S5 E13: Gravity

Paris and Tuvok crash land yet another shuttle, and befriend a female alien after Tuvok saves her life. The universal translators aren't working, except the one built in to the Doctor's program, so as a decent amount of time passes, she learns english - and falls in love with Tuvok. Meanwhile, Voyager finds the gravity well that sucked the shuttle into a different layer of subspace, a place in which time moves much faster. Voyager also encounters aliens who intend to shut down this giant OSHA violation, and have to hurry to beam the away team out through a probe relay. Tuvok has to disappoint Noss, but mindmelds with her before returning her to her home, and she understands him.

What I don't mention in the recap are a pair of scenes interspersed in the story that show us some of Tuvok's rebellious childhood. You see, he had an unrequited romantic interest with a non-Vulcan, and his parents forced him to go to a Vulcan master in order to regain control of his emotions. The first scene is reasonably non-painful, since the master is calm and unflappable in the face of young Tuvok's outbursts, doesn't force his views on Tuvok, and establishes a rapport with him in a realistic manner. The second scene is of more dubious merit. It is revealed there that the reason for Tuvok's loss of control is all about his love interest, rather than a honest dispute with the precepts of emotional suppression, and it reads like an angsty teen fan-fic story.

But here's where it gets crazy: after we're done watching this episode, my wife turns to me and says something to the effect of "Doesn't Tuvok's boyhood situation feel just like the parents of a gay kid sending them to one of those gay-deprogramming camps?" And yeah, it does. The writers of Star Trek (and I'm not just talking Voyager here) have gradually, over many episodes in many seasons, boxed themselves into an odd place with the Vulcans. Even as early as TOS it is established that the Vulcans were not always unemotional, and had quite a barbarous history. But over time, through TOS, TNG, and Voyager, it became clear that Vulcans are still emotional (even when they're not undergoing Pon Farr), they just learn, in each individual's lifetime, to repress their emotions. That puts us in the situation where Vulcans must go through some sort of social programming at a very young age in order to conform to their social norms.

Now, I love Vulcans. I love their even temper, their sometimes pragmatic-to-the-point-of-cynicism approach to life, and their resilience in the faces of innumerable jerk-wad co-workers who feel the need to brag about their "unique" emotions on a seemingly daily basis. And that's why I'm uncomfortable with the picture that this episode is painting of Vulcan society. It's not really this episode's fault though: the writers just took an honest look at the implications of what we know about Vulcans by now, and this is what they got. I guess I just would have been happier if they'd try to fix the problem, rather than just depressing me with an illustration of the problem.

However, it is this episode's fault that it is primarily a trite love story, and a continued collision of characters who don't have any chemistry together. There are a lot of love stories out there. In my book, if you're going to write a new one, you've got to have something really clever up your sleeve. One of my favorite things about Star Trek, and sci-fi in general, is that these shows tend to avoid the general cliche that every story has to have an element of romance. But here we got a teen angst story with Tuvok being regretful that he has to make someone else feel the emotion that broke his own emotional control when he was young. Bleh. The passage of time is not very well conveyed on the planet scenes, leaving the viewer to guess that the reason people are acting funny is that months have passed (until it is established later on in a Voyager-based scene). Also, the writers seem to like to combine Tuvok and Paris a lot in their stories, and I can't tell why. Nothing about the duo works for me. Paris' jabs about logic just come off as pathetic, and Tuvok's wit is completely lost on a character as aloof as Tom. Tuvok works much better with the Doctor, or Seven, or Chakotay, or Torres, or Kim, or Janeway, or Neelix.

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: When I asked for a Tuvok story in my last review, this is by no stretch of the imagination what I meant. So Tim Russ isn't feeling challenged; that doesn't mean you have to give him a boring love story. It isn't even like he had much actual emotion to show here anyways.