“Flesh and Blood”
Written by Jack Monaco and Bryan Fuller & Raf Green and Kenneth Biller
Directed by Mike Vejar and David Livingston
Season 7, Episodes 9 & 10
Production episode 253
Original air date: November 29, 2000
Stardate: 54315.3
Captain’s log. A couple of Hirogen are hunting prey—but their prey ambushes and kills them. Said prey are a collection of Alpha Quadrant species, including Starfleet officers, Romulan soldiers, etc. The entire ship is a holodeck, and the prey are holograms who have killed most of the Hirogen on board.
Voyager responds to the Hirogen’s distress call. Chakotay, Tuvok, Paris, and a security guard all beam over. They find a lot of Hirogen corpses (killed with a type-3 Starfleet-issue phaser), and a bat’leth covered in Hirogen blood. They find only one survivor, Donik, who isn’t actually a hunter, but rather an engineer. Seven discovers that the ship is a holodeck, an adaptation of Starfleet holo-tech. For one thing, sensors detected it as a real tropical atmosphere until they shut it off. For another, the safeties have all been disabled.
Janeway is upset. The whole point of giving the Hirogen holo-tech was to enable them to preserve their culture without hurting anyone. Instead, they are getting themselves killed, as there are 43 corpses on the Hirogen base, with Donik the only survivor. Donik says that the holograms have malfunctioned and transferred their matrices to a ship with holo-emitters and escaped. Donik improved the holograms’ programs to be self-aware and ingenious to make the hunts more interesting and worthwhile, which has backfired rather spectacularly.
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Until the Last of Me
A Hirogen ship arrives in response to the distress call. The Hirogen alpha agrees to allow Janeway to participate in the hunt for the holograms. However, when they find the ship, Kim detects no weapons, engines, or shields. Before Janeway can pull an Admiral Ackbar, the ship disappears: it was a hologram, hiding an explosive device that takes out the Hirogen ship.
The few survivors of the Hirogen ship are beamed to Voyager. Another Hirogen ship shows up, firing on Voyager and then transferring the EMH to their ship—this is where the holograms have wound up, and their leader, a Bajoran named Iden, welcomes the EMH aboard.
The doctor isn’t thrilled with being kidnapped, especially when he’s got a sickbay full of wounded, but Iden says they have wounded as well. Several of the holograms are malfunctioning. The EMH points out that he’s a doctor, not an engineer, but manages to fix some of the holograms’ issues.
On Voyager, Donik is working with Torres and Seven to find a way to disable the holograms. Torres, though, doesn’t think they’re malfunctioning, they’re just doing what they were programmed to do after Donik souped them up. One of the enhancements Donik programmed was to allow them to feel pain when hurt, which the EMH is appalled by when he treats a holographic human.
Iden—whom the EMH sees praying to the Prophets, apparently he was programmed with a full set of Bajoran religious beliefs—invites the EMH to join them. They want to live in peace, and also liberate other holograms that are enslaved. The EMH refuses, saying he has a good life on Voyager with colleagues who respect him. Iden is skeptical, as he doesn’t trust any organics, and doesn’t believe that the EMH is truly an equal to his crewmates.
He also wants the EMH to understand what they’ve been through, so they deactivate him and download the memories of another one of them into his matrix, so he gets to experience being hunted by the Hirogen first hand. He’s less than thrilled about this, though it does give him a bit more sympathy toward what they’ve been through. Kejal, a holographic Cardassian who has taught herself a lot about computers and engineering, has developed a holographic field generator that can allow them to live on a planet. But it needs work. The EMH can’t provide it, but he believes Torres could help. Iden rejects the notion: he doesn’t trust organics, and Voyager is working with the Hirogen. The EMH insists that they’re only doing so because they don’t know the whole story, and he believes he can convince them. Iden agrees.
Meanwhile, Donik, Seven, and Torres have whipped up an anti-photon pulse that will shut the holograms down. Before they can install it, the ship arrives. Janeway goes to red alert, but then the EMH contacts them, saying they just want to talk.
The EMH pleads the holograms’ case, but Janeway refuses. They got into this mess by giving the Hirogen technology, and she won’t make it worse by giving away more technology. Janeway’s counterproposal is to deactivate them, store them on Voyager, and find a new world for them. The EMH angrily accuses Janeway of treating them different than she would if they were organic.
The Hirogen in the mess hall—sickbay got overcrowded—stage a rebellion, and before Tuvok can put it down, one Hirogen gets a signal out. Now there are two more Hirogen ships en route.
Iden refuses Janeway’s offer, and Janeway says that she could deactivate them forcefully, but would rather they volunteered. Iden still refuses, saying Janeway is no different from the Hirogen.
A firefight breaks out between the holograms and Voyager. The EMH is unhappy, but Janeway dismisses him to the mess hall to treat the wounded. Instead, he goes to sickbay, copies Voyager’s shield schematics, and defects to the holograms, giving them the shield frequencies so they can beam him over.
When Voyager fires the pulse, the holograms use the specs the EMH provided to send a feedback loop. This destroys the deflector dish, and overloads the warp core. Torres manages to put a force field around the core to keep it from blowing up, but is rendered unconscious. Voyager’s shields are down, so Iden scans for Klingon life signs and beams Torres over. The EMH is livid that Torres has been kidnapped.
The holograms bugger off while Voyager licks their wounds. Janeway thinks that the EMH’s program has been tampered with, but Chakotay points out that he could genuinely believe in the holograms’ cause. Meanwhile, the Hirogen ships are approaching. The wounded Hirogen are beamed over, but Donik wishes to stay. He became an engineer instead of a hunter so he could work on the holograms. It’s his fault that this all happened, and he wants to make amends. The Hirogen alpha is more than happy to let Janeway keep the coward. The alpha also says that Voyager is not welcome on this hunt. If they get anywhere near the Hirogen, they will be considered prey.
Donik helps Voyager sneak along behind the Hirogen in their ion wake, allowing them to follow without being detected.
Torres has no interest in helping her kidnappers, but the EMH pleads their case, likening them to the Maquis. She finally agrees to at least look at the generator, though she is nonplussed to realize that she’s working with a Cardassian (sort of).
The holograms have found a world that Iden has named Ha’Dara, which is Bajoran for “home of light.” It’s a Class-Y planet, inimical to organic life, but they can set up any kind of holographic environment there and live in peace. Iden again offers the EMH a place on their world, and he’s considering it.
The Hirogen catch up to the holograms, who hide in a nebula. Torres figures out how to fix the generator, but hasn’t decided if she’s going to tell the holograms how to do it yet. She talks at length with Kejal, and soon comes to appreciate that she, at least, is a good person trying to make a better life.
Iden, though, is showing signs of megalomania. He detects a Nuu’Bari ship outside the nebula, and they head there to liberate their holograms. Iden transfers the trio of holograms on board, and then blow up the ship for good measure, murdering the two crew members. The EMH, Torres, and Kejal are all appalled at this bloodthirsty act. To make matters worse, the holograms are very basic aids that don’t have the capability for self-awareness or much of anything beyond their basic tasks.
The holograms head to Ha’Dara. The EMH agrees to let him and Torres go once Ha’Dara is operational, but it’s not clear he’s going to follow through on that promise. The Hirogen arrive and fire on the holograms—but Voyager then fires on the Hirogen.
Voyager’s weapons fire damages the Hirogen’s shields, and Iden then takes his ship into the atmosphere and beams all the Hirogen to the surface, where they won’t survive for long. The holograms beam down to hunt them, along with the generator, which Torres has made operational. Iden deactivates the EMH and takes the mobile emitter, and leads his troops into battle.
As they slaughter the Hirogen, Torres convinces Kejal to betray Iden, because she’s not a killer. She deactivates all the holograms—but Iden is not part of the matrix anymore, thanks to the mobile emitter. So she reactivates the EMH and sends him to the surface, armed. The EMH vaporizes Iden.
Voyager’s shields are damaged, so they can’t follow the holograms into the toxic atmosphere, but the Delta Flyer‘s are intact. Chakotay, Tuvok, and Paris take it into the atmosphere, and beam Torres to safety.
Only five Hirogen are still alive. Chakotay beams them to the Flyer. Aside from Iden, whose matrix is lost, the holograms are all in the computer except for Kejal. She rejects Janeway’s offer to stay on Voyager. Donik offers to stay with the holograms and help them create a new life, since he was responsible for their becoming sentient in the first place. Janeway agrees.
The EMH offers to give up his mobile emitter and subject himself to whatever punishment is appropriate. Janeway, however, declines to punish him, as she doesn’t feel he should be punished for being who he is.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Torres is able to stop a warp-core breach by putting a force field around the warp core. Not clear as to how that works, since that would just contain it and not stop it, but whatever.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is totally uninterested in treating the holograms like actual people. Which is kind of a problem.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok subdues a Hirogen with a neck pinch, which is lovely. Also he brings another security guard with him on the away team who, amazingly, doesn’t die…
Half and half. Torres’ initial response to being kidnapped is, rightly, to refuse to help, but she eventually decides to help the holograms after getting to know Kejal.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix gets to be the Hirogen’s hostage, and then later convinces the Hirogen beta to let the holograms go and tell the story that they were destroyed by mighty hunters, rather than try to fight them and maybe lose.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. At the top of the episode, the EMH requests of Chakotay that he be allowed to speak at a medical symposium. Chakotay refuses, as the symposium is two weeks behind them. One wonders if the EMH’s crankiness at being denied a speaking engagement was a factor in his subsequent behavior…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. When the Flyer rescues Torres, Paris grumpily says to her, “If this marriage is going to work, you’ve got to cut back on the traveling.”
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Just like with Moriarty (by accident), Vic Fontaine (by design), and the various EMHs (by design and experience), the prey holograms become self-aware and sentient. Though the Nuu’Bari holograms are a reminder that they’re not all like that…
Do it.
“It may be the warriors who get the glory, but it’s the engineers who build societies.”
–Torres telling Kejal the way life really is.
Welcome aboard. Paul S. Eckstein, having played a Hirogen in “The Killing Game” two-parter, comes back to play a different Hirogen in this episode. Other past Trek guests are here also: Cindy Katz as Kejal (previously Yteppa in DS9’s “Second Skin”), Spencer Garrett as Weiss (previously Simon Trases in TNG’s “The Drumhead”), and the mighty Vaughn Armstrong as a Hirogen (his seventh role on Trek, most recently as a Vidiian in “Fury,” with his next to be a Klingon in “Endgame”).
Jeff Yagher plays Iden, while the other Hirogen are played by Ryan Bollman, Michael Wiseman, Todd Jeffries, Don McMillan, Chad Halyard, and David Keith Anderson.
Trivial matters: This is a sequel to “The Killing Game” two-parter, showing the consequences of Janeway giving holodeck technology to the Hirogen.
Like “The Killing Game” and “Dark Frontier,” this was two episodes mashed into one to air on the same night. And like “Dark Frontier” (but not like “The Killing Game”), it’s been kept as a single episode on home video releases and streaming services. Interestingly, this episode only has a single production number, unlike the others.
Class-Y planets were first established in “Demon.”
In an amusing bit of irony, Jeff Yagher also provided the illustrations for the Trek reference book The Hologram’s Handbook, written by Robert Picardo in character as the EMH.
Iden mentions other species that have holographic servants, including the Lokirrim, whom we saw dealing with a photonic revolt in “Body and Soul.”
The events of this episode will be referenced in “Author Author.”
Set a course for home. “Darkness will become light.” There’s a lot to like in this episode. It’s a good vehicle for the always-wonderful Robert Picardo, and also a very good use of Roxann Dawson’s Torres. It has a very Trekkish message about how we treat the “other,” and how if we don’t treat them with respect and consideration it ends badly—not just artificial life (TNG’s “The Measure of a Man” and “The Offspring“), but also aliens we make assumptions about (the original series’ “Arena” and “The Devil in the Dark“). Janeway falls victim to the same prejudices that we’ve seen other captains fall prey to (Kirk in “Arena,” Picard in “The Offspring,” Janeway herself in a similar situation in “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy“). And it’s always good to see the Hirogen again.
And it’s especially nice to see Voyager show consequences. I wish the script had acknowledged that giving the Hirogen holo-tech was a necessary evil—it was the only way to stop the fighting between Voyager and the Hirogen that had already claimed several lives. It was a short-term solution that now has long-term consequences. And I like the callback to the photonic resistance against the Lokirrim from “Body and Soul.”
With all that, though, this two-hour episode doesn’t quite cohere. Part of the problem is that Iden is a nowhere antagonist. Jeff Yagher has no discernible personality (Cindy Katz and Spencer Garrett do a much better job), and his transition from bland affable leader to megalomaniacal murderer is utterly unconvincing. It’s a narrative cheat to make the EMH’s decision easier, but it makes the arguments far less convincing. The holograms generally are not the nicest people around—they kidnap both the EMH and Torres, they pretty much torture the EMH to make a point—but it was up to Yagher to show how they were evolving past that, and he never really did that. He was unconvincing as an antihero, as a resistance leader, or as a lunatic.
I love when Janeway tries to put the EMH off by saying she won’t be dragged into an argument about holographic rights and the doctor doesn’t let her get away with it. Like it or not, it’s been established that at least some holograms are sentient—including the EMH himself. That comes with a level of responsibility to treat them like people instead of programs, and Janeway’s willingness to just turn them off against their will is problematic.
Donik is also a tiresomely clichéd character. The Hirogen were introduced as truly alien, but here they come across as warmed-over Klingons who shout a lot and complain about the cowardly technician.
I also would have liked there to have been some consequences for the EMH. After all, what he did was at least as bad as what Paris did in “Thirty Days,” and he got a month in a cell and a demotion. I think the doctor’s offer of having the mobile emitter taken away would’ve been a nice little consequence. I mean, since they’re kind of doing that now…
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido is also reviewing the new episodes of Lower Decks, with his take on the Voyager-adjacent episode “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris” having gone up on this site earlier today.
This was a fairly good one. It was nice to follow up on “The Killing Game,” though as with a number of season 7 episodes, it feels like it was only now that the show was allowed to tell the follow-up stories it should ideally have done years earlier. But that’s a fault of the earlier seasons and their aggressive avoidance of continuity for whatever reason. Season 7 was just trying to make up for lost time as best it could, and it deserves credit for that.
I agree Jeff Yagher wasn’t all that compelling an antagonist. I remember him mainly from his role as Kyle Bates in V: The Series, and he wasn’t particularly impressive there either. But it’s still an interesting take on the AI-rights issue, and fortunately remembers what later episodes don’t, that not all holograms are sentient. I also like seeing the Hirogen fleshed out by showing that they’re not all hunters.
Fun fact: The decision to make this a movie was for the November sweeps (link) I list that here because Memory Alpha clearly states why “The Way of the Warrior” and “Dark Frontier” were initially feature-length and not two-parters, but it mentions no reason as to why this was made feature-length. Not knowing why had me tearing my hair out at least…
Voyager sure is a strange place. If the Doctor wants to leave permanently to be an opera singer, then he’s welcome to walk out the door and Tom Paris will ostensibly handle the medical needs of the ship. If the Doctor wants to, as he proposes, borrow a shuttle for a month and eventually catch back up… nope, sorry, nothing we can do, that’s too inconvenient. He’s right, the ship stops to explore things all the time, and a medical conference sounds like a great place for some soft diplomacy.
And basically a repeat of Critical Care– a good premise in there somewhere, but apparently someone wanted to make damn sure nobody would end the episode siding with Iden, so they gradually make his position crazier. It’s a real shame, because with 90 minutes there was plenty of time for the characters to have a legitimate conflict of interests.
I agree The Doctor should have been punished. But realistically, he is still their only doctor. If Janeway takes away the mobile emitter, and he is needed in some medical emergency somewhere other than sickbay, that’s a problem.
Leaving him with the emitter but confining him to Sickbay would work though. That way he has the emitter handy for emergency situations. It’s also more of a mental punishment that he has the emitter on him, but can’t take advantage of his mobility.
grenadier: Of course, the emitter would still be around for emergencies, but it’s his free use of it that would be restrained. That would be very similar to imprisoning him. And the reason for not doing so doesn’t really wash. I mean, Paris was being true to himself when he was an idiot in “Thirty Days” and he got punished. It only makes sense that the doc would be punished in some way as well.
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido
IMO Voyager had a habit of going for the dramatic at the expense of the interesting, and I think that’s what happened here. It is more dramatic for Iden to turn out to go all David Koresh, but it isn’t as interesting. The dilemma and drama are already there- Janeway gave away technology despite always insisting that she wouldn’t- and she gave it to the people most likely to do, well, exactly what they did. There’s a lot there! But instead we spend too much time on a character who doesn’t really need to be a mustache-twirling villain, played by an actor who can’t really pull it off.
I give the show props for following up on this particular bit of continuity, but something about it just doesn’t gel for me.
This was an entertaining enough spectacle feature-length episode, with the emphasis on action and holographic characters representing lots of Alpha (and Delta) Quadrant species like Borg, Cardassians, Klingons, Bajorans, Breen, etc. Why there aren’t more Delta Quadrant species represented by the holograms is curious since the Hirogen programmed them.
Speaking of the Hirogen, again, it seems far-fetched they’re even out this far considering the vast leaps forward Voyager has made since first encountering the Hirogen all the way back in Season 4.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Spencer Garrett in this because it had been like 9 years since his last Trek appearance in “The Drumhead” and I only saw this episode for the first time a few years ago.
Jeff Yagher was very familiar to me here for some reason and then I discovered it was because he was in another one of my favorite series Six Feet Under in the early 2000’s. He played Hoyt, a recurring character who was also pretty bland, which made the reveal that he did something truly horrible all the more shocking. And then of course he was on Seinfeld in one of my favorite episodes: “The Marble Rye.” He’s a saxophonist and Elaine’s boyfriend-of-the-week. She decides to dump him over the end credits when she believes his horrible saxophone playing skills = he’s just as bad at oral sex. Lol
https://youtu.be/m8xsSAm0FMc
@7/garreth: “Why there aren’t more Delta Quadrant species represented by the holograms is curious since the Hirogen programmed them.”
One, the Hirogen probably wanted to try hunting novel prey species. Two, they had no experience with programming holodecks, so it was probably easier just to draw from the character design and behavior parameters already programmed into the database, like the way you’d create a player character in a MMORPG.
“Speaking of the Hirogen, again, it seems far-fetched they’re even out this far considering the vast leaps forward Voyager has made since first encountering the Hirogen all the way back in Season 4.”
No, it really doesn’t. They’re a nomadic species, and like most predators, they live in small groups that are spread far apart so as not to compete with one another for hunting territory. So it’s natural that they’d be far more widespread than your typical civilization; indeed, it’s downright inevitable. Also, they’ve evidently been around for a long time, long enough to spread that far, and until Voyager destroyed it, they made use of an ancient communication network that spread well into the Beta Quadrant.
More likely, the studio was taking the opportunity to amortize all of those Alpha Quadrant prosthetics, props, and costumes left over from DS9. Kind of like the use of the Ferengi in “Inside Man.”
@9/bgsu98: Naturally, but the question was why the Hirogen would’ve done it in-universe.
Voyager did all this work to explore the implications of holographic rights, and then Picard ignores the issue while being all about rights of artificial life forms. And it has a bunch of ship holograms that are comic relief. And it has a Voyager character in the cast. I guess continuity gets in the way of storytelling, but I think dealing with this kind of disconnect would make better stories.
@11/rm: As I’ve said before, the concept of “holographic rights” is gibberish. It’s like saying “vertebrate rights.” Only some vertebrates are intelligent, thinking beings, and only some holograms are. Heck, it isn’t even correct to call them holograms. They’re AIs. The holograms are just their external interfaces. I wish Trek wouldn’t perpetuate that mistake. Both Voyager and Picard are equally guilty of that — PIC by treating androids and holograms as somehow separate categories when they’re both AIs.
“Flesh and Blood” demonstrated the interesting notion that shooting a hologram with a phaser somehow destroys the program which is actually in a computer.
@13/bgsu98: ““Flesh and Blood” demonstrated the interesting notion that shooting a hologram with a phaser somehow destroys the program which is actually in a computer.
”
If you mean Iden, Keith’s summary says he was loaded into the mobile emitter at the time. So presumably the phaser disrupted the program in the mobile emitter, or something. I guess Iden didn’t figure out how to make himself permeable to phaser fire like the Doctor could do?
“If you’ve taught me anything, it’s that I’m not one of your own.”
This is another one where I’m never quite sure whether to regard it as a two-parter or a double length episode. I made a point of taping the two episodes and watching them back to back (and hilariously, I’ve still got most of that off air recording on a very worn tape!), only to realise it felt like a two-parter, with the two halves heading in different directions. Part I involves the slow discovery that the apparently malfunctioning holograms are an oppressed underclass in need of help, then Part II slowly reveals that the holograms have become the same xenophobic sadists they once feared and it’s the Hirogen that need protecting after all. And my home video release has them as two episodes, but then so did the original release of “All Good Things”, which was a syndication edit with scenes and lines missing. However, the Voyager releases are pretty consistent otherwise: “Caretaker”, “Dark Frontier” and “Endgame” are all one double-length episode, nothing else is.
But okay, we’re doing the two episodes together. Good for me in a way, since I won’t be able to comment on next week’s posts until the following weekend and it would have been a long gap mid-story, but bad in another, since I’ve just had to sit up to the early hours of the morning watching Part II…
So…yeah. Suddenly the Hirogen are back. And yes, I see the same old argument being made: that they’re a nomadic species and they were using that galaxy-spanning subspace network that was destroyed back in “Hunters” (ie before they got holodeck technology). But…I still find it a stretch. The vast majority of Voyager’s encounters with the Hirogen took place over the course of four or five episodes in Season 4. We didn’t see any more in the real world until Season 6, when they encountered precisely one Hirogen. And now, several massive jumps closer to home on from “The Killing Game”, Voyager’s suddenly in an area of space full of Hirogen, who will then be gone again after the story’s over. What’s more, they’re Hirogen who know Janeway and Voyager by name and have the holodeck technology that they left behind 30,000 light years back. Yes, it’s possible some Hirogen have journeyed this far. Yes, it’s possible that the Hirogen have spent the last three years passing on the schematics for holodeck technology across tens of thousands of light years. But that’s a heck of a suspension of disbelief.
But if you can suspend your disbelief, then it is a welcome chance to examine the consequences of Voyager interfering and then flying off. Problem is the plot seems to have put Janeway in full-on schizophrenic mode, as she alternates between accepting she has an obligation to resolve the situation she created and self-righteously trying to impose her own judgement on everyone involved. She’s great when she stands up to Chakotay and Tuvok’s objections, but she’s incredibly blinkered in the way she ignores the Doctor’s assessment of the situation and just tries to wrap everything up neatly. To be fair, she hasn’t spent the amount of time with the holograms that the Doctor has, and he wasn’t exactly sympathetic towards them to start with. And she does make a reasonably fair offer to Iden. But then she slips back to Plan A and starts opening fire because she can’t think of anything better. And it carries on into Part II, where she and her crew spend most of their time blundering around without understanding the situation, doing the exact thing that’s going to get the highest number of people killed at every juncture. Five Hirogen survivors out of dozens, and that’s down to Torres, the Doctor and Kejal, not anyone on Voyager.
Iden is a bit daft abducting the Doctor to treat non-organic patients, although he ultimately does a good job of it. It’s a nice subversion to have a guy we don’t know on the away team who doesn’t get killed. Tuvok takes a chance sneaking up on Donik and nerve pinching him rather than just stunning him, but maybe he was worried about exacerbating his injuries. Also nice that we actually see some medical staff other than the Doctor and Paris. The security guards in the mess hall put in a pretty poor show given how easily Tuvok’s team resolve things: Can’t anyone pick up a weapon once Neelix is out of danger?
Iden’s character arc ultimately feels unsatisfying. He’s nuts, he won’t see reason, and ultimately he’s taken care of with one shot that he never even knows is coming. It’s extremely anti-climatic. As for the practicalities: He seems to be shot with a holographic weapon, and he was about to shoot the Beta-Hirogen so presumably needed to stay “solid” to do that, plus he had his back to the Doctor and was still counting on a “them and us” philosophy. We at least get to see Janeway trying to pretend she’s taking responsibility: She acknowledges it’s up to Donik and Kejal to make their own choices rather than trying to force a solution on them like she’s been doing for most of the episode.
Vaughn Armstrong racks up another Voyager appearance. Is he the only person to have played a Klingon, a Romulan, a Cardassian, a Borg, a Vidiian and a Hirogen? I suspect so, certainly as far as credited actors are concerned. Oddly, he’s credited on Part II despite his character dying in Part I.
Interesting that Voyager’s crew now see trading technology as an everyday occurrence. It seems like a long time ago that Janeway would rather blow up the ship than give the Kazon replicators.
@15/cap-mjb: “But…I still find it a stretch. The vast majority of Voyager’s encounters with the Hirogen took place over the course of four or five episodes in Season 4. We didn’t see any more in the real world until Season 6, when they encountered precisely one Hirogen. And now, several massive jumps closer to home on from “The Killing Game”, Voyager’s suddenly in an area of space full of Hirogen, who will then be gone again after the story’s over.”
Makes perfect sense to me. Again, they’re nomadic, territorial predators. They’d both be widespread and have a lot of gaps in between them, because they’d have no incentive to stay together in any kind of uniform distribution. And Voyager isn’t making a comprehensive survey of the quadrant, just going in a straight line with some very big gaps in it. So it makes perfect sense that they’d only intermittently run into Hirogen groups even if those groups were spread out irregularly throughout most of the Delta Quadrant.
And really, the assumption that any given species would be limited to only a finite part of the galaxy doesn’t make a lot of sense. Look at human cultures on Earth. You can find immigrants from any given nation living just about anywhere on the planet. People have been traveling long enough to have become fully distributed around the globe. It therefore stands to reason that any warp-using civilization that’s been around for more than a few thousand years has probably got members of its population that have migrated and founded colonies all over the galaxy. You could run into them anywhere, and they might be very far apart because any colonies in between might have failed and been abandoned. So there should be countless species whose descendants are found in every region of the galaxy. It should be more the rule than the exception. (Which would certainly explain all the reused alien makeups that showed up in both TNG/DS9 and VGR.)
The problem is that Trek too often has the lazy habit of assuming that alien civilizations are all around the same age as the Federation, give or take mere centuries. Realistically they’d be more likely to be millions of years ahead or behind, or at least thousands.
“Interesting that Voyager’s crew now see trading technology as an everyday occurrence. It seems like a long time ago that Janeway would rather blow up the ship than give the Kazon replicators.”
That was supposed to be because the Kazon and other powers in the initial region of the series were far enough behind the Federation that the technology would’ve been disruptive. If trading with cultures on a more equal footing, that wouldn’t necessarily apply. Also, of course, the Kazon clearly didn’t have good intentions for the use of the technology.
Season 6 could have used a blockbuster two hour event like this one. Flesh and Blood is a welcome followup to the Hirogen arc. It has some pacing issues given the extended runtime, even though there’s plenty of plot. It was a very clever move to use the Hirogen issue as a springboard for the EMH’s own personal fight for holographic rights.
My only issue is the obvious geographic one. The Hirogen may be nomadic, and I can buy Voyager finding more of them this far out, but not ones using Federation-grade holotechnology. Voyager has gone through countless light years since their last encounter – not counting Tsunkatse – and unless the Hirogen are good at finding wormholes, there is no way the holotechnology could have wound up with this particular Hirogen group this deep into the quadrant.
Meanwhile, season 7 keeps giving Torres more to do, which is always welcome. And I adored that the EMH threw Janeway’s prejudice back at her (Picardo really sells that feeling of outrage throughout this). The show spends way too much time painting the captain as the unquestioning voice of reason, even when all evidence proves otherwise. Plus, the whole plot is the result of Janeway’s careless choice way back then. It was really bold of the staff this late in the show’s run to challenge Janeway like this. A bright spot in a very middling season.
Didn’t the Hirogen have a widespread and ancient communications network? Could the plans for the holotech be spread over many lightyears to many hunting parties that way?
Oh wait, I forgot the network was disabled. Never mind.
I just read another interesting Star Trek factoid related to Jeff Yagher: he’s married to Meghan Gallagher who guest starred two-episodes back in “Body and Soul” along with her two appearances on DS9 as two different characters.
@16/CLB: I get that you’re trying to rationalize the Hirogen showing up in Season 7 after they were first encountered in Season 4, and making that analogous to nomads spread apart on Earth. But on this show we’re talking about what, the span of 30,000 light years or so? And Voyager just happens upon this other set of Hirogen after all that time and distance (and who know Janeway and who have the same holographic technology as Season 4 Hirogen)? It really makes space seem rather small to keep encountering the same people and races. Interstellar space is so huge that these types of coincidences should never happen. It should be akin to something like pinpointing a specific grain of sand somewhere on this planet which for all intents and purposes is impossible. But this is Star Trek and specifically, Voyager, so we have lots of improbable coincidences and chance encounters, from finding Amelia Earhart to a lost 21st century U.S.A spacecraft, to the upcoming appearances of a Klingon vessel and crew, and a Talaxian colony. But whatever makes for an interesting or exciting story I guess.
@16: As has been pointed out, not only does the episode suddenly have a bunch of Hirogen living in this part of space, but it basically portrays them as the same Hirogen, with the same culture and history, not just stretching back centuries but within the last three years. Despite the rewatch insisting they’re different characters, Paul Eckstein might as well be playing the same Hirogen from “The Killing Game”. This isn’t just the equivalent of there being the same ethnic groups scattered around our planet. This is the equivalent of giving a smartphone to an immigrant from Borneo in New York, and it resulting in every tribesman in Borneo having them and knowing the name of the person that gave it to them. Yes, races and cultures spread out, but they develop their own individual identity once they do so. They don’t stay as one homogenous mass who all know each other’s addresses and phone numbers.
@17/Eduardo: “unless the Hirogen are good at finding wormholes, there is no way the holotechnology could have wound up with this particular Hirogen group this deep into the quadrant.”
Of course it could. Janeway only gave them one physical unit, after all; in order to adopt it civilization-wide, they would’ve had to know how to build or replicate new ones based on its hardware design and software, and that means it would have been propagated by transmitting the information from one Hirogen band to another, not shipping physical objects. And information can spread through subspace radio, much faster than physical travel.
Granted, with the subspace network destroyed, the transmission of information across the Hirogen diaspora would have been relatively slower, but adjacent Hirogen bands could still communicate by local subspace radio and pass the data along chain-letter style, one step at a time.
@20/garreth: “But on this show we’re talking about what, the span of 30,000 light years or so? And Voyager just happens upon this other set of Hirogen after all that time and distance (and who know Janeway and who have the same holographic technology as Season 4 Hirogen)?”
We’re going in circles. I’ve already explained why it makes perfect sense to expect an ancient nomadic species like the Hirogen to be distributed widely and unevenly throughout the entire galaxy.
After all, by TNG-era assumptions, 30,000 light years is typically only about a three-decade journey for a warp-capable civilization, give or take. Crossing the entire galaxy would take only about a century. And we know from “The Killing Game” that the Hirogen way of life has been unchanged for at least a thousand years, so they’ve probably been around even longer than that. That’s long enough to have crossed the galaxy ten times over, if not more, so it’s easily long enough for the Hirogen diaspora to have spread throughout the entire Delta Quadrant at least, and possibly to every other quadrant as well. It’s not rationalization — it’s obvious common sense as long as you keep the numbers in mind.
So it shouldn’t be unrealistic to encounter offshoots of the same civilization all over the galaxy, any more than it would be unrealistic for, say, a French person to travel to Japan and find that other French people live there. What’s unrealistic is Trek’s assumption that it wouldn’t usually happen, that every species should be expected to remain eternally limited to no more than a year’s travel time from its planet of origin. For a young civilization, one around the Federation’s age, sure, but realistically, the vast majority of civilizations in the galaxy should be immensely older than the Federation.
“Interstellar space is so huge that these types of coincidences should never happen. It should be akin to something like pinpointing a specific grain of sand somewhere on this planet which for all intents and purposes is impossible.”
That would be a valid point if you’re talking about the Klingons or Talaxians or Malon, but it makes no sense for the Hirogen. By their very nature, as a nomadic culture more than a thousand years old, the Hirogen are just the type of civilization that could be found all over the quadrant. I’m sure that was exactly the intent behind their creation — to set up an antagonist that, unlike the Kazon or Vidiians, you would plausibly expect Voyager to keep running into year after year.
@21/cap: “Yes, races and cultures spread out, but they develop their own individual identity once they do so. They don’t stay as one homogenous mass who all know each other’s addresses and phone numbers.”
Normally, yes. But up until a few years ago, the Hirogen had a galaxywide subspace comms network that they’d been using regularly for at least a thousand years. That would have facilitated the sharing of information and culture across the entire diaspora.
Really appreciate your Devil’s Advocate stance on the Hirogen topic, Christopher. And I mostly agree with you. But the fact that these Hirogen knew Janeway and have the holodeck technology, in only 3 years after it was given to a different set of Hirogen 30,000 LYs away, is just too big of a stretch. In 3 years time, that info somehow travels 30,000 LYs AND the Hirogen are able to construct the holodeck technology past even what Voyager uses.
@23/Austin: “Devil’s Advocate?” What are you talking about? That phrase means arguing a contrary position you don’t necessarily believe as a rhetorical device to ensure that all sides of a debate are considered, or to refute it in order to reinforce the point you actually want to make. I’m doing neither of those things. I absolutely do believe this; in fact, I’m astonished that it isn’t self-evident to everyone. As I said, it seems probable that the Hirogen were created specifically to be the kind of species that would credibly be encountered again and again across the galaxy — ancient, nomadic, territorial like pack hunters, and possessing a comm network that stretches nearly to Federation space. It’s literally built into the concept of the Hirogen that they are anything but a local power, that they would be found in small, widely scattered bands all over the quadrant rather than clumped in just one region. That’s not devil’s advocacy, it’s straightforward reasoning from the facts.
“In 3 years time, that info somehow travels 30,000 LYs”
“Somehow?” It’s called subspace radio! With powerful enough subspace transmitters, you can communicate instantly across hundreds, even thousands of light years. Let’s say that in those 30,000 ly, there are 50 local Hirogen communities an average of 600 light years apart. Communicating 600 light years could be done pretty much instantaneously. If it took each community, say, a week to process the information and get around to sharing it with the neighbors, it would take only a year for the info to propagate that distance.
“AND the Hirogen are able to construct the holodeck technology past even what Voyager uses.”
Why not? Don’t mistake the Hirogen for the Kazon. Just because they’re hunters doesn’t make them primitive or stupid. As I said, “The Killing Game” established that their society has not changed for over a thousand years. That means they were warp-capable no later than the 14th century, 700 years before Zefram Cochrane, and probably much, much sooner (since an early spacegoing civilization would surely undergo extensive change due to the novelty of interstellar contact, and might take centuries or longer to reach a point of unchanging stability). The reason they didn’t have holodecks is because they weren’t interested in developing them, not that they weren’t intelligent or advanced enough.
I think the idea that the Hirogen are so spread out (and spread out in exactly the straight line Voyager is taking home) would have been easier to swallow if Voyager hadn’t been so consistently bad about continuing to run into races long after they should have (like the Kazon). Sure, maybe getting to phone call each other regularly kept the Hirogen largely homogenous (although you need only look at the former British Empire to see how quickly people separated by geography form their own distinct cultures that would be obvious to an outside observer), but after so many episodes of handwaving away why our fearless crew runs into the same people and stuff all the time, it seems like laziness and lack of worldbuilding instead of some brilliant comment on the nature of nomadic space-faring people. Casting the same actor to do the Nick Locarno/ Tom Paris thing with really doesn’t help, either.
@24 – Huh. I always thought you took these stances as a way to offer plausible, in-world reasons for something that was probably lazy/rushed/bad writing. Not that you actually believed them. My apologies.
@22/Christopher: Even if the holotechnology information is spread out through subspace across thousands of light years to other Hirogen, presumably it still takes time for them to properly learn the technology, where it came from, recreate it from scratch on their end, and figure out what it can do – bugs and glitches and all.
I do find it a bit of a stretch to assume all of this can happen in less than three years, especially given it’s a society of hunters, where proper engineers are few and far between. The Hirogen on the region where The Killing Game took place could certainly be operating holotech on that level. But the ones who hunt their prey 30K light years away, who have had way less time to learn this technology? Still a stretch.
I finished rewatching this last night. My biggest reaction to it was, Who cares? There wasn’t enough story to justify a two-hour episode. Unlike “The Killing Game” and “Dark Frontier,” this episode lacked the scope that a Special! Two-Hour! Event! requires. “Dark Frontier” had plenty of problems, but you can’t say that they didn’t aim big. It had the Borg, the unicomplex, the Queen, we saw a planet (or ship, I can’t remember) be assimilated. This? Was ladened with excessive technobabble, gratuitous and uninteresting action scenes of ships firing on each other, random sparkly “explosions” on the bridge, uninteresting characters, and the usual Voyager tropes: Aliens fire on Voyager; Janeway waits until the shields fall below 50% to return fire, the Doctor’s program is once again stolen, Seven accompanies the away team for no compelling reason, an alien hacks into the ship’s comm system… using Neelix’ stove? Bland, hoary Hirogens who feel like warmed-over Klingons. I didn’t like seeing Bajorans or Cardassians in a Voyager episode, because, damn it, that’s DS9’s bailiwick and it felt like watching a little kid trying on her big sister’s make-up with less than stellar results. We learn that Janeway has been trading replicators, when, for two years, we listened to Janeway say that she would rather destroy Voyager than allow the Kazon access to replicator technology. Encountering these Hirogen, with Voyager’s holotechnology, 30,000 light years from where they’d last encountered the Hirogen, seemed implausible. Torres contained a warp core breach, with a force field? We’re told that New Bajor is a class-Y planet, but the Hirogen are able to survive on the surface. And on and on.
@28 I forgot this was the episode where Janeway suddenly reveals she’s been giving away replicators! What a weird turn, and on such a throw away line!
@25/wildfyre: “and spread out in exactly the straight line Voyager is taking home”
Of course not. The relatively straight line of the Pennsylvania Turnpike passes through a number of towns, but that doesn’t mean every town in Pennsylvania is on that line — it just means there are towns throughout Pennsylvania, so that any given straight line will naturally pass by a number of them. Any other straight line through the state would intersect a number of towns as well. We’re seeing a small cross-section of something much larger.
“would have been easier to swallow if Voyager hadn’t been so consistently bad about continuing to run into races long after they should have (like the Kazon).”
But that’s just it. They learned from their mistakes with the Kazon and Vidiians, so they made a point of designing the Hirogen in such a way that it would make sense to keep running into them — making them nomadic like the Kazon, but much older and more advanced so they’d credibly have had time to spread much further, and explicitly established as using a communications network that spans most of the Delta and Beta Quadrants, to seed the possibility right up front that they could be found anywhere within that range.
Indeed, I’ve always felt that, given how widespread and nomadic the Hirogen are, they could quite plausibly turn up in Federation space, given how close their comm network came to it. There is nothing implausible about nomads being widespread. That is part of what defines nomadism.
“it seems like laziness and lack of worldbuilding instead of some brilliant comment on the nature of nomadic space-faring people.”
I never said it was brilliant, just that it was built into the concept of the Hirogen literally from their debut.
@26/Austin: “I always thought you took these stances as a way to offer plausible, in-world reasons for something that was probably lazy/rushed/bad writing. Not that you actually believed them. My apologies.”
What do you mean, “these stances?” Each case is individual, so blanket generalizations are never good reasoning. Yes, there are other cases where the writing was sloppy and you have to rationalize them after the fact, but this is not one of them. As I keep saying, the Hirogen were built from the start to be more plausible as long-term recurring foes than other species.
@27/Eduardo: “But the ones who hunt their prey 30K light years away, who have had way less time to learn this technology? Still a stretch.”
I’m really not convinced there would be any such difference. I was being deliberately conservative with my “one week between transmissions” estimate to show that it could be done even with conservative assumptions. (So in that respect I actually was playing devil’s advocate.) How long does it take us to transmit a meme around the entire planet? Literally seconds. Even without the communications network, given what we know about the speed and range of subspace radio, it might only take a matter of weeks at most for the information to spread throughout all Hirogen territory.
And as I’ve said before, I’m willing to cut season 7 some slack for picking up story points years later than they realistically should have been, because that’s not season 7’s fault, it’s the fault of seasons 5 and 6 for refusing to pick up on them earlier. It would be unfair to the season 7 staff to say they were wrong to do this story just because their predecessors dropped the ball. Better late than never.
A very minor nitpick, but the Romulan hologram is wearing the newer style uniform that debuted at some point on Deep Space Nine. When the Romulans appeared on DS9’s “Visionary,” they were still wearing the older style uniforms (with the Dynasty-esque shoulder pads). As Voyager had already been lost in the Delta Quadrant at this point, their computer records of the Romulans should have still featured the older uniforms.
@31/bgsu: Actually, no. The EMH encountered the Romulans of the Alpha Quadrant with their updated uniform style in Season 4’s “Message in a Bottle.” When he returned to Voyager he no doubt updated the ship’s computer library with all of the information he acquired on his quadrant-spanning adventure. That episode was before “The Killing Game” 2-parter in which Janeway gave the Hirogen holodeck technology which would already have the updated look of the Romulan Empire officer uniform in its programming.
It’s kinda weird that they updated the Romulan uniforms but not the Starfleet ones. You’d think Admiral Paris could send the replicator pattern to them in one of his letters. If Voyager has the capability of replicating a new shuttle every other week, getting everyone the new uniform shouldn’t be a problem.
@33/wildfyre: We’ve seen that it’s not unheard of for two or more uniform designs to be in use simultaneously. The TOS pilot-style uniforms were occasionally glimpsed on various characters in TOS, such as the Antares crew in “Charlie X” and the odd crowd-scene extra in “Wolf in the Fold” and “The Trouble with Tribbles.” So those uniforms remained in use on some ships after the Enterprise updated its uniforms. Similarly, we saw Pike’s Enterprise and Discovery having different uniforms at the same time, and just last week we saw Tom Paris wearing a First Contact uniform alongside Cerritos crew wearing their different uniform style. So from TOS to the present, there’s evidence that the uniforms aren’t fleetwide but can differ from branch to branch or ship to ship. Which means there could be a reason for Voyager keeping the old uniform style aside from just being out of touch.
When I was in the US Army in the mid-80’s the old greens were still being worn by some people while the rest of us were in camo. It took something like a decade for the full changeover to occur. The blue dress uniform hasn’t changed in decades, but the Class A/B uniform (for offices or coat and tie environments) changes every couple of decades.
@35 I mean, I get it in real armies, because you can bet it took me a while to go from ACUs to OCPs because I didn’t want to spend the time and effort (and money) going and getting whole new uniforms, getting new nametapes, boots, etc. But in Trek you can just walk up to the replicator and say “I need a new uniform” and get one. I would have been in OCPs the next day if it was that easy. I mean- I am assuming the real reason is that UPN didn’t want to shell out for a bunch of new uniforms so late in the run, but in-universe I can’t really think of a reason why. They were wearing the standard uniform when they left, so it isn’t like Voyager got uniforms specific to them.
@36/wildfyre: As I said, though, we’ve seen enough examples from the Antares to the Cerritos to know that delayed updating is not the only reason for having more than one uniform style in simultaneous use. They could reflect different duty assignments, like how the Antares was meant to be a merchant marine ship and the Cerritos is a “second contact” ship meant for more small-scale, routine missions than the top-of-the-line ships get assigned. Maybe, since Voyager was believed lost, it was taken out of the roster for updated ship and fleet assignments, and so it’s just sort of an unassigned free-agent ship now, and thus it doesn’t meet the parameters that would warrant assigning it the updated uniforms that the Enterprise and DS9 got.
@33/34. We also saw Enterprise D crew members going back and forth between the TNG style uniforms and the Deep Space Nine style uniforms in Star Trek Generations.
Yeah I liked this one it was good to see the Doctor front and centre of an episode without any real comedy scenes it gives Robert Picardo a chance to show his range, I think it could have had an even greater impact if it had come later in the final season where you think there might actually be the possibility that the The Doctor might leave voyager and be with his own kind, it would actually make sense for the character and the storyline Running through this episode….in the end of course they do that with Neelix later in the season in an episode and story which certainly does not make sense at any level.
I agree. Iden’s turn to messianic was a narrative dodge, and it’s disappointing and unconvincing. I like my glory-motivated prophets as much as the next guy (maybe more so), but it’s too avoidant.
Otherwise it’s a fine episode with some exciting space combat and compelling questions. Probably my favorite part is the mining robots. Because right before they were transported over I was thinking how silly it would be to create a sentient manual laborer. Indeed it would be.
The thing with the punishment not being equitable is funny in a different way. It’s almost like Janeaway’s standard is if you do something bad and it shows you’ve achieved becominging more human it’s fine, but if you do something bad to show that you’re just human, you get punished.