“Cathexis”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by Kim Friedman
Season 1, Episode 12
Production episode 113
Original air date: May 1, 1995
Stardate: 48734.2
Captain’s log. Janeway play-acting on the holodeck is interrupted by Kim, who reports that Chakotay and Tuvok’s shuttle is on course for Voyager, but neither are responding to hails. Janeway has them beamed to sickbay, where they’re both unconscious. The EMH treats them, but while Tuvok just has an easily treated concussion, Chakotay is in a coma and shows no neural or brain activity whatsoever. He can be kept breathing indefinitely, but there’s every indication that he’s completely brain-dead.
Tuvok reports that, while returning from their trading mission, they encountered another ship in a dark-matter nebula. It fired on the shuttle and an energy surge took both Chakotay and Tuvok out. Tuvok then offers to check the sensor logs, as he has no memory of what happened after that, but those logs were destroyed when they were fired upon.
Janeway sets course for the nebula to investigate what happened.
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Torres sets up a medicine wheel in sickbay and uses it to help Chakotay find his way back. She expects the EMH to bitch about it, but he knows all about the medicine wheel—indeed, he corrects something Torres does wrong—and his only complaint is that she didn’t ask first.
They approach the nebula, but then they change course unexpectedly away from the nebula. Kim reports that the course change came from the conn. Paris denies this. Janeway has Torres and Paris check helm control and other systems to see what’s happening, and transfers navigation to Kim’s station.
They change course again away from the nebula, and now Kim is locked out of helm control. They trace the change to navigation control on deck 12, and Torres says she saw Paris there. Paris denies ever going in there, but Tuvok examines the console, and finds that Paris’s DNA is on the console. Paris reports to sickbay to be checked for memory loss.
Tuvok has found the ion trail of the ship that attacked the shuttle. As they’re about to enter the nebula to follow the trail, the warp core shuts completely down. Records show that Torres did it, but she has no memory of doing so.
The EMH scans the memory engrams of both Torres and Paris, and discovers that they both have different memory patterns in their brains during the times that they sabotaged the ship. The theory is that there’s an alien temporarily possessing members of the crew to try to keep them out of the nebula.
Since the EMH is immune to such takeover, Janeway transfers command codes to him. He’s not in charge, but he’s a backstop in case Janeway is compromised.
Kes has been sensing a presence on the ship, and Tuvok offers to mind-meld with her to try to focus her nascent telepathy to trace the presence. However, while checking systems, Kim and Lieutenant Durst find both Tuvok and Kes unconscious in a turbolift.
Tuvok regains consciousness first and says they were subject to an energy discharge similar to that of what hit him and Chakotay on the shuttle. The EMH notes that Kes doesn’t show any signs of being hit with such a discharge, but does have nerve damage in her trapezius.
Paris suggests they do a magneton scan, and they start to set that up. Tuvok reports to Janeway that Kes was physically assaulted, and Janeway is concerned that the alien possessed Tuvok and had him attack Kes. She calls sickbay, but the EMH doesn’t answer. Someone has shut the EMH off and locked him down with a complex encryption. The good news is that the command codes automatically reverted to Janeway when that happened, but she’s worried that they have no cover, so she splits the command codes between herself and Tuvok. They go to the bridge to start the magneton scan, but then the alien seems to jump from person to person, attacking Tuvok. Finally, Tuvok has to stun everyone on the bridge with a wide-angle phaser blast.
After everyone is treated, Torres calls Janeway to engineering—she checked over the shuttle logs, and they weren’t damaged, they were deliberately erased and then covered up with fake damage. There was an energy discharge, but no sign of a ship. Janeway doesn’t understand why Tuvok would lie.
Janeway points out that Tuvok lied about there being a ship. Tuvok insists there was, and shows her the ion trail, which, based on her observations, could not possibly have had an engine. Tuvok then insists that Janeway is possessed by the alien, but the jig is pretty much up, and Tuvok then holds the entire bridge hostage. He has been possessed this whole time by a member of the Komar, a species that lives in the nebula and feeds on neural energy.
While Tuvok tries to head into the nebula, Torres is possessed and ejects the warp core, and everyone realizes that there are two entities possessing people on board—one trying to get them into the nebula (the Komar possessing Tuvok) and another trying to keep them away. Janeway also realizes that only two people on board have the authority to eject the warp core: herself and Chakotay. Sure enough, Chakotay’s command codes were used by Torres to eject the core.
Angrily, the Komar in Tuvok use thrusters to head into the nebula. Janeway manages to start the magneton scan—which causes dizziness and disorientation, thus allowing them to overpower the Komar. Unfortunately, the Komar erased their navigation data as they went.
Down in sickbay, where Neelix is checking on Kes, Chakotay possesses him and manipulates the stones on the medicine wheel to indicate a course they should take through the nebula to get out safely. The EMH is able to cure Chakotay and Tuvok both and Chakotay explains that the Komar attacked the shuttle, and he felt himself floating above everything. But he found himself able to share consciousness with people, so he did that to try to keep the ship safe. He apologizes to Tuvok for knocking him around so much.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Hey look, it’s another dark-matter nebula, because it was the 1990s and “dark matter” sounded really really cool!
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway tries very hard to keep the ship safe, putting the command codes in the EMH’s hands as a backstop, and then when he’s taken out, splitting the codes between two people for checks and balances, which is what finally tips the Komar’s hand.
Half and half. Torres once promised Chakotay to use the medicine wheel on him if he was ever in a coma, and does so. Apparently the script originally called for Torres to paint the wheel on the bulkhead in sickbay, which would’ve been so much cooler, but the production staff overruled both scripter Brannon Braga and director Kim Friedman, and had it just be an animal skin hanging from a stand.
Mr. Vulcan. The Komar possess Tuvok throughout the episode, and assimilate his knowledge and personality quite thoroughly, as Tuvok doesn’t act out of character at all until Janeway catches him out in his lies.
Forever an ensign. At one point, Kim’s mind wanders and the rest of the crew assumes he’s been possessed, which is when Janeway realizes that their paranoia is on overdrive.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Even though he’s programmed with all the medical knowledge the Federation has access to, up to and including Chakotay’s medicine wheel, and even though he’s standing next to a Vulcan as he diagnoses Kes, the EMH somehow doesn’t recognize the symptoms of the Vulcan neck pinch.
Everyone comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is beside himself over Kes being unconscious, and starts accusing half the crew of being possessed, based on such minor details as changing a drinks order.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Janeway’s holonovel is never given a title, and takes place in England some time in either the nineteenth or early twentieth century. It has Janeway as Lucille Davenport, who has been hired by Lord Burleigh to become governess to his two children after the death of his wife. She butts heads with the housekeeper Mrs. Templeton, and Burleigh warns her never to go to the fourth floor, which is likely important to the plot.
Do it.
“How did you manage to reintegrate his consciousness?”
“It involved three neural transceivers, two cortical stimulators, and fifty gigaquads of computer memory. I would be happy to take you through the process, but it would take at least ten hours to explain it all to you. Needless to say, it was a remarkable procedure. I would consider writing a paper about it, if there were a convenient forum in which to publish it…”
–Torres asking a simple question and the EMH making her sorry she asked.
Welcome aboard. Brian Markinson makes the first of two appearances as Durst. He’ll be back in the next episode, “Faces.” Markinson has also appeared on TNG‘s “Homeward” as a Boralaan and DS9‘s “In the Cards” as the eccentric scientist Giger.
In addition, Michael Cumptsy and Carolyn Seymour debut their roles as part of Janeway’s Gothic holonovel, the former as Lord Burleigh, the latter as the housekeeper Mrs. Templeton. It’s Seymour’s fourth role on Trek, the other three being two different Romulan ship commanders in “Contagion” and “Face of the Enemy” and Mirasta Yale in “First Contact,” all on TNG. Both will return in “Persistence of Vision.”
Trivial matters: Janeway’s holonovel program will be seen twice more, in “Learning Curve” and “Persistence of Vision.” It was originally written and filmed for “Eye of the Needle,” but was cut for time. That sequence was directed by Winrich Kolbe, and inserted into the top of this episode, with a captain’s log voiceover and a new end-of-scene transition inserted.
Carolyn Seymour’s role in this (and the character’s return in “Persistence of Vision”) is the only one of her four Trek roles where she isn’t wearing facial prosthetics.
Chakotay’s medicine wheel is a kitbash of other medicine wheels usually found in tribes from the plains of North America, contrary to the later establishment of Chakotay’s tribe (not named here) as being Central American.
The Komar have the same ability to possess people that the disembodied energy beings did in TNG‘s “Power Play,” and Chakotay gets it for a while, too.
Chakotay and Tuvok’s trading mission was with the Ilidarians, whom Neelix mentioned as a potential trading partner back in “Parallax.”
Set a course for home. “You might have asked before adorning sickbay with animal remains.” This is a decent little science fictional mystery, but where last time had a bog-standard plot that was elevated by the uniquely Voyager aspects (in that case, the EMH), this time we have it done in by not embracing the uniquely Voyager aspects.
One of the frustrating notions of Voyager’s first season is that Paramount spent the second half of 1994 promoting their upcoming new show as being all about a Starfleet and a Maquis crew being forced to work together to get home. The promised conflict between antagonistic crews never really materialized on the show, though, even when it would have made sense.
The first two people who are possessed by Chakotay and conscripted to do odd things are Paris—a criminal—and Torres—one of the Maquis. This is a perfect opportunity to sow seeds of dissent, to tease the possibility of a Maquis plot to take over the ship, or some damn thing. Instead, Janeway gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, never suspects anything other than weird outside forces, and it’s just maddening.
Chakotay’s medicine wheel is also unfortunate, as it feels like they decided, “Hey, we need an Indian thing here” without really thinking it through. (This is likely an artifact of Voyager hiring a fake Native, “Jamake Highwater,” a.k.a. Jackie Marks, to be their consultant on Indigenous matters.) And it is kind of hilarious that Robert Beltran spends 90% of the episode in a coma.
Having said that, it is a decent mystery. In particular, you don’t realize that Tuvok’s the bad guy for most of the episode, and yet all the hints are there. It comes together very well, and there are some nice touches, from the bruising on Kes’s shoulder in the turbolift, hinting at the real reason for her being unconscious, to Kim being lost in thought during the meeting and everyone thinking he’s been posssessed.
It should’ve been so much more than it was, though.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges everyone to support the Bad Ass Moms Kickstarter. The next anthology from Crazy 8 Press. It’s a nifty anthology about, well, bad ass moms, and if it makes its first stretch goal, it’ll also include a story by Keith about a woman in New York City who is both a mother and a hunter of supernatural creatures. Other contributors include Mary Fan (who also edited the anthology), Star Trek fiction writers Derek Tyler Attico, Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, Paul Kupperberg, and Aaron Rosenberg, as well as Danielle Ackley-McPhail, T. Erik Bakutis, Russ Colchamiro, Paige Daniels, Kathleen O. David, Heather Hutsell, Kris Katzen, Karissa Laurel, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, TJ Perkins, Jenifer Purcell Rosenberg, Joanna Schnurman, Hildy Silverman, and Denise Sutton. Click here and please consider supporting it!
Medicine wheels are not medical in purpose according to Wikipedia. Medicine in the Native American sense is spiritual power. As the wheels’ purpose is spiritual maybe it could bring back a wandering soul but why would the Doctor know of it?
I’m just sorry we never really got to see Commander Chakotay and The Doctor chat a little about what it takes to be a ‘Medicine Man’ in every sense of the word; it’s more than a little fascinating to learn that an avatar of Science (quite literally an avatar in the digital sense of word) like Holo-doc apparently has more than a little of the old “leeches and bones from a mummies tomb” grimoire in his databanks (presumably lurking in some dark corner of that digital mind, spooking the Anatomy Textbooks, Academic Papers and ‘Sci-Fi Wikipedia’ he presumably calls into the forefront of his memory rather more often).
@1 Because the doctor has a database on psycho-spiritual practices. If you’re trying to program the ultimate doctor and have basically unlimited storage, why not include practices a patient or their family might want employed even if its medically dubious?
The blurb on my streaming site spoils the mystery which is very rude.
ETA: @2 The show would have probably made a hash of talking about Medicine in any detail. It’s probably better that they didn’t.
I think the costumes in Janeway’s horrible gothic romance indicate an 1840s-ish date. Between it and the fake native American stuff I have always found it hard to love this one.
Was there ever an explanation of how the rocks stuck to the deerskin on the medicine wheel? The whole concept annoys me, because it’s so culturally inept, but the sticky rocks make no sense at all.
Only Janeway and Chakotay have authority to eject the warp core? Shouldn’t the chief engineer have that authority too?
The main thing I remember about this one — aside from having to look up what the name meant — was that it was the episode where 24th-century Star Trek finally, finally remembered there was such a thing as wide-field phaser stun, even if the animation used to depict it was weird, a bunch of thin beams rather than the actual wide field of light used in “The Return of the Archons” and “A Piece of the Action.” But then, I kinda can’t blame them for avoiding it, since it’s a bit too much of an easy out for the characters. A whole army is charging you? Zap, problem solved. (My in-universe rationalization in one of my novels was that Starfleet decided it was too dangerous. Different people would be affected differently by the same “nonlethal” charge, depending on body mass, metabolism, health, etc. — what might only daze one person could kill another. I figure phasers have feedback sensors that let them calibrate a stun beam to the individual target, but that wouldn’t be feasible for a blanket effect, so there’s more risk of lethality.)
@5 – that bothered me, too; I think that Geordi does it on his own authority in Insurrection (although he pre-empts Riker, who was about to order the same thing).
What a tedious episode, in places. This is the first in the rewatch where I skipped long bits of the episode, mainly drawn-out “one of us could be it right now” faff. I did enjoy the holodeck first act (I think that the costumes are early/mid Victorian). I think that the episode makes a couple of errors: it cut out the doctor far too early (and therefore denies itself Robert Picardo’s talent), and the whole Chakotay spiritual thing is, as ever, mishandled.
But I agree with KRAD – the concept is fascinating and I think a fair score, as ever, from his rewatch. The episode reminds me of one of the first Star Trek books I read, “Ghost Walker” by Barbara Hambly. The premise is slightly different, but the whole displaced consciousness thing has similarities.
@@.-@: Yes, I too would like to know the answer to the mystery of the sticky rocks!
@8/GarretH: I figure the rocks are treated with the same kind of futuristic adhesion tech that commbadges use. If they can warp space and instantly translate any language, surely they can figure out ways to stick things to other things.
They are future rocks… Ooo…
Or boring, crafty person answer – there is a thin metal sheet attached to the back of the animal skin & magnets have been glued to the back of the rocks.
@krad: Good catch. I didn’t even think about the potential paranoia that the Maquis/Federation divide could have generated from this particular premise….
Cathexis is your typical high-concept possession episode. Not unlike Menosky’s own Dramatis Personae. But it lacks the energy that DS9 outing had. An excessive by-the-book execution makes this one a bit of a slog. Parts of it work, though I figured we were dealing with Vulcan Nerve Pinches well before anyone else.
Indirectly, this episode is the precursor to a rather poor tradition on Voyager, specifically episodes where Tuvok doesn’t act like himself. Just because that premise worked a couple of times with Spock, it doesn’t mean it has to work for every Vulcan. I think it’s a poor use of the ship’s security officer in the long run, in terms of lazy plotting. But Cathexis works well enough on that end. Season 2’s Meld is also effective, probably the better example. But others wouldn’t fare so well….
Janeway transferring the command codes to the EMH may have been the first inadvertent step towards inspiring him to develop the ECH later in the show’s run. Giving this much power and control to a hologram had to have consequences, even though it took another few seasons for it to come to fruition.
Of course, this episode would only have worked in an early season. By season 6 or so, if Chakotay had fallen into a coma, how could anyone have told the difference? :D
Thank you to y’all who narrowed the timeframe of Janeway’s holonovel.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I was puzzled by the decision to eject the warp core, because it seemed to me that it’s usually only done as a last resort when a ship is about to blow up. But since in this case it was only done to prevent Voyager from going to warp, I suppose it’s plausible that they could just pick it up again later.
John M. Cowan: in the log entry at the end of the episode, Janeway mentions that they retrieved the warp core.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@12/Christopher: Isn’t that the basic plot for season 5’s The Fight? Chakotay’s boxing passion almost drew me towards a coma.
Also, something I’ve left unsaid previously. I didn’t get to really watch this episode all the way through until I actually did a full Voyager first-time serious watch last year. When VOY originally aired its first season, I only glimpsed through a few episodes, and this one was one of them, but couldn’t make it past that dreadful Victorian holo-fantasy teaser. I had no idea it was going to be about possession.
@14/John M. Cowan: Also, according to the master systems display (the cutaway plan of the ship at the back of the bridge), Voyager had a spare in the trunk — a replacement warp core tucked away in case of emergencies. You can see it at just about the middle of the ship in the cutaway, behind the deflector dish assembly. Although I think there’s a later episode that ignores this and treats their core as one of a kind.
@18 Which makes perfect sense since the warp core is a single point failure for everyone dying in the cold dark of space. Though one hopes they have enough back up life support for evacuation by shuttle assuming a habitable planet is within range.
Now I wish we’d gotten an episode where they had to install the back up core which means a bunch of really tedious EVA work while keeping the ship relatively stationary and there’s a looming threat breathing down their necks.
@18/noblehunter: “Which makes perfect sense since the warp core is a single point failure for everyone dying in the cold dark of space.”
I realized long ago that it would make more sense if starships always traveled in groups of at least two, so you’d have a backup if one ship broke down in the depths of interstellar space.
@19 Try telling the admiralty that. But it’s probably the only thing that makes sense from a redundancy point of view. At least once you have crews you can’t fit on shuttles.
The one thing I liked about the warp core ejection sequence at the end of Star Trek (2009) is that there were multiple cores.
Not the most memorable episode but there’s a nice mystery at the heart of it. I remember on first viewing I figured out that there were two entities on board, one who was possessing people to keep them away from the nebula and one that had been in Tuvok all along and wanted to go back there, a good few scenes before the characters did, but I didn’t twig that the other one was Chakotay until they said so. It basically ends with a few generic evil aliens and a rather quick wrap-up, where Voyager somehow gets its warp core back despite apparently leaving it in the nebula (they say they’ve entered it before the warp core ejects), the Doctor’s suddenly back on-line and Kes is suddenly fine, but it’s a nice ride there. And I do appreciate the Doctor irritably noting that the explanation of how he revived Chakotay would take hours.
Oh dear, Janeway’s gothic holonovel. It might not have been too bad if this had been it, but they keep going back to it just long enough for the plot to matter and then suddenly drop it a few episodes into Season 2. What we’re left with seems like a slightly bizarre cross between Jane Eyre and Rebecca. (Carolyn Seymour also played a similar character in an episode of Quantum Leap, although to British telefantasy fans she’s arguably best known as the original star of the original Survivors.) Knowing the scene was filmed for a different episode, it’s noticeable how quickly we cut to Kim on the bridge during their conversation.
Tuvok and Paris’ rank insignia are all over the place in this episode, as if someone suddenly decided they’d been getting it wrong halfway through filming. (The two images above show Tuvok with lieutenant commander pips, but he’s a lieutenant in several scenes at the beginning and end.) Second episode running where the menace of the week doesn’t affect the Doctor, although it’s not such a feature here. With the Doctor and Kes both out of action, Paris serves as medic, the last time we see him do anything medical-related until after Kes has left in Season 4.
(This isn’t listed on the Voyager rewatch index, by the way.)
@9&10: Thanks for the answers to the mystery sticky rocks situation, both in-story and behind-the-scenes-production actuality. I figure for the combadges, the costumers also had magnetic plates strategically placed inside of the uniforms/costumes to make the combadges stay in place.
Regarding the holo-novel, I recall it being abruptly dropped in season 2 and then being disappointed because I wanted to know where the mystery was going and I liked seeing more of Carolyn Seymour on Star Trek. I thought the holo-novel might take on a ghosts-in-the-attic type of quality like in The Others (2001) which also involved a nanny being hired to look after a couple of kids in a creepy house, although this episode aired years before the movie so maybe I’m just reflecting on reruns of the episodes that I watched after the movie came out.
Note to moderators: This episode is missing from the Voyager rewatch table of contents.
As krad said, a decent little mystery.
I’m glad that I had no idea that Voyager was supposed to be about the conflict between the two crews, and I’m even gladder that they abandoned the idea almost immediately. I want my fictional heroes to be sensible, intelligent adults, and the way they didn’t give in to the allure of paranoia in this episode made me quite happy.
The medicine wheel may have been fake, but co-opting it as a map was cool.
Unlike some of the other commenters, I enjoyed Janeway’s gothic holonovel. Especially after last week’s Beowulf. While the young, male ensign becomes a monster-slaying hero on the holodeck, the female captain relaxes from her job by playing a mere governess. This rings very true to me.
I also liked that Janeway offered to help the aliens to find another source of energy, even if they didn’t take the offer.
@7/le_jones: I was thinking of Ghost Walker too! That’s why I immediately thought “it’s Chakotay” when the “alien presence” manifested itself, and then I spent the rest of the episode hoping that I was right. That novel is one of my favourites, and it was nice to see a similar story here.
I should add that I have no problem with the holonovel per se, just with the way it develops and then…doesn’t develop. Yet another missed opportunity, although the reason given at the time was that it was dropped because it was “unpopular”. (I think Janeway’s later Leonardo da Vinci hang-out was billed as its replacement.)
@24/cap-mjb: Sorry if I misunderstood you. I don’t remember what happened to the holonovel later, I just liked it here.
Although, come to think of it, I would have liked it even more if Janeway had spent her free time with Tuvok or Chakotay.
@22/GarretH: “I figure for the combadges, the costumers also had magnetic plates strategically placed inside of the uniforms/costumes to make the combadges stay in place.”
I think most of the time the badges would’ve been pinned on; I have a commbadge replica that was advertised as being from the original mold, and it’s just an ordinary pin sort of thing. The only times they would’ve done it differently were for shots of the badges being put on or removed, in which case it might’ve been magnetic or might’ve just been affixed with tape or spirit gum, just long enough to get the shot and make it look like it was held in place by some fancy high-tech means. As soon as they cut to a different shot, it’d just be pinned on normally, or maybe sewn in place.
The replica commbadge I had from TNG had two of those pins with the locking caps (one on each side) – they held it very well and steady on my jeans jacket. Might not be the way the show ones were done, because those caps would have been uncomfortable against skin with daily wear.
@27/treebee72: Yeah, that’s how mine works — I just didn’t know how to describe the mechanism. (Well, worked. One of the caps stopped locking many years ago and I seem to have misplaced it since then.) I wore it as part of my “uniform” when I worked briefly as a tour guide for a Trek-themed science exhibit at the local museum, and I don’t remember it being too uncomfortable, even though I have very sensitive skin.
Still, thinking it over, I figure it’s most likely the pins were sewn or glued in place, except in shots where they were put on or removed.
Commbadges also seem to have built-in transporters. In “Ensign Ro,” Ro takes off her jacket to give to a kid and it magically jumps onto her undershirt. And in “Darmok,” Picard’s does the same thing from jacket to shirt.
The Gothic holonovel and the repetitive scenes from last time’s Heroes and Demons pose a similar quandary: The repetitive dialogue scenes last time are justified because these are new players in the same game, so of course they get the same interactions. Similarly, Janeway’s life is crazy, it makes sense that she would choose a somewhat down to earth, slow-paced holonovel. So if a scene is boring but there are compelling in-universe reasons for it to be boring, is that good or bad? I guess it depends how you look at it. But the gothic holonovel certainly screams “cost savings” more than “best idea we could come up with.”
Which, oddly, helps this episode in a roundabout way even though the holonovel scene wasn’t intended for this episode: Normally it’s instantly suspicious when a character describes a series of events the viewer didn’t see. But it reads more like cost savings than a clue in a mystery plot, so it doesn’t *seem* suspicious on this occasion.
00 / KRAD:
One of the frustrating notions of Voyager’s first season is that Paramount spent the second half of 1994 promoting their upcoming new show as being all about a Starfleet and a Maquis crew being forced to work together to get home. The promised conflict between antagonistic crews never really materialized on the show, though, even when it would have made sense.
Yeah, I think I remarked on this back during the DS9 Rewatch, but that’s one of the great tragic ironies of VOY for me.
The Maquis were created specifically to set up VOY…and yet DS9 (wherein they made their debut) ended up getting more dramatic mileage out of them than the intended show.
“It should’ve been so much more than it was, though.”
Hey, what’s the big idea skipping right to the series recap after only 12 episodes?
;)
I always thought it was funny that a tough Starfleet captain liked dressing up in a crinoline and playing a gothic heroine. But it’s no sillier that playing a noir gumshoe. Whatever floats your boat!
But why is it that nobody in the 24th century is ever a fan of anything less than 400 years old? Don’t they have any current popular culture? Just once I would’ve liked to see a Starfleet character eager to dress up and play a Martian Revolutionary War hero or a pioneer of the settlement of Alpha Centauri or the hero of their favorite holoshow when they were a kid.
Well, now that I say that, I remember that Voyager did eventually give us that last one with Flotter and Trevis. But for the most part, only aliens in Trek get to have their own current culture, like Klingon opera or Cardassian enigma tales or Quark’s Marauder Mo action figures. Humans are always obsessed with stuff from the 20th century or earlier. Sometimes it seems as if Earth just stopped creating stuff after First Contact.
@34: Or maybe they’d want to dress up and take part in an adventure on a 22nd century starship.
@35/cap-mjb: We do not speak of this.
@34 / CLB:
But why is it that nobody in the 24th century is ever a fan of anything less than 400 years old? Don’t they have any current popular culture? Just once I would’ve liked to see a Starfleet character eager to dress up and play a Martian Revolutionary War hero or a pioneer of the settlement of Alpha Centauri or the hero of their favorite holoshow when they were a kid.
That’s a good point, actually.
It’s kinda like what we were discussing with Romulan culture over in the Picard discussions. It’s something that seems like an obvious, go-to bit of Trek world-building — and yet nobody’s really tackled it in 50 years worth of media.
Missed opportunity because it’d be great to see.
@37/Mr. Magic: “yet nobody’s really tackled it in 50 years worth of media.”
Not in onscreen media, but Diane Duane created a very rich and well-loved verison of Romulan (Rihannsu) culture in several novels in the ’80s, and then again in the early 2000s when the series was revived (it was so popular that they continued it even though it was out of continuity by then).
@38:
To clarify, I was talking about on-screen Canon, not the extended franchise.
(As I’ve said before in the Picard discussions, heh, I love Duanne’s Rihannsu books and I’m so happy the most recent Picard episode incorporated elements of her world-building).
I was also specifically talking about any canonical depictions of Federation popular culture. As you said,iit seems like such an obvious arena to explore with world-building, but again, nobody has really explored it on any of the shows or in the films.
It’s a glaring oversight, really.
@39/Mr. Magic: You said “media,” and books are media too, so it wasn’t clear what you meant.
@40:
Ah, yeah, that makes sense. I said media and I guess I automatically thought that equaled only TV and Film.
Anyway, I have wondered before what speculative fiction and the literary industry looks like in the 24th Century. We got glimpses with Jake on DS9 and a little bit with the Doctor in “Author, Author”, but again, it was never really explored.
I always remember this one as the episode where they finally fixed Tuvok, Paris, and Torres’ rank insignia. Up to now, Tuvok had lieutenant commander insignia, Paris had full lieutenant insignia, and Torres had provisional lieutenant insignia. But Tuvok has been called “Lieutenant” since “Parallax” ( Tuvok wasn’t referred to by rank in “Caretaker”, so I originally assumed he was in fact a lieutenant commander). But of course, lieutenant commanders are sometimes referred to as lieutenant (i.e., Picard calling Geordi “Lieutenant” in “The Most Toys”, and Lt. Cmdr. Saru being referred to as Lieutenant Saru by Burnham in “A Vulcan Hello”), just to make it more confusing. As someone already said, Tuvok and Paris’ insignia goes back and forth until it finally settles on Tuvok with full lieutenant insignia and Paris with lieutenant junior grade insignia, where it will stay until Tuvok is actually (finally) promoted to lieutenant commander early in season 4. And Torres’ insignia will stay provisional lieutenant junior grade for the duration. (There’s also “Commander” Chakotay having provisional lieutenant commander insignia, but nope, nope, nope…)
I dunno, I like the focus on classic art in Star Trek. It makes sense to me – after all, we read old books and look at old paintings right now – and it has the benefit of introducing the viewers to works of art they can then seek out on their own (as opposed to, say, Klingon opera). It introduced me to quite a few poets and writers.
If anything, I’d like to see more art from all over the world. It’s a bit too focused on the British.
Is Klingon opera really all that contemporary? I always imagined it as something centuries old and stuck in a Wagner loop.
@43/Jana: Sure, we still enjoy the classics, but alongside recent and modern pop culture. My point is that it shouldn’t be either/or, it should be both. Or at least that they should enjoy some classics that are less than 400 years old. From the Trek characters’ point of view, the 22nd century should be just as much a part of history as the 16th century. There shouldn’t be some arbitrary cutoff date between them. So the fact that hardly anybody in the Trek future is a fan of any human literature or culture or music more recent than our present day is one of the things that breaks the illusion of being in the future and reminds us that it really is a present-day creation.
@45/Christopher: On the other hand, it makes the characters more relatable. I share Kirk’s love of poetry and Janeway’s fascination with Leonardo da Vinci. It makes it easier for me to get into their head. I don’t think I would feel the same way about a fictional character who is a fan of some other fictional character.
But I agree that it should be both. Janeway could have been a fan of several scientists, for example, or Data could have added a 22nd century physicist to his poker table.
@46/Jana: Yes, that’s the way to do it — to mix recognizable and futuristic references. TOS was good at this. “The same old promises made by Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Hitler, Ferris, Maltuvis.” “The Nobel and Z-Magnees Prizes.” The Excalbians’ historical recreations mixing Lincoln and Genghis with Col. Green, Surak, Kahless, etc.
I’m sure the explanation of how the medicine wheel was created is correct, but still annoyed by it – we are given a narrative of an indigenous ritual involving a folded deerskin and rocks, then shown an effect only possible with a metallised backing and with magnets turning said spiritually significant rocks into the sort of cheap fridge magnets sold on market stalls. I’m Irish and often get a little irritated by how we get portrayed on ST (redeemed by O’Brien and by Kevin Riley, but omg fair Haven?), but native Americans get it so much worse, with hardly any mitigating factors. Certainly not Chakotay – the Animated Series gets closest to showing a scrap of respect.
Don’t get me started on combadges, or I’ll be complaining about Odo going from drinking glass or rat to a person with a functioning combadge with no explanation. Ever. They’re Magic Space Science. And they don’t make clicky noises like the medicine wheel rocks.
@445/46 ,Well there was the Captain Proton holo-novel
@48/Elderberry: I totally get your annoyance. Since you’re Irish, I’m sure you were just as annoyed at the “classic” TNG episode “Up the Long Ladder” which featured a colony of stereotypical Irish folk.
@48: And good catch about Odo’s combadge! I guess that had never occurred to me but yeah, where is that combadge going when he changes shape unless it’s meant to be a fake combadge for appearances-sake?
@51/GarretH: DS9 co-showrunner Robert Hewitt Wolfe’s behind-the-scenes rationalization for Odo’s mass changes was that Changelings’ bodies extended into the fourth dimension and they could shunt most of their mass out of 3D space as needed. Presumably Odo’s combadge was similarly shunted.
In Trek-related news, David Wise has passed away. His long career as an animation writer began with Star Trek TAS.
https://twitter.com/mcvalada/status/1235316109500452870
@47 but the interesting thing as you pointed out earlier above is that the Federation doesn’t appear to have any current pop culture.
The music that people perform? Pretty much just classical, pre-20th century stuff. Theatre seems a bit better (consider Riker and Data performing in Frame of Mind) but The Conscience of the King, ST6-TUC and all kinds of other references suggest Shakespeare wields massive influence still. That’s almost like us keeping someone like Terence or Seneca at the heart of our performance tradition rather than playwrights of mostly academic interest.
Where’s the Federation’s Beyoncé? Where’s their J. J. Abrams? It amazes me that their civilization, so forward looking in so many ways, and so open to various alien cultures, is so hidebound and backwards looking when it comes to their own culture
@54/corydon: Yes, that’s my point — TOS was better at establishing a mix of past and future history/culture, but later Trek shows have mostly dropped the ball and failed to establish any future Earth culture. Okay, granted, songs like “Beyond Antares” and the space hippies’ tunes didn’t sound any different stylistically from the kind of music you’d hear in the 1960s, but at least they were supposed to be contemporary songs for the characters. And there was the odd reference in TOS to future literature too, like “Nightingale Woman.” Even when past Earth culture was evoked, it was sometimes through a futuristic filter, like “Shakespeare in Arcturian dress.” There was at least some attempt to convey the sense that there was still an active, developing human culture in the future. But later shows just fell back on stuff from the 20th century and before, and the only future culture they invented was alien.
@54/corydon @55/Christopher: We know at least one broadcast avenue of pop culture was more-or-less abolished in the future. In TNG’s The Neutral Zone, Data mentions that television had fallen by the wayside around the 2040’s. Although none of the TNG writers at the time could predict that streaming and YouTube would shake the broadcast field as they are now, I assume they meant that the traditional audiovisual entertainment model as a whole (movies included) was going to become outdated.
@56/Eduardo: That may have been the implication intended by “Zone”‘s writers, but given what was shown later on (e.g. in “Past Tense”), the more logical interpretation is that broadcast media were simply supplanted by online media, what we’d now call streaming. Although that does still qualify as television, since the word applies to any long-range electronic transmission of audiovisual content, not just broadcast transmission (otherwise closed-circuit and cable wouldn’t be considered TV, and of course they are).
@57/Christopher: Though Past Tense takes place in 2024, 15-20 years before Data’s television revelation. It could be that the Bell Riots and the ensuing social movements somehow forced a cultural shift in society’s priorities, thus causing the eventual fade out of broadcast TV.
And a third World War was also in the works. if that war took place in the 2050’s, and television had gone defunct less than a decade prior, could this mean that the war was fought because of a lack of entertainment for the masses?
Also, that last one was meant as a joke.
@58/Eduardo: I just don’t buy that a whole medium would cease to exist. It’s a silly idea, one of many very bad ideas in “The Neutral Zone,” which was shot from a first-draft script due to the ’88 writers’ strike and thus was a hell of a mess.
@58/59 Perhaps not as much of a joke as you might think. “Bread and circuses” is the old, familiar adage for how to keep the masses in line. Well, mass entertainment, available for cheap or free certainly qualifies as circuses. I’ve heard the theory advanced that the internet functions to ward off actual insurgencies by allowing would-be revolutionaries to play-act one online (a sort of variant on the “Internet Tough Guy,” “keyboard commando” type we’re all quite familiar with).
I could potentially see a future civilization deliberately reject mass media as too dangerous to be allowed to exist. You don’t have to go very far (*cough* cable news) to see mass media being used in ways that are quite destructive. Then, too, a civilization may have a strong objection to the passive consumption of media, hence more of an emphasis on live performance.
Finally, we should recognize that Starfleet in particular represents the elite of Federation society. It should be expected that elite culture will differ from that of the common person in the Federation (and that mass culture will probably be far more localized, at least to the planetary level, assuming that interstellar travel and subspace transmission are still limited goods and not generally available freely to everyone). In this regard, Tasha Yar, representing someone who clawed her way up from nothing, might potentially have been a real opportunity to explore class differences in the Federation. On the other hand, I’m sure the idea of social class would have been something Gene Roddenberry would have absolutely denied existed. Still, we like to make the same assertion in the US too, even though it’s manifestly untrue
@21 I was thinking of the holonovel as a kind of cross between Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw, but I think your comparison to Rebecca might be more accurate.
I kind of obliquely enjoyed the holonovel just because I really like Jane Eyre, and I’m a sucker for a good mystery/ghost story, to be honest; so I’m a little disappointed we never got to see where its plot was going.
Other than that, as far as the rest of the episode goes, I don’t really have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. While ultimately failing to meet its full potential, it is a fun little mystery at least.
sorry accidental post, didn’t realize until now
@Communicator stickiness: I’ve seen some behind the scenes stuff on TNG. At some point in time, the costumes had a square of velcro by which the communicators were affixed. I don’t now how long it was like this (maybe it has always been like that?), but for scenes where the communicator would have no reason to be removed, it makes a lot of sense. In scenes where a communicator wasn’t needed or physically removed via plot, the actors would just wear a version of the costume without the velcro patch.
Ahh, the much talked about but rarely seen wide beam phaser stun. It was a cool scene for the writers to remember that phasers can do that. According to Commander Riker in the TNG 6th season’s Frame of Mind, a max setting wide beam could level half a building. Now that would be something cool to see next!
The episode itself I thought was decent. Using the medicine wheel as a map was a cool touch. I must say also that the reveal of Chakotay being one of the possessers was a neat twist that I didn’t see coming.
As for the holonovel, I didn’t mind it so much because I’m a sucker for period pieces. It’s just too bad it never really went anywhere.
A friend of mine had some actual combadge props from TNG and they also used velcro to attach. Magnets would not have been an option for them because they were actually made of wood instead of metal. The paint used made them look remarkably metallic even in person and much more so on film.