“Persistence of Vision”
Written by Jeri Taylor
Directed by James L. Conway
Season 2, Episode 8
Production episode 124
Original air date: October 30, 1995
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Janeway is having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day. Voyager is about to enter Bothan space. Paris has a report for her, Tuvok wants to have a security briefing, Neelix wants to talk to her about the Bothans, and Torres and Kim are ready to test their first attempt to have the EMH function outside sickbay.
The latter almost works—the EMH is transferred to engineering, but is only about half a foot tall. However, he’s not so short that he doesn’t notice that Janeway is exhausted and stressed out, and he uses the chief medical officer’s authority over even the captain when it comes to medical matters to order her to relax on the holodeck.
She goes to her Gothic holonovel—pausing when she changes clothes to stare longingly at the picture of her, Mark Johnson, and Molly the Irish setter—but it’s interrupted by Chakotay informing her that the Bothans have hailed them.
After changing back into uniform, and a hasty consult with Neelix, she exchanges pleasantries with the Bothan, who does not show his face. They agree to meet and discuss terms of being able to cross Bothan space.
Once that’s done, she wishes to talk to Neelix further in her ready room—he suggests instead that they speak over lunch, as she hasn’t eaten in a while. While she checks out the buffet, she’s brought up short to see that one of the dishes looks like the cucumber sandwiches from the holonovel—and Neelix serves her tea in a cup that looks like one from the holonovel as well.
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Later, she’s walking down a corridor and hears the voice of Lord Burleigh, from the holonovel, and sees Burleigh’s daughter Beatrice. The first thing she does is go to engineering to see if Torres and Kim’s experiments would result in holodeck characters in the corridors. They don’t think it will, but they run a diagnostic, with Janeway returning to the holodeck to run the holonovel. However, they find nothing—and when she returns to the mess hall, she discovers that what she thought were cucumber sandwiches and a fancy tea cup were just fried murt cakes and a standard Starfleet issue thermal mug.
Realizing it may well be a medical problem with her rather than a technical problem with the ship, she checks herself into sickbay. The EMH and Kes run several scans and find nothing—but then Janeway once again hallucinates Beatrice. To Janeway’s surprise, Kes also sees Beatrice, but then she seems to reflect off Kes and disappear into Janeway.
Kes has been working with Tuvok on her telepathic abilities, and she can apparently also see what Janeway is seeing. The EMH needs to run more tests, so he sends Janeway to her quarters to rest.
Once there, she hears Mark’s voice, and then Mrs. Templeton, the housekeeper from the holonovel, attacks her with a knife, drawing blood. She calls for security—and then we discover that she never left sickbay. Tuvok is there along with the EMH and Kes, trying to bring her out of a fugue state.
They succeed, and Janeway officially relinquishes command to Chakotay while she is in sickbay. The Bothans arrive, and are annoyed that they don’t get to talk to Janeway. They also have two other ships cloaked nearby, and Voyager quickly gets into a firefight, in which they are pretty badly spanked.
The Bothans contact them again, asking for terms of surrender, saying they’re damaged and their captain is indisposed. However, Janeway has checked herself out of sickbay, refusing to lay about while her ship is being pounded. But when she arrives on the bridge, the Bothan steps into the light and is revealed to be Mark—
—at least to Janeway. Paris sees his father Admiral Owen Paris, Kim sees his girlfriend Libby, and Tuvok sees his wife T’Pel.
Tuvok sees his lute and believes he’s back on Vulcan. He becomes completely catatonic and unresponsive, as is Kim and much of the bridge crew. Torres reports from engineering that her staff has also gone catatonic. Janeway sends Chakotay to help her modulate the warp core to give off a pulse that should snap them out of it.
Torres sees a hallucination of Chakotay who comes on to her and takes her to bed. Chakotay himself never made it out of the turbolift. Pretty soon, everyone on the ship goes catatonic except for the EMH and Kes. The latter goes to engineering to enact Torres’s plan with help from the EMH. A hallucination of Neelix tries to stop her, and then Kes suffers great pain and lesions on her skin. Kes, however, is able to fight back and “Neelix” changes into a Bothan, who collapses on the deck. Kes enacts the pulse and everyone wakes up. Torres holds a phaser on the Bothan, and Janeway threatens all kinds of things that turn out to be pointless, because the Bothan was apparently never there. He and the ships all disappear.
Voyager pootles through Bothan space unmolested the rest of the way. Janeway and Torres have a heart-to-heart, and Janeway admits that the holonovel holds less interest for her, as she would prefer reality for a while.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Torres detects a psionic field when the Bothan is telepathically attacking, and she is able to use the warp core to block it. Or, at least, plan that, and it’s left to Kes and the EMH to execute it.
There’s coffee in that nebula! The hallucination of Mark taunts Janeway by saying he’s been faithful, and she insists she has been, despite the fact that Lord Burleigh on the holodeck kissed her.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is the one who is able to bring Janeway out of her fugue in sickbay, and he later believes he’s back on Vulcan.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Torres and Kim are trying to make a reality what the EMH hallucinated in “Projections,” to wit, putting holoemitters elsewhere on the ship so the doctor can function outside sickbay and the holodeck. The first attempt fails rather hilariously…
Half and half. Torres comes up with the solution to the problem, and it actually works!
Forever an ensign. Kim says he sees his girlfriend, but we don’t see his interactions with her because, I guess, they didn’t want to bring Jennifer Gatti back so soon?
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix has been in touch with some of his fellow scavengers for information about the Bothans, and it isn’t good, as many ships have been lost in their space.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. This episode proposes the notion that Torres secretly has the hots for Chakotay, a notion never mentioned before and which will not be mentioned again. Janeway is also smooched by Lord Burleigh in the holonovel, and she pines for Mark a lot.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. This is the last we see of the Gothic holonovel. So we’ll never know what’s on the fourth floor. (Okay, so it’s totally Lady Burleigh still alive and playing the piano. Still it would’ve been nice to see that…)
Do it.
“Well, this is certainly a brilliant feat of engineering…”
“What happened?”
“I’d guess the imaging interface wasn’t properly stabilized.”
“Just a small oversight—no pun intended.”
–The EMH being cranky about being six inches tall, Janeway being annoyed, Torres diagnosing the problem, and Kim making the obvious rejoinder.
Welcome aboard. Lotta recurring characters in this one. Stan Ivar returns from “Caretaker” as the image of Mark Johnson. Marva Hicks makes the first of two appearances as the image of T’Pel—she’ll return as a holodeck re-creation of T’Pel in “Body and Soul.” Warren Munson debuts the character of Owen Paris; Munson’s voice will be used for Owen in “Thirty Days,” but when the character is seen next in the sixth season’s “Pathfinder,” he’ll be played by Richard Herd (who will continue in the role through the final two seasons).
Michael Cumptsy, Carolyn Seymour, Thomas Dekker, and Lindsay Haun all make their final appearances as the characters in Janeway’s Gothic holonovel, previously seen in “Cathexis” and “Learning Curve.” (Haun will return as Belle in the third season’s “Real Life.”)
And Patrick Kerr plays the Bothan. Kerr is probably best known for playing Noel Shempsky on Frasier, who is a devoted Star Trek fan.
Trivial matters: It was established in “Cathexis” that Tuvok was working with Kes on her telepathy.
We learn Tuvok’s wife’s name in this episode, Paris sees his father, mentioned not-all-that-fondly by him in “Caretaker,” “Time and Again,” and “Parturition,” and Kim mentions the girlfriend established in “Time and Again” and seen in “Non Sequitur.”
The image of Vulcan that Tuvok sees is a matte painting used for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Torres’s secret lust for Chakotay was also part of both characters’ backstory as spelled out in the novel Pathways, which was also written by Jeri Taylor, who wrote this episode and was the show-runner for Voyager‘s first several seasons.
Your humble rewatcher wrote a story called “Letting Go” in the 2005 Voyager anthology Distant Shores that focused on the people left behind when Voyager went missing, and Mark was the POV character. The story also has appearances by Owen and T’Pel.
The oft-mentioned-but-never-seen Hargrove is mentioned once again by Neelix, and Ashmore—the name given to one of the regular extras—is also mentioned by the Bothan posing as Neelix.
Set a course for home. “You’re a powerful little thing.” It’s amusing to see the progression of starship captains who need R&R but won’t take it. In “Shore Leave,” Spock had to engage in rhetorical trickery to get Kirk to take leave on the pleasure planet they found. In “Captain’s Holiday” that same rhetorical trickery by Crusher didn’t actually work on Picard, but eventually the sheer weight of various crewmembers importuning him to take a vacation already got him to go.
And in “Persistence of Vision,” all it takes is the chief medical officer telling Janeway she needs a break, with all the authority he can muster while being six inches tall and a hologram.
It’s actually rather refreshing that Janeway doesn’t need to be tricked or bullied into taking a vacation, that she’s actually mature enough and self-aware enough to realize that she’s pushing herself to the point of exhaustion and needs a little Gothic romance/horror to reset her brain. It’s a welcome change from the tired machismo of Jim Kirk and the stoic idiocy of Jean-Luc Picard.
Of course, things go horribly wrong, because if they didn’t go horribly wrong, we wouldn’t have an episode. It’s good to have Janeway addressing how much she misses her boyfriend, and good to see Kes taking advantage of her nascent telepathy to save everyone’s asses, aided and abetted by the EMH, who has the same function here that Data did on TNG, to wit, the inorganic dude who isn’t affected by what messes with the organics.
I’m very grateful that this is really the only time we saw any hint of a Torres/Chakotay romance. The two of them have a strong bond as friends and fellow Maquis, especially given that they’re the only Maquis among the senior staff, and that bond has been shown to good end a few times, particularly in “Parallax,” “The Cloud,” and “Cathexis,” and grafting a romance onto that just feels boring and lazy. Having said that, I do like that, unlike everyone else—who all seem to see people they left behind in the Alpha Quadrant—what Torres sees is someone in the here-and-now, consistent with what she told Kim in “Eye of the Needle,” that she doesn’t really have anyone or anything important back home.
Two of my favorite moments in this episode are brief, but very effective. We see the Bothans’ attack on Tuvok only briefly, but Tim Russ with just subtle changes to his facial expressions beautifully sells both the rational Vulcan’s disbelief of what he sees, yet also the longing for what he does see, in only forty-two seconds of screen time. The other is Paris, who is very much not drawn in by the image of his father, and Robert Duncan McNeill puts a lot of fraught emotions into his assurances to Janeway that he’s not even tempted to look at the viewscreen.
As much fun as it is to dig into the characters’ psyches a bit, particularly Janeway’s, and as nice as it is to see Kes save the day, I find the Bothans themselves to be disappointing in the end, mostly because we don’t find out what they actually get out of their ability to put sentient beings into a coma. And what are they, really? Are they beings of energy like the Organians? Powerful creatures like the Metrons or the Q? Overly powerful telepaths like the Talosians whose physicality is atrophied?
Still, this is a fun character piece with lots of nice little touches, from the six-inch EMH to Janeway’s methodical attempts to figure out what’s happening, plus just a general reminder that the most of the crew has something to get home to. James L. Conway’s direction is superb, conveying the growing confusion and horror beautifully. I particularly liked the incredibly effective smash cut from Janeway being attacked by Mrs. Templeton in her cabin to sickbay with Tuvok trying desperately to get her out of it.
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido hopes folks will consider supporting the crowdfund for his next novel, a collaboration with David Sherman entitled To Hell and Regroup, the third book in the “18th Race” trilogy of military science fiction novels. It’s being jointly crowdfunded with Christopher L. Bennett’s Arachne’s Crime, the first of a planned duology of science fiction novels. Check it out!
I liked this episode and rather disappointed that the Bothans are never used again. Question though: was Janeway already affected when she snapped in the beginning of the episode? Or was it really just stress?
Austin: Pretty sure that was really-o-truly-o stress.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
IIRC, many Bothans died to get the battle station plans to the Alliance.
It’s not entirely clear what happened just before this episode, but Janeway either needs to delegate more or Kim seriously screwed up by calling her down for no reason. There’s no earthly reason she should be there to personally see if the attempt to transfer the Doctor works, she can read about it later in the report.
I find the Bothans themselves to be disappointing in the end, mostly because we don’t find out what they actually get out of their ability to put sentient beings into a coma.
Yeah, the “Because I can” makes me think they’re more like Trelane and playing with sentient beings for fun. And, at least in broadcast order, that’s two and arguably three times in three weeks where we come across aliens without really learning anything about them or their motives. That’s okay sometimes, but is starting to feel like a cheat to not worry about giving the antagonist reasonable motivations.
Doggone it, @3, I was going to make a Many Bothans Died joke. Surprised Keith was able to resist it himself!
SKO: I do, very occasionally, show restraint. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@.-@ – I thought the “Because I can” line to be chillingly delivered. It worked for me.
“The hallucination of Mark taunts Janeway by saying he’s been faithful, and she insists she has been, despite the fact that Lord Burleigh on the holodeck kissed her.”
Has Star Trek ever done a story on whether kissing (or more!) with holodeck characters counts as cheating and how it effects relationships? I’d imagine it is a bit of an issue in the 24th century. The answer is probably the reason we have a section heading called “No sex, please, we’re Starfleet” but always worth checking.
I had completely forgotten what this episode was about. In my mind, for some reason, I was confusing it with “Scientific Method” from season 4. Oddly, though, I still have a pretty clear recollection of the Bothan’s frowny-mouthed appearance.
I suppose it’s appropriate that there are Bothans in both Star Trek and Star Wars. Huh? Huh?
…
Are those crickets?
I never had a problem with the Bothans being a one-episode species. As far as I was concerned, they pulled the same stunt on any ship that entered their territory. If it worked, they had a ship filled with technology for themselves. If it didn’t work, they laid low, knowing they’d done nothing to give away their physical location. In essence, a better version of the aliens in Season 4’s “Waking Moments”.
Finally, an engaging episode of Voyager! I really felt the tension and ticking clock as the crew races to initiate the pulse before they succumb to the illusions. The events of this episode serve as ample evidence for the Doctor’s plans to get the ECH program up and running.
I like how Kes, the “powerful little thing”, had an active role in saving the ship. It’s great to see Janeway indulging again in some R&R time. I do find it disappointing that we never got more of this holonovel: to witness Janeway getting a little romance in her life, the welcome presence of Carolyn Seymour, and I liked those bratty kids! Also, does kissing (and beyond) with a holodeck character count as cheating on your significant other? Please discuss amongst yourselves. The Torres passionately longing for Chakotay revelation did come out of nowhere however I did find it believable and convincingly acted. A hint of it cropping up later in the series would have at least been nice. It would have been nice also to getting the actress who played Libby to come back here for a nice bit of continuity. And I also would have liked to have seen what Chakotay and even Neelix were hallucinating about.
I didn’t remember that the Bothans were also in Star Wars. I guess I’m not that much of a Star Wars fan!
@8 If my admittedly imperfect memory serves, Tuvok will struggle with exactly that question during his obligatory pon farr episode, feeling that relieving his *ahem* biological imperative with a hologram of his wife would be unfaithful to the actual wife left behind in the Alpha Quadrant.
Oh, the image of Janeway on the ground as she looms large over a shrunken EMH felt very Gulliver’s Travels. Also, this is a variation of the shrinking Doctor joke from first season’s Parallax although there his image was more “squashed” then being proportionately shrunken.
@8, 11 – But honey, it was just a bunch of light particles! Though my brain still struggles to grasp the concept of a hologram. It’s basically a projected image given substance by a force field. So what would kissing one feel like? Does it feel like real lips? Or if you took it further…what exactly would you be…err…having relations with?
Now my brain hurts. That’s why I don’t like thinking about the science stuff.
Kim strikes me as a bit of an overachiever. So he probably called the captain down for the holoemitter demo to be all “look what I can do, can I get a promotion now?” and like a lot of people trying too hard, didn’t think through the consequences of if it doesn’t go well.
I enjoyed the pacing of this episode. Particularly when it looks like they’ve lost completely, when even Janeway succombs to the coma and she seemed like the last man standing. You kinda forget about Kes and the EMH until they show up.
The “Because I can” explanation was good enough for me. They could have elaborated more, but I took it as a ‘power corrupts’ storyline. Their species has so much power over other’s minds, with no check and balance on their power it’s turned them into perverse vilains. Or at least it did to that one individual. Similarly, coming across a person who can fight it was enough to make them turn tail and run, as they don’t know what to do with that. They rely solely on their ability to control.
@10, I love that theory. They’re essentially free-rolling for a ship full of treasure. And there’s multiple revenue streams from this little operation, in that when it works they can sell the comatose crew to the Vidiians for spare parts…
@9 I laughed, then hated myself for laughing.
An excellent episode, perfectly paced and practically flawless. It starts off great and keeps building the suspense throughout. The only real disappointments here being that Jennifer Gatti was not brought back to appear as Libby, and we’ll NEVER get to see the fourth floor of the Burleigh manor for the reveal we’re all anticipating! BOO! HISS! BOO! It would have also been nice to at least get a hint of what Neelix and Chakotay were hallucinating as well.
Include me among those that expressed satisfaction with the denouement of the episode in that the only explanation we’re given for the Bothan’s behavior is ‘Because I can.’ It is chilling and effective – and the crew also isn’t even able to hold him captive. It makes for a formidable enemy.
Regarding the Torres-Chakotay romance that Torres imagined, she does make a point at the end of the episode to say during her conversation with the captain that her hallucination experience was ‘uncomfortable’ for her. Perhaps that is because she never really had romantic feelings for Chakotay, making it possible that the Bothan manipulated the entirety of her hallucination – including making her imagine she had romantic feelings for Chakotay. As you pointed out Keith, she doesn’t have anyone or anything she truly desires to get to back to in the Alpha Quadrant….the Bothan may have simply improvised. Seems like it could be a possibility anyway.
My wife and I have it on good authority from talking to Michael Cumpsty directly that he would have liked to continue the holo-novel into more episodes, but Kate Mulgrew decided to stop it because she wasn’t happy with that setting.
Incidentally, Michael Cumpsty played John Dickinson in the Broadway revival of “1776”, with Brent Spiner playing John Adams and Richard Poe playing John Hancock.
@18 – I can’t blame her. I didn’t care for the setting either. Has Star Trek ever portrayed any of the fictional centuries between now and the future? Yes, I know, contemporary audiences and all that. But everything is always our past.
In the midst of a fair bit of gushing praise, I have to say this one is somewhat oddly structured. For much of its running time, it’s a Janeway episode…then she suddenly spends most of Act 4 comatose while the Doctor and Kes save the ship. Not that I’m complaining about one of the first examples of Kes being badass, and the idea of her perceiving the alien’s powers differently and acting as a kind of opposite pole to him has been set up, but it seems an odd storytelling choice to remove your protagonist and viewpoint character from the climax. It’s not really clear as well why the Bothan suddenly switches from targeting Janeway to going after the entire crew. Why not just mess with everyone from the start?
But then, maybe there need to be unanswered questions. It’s basically a ghost story, and while we get the sci-fi trappings of it all being down to some voyeuristic psychic alien, we also get signs that it’s not as simple as that, as the Bothan fades away like a ghost at the end. Some sort of projection from a distance? Who knows?
Paris’ ladies’ man reputation takes a definite battering here: While everyone else seems to see the object of their desires and get to have dream sex, all he gets is his father telling him he’s useless. He is the last one of the bridge crew to succumb though (aside from Janeway), so power to him there, and he’s also the first one to suggest cloaked ships. Not sure how much we’re meant to read into him being the first one Kes hallucinates, as if he’s the person she’s most likely to stop and help if she finds them injured. There’s an odd moment where Janeway tells Kes to come to the bridge and she acknowledges but never shows up: Maybe her response was meant to be a hallucination but we don’t see much other suggestion of that type of thing.
Oh, and goodbye to Janeway’s holodeck programme. As I mentioned in the rewatch of “Cathexsis”, it seems to go on just long enough to make us interested in the plot, then get dropped. (They have to have been building up to the reveal Lord Burleigh had his wife locked away on the fourth floor, right?) I wonder if a consideration was that the actors playing the children were going to start aging, although I didn’t think they were noticeably older here despite it being some months since we last saw them. I guess this experience soured it for Janeway?
Odd that we never get a follow-up on Torres and Kim trying to transfer the Doctor to key areas, especially since they say they only need a couple of hours to fix the problem! It’s over a year before a (completely different) solution to him leaving sickbay is found. But it does give us the brilliant moment when the Doctor manages to order Janeway to take some time off whilst being just a few inches tall.
I also love the expressions on everyone’s faces when Neelix convinces Janeway to let him prepare her a meal while they chat: Tuvok, Kim and Chakotay all seem to be thinking “Good luck with that.”
“It’s a welcome change from the tired machismo of Jim Kirk and the stoic idiocy of Jean-Luc Picard.”
What about the “Immunity Syndrome” where Kirk admits in his log that he’s “looking forward to a nice period of rest on some lovely planet” and tries to get Starfleet to assign the emergency mission to another vessel because they’re exhausted? And perhaps I’m reaching here, but Kirk, without hesitation, takes Spock’s advice to rest at the end of “Wolf in the Fold.” (Although, granted, he changes his mind about going to the planet because he doesn’t want to go only by himself)
The strongest episode to date. It delved into the characters past and minds in a very interesting way. The Bothans were an interesting species. I like how we don’t really get to see them or explore their culture even more. But that was very effective.
Torres/Chakotay story was weird but is believable since they worked together for years. I am glad the writers didn’t explore it further. It was nice to give Janeway some sort of development with her relationship wit Mark. The scenes wit these two were amazing.
And this was a great episode for Kes and for her to shine. A character that her development was mis-handled. The writers should have explored her powers even further. But it was great to see her saving the day. So much miss opportunities with Kes.
Excellent episode and one of the strongest season 2 episodes from a somewhat rocky season.
@14
That, umm, speculation, has come up in these rewatches before. I think the only conclusion we’ve reached is that you don’t want to be the guy tasked with cleaning the holodeck/suite/whatever.
@23 – Lol, oh man, I’m sorry I asked.
@23: But the ship is self-cleaning! Remember?
@20 I think changing the protagonist like that was part of what made the tension so effective. Because it had been focused on Janeway, and then Janeway fell victim to the psionic field, it looks like they lost the fight and Voyager was screwed.
So the season’s 8th episode gets scored with a warp factor rating of 8. I seriously doubt Tattoo will be scoring a 9, and there’s little chance of Cold Fire scoring a 10.
Not much I can say about this episode. A nice character piece driven by what I consider to be a pretty unremarkable crew in danger plot. The Bothans are generic and uninteresting antagonists. As has been asked, why do they violate the crew like this? Which leads to another issue I have: is it really necessary to have the characters facing danger every episode? Persistence of Vision is about the crew’s memories and fears, reminding us of what they’ve left behind. You don’t need some third rate alien antagonist to bring that out.
It’s almost as if the writers are afraid of developing an episode without major external conflict driving it. TNG once did Coming of Age, an episode that dealt primarily with an ongoing investigation and Wesley’s academy exams. No shipboard danger plot required. Enterprise would do the same with experimental episodes like Breaking the Ice. I like to imagine a version of Persistence of Vision without the Bothans.
Persistence works mainly thanks to some excellent direction. James L. Conway was on a roll during this particular 1995/1996 period, doing outstanding DS9 work, left and right (Way of the Warrior; Little Green Men; Shattered Mirror; For The Cause), plus VOY’s Death Wish later on.
@25 Normally, but sometimes the crew must “manually” clean parts of the ship as punishment, like Neelix’s punishment to clean the exhaust manifolds in “Fair Trade”
@26: I guess that’s one way of looking at it but the tension dissipates very quickly: Immediately after Janeway goes down (or at least after the commercial break), it cuts to the Doctor and Kes and the audience think “Okay, so the episode’s about them now?”
@29: I enjoyed that change of character focus though. It’s atypical and it throws the viewer off but I think not in a bad way.
I’m imagining Harry and the illusory Libby talking:
Libby: I know what you did, Harry. You moved all of time and space to leave me. Why didn’t you love me enough to stay with me, Harry?
Kim: I do love you, Libby. But it was my destiny to be–
Libby: To be what, Harry? Stuck in a tin bucket on the other side of the galaxy, instead of with me?
Kim: Libby, I–
Libby: That’s dumb, Harry. That’s really dumb.
Harry, realizing “Libby” is 100% correct, succumbs to a catatonic state.
The scene practically writes itself.
@19 – Austin: Sure, Star Trek has briefly shown “the future” between the audience’s present and the show’s present. First, in TOS, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”, aired in 1967 but set in 1969. TOS also showed future Earth tyrants, like Khan in “Space Seed” or Colonel Green in “The Savage Courtain” (he was later mentioned/shown on ENT).
Then, TNG’s pilot, Encounter At Farpoint, has Q show soldier outfits for WWIII, and we see the aftermath of WWIII in the movie “First Contact”. DS9 mentioned/showed future baseball players.
Perhaps the best example of what you’re looking for is DS9’s two-parter “Past Tense”, set in the year 2024.
@32/MaGnUs: And yet Trek never depicts art or culture from our future, unless it’s alien. Characters who are fond of things from Earth’s past are always fond of pre-21st-century things like Gothic romance or ’30s movie serials or Westerns or pulp detective novels or ’60s Vegas lounge singers. We never see a character who’s a fan of early 22nd-century Mars colonial adventure fiction or Vulcan-Indian fusion cuisine or anything that’s from their past but our future.
That is definitely true. Hopefuly, they’ll fix it at some point.
@33 – Vulcan-Indian fusion soul food– I bet that would be interesting! Your point is right on of course, but I understand why the writers always go there. It’s interesting to contemplate a 24th century human getting off on fads or art that we can relate to as well. I don’t know what 22nd century music would attract the attention of Tom Paris or Janeway, but in order to build an episode around that they would have to invent it in the first place. The wonder of seeing the characters appreciating earth’s history would be blunted, because we can’t relate to earth history that doesn’t yet exist as well as we can with things we are already familiar with.
That said, there is the occasional example of Trek revisiting the interim between late 20th century and the 24th, like Zephram Cochrane. But it goes right to your point that in First Contact they have him portrayed as this throw-back ex-hippie by an actor 20 years older than Cochrane would have been at the time, who insists on a 100 year old cassette recording of Magic Carpet Ride as the soundtrack to the first human warp flight.
@35/fullyfunctional: “but in order to build an episode around that they would have to invent it in the first place.”
First off, they don’t need to build an episode around something just to reference it now and then. Second, inventing future stuff is literally their job. If they can invent alien culture like Klingon opera and Cardassian enigma tales and Marauder Mo action figures, it shouldn’t be any harder to invent some future human culture. Indeed, they have done so on occasion where sports are concerned — Parrises squares, Velocity, anbo-jyutsu, hoverball — so there’s no reason they couldn’t do so for other types of entertainment and culture. And they did get around to it at least once, with The Adventures of Flotter and Trevis.
Clb, I’m not arguing your point, just suggesting that I think the reason our 24th century friends seem to be obsessed with circa 20th century civilization is because the writers knew the viewer could relate.
@37/fully: Yeah, but that’s the lazy route. As I said, they did create alien culture, future sports, and the like, and viewers were able to relate to those. It’s a writer’s job to sell ideas to the audience, not just coast on what they already recognize.
“Because I can” was a refreshing answer for the alien’s motivation for giving Voyager a Hard Time. You know, the DS9 episode “Hard Time?” Eh? Eh? Ok I’ll stop. It’s clever (because I’m not) in that this seems to be the arbitrary reason for a lot of the conflicts in Star Trek and we finally get an episode to admit it!
Random side note: For the longest time I had this episode and “Cathexis” confused. I guess it’s partly because of the Burleigh holonovel being present in both episodes. When I finally saw this episode again, I couldn’t remember anything about “Cathexis” at all. As it turned out, I had only ever saw a little bit of the beginning of “Cathexis” when Voyager first aired, which explained my confusion. Apparently I also have a cathexis for the word cathexis.
I really liked Persistence of Vision because it unsettles us in a way few Star Trek episodes ever do. From moment to moment you’re never really sure if what you’re seeing is illusory or not (not exactly original but seldom done as spookily as here). One author even compared it with Sapphire & Steel the way outside forces intrude upon the present or the eerieness of Stephen King’s It (the miniseries and not the films). 15: the Bothan is similar to Jev from Violations where he gets inside the minds of his victims and forces them to see what he wants until they can endure no more and slip into comas/catatonia. 26: I really like episodes where it looks like our heroes are not going to get out of this like the equally spooky Night Terrors or the epic Sacrifice of Angels.
I once watched an episode of Sapphire and Steel with my father. He turned to me in total confusion, ‘This makes no sense!’ ‘I know, isn’t it great?’ I answered.
One of the most cryptic TV shows I’ve ever seen. It refuses to clarify much of what’s going on and even seems to delight in doing that, which only adds to it’s creepiness, much like Persistence of Vision.
I quite liked this episode it was much needed as this point too as the last few had not been particularly great (in all honesty they had been quite rubbish). But this was good, everyone is convincing in their role and it has a creepy villain and creepy ending too which isn’t all wrapped up in a nice tidy bow. I too was disappointed they couldn’t find time to bring a resolution to Janeway’s holo novel at any future point I would have much rather seen that resolved in this season than all the Kazon crap we had to sit through.
I liked this episode! First time watching Voyager. Too bad no more Chakotay x Torres romance..