S7 E15: The Void

Voyager gets sucked into an area of space that is void of all matter, and is immediately attacked by enemy ships. Another ship, captained by a man named Valen, arrives and he welcomes them to this area of space that has no way out and is filled with people who will do anything to survive. He offers to trade for some supplies, but Janeway is unwilling to trade him any photon torpedoes. Low on resources after the attack, she is faced with asking her crew to die for her their principles. One by one, she manages to recruit a number of other ships into an alliance of good will, and by working together they make their way out of the void.

This is generally a feel-good, "aren't the good guys just swell" episode. I'm okay with that; I see enough examples of the waste that humanity has to offer on a daily basis that I don't really need my televised entertainment to constantly remind me that humanity is kind of filled with scumbags. This episode does kind of remind me of a "chinese proverb" (a quick google search has it attributed to Korean, Vietnamese, and Papal sources as well) that I've heard a number of times from different sources. See, in hell, people are sitting around a round table/pot of noodles/whatever but cannot feed themselves because they have meter-long chopsticks, so they are miserable and starving all the time. But in heaven, no one goes hungry because everyone feeds each other out of kindness and goodwill.

That story has bothered me since the day I heard it. So what's the moral, that only smart people go to heaven? That dilemma's not being solved with goodness of the soul, it is being solved with cunning. I've known plenty of unscrupulous smart people who are good at solving riddles. Anyone who works together for mutual gain can be more effective, and people who don't have prime directives to follow are significantly more dangerous in groups. And don't even get me started on the one where a guy goes to a job interview over breakfast/lunch/dinner and doesn't get hired because he salts/peppers/mayonnaises his food before tasting it. That doesn't tell the interviewer anything about the guy's competence - heck, you could just as easily twist it the other way and say that he's a man who happens to know what he likes!

Okay, I guess I did get started on it. Why didn't you stop me? Anyways, this episode actually does a decent job of avoiding the trite pitfalls of those parables; the bad guys do learn from the alliance's successes and start teaming up. And Janeway, she even admits that she made a mistake! That's the third time in seven years! And the writers don't just use it as an opportunity to show that she was right all along. Sure, the alliance gets out of the void, but for all we know the bad guy alliance is soon to follow. We even know that they have the tools at their disposal because that one guy Janeway kicked out of the alliance had access to a critical component. I also really appreciated that the two good guys with screen time were both from one-off quasi-villain factions - and the potato guys from Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy were even still good at that espionage stuff that they were good at in their one episode. Good attention to detail.

There's kind of a C-plot with aliens who are "native" to the void. Native to an area of space with absolutely no matter in it? Reminds me of the guys from the previous "area of space with no stars in it" episode, Night. These two episodes actually start from a pretty similar place: a completely silly void space zone with aliens that are somehow native to it. But while Night filled itself with boring villains and bizarre Janeway behavior, this one has an interesting plot about cooperation and maintaining one's principles. And the aliens, they're pretty cool. They don't respond to spoken language, but the Doctor discovers that they can hear when they respond positively to his opera music. Since I guess they don't respond to the nuances of consonants and vowel variations on sounds, he finds a way to communicate with them through the tone frequencies of music. They end up huddled in groups with chirping padds, conversing in eerie-sounding electronic music. Just a fun idea. I don't know that it could have carried a whole episode, but it was perfect as a flavor element here.

Watchability: 4/5

Bottom Line: The message is somewhat sappy, but avoids being overly saccharine when it counts. Interesting players and cool ideas keep this episode running.