| Three misfits have been identified by Seven through a ship-wide efficiency analysis, and Janeway makes it her goal to make sure they become functional, happy members of the Voyager crew. She takes them on their first away mission: a routine Delta Flyer survey mission. Of course, what makes it routine is that everything goes wrong and everyone almost dies. There's some (more) dark matter nonsense but by the end everyone is fixed by Janeway and lives happily ever after. |
As this love letter to Janeway got underway, I was certain that Jeri Taylor, queen of the Janeway fan club, would have some share of the writing credits here. To my surprise, it was just Dianna Gitto, with some teleplay assistance from Joe Menosky (one of the more consistent Voyager writers). Memory alpha didn't have any more information on her, she's never written anything else in the history of recorded visual media, and I abandoned a google search on her name nine pages in after all that produced were tons of automatically generated pages and enough Voyager episode reviews to make me feel generally unimportant. Fortunately, no one else disliked this episode as much as I did, so I guess I've got that going for me. Anyways, I have no more information on this Gitto character than I started out with, but at least I'll never have to watch anything she's written ever again.
This episode takes the "Janeway knows best" theme, clones it enough times to make an army, and invades your home town with it, killing everyone you've ever loved despite your home town's complete lack of strategic importance. Well, unless you grew up somewhere strategically important. That's not the point. Janeway has every single answer ever here. No, Chakotay, she can't simply leave these people who would have washed out of Starfleet be, she must bend them to her will and make them love her. No, guy with five advanced degrees in theoretical cosmology, of course Janeway knows more about that than you do. Person with no self-confidence, Janeway will find that one good quality about you that will make it not matter that you constantly make mistakes in your work. And you, hypochondriac? I guess you could say that she just got lucky that the alien that burrowed inside you happened to cure you, but you know she planned it that way all along.
It doesn't help that these unknowns that surround her for the episode are caricatures of caricatures. It isn't enough to have one advanced degree in theoretical cosmology, of course he has to have five. And he has to show how much more interested he is in his research than he is in being on a starship in the great unknown by also being a complete jerk all the time to everyone forever. You bet that his one interest informs every single interaction he has with anyone else. The other two aren't any better; the
That does leave two things undiscussed: Dark Matter is back as a meaningless buzzword after its abuse in One Small Step, and Tom Morello, the lead guitarist from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, makes a cameo appearance. I always feel bad for the celebrity Trek fans, who are so eager to go on Trek and finally get to use their fame to live their dream, but then they get stuck in an episode like this one. As for the bad science? Well, it's bad, I guess I should be used to that by now. But there was some more bad science when they start discussing a stellar nursery, and I think, because my wife knows that sort of stuff because of her job, the inaccuracies may have given her a seizure. I guess it would be my job to diagnose that, but there was no postictal phase, so maybe it was just a fit of uncontrollable rage.
Watchability: 1/5
Bottom Line: I can't really see how this vapid plot would even please a staunch Janeway fan. But I guess there's a reason why creationists would go to a creationist museum, and it isn't for the purpose of hearing scientifically rigorous debate.
No comments:
Post a Comment