This episode has been consistently ranked as the worst Voyager episode ever by numerous fan polls, and for a good reason: it is pretty terrible. Tom Paris, not even the genius engineer of this crew, just the pilot, figures out how to make a shuttle fly at infinite speed (warp ten). He does so, then inexplicably turns into a lizard man, kidnaps Janeway and turns her into a lizard too by taking her to warp ten, and then, after turning into a giant tadpole, makes tadpole babies with her. That's it, that's the whole plot. The indispensible Ex Astris Scientia has a very thorough rundown of all the science errors in this episode, so I'm not going to rehash that. I'm going to try to defend it, fail, and move on.
The reason why Paris, the non-engineer, makes this engineering breakthrough is because they writers felt that he had been underutilized - and they're right. There's some okay stuff here about how Paris wants to do something important in his life - but it's more of a footnote, and reminds me of how poorly they've utilized the Paris character. He should be a goldmine: the ambitious and privileged youth who lost everything due to his arrogance and now gets a second chance, but he's still pretty arrogant as a failure, so he's got a lot of ground to cover. But so far he's either been kind of flaky, or just used as the generic navigation officer. They do get into his driving motivations a bit here, but it is kind of lost in all the noise. Persistence of Vision did Paris' background better with the 10 second illusion segment.
Now, I can take some bad science. I mean, even the laughably bad Parallax got a bye based on the strength of the B'Elanna development. Or even the more direct parallel, Genesis, is completely watchable because it is used to tell a fun adventure story and the makeup is pretty cool. But here there's not much to distract me; just the implausibility of attaining infinite speed, and the ludicrousness of the results. I mean, calling Paris' mutation the natural path of human evolution belies a total lack of understanding of evolution. He even becomes less suited to his environment at times, like when he stops being able to breathe the air. However, I suppose random mutation is part of evolution, so maybe the Doctor was trying to say that this is one of the infinite possibilities for future human evolution. I mean, that isn't what he actually said, but that's a way they could have put a bandaid on this gutshot of an episode.
Overall, I've been pretty displeased with Voyager's science consultants. More often than not, the writing process seems to start with "Wouldn't it be cool if X happened? Let's find some science words to have people say, that way we can do X," rather than "Isn't Y a cool science concept? Let's take it to its theoretical limits and see what cool stuff would happen." Certainly, every Trek has its episodes that are guilty of doing the "science episode writing" backwards, but Voyager seems to do it more often, and have fewer examples of doing it right. All that said, this episode non-withstanding, I'm enjoying the second half of this season a lot more, and am looking forward to the next one despite this hiccup.
Watchability 1/5
Bottom Line: This is the episode that all other terrible science episodes can point to and say "Hey, at least I'm not Threshold!" At the same time, this episode can say: "At least I'm not Parturition."
No comments:
Post a Comment