“Friendship One”
Written by Michael Taylor & Bryan Fuller
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 7, Episode 21
Production episode 267
Original air date: April 25, 2001
Stardate: 54775.4
Captain’s log. A probe called Friendship 1, which launched from Earth in the twenty-first century, arrives at a planet in the Delta Quadrant.
Cut to Voyager, an indeterminate amount of time later, where Janeway is talking with Admiral Hendricks, a former professor of hers at the Academy. He has an assignment for her: to find Friendship 1.
It takes them a bit off course, but Janeway is grateful to have an actual assignment from Starfleet. The resident space-flight nerds, Chaktoay, Paris, and Kim, are all intimately familiar with the story of Friendship 1, and they’re thrilled at the notion of retrieving a bit of history.
Buy the Book
Until the Last of Me
They eventually find it on a radiation-choked planet with no lifesigns. There’s too much radiation to use the transporter, so Chakotay leads an away team on the Delta Flyer that includes Paris, Neelix, Kim, and Carey—Torres wants to go, but the radiation is too dangerous for her and Paris’ unborn child.
The away team finds the probe and also a bunch of missile silos, though the missiles themselves are unfired. Paris, Neelix, and Carey are ambushed by humanoids who are covered in lesions. They take the trio hostage and demand restitution from Voyager for the damage done by Friendship 1. They constructed an antimatter generator based on the technology they found on the probe, and that generator exploded, resulting in the nuclear winter they now suffer under.
Two aliens invade the Flyer, but Chakotay and Kim are able to fight back. One escapes, but the other is stunned. Chakotay returns to Voyager, bringing the alien—whose name is Otrin—to sickbay. The EMH examines him and determines that they are so suffused with radiation that their lifesigns are masked by being in the atmosphere.
The leader of the aliens, Verin, demands that Voyager evacuate all of them to another planet. Tuvok and Seven determine that it would take three years for Voyager to get the entire population to the new world. Tuvok suggests an away team extract the hostages, but Janeway doesn’t want to reinforce the notion that humans are assholes.
Otrin explains that his people assumed Friendship 1 to be a prelude to an invasion: provide a world with dangerous technology that they would misuse and then destroy themselves, thus leaving them open for attack. Janeway tries to explain that the notion is absurd, but while Otrin is willing to listen to reason—especially after the EMH, with help from Seven’s nanoprobes, is able to reverse Otrin’s radiation poisoning—but Verin is not.
On the surface, Paris does his best to treat Carey for a concussion given that they won’t let him use his medikit. He talks with a woman named Brin, who is pregnant. Paris tries to bond with her over his own impending fatherhood, and also says that the best doctor in the quadrant is on their ship.
Janeway offers an alternative to Verin: to cure them, and try to fix the atmosphere, just as they’re curing Otrin. In the short term, she will beam down food and medical supplies in exchange for one hostage. Verin agrees to beam Carey back, but shoots him just as he transports. The EMH declares him dead.
Janeway claims to agree to evacuate Verin’s people, but says she needs an hour. She then sends Tuvok and the EMH down to perform the extraction, as after Carey was murdered, her interest in not being perceived poorly is pretty much gone.
Brin starts to have contractions. Paris is able to help her give birth, and also revive the stillborn baby. When Tuvok and the EMH successfully exfiltrate the team, Paris begs Brin to let him bring the baby back to Voyager. She agrees.
The same cure that worked on Otrin works on the baby. Janeway wants to beam the baby down with Otrin and some medical supplies and go on their way, but Paris and Neelix convince her to stay and help them. Janeway is reluctant to help murderers, but she is persuaded eventually: Carey’s murder was the act of one person, and the entire planet is suffering so badly. And if Voyager still helps them without being coerced, it might finally change their perception of humanity.
Otrin has come up with a way to get rid of the radiation in the atmosphere, but they have to use photon torpedoes to deliver it. Voyager does so, though they have to go into the atmosphere to do it, for reasons the script doesn’t adequately explain. Verin, who has gone completely ’round the bend, orders the missiles to be fired on Voyager, thinking that this is an attack. But Brin pulls a gun on Verin and orders him to stop. Voyager saved her child, and she won’t let Verin hurt them. The rest of the people are on her side, and Verin is livid that they’ve betrayed him after he’s kept them alive this long.
But then the sky clears and they all see the sun for the first time.
Voyager retrieves Friendship 1 and continues homeward, having left the planet in much better shape. Chakotay and Janeway mourn Carey’s death over a Voyager-in-a-bottle he was constructing—he’d done all of it save for one nacelle.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Friendship 1’s design is an entertaining kitbash of two other bits of twenty-first-century Trek tech: the nacelles look like that of the Phoenix, Zefram Cochrane’s warp ship from First Contact, and the head looks like the Nomad probe from the original series’ “The Changeling.”
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway has to be convinced to still help the aliens after they killed Carey. She also sensibly keeps her options open, investigating the possibility of evacuating the aliens to another planet and also keeping a rescue in her hip pocket.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok seems to be totally incompetent during the exfiltration, easily being captured, but it turns out that he was “captured” by the EMH in disguise, and the two of them rescue the away team with little difficulty.
Half and half. Torres has to be convinced by Paris not to go on an away mission to a radiation-choked planet while pregnant. This also indirectly leads to her deputy chief engineer being killed.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix, in his role as ship’s ambassador, tries to reason with Verin, telling him about the war Talax fought against the Haakonians, and pretending that he thinks humans are arrogant, but still generally okay. This fails rather spectacularly, with Verin tartly informing Neelix that he shouldn’t compare his life to Verin’s.
Resistance is futile. When Otrin asks Seven about her nanoprobes, she says that she is unique as the only person on board who has them, having apparently forgotten that Icheb exists.
Do it.
“From the first time you spoke up in my classroom, I knew you’d go far.”
“A little farther than I expected, Professor.”
–Hendricks and Janeway having a little bonding moment.
Welcome aboard. The various aliens are played by Ken Land (Verin), John Prosky (Otrin), Bari Hochwald (Brin), and Ashley Edner (Yun). Hochwald previously appeared as Dr. Lense in DS9’s “Explorers” and will be in Enterprise’s “Marauders” as E’lis. Prosky previously played a Bolian in DS9’s “For the Cause.” Edner will play an alien woman Chekov chats up in Star Trek Beyond.
Peter Dennis plays Admiral Hendricks. He previously played Sir Isaac Newton in “Death Wish.”
And finally recurring regular Josh Clark makes his final appearance as Carey.
Trivial matters: Friendship 1 was launched after first contact with the Vulcans, which was chronicled in First Contact.
Neelix tells Varin about the Metreon Cascade that destroyed his homeworld and killed his family, as chronicled in “Jetrel.”
Janeway tells Hendricks about the Voth that they met in “Distant Origin.” Hendricks also mentions their first contact with the Vaadwaur (“Dragon’s Teeth“) and the Kobali (“Ashes to Ashes“).
When Friendship 1 arrives, part of its message is a bit from Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” The away team also finds an abandoned toy on the planet that plays the opening of the Vivaldi piece.
Carey’s death is either the twenty-second or twenty-third confirmed fatality on Voyager, depending on how many people died in “Equinox, Part II,” plus however many might have died in “The Killing Game, Part II.” Ignoring everything since and going back to the notion that there were 155 people on board at the end of “Caretaker” (the 152 Janeway cited in “The 37’s,” plus the departed Seska, the deceased Durst, and the EMH, whom Janeway would not have counted at that point), that would make the current complement at no more than 139 (again, depending on “The Killing Game”). While they’ve lost at least twenty-two, they’ve also added five Equinox crew and Icheb.
Set a course for home. “We, the people of Earth, greet you in the spirit of peace and humility.” This could have been a strong episode; this could’ve been a good episode. Instead, it’s an episode that just makes me incredibly angry.
The big thing that irks me is the spectacularly gratuitous and awful killing of Carey. Having already botched the character by setting him up as a possible foil for Torres, the show proceeded to forget all about him once he was cleared of being the traitor on board in “State of Flux,” reduced to only appearing in flashbacks after that. Then, to bring him back like this, as if he’s been there all along, and to then just kill him off like that is simply horrible. It’s even worse now because (a) Voyager is in touch with the Alpha Quadrant, which means that Carey has been in regular contact with his wife and children, and (b) the show is ending in four episodes and getting the ship home. If the show had any history or notion of dealing with consequences of actions, and of actually caring about the welfare of anyone not in the opening credits, this could be played for pathos, but it totally isn’t. Carey will go back to being so completely forgotten that when Admiral Janeway goes back in time in “Endgame,” it’s so very important to save Seven, yet she can’t be arsed to go back a few weeks earlier and save Carey.
I’ll get to that more when we discuss “Endgame” in a couple weeks, but in the meantime, the episode is trying so desperately to make Carey’s death meaningful, but it’s too little, too late. And it just is so damn gratuitous.
I hated this episode in 2001, and I hate it more twenty years later, because I’ve learned that show-runner Kenneth Biller apparently specifically told scripters Michael Taylor and Bryan Fuller that it was okay to kill off a recurring character in this one. First off, Voyager has so few recurring characters that this seems silly. The others they considered were Wildman and Tal, and I really wish in some ways they had gone with Wildman, because then, goddammit, there would have been consequences, as Wildman’s daughter Naomi is one of the few characters who’s actually had character development, and her mother’s death might have had an impact beyond the scope of this episode.
On top of that, the death is just so badly handled. We’ve seen twenty-fourth-century medicine perform all kinds of things, yet the EMH just stands there with his thumb up his ass when Carey is beamed aboard and declares him dead. Paris made more of an effort in this episode to save Brin’s child, yet no heroic efforts are made to even try to save Carey. (We won’t even get into the fact that Seven’s nanoprobes—which are being used right here in this episode to cure the aliens—aren’t used to try to revive him the way they were for Neelix in “Mortal Coil.”)
The rest of the episode is just maddeningly dumb. The aliens—whom Taylor and Fuller couldn’t even summon up the energy to provide a name for—have convinced themselves that this probe launched centuries ago was a prelude to an invasion that Voyager is just getting around to now. I’m not saying it isn’t realistic for people to be that delusional, but realistic doesn’t always make for good drama, and it’s hard to feel sorry for people who go to that much trouble to blame other people for their own screwups. It’s even harder to feel sorry for them when they go around killing hostages.
In the end, compassion does win the day, and Janeway does help them despite Verin’s actions, which is as it should be. I like the scene where Paris and Neelix advocate for the people on the surface, who shouldn’t be held responsible for the depraved actions of one murderer. But it’s not enough to save this incredibly maddening episode.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido contributed to each of the first two volumes of The Subterranean Blue Grotto Essays on Batman ’66, published by Crazy 8 Press. For the season one book, entitled ZLONK! ZOK! ZOWIE!, he wrote about “Fine Feathered Finks”/”The Penguin’s a Jinx,” the debut of Burgess Meredith’s interpretation of the Penguin. His piece for the season two book, BIFF! BAM! EEE-YOW!, is also Penguin-related, as he writes about “Hizzoner the Penguin”/”Dizzoner the Penguin.” He plans to contribute to the season three book, which should be out next year, though he probably won’t do another Penguin episode.
Yea, I always thought that killing off Carey just seemed pointless and cruel. I did like that they at least did something to reflect on the fact that he died, and the ship in the bottle scene was nice (although it would have been nicer to see that he had a more futuristic hobby that building ships in bottles, something that has fallen out of popularity now- although I know Trek for whatever reason loves them). I also liked that they got their first “mission” from Starfleet here. I desperately wish that these final episodes did something more to make it seem like the series was about to end, but that isn’t really this episode’s fault, specifically.
The idea of a well-intended plan gone horribly awry is an interesting one, but the episode seems too unfocused to really do it justice. I don’t hate it the way some people do, but it is a solid “meh” from me.
You know, with the 10th anniversary of its cancellation this past year, I’ve been re-watching Stargate Universe for the first time in quite a while.
For all its flaws at the time (and still even now), at least Wright and Cooper understood the value and need to build the recurring cast among the Icarus Base survivors. And when it worked right, you felt the inevitable losses.
So, it’s got me looking at episodes of VOY like this again and just marveling at how completely and utterly they failed on that front.
I desperately wish that these final episodes did something more to make it seem like the series was about to end, but that isn’t really this episode’s fault, specifically.
VOY’s final Season fell victim to the same problem as TNG’s last year. Everybody was clearly out of ideas and running on fumes. But unlike TNG, they weren’t boxed in by only being able to resolve so many things in order to leave enough gas in the tank for the Movie.
Hell, while even DS9’s final Season wasn’t running on all cylinders, at least they nailed the sense that end was nigh for the War and the series.
Killing Carey somehow felt like a deliberate kick in the teeth for long-term fans, almost penalising the people who’d been watching from the beginning.
It was essentially:
“Look! This guy! You thought we’d forgotten about this guy, didn’t you? Well we hadn’t, honest. You judged us for forgetting about him, but we didn’t. Oh, whoops, we appear to have killed him for no reason. What a shame. Now shut up or we might accidentally bring back and then kill off all the other forgotten early-season characters between now and Endgame. Just because we can.”
Yeah, really, all they had to do was have Carey show up a couple times of year, give him some character and this would have been a much stronger episode. Instead, this.
Also: I recognize the previews aren’t the fault of the people who actually made the show, and I’ve resisted linking to play the “can you believe how bad this trailer is?” game. But this episode isn’t any good anyway and yet somehow they also failed to make a good trailer out of an episode that had plenty of action. The trailer is built around the idea that, hey, the survivors of a nuclear fallout might look pretty scary, so you should tune in and see what our makeup people come up with.
No, seriously, that’s it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPi0Daycj90
Maybe the preview person was on a tight clock, or some of the footage was still being worked on by the time the trailer was due or… something… but this is absurd. At least they didn’t spoil anything but yeesh.
@2 You are absolutely right. I feel like I know more about Morn than I do about Carey, or really almost any character on Voyager that isn’t in the opening credits.
Rick: whoever it was at Paramount (or hired by Paramount) to do the Voyager trailers was uproariously horrible at their job. Seriously, Voyager had the absolute worst trailers…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I agree on the slapdash handling of Carey’s death. Even the very first time I saw this one, it stood out to me how half-hearted it was, just zap, he’s instantly dead, no attempts to perform even the kind of basic revival attempts any competent doctor would perform today, let alone remembering how far Dr. Crusher went to try to save Tasha Yar in “Skin of Evil.” It was incredibly lazy. At least, if they wanted to kill him off so decisively, they should’ve had the alien weapon disintegrate him or something.
Otherwise, I think I found it an okay episode. A bit of a reach — kind of literally — that an Earth probe was able to make it all the way to the DQ, even with 200 years or more to do it in. It’s implausible that it would have that kind of range. But better here than 30 or 40,000 light years further back, at least. But a decent idea, to show an early human exploration effort having disastrous unintended consequences and forcing the crew to deal with them. Better in concept than execution, though.
One notable detail is that the episode establishes that the familiar arrowhead insignia used by Starfleet originated (on its side) as the emblem of the United Earth Space Probe Agency in the late 21st century. A nail in the coffin of the old belief that the arrowhead originated as the Enterprise insignia and was later adopted by all of Starfleet to “honor” that vessel (which seems like quite a slight against all the others). There were people who complained about Kelvin and Discovery using the arrowhead for all of Starfleet decades before TOS, but they overlooked that “Friendship One” had established its use 200 years earlier, and also that Enterprise (the show) used a tiny version of it as the collar pin for enlisted personnel’s uniforms. (A few years back, a TOS memo was unearthed proving that the arrowhead was meant to be used by all capital ships and that the distinct insignias of the Constellation and Exeter were costuming errors.)
Wow, that trailer reeks of the reality TV/game show revelation craze. What will they look like?! Who will Seven give the rose to?! Will Harry be voted off Voyager?!
God, I hated the Aughts.
Not much to add that won’t just reiterate what other people are saying. I didn’t see this episode for the first time until about a year ago or so so I was actually surprised that Carey even came back one last time. Therefore, I thought it was needlessly cruel to bring him back so close to the series ending and him reuniting with his family just to kill him off. If the writers really wanted to make it an impactful death, then Carey should have been seeded throughout the series. And then a proper emotional funeral by the crew to honor their fallen officer. I mean with only 150 people or so, this is basically a small village where everyone should know each other pretty intimately and every life lost is a devastating blow to that community.
And no one thought to use Seven’s magic nanoprobes to reanimate Carey back to life?
Plus, this just highlights again how “Endgame” is an insult to everyone aboard who died who isn’t Seven.
Now that it has been mentioned in a review, I can say what I’ve been holding on to for the past several episodes, and that is the finale is what cemented the idea in my mind that Voyager became “The Seven of Nine Power Hour.” Janeways entire reason for going back in time and getting a crew home early was the fact that Seven died. No one else, and certainly not Carey. Just. Seven. It was utterly maddening.
@10/garreth: “And no one thought to use Seven’s magic nanoprobes to reanimate Carey back to life?”
As I’ve mentioned before, the intent in “Mortal Coil” was clearly that Neelix’s reaction to his nanoprobe resurrection was supposed to be so traumatic that they realized it had been a mistake to do it and never tried it again. After all, you don’t introduce a game-changing tech like that without providing some excuse for why it won’t be used again. Although it’s unconvincing, because Neelix was perfectly fine the next time we saw him, without any lingering trauma.
But the hell of it is, they shouldn’t even have needed nanoprobes. We’ve seen plenty of cases in TNG and DS9 when people with worse injuries than Carey’s were restored from the brink of death with 24th-century medical science. But they didn’t even attempt normal revival methods. That’s what’s so stupid and slapdash about it, that he’s just got this little burn mark on his uniform and the Doctor barely glances at him before writing him off as dead. He didn’t even try to save him.
Christopher: that rationalization regarding the zombie nanoprobe revival is utter nonsense, and I said so when you raised the point in the “Mutual Coil” rewatch. That’s a lovely conversation with Carey’s wife….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
You kind of knew Carey’s death was coming just by the fact he was being featured so heavily in the episode. That doesn’t bode well for background-types. Too many lines, must be about to bite it.
I always thought this was basically the writers fixing their mistake, they thought all this time that they had killed off Carey instead of Hogan, so now they have to finish the job.
It seemed to be one of those “this is why the Prime Directive is so right!” stories, but it doesn’t make a good case. The PD is supposed to be so obvious I guess that the aliens themselves know to blame Earth for not having practiced it? Just seems way over the top.
I kind of hate this episode for multiple reasons:
1. I don’t think that at any point in human history would someone be so stupid as to put the secrets of anti-matter in a non-directional matter to random strangers. Anymore than its likely to put in the next space probe how to build nuclear weapons.
2. The people on this planet are the ones responsible for mishandling it in the first place and frankly, I think Starfleet should have the attitude it was their own damned fault.
3. The final bit about exploration not being worth even one life is the most Un-Star Trek sentiment you can get. Risk is our business and death is a part of it for the greater glory.
@13/krad: Yes, I acknowledge that it was unconvincing, but it was still the intent of “Mortal Coil.” The makers of the show never had any intention of the “cure” being reused, since it would take away all suspense if your characters had a magic cure for death. You can argue that “Mortal Coil” should not have been made in the first place (or at least that its method of resurrection be more clearly established as unrepeatable); that’s a perfectly valid position. But demanding that its bad idea be kept around permanently seems like getting it backward.
@14/karey: “It seemed to be one of those “this is why the Prime Directive is so right!” stories, but it doesn’t make a good case. The PD is supposed to be so obvious I guess that the aliens themselves know to blame Earth for not having practiced it? Just seems way over the top.”
Not at all. The point of the PD is as a safeguard against the kind of cultural imperialism and well-intentioned but destructive “Civilising Mission” meddling that Western civilization inflicted on other parts of the world like India and the Middle East in the age of empires. The victims of that meddling certainly knew who was to blame for it and had every right to be angry at them. That’s exactly why the PD is needed — to remind us not to give other cultures a reason to be mad at us for harming them.
@15/C.T. Phipps: “The final bit about exploration not being worth even one life is the most Un-Star Trek sentiment you can get. Risk is our business and death is a part of it for the greater glory.”
That refers to voluntarily, consensually risking your own life. It would be monstrous to apply the same sentiment to risking other people’s lives.
@15/16:
I guess you could also argue that in this instance, Janeway’s sentiment makes sense in the context of the episode and the close of the series.
VOY’s endured and made it far enough home to re-establish contact and finally have an official mission from SFC again for the first time since the original Badlands mission. It should be a milk run and represent a return to normalcy Janeway and company haven’t had in 7 years (and probably thought they’d never have again).
Instead, it gets one of the show’s oldest recurring characters killed and in a completely pointless manner. And we’ve seen how bitter and guilt-ridden Janeway has been about stranding the crew (ex. “Night”). It’s the old guilt re-surfacing for the first time in quite a while.
As many problems as this episode has, it’s compounded by the lack of Friendship One being mentioned in Enterprise. Using Friendship One would have made an interesting plot hook for a couple of reasons.
1) Friendship One would explain why the Vulcans had kept Humanity on a short leash for almost a century. Yes, we’re an inquisitive species (which the Vulcans find somewhat illogical), but Friendship One also had information on how to utilize Antimatter (which was obviously misused in this episode). I don’t think that late 21st to early 22nd century Earth was quite ready to actually meet other intelligent life.
2) Following the course of Friendship One could have been the mission of Enterprise. Apparently Earth had contact with the probe for decades so Enterprise would have been the first crewed true deep space probe for Humanity. Season one essentially would have been a shakedown cruise, following a reasonably charted course, with the crew learning how to operate in non familiar environments and interact with other species.
@CharlesRosenberg
1. I think the problem with that is that it falls into the issue of the show that Archer is supposed to be right not wrong. One of the most persistent issues of Season One and Two is the fact that Archer’s hostility to the Vulcans is meant to be sympathetic to the Vulcans and a response to THEIR racism. As we both know, plenty of fans felt the opposite and that Archer instead came off as the bigot being very patiently dealt with by people doing their best not to get mad.
Pulaski and Data writ large.
2. Honestly, I feel like this is something that makes humanity look so stupid it should have been retconned as something done by civilians. A bunch of would be explorers who sent it down a wormhole in defiance of the Prime Directive.
@18/Charles Rosenburg: You can’t really blame this episode for what Enterprise didn’t do as that prequel series was produced after Voyager. That’s entirely on the writers of Enterprise to integrate into their stories historical elements that the prior series introduced. It’s like saying the TNG episode “First Contact” was made worse because its description of first contact with the Klingons was not what was portrayed on Enterprise when the later produced series showed their version of that first contact.
@20,
It’s like saying the TNG episode “First Contact” was made worse because its description of first contact with the Klingons was not what was portrayed on Enterprise when the later produced series showed their version of that first contact.
My head canon has always been that “First Contact” was how that phase of UFP/Klingon history originally unfolded before “Broken Bow” and the Temporal Cold War’s repercussions (i.e. the Suliban pursuit of Klaang).
Honestly, given how much I disliked the foray’s into series continuity that Enterprise did do, I’m actually pretty happy that they didn’t try to tie into this one. Prophets only know what kind of nonsense we would have been subjected to.
@19/C.T. Phipps: I think you mistakenly credited me for Charles Rosenberg’s comment #18.
@20/garreth: Strictly speaking, Enterprise does not contradict TNG: “First Contact,” because in that episode, Picard only says that a botched first contact with the Klingons led to generations of conflict. He never specified it was Earth’s first contact; we just assume that because we’re used to Trek being human-centric by default. In my novels, I interpreted Picard’s reference as being to Vulcan‘s first contact with the Klingons — which is more or less consistent with Burnham’s later description of that event in “The Vulcan Hello.”
“If you think murdering one of my crewmen is going to make me more receptive to your demands, you’re mistaken.”
This is the second of the two episodes I’d avoided since first watching. And like “Thirty Days”, I found it had things to enjoy, but it still had that one distasteful element that made me avoid it in the first place. There’s definitely a story to be told about Voyager having to deal with the mistakes of their pre-Federation, pre-Prime Directive ancestors, and it does demonstrate the dangers of just handing out technology to people who might not know how to deal with it…although given the events of “Flesh and Blood”, it seems that’s a lesson Voyager haven’t learnt themselves! And it’s got excellent characterisation of Paris, who really has become one of the most compassionate people on board by this point: Maybe it wasn’t worth stranding over a hundred people in the Delta Quadrant for, as Chakotay claimed in “Shattered”, but this trip has definitely made him a better person.
But yeah. Here we have the Voyager equivalent of “Skin of Evil”, and I say that as someone who actually quite likes “Skin of Evil”, but this one really doesn’t know how to follow through on the moment. Because they bring back Joe Carey, not seen in the present day since Season 1, just so they can give him a pointless, brutal, redshirt death. Maybe they should be commended for making it someone we care about rather than killing Ensign Never Seen Before, but it just increases the utter frustration, as his death comes down to a catalogue of bad decisions. Janeway badly misjudges how far she can push things, and he pays the price. And of course, in order for him to die, everyone has to forget that they’re in Star Trek. Not only do they seem to wait several seconds to beam him up so Verin’s got time to grab a weapon, and never mind Seven finding the cure to death in “Mortal Coil” and promptly forgetting it again, remember how Chakotay said in “Initiations” that he could be revived if he got to Sickbay within two minutes of getting shot? Apparently no-one else did, because the Doctor doesn’t even try to save him, just waves a tricorder over him and says “He’s dead, Kathryn.”
And the aftermath fails to properly pay it off, alternating between too extreme and not extreme enough a reaction. Just to complete her bad day, Janeway brands an entire race “murderers” for the actions of their leader and prepares to abandon thousands of people to a long lingering death out of revenge. Even her excuse that they don’t want her help doesn’t work, because she’s met Otrin and he definitely does. It shouldn’t take Paris and Neelix to tell her that her attitude stinks. But at the same time, this means helping Verin along with the 5499 innocent bystanders and rewarding him for murder. It’s not even clear whether he’s deposed or not: The others point their guns at him to stop him attacking Voyager, but they could well have put them down afterwards and said “Okay, what do we do now, sir?” (And does Voyager actually provide them with treatment for the radiation damage they’ve already suffered, or just casually warp away after just making sure they don’t get any worse, probably?) A scene of Janeway and Chakotay looking sad over a model starship doesn’t really feel like enough.
Starfleet lost contact with Friendship One 130 years ago which is, what, during Robert April’s command of the Enterprise? That seems remarkably recent given when it was launched! Torres say she hasn’t been on an away mission in months: Aside from “Workforce”, which wasn’t an official away mission, we haven’t seen her off the ship since she found out she was pregnant. (Before, it was probably “Flesh and Blood”.)
Judging from the last few episodes, it seems as though the show is moving towards the Ridiculously Short Pre-Credits Syndrome that would go on to blight Enterprise, with less than a minute of actual story before the first commercial break.
As soon as I saw him, I told my partner… “If they kill Carey, I’m going to riot.”
I legit almost stopped watching after he died. I was absolutely going to stop, but there were only a few episodes left.
Bastages, each and every one of them.
@Christopher
Sorry, edited.
As for humanity’s first conflict with the Klingons, I point out that Archer’s attempts to make friends with the Klingons repeatedly just tick them off more and more. Delivering the dead body of one of their agents to one of the council was also apparently an insult.
@26/C.T. Phipps: The fact remains, though, that Picard never specified whose first contact with the Klingons it was, so we should resist assuming that he was talking about humans. Especially since “The Vulcan Hello” put Vulcan’s first contact with Klingons 135 years before “Broken Bow.” Vulcans are founding members of the Federation too, so surely that should count as the first relevant contact.
(Although Trek gives Zefram Cochrane credit for inventing warp drive even though Vulcans and Andorians had it centuries earlier. Humans must look incredibly racist to other Federation members…)
@23/CLB: Yes, the first contact with the Klingons as depicted in “Broken Bow” didn’t contradict anything Picard stated in “First Contact” but it still came as a disappointment to me with that depiction. Picard’s description of that disastrous encounter conjured an image in my mind of a Federation ship coming upon another Klingon ship or colony where diplomatic overtures went very wrong and which could have been prevented if an available opportunity for covert observation had been taken advantage of. It would therefore reinforce the point Picard was trying to make to Durken, the leader of the world he was forced to make premature first contact with in said episode. The Klingon element in “Broken Bow” could have been saved for a later episode in Enterprise and as something of a big event. As it is, they felt shoehorned into the whole Suliban/temporal cold war plot of the series premiere and included just because Klingons are so familiar and popular to the general audience.
I had read somewhere that the reason they killed Carey is that the writers thought he was already dead and was amazed to discover he wasn’t i don’t know if anyone else can confirm that but it’s kinda funny if true.
Carey’s abrupt death doesn’t bother me as much, partly because I never cared that much about the character to begin with. I do agree, however, that killing him off in this fashion feels both awkward and questionable. Why bring back a secondary character who hasn’t had due screentime in years just to kill him off? If Biller’s idea was to raise the overall stakes as we approach the finale, it didn’t work. With DS9, we’d spent years following Damar, which made his demise in the finale appropriately tragic. Same with Ro’s Maquis defection on TNG. If Fuller and Taylor had instead killed someone a little more central, like say Chakotay or Kim, it might have had more of an impact. Killing off a main cast member would have made this more effective.
As for the main plot, Friendship One reminds me a bit of the upcoming Enterprise episode, Terra Nova. I wouldn’t be surprised if this episode was Braga’s inspiration for that one. It follows many of the same beats, with the captain struggling to reach common ground with the unwelcoming aliens.
@30/Eduardo: “I wouldn’t be surprised if this episode was Braga’s inspiration for that one.”
It didn’t have to be intentional. When you write that many different things, it’s inevitable that you end up reusing some patterns and ideas from time to time, sometimes without even consciously realizing it. I’ve had that happen to me (I recently realized I’d inadvertently created two extremely similar characters in two separate works), and I’m not nearly as busy as a TV showrunner.
@31/Christopher: Indeed, that can happen. Plus, at 800 episodes, it’d be pretty hard for Trek to not end up repeating itself in some shape and form.
@26/C.T.: When did Archer deliver the dead body of a Klingon to their council? If you’re talking about what happened in the pilot, the Klingon that Archer brought home was alive and (mostly) well, and while the council didn’t exactly thank him, they didn’t exactly reject the idea either.
Otherwise, I agree that nothing in “Broken Bow” contradicts “First Contact”: The first human to see a Klingon shot him, which seems pretty disastrous to me, and while it didn’t lead to open warfare or anything, humans and Klingons remain on bad terms for the rest of the series. CLB’s suggestion that Picard was referring to first contact between Vulcans and Klingons is equally valid.
The premise of this episode had sort of appeared in an episode of the UK SF series Space: 1999 and was handled, I reckon, rather better than here which given that Space: 1999 was about the moon travelling around the galaxy at interstellar speed after an explosion says something. Here Earth has sent out a probe with a drive that is fatal to life when in operation and which was meant to shut down if it encountered any. Of course that has failed and when the moon encounters it, it is being followed by a fleet of alien ships who would like a chat with the somewhat reckless species that launched it. The episode’s title, as it happens, is ‘Voyager’s Return’.
If I saw this episode originally, I sure didn’t have any memory of it, but I finally got around to watching it last night. It does remind me a lot of Enterprise‘s “Terra Nova” (which, incidentally, is the last episode of Enterprise I watched during the series’ original run when I gave up out of sheer boredom). Again, in the tiny sliver of space through which Voyager is traveling home, Voyager encounters another Alpha Quadrant artifact. Space is just littered with goodies from the Alpha Quadrant, it seems. Lieutenant Carey’s death is out of nowhere (the guy hasn’t been seen in years aside from flashback and time travel episodes), the Doctor makes no attempt at reviving him, and he will end up missing out on Admiral Janeway’s time travel “rescue” of the crew by a matter of weeks. Tough break, pal.
One small nitpick. Neelix talks about how his planet was destroyed by a similar disaster to the one he encounters here, but it wasn’t the planet (Talax) that was destroyed, but the moon (Rinax).
Just so folks know, we’re postponing Monday’s Voyager Rewatch to Tuesday in honor of Indigenous People’s Day (and the episode in question, “Natural Law,” has a certain appropriateness for IP Day). Look for it Tuesday at 1pm.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@35: I can forgive Neelix that discrepancy in the story because the exact details don’t matter. He and his friends are being held hostage in a stressful situation and trying to get his captors to relate to him. He’s not going to be fact-checked so it sounds more significant and more sympathetic to say that it was his planet that was destroyed versus a moon.
@37 Plus exaggerating his experiences is a very Neelix thing to do.
garreth and wilfyrewarning are both correct: Neelix was trying to elicit sympathy from Verin. Under those circumstances, it’s best to not complicate the story overmuch…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It seems to me that the distinction between a planet and moon is a nitpick that only matters to astronomers. If a moon is large enough to have an atmosphere and livable gravity, then it would certainly qualify as a planet if not for the technicality of orbiting another planetary body instead of a star. So it seems like an incredibly trivial detail.
Although the attitudes of the moon natives in last week’s Lower Decks would argue that they see it otherwise…
@27/CLB: My headcanon (which may have been contradicted by ENTERPRISE or other shows that I didn’t pay much attention to) is that, at least through the 21st Century, Vulcan FTL ships were powered by quantum singularity drives like those of their Romulan cousins. So Cochrane *did* invent the warp drive – a distinct and possibly “fascinating” method to the Vulcans. Presumably after First Contact, the Vulcans studied Cochrane’s warp technology and added improvements and refinements, and by the 23rd Century warp drive was the standard across all Federation worlds’ ships.
It’s the sloppyness and lazy writing that infuriates me with Voyager, they bring Carey back to red shirt him and as Krad says act as if he’s been around all the time despite the fact we as viewers have seen Him about as regularly as we have seen Halley’s Comet, why didn’t they just insert a line of dialogue saying “what’s it like not to be running the Engineering night shift for a change” it would give us an “oh that’s where he’s been” moment it would be quite believable if he had Been given that role to stop him and Tores clashing,
The rest is a by the numbers episode that would not have been out of place in uneven season one of TNG. poor stuff and almost like everyone was losing interest.
I preferred this episode when it was called “Voyager’s Return” on Space: 1999.
@41/Tony Tower: “My headcanon (which may have been contradicted by ENTERPRISE or other shows that I didn’t pay much attention to) is that, at least through the 21st Century, Vulcan FTL ships were powered by quantum singularity drives like those of their Romulan cousins. So Cochrane *did* invent the warp drive – a distinct and possibly “fascinating” method to the Vulcans.”
I must have missed this back in 2021. This doesn’t work, because ships with quantum singularity power are still using warp drives; they just get their power for the drives from, presumably, the energy release of matter falling into a singularity, rather than from matter-antimatter annihilation. It’s only a difference in the power source, not the thing it powers.
I mean, “warp” is just a generic term for the topological distortion of spacetime. Any propulsion system that distorts spacetime to move a ship at effective superluminal speed is a warp drive, regardless of whether it’s powered by annihilation, a singularity, or a lot of people shoveling coal really fast. It’s the most basic, generic way to achieve FTL, the equivalent of inventing the wheel. And matter-antimatter is the most natural and obvious power source for it, which is why Roddenberry’s science advisors told him it was the only thing that would do the job. It’s enormously easier to create and contain antimatter than it is to create and contain a stable quantum singularity.
@44/CLB: “A lot of people shoveling coal really fast” puts a really fun picture in my head.
I imagine EMH Mark 1s …