| Seven puts Neelix in charge of watching the Borg kids when Voyager needs to power down in the middle of their regeneration cycles, and instructs him to make sure they don't get scared. Neelix decides that the pitch-black of a ship-wide power outage would be a great time to introduce them to ghost stories, and proceeds to weave a yarn about a non-corporeal alien that enters Voyager in a nebula, and takes over the ship. The crew gets separated, and eventually Janeway has to out-macho the electric gas creature to convince it to let her take it to a new nebula home. In Neelix's story, she succeeds, but it is never made clear afterwards if there was actually any truth to anything Neelix said. |
While it seems out of character for the Protector Neelix of Once Upon a Time to decide to actively attempt to scare the children by telling them the tale in ghost-story format, it did give the episode a unique narrative style (at least for a Trek episode). I do appreciate that the veracity of his story is never exactly confirmed, though I like to think that maybe he learned something from Once Upon a Time and he did give an accurate representation of events. Either way, leaving me with a bit of leeway to imagine what the actual events were is, on average, a good thing.
The title of this episode has drawn my attention a number of times when looking at lists of Voyager episodes in various places. Reason number one is that it is simply a long episode name, but number two is it is a creative episode name. With a name like that, it conjures up images of a genuinely scary horror-themed episode, which the episode itself does not exactly live up to. There is one scene, when Story-Neelix is leaving the mess hall, that did capture the haunted house vibe, but that's about it. I'm not really one for the horror genre in general, so that's not much of a disappointment to me, but it didn't have much else going for it either. The humor that the writers keep trying to use by having the Borg kids use Borg buzzwords doesn't do anything for me, and the actual story of the ship's possession isn't exactly new ground.
This episode is unfortunately also another sighting of the recurring "insult the audience" trope, which I first complained about in Spirit Folk. Here, the Borg kids are stand-ins for the Trek audience that cares about details and complains when they are incorrect - in this case, something about some emissions from the bussard collectors. Sure, Neelix is right when he brushes off the complaint and says that it isn't particularly relevant to his ghost story, I too can often brush these minor inconsistencies. But if the writers thought that those were the only types of inconsistencies that their show had, they were truly delusional. I've complained about them for about six months now, and I haven't even touched on the shuttlecraft issue - I know other people have been there before me and have done it better. I'm more concerned with the Voyager solution to character development, the take a step backwards to take a step forwards approach.
Anyways, I could be reading into it too much, maybe the writers don't mean to condescendingly brush us off like we're a bunch of kids who just don't know any better. But this is the third time I've picked up on it (counting the "screw you" to J/C fans in Muse), and in the Voyager environment, three episodes basically constitutes a theme on par with the Alzheimer's theme.
Watchability: 3/5
Bottom Line: A creative title and some minor chances taken with the narrative style of the story elevate this episode all the way up to three. Definitely the least interesting Neelix episode in a while.
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