Before I launch into the review of this one, a little about me. I think I empathize too much with on-screen characters. Whenever they are put in an uncomfortably awkward situation, it becomes unbearable for me. If it is bad enough (and I am invested enough to keep watching, say, for a review), I need to frequently remind myself "that's not me, that's some other guy, I don't need to worry." This makes most romantic comedies completely unwatchable for me - being caught in a lie seems to be many writers' idea of comedy gold. Star Trek, in general, is pretty good at not having these moments, or at least having them be outlandish enough that I can distance myself more easily. That was not the case for this episode.
Harry Kim wakes up on Earth in an alternate timeline where he didn't join the Voyager crew. No one around him is aware anything changed. As a result, for the first half of the episode, he is paraded around from situation to situation where he is a fish out of water. First he bumbles around with his fiancée, then some cafe owner, and worst, it is also the day that he needs to make an incredibly important presentation about some new engine design to starfleet admirals. This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Anyone who has dreamt that they were about to star in a play that they didn't know the script for, or had a final in a class that they didn't know they were signed up for all semester, knows how he must feel. And I feel it with him the whole way.
If it were good writing that was doing that to me, that would be one thing. I could comfortably recommend it to people who aren't like me. But every bit of dialogue was plain, boring, something that seemed right out of the alternate timeline play book. Harry's fiancée swallows all her lines, as if she were just the prosthetic skin stretched over some toothless cave troll, unable to see though the prosthetic eyes so that she bumbles around almost comically, but mostly pathetically. The pacing... I mean, we all know that Harry's going to figure it out, get back home, and fix everything. But the writers still insist on dragging us through this charade, scene after scene, meaninglessly, pointlessly.
Harry goes and finds Tom Paris (who didn't make it on to Voyager because Harry wasn't there at Quark's Bar), and awwww, we see what a great influence Voyager has been in his life, because now he's just a drunk in a bar (actually, the bar he created in the holodeck). Now, given that Harry's acting oddly and has been to see a maquis sympathizer, the admirals think he's a spy. And Harry, just to make me more uncomfortable, seems to be acting extra suspicious. Harry! Stop being stupid!
Finally, because the writers didn't actually have a good solution in mind (the science is always an afterthought), the cafe guy turns out to be an alien, and tells Kim that he accidentally changed the timeline by running into one of their timestreams by mistake and activating it. Oops! I'm glad these things are all over everywhere, both Alpha and Delta quadrants, so that Harry has a chance to get back. But if these things are everywhere, why aren't they being tripped all the time? I'd liked to have seen these aliens be more malevolent, so that they could resolve the episode by removing these timestreams, so that there won't always be the risk of this stuff happening again.
Kim decides that he is honor-bound to revert things to the way they were, and the only way to do that is break out of his ankle tracker that starfleet security gave him and reenact the accident that changed things. Even the alien guy says "dude, there's no way that'll work" but Harry is reckless now, I guess. Tom's cool with that, even though Harry hit him in the face before, and wants to help, wants to redeem himself. Well, nothing else here is believable, so why not?
They steal a runabout and get shot at by starfleet and recreate the accident in a way that is not even internally consistent with the episode. Initially, Harry triggers it with some scans, something happens, and Voyager tries an emergency beam out. This time, he does the scans again, but this time nothing happens. It doesn't make sense. If nothing happens with the scans, why did they need an emergency beam out? Harry, unlike me, is convinced though that the beam out is the missing ingredient, tries it, and restores everything to normal. That kind of inconsistency is something I can usually gloss over if everything else had been good, but only if there is some other good element I can distract myself with. No such luck here.
It's not a total Voyager Reset Button (VRB) episode, because Kim at least retains knowledge of everything that happened. In the VRB episode last season no one remembered anything, so there weren't even any lessons learned. I guess that's something.
Watchability: 1/5
Bottom Line: I will grant that a different person may have enjoyed that episode more than me. But for me, this is the lowest point that this project has reached. It can only be up from here, right? Right? I want to like Voyager, I want to like Voyager, I want to like Voyager...
No comments:
Post a Comment