“Human Error”
Written by André Bormanis & Kenneth Biller & Brannon Braga
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 7, Episode 18
Production episode 264
Original air date: March 7, 2001
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. We open with Seven playing the piano. Her hair is down, and her Borg implants are gone. She then goes to a baby shower for Torres, makes a toast and also has a conversation with Janeway about her future. She wants to be issued a uniform and also quarters since she no longer needs to regenerate.
Seven is then summoned to astrometrics, where we discover that this is all a holodeck scenario. When she ends the program, her implants are all back in place, and she puts her hair back up as she leaves. She’s doing holodeck scenarios to help with her social skills, but also to experiment with what life might be like if she was fully human and no longer dependent on Borg tech to survive.
Paris, Tuvok, and Janeway meet Seven in astrometrics. Voyager picked up some massive energy discharges about six light-years ahead. Seven is unable to determine the source. Janeway doesn’t think it’s worth altering the course, but they should keep an eye on it. Once business is done, Janeway confirms that the baby shower is still on and Paris confirms that Torres has no idea it’s coming. Both Seven and Tuvok express discomfort with attending.
Seven returns to the holodeck, where she is in her new quarters—which are quite sparse. A holographic Neelix gives her decorating tips, while a holographic Chakotay shows up with a dream catcher as a housewarming gift, and they also make a date for dinner—once she gets a replicator. And furniture.
The EMH is examining Seven, and also singing lullabies. There’s a flaw in one of her implants, which controls her arm movement. However, Seven puts off the procedure to repair it, as she has “research” to do. The EMH’s queries about the research are met with a snide request not to stick his nose in Seven’s personal life, to which the doctor’s quiet reply is that he didn’t realize that she had one.
The ship is impacted by a shockwave from more energy discharges, this intense enough to knock out Voyager’s warp field. They soon determine that the energy discharges are subspace warheads that were launched toward a probe. This is an ongoing thing, and the radiation is intense enough that Voyager can’t form a warp field.
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Seven works to fine-tune the sensors so they’ll get extra warning when another shockwave approaches. Icheb relieves her two hours early, saying that the EMH instructed him to do so in order for her to spend more time regenerating, which she needs. Seven allows Icheb to relieve her, but instead of regenerating, she goes to engineering and gives Torres a belated baby-shower gift, along with an apology for missing the shower itself. It’s a pair of booties that will protect the baby’s feet from very low temperatures. Seven also attempts small talk, asking Torres about hair care.
Seven returns to the holodeck and has her holographic date with Chakotay (while wearing a very nice red dress). The date goes extremely well, and when they’re having what appears to be a post-coital snooze on the couch, Seven dreams about the date.
Then the real Chakotay summons her to astrometrics. Icheb has picked up a warning beacon: Apparently this is a munitions range, and they shouldn’t be in the area. Oops. Chakotay also upbraids Seven for being late for her shift.
Seven relieves Icheb, then works for maybe half a second before returning to the holodeck. She plays the piano for holo-Chakotay, but he criticizes her for not having passion. He turns off the metronome she’s using to keep the beat in the hopes of it inspiring her to show more oomph in her playing.
More warheads go off. Seven isn’t at her post, and hastily runs to astrometrics from the holodeck to belatedly get her fine-tuned sensors online. After the crisis has passed, Janeway summons Seven to her ready room. Seven lies and says that the 49 hours she’s spent on the holodeck over the last six days were to test a new gravimetric array. Janeway offers to help her out with it once they’re past the munitions range.
Seven apologizes to Icheb for being negligent, and then goes back to the holodeck to break up with holo-Chakotay. She says it’s because it’s interfering with her work, and Chakotay offers to talk to Janeway about lightening her load because he doesn’t know he’s a hologram. The argument continues, then Seven cries out in pain and manages to call for a medical emergency before falling unconscious. The EMH transfers his program to the holodeck, and asks Chakotay what happened—not realizing he’s a hologram. Once the EMH figures out what’s happening, he ends the program and has Seven brought to sickbay.
Her cortical node was destabilizing. The EMH has managed to fix it. Seven finally admits the truth: She’s been trying to re-create the joy and happiness she felt in Unimatrix Zero. The EMH is thrilled, but Seven isn’t—it’s interfering with her duties, and, apparently, her cortical node. There’s a failsafe in the node that triggers a shutdown if a drone gets too emotional. The EMH offers to work to get rid of that function, but Seven declines.
They finally get the warp drive up and running, but the warp field attracts one of the warheads. Tuvok’s attempt to stop it fails, but Seven comes up with a way to beam out the detonator, which she does at the last possible second, thus saving the ship.
Later, Chakotay catches up to Seven in a corridor, asking if she’s attending Neelix’s cooking class—even Tuvok is going. But Seven declines, saying she’s no longer interested in cooking. Chakotay says she should try to be more social with the crew.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Hey, look, we get shockwaves in space! Which are, like, totally impossible since there’s nothing to propagate the shockwave in a vacuum!
There’s coffee in that nebula! Holo-Janeway has a serious conversation with Seven about her getting a uniform, her own quarters, and, for some reason, about the possibility of having a baby. Because that’s what women really want, am I right, guys?
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok bonds with Seven over their mutual discomfort with baby showers. It’s kinda cute.
Half and half. Torres has her baby shower, though we don’t see the actual shower, only the holographic one that Seven puts together. The gifts we see in Seven’s simulation include a logic puzzle from Tuvok and a Starfleet diaper from Kim.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is rather surprised to learn that Seven is doing stuff with social interactions that he didn’t know about, and later tries to convince her to keep doing what she’s been doing, to no avail.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Holo-Neelix gives Seven decorating advice. He’s particularly keen on her getting drapes, which he says should match the carpet. (Wah-hey?)
Resistance is futile. Seven’s gift to the Torres baby is actually practical as well as cute. The booties are, of course, shiny silver, because this is science fiction, and they must look like booties of the future!
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Seven chooses Chakotay to be her holographic blow-up doll because he has many admirable qualities, apparently.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. The holodeck has already proven able to make Torres into a pregnant woman, so I guess it makes sense that it can get rid of Seven’s Borg implants for the duration of the program…
Also Seven comes up with overwhelmingly generic and clichéd gifts for her holodeck scenarios: a logic puzzle from the guy who values logic; a diaper from the youngest guy in the bridge crew; and a dream catcher from the Indigenous dude. Sigh.
Do it. “You have an appealing coiffure. What is your grooming regimen?”
“You’re asking me what I do with my hair?”
“Yes.”
“Um, well, nothing too elaborate—sonic shower, a little engine grease.”
Seven making small talk and Torres taking the piss. (Unless she really does use engine grease. Which I suppose she might…)
Welcome aboard. The only guest is recurring regular Manu Intiraymi as Icheb.
Trivial matters: Seven experienced emotions and happiness in Unimatrix Zero in the appropriately titled “Unimatrix Zero” two-parter.
Icheb has been studying Earth history, and quotes both Sophocles and Titus Livius in the episode.
Music in this episode includes two pieces by Frédéric Chopin: Nocturne #1 in E Minor, Opus 72 (which Seven is playing in the teaser) and Barcarolle in F-sharp major, Opus 60 (which is playing during Seven’s date with holo-Chakotay). In addition, holo-Chakotay cites Robert Schumann’s “Of Foreign Countries and People” from Scenes of Childhood as his favorite piece of music.
Seven’s exploration of cooking was first seen in “The Void,” when she prepared a meal for several members of the crew.
Seven and Chakotay will later start up a relationship in the real world, as seen in “Endgame.”
Set a course for home. “I’ll bring the wine—and the furniture.” I had the hardest time focusing on this episode. Part of it is that the effectiveness of the opening—Seven playing the piano and making toasts and asking for a uniform and having no Borg implants anymore—is lost on this twenty-one-years-later rewatch because we know it’s not real. Then again, it was even more frustrating in 2001 to see this forward movement for the character, only to have it yanked out from under us when it’s revealed to be a holographic fake.
In the abstract, it’s a good idea to have Seven experimenting with social interactions and dating and attending parties and playing the piano. But then the ending screws it all up by having Seven’s cortical node knock her out. Yes, on this show where the reset button is routinely pushed to get everything back to the status quo no matter how unconvincing it is, they this time put an actual reset button in Seven’s head. And then they don’t let Seven accept the EMH’s offer to fix it.
So it all winds up for naught, and now Seven is back to being emotionally controlled and awkward and stuff. Sigh.
And none of it was particularly gripping. Throughout this entire rewatch, I found my attention wandering. I was in a permanent state of ungrippedness. Probably because I just knew watching this was going to be inconsequential, and the episode doubled down on that inconsequentiality.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s most recent fiction includes the thriller Animal (written with Dr. Munish K. Batra) about a serial killer who targets people who harm animals; All-the-Way House, part of the Systema Paradoxa series of books about cryptids, telling the secret origin of the Jersey Devil; “Unguarded,” a story about guardian angels in two different faiths in the anthology Devilish and Divine; and “In Earth and Sky and Sea Strange Things There Be,” a story of H. Rider Haggard’s She, in the charity anthology Turning the Tied.
I will say, the plot point with Seven’s cortical node does come back in the finale Endgame, so it does ultimately go somewhere. But for the purposes of this episode, I understand your point.
This episode at least has the distinction of being my very last invocation of SF Debris during the Rewatch:
Janeway: Everyone makes mistakes. I’ve even been known to make a few myself.
Chuck!Janeway: I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to use nicotine-spiked coffee or caffeine-spiked cigarettes, so I tried both at once. I’m not certain, but I think I could move through walls.
Anyway, not much else I can add to Keith’s thoughts.
Hmm, well I actually liked this one but maybe I just like most Seven episodes and Jeri Ryan’s performance as a struggling ex-B is always compelling to watch. This episode seemed like a logical extension of the previous “Someone to Watch Over Me” where Seven first explores dating. I just thought the jarring thing was that Seven was dating holo-Chakotay. I just don’t see it all and found it even more blech in “Endgame.” But of course, ya know, if Seven is gonna be dating it has to be a someone of the male gender in the main cast and Paris wouldn’t work, nor Tuvok, a Neelix pairing would be laughable, the Doctor’s love for Seven has to go on unrequited, and the writers are fine with not developing Kim, so I guess that means we’re stuck with Chakotay as the ideal man for Seven.
I wasn’t really bothered by the “reset button” at the end of this story because every episode doesn’t need to end with a happy ending and shows that this will be something that Seven will continue to struggle with. And besides, it is the easy kind of technological fix the writers could give Seven someday just as Data in Star Trek Generations finally decided he’s ready to give the ‘ol emotion chip a whirl.
The biggest thing I remember disliking about this episode was the Seven / Chakotay thing, for a multitude of reasons. There’s the creepiness of dating a hologram of someone that you work with every day, first of all.
Not only do they work together, there’s also the fact that Chakotay is kind-of-sort-of her commanding officer except not really because the showrunners never knew how to fit Seven into any kind of command structure? I don’t know, it’s not technically wrong, but feels a little icky. I can be open-minded about people getting up to weird stuff on the holodeck in theory but I don’t really want to see it.
There’s the fact that Chakotay’s character is just so bland while Seven was easily one of the highlights of the show, and teenage me was probably a bit jealous of the whole thing. Such is life, but Seven/Chakotay is not a ship that I’m on board with.
Seven in normal clothes (and that red dress) with her hair down, though? Sign me up for more of that instead of continued catsuit. Too bad it was all just a dream…
“Holo-Janeway has a serious conversation with Seven…for some reason, about the possibility of having a baby. Because that’s what women really want, am I right, guys?”
Keith, I always enjoy your re-watches, but I’m not entirely a fan of your attitude here. I agree that it’s a cliche to show women (always or inevitably) talking about motherhood. But it’s also a cliche to assume that, because women are successful in their careers, that must mean they have no interest in starting a family (or in showing interest in the life of someone who is planning to do so).
garreth: I’m usually all on board for Seven struggling with humanity, both here and on Picard, but it just didn’t fly for me here.
Alan: it wouldn’t have bothered me so much except the subject has so rarely come up, and it really should have. In fact, it hasn’t even been discussed much since “Elogium,” and that’s with a pregnant woman in the cast!!! Yet it’s one of the first things Seven and Janeway discuss when she’s more human. Bleah.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I always wondered why they didn’t give her quarters, regardless. I mean, maybe the alcove had to go in the cargo bay initially for space/ energy reasons, but you’d think after a couple years they could have given her some privacy (not to mention you’d think they’d want to use the cargo bay for…. cargo). Even if she had to sleep in the cargo bay alcove, she might still want a room for other stuff, like Data did. And why didn’t they ever offer her a uniform (other than that the producers were really committed to keeping Jeri Ryan in the catsuit)? Every random terrorist got one, why not Seven? She was the acting head of a department on the ship, you’d think they would have at least given her the option. And yea, her catsuit was meant to be at least somewhat medicinal, but it isn’t like she couldn’t have worn a uniform over it. Heck, even Neelix apparently asked for and was given one in the “Year of Hell” timeline, so it isn’t like the barrier for entry is that high out in the Delta Quadrant.
The biggest reason I started to dislike Voyager was because it seemed like it became “The Seven Of Nine Show.” Chakotay is supposed to be the XO of the ship and never really got anything to do, which is a huge departure from Riker and Kira before him, so what do they do to give him more screentime? Pair him up with the new de facto main character of the show. I get that they wanted to write more “what does it mean to be Human” stories with a female Data in skin tight Lycra, but the majority of the cast and the very premise of the show got lost in her wake. Then again, half of the original premise was abandoned almost immediately anyway, so I guess it was inevitable.
But KRAD got me wondering, what kind of engine grease would you use on the warp core? Some kind of slippery subatomic particles?
@8
I agree the writers could’ve done more interesting things with Chakotay, but it’s not like there were no episodes centered around him. There were quite a few, really.
@8,9: Yeah, there were a number of episodes centered on Chakotay over the seven seasons but a lot of them were duds, didn’t take his character in any interesting directions, and a bunch of them featured offensive, idiotic indigenous people tropes that were just stereotypes and didn’t dig beneath the surface. Just being the head of the Maquis, he should have been a more dynamic character constantly challenging and butting heads with Janeway with a simmering sexual tension between the two. I don’t blame Beltran for getting bored of the work and publicly lambasting the show. And I thought the Chakotay/Seven relationship out of nowhere was ill-conceived. I will forever be a Chakot-way shipper (or is that Jane-otay?).
Yeah, the only Chakotay episodes that really stick in my mind as being worth a second look are the one where he’s brainwashed into being a soldier and the one with dinosaurs, because… hey… dinosaurs! I like dinosaurs.
Another one where I don’t really have anything to add. I don’t quite remember how I reacted to it, although I think I found the idea of the cortical node suppressing Seven’s emotions to be problematical from a continuity standpoint. There have been plenty of times over the past few seasons where Seven has had strong emotional reactions to things without any mention of this.
@8/JasonD: “The biggest reason I started to dislike Voyager was because it seemed like it became “The Seven Of Nine Show.””
As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, I once made a list of which characters got focus episodes in seasons 4-7 (as part of an article for Star Trek Magazine), and I found that Janeway was always the most heavily featured character in those seasons, with Seven in a close second place overall and the Doctor third, although in season 7 the Doctor actually had slightly more focus episodes than Seven did, taking second place away from her. Seven was the primary focus in no more than a third of the episodes she appeared in.
So no, it wasn’t the Seven show. It was the Janeway-Seven-Doctor show, much like TOS became the Kirk-Spock-McCoy show and the TNG movies became the Picard-Data-Worf show.
@10/garreth: The causality goes both ways, I think; Beltran not only got bored with the show, he got vocally bored and gave up trying, so the producers gave him less to do.
I seem to recall reading an interview with Brannon Braga where that he had intended Seven of Nine to be a much more tragic character who would find herself no longer a Borg but unable to ever really return to humanity either, and that she was intended to sacrifice herself in the finale, knowing that there’d be no place for her on Earth. I think that this episode was made to set that up.
@13: I can’t imagine Braga (who was actually dating Jeri Ryan at the time), Berman, UPN, Paramount, etc. ever seriously considering killing off Seven of Nine who was like Voyager’s golden goose, even if the series was coming to an end.
I think that there are a few problems with Chakotay, the first being that he was badly mishandled from pretty much the beginning. In principle, his character should have been interesting: an essentially peaceful, spiritual man who had nevertheless betrayed Starfleet to become a terrorist. That would have been an interesting duality to examine, but unfortunately they spent the first few seasons with him focusing largely on pseudo-Native American mysticism; and then not even that later on. Secondly, frankly, I don’t know how good of an actor Robert Beltran was. I mean, he claims he was phoning it in on later seasons, but his acting…doesn’t seem appreciably different from when he was apparently giving it his all. Part of that, again, is probably just the way that Chakotay was written, but honestly the only episode in which I can recall Beltran distinguishing himself was “Nemesis” in season 4.
The problem with Chakotay, and the rest of the Maquis, is that when Voyager debuted we already had a great ongoing, spiritual, good-hearted, ex-terrorist character with Kira Nerys. She filled that spot in Star Trek quite well, and these poor schmucks on Voyager always came across to me as reheated leftovers from DS9 they didn’t quite know what to do with.
It’s a great concept having two opposing crews forced to survive on the same ship far from home, but why not make the other non-Starfleet crew… alien? You know, like alien to Starfleet and alien to the audience. Instead, they chose to boldly cover ground we’d already recently seen, and were seeing at the same time for a while.
When we get to the finale, I’ll be able to point out further reason for my view in Voyager becoming the Seven Show, but I don’t want to go into spoiler territory here.
@10: Points for Chakot-way, definitely flows well as the name of a ‘ship on an ship. Although I can see why they would probably want to avoid “Moonlighting in Space” sometimes it just works.
@16/ wilco: That’s an interesting point actually; I’d love to see an alternate-universe version of Voyager where they get stuck with a crew of Romulans or something.
@16,18: I always thought being stuck with a handful of Cardassians aboard would have been great as an ongoing story arc whether it was just a Starfleet crew or a mixed Starfleet/Maquis crew that had to deal with the unwelcome guests.
@18
I agree, if not a new alien culture, Romulans would’ve been a good pick. Much to uncover there.
I found it particularly funny that Tuvok’s baby toy was on a level Paris could enjoy playing with.
The story seems to be part of an arc to me. Started in Unimatrix zero, and despite her deciding not to undergo the procedure here, its a choice she reverses later on.
It’s nice that they weighed in some on what a big loss unimatrix zero was emotionally. They presented it in those episodes like “wow what a great idea! Destroy the place and you beat the borg queen!” It was going to get destroyed anyway since the Borg were closing in on it, but let’s dwell on what a catastrophic loss that is for a bit?
For what its worth I found Beltran’s acting quite convincing, as a hologram completely committed to the relationship and then as a whole separate person.
“You have an intriguing facial structure.”
Seven playing the piano is one of the strangest pre-credits in the franchise’s history: It’s not even as though it’s that out of character! Presumably we’re meant to be wondering what happened to her Borg implants, but we’ve been here before in “Relativity”. We then get the old “The audience don’t know this is the holodeck” bluff, although it doesn’t last for long: When the action cuts to the bridge, television grammar suggests this is going on at the same time, although we don’t know for sure until it cuts back to Seven on the holodeck.
So far, so familiar: We’ve had at least two episodes of Lieutenant Barclay getting lost in fantasy to the detriment of real life, one of which was just last season. Voyager stumbling into a weapons testing range (and typically deciding to just plough ahead instead of reversing course and finding another way) is basically just a plot device for something to happen that needs Seven’s attention while she’s too busy with her holodeck simulations to be committed to her job, and for her to pull herself together just in time to save the day.
Seven seems more comfortable with her carefully-controlled, consequence-free social interaction than venturing out into the real world: She’s a hit at the simulated baby shower, but can’t bring herself to attend the real one. The usual pattern is for her to realise she needs to get out and meet real people…and this is where the episode finally subverts expectations, as Seven learns forming strong emotional connections with others is actually harmful to her. It’s at least two seasons too late, but the show’s finally come up with a plot reason for Seven not having any lasting character development! Shame it’s a bit of a waste with less than half a season to go, and “Endgame” will undo it anyway.
Whilst she was never going to lose the Borg implants, it’s a shame Seven never requested a uniform in reality instead of continuing to wear skin-tight catsuits because reasons. (It’s also a shame in some ways that she only wears it for one scene before switching to a slinky red dress.) Seven apparently has sex with holo-Chakotay, although they’re fully clothed when they wake up. (Seriously, is every woman in the main cast secretly in love with him?) The Doctor’s reaction to Seven’s choice of romantic partner is laden with subtext (see “Someone to Watch Over Me”).
Gotta agree about the bait-and-switch opening salvo: knowing how the Reset Button works, even the FIRST watch was frustrating.
@krad Don’t think the Red Dwarf riff went unnoticed. If TPTB gave you the green light, would you consider a re(d)watch?
I’d assumed that the reason Seven was never issued a Starfleet uniform was the same reason she never officially got promoted above Harry Kim- she wasn’t ever actually enlisted into Starfleet, instead maintaining a slightly messy position as a sort of civilian expert.
Which of course still doesn’t explain why she stays in the catsuits.
@24/benjamin: The problem is that they did give uniforms to all the Maquis crew, even the ones who’d never been in Starfleet. So it’s contradictory to give uniforms to them but not to Seven.
I’ve said this before. There’s a certain Seven trend throughout season 7, whether it’s intentional or not. There’s this ongoing feeling that Seven isn’t really meant to achieve a happy ending. That she can’t escape her Borg past, and that she’ll never truly fit in with mankind. The fact that Picard corroborates this nearly two decades later only heightens this almost tragic arc. It feels very anti-Trek in a lot of ways, with no room for hope or optimism, none of the humanism we usually see with the outsider characters.
I’d argue it’s intentional, given what we’ll see in Endgame, and what motivates Admiral Janeway to change the past.
Meanwhile, the episode itself seems to follow many of the same beats we’ve previously seen on Biller’s own Extreme Risk. Seven keeps indulging on destructive behavior just like Torres, using the events of Unimatrix Zero as the springboard (just like Risk used the Maquis demise on DS9’s Blaze of Glory). I’m guessing Braga’s busy schedule with Enterprise had something to do with this rather predictable narrative choice.
Not Seven’s best episode. And little to no chemistry with “Chakotay” (it certainly doesn’t help that the show never had that many Seven/Chakotay scenes in prior seasons to begin with; nothing to build upon, which is why the whole thing feels thrown together).
@krad: Wasn’t space shockwave a central plot point on Generations? Blowing up the Amargosa and Veridian stars certainly caused them.
@25- Christopher: Yes, but they also gave the Maquis ranks, and clear places in the command hierarchy. Whether that sort of field commission would hold up one they reached the Alpha Quadrant, should any of the Maquis decide to pursue a continuing career in Starfleet is another question, but at least as far as their time on Voyager, they were clearly being folded into the Starfleet paradigm in a way that Seven wasn’t- nor, as I recall was Kes, who I’m pretty sure we only saw in uniform in alternate timelines. (Neelix, to make matters more complicated, wears a uniform… sometimes, but doesn’t seem to have a rank).
Now, I don’t think we fundamentally disagree here- Seven is treated differently than the Maquis crew, and the reasoning and implications of that I don’t think are ever really fully discussed. I just think that the uniform is only one part, and, if the most visible, still not necessarily the most important part of that.
@26/Eduardo: Yes, Trek is full of “shock waves” in space, as is a lot of other sci-fi, but Keith’s point is that it shouldn’t happen, that the very idea is nonsense, for the exact same reason that sound in space would be nonsense. A shock wave is a propagating disturbance in a medium, so the idea of a shock wave in vacuum — the absence of a medium — is a contradiction in terms.
Well, technically, space is not a perfect vacuum, so there can be shock waves in the interstellar medium. But that medium is so tenuous and diffuse that they’d have no noticeable effect on the scale of a starship. And of course, they certainly wouldn’t propagate faster than light as seen in The Undiscovered Country and Generations. They’d propagate at the speed of sound in the interstellar medium, which would be a very low speed for something so diffuse.
I mean, she became the head of the astrometrics department, appears to have Starfleet people who answer to her (as seen in “Good Shepard”), and her presence is requested in senior staff meetings. That seems to me like she is pretty well integrated into the Starfleet operations in ways that Neelix and Kes weren’t (Neelix only wears a uniform in alternate timelines, as far as I can remember, and has no rank in “our” timeline). I can’t really think of any compellingly good reason why she shouldn’t get offered a uniform and a field commission, and the show can’t really seem to, either.
@29/wildfyre: “I can’t really think of any compellingly good reason why she shouldn’t get offered a uniform and a field commission, and the show can’t really seem to, either.”
Maybe she was offered them and turned them down. Once Seven confronted her trauma at being assimilated into the Borg and embraced her individuality, maybe the idea of being “assimilated” into a different conformist hierarchy was distasteful to her.
Maybe Borg ships were like all hot and humid and such and Seven, feeling rather cold aboard Voyager, enjoyed the snug, warming feel of her skin-tight catsuits.
It’s been some time since I watched it, but didn’t the disgraced remaining members of the Equinox crew still have their uniforms at the end of that episode? And didn’t the arrogant engineer who was with the Traveller also have some variation of the uniform, minus the rank? Seems like if those folks could wear the threads, Seven could have also.
@30 Well, sure, any number of things could have happened off screen, my complaint is that I would like to see these conversations actually happen, instead of just having to assume that they figured it out over a commercial break. If it was just Seven’s uniform that would be one thing, but Voyager has a tendency to solve all kinds of problems without us ever seeing them, and it takes away from the realism and the drama for me, not to mention that I think it is weak storytelling. So I guess I should have said “I can’t really think of any compellingly good reason why she shouldn’t get offered a uniform on screen.” She clearly wants one now, so it would have been nice to actually get to see that change.
@33/wildfyre: All good points.
I’ll be honest — while I objectively understood how little sense the catsuit made, I still really loved the way she looked in it. So I didn’t worry about it much.
Holy temporal anomaly. Hi, I’m joining you all from what I thought was the future!
I’m a longtime TNG fan who never saw DS9 or Voyager but whimsically started a Voyager binge a few months ago – and I googled up these rewatches and discussions for company, but somehow thought they were comments from years ago. Then in Aug. 2021 they said VOY is leaving Netflix, so I accelerate my watching but somehow still don’t notice y’all are nearly in real time with me until… today. Sept 29. I watch “Endgame” … had *reactions* to it… googled to find this rewatch… only to find y’all have NOT yet rewatched it and I am coming to you from slightly in the future!
So hello. :) tl;dr I just watched most of VOY in the past couple months and have been enjoying y’all’s opinions/comments (which i sort of thought were 10 yrs old because timestamps are hard, apparently *thwacks head*). I’ve gone from literally angry at how dumb some of these episodes are to openly weeping at “The Yankees. In six games.” Now I find y’all are all alive and watching in real time with me, so… Hi! I’m new here! Can’t wait to see what you think of the finale!
It’s too bad the producers didn’t have a mental light bulb moment when Jeri Ryan wore a Starfleet uniform in “Relativity” and have her wear that from then as on she looked great and professional in that. It would have mirrored the situation on TNG when Troi was ordered to wear a regulation uniform by Capt. Jellico and the producers decided she looked good in one and kept her that way from then on.
But I suppose UPN wanted to maintain their resident sex symbol by keeping her in the catsuit and this would carry on with T’Pol and her wardrobe of catsuits on Enterprise.
#37 re:T’Pol, I remember being especially disappointed by that, because I always thought the non-Starfleet Vulcans had really cool, distinct costumes, and I was curious how that would transfer over to a more practical outfit better suited to working on a ship like Enterprise, and then it was…. literally just the same kind of catsuit we’d seen before on Troi and Seven. I remember thinking it was such a let down and missed opportunity.
@12 It makes sense for the captain of a star trek show to get more focus than the other characters. They’re the captain for pete’s sake. This was even lampooned in Galaxy quest, about how irritating it was that Jason Nesmith had more star power than the other actors got, but it is what it is.
Even if Seven had a seemingly equitable number of episodes when dedicated to be the main storyline, she had disproportionate presence as a B character in the others, to the point they would shoehorn her in at times when it made no sense. Like Seven lecturing B’elanna on how to put effort into relationships to get closer to Paris in Drive. Really? Of all the cast of characters to provide this perspective, they go with Seven? It’s obviously just an excuse to put her on screen, and its not a very good one, its just weird. Or in Nightingale where she’s suddenly an expert on letting people do their jobs, even though this goes against basically every feature of her personality.
@39/karey: “It makes sense for the captain of a star trek show to get more focus than the other characters. They’re the captain for pete’s sake.”
Tell that to NBC in the sixties. Since Spock was the huge breakout character, with Nimoy creating a near-Beatlemania-level frenzy in female viewers and getting more fan mail than the rest of the cast put together, NBC put a lot of pressure on Roddenberry to make Spock the star of the show, and Roddenberry had to fight to keep Kirk central.
Indeed, there are many cases in TV history of a supporting character becoming a breakout star and marginalizing the nominal lead — Dr. Smith on Lost in Space, Fonzie on Happy Days, Avon on Blake’s 7, Urkel on Family Matters, etc. Sometimes they even take over the show completely when the original lead goes away (as with Fonzie and Avon, or in a more extreme case, John Steed in The Avengers, who pushed out the original lead after just one season). There’s no law that says the lead character has to stay the lead character. So it was by no means automatic that Janeway would remain the most prominent character. The producers chose to maintain that balance.
I’ve always found it a sexist double standard that people are less forgiving of Seven’s centrality than they are of Spock’s, when the two situations are essentially identical — a supporting character becoming a breakout hit with audiences and a major sex symbol and thus ending up about equal in prominence with the series lead/captain, with the doctor becoming the third most important part of the ensemble and the rest of the cast being secondary. Why is it okay for Spock yet unforgivable for Seven? That’s just not fair.
So either the show did turn into the Seven show and that’s ok, or her show presence was actually proportional and the seeming extra focus on her was an illusion. Can’t be both ways.
@41/karey: That’s a false dichotomy between two straw men. It did not turn into “the Seven show”; it focused on Janeway, Seven, and the Doctor in that order (though the Doctor actually had slightly more focus episodes than Seven in season 7), just as TOS focused on Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. There was an increased focus on her, but it is incorrect to say she became the exclusive focus. You say “Can’t be both ways,” but that’s misdefining the question as a black-and-white binary. In most things in life, the real truth is found somewhere in the middle ground between the extremes.
It is natural that the breakout character in a show would get a lot of focus; it happened with Spock, and it’s happened with many other TV characters without provoking the kind of outrage that’s directed at Seven. It arguably happened with Worf, a character who started out as an afterthought not even included in the series bible, but who ended up becoming so central that he even outlived the series and got added to another series. It happened to an extent with Philippa Georgiou, who was brought back from the dead after a fashion to give the actress more to do and has theoretically earned a spinoff as well.
I actually remember this episode, unlike most this season, mostly for how creepy it seemed for Seven to use Chakotay like that in the holodeck (shades of Barclay or LaForge), but she did look great in uniform.
One of the problems that I have with this one (besides the unremarked upon skeeviness of secretly shtupping a hologram of one of your colleagues) is the fact that human!Seven doesn’t really come across as being Seven’s “authentic self,” so much as an attempt to mask the elements of her personality that the rest of the crew find offputting. Still, I think that there’s a pretty interesting bridge that can be drawn between this episode and her character arc on Picard, though I will need to put some more thought into it.
I actually found this episode really… hypnotic. And no, not for the reason you may be thinking.* It’s a really intriguing exploration of someone trying out emotions and coming to see their own limitations in experiencing them. Maybe I liked it because I can have trouble with the idea of accepting happiness, and I can have a tendency to self sabotage or be self-limiting. So that’s why the re-set button didn’t bother me. It’s a choice Seven makes because the alternative, accepting emotions is way too frightening. And her choice is ultimately a painful one.
And overall, I just enjoyed how it moved in and out of reality and dreams. The scene with real Chakotay paging Seven when she’s with holo-Chakotay is a fascinating juxtaposition.
I find a curious double standard in the rewatch tho. If it had been a male crew member (a las Barkley) doing the same thing with a female member of the crew, he’d be called out for being creepy. There’s really not much difference.
Anyway, I quite liked this one for my own emotional reasons.
[*] OK, that red dress was
Oh, and the hair conversation with B’Lana deserves some scrutiny. It made me smirk for sure. Out-of-universe, it’s a wig, of course. But, in-universe, that’s some serious time with whatever blow-dryer technology they have on Trek. No one gets that kind of flawless body without puffing it up up spraying the hell out of it.