“One Small Step”
Written by Mike Wollaeger & Jessica Scott and Bryan Fuller & Michael Taylor
Directed by Robert Picardo
Season 6, Episode 8
Production episode 228
Original air date: November 17, 1999
Stardate: 53292.7
Captain’s log. We open in October 2032 on Mars. Lieutenant John Kelly is in orbit in Ares IV while communicating with the two astronauts on the surface, Rose Kumagawa and Andrei Novakovich. Something appears in orbit, which winds up consuming Ares IV.
In the 24th century in the Delta Quadrant, Chakotay’s attempt to relax is interrupted by the door chime—but there’s no one on the other side of the door. There are several other minor malfunctions of communications and hospitality systems. Chakotay goes to engineering to find that Seven is upgrading the computer—which she’s doing without authorization. She has been requesting these upgrades for months, but Torres has refused to go for it, so she’s going ahead and doing it anyhow to show how efficient they’ll be. Chakotay dryly comments that she’s not really succeeding at that.
Voyager gets hit with gravimetric disturbances, which causes Kim to take the drastic step of waking Janeway up at 0200. (He actually calls “senior officers” to the bridge, which prompts Seven to accompany Chakotay, even though she isn’t any kind of officer, senior or otherwise.) They find a graviton ellipse: a phenomenon that just appears out of subspace, wanders around in normal space for a while, damaging anything in its path, then buggering back to subspace. Chakotay recalls that the first human encounter with a graviton ellipse was the Ares IV, which was destroyed by one (though they didn’t know what it was at the time).
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Janeway and Chakotay agree that they should investigate it, which confuses the hell out of Seven, who doesn’t think it’s worth the risk. The Borg has encountered such ellipses, and they were able to modify their shields to avoid being harmed by them. Janeway orders a probe sent in, and it detects materials inside the ellipse consistent with the construction of 21st-century Earth spacecraft.
With the notable exception of Seven, the entire “senior staff” thinks they should investigate, modifying the Delta Flyer shields with the Borg method Seven mentioned. Seven thinks this is dumb, but everyone else—particularly Chakotay the anthropologist and Paris the Mars nerd—is giddy over the notion of exploring it and possibly finding the wreckage of Ares IV. (Both Chakotay and Paris list Kelly as one of their heroes.)
Seven objects to Janeway in private, viewing this as more about sentiment than exploration, but Janeway says it’s about history. Seven, though, feels that history is irrelevant. Janeway also encourages Seven to volunteer to join the away team, though she stops short of ordering her to go.
The modifications are completed, and Chakotay, Paris, and Seven head into the ellipse in the Flyer. They find themselves in a calm area at the epicenter of the ellipse—the eye of the storm, as it were. They also find a ton of debris from all over the quadrant, and Seven even recognizes some of it as extradimensional. They also find Ares IV—intact! It’s way too big to fit in the Flyer’s hold, so they’ll have to tow it out.
The ellipse’s course keeps altering slightly, as if something’s attracting it—Voyager eventually realizes that it’s a dark matter asteroid, with which it will collide. This reduces the amount of time the gang has to play in the ellipse. Chakotay insists on trying to tow Ares IV out anyhow, to Paris and Seven’s chagrin. They almost make it, but the ellipse collides with the asteroid before they can escape it, sending shockwaves through the Flyer. Chakotay is badly injured, the Flyer is badly damaged, and the ellipse now is going to be returning to subspace sooner than expected. They’re stuck and screwed. The plasma manifold is fused—it can’t be repaired, and fabricating one is beyond the capability of the Flyer’‘s replicator.
Janeway calls a brainstorming meeting, and it’s Torres who hits on a solution: Ares IV has an ion distributor that can be modified to channel warp plasma. Paris’ hand is needed at the helm of the Flyer and Chakotay is badly hurt, so it’s left to Seven to beam over to retrieve it. Chakotay also asks her to download the vessel’s database.
Seven finds Kelly’s body, and also notes that there are recordings that postdate the ship being brought into the ellipse. Seven plays them over the commlink while she works.
Kelly continued to take readings and study the ellipse while he was trapped in it, which he was for quite some time. He sees debris from obviously alien vessels, and realizes that there is life on other worlds (this is thirty years before humans’ first contact with Vulcans). He continues to record data even though he knows there’s very little chance of it being seen by anyone but him. Among his last words are saying that he doesn’t regret anything, and doesn’t view his mission as a failure. (His actual last words are wondering who won the World Series in 2032, as it was still in progress when he was swallowed by the ellipse.)
Seven is visibly moved by his dedication to science, and makes sure to download the database as Chakotay requested before beaming back with the ion distributor—and also with Kelly’s body. She and Paris are able to juryrig the distributor into a plasma manifold, and the Flyer returns to Voyager. Janeway holds a memorial service for Kelly (Chakotay listens to it from sickbay), and before the coffin containing his body is shot into space, Seven says a few uncharacteristically sentimental words, then puts a hand on the coffin and says, “The Yankees in six games.”
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? On the one hand, it seems silly that a 21st-century ion distributor can sub out for a plasma manifold that won’t be invented for three hundred years. On the other hand, Ares IV is only three decades prior to the successful implementation of warp drive, and it’s perfectly possible that Zefram Cochrane based the design of his warp engine on the ion drives used by the Ares ships.
There’s coffee in that nebula! While Janeway isn’t quite as geeked out as her first officer or pilot about finding Ares IV, she does have to explain why history is so important to Seven—at which she fails, as it takes listening to Kelly’s logs to get her to figure it out.
She also really doesn’t like being woken up at two in the morning…
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok has to remind Seven that exploration has its value even when it’s something dangerous. “One must allow for the unexpected discovery.” Which then happens a second later, making him look real smart…
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH waxes rhapsodic about what he claims was his first away mission (which it wasn’t—that would, technically, be “Future’s End, Part II,” and you could make an argument for “Heroes and Demons“), and also is nerding out just as much about the possibility of finding Ares IV, to Seven’s great chagrin.
Half and half. Torres saves the day because the writers remembered for the first time in far too long that Torres’ super-power is out-of-the-box engineering solutions that are so crazy they just might work.
Resistance is futile. Seven thinks the entire mission is a silly goose. She also apparently wanted to be a ballerina when she was a kid.
Do it.
“I see you’re making some changes to the computer core.”
“I have enhanced the command sequencers with Borg algorithms.”
“Well, your enhancements are wreaking havoc with our secondary systems.”
“Insignificant malfunctions. I will correct them.”
“I don’t recall authorizing any modifications.”
“The computer core is inefficient. It needed to be improved.”
“I appreciate your initiative, but that’s not up to you.”
“I’ve explained the value of these enhancements on several occasions, but Lieutenant Torres chose to ignore me. I thought a demonstration would be more persuasive.”
“Well, I doubt this one’s going to change her mind.”
“Clearly, Voyager is not yet ready for assimilation. A joke—the doctor suggested that I defuse tense situations with humor.”
–Chakotay complaining about Seven’s tinkering, with Seven showing that she’s learned the human truism that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. (And also showing that her sense of humor is a work in progress.)
Welcome aboard. The only guest star in this one is the great Phil Morris, who plays his fifth of five roles on Trek, going back to when he was a small child. He played one of the kids in “Miri” on the original series and was a cadet in The Search for Spock. He also appeared twice on DS9, as a Klingon in “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places” and a Jem’Hadar in “Rocks and Shoals.”
Trivial matters: This is far from the only science fiction story to posit that a Mars mission would be on a ship called Ares, since Mars is the name the Romans gave to the god of war that the Greeks named Ares.
In the teaser, the astronauts are talking about the World Series, with the New York Yankees playing the London Kings, with a specific mention of Buck Bokai breaking Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive-game hitting streak (56, which he accomplished in 1941). The existence of the Kings and that one of their players broke DiMaggio’s record occurred in TNG’s “The Big Goodbye.” Bokai was established in DS9’s “The Storyteller,” and that Bokai was the one who broke the Yankee Clipper’s record was established (and Bokai seen) in DS9’s “If Wishes Were Horses.”
However, the scripters obviously don’t know baseball very well. Kelly says that Bokai broke DiMaggio’s streak in the middle of the World Series, which isn’t possible as a consecutive-game hitting streak would only be counted during the regular season, not the postseason. Having said that, it’s possible that the rules on that will change between now and 2032 which is, if nothing else, far more likely than there being an MLB team in London, since the travel requirements for a team on the other side of the Atlantic to play with teams all over the U.S. would not be manageable…
The EMH’s away mission to Arakis Prime has never been chronicled. It may have also been meant as a tribute to Frank Herbert’s Dune and its sequels, which are primarily set on the planet Arrakis.
Set a course for home. “I hope you don’t look at this as a failure—I don’t.” I have to admit, I totally teared up at the end of this episode. Hearing Kelly’s logs just tugged at the ol’ heartstrings, and Phil Morris, as usual, played it perfectly. Even toward the end when he’s obviously suffering the effects of hypoxia, he’s still trying to do his duty and learn as much as possible.
This episode is about as subtle as a nuclear explosion in its message about what Star Trek is all about, but given the importance of the message, I’m willing to forgive it. Star Trek has been incredibly influential on the space program—NASA’s employees from the 1970s onward are well-stocked with people who grew up watching one or more of the Trek shows, and Nichelle Nichols in particular leveraged her status as a Trek actor to do a ton of outreach to get more women and people of color into the space program throughout the 1970s and 1980s—so this love letter to the space program is particularly apt.
It does require a bit of backsliding with the character of Seven, though. Her recalcitrant attitude toward exploration and scientific inquiry for its own sake would’ve made more sense in the fourth or early fifth season, but really doesn’t work more than two years into her tenure on Voyager. Having said that (a) it’s not the first time Voyager has ignored character development for the sake of a story and (b) Jeri Ryan does superlative work here. In the scene on Ares IV, Ryan shows Seven’s growing understanding of the need to learn from history and the nobility of scientific inquiry and the pursuit of understanding the greater universe purely via facial expressions. More to the point, purely through facial expressions while wearing a bulky EVA suit. Major kudos to her for that silent performance.
Second-time director Robert Picardo deserves a lot of credit, too. The enthusiasm that the crew in general and Chakotay and Paris in particular have for this mission is very well played, and it’s to the credit of both Picardo and the actors he’s directing that it never bleeds over into goofiness or hysteria. Even Chakotay’s stubborn insistence on towing Ares IV isn’t overplayed.
It’s an overly sentimental episode, which is one reason why I can’t quite bring myself to give it a 10, but it’s a damn fine piece of sentiment, with truly great performances by Ryan, Morris, Robert Beltran, and Robert Duncan McNeill.
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s first public appearance since the recent apocalypse started will be next Tuesday! He will be helping inaugurate the monthly Rooftop Readings at the Ample Hills Creamery on Nevins Street in Brooklyn on Tuesday the 18th of May from 7-9pm. Keith will be joined by fellow scribes Mary Fan and Alex Shvartsman. Tickets are $10 and for that, you don’t just get three authors reading their work, you also get one free ice cream! Such a deal! Details (and lineups for future readings) here.
I was going to ask if it is silly that I teared up at the end, but Keith beat me to it and now I don’t feel quite so silly. I got a little misty-eyed starting when Seven stuck her combadge on Kelly’s remains and up until the end of the episode, when Seven whispers, “Yankees in 6.” I’m always a sucker for military funerals.
Phil Morris does great work in this, and I love the entire part of the episode that is dedicated to him and space exploration in general is truly excellent. Kelly’s dedication to continuing his work even when he knows anyone is unlikely to see it is touching, and reminded me of some of the notes and logbooks found from doomed Artic expeditions. Morris really walks the line well of conveying all the emotion of a doomed man, without ever going overboard with it, and he deserves all the kudos for that, IMO.
I do agree with KRAD that this is some backsliding for Seven, and frankly it would have been nice to give one of the other characters a chance to do something for an episode (it also would have been nice for her to have learned her lesson about not exceeding her authority from last episode…). Chakotay, in particular, seems to be brought along on this trip for no real reason other than to give Robert Beltran a chance to go over to a different set for a change. (I heard this was originally a Chakotay story, and then it was changed to Seven halfway through, although I don’t know if that’s true, it would explain why he tags along only to sit around while the action is happening.)
That said, Voyager bumping into things from the Alpha Quadrant in particular and Earth in general stopped being believable ages ago, and I am once again annoyed by it here. It was one thing when this stuff happened on TNG and DS9, which are at least set (relatively) close to earth and in/around the AQ, but c’mon, Voyager shouldn’t have ever run into anything from back home, let alone at the frequency they do.
I got a little misty-eyed just reading the recap. This was a superb celebration of the spirit of exploration that drives Star Trek (at least when its writers remember it), and yes, they could hardly have done better than Phil Morris in the role of Kelly. The science of the ellipse is silly, though, and the backstory further complicates the extremely inconsistent Trek chronology of 21st-century human spaceflight, but I can overlook those due to the episode’s strengths and its heart being in the right place.
@3,
…and the backstory further complicates the extremely inconsistent Trek chronology of 21st-century human spaceflight…
Yeah, I have to give Dayton Ward credit for trying his damnedest to weld all the canonical details of the pre-First Contact 21st Century space exploration (including the Ares mission) into a cohesive whole for TNG: Hearts and Minds.
Does Future’s End, Part II count as an away mission for the EMH? While he was certainly “away”, he didn’t have an assigned “mission”.
Hmm, maybe I need to watch this one again. I’ve seen it all of one time and in the past week. It is very much what “Star Trek” is about but I felt a bit bored watching it. I had actually assumed that John Kelly survived the trip to the 24th century and a lot of the story would be about this man displaced in time and interacting with the crew. So I was wrong there. And this is yet another instance of Voyager encountering something from Earth’s solar system/Alpha Quadrant despite the vastness of space. But whatever.
The funeral scene on the bridge was very nicely done though. Interesting venue to place a casket. Why not do it in a larger room like the cargo or shuttle bay to allow for more of the crew to witness the proceedings firsthand? I know, I know, it’s a budgetary/stylistic choice.
Phil Morris is probably best known, at least to me anyway, as Jackie Chiles on Seinfeld which was a take on O.J. Simpson trial defense attorney Johnnie Cochran. Phil’s got great comic chops.
Janeway refers to Neelix’ planet this week as Talax, which is what it was originally called, despite a few slips into “Talaxia.” As John Kelly would say, “it’s outrageous, egregious, preposterous.”
I’m with Seven in preferring to apply Borg technology to the space tornado which the Borg know all about, to avoid getting sucked into it and carried off to another dimension. And a 21st century Mars ship inside with a dead guy in it isn’t much more of a reason to send living 24th century crew in there. Anyway, they rescue the dead guy and… throw him back into space at the end.
Presumably there was a story conference to make sure there was never any suggestion at all that, say, Voyager could fly inside this thing and immediately pop out back next to Mars. It’s just for the wonder of it. Just portray me as Proxmire on this one.
Correction:
The EMH didn’t claim it was his first away mission. He said “Arakis Prime, one of my first away missions”.
On the subject of a London MLB team and the practicalities (or otherwise): there’s a couple of examples of this sort of thing going on in Rugby (pre-Covid, at least). In Rugby Union, two South African sides have been competing in the Pro 14 tournament while in Rugby League the Toronto Wolfpack played a season (I think) of UK Super League.
I know part of the deal for the Wolfpack was they covered everyone’s travel costs, but I think it was working out at least slightly well up until Covid struck. I’m not sure of the details for the Pro 14 but I’m fairly sure they had at least two seasons in the competition so one assumes it was also working out okay.
We also get a number of NFL games played in London now (next year I believe we’re due to get 4 games with assorted teams) but in those cases none of them are local, they just randomly rock up and play a game at Wembley/Twickenham/White Hart Lane!
So, with that said: the travel side of the issue isn’t really the problem. The REAL problem is finding enough people in London who want to play baseball to a high enough standard!
@7: I see what you did there! Lol
@8: Yeah, that reminded me that during the funeral scene, I thought why not just hold on to his remains to bring back to Earth assuming they make it? Kelly’s family might want John’s remains and if not, it could become part of some memorial on Earth or Mars.
wildfyrewarning & garreth: This instance of them finding something from Earth doesn’t bother me as much as the others because the ellipse has been pingponging all over the galaxy for 375 years.
Croesos: The EMH did too have a mission in “FE2” — rescuing Chakotay and Torres from the militia goons.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Athersgeo: it’s not just travel, it’s time zones. South Africa is only two time zones away from England. The U.S. is five, six, seven, and eight time zones away.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yea, I know funeral traditions change and whatever, but I always found the “jettison the body!” burial to be one of the weirder “Starships are just Navy Vessels IN SPACE!!” aspects of Trek (and other shows). Especially considering that most real-world vessels try to avoid burying people at sea if they possibly can. It was/ is done when there is no other means of preserving the body to bring it home, or when doing so is impractical (like being at war, or it being 1800). A fishing ship from my hometown once put a guy who died while they were at sea in the cargo hold (where the fish go), because the ice was enough to keep him from decomposing until they could get him home for a real burial (fun fact: this little anecdote made it into the book The Perfect Storm). Voyager has a morgue (we see it at least once in the series), so its not like they don’t have the ability to keep bodies preserved in stasis and stored properly until they get home. Like I said, I guess in the future this is cool with everyone, and it films really well, but I always find it to be a little silly, personally.
@krad yea, honestly it annoys me less in this one, because it is a really well-done episode, but I still think the overall effect of “hey! this is from home!,” which might have worked really well once or twice, is diminished by the fact that the whole series features a Hansel and Gretel-like trail of breadcrumbs from the Caretaker’s Array all the way back to Earth, and often for no good plot-related reason.
Jettisoning the body into space is somehow weirder than cremation or burial in the ground? And Kelly has been dead for centuries; I doubt his descendants (if he has any) would much care about his remains.
Boy, tough crowd today.
@@@@@ KRAD – Toronto’s not in South Africa…
@15 It isn’t that it is “weirder” per say (all death traditions are pretty weird), just that most people get some form of closure from being able to perform funeral rituals for their relatives, and for most human cultures that involves having the physical body of the deceased present. I know people who’ve lost relatives at sea, and not being able to lay their bodies to rest was a source of major angst for most of them. Again, this is the bright shiny future, so maybe they’ve evolved beyond that, but it still seems like it would be nice to give the families the choice if you possibly can.
Continuing my Phil Morris/Jackie Chiles tangent, here is a clip of all his great Seinfeld appearances (also featuring Star Trek alums Armin Shimmerman, Teri Hatcher, Brenda Strong, and Estelle Harris):
https://youtu.be/jpcEietIoxk
Around the time of Seinfeld nearing the end of its run there was speculation of potential spin-offs and I always thought one centering on Jackie Chiles was a no-brainer. Frankly I was pretty surprised no spin-offs at all came to pass.
@17 – Again, he’s been dead for centuries. If someone came to me and said they had my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s remains, they would be met with a shrug and a, “Ok?” I seriously doubt some very distant relative, who would not even have the faintest connection with him, is torn up about his disappearance centuries ago.
@19 I was referring to the practice in general, but I still think it’s weird they do it here. If someone found John Cabot bobbing around in the Bay of Islands in an ice cube, they would probably bring him back to land to be buried instead of throwing him back in the drink if they had the means to, regardless of the fact that his relatives are all pretty darn dead.
Another difference between the NFL and baseball is that football games are (roughly) once per week, while baseball teams play nearly every day during the season. (I would assume rugby is played on more like a football schedule than a baseball one, although I admit I don’t know much about the sport.) So that makes a really long travel distance between games/series a lot more difficult in baseball.
Re: storing Kelly’s body in the morgue, I don’t see it as practical for a starship stranded alone far from home, often with limited resources, to waste energy preserving a corpse and lugging that extra inert mass around. Heck, they should be recycling their dead crew’s biomass into the ship’s replicator stores and/or airponics bay. A closed ecosystem can’t afford to let biomass just sit there unused. (It sounds morbid, but it’s exactly what naturally happens to buried bodies on Earth, as they get consumed and recycled into the ecosystem. A peasant can eat of the fish that hath et of the worm that et of a king, and all that.)
As for a historically significant corpse like Kelly’s, there’s a little more incentive to preserve it, but surely it could be thoroughly documented down to the molecular level and reconstructed holographically, so any scientific or medical questions about his remains could be examined that way. As for preserving his remains for his family, he could just be cremated and the ashes stored with little waste of space or energy.
The smile on my face from this episode popped up with the thumbnail of Seven in the space suit. It just takes you back to wanting to grow up to be an astronaut. I never placed the actor’s face though. It makes you wonder if Kelly just had a kid back on Earth, who would produce a line that would eventually lead to a Starfleet cadet on the Enterprise.
The Graviton Ellipse is fine to me. Bouncing around on a Galactic subspace jetstream or being dragged along by an unstable wormhole or three, a crazy bubble of gravity popping up all over the galaxy doesn’t seem outrageous for Trek science.
This episode actually makes me look forward a little more to re-watching Enterprise. Being a brief look at earlier days of space exploration and the spirit of discovery while things are so much harder, with less lofty and fanciful technology to help you along. Too bad it wasn’t what star trek viewers were really interested in, another one of those things that was a good idea on paper but didn’t seem to work when made.
Chakotay’s choices inside the ellipse seem like something he should get court-martialed for. Voyager has leaned heavily lately on the consequences of taking risks, so I guess they needed to swing back the other way and justify why you take risks and hope things work out sometimes.
I do really enjoy the times they give Seven other outfits to be in. She looked fantastic in a starfleet uniform in Relativity, and again here in a space suit. And I know she isn’t Starfleet, hence no uniform, but if not then why is she considered a ‘senior officer’, or an officer at all? Is it just due to general Borg superiority?
Could it be in future baseball that Europe has its own leagues and its own pennant winner that plays the different champs from their respective countries? As in a true World Series?
Keith: your Articles of the Federation made the list of “Best Star Trek Novels” in this video:
chat and list about Trek novels
@19: That just speaks to your personal stance on the matter. For me, as a centuries old descendant, I think it would be very cool to be presented with the remains of an ancestor, especially one of such historical importance. I’d see if I could find some record of how he’d want his remains to be handled. If there were no such instructions, I might want to keep some in an urn or something or donate some or all of the remains to an existing space exploration museum or propose a monument to this hero with his ashes or remains interred there.
@12: Yes, but even with the pingponging all over the place, space is still vast and the odds are astronomically slim that Voyager would cross paths with the old Earth vessel in the same space at the same time.
@27/garreth: “Yes, but even with the pingponging all over the place, space is still vast and the odds are astronomically slim that Voyager would cross paths with the old Earth vessel in the same space at the same time.”
In principle, I agree. In practice, though, it’s not just Voyager; it seems to be pretty common for Starfleet ships anywhere in the galaxy to run into Earth or Earth-adjacent things at random, like the Enterprise stumbling across the Botany Bay and Trelane and Zefram Cochrane and Flint, or the Enterprise-D finding the Charybdis or a satellite full of 20th-century corpsicles. That would seem to imply that displaced Earth-related things and peoples are distributed pretty evenly throughout the entire galaxy, so the odds of any given ship encountering them repeatedly are high as a result.
Which would imply that there are a ton of civilizations out there that have never encountered the Federation yet have nonetheless encountered displaced people or artifacts from Earth. I wonder what they think of them. Well, sometimes they turn them into super-advanced techno-gods and send them back to Earth to merge with their Creator. But there might be some planet where, say, a 1972 Dodge Charger fell through a subspace vacuole and the natives started worshipping it as a divine monolith.
@28/CLB: Sure, I get that this phenomena isn’t exclusive to Voyager but it stands out to me much more than the other series, because we are much much further out from Earth/the Alpha Quadrant making these chance encounters even more of a big coincidence. And I think it also runs counter to the very premise of the series: the ship being all alone and far from home. Running into Amelia Earhart and 21st century American spacecraft, and Klingons (coming up next season), lessens the sense of isolation and unique alien-ness of the Delta Quadrant which had originally fired up my imagination when the premise of Voyager was first announced.
@29/garreth: Yeah, but Earth-duplicate planets and holodeck adventures work against TOS and TNG’s premise of exploring strange new worlds. Practicality limits how well a show can achieve its ideals. Sometimes, you need Earth-based elements to save money. Sometimes, you need them in order to tell a character-driven story about something meaningful from a character’s past or their heritage.
And it isn’t just Earth things. Data ran into his evil twin a couple times. Worf and B’Elanna encountered other Klingons. Odo’s people turned out to be the big bads of the Dominion. The EMH encountered other holograms. The Borg showed up often once Seven was on the show. It’s natural to want to tell stories about characters encountering things they have a connection to, so as to explore their past, their cultural context, or their identity.
You may recall me talking about the couple of times I pitched to Voyager, with only one of my pitches not being rejected out of hand, though it didn’t ultimately sell. That one idea that made it as far as being proposed in the writers’ room was a story where Voyager encountered a sort of alien museum preserving copies of the consciousnesses of great figures from galactic history — one of whom was Surak. So Tuvok got to meet the founder of his belief system and discovered that a lot of what he thought he knew was wrong.
“If scientific knowledge was all we were after, then the Federation would have built a fleet of probes, not starships. Exploration is about seeing things with your own eyes.”
First things first…I don’t want to think about how close we are to 2032. We’re closer to that than we are to the release of the first Abramsverse Star Trek film. Crazy.
Quite sweet. Voyager aren’t going to make any great discovery of scientific import, but they get to pay tribute to one of Earth’s first pioneers and add to his legacy. (Hey, spoiler alert: We’re only two episodes away from them being able to pass the news back home!) Seven’s cynical about it all at first but inevitably she has to come round by the end of the episode and pay her own tribute to Lieutenant Kelly.
Chakotay does nearly get his team killed by disobeying orders, but I guess it’s refreshing that someone attempts a dramatic last second escape and fails miserably. (Of course, they then do it again and succeed at the end of the episode!)
With both Paris and Chakotay off the ship, Torres is suddenly working the helm in the closing scenes. Neelix’s only on-screen appearance is during the funeral scenes, although we hear his voice over the comline early on. Slightly odd that the early computer disruptions turn out to be nothing to do with the plot of the episode!
@31/cap: “Slightly odd that the early computer disruptions turn out to be nothing to do with the plot of the episode!”
I think maybe they’re more about character, underlining Seven’s drive for efficiency to set up her dismissal of exploration as a waste of energy. Although if so, it doesn’t come together very well. Maybe the script just ran short and they needed padding.
@10:
That won’t be much of a problem. A London team would start out heavily staffed with players from elsewhere in the world. Buck Bokai, for example, is supposed to be an American from Marina Del Rey, California. If a group of investors feels that there’s enough of an audience for the sport, they’ll bankroll it. If it takes off, the home-grown talent will develop in due course.
In a “reverse” situation, we know that there’s enough interest in soccer in this country to support a league. And it’s been around long enough that it doesn’t depend solely on imported talent.
(And as for a baseball event that does have a requirement that the players be “from” the nation they’re playing for: the Netherlands team in the World Baseball Classic is drawn largely from Aruba, Curacao, etc. Great Britain does have a squad in that event; most of the players on their team are not from GB, but qualify due to British parents, grandparents, etc. The Italian team is chock full of MLB players from the Italian diaspora.)
I cry every time at the end of this episode and I cried at the end of this review.
As far as body storage goes, space limitations might be a factor. Keeping ashes as opposed to bodies might be necessary. But, this is space. Cold and vacuum are two things they have lots of easy access to.
@35/Ellynne: “But, this is space. Cold and vacuum are two things they have lots of easy access to.”
If it were, like, a separate pod being dragged behind the ship on a tether, maybe. But if you’re talking a volume within the ship itself, no. Contrary to popular belief, vacuum is an excellent insulator. A spacecraft loses heat very slowly, like coffee in a thermos (vacuum flask). The problem inside a spacecraft is not keeping things warm, but keeping them from overheating. That’s why the Space Shuttles had heat radiators inside their cargo doors and had to keep the doors constantly open in orbit to radiate excess heat. (That’s maily because they spent so much time in direct sunlight, getting heated from outside. But I’m sure a warp engine would generate a hell of a lot of waste heat inside the ship.)
So it wouldn’t be that easy to keep a compartment inside a spacecraft chilled. It would take power to cool it down, and then the heat would just be transferred to some other part of the ship, unless you could radiate it directly to space. But that would be on top of all the other waste heat you’d need to radiate to space, and the radiators and coolant systems would only have so much capacity.
@35 Maybe, but we will see in the second-to-last episode of the entire series that there are apparently empty vaults in the morgue. So it’s not like they were using them and then ran out of storage, leading them to space the remains of anyone who died after that.
@37/wildfyre: Yes, but that’s not the issue. Keeping a centuries-old body in a morgue slot for potentially something like 30-40 years seems like a bad idea when you might eventually need the space for future casualties, or the energy expenditure for other purposes. It’s about thinking long-term. A ship in Voyager‘s situation cannot indulge in inefficiencies (let’s just ignore all the holodeck episodes for the moment).
@38 Yea, I have a kind of hard time believing that is a huge concern, considering that Voyager always manages to reset button itself back to full strength. And even if it was, I don’t see that as a reason not to at least try. If the proverbial freezer loses power then they can always jettison the bodies then. Same if the space is suddenly is needed for something else. But I can’t imagine that the power drain of keeping the freezers on is enough to throw off the function of Voyager, especially this late in the series, when they have completely given up on pretending that logistics is a problem for the ship. If the sonic showers, laundry/ replicators, and holodecks are all working just fine, I don’t see any reason why the morgue wouldn’t be able to operate normally. Space-wise being able to cremate any remains would make more sense, but I understand why a spaceship might not be thrilled with the idea of burning things onboard.
Beliefs and customs change. Burial in space may well be the preference for people who live and work on Starships. It’s way to late to give Kelly’s friends and family any closure and Kelly himself might have preferred burial in space. IMO Kelly’s recordings will be much more important to any family as well as historians. His voice and thoughts over an empty coil.
Who wouldn’t want to have their remains in space? It’s a little grander than a burial at sea. In space, you have the chance to sail for millions of years across the cosmos (and maybe have your corpse reanimated by curious aliens). In the ocean, what happens now, you get caught in a big mass of floating garbage, stuck between Arby’s wrappers. Space please.
I heartily agree with the above. One Small Step loses a point or two due to the forced character regression in Seven in order for the story to work. But otherwise, this is an uplifting classic Trekkian story at its core. It’s not subtle, but it gets the job done, with some great performances. As usual, Ryan nails it, and the rest of the cast isn’t far behind.
And it’s a nice change of pace for Voyager to embrace a pure rescue story without the need to resort to some half-baked villain of the week, making it about how the story affects the characters instead. I imagine Michael Piller had good notes for this one (he was still technically a consultant, with access to the script drafts).
Wasn’t Morris also a contender for playing LaForge in 1987? He would have been the right age.
@39/wildfyre: “Space-wise being able to cremate any remains would make more sense, but I understand why a spaceship might not be thrilled with the idea of burning things onboard.”
In an enclosed incinerator compartment, why not? Heck, a matter-antimatter reactor makes a crematorium look like a deep freeze, and they have one of those running inside the ship 24/7.
@22 = Why not just scan the body into a format that the replicator can sue? He’s dead, so there’s no problem with the “replicators can’t re-create living things” rule. Then, you can have the burial in space the the mass of a corpse is going to threaten the chances of Voyager getting home. However, they have lost a number of people either through dying and not retrieving the body or leaving the ship such as Seska did. If anything, Voyager can handle the extra mass now than they could when they left DS9.
For comparison, one cubic metre of liquid hydrogen has a mass of ~70 kg or roughly 150 pounds. If mass were a problem, they’d be more concerned about overfilling the tank when looking for the strangely hard to find deuterium.
When they get home, you replicate the body to give to any surviving family or place it in a memorial to the Ares IV and wipe the replicator pattern.
On the comment of the impossibility of a Baseball team in London, consider this. In the Star Trek setting Baseball truly becomes a global pastime. In addition to the American and National Leagues, there’s European and Asian Leaves (think of a Japanese/Korean equivalent of MLB). In that context, the World Series truly is a WORLD series. There would be a playoff with the top teams globally competing at a venue selected much like the selection process for the World Cup or Olympics. Each individual league would be playing in a limited number of time zones, which would limit in season travel issues. At that point, the biggest impediment would be if a league would come from the Southern Hemisphere, where the season would take place during Winter and there might be weather issues.
Is it possible that the London Kings are based in London, Ontario? I don’t remember whether or not any of the references to them have specified that it’s the London in the U.K. (Of course, this would be most likely fudging the writers’ intention in order to go with something a bit more practical.)
I suppose we might also assume that transatlantic flight has just gotten way faster by then that it’s not that much of a stretch, and maybe there are sci-fi medicines that mitigate the effects of jetlag. :)
–Andy
@45/Charles Rosenberg: “(think of a Japanese/Korean equivalent of MLB)”
There already is major-league baseball in Japan, though it’s independent of the American leagues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Professional_Baseball
Charles Rosenberg: Except we’re talking about the early-to-mid 21st century, which in the Star Trek universe is one where baseball is a dying sport, and also when Earth has its third World War.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Regarding the London Kings … could it be London, Ontario? Or is this such a provincially Canadian suggestion it’s absolutely ludicrous?
@50 Perhaps it is a Major League scenario, where they were moved to Ontario in the declining days of baseball specifically because they’d lose money there.
Re cremation vs. freezing vs. various other methods of preserving (or not) remains:
it’s unclear what the attitude toward dealing with corpses would be, given that it is the future, the circumstances on Voyager, and the differing funerary customs of the different races that make up the crew (we know there are/were Bolians, Betazoids, Vulcans, Bajorans, an Ocampa, a Talaxian, etc. as well as Humans (including the Human/Ktarian and the Human/Klingon, who are culturally Human for most purposes in this argument)).
Attitudes can range from the most elaborate to the Klingon one of “it’s an empty shell.” (I imagine on Klingon ships the bodies of the honored dead are considered as organic waste and simply fed into the replicator cycle as raw material.)
Absent any other considerations, I think giving Kelly “to the stars” is entirely appropriate.
At least there are no Ferengi on Voyager …
@52/markovlund: It’s true that there would be a variety of attitudes on burial, but that’s why the only preference that matters for an individual is their own recorded preference, or absent that, their family’s. So 24th-century attitudes or Klingon attitudes or Bolian attitudes are utterly irrelevant to the question of how to treat the remains of 21st-century Earth native John Kelly.
As an astronaut on a long and dangerous mission, I imagine Kelly would have had his preferences on record with NASA in the event of his death, so that would be in the historical record. Although it turns out that there isn’t yet an official NASA protocol for how to deal with the body if someone dies in space:
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-if-someone-dies-in-space-2015-4
Except it turns out that a burial in space wouldn’t be permitted due to UN treaties prohibiting littering in space. Presumably the Delta Quadrant is beyond the bounds of those treaties, though.
(It’s creepy that all I had to type into the search bar was “NASA protocol” and Google immediately suggested “NASA protocol for death in space” as the top suggestion. Either I’ve done this search before, or Google is getting even nosier about my browsing activity, or a lot of people are morbidly curious about this topic.)
@52 – “the only preference that matters for an individual is their own recorded preference, or absent that, their family’s”
Actually, it would be up to the chartering organization, NASA or Starfleet or whoever. Kelly could have pit in his will a desire to be buried on Mars but there’s no way that NASA would allow a body, filled up with billions of Earth microbes, to be buried there. You can make your wishes known but your bosses back on Earth are under no obligation to follow your wishes.
@54: What are the other Mars explorers doing for a bathroom? On the Earth microbe front.
“Before Eden” by Arthur C. Clarke of course, except that that’s astronauts visiting Venus.
@55
Sterilized with extreme prejudice or freeze-dried (cf. The Martian; note the protagonist uses only his own waste).
Also, at some point the engines may be advanced enough to take about anything as reaction mass.
And this is before we’ve invented replicators …
This episode clearly diverged from its original intent, which I can only imagine would have been Seven would’ve revived John Kelly with Borg nanoprobes, they spend the bulk of the episode with several members of Voyager’s main cast geeking out over spending time with their hero, John Kelly comes up with the solution of using his old tech as a source of power when the inept members of Voyager can’t come up with squat, then at episode’s end Janeway acts like they’d love to have Kelly on board with them as they continue toward the Alpha quadrant, but because Voyager won’t add any new crewmembers, he conveniently decides to continue exploring and collecting data, and doing that in a brand new place like the Delta Quadrant is a dream come true! So he begs to be given a shuttle so he can go off on his own and collect data until the next ship finds him in a couple hundred years. who will then use the data’s he’s collected to great use.
@57 Then he’ll bump into Montgomery Scott, they’ll find Amelia Earhart, and the three of them will set up a theme park.
It gets me that with all the prior cases where Chakotay would’ve been justified in telling Seven to lose the attitude, he chooses the time when he disobeyed orders and nearly got his away team killed.
@31/@32 “Slightly odd that the early computer disruptions turn out to be nothing to do with the plot of the episode!”
“I think maybe they’re more about character, underlining Seven’s drive for efficiency to set up her dismissal of exploration as a waste of energy. Although if so, it doesn’t come together very well. Maybe the script just ran short and they needed padding.”
I don’t think it’s padding at all. I’d say Seven’s tinkering was intended as deliberate foreshadowing of Chakotay’s later choice to tractor the Ares. Each makes a high-handed decision that suits their preferences, each disobeys the wishes of their (quasi-)superiors in doing so (Seven asked Torres for permission and was refused, Chakotay asked Janeway for permission and was refused), and each gets their backside handed to them as a consequence.
Seven’s actions are of course lower-stakes than Chakotay’s: she inflicts an evening of inconvenience on the crew, but it’s far cry from Chakotay trapping himself and his colleagues in the ellipse. Still, I think watching Chakotay chew Seven out gives the later scene in which Seven returns the favour more power. It is a salutary reminder that they aren’t so different really, which then (for me) makes Seven’s 180 to Chakotay’s way of thinking, while listening to Kelly’s logs, more convincing as a narrative choice.
All that said, if the parallels don’t work, and the computer disruptions come off looking like padding, it’s probably a sign of poor writing.
I know that getting upset over bad science on Voyager is an exercise in futility, but it bugs me that an anomaly that is attracted to electromagnetic radiation would be pulled off course by dark matter. Like, they could have made it literally anything; instead, they opted to use the one substance whose only known property is that it doesn’t emit or directly interact with light.
This is a really nice episode – finally one where i felt that it was not just something that “ah, we have to do yet another episode, let’s do something”, but actually that there was a real story to tell.
Is it fair to call it a wonderfully well-grounded story if it takes place in an ellipse in space?
Because that’s part of what makes this work: It feels very real. Aside from the Laurel and Hardy level humor of Chakotay trying to escape his quarters (which I love, actually) everything else seems very real. The relationships between the 21st century characters, the little things like the baseball thread. The sets. It feels very lived in. And having a character wear an actual space suit for a change, thank you.
I would subtract half a point for when they put the old technology literally in front of the new technology and it doesn’t seem to be connected or light up or anything and like, “We’re good to go now”… felt like a dress rehearsal where the props weren’t ready. But it’s great.
Spectacular. Emotional. Beautiful. Philosophical. It hit all the notes for me. I particularly liked the art direction of the CM. It’s proof that Star Trek can sometimes get retrofuturism right. And Ryan is superb. Really, everyone is. I personally wouldn’t knock it down for being sentimental because when sentimentality is done right, it should be recognized. I would call this one of Trek’s best.