how could you claim that they are not already rehabilitated? The Maquis crewmembers have basically gone through a much more stringent rehabilitation program then anything they would have received in a Federation rehabilitation center.
But even if you are correct, and the Maquis are still facing prison time back in the Alpha Quadrant, the Maquis members could still rationally believe that a stay in a Federation county club prison in New Zealand is a lot better than being alone in the Delta Quadrant where you are subject to ongoing attacks from Borg and Hirogen and Vidians.
@14,
Christie Golden actually sorta used that approach in the opening VOY Relaunch novels (since the show, in typical VOY fashion, had wasted this opportunity by its conclusion).
Here was Owen Paris’ explantion of Janeway in the opening of Homecoming:
“During the last days of [the Dominion War] there was a shortage of trained, capable officers. The situation was desperate. A general pardon was therefore offered to any of the Maquis who chose to return to Starfleet, absolving them of any wrongdoing, and after the massacre on Tevlik’s moon, it was argued that there was no reason to doubt their commitment to the cause. To be honest, I opposed the amnesty. I did not think Maquis could be trusted. I have never been so happy to be proven wrong. The former Maquis served bravely and loyally. Therefore, I hereby extend the amnesty to all those who Captain Janeway informs me have served her so well.”
IIRC, there were also PR optics in play. Janeway and her crew were considered heroes by the UFP at large. Command feared prosecuting Chakotay and company would blow up in their faces and cause a pubkic backlash Starfleet really didn’t need in the initial post-War years.
It’s a classic case of an episode that doesn’t have nearly enough story for 44 minutes. It’s not a bad one. But it definitely suffers from some really sluggish pacing. Of course, reading the recap gives us a very humorous perspective. It’s insane just how many obstacles are thrown in front of Seven. Powering down the EMH; threatening to power down Seven; and there’s always an excuse as to the why behind these obstacles. That is one mean resourceful space creature. People might as well ditch telepaths and harvest the creature’s abilities somehow.
Given Naomi’s role in the episode, this also somewhat reminds me of TNG’s The Game. Thankfully, Voyager figured out how to do the kid saving the ship plot device right. This is no Wesley Crusher scenario. She’s not the savior. She’s merely Seven’s helpful sidekick. And their dynamic is enough to keep things fun.
@16:
Haha! That’s too funny! I’ll have to watch that review (or watch it again since I may have seen it already.
As I’ve said throughout the entire Rewatch, Chuck Sonnenburg is the gift that keeps on giving.
“A direct route to Earth’s doorstep, out of the blue. What’s wrong this picture?”
So the ship is saved by the Doctor, Seven…and Naomi Wildman. A bit of variety at least. To be fair, after the overload of Season 4, we have had quite a few episodes this season which have just treated Seven as part of the ensemble, and halfway through she’s only really had three focus episodes, although that’s probably two or three more than most of the cast. As with their previous team-up in “One”, she’s very much the viewpoint character with the Doctor off screen for huge chunks: In fact, we’re practically into the final third before they properly team up.
Voyager flying blindly into the creature while the crew see something beautiful is a rather chilling moment. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Kirk would have blown this dangerous monster to bits (“The Immunity Syndrome” is an obvious comparison), but at least they have the sense to leave a few warning buoys behind for the next unlucky ship that comes along. (How useful they’ll be with a creature that’s mobile and can affect people’s judgement from a considerable distance is another matter.) I’d forgotten W. Morgan Sheppard did a Voyager. (Given the references above, I feel obliged to point out he and son Mark played the same character in different time periods in an episode of Doctor Who.) He seems to be having a little bit too much fun playing Qatai as some sort of grizzled old sea captain IN SPACE.
Whilst it’s a big shame that Samantha Wildman has become an off screen presence, there is something oddly endearing about the village raising this child: Janeway noted back in “Deadlock” that it felt like she was the child of everyone. Paris gets to play parent at the start while Seven remains aloof (while he’s simultaneously being the naughty child winding up the serious-minded grown-up), but pretty soon she has to step up and take on the role. Someone should have got the Doctor to treat her wound though… (I’m tempted to wonder if Scarlett Pomers had a cut in real life and they wrote it in!)
Seven is able to bypass Janeway’s security lockout with a very minor adjustment to the nearest panel. Seven’s father actually having a sister alive on Earth who’s apparently not the sister mentioned here leaves me wondering if someone got confused. Naomi’s description of the creature as a pitcher plant apparently caught on, since Chakotay uses the term in “Shattered”. It’s actually Kim that tries to bring the forcefield down, not Tuvok.
I cannot explain why but i do love this episode. Its one of my most rewatched ones. I think it’s because its a simple, straightforward plot.
while i never cared much for Voyager focusing so much on Earth verses Federation Space in general, i thought they did a good job explaining why everyone bought the deception. With so much positive reinforcement, especially regarding something you really, really want, why not fall for it? Not to mention, every one around them is all gleeful too.
Quoth bguy: “The Maquis didn’t become truly radicalized and start attacking civilian populations until Eddington took charge.”
Um, no. The Maquis’s very first action as an organization was to blow up the freighter Bok’Nor, which was docked at Deep Space 9, a facility chock full of civilians. They were utterly and completely radicalized from jump.
Quoth cap-mjb: “Seven’s father actually having a sister alive on Earth who’s apparently not the sister mentioned here leaves me wondering if someone got confused.”
What do you mean? The aunt in this episode was totally made up by the creature in an attempt to get Seven on board with the this-is-a-wormhole notion.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@27: I guess I’m saying that I wonder if someone on the writing staff had a vague memory that they’d established Seven as having an aunt at one point and forgot that it was made up. It’s an odd one on several levels. Lack of explanation for how the pitcher plant’s illusions work aside, it seems strange that a)no-one bothered to look up whether Seven had any family left before and b)she’d get a hallucinatory letter from an invented relative if there was a real one out there.
@21 Yea, I agree with KRAD in @27- the Maquis were always radical. We saw more of the radical stuff they were doing when Eddington took over because Sisko was there, and so we got to go along for the ride instead of hearing about things happening off-screen, but the Maquis adopted terrorist tactics pretty much from the jump, which again makes sense if they were modeling themselves off of the Bajoran resistance. I don’t think it is much of a stretch to assume they were getting the same kind of training from the Bajorans that Kira would later give to Damar. And I don’t think there is any reason to believe Chakotay and his cell were doing anything radically different from the other Maquis we see on-screen; the fact that so many people took the effort to infiltrate it suggests the opposite.
I do think it is one of the weaknesses of the show that we never really find out *what* they were doing, or how it effected any of them other than B’Elanna’s depression at losing them. Maybe they didn’t want to make them too unlikeable, but Kira over on DS9 proved that you could have a character who was an admitted terrorist and still have her be a sympathetic and likable (to a lesser extent, Ro showed the same thing on TNG). It’s also just poor writing that the show never bothers to tell us what is going to happen to them when they get home (I mean, I guess you can infer from alternate histories, but that’s about it). This is a cause these people gave up their careers, families, and lives for, and the show just kind of forgets about it. If the Federation forgives them all and welcomes them back- that’s great! But they could at least show us that, and show the characters processing it.
@27, @28 I am assuming that the pitcher plant creates these fantasies from people’s own minds, given how specific and personalized they are. I think it is possible that Seven might have a very vague memory of having an aunt back in the Alpha Quadrant, and either the pitcher plant just made up the rest of the details (her name, what she looked like), she had more than one aunt (and maybe this one we see is now deceased), or the writers just forgot that this was really supposed to be her aunt and created an unnecessary new aunt in a later episode. It seems unlikely to me that the pitcher plant completely made up the idea of Seven having a relative.
@29/wildfyre: “the Maquis adopted terrorist tactics pretty much from the jump, which again makes sense if they were modeling themselves off of the Bajoran resistance.”
They named themselves after the French resistance in WWII, so that was probably their primary model. There’s nothing specifically Bajoran about using guerrilla tactics against a more powerful foe.
@30 Obviously no one group invented guerilla tactics. But the number of Bajorans in the Maquis, the similarity of the Maquis cause to the Bajoran one, and the fact that they felt comfortable using a Bajoran space station as a place to meet, stage attacks, and conduct business would all lead me to believe that the Maquis received at least some of their training from the Bajorans. Considering how quickly they were able to form into a fairly effective terrorist organization, it seems likely to me that *someone* who had done this before was providing support, and the Bajorans are the nearest and most obvious game in town for that. The Bajorans didn’t invent guerilla warfare, but they certainly had the knowledge and the access to teach it to a new group. I get why they used the name, but I don’t think it is likely that Chakotay spent all his time studying the French instead of the more recent and obvious example to go off of. Plenty of extremist groups today (especially far-right ones) name themselves after groups from Ancient Greece or the Crusades- it doesn’t mean their tactics and structure are even remotely similar.
@31/wildfyre: I was responding to the phrase “modeling themselves off of.” I took that as being about their original inspiration, more than their specific tactics and training, which would come later.
@27: Wasn’t the Bok’nor smuggling weapons to the Cardassians in the DMZ? (Certainly the Maquis believed it was smuggling weapons.) Targeting a ship that you believe to be smuggling arms is quite a bit different than deliberately targeting civilian populations.
@29: We see a lot of the Maquis’s pre-Eddington actions and again during that time period all their attacks are either against military targets or civilian ships transporting weapons.
Maquis Part 1-they attack the Bok’nor (believed to be smuggling weapons)
-they kidnap Gul Dukat (a military leader)
Maquis Part 2-they attempt to attack a Cardassian arms depot. Are intercepted by armed Starfleet vessels.
Preemptive Strike-they attack a Cardassian warship.
they steal supplies from the USS Enterprise (an armed Starfleet vessel)
they plan to attack a convoy carrying what they believe to be biological weapons.
The Defiant-they steal the USS Defiant (an armed Starfleet vessel)
-they attack Cardassian warships and military outposts with the Defiant
At no point in those episodes do we see the Maquis deliberately targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure (as they would later do under Eddington.) Nor during that time do we ever hear any reference to the Maquis deliberately targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure. And I think the episode “Preemptive Strike” is particularly telling on this point. It’s mentioned in that episode that the Maquis are wanting to take on bigger targets, yet when Starfleet comes up with a plan to lure a large Maquis force into an ambush, they have to bait it with false intelligence that it is a convoy carrying biological weapons. If the Maquis at that time were open to attacking civilians they wouldn’t have had to wait for a juicy target to come along. They would have just attacked one of the Cardassian colonies in the DMZ. And the fact that Starfleet specifically baited the Maquis with information about a weapons convoy suggests that Starfleet knew that the Maquis wasn’t interested in hitting civilian targets, so they had to offer up a valid military target to get the Maquis’s interest.
Thus the onscreen evidence suggests the Maquis were much less radical before Eddington took over. They only started using WMDs and deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in the Eddington era.
I do agree with you though that Voyager really needed an episode or two showing the aftermath of the crew’s return to Earth.
I really liked this episode. Great job Scarlett Pomers (Naomi Wildman). I’m a sucker for those innocent kid episodes. DS9 Shadow Play was another.
I’m just not sure that the New Your Times reading list has hit the Delta Quadrant though. Still, nice Quote from Moby Dick by the doctor. The doctor has a knack for mentioning relevant information only to Earthlings to Aliens in the Delta Quadrant
This would be a Warp 9 for me.
bguy: The Bok’Nor was docked at Deep Space 9 when it was targeted and blown up. They blew up a starship with a warp drive (an engine powered by antimatter) that was docked at a station that was chock full of civilians. The possibilities for collateral damage are huge. It may not have been a civilian target, but it was hit in a location where the possibility for civilian casualties was extremely real. The only reason there weren’t massive civilian casualties was because the TV show on which it happened was called Deep Space Nine and therefore the station was protected by plot armor. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Maquis, at the very least, showed depraved indifference to the danger their actions posed to the innocent civilians on DS9.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@35: In-story there was no indication that DS9 was ever in any danger from the destruction of the Bok’Nor. Notably Sisko doesn’t even try to argue the potential danger to the people onboard DS9 when he is debating the destruction of the Bok’Nor with Hudson which it certainly seems like Sisko would have brought up if he thought there was any potential risk to the people onboard DS9. You can deride DS9 not being in danger as plot armor if you wish, but based on what was shown in-story DS9 was not actually in any risk, and given the technical expertise of the sabotage job it is logical to assume that the Maquis saboteurs knew they could blow up the Bok’nor without endangering DS9, thus you really can’t use that incident to claim the Maquis at that time were demonstrating depraved indifference to civilian casualties.
But regardless even if you were correct about the risk to DS9 from the Bok’nor bombing there’s still a distinction between being willing to accept collateral damage to hit valid military targets and the deliberate targeting of civilian populations. The former is bad (though current International Humanitarian Law does accept collateral damage as permissible in warfare so long as the collateral damage is not excessive in regards to the military advantage obtained by hitting the valid target) but the later is much worse, and the Maquis don’t cross the line into deliberately targeting civilian populations until Eddington took over (which was long after Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant.)
@36 I never claimed they were deliberately targeting civilian populations- I claimed that they considered it fair game if civilians happened to be harmed in one of their actions.
Legitimate pardons for the Maquis are a moot point in this situation, aren’t they? Wasn’t the creature sending to their brains promises of any great thing they wanted back in the Alpha Quadrant? It would’ve promised them a land of sunshine and lollipops if it meant getting to eat them.
I lived through a terrorist campaign, The Troubles, when I was a child, let me just say that there is no “safely” when it comes to bombs and blowing stuff up. Once you start planting them, you are absolutely risking blowing up the wrong place or blowing up more than intended.
I wonder how the Voyager crew repaired their ship after it was already demolecularized by the space creature?
@40,
Sssshhh!
Don’t bring logic and consequences into this corner of the 24th Century!
Wisecracking aside, VOY’s refusal to acknowledge the wear and tear of their DQ cross-country sojourn remains infuriating even 20 years later.
And I know it pissed off Ronald Moore too, hence Galactica’s cumulative damage adding up as BSG developed.
BSG was too much of an overcorrection by Ron Moore though. He had good intentions, but he swung from one [perceived] extreme, all the way to a very different extreme. He should have tried to land more in the middle, and maybe we’d not have lost almost two decades of genre tv to battlestar syndrome too.
@40/garreth: “I wonder how the Voyager crew repaired their ship after it was already demolecularized by the space creature?”
The same way they repair any other hull damage, no doubt. Presumably they replicate and install replacement hull plating, or maybe wave some glowy gizmo over weakened hull sections to re-strengthen their molecular bonds, or whatever.
Since Discovery has now retroactively established the existence of maintenance/repair drones aboard Starfleet ships in the 23rd century and also shown them still in use in the 32nd, we can assume that 24th-century ships had them too, lurking offscreen and doing repairs when we weren’t looking.
@41
I remember holding out hope that a barely held together Voyager would land in San Francisco in the finale, then collapse in a pile of junk ala the Bluesmobile in The Blues Brothers.
It goes without saying this episode owes an intellectual debt the size of a gigantic space creature to the original series episode “The Immunity Syndrone.”
@44,
I remember holding out hope that a barely held together Voyager would land in San Francisco in the finale, then collapse in a pile of junk ala the Bluesmobile in The Blues Brothers.
LMAO. :D
I remember loving this episode. On further review … I like it, still. I was a dozen years older than Pomers was in this episode when I first saw it but I still enjoyed a “kid helps save the day” episode. (I also missed most of the first season of TNG at that point. Suffice to say Wesley is a lot less annoying when you’re younger than Wil Wheaton and you miss “The Naked Now”…) Now, I can see the padding issues but I still love how the plant got to Seven in the end.
And W. Morgan Sheppard and his son will always be the FBI agent Canton Everett Delaware III.
I’m always a sucker for Seven and Naomi, so this is an episode that puts a smile on my face. I remember deeply enjoying it though. The Telepathic Pitcher Plant was a great concept. Though I wonder what it ate before starships were flying around?
@48/Mr. D: The galaxy is very old, and there are civilizations in Trek that are millions of years more advanced than humans, like the Organians. We know from TNG: “The Chase” that the first humanoid civilization evolved 4 billion years ago. It’s safe to assume, then, that there have been starships flying around for billions of years, long enough for cosmozoans to evolve to prey upon them.
Although we can assume that the individual cosmozoans we’ve seen don’t exist in isolation, that there must be a whole spacegoing ecosystem for them to evolve in, and that they feed on each other as well as on whatever spacefarers stumble across them. That was something I tried to address in Star Trek: Titan — Orion’s Hounds way back in 2006.
@49/ChristopherLBennett
I almost instinctively want to reject that out of hand. I think it’s because it feels odd to consider that something in nature might evolve to consume members of a technologically advanced civilization as a primary food source. Then again a starship is a ready source of both refined minerals and electrical energy, and whatever a creature that large could get from a few tons of humanoid matter. Then I considered an animal like a bedbug and wonder, where did they live and how did they feed before humans invented beds? In the end no matter how advanced a species becomes they don’t cease to be a part of a local ecosystem. I’m not actually a direct part of a shark’s ecosystem, until I go in the ocean, then I’m below it in the food chain. So I can see how after billions of years of starfaring civilizations, a cosmic shark equivalent may become accustomed to saying to itself, “That’s edible” when it sees a starship zip by. It could be just as simple as, “That’ll fit in my mouth”.
@50/Mr. D: “I think it’s because it feels odd to consider that something in nature might evolve to consume members of a technologically advanced civilization as a primary food source… Then I considered an animal like a bedbug and wonder, where did they live and how did they feed before humans invented beds? In the end no matter how advanced a species becomes they don’t cease to be a part of a local ecosystem.”
Exactly. There are microbes that are evolving to digest plastic. Cities affect the evolution of plants and animals in a number of documented ways, such as the evolution of reduced light sensitivity or greater heat tolerance. Evolution is adaptation to the environment. If that environment includes technological elements, then evolution will adapt to them. The distinction between “natural” and “artificial” only matters to humans, not to genes.
@51: Gorillas have beds, kind of… and they’re dressed in fur anyway.
I’m kind of surprised no one has mentioned the very end of this episode, which shows Qatai heading back into the creature. Is he making another try at killing it? Has it fooled him again? We aren’t told either way, but I’d have thought the shot was worth a comment
He’s explicitly linked with the character of Captain Ahab by the Doctor’s line refusing the role of Ishmael.
And as we know, Ahab just can’t stop going after Moby Dick, over and over again. (See also (better) TOS ep “The Doomsday Machine” which makes similar references)
And then when I post, it removes the “1.”s anyway
I agree that the pacing in this episode bogs a bit, though overall I liked it. I will always be a sucker for Moby Dick stories. And the direction otherwise was mighty fine, at least in terms of mood and anxiety.
In terms of how everyone — including ex-Maquis — was excited about getting home, I think it could be handwaved by the creature finding small entrances to the psyche and chipping away with unbelievably good news. Also, I’m assuming that Star Fleet would grant them amnesty. After all, without them, Voyager wouldn’t get home.
But mostly, I want to say that if someone had told me that one of the best narrative threads on Voyager would be an ex-borg hottie forming a bond with a precocious forehead-bump child, I would have laughed. But the acting and the script just come together to do the near impossible, episode after episode.