“Course: Oblivion”
Written by Bryan Fuller & Nick Sagan
Directed by Anson Williams
Season 5, Episode 18
Production episode 213
Original air date: March 3, 1999
Stardate: 52586.3
Captain’s log. Janeway performs a wedding ceremony in the mess hall, uniting Paris and Torres in connubial bliss. Paris has lieutenant’s pips, and after the ceremony we cut down to a Jefferies Tube where it looks like the deckplates are warping.
Voyager has an enhanced warp drive that will get them home in two years. Chakotay and Janeway discuss what specific route to take while Paris and Torres try to figure out where to “go” on their honeymoon on the holodeck. Torres is going over last-minute engineering stuff with Seven (who is taking over engineering during the honeymoon for reasons the script never bothers to explain). They find an anomaly in the Jefferies Tube and find the warped deckplates we saw at the end of the teaser.
The ship’s superstructure is losing molecular cohesion. They soon determine that the warp drive is causing all manner of molecular cohesion issues. They take the warp drive offline and try to figure out the problem.
Torres returns to the quarters she shares with Paris after a frustratingly long day of not figuring out how to fix the problem, and she gets really really cold. Paris comes home to find her curled up in the bathroom shivering. He takes her to sickbay where two other engineers are also laid up. These three have it worst, but the EMH informs Janeway that the entire crew is suffering from cellular degradation, similar to what’s happening to the ship.
Everything on board is suffering from the degradation, including anything they replicate. Neelix, however, has a few items that aren’t showing any signs of it, and they’re all things he brought on board from off-ship within the past few months.
Paris sits by Torres’ side, talking about their honeymoon, but then she dies.
Tuvok and Chakotay have backtracked their missions, mentioning several completely unfamiliar events, before finally hitting on a recognizable one: the demon planet where they mined deuterium and the crew was duplicated. This prompts a rather disturbing hypothesis. To prove it, they inject Torres’s corpse with a dichromate catalyst, which turns Torres’ body into silver goo.
They’re the duplicates. They all have the complete memories of the original Voyager crew, but they’re not really humans, Vulcans, Bolians, etc. The tests they ran on the enhanced warp drive proved it wasn’t harmful to humanoids, but they didn’t know to scan for silver-blood-based life forms. Even the EMH isn’t safe, as the equipment that runs him is also duplicated and degrading.
The EMH’s suggestion is to find the original Voyager, as they could copy the original crew’s genetic patterns. But they have no idea where the ship is. Tuvok suggests finding another Class-Y planet, and they do—but a hostile species is using it for mining and fires on Voyager to keep them away. They could fight back, but Janeway insists that they’re still Starfleet and won’t assault a ship defending its territory for their own gain, and so they move on.
Paris doesn’t think they should even listen to Janeway anymore, since she’s not really a captain, but he reluctantly goes along with her orders. Chakotay keeps his disagreements private, urging Janeway in her ready room to go back to their true home of the demon planet, rather than plow onward to the home of the people they’re copied from. But Janeway insists that her goal is to get her crew home—what if the original Voyager crew was destroyed?
In the middle of the argument, Chakotay collapses. He dies, and Janeway realizes she’s been an idiot, and orders Voyager to head back to the demon planet. They also put out a general distress call to the real Voyager.
The ship and crew both continue to deteriorate. The holoemitters are all toast, and so the EMH is lost to them. Tuvok is dead and Paris is in a coma; Neelix is now the de facto medic. The deflector fails, and space dust gets into the warp drive. Kim manages to fix it, but the celebration is curtailed when they see that Janeway died in the captain’s chair.
Kim takes command and carries out Janeway’s final order, which is to create a time capsule out of non-silver-blood material so that something will be preserved of them. But by the time it’s complete, the launch systems are so badly degraded that the time capsule explodes. Sensors detect the real Voyager, which is responding to their distress call. Kim and Seven try to hold the ship together long enough, to no avail.
By the time the original Voyager arrives at the source of the distress call, all they see is liquid debris in a cloud in space, with no life signs. Making a note of it for the record, they continue on their journey home.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Somehow, the duplicate Voyager crew can now survive in a standard Class-M-type atmosphere, despite the entire plot of “Demon” revolving around the notion that they could only survive in a Class-Y atmosphere. Also we never learn the nature of the enhanced warp drive, but it’s apparently super-duper fast, as it will get them to the Alpha Quadrant in two years. (Of course, the ship itself will get home in two years…)
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway insists on sticking with the get-to-the-Alpha-Quadrant mission, even though it isn’t really their mission, because she’s that much Kathryn Janeway. But Chakotay dying in front of her makes her realize the error of her ways.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok gets the dramatic irony award when he and Chakotay are going over the demon-planet mission, and he says, “I’ve often wondered what happened to them. Are they flourishing? Have they continued to evolve?” FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK!
Half and half. Because she works most closely with the warp drive—both literally and figuratively—Torres is the first casualty of its effects.
Forever an ensign. Kim winds up in charge in the end, and he tries really hard to do something right, but the ship is too far gone (as evidenced by the fact that he’s in charge) for anything to work right.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is the one who finds the first clue to what’s going on when he realizes that stuff he brought on board recently isn’t affected by the deterioration. (Why some of that stuff isn’t found among the debris Voyager encounters at the end is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Resistance is futile. Somehow, Seven’s nanoprobes, which are just as much copies as everything else, are able to enhance the warp field.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH has to explain the tradition of throwing rice at the bride and groom as they depart the wedding to Neelix and Seven. Neelix is particularly confused as to why the rice isn’t cooked.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. The duplicate Paris and Torres apparently got their shit together faster than the real ones, as they’re already getting married.
Buy the Book
Fugitive Telemetry
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Neelix brings Paris a list of possible holodeck honeymoon destinations, including the fifth moon of Cytax, which has crickets whose song is an auditory aphrodisiac, and the beaches of Ahmedeen, where you can windsurf on liquid argon. Paris prefers Chicago in the 1920s.
Do it.
“How’s my old lady?”
“Well enough to break your nose if you call me that again.”
–Paris visiting Torres in sickbay.
Welcome aboard. The closest this episode has to a guest star is Majel Barrett’s voice in her recurring role throughout the first wave of Trek spinoffs as the voice of Starfleet computers.
Trivial matters: This is, obviously, a sequel to “Demon,” following up on the duplicate crew and ship created at the end of that episode. Anson Williams directed both episodes.
Tuvok and Chakotay describe the demon planet as being in the Vaskan Sector, a nod to the episode prior to “Demon,” “Living Witness,” when Voyager visited the homeworld of the Vaskans and Kyrians.
This version of Paris never did anything quite so stupid as his counterpart did in “Thirty Days,” so he’s still a lieutenant.
This is the fourth time we’ve seen a Starfleet command officer (or, at least, someone who thinks she is) perform a wedding, and the only one of those four where they didn’t give the “happy privilege” speech that Kirk gave in the original series’ “Balance of Terror,” repeated by Picard in TNG’s “Data’s Day” and Ross in DS9’s “‘Til Death Do Us Part.”
The real Paris and Torres will eventually tie the knot, but not until the seventh season’s “Drive.”
Set a course for home. “They’re saving the painstiks for the honeymoon.” As much as I disliked “Demon,” that’s how much I love this magnificent tragedy of an episode. Since we’re stuck with the duplicate Voyager crew anyhow, it’s fun to follow up on them. I love the idea that they’ve forgotten that they’re duplicates and are blithely barreling forward as if they’re the bona fide Voyager. Best of all are the hints of other adventures and accomplishments: first contact with the Kmada, the N’Kree trying to conscript them into their battle fleet, the acquisition/creation of an enhanced warp drive that will get them home faster. And thanks to the wonderfully tragic ending (which was apparently at the urging of co-writer Nick Sagan—one draft of the script had Voyager at least find the time capsule), it’s all lost.
I particularly love that the crew have varying reactions to the revelation. Paris questions everything, wonders if the chain of command on board even matters anymore. Tuvok even pushes back a bit, suggesting ways to destroy the mining ship that threatens them when they find a Class-Y planet, something the real Tuvok likely wouldn’t suggest (though his reasoning is probably still rooted in logic). Meanwhile, Janeway struggles to keep to the ideals that she knows are a part of the very fibre of her being, even though they aren’t really. Kate Mulgrew does an especially excellent job of showing Janeway’s conflict here, all while her face is made up to show her body deteriorating.
Extra points to Jeri Ryan, Garrett Wang, and Ethan Phillips, who are the last three of the duplicates to survive, and who are utterly slathered in latex to show what bad shape they’re in, while still struggling to keep it all together.
It’s not entirely perfect. The duplicate crew shouldn’t be able to survive at all, and if they figured out how to survive in a Class-M atmosphere, they should also remember that they figured it out and why. It makes no sense that Seven would take over engineering while Torres is honeymooning rather than one of the friggin engineering staff (like, say, the deputy chief engineer who’s been around from jump), and shouldn’t Voyager have found some of the non-duplicated items in the debris? But these are minor nits in an otherwise fabulous episode.
A rare case of Voyager showing that actions have consequences, and lookie! It’s one of their better outings! There should be a lesson in that…
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest work of fiction came out this past weekend: the short story “In Earth and Sky and Sea Strange Things There Be,” a story of Ayesha, the title character in H. Rider Haggard’s 19th-century novel She. The story is in Turning the Tied, a charity anthology published by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, benefitting the World Literacy Foundation, and features a bunch of stories about various public-domain characters by some of the finest tie-in writers in the biz, including fellow Trek scribes Rigel Ailur, Derek Tyler Attico, Greg Cox, Kelli Fitzpatrick, Robert Greenberger, Jeff Mariotte, Scott Pearson, Aaron Rosenberg, and Robert Vardeman. Full list of ordering links on the IAMTW web site.
The background of this episode is so incredibly silly that I’m not even going to bother getting into it, since KRAD covered most of it.
But seriously, what a great episode. I’m kind of curious as to why the decision was made to follow up on “Demon,” out of all the episodes that really should have had some kind of impact on future, but it works. It shows just why Starfleet has so many rules about meddling with things when you have no idea what the consequences might be. Our duplicate crew is incredibly tragic, and made all the more so by the fact that they wouldn’t even be in this situation if it weren’t for the Prime!Crew coming along and giving them sentient life. So many Trek episodes end with the crew blithely sailing on and leaving the aliens-of-the-week to deal with god only knows what kind of consequences, and I like when we find out that sometimes that does more harm than good. The scene between Paris and Torres in sickbay was also incredibly sweet, should-out to Robbie Duncan McNeil for really pulling that off.
This was another of those episodes (like “Living Witness”) that are very confusing until you figure out you’re not seeing the real Voyager. Although here the differences were subtler and took more time to sink in.
This is also the kind of episode like “Year of Hell” where you can tell that the writers are chafing against UPN’s (or Rick Berman’s?) insistence on keeping story arcs to a minimum and are using an alternate-reality story to sneak in the kind of real character development and change in an hour that they would’ve preferred to do over a season or three.
It’s pretty effective, but I think maybe the ending is just too much of a downer for me. And I hate “Demon” and count it as apocryphal in my own mind, so that requires me to do the same with this one. The fact that it isn’t even consistent with what “Demon” established about the Silver Blood just compounds the issue.
So this episode was mostly good and compelling but what really knocks it down a big peg for me is the ending – it seemed unnecessarily cruel, pretty much only mandated because Voyager has to stay within its allotted one hour running time and the series can’t commit to serialized storytelling where the crew meeting its duplicates can’t extend into a second hour. Aside from the fact the “real” Voyager should have detected elements of the capsule, why not let its messages survive for the crew to process and contemplate. It would at least be meaningful to the audience and the show can still hit the reset button in the following episode like it often does anyway, not ever mentioning events that came before.
It’s pretty contrived that the “real” Voyager and the duplicate Voyager would even be as close as they got to each other in the ending considering the separate events and paths and distances between them.
And the score for this episode is atrocious. The acting in the Torres/Paris scene in sickbay where she dies is affecting and emotional but the score doesn’t capture the mood of that scene at all. It’s more like what I’d call “whimsical” and the scoring in other scenes are also a letdown like in the battle with the alien ship and the last scene. For all of these nits I’d give this episode only a 6.
“They could fight back, but Janeway insists that they’re still Starfleet and won’t assault a ship defending its territory for their own gain, and so they move on.”
Would it be churlish to suggest this is a clear sign of Silver!Janeway’s ongoing deterioration?
This is also the kind of episode like “Year of Hell” where you can tell that the writers are chafing against UPN’s (or Rick Berman’s?) insistence on keeping story arcs to a minimum and are using an alternate-reality story to sneak in the kind of real character development and change in an hour that they would’ve preferred to do over a season or three.
I still wonder how VOY might have fared it had debuted even a decade later when story arcs and serialization were becoming more and more of the norm in the TV market.
Maybe Berman and the UPN execs would’ve been more open to that kind of model. But given some of the VOY horror stories I’ve heard, I doubt it.
I hated this episode and have never rewatched it. I applaud they actually did a consequences episode but it’s such a downer, I’ve never felt the urge to revisit it. I’m glad others get more from it than I do though.
Quoth Christopher: “And I hate “Demon” and count it as apocryphal in my own mind, so that requires me to do the same with this one.”
Nonsense. It’s fiction, you’re not “required” to do anything of the sort, any more than you’re “required” to come up with explanations for other inconsistencies. You don’t have to discount something good just because it connects to something bad.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@7/krad: It’s not about good or bad, just continuity. I enjoy a lot of Trek stories that I don’t count as part of my personal Trek continuity because they just can’t be reconciled with it. I can’t believe that “Demon” actually happened, because it makes no damn sense. So as much as I enjoy “Course: Oblivion,” as far as I’m concerned it’s just an “imaginary story.” That’s not a value judgment to me, just a matter of cataloguing.
“All our history. Gone.”
There seem to be two schools of thought about this one. The first is that it’s a brave episode because all the characters die and no-one knows about it. The second is that it’s a pointless episode because all the characters die and no-one knows about it. It’s like “Deadlock” turned up to eleven. Well, I guess they’re both right: In terms of continuity, you could skip this and not miss anything, but since when is continuity the best reason to watch an episode? Of course, in some ways the ending is inevitable: It was always unlikely the show would have carried on with two Voyagers out there.
As a sequel to “Demon”, this takes a lot of generosity. At the end of that episode, you had a planet inhabited by duplicates of the Voyager crew. And yes, they could get confused at times about who they were, so it’s not entirely out of the question that they’d believe themselves to be the genuine article. But in the time since then, they’ve somehow acquired a duplicate Voyager, complete with a duplicate EMH, composed of the same material as them, by a method that the episode doesn’t bother to explain. Did they make it through wishful thinking?
As in “Timeless”, the crew’s problem is that their captain can be an inflexible idiot at times. And there’s no guardian angel to stop them all dying here. Faced with the truth, Janeway sticks with her standard plan of pointing the ship in the direction of the Alpha Quadrant and hoping for the best. Staying true to the memories you’ve got is one thing. Denying reality and thinking you’re all going to be welcomed back home as if you’re the real thing is the most delusional thing she’s ever done. Both Chakotay and Paris seem to have a better grasp of things and it takes Chakotay dying for the point to hit home.
It’s slightly amusing that the episode ends with Kim, Neelix and Seven running the ship because everyone else is dead. (As with a lot of Voyager episodes, it does make you wonder what the other 100+ crew are for.) This does mean a few characters don’t get a proper send-off: The last we hear of Paris is that there’s “no change” and Tuvok’s disappearance between scenes isn’t even commented on.
The duplicate Paris still being a lieutenant is the first clue that things aren’t as they appear to be. (My favourite badly-needed-an-editor guide book Delta Quadrant completely missed this detail and instead claimed that he’d coincidentally been demoted as well.) I think that’s the first time we see the Voyager crew in dress uniform and it isn’t even the real crew! (For some reason, even though the rank and file and the Doctor are in normal duty uniform, Tuvok wears dress uniform despite not seeming to have a role in the wedding.) At one point “Demon” is said to be ten months ago, although given that the crew’s memories are faulty and the uncertain placing of the episode, it’s not clear what this means in terms of the show’s chronology. (Is all of this happening after “The Disease”, or is this what the duplicate Voyager was getting up to when the originals were encountering the Devore, the Borg Queen and the pitcher plant? The events seem to cover at least several weeks.)
I couldn’t get past that they somehow duplicated Voyager and the EMH. That…just makes absolutely no sense. How do you even begin to duplicate a starship? Or a sentient hologram, for that matter? Boggles the mind.
@10/Austin: The ship did come into contact with the Silver Blood, IIRC, so I presume they were able to sample it the same way they did the people. It’s so different in composition that the distinction between organic vs. inorganic matter doesn’t seem to, well, matter much; if it can bridge the divide to duplicate one, it should be able to do the same with the other.
And the EMH isn’t separate from the ship, but is an outgrowth of its computer systems. If the Silver Blood could copy humanoid neural networks precisely enough to replicate their consciousness and personality, then I don’t see why it couldn’t do the same with a starship’s neural network.
Paris being a lieutenant in the beginning of this episode was never a clue to me that anything was amiss because by this point in Voyager‘s run I was missing episodes and didn’t see “30 Days” prior (I was in a small college town at the time and I believe it was harder to get UPN programming). But it was a nice clue to regular viewers that were paying close attention. And I always wondered when the “real” Torres/Paris got married. I only just found out it’s in “Drive” which I haven’t finished yet!
I’ve always liked this episode, despite the inconsistencies, but I admit it could’ve been interesting to have the duplicate crew stay on the Demon planet and see what they make of such a different environment.
If the episode had been entitled “Course: Oblivion!” I would have bumped up my score another point. Perhaps already having an episode this season with an exclamation point met the quota for the producers.
It is very tragic, but I’m comforted by the idea that the missions they carried out in their months of existence would have impacted the people they encountered, and its those people that can remember them still. I actually find it implausible that the real Voyager never hears about them, considering they must be following the same general course. But I guess they mostly would have been behind the real Voyager, until whenever the enhanced drive came online. Then they would have been ahead, but into areas Voyager 1 skipped over in their 20k jump?
@krad “engineering stuff with Seven (who is taking over engineering during the honeymoon for reasons the script never bothers to explain).”
For the same reason that Chekov took over as chief engineer in Into Darkness, because they get their own credit instead of being lumped in with everyone else.
@15/karey: It occurred to me from your comment that it would have made for a potentially interesting storyline if the “real” Voyager had to clean up some kind of mess to an alien society inadvertently caused by the duplicate Voyager and the original crew is stunned that they have duplicates of themselves somewhere out there. Maybe they’d piece together that it was their duplicates from the demon planet. Ironically, there’s an episode coming in a later season where hucksters pass themselves off as the Voyager crew and soils their good name (“Live Fast and Prosper”).
And just like that, we go from the season’s lowest point (The Disease) to one of its best episodes. That’s the benefit of episodic storytelling and standalone episodes.
Course: Oblivion manages to salvage the abortion that was Demon and turn the duplicates concept into a well-written story with actual consequences. In many ways, this works better than Year of Hell, because in this one there’s no reset button at the end of act 5 to save the duplicates from their tragic outcome. This could easily play as a Twilight Zone story. We are after all dealing with original characters with a beginning, middle and end. We’re not dealing with the actual crew and their permanent plot armor. This gives the show freedom to go all the way with the tragic outcome. I know I was exasperated when the real crew didn’t find even a single shred of evidence that those people existed. A very earned ending.
On top of that, Fuller and Sagan craft a well paced script that dwells in the little details that set this crew apart from the original (this version of Paris being more adjusted than the real thing, for one). It’s very much a character piece, and a nice challenge for the cast in having to play these slightly different versions of their characters who come to grips with their origin.
And just how convenient is it that their new Warp Drive just happens to set their timetable to reach the Alpha Quadrant in exactly two years, just in time for season 7?
Granted, the science aspect doesn’t really make much sense, but that’s the price from being a sequel to Demon. I can live with that given the way the story ultimately goes. As for Seven being the surrogate engineer, I’ve long since given up on Voyager remembering it had secondary crewmembers such as Carey (Vorik obviously doesn’t qualify for the chief position just yet). For better and worse, we might as well accept the only real recurring non-main cast presence on the ship is Naomi Wildman.
The episode which matters even less than the rest of Voyager episodes. Even Threshold is a better investment in time than this story. Once they explain the “twist” then the viewer can safely switch off, because none of them matter at all and the story is nothing more than that twist of things are different because they are not the same. At least Living Witness had something to say about the nature of historical biases.
Didn’t the real voyager jump forward like a decade in travel time a few episodes back?
There have been at least two time jumps in the fifth season that I can remember: “Timeless” and “Dark Frontier.”
@21: We’re talking about distance leaps, not time jumps. And the season’s first episode, Night, also had Voyager skipping a large distance to clear the null space region.
I guess I meant “time jump” in that they were jumps that shaved time off their journey. And yes, I forgot about “Night.”
@20/John: Yes, the real Voyager jumped forward quite a bit, but the “enhanced warp drive” had apparently let the fake Voyager go even farther. The impression I get is that they had considerably overshot the real ship, then doubled back to try to return to the Demon planet, and sort of ran into the original in the middle.
@24 well that’s awfully convenient.
I’m not going to rewatch this episode again (I binged these last year in quarantine), so maybe this gets addressed and I forgot: is it possible that they’ve modified the atmosphere to be Y-class and have forgotten, just like they forgot they’re duplicates? Didn’t they temporarily maintain a contained Y environment in Demon? And even if they didn’t, the duplicate engineers apparently are better than the originals, what getting the engines to work better/faster than B’elana ever did, so why couldn’t they fix this, too. It’s almost like science fiction sometimes has problems with internal consistency.
kayom: By that argument, you can ignore “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” too. Yet that routinely tops people’s “best of” lists.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One of my favorites.
This is a pretty great episode. I remember watching it as a kid and specifically wondering why Paris was a Lieutenant again, but not really catching on to what was actually happening until it was spelled out for me. It also made me sad to realize that this meant Tom and B’elanna weren’t really married yet.
I’m a little surprised, however, that it reviewed as highly as this due to “plot holes” which have dragged down other episodes. Did no one on the Fake Crew ever do tricorder scans and realize that nothing was made out of what they thought? People, ship components, bio-neural gel packs, all of it. Even more so, does a warp drive really work when made out of silver blood? I could maybe buy the blood mimicking material structures, but not antimatter.
The whole premise has some pretty gigantic questions in my book. That said, I haven’t let this get me down about many previous episodes with similar flaws, so I’m right in agreement with this one!
@25/John: Somewhat unlikely, perhaps, but at least they were both on approximately the same straight-line path, so it’s not completely unreasonable that they’d run into each other.
Also, when the fake ship first detected the real one and sent out a distress signal, it was 22 light years away. Quite close on a galactic scale, but still, they did ultimately miss each other, so it could’ve been a worse coincidence than it was.
In fact, we’ll get a significantly bigger coincidence in just eight episodes, when Voyager detects Equinox‘s distress signal at a distance of only 3.2 light years. So maybe we should save our skepticism for then.
@26/Benno: “It’s almost like science fiction sometimes has problems with internal consistency.”
Don’t blame the genre. Plenty of non-SF series have internal continuity problems too. Just try to work up a coherent timeline for M*A*S*H, say. Or explain what happened to big brother Chuck Cunningham in Happy Days.
When Spike had the rights to show Voyager, this episode was on every time i came home from high school to the point where I just hated watching it everytime they got to season 5
@ChristopherLBennett
Obviously he was drafted to fight in Korea and joined the 4077.
@31/templarsteel: That happened to me with TOS: “The Cloud Minders” for a while back in the ’80s or ’90s. For some reason, it seemed like every time I happened across a TOS rerun, it was that episode, and I really came to loathe it.
Yesterday’s Enterprise had something to say on the nature of sacrifice and how small actions can have big differences, also it is essential to understand the Klingon Civil War arc, and the Romulan resurgence plots. Try again.
It’s funny that it only took a few weeks/months for a fake crew of Voyager to figure out how to get home. It really makes the real Voyager’s insistence on relentlessly traveling back to the Alpha Quadrant look downright silly. They would probably already be home if they stayed in the Delta Quadrant and focused on finding a way to speed their journey.
A thought that occurred to me after watching this episode: are we sure all the episodes we’ve been seeing are the real Voyager, or might we have occasionally been seeing one of the adventures of the duplicate Voyager? :)
@36/Lisa: I recall considering the possibility that some of the episodes might have been about the duplicate ship, but deciding it didn’t work out because the details didn’t fit.
First off, we can rule out everything from “Thirty Days” onward, because of Paris’s demotion. We can probably rule out “One” for being too soon after “Demon” — not enough time for the duplicates to create the ship and forget their identities. We can rule out episodes that introduce things with lasting continuity impact — “Hope and Fear” for quantum slipstream, “Night” for contact with the Malon, “Extreme Risk” for introducing the Delta Flyer, every subsequent Flyer episode (it isn’t mentioned in “Oblivion” and we can assume they didn’t have one, since it’d be a hell of a coincidence), and “Infinite Regress” for initiating the Seven-Naomi friendship.
So that leaves only “Drone” and “Nothing Human” as possibilities, and those might have details that exclude them.
@@@@@ 36, CLB: Re “Drone”
Oh, there’s a thought. If we’re going to accept everything else that’s been duplicated, we might as well throw Borg nanoprobes in the mix, but that would make One’s composition even more needlessly complex. On the other hand, it might answer the question as to why the Borg were so interested in him, since I recall some complaints from that discussion that the Borg ought not be that interested in Federation tech from a mere handful of centuries on. A hyperadaptive lifeform capable of duplicating advanced technology from minimal contact with it, on the other hand…
(Edited to smooth out a heccuva run-on sentence, content substantially the same)
@38/benjamin: I don’t care for that idea, since it overcomplicates the story in a way that works against its intent. Besides, if the Blood could duplicate everything perfectly enough that the crew themselves couldn’t tell the difference from up-close, detailed analysis, I question whether the Borg could tell the difference just from picking up a signal at a distance.
Besides, the case can be made that Seven’s experience with One lays necessary groundwork for her adoption of the Borg children next season, and possibly even for her openness to friendship with Naomi in this season.
Another thought I have had: perhaps the duplicates were only meant to be gone from their world for a limited time, to go out and see the universe first-hand that they can glimpse through the memories of the Voyager crew and bring that back to their world. They might have found a way to survive for a limited time away from their world (and I agree that the life support on their ship probably is circulating something very different from our air). But because they have to rely on the knowledge and skills of the Voyager crew so much in their travels and adventures, they begin forgetting what they really are and take up the mission to get to the Alpha Quadrant instead. This is probably why they got the new warp drive. If only they had remembered themselves, they could have survived, gone home with their new experiences, and probably continued making these limited trips for a long time.
I been waiting for this review; not because I particularly love the episode but rather because it was the first Star Trek episode I have ever watched my entire life and therefore holds a special place in my heart. A very young me was tuning in to random channels after school and this just happened to be on while I was doing homework. Prior to this I have never watched either TOS or TNG and had no background at all about what Trek was about. My parents are not native English speakers so they have no idea what Trek is about. None of my friends at school ever talked about Trek at all (not many nerds in my school, just big bad mean bullies).
I barely understood anything going on (especially any of the characters) and luckily there wasn’t too much technobabble talk during this episode. But by the end of the episode when the ship was blown up I was thinking in my mind… “wow, this is what Star Trek is really about.. It all seems so dark and disastrous, yet mysterious and interesting in a way.” Of course that thought was based on this particular episode alone. I knew Janeway was the Captain because she was giving all the orders though, and that’s about it…
For whatever reason the network aired “The Disease” after this one the next day the same time slot. And oh boy my thoughts for the next episode was “Star Trek is also a sexy show” because the first thing I remember about that episode is the female Alien feeling up Harry and pulling his shirt off. I didn’t even know she was Alien to be honest. I however did not however finish watching that episode because it was not interesting to me.
For whatever reason I kept thinking Seven of Nine was one of the bad guys the whole time with my brief exposure to Voyager. But then I thought if she was so bad why is she part of the crew… Internet was not widely available yet around this time in life so there was nowhere I could look or anyone I could ask. It wasn’t until I met my husband who is a fan of Trek (his favourite is TNG) that I started watching all Trek shows and became an even bigger fan then he ever was. I started going crazy buying all the DVD’s, looking up all the history and characters (I love DS9 the best of all Trek variations but my favourite Sci-Fi show is SG1 to date). But this episode is my first journey into Trek and I couldn’t imagine my life without it. :)
Thank you Keith for a wonderful review as always, I’ve been following quietly for a while now and this is my first post. :)
Thank you for posting, WhiteHairedDemoness!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@36: Lisa, there is no real “Starship Voyager”. It’s only a TV show. And several episodes are needlessly confusing if you don’t bear this in mind. ;-)
Sheesh. You are no fun at all.
I just try to help – ;-)
This is absolutely Voyager does the Twilight Zone. If it weren’t for the visuals being hard on me, I might have loved it. Slow clap respect to them for making a truly dark ending, where all the adventures and the technology to get back to Earth quickly were lost, despite all “our” characters at their best.
As long as I’m procrastinaposting, let me add that I don’t think they intended to make the time capsule out of non-silver-blood material, nor did they have enough to do that. I think Seven said she would make it out of whatever has not yet been affected. But by the time it was ready to send, it had started dissolving.
Oh and I like the theory that they had made the ship compatible with their biology. The readouts might show normal Earth temperatures, but not really be.