| The teaser opens with an alien captain barreling into a giant maw in space, being shot at with lightening. When we get back to Voyager, it seems the crew has found a possible wormhole back home, straight to Earth, but everyone is skeptical. By the time Seven, Paris, and Naomi return from a survey mission on the Delta Flyer, however, everyone is quite confident that it is their ticket home, and everyone has personally received some good news. Paris is sucked right in, but Seven remains skeptical, and though the main computer seems to be among those who have thrown caution to the wind (to the point of ignoring bad sensor readings), she manages to contact the ship from the teaser - whose captain confirms her fears that the crew is being deceived. Since no one will hear her out, she activates the Doctor to help, but the crew, acting on "instructions" from "starfleet" shut him off again, subdue her, and enter the wormhole. Now the ship is trapped inside the gut of a giant space beast, which is digesting it slowly, but everyone is comatose with illusions of home - everyone but Seven, the Doctor... and Naomi, who also isn't particularly interested in returning to Earth. With the help of the other ship's captain, a man who has dedicated his life to destroying the monster in which they now reside (compared to Ahab by the Doctor), they work on getting out. Everyone but the Doctor agrees that it is okay to try to kill the thing that is trying to kill them, but he convinces them to try to sour the taste of their ships by igniting drive plasma - which appears to work at first, but it turns out to be another deception. They try again, and succeed, but I will be assuming that the entire rest of the series is an elaborate hoax inside the belly of the beast. |
This episode is highly reminiscent of the second season episode Persistence of Vision, another time when the crew is disabled by visions which are custom-tailored to the individual. I liked that episode a lot - while it was marred to an extent by its "love letter to Janeway" elements, I often think back to that episode as an example of how you can do some sneaky character development. It ultimately squandered some of its character growth opportunities by focusing on just Janeway's resilience and Kes' psychic powers and allowing everyone else to be completely hoodwinked, but I still think of it fondly.
Similarly, everyone but Seven and the Doctor come out of this episode looking pretty bad. Sure, these are potent visions that they're facing, but why aren't Seven and Naomi affected at all? It appeared at first as though they simply possessed some sort of physiological immunity in addition to their lack of interest in Earth, but the final scenes indicate that no such immunity is present. That feels especially strange when I've complained several times (Night being the most recent) that half the main characters aren't actually interested in going home. In particular, Paris' interest seems pretty out of the blue: most of his (admittedly scant) character development has been about how much more of a life he has on Voyager than he did before Voyager. And Torres has on multiple occasions spoken of her apathy about returning, even before she found out that all her friends on the other side of the galaxy are dead. Her vision of a world in which the Maquis are alive after all must be tempting, but I just don't see her as being that naive.
The creature, and its nemesis captain, are very cool though. For all those complaints, I had a great time watching this episode. The pacing is excellent, the conflict is natural, and if we're just going to focus on a few characters, the Doctor, Seven, and even Naomi are not bad choices. Seven's antipathy towards returning home is subtler here than it was in Hope and Fear and is more believable as a result.
I do have one last thing to say, not really a complaint, just an observation: this could have been a Tuvok episode. I remember being disappointed that his Vulcan mental discipline offered him no protection in Persistence of Vision, and I wish it could have at least helped him this time. A Tuvok-centric episode doesn't need to be a scandalous look at his underlying emotions, it could be a celebration of what that emotional control provides to him in return. Kind of adds some more weight to the Tim Russ quote at the end of the Bride of Chaotica! review.
Watchability: 4/5
Bottom Line: Fun, exciting episode, but it is a little too close to the plot of a previous episode to be taken completely on its own merits.
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