S6 E08: One Small Step

In 2032, during a manned mission to Mars, a graviton ellipse emerges from subspace and consumes one of humanity's primitive spacecraft, never to be seen again. Never, until it emerges in the delta quadrant in Voyager's path. The crew is uniformly excited about exploring it, except Seven, who is all of a sudden extra skeptical about inefficient diversions again. Janeway talks down to her until she consents to "volunteering" for a Delta Flyer mission into the ellipse, commanded by Chakotay. They find the module intact, but a dark matter asteroid's impending collision with the ellipse forces a retreat - a retreat which Chakotay bungles by insisting they disobey Janeway's orders and slow themselves down by retrieving the module. Seven is understandably mad at him, since now the Flyer is damaged and they need to salvage parts from the module in order to repair the Flyer and escape. While Seven is aboard the ship, per Paris and Chakotay's request, she leaves the module's commander's logs running, and is so moved by his valor and thirst for exploration that she downloads his logs (and beams his corpse back) practically causing the same problem Chakotay did by delaying their departure. The Flyer escapes just before the ellipse returns to subspace, and while Seven has nurtured her inquisitive side, no one has learned any lessons about reckless behavior.

I do appreciate the thread in this episode about the emotional impact of manned space missions. While that topic is only once addressed somewhat tangentially in the dialogue, the story fairly clearly presents a case for manned space missions as inspiring events. The admiration that the characters show is not directed at the Mars missions so much as the human heroes who undertook those missions. Don't get me wrong: the Mars rover missions are also inspiring, in their own way, and it is certainly economically inefficient to send a human to Mars, but I'd love to know that we put a human footprint on that planet. There was a recent XKCD strip, whose alt-text expresses my point better than I can: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

I have one nitpick before I launch into the "what is wrong with these characters??" section. A graviton ellipse is just a magical space phenomena, so sure, it can do anything they want it to. But then there's the matter of the "dark matter asteroid." I knew very little about what dark matter is, so I spent about five minutes on wikipedia, and I already know enough to know that the writers were just like "Anyone heard a good space term recently? What's that, dark matter? Works for me!" So the vast majority of dark matter is non-baryonic, which is to say, isn't composed of atoms. I think that rules out that class of dark matter from being called an asteroid. Some small fraction is baryonic dark matter, which is composed of massive compact halo objects, which is a fancy way of saying "big things that don't emit light." A "dark matter asteroid" would just be an asteroid that isn't near a star. Doesn't sound so special now, does it? If you're going to make a show that glorifies manned space travel, could you at least make it not punish people for knowing things?

So, again, we've got par-for-the-Voyager-course take a step backwards to take a step forwards development for Seven. Janeway is back at it, preaching and condescending, and it rings all the more hollow when a perfectly valid lesson from this episode could be "taking risks with your friends' lives makes you a pretty lousy friend." But, no, Janeway has to be right, so the lesson is that "the quest for trivia is more important than your life or the life of anyone you know or care about." Worse, Chakotay's insubordination is out of the blue, recless, and he never faces any consequences for it. Well, I have a treat for you. I had heard a number of times that Robert Beltran had been outspoken in his dislike for the Voyager writing team, but hadn't seen any evidence of it. All the memory alpha annotations have shown no evidence of that dissention, until now, when it sent me to this article. While his reflections seem somewhat self-serving at times, I cannot say that I disagree with many of his sentiments. I recommend checking out the whole article, but will leave you with a nice juicy quote about this particular episode: "Everybody was so impressed and saying what a great script it was; I wasn't so impressed with it, because it ends up the same way - Seven of Nine saves the day, and Chakotay's prostrate on the bed and impotent, not able to do anything. It ultimately became all about Seven of Nine appreciating something that she hadn't appreciated before. And how many times have we all seen that? So to me, it was the same thing dressed up in a different cloth."

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: The episode itself is dreadfully boring, smothered by the Janeway and Seven scenes, with inconsistent characterization that ignores any previous growth by the characters in the past. But, the heart is completely in the right place, and I will always reward that highly (yes, 3/5 is a high reward compared to the score I would have given it otherwise).