“Repression”
Written by Kenneth Biller and Mark Haskell Smith
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 7, Episode 4
Production episode 251
Original air date: October 25, 2000
Stardate: 54090.4
Captain’s log. Somewhere in the Alpha Quadrant, a Bajoran named Teero Anaydis is reciting a religious ritual while looking at the crew manifest of the Val Jean, Chakotay’s Maquis ship, including Chakotay, Torres, Ann Smithee, and Tuvok.
In the Delta Quadrant, newlyweds Paris and Torres are going on a holodeck excursion to a 1932 movie theater to watch Revenge of the Creature in 3D. Paris has made it a bit too realistic—chewing gum on the floor, e.g.—and when a holographic audience member shushes them, they delete the audience. But there’s still someone in a seat for some reason. It turns out to be Tabor, who had the holodeck before them—and he’s in a coma.
The EMH reports that Tabor has microfractures on his skull and nerve damage on his shoulder. He was definitely assaulted, but the doctor can’t figure out why he’s unconscious. Tuvok examines the holodeck, and then Tabor’s quarters. He finds Crewman Jor in the latter location, claiming she’s getting a book to read to him while he’s comatose. Tuvok questions her, then dismisses her.
Crewman Yosa is working in a Jefferies Tube when he’s attacked by an assailant who has turned off the lights and can’t be seen behind a handheld flashlight. Yosa is later found in the same comatose state as Tabor by Jor, which piques Tuvok’s suspicions. However, when he and Chakotay go to question her, they find her unconscious as well.
There are two more comatose victims in sickbay, and all five of them are Maquis. Chakotay gathers the remaining Maquis crew and orders them to arm themselves and to travel in groups of two or more. If they see anything odd, they should report it to Tuvok—Chell, however, says he prefers to report it to Chakotay directly, as he doesn’t trust Tuvok, still, a sentiment shared by others. Chell also suspects that this is a Starfleet plot, as they now know for sure that a quarter of the crew are Maquis. He also suspects Seven.
Kim and Paris are able to use photonic displacement of real people in the holodeck prior to Paris and Torres arriving to create a silhouette of Tabor—and also a silhouette of another figure standing over him. They can’t make out details, but now they have the height and build of the person. (Kim jokes that now they know it isn’t Naomi Wildman…)
Tabor regains consciousness, but he remembers nothing of who attacked him. Chakotay finds Chell by himself—Torres got tired of his bitching and moaning, and went to Cargo Bay 2 alone. Leaving Chell with his own partner, Chakotay goes to the cargo bay to find Torres unconscious—and then he’s assaulted by Tuvok, who renders Chakotay unconscious, and then initiates a mind-meld.
Tuvok, with no memory of attacking Torres and Chakotay, discusses the case with Janeway. Jor and Yosa are now also conscious, also with no memory of being assaulted. Janeway recommends that Tuvok take a break and meditate.
While doing so, Tuvok gets flashes of his attacking various crewmembers who turned up comatose. He also sees Teero in the reflection of his washroom mirror.
Going to the holodeck, Tuvok asks for the height of the photonic silhouette of Tabor’s attacker and then his own height. He also asks for his own location during the attack—information that is under a security lockout. Tuvok disengages the lockout, and the computer says that Tuvok was on the holodeck when Tabor was assaulted.
Tuvok urges Janeway to confine him to the brig. He is hallucinating Teero. He also mentions that, while he looked at most of the letters from home in the latest datastream, he didn’t investigate the letter he himself received from his son Sek.
Seven checks that letter, and finds a message embedded in it from Teero. Chakotay, who has just awakened from his own coma, recognizes Teero as a fanatical Bajoran vedek sympathetic to the Maquis cause who was experimenting with mind control. For that reason, even the Maquis rejected him.
Janeway goes to Tuvok in the brig, and he recalls that Teero kidnapped him and experimented on him. He knew that Tuvok was undercover Starfleet but didn’t expose him for no compellingly good reason. Instead he left post-hypnotic suggestions in his head, which he activated with the embedded message in Sek’s note.
Tuvok then taps his combadge, calls Chakotay and says, “pagh’tem’far b’tanay.” Chakotay is now also activated, as Tuvok put the post-hypnotic suggestion in Chakotay’s mind when he mind-melded with him, ditto the other Maquis crew Tuvok assaulted.
Chakotay, Torres, Tabor, Jor, Yosa, and the others quickly and efficiently take control of the ship, deactivating the EMH and confining everyone else to quarters, except for Janeway and the security guard in charge of the brig, who are placed in Tuvok’s cell.
After setting course for a Class-M planet to place the Starfleet crew on while the Maquis take Voyager the rest of the way home, Chakotay summons Tuvok to the ready room, and also has Janeway brought up. Chakotay orders Tuvok to shoot Janeway to prove his loyalty. The phaser, however, is defective, so when Tuvok shoots her, nothing happens.
However, that was the bucket of ice water in the face Tuvok needed. He initiates another mind-meld with Chakotay, which frees him from Teero’s mind control. Before too long, the ship is restored to normal. By way of celebrating, Paris invites everyone to the holodeck for a viewing of another 3D movie, Attack of the Lobster People.
Buy the Book
Until the Last of Me
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, a Bajoran vedek can do remote-control mind-control by embedding a message in a letter. Sure.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway implores Tuvok to remember who he is when he’s about to shoot her, and that helps bring Tuvok back to himself.
Mr. Vulcan. While he was embedded in Chakotay’s cell, Tuvok went on a mission that took him to meet Teero. And boy was he sorry…
Also his son has given up studying exolinguistics in favor of musical composition.
Forever an ensign. One of the letters Tuvok reads through is from Kim’s cousin, which reveals that Kim had a good friend who was killed by the Maquis, a fact that has somehow not come up at all over the last six-plus years. Kim sarcastically confesses, saying that he used his Captain Proton comatizer to incapacitate the Maquis crew.
Half and half. Torres is less than impressed with the level of detail in Paris’ movie theater holodeck simulation, especially since she gets gum on her shoes and has to wear doofy 3D glasses.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The first thing Chakotay does when he goes full Maquis is deactivate the EMH. He probably remembers that the doc was critical to the crew’s success the last two times a hostile force took over the ship…
Resistance is futile. Seven is the one who finds the embedded message in Sek’s letter to Tuvok.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Paris takes Torres on a date the holodeck in part to make it clear that, just because they’re married, doesn’t mean the romance is dead.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Kim and Paris are able to use displaced photons to get silhouettes of people who were in the holodeck. Because they’re just that awesome.
Do it.
“Let me get this straight. You’ve gone to all this trouble to program a three-dimensional environment that projects a two-dimensional image, and now you’re asking me to wear these to make it look three-dimensional again?”
–Torres, expressing dubiousness about the whole 3D movie thing
Welcome aboard. Derek McGrath (Chell) and Jad Mager (Tabor) reprise their prior roles as Maquis members of the crew, the former from “Learning Curve,” the latter from “Nothing Human.” Carol Krnic, Mark Rafael Truitt, and Scott Alan Smith play other Maquis crew, while Ronald Robinson plays Sek.
And this week’s Robert Knepper moment is my namesake Keith Szarabajka, one of the great gravel-voiced character actors, who plays Teero. He’ll also appear in Enterprise’s “Rogue Planet.”
Trivial matters: This episode establishes that Chakotay’s ship that was destroyed in “Caretaker” was called the Val Jean, named after the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. It’s also established that there are around thirty Maquis crew aboard. (And there had to have been more than that at first, since some of the deceased crew, such as Suder, Hogan, Bendera, and Jonas, were also Maquis.) Chakotay says there are twenty-three still to be “converted” via mind-meld when there are seven mutineers. It’s also stated that a quarter of the crew is Maquis, which somewhat tracks with the likely crew complement of around 130 (though the show itself has stated several different numbers for that…).
The term pagh’tem’far that Teero uses as part of his ritual and also as an activation keyword is a Bajoran term that was established in DS9’s “Rapture” as referring to a vision from the Prophets.
One of the Maquis crew seen is a Vulcan female, which belies “Counterpoint,” which established only two Vulcans on board, but which is consistent with both “Flashback” and “Endgame,” which both referred to multiple Vulcans besides Tuvok on board.
Janeway mentions that the Maquis rebellion ended three years ago, referring to the events of DS9’s “Blaze of Glory,” though those events were actually four years previous—however, Voyager didn’t learn of it until “Hunters,” which was three years ago, which is probably what Janeway is dating from.
Revenge of the Creature was an actual 3D movie, the sequel to The Creature From the Black Lagoon. In keeping with Paris getting his dates wrong, it was released in 1955, two decades after the date he was allegedly taking Torres to. Attack of the Lobster People doesn’t actually exist, though there is Attack of the Crab Monsters…
While there is a Palace Theater in Chicago, these days known as the Cadillac Palace Theater, which opened in 1926, it’s a stage venue, not a movie theater. The scenes in the movie theater were shot in Paramount Pictures’ Gower Theater.
Ann Smithee, the member of Chakotay’s crew seen in Teero’s manifest, has never been seen or mentioned elsewhere.
Set a course for home. “Your sarcasm could be viewed as subterfuge.” What a spectacularly idiotic episode. Absolutely nothing that happens in this episode makes any sense, but the thing that makes the least sense is that this is happening in the seventh season. It’s a horribly artificial way to create some of the Maquis-Starfleet tension that was promised by months of promotional material regarding Voyager in 1994 and that the show then utterly failed to deliver once it debuted in 1995.
But the method by which this happens cuts off the air supply to my disbelief. Teero is a Bajoran vedek who is so out there that the Maquis thought he was a little too radical. Think about that for a second: the terrorist group that was at the top of both the Federation and the Cardassians’ most-wanted list for several years, that announced their existence to the galaxy by blowing up a ship on a crowded space station, thought this guy was a bit too much for them. Yet somehow, a little over a year after the Dominion War ended, this Bajoran citizen somehow has the resources to embed a post-hypnotic suggestion into a private letter sent by a Vulcan teenager to his Starfleet officer father, somehow getting it past Project Pathfinder (a project full of Starfleet engineers, remember).
Let’s forget that, for a second. Let’s assume that Teero is just that good. We’re also supposed to believe that he planted this suggestion in Tuvok’s head for whatever reason, but never bothered to expose him as a Starfleet mole, instead waiting for the right moment to activate him—and, somehow, that moment is six years later, after the Maquis are a distant memory, and when Tuvok and the rest of Chakotay’s cell are 35,000 light-years away. Because why, exactly? And “because he’s insane” isn’t an answer, because if he’s that nutsy-cuckoo, he wouldn’t have the wherewithal to put together this incredibly complicated and difficult plan.
On top of that, the episode has the most anticlimactic climax in the 55-year history of Star Trek. Tuvok just suddenly is himself again, and he mind-melds with people and that’s it, it just stops. And all is forgiven. Because of course it is.
The episode has its moments. Both movie-watching scenes, with Paris and Torres near the beginning and Janeway and Tuvok at the end, are priceless. And it’s fun to watch Tuvok investigate a crime, and then it’s revealed that he’s the culprit. I particularly love that, even though he’s obviously stunned by the revelation that he himself is responsible, he meticulously goes through the evidence, asking direct questions of the computer in front of Janeway and Kim to verify his hypothesis, and then very calmly telling Janeway to put him in the brig. Tim Russ absolutely nails the episode, including Tuvok fighting against Teero’s attempts at mind-control.
The rest of it falls incredibly flat. Keith Szarabajka is utterly uninteresting as Teero, while Robert Beltran and Roxann Dawson don’t act that much differently than themselves when they’re mind-controlled, which is disappointing. And at no point does Paris try to get through to his wife that maybe she shouldn’t leave her husband behind on a planet, a plot point that would seem to be blindingly obvious to pursue. It’s not like they forgot that the two of them were a couple, since the entire first scene of Act 1 is predicated on it…
This might—might—have worked in the first or second season. Hell, this could’ve been a good use of one of the Maquis crew on board (Suder, maybe?). As a seventh-season episode, it’s just absurd, made more so by the spectacular imbecility of the story’s execution.
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido will also be reviewing each episode of the new season of Lower Decks, starting on Thursday with the second-season premiere.
Yeah, I remember wondering at this point during the original airing about how, or even if, the show would deal with the lingering issue of the Maquis during the final Season and what would happen if they got home.
Suffice it to say, this was not a good sign.
Let’s talk about the “photonic displacement” on the holodeck… We all know what the holodeck is used for, so now it’s revealed that you leave behind an afterimage of yourself in whatever position you happened to be in at some moment in time?
Behave yourselves, folks. 
I would say this is probably the worst episode of season seven, although it does have a few praiseworthy elements: 1) I was stunned that they brought back two Maquis characters who had appeared in previous episodes (Chell and Tabor). It would have been easy to do this story with only extras as the Maquis characters (and we did get plenty of them), so this tiny bit of continuity was appreciated, and 2) some of the cinematography was impressive. That’s all I have in the way of praise. As Keith said, it was a superbly dumb episode
I was multitasking while watching this episode, and it ended so abruptly that I thought I must have missed something while looking at my computer. I rewound a few seconds to see what revelation had passed me by that saved the crew, but no, just a blink and we’re all done now, everything is fine. It’s just that anticlimactic.
Also, I realize the Vulcans are the least themselves when something takes over their mind, but does it have to always be the Vulcans? This is just Yet Another Vulcan Emotion Show. Tim Russ is phenomenal, don’t get me wrong, but I like it when other people get zapped to a different personality, too.
BTW Keith – I like that you added the in-show movies to the tags. I hope someday a cheesy monster movie rewatch happens (or a Clint Eastwood rewatch?) and the Revenge of the Creature tag gets used again.
This episode is full of WTF’s, but this is the craziest because it’s completely unnecessary. Okay, so apparently the computer is logging where everybody is at all times. This is a logical extension of abilities we’ve seen it have before– but then that should be used in every investigation including this one. The absolute first thing Tuvok would do, whether it’s here, “Meld,” or any other investigation is ask the computer where everybody was at that time, which should quickly eliminate most of the suspects. Either his name is on there and it puts him at the scene of the crime or a big “SECURITY LOCKOUT” is next to his name which should also cause him to look into this more closely. I guess in theory it’s possible that he programmed the computer to put a false location for himself, but then it should have repeated the lie when he asked directly. And either way it still should have been used as a tool to rule out other suspects, but never does he ever ask where Harry Kim was at the time of the various attacks.
The rest of the contrivances, in their ever so slightest defense, were at least necessary to make this episode’s plot “work.” This was just thrown in for no good reason. Not a great sign for the new season, folks. Amazingly, Season 7 is a bit better than Season 6, but nobody could have predicted that from the opening stretch.
A slight diversion here, a question for everyone: What’s your favorite old monster movie?
Not much I can add. I recall finding this one strange and incongruous, since it had been so long since the Maquis had mattered and it felt like it should’ve come years earlier — and because of the implausibility of the premise. It’s just so convoluted.
@4/dunsel: We’ve known since TNG that crewmembers can be tracked by their combadges, but that was in real time; I don’t know if it’s been established before that a log is kept.
G.Spiggott: so many to choose from. Probably The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, mostly because it’s surprisingly short on zombies and surprisingly long on musical dance numbers…………
Also: Evil Brain from Outer Space, which has the world’s least convincing superhero……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@6 We’ve known since TNG that crewmembers can be tracked by their combadges, but that was in real time; I don’t know if it’s been established before that a log is kept.
I believe you’re correct that this is the first time we’ve seen the existence of such a log, which is why I called it a logical extension. It’s not like they’re going to run out of hard drive space, so just survey it once a minute, dump it into a log, and the information is there if it’s needed. But this retroactively raises the question on why this was never used in any prior investigation or, for that matter, why it wasn’t used on other suspects in this investigation– presumably it would have alibi’d out everybody else Tuvok suspects in the early-going. There’s still the old saw of taking off the combadge, but with a polling rate of once a minute it’s going to be pretty easy to tell if someone wasn’t attached to their combadge at the time.
So it would have been better, I think, not to establish that the computer has this ability, then let viewers/writers rationalize that it’s not stored due to privacy reasons, etc.
(7)
Excellent, and I see Incredibly Strange Creatures is free to watch on Tubi. This is premium entertainment, people!
The Palace theater in Chicago did show motion pictures from the 1930s until the 1970s. The link to the Wikipedia article even references the conversion to a movie palace in 1931.
Biggus: Derp. Good catch.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who failed his saving throw vs. research
Keith, nearly shooting Janeway is not what snapped Tuvok out of it. The episode clearly showed that he was in control the entire time, from giving Janeway a significant look in the brig when he walks out, to Janeway asking him how he knew the phaser didn’t work (she wasn’t entirely reassured by his logical explanation that, since Chakotay doubted his loyalty, he wouldn’t have given him a working phaser).
There was some Maquis Starfleet tension that they finally got back to. Chakotay referring to starfleet as “your crew” instead of our crew, the awkward tension that created. Even though Janeway knows Chakotay was under mind control, she doesn’t seem so willing to forgive him as she did Tuvok. Chakotay doesn’t seem the least bit sorry, even though it wasn’t his fault. You don’t see them patch things up.
I still enjoyed the atmosphere the mystery attacker situation created for the first half, and the manchurian candidate issues it brought about for the second. But I did find it hard to believe that Tuvok didn’t investigate his own letter, purely to see if there was anything fishy about it like a virus embedded that he didn’t know about. The fact he didn’t means he really thought there’d be a plot spelled out directly to the recipients in their letters in plain English.
I want to know why Tabor is back in uniform. He had resigned on the grounds of moral objection to shipboard medical policy in “Nothing Human”.
@14/John Taylor: Tabor requested to be relieved of duty in “Nothing Human,” but Chakotay denied his request.
I have such a strange feeling like I’ve read this exact post before.
Well, not exact but certainly similar.
Maybe you got a hold of Spock’s Brain.
Too soon?
Jk, an excellent post as always. First season, absolutely, and a better climax (that’s what she said).
What I remember most about this episode is the criminal under use of the great Keith Szarabajka. I first became a fan of his on the original “The Equalizer.” I also liked him on the weird but enjoyable “Golden Years.” This episode also shows one of the worst sins of Voyager not being able to have enough recurring actors that you get to know and care about.
@12/Austin – I’m not sure it was all that clear. I just rewatched that section, and I don’t see a significant look – I see complete disinterest. He doesn’t care about her, and he says as much: “Your orders, Captain?” (directed to Chakotay). There’s nothing on screen to indicate what moment, exactly, he switched back to being Starfleet. Tim Russ is capable of conveying that information in a single glance – but I don’t see it.
As an aside, how amazing is it that we can just pull up the show on Netflix to rewatch what we’re talking about? From the VHS tapes I recorded TNG onto, to instantly going straight to the very scene I want within seconds. Thank you, Al Gore!
“It doesn’t make sense. There’s nothing you can accomplish.”
Oh boy.
The first half of this isn’t too bad. It’s been a long time since we’ve had an episode really make use of the Maquis being on board and this one even gets a couple of familiar faces back from earlier seasons. While it’s a bit hard to take their mistrust of Starfleet after at least five seasons of being good little officers, it’s true that old resentments can come to the surface in situations like this. And there is something creepy about Tuvok carrying out an investigation only to slowly realise that he’s the culprit. Presumably he also caused the lights to go out every time there’s an attack but this does stretch credibility at times, especially when Jor is discovered alone in a darkened mess hall. (No-one else was hungry?)
But unfortunately it all falls apart in the second half because of two fundamental problems: The plot is completely stupid and the episode has no idea what to do with it.
We’re told Teero is a mentally unstable fanatic. Secretly brainwashing Tuvok instead of letting the rest of the Maquis know he’s a Starfleet plant is, I suppose, merely ordinary mad scientist logic, and this is of course the first chance he’s had to make contact with him. But it takes a particular kind of stubbornness for him to decide to activate this sleeper agent when both the Maquis and the Cardassians have been massacred in order to take over a ship 35,000 light years away just for the sake of it, as if he was determined to do something with his toy, no matter how pointless. And how has this guy not either been killed by the Dominion or put in jail? And even if he did escape detection, how did he manage to implant his message in a Starfleet data stream? Plus of course he’s apparently still at large in the Alpha Quadrant at the end: I hope Janeway sends Starfleet a note about him in the next data stream.
It’s bad enough that what seems to be about half a dozen Maquis manage to take over Voyager without any difficulty. But then it happens again less than ten minutes later, as Chakotay and Tuvok somehow manage to get everyone else to surrender just by waving their phasers around a bit (despite being outnumbered), Janeway is released from the brig and yeah, episode over, let’s go watch a movie. Presumably there’s a missing scene of them being lined up for Tuvok to forcibly mind-meld them back to normal. I think it was the previous year when UPN suddenly decided to have more adverts per hour and completed episodes had another two minutes trimmed from them, but this one feels like someone snipped the end off and hoped we wouldn’t notice.
As in “Juggernaut”, Chakotay issues an instruction that no-one work alone and then forgets it when the plot needs it, walking off on his own to look for Torres so he can suffer the same fate as her. Seven seasons in, we finally see that there’s a second door letting out of the captain’s ready room, making sense of the scene in “Basics” where Cullah somehow manages to leave the ready room after Paris has recaptured the bridge. There’s at least a couple of references to them having been on Voyager seven years. Naomi is mentioned but not seen. I knew Keith Szarbajka did an Enterprise but I was completely unaware that he did a Voyager as well, so it was a shock when his name popped up.
@12: No, I don’t buy that. If Tuvok was in control all along, why activate the Maquis in the first place instead of just removing the post-hypnotic suggestion and ending the episode even earlier?
I thought this episode was completely pointless. The focus on Maquis /Starfleet tensions aboard Voyager could have been something good if it was a consistent theme throughout the series. However, it was dropped early on in season one so it’s a bit jarring to revive it all of a sudden in the last season.
And then I didn’t get the point of the mad scientist’s scheme. Why go to the effort of making the Maquis takeover Voyager, a ship 35,000 light years from home when the cause of the Maquis had already been vanquished? And this is all bad enough before we get to the logistical improbabilities of what the mad scientist has to do to enact his dastardly plans.
The only things I liked were Tim Russ’ performance and the scenes in the holodeck movie theater program.
As an aside, it occurs to me that since “Blaze of Glory” was near the end of a season and this is near the beginning, it might actually be closer to three years than four since the Maquis were wiped out. (In real life, there was 3 years 5 months between the broadcast of the two episodes.)
There’s probably not actually enough evidence to suggest that the Maquis evolved, at least partially, out of a Victor Hugo book club, is there?
@18 – However you want to interpret that scene, there’s no denying the last scene where Janeway asks Tuvok how he knew the phaser wouldn’t work. The question and Tuvok’s answer would make no sense if Tuvok only snapped out of it once he tried to shoot her. Besides, Tuvok is shown struggling against the mind control the entire episode, but suddenly he is cool and calm when Chakotay arrives in the brig? I thought it was obvious.
I like this one more than most, not the least because hey! it turns out everyone does have civilian clothes, they just never wear them outside the holodeck! And I like that someone on the writing staff remembered what the premise of the show was, even if it was a day late and a dollar short. The framing is ridiculous, but honestly it isn’t all that much more ridiculous than some of the other premises on Voyager.
Honestly, after your 3rd or 4th time getting mind controlled into doing something stupid, you probably get pretty good at compartmentalizing it into “not my fault, nothing I could do, not going to even bother apologizing for it.” Otherwise half of Starfleet would spend their whole careers reciting mea culpa every time the alien of the week takes them over.
I’m not going to lie, that photograph coupled with that title made it look as though Mr Chakotay & Mr Tuvok would be getting up to a little ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ before I was reminded of the actual plot of this particular disappointed.
Doubtless a certain sort of fan will be terribly, terribly disappointed. (-;
Winrich Kolbe does what he can to try and make this watchable – in his final turn as director for the show. The investigation aspect of it is watchable. And Torres’ assessment of Paris recreating a movie theater is spot-on. But otherwise, Repression falls firmly into the cliché category, in which yet another Tuvok story is dependant on him losing control of his mind. It was fresh when they did season 2’s Meld. It’s just tired now.
Bringing back the Maquis issue this late in the run was very much propping up a dead horse. It’s set on Voyager’s DNA that episodes don’t have long-term consequences, so why bother doing a story that won’t alter the staus quo at all?
It also reflects Kenneth Biller’s complete lack of focus in building proper continuity and serialization. Is this supposed to be a greatest hits version of former Voyager elements or did another different story fall through the cracks? A mind-controlling Bajoran Vedek is such a lazy plot device – one that ignores the inner workings of the Pathfinder project. Not that I’m surprised. Biller once criticized Extreme Risk for relying on DS9’s termination of the Maquis as a springboard for Torres’ suicidal actions on that episode. That lack of care for world-building shows itself fully here.
Does anyone know if the script for this episode was, in fact, written in Season 1 or 2? That would make some kind of odd sense at least. The Marquis storyline closed out (pretty effectively, I think) with DS9’s “Blaze of Glory”
@27/Matel: It’s unlikely it was conceived that early, given that it depends on contact with the Alpha Quadrant. I think it’s more likely that the crew getting back in contact with the AQ motivated the writers to pick up on dangling AQ-related threads like the Maquis.
When Tuvoc was investigating and mentioned the perpetrator had used security protocols to cover his tracks, I figured it was probably Tuvoc himself doing it. I mean, who else on the show has security protocols? It probably wasn’t going to be Janeway or Chakotay, so it’d have to be an invisible other crewman brought to the fore for one episode, and Voyager don’t really do that. The other option was another latent Seska trap finally being sprung years later.
@23: But it does make sense if he only snapped out of it just before he tried to shoot her. I take your point about him suddenly being calm, but I took that to mean the mind control had subsumed him, not that he’d overcome it. After all, he didn’t seem to be actively fighting against it when he attacked Chakotay and the others, he seemed calm then, if more zombie-like. Unless it was just an act, it seems unlikely that Janeway would try and talk him out of the mind control if she knew he was faking.
@29 I wondered why, when the injuries on everyone were so clearly the result of a Vulcan nerve pinch (I called that the second they said the first victim’s injuries), that Vorik and Suddenly Appearing Female Vulcan weren’t suspects, even if Tuvok didn’t think he himself was the one who did it.
All I have to say is that Janeway and Tuvok look hilariously badass with their 3D glasses on.
I also called it that Tuvok was the perpetrator when the first victim’s injuries included damage to his neck. It seemed pretty obvious from the get-go that the big reveal would be: “chief of security discovers that it is he who has been assaulting the victims, bom bom bom!” So there was never any suspense for me during the rest of the episode since I knew it was Tuvok the whole time. Maybe the writers could have left out the damage to the neck part and threw in a Starfleet officer guest star to at least throw of the audience’s suspicions. It could have been another opportunity to bring back the long absent Lt. Carey!
Where did they find time to change into Marquis Uniforms two thirds of the way through? More to the point why?
Dumb Dumb Dumb episode… and it was blindingly obvious it was Tuvok on first watching especially as the holographic image Kim is developing looks like him from the start…
I’m not a fan of mind-control episodes of anything. It’s just an easy way to make a known character do an out-of-character thing with hand-wave technology that’s never used again, despite how powerful it is. So, I had some prejudice, which was well-placed. Revealing Tuvok too early on is the first sap of suspense from this episode.
I wonder if the point of the plot was so that in the next transmission to the Alpha Quad, Chakote could say “neeener neeener, we got your ship. We’ll see you in three years.” Maybe.
The best parts are in the movie theater — tho, holy hell — couldn’t they have found a more impressive movie theater in all of Los Angeles? Paris is going on about the grandeur of something the size of a screening room. No wonder Torres was unimpressed, though her line about 3-D is really funny.
Also, I snort-laughed out loud when the Bolian was looking at his hands with the 3-D glasses on. I’m guessing it must have turned them purple.
I think I figured it actually was a Paramount screening room.
Most likely. I’m sure it was easier to film in — just not that impressive. I say that as someone who really likes old theaters.