“Blink of an Eye”
Written by Michael Taylor and Joe Menosky
Directed by Gabrielle Beaumont
Season 6, Episode 12
Production episode 233
Original air date: January 19, 2000
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Voyager finds a planet that is rotating on its axis 58 times per minute. When they investigate, they find themselves trapped in a geosynchronous orbit. Down below on the surface, the aboriginal locals see the new star in the sky and consult the shaman, who announces that it is a new god, and they must now only sacrifice fire fruit to it (when Voyager appeared, a sacrifice was being made to Tahal with fire fruit). Voyager’s presence is also causing earthquakes—the people refer to the new god as the Ground Shaker.
Seven reports that the planet has a tachyon core. As a result, time is passing much faster on the planet than it is in the rest of the galaxy. For every second that passes on Voyager, a day passes on the planet. Chakotay has Torres configure a probe to take images every ten milliseconds. This is, to Chakotay, the anthropological find of a lifetime.
Centuries later on the planet, a protector summons his former teacher to compose a letter, which he sends in a hot-air balloon up into the sky to the star, asking them to stop causing the ground to shake.
Chakotay and Torres observe the surface, watching their industrial age begin. Eventually, the probe starts to break down—it’s been going for centuries—and Chakotay orders it destroyed. The people on the surface see the explosion for weeks.
A telescope is constructed with the primary purpose of observing the Sky Ship. They have also been sending radio transmissions into orbit.
Seven receives the transmission, but has to slow it down considerably. It’s very polite and friendly, but begs the Sky Ship to stop giving them earthquakes. It also mentions that the Sky Ship’s arrival is part of their culture’s mythology. Paris thinks they need to answer the communication. Of course, the guy who sent it is centuries dead by this point, but still. Tuvok argues against it for Prime Directive reasons, but Chakotay points out that the contamination has already happened: Voyager has been part of the planet’s mythology for centuries.
Because he’s the only one who can survive the transition into the planet’s faster timeframe, the EMH is sent down. The plan is to beam him down to observe for a couple of days—three seconds on Voyager. However, the attempted beam-back fails. It takes the better part of twenty minutes to technobabble their way to retrieving him, and by that time he’s been down there for three years. He actually created a life for himself down there, and has observed quite a bit. His roommate was a composer, and she created an aria about the Sky Ship. He also lived through a war, which destroyed his apartment.
He also reports that Voyager is responsible for a great deal of innovation and invention. A large portion of their culture has been geared toward reaching for the stars to contact the Sky Ship. They download the information he’s gathered, and attempt to break orbit, but it fails, and increases the seismic effects on the planet.
The people on the world have developed a space program, and two astronauts, Gotana-Retz and Terrina, fly into orbit and dock with Voyager. From their point of view, the ship and its inhabitants are standing still. Suddenly, the two of them feel ill and then transit into Voyager’s timeline. Terrina dies from the physical stress, but the EMH is able to save Retz.
Buy the Book
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
He realizes that years have passed on the surface, and everyone he knows is long dead. And he’ll get farther away from his own time the longer he stays. He dreamt of the Sky Ship since he was an infant, and is both thrilled and awed to see his first-ever dream come true.
The people on the surface start bombarding Voyager with weapons that improve with each salvo—it’s days between bombardments, and they refine the missiles each time. Retz agrees to return to the surface and convince them that Voyager isn’t a deliberate threat, they just want to leave orbit.
Retz flies down, and soon the bombardment stops. Two ships fly into orbit and are able to push Voyager out of orbit. Retz projects a hologram of himself onto the bridge. He was able to take the EMH’s data and guide the world toward technology that would allow Voyager to go on their way. After Voyager leaves, we see the very elderly Retz watch the Sky Ship leave the sky forever.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, a planet with a tachyon core will move faster through time than the rest of the galaxy. Of course, tachyons move faster than light, so I don’t know how that could possibly work, but whatever.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway makes it clear to Retz that she won’t keep him trapped there forever, but understands the problematic nature of returning him home decades after he left.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is against any contact with the locals, as it’s a Prime Directive violation. Chakotay points out that that toothpaste is already out of the tube.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH spends three years on the planet, assimilating quite well into the society. He asks Retz about how a particular sports team is doing, and is appalled to learn that the team—which includes the grandson of a player he saw—is doing very poorly.
Half and half. Torres modifies a probe so that they can observe the planet, and while her enthusiasm isn’t anywhere near as high as Chakotay’s, you can tell that she thinks it’s cool.
Forever an ensign. Kim is the one who figures out the best place to beam the EMH down, but has trouble finding him after twenty minutes. (Chakotay has him scan near opera houses and cultural centers, and sure enough…)
Resistance is futile. Naomi is taking an astronomy class, and informs Seven that she’s writing a paper on the planet. She titles it “The Weird Planet Where Time Moved Very Fast and So Did the People Who Lived There.” Seven convinces her to shorten the title to “The Weird Planet Displaced in Time.”
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. The EMH has a “roommate” and a son while he’s down there, though he’s parsimonious with specifics. The son is named Jason, whom he apparently named.
Do it.
“Mountain or Lakeside?”
“Mountain, of course. Don’t tell me you’re a Lakeside supporter!”
“You really were on the surface…”
“How are they doing this season?”
“Not good. Five wins, twelve losses.”
“I don’t believe it! Who’s guarding for them?”
“Torelius.”
“Any relation to the Torelius?”
“His grandson.”
“I saw the original defend for Mountain in the playoffs against Red River.”
“That was before I was born.”
“He would’ve gone into voluntary exile after a 5-12 season!”
–Retz and the EMH talking sports.
Welcome aboard. The great Daniel Dae Kim—these days known for his starring roles on Lost and Hawaii Five-Oh, and who prior to this had a starring role on Babylon 5: Crusade—plays Gotana-Retz. He’ll return on Enterprise in the recurring role of one of the MACOs.
Obi Ndefo, last seen as Martok’s son Drex in DS9’s “The Way of the Warrior,” plays the protector who sends a letter via balloon, and Olaf Pooley plays the cleric who writes that letter. Daniel Zacapa (last seen as an occupant of a Sanctuary District in DS9’s “Past Tense, Part II”) and Jon Cellini play the two guys working the telescope, Kat Sawyer-Young plays Terrina, Melik Malkasian plays the shaman, Walter Hamilton McCready plays the guy who was sacrificing fire fruit, and Scarlett Pomers is back as Naomi.
Trivial matters: The EMH’s three-year sojourn on the planet was chronicled in the short story “Eighteen Minutes” by Terri Osborne in the anthology Distant Shores. Among other things, she explains how the EMH contrived to have a son. The story also provides the names Tahal-Meeroj for the planet and Tahal-Isut for the people of the world, who are never named in the script. It adds tremendous amounts of texture to the episode.
This is the last Trek episode directed by Gabrielle Beaumont, and virtually the last of her career before she retired after 2000, as her only credits after this are two episodes of Baywatch. Beaumont was the first woman to direct a Trek episode when she helmed TNG’s “Booby Trap.”
Beaumont also hired her husband to play one of the roles: Olaf Pooley, who played the cleric who wrote the letter to Voyager sent by weather balloon.
Set a course for home. “We’ve done enough damage to these people over the last thousand years.” The actual science behind this story is laughably bad, but the story itself is so good that I really don’t care that much. It’s just an excuse to do an entire civilization in an hour, and doing so is tremendous fun. Seeing the different stages of the people’s development, and how they respond to the Sky Ship, is a delight.
As usual, they’re a little too human—it’s the same problem I had with TNG’s “First Contact”—and it’s a bit too much of a coincidence that Voyager’s arrival so perfectly tracks with the early development of humanoid civilization on the world.
But the episode is sold on some excellent quick-and-dirty character development by scripter Joe Menosky. We see several sets of two people—the shaman and the guy making sacrifices, the protector and his erstwhile mentor, the two guys at the telescope, and the two astronauts—who create instant, lasting impressions. These are people we come to care about, even though they’re all dead within seconds of our encountering them.
Daniel Dae Kim is the most famous guest, even at this early stage of his career, and he brings the same subdued intensity that he brings to all his roles. Retz’s self-effacing nature and determination to do what’s best for his people is very compelling, though his best moment is the final shot where he stares at the sky watching Voyager disappear, and you can see his satisfaction even under all the old-age makeup.
All the other guest stars do well, also, particularly the mentor-student banter between Obi Ndefo and Olaf Pooley and the cynical exhaustion from Daniel Zapaca and Jon Cellini at the telescope.
The regulars do well, too, most notably the three Roberts: Beltran showing Chakotay’s anthropological nerdity, Picardo showing how much the EMH experienced in three years on the world (the conversation between him and Retz about sports is just epic), and Duncan McNeill giving us a Paris who urgently insists on responding to the radio transmission, Prime Directive be damned.
It’s a nifty little science fictional concept, even if the science is dopey, and a very satisfying hour.
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido has two books coming out in June: All-the-Way House, the latest in the Systema Paradoxa series of novellas about cryptids, in this case detailing the secret origin of the Jersey Devil; and Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours Omnibus, which reprints three mid-2000s Spidey novels, including Keith’s Down These Mean Streets, regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett’s Drowned in Thunder, and best-selling author Jim Butcher’s The Darkest Hours.
The plot sounds like a variation of “Dragon’s Egg” by Robert Forward.
A very solid episode (although it always felt like a hold over TNG episode to me, but I don’t know if that is because of the aforementioned similarity to the episode “First Contact,” or just because there isn’t anything in it that that makes it unique to Voyager), and one of the better retellings of Dragon’s Egg. It is hard to go wrong casting Daniel Dae Kim in something, and I was pleasantly surprised to see him pop up over on Enterprise. The character work really is very good in this one, too, which was impressive given the little time we spent with those characters, and also that Voyager didn’t always excel at character development for it’s one-off characters.
A truly wonderful episode, demonstrating just how wildly inconsistent Voyager was, airing in between “Fair Haven” and “Virtuoso,” two of the worst episodes ever committed to video.
A terrific episode, and a solid piece of evidence for the argument that episodic television has become underrated and not everything has to be a season-long arc. Of course, I would’ve loved to spend more time learning about the Doctor’s experiences on the planet (so I’m glad the short story was done), but sometimes it’s good to spend an hour on a single really impressive idea handled well. Daniel Dae Kim did a terrific job too.
I do have to wonder, though, why every character we see on the planet is male.
As for the tachyon core, I’d assume the tachyons are whirling around the core like in a particle accelerator, explaining how they can move faster than light yet stay in one place.
“it’s a bit too much of a coincidence that Voyager’s arrival so perfectly tracks with the early development of humanoid civilization on the world.”
Not really. Homo sapiens evolved 3-400,000 years ago, became behaviorally modern about 40-50,000 years ago, but didn’t develop agriculture until 8-10,000 years ago or start living in cities until about 5000 years ago. Those kinds of advances don’t just happen automatically; there has to be the right catalyst to prompt a major change in how people live, such as droughts or climate shifts resulting in food shortages that prompt the development of new solutions.
So it could be that the Tahal-Isut existed at a hunter-gatherer level for dozens of subjective millennia, and then the Sky Ship arrived and started making the ground shake, so the people needed to innovate to cope with the new problem, and were inspired by the existence of the Sky Ship to develop science so they could understand it. So Voyager‘s arrival didn’t just coincidentally parallel the development of their civilization, it caused it.
So if the planet had an “aboriginal” humanoid culture at the start of the episode, how long had the planet actually been there? It’s awfully convenient that Voyager shows up on just the right day to be a factor in this developing culture. If they had been a month later, they’d be looking at a very different society, and a month earlier there might not have been any intelligent life. I haven’t done the math, but have to wonder if this whole planet formed, cooled, and developed life in only a matter of a relatively few years, compared to Earth.
I know I’ve watched this episode once and thought the concept was cool. I need to give it another watch. I also heard that this same sci-fi concept was used in another non-Trek story and used better, perhaps what @1/wiredog is referring to.
I became familiar with Daniel Dae Kim in Lost before I ever saw this episode so it was cool to see him in an earlier acting role and that he was on Star Trek. It’s also just rare period to see an actor of Asian descent on American network drama so that’s always very welcome too. I haven’t seen Kim’s work on Enterprise yet. But I think it would be great if he joined the cast of a new Star Trek spin-off at some point.
@4/CLB: Perhaps it’s a patriarchal/sexist society where women don’t leave the home? Maybe there’s a female population shortage?
So, uh, how did the Doctor take being beamed away from his son?
I can’t see where a society that patriarchal would have a woman commanding their first spacecraft, especially when the mission was as culturally important as getting to the skyship.
@9/RaySea: The society could have started patriarchal but evolved over millennia to be more progressive and enlightened much like human society.
It really bothers me that they gave the Doctor a partner and son who died and the Doctor doesn’t mourn them at all i know that would have distracted from the rest of the story but it didn’t need to be apart of the story at all.
@7/garreth: I’m asking why Taylor and Menosky chose to make it a history dominated by men, not asking for an in-story excuse. It’s probably because their generation (and mine) was raised with a sexist history education that effaced female contributions, and they unthinkingly replicated that bias.
Ahh I’ve always loved this episode. Such a wildly pure sci-fi story and I agree, I cared about the people on that planet in every generation. Honestly it’s kind of a classic story, where usually it would be humans reacting to an alien ship, this time we’re the aliens. The premise allowing us to stimulate their development in a positive way is rather splendid. I also like the turn around, rather than Starfleet saving someone else, Starfleet was saved by people they positively affected. I think this is the first thing I saw Daniel Dae-Kim in, and he makes an immediate impression. Captain America swag. He just looks like The Hero. This episode always gives me a huge smile.
In a broader sense there’s a wonderful thought experiment to wonder if the Scalosians could’ve been welcomed on this Tachyon world. Wink and Blink of an Eye are pretty good at taking substantially different approaches to the same concept of hyper-accelerated people. They invert who is the threat, why the ship is there, and the intentions of the people on the planet. It’s just great, I’m gonna smile some more. I think this rounds out my Voyager Top Three alongside “Hope and Fear” and “Scientific Method”.
@8 – He was ecstatic to see Janeway and Torres again and was just overall in a good mood. If not for the part where he asks about his “son,” you would have never known he left someone like that behind.
The science in this episode was too fantastical for me to enjoy what is supposed to be science fiction.
One wonders if this preceded that groovy Simpsons episode (Treehouse of Terror series) where Lisa inadvertently creates a microscopic society that develops and industrializes in the span of days all in her lab. This is very reminiscent.
Quoth Christopher: “I do have to wonder, though, why every character we see on the planet is male.”
They weren’t. The commander of the expedition that Daniel Dae Kim was the pilot for was a woman.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@18/krad: Yeah, I remember that now. Still, everyone shown in the “historical milestone” scenes was male.
@15:”One wonders if this preceded that groovy Simpsons episode (Treehouse of Terror series) where Lisa inadvertently creates a microscopic society that develops and industrializes in the span of days all in her lab. This is very reminiscent.” “
Pretty sure that THE SIMPSONS ep was based on Sturgeon’s classic 1941 story “Microcosmic God.”
It has amazed me as Keith has done this rewatch just how many later season Voyager episodes I have absolutely no recollection of, despite faithfully watching when they aired. This one, however, stuck with me. I found the “big idea” of Voyager watching (and unintentionally influencing) the evolution of a civilization so compelling that after I finished the episode I sent a fan letter to the production team through the old startrek.com site telling them it was one of the best episodes of any Trek I’d seen. That’s the only time I’ve ever fangoobered to that level.
I swear that the earlier episodes got more re-runs in syndication, because I feel the same way. I usually remember almost all of the episodes, but I have far better memories of the earlier seasons, despite not being old enough to have seen most of them on the original run.
“Unless we want to live our lives in the blink of an eye, I suggest we find a way out of here.”
Now this is how to take a high-concept idea and turn it into a story. It’s a simply beautiful tale of the impact Voyager has on a culture. The little vignettes of life on the planet as they attempt throughout the centuries to make sense of this strange object above them are well-crafted. Voyager watches civilisations rise and fall and so do we, with them helpless to correct the damage they’re doing to the planet. And it’s a neat pay-off that ultimately it’s the people of the planet who save them, inspired by their presence and by one man’s meeting with them.
Tuvok’s blind adherence to the Prime Directive is rather blinkered: Chakotay and Paris get to share the McCoy role in the argument while Janeway strikes a middle path. The Doctor having a son? Let’s just assume he was adopted. Neelix only appears in one scene without dialogue. Naomi’s scene has a whiff of contractual obligation about it, but it’s fun anyway.
There was a time when I had no idea Olaf Pooley (another Doctor Who veteran and possibly the only person to have done Doctor Who, Star Trek and Doomwatch) had been in Star Trek: Someone asked me about it and I was like “No, he never did one”, then I looked it up and went “Really?!” Shortly after, he died aged 101. (He’s a sprightly 85 here!)
I’m pretty sure I already knew Daniel Dae Kim when I first saw this, but the only prior credit that rings a bell is Crusade. I think I’m mostly familiar with him from his recurring role as a Wolfram & Hart toady in Angel, which he first played a year or so after this, although I may have seen that first.
cap-mjb: The explanation for the EMH’s son Jason that Terri Osborne provides in “Eighteen Minutes” is quite nifty. I strongly recommend — well, the entire Distant Shores anthology, truly, as it addressed many of the show’s side roads and missed opportunities, but Terri’s story in particular added tremendous texture to this episode.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@.-@ – If their planet is the same relative age as earth (4.5 billion years) then 400,000 years (your date for when humans developed) is only 0.00888% the age of the planet. Put another way, the entirety of human history is (1/0.00888) 1/112th the age of the planet. Less than 1%. And yet Voyager just happens to stumble across this plat at just the right moment. And it’s even more unlikely since the inhabitants hadn’t just come down from the trees.
Just another ST coincidence where our heroes just happen to be in the right place at exactly the right time.
The only thing I don’t like about this episode is that, at the end of the episode, we didn’t get to see anything new that would absolutely fire our imagination and make us want to invent something. In TOS we had viewscreens, warp drive, communicators, etc. In TNG we had PADDs, replicators, holodecks, etc. Story focus and the stress of producing for TV notwithstanding, I would have loved to see something on the planet in the final scene – something ahead of its time – that made me think “Wow, we should invent something like that within the next 100 years!”. Other than that small gripe, a great episode for sure.
Having just watched this episode for a second time it holds up as very solid.
Just a couple of quibbles and this is beyond the wonky science: (1) I didn’t see how the astronauts could have boarded Voyager. Yes, they made entry at a docking port but a starship should be locked down tight at any point of entry to repel intruders. This is supposed to be a state-of-the-art starship! (2) I can’t believe Paris suggested firing back at the civilization on the planet. Yes, Voyager was under attack, but the ship was the very cause of the planet’s destabilization to begin with. And at least Janeway explained that to him and shut him down. But it seemed weird Paris called for violent action when he was one of the first proponents for helping the civilization and Prime Directive be damned.
@23/kkozoriz: You could say the same about any planet a Trek starship visits. Realistically, the typical alien world should be either many millions of years behind Earth’s development or ahead of it. Most of the aliens they encounter should be either single-celled life or (within the conceits of Trek evolution) Organian-level superintelligences. It’s a hugely implausible coincidence that most of the species encountered in Trek are within a few hundred years of our technological level.
But you know what? Most stories depend on coincidence. They’re not about probable or routine events, they’re about events that are exceptional enough to be interesting. Yes, it’s more probable that they’d come upon a planet when it didn’t have intelligent life or civilization, but that wouldn’t be interesting enough to tell a story about, so we wouldn’t see it. Just as we wouldn’t have seen a story about Peter Parker being bitten by an ordinary spider, or a story where Threepio and Artoo crashed on a different part of Tatooine and never met Luke. Drama shapes probabilities, not the other way around.
How can a planet have a tachyon core??? Now if they said a trilithium core that combined with the radiation of the sun creates a tachyon stream affecting the time rate. I know, still techno babble but a little less silly.
Once again, we reap the benefits of Voyager’s episodic nature. Going from one of the show’s worst hours to one of its very best. And that’s why I reiterate what I said on the Fair Haven rewatch: Blink of an Eye should have been the first episode to air, thus opening the year on a good note. This episode is a mission statement on the essence of what Star Trek is all about. By airing Fair Haven first, UPN may as well have spoiled Blink’s chances of getting good ratings.
I, for one, was a fan of Babylon 5 and its universe long before I got around to exploring the deeper corners of the Trek franchise, so I was well aware of Daniel Dae Kim. Much like Patricia Tallman, he’s one of those actors you don’t quite realize just how pretty much everywhere he’s been, from Crusade to Trek to 24 to LOST to 5-0. As usual, he’s well cast, making the best out of Retz, who’s instantly compelling without effort.
As with season 4’s Living Witness, this episode is yet another good example of establishing how Voyager can have an impact on Delta Quadrant cultures. I’m not going to rate the science, but I truly appreciate the effort to display a planet whose society ages and evolves at a far faster rate than the rest of the universe. This cuts them off from the rest of the universe in such a way that it harkens back to the outdated notion of humanity being completely alone in an empty universe, where it’s assumed there are no other life forms out there. So, to see Voyager directly interfering and breaking that isolation is very much in line with the Roddenberry philosophy of Trek. These people now have something to look up to.
And, of course, the plot leads to one of the better uses of the Prime Directive, as well as cobbling the better parts of TNG’s Who Watches the Watchers and First Contact (even the flawed Justice, to a degree). Definitely a classic that still holds up 20 years later!
All these years being tolerably fond of VOYAGER and this is the first time I realise that it has THREE Bobs in it’s cast! (As Sherlock Holmes would say “You see, but you do not observe”).
Before I hide my face in shame, one would like to say that this is almost certainly my very favourite episode of VOYAGER and quite possibly my very favourite episode of STAR TREK.
‘Nuff said.
@@@@@1/wiredog and @@@@@2/wildfyrewarning:
Thirded on the “this looks strongly inspired by Dragon’s Egg (1980)” — I recall immediately noticing the similarity in premise (“oops, we’re affecting their cultural development”) and resolution (“they’ve developed sufficiently to rescue us”), with the technobabble-twist that makes the aliens-du-jour carbon-humanoids rather than neutron-biology critters whose chemistry operates a million times faster.
So, what happened after a few more outside-weeks of development? Did they stay at home? Reach the stage of terraforming colony worlds with tachyon cores? Or transcend and thereby conveniently render the question moot?
(This aired in January 2000? ISTR viewing it in my college dorm, but that ended in mid-1998. Memory’s finally going, I guess, or maybe all the VGR eps smear together.)
It’s been mentioned here that other sci-fi properties have used this same basic plot. I really enjoyed Doctor Who‘s version, “Rise and Fall,” a short audio story found on the Big Finish collection “Short Trips, Volume 1.” It’s a shorter story than “Blink of an Eye,” so the protagonists don’t do as much, but I recommend it to fans of this type of story.
@31/Brian: As it happens, Doctor Who: “Rise and Fall” is available for free on Big Finish’s SoundCloud channel, so anyone can listen to it:
https://soundcloud.com/big-finish/doctor-who-short-trips-rise?in=big-finish/sets/complete-free-big-finish
@30- My money’s on “Ascended to wibbly energy beings who only occasionally interact with the material universe to screw around with Starship Captains that take themselves overly seriously.”
It’s too bad the female astronaut died. Her meeting Janeway might have struck a chord, assuming she came from a patriarchal society. But her being the commander of the mission is a nice touch, and could be taken as a commentary on the progression of leads in Star Trek series, I suppose. In any event, a great episode.
I remember feeling particularly inspired by and loving this episode when it aired. Its probably because Daniel Dae Kim made such an impression in his role, clearly he was headed for big things. I have some minor nitpicks about the storyline. We watch the society go through many stages of development in its relationship to Voyager, but a common theme is that some always feel adversarial towards the ship. I would think such sentiments would have gone away with time, if Voyager has been a constant through so many centuries. It would just be a normal part of their world, like our Moon. The constant struggle Voyager presents to them through earthquakes also seems unlikely. If earthquakes have been a constant since their caveman days, they would have technologically adjusted to it long ago and would be seen as no big deal to daily life. And given Voyager’s importance to so much of their history, literature, science, etc, in the near future they’ve decided to just annihilate it with antimatter torpedoes? That seems like an unlikely sentiment to settle on. And if they were so intent on destroying voyager, it seems like quite a quick turnaround to then fly up there and tractor beam voyager out of the way all helpfully.
@29/Ed: Amongst the cast, only Picardo was known as “Bob.” Duncan McNeill was “Robby.” And Beltran stuck with “Robert.”
@35/karey: “And if they were so intent on destroying voyager, it seems like quite a quick turnaround to then fly up there and tractor beam voyager out of the way all helpfully.”
But that’s the whole point — that what seems quick from outside is a lifetime or more on the planet. It may have taken subjective years for Retz to convince his people to change their approach and start working on the technology to save Voyager. As we saw, he was an elderly man by the time it happened.
Plus, of course, they attempted to destroy the ship when they believed that their astronauts had been lost, possibly killed by the ship’s occupants. When Retz returned — a legendary figure from lifetimes past turning up miraculously alive and well — and told them the crew was benevolent, that would’ve changed everything.
@36/garreth: What a coincidence. In my first-grade English class, we had three Roberts whom the teacher differentiated by calling them Robert, Robby, and Rob.
@37 – Slight correction. He was still young when they helped Voyager. He was an old man when he looked up into the sky to watch Voyager disappear.
Speaking of which, Voyager’s glow disappeared immediately. Shouldn’t their departure have been a slow process when viewed from the planet?
@25: While I fully endorse Janeway’s decision, I understand why Paris would suggest it: Voyager was unable to manoeuvre and losing shields with every hit, so if the natives hadn’t ceased fire they’d have been almost certainly destroyed. It’s also interesting to muse on the practicalities. If they did fire a phaser or photon torpedo, presumably from the natives’ point of view it would take days to get there. Enough time for them to evacuate the area, but not enough to dismantle a fixed surface-to-space weapons platform?
@35/37: It’s mentioned at one point that Retz would have been back on the surface for a year and a half local time and Voyager was still being fired upon, so it seems to have taken some considerable time for him to convince his people to cease fire. (Or maybe even give up, contact another group who’d be willing to pull Voyager out of danger and spend time constructing ships to do that: The Doctor did mention that opinion was divided between those who wanted to contact Voyager and those who wanted it destroyed.)
@26 – All very true. However, Voyager really wore out my coincidence filter with their continual running into people and ships from the Alpha Quadrant. There’s coincidental happenings in other shows but it really shouldn’t have been an issue on Voyager. But we get Romulans and Ferengi and a Cardassin bomb and a Starfleet ship and Barclay finding them despite having no idea where they are and all the rest. By the time they got to this one, I’m at the roll my eyeballs out the back of my head stage.
I pit it in the same basket of the “OMG, we’re running out of <insert something>” and them a couple of episodes later, they can easily replicate what they were looking for. Example, deuterium. The cosmos is full of the stuff and these folks don’t seem to realize it.
Also, “We’re low on torpedoes. we have to conserve them” and yet they can chrin out shuttles on demand.
Cool episode (although Dragon’s Egg is much, much better) but you can’t think too much about it. Just plop your brain in a jar and enjoy it for what it is, fluffy entertainment.
@39: Sure, I understood that Voyager was about to be destroyed by the weapon’s fire coming from the planet, but firing back against the planet would have been an aggressive action which could have very well killed people. And so I just reiterate my point that it was Voyager’s fault for causing the planet’s earthquakes in the first place, even if it was an accident. Therefore I find even the suggestion to return fire on the “innocent” population so in the wrong and was surprised Paris would even suggest it. If the ship could fire a non-lethal weapon that’s another thing entirely.
@41/garreth
Well…ship phasers do in fact have a stun setting, as displayed in “A Piece of the Action”.
@41 – I found it odd that Voyager was about to accept total annihilation.
@43: If that’s the only option it comes down to it’s an honorable way to go out as opposed to firing on innocents to save oneself. Janeway understood this.
@44/garreth: Yep. We’ve seen more than a few cases of captains being willing to sacrifice their ships and crews to protect others. Kirk went to the self-destruct well on a number of occasions — “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” “Beyond the Farthest Star,” “One of Our Planets is Missing,” ST:TMP. (I’m not counting TSFS because they abandoned ship.)
@44 – In that case, every Federation ship should be destroyed when someone attacks them.
@46/Austin: Naturally each situation is different. The natives here believed they were under attack and were fighting in self-defense. That’s a misunderstanding. In such a situation, naturally a Starfleet crew would try to find a peaceful way to resolve the conflict, such as retreating until they could explain things. Here, they were trapped and unable to retreat, as well as unable to communicate. They didn’t have the options they’d have in a different situation, which is why a blanket generalization makes no sense here.
@47 – All I’m saying is, if I was a crewman on Voyager and the captain was about to sacrifice my life because she refused to fire back at an enemy that was attacking us unprovoked, I’m getting off at the next port of call, thank you very much. I’m not flying on a ship with that psycho.
@48: The civilization on the planet isn’t the “enemy” though. From their perspective, Voyager did provoke their actions. This is an entirely unique situation and you can’t equate this society as like the Borg or the Kazon or the Vidiians all of whom Janeway would protect her ship and crew from and I think you know that.
@49 – Of course I know that. I just think it’s absurd that Janeway would assume the fetal position and die, along with every person on board, when the only sin Voyager committed was existing. It’s not like I’m saying they should nuke the entire planet. All that was needed was to fire at the weapon array. There would be some casualties, sure, but they weren’t innocent. If you fire a weapon, you better be prepared to accept the consequences.
@48/50: They thought they were acting in self-defense. And they were right — Voyager‘s presence endangered them. They were not the aggressors, and they were not unprovoked. This was a situation where neither side was in the wrong but they couldn’t coexist.
This is a bit of a Lost tangent but since it also relates to Daniel Dae Kim: his character arc on that series from beginning to end, along with the character that plays his wife, was one of the most emotionally effective and beautifully tragic storylines I’ve ever seen on television (basically a love story in the face of class/family obstacles, and then literally being separated by space/time itself). I tear up just thinking about it. As disappointed as I was with the overall ending of the series, one could just isolate Kim’s character’s storyline and it would be satisfying to watch on its own. Great work he did.
Just so everyone knows, the rewatch took Memorial Day off. We’ll be back Thursday with “Virtuoso.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
We were only one episode off from the episode bumped by Memorial Day being “Memorial.” So close…
I said it a while back, but this is one of my favorite episodes of not just Voyager, but of Trek in general. It’s true, you care about every single person you meet on the surface, even though you know they’re long dead once we’ve moved on from them. And of course Daniel Dae Kim kills it, giving a a very sympathetic and very relatable hero in Gatana Retz.
Kudos also to Paul Baillargeon, whose lovely score for this episode I’ve been humming for the past twenty-one years.
I’d say that this is my all-time favorite Voyager episode.
One thing I didn’t think of when watching it for the first time is, how useful could a space program be to this planet? If their astronauts ever get far enough from their planet, time will move so slowly for them that by the time they get home, even from what should be a routinely short journey, centuries will have passed on the planet and everyone they knew will be dead.
@57/richf: What if everyone on the planet left together and resettled another planet or just voyaged the stars? At least this way they’d all exist in the same space/time as (most of) the rest of the universe.
@57/richf: “how useful could a space program be to this planet? If their astronauts ever get far enough from their planet, time will move so slowly for them that by the time they get home, even from what should be a routinely short journey, centuries will have passed on the planet and everyone they knew will be dead.”
That’s what interstellar travel would be like in a universe without faster-than-light capability (like ours, most likely). It’s an undertaking that requires looking beyond your own lifetime and working for posterity. A lot of human undertakings over the ages have been like that — say, founding a country or building a medieval European cathedral. The fact that it benefits later generations rather than your own is basically the thing that makes it worth doing.
@57 – Most likely, they’d die when they transited out of their native time continuum, just like the other astronaut did. Retz only survived because of the EMH.
How much enthusiasm for pouring more resources into spaceflight would we have if Gagarin, Titov, Glenn, Carpenter, Nikolayev and Popovich had all died upon reaching orbit?
@60: They seem to have worked out a way for Retz to survive in Voyager’s timeframe by the end, albeit temporarily. Possibly a longer-term solution was not to far away.
How useful is a space program to our planet?
There was vocal opposition to the Apollo program from those who thought the money would be better spent on social programs, and those who saw it as a salvo in the Cold War.
People on other planets would likely have far different opinions on space programs than we did.
@61 – Which was only possible because he survived the first time due to the EMH. On their own, they probably would have given up,
There were some in government and NASA itself who called for ending the shuttle program after Challenger. Now, that’s not exactly the same since there wasn’t a call to end spaceflight altogether but if the first half dozen orbital missions had all ended with the cosmonauts/astronauts dying within minutes of entering orbit, there’d be a lot more pressure to end the program.
@62/BeeGee: “How useful is a space program to our planet?”
The mineral resources available in the asteroid belt are thousands of times more abundant than those available on Earth, even if we strip-mined the planet’s entire crust. Our supply of rare earth elements for use in higher technology is rapidly dwindling, as is the Earth’s supply of helium (for coolant and other industrial processes). Within a matter of decades, we’ll need to start mining space for those resources or our technological infrastructure won’t be able thrive and advance anymore.
“There was vocal opposition to the Apollo program from those who thought the money would be better spent on social programs”
Always a specious argument, since the NASA budget has always been dwarfed by government spending on the military, corporate subsidies, and the like.
“and those who saw it as a salvo in the Cold War.”
That much is true. It was really more about developing better missile launch capability in the minds of the governments, as well as the propaganda value. That’s why it didn’t prove sustainable. Historically, the development of a new frontier doesn’t take off until private enterprises take the lead with government backing and support and the effort becomes profitable enough to pay for itself. We may be on the verge of that finally happening, what with private aerospace firms in a race to develop new launch systems.
“People on other planets would likely have far different opinions on space programs than we did.”
People on this planet have the entire gamut of opinions, so presumably the same would go for any realistically depicted planet (as opposed to a Planet of Hats with only one personality or ideology among an entire species).
“There was vocal opposition to the Apollo program from those who thought the money would be better spent on social programs”
Which is kind of a strange argument to make since the 1960s also saw the largest expansion of the welfare state since the New Deal. Remember “The Great Society,” anybody? Many of those programs are still with us.
By the way, the most the US Government ever spent on the space program in a given year was in 1966 with 4.41% of the total federal budget directed towards NASA. Today it’s around 0.48%.
@63: But…he did, so they didn’t?
@66 – Not talking just about that specific situation but about their space program in general. Outside medical assistance was needed that won’t be around for their next spaceflight. When their astronauts start dying upon reaching orbit, how ling will they continue to pursue manned spaceflight?
@67: As I said, by their next space flight they seemed to be on the way to solving the problem themselves.
One thing that looked wrong to me – the Doctor and Retz strolling to the docking port and chatting about sports teams. The life and time that Retz left is further away by the second, Voyager time: the sports seasons probably last five minutes. He should be running to get home while the planet still speaks his language… or they should have dropped in a line of technobabble to say that they could launch him home safely in exactly x seconds because blah blah, then he can spend x seconds talking with the Doctor about sport.
Loved this episode. Looked it up afterward and saw it was inspired by a book called Dragon’s Egg (mentioned several times by others here), and read it and I loved that book too. High point of the season for me.
I haven’t read Dragon’s Egg; I hadn’t even heard of it before I came to this Rewatch. But like @15 and @18 above, I was reminded of “The Genesis Tub,” a story in The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror VII” episode from 1996, in which Lisa accidentally creates a whole world in a petri dish.
That story itself was inspired by “The Little People,” an episode of Season 3 of the original The Twilight Zone, which first aired in 1962.
@69: It probably would have been difficult for Retz to conceptualize the urgency of his situation.
This episode is among my favourite Voyager episodes.
I was rewatching it while also watching the closing episodes of Picard…I’m really not a Voyager fan, but omg this episode is sooo much better than the story of any Picard seasons. And in a single episode there’s more things happening than in the 10 episodes of Season 3.
I can’t tell you how badly I wanted it to turn out that, when they beamed the Doctor back aboard Voyager, he’d become ruler of the entire world. I was imagining him in like purple robes and a crown. LOL.
This episode always reminds me of the Doctor Who story “Rise and Fall,” which admittedly came out a decade later. The TARDIS arrives on a planet where time runs fast, and while the Doctor and Ian only stand there for a few minutes, an entire society is born and dies out in front of them.
Oh, yes, the audio story from Big Finish. The story is available for free on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/big-finish/doctor-who-short-trips-rise?in=big-finish/sets/complete-free-big-finish&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Man, I almost skipped this one because I thought it would be yet another debate about the Prime Directive’s impact on an ancient civilization. I was reminded of at least one godawful TNG episode. But I stuck with it after seeing it made several best-of lists. And I’m glad I did. There is debate — but it’s short, and the plot goes somewhere else entirely (and is vaguely reminiscent of another TNG episode where Picard lives a whole life in a fraction of a second). It was a PD episode almost in reverse.
Anyway, it was nicely mind blowing, even if I just turned off my skeptical brain. Like, how did the astronauts force entry into Voyager? I reasoned that the time differential somehow allowed them to force the airlock open, the way they could force open all the doors on the ship. IDK. The same way every computer can download and interpret data from any other computer (which is probably the biggest fiction Trek has ever foisted on us).
It’s just nice to see a concept executed well in an episode that never bogs.