“Tattoo”
Written by Larry Brody and Michael Piller
Directed by Alexander Singer
Season 2, Episode 9
Production episode 125
Original air date: November 6, 1995
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Chakotay, Torres, Tuvok, and Neelix are on an away team trying to find polyferranide, which they need for a repair of the warp nacelles. Unfortunately, what they find is not right for what they need.
Neelix and Tuvok find a symbol on the ground, and Chakotay recognizes it. When he was a boy, his father, Kolopak, took him to Earth from the colony on the Cardassian border where he grew up, specifically to Central America, to find the Rubber Tree People. They are an Indigenous tribe who still, in the twenty-fourth century, live in relative isolation, being one with the land, and shunning technology. They also left this symbol in the ground, which they believed came from the Sky Spirits, and Chakotay is very surprised to see it on a planet 70,000 light-years from Earth.
There’s a warp trail from a ship that left orbit relatively recently, and Janeway decides to follow it—partly to satisfy Chakotay’s curiosity as to whether or not they left the mark, but mainly because they might have a source of the polyferranides they need.
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Wildman is in sickbay for a prenatal checkup, and she complains of back pain. The EMH tells her to put her feet up when she sits, and rejects Kes’s notion that she should have some time off. After Wildman leaves, Kes critiques the EMH’s bedside manner, saying he doesn’t understand how sick people feel because he’s never felt pain or discomfort. (Why the EMH never mentions the pain he felt during his hallucinatory experience in “Projections” is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Voyager arrives at the end of the warp trail, but there’s no sign of the ship or of much of anything else, though they do detect the polyferranides. An attempt to beam down an away team proves problematic, as every time the transporter locks on, there’s a massive electrical storm that interferes with transport. When they lock on to an other site, the storm appears there, leaving the previous spot.
So Chakotay takes a shuttle down. The landing site is a jungle very much like the Central American region where Kolopak took him as a teenager, down to the same flora. He flashes back to that time, remembering that he didn’t really want to be there, did not embrace his heritage the way Kolopak did, and hated the bugs and the lack of technology. He also informs his father that he’s been sponsored to Starfleet Academy. Kolopak is disappointed but accepts this.
In the present, Neelix is attacked by a bird that looks exactly like an Earth hawk. Chakotay saw similar hawks in Central America as a teenager. Neelix is beamed back to the ship to be treated. Weirdly, the transporter works fine now.
The EMH has decided to give himself a holographic version of the Levodian flu, as a way of helping him empathize with his patients more. It doesn’t quite work as planned, though. At first, he is just as curt with his patients as ever, and then once the illness has gone on for a while, he’s absolutely miserable, sniffling and snerfling and coughing and sneezing while treating Neelix.
The weather on the planet keeps getting worse and worse, to the point where the away team runs to the shuttle to escape—but then a tree falls on Chakotay. The weather gets so bad that Tuvok calls for an emergency beamout—but the falling tree knocked Chakotay’s combadge off, so only Tuvok and Torres beam back.
Voyager’s sensors can no longer pick up Chakotay or the shuttle. Janeway wishes to lead another away team down, but the transporters are once again not working, and the atmospheric conditions are too brutal for another shuttle. Tuvok is now convinced that there’s an intelligence trying to keep them off the planet—they can beam off the world but not onto it, and the weather has been very specifically designed to keep them out.
The EMH, meanwhile, is beside himself, as he programmed himself for a 29-hour flu and it’s been thirty hours. Kes, however, reveals that she extended the flu by an hour and three-quarters, as she felt it wouldn’t be a fair test of his compassion if he knew the expiry date, as it were.
Janeway orders Voyager to land, but they are buffeted by gale force winds that threaten to get through their shields.
On the planet, Chakotay recalls meeting the Rubber Tree People, who spoke of the Sky Spirits. Stripping out of his uniform to show that he is no threat, the Sky Spirits then provide a piece of clothing to cover himself, because apparently the Sky Spirits run Broadcast Standards & Practices. The leader of the Sky Spirits says that they came to Earth 45,000 years ago and found the ancestors of the Rubber Tree People, granting them the ability to commune with the earth and care for the world. They had later heard that their people were hunted to extinction. They had assumed that Voyager’s messages of peace were the usual bullshit from the same humans who wiped out the Indigenous peoples. Chakotay assures him that they’re better now. He also says that he rejected his people’s ways when he was a teenager, but after his father died, he got the same over-the-eye tattoo of the Sky Spirits that Kolopak had and fought for his people’s freedom as he did.
The Sky Spirits get rid of the shitty weather and the cloak that is hiding Chakotay and the shuttle from Voyager’s sensors. Tuvok, Torres, and Kes beam down to rescue him, but he tells them he’s fine. They beam back to Voyager, with the Sky Spirits allowing them to take some polyferranides back with them, and also seemingly forgetting that they left a shuttle on the surface…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, warp nacelles need polyferranides to function properly.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is cranky about the fact that the Sky Spirits are trying to keep them off the planet when Chakotay is still down there.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok raised orchids on Vulcan, prompting an unexpected bonding moment with Neelix. Typically, Neelix ruins it by going on about how delicious orchids are.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH tries to be a more compassionate physician by giving himself an illness, and instead learns the truth of the adage that doctors make the worst patients, as his behavior gets even more abominable while ill.
He still says “Please state the nature of the medical emergency” when activated. He had discontinued that function, but he found that he didn’t know what to say to “break the ice,” as it were, when turned on, so he restored it.
Half and half. Torres tries to increase power to Voyager’s shields so they can get through the Sky Spirits’ awful weather, but it only increases it by eight percent, which doesn’t cut it.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is attacked by a hawk—probably pissed that he goes around eating orchids…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. We see Chakotay’s butt, but it’s apparently a body double rather than Robert Beltran’s backside.
Do it.
“Doc, I don’t feel so good.”
“Neither do I, and you don’t hear me complaining.”
–Kim visiting sickbay and the flu-stricken EMH making him regret it.
Welcome aboard. Nancy Hower officially makes Wildman a recurring character with her second appearance after “Elogium“; she’ll next be seen in “Dreadnought.” Richard Chaves plays the chief of the Rubber Tree People, while Douglas Spain plays the teenaged Chakotay.
We also get two guests who previously played Vulcans on TNG: Henry Darrow, last seen as Admiral Savar in “Conspiracy,” makes his first of two appearances this season as Kolopak; he’ll be back as a vision of Chakotay’s in “Basics, Part I.” And Richard Fancy, last seen as Captain Satelk in “The First Duty,” plays the leader of the Sky Spirits.
Trivial matters: Chakotay mentions that Captain Sulu sponsored his application to Starfleet Academy. It could have been Hikaru Sulu from the original series, though he would’ve been 107 at the time. Chakotay refers to Sulu as male, so it’s likely not Hikaru’s daughter Demora (seen in Star Trek Generations). The novel Pathways by Jeri Taylor had it be Hiromi Sulu, the son of Demora, while the story “Seduced” by Christie Golden in Tales from the Captain’s Table (which was edited by your humble rewatcher) had it be Demora, with an explanation why Chakotay let his father believe Sulu was male. Hikaru Sulu will be seen in the third-season episode “Flashback,” which will establish that Tuvok served under him on the Excelsior.
Larry Brody sold this to Voyager for its first season, but it was having development issues, which were settled when Michael Piller returned to the day-to-day of Voyager following the cancellation of Legend. It’s Piller’s first teleplay credit for the second season.
Voyager will be seen to be looking for polyferranides again in “Innocence” later this season.
Janeway orders Voyager to land, just as they did in “The 37’s,” but they never actually hit the ground.
The B-story with the EMH giving himself an illness was based on a notion Robert Picardo pitched at Jeri Taylor and Piller.
Set a course for home. “That’s why they call it a rain-forest.” In the three decades since “The Paradise Syndrome,” we’ve gone from portraying Indigenous people as ignorant savages who talk like children and who need a white dude to come and show them how to do cool things like irrigation and gourds, to here portraying Indigenous people as noble “primitives” who are at one with nature and are a pure form of humanity. Or, uh, something.
Voyager is hardly the only piece of popular culture that was guilty of this overcorrection in the 1990s. In order to apologize for centuries of oppression and war and genocide, and for many decades of portrayal in popular culture as inferior, we instead get New Age environmentalism. As a result, we get shiny happy Indigenous people who commune with nature and are pure and wonderful, which is just as patronizing an attitude as viewing them as technologically inferior savages was, albeit one that’s at least, y’know, nicer. It comes from a better place, but it’s still self-righteous, prejudicial nonsense.
It doesn’t help that the episode acts as if all Indigenous people are monolithic, with the Sky Spirits talking as if the people they met on Earth 45,000 years ago were the forebears of all the “Indians,” which is ridiculous and reductive. We’ve had enough problems with Chakotay being a weird hodge-podge of different fake traditions, and then this episode specifically says that his tribe is from Central America, even though everything we’ve seen prior to this feels like a mishmash of generic Plains tropes, and it’s just a mess. (This is what happens when you hire a fake Indian to be your Native consultant…) Making this all so much worse is that the Sky Spirits are very obviously white guys in latex, so it winds up coming across as yet more white-people-help-the natives nonsense, just like “The Paradise Syndrome.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
This also marks the second time this season that Voyager—which is lost in a region of space that is so incredibly far from home that they can’t realistically get back in their lifetime—has come across people who’ve been to Earth. “The 37’s” was bad enough in that regard, but this is just ridiculous, that this has happened twice on the straight line between Ocampa and the Federation…
The episode ranks as high as a 2 for the same reason that any episode that has any kind of focus on the EMH gets a bump in rank: Robert Picardo Is Awesome, and watching him get holographically sick is an absolute delight. Even if that part of the plot is predicated on his never feeling pain before, and he has felt pain before…
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido encourages all and sundry to support the crowdfund for the third book in the “18th Race” trilogy of military science fiction novels, To Hell and Regroup, which Keith wrote with David Sherman. It’s being jointly funded along with Christopher L. Bennett’s Arachne’s Crime, and it’s already reached the funding goal, so if you support it, you’re guaranteed to get the books! Check it out!
Three articles worth reading about this episode:
“The Rubber Tree People: Mayan or Myth” by Spiletta42
Review of the episode on The M0vie Blog
Review of the episode by TrekkieFeminist
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I find Chakotay’s vision-quest or sky-spirit episodes to be exercises in endurance that I usually lose. The only redeeming aspect of this is Jennifer Lien’s wickedly casual delivery when Kes reveals that she added time to the doctor’s simulated illness program. That single moment is worth at least 2 points on the rating, so I agree with the total of 2. :) Otherwise, this is a complete dud for me
Not only has the EMH felt pain before, but in just the last episode he recognized that Janeway was mentally exhausted and told her to take a break & chill. And last season had the ep where he told the dude over-exercising to cut back. But this episode, he has patients in physical pain & is ‘they are All Whiny Babies!’. Sure, whatever…
It’s worth noting that 45,000 years ago was long before any currently extant Native American population settled in the Americas. There’s some ambiguous evidence suggesting human presence as much as 40,000 ya, but whatever population left it, if any, didn’t survive and did not become the ancestors of the Native Americans who descended from Eurasian migrants starting maybe 14-16,000 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas
It is, however, around the time (give or take a few thousand years) that human behavioral modernity emerged and modern humans began to migrate out of Africa. So I’ve always taken this episode to say that the Sky Spirits were partially the ancestors, not just of the Rubber Tree People, but of all modern humans. As I recall, the episode said that it was their descendants who had the wanderlust and curiosity that allowed humanity to spread across the Earth and to the stars. It just so happens that the Rubber Tree People are the last surviving population with relatively “pure” Sky Spirit genes and physiognomy, that all the others have been wiped out and the remaining humans have less surviving Sky Spirit ancestry. The idea wasn’t that this was uniquely the Native Americans’ heritage, but that it was all humans’ heritage and that Native Americans epitomized it through their intrepidity in spreading to the farthest habitable reaches of the Earth.
Given that, though, it certainly would’ve been preferable to cast a nonwhite actor as the Sky Spirit. No question about that.
What does this mean:
“45,000 years ago, on our first visit to your world, we met a small group of nomadic hunters. They had no spoken language, no culture, except the use of fire and stone weapons. “
No “spoken language?” Did they communicate with sign language?
This episode is really bad…..
Sabrina: they probably just grunted and pointed a lot. Y’know, like chimpanzees…. *rolls eyes so hard*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
More forehead aliens. Exciting. Also, does that mean the indigenous forehead people on Earth pre-date First Contact? I’m confused.
Also, I’m not sure how a hologram experiences illness as the EMH doesn’t actually have an organic body…
Austin: I dunno, if you can program a voice and a personality and tone of voice and physical movements into a hologram, why not also program the physical responses to illness?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@4″ So I’ve always taken this episode to say that the Sky Spirits were partially the ancestors, not just of the Rubber Tree People, but of all modern humans. As I recall, the episode said that it was their descendants who had the wanderlust and curiosity that allowed humanity to spread across the Earth and to the stars. “
I dunno.Based on this passage, it certainly looks as though the ep is specifically talking about the ancestors of the Amerinds:
” Forty five thousand years ago, on our first visit to your world, we met a small group of nomadic hunters. They had no spoken language, no culture, except the use of fire and stone weapons. But they did have a respect for the land and for other living creatures that impressed us deeply. We decided to give them an inheritance, a genetic bonding so they might thrive and protect your world. On subsequent visits, we found that our genetic gift brought about a spirit of curiosity and adventure. It impelled them to migrate away from the cold climate to a new, unpeopled land. It took them almost a thousand generations to cross your planet. Hundreds of thousands of them flourished in their new land. Their civilisation had a profound influence on others of your species. But then, new people came with weapons and disease. The Inheritors who survived scattered. Many sought refuge in other societies. Twelve generations ago, when we returned, we found no sign of their existence.”
@8 Keith – Does that mean his increasing irritability as the symptoms progressed simply programming as well? That would defeat the purpose of the exercise if it was simply a matter of programming. I don’t know, I just think the whole thing was pointless.
@5/Sabrina Garrett: There is a theory that humans evolved sign language before speech. However, it would’ve happened much more than 45,000 years ago.
@9/Sabrina: Yes, they’re the ancestors of Native Americans because they’re the ancestors of all humans, or at least a notable percentage of humans. He said it took almost a thousand generations to spread across the planet to their final homeland, and if we define a generation as about 30-35 years, that comes close to the interval between humans first spreading out of Africa and humans settling the Americas. As I said, the implication was that the Sky Spirits’ DNA triggered humans’ first migration out of Africa 45,000 years ago, that their descendants spread all over the world (perhaps with pure-blooded humans following in their footsteps and periodically warring with them or displacing them), and that eventually all their recognizable descendants worldwide were wiped out except the Rubber Tree People, who survived due to their extreme isolation.
@10/Austin: “That woud defeat the purpose of the exercise…”: Yes, that’s the whole point of the story — that the exercise backfired, that it didn’t have the result the Doctor hoped for. If he’d known exactly what the outcome would be, he wouldn’t have needed to conduct the experiment.
@@.-@ Counterpoint- given that “We decided to give them an inheritance, a genetic bonding so they might thrive and protect your world,” sounds to me an awful lot like “We found a ‘primitive’ people and decided the best thing was to make them more like us- perhaps by dubiously consensual breeding projects,” casting a white actor might have been sadly apropos.
I’d be willing to bet money that speech pre-dates homo sapiens. Toolmaking requires communication and while chimpanzees don’t have speech, I wouldn’t be surprised if australopithecines did.
As to this episode, I vaguely remember it.
This is godawful:
” Forty five thousand years ago, on our first visit to your world, we met a small group of nomadic hunters. They had no spoken language, no culture, except the use of fire and stone weapons”
As mentioned above, I’m not sure what this means. Did they have a non-spoken language? Did the Space Gods give the Amerinds the gift of spoken language?
” But they did have a respect for the land and for other living creatures that impressed us deeply.”
Amerinds are, like, really in tune with the land…..
“We decided to give them an inheritance, a genetic bonding so they might thrive and protect your world.”
But, you know, they still need a little of the old “Space God” DNA….
“On subsequent visits, we found that our genetic gift brought about a spirit of curiosity and adventure.”
See, without the special Space God DNA, they never would have amounted to anything…
“It impelled them to migrate away from the cold climate to a new, unpeopled land.”
No Space God DNA, and the Amerinds never leave Siberia….
“It took them almost a thousand generations to cross your planet.”
Let’s see, 30 years to a generation, 1,000×30=30,000…..45,000 minus 30,000 gets us to approx 15,000 BC….So, yeah, that clocks with current thinking on when the Amerinds arrived in the Americas, more or less…
“Hundreds of thousands of them flourished in their new land. Their civilisation had a profound influence on others of your species.”
You know, maize and potatoes and stuff….
“But then, new people came with weapons and disease. “
Europeans are like not in touch with nature….
“The Inheritors who survived scattered. Many sought refuge in other societies. Twelve generations ago, when we returned, we found no sign of their existence.”
12×30= 360….The second season of VOYAGER takes place in roughly, what, 2372…2372 minus 360 is 2012….So the Sky Spirits were on Earth in 2012? If memory serves, wasn’t 2012 was when, according to “Mayan prophecy,” the world was going to end….
I agree that Chakotay was a culturally mess. There was some irony when, in one episode, Chakotay is just saved from falling to his demise after a stair collapses. He is asked if that meant his life was now owned by the saviour. Chakotay responds “Wrong tribe”.
However it wasn’t just Native Americans that got the shallow treatment. Apart from James Doohan all the Scots have been appalling. Just about acceptable accents but totally wrong words and ways of speaking. The most recent and worst being the Emergence Holo Engineers in Picard.
Ironically due to this quarantine, I’m actually reading the novel Pathways for the first time. I’d gotten it as a gift years ago but never quite got around to reading it until now. In fact, I’ve just finished Chapter 2, which deals primarily with Chakotay’s youth and Academy years. The novel and the way it’s written makes it a lot easier for me to step into young Chakotay’s shoes and sympathize with him, even though he’s still not the most interesting character. That’s something they never really pulled off well in filmed live action. Plus, we get appearances of Kolopak, and also the introduction of his former girlfriend Sveta, who has since left Starfleet, lost her family and joined the Maquis.
As for Tattoo, it’s that bad of an episode. It took me several tries to get through this one. The pacing is glacial. There’s not much plot in there to speak of, and the character work is way too archetypal. And, of course, it’s a deeply problematic and simplistic portrayal of Native Americans with neither nuance nor complexity.
On some of Voyager’s DVD features, there’s an extended interview with Michael Piller in which he dives into the fact that he wrote Tattoo as a means of pushing the other staff writers towards updating Voyager’s approach to narrative to get closer towards the conventions of what was then considered modern television, citing ER‘s breakneck story pacing as an example. If that was his intention, this episode failed miserably, because as I’ve said, the pacing is still atrocious.
In a way, this reminds me of TNG’s The Chase (the idea of aliens being behind the uniform appearances of humanoid beings), but at least that episode had an interesting “chase” plot driving the story. Tattoo boils down to freak electrical storms and aliens botching Voyager’s rescue attempts, plus a limp B plot.
Also, a fun side trivia: Larry Brody wrote an episode of the Animated Series.
@11: “Yes, they’re the ancestors of Native Americans because they’re the ancestors of all humans, or at least a notable percentage of humans. He said it took almost a thousand generations to spread across the planet to their final homeland, and if we define a generation as about 30-35 years, that comes close to the interval between humans first spreading out of Africa and humans settling the Americas. As I said, the implication was that the Sky Spirits’ DNA triggered humans’ first migration out of Africa 45,000 years ago,”
That doesn’t square with this:
“It impelled them to migrate away from the cold climate to a new, unpeopled land.”
The spoken lines plus visual imagery are pretty clearly meant to indicate that that the humans who encountered the “Sky Spirits’ were not living in Africa….
A monolithic, ridiculous, reductive culture that reads like it was written by a tribe of white people from Connecticut? Yep, sounds like another beige-wearing TNG-VOY era Star Trek culture-of-the-week to me.
@14/Sabrina: “Did they have a non-spoken language?”
We already covered this. Sign language is a thing that exists.
“Amerinds are, like, really in tune with the land…..”
We already covered this too. 45,000 years ago, there was no such thing as an “Amerind.” There was no human population in the Americas yet. Modern humans existed only in Africa.
Again, the point was not that the Native Americans were the exclusive descendants of the Sky Spirits. The point was that the Sky Spirits gave humanity the spark that caused it to leave Africa and colonize the whole world, but all their descendants died out except the really isolated Rubber Tree People.
“Let’s see, 30 years to a generation, 1,000×30=30,000…..45,000 minus 30,000 gets us to approx 15,000 BC….So, yeah, that clocks with current thinking on when the Amerinds arrived in the Americas, more or less…”
Which is just what I already said in my last response to you.
“If memory serves, wasn’t 2012 was when, according to “Mayan prophecy,” the world was going to end….”
No, it wasn’t. It was when the current long cycle in the Mayan calendar would end and the next one would begin. Some idiot took that factoid and superimposed a European chiliastic interpretation on it to scare people and sell books. The idea of the world coming to an end is pretty much a unique feature of Western religions and was never part of Maya beliefs.
@15/B0b: The accents of La Sirena‘s emergency holograms are pretty clearly all meant to be caricatured. They aren’t real people, after all, they’re programmed simulations.
@17/Sabrina: “The spoken lines plus visual imagery are pretty clearly meant to indicate that that the humans who encountered the “Sky Spirits’ were not living in Africa….”
He said they visited their descendants many times over the millennia. Clearly that line is referring to a later point in the sequence. But the dating is unambiguous — 45,000 years ago is roughly when anatomically and behaviorally modern humans began to migrate out of Africa.
For the “Voyager Rewatch Drinking Game”, should the parenthetical “…is left as an exercise for the reader).” be worth one drink or two? And what about a link to Jamake Highwater? Finish the glass? :-) (I do love the rewatches, btw despite the snark here :-) )
Hikaru Sulu would have been fine working at Starfleet Academy. 107 is like middle-aged in the world of Star Trek. Remember people are living to almost 180 years during that time.
That’s one of the big problems I have with Star Trek. The ageism of the time. I mean look at TOS The Man Trap when Kirk describes a woman in her 30’s.
Or with TNG’s Too Short a Season. What’s the point of living such long lives thanks to all that amazing future medicine and tech if you’re going to be a shriveled Admiral in a wheelchair gasping every second line for the next 75 years. Kill me now.
The DS9 novels got it right with the new station XO who was a 100-year-old war veteran and they used a man aged 50-60 for the cover art. That is what you would look like at 100.
But no. We can’t fathom this concept because of how we view the elderly and aging through today’s lens. So much to the point that people have to rework canon with alternative explanations that kinda ruin the narrative.
So yes Sulu could still be kicking ass in the 24th century and still look like he did in Flashback.
A modern example of aging changes/improves in the span of 50 years thanks to a better quality of life. During Who’s 50th anniversary, Paul McGann was the same age as William Hartnel was when he was the Doctor. That’s within 50 years. Imagine how it’s going to change/improve in 400 years.
@21/Dorvan: “Remember people are living to almost 180 years during that time.”
Maybe Vulcans are, but not humans. In “Encounter at Farpoint,” the 137-year-old McCoy is treated as exceptionally long-lived. In one DS9 episode, Dax says she expects O’Brien to die comfortably in bed at 140, which she presents as a best-case scenario and thus is implicitly around the maximum expected human lifespan. Picard in his namesake series is 94 years old, and he’s clearly well beyond middle age. (I felt the DS9 novels got it wrong with Elias Vaughn, because they interpreted Dax’s 140-years reference to be a average human life expectancy rather than a maximum. Picard clearly shows otherwise.)
Oh, forgot to mention, it seriously took me several minutes to realize that wasn’t Patrick Duffy playing Kolopak.
@22/Christopher: One of the earlier Fontana Farpoint drafts had McCoy’s age as 147 before they toned it down.
I’ve always assumed Dax’s mention of O’Brien living until 140 to be the 2370’s equivalent of living until 100 nowadays. A natural extension of medical technology, plus healthier living. After all, less than 200 years ago, it was rare for people to live even past middle age due to all kinds of external factors.
@19
Er, and we all know how well caricatures of other cultures are received…
I’m pretty sure I caught this episode during its initial airing but haven’t watched it since and I still can’t bring myself to watch it again based on the Chakotay focus, the limp premise, and general silliness. However, I admit I just pulled it up to find the scene of Chakotay’s bare butt! I think this is the first instance of nudity of any kind on Star Trek and this was aired on network TV in prime time no less! At least that makes this episode of note.
Christopher, you keep mentioning Africa. The problem is, the episode itself has the aboriginal people the Sky Spirits encounter in the middle of a massive blizzard, all wearing heavy furs. It’s meant to be polar.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@24/Eduardo: Yes, but 140 years was meant to be the best case, an ideal scenario, not merely an average one. Certainly possible, but considerably better than typical.
“After all, less than 200 years ago, it was rare for people to live even past middle age due to all kinds of external factors.”
Not as much as people think. There were plenty of people who lived to their 70s or more, to the point that the Bible specifically says humans are allotted threescore years and ten. Yes, the average life expectancy was often in the 30s or 40s, but that’s because infant mortality was extremely high. A lot of people died in infancy, but if they survived childhood, they had a good chance of making it to 60 or 70. And the average of those two extremes falls somewhere in the middle. An average is just the middle of a range, more or less, and too many people make the mistake of expecting most entities within that range to fall on or near the average. (For instance, the average position of a car on a circular race track is the center of the circle, a point the car never occupies at all.)
@25/JFWheeler: The point is that the unrealism of the holograms’ accents is meant to be an error on the part of the characters who programmed them, rather than an expression of the creators’ own beliefs or attitudes.
@27/krad: Certainly the episode’s chronology is muddled, but as I keep saying, the real-life fact is that 45,000 years ago, Africa is where modern humans would be found. Personally I happen to think that reality is a little more real than fiction.
@28/CLB, But human species had been migrating out of Africa since Homo Erectus so it probably wasn’t the “space gene” that created human “wanderlust”. It was most likely just a fact of life in a hunter gatherer “economy” for a successful species. In any event all modern human cultures had hunter gatherer societies until the end of the last Ice Age around 8000 BCE when climate change forced many societies to find new ways of feeding themselves or die out and then introduced this technology to other cultures through trade and migration . I actually find the whole “human cultures determined by genetics” idea kind of disturbing. So, what, is there a special “space gene” that kept people from developing agriculture or pastoralism?
The writers probably got the timescale wrong along with everything else. Needless to say there are no ‘Rubber Tree People’ and the idea that Amerinds are special because of the gifts of white visitors from the sky is seriously offensive. Really just pick a tribe and stick to it! Research isn’t that hard!
@19:
@14/Sabrina: “Did they have a non-spoken language?”
We already covered this. Sign language is a thing that exists.”
I know , but is that what the writer intended? After all, he could have had written something like “communicating non-verbally with a purely gestural language.”
““Amerinds are, like, really in tune with the land…..”
We already covered this too. 45,000 years ago, there was no such thing as an “Amerind.” There was no human population in the Americas yet. Modern humans existed only in Africa.”
The ep is clearing showing us the ancestors of the Amerinds. And the imagery that we get of the contact is polar/arctic/Siberian, not African.
““Let’s see, 30 years to a generation, 1,000×30=30,000…..45,000 minus 30,000 gets us to approx 15,000 BC….So, yeah, that clocks with current thinking on when the Amerinds arrived in the Americas, more or less…”
Which is just what I already said in my last response to you.”
And I wrote that before I read your response. Sometimes stuff gets posted a tad late.
“If memory serves, wasn’t 2012 was when, according to “Mayan prophecy,” the world was going to end….”
No, it wasn’t. It was when the current long cycle in the Mayan calendar would end and the next one would begin. Some idiot took that factoid and superimposed a European chiliastic interpretation on it to scare people and sell books. The idea of the world coming to an end is pretty much a unique feature of Western religions and was never part of Maya beliefs.”
That’s why I put it in quote marks. I wasn’t endorsing it as a correct interpretation of Mayan beliefs, I was merely indicating that it is in accord with the ep’s von Daniken-esque mumbo-jumbo….
@28: “but as I keep saying, the real-life fact is that 45,000 years ago, Africa is where modern humans would be found. Personally I happen to think that reality is a little more real than fiction.”
But we’re not talking about reality; we’re talking about an episode of a TV show, and the ep is clearly trying to tell us that the ancestors of the Amerinds were infused with alien DNA 45,000 years in a location that looks an awful lot like Siberia….
I must have missed this episode way back when it aired, because I had no memory of it at all when I went back to rewatch the series (and I was actually surprised at how many episodes I did remember).
I think my main reaction was disbelief. As in, “Wait, they’re actually going with this?” And then, after the fact, “Oh my God, they actually went with it.” Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?
I usually find myself filling the role of apologist for this series, but this is one episode I honestly can’t bring myself to defend. As in, I feel like I should be apologizing to people of Native American descent on behalf of “stupid white people” everywhere (not the first time I’ve felt that way, to be perfectly honest).
What a dreadful episode…I’ve always disliked this one. Mostly just a big mess. However, I do like the brief bonding moment between Neelix & Tuvok over their interest in orchids, which Neelix predictably (and humorously) destroys in an instant by talking about using them in a salad. Additionally, the sub-plot with the Doctor was done nicely and has a neat twist to it’s resolution too. And I do have to admit that I did like the moment when Chakotay, while piloting the shuttle through the storm, sees the face imprinted on the sky…it was a nice mystical touch – all for naught, but still effective I thought.
I also wondered about the reference to Captain Sulu, as I was convinced that it couldn’t be Hikaru Sulu, but then remembered he had a daughter – only this time when watching this episode I caught the fact that the gender was male. So, thanks to all who provided information to formulate an answer to that question.
I’ve always liked both guest stars, Henry Darrow (Manolito Montoya) and Richard Fancy (Mr. Lippman), who appeared here too. It’s too bad that the framing story here was so awful – it makes it seem like even more of a ‘crime’ to have wasted their efforts.
@29/remremulo: “But human species had been migrating out of Africa since Homo Erectus so it probably wasn’t the “space gene” that created human “wanderlust”.”
According to the “generalist specialist” model of human development proposed in 2018 by archaeologists Patrick Roberts and Brian Stewart, our particular human species is, in fact, different from other hominids in that we do feel more compelled to expand into less comfortable environments, which required us to adapt and innovate and may be responsible for our success where other hominids failed.
https://news.umich.edu/homo-sapiens-the-global-general-specialist/
https://www.inverse.com/article/47597-generalist-specialist-homo-sapien-adaption
So there is some merit to the idea, though their theory differs from “Tattoo” on the timing.
@31/Sabrina: “The ep is clearing showing us the ancestors of the Amerinds.”
Once again: the ancestors of all humans would obviously be the ancestors of the Native Americans too. That is literally what “all” means.
And okay, I’ll concede on the Africa thing; there is evidence of modern humans in Siberia around 45,000 years ago. But here’s the thing: Those humans in Siberia didn’t all become Native Americans. Some of them stayed in Asia, and no doubt intermingled with other human populations in Eurasia over the subsequent millennia. So we are still talking about a sizeable percentage of humanity on multiple continents. Just because that includes Native Americans does not make it limited to them. The reason the last surviving Sky Spirit descendants were Native American is because the populations that remained in Eurasia were wiped out by competing human groups, and eventually so were the ones in the Americas thanks to European colonization, except for the really remote Rubber Tree People.
The indigenous people in my area burned down a forest the size of England and drove whole taxonomic orders of birds extinct, which gives me a different perspective on the Noble Savage thing. As for Chakotay’s characterisation, it amuses me that one of the actors playing a space rebel in The Expanse actually is an “Indian” – Canadian First Nations rather than Native American. Presumably the character is too, but it never comes up.
“The reason the last surviving Sky Spirit descendants were Native American is because the populations that remained in Eurasia were wiped out by competing human groups, and eventually so were the ones in the Americas thanks to European colonization, except for the really remote Rubber Tree People.”
@34/CLB, I don’t know, that sounds too much like all the old imperialist “noble savage” crap.
And actually, the Polynesians seem a better subject for this kind of philosophising than Native Americans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia
Allow my voice to join in with the chorus. This episode is dreadful, both as a paean to Aboriginal peoples and as a story in its own right, and yet another example of how Michael Pillar should have quit while he was ahead with his First Nations fetish. If nothing else, it did give us fodder for an excellent SFDebris review (hang in there, Chuck, we’re all pulling for you!), complete with a theoretical DS9 comparison which is both hysterically funny and completely NSFW.
@35: That’s pretty interesting. Mind if I ask what your area is, just out of curiosity?
@37: New Zealand. Not that I’m singling out the Maori as especially bad.
@36/remremulo: “CLB, I don’t know, that sounds too much like all the old imperialist “noble savage” crap.”
I wasn’t speaking of nobility, but of geographic isolation. The settlers of the Americas were cut off from the rest of humanity for 14,000 years, so whatever migrations, conflicts, diseases, etc. wiped out the various Sky Spirit-descended populations in Eurasia/Africa would not have extended to the Americas. As for any such processes happening within the Americas themselves, it’s not as easy for any one population group to spread all the way through the Americas because they’re north-south oriented rather than east-west, so the changing climates along the way are an impediment to the wide spread of any single culture. So there’s a better chance of Sky Spirit descendants surviving to the modern age. Though once the Columbian extinction event came, it was only the most isolated rainforest population, the Rubber Tree People, that managed to survive when other surviving populations were wiped out by imported pandemics or aggressive colonists.
@39/CLB “Columbian Extinction Event”? Of course you know that there are still 70 million indigenous people still alive in the in the Americas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas) and numerous others in Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia and Polynesia? The people who have been exploited and displaced throughout the world through imperialism (and it’s still going on and not just by Western powers) are still around and they should not be viewed as a paleontological extinction event.
The “reveal” in this episode is so nonsensical that I prefer to think of this as a second encounter with the Botha. They can, after all, apparently read people’s minds and generate hallucinations, which would explain everything in this episode. This one is less homicidal and just prefers to troll people into believing absurd things. Chakotay doesn’t know any better, so just takes it seriously when the BothaTroll delivers a preposterous backstory he made up on the spot. This doesn’t actually make the episode any better, mind you, but does save the contrivance of Voyager running into another Earth connection.
Hmm.
There is some decent stuff in here but it seems to take a long time to get going, and then when it does it’s not quite sure where exactly it is going. There’s a look into Chakotay’s past which is bordering on an origin story: It feels at times as though it’s setting up for the observation that he has actually managed to marry his people’s traditions with the modern world, but then it doesn’t quite get there. There’s a rather perfunctory “aliens influencing prehistoric humans” story, which is a bit tacked on. And there’s a touch of the “We were really sh*tty to the American Indians, weren’t we?” guilt complex that seemed to permeate a lot of American television at the time and got some rather cynical reviews.
As has been pointed out, there’s probably more entertainment to be found from the B-plot with the Doctor: The interaction between him and Kes crackles as usual. (“She’s far more devious than I ever imagined.”)
At least we get Henry Darrow bringing a bit of gravitas in the first of his two appearances as Kolopak, and it’s interesting that the show chooses to make him a bit of a dick rather than falling completely into the wise old Indian trope: He’s rather inconsiderate of the young Chakotay at times, even if Chakotay was a sulky teenager. He was previously Star Trek’s first Vulcan admiral (I think, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone told me I’m wrong), and it occurs to me that he’s in the 24th episode of both TNG and Voyager!
It’s a bit of a cheat to have Janeway preparing to lead the away team the first time round, then not going along the second time round so the away team are all subordinate to Chakotay and he can do that disgusted “Put those things away” when they turn up with phasers drawn. I’m in two minds about that: The aliens just tried to kill Voyager and everyone on board, so there’s justifiable suspicion, but it doesn’t say much for Starfleet’s peaceful intentions that their response to aliens standing down in an attack is to point guns at them.
Also as pointed out, despite saying they can locate the shuttle, the away team apparently beam straight back to the ship and leave it behind. So that’s potentially four shuttles lost in five episodes at the beginning of the (sans holdover episodes) second season. Even if they dial down on it in later seasons, it’s no wonder they got a reputation for losing so many of the damn things.
I once heard Ronald B Moore (ie the special effects guy, not the writer with the similar name) tell an anecdote about the “naked Chakotay” scene. The body double used was wearing flesh-coloured (under)pants and it was decided at the last minute they wanted him to lose them. He refused unless he was paid an extra $200 so did it with them on. It was then decided it was obvious he was wearing them, so the scene was handed over to the CGI guys who spent thousands of dollars digitally altering the scene so he looked naked. The network then saw it and went “You can’t show that!” so the scene was handed back to them and they spent thousands more dollars adding in a strategically positioned piece of foliage…
Count me among those who find it perfectly plausible for Hikaru Sulu to still be around c.2350, given that the much older McCoy was leading a relatively active life a decade later. I would say that there’s plenty of evidence that humans living for over a century isn’t exactly unusual: It’s not unheard of even now, and if living four decades longer than that is even possible, then there’s probably thousands if not millions of centenarians around. It’s possible that Sulu’s retired but still referred to as “captain” as a courtesy and can still sign someone’s application form.
@41/Rick: I like your idea of an alien race that gets off on trolling other species that pass through its space/planet and that that’s what really happened to Chakotay! Sounds better than the actual premise of this episode.
@42/cap-mjb: Good story about the body double! Seems strange that the network would be so prudish about Chakotay’s behind when about 8-9 years later they had no problem with T’Pol on Enterprise showing blatant T&A! Haha.
I watched about a minute more of this episode for the Doctor/Kes part. At least that part I can admit was amusing/well-acted.
@34:
“@31/Sabrina: “The ep is clearing showing us the ancestors of the Amerinds.”
Once again: the ancestors of all humans would obviously be the ancestors of the Native Americans too. That is literally what “all” means.”
But the Sky Spirits didn’t interact with the ancestors of all humans; they interacted with the ancestors of the Amerinds:
” Forty five thousand years ago, on our first visit to your world, we met a small group of nomadic hunters. They had no spoken language, no culture, except the use of fire and stone weapons. But they did have a respect for the land and for other living creatures that impressed us deeply. We decided to give them an inheritance, a genetic bonding so they might thrive and protect your world. On subsequent visits, we found that our genetic gift brought about a spirit of curiosity and adventure. It impelled them to migrate away from the cold climate to a new, unpeopled land. It took them almost a thousand generations to cross your planet. Hundreds of thousands of them flourished in their new land. Their civilisation had a profound influence on others of your species. But then, new people came with weapons and disease. The Inheritors who survived scattered. Many sought refuge in other societies. Twelve generations ago, when we returned, we found no sign of their existence.”
“But here’s the thing: Those humans in Siberia didn’t all become Native Americans. Some of them stayed in Asia, and no doubt intermingled with other human populations in Eurasia over the subsequent millennia. So we are still talking about a sizeable percentage of humanity on multiple continents. Just because that includes Native Americans does not make it limited to them. The reason the last surviving Sky Spirit descendants were Native American is because the populations that remained in Eurasia were wiped out by competing human groups, and eventually so were the ones in the Americas thanks to European colonization, except for the really remote Rubber Tree People.”
Where was any of this indicated in the episode? I think that you and I are operating at cross purposes. You are attempting to write a better version of “Tattoo,” whereas I’m simply looking at what was actually shown. And, in the actual episode, we get this:
Super-advanced aliens make contact with the ancestors of the Amerinds 45,000 years ago. These ancestors are standard issue Noble Savages (they respect the land and its creatures). They also lack a spoken language….The Space Gods are so impressed by the aforesaid Noble Savages, that they give them some of their super special DNA. This super special DNA gives them a spirit of curiosity and adventure, and they move on (circa 15,000 years ago) and colonize the Americas.Then the Europeans show up, with their warlike ways and Old World diseases, and they take a big demographic hit. The Space Gods come back one last time in 2012 (You know, for mumbo-jumboish reasons involving New Age takes on the Mayans)…..
@40/remremulo: An extinction event doesn’t have to be complete to qualify. The pandemics that swept the Americas after European colonization are estimated to have killed up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas. The term is not meant to dismiss the populations that survive, but to acknowledge the horrific magnitude of the devastation. There certainly were many indigenous communities that were completely wiped out, or whose few survivors were so scattered that their cultures effectively ceased to exist. We’ll never know how many because they were long gone before they could be documented in writing.
@44/Sabrina: “Where was any of this indicated in the episode? I think that you and I are operating at cross purposes. You are attempting to write a better version of “Tattoo,” whereas I’m simply looking at what was actually shown.”
On the contrary, I’m reasoning directly from the information given in the episode. One, they originated 45,000 years ago somewhere in Afro-Eurasia, which means they lived there for more than 30,000 years before any of their descendants settled in America. Two, they were driven by “a spirit of curiosity and adventure” that led them to expand. Therefore, it is profoundly obvious that they would’ve spread all over Africa and Eurasia, settling all over the place, and only some of their descendants would’ve eventually crossed the Bering Strait to become Native Americans. It is a complete contradiction in terms to postulate that a people driven to travel and explore would’ve stayed clumped together as a single population for over 30,000 years. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Again, the episode never said that the Native Americans were their only descendants, just the only ones that survived, that retained that original spirit of curiosity and adventure that drove human expansion to the farthest corners of the Earth. I can certainly see how the episode can be taken to imply that they’re the only descendants, but if you really think it through, you see there’s a more plausible interpretation of the evidence as presented.
@38: Thanks for letting me know, I’ll definitely have to look into it.
@42: Agreed about Sulu: calling him by his rank even after he’s retired makes sense just out of sheer respect, and given standards of living across the Federation, it’s easy to imagine that life expectancies have likewise significantly increased.
I’m surprised that we’ve gotten to 46-some comments and nobody has challenged the idea that primitive people waited until their 30s to have babies. Nope. Try halving that.
On the other hand, maybe they were referring to Sky Spirit generations?
Not wanting to upset the apple cart – but in amongst all the discussions of the Human Diaspora no-one seems to have mentioned the fact that in the flashbacks to Chakotay’s youth, the ‘Rubber Tree People’ that he and his father encountered *back on Earth* all had forehead ridges resembling those of the Sky Spirits – does that not seem a little…. problematic…. with humans as we currently know them (and somehow Biomoding seems a little out of character for the RTPs!)
@47/SaraB: Of course I wasn’t suggesting anything of the kind. Obviously the definition of a “generation” length is a very approximate thing, but so is the range of uncertainty when talking about how long ago prehistoric events happened, and the inaccuracies of a fictional account add yet another layer of ambiguity. So none of these figures should be taken as precise. It’s more about the rough order of magnitude.
@48/Tom: As I’ve been saying all along, what was presumably intended was that some of these Sky Spirit-descended populations lived in various places on Earth for 45,000 years, presumably interbreeding some with human populations so that some groups had more visible Sky Spirit traits than others (just as we now know that some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA survives in most human populations due to past interbreeding); but over the course of millennia, the “alien”-looking ones were progressively wiped out by the more human populations until eventually the isolated Rubber Tree people were the last survivors. Presumably the others were all wiped out in prehistory and so no records of them survived.
@48 – I did bring it up @7. I’m confused as to how alien peoples lived on Earth all along before First Contact. Nobody noticed this?
@50/Austin: We’re talking about prehistory, thousands of years before there were written records. And the paleontological record is fragmentary at best. It’s only been a decade since we discovered Denisova hominins, who interbred with Homo sapiens and lived as recently as 15,000 years ago. If we could’ve been unaware that Denisovans existed until recently — or Homo floresiensis, the so-called “hobbits” that were only discovered in 2003 and lived at least until 50,000 years ago — then we could’ve been unaware of the human-Sky Spirit hybrids too.
@51 – But the Rubber Tree people were not extinct.
@52/Austin: But they were profoundly isolated in the rainforest, so they survived after all the others had gone extinct, and remained undiscovered because of their isolation. Again, there is abundant real-life precedent for remote rainforest populations existing undiscovered by civilization until fairly recent times.
Am I the only one who would like to see a people found and “helped” by an older alien civilization really not liking them?
Chakotay’s Dad: We must perform the rituals and honor the Sky Spirits.
Chakotay: Because they are older and wiser than we are and taught us all that be-one-with-the-universe stuff?
CA: Because they’re a bunch of curmudgeons who will show up and lecture us about how no one shows proper respect for Sky Spirits these days like in the old days.
Chakotay: And what does this symbol mean?
CA: If you see it, you will know you have reached the world the Sky Spirits. Roughly translated, it means, “Get off my lawn.” Beware, ignoring this sign brings dire consequences. They’ll tell you you have to do something to show your respect or pure intentions. But, really they just want you to look ridiculous and are probably posting it to youtube.
I see that wikipedia thinks he was already known to be a fraud. Which makes me wonder why someone would hire a known liar as a consultant.
ad: He was exposed in 1984, but not everyone believed the allegation that he was a fake. It wasn’t generally accepted that he was full of shit until after he died in 2001.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@56/krad: I can understand why the allegations of fraud might not have been believed. They’re the sort of accusations that one would expect to be leveled against a genuine expert to discredit them. So VGR’s producers probably assumed that was the case, or he convinced them it was.
Richard Chavez played Colonel Ironhorse in the syndicated War of the Worlds tv show, another Paramount show that ran about the same time as Star Trek: The Next Generation, and also auditioned for the role of Chakotay.
@58/Gordon: Indeed, War of the Worlds: The Series was TNG’s syndication partner — Paramount offered it to TV stations bundled alongside TNG seasons 2 & 3 as a package deal. Although it was a much lower-budget, cheesier show.
@58: Ah, I was unaware of that. And I remember as a kid also being into the War of the Worlds TV show, at least initially.
I don’t know if he auditioned for the role of Chakotay, but I remember Native American actor Graham Greene stating in an interview decades ago that he’d like to be on Star Trek. No offense to Robert Beltran, but it kind of makes you wonder that if an actual Native American had been cast in the role then maybe the character would have been portrayed more authentically and not as some strange and offensive mish-mash or invention of Native American cultures and characteristics.
@60/GarretH: Robert Beltran is part-Native. He’s a Mexican-American of part-indigenous (Mestizo) origin, like the majority of Mexicans. It’s just that US legal definitions are screwed-up and erroneously define Hispanic and Native American as mutually exclusive categories, or so I read.
@61/CLB: I see what you’re saying but what I was implying was that perhaps if another actor was cast in the role that was more sensitive to inaccurate and just plain offensive portrayals of Native Americans, then maybe he would have stood up to the show runners regarding these offenses and disavowed that fake consultant. It’s just how I would like to have imagined things going instead of how they actually turned out.
@61: The US government considers Hispanic/Latino to represent a cultural group with origins in Latin America. It’s a very common misperception that it is a racial category. Hispanics may be of any race. The current pope is Argentinean but his parents were Italian immigrants. Shakira is Colombian but her parents are Syrian. And the president of Peru in the 1990s was Alberto Fujimori, who was born to Japanese immigrants.
@62/GarretH: I read here that Beltran did push for greater accuracy, and that’s why Chakotay’s origin was eventually settled on as Central American like Beltran’s own ancestry, rather than the generic Plains-ish stuff they originally implied. So I don’t understand this desire to blame the actor.
Besides, definitions of offensiveness depend on your point of view. Compared to earlier and contemporary media portrayals of Native Americans at the time, Voyager‘s portrayal was fairly progressive. It’s only in retrospect, after having made considerably more progress, that we can see how far they fall short. It’s the same as TOS’s portrayal of women, which was relatively feminist for its day but profoundly backwards for our day. You can’t blame people in the past for not being as far forward as we are today. Progress is made a step at a time.
@63/rms81: That’s all true, but the idea offered on that site is the only remotely credible explanation I’ve ever seen for the strange presumption among fans that Beltran is not genuinely indigenous.
I wonder where the spirit of Discovery and exploration that sent old world explorers to the new world came from? Not to mention the spirit of exploration and discovery that sent human populations into space. I also wonder what happened to that spirit among the reclusive Rubber Tree People?
@65: That would require the writers to set aside their Western self-loathing for fifteen seconds and acknowledge that going on an adventure to unfamiliar lands doesn’t inherently make you an monster, an impossibility in a day and age when merely stepping out your door in the morning makes you a perfidious colonialist who’s actively trampling on indigenous rights by mere virtue of your existence.
@63: And one of Chile’s founding fathers was named Bernardo O’Higgins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_O%27Higgins
Regarding the question of verbal communication 45,000 years ago:
I remember reading in a book about human evolution, that human vocal chords were ill-equipped for speech until about that time.
Not sure if that’s historically true or not. But the notion did appear in a respectable book about human evolution from about 1990, which is less than a decade before this episode aired.
So it looks like the Voyager writers did their proper homework here. If they got it wrong, that’s only because the scientists themselves got it wrong back then.
@61 / @63: Just like other conversations we’ve had in Trek rewatches, the US in general doesn’t understand that “Hispanic” or “Latino” is a cultural heritage that does not determine your physical appearance. Many, if not most people in the US can’t fathom a Hispanic person being fair-skinned and having blue or green eyes, or that someone can look fully “black” and also be Hispanic. Same goes for mixed European/native people in Latin America.
@37/Devin Smith: I had never heard of SF Debris until your comment but since looking it up, those Trek reviews have taken up a good portion of my time in the past week or so! I’m loving Chuck’s commentary and snark in general but especially on the crappy episodes. The guy is hilarious so thanks for the mention!
@70: You’re very welcome, Garret, glad you’ve been enjoying them! Yeah, Chuck is great. I’ve found that not only does he frequently offer unexpected insights, but even when I’m disagreeing with his conclusions, they’re still well-considered and entertainingly presented. If you haven’t already, I really recommend watching his Dragon Age: Origins series as well, that’s another good one from him.
Thinking about this episode is giving me a headache! This crapisode contains so much nonsense I want to pretend it never existed in its aired form; in fact I think I will. Considering how ludicrous the idea is of Chakotay finding a symbol he recognizes on a planet 70,000 lightyears from Earth, I move to rewrite this episode on the spot! The away team found a small amount of polyferranide dust (I’m calling it dust because it’s convenient for my rewrite) arranged in a pattern that Chakotay thought he recognized. Like finding shapes in clouds, he realized that it was his imagination. Upon further analysis, this polyferranide is not right for what they need and they beam back to the ship. Roll the end credits…
I’m here on Indigenous People’s Day as per krad’s suggestion, and can I just add my own reason for hating this episode to the list? This is just a pet peeve of mine, but I’ve always hated it when sci-fi points to human accomplishments and then assigns the credit to aliens. Aliens didn’t build the pyramids, we did! Unless it’s done as a joke or on a very small scale (such as Vulcans introducing velcro to Earth), I can’t stand plot points that depend on this.
It’s bad enough when technological achievements are credited to aliens, but to say that an entire culture/religion was “uplifted” by aliens? To hell with that. Krad pointed out the implications of using white guys in latex as the Sky Spirits, and I absolutely agree with that, but it wouldn’t have been a significant improvement if they’d used indigenous actors in latex. Using the alien origin trope in this way at all only serves to make an already marginalized group even more “other”, regardless of poor casting choices.
Side note: has an origin story for a tattoo ever been a good idea? The only other tv episode I can think of is “Stranger in a Strange Land” from Lost, and that was also a waste of an episode.
@73: “Side note: has an origin story for a tattoo ever been a good idea? The only other tv episode I can think of is “Stranger in a Strange Land” from Lost, and that was also a waste of an episode.”
I understand the mystery of the main character’s tattoos, which predict various crimes and disasters, to be the main driving plot of Blindspot, but since I haven’t actually seen that show*, I can’t comment as to it’s quality.
*I’m skeptical of shows that start off with a central mystery arc, as it rarely seems like they’re designed in such a way as to bring a satisfying conclusion. Either the show ends early with little resolution, or continues past the reasonable point of resolution and has to add layers and side plots until a neat resolution is more or less impossible.
@73/Fry08: Indeed, those “ancient astronaut” theories are usually predicated in racism, used by white supremacists to advance the idea that no nonwhite culture could have invented anything great without outside help. The most famous “ancient astronaut” theorist, Erich von Daniken, was a convicted fraud and plagiarist who based his ideas on neo-Nazi ideology and advocated some grossly racist ideas, though they were edited out of his more famous books.
At least in this case, as I discussed earlier in the thread, the time frame given for the Sky Spirits’ presence (45,000 years ago) would require them to be the ancestors of all modern humans, not any one ethnic group thereof. Although as I mentioned before, it was a very bad idea to cast them as white. I think the “white” ethnic group is actually the youngest one, a relatively recent mutation.
“Side note: has an origin story for a tattoo ever been a good idea? The only other tv episode I can think of is “Stranger in a Strange Land” from Lost, and that was also a waste of an episode.”
That was an ongoing thread in Arrow — the origin of Oliver Queen’s various tattoos and scars over his five years’ worth of flashbacks.
@73/74/75: This is kind of/sort of relevant, I think…
Not an origin story, but definitely a callback to a much maligned episode. I remember in the early 2000’s Brannon Braga created a show called Threshold. Why he wanted to use the name of arguably the worst Star Trek episode in history (maybe even the worst sci-fi episode in history), I don’t know. Perhaps it was a way to atone for that dubious distinction? Anyways, I thought the show was pretty good and Brent Spiner was in it to boot! Sadly it got cancelled after only 13 episodes.
@76/Thierafhal: Brannon Braga did not create Threshold. Its creator was Bragi F. Schut. The majority of Braga’s post-Trek work has been on shows created by other people — Threshold, 24, Terra Nova, Cosmos, The Orville. The only non-Trek series he has a creator credit on are Flashforward, which he “created” with David Goyer based on the Robert J. Sawyer novel, and Salem, which he co-created with Adam Simon. He has never had a solo creator credit on any show, because he’s not an auteur, just a journeyman showrunner who’s brought in to help execute other people’s ideas.
The original plan for Threshold, or at least the hope, was to change its title every season as the alien invasion got worse over a 3-year arc — they wanted to call the second season Foothold and the third season Stranglehold. I doubt the network would’ve let them do that, but maybe they could’ve used them as season subtitles.
@77/CLB:
Not to dispute you, but I remember clearly him being touted as the creator back when I watched it and corroborated when I googled “threshold tv show”, today. However IMDB says the creator is Bragi F. Schut, as you say, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
And yes, I vaguely remember that too, about the show’s name changing every season. That would have been an interesting idea if it had been allowed to come to fruition.
@78/Thierafhal: “I remember clearly him being touted as the creator back when I watched it and corroborated when I googled “threshold tv show”, today.”
That’s strange. I just Googled the same phrase, and most of the sites that came up on the first page listed Schut as the creator, or didn’t mention the creator at all. I only found a couple further down on the page that erroneously listed Braga as creator, and one of them listed him as co-creator after Schut.
Anyway, “touting” doesn’t matter, and hearsay isn’t evidence. People get things wrong all the time. A showrunner is typically the creator of a show, so a lot of people jumped to that conclusion rather than looking more closely at the facts. Some of them were probably confused by the similarity of names between Bragi Schut and Brannon Braga. Which is why the actual credits are the only source that matters.
Quoth CuttlefishBenjamin: “I understand the mystery of the main character’s tattoos, which predict various crimes and disasters, to be the main driving plot of Blindspot, but since I haven’t actually seen that show*, I can’t comment as to it’s quality.”
I have seen the show, at least its first season, solely on the strength of Jaimie Alexander, whom I adored as Sif in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The show was absolutely horrible, and I didn’t come back for the second season, nor did I miss it in the least. The only thing Blindspot was good for was keeping Alexander too busy to appear in Ragnarok thus sparing us all the ignominy of Sif being redshirted along with the Warriors Three in that misbegotten, overrated film.
(Yes, I hated many aspects of Thor: Ragnarok. Click here to read why.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@79/CLB
Agreed. I know Wikipedia, for example, is a go-to site for a lot of people and I use it too. However, I’m always fully aware that not all info on wiki is accurate. I like to cross-reference info I find there with some other sources whenever I’m serious about researching something.
But ya, as I said, I’m not disputing you, I just remember seeing advertisements for Threshold back in the day with Brannon Braga’s name attached as the creator. It’s a moot point now, but I had no reason to doubt it at the time and I was intrigued. The Voyager episode was a mess, but I didn’t want to hold that against Braga. After all, on a good day, he’s written or contributed to some fantastic episodes. “Frame of Mind” and “Cause and Effect” being the most memorable for me. Sorry, going off on one of my infamous (to me) tangents again…
@75/CLB – Ah, thanks for the clarification. I had the same confusion as other posters above. Without having a rough idea what was going on 45,000 years ago, and given the dialog explaining that “new” people annihilated the Inheritors, it’s easy to walk away from the episode with the idea that the genetic gift was only to a select group of people and not all humanity.
I learned something new from your comment about the “ancient astronauts” trope, though I can’t say it (or the Wikipedia rabbit hole I just went down) surprised me much. It gives me another reason to dislike that plot device when I see it.
@81/Thierafhal: “I just remember seeing advertisements for Threshold back in the day with Brannon Braga’s name attached as the creator.”
They might have said something like “From the co-creator of Star Trek: Enterprise” and people just assumed that meant he was the creator of this one too. I can’t find any such trailers online to check, though.
Robert Duncan McNeill in his Voyager podcast for this episode has a hilarious story behind Chakotay’s nude scene that is worth a listen if just for this particular tidbit:
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5jYXB0aXZhdGUuZm0vdGhlLWRlbHRhLWZseWVycy8/episode/NTE0MGU4NDQtYmM3Ny00MDI3LThiNDgtNjQ4NjU1MTdhNTc4?hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwiS2_bAwrPsAhWTup4KHVljA84QieUEegQIDxAH&ep=6
Tatto actually has special significance for Robert Beltran because like Chakotay, he also doesn’t speak his own native language (but doesn’t it bother him that it’s all built on lies and misinformation?). Tuvok does mention finding the downed shuttle from orbit, Krad. It’s possible it’s recovery happened offscreen. Is Torres trying to restore power to the shields or to the engines? I always assumed it was the latter so they could escape the cyclone and take the ship into a higher orbit. I’m also glad you subscribe to The Movie Blog, Krad because I believe it’s an essential stopover for genre/non genre reviews (and great for cross referencing). 32: you’ll feel the same way after you’ve seen Threshold later in the season. 43: that scene with T’Pol is the gif that keeps on giving (but I don’t remember any breasts). 58: Richard Chaves was also in another jungle in Predator (where he first showed his facility for other languages). 69: is Torres supposed to be Hispanic/Latino on her father’s side?
@85/David Sim: “is Torres supposed to be Hispanic/Latino on her father’s side?”
When her father appears in flashback in season 7, he’ll be played by Juan García, so I’d say yes (although the character’s given name is John).
Sigh… more patronising demeaning drivel from Voyager (and sadly Trek as a whole) in its portrayal of North / Central American natives. Journeys End was bad enough on TNG and I find it incomprehensible that someone in the production or at the network hadn’t said “whoah… stop and rethink” by this point. I found this uncomfortable viewing in the 90s now it’s extremely painful to think this was even brought to the screen. Terrible. 0 out of 10
@85: T’Pol would show her breasts when disrobing for her mutual massage sessions with Trip in Season Three. There was no nipple but you basically saw her breasts because she was cupping them with her hands. I feel like I’m writing erotic fiction here!
Also, on a later edition of the Delta Flyers podcast that Garrett Wang and Robert Duncan McNeill host, Garrett revealed that Beltran informed him that he refused to do the nude scene so production used a body double in a nude stocking. However, it ended up looking funny in their opinion so a digital butt crack was drawn in. And now we all know this little interesting behind-the-scenes tidbit!
88: Star Trek often casts beautiful women but T’Pol was the first to actually do the things we’ve only ever read about in Trek’s more erotic fiction.
Bit of trivia: guest actor Henry Darrow has an Emmy.
Henry Darrow died today.
To be fair to Neelix, orchids are delicious with a vinegar dressing.