S6 E12: Blink of an Eye

Voyager has entered into orbit of a donut shaped planet with a tachyon core, and the warp drive goes off-line. Trapped in orbit, they discover that the planet is moving through time at a different rate from the rest of the universe, and supports a civilization that is progressing rapidly. Voyager's presence causes earthquakes on the planet, and, over the centuries, has attracted the attention of the populace below. First they send radio transmissions, a response to which is forbidden by the prime directive, but the Doctor is sent down to observe the planet and hopefully get information about getting home (and due to a glitch in the transporter, spends 3 years down there in the minutes it takes to reestablish a transporter lock). Next, the planet's residents send a manned space mission, but only one of the astronauts survives the time differential. By the time he awakes, years have passed back home. He tells the Voyager crew of the place their ship has held in his culture for centuries, and agrees to help Voyager by returning to his planet when the ship starts being bombarded from the ground. In a few hours, he returns in ships that are more advanced than Voyager, and helps them escape the planet's field.

Trek has a long history of "accelerated time" stories; other than Voyager's own less than awesome Gravity, there's The Inner Light, The Visitor, Wink of an Eye, and Timescape, all episodes where time passes faster or slower for some than it does for others. Additionally, this episode is also evocative of Children of Time, where the Defiant travels forward in time to meet it a culture made of its own descendants. This particular episode has a larger scope than many of those other episodes, since we get snapshots of a whole species' development. That the scope is larger does not make this a quality episode on its own, it is in the details of the development and the personal connections where it meets with success.
 
While overall One Small Step faltered when it came to storytelling, I mentioned that I really appreciated the undertones of excitement about manned space travel. This episode focuses more directly on its theme of Voyager inspiring the inhabitants to go to space, and doesn't get bogged down in a heavy-handed story about Seven learning to be more human. It does a good job of showing different reactions to Voyager's presence throughout the culture's development; religious interpretations, the questioning of those beliefs, and uncertainty regarding Voyager's intentions. For me, the best tie between the planet's culture and Voyager is the Doctor; his time on the planet allows him to make a connection with the people there, and I feel that the best realized scene of the episode is the one between him and the guy from the planet who comes to the ship.

Of course, what would a Voyager episode be without really terrible science? A tachyon core? Really? The core of the planet is moving faster than light? Or how about the visit from the planet's astronauts - why don't they slow down as they approach Voyager? How does that make any sense? If time is moving at one speed on the planet, and another in orbit of the planet... I guess maybe they were assuming there could be such a thing as temporal momentum? Doesn't seem very likely to me, but then again I have never been to a planet with a tachyon core. It doesn't really add anything to the story to gave time work in this nonsensical way - why do it then?

Watchability: 5/5

Bottom Line: Bad science aside, the idea of this episode is very interesting, which made it very enjoyable to watch.

Addendum: Over the last couple of months, I've been enjoying SFDebris' video sci-fi reviews, but this is the first time I've watched one of his reviews before I've "published" my own review of that episode. In his Blink of an Eye review, he brings up a number of striking similarities between it and a science fiction book by the name of Dragon's Egg. While it is more than a bit of a stretch to imagine that Voyager's writers actually read hard sci-fi, the detail of some of the parallels is suspicious to say the least.

I've always thought of Trek, particularly TOS and TNG, as kind of a sci-fi sampler dish. DS9's a little different due to its format, but on the whole the alien-a-week shows hit upon a lot of well-worn sci-fi tropes. Even a story as good as The City on the Edge of Forever wasn't exactly groundbreaking in terms of its concepts - anyone who examines the idea of time travel to the past is going to need to deal with the reality that changing things, even for what seems like the better, is going to have consequences. While I haven't read Dragon's Egg (though I should, it sounds great), and if it truly inspired this episode some sort of credit should have been given, I feel like Blink of an Eye fits right in with other Trek episodes that get the imagination flowing and encourage the viewer to seek out more, similar stories. Either way, even knowing now that it wasn't a unique and original concept, I still had a great time watching this episode.

Double Addendum: Apparently, CBS has just made SFDebris take down all his videos, and he hasn't uploaded this one to his BlipTV site yet, so you won't see that one up anymore. Boo on them.