S5 E01: Night

We join Voyager two months in to a two year journey through a completely blank area of space. The emptiness is taking its toll on the crew: The holodecks are overbooked, Torres and Paris are fighting (okay, I guess that's not new), Janeway has gone in to seclusion to brood, and Neelix is suffering from a fear of nothingness. The monotony is broken when they are attacked and boarded, but they are rescued by an unpleasant looking man (Emck) who says he can help them cross the Void instantaneously. All he wants in exchange is the invader that the crew captured. Janeway is instantly suspicious of this gift horse, and proceeds to inspect his grotesque mouth thoroughly. Sure enough, the Void guys are just trying to defend themselves from Emck and his Malon bretheren, who have been using the Void to dump their waste - waste filled with harmful radiation. Janeway offers to teach the Malons how to upgrade their reactors so that they don't kill people, but Emck really likes being the villain, so he declines. Thus Voyager is forced to fight its way through Emck's shortcut, and collapse it on their way through.

The writers seem to have decided to consistently use Paris and Torres as a signal to the viewer that tensions are strained on the ship. However, because they're constantly being used this way, we've only really seen them be happy together once in half a season - and that was after fighting for the entire rest of the episode. I guess I can understand why Tom is still in the relationship; since he starts all the fights, I assume that he enjoys them. Why else would he still be pursuing someone that he clearly has no interest in accommodating in any way? What I don't understand is why B'Elanna hasn't planted a bat'leth firmly in his skull.

Janeway's behavior is pretty strange, and I'd be pleased that she's actually being introspective about her choices if there were actually somebody on the ship who is disappointed that they didn't go home in the first episode. Seven doesn't seem to talk back to her anymore, and she and Neelix really have no interest in going to a place that isn't their home. Likewise, the Doctor, Torres, and Paris really have no loved ones to go back to (for various reasons). Chakotay has a secret Janeway shrine in his closet, so she'll get no dissent there. And Tuvok and Kim, the only two characters who really have anything to come home to are both written to be complete Janeway sycophants as well. So of course, when she comes out of her brooding to offer to stay behind to blow up the shortcut, everyone rallies behind her because they love her soooo much.

The Malons, as villains go, are uncomfortably like the Ferengi. Not just in the "commerce above honor" sense, but in the "let's have a new villain, and base them completely on a two dimensional metaphor" sense. While the Ferengi, while they were still in their villain phase of TNG, were walking metaphors for how ugly greed is. They were kind of like those episodes where they go back in time to present day earth and point and laugh at how odd our customs are; instead the Ferengi were there to be strawmen for corporate greed, in an attempt to inspire the same derision. For the Malons, simply substitute greed for pollution, and there you have it. After the smashing success of the Ferengi as villains, I can understand why the writers were in a hurry to capitalize on that formula.

Wow, all that panning, and I haven't even touched on the science inconsistencies. The idea of a starfieldless sky is interesting, but emptiness won't do that. To obscure you need some sort of object and as long as they're still inside the galaxy, there's got to be some obscuring going on. But they go out of their way to say that it is just completely empty. Which actually gets me thinking: why do we never see the milky way (or, well, the viewed-from-space equivalent) in any star field shot in sci-fi shows? Especially when you're in space, and you have no atmosphere to block your viewing, I'd expect to see some areas of greater star density. Oh, and the Void creatures: they've evolved to live more naturally in a star-free environment. What? This place has nothing - so, no planets. Did they evolve on naturally occurring starships? Or did they start out in some other part of space, come to the void, and stay there for millions of years, living on their starships? I suspect it would be difficult to find enough matter to sustain a civilization in an area of space that is completely devoid of matter.

I suppose that it bears mentioning that this is the first episode to use the Captain Proton holoprogram, which doesn't play a big role here, but isn't annoying. Well, I guess I was annoyed when the power went down on Voyager, which shut off the lights, and shut off the lights in the holoprogram without shutting down the program itself. I don't even...

Watchability: 1/5

Bottom Line: This episode was a complete letdown for a season premiere. Bad science, annoying characterization, and a villain with the depth of a sheet of paper upon which someone wrote the word "POLLUTION" make for a very boring premiere. But, as I recall, the first four episodes of season four had scores of three or less, and ended up picking up a fair amount of momentum. Fingers are crossed.