“Night”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by David Livingston
Season 5, Episode 1
Production episode 195
Original air date: October 14, 1998
Stardate: 52081.2
Captain’s log. Paris and Kim are acting out a Captain Proton adventure on the holodeck, which is interrupted by the EMH, who declares that they’ve gone over their allotted time, which leads to a fight between Paris and the doctor for time, and then a power surge on the holodeck.
This is but one of several ways by which the crew’s sinking morale is manifesting. They’ve been going through an empty region of space that the crew has taken to calling “the void” for two months, and it will take another two years to get through it. There are no star systems within 2500 light-years, and a large concentration of theta radiation means they can’t even see distant stars. The viewscreen just provides a black screen.
Janeway has spent most of the last two months in her quarters. Chakotay holds a weekly staff meeting, which boils down to “nothing new,” as the ship is in good shape, they’re well supplied, they’re just bored shitless. They also want to know why they haven’t seen the captain, but Chakotay assures them that she has the right to stay in her quarters.
Neelix wakes up in a panic, goes to the mess hall in time for a Paris-Torres argument, and then has another panic attack. The EMH diagnoses him with nihilophobia, the fear of nothingness.
In astrometrics, Tuvok and Seven detect a massive amount of theta radiation on long-range sensors, source unknown. Chakotay reports this to Janeway, and tries to get her to leave her quarters for a game of Velocity on the holodeck. But the captain is uninterested. The lack of activity has caused her to go all introspective, and she questions her decision to strand them in the Delta Quadrant to save the Ocampa.
During the night shift, power suddenly goes out on the entire ship. The crew struggles to restore it. Kim is able to get partial sensors back up and running, and detects a dampening field, but can’t trace the source. Tuvok uses a photon torpedo as a flare, at which point they see three ships. Seventeen aliens from the ships beam aboard and attack the crew. The one that attacks Paris and Seven on the holodeck is taken out by Captain Proton’s ray gun after Seven disengages the safeties. Janeway finally comes out of her quarters and wounds another before leading the repowering of the ship in engineering.
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Voyager and the aliens exchange weapons fire, and then another ship arrives. This is a Malon cruiser. Sixteen of the aliens beam off, but the one Seven wounded is helpless in sickbay.
The Malon shipmaster, Controller Emck, beams aboard, though they have to keep him behind a force field until the biofilter can screen out the theta radiation he’s awash in. The Malon’s warp drives create theta radiation as waste byproduct, and Emck has been using a spatial vortex to dump the waste in the void. He’s more than happy to escort Voyager to the vortex so they can get out of the void faster, but only if they turn over the alien they’ve got in sickbay.
Janeway and Chakotay question the alien in sickbay, in which the EMH has turned the lights down, as the aliens are photosensitive. They’re native to the void, but the Malon dumping their waste is killing them. The aliens attacked Voyager thinking they were the Malon’s allies. They’ve tried negotiating with Emck, but he’s ignored them and his ship is too powerful for them to fight. The alien begs for Janeway’s help.
Voyager travels to where there are more alien ships and beam the alien off. They then rendezvous with Emck. They can’t turn the alien over to him, but they can offer him something better: a way to refine their warp technology so they won’t emit such noxious waste. But while Emck expresses an interest, it’s feigned—refining warp drives will put him out of business, and he makes some very good coin using the void as his dumping ground, which no other Malon know about.
Janeway beams Emck off the ship and decides to go for plan B: destroy the vortex. But she doesn’t want to force Voyager to go through this soul-sucking void any longer, so she will stay behind in a shuttlecraft and destroy it after Voyager goes through. The entire bridge crew rejects the notion of her being stuck hundreds of light-years behind them in a shuttlecraft, and she’s faced with a very heartening mutiny.
So they go with plan C: burn the bridge as they cross it, as it were, destroying the vortex when they go in, staying just ahead of the shockwave. Torres boosts the aft shields, while Tuvok adjusts some torpedoes to delayed detonation.
Emck, however, doesn’t let them go quietly, and they get into a firefight. The good news is that the aliens come to their rescue, and with their help, Emck’s ship is destroyed. The bad news is that Voyager has lost propulsion in the battle damage. So instead, they ride the shockwave of the torpedo detonation through the vortex. It doesn’t quite get them all the way through the void, but soon they find themselves back among the stars.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? One of the benefits of a rewatch is that I realized that one of the things that annoyed me about this episode was actually covered. It made no sense that they couldn’t see any stars while in the void because there was literally nothing blocking their view of the stars beyond the void. However, Seven tells Chakotay early on that the theta radiation is occluding sensors, keeping them from seeing past the void. (Something else to ding the Malon for, as Emck’s clandestine waste-dumping is contributing to the psychological awfulness of crossing the void.)
Having said that, after they’re through the vortex and past where Emck was dumping his waste, they should have seen stars immediately.
There’s coffee in that nebula! When she served as commander of the U.S.S. Billings, Janeway finished a survey herself after the first attempt injured three people under her command. When she tries something similar with collapsing the vortex, the entire crew tells her to screw off and forces her to be the captain again.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok uses astrometrics to meditate, as the inability to see stars interferes with his usual meditative practices.
Forever an ensign. At one point, Kim has the bridge to himself, and he plays a song he composed on the clarinet, “Echoes of the Void.” When Tuvok enters the bridge, Kim plays it for him.
Resistance is futile. Seven is dragooned into joining Paris on the holodeck for a Captain Proton adventure. She approaches the role with absolutely no enthusiasm and ruthless efficiency. However, when Paris later pilots them through Emck’s attack, Seven comments, “Captain Proton to the rescue.”
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH apparently suffered from a form of nihilophobia whenever he was shut down. His descriptions of that don’t really make Neelix feel any better about his own panic attack.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix’s suggestion for a way to alleviate the boredom is for the crew to cross-train in areas of the ship they’re less familiar with. A ship that’s lost so many of its crew and had to integrate a bunch of terrorists should have cross-discipline training as a matter of course, so it’s weird that that hasn’t happened in four years. Then again, Neelix may have just been suggesting it by way of he himself getting more training, consistent with his endless desire to make himself more useful to the crew.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Paris and Torres play a game of durotta together, which leads to a nasty fight that only doesn’t escalate because Neelix has a panic attack in front of them.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. We’re introduced to the Captain Proton holodeck scenario, which is a 1930s movie serial that Paris is a fan of. Paris plays the title character, Kim plays his loyal sidekick Buster Kincaid, and Seven plays his secretary Constance Goodheart.
Also, when power goes out from the void aliens’ attack, the holodeck power remains intact, but the lights go out for no compellingly good reason.
Do it.
“Needless to say, the view from my quarters has been less than stellar lately.”
–Tuvok making a terrible pun.
Welcome aboard. Martin Rayner debuts the role of Doctor Chaotica, Captain Proton’s arch-nemesis. He’ll return to the role in “Bride of Chaotica!” and “Shattered.”
Steve Dennis plays two of the void aliens. He’ll return as Fennim in “Think Tank,” Onquanii in “Warhead,” Thompson in the “Equinox” two-parter, and an Andorian in two Enterprise episodes.
Ken Magee plays Emck.
Trivial matters: After season four, Jeri Taylor, who had worked on Trek shows for eight years, and who had just turned sixty, retired. Like fellow co-creator Michael Piller, she remained as a creative consultant, and would write one more episode of the show later this season (“Nothing Human”). Brannon Braga was promoted to executive producer and show-runner to replace her.
The Malon will continue to recur as antagonists throughout this season. They also appear in your humble rewatcher’s novel Demons of Air and Darkness (which takes place at the same time as Voyager’s sixth season) and in the games Star Trek Online and Elite Force.
This is the only appearance of the game of Durotta, which looks like Quarto given a different “science fictiony” name.
Voyager uses more than a dozen photon torpedoes. At this point, they’ve used about forty, which is more than the thirty-eight that they were established as having in season one, and which were deemed irreplaceable.
The String Theory novel trilogy, done for the show’s tenth anniversary in 2005 by Jeffrey Lang, Kirsten Beyer, and Heather Jarman, takes place between “Hope and Fear” and “Night,” and provides an explanation for the void, as well as for Janeway’s depression (and for later instances of inconsistent behavior on the character’s part).
The Captain Proton holodeck program will continue to recur throughout the rest of the show’s run, and even be the focus of an episode, “Bride of Chaotica!” It’s also referenced in an Enterprise episode, “Cogenitor.”
The tie-in fiction also proposed the notion that there were Captain Proton prose stories. One such appeared in Amazing Stories magazine, “The Space Vortex of Doom,” written by Dean Wesley Smith (under the pseudonym of D.W. “Prof” Smith, a riff on E.E. “Doc” Smith, author of the Lensman novels, which were one of the primary influences on Star Trek, and pretty much every other space opera in history). Later, Pocket Books published Captain Proton: Defender of the Earth, also written by Smith, which included four short stories, two articles, and a letters page, the latter of which included a letter from a young reader named Benny Russell (who would grow up to become a science fiction writer in DS9’s “Far Beyond the Stars“). The short story “Captain Proton and the Orb of Bajor” by Jonathan Bridge in the Strange New Worlds IV anthology also linked Russell to Proton, by having Russell be the scripter for a Captain Proton radio drama.
Set a course for home. “Time to take out the garbage.” This is a very low-key, but very powerful opening for a new season of this show about being far from home. What I particularly like about it—something I didn’t really appreciate when I first saw it as a 29-year-old in 1998—is that it’s a fantastic meditation on clinical depression.
Janeway has always been fiercely protective of her crew, and always taken her role as their caretaker (ahem) seriously. Sometimes that’s been to the point of ridiculousness—barreling through where angels fear to tread in both “The Swarm” and “One,” for example—but she’s always focused on what will get her people home safely, while still generally maintaining Starfleet’s ideals—for example, willing to sacrifice the ship to save a civilization in “Dreadnought,” and even in this episode offering the hand of friendship to Emck even after he’s proven to be a jackass.
But being stuck with no distractions for eight weeks gets her all introspective, and sometimes that way lies madness—or, at the very least, a very dark self-examining hole that it’s really hard to crawl out of. There’s no ship’s counselor on board, and indeed only one actual medical professional, and he’s an AI patterned after a jerk. Honestly, we should be seeing more of this kind of thing, especially given that we’re talking about people separated from home at a distance that makes their getting home in their lifetime unlikely who’ve also watched more than a score of their shipmates die. Oh, and we know at least three of the Maquis who joined the crew had some manner of psychological issues, between Torres’s anger issues and the murderous impulses of both Dalby and Suder.
I would’ve liked a little more discussion of the fact that Janeway’s decision to strand Voyager was specifically made to save the Ocampa from being pillaged by the Kazon, which was absolutely the right thing to do. For that matter, I would’ve liked her introspection to have been less focused on the general issue of her stranding them in the Delta Quadrant and more on the specific issue of the twenty or so people under her command who’ve died since they’ve been stranded.
Still and all, these are minor points, and at the very least, Janeway gets a good reminder of the right thing to do when she’s given another opportunity to save someone, in this case the aliens who live in the void, who are being slowly murdered by Emck’s greed. The Malon’s villainy here is even more resonant now as it was two decades ago, as he places his own profit margins over the lives of innocent people.
And, for all that it’s sappy and against military protocol and all that, seeing everyone basically tell Janeway to go jump in a lake because they’re not gonna let her sacrifice herself is a tug-the-heartstrings moment. It’s a good reminder to Janeway that, while she may be responsible for the family they’ve built on Voyager over the past four years, they are a family, and they all help each other out.
On top of that, we get the absolutely delightful Captain Proton holodeck program, which is one of the best contributions Voyager made to the Trek milieu, and by far the best of the various recurring holodeck programs.
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest novel was released this month: Animal, a thriller he co-authored with Dr. Munish K. Batra about a serial killer who targets people who harm animals. Here’s an interview Keith did about the book on Second Life’s “The Mystery Hour with Con Sweeney.”
I feel like this sentence should be written as “Seven DiSeNgAgEs ThE sAfEtIeS.”
I wasn’t sure if the episode wanted us to think that the radiation blocking the stars was all from the Malon or we were supposed to assume there was some other source.
It was still a fun episode though I wish we had more time with the void aliens
I love this episode, for reasons both large and small. I love that we finally (FINALLY) get some real, in depth soul-searching about them being stranded out here, especially on the part of Janeway (who is the only one who really had a choice in the matter, in the end). It is well-needed and I like that the writers are seeming to allow her to be a little more vulnerable as time goes on. I love Captain Proton- it is pure cheese, but the actors playing the holocharacters do so with such sincerity that it is just great to watch. The blond haired lady’s loud screams (and Kim’s increasing annoyed reactions to them) always make me smile. A small thing, but I like that Chakotay spends a lot of the climax of the episode running around in just his t-shirt. That’s always the sort of thing I feel like we should see more of, especially on Voyager. No matter what time of day/ night or how urgent things are, everyone always seems to have enough to get their full uniform on and do their hair, so it was nice to see that subverted. I also like how at his wits end Chakotay seems- it was one of the better portrayals of how the trip was really dragging on everyone, IMO.
On the other hand, a lot of little things bug me in this one. As KRAD pointed out, there is no reason for the lights in the holodeck to go off. Paris says the deck is “frozen,” but that’s no reason for the lights not to work. Also, how does Voyager not have emergency lighting? Seven says independent systems are still functioning, which means that they don’t even have, say, the battery-operated strip lights that modern planes use to mark the walkways. And yea, it seems like cross-training people should have been done a long time ago- then maybe the only semi-trained medical professional (besides the EMH) wouldn’t be the same person they need to pilot the ship in the case of an emergency.
Also, I wish they had made the time frame a little longer or changed the nature of people’s tetchiness. I understand Janeway getting depressed over her decisions when she suddenly has this unexpected downtime, but it hasn’t even been 2 months and the crew is already losing their minds. They aren’t sitting at a dead stop- they are still doing all their normal operations. Given that Voyager has been running non-stop you’d think there would be enough repairs, upgrades, and diagnostics to keep people busy for years once they finally weren’t being shot at every week. Making it 6 months into the Void would have made a little more sense to me. Alternatively, this would have been a nice time to show that some of the crew are *also* angry and depressed about being stuck out here. I actually think it would have made the resolution at the end more powerful, too. Instead we just get B’Elanna and Tom sniping at each other over board games. This episode made me miss some of the rougher characters we had back in the early days of the series, before the writers did a purge of any character who stepped out of line.
The Tuvok-Chakotay interaction late in the episode is one of the scenes I’ve always remembered about this episode.
It’s easy to forget at this point in the show that Tuvok was in line to replace Cavit as XO after he was killed in the Pilot and Janeway instead chose Chakotay to try and unify the Starfleet and Maquis crews. Tuvok understood the logic, but was disappointed and Chakotay likewise held a grudge for a while over Tuvok’s infiltration of his Cell.
So it’s a small character development, but it’s nice to see Chakotay acknowledge that — but to also value Tuvok’s insight into Janeway and to seek his help in bringing her out of her guilt trip.
In general I do like this, but I definitely have my nitpicks. The void aliens claim to have lived there for millions of years, having evolved to suit the environment… but are those starships they fly around in also millions of years old? What do they eat? Do they just survive off replicators in their ships? If so, on what resources do they power those ships? There is supposed to be literally nothing in this void, so how have they survived to evolve over the course of millions of years? The environmental message is appreciated, but they really didn’t think it through.
As for the holodeck, it is my retcon that the physical sets of the Captain Proton programme are hard-replicated, so when Voyager lost power, it couldn’t un-replicate them, which is why they remained even when the ship lost power enough to cut the lights. Similar to what happened at the end of “The Killing Game”.
Also, while this is good character work for Janeway, I’m mildly troubled that we have one of the three female characters going through a depression here, and only two eps later in “Extreme Risk” we have another female character going through a depression, while the third female character is already an emotionless robot. It’s the kind of thing I shouldn’t have to worry about, all things being equal… but all things are not equal.
Also odd that both those eps have a conflict with the Malon as the subplot, and “Juggernaut” also features B’Elanna dealing with her mental health during a Malon adventure. It kind of feels like the writers are trying to draw some parallel between the Malon and mental health issues, but if so I can’t figure out what that connection is supposed to be. The Malon are capitalist garbage-men who want to maintain the status quo for fear of losing their role in society, but I don’t see how that relates to depression.
Mixed feelings about this one. It was a nice, moody episode, but like many VGR episodes, the frustrating thing is that it’s a one-time use of something that should’ve been more routine. In this case, I’m talking about the visual effects, with the ship flying through profound darkness and lit only by its running lights. Not only is it gorgeous, but it should always look like that in interstellar space! Trek has always used too much fill light in space scenes. This was finally the way it should’ve looked all the time.
The story is decent, but it’s reliant on some really iffy science. For one thing, the idea of humanoid life evolving in a starless void is improbable. Okay, you could have geothermally heated rogue planets out there, but the kind of life that evolved there would probably be very different from humanoid. I guess you could posit that the void beings evolved elsewhere and adapted to the void, though.
The other thing that frustrates me is the claim that the Malon need to dump “antimatter waste.” Matter-antimatter reactions don’t have waste. It’s the complete conversion of mass to energy — nothing is left. It’s the ultimate clean energy source. I suppose there might be a way to rationalize it, though. M/AM reactions do give off a lot of gamma radiation that could transmute nearby matter into radioactive isotopes. Maybe the Malon’s waste is something they use as a coolant in their M/AM reactors, turned radioactive by the gamma exposure. Or maybe it’s a byproduct of the process they use to manufacture antimatter. Either way, it’s clumsy and improbable, and it’s annoying that the writers took a concept based on nuclear fission reactors and applied it thoughtlessly and inappropriately to an entirely different energy source.
“It made no sense that they couldn’t see any stars while in the void because there was literally nothing blocking their view of the stars beyond the void. However, Seven tells Chakotay early on that the theta radiation is occluding sensors, keeping them from seeing past the void.”
Hate to break it to you, Keith, but the truth is, it would’ve made sense even without the handwave. The naked eye can only make out stars within a few hundred light years, maybe a few thousand for the really bright ones. (Our own Sun would be invisible to the human eye from as little as 80 light years away, IIRC, contrary to all those sci-fi movies and shows when people on planets hundreds or thousands of light-years away are able to point out Sol in the alien sky.) If there are no stars within 2500 light years, there would be at most a few dim pinpricks visible to the naked eye, plus maybe the faint haze of distant galaxies or the band of the Milky Way. They could’ve just postulated a large cloud of dust occupying the void to block out the remaining light. Sensors could see more, but the psychological impact of not seeing the stars out the window would be much the same.
And the idea of radiation obscuring light is nonsensical, even more so than the antimatter waste. Radiation isn’t opaque.
@2: And yea, it seems like cross-training people should have been done a long time ago- then maybe the only semi-trained medical professional (besides the EMH) wouldn’t be the same person they need to pilot the ship in the case of an emergency.
This drives me crazy and will never be fixed. One of the most common scenarios where casualties are going to come in and the Doctor needs an extra pair of hands is combat. Where, of course, you want your ace pilot at the helm. Doc basically picked Paris’s name out of a hat for this and it makes no sense. Even restricting ourselves to “characters in the credits,” surely Neelix is a more logical choice– morale and the kitchen can wait.
On the rewatch, the climax also bugs me, because the choice being made appears to be false. Correct me if I missed something but: Voyager already knows where the vortex is and Emck has to leave eventually– the whole point is to get more waste to dump and come back. So, fine, wait for him to leave (the Night Aliens would presumably be willing to act as scouts for this purpose, and they’re perfect for the job since their ships are so hart to detect). At that point, getting through and collapsing the vortex becomes trivial– just put a torpedo on a timed delay. Or, hell, since apparently it’s okay to give technology away this week, gift the Night Aliens a shuttlecraft and they can handle firing the torpedo after Voyager is through. It’s also a nonlethal solution, because then Emck and his crew don’t have to die– they’ll just find the vortex is busted next time they try to use it.
Mr. Magic: the Chakotay-Tuvok tension is something that should’ve gotten more play than it actually got — much like the Chakotay-Paris tension from “Caretaker” that never really went anywhere.
DS9Continuing: I’m fairly certain that the links between the Malon and depression are coincidental. I doubt that much thought went into it, especially since the reuse of the Malon could have been as much a budgetary decision to amortize the cost of the existing costume and makeup design. *shrug*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@@@@ 6: They could have promoted Samantha Wildman to be the substitute doctor / nurse. I know she’s a science officer and not a medic, but it’s still closer than a starship pilot with two semesters of biology, and at least she’s in a blue uniform. Plus it was already weird that Naomi is in more episodes than her mother. Paris already has plenty to do as the senior pilot in charge of Voyager‘s magically reappearing shuttles.
@7 Yea, it annoys me, too. There are tons of people in blue shirts walking around, and assuming that literally *any* of them are experts in biology or anything close to it, they would all be more logical options for a nurse assistant than Paris. It always felt like an opportunity to create a bit of a B-cast (something Voyager never really got around to) by having someone in that role. Training up a couple of the Maquis to be combat medics would have made sense, too, given that they likely have at least a basic familiarity with treating trauma wounds (I’m not any kind of medic and I can do basic things like applying bandages, sticking an IV, inserting a nasopharyngeal airway, and performing a needle-chest decompression). Paris was the absolute least logically choice.
Well, truly, the perfect choice for medic was Kes. Sigh.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Hey, CBS, now that Short Treks are a thing, I wouldn’t mind seeing at least one dedicated to the further adventures of Captain Proton. Live-action or animated, it’s up to you. But it would be fun seeing or just hearing Wang and McNeil in those roles again.
Maybe I’m an atypical case, and maybe this is just the quarantine speaking, but two months of relative isolation- among a familiar crew, aboard a spaceship with plenty of spare room, and, you know, holodecks, even the absence of much of a view out the windows, doesn’t seem like that much of a hardship to me.
Granted that a standard starship crew has probably self selected for folks who feel strongly about gazing out the window at starscapes.
Also, obligatory shout-out to an Alan Moore Green Lantern story featuring a lightless void-
“In loudest din, or hush profound,
My ears catch Evil’s slightest sound,
Let those who toll out evil’s knell
Beware my power, the F-Sharp Bell!”
My nitpick on this that I actually just thought of while looking at this review is how do you turn off safeties for a fictional ray gun? It would make sense for an actual gun with bullets (or even a holographic recreation of a more contemporary phaser / phase pistol / disruptor) but for an object that I would assume was never realistically created except for a movie prop, it makes no sense.
@12
I actually kind of felt the opposite way. Modern astronauts are specifically selected to be people who hold up really well in being stuck in small, tight spaces with no fresh air and not a ton of windows, and I would imagine that would be true for Starfleet officers, too, especially ones given jobs on starships. Given the space distribution on the ship, there have to be tons of work areas/ living quarters that don’t have viewports, so it seems weird that people are losing it after like 6 weeks of not seeing little lights flash by. B’Elanna in particular works in engineering, where there don’t appear to be many windows, so why is this hitting her so hard? The short time period made me feel like the problem isn’t that they can’t see the stars, but maybe that the Vitamin D “‘Happy Lamps” are malfunctioning. Again, if they had focused more on the angle that this was the first time in 4 years everyone had really had time to stop and think, and were therefore having a sort of delayed reckoning to being stuck in the DQ, it would have made a little more sense to me.
@13- It’s probably too late to start a counter for Holodeck OSHA violations, but at this point I think the bulk of the evidence points to the fact that once you switch the holodeck safeties off, the program running will cheerfully go “You want a real raygun? You get a real raygun! The bad guys get real rayguns. Everybody gets a real raygun!” For a program as advanced as the holodeck seems to be, taking the stated effect in the fiction of a made-up weapon and creating a device that can mimic those effects, even if using very different scientific principles, should be entirely possible.
I was never clear on whether Captain Proton was meant to be a genuine adventure serial that was released in the 1940s within the Trek universe, or a 24th-century holodeck program created as a pastiche of 1940s serials. But the inclusion of The Bride of Chaotica on a movie list in ENT: “Cogenitor” seems to confirm the former.
I have the same question, by the way, about Vic Fontaine. Was there really, in the Trek universe, a Rat Pack member named Vic Fontaine? Or did Bashir’s friend Felix invent him as a pastiche thereof?
@16, Christopher,
Re: Fontaine, the main hint I think is his evidently non-holographic double in “The Emperor’s New Cloak,” which leads me to conclude that holo-Fontaine’s appearance, at least, was modeled off of a contemporary individual, and consequently that he’s a pastiche.
But then again, I’m depending upon there being a reasonable correlation between someone’s existence in the main universe and the mirrorverse, and that way madness lies.
@15 – In that case, have the holodeck create a ship that mimics a Borg cube with transwarp drive, and viola! The crew is back home ;)
I was at the 2013 Creation convention in Vegas and had the opportunity to see the entire Voyager crew there (Jennifer Lien may not have been there, I can’t remember.) Robert Picardo and Garrett Wang told an amusing story about filming this episode.
The Void aliens, when walking around the set, just looked like giant, walking turds with arms and legs. Apparently no one could keep a straight face and the aliens were jokingly referred to as “The Captain’s Log.”
all due respect KRAD but I find the Captain Proton garbage to be one of the main reasons VOY was so rotten the last three years and one of the worst ideas of the franchise if not the worst
Matt Brady: Fair enough. I eagerly watched the movie serials that Captain Proton was based on when I was in college, and they have a warm place in my heart, and I see the Proton stuff as a lovely tribute to the earliest days of screen science fiction of which Star Trek is a descendant.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Given that Ensign Wildman was an exobiologist (study of living alien organisms), it would have made some sense that she be trained as a nurse or med tech; she would have been more qualified than Paris’s two semesters of biochemistry. Of course, he was originally put on the ship as an “observer” without rank, something the later seasons would forget but he basically became the jack-of-all-trades. Sigh.
I still think Trek has missed a creative opportunity by having all the popular culture that its characters enjoy be based on stuff from our own time or earlier. There’s so much uncharted territory in between. Instead of creating imaginary culture from our past like Vic Fontaine and Captain Proton, they could’ve created imaginary culture from the characters’ past but our future. Show us the 24th-century characters enjoying old-fashioned, retro entertainment like “Westerns” from the wild and wooly Mars colonial era of the early 2100s, say. We eventually got a glimpse of future pop culture with Flotter and Trevis, but that was just in one or two episodes. It would’ve been cool if one of VGR’s long-running holonovel scenarios had been something from our future, giving them a chance for ongoing worldbuilding about Trek history as a parallel to VGR’s own narrative.
I’ve tried to hint at things like this from time to time in my Trek novels, including a long-running 24th-century soap opera set aboard a low-warp Space Boomer ship from the 22nd century, and a 22nd-century Bollywood movie about the Vulcan Reformation (because surely syncretic culture would be a thing too).
@23- Hear hear! There are occasional examples from other species- alien operas (Klingon, that one from Discovery where the Diva kills herself on opening night), Bashir and Garak’s discussions of Cardassian literature, but humanity the Trek universe doesn’t seem to produce a lot of media that isn’t either recreations or pastiches of those familiar to 20th/21st century viewers.
And people complain about reboot heavy movie slates today!
@23, I agree with you whole-heartedly. Pop culture in the future seems to have either completely stalled circa what was in the public domain in 1980, or be entirely alien in nature (like Klingon opera or Cardassian novels). For a culture that claims to value arts and culture so much, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot going on in those areas (although shout-out to Dr. Crusher for her playwriting, and Data for his painting). It can certainly be done well (I like “Captain Proton” and I adore the Benny Russel DS9 story), but more often than that it is just… boring. If I wanted to watch a Bronte-esque story, there are some very, very good ones out there, but it isn’t what I tune into VOY to watch (thank god they finally dropped that). I don’t know if it is an imagination thing or a budget thing (I’m sure it is a lot cheaper to get props for the 1940s than it is to have to create ones for the 24th century), but it is a little annoying after a while.
I feel a similar way about time travel stories that bring the characters to the viewer’s present (or at least, the present when it aired) or past. DS9 did it right (IMO) with “Past Tense,” where we were thrown into the “past” of the characters, but into our future, so we got to see an important part of Federation history fleshed out for us, it was great for showing us Sisko’s interest in civil rights, and they still got to do the “fish out of water” thing.
Let’s not forget Jake Sisko is destined to become a great novelist or something. Ditto for Geordi LaForge. Though those were both possible futures.
I agree, however, the Star Trek universe could certainly use more future art. Personally, I could go for a Klingon private eye series set in Hagh’wa’ii.
When I was in the Army cross-training was a constant. I was a commo guy (a wiredog) but spent a fair amount of time in the motor pool, and learned how to fire the Stinger missile.
In 2009 I had the pleasure of seeing Martin Rayner in “Freud’s Last Session” at Barrington Stage in Pittsfield, MA. It later transferred to off-Broadway. Martin Rayner played Sigmund Freud with Mark H. Dold as C. S. Lewis. This was a speculative play about how a meeting between the two might have gone. (There is no historic proof that they ever met.)
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Total agree on the cross-training.
We had one guy teach the same course for the last 30 years and the minute he announced his retirement the department started scrambling to try to replace him. He’s been gone almost one year and we’re already trying to retire the course.
In Voyager‘s case, aren’t they supposed to be training everyone and whatever tiny humans are going to replace them, in the event of more casualties? Neelix was absolutely right, even if he was doing it for a “selfish” reason. It gives people stuff to do.
Yeah, Star Trek has been consistently terrible about creating popular culture between the present day of reality and the present day of the TV series, from the woefully unimaginative scenarios in “Shore Leave” on the original series to the holodeck programs on the 24th-century spinoffs to Discovery‘s use of music.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Another favorite, and a fantastic yet not overly bombastic season premiere. Captain Proton! Yay! I confess to unabashedly loving the Captain Proton scenario.
Also loved Janeway gets to not be superhuman and have doubts and guilt and depression. And we get snippets of our crew suffering from cabin fever and not being super…humanoid people. I adore moments where we see a crew just being people dealing with unpleasant shit.
And then when shit hits the fan, our Captain comes out to lead her crew once again, and the crew pulls together to protect and help people in need, including the Captain. The senior staff gives Janeway a reminder that they love her, and will not tolerate any self-sacrificing bullshit from their Captain.
Just a lovely opening to the season.
“Nihilophobia, the fear of nothingness. Or, in layman’s terms…the fear of nothingness.”
Bit late to the party: Wasn’t on here much yesterday, sorry!
That’s a pretty confident debut. The fact it takes about fifteen minutes for Janeway to show up, and even longer for the plot to kick into high gear, gives us an opportunity for some good character work and some nice interaction. Chakotay trying to keep the crew together, Neelix’s panic and the Doctor’s awkward attempts to calm him, Kim playing the clarinet for Tuvok, Paris persuading Seven to play Captain Proton with him (I think the joke wears a bit thin later on when the programme’s used too much but here it works well), Seven suggesting Tuvok try Borg rejuvenation instead of meditation (I have no idea if she’s joking or not, although this episode does suggest her sense of humour’s improving with her wry use of Borg phrases and “Captain Proton to the rescue”). The only one that isn’t particularly interesting is Paris and Torres bickering because, well, that’s normal for them. Chakotay and Tuvok’s tense alliance is an odd note as well: It feels like a callback to the Season One tension between them, but that seems to have long since been resolved.
After wallowing for much of the episode, Janeway finally kicks into high gear when there’s a problem to be solved. Even then, she avoids the bridge, leaving Tuvok to handle the initial contact with Emck while she hides out in engineering and even delegating the later negotiations to Chakotay. Having decided she made the wrong decision four years ago, she decides to send her crew closer to home while she stays behind to blow up the route, because she’s convinced they wouldn’t have let themselves be stranded in the Delta Quadrant to protect the Ocampa if she’d given them the choice. Except here they do make a choice and they’re willing to do the same thing again…or at least come up with a third option that keeps the crew together and gives them another forward jump.
Emck is an interesting villain, who both is and isn’t a traditional Star Trek opponent. The unacceptable face of capitalism, putting profit ahead of progress. It’s interesting to ponder if Voyager ever did bother to contact the Malon authorities and let them know there was an alternative.
The two month gap between seasons is an interesting counterpoint to the fact that Season 4 was said to only cover nine months. Janeway says the other people on the main titles could be hanged for mutiny: Presumably she’s joking, unless Starfleet’s had a big change in policy since “Turnabout Intruder”.
This kind of a Voyager classic.
I remember everything in this episode fondly, the void worked, the Malon worked as a villain because on the one hand he was kind of just a guy doing his job, but on the other hand he’d found a way to make his money dirty. But he’s hardly an outlier and the follow up Malon episodes make these guys capitalists that are even worse than the Ferengi.
@5/ChristopherLBennett
They did get the lighting right once, in The Motion Picture which is still the most beautiful lighting of a starship in the franchise. From turning on the lights in Spacedock to the Enterprise cruising through the night to face V’Ger it was a gorgeous stars out lights on bonanza. And you’re right it should’ve been the standard. I can understand the normal lighting in a star system, but not out in space. Also, thank you because I was going to ask if it was even possible for radiation to actually block light instead of something more banal like Interstellar dust.
On that note, how much of anything would he have to dump over how long to actually create a multi-light year spanning radioactive smog cloud? This is an interesting conglomeration of the trope “Sci Fi Writers have no sense of scale” present company exempted of course.
@33/cap-mjb: “The two month gap between seasons is an interesting counterpoint to the fact that Season 4 was said to only cover nine months.”
It wasn’t dissimilar to how a lot of episodic TV had begun handling the passage of time by then and still does today. Shows set in the present day often make a pretense of happening in real time, beginning in September and ending in May or June, with a gap of several months between seasons. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did this a lot, with the gaps between seasons taking place during summer vacation at school.
Of course, this gets very contrived in combination with the modern trend of having a new “Big Bad” each season (indeed, Buffy coined the term “Big Bad” and codified the formula), because it means that every new villain coincidentally begins their evil scheme in the fall and gets defeated in May or June like clockwork. But then, TNG and DS9 had the same problem with massive, cliffhanger-worthy crises always happening once a year just when the stardate rolled over to 000.
The Malon, so inept they can create waste products from a reaction that produces no waste products. They make the Kazon look smart, and those guys couldn’t find freakin’ water.
So… I was wondering; could it be that Voyager was going across a gap between the spiral arms? They talk about it as if it’s something more weird than that, but it seems to me to be the easiest way to have it be both large enough, and unavoidable enough, and empty enough.
@35 – Don’t forget that Harry Potter managed to wrap up his yearly adventures by the end of the school year!
@37/kaitlyn: It’s a myth that the gaps between spiral arms are empty of stars. The spiral arms aren’t made of stars; they’re actually compression waves in the interstellar medium (gas and dust), like very, very low-frequency sound waves cycling through the galactic disk. They’re brighter than the rest of the stellar disk because the compression of the gas and dust triggers star formation, so they’re lit up with stellar-nursery nebulae and bright, short-lived supergiant stars. But the population density of stars within the arms is only about 10% greater than the density between the arms.
@5/CLB, That can’t be right — the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years from earth and can still be seen with the naked eye. At the very least, Voyager should have been able to see it, (if we disregard other occluding effects of magic radiation or whatever makes the Void work.)
@40/SaraB: You missed the part where I said “plus maybe the faint haze of distant galaxies or the band of the Milky Way.” You could see Andromeda and the Magellanic Clouds, but they’re quite dim. Take away all the nearby stars and you’re left with a mostly black sky with only a few faint smudges of light, which would still feel pretty empty. And as I said, you could posit a widespread dust cloud to obscure those last bits of light.
@35/CLB: That’s an interesting point. You can see Deep Space Nine moving towards that model at the time: Every season tended to end on a high point, with a big revelation or potential game changer, but there was a big time skip before the next season. Voyager though tended to follow the later TNG model of the 26-episode season covering the whole year (the “one episode equals two weeks” theory seemed to be treated like a rule set in stone by some people) with each season following immediately on from the previous one. The gap between Seasons 4 and 5 is a rare exception.
Keen-eyed observers of Captain Proton will notice a remarkable similarity to Commando Cody, a short film series that ran in the 1930s. It’s a short that was riffed on early in the MST3K run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjLR7cVTrfw&list=PLqMMafXFnOFN66v-IU_xBVVEzvK5thbIB
@43/Big Data: Yes, Commando Cody was clearly the primary referent, along with Flash Gordon. Commando Cody and his fellow Rocket Men were also, of course, the inspiration for The Rocketeer.
Also, the third “Rocket Man” serial, Zombies of the Stratosphere, featured a young Leonard Nimoy as one of the Martians.
I thought this was a decent story and a different, low-key way to start the season. I liked how it showed Janeway as flawed what with her sulking and “depression,” and the void is definitely eerie and unnerving. I like the makeup/costume designs of the void aliens and the Malon, the “environmental villains.” And it ended up being a true Star Trek tale with Voyager coming to the rescue of the void aliens and the sappy but touching moment of the crew not letting the captain doing the rescue solely by herself.
I never liked the Captain Proton holo program though – it’s just too hokey to me (yes, I know it’s supposed to be) and it’s yet another example of 20th century entertainment because that’s all that humans of the far future seem to fixate on which I find unlikely and annoying. I still can’t bring myself to watch “Bride of Chaotica” but maybe I’ll try for this rewatch.
“On Earth in the twentieth century, they had fascism, genocide, the Eugenics Wars, but they produced Charlie Chaplin, Harold Robbins, and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. In the Federation, they had brotherly love, they had centuries of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The holodeck.”
Novel “Debtors’ Planet” mentions “Robot Rolls” which is specifically a deliberate 24th century remake of “Mister Ed” which isn’t generally known, evidently with a self-driving vehicle. At least it isn’t “My Mother The Car”. I think Captain Kirk canonically likes a 22nd century novelist, but it doesn’t keep coming up like Dixon Hill.
Possibly they just aren’t allowed to show us the characters enjoying post 21st century culture because of the Temporal Prime Directive. I mean, if I have seen the plot of “The Symbiote of Dorian Gray”, I could just write it myself. Not so well, of course, but, first!
Night is one understated, low-key season premiere. On one hand, moody episodes are something we can easily expect coming from Brannon Braga. On the other, he’d become so accostumed to doing bombastic blockbuster two parters over the past two seasons that it almost feels weird to have such a quiet opening episode to a season. But coming on the heels of Hope and Fear, it feels right. In fact, DS9 also had a quiet season opener that same year*. A happy coincidence?
(and thank heaven they broke trend and avoided the season-ending cliffhanger for once)
*and for the first time in years, DS9 opens its season ahead of Voyager. I’m guessing it’s because of season 5’s increased reliance on CG and other VFX, requiring extra post-production time.
My one issue with Night is that Janeway’s depression makes perfect sense in light of their failed chance at getting home last season. But they never even bring up the events of Hope and Fear. Otherwise, Janeway’s plight makes perfect sense. It’s a nice change of pace having the captain second-guessing herself and self-isolating in response to her choices. Plus, the black void is a perfect metaphor for Janeway’s choices that made them Delta Quadrangt nomads, and not just her initial choice regarding the Caretaker.
But having the crew pull together to snap her out of it and save the day is always welcome. And we get our first glimpse of Captain Proton to top it off.
The Malon are no Hirogen, but they still serve their purpose as antagonists for the season. Plus, an enviromental morality play is usually welcome, as long as it’s not overdone. At least, this isn’t TNG’s Force of Nature. No blatant ozone layer/warp drive parallels here.
The void is a great premise and I think if this was been made today they would have just stuck with the episode focusing on the effect on the crew and them finding scientific resolution to the dilemma, it could have been Voyagers version of the TNG episode “Family” with an almost pure focus on the interpersonal relations of the crew.. sadly and perhaps predictably they had to find an Alien antagonist because we all knew back then genre fans can’t concentrate for 44 minutes without a villain to root against right?
It’s half a great episode and half a predictable ho hum of an episode.
@23 Re: A 22nd-century Bollywood movie regarding the Vulcan Reformation.
I know Bollywood has recently somewhat steered towards more introspective movies and away from high drama but my mind just leaped to the notoriously 90s cheesefests starring Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Govinda with the slapstick humour and over-the-top dance numbers. Now all I can think about is Vulcans watching one of those 90s Bollywood blockbusters and valiantly trying to contain their horror at the blatant and frivolous display of emotion and illogical behaviour. I think Bollywood would love pre-Reformation Vulcans, and yes, they would play up their savagery in a really offensive way, BUT they would also play up the Reformation as a spiritual enlightenment and end on a really high positive note (not unlike Trek itself) and so the Vulcans would be extremely conflicted about the movie. They would probably conceed that it’s better than the Hollywood one, which would probably bend over backwards to explain how the Vulcan Reformation came about because of some (probably American, definitely White) Human.
I kind of want to see a Bollywood movie about a Klingon battle though. I feel like Klingons would love a historical tale depicted in a larger than life way like the recent ‘Bajirao Mastani’ or ‘Padmavat’ with all the action scenes, talks of honour, warrior-like female love interests, and all the group singing and dancing. Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think that the Klingons would absolutely love Bollywood action blockbusters, and Klingons in general would make great subjects for such blockbusters.
Also, on the topic, I think Trills would be a great addition to Indian TV serials (telenovellas). We already have reincarnation as an extremely popular trope, so changing hosts just feels like a natural stand-in for that. Especially the issues regarding reassociation just lend themselves to a great number of dramatic possibilities. I’m already thinking up storylines about star-crossed lovers, revenge seeking, dealing with loss without closure, adultery, and any and all types of unfinished business. A lot of drama can also be generated around the whole joined Trill selection process.
I’m not even going to go into how the Cardassians would love the multi-generational family movies like ‘Hum Sath Sath Hai’ and ‘Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gam’ because then I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself. Think about it – late 24th-century Bollywood encounters the repetitive Cardassian epic and thus begins the great (19)90s Family Drama Revival with an entire era of movies featuring huge tight-knit joint families complete with heavily protected family secrets, deeply rooted alliances and rivalries, and greatly banter-driven romance, with a similar emphasis of “family before everything” plus a little bit of “duty to state” sprinkled in (though that can possibly change after the Dominion War). I’d watch the hell out of that.
When the alarms started blaring and the ship came under attack, I imagined every crewmember on board standing up, raising their fist into the air, yelling “YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!”
Voyager is my least favorite series of pre-Discovery Trek, so admittedly there are some pretty slim pickings. But the “Time to take out the garbage” scene is arguably my favorite moment in all of Voyager and Kate Mulgrew delivers the line perfectly! In fact, I recall I was actually cheering at my television set when I first saw the episode way back in the day.
I miss the days when I was young and foolish and the Malon captain seemed like a ridiculous strawman caricature of a polluting businessman.
Re: the fact that ST pop culture references tend to be to the 20th century.
Some of the stuff popular in 2023 is really really old. I’ll bet no living playwright gets their plays performed as often as Shakespeare; Jane Austin’s novels are more read today than all but the biggest best sellers; and I doubt any living composer’s work is performed as often as Bach’s. In fact, all three are probably more popular today than when they were alive*. Plus, what we dismiss as ‘pop culture’ could very easily be considered classics by a later generation; Shakespeare’s work was totally ‘pop culture’ in his day but nowadays we tend to treat it with an air of reverence that would have puzzled Elizabethans. Jane Austin’s audience was teenage girls – her irony totally went over the heads of contemporary ‘adult’ critics. So I could absolutely see, say, Seinfeld getting this treatment, as we see on the Orville. (Plus I bet future academics will be able to make entire careers trying to track down and explain Seinfeld’s or Bob Dylan’s [“make love to Elizabeth Taylor – catch hell from Richard Burton”] pop culture references, much like Eliot’s The Waste Land today.)
As far as references to post-20th century pop culture go, well, I have never been one bit impressed with Trek’s attempts to present alien music, which sounds to me like bad New Age music (and I don’t even think good New Age music is particularly good). Trek is wise to stick with Shakespeare rather than showing bits of a 22nd century play since the writers would have to be as good as Shakespeare for it to come across as convincing.
*the double-edged sword of American IP laws is probably relevant here
@53/ASoullessMinion: As I’ve said elsewhere, I have no problem with Trek characters liking stuff from the 20th century or earlier; my problem is the near-total lack of any human culture more recent than that. The only post-2000 culture we see in Trek, with rare exceptions like Flotter and Trevis, is alien culture. Did humans just stop creating new entertainment after First Contact?
“Trek is wise to stick with Shakespeare rather than showing bits of a 22nd century play since the writers would have to be as good as Shakespeare for it to come across as convincing.”
Why would that be required? Very little pop culture is on the level of Shakespeare, and plenty of people are fans of cheesier, more lowbrow things. I’ve discovered in my own writing that it can be a lot of fun to create the schlocky, trashy entertainment of the future.
I’m at the point of the shipwide powerloss and the holodeck scene is driving me nuts…the holodeck is working, but it’s DARK. I mean what level of stupidity is that? Either have the holodeck up and running (it used to have its own power network, though this idea seems to be gone by season 3 or 4 already) or have it shut down. But having it running, just without lights?
Just to say, I watched this because of Captain Proton’s appearance on Lower Decks, and really liked it. And they do say something about how the holodeck still has independent power, and Seven tries to route its power elsewhere, but it fails.
The lights being out thing makes no sense. I am pretty sure in some holodeck episodes, it’s canon that the characters on the holodeck have no idea what’s up with the rest of the ship, as long as the power is on. It is part of the horror, that the holodeck keeps blithely going while the ship is in peril. It’s so real.