The Voyager crew finds a gas giant with "habitable asteroids" in its ring system, which is clearly a cost-saving measure because an asteroid by definition does not have sufficient mass to sustain an atmosphere. They just wanted to use their cave set again without needing to come up with some spacesuits. However, this complaint is my only one about this episode.
These asteroids server as a burial ground for a species that lives elsewhere. When a distortion opens up right next to the investigating away team, Kim is accidentally sent back through the portal - which the aliens on the other side see as a return from the "next emanation" (land of the dead). He finds an alien race with very rigid beliefs about the afterlife, who believe they know precisely what happens. Kim's very presence challenges everything they thought they knew. What we get are a nice spread of reactions, both from the aliens and Kim. Kim, for his part, plays the agnostic well: [paraphrasing] Well, yeah, there are dead bodies over there, but man, I don't know what happens to your consciousness when you die! Just because I came from where you dump your bodies doesn't mean I have any answers.
On the part of the aliens, we have the flustered guy in charge of the facility for the dying. He tries to keep Kim quiet, then wants to study him to find some way to reconcile what Kim is telling him versus what he has always known to be true. Even though he acts as the antagonist because he doesn't want to send Kim back, he's not really a bad guy. Another alien, the wife of a man "scheduled to die," reacts in anger to Harry for sowing any seeds of doubt. A third, which the Voyager crew resuscitated in order to try to find Kim, reacts in fear. Even seeing the other side for herself, she has trouble adjusting her world-view to accommodate the new data. Her views are so rigid that either death is exactly everything she'd known, or it is all false.
The fourth alien (okay, it's the first one we meet, but he's the most interesting so I saved him for last) has the most depth. After a bit of adjustment, he can come to terms with the idea of doubt about what happens after death. Here's his problem though: he's just scheduled to die, he's not actually dying. This is where we get an idea of why the aliens views are so rigid; their entire culture is built on the premise that it's okay to choose to die because you're too ill, too depressed, or too much of a burden to others. I mean, if you know for sure what's going to happen when you die (and your religion has a happy afterlife and no anti-suicide clause), why not choose to move along if living is too "inconvenient"? What's more unsettling is that this guy has actually been pressured into choosing death by his family, and now that he has doubt, he is understandably uncertain about going through with the procedure.
Different Treks cope with religion differently. TOS and TNG are both pretty aggressively atheist; see for example Who Watches the Watchers (TNG 3x04) where Picard is all [paraphrasing] Yeah, this whole superstition thing you guys have reverted to in our presence is cute and all, but we gave up nonsense like gods when we grew up as a culture. Those series looove to show how humanity is better than the gods, whether they're cruel and petty like Q, or attention-seeking like Apollo (TOS "Who Mourns for Adonais?" 2x04). Of course, as I've mentioned before, it's easy to cherry pick episodes and say "this is the unifying message of the whole series!" when there are always counter examples due to the multi-writer nature of Trek. Just look at Q - early on, he's very much the model of "gods are corrupted by infinite power," but later (much more engaging uses) like Tapestry and All Good Things, cast him in a much more balanced light. On the whole though, I'll stand by my original assessment, that TOS and TNG take the atheist view, even though most of the time they're nice and non-judgemental.
DS9 is much more agnostic in its approach, largely because its central race, the Bajorans, are so religious... and their gods live right next door. They've even said "Hey guys, what's up?" on occasion. They have religious good guys and religious bad guys, and even the non-religious characters always take a very respectful approach to those who are religious. I feel that in this episode, Voyager is also actively choosing the agnostic approach, and I like it. This episode feels very well balanced, with lots of points of view and no one being a clear bad guy. If this society continues to pressure people into euthanasia after fully assimilating all this new information they've received on the afterlife, I'd probably be wishing Voyager came down harder on them. But it's Voyager, so we move on, and keep heading home.
Watchability: 5/5
Bottom Line: Lots of food for thought in this episode, without being preachy or heavy-handed. Actually downright delicately handled. I liked it. And no Neelix is always a plus.
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