“Non Sequitur”
Written by Brannon Braga
Directed by David Livingston
Season 2, Episode 5
Production episode 122
Original air date: September 25, 1995
Stardate: 49001
Captain’s log. Kim wakes up from a dream that includes Janeway trying to contact him on a shuttlecraft to find himself in bed in the apartment he shares in San Francisco’s Old Town neighborhood with his fiancée Libby. This confuses him, as he and Libby were not engaged when Voyager was lost—and, well, he should be on Voyager. Libby tells him the date, which is the date he thinks it is, but everything is different.
He’s assigned to the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, and today he’s to help Lieutenant Lasca with a presentation for a new runabout, the U.S.S. Yellowstone. He flubs the presentation (because he knows absolutely nothing about it), claiming to be ill, and Admiral Strickler says he’s off to the Cardassian border, so they’ll have to postpone for a while. Lasca is not pleased.
Kim goes to his office and reads his service record. He was apparently denied the posting to Voyager he’d requested, and instead was assigned to the S.C.E. Ensign Daniel Byrd, whom he and Libby both know personally, got the ops position instead. His career in the S.C.E. is distinguished, apparently, and Lasca had indicated that a promotion to junior-grade lieutenant was in the offing if the presentation went well.
Kim tries to go home, but can’t remember the address, and has to abashedly ask Cosimo, who owns the café where he apparently gets a Vulcan mocha every morning, where he lives.
Libby was in the shower when he got home, and they have a talk that ends in mad passionate nookie. Kim asks her to say she loves him as if he hasn’t heard it in months. He says that he’s been away on a mission that got them lost for a long time, and he has missed her—she thinks it’s some kind of role-play foreplay.
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Network Effect
At four a.m., he wakes up and goes to his computer, pausing to hold his clarinet again for the first time in forever. He tries to call up Voyager’s mission profile, but it’s classified. However, Kim knows the ship’s access codes, what with being the ops officer and all, and is able to read the crew manifest. It looks familiar, but two names are missing—his own, and Tom Paris. According to the computer, Paris was imprisoned, and only recently released on parole.
Libby tries to find out what’s wrong, and Kim insists he’s in the wrong reality and he has to go to Marseilles. Libby thinks he should see a counselor or a neurologist, but he insists, and she trusts him and lets him go.
Kim finds Paris in the real Chez Sandrine playing pool. Paris explains that he was supposed to be on Voyager, but he got into a bar fight on Deep Space 9 and got imprisoned by a cranky shapeshifter, thus keeping him from going on the mission despite Janeway’s best efforts. All things considered, he thinks he’s better off. He finds Kim’s story of this being the wrong timeline to be crazy, but Kim says Paris is the best pilot he knows and he needs his help to get back to the right timeline. Paris basically tells him to screw off.
Kim goes home to find Lasca and a Starfleet Security detail, who escort him to talk to Strickler (who was supposed to be going to the Cardassian border, so it’s not clear why he’s still there). They know he accessed classified data about Voyager and was in contact with Paris, a criminal and Maquis sympathizer. Kim tries to explain what’s going on from his POV, and Strickler and Lasca try to make sense of it. Several possibilities are mentioned, both good (Kim has had his memory altered) and bad (he’s a Maquis sympathizer himself) and somewhere in the middle (he’s been replaced by an alien). Oddly, his being a changeling spy is never brought up, even though this is right when paranoia about such is at its height (this episode aired between DS9’s “The Adversary” and “The Way of the Warrior“).
Eventually, Kim stands at attention and refuses to speak further without legal counsel. The response to this is, oddly, not to summon someone from the JAG office to represent him as he just requested, but instead to put an ankle bracelet on him and confine him to his apartment.
He encounters Cosimo on his way home, and the café owner reveals that he’s actually an alien from a species that lives outside time and space. Kim’s shuttlecraft encountered a timestream and it altered reality, changing to a different timeline. Cosimo has no control over it, nor any way to get him back to reality, but his people have mapped the timestreams, and he provides that for Kim, at least.
Kim starts tampering with the ankle bracelet. Libby sees that and is livid. She can’t understand why he would abandon her for a world where he was lost to her for decades, possibly forever. She says she doesn’t know him anymore, but he insists he’s the same guy she met at the Ktarian music festival, the same guy who took three weeks to work up the courage to ask her out. But he’s also a guy who can’t remain in a wrong timeline where Paris isn’t living his best life and where Byrd is stuck in the Delta Quadrant.
When Starfleet Security shows up, he jumps out a window. The security guys chase him on foot, even though Kim is still wearing his combadge and Starfleet has access to transporter technology. Just as the security guard catches up to Kim, Paris socks him in the jaw. Paris changed his mind about helping Kim because Kim is the first person he’s met in a while that cared about Paris’s future.
The two of them are able to break into Spacedock via Paris’s personal mini-transporter that he got his hands on, er, somehow, despite being a parolee. They then steal the experimental Yellowstone runabout, er, somehow—apparently Starfleet doesn’t actually secure their craft. Kim goes to a timestream location near Earth and re-creates the circumstances of the situation he was in right before he woke up in San Francisco, with Paris holding off the Starfleet pursuit ships, er, somehow. The runabout explodes just as Paris activates the transporter—
—and Kim is back on the shuttlecraft. Voyager manages to beam him out before the shuttle is destroyed by the temporal anomaly. After arriving on the bridge, Kim thanks a very confused Paris for all his help.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Kim’s shuttlecraft encountered a temporal anomaly that altered the timeline so that Ensign Daniel Byrd was assigned to Voyager instead of Kim. Kim has to re-create the accident in order to get home.
Forever an ensign. Apparently Kim believes he’s meant to be lost in the Delta Quadrant and miserable and alone, rather than be a successful member of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers on the verge of promotion while living with the love of his life whom he’s about to marry. Sure.
Preservation of matter and energy is for wimps. In the alternate reality, Odo arrested Paris after the latter got into a bar fight at Quark’s. This got his parole revoked, and he couldn’t go to the Badlands with Voyager.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. By not disappearing down the Caretaker’s rabbit hole, Kim’s relationship with Libby (who is obviously the girlfriend he mentioned in “Time and Again“) deepened to the point where they’re engaged and living together. Since Kim couldn’t remember the address when he came home from Starfleet HQ, it’s obviously not where they were living before. (Then again, he was at the Academy, so he may well have lived in student housing before reporting to Voyager in the main timeline.)
Do it.
“Where are you going?”
“Marseilles, France.”
“What for?”
“I’ve got to see Paris.”
“But you just said you were going to Marseille.”
–Libby and Kim doing their version of “Who’s on First?”
Welcome aboard. Jennifer Gatti, last seen as Ba’el in TNG’s “Birthright” two-parter, plays Libby. Jack Shearer, last seen on DS9 as a Bolian in “The Forsaken” and a Romulan in “Visionary,” plays Strickler; he’ll be back as a different admiral, Hayes, in “Hope and Fear” and “Life Line,” as well as the movie First Contact. Mark Kiely plays Lasca, and great character actor Louis Giambalvo plays Cosimo.
Trivial matters: This is Gatti’s only appearance as Libby, though the character will be referenced again in “Persistence of Vision” and “The Thaw.” She also appears extensively in the first four post-finale Voyager novels by Christie Golden (Homecoming, The Farther Shore, Old Wounds, and Enemy of My Enemy), given the last name of Webber, where it’s revealed she’s an operative for Starfleet Intelligence. When Kirsten Beyer took over the Voyager post-finale novels with Full Circle, she was written out, with her and Kim breaking up.
This episode came about because, after the first season, Garrett Wang complained that his character had gotten so little action on the show he didn’t even have a stunt double. Nor did he ever have a romance (I guess he thought “Prime Factors” didn’t really count, since it didn’t go past flirting). Brannon Braga addressed this concern by giving him both.
The interrogation scene was written for Counselor Deanna Troi, but Marina Sirtis was unavailable so they had it be the same admiral to whom Kim gave his presentation, despite the admiral having said he was headed for the Cardassian border right after the presentation.
Kim’s being a clarinetist was established in “Caretaker,” though this is the first time we’ve seen him holding the instrument. He will finally replicate a new one for himself in “Parturition.”
This episode makes copious use of old footage: The Motion Picture (Kim’s shuttle entering Starfleet Command), The Voyage Home (exterior of Starfleet HQ), The Undiscovered Country (establishing shot of San Francisco at night), TNG’s “Relics” (the doors of Spacedock closing, reusing the Dyson Sphere’s door closing), and DS9’s “Armageddon Game” (the runabout exploding).
The Starfleet Corps of Engineers was first mentioned in The Wrath of Khan, and had their own series of monthly novella-length eBooks from 2000-2007, which your humble rewatcher co-developed, edited, and contributed several stories to. They also played a supporting role in the Vanguard series by David Mack, Dayton Ward, and Kevin Dilmore. Among the S.C.E.’s other appearances: the reference book Federation: The First 150 Years by David A. Goodman; the novels Prime Directive by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Avatar Book 1 by S.D. Perry, A Time to Die by John Vornholt, and A Singular Destiny by your humble rewatcher; and the comic books Assimilation2 by Scott & David Tipton, Tony Lee, & J.K. Woodward and issue #8 of Malibu’s DS9 comic by Mark A. Altman & Gordon Purcell.
When Kim is going through an alphabetical listing of the crew, he mentions Orlando, Parsons, Peterson, and Platt. Parsons has been mentioned, and seen in passing played by an extra, several times before, including “Phage,” “Cathexis,” “Initiations,” and “Projections.” The others are never seen or mentioned ever again, though they’re also all listed on a crew manifest that will be seen in “11:59.”
Voyager loses their second shuttlecraft this season, this one named the Drake (presumably after Sir Francis).
Daniel Byrd will be referenced again, in “Juggernaut,” where it will be revealed that he grew up on Kessik IV with Torres. The novel Echoes by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, & Nina Kiriki Hoffman explicitly establishes that Byrd and Kim graduated together and Janeway had a choice between the two of them.
For the second time (TNG’s “Time’s Arrow” two-parter being the first), a Star Trek episode takes place in San Francisco with several outdoor scenes in which the hilliest city in the country is completely flat.
Set a course for home. “There goes my bank shot.” This is another must-fix-history story in the grand old tradition of “The City on the Edge of Forever” on the original series where history gets “broken” in some way and our heroes must restore the timeline. Voyager itself has dipped into this well once before (“Time and Again“), and will do so again, notably in the “Year of Hell” two-parter, “Timeless,” and “Endgame.”
The problem with “Non Sequitur” is one that will also plague “Endgame”: we are given absolutely no good reason why this particular timeline should be fixed.
Seriously, Kim is (a) not trapped on a ship 70,000 light-years from home, (b) now engaged to the love of his life, and (c) working for the S.C.E. on the verge of a promotion (that he will never actually get in the main timeline). What possible reason does he have to fix things? What possible reason does he have to go back to that other life? Supposedly, there’s the fact that Paris is so miserable on Earth, but I’m sorry, being stuck in another quadrant is not, by any stretch of the imagination, better than being home.
There are so many ways this could have worked. One is to give us some idea who Daniel Byrd is, and why it would be so much worse for him to be stuck in the Delta Quadrant than it would be Kim. Heck, keep it simple and clichéd: he left a pregnant wife behind, and Kim doesn’t want that kid to grow up without a father.
Better yet, find out that they discovered the wreckage of Voyager in the Badlands, and according to the sensor logs, they tried to return home through the Caretaker’s array and were destroyed. In which case, Kim would try to restore the timeline so his friends wouldn’t all die, because being stuck in the Delta Quadrant is better than being dead.
In the absence of that, there are many other things that should have happened in this episode that didn’t, starting with Kim fucking telling someone where Voyager is! Seriously, he has Voyager’s access codes, which he only has because of his knowledge as ops officer, and he knows enough specific details about the crew that he could probably provide enough personal details to make his story convincing to Starfleet Command. Have him do what Barclay would do four years later in “Pathfinder” and try to get in touch with Voyager or at least figure out something. That would’ve been way more useful than nearly getting arrested by Starfleet Security and stealing a runabout because the guy who makes your coffee told you to.
Oh yeah, Starfleet Security. Starfleet has various methods of vehicular transport as well as, y’know, a transporter that can be used to lock onto the combadge Kim’s wearing (or, for that matter, the ankle bracelet he’s also wearing), and yet, for some reason, they have to chase him on foot? Buh?
I also didn’t buy for a nanosecond that a paroled Paris who spent time in Odo’s holding cells would go out of his way to share a drink with Kim, much less travel halfway around the world, break into Starfleet, and sacrifice his life to help him get back to a shittier timeline.
This could’ve been a fun mess-with-your-head what-is-real-and-what-isn’t story of a type that Brannon Braga has written extremely well in the past (as recently as two episodes ago). Instead, it’s a hoary temporal storyline in which the explanation is provided in a lengthy and awkward infodump by Louis Giambalvo in a comedy Italian accent, and which at no point provides any good reason why Kim should do anything other than stay right where he is and enjoy being a successful officer with a fiancée he loves instead of a useless ensign stuck in a tin can on the other side of the galaxy.
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido has started a YouTube channel called “KRAD COVID readings,” where he’s reading his works of short fiction, by way of giving folks some entertainment while they’re at home because of the coronavirus. Episode #6 is him reading his Voyager short story “Letting Go.” Please do subscribe!
An episode focused on Kim? Yikes. Garrett Wang is really not that good of an actor, IMO. He has no presence. It feels like he’s just reciting his lines. So this episode was a big dud for me.
Oh man, I accidentally caught this one on TV in my early teens. It confused the heck out of me, but I’d caught so little of the Voyager backstory by that point that I assumed I’d missed a few big pieces of the puzzle. Nope. Waking up in San Francisco with a fiancée and a stable working life after an intense, detailed nightmare of being trapped in the Delta Quadrant still sounds like a huge relief to me. Alas, opening credits and all that.
On the plus side, this review made me laugh out loud when we hit the Deep Space 9 reference. I didn’t catch that the first time around, probably because I hadn’t yet watched as much as a single episode.
Let’s be honest: stealing a Starfleet shuttle is the easiest thing in the world. All Starfleet Security is good for is as an employment centre for alien agents and traitors.
The problem with “Non Sequitur” is one that will also plague “Endgame”: we are given absolutely no good reason why this particular timeline should be fixed.
Personally, I can think of several legit reasons to fix the timeline in “Endgame.” But we’ll get to that when the time comes :-)
Ugh. As KRAD mentions, this episode had potential with its interesting premise: would Kim choose to keep this happier, better life for himself, or do the “right thing” and restore the timeline? But the execution is so thoroughly botched and everything that we get here is so extremely lazy as depicted and written. The way in which Kim is brought into this alternate reality is so vague that even the temporal alien or whatever he is doesn’t bother to go into specifics (and Braga’s never been good at creating realistic sounding explanations to his far-out premises).
Krad mentions the fiancé and the job but another important thing for Kim to stay for in this reality is his closeness to his parents and at last he’s near them again. Getting back to the main dilemma of Kim staying put or returning to the status quo, the moral issue really needed to be fleshed out a lot better in order for us to really believe Kim just had to follow his conscience. The main things we’re told as the audience that weight on Kim’s mind are: (1) this Daniel Byrd guy who Kim says shouldn’t be there and (2) Tom Paris, who should be on Voyager. As to (1), we, the audience, don’t know Daniel Byrd, and as far as we know, Kim doesn’t know him either. So why should we (or even Kim) care? And no attempt is shown as to what this Byrd guy left behind that matters to him. (2) The focus should have just been on Tom Paris since that is someone that we, and Kim, care about, but as depicted, his status here as a “loser” just isn’t enough for Kim to give up everything he has suddenly gained. At least make Paris perhaps a decent person but confined to a hospital bed in excruciating pain with an incurable disease. And he could have mended things with his admiral father too. At least then would we believe that Kim just can’t let this go on and needs to get back to Voyager; or any of the other ideas that Krad had as to why Kim should be motivated to go back would have been infinitely better then what was depicted in this episode.
The re-use of the Dyson Sphere docking doors here? Ugh. A re-use of the docking doors scene of the Federation starbase from ST III: TSFS (which itself was re-used in TNG in “11001001”) would have been a much better and appropriate re-use of footage.
I guess it’s a good thing Kim lived in the Old District of San Francisco which alleviated the production crew of having to design futuristic city sets.
So Tom Paris in this timeline gets into a bar fight with Quark? Must have been a one-sided fight. And here Paris fights Quark over the latter trying to sell him that same knockoff crystal crap that Paris had Kim just walk away from when the same incident happened in the “proper” timeline? Uh huh. Sure, Jan.
Early season 2 of Voyager is just the pits!
@1: I will concede that Garrett Wang’s performance really wasn’t that good here. I had to replay the scene in which the coffee shop alien reveals his true identity to Kim because (1) the alien says the dialogue so casually as if it’s no big whoop, and then (2) Kim literally has no reaction to this huge revelation and has a blank expression on his face. However, I think Wang can act and will improve as the years go by and if given something interesting to do, “The Chute” in season 3 and “Timeless” in season 5 come to mind.
Hmm, I remember finding this a reasonably enjoyable episode, though that’s probably at least 50% due to Jennifer Gatti being incredibly hot. Also just getting a glimpse of bright, cheery life on Earth in the Federation, something we didn’t get often.
The main problem I remember having with it is that I hate the idea of a “personal mini-transporter.” It makes no damn sense. As I’ve said elsewhere in connection with Nemesis‘s use of the same idea, a transporter couldn’t possibly beam itself, since it couldn’t function while in a disassembled state; and it couldn’t be smaller than the object it’s transporting, since the volume of the dissassembled particles stored in the pattern buffer would necessarily be greater than the volume of the intact object. So I always assumed that the “mini-transporter” was more just a remote control that tapped into the Starfleet or civilian transporter network.
I suppose maybe I liked the novelty of a story where the alternate timeline isn’t dystopian or awful, where it’s ideal for the protagonist but he makes the self-sacrificing choice to put things back for the sake of others. I agree, though, that it didn’t do an adequate job establishing how it was so much worse for others, except for Paris missing his shot at redemption and Byrd getting stranded in Harry’s place.
Also, the episode is ambiguous on whether Harry actually altered history or just slipped sideways into a parallel timeline. Cosimo spoke of it as changing history, but Harry consistently spoke in terms of needing to “get back” to his home reality, rather than fixing reality itself, so he seemed to be assuming both timelines existed independently and it was just a case of moving back to the right one. Which would mean that he got that timeline’s Paris killed for his own convenience, which is hardly selfless.
I was hoping the review would give me some reasons to want to watch this episode since I dislike these sorts of premises. Sadly, it did not. The justifying technobabble is even worse than usual. How could a timestream location in the Delta quadrant change events in the Alpha quadrant?
Anyways, I’m not going to watch this one.
@5:
Yes! I thought I had missed a scene where the alien revealed himself. I rewound and nope, that’s literally how it went down.
Plus, they don’t really establish a credible ticking clock. So even if we accept that Kim should “fix” the timeline, then obviously he should get Starfleet on board and do whatever it takes to persuade them, including submitting to a Betazed scan. Then, the crazy attempt to get back to his own timeline could at least be done under controlled circumstances.
@6 CLB:
“Also, the episode is ambiguous on whether Harry actually altered history or just slipped sideways into a parallel timeline. . . . Which would mean that he got that timeline’s Paris killed for his own convenience, which is hardly selfless.”
Not to mention the implications for this timeline’s Harry! Worst case scenario, he took Harry’s place in the doomed runabout (or space) and best case scenario, he’s on Earth with a lot of questions he can’t answer. The whole thing just isn’t well crafted.
Non Sequitur is one weird episode. On one hand, as @Christopher pointed out, it’s fun to get outdoors and spend some time in the streets with actual sunshine and blue skies. But on the other, this isn’t the story I’d expect out of an episode spent on Earth.
Is it just me or was this particular version of Starfleet consciously designed as a fascist regime? Keeping in mind that this episode was written around the same time as DS9’s Homefront/Paradise Lost two parter, one could assume Braga was borrowing Moore’s idea of the military enforcing tight security in a context of infiltration paranoia. The thing is, 45 minutes isn’t nearly enough time to tell a story about Harry being inquisitive about Voyager’s whereabouts to suddenly having a scene of Starfleet security chasing him across the streets.
This probably would have played better had they used the changeling infiltration aspect as a backdrop. The idea of Maquis spies goes against the very notion of what the Maquis represent. As Eddington pointed out, they had no quarrel against the Federation. Why would anyone bother to infiltrate the upper ranks? Which makes Starfleet’s Maquis infiltration concern at the very least misguided.
I’m usually fond of David Livingston’s work (TNG’s The Mind’s Eye; ENT’s Impulse, and even several VOY entries), but the whole chasing through the streets sequence looks cheap. Feels like an old movie set rather than an actual location. I’m guessing budget was tight for this one. Way too few extras.
I like Gatti as an actress, but Birthright made far better use of her than here. Being stuck playing the annoyed girlfriend is a waste of her talents, and the fact is her and Garrett Wang have no chemistry.
The problem is also that this particular story doesn’t work with any other character. Chakotay is Maquis. B’Elanna ditto Tuvok is a Vulcan. Neelix is a Talaxian war orphan. Kes is Ocampa. The Doctor is a hologram. Paris is a former rebel. And Janeway is the Captain. Kim was conciously designed in the show bible as the young ensign who misses his home and family the most. In theory, a story like Non Sequitur should work, but Wang isn’t good enough of an actor to sell it. And framing it as a story the guy being suddenly insistent on returning to the real, less desirable reality feels tacked on.
Ironically, Timeless would use similar Kim beats and work much better later on.
we’ll cross that bridge when we get there but I would say Endgame does a decent job explaining why it wants to change the timeline, imo, even if you could argue it’s unethical for Janeway to do so, but fully agree this episode does absolutely nothing to establish why this needs to be changed, other than that I guess it’s kind of a shitty thing to do Daniel Byrd, but as Keith notes the episode does nothing with that.
@8: Right! I thought I had missed a scene too and thus I had to rewind.
Speaking of this Cosimo fella, Kim seemed to recognize him and Cosimo acted familiar with Kim down to his coffee preference which Kim didn’t seem to question. So I take it that Cosimo was an actual person. But this Cosimo is actually a temporal alien. So where is the real Cosimo? Or is this really Cosimo and his body is being inhabited by the alien? Just another question among others in this story but I dislike the episode so I won’t really ponder it too hard!
I’m looking forward to the review on Monday of “Twisted” because I can’t wait to trash it and I personally believe is worse than “Threshold”!
On the other hand, in the new timeline Kim could end up being killed in the Dominion War (of course he would have no way of knowing that)..
@10 Eduardo: “Is it just me or was this particular version of Starfleet consciously designed as a fascist regime?”
I don’t know, Starfleet seems pretty reasonable here, particularly for a military that knows a war is very likely coming soon and is already engaged in hostilities against the Maquis. Harry Kim accessed confidential files and wouldn’t be the first Starfleet Officer to defect to the Maquis. They quite naturally have questions, are willing to hear Kim out, but quite naturally don’t immediately believe his crazy story. They entertain the possibility that Harry Kim might believe he’s telling the truth but merely be delusional. They recognize that he has the right to counsel and questioning stops shortly after he invokes it. They don’t even throw him in the brig, they just give him an ankle monitor and are only chasing him because Kim tried to tamper with it. It might be different if Harry Kim wasn’t in Starfleet, but as military discipline and suspicion goes this is a very light touch. Had Kim decided to persuade them rather than go rogue, he likely could have persuaded them he was telling the truth eventually (whether they would go along with his crazy plan is a different question).
@10: Maybe it’s implied but I doubt Braga wanted to specifically reference what was happening with the Dominion and it’s effects on Earth because it might have confused viewers of Voyager who don’t watch DS9 (and there were definitely people who watched the former and couldn’t get into the latter series). In fact, Voyager’s references to the events on DS9 would be few and far-between (I know there’s a quick reference to it in “Message in a Bottle” and more of a direct reaction it in “Extreme Risk” to cite a couple of examples.
Yes, this all did feel like a budget-saving episode what with the copious re-use of other Star Trek properties’ footage, minimal extras, and a set that felt like the backlot of Universal Studios recreation of 1920’s New York City.
For those questioning Garrett Wang’s acting abilities, I remember him saying in his interview on Trek.fm that the human characters on Voyager were specifically told to play it down and be less interesting, so as to make the alien characters pop out more. The one time he tried to sneak in some acting under the radar, he was taken aside and told to knock it off or else. Anthony Montgomery said the same thing about his time on Enterprise. So it may be that they both possess more acting skills than the material and/or director was allowing them to demonstrate.
@12/GarretH: Harry didn’t know Cosimo, just played along when Cosimo recognized him. Cosimo said he’d been coming to the coffee shop since he left the Academy 8 months ago (consistent with the interval since “Caretaker”), and Harry’s service record says he requested the Voyager posting immediately on graduating from the Academy. So in the main timeline, he never met Cosimo.
You’re right in #16 that DS9 and VGR generally tried not to refer to each other too much, since one was syndicated and one was on a new, small network, so there was no guarantee that both shows would be available in every market. They each had to be able to stand on their own without too much reference to complicated continuity from the other.
Besides, maybe Harry and Tom’s career paths aren’t the only changes between the timelines. Maybe the Dominion threat is lesser here and the Maquis conflict is more heated. (Maybe the Dominion clandestinely backed the Maquis instead of the Cardassians?)
@17: Got it, but then still, is there a real Cosimo?!? Or does the temporal alien have a side-gig running a coffee shop in Old San Francisco on 24th century Earth? Possibilities of a spin-off here?
And also, agreed about further changes to this parallel universe. Who’s to say if the Dominion is even a threat (yet) in this reality?
@16: I’m aware of that same interview Wang gave and have even cited it here previously. But as I also just mentioned, Wang can act and he was much more emotive and expressive in episodes like “The Chute” next season and 5th season’s “Timeless” so perhaps the restrictions on how human characters could act had been eased by then.
@14: I personally feel the ankle monitor to be a step too far as it is, and they dive a little too fast towards that solution, which obviously wouldn’t sit well with Kim and would only push him towards more extreme behavior. I’m still of the mind that this particular conflict feels forced.
As for avoiding sprinkling DS9 references on VOY, I can understand the reluctance, though it still leaves the episode without a compelling enough reason as to paint Starfleet in such a negative light (other than serving as a forced story method to convince Kim that that reality was a worse deal than being stranded on the Delta Quadrant).
@17/Christopher: That’s one thing I doubt the Dominion would ever attempt. The Dominion has always operated by attempting alliances with established powers (or piting them against each other) before employing the Jem’ Hadar. Covertly backing an independent movement like the Maquis would go against their usual mode. They’d treat the Maquis no different than any real world government that tends to label non-government groups as terrorists when they become politically inconvenient, which is more or less what happens when we get to Blaze of Glory.
It makes no sense that Janeway can’t get Paris out of Odo’s brig, since he’s integral to her mission to the Badlands. Even if Sisko doesn’t help Janeway out, one call to Starfleet Command and someone would be yelling at Sisko to get Odo in line.
@19: I don’t feel though Starfleet is being portrayed here in a negative light. They have justifiable concerns that Kim is acting very unusually: from accessing info on Voyager he shouldn’t have access to, to meeting up with an ex-Maquis, to his general odd behavior with those close to him. Monitoring his movements seems quite understandable.
21/Magnus: It certainly isn’t believable nor is the event that would have landed Paris in the brig in the first place: namely, getting into a bar fight with Quark of all people. We saw in “Caretaker” that Paris (with Kim) walked away from the situation when Quark pulled the very same scam. So now all of a sudden Paris is so brutish that he attacks Quark?
@18/GarretH: My impression is that the alien invented the Cosimo persona to keep an eye on Harry when he got lost in the timestream. Since Harry didn’t know anything about his circumstances in the altered timeline, it was easy for Cosimo to pretend to be someone he’d known for months.
I sort of remember liking this episode, but now it sounds horrible!
But the one thing that always bothered me was the reuse of the Dyson sphere footage to represent Earth spacedock. It was starting to be clear that someone somewhere in the production team just didn’t care that much at this point.
I think most people would assume they’d had a very real nightmare and go on living their great new life.
Devin Clancy: “It was starting to be clear that someone somewhere in the production team just didn’t care that much at this point.”
That’s an unfair characterization. Reusing footage is a common method of saving money on TV shows. Blowing the budget leads to “Shades of Gray.” Saving money where you can allows you to do big budget-busters every once in a while.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@23/CLB: But how did Cosimo procure his own shop? Did he hold interviews and hire employees? Did he learn to make Vulcan coffee? Perplexing questions I know.
@24/Devin Clancy: maybe saying they don’t care is a bit strong but better choices could definitely have been made. The Dyson Sphere footage irked me too. The Federation spacedock footage with the doors shutting could have been used instead.
@7/noblehunter: You’re really not missing anything if you skip this one unless you enjoy nitpicking an episode apart. Alternate reality/parallel universe stories should at least be fun and interesting even if there is a reset button at the end and the showrunners couldn’t even manage that here.
@28/GarretH: It may be that the TNG Dyson Sphere footage was more convenient or less expensive to use because it was created in-house rather than borrowed from ILM. Or maybe it was a better fit for the camera angle they wanted.
Reused footage doesn’t really bother me. I understand there’s a budget constraint. It’s also why, long ago, I came to terms with the fact that most aliens look human but with a different forehead or ears.
What is Vulcan coffee, has does anyone know? Is it extra black? Does it have some Vulcan condiment in it? Or is it a plant originating on Vulcan that is brewed sort of like coffee? Are stimulants logical?
It’s not even Vulcan coffee – it’s Vulcan MOCHA. I could hand-wave Vulcan’s having coffee, but chocolate coffee???
@31, 32 – Maybe the mocha was just named after Vulcan, rather than it being coffee Vulcans drink?
@30: Yes, I do really understand these practical budgetary realities and we have plenty more Voyager episodes coming up with alien races that basically appear human. I just remember my disappointment with that as a teenager growing up with this show because I had imagined the Delta Quadrant being this very alien, intriguing area of space that was unlike anything we had ever seen depicted before and then…nope!
Jennifer Gatti played the only Klingon I ever found attractive. Here, unfortunately, her looks couldn’t even come close to saving this dud of an episode. Although I admit I got a genuine laugh out of tough and shady Paris trying to throw hands with Kim at Chez Sandrine wearing a goofy multicolored vest that looked like something Neelix designed.
Profoundly disappointing episode – which could have been a great one, as it sets up very nicely from the beginning. Reading through the comments here, apparently none of us who watched this air originally could fathom why Harry would EVER want to leave this near-paradise of an existence to get back to Voyager. I was anticipating that he had been captured by aliens who were manipulating his thoughts and attempting to learn from him how to incapacitate Voyager so they could commandeer it – or that he was actually still on the ship but unconscious and in sick bay, being treated for some sort of alien germ/virus he’d become infected with, or perhaps gotten seriously injured during an away mission and in his delirium began imagining the sequence we see.
I like the ideas which have been presented here to frame the story around to make Harry’s presence back on Earth work, particularly the proposal that Starfleet discovered wreckage of Voyager in the Badlands, that they were then able to determine through it’s sensor logs Voyager attempted to return using the Caretaker’s array, getting destroyed in the process. Then at least we’d have a reason for why Harry would make every effort possible to try and restore what is (according to him) the proper timeline so the friends he’d made (plus the one he was already friends with: Danny Byrd) wouldn’t be killed. In any case, minus a solid explanation for his actions, it just seems quite lamebrained and unbelievable that he’d be trying so hard to return.
There are a lot of goofs and oversights here (all of which have been detailed), and the biggest one that I always remember this particular ep for is when Security is chasing Harry, because – as was already mentioned here several times – they have applied an ankle bracelet to him and could easily lock on to him through it and transport him to the brig. Not to mention he is wearing his com badge as well, and they could lock onto to that also. When I first watched it I remember wondering why they weren’t just locking onto him. Padding out the time in the ep with a short chase sequence I guess…
Seems everything about this episode was a great opportunity blown. I don’t necessarily hate the episode as there are some bright spots to it, for instance I like both the guest stars and was quite disappointed that they didn’t find a way to bring back the lovely Jennifer Gatti to reprise her role as Libby. They could have written her into Timeless instead of having Chakotay have a main squeeze; they also could have introduced us to Danny Byrd in that same episode, maybe have him being the First Officer on the Challenger who also confronts Harry about the actions he is taking.
@31/IBookwyrme: Well, according to Marc Okrand’s Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, raktajino (“Klingon coffee”) is a human beverage derived from raktaj, a Klingon blend of qa’vIn (a potent, genetically engineered strain of Earth coffee beans) and ra’taj liquor, and named as a blend of raktaj and cappuccino. So maybe Vulcan mocha is similarly made from a variety of coffee and/or cacao beans cultivated on Vulcan. Or maybe it’s just regular caffe mocha made with sehlat milk.
Star Trek has a tendency to be way too essentialist about the origins of things — every person or food or drink or other entity from a given planet is assumed to be native to that planet. But when cultures interact, they exchange things — immigrants, imported crops and trade goods, literature, religions, etc. It’s unrealistic how unblended the Federation’s cultures are after 200 years of partnership. There should be a lot more mixing, including plenty of fusion cuisine.
@36/darrel: The idea wasn’t supposed to be that Harry wanted to leave, but that he wanted to stay but was noble enough to sacrifice his self-interest for Paris’s sake. But it wasn’t very convincing.
Huh. Pretty much ever since this rewatch started, I’ve been loudly insisting that Janeway has short hair in this one as well as “Parturition”. So I was sat there at the end, knowing she was about to appear, waiting for the moment…and she doesn’t, at all. I can only assume that, like Harry, I’ve just slipped through from another reality.
It would be churlish to say that that’s the most memorable thing about the episode but. Garrett Wang does his best virtually having to carry the whole thing himself but he’s got very little to play off (with one obvious exception, which we’ll get to later). It’s nice if a bit ethically dubious that he gets to spend one last night with his lost love (Harry’s doomed love life again!) but the episode doesn’t really convince that Libby’s his soul mate: Fair play to her though, she’s the only person from this new life of his that actually sticks her neck out for him. It’s quite possibly pushing credibility that, with a billion things that could happen when Harry goes into that time stream, he ends up back in the version of reality that we need for the next episode but hey, it’s Star Trek, these things happen. (I definitely prefer the DC-lite “Harry Kim punched time and changed history explanation” explanation than that this is an existing parallel universe.) Starfleet must also be pretty paranoid to have Paris under surveillance: This is just an excuse for one of their agents to spend a lot of time in a bar, right?
But what I absolutely love about this episode is what it tells us about Paris and Kim’s friendship. I remember when I first watched it and we had that scene in the bar I thought that was going to be it: We and Harry see that the Paris of this reality is a drunken loser, giving us a reason to want the other reality back. (Aside from essential nobility in not wanting to trade places with some other poor bloke and a belief in how Things Should Be, it’s about Kim’s only motivation for wanting to put things right.) And then, about an act later, Paris is suddenly there coming to Harry’s rescue and I was delighted. And it’s telling that he’s suddenly a lot more like the Paris we know, or at least the Paris of early Season One which isn’t quite the same thing.
Because what Kim seems to miss is that this isn’t what Paris would be like if he hadn’t accepted Janeway’s offer to join Voyager. This is what Paris would be like if he’d never met Harry Kim. If he hadn’t encountered him in Quark’s and chosen to take him under his wing, and been rewarded with the first friend he’d had in a long time, and chosen to go dashing into the firing line on the Caretaker’s array and on the Ocampa planet mainly because he needed to know his friend was all right. And when Harry Kim comes into his life in this reality, and offers him the hand of friendship, he makes the same choice and takes on the might of Starfleet for him. Any episode with that in has got to have something going for it.
You know, on a previous viewing I thought exactly the same as you, Keith, that the admiral said he was on his way to the Cardassian border and then was somehow still there a few scenes later. So I watched the episode expecting to see this mistake…and I realised it wasn’t there, because he actually said he was leaving for the border “in a few days” so it makes perfect sense that he’d still be there what seems to be the next day. I guess it’s one of these things that you need to see a few times to get all the nuances of!
With Voyager only appearing in the closing minutes, there’s no room for an appearance by the Doctor, Neelix or Kes. That makes this Kes’ first non-appearance, and I think she goes on to miss quite a few second season episodes, although not as many as some guidebooks say!
Why do Harry’s codes even work? Is every officer on Voyager given the same codes? Terrible even from a ’90s IT perspective.
This episode felt out of place, and aptly titled.
Well I enjoyed this episode. I like Kim, but I”m an engineer myself and always have soft spots for starfleet engineers. so he was one of my fav voyager peeps.
Do agree there was a lot of untapped potential here though. could have been soooo much better.
I think Harrys decision to go back actually says a lot about his principled character. This isn’t right. yes its awesome for me but voyager needs me and thats where i need to be with my band of brothers.
The flat San Francisco will be karmically balanced in ENT’s “Carpenter Street”, where a number of outdoor scenes set in Detroit clearly show mountains in the background.
S
I always assume that things with aliens in the name used by humans have very dubious connections to the aliens, just like the real-world “Spanish Flu” or “French Fries”. Doctor Who’s “Venusian Akido” is what convinced me of that.
I will clarify my earlier point to say that reuse of footage in general is necessary and usually OK. It doesn’t bother me if one starship happens to look and move exactly like another starship of the same class.
But reuse of footage of alien tech from a very well-known scene from a memorable episode to represent Federation tech is showing that they don’t care to put in the effort necessary to suspend disbelief. As another comment mentioned, I’d be totally fine if they recycled the actual footage of the space dock door from either Trek III or VI.
I kind of liked the chase scene If only because of the devastating elbow Harry drops to lay out one of the Starfleet security guys on his fire escape. Something about him leaving that guy sprawled out on his back cracks me up.
Harry and Libby’s apartment is very cool, with those loft-style windows. But their view of the Transamerica Pyramid doesn’t really jibe with them being in the Mission District, as indicated by the signage when Harry’s running down the street.
Sorry nitpick but Pittsburgh is the hilliest city in the US. It just doesn’t have the San Fran media hype machine. There’s a mountain next to downtown Pittsburgh
In regard to the reuse of stock vfx footage, as disappointing as it is, you have turn back the clock to the production methods of the time period & the limitations of a tv show budget to gain a better understanding of what the production crew was up against.
CGI vfx were still in their infancy, and the type of shots typical for the time included miniatures, motion control stages, multiple takes for each of the elements in the shot, optical line-up, shooting exposure wedges, optical composting, etc. All of which required crews of people, long hours & film lab costs. And if you were doing CGI shots on film, render times for a single frame could be hours even on a top-end Silicon Graphics computer. You may remember in TOS that the film elements of the Enterprise had to be reused over & over, resulting in less than stellar composites, even when the show was new. And the Trek movies reused footage & models such as the Orbital Office from TMP being filmed upside-down as Space Station Regula 1 in Wrath of Khan, or the Genesis Project footage reused in, I think, 3 films.
Nowadays, CGI assets can keep this from happening as often, but it still does when budget & the lack of time raise their ugly heads. Trust me, no one, especially the vfx crew, wants to take the cheap & easy way out, but sometimes it’s the only way to get the show done on time.
I used to like this episode more, but I can’t deny, what a missed opportunity. But I agree with @40 — this just isn’t right. Yes, it’s a much better life for me now, but it isn’t right.
But then, after all this trouble, Harry decides not to go through with his plan? He actually needs to be pushed into the transporter? Yes, I can see why he hesitated at the last moment, for the sake of Tom, but…come on…
@39 It’s more like Voyager had lots and lots of different access codes, and Kim needed to know only one of them. Just because he was in a different reality doesn’t mean that “everything” about that reality changed…It’s not unreasonable to think that Voyager would have had those exact same codes then and now.
@43 Agreed. I feel the same about the future episode Parturition, where they use “Dominion” ships in the simulation.
@43/Devin Clancy: “But reuse of footage of alien tech from a very well-known scene from a memorable episode to represent Federation tech is showing that they don’t care to put in the effort necessary to suspend disbelief. “
You don’t know that. You don’t know what went into making the decision. You’re just choosing to assume the worst, and that is petty and unfair.
Besides, you’re misusing the concept of suspension of disbelief. That’s not the creators’ responsibility, it’s the audience’s. For thousands of years, most dramatic works were presented on blank stages and audiences were able to suspend disbelief and imagine whole palaces and battlefields and forests. Women in Shakespeare plays were portrayed by boys, and audiences were able to suspend disbelief and accept that they were women. In kabuki theater, black-clad stagehands are fully visible onstage manipulating puppets and props, yet the audience chooses to ignore them and believe the puppets are real. The full phrase, which people tend to forget these days, is “willing suspension of disbelief.” It’s your choice not to worry about the unreality and imperfection because you’re willing to buy into the story.
If your ability to suspend disbelief is so feeble that you can’t get past the wrong doors being used in a shot only a few seconds long, then I don’t know how you can cope with TOS’s reuse of matte paintings like the Rigel fortress or the lithium-cracking station, or all the same consoles and weapons showing up on multiple different planets.
@20 The Federation overriding local laws tends to be frowned on (Bajor and Deep Space 9 are outside Federation territory, remember), especially for the sake of something as minor as finding one Maquis ship and one undercover Starfleet officer. When the same situation cropped up in “In the Pale Moonlight”, Sisko basically had to bribe Quark to drop the charges.
@39 For 25 years it’s been a concrete fact in my brain that raktajino was Bajoran. Feeling pretty rattled right now :)
Apologies, I meant @37
Another thing that could have been better is if a scene was included with Kim’s parents – he’s so happy to see them again and give his mom and a dad a hug – and they’re a bit shocked to see him being so sweet because maybe they just saw him a few days ago or so. Or at least have Kim chat with them over a com channel. Definitely missed opportunity.
24th century civilian fashions are so overly elaborate. Can’t anyone just wear a t-shirt?
@46 – I had no qualm with this episode reusing stock vfx footage, I just felt their was better stock vfx footage that could have been chosen. Also, this episode took place in 1995. CGI technology was being developed and used in the ‘80s so and by this point Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park had been released, not to mention many instances of CGI use in TNG and DS9 so I disagree with the assertion that CGI was still in its “infancy” in 1995.
@52/GarretH: I had to grow up with the Rigel VII fortress being passed off as Flint’s mansion, Delta Vega being repainted as Tantalus Penal Colony, the Eminiar VII city showing up on Scalos, and countless different planets having the same continent shapes. You guys should be able to cope with a lousy pair of doors.
@53/CLB: I grew up in a different era so I expect better! Lol. :op
GarretH: Maybe not in its infancy, but CGI was still a) expensive and b) in its pre-adolescence at the very least.
A) is the particularly relevant part.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Seriously! Not only is he giving up his happiness, his future, and everything else with the implausibly-proffered assistance of alt-Paris, but he’s in a better position to help his friends on Voyager if he stays where he is and convinces somebody in Starfleet he knows what happened to Voyager. Which, as you say, shouldn’t be that hard.
Speaking of which, this is also one of those Trek episodes that is frustrating for having a plot that depends on authority figures’ collective failures of imagination. TNG sometimes got it right, and I think DS9 sometimes as well, but “Non Sequitur” is one of the episodes that doesn’t. You’re in Starfleet. You have recorded instances of vessels traveling through time, officers visiting evil mirror universes, encounters with godlike entities on a semi-regular basis, Captain’s Log entries about finding Abraham Lincoln just floating around in space, just any and all kinds of weirdness beyond what you can imagine: when somebody says, “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m from a parallel universe,” you don’t exclude the possibility, you say, “Right, that’s a credible hypothesis. We should probably have you working from home a bit until we exclude the others, Mr. Kim, but let’s get Simpson from Strings & Tachyons to make a whatsit to test you for strange frequencies.”
I’m a Starfleet officer and a crew member tells me there’s interdimensional shenanigans in time and space happening? Why the hell not? Sounds plausible. Bring me a sensor sweep and a latte.
@53/CLB I think that the Eminiar VII city originally appeared as the star base in The Menagerie and thus appeared three times, though I could be mistaken. In any event I think the remasters changed the background cities for many of these episodes. I know that they gave the Scalosians their own skyline
@56/eric: You’re right — in TNG: “Parallels,” they could easily determine someone was from a parallel timeline by scanning their quantum signature. It should’ve been simple to prove Harry’s story.
@57/remremulo: No, Starbase 11 and Eminiar VII were separte matte paintings, though all of TOS’s matte paintings were done by the great Albert Whitlock, so they have a similar style. (Whitlock also did a different angle on Starbase 11 for “Court Martial.”)
@52/GarretH I completely understand your disagreeing with their aesthetic choices re: stock footage & yes, I’ll agree, perhaps “infancy” was not the correct word, but I remember that time distinctly, and boy, the watershed work in Jurassic Park set a bar that was VERY hard for all of us to reach or maintain. That time period before Maya/Nuke/Autodesk/AfterEffects involved most studios writing their own code to achieve things like morphing effects, etc. I remember a lot of missed meals, working long nights & myself and fellow crew members sleeping at studios nursing computers through renders so we’d have something to send to the lab for dailies. Even generating CGI effects for tv/video was not easy–the biggest advantage was rendering at a lower resolution & not having to output back to film (which had its own set of problems involving color-matching, sharpness, etc.) But there was still a practice of reusing the same assets when budget/time restraints came into play. The kind of fx used in the stock footage in this ep would have been too expensive to shoot as models or build in CG for one episode & probably would not have been on par with the other vfx shots in the show.
I just wanted to add some perspective to the conversation from someone who was in the trenches in those days when CG began taking over the optical/photochemical vfx processes. It was a tough transition, and many times what appeared seamless on the screen was put there by brute force & a lot of unpaid hours of overtime! :)
I can’t help imagining the Department of Temporal Investigations from DS9’s Trials and Tribble-ations episode has to deal with stuff like this way too often. Some guy drops in from some alternate reality and they are desperate to return to their rightful universe (even if in this case, everything is pretty darn awesome for Harry) and they have to stop them from doing something really foolish.
The whole ‘interrogation’ scene with the Admiral and Kim’s buddy coming up with more ‘plausible’ explanations than alt dimension drove me up the wall. Like eric @56 notes, there has been a ton of time travel shenanigans in the Trek universe at this point, why would they just straight up discount Kim’s story? When watching the ep, I rolled my eyes when they went as far as suggesting he was replaced by an alien, but I just realized that was probably their weak attempt to shout out the Changling story line on DS9.
@59: Thank you for your valuable insight into VFX during that era. Seems like it definitely was challenging and time consuming to do CGI then! We viewers just take all of that hard work and man hours for granted! Haha
I’m amused that the FX shot constitutes a plurality of the discussion of this episode, which probably goes to show just how uninteresting the plot is. I’m a Trek junkie, have seen both episodes at least twice, and could not have told you at gunpoint that it was a reused shot. I didn’t even know about it until this review. This is definitionally true of everybody who didn’t see Relics, but probably most of the rest as well.
I remember thinking when I watched this in ’95: Why would Harry want to leave Libby? Libby is hottt. That was pretty much my thought during the whole episode (I was 15, cut me some slack). You have the woman of your dreams, a sterling career, the chance to actually be promoted, and you give it all up because Tom Paris is…stuck playing pool in lovely Marseilles? Because some dude we don’t know or given a reason to care about took your place on Voyager? Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Oh, and Krad: subscribed!
Arrrrrrgggggh.
To be fair I could just post that and it would sum up how I felt. What a wasted opportunity.
So my take on the concept was that this was a variant on “The Royale”; an artificial reality that was created for Harry when the aliens couldn’t get him out of that-thing-that-he-fell-into. I didn’t feel at any point that he was actually on the real Earth.
But it’s an Earth, and I am a sucker for Earthbound stories in Star Trek whether it’s “Conspiracy”, “Family,” “The First Duty”, “Paradise Lost”, some on that list good, some awful. So I enjoyed seeing another part of 24th century Earth (even if a lot of it was old clips!).
The problem (ok one of them) is Garrett Wang; there is a lot for him to do, and he’s overwhelmed quite quickly – I use that word deliberately as he just doesn’t really interact with the events in the story. I agree with @38 – the Paris / Kim banter and interchange is great fun to watch. I was kinda hoping that they take the Yellowstone and go off in the AQ on a bromance adventure.
But no, they get him back, and we’re back with Neelix and bloody Chakotay. (downbeat voice) Yay…
@62, Treebee, I agree with you. By this time time and dimensional switches should be old hat to Starfleet and a totally believable explanation for anything.
What I want to know is who puts an ankle monitor on the outside of your pants?! Seriously, you have to be able to change your pants once in a while. You can’t lock it on that tight on the outside.
@67 And after a few days, they’d be able to track Harry by smell.
Good catch.
On the subject of visual effects, one of the things I like doing in DS9 and Voyager is seeing the progression of visual effects. The later in the show you get, the more often you see new CGI sequences (and not just stock footage) and new physical sets filled with amazing bells and whistles, without as much need to reuse a lot of sets, models or stock footage. Perhaps there was a budget increase in later seasons. But it’s more than that; CGI got cheaper that quickly, and they had all of these CGI models and effects in their toolbox. Plus, as someone on TNG said, the producers got better at wisely and efficiently spending the money they were given.
At the end, Harry figures that the emergency transport was one of the elements necessary to recreate his “accident”, so Tom beams him…where? Out into space? They aren’t anywhere near Voyager.
Also, what was the object left on the floor after Kim and Paris beam out of Harry’s office?
@24/Devin Clancy: When I first watched this episode, I certainly noticed the reuse of the Dyson’s Sphere doors, but it didn’t really bother me because there appear to be many other large doors on the Spacedock model in various sections. Who’s to say that the Runabout was kept in the main concourse with the larger starships? Some of those other sections might be dedicated to smaller craft and use some of those different sets of doors.
All of “Voyager” could be titled “Non Sequitur,” because very little actually changes from the end of episode 1 to the end of season 7.
@72/SethC: Surely it’s the things that do change inconsistently and illogically that would be a better fit to the title “Non Sequitur” (literally “It does not follow”). Like the warp engines being irreparably damaged at the end of “Investigations” and inexplicably fine again a week later. Or Kes’s breakup with Neelix in “Warlord” being done by Tieran instead of Kes, yet still being treated as a real breakup later on. Or endings like the Doctor’s memory loss in “The Swarm” or Tuvix’s separation cutting off abruptly and never getting any followup.
*73/ChristopherLBennett: I was clearly being sardonic.
I guess Harry was overly optimistic that he would be promoted for having survived all that, which is why he returned. Haha. Little did he know. In the 7th season, he commented if he was in the AQ, he would be a lieutenant or lt. cmdr. by then. This timeline shows he would have been. In 8 months since graduating from the Academy, he’s giving presentations to Starfleet brass on new ship propulsion designs that he created, he’s on the fast track to promotion, he’s on Earth, with his relatively attractive girlfriend now fiancee (who in the prime universe he admitted waking up calling her name) and he’s a transporter ride from his beloved parents. So Daniel Byrd, someone we’ve never seen and never will see, is lost in the Delta Quadrant and Tom Paris is stuck hustling pool, drinking and womanizing in the Mediterranean-bo hoo hoo. Instead, Kim he goes back to Voyager, where (spolier alert!) he never rises above the rank of ensign, lost in the Delta Quadrant, where even with seniority, he is a junior officer to a former “observer” (Paris) and Maquis terrorist (Torres), even when the former is demoted and then promoted without any demonstrable reason. Brilliant job, Harry.
@74/SethC: Yes, obviously you were attempting a joke, but my point was that the joke failed because you were trying to link the title “Non Sequitur” with the lack of change, which is a contradiction in terms. I was saying a joke that linked that title with the actual non sequiturs in the storytelling would work better.
It does not follow, because continuity be damned. “It does not follow up.”
I didn’t have as much of a problem with Harry wanting to get back to Voyager, because I saw very little chemistry with Libby. He was barely there with her (except for the nookie scene, of course); my impression was that he was horrified to find out he was engaged to her, and after however long he’d been gone had fallen more than a little out of love. It might have worked if that had been part of why he fought to get back to Vger – he isn’t really in love with his girl anymore, his job is boring compared to the Gamma Quadrant, and he misses the comradeship of the, er, ship. Unfortunately, they never really said any of that.
Krad, the Runabout exploded because of battle damage and not because of the anomaly and Harry does tell Starfleet of Voyager’s situation – they just don’t believe him (Starfleet admirals have a long history of being convinced they’re right even when proof they’re not is staring them right in the face). Also, Tom never shares a drink with Harry at Sandrines. 5: Brannon Braga has always been stronger on theory than he is on execution – for every Cause and Effect or Parallels there’s a Genesis or a Threshold. And it is very strange that Harry never tries to contact his parents; you’d think he would have jumped at that chance. 70: looks like a phaser to me and Harry had to beam off the Runabout and into space because that was what the alternate Voyager did – they attempted to beam him aboard.
Kim shows admirable self discipline to want to leave Libby and Travel back to the Delta quadrant especially after those first couple of scenes with her…I’m not sure I would have been in such a rush. Garret Wang does well here to carry an entire episode as Kim has not been up to this point the most dynamic character Trek has ever put on screen. I also think I liked this version of Paris more than the main one too.
I’m surprised how many commenters expressed puzzlement about why Kim HAD to go back to Voyager. As a veteran with over 26 years in the service, I understood it clearly. It’s about honor.
I don’t mean “honor” the way Klingons used the word. They paid lip service to it on a daily basis, yet their actions were routinely lacking in that trait. I mean “honor” in the way that lets a person be able to look at themselves in the mirror each morning.
Kim is honor-bound to rejoin the Voyager crew because their fate is tied up with his, for better or worse, as a member of that crew. How could he live out the rest of his life with the knowledge that he abandoned them in the Delta Quadrant? Sure, he could try to work with Starfleet to help bring them back home, but what if that never succeeded?
Part of the Code of Conduct of the U.S. Armed Forces is that, in times of captivity or other adverse situation, no individual should accept a special favor that isn’t given to everyone in that individual’s situation. I think Starfleet personnel are expected to adopt a similar code. If Harry Kim accepts the “gift” of being returned home, yet the rest of Voyager remains stranded in the DQ, then Kim would not be living up to that code.
We also trust that, if we are wounded or killed on the battlefield, our countrymen will make every effort to bring us home. Harry’s desire to return to Voyager is the other side of that coin. They wouldn’t abandon him, so he can’t abandon them.
I don’t know why the episode’s writer(s) didn’t make that point. They could have cut that unnecessary foot chase to allow more time for a discussion of the philosophical side of Harry’s decision.
@81/Great post and for a very valid perspective. I think the episode was very muddled and could have, as you pointed out, been clearer and more explicit on the internal conflict Kim had between remaining with his loved ones on Earth (after so much lip service, why weren’t Kim’s parents in this episode? It would have been such a tear-jerker for Kim to give them a proper goodbye. Sigh.), and his devotion to his comrades on Voyager. In fact, that very plot point was much, much better handled in ”Timeless” which is one factor in why I love that episode so much.
@81/Poker Player: Ya, I’ve never understood that angle either. Even for people without a military background, I think there is the idea of basic human integrity. Would everyone choose to go back to Voyager’s predicament? Of course not, and I wouldn’t necessarily think less of them. But I think it would be surprising how many people WOULD go back.
Also, there’s a reoccurring theme in Star Trek about a crew having a sense of family with regards to each other. Kirk declared Spock a brother on more than one occasion and embraced Spock and McCoy as his family at the end of “STV.” Tasha Yar, in her final message to her comrades after her death, lamented her and Worf orphans who found themselves in the Enterprise D‘s family. Dexter Remick, before he became the home of a malevolent parasite and then became BBQ (Hey! home and BBQ are family things too!), revealed his admiration for the sense of teamwork and feeling of family of the aforementioned Enterprise D crew; I could go on forever. Ultimately Kim has the unenviable task of choosing between two families.
Poker Player: That’s a fair point, but there’s another option that the episode didn’t deal with, which I brought up in the review: WHY DIDN’T HE TELL ANYONE IN STARFLEET WHERE VOYAGER WAS? At that point, everyone just believed Voyager to be missing, possibly destroyed, with absolutely no idea where they were. He was in a unique position to work to rescue his comrades, which is what he should have been doing instead of playing games with runabouts and convicts.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Just had a quick rewatch, wanted to vent a little: Harry goes to his presentation, clueless of course, but having forgotten to bring the crucial schematics. Wait, hold on – “forgotten”? This is one of those moments where the writers transfer late 20th century office life to the 24th century without thinking of computers – Harry should just be able to call up the files he needs using his padd! (Yes, never mind that this wouldn’t have helped him in this situation – it’s the principle.)
This happens in various episodes – characters will treat padds like paper notepads and physically hand them to each other in order to send reports or access information, when even in this century, cloud-based data storage is increasingly rendering local hard drives obsolete.
I acknowledge all of KRAD’s problems with this episode, but I still enjoyed it for what it was, a chance for Garret Wang to have some adventure and romance for a little while, as long as you don’t think to much about it.
Incredibly late to the party, but I’m stunned by the amount of people not understanding Harry’s decision to return.
Daniel Byrd is trapped in the Delta Quadrant in Kim’s place, which is reason enough for him to want to revert the timeline change. He’s the hero, like most Star Trek protagonists, and he wants to save his friend.
As the episode goes on, he gets more and more reasons, though – Tom’s life is better on Voyager than it is in the new timeline, and Kim’s months-long memory gap means that he’s essentially an imposter in this timeline. He seems to feel that staying would be unfair to Libby, too – he tells her that he’s not who she thinks he is, and he’s not exactly wrong.
I don’t think it’s an outstanding episode by any means, but Kim’s decision to return is (with the information we’re given) explicitly set up as being the moral thing to do, which is reason enough for him to do it. As he says to Libby, if he stayed, he’d be betraying himself and his values to the point of not even being Harry Kim anymore, taking the seemingly-easy option to save himself at the expense of Byrd.
There’s also just the fact that it’s weird being sent into a different timeline where the last four months of your life weren’t actually lived by you. I’d want to revert it just to avoid the identity crisis.
I agree the episode should have made a lot more of the premise – give us some more detail about Byrd, show us more of the effects of the memory gap on Libby and her relationship with Harry, show Tom’s situation much more vividly, etc – but even without all that, the episode explains and justifies Kim’s decision very early on.
Descent: So why didn’t Harry TELL STARFLEET WHERE VOYAGER WAS????? Then they could’ve gotten Project: Pathfinder started years sooner. That would’ve been a significantly more heroic act than trying to steal a runabout and probably get himself killed (which was a far more likely outcome of his and Paris’s shenanigans then going back to his timeline, and it only worked because of plot armor).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Am I literally the only person with vision not blurred by teen memories? Jennifer Gatti is very pretty but she’s so awkward in this episode. The oner scene where they run sides on the bed is right out of a college acting class; it’s okay. But she is often stiff and stumbles over words, and like, they left it in for some reason.
But to me it’s 50/50 with respect to her character’s choices, which are certainly not her fault, but I think there are actors who could have sold it. Her character acts and looks immature, to me, to be brilliant Harry’s super cool smart fiancee. She speaks in cliché and Harry lies to her and hides his whole deal from her worse than Fred Flintstone. How great would it have been if she’d been a B’Elanna problem solvery type (without the temper) who teams up with him? More fun, for sure, and how heartbreaking that he has to leave her. In this ep, I was unmoved.
I can’t even with the attempt to return. It makes SO little sense. I was hanging onto my disbelief for dear life.
It didn’t have to be so risky, and could still have been engaging. It didn’t have to be based on his half-remembered details. The seconds didn’t have to be so few.
But even given all that, who’s to say that doing the same moves in the same order would reverse the accident? “So putting ice into this hot drink made it cold… We have to put more of the exact same ice into a different cup, and then it’ll get hot again!”
Also, the accident caused him to slip into another reality in the same moment. Why would his shuttle even be there if he manages to slip back a few days later? Haha, you’re in space.
I also wish Cosimo had been a street performer or vendor. Would have made a lot more sense than owning a storefront. On top of everything else, what happens when Kim is settled in, Cosimo can just disappear?
Ugh ugh ugh. I enjoyed some of it but not if I thought about it. This could have been a really cool episode! Especially with a Troi scene. Rooting for them to get along, knowing she’s a good guy, but realizing she won’t quite be able to believe him.
Last thoughts, I almost promise:
I think inventing a Vulcan Mocha is kind of a joke. Maybe they came close to calling it a Spock. Half strong dark hot coffee slow-roasted for 150 years, half Hershey’s sweet American milk chocolate. But my initial impression was it would be a cheap, inaccurate representation of something legit that regular people wouldn’t be able to stomach.
I can believe that Security couldn’t transport Kim and had to chase him. The ankle bracelet was disabled. They knew how to find him because it had just been disabled and the apartment was his last known location. His comm badge may have been disabled too, but also comm badges are like cell phones; they need a transponder/provider to work, which is why comm badges fail when the main computer has issues on the ship. There may be rules (of physics or of law) about spontaneous beaming of people from crowded public spaces based on the crowded cell network. I like the idea that he was preparing to run and had made himself less trackable before the chase.
A remote site-to-site transporter? To me, it seemed to be a controller. He basically requested a transporter Lyft for them, like there’s a secret network of transporters on the dark web. Or a frequency hopping bot network that allowed use of various legal transporters through a back door virus kind of thing.
This could have been better worked out and lasted several episodes, there was so much in it.
If I were Harry, apart from everything that has been said here, the situation would be like this:
I might as well have been in solitary confinement for the time since Voyager left Earth. I have no clue about things that happened to Earth, my family and Libby during the last years. I would stumble at every step, seeming strange, dumb and thoughtless as there surely are a thousand things I ought to know about my relations. After now being back with Libby, the risk of blowing that would be exponentially higher than it would be anyway (I hope most of you here remember how hard it is to keep relations intact even IF you are aware of all the little things to say and – more importantly – not mention, all the little traits that create closeness and all the little turn-offs you may have left behind with a lot of effort). I just wouldn’t know any of that. I would be a stranger to my own life, awkward at best to my loved ones, more probably someone just having cracked over night.
Then I would be in my dream job – without a clue about what I am currently working on and without all the stuff I learned as a JUNIOR engineer during the last years (not a guy with 20 years of experience moving on to a new project and self-assured in a leading role). The constant fear of blowing that, too, not knowing any of my colleagues and their roles and strenghts and weaknesses plus the evident inability to do my job on a daily basis without looking up things lengthily would make me a mess that soon falls out of grace with superiors as well as peers.
To me, staying there is the sure path to losing my street-cred, falling-out with everyone dear, and psychological breakdown. I need to get back to my former life, this one is filled with strangers and unknown situations.
Finally and ultimately, of course, duty and honor command me to return. But there also is no allure to staying, at least not in my book.