“One”
Written by Jeri Taylor
Directed by Kenneth Biller
Season 4, Episode 25
Production episode 193
Original air date: May 13, 1998
Stardate: 51929.3
Captain’s log. Seven is on the holodeck, trying to learn how to have conversations with people, under the supervision of the EMH. However, she treats “getting to know you” questions as an interrogation, and barely gives Torres and Kim time to answer the questions she asks before moving on. The EMH castigates her for her behavior, and she decides she’d rather go to sickbay to perform medical maintenance than keep going through this program.
Voyager reaches a Mutara-class nebula, but it gives off radiation that is instantly harmful, giving the crew headaches and burns. One crewmember dies before Tuvok—who is slightly more resistant—is able to reverse course.
The nebula is too large to go around without costing them a year’s travel time. It’ll take a month to go through, but the crew will be in danger. Janeway’s decision, based on the EMH’s recommendation, is to put the crew in stasis in chambers that will protect them from the radiation. Only the EMH and Seven—who wasn’t affected the first time they approached the nebula—will remain active and will run the ship. Chakotay expresses concern privately to Janeway that they’re leaving the ship in the hands of an ex-Borg and a hologram, but she doesn’t see that they have a choice. She also trusts Seven, more than the others do. Chakotay agrees to go with her instincts.
Kim and Paris get put in stasis, Paris bitching the entire time. Janeway goes in last, reminding Seven that the EMH is in charge as chief medical officer. Seven is skeptical of the notion of a hologram being in charge, but accedes.
Seven establishes a routine for her daily life aboard ship. She checks on ship’s systems, makes course corrections as necessary, eats nutritional supplements in the mess hall, and also deals with Paris, who has managed to get himself out of his stasis chamber.
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However, the EMH and Seven have been grating on each others’ nerves. He suggests a holodeck excursion, and the EMH creates a party in the mess hall. Seven’s idea of small talk is to conscript the holographic versions of Neelix and Janeway to help her with her notions of using the warp field to protect them better from the radiation. The EMH and Seven break into an argument, and start to think they need to avoid each other’s company for a while.
Then an alarm goes off: there’s a warp-core breach. The EMH goes to the bridge while Seven goes to engineering, but when she arrives, the warp core is fine. Turns out that the bioneural gelpacks are being affected, and they’re making the computer give false readings. While they’re in the Jefferies Tube fixing them, the EMH’s mobile emitter starts to futz out. Seven gets back to sickbay in time, but the emitter is toast, so the doctor is now trapped in sickbay.
Twenty-nine days into the journey, and Seven is having difficulties. She’s having strange dreams while regenerating. The computer is starting to fail, and the ship requires more maintenance than ever to get through the last six days of the nebula trip.
At one point, Seven thinks she hears Paris again, but he’s in his stasis chamber as he should be.
Sensors detect a one-person ship. Its occupant is an alien named Trajis Lo-Tarik, who is resistant to the radiation. His ship, not so much—he is attempting to be the first of his kind to make it all the way through the nebula. He also claims to have never heard of the Borg.
Trajis and Seven agree to a trade of a microfusion reactor for some liquid helium, but then Trajis asks if she as a former drone can handle the isolation. That gets Seven’s attention, as he said he’d never heard of the Borg. She pulls a phaser on him, but when she’s distracted by Paris’ phantom voice, he gets away.
The EMH insists there are no other life-form readings on board, but the ship isn’t exactly at 100% so it could just be malfunctioning. She goes to engineering, while Trajis comes over the intercom and threatens to damage the warp engines from the bridge. When Seven arrives, she sees Paris and Kim writhing on the deck and then bursting into flames. Seven cuts off life support to the bridge, which neutralizes Trajis. She reports this to the EMH, who has fixed his mobile emitter and will join her in engineering.
To her shock, Trajis arrives in engineering first, unharmed. She pulls a phaser on him again. The EMH enters to see that Seven is talking to no one—Trajis is a hallucination. The doctor informs her that her Borg implants are being affected in a manner similar to that of the gelpacks.
The EPS conduits overload, and the EMH can no longer stay active, as the repairs he made to the emitter are tied to the EPS conduits. He has to off-line for the rest of the trip, leaving Seven alone.
Seven’s final days in the nebula are spent hallucinating members of the crew, all looking injured from radiation burns, mocking her constantly, as well as a Borg drone doing likewise. The hallucinatory crew mocks her efforts to keep the propulsion systems going for the final push, using power from the stasis chambers to temporarily goose the engines before diverting life support back to the chambers. Denied life support, she passes out.
She awakens in sickbay. Once they cleared the nebula, the systems were no longer affected by the radiation. The EMH reactivated and woke everyone up from stasis. After accepting the gratitude of Janeway, Chakotay, and the EMH, she says she’s glad she could help.
Later, she goes to the mess hall and sits down with Kim, Paris, and Torres and actually engages them in conversation.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? It’s yet another made-up radiation, subnucleonic radiation! Which apparently gives you a headache and burns you alive. Unless you have Borg implants, in which case it gives you hallucinations after a few weeks in…
There’s coffee in that nebula! When told by the EMH that the only alternative to slicing a year off their journey by going around the nebula is to go through with only two people functioning, Janeway takes it. She also admits to Chakotay that her trust of Seven is still mostly borne of instinct.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok reminds everyone that Vulcans are stronger than humans by dealing with the radiation better than the humans on the bridge and moving the ship away from the nebula before anyone else dies.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. On the holodeck, Seven asks Neelix for his help due to his knowledge of warp theory. Okay, then.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is in charge of the ship for most of the trip through the nebula, due to a plan he himself suggested. Not self-serving at all!
Forever an ensign. The holographic Kim mentions that he was born in South Carolina. Between this and Sulu mentioning in The Voyage Home that he was born in San Francisco, the only two Asian opening-credits regulars in Trek to date aren’t actually from Asia. (This rather unfortunate streak will be broken with Hoshi Sato on Enterprise, who was born in Japan.)
Half and half. The holographic Torres reveals that Chakotay saved her life, and that is what led her to joining the Maquis.
Resistance is futile. Seven was once cut off from the Collective for two hours. It was very traumatic, but as nothing compared to what she goes through here.
Oh, and she saves everyone’s ass. Because she’s just that awesome.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. The EMH has been using holographic versions of the crew for Seven to practice her conversational skills on. It’s not going as well as he wishes. Ironically, it takes, not the holodeck, but her being virtually alone for the better part of a month (and completely so for the better part of a week) for his lessons to her to take.
Do it.
“What if we had to get out in a hurry?”
“You can unlock the unit from inside, Tom.”
“Do I detect a hint of claustrophobia, Lieutenant?”
“Why do they have to design these things like coffins?”
“Should we replicate you a teddy bear?”
–Paris bitching about going into stasis and being trolled by Janeway, the EMH, and Kim.
Welcome aboard. Wade Williams and his resonant voice play Trajis. He’ll be back on Enterprise’s “Civilization” as Garos. For the second time in three episodes, one of Sports Night’s tech crew appears, as this time Ron Ostrow plays the Borg drone. (Timothy Davis-Reed appeared in “Living Witness.”)
Trivial matters: This episode was written off a pitch that James Swallow sold to Voyager, though he received no writing credit for the episode. Swallow, who was writing for several of the official Star Trek magazines at the time, has gone on to become a prolific Star Trek prose writer, with many novels and short stories to his credit, most recently the just-released Star Trek: Picard tie-in novel The Dark Veil.
This is the second directorial effort for Kenneth Biller, a producer on the show, and one of the few people who’ve both written and directed Trek installments. His other time behind the camera was “Revulsion.”
Torres joining the Maquis after Chakotay saved her life was established in scripter Jeri Taylor’s novel Pathways.
The nebula is referred to as a Mutara-class, the name likely deriving from the Mutara Nebula that was seen in The Wrath of Khan.
The incident where Seven was cut off from the Collective for two hours will be dramatized in “Survival Instinct.”
The crew member who dies on the bridge is the nineteenth confirmed death on board. There might be others who died in “The Killing Game, Part II,” but the crew complement should be between 130 and 140 at this point, despite Janeway’s reference to there being 150 people aboard.
And now for something really trivial: this episode, when it aired, set the record for shortest Trek episode title, vaulting past the original series’ “Miri.” It will be supplanted by “Q2” in season seven, and then again by “E2” in season three of Enterprise. (In case you’re wondering, “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” in the third season of the original series remains the longest, despite challenges from DS9 and Discovery.)
Set a course for home. “I am alone.” In 1997, when it was announced that Jeri Ryan—who had just recently starred on the one-season-and-done Dark Skies, a mediocre X-Files ripoff on which Ryan didn’t really stand out—would be joining Voyager’s cast, it seemed like an attempt to add T&A to the show at the expense of good storytelling.
That turned out not to be the case. Well, okay, it was partly the case, in that the character was very obviously created with the heterosexual male gaze in mind. But Ryan elevated the material, as did the writing. Yeah, Ryan was awful on Dark Skies, but so was J.T. Walsh, and he was one of the finest actors of his time.
While there’s a lot good to say about “One,” the thing it primarily accomplishes is provide a vehicle for the two breakout characters on the show: Seven of Nine and the Emergency Medical Hologram. Ryan and Robert Picardo continue to hone their double act and also show their skills solo as they spend most of the episode (even before the nebula) doing a two-person play. It’s not a coincidence that many of Trek’s most compelling characters have been the outsiders that have tried to fit in with the more “mainstream” humanoids they serve with—Spock, Data, Odo, Worf, Saru—and both the EMH and Seven are solidly in that mode. It’s especially entertaining to watch the EMH—whose own movement toward being more human has only really happened in fits and starts and who is, basically, an obnoxious asshole—try to teach Seven how to be friendlier with the crew.
The meat of the episode is Seven’s struggle with loneliness. This is the problems she initially faced in “The Gift” right after being separated from the Collective writ large: she has to spend a month with only the EMH and the voices in her head to talk to. Seven has no emotional depth to deal with this, and Ryan plays her helplessness perfectly, as it’s a strong and determined helplessness, one that refuses to surrender even though she’s obviously scared shitless. Kudos also to Wade Williams and Ron Ostrow for creating scary boogeymen for her to deal with, and also to the rest of the cast for playing their hallucinatory selves as snotty versions of themselves. (Except for Robert Duncan McNeill, whose hallucinatory snotty Paris is exactly the same as the real one.)
This is a superb character study of a character who has proven—not just on this show, but also on Picard—to be one of the strongest characters in the Trek universe.
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest novel was just released this week: Animal, a thriller he co-authored with Dr. Munish K. Batra about a serial killer who targets people who harm animals.
How is Paris alert enough to get himself out of the stasis pod, but not alert enough to get himself more than two steps out the door? Why was he able to “wake up” at all? Why is he not being burned by the radiation when Seven found him? When I first watched the episode, I assumed him being out of the pod was the first sign that Seven was losing it, but given the joke that’s made at the end about him getting out, it seems like that actually happened. I guess it was just to give Seven’s later hallucinations of hearing his voice a basis in reality, but it just seemed weird.
Anyway, this is a great episode that makes great use of both Picardo and Ryan. I love that each iteration of Trek will have someone who is magically immune to the technobabble of the week (Data, Odo, the Doctor/ Seven, T’ Pol even played this role a bit on ENT) so they can heroically save the day. It makes a great argument for having vast diversity on your ship.
I do wish that the writers would use larger scales for things. When your trip is measured in decades (and your best chance of getting home is finding a shortcut, not actually making a straight line back), 1 year doesn’t seem like all that big of a deal. I mean, they came within hours of everyone on the ship dying to avoid it, and they’ve likely spent at least 1 year to stop off and do Science! every time they see something interesting. Making it 10 years would have made a lot more sense. Also- how does Seven run out of breathable air so quicky? The ship is (theoretically) airtight, and she is the only person on board using a normal amount of oxygen- she should have been able to last *days* on a ship as big as Voyager.
A pretty good character study, but with one of Voyager‘s many contrived “big thing blocking our route” premises to set it up. Also, the bit about Paris getting out of his stasis chamber never made sense to me. Stasis isn’t sleep! It’s suspended animation! It’s something that can keep a person alive and unaging for centuries (see “Space Seed”), a near-complete shutdown of life functions. It shouldn’t be possible to wake up from it in the middle of the night because you need a drink of water.
I recently watched all of Enterprise for the first time and it seems they borrowed from this episode’s concept for the episode “Doctor’s Orders.”
Apparently the large crew is redundant for piloting a spacecraft for a long period of time…
The comment about “big thing blocking our route” is even more true with the addition of Stellar Cartography. They’ve been able to plot a shorter route home, find things like deuterium (heh) from Monday’s “Demon” episode, etc. yet they can’t determine that this nebula is an issue until it kills someone?
@5/brandonw: Oh, yes, you’ve just reminded me of the other, far bigger nonsensical thing about this premise. Space has no horizons. You can see everything in every direction, even from billions of light-years away, if it’s bright enough or you have a good enough telescope and there’s nothing in the way. If this nebula were that gigantic that it would take a year to circle at warp, it should be visible from thousands of parsecs away. They should’ve seen it in their path as soon as they reached this part of the galaxy in “The Gift.” They should’ve known all year that it was in their way and that it would pose a hazard to them, and they should’ve tweaked their course to ease around it months ago. This plot makes as little sense in its way as “Demon.”
This is a good one once the premise of “we have to go through the nebula” is accepted, but the script didn’t do a good job of getting us there. Others have already pointed out some issues but:
The nebula is too large to go around without costing them a year’s travel time. It’ll take a month to go through, but the crew will be in danger.
Taking this as a given, it’s only a delta of 11 months. Let’s see, do we risk everybody dying on this mad venture or do we just take the extra time? It seems obvious they should just take the extra time. In their journey, they may discover someone who knows a way through the nebula or can adapt their shielding or whatever. To the extent they’re still looking for shortcuts, they’re just as likely to find them going around the nebula as on the other side of it. And to the extent they really think the ship is going to take 70 years to get home… well except maybe Tuvok, Naomi and the Doctor everybody currently alive is going to be dead by the time the ship gets home anyway, so what’s the difference? Not a good week for Janeway, this is a blown call for sure. The crew might grumble about taking the scenic route, but there’s a reason you’re the captain.
@6: Thanks for confirming the issue that I was most aware of. But, it was just one more thing I threw in the circular file so I could enjoy the character study.
@@.-@ Yea, I guess this is why the ever-decreasing number of crewmen isn’t an issue. Apparently the whole ship can be run by 2 people at a time, for a month at a time, just by largely re-routing a couple things. Makes you wonder what the other 130-some odd people on the ship even do (although in “Good Shepard” we find out that they hand-walk PADDs around with orders on them, so maybe they are just finding busy work for people).
@7 I felt the same way back when Janeway decided they were going to try to go through Borg space. They are just as likely to find a wormhole or whatever by going around it, a couple years here and there on a 70-year trip is pocket change, and the risk you are taking is HUGE. It works, but sometimes it is obvious that it only works because otherwise there wouldn’t be a show, instead of it actually making much sense or showing the great talent of our fearless crew.
Modern LPG tankers or big freighters run with a crew of 15-20, while equivalent-sized military ships have crews of hundreds or a thousand – it doesn’t seem crazy that you can run a starship on minimum operations with 1-2 people. The rest of the crew is there for the mission and to deal with unexpected events (and maintenance – the ship did break down over the course of the month, although that’s also partially due to the hostile environment.)
I’m willing to believe that they did know about the nebula for a while, but not about the radiation until they got there, given that they were sailing right into it and it killed someone before they detected it. In fact, they didn’t detect it until after the EMH examined stuff after the fact. So I’m willing to believe that they fully intended to bop through the nebula directly.
And it makes sense that a ship can be run by two people when all the ship is doing is flying in a straight unobstructed path. For the purposes of this particular mission, it wasn’t a ship, it was a missile.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
For better or for worse, the idea that a Federation starship can be operated by a handful of individuals dates back to THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK at least, when the Enterprise, which usually boasted a a crew of four hundred-plus, was successfully hijacked by Kirk and Co.
@10, 11 – What possible mission is required for there to be over 150 crew? What, exactly, are the non-credited crewmen doing and what was their original purpose? Why build so large a ship? Now that there are mobile emitters, you can probably eliminate the entire Starfleet personnel and just run ships with holograms. If you can fly for a month through a hostile nebula with one person and one hologram, there’s no need to employ such large crews or build such large ships.
@11/krad: “I’m willing to believe that they did know about the nebula for a while, but not about the radiation until they got there, given that they were sailing right into it and it killed someone before they detected it.”
But that’s just what I don’t buy. Radiation radiates. It shines outward. Light is radiation. Everything we know about stuff out in space is literally because we see its radiation, whether it’s in radio or infrared or visible or UV or x-rays or gamma or cosmic rays (or gravity waves if you extend the definition that far). So it’s contradictory to say “We can see it but we can’t see its radiation.” If the radiation is that fierce, then it would be extremely visible from a distance to the right kind of telescope, and presumably the ship scans in every band of the spectrum at once.
Even if the radiation were of a type that was absorbed by the matter of the nebula so that it didn’t escape outward from it, then you could still do the thing that science is very good at, which is extrapolating the existence of the unseen radiation by observing its visible effects on things — like how we use cloud tanks to detect gamma rays by the decay particles given off by the atoms they hit, rather than seeing the gamma rays themselves. If nothing else, if the matter in the nebula were getting hit by that much radiation, it would probably make it anomalously warm, which you could see in infrared and extrapolate the cause of. All energy turns into waste heat eventually.
Not to mention that it’s a Mutara-class nebula, and we know from The Wrath of Khan that the Mutara Nebula was a fierce radiation environment, intense enough to create extreme sensor interference and even generate what looked like lightning flashes. So I’ve always taken it as a given that “Mutara-class nebula” means an unusually dense, turbulent, dangerously energetic nebula. That’s the most evident thing that made Mutara distinct from ordinary nebulae, after all.
@13/Austin: “What possible mission is required for there to be over 150 crew?”
It’s a science ship. There are lots of different kinds of sciences, and few people are experts in more than one.
@13/Austin: “What possible mission is required for there to be over 150 crew?”
As Christopher says, there’s the mission crew – the scientists and explorers, and the people needed to maintain and operate science and exploration functions (from sensors to transporters to shuttlecraft) that weren’t needed for the nebula-crossing.
There’s crew to maintain the ship – you can coast for a month with minimal maintenance, but stuff does break down eventually (as the episode shows…)
There’s crew to fight the ship if/as needed, and to do damage control and repairs.
A US Navy destroyer is twenty times smaller than a supertanker but has twenty times as many crew, and I bet they have plenty to do. The USN has experimented with ships built to more civilian crew levels with limited success. Still, you could undoubtably build in enough automation that a few people could sail a DDG from point to point, but you’d want the whole crew to actually do anything once you get to that point.
It actually makes sense to me that Federation ships would be able to be very minimally crewed (technology would obviously be able to pick up some of the jobs done by humans on, say, our current military vessels), it is just annoying in Voyager because such a big fuss was made in the beginning of the series about how they were short-handed, and they have continued to lose people. If Seven and the EMH had a couple of engineers it seems like they would have been able to keep the ship going just fine, so what was all that early concern about not having enough people all for.
@16/wildfyre: The ship was badly damaged at first, so a lot of its automated functions probably weren’t working and thus more personnel were needed to compensate.
“I cannot function alone.”
Another day, another Seven of Nine character piece. The problem is they’re all starting to feel a bit samey. This is at least the third time this season where Seven’s examined her history as a Borg and decided her loyalty is to Voyager now. And whatever lessons she appears to learn, she usually goes back to being as aloof and distant as ever in the next episode.
As to the specifics…well, we’ve seen the Doctor and Seven team up before but I think this is the first one to actually remove the rest of the crew for the duration. The Doctor’s definitely playing second banana though, first confined to sickbay and then offline completely. This helps with Seven’s sense of isolation but means we’re left with a lot of scenes of Jeri Ryan walking up and down corridors. The introduction of Trajis (and I’ll admit, I didn’t see the twist that he was a hallucination coming on first viewing) mainly serves to break up the monotony, which I guess is kind of the idea as far as Seven’s subconscious is concerned. So by the end, Seven’s realised that however much she gets irritated by Voyager’s crew, she still misses them when they’re not around. But she’ll probably carry on being irritated by them anyway, for all her seeking out company at the end.
First time we see the Doctor in command of the ship, although he doesn’t spend much time on the bridge.
@16 – It’s one reason why I’m baffled that there are still pilots. Or why there are still “ace” pilots, when all they are doing is inputting commands at a computer console. These computers in Trek are so powerful, they could probably fly the ship 1,000X better than any organic pilot.
@19 They tried that in The Ultimate Computer; go well, it did not. Plus The Federation is all about “the experience”, so letting even a non-murdery computer do it would not be providing the experiential part of Federation culture.
@20/kayom: The only reason the M-5 went rogue in “The Ultimate Computer” is because it was based on Richard Daystrom’s personality engrams and he was unstable. If anything, the episode didn’t prove that computers are unreliable at doing humans’ jobs, it proved that human psyches are unreliable at doing computers’ jobs.
The performances are great, but I just can’t suspend disbelief here. It would take a year, at warp speed, to go around the nebula? Not only must they have known it was there, whether or not they could detect the radiation, they must have steered straight toward it! Why wouldn’t you angle your approach to give yourselves the option of going around? And yes, a nebula might be extremely big, but big and dense enough to have intense radiation across the entire thing? If it’s that dense and has that much radiation, and if ships can’t operate shields in a Mutara-class nebula, how can the ship possibly travel at warp speed safely?
Stasis chambers: fine. I have my doubts about their apparent lack of contingency plans in the event that Voyager comes across a ship crewed by beings able to resist the radiation, especially as sensors are going to be useless. I am dubious about the safety of the chambers, and wonder about the effects of putting Naomi Wildman into stasus. But the presence of these stasis chambers leads me to a much larger objection. If Voyager can operate with a smaller crew, and if it can afford the energy costs to put the entire crew into stasis, and if it is looking at a return voyage to Earth that could take longer than the crew’s lifespan… why not put half the crew into stasis at a time, and double the number of years that they have to get back?
Seven’s hallucinations are suspiciously plot-relevant. I’m not saying such things are impossible, but you’d expect her to see and hear a lot of things that aren’t as on-the-nose as a hostile alien sabotaging the ship. And I’m not sure that I buy that they know all these things about this radiation but never thought about the cumulative effect of the ship’s organic components: being caught off-guard by something like that makes the Voyager crew appear incompetent.
As a performance piece, this is good stuff. But the rationale for the situation is thin indeed.
Funny coming to this rewatch after “That Hope is You Pt II” where the theme was Connecting. Here we see poor Seven completely void of connection. I think this is where she starts to see the crew as her collective.
I’m fascinated by questions of the need for so many crew. The Enterprise-D carries 1014 crew, personnel for security, dozens of science labs, engineers. Our previous conversations have noted there are jobs that should be there that aren’t such as a JAG officer. I once looked up a list of all of the branches of science to see how many science officers my starship would have, there are around a hundred that would be relevant, only 10 were ones that would be Star Trek specific, and only about a dozen that would be shared with medical sciences. You could easily get a hundred people in blue uniforms if you only have one person specializing in each individual discipline.
I’m also miffed. This time, because the title is One, so I got hyped up forgetting what episode it was. I still have to wait for “Drone” to get here.
@23/Mr. D: I also confused this one with “Drone.” These one-word titles are so annoying.
As to why these ships need crews at all, there’s a lot of reasons primary among them, “Because it’s there.” These ships are constructed for the express purpose of sending people out into the stars to explore. None of these people joined Starfleet to sit back and let the damned computer do everything. People join the crew of a starship to go out, to see, to learn about things first hand. It’s the Human Adventure, alongside our sapient brethren. Otherwise we’re not sending out ships, we’re just sending out probes.
Star Trek has a message about technology not being scary but being a tool responsibly used by people to improve our quality of life and expand our knowledge. Conversely it also has a message about not letting technology replace people. Numerous times it has transpired that relying on technology goes awry, because the people let the technology manage their lives instead of them managing the machines from Miri’s people, to the people that stole Spock’s brain, the Fabrini, the Betans and Landru.
As for in battle…I’m not sure having two AI duking it out is something we want. Sapient minds add unpredictability that rational computers lack. Furthermore, the Skynet Lesson. Never put AI in control of your weapons, you can’t be sure they won’t point them at you. Which I know is odd to say as Star Trek has overall always had a positive view of Artificial Intelligence giving them their place as lifeforms. Data, The Doctor, Exocomps, Nanites. I feel that there has been a balance of prudence with technology over reliance on technology.
@23 I always wondered about the science personnel on Voyager. Given that early on they were short personnel to run the ship, you’d think anyone who had any job that wasn’t strictly “keep the ship in running/ fighting condition” would have been cross-trained to do something else. You don’t really need, say, and exobotonist if you aren’t stopping off at any planets unless you absolutely have to, especially when you could re-train them to do basic engineering tasks, thus freeing up the more experienced engineers to focus on bigger problems. I also can’t imagine that the crew has much in the way of say, biologists, since it would have made a heck of a lot more sense to begin training one of them to be a nurse than it would to have Paris do it (I mean, you’d think you’d want your pilot, you know, piloting in the case of an emergency, not playing doctor). I always wondered what most of the Maquis did, as well. Security would be something most of them would be qualified for, but I have to imagine that Tuvok didn’t just allow half of his staff to be, you know, terrorists. You’d think more of them would have been trained to be field medics (given that they likely have at least some experience in doing trauma care, even if it is only of the self-aid/ buddy-aid type), but they didn’t opt for that either. What do half the people on this ship even *do* on a day-to-day basis? Really it is a miracle that they can only conjure up 3 deadbeats (none of them former Maquis, interestingly) in “Good Shepard.”
@25 – I was being somewhat facetious when I said why don’t they just crew starships with holograms. I know it’s all about exploration, etc. But it bugs me when they have these episodes (or movies) when a bare handful of people are all that’s necessary to crew something as complex (with a ton of moving parts) as a starship. If that’s really the case, then what’s the point of these episodes? Every time there’s a challenge, such as the mad scrambles we see in engineering to solve some life or death problem with technobabble, why not just turn it over to the much more capable computer and let it solve the issue?
After all, because of all the automation, you only need two people to crew the ship! Surely, with the computer capable of creating sentient programs, any issue can be solved with the processing power of a giant computer and liberal use of holograms. Trek creates this world of wondrously advanced AI, and then ignores it! In most episodes, the computer is treated as nothing more than something akin to Alexa. Instead of asking the computer for mundane calculations, how about asking for its input on a solution? Either an organic crew is needed or the machines can take care of anything. You can’t have it both ways.
Yep, only 2 episodes since Living Witness and already the Doctor has another near death experience by strolling outside of sickbay. Guess they haven’t rebuilt his “backup module” yet, though he acts like there’s never been any such thing, given the existential dilemma he had about nearly being lost forever.
@27/Austin: “Every time there’s a challenge, such as the mad scrambles we see in engineering to solve some life or death problem with technobabble, why not just turn it over to the much more capable computer and let it solve the issue?”
As this episode (and The Search for Spock) showed, though, shipwide automation is limited. It works fine when everything is nominal, but if there’s a serious crisis, its ability to fix things is limited.
Think of it like your body. It can take care of itself normally, it can heal itself from minor injuries or illnesses, but when things get serious enough, it needs additional help.
@28/karey: Since the entirety of “Living Witness” takes place centuries in the future, do we really know for sure when its “present-day” events occurred relative to other episodes?
@23/wildfyrewarning
Arguably an exobotanist should’ve been the one showing Kes how to make the Aeroponics bay. In a low food situation the Exobotanist would practically become a senior staff position.
You bring up a lot of good points. It seems Janeway ran the crew as Starfleet as possible, so people were likely doing standard science tasks. For instance cataloguing everything they came across on sensors, looking for resources, and general maintenance. Especially for the Starfleet crew, keeping everyone in their normal positions might be a good way to maintain normalcy. The Maquis are a radically different thing. You’d probably have them do whatever they did on Maquis ships be it engineering, security, or a medic. Voyager likely would’ve had the most interesting Lower Decks episodes.
@27/Austin
That’s funny, since Bezos was inspired to make Alexa because of the ship’s computer in Star Trek.
The idea is that a computer is a poor replacement for a person. Even with the EMH they basically copy a person and give them full access to a database. The EMH isn’t a cranky jerk because he’s a computer, he’s a cranky jerk because he’s basically a carbon copy of his father, who is a cranky jerk. One thing I find odd about the 32nd century holograms is you’d think they’d be more consistently life like, but they usually come off a bit more wooden than the ones in the 24th century.
This episode does highlight one critical flaw of your supposition. Computers are susceptible to breaking down in ways that people aren’t. The ship’s systems needed people to maintain them. It’s a more symbiotic relationship the machine Starfleet uses need people, just as much as the people need machines.
If we consider radiation only to be the EM spectrum, then subnucleonic radiation makes zero sense. If however, we consider particle emission as a form of radiation, it’s a whole different ballgame. Considered Alpha Particles (Helium Nuclei), Protons, or Neutrons. All are forms of radiation, but their effects are short range, and direct detection from a distance isn’t always easy. Suppose subnucleonic radiation is the direct emission of quarks of various flavors. Given the short half-life before the heavier quarks decay to up/down or their antimatter counterparts, and those quarks combining to make protons and neutrons, I’m not surprised that Voyager couldn’t detect subnucleonic radiation from a distance.
Yes it’s typical technobabble, but it comes out cleaner than trying to explain unbound quarks.
@31/Charles Rosenberg: “Given the short half-life before the heavier quarks decay to up/down or their antimatter counterparts, and those quarks combining to make protons and neutrons, I’m not surprised that Voyager couldn’t detect subnucleonic radiation from a distance.”
Fair point, but as I said, if the radiation is that intense at short range, then it could have an effect on nebular matter that Voyager could detect from a distance and use to extrapolate the radiation that causes it. When high-energy particle radiation hits matter, it tends to cause transmutations, knock neutrons out of nuclei, stuff like that.
Besides, if there’s a whole category of things called Mutara-class nebulae, that means the Federation is aware of several that have similar conditions, distinct enough from other nebulae to warrant a special label. So it follows that other Mutara-class nebulae would have much the same conditions, so they should know that the radiation is a possibility.
Great character study for Seven where she learns an important lesson, the majority of the interaction is between a couple of the best characters/actors on the show, and you don’t have to deal with all of the other characters that much either. It’s an automatic winner for me.
I agree with others in that the trip around the nebula should have taken much longer than a year otherwise going around is the more sensible option. So what if the alternative route takes only 11 months less time when it’s so dangerous, and you’ve got like 60 years or so on your journey anyway?
@27- My ongoing quibbles with the bizarre arbitrary lines Trek draws between different types of artificial intelligence aside, this is one of the things I appreciated about Picard- where a lone starship captain rounds out his crew with a variety of holograms. That the holograms all look like him and speak in a distinct heavy accent is, I think, a personal affectation, but it’s a nice extrapolation of the technology.
(Why he needs an emergency holographic pilot instead of skipping a step and just having an autopilot, eh, but the extra mobile pair of hands makes sense for the engineer and the doctor).
@29 – I like the human body analogy, but I don’t think it fits. The body is not sentient. The computer is clearly shown to be able to create sentient programs. And with relative ease, it seems. Throw in some holo-projectors and it should be able to perform any kind of self-repair needed.
@34 – A captain with a ship crewed by holograms sounds like an intriguing premise for a new show!
@35/Austin: “The computer is clearly shown to be able to create sentient programs. And with relative ease, it seems.”
On the contrary, sentient AIs like Moriarty and the Doctor are normally represented as exceptions, not the rule, aside from some ambiguous cases like “Message in a Bottle” and the embarrassingly stupid ending of “Author, Author.” And as this episode shows, the Doctor himself is vulnerable to tech breakdowns in the ship’s systems. It stands to reason that if something attacks the tech systems of the ship, it’s a good idea to have organic crew onboard to fix them.
“A captain with a ship crewed by holograms sounds like an intriguing premise for a new show!”
IDW’s Waypoint comics anthology had a story in its first issue set in a possible future where Geordi La Forge is captain of an Enterprise whose entire crew consists of holograms of Data, controlled by Data’s consciousness as the ship’s computer.
@29/CLB: “Since the entirety of “Living Witness” takes place centuries in the future, do we really know for sure when its “present-day” events occurred relative to other episodes?”
Not for sure, no. I guess the only response is that there must be a reason the episodes are shown in the order they are!
I happily suspend disbelief with this one as it’s easily one of my Top 10 episodes of Voyager. I adore the scene at the end as Seven joins in, for really real this time, with the crew in the mess hall and demonstrates the exact social lessons both Janeway and the Doc have been teaching her. I’m not usually a fan of episodes where 3/4 of the cast get sidelined but this is one of the good ones.
What’s wrong with having two Asians in a row be from America? Frankly that demographic is underrepresented in media so Star Trek is really going against the grain here. If it weren’t for the fact that they already had Sulu and Kim, I would have actually called Sato’s origin unfortunate as it seems to be the norm for Asians to be from Asia, rather than be from immigrant families.
Great review otherwise, just a nitpick I had.
Mav: Because supposedly the Earth of Star Trek is a united Earth, not a United States of Earth, and 60% of the people on this Earth live in Asia. And it’s especially wrong to have “two Asians in a row be from America” when they’re the only two Asians…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@39/Mav: “What’s wrong with having two Asians in a row be from America?”
What’s wrong is that that constituted 100 percent of Asian Trek regulars, until Hoshi Sato came along. It fed into Trek’s tendency to portray the supposedly global culture of future Earth as almost entirely America-centric. It might be relatively multiethnic, but falls far short of being multicultural.
And even Hoshi, for all that she’s nominally a Kyoto native, is entirely American in speech and behavior. She never demonstrated any notably Japanese cultural background or interest, or ever seemed to speak Japanese as far as I can recall.
Yea, Keiko O’Brien is the only reoccurring character I can think of who was specifically from an Asian country (Japan), who the writers made some effort to actually make that seem like her real backstory. Although she- like Garret Wang, who plays the Korean-American Harry Kim- is portrayed by an American of Chinese descent.
Does Seven saving the ship make her “One…singular sensation”?
Sorry, but I couldn’t resist. That’s the first thing the title makes me think of.
@40, 41: Haha I suppose as an Asian American it’s hard to find Asians in media that aren’t from Asia; more often than not when someone sees an Asian they assume they are not American, and this is reflected a lot in media so seeing Harry Kim (and to a lesser extent, Sulu) was a huge validation for me growing up. It’s just a sad thought to me that an aspect that brought me great joy and made me feel seen is an aspect that others would have preferred to be different.
I can understand the sentiment though, more diversity is always better. I’m currently in the middle of my own rewatch and it’s struck me with how progressive Star Trek was with their casting choices, but of course there could always be improvements!
@42: Okay, I’ll bite: Where is it said that Harry Kim’s ancestry is Korean? He makes a comment in “Parturition” that implies he’s of Chinese descent.
@45/cap-mjb: Harry just says there’s an old Chinese expression. I’ve heard lots of non-Chinese people invoke Chinese expressions, like “May you live in interesting times,” say. So I don’t think that suggests anything about his ancestry.
Kim is the most common surname in Korea. It is occasionally a Vietnamese name, but never a Chinese surname as far as I can tell. The Chinese character used for the Korean name Kim, 金, is pronounced Jin in Mandarin, Gam or Gim in Cantonese.
@46/CLB: “Harry just says there’s an old Chinese expression.”
At which point Paris points out it’s not actually a Chinese expression and Kim awkwardly replies “If it works, use it.” It seems to be a sub-Pavel Chekov gag about claiming his people came up with something they didn’t.
It’s not impossible perhaps that in the 24th century someone born in a Chinese family in the USA might have a Korean-Vietnamese surname.
Electron neutrinos are formed in the Sun and fly out, but a lot of them change to a different type of neutrino before they reach, for instance, the Earth. Some sources disagree whether this happens inside the Sun, or out in space. It looks like the latter, I think. So, an electron neutrino raygun has limited range, among other drawbacks. I suppose that a raygun that works moderately well at range of 150 million km away isn’t so bad.
Maybe the radiation in “One” goes unnoticed through the shields but interacts badly with the hull. I think in James White’s “Grapeliner” “universe” (seen in one short-ish story in 1959?), space travel in the solar system is mainly carried out inside inflatable plastic bubbles, because the premise is cosmic radiation is safe but cosmic radiation that hits solid matter, specifically metal, makes dangerous secondary radiation. So the passenger ship looks like a big bunch of grapes, with a metal, um, locomotive module. I wonder which idea came first to the author, perhaps the cover art… (which in the event, misses the opportunity.) Also, due to the effect of radiation on the reproductive process and on long term health in general, full time space crew are all senior citizens not so interested in either. (James White was about 30 in 1959.)
I liked “Dark Skies”!…
@47/cap-mjb: “At which point Paris points out it’s not actually a Chinese expression and Kim awkwardly replies “If it works, use it.” It seems to be a sub-Pavel Chekov gag about claiming his people came up with something they didn’t.”
I think that’s a huuuuuuuuge reach. Anyone could claim that something is an old Chinese expression; hell, white people have been doing exactly that for generations, joking about “Confucius say” this and that. Cultural appropriation is a thing, you know.
Not only that, but non-Chinese Asian cultures have been influenced by Chinese culture and ideas for thousands of years, because China has been the dominant political, military, and cultural power in Asia for thousands of years. So just because an ethnically Asian person mentions something Chinese, that doesn’t require him to be Chinese himself — any more than a white person who quotes Shakespeare has to be from England.
“It’s not impossible perhaps that in the 24th century someone born in a Chinese family in the USA might have a Korean-Vietnamese surname.”
But enormously more likely that he’s Korean. “Not impossible” does not outweigh “highly probable.”
For what it’s worth, though, apparently Brannon Braga believed that Kim was Chinese-American, or at least claimed as much when speaking to Garrett Wang about it, according to Wang in this podcast. But Braga wasn’t the one who created the character, and he might have just assumed it because Wang is Taiwanese-American (like how fans assume Sulu was supposed to be Japanese even though Sulu is not a Japanese name and the character was intended to be generically “pan-Asian”). White Americans aren’t good at distinguishing between Asian cultures, so maybe Braga just didn’t understand that Kim is a Korean surname.
any more than a white person who quotes Shakespeare has to be from England.
And there’s a very obvious instance in Trek where that’s the case….
@49/CLB: I think what we can conclude from all this is…no-one actually knows whether Kim is Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean or even something else entirely!
@51/cap-mjb: That’s why probability is a thing. You don’t have to settle for helplessly not knowing which option to choose. You can know that one is more likely to be true than the others. We rarely have absolute certainty about anything, so probability is what we rely on to draw conclusions about most things in life.
And the burden of proof is on the less probable case. If someone is named Kim, it’s a reasonably safe bet that they’re Korean. So we favor that hypothesis unless there is evidence to the contrary.
Yea, Kim is a Korean last name, and given that it is never stated otherwise (Harry knows about as many Chinese proverbs as I do, and my family came from Sweden) there is really no reason to think otherwise. Given that the Voyager writers were perfectly capable of making up names to match an entirely fictional pan-Native American culture, and that TOS made up the name “Sulu” to represent some sort of pan-Asianism, there is no reason to assume that his name is anything other than what it appears to be: an extremely common Korean last name for a Korean character. Even if his family had gone somewhere after Korea but before the United States, it wouldn’t really stop him from being Korean-American.
@46:
“@45/cap-mjb: Harry just says there’s an old Chinese expression. I’ve heard lots of non-Chinese people invoke Chinese expressions, like “May you live in interesting times,” say”
I’ve been reliably informed that that *particular* expression is, in fact, of Anglo origin, and was intentionally misattributed to lend it a certain extra punch.
@52 and @53: Well, you can say that if something’s probably true that means it’s definitely true, and say that Kim’s definitely Korean even though he never says so, or you can embrace the uncertainty and allow anyone to put their own interpretation on the limited facts. Insisting all his ancestry comes from only one or two countries isn’t very multi-cultural. Maybe he had a paternal line Korean great-grandfather and the rest of the family were something else!
So, does this never come up in Pathways then? I keep expecting someone to chime in with “Well, Jeri Taylor said…”
@55/cap-mjb: I’m not “insisting” anything — I just don’t understand your insistence on favoring an improbable interpretation over the more likely one. Saying that something is more probable is not the same thing as saying it’s certain. Saying you’re unlikely to get a royal flush in poker is not the same as saying it will never happen — it’s just having enough basic understanding of how odds work to recognize that you shouldn’t assume it’s inevitable.
“Embrace the uncertainty” does not mean “treat all possibilities as equally likely.” Uncertainty is a thing that can be codified using the laws of probability. As I said, nothing is ever absolutely certain, but we can apply our knowledge and intelligence to rank different possibilities against one another and assess which ones are more likely. So it is nonsense to talk as though the only two options are “Assume one thing is absolutely true” and “Assume it’s impossible to choose between different options.” There is a lot of sensible middle ground between those two absurd extremes.
I was annoyed by a commenter on another Star Trek internet forum back in season one of Discovery who was hoping that it would be revealed that MU Georgiou was the descendent of MU Hoshi Sato, because you know, they’re both Asians. I responded that that was really reductive since that comment suggests all Asian cultures are interchangeable and not distinctly different. It would be as ridiculous as me hoping that Jean-Luc Picard is the descendant of James Kirk because they’re both white guys, never mind the fact that they originate from different regions of Earth and have different ethnicities. Georgiou is not an Asian surname and the actress is Malay, although she has played Chinese and Japanese characters before. Still, it’s making an assumption that Georgiou is also Japanese when that was never established. Plus, it’s also very “small universe” making heroes of different Star Trek series spanning centuries and billion of lives somehow being related to each other or a few degrees of separation. There was a very similar comment, perhaps by the same person, that they hoped Michael was also the descendant of Uhura. Again, very reductive because they just happen to be the two most prominent black female characters on Star Trek.
Interesting that Taylor’s final script as head writer for the franchise didn’t focus on the captain, as is her usual approach (Coda; Persistence of Vision; Resolutions; The 37’s).
As is to be expected, One is a wonderful character piece focusing on the show’s finest addition to the cast. Not much to say that hasn’t already been said before. Ryan effortlessly carries the episode, and Picardo also pulls his own weight. A story about a character being forced to fly solo for an extended period of time is usually an effective one, especially when the actor is up for the challenge. Brannon Braga was likely aware of this, because he essentially remade this episode as a Phlox vehicle during Enterprise’s third season.
Seven’s struggles with being alone, cut off from the Collective and the constant voices are well documented, and this episodes serves as a timely reminder of that ongoing thread. It’s worth noting that we’ll be seeing the flip-side to that notion on next season’s Infinite Regress.
@12/Greg: Of course, while that movie established that three people could fly the Enterprise to Genesis, it also demonstrated the pitfalls of Scotty’s attempt at bypassing multiple systems in order to achieve that kind of automation. The minute Scotty fires torpedoes at the Klingons, the automation system overloads, preventing the activation of deflector shields or any other countermeasures, making them sitting ducks for Kruge.
@58- I believe we’re told that Georgiou1 was born in Malaysia. I vaguely assumed that, like her actress, she was a Malaysian of Chinese descent, although whether that means she’s descended from the modern day existing substantial Chinese-Malaysian population, or of some immigration happening in the intervening centuries (which include major political upheavals that seem likely to redraw before eventually eliminating national borders, and to provoke mass migrations), is another question entirely.
1: That is, the one from Earth. To what degree Terran Georgiou’s history matches up seems likely to produce an entirely unhelpful rant about how little sense the relationship of the two universes makes.
I am guessing the main selling point to the studio for this one is “it’s got the hot babe in every scene” and they snatched their hands off. That puts it down though because this is a very good episode and really shows Jeri Ryan’s acting ability off. One thing that I was never 100% sure about was that Alien always a figment of Sevens imagination or did she really trade with him then hallucinated the creepy stuff afterwards… seems a rather specific alien to have dreamed up.
Not a strong episode on the science front, and for once I don’t even care. I really really love this episode. I was not a fan of Seven’s arc till now (it’s my first time watching) but this one won me over.
My problem is not with the character of Seven of Nine, but rather with the approach of people helping her regain her humanity. Star Trek has a serious problem with conflating biology with culture, both being very much independent. I mean, we’re all human, and still come from very different cultural backgrounds. We do have things in common, but there is no one way to be human, neither is there a correct way to be human. When you treat humanity as a monolith, which is what Seven’s mentor figures do at times, you take away what makes us so interesting in the first place. My other problem is that Seven always reads as someone who is autistic or neurodivergent in some way to me, and instead of tailoring their lessons to fit her understanding, the crew tends to force their views on her. Of course she’s not going to be exactly the same as them, she’s always going to be a little different, and that’s okay. What’s important is her social and emotional well-being and the crew, especially Janeway really lose sight of that sometimes.
This episode was refreshing in that a fear of isolation is something that is very much human, although of course different people have different tolerance levels and defense mechanisms. It was fascinating to see how being an ex-Borg affected Seven in those respects, and especially interesting to note a subconscious aversion to assimilation. I don’t think she has admitted to herself that she doesn’t want to return to the Borg (that self-awareness will be gained in ‘Hope and Fear’) but there are certainly elements of that in her hallucinations.
A very enjoyable episode, though I really wish they had got the science parts to an acceptably believable level.
It’s a well-performed piece, but I just can’t get past the stupidity of putting the whole crew in stasis, barring one insubordinate former Borg and a hologram, leaving the fate of everyone in their hands for a month, not even understanding what the long-term effects of the nebula might be to everyone, when going around it will only add a number of months to a 70 year journey. It was a crazy, unjustifiable gamble.
@42, Nurse Alyssa Ogawa was another recurring Asian character. She was of Japanese descent and born in Vancouver, according to the Starship Creator program.
I’d say Enterprise‘s “Doctor’s Orders” did this basic idea better.
Solid episode, but with a few things that annoyed me. As mentioned in the comments, the Paris leaving his pod thing was just dumb. Another thing that had me rolling my eyes was the random death of the random extra. There was absolutely no need for yet another crew death to show how dangerous the nebula was. I think the danger was perfectly apparent when everyone started getting headaches and skin burns without resorting to the red shirt cliche. The other thing that I didn’t like was the sci-fi explanation for why Seven was starting to go binky-bonkers. I think the episode would have been a tad stronger if it was purely a psychological problem Seven faced.