“Emanations”
Written by Brannon Braga
Directed by David Livingston
Season 1, Episode 8
Production episode 109
Original air date: March 13, 1995
Stardate: 48623.5
Captain’s log. Voyager has detected a heretofore undiscovered element in the asteroids of a ring around a planet. They investigate, as it could be useful, not just to catalogue, but to mine and use. Chakotay, Kim, and Torres beam down to discover that the element is in a weird coating that’s on a bunch of dead bodies that seem to be haphazardly stored in the asteroid. (The asteroid is also Class M; the notion that an asteroid would have oxygen-nitrogen air and the same gravity as Earth is patently absurd, but doing space suits and filming in a gravity-less environment aren’t really in a 1990s TV show’s budget.)
Upon realizing that this is a burial ground of sorts, Chakotay recommends that they not do any tricorder scans, only visually scan the area, out of respect for the dead. Kim argues against that, but Janeway agrees with Chakotay; Kim is at least grateful to Chakotay for letting him give his side.
A subspace vacuole opens near where the away team is. Seska tries to beam the team back, but there’s difficulty locking on. When she finally gets them aboard, she gets Chakotay, Torres, and a dead body that wasn’t there before, but no Kim.
They beam the body to sickbay, where the EMH is able to revive her. She was mostly dead, from cancer, but not all dead. The EMH was able to remove the cancer and regrow the lost tissue. Yay 24th-century medicine!
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For his part, Kim finds himself inside a pod. He’s on the homeworld of the Vhnori—which, he soon learns, is not the world Voyager and the asteroid ring were in orbit of.
The Vhnori send those who are dead or near dead through the subspace vacuoles to what they call the next emanation. Their belief is that the vacuoles lead to the afterlife. They are nonplussed when Kim says that he didn’t come from the afterlife, he came from an asteroid full of dead bodies. Vhnori believe that they are reborn in the next emanation, and Kim quickly walks back his comments, not wanting to step on the Vhnori’s beliefs. He does, however, want to go home.
Ptera, the woman the EMH revived, is completely freaked out by waking up in Voyager’s sickbay rather than the next emanation. She wants to know where her brother is, and Janeway has to patiently explain that this isn’t the afterlife, it’s a starship. Janeway tries to console her by saying that their act of curing her and reviving her could very well have kept her from going on to the next emanation, but that is small comfort, as Vhnori believe that they go onto the next emanation in their bodies, so the presence of all these corpses in the asteroid belt is distressing to her, also.
The bodies start appearing on Voyager, as the vacuoles are attracted to the ship’s warp core. Janeway orders the ship to move away from the planet while they try to figure out a way to get Kim back and send Ptera home.
Kim meets Hatil Garan, who was badly injured some time in the past, and has chosen to die and move on to the next emanation so he won’t be a burden to his family. Kim’s presence has put his plan in doubt, much to his wife’s distress.
Torres comes up with the notion of re-creating the accident that started the whole thing, running the transporter when a vacuole appears. They return to the planet, with the warp core shielded, but it fails—and when Ptera rematerializes, she’s dead. Sadly, Janeway beams her body to the asteroid with the others.
Garan tells Kim that he has seriously considered running away to the mountains—he has family there who will shelter him—rather than go through with the ceremony. He only hasn’t because he doesn’t want to hurt his family—but then Kim hits on the notion of Kim going in his place, with his immediate family none the wiser. The ritual includes being covered head to toe in a shroud, so Kim wears the shroud. Somehow, none of Garan’s closest friends and family notice that he’s a different body shape and doesn’t talk. He gets into the pod and is then killed with a lethal injection, which is part of the process, and then is transported through a vacuole to Voyager.
The ship detects a new body with human lifesigns, and Janeway immediately instructs the body to be sent to sickbay. The EMH is able to revive Kim.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Amusingly, just a few months before this episode aired, the 111th element was discovered, Roentgenium. This episode postulates that another 135 elements would be discovered between when the episode aired and when the episode takes place. As it happens, seven of those 135 were discovered in the 25 years since “Emanations” aired.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway insists that Kim take a couple of days off after this experience before going back to duty. She says that as she’s gotten older, she regrets not taking time to reflect on things that happened to her when she was a callow youth, and she doesn’t want Kim to have those same regrets later in life.
Half and half. Torres is grumpy about Chakotay not letting her use her tricorder to examine Element 247. She also comes up with a way to put Kim and Ptera in their rightful places and fails utterly, killing Ptera along the way.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Apparently, cancer has been cured by the 24th century, which is awesome.
Forever an ensign. Kim tries very hard not to violate the Prime Directive with the Vhnori, but he’s also not sanguine about being sent to a “secure” facility for his own protection, which smacks of being imprisoned because of the effect his presence is having on the Vhnori.
Do it.
“No artifacts, no inscriptions, just some naked dead people.”
–Torres summing up what they found on the asteroid.
Welcome aboard. Jerry Hardin makes his third and final Trek role as Neria, having appeared on TNG as Radue in “When the Bough Breaks” and Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, in the “Time’s Arrow” two-parter. Jefrey Alan Chandler plays Hatil Garan—he’ll later play the Trill guardian in DS9‘s “Facets.” Cecile Callan plays Ptera and Robin Groves plays Loria Garan. Plus, we’ve got recurring regular Martha Hackett as Seska.
Trivial matters: This is the first of several times that Harry Kim will die onscreen. Luckily in this case, like Ptera initially, he was only mostly dead.
Brannon Braga’s notion for this episode goes back to his time as a staff writer on TNG when he wanted to do a story about death and the afterlife. His script originally called for Kim’s death in the pod before returning to Voyager to be entirely shot from Kim’s own POV, so we could see death through his eyes, but it was deemed too difficult to film properly.
The Vhnori are said to be “class 5 humanoids,” a classification never heard before or since (though we will later learn that the Vidiians are “class 3 humanoids”).
When Voyager first started, it used a teaser-and-four-act structure, more typical of a network show. However, starting with this episode, Voyager reverted to the teaser-and-five-act structure used by its first-run-syndication predecessors TNG and DS9.
Set a course for home. “I’m getting ready to die.” Just as the previous episode felt in many ways like a redo of (and improvement on) a terrible TNG episode, so too with this one: It feels structurally very similar to “Homeward,” but improves on it mostly by not having the heroes of the show being murdering assholes.
I like the fact that throughout the entire episode, Voyager defaults to respecting other cultures, even if they don’t understand it or think it’s weird. Chakotay refuses to disturb the bodies (giving an anecdote about a time he accidentally desecrated a grave as a young officer), Janeway tries to reassure Ptera that the next emanation may still be a possibility (and admitting that they don’t know squat about death, really, either), and Kim attempts to reconcile his own experiences with what the Vhnori believe, not always to good effect.
Still, I would’ve liked to have seen more done with this. Kim’s presence would be a huge disruption, and we only really saw it in terms of Loria Garan bitching Kim out and Neria telling us that Kim’s presence is causing problems. We should’ve seen more crises of faith and anger the way we saw it community-wide in, for example, “First Contact” and “The Masterpiece Society” on TNG (those episodes had other problems, but at the very least they showed the widespread effect that Starfleet’s presence had on the society in question). Also Ptera’s death is a bit too perfunctory. I wish there had been more mourning for her—I mean, yeah, she was already dead, truly, but it just feels like they shrug and move on, which is not fair to her. Also, it’s a little too convenient that the folks going to the next emanation are covered completely by shrouds, thus making it easy to send a different person through…
I did love the final scene between Janeway and Kim, showing how much the captain cares about her crew’s well being. And in general, this is a nifty science fictional concept that shows the difficulties of cultural relativism, especially when you’re not prepared for a first-contact situation. I also like the fact that we never do find out exactly where the Vhnori homeworld is. Neria talks of other dimensions, and it’s perfectly possible that they are in an other dimension. We just don’t know, and I find that appropriate in an episode that is about the greatest unknown of them all, death.
Plus, it’s got Jerry Hardin, who is always magnificent, and it’s a very good vehicle for Garrett Wang, as Kim gets a serious trial-by-fire.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be a guest at Farpoint 2020 this weekend in Cockeysville, Maryland, just north of Baltimore, his first convention appearance of the year. He’ll be there as an author and musical guest, doing panels, readings, and autographings, as well as a concert with his band Boogie Knights. Other guests include Trek actors Mary Chieffo (L’Rell), Penny Johnson Jerald (Kasidy Yates), and Anthony Montgomery (Travis Mayweather), and fellow Trek scribes Derek Tyler Attico, Peter David, Dave Galanter, Allyn Gibson, Robert Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, David Mack, Aaron Rosenberg, Howard Weinstein, and Steven H. Wilson. Keith’s full schedule can be found here.
IIRC the animated series had “life support belts” which could be used in vacuum or whatnot instead of a space suit. (They created a force field or something around the user and presumably included air inside that.) I thought TNG and successor shows should have picked that up, but I don’t think they ever did.
It’s interesting that they never mention the Prime Directive in this episode. I think everyone does a decent job of trying to keep to the PD even when–especially in Harry’s case–it’s a little too late. Harry disappearing himself is probably the best thing he could do to mend the accidental breach, even if conspiracy theorists would have a field day. Good thing it also got him home.
Maybe I’m looking too hard now, but Chakotay objecting to scanning the bodies sounded a bit like “enlightened Native American” to me.
Are we going to keep count of Harry dying?
I have a feeling between the implausibly habitable asteroids and just filming Harry in the death facility this was lower budget episode. Not as claustrophobic as a bottle episode but not much roomier either.
I think this is my favourite episode yet. It has interesting aliens, big themes, relatable guest characters, the crew trying to be helpful, and a very real sense of claustrophobia and fear when Kim literally has to die to get back to Voyager. The pacing is also nice. It never feels rushed even though there is so much going on.
Dan: the force fields from the animated series were mainly done to save money — it was cheaper to put a glowy effect around the existing animated figures than it was to create new figures with space suits on. I always liked the idea of the belt force fields, too, but its lack of a failsafe or backup is problematic….
noblehunter: If Chakotay hadn’t given a specific example from when he was a young officer and did something dumb, I might agree with you, but that was more him being a good Starfleet officer than him being Indigenous Dude Who Respects Life Cuz They’re Like That.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“(The asteroid is also Class M; the notion that an asteroid would have oxygen-nitrogen air and the same gravity as Earth is patently absurd, but doing space suits and filming in a gravity-less environment aren’t really in a 1990s TV show’s budget.)”
God I so love The Expanse for showing kids like my son what can be done on the small screen even if it isn’t perfect either (Perfect being the enemy of Good Enough). Star Trek is best at the people, keep them away from science.
wlewisiii: Thing is, Discovery and Picard are doing space suits and such where necessary. (Well, Picard hasn’t yet, but the point is, they could.) CGI and greenscreening is at the point where it can easily be done, where it really couldn’t without blowing the budget in 1995. That likely would’ve been the case if The Expanse was made 25 years ago, too…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@5/wlewisiii: And yet Star Trek has inspired people to become scientists.
@@.-@ Point. I could also see Tuvok reminding the science nerds to mind their manners.
This is another case where I’m having trouble remembering what I thought of the episode. I think I was annoyed by the wonky science but thought the premise and the attempt to engage with faith were kind of interesting, maybe.
“Neria talks of other dimensions, and it’s perfectly possible that they are in an other dimension. We just don’t know, and I find that appropriate in an episode that is about the greatest unknown of them all, death.”
The episode was pretty explicit that it was another dimension. Not only did Neria say that, but Chakotay talked about penetrating the “dimensional barrier” (perhaps related to the “field density between universes” that Scotty was talking about in “Mirror, Mirror”) and Janeway talked in her log about sending Ptera back to her home dimension.
(Although I never quite got how “dimension” came to be used to mean a parallel physical plane or universe. A dimension is a direction, an axis, like our three dimensions of space. Another dimension would be another direction perpendicular to all three. You could move along a fourth or fifth dimension to leave our 3D universe and enter a different one that was parallel to it along one of those higher dimensions/directions, but it’s sloppy to refer to that other universe itself as a dimension. It’s kind of like confusing a neighboring state with the interstate you’d take to get there. But alas, the terminology has been in regular use for generations now, so there’s no fixing it.)
@2/noblehunter: I think Chakotay’s concerns here were established more as a function of his training as an anthropologist than his ethnicity. Although being raised in a culture that cared about holding on to its people’s ancestral traditions could’ve influenced his interest in anthropology.
@4/krad: Space Academy and Jason of Star Command, live-action shows from the same company that made TAS (Filmation Associates), also had force field belts in place of spacesuits, although they were more like boxes clipped to the belt. When activated, a light would go on, but the field itself would be invisible. I think I’ve seen the same done in at least one other live-action work, though I can’t remember what. Later live-action Trek could’ve done the same, maybe with just an initial bit of animation to show the field briefly flickering as it comes on, as TNG-era Trek tended to do with other kinds of force field. DS9 did do something similar with the Jem-Hadar’s personal shields.
KRAD wrote:
In passing I’d like to note, in passing and in vague failure-of-worldbuilding annoyance, that in Trek, “mostly dead” is a matter of plot requirements. Consider the first episode of Picard, in which somebody gets stabbed in the chest, but there’s no rush to “call the paramedics, get the stasis-hover-gurney, and prepare the organ-cloning lab”. I mean, exactly that injury had barely inconvenienced Picard himself, 50 years earlier.
Philip: that’s not just Trek, that’s dramatic fiction generally. People die instantly when the plot calls for it, slowly when it calls for that, even if it’s the same injury.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Also note that the (cut short) conversation between Torres and Chakotay about Klingon funeral practices (Torres saying they don’t have any and Chakotay citing archeological evidence) foreshadows some of what we’ll later see on Discovery, with the ancient sarcophagus-ship.
re: 6.
If I remember correctly, Voyager doesn’t get space suits until after First Contact where they resused the suits worn in that movie.
Bobby
“She also comes up with a way to put Kim and Ptera in their rightful places and fails utterly, killing Ptera along the way.”
I love this bit. Throughout Star Trek, we’re always being informed the crew is facing impossible odds, plan x is one in a million, etc., and almost always work out. Franchise wide, at least on screen, this is one of the few times they try something and it just doesn’t work, doesn’t help, and comes with a massive loss. Wish all the Trek series had done more of this so when characters rolled the dice it felt more meaningful.
@9: >Although I never quite got how “dimension” came to be used to mean a parallel physical plane or universe.
Theosophists talking about alternative states of being. Then their terminology was used to describe different ‘planes’ in Dungeons and Dragons, and now there’s no going back.
Quoth melendwyr: “Then their terminology was used to describe different ‘planes’ in Dungeons and Dragons, and now there’s no going back.”
DAMN YOU, GARY GYGAX! *shakes fist*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@15/melendwyr: I have no doubt that the Theosophists were just borrowing from the mathematicians and physicists who began exploring higher-dimensional geometry and physics starting in the mid-1800s. Books like Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland no doubt had an influence too. Despite my rhetorical comment earlier, it’s not that hard to understand how laypeople could misunderstand “higher dimension” to mean a parallel plane of existence rather than the direction one would need to travel in to reach it. And that usage in fiction predates D&D by a very long time — it was commonplace by 1930 at the latest.
They scan the planet ring, scan the large asteroid the bodies are on, scan with 3 tricorders on foot en route to the bodies, scan the first body, continue scanning into the next room filled with bodies, break to the intro song, keep scanning and gather that all the bodies are dead, then later decide to only do passive scans, and then to only do visual scans, as if they hadn’t gathered all of the available info already. All this to respect that “they wished their dead to be left alone,” yet they continue to mill around and search the burial site, and Chakotay states that they’ll produce a thorough report based only on their visual assessments? If anything, scanning would be less of a desecration as it would limit the amount of movement required about the site, and Torres wouldn’t wander off and check out the naked recently arrived corpses, but then, shouldn’t they just leave if they want to be respectful? They already know the unknown element is inside the bodies and therefore completely unethical to extract – why are they even hanging around at this point? Is this just Halloween to you? Just take the tricorder data you’ve got and make a holodeck recreation from it if you like wandering around alien grave sites and making guesses about their psychology (Chakotay’s pastime apparently – he’s real fun at a party). How does Chakotay’s anecdote about physically stealing an object from a grave site even begin to relate to scanning a grave site? Also his anecdote can be summed up thusly: “pretty rocks in this grave site, I think I’ll take one as a memento.” No dude, no. I don’t care how old you were when you did that unless you were 6 or younger, that’s just so careless and simple minded.
The tricorder thing seems to simply be a clumsy way to have the away team be surprised by appearance of the subspace vacuole, but then, its appearance causes them to whip out their tricorders and scan some more! Maybe it was simply a half-baked spiritual “turn off your targeting computer” moment. Just lame either way.
Even the term ‘plane of existence’ comes from a theosophical model – set the idiom aside and analyze it rationally for a moment. Just what *exactly* is meant by a ‘plane’ of existence? And I’m not talking about an airplane, but the geometrical construction.
I believe the original comparison was to pages in a book – they overlap each other, each touches only two others, they touch at all points, etc.
#16: Actually, I think the usage of “dimension” for “parallel universe” traces back at least as far as the DC Silver Age comics — specifically, if memory serves, the excuse for the Justice Society/Justice League team-ups was that the settings then known as Earth-1 and Earth-2 were in adjacent dimensions. I want to say that this was used in part as an excuse to justify the idea of two Earths being so similar to one another, with subsequently discovered alt-Earths being farther outward on a sort of wavelength scale or spectrum in rough accordance with the degree of difference from the perceived baseline. (That would be in line with the sorts of things they were using to explain how the Flash’s reality-hopping powers worked at the time, but it may also be me extrapolating some of my own later rubber-science thinking onto the matter.)
And of course on a whole different axis, recall that the notion of “dimension” as a reality-axis also dates back at least to the coinage of the TARDIS acronym as “Time and Relative Dimensions In Space”. Even though we mostly think of the Doctor as a time traveler, time is only one of the vectors along which the TARDIS can theoretically travel (and this was exploited even by the earlier Doctors, as for instance in “The Celestial Toymaker”).
18, you raise excellent points. Come to think of it, it’s kind of crazy that Kim, Chakotay, and Janeway are figuring this out on the fly. Starfleet is an organization where one of the primary missions is exploration, surely they’d have rules and regulations about what’s allowed when first contact consists of coming across alien dead. The topic must come up with some regularity.
@9: I have a vague recollection that the idea of force field belts as space suits also showed up in the live-action TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981), although my memory may be faulty.
Out of curiosity, how many folks are watching along with Keith? That’s what I do when I have access to the show (this one is on Netflix). I’ve been watching two episodes at a time so I’m ready for the week’s rewatches.
I started by watching the first couple of episodes but am now behind (CBS All Access has *all* the Trek series in its library), but am now behind (life being crowded just now). I hope to catch up again in a week or so….
23, I first saw season one of Voyager as a teenager who had no idea how stories worked. I’m doing the rewatch along with Keith and have been pleasantly surprised by every episode not named Phage.
@23 I started watching along, too. It’s kinda relaxing to only “have” to watch an episode or two at a time.
A nice cerebral episode that couldn’t really have been done at any other time with any other character, or at least not with the same effectiveness. It relies a lot on Harry Kim’s inexperience: In later seasons, he was a more seasoned officer who’d probably be able to handle a first contact experience more effectively. Here, after showing his naivete on the asteroid, he gets thrown into a situation that’s out of his comfort zone, and by his presence and by a few innocent comments he manages to throw the Vhnori society into uproar. Not that Voyager’s crew do any better, as they revive Ptera without really knowing what they’re doing and put her through unnecessary trauma.
I like the depth and respect given to the Vhnori here. There’s no real malice from them, yet things that seem natural to them make the Starfleet types uncomfortable, and things that are essential to Harry seem irrelevant to them. Neria probably isn’t a bad man, but Harry asks questions of him that he isn’t prepared to consider. Hatil Garan is the doubter, whose doubts are increased by what Harry represents. Harry ends up coming up with a last minute gambit that gives them both what they want.
Best of all, if this was Roddenberryesque TNG, then we’d be treated to a smug attitude with our Starfleet heroes looking down on the Vhnori and their beliefs. Harry attempts that at the end (although he’s respectful to their faces), but Janeway pulls him up short, pointing out they don’t have all the answers.
First mention of Seska’s name. Yes, I’m sure it was in the scripts for her first two appearances, but anyone who doesn’t have cast list to hand wouldn’t know that!
I’ve got into the habit of watching two episodes over the weekend (one Saturday, one Sunday), writing up my immediate thoughts and then editing and posting after reading what’s on here. I do dread the day when I’m away for the weekend. I think I may skip those two episodes and just comment from memory, and hope it’s a couple of really bad episodes instead of one I’m looking forward to…
@20/John C. Bunnell: You missed my earlier post where I established (with a verifying link) that the terminology was well-established in prose SF by 1930, based on scientific and mathematical thinking going back to the mid-1800s.
Comic books and TV shows and movies and RPGs hardly ever invent science fiction terminology or tropes. They adopt them from prose science fiction, which generally bases them on real scientific theory. And you can almost always rest assured that the earliest usage of a concept that you were personally exposed to growing up is just borrowing from a considerably earlier usage. Which is why etymological reference sites like the one I linked to, the result of actual research to track down the earliest documented uses of words, are more reliable than anecdotal experience.
TARDIS was originally said to stand for Time and Relative Dimension in Space, singular. It pretty quickly got changed to Dimensions, but the modern series has reverted to the singular.
@22/tinsoldier: I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Buck Rogers, since I think it was something I’ve seen relatively recently and from about that era. I can’t be sure, though.
@28: Another place that the force-field suit shows up is in the book Tom Swift: Ark Two (1982); in that book, it is created as a deep-sea diving suit, although the characters also use them to survive in space (albeit only for a few seconds before reaching safety, as the suits are not intended to be used in a vacuum).
#28: Cross-posted, actually — and in any case, I hadn’t meant to cite the earliest possible usage, merely one predating the then-current citation. [In this broad class of historiography, last I looked, that OED site still has me down for earliest known usage of the term “shared world” with respect to genre-fiction universes in the Thieves’ World mode, in an early-1980s book review column. I am morally certain I didn’t actually coin the phrase, but until someone comes along with an earlier citation, I am the question to a valid fannish Jeopardy answer. :-) ]
@23/MeredithP: I watched Voyager when it was new, and I’m rewatching along now, usually on Monday and Thursday mornings. So far I’ve enjoyed every episode except “Ex Post Facto”.
@23/MeredithP – I rewatched “Caretaker” and “Parallax” in advance of the their particular reviews but then have generally skipped ahead to episodes that I remember liking/having more interest in. I still come here for every rewatch review though and the comments since sometimes that is more fun for me than the particular episode!
@23
Channel 20.3 here in the DC area is showing all the Star Trek series every weeknight, and I have a Tivo.
I am watching. I tried to watch Voyager two or three years ago but fizzled out after a few episodes, is it just didn’t really grabbed me. But now with this re-watch, I enjoy reading Krad’s reviews and the comments, and only having to watch to a week makes it easier to slog through the ones I regret watching in the first place, LOL. It’s better than I remembered, to this point. Not a high bar, admittedly. I’m told that like most Trek series it gets better as it goes along, so I have some hopes
I’m going to assume Class 5 humanoid means ‘four nostrils as well as a funny forehead’.
Suffice to say, Brannon Braga has an endless fascination for death and what lies beyond.
When this episode first aired, Star Trek Generations was still fresh in theatres. And that movie was all about mortality. Kirk’s death; Picard losing his only family; Guinan and Soran’s respective ways of coping with loss after the Borg. Not to mention the constant death imagery across the film, most evident during the Enterprise saucer crash sequence.
Emanations does a decent job addressing the potential spiritual pitfalls of believing in something and having that faith violently shaken and broken by reality. The Vhnori are a very interesting one-episode alien race, and Ptera makes for one of the more interesting characters who get their world turned upside down by meeting an advanced starfleet crew.
I didn’t catch the Homeward similarities myself, but I can see how they would relate. It’s a credit to Voyager that Janeway and the crew does their best to preserve and respect the other culture. I particularly like that they use Chakotay as the one who vets the idea of using tricorders. It makes sense that it would be the one character whose ancestors left Earth to preserve their ways.
If only this hadn’t been a Harry Kim episode.
Granted, the writers were still getting to know these characters and trying to see which ones worked and which ones didn’t. But Emanations, despite its strengths, is the first time we get to see upfront that Wang cannot carry an episode. Not only does he not make for a convincing ensign, but he doesn’t do strong emotions convincingly. Even Wheaton did it better. It’s not surprising Braga and the other writers would cease trying to make characters like Kim and Chakotay work, choosing instead to build 90% of the later seasons around Mulgrew, Picardo and Ryan, because they could be counted on for delivering.
But it was episode 9. I can’t fault the writers for giving Kim a trial run, at least. And the crew is effectively used across the plot. Can’t complain. It’s a competent episode for what it is.
@36/Eduardo: Generations was co-written by Ron Moore and Brannon Braga and plotted by the two of them plus Rick Berman. Of the three, Braga was the least senior, lowest-ranked member of the staff. So why assume the focus on aging and mortality came specifically from him?
It’s always been weird to me how people keep assuming that any production Braga collaborated on can have its decisions attributed exclusively to him as if his collaborators didn’t exist. That’s a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of his career. He’s always been a collaborator, rarely a solo writer. Every series on which he’s been a showrunner has either been created by someone else or co-created with someone else, and his one overarching signature as a showrunner is that he has no overarching signature, but is just there to help execute other creators’ visions. I’ve seen it argued that of all Star Trek showrunners, he was the one least successful at asserting his own vision over Rick Berman’s.
Of the three, Braga was the least senior, lowest-ranked member of the staff.
@37/Christopher: Not by much. On TNG itself, Braga was the most prolific writer, second only to Moore in staff seniority (certainly more senior than Echevarria and Shankar; Menosky obviously AWOL during that period). One can argue he was picked by Berman along with Moore to write Generations on account of that TNG output. I like to think even a less senior writer can still write important aspects of a script. Even if the mortality angle didn’t necessarily come from him, he was obviously aware of it given he was, you know, co-writing the thing.
Evidently, writing partnerships have varying degress of collaboration. In theory, each writer does at least one separate rewrite of the script. But even if they split the whole thing 50/50, or selected specific scenes to each one’s strengths, it’s immaterial.
According to the Generations DVD commentary, one writing method for them was for one writer to dictate while the other typed on Final Draft. In theory, it was a full collaboration, both aware of the contents and intent of each scene as written. So the mortality angle was very much in Braga’s mind.
@38/Eduardo: Yes, obviously he was aware of the concepts in the script he co-wrote, but that doesn’t mean the idea originated with him or reflects a specific preoccupation of his. According to Moore in the TNG Companion, the three of them came up with GEN’s focus on mortality together during a brainstorming session, because they wanted the movie to be about something big and important in Picard’s life, and there’s not much bigger than mortality. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they also had The Wrath of Khan and its focus on mortality in mind, because every Trek movie seems to want to imitate TWOK in some way.)
@38
The Generations commentary you mentioned is one of my favorites. It’s not often you get to hear screenwriters dissect their own script and point out what worked and what didn’t. They even pointed out tiny flaws I had missed in many viewings of the movie.
@34/fullyfunctional: Yes, Voyager definitely improves as it goes along. Every season gets better and better, and by season 4, once Seven joins, I feel like it’s in a comfortable groove and some “classic” episodes are more prevalent.
@41/GarretH: I remember that I liked it less after Seven joined. I’m curious how I will feel about it now.
@41-42:I think Season 4 is still good but after that they seem to lose any ability to build a storyline and were just churning them out. There were still some decent episodes in there but I think the show lost focus a lot.
(As an aside, being the 20th century throwback I am, I’m rewatching series via my VHS collection…)
@42 Same but I think it might be because I’m too gay to enjoy the eye candy and was too young to appreciate the acting.
cap-mjb: I’m impressed that you still have a working VCR………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@43 – Wow, VHS! I don’t think I’ve used one of those since 2001! But likewise, I was using it to record Voyager (and DS9) episodes because I lived in a small college town at the time without a UPN station so episodes would air late at night/early in the morning.
@45 and 46: It’s mostly working: Some tapes seem to play better than others, but I do have a spare machine up in the loft. I did over the years acquire the full catalogue of Voyager CIC Video releases (most of them long after the show had been released on DVD, when you could pick them up for a couple of quid on eBay!), so they’ve getting an airing. (The same for DS9 and the first season of Enterprise, TOS and TNG are a mix of various releases.)
To bring the tone down a bit, I must admit I struggled to see the similarity between this one and “Homeward”. They’ve both got a subplot where one of the aliens of the week ends up on the ship, experiences a huge culture shock and dies, but the A-plots don’t seem to have much in common.
I think this episode has an interesting concept, but that is all. Kim’s plan to replace Garan is stupid, he could die, permanently.
@12 – Cybersnark: Kind of dumb of VOY to say there are no Klingon funerary practices, when we saw them in TNG S1 or S2. But it could be that Torres is just ignorant.
@23 – MeredithP: Not me, because I only finished my rewatch of VOY (and my son’s first watch) last year or the year before.
@48/MaGnUs: “Kim’s plan to replace Garan is stupid, he could die, permanently.”
That doesn’t make it stupid, just risky.
“Kind of dumb of VOY to say there are no Klingon funerary practices, when we saw them in TNG S1 or S2.”
This is from TNG S1 (“Heart of Glory”):
It doesn’t matter that we don’t – and can’t – know precisely which aspects of scripts Braga collaborated on actually came from him. We have an extensive collection of episodes and movies that Braga worked on, and we can compare to see what themes correlate with his presence on the writing team.
As far as I’m concerned, he was one of the major reasons why later Star Trek doesn’t work. Not the sole reason, but a significant contributing factor.
@50/melendwyr: And I say that if you look at Braga’s post-Trek career, the idea that he had a clear vision of his own that he imposed on Trek falls apart. The one unifying thread of his showrunning career is its lack of a unifying vision; he merely takes other people’s visions and does a workmanlike job helping them execute them.
I agree that the Trek seasons showrun by Braga are the weakest, but I believe the reason for that has been misdiagnosed; it’s not because Braga imposed his own flawed vision, but because he didn’t have enough of his own vision to counteract Rick Berman’s ideas. Berman came more from the logistical, nuts-and-bolts side of production than the writing side; he was very good at turning scripts into excellently made and excellently cast productions, but when it came to generating the ideas in the first place, he was too cautious and needed a strong showrunner to balance him and push in bolder directions. I don’t think Braga had that strength, since it’s more his nature to be a collaborator, a team player.
There’s long been this desire in fandom to demonize Braga as exclusively at fault for Trek’s failings, presuming that he’s the same kind of auteur filmmaker as a Joss Whedon or a David E. Kelley, someone whose ideas are distinctly and unambiguously his own. But that’s just misunderstanding who Braga is. He’s not a solo creator. Most of what he’s done, he’s done in partnership with others. He was Moore’s writing partner on TNG, Menosky’s partner on most of VGR, Berman’s partner on ENT, and all his post-Trek shows have either been co-created with someone else or wholly created by someone else.
I don’t care about the etiology. Braga’s name can reliably be used to diagnose content. Whether he introduces the flaws, or tends to be paired with people who introduce the flaws and not to be able to change them, makes not the slightest difference.
@52/melendwyr: “Braga’s name can reliably be used to diagnose content.”
That’s a gross oversimplification. His name is attached to some very well-regarded episodes like “Reunion, “Cause and Effect,” “Frame of Mind,” “Remember,” and “Distant Origin” as well as duds like “Aquiel” and “Threshold.” Even if he wasn’t a very strong showrunner, he had the capability to come up with some very striking ideas for individual episodes, though of course not all of them were equally successful, any more than with any other writer.
Writing is complex. Any writer will have some successes, some failures, and plenty in between. And on a TV series staff, no single writer is exclusively responsible for any episode’s content; the whole staff contributes to every single episode and the final draft is always written by the showrunner, no matter who gets the onscreen credit. So no, the listed names in the credits are not a “reliable” indicator of anything. Screenwriting just doesn’t work that way.
@49 – JanaJansen: Kim should have explored other avenues first, waited to see if he could contact Voyager, etc. And about Heart Of Glory, that’s the very same episode where Worf and two other Klingons actually perform a funeral ritual for a dead Klingon. What they do (or not) with the body afterwards is another thing.
@54/MaGnUs: “Kim should have explored other avenues first, waited to see if he could contact Voyager, etc.”
He could have done that, risking that Voyager might leave, and that it might be impossible because the Vhnori had their own ideas what to do with him. Or he could stake everything on getting back immediately, risk dying, help Garan, and remove his own potentially disruptive influence on the Vhnori. I think he did the right thing.
“And about Heart Of Glory, that’s the very same episode where Worf and two other Klingons actually perform a funeral ritual for a dead Klingon.”
They performed a ritual, but I wouldn’t have called it a funeral ritual. I guess it depends on your definition of funeral. If it means “a ceremony for burying or burning the body of a dead person”, Klingons have rituals for the dead, but no funeral rituals; if it means “a ceremony honoring someone who has recently died, which happens before burying or burning the body”, they do. (I found both definitions in the Cambridge Dictionary).
@54/MaGnUs: I’m with Jana on this. A funeral is about dealing with the body. There are other kinds of mourning rituals that are not funerals — wakes, memorials, sitting shiva, etc.
@55/Jana: I’d actually interpret both your quoted definitions as saying the same thing — in the latter, I take it to mean that the ceremony immediately precedes dealing with the body and is part of the same ritual. After all, the definition wouldn’t apply to a ceremony that’s unconnected to the disposition of the body and thus could happen either before or after it.
@53: >That’s a gross oversimplification.
Of course it is! Wouldn’t be much of a heuristic if it weren’t. Evaluating Sharknado on the basis of the name alone was a classic case of judging the book by its cover, and yet I managed to avoid a piece of trash by applying the rule of thumb to the promotional materials and judging it not worth the time to investigate.
Maybe Braga actually has nothing wrong with him. But his presence is still a warning sign. (Good ol’ neural network training in progress.)
I liked this episode, but I thought it would have been more interesting if they didn’t write in that “neural energy” whatsit to give a scifi twist to the aliens’ possible afterlife and just left it as a faith issue.
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Amusing to note that, just as in “Phage”, a junior crew member is taken along on an away team investigating unusual readings in an asteroid, and Bad Stuff happens to them. You’d think they’d have learned by now.
Late late rewatch, but (thanks to the recent strikes?) I find myself low on escapist fuel. And I need a lot of fuel to escape the gravity of today’s whatnot. Reroute emergency power to the Netflix emitter array!
Anyway, I wanted to state here that my heart went out to the Vhnori in the aftermath of this intrusion. I know it probably wouldn’t have been possible, but I wish they had at least tried to send them a message, leave them some hope. I imagine the chaos and hopelessness they might have if there’s now a big hole in all their beliefs. I can see this descending into war. What if they decide to give up on all their practices? Think of the millions of souls who will never be reunited with their families.
It’d be fun if Lower Decks runs into that.
That said, I see a lot of truth in the philosophy that atheism breeds morality, not chaos. If all we have is now, and the only home we have is here, it may bring focus on making this place better. I mean, of course their medicine isn’t as good as the Federation’s. Why bother?