“The Omega Directive”
Written by Jimmy Diggs & Steve J. Kay and Lisa Klink
Directed by Victor Lobl
Season 4, Episode 21
Production episode 189
Original air date: April 15, 1998
Stardate: 51781.2
This past weekend, Star Trek novelist Dave Galanter, whose work included the Voyager novel Battle Lines, as well as the recent Discovery novel Dead Endless, lost his battle with cancer at the age of 51. He was a valued colleague and a dear friend, and he will be sorely missed. This week’s rewatches and reviews are dedicated to his memory.
Captain’s log. Seven comes out of her regeneration cycle, dictates a log entry, and then goes to the mess hall to fetch Kim for a sensor diagnostic, finishing his kal-toh game for him, to Kim’s annoyance and Tuvok’s surprise. En route to the diagnostic, Voyager falls out of warp.
The ship has basically come to a full stop and won’t allow anyone save Janeway access to anything, with a big Greek letter omega dominating all the monitor screens. Janeway tells everyone to sit tight and not speak of this, and then locks herself in the ready room.
Janeway unseals the computer and is informed that “the omega phenomenon” has been detected a bit over a light-year away, and so the Omega Directive is in place.
Without saying why, Janeway orders multiphasic shielding put around the warp core. Chakotay passes this order to Torres, who says that the rumor going around the ship is that the Omega Directive has been engaged. This gets Seven’s attention.
Janeway then summons Seven to her ready room. Janeway assumes that, since the Borg have assimilated starship captains (Jean-Luc Picard for sure, and possibly some others at Wolf 359), she also knows of the directive, which Seven confirms. Janeway can either read Seven in on her mission or confine her to the cargo bay. Seven suggests the latter, because she does not wish to destroy the omega molecule that has been detected, as required by the directive.
The Borg has encountered the omega molecule—an incredibly powerful but destructive force—several times, and almost was able to stabilize for a fraction of a second, which is better than anyone else has managed. Janeway, however, stands by her orders, especially since the Borg learning how to stabilize the molecule, even briefly, resulted in the loss of twenty-nine ships and six hundred thousand drones. Janeway thinks the destructive risk is too great. Seven accedes to Janeway’s order, as even getting to observe an omega molecule would mean a great deal to Seven. Apparently the Borg think of the omega molecule as the closest nature has come to perfection.
Janeway then goes to sickbay, ordering the EMH to whip up some arithrazine. The EMH is unwilling, because arithrazine needs to be monitored when administered, but Janeway can’t read the doctor in on the mission, and orders him to make it anyhow, even though it violates Starfleet protocols. She also has Tuvok and Kim modifying a torpedo to have a yield of fifty isotons, which would be enough to destroy a small planet.
Seven analyzes the sensor data, and it turns out to be worse than they realized: there are hundreds of unstable omega molecules. It’s going to take more than two of them to deal with it. Janeway refuses.
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Janeway has Kim and Tuvok increase the torpedo yield to eighty isotons, and then informs Chakotay that she and Seven will be leaving in a shuttle to perform their classified mission. If they come back, all is well. If they don’t, there will be a massive subspace explosion, and if that happens, Chakotay should take Voyager as far away from the area as possible, and to just keep booking it to the Alpha Quadrant.
Chakotay pleads with Janeway to at least read the senior staff in—they can help her more readily if they know what they’re doing.
Janeway relents and reads in the senior staff. The omega molecule was discovered by a twenty-third-century scientist named Ketteract, and the resultant explosion when he tried and failed to stabilize it caused tremendous destruction in both space and subspace. The Omega Directive was then implemented, and it applies to all Starfleet vessels, and knowledge is limited to captains and admirals. Were they home, Janeway’s response to Voyager detecting an omega molecule would be to summon a special Starfleet team to dispose of it. Since they’re stuck in the Delta Quadrant, they have to do it themselves.
Voyager traces the omega molecules to a Class-M moon, where the local civilization has apparently been experimenting with omega molecules. The explosion on the surface is as devastating as the footage Janeway showed of Ketteract’s facility. Despite the radiation, Kim says a team can transport to the surface, and Janeway and Tuvok lead a security team down.
Meanwhile on Voyager, Seven is supervising the construction of a module that will contain the omega molecules so they can be neutralized—and if they can’t be neutralized, they can be destroyed, which was the original plan before they realized how many molecules there were.
The alien scientists are sent up to Voyager for treatment. Seven talks to the head scientist in sickbay, and learns that they attempted a method of stabilizing the molecule that neither the Borg nor Ketteract thought of, and she thinks she can adapt it to work for them. She then pleads with Chakotay to convince Janeway to allow her to try this.
Janeway and Tuvok set up the molecules to be beamed to the containment unit. The captain then returns to the ship, and refuses Seven’s request. The risk is too great—if these molecules explode the way every other omega molecule has, it’ll destroy subspace in half the Delta Quadrant, making warp travel damn near impossible.
Unfortunately, they’re on the clock now, as the moon is an outpost for another world that is pissed that some ship has come in and invaded their space. Chakotay tries to convince the ships that their intentions are peaceful, but given that Voyager stole their scientific research, they don’t really buy it.
Seven’s neutralizing program isn’t working fast enough—and, worse, the omega molecules start to reset to their unstable forms. So they go with Plan B: eject the containment unit into space and blow it up.
After they do that, and run like hell from the aliens, Seven goes to the da Vinci workshop on the holodeck, staring at the crucifix on Leonardo’s wall. Seeing the omega molecules up close was as close as the ex-Borg is ever likely to come to a religious experience.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Omega molecules are unstable and powerful enough to cause an explosion that bleeds into subspace, damaging both permanently.
There’s coffee in that nebula! It takes Janeway half the episode to realize that trying to implement the Omega Directive all by herself, even with Seven’s help, isn’t especially practical.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok and Kim have apparently continued to play kal-toh against each other, and Kim has actually approached the possibility of beating Tuvok occasionally.
Forever an ensign. When Seven mentions the sensor diagnostic she and Kim are supposed to perform, she states that she is designated three hours and twenty minutes for the actual diagnostic, plus “an additional seventeen minutes for Ensign Kim’s usual conversational digressions.” Kim later proves her right by indulging in multiple conversational digressions with Tuvok while modifying a torpedo.
Resistance is futile. When constructing the containment unit, Seven gives the crewmembers assigned to assist her Borg designations (“three of ten” and so on). Kim complains about this to no avail.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is not happy about giving Janeway arithrazine without knowing why, nor is he happy with Seven wishing to interrogate the alien before he’s recovered. Not a happy-making episode for him…
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Seven goes to the re-creation of medieval Italy to try to figure out religion. When Leonardo complains, she deactivates him.
Do it.
“Want to know what I think?”
“No.”
“I think there’s a type-6 protostar out there, and the captain’s planning on detonating it and opening up a wormhole to the Alpha Quadrant. In theory, it’s possible. And because she doesn’t want to get our hopes up, she’s not telling anybody.”
“Then I wouldn’t suggest getting your hopes up.”
–Kim gossiping and ignoring Tuvok’s very pointed replies.
Welcome aboard. The only guest is Jeff Austin, who plays the alien scientist. He previously played a Bolian security guard on the Defiant in DS9’s “The Adversary.”
Trivial matters: The story of the discovery of the omega molecule, the destruction caused by Dr. Ketteract’s experiments, and the creation of the titular directive was told in the Section 31 novel Cloak by S.D. Perry. Versions of it also were told in the video game Star Trek: Legacy and the comic book Star Trek: Year Four: The Enterprise Experiment by D.C. Fontana, Derek Chester, & Gordon Purcell.
The EMH recommends that Seven read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens for educational purposes. That story was also performed by Data in TNG’s “Devil’s Due,” and TNG/Picard star Sir Patrick Stewart did one-person shows performing the entire story throughout the 1990s.
When discussing scientists who worked on scientific projects used for destructive purpose, Janeway mentions Albert Einstein in reference to the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II, as well as Carol Marcus in reference to Project: Genesis from The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock.
Kim and Tuvok play kal-toh, the Vulcan logic game that was first seen in “Alter Ego.” When Kim is gossiping to a disinterested Tuvok, one of his speculations is that they’re chasing Species 8472 from the “Scorpion” two-parter and “Prey.”
This is the first mention of arithrazine and of theta radiation, which arithrazine is used to treat. Theta radiation will again be seen in relation to the Malon in “Night,” “Extreme Risk,” and “Juggernaut.”
Torres is only in one scene, as Roxann Dawson went into labor during the filming of this episode. She doesn’t appear in either of the next two episodes, either, not returning from her maternity leave until “Demon.”
Set a course for home. “The final frontier has some boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed.” This is one of those episodes that probably seemed like a great idea in the writers room. “So we’ve got the Prime Directive, right? So what if we have, wait for it—the Omega Directive! It’s, like, the ultimate directive!”
The problem is that what they came up with doesn’t entirely work. Okay, fine, there’s this molecule that’s so incredibly dangerous that it has to be neutralized when its found to the exclusion of all else. First of all, why is it confined only to captains and admirals? There are smaller ships that are commanded by people of lower rank (for example, the Prometheus in DS9’s “Second Skin,” not to mention the Defiant for the entirety of DS9’s third season). I mean, what if Commander Sisko took the Defiant into the Gamma Quadrant and the Omega Directive went off. Would he even be informed what to do? For that matter, what if it had been Janeway who died when they fell down the Caretaker’s rabbit hole and Lt. Commander Cavit survived and was in charge of the ship. Would he have known what to do when they reached this part of space?
And then there’s the fact that Starfleet—which has contingencies for, y’know, everything—has no contingency for a ship that is very far from home triggering the Omega Directive. I mean, Voyager is hardly the first ship to find itself thousands of light-years from home unexpectedly (cf. “By Any Other Name,” “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” “Where No One Has Gone Before,” “Q Who“), not to mention the fact that we know that Starfleet sometimes sends ships on long-term missions that will take them very very very very far from Federation space (cf. “The Icarus Factor,” “The Sound of Her Voice“). So why doesn’t Janeway have such a contingency?
Also I have a serious jurisdictional issue here. The omega molecule is so dangerous that Starfleet captains have standing orders to invade a sovereign nation and confiscate their property. That’s how wars start. I can understand the directive having full force and effect in the Federation, and even possibly in the territory of people who are allied with the Federation. (Though I’d love to see them try this nonsense with the Klingons…) But there’s absolutely no way it could possibly work in space not controlled by the Federation, because it would require a full-on invasion of a military force into sovereign territory, and there’s nothing that really justifies that. Worse, the alien scientist specifically says to Seven that his people are in dire straits and they need the omega molecule as an energy source. Usually, in dramatic fiction, the powerful people who show up and steal your stuff without caring that you need it to save your people are the villains of the piece.
I like the character development of Seven. The notion that the Borg worship perfection is actually in character, since they were established from the git-go as consumers of technology that they use to improve themselves. This is the closest to emotional that Seven has gotten when she wasn’t brainwashed into thinking she was a chanteuse. I also love the way the crew speculates and gossips about it. The Tuvok-Kim scene when they’re modifying the torpedo is a classic.
I don’t like that Janeway and Chakotay are still allowing Seven to be insubordinate—Seven speaks to Janeway in an imperious manner that she wouldn’t tolerate from anyone else under her command, and the whole notion of giving the members of her engineering team Borg designations is obscene. But Chakotay just laughs it off when Kim complains.
This is a classic case of a good idea that is utterly botched in execution.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s 2021 output will start with the thriller Animal, a novel written with Dr. Munish K. Batra; continue with Feat of Clay, the second book in his urban fantasy series following 2019’s A Furnace Sealed; and also include the short story “Unguarded” in the anthology Horns and Halos, edited by Danielle Ackley-McPhail & John L. French; with more still to be announced.
I remember this episode, but now that I read the summary, I can’t help thinking of this scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2KD2O9lSuA&t=0s&list=PL6uqS78XBHAelSxOw5fUTnNWiAt9Jcf7L&index=12 when I read of the “Omega” alert flashing on all the screens.
Well, that’s a great way to keep something a secret and ensure there isn’t a whole bunch of people now curious about what the weird symbol on the screen could possibly mean (especially since the message on the screen is literally just the Greek letter that the particle is named after). In addition to needing a Legal representative onboard, Starfleet might want to consider having an information security officer. Seriously, why wouldn’t the symbol just show up in say, Janeway’s ready room and her screen by her chair? Or just have the computer say “Urgent: Captain to the ready room” and show her once she is there. What possible reason is there for something this top-secret to be plastered on every single screen on the bridge? Part of keeping classified information classified is ensuring that people don’t even know there *is* something that is classified if they don’t have to.
I largely agree with KRAD’s assessment of this episode: good idea, and some good moments (Seven’s character development is good, and Chakotay telling Harry to shut up and row when he complained about Seven’s management style always cracks me up), but it’s trying too hard for an episode that won’t ever matter again. Straight-up invading and messing with another society by force because they might do something dangerous is weirdly out of character for the Federation writ large, and in particular you have to wonder why Janeway cares so much about it happening in some random corner of the Delta Quadrant. I mean, by all means- go there and try to explain to the people why it is a bad idea (and maybe offer them some help in finding another means of energy), but it would hardly matter to the Federation if this random system they are unlikely to ever visit is unable to conduct FTL travel through it in the future. And Janeway was willing to let a civilization blow itself into oblivion in “Time and Away” (before she realized that *she* was the cause of it in the first place and fixed it) so clearly senient life being eradicated on a planet isn’t enough by itself to merit interference, either. This is an episode that would have worked a lot better over on TNG, where they are inside the bounds of the Federation, or even on DS9, where they are outside it, but still extend a heavy influence.
Another way to tackle this might have been to show Janeway really torn between following it (at great risk to herself and her crew, not to mention the possibility that they aren’t able to use warp drive and really are stuck there forever), or having to disobey a direct order based on nothing but her own assessment of the situation and consideration of Voyager’s unusual circumstances. That way we could have seen her make a tough choice with real consequences either way, instead of just plowing blindly in because orders are orders. Have her do it, by all means, but let us see that this isn’t just black-and-white for her. Setting it up so that Voyager stood a good chance of not being able to go to warp again would have been a good way to ratchet up the tension and give the story some real stakes.
That said, I liked the idea that the Borg had something they saw as being the pinnacle of perfection. I imagine if you asked, say, a bee to pick a symbol of perfection, it might pick a hexagon, and given the insect society-Borg collective parallels, I always thought it was neat.
If you’re going to pick something as your idea of perfection, why pick something as unstable as the omega particle?
@3:
If you’re going to pick something as your idea of perfection, why pick something as unstable as the omega particle?
I always liked how David Mack reconciled that paradox in his Destiny Trilogy and why the Borg were so obsessed with Omega.
Anyway, I’ll echo the sentiments of KRAD and the others: Interesting premise, but less-than-stellar execution.
“This past weekend, Star Trek novelist Dave Galanter […] lost his battle with cancer at the age of 51.”
That’s very sad news. My condolences to his friends and family. He was my favourite among the modern Star Trek writers. “The Leader” was the best story in the Constellations anthology, and Troublesome Minds remains one of my favourite TOS novels ever.
This episode is ill-conceived at best, but I also found it thoughtlessly Federation-centric. Captain Janeway recounts the discovery of the Omega Molecule by a Federation scientist. But the Borg, and this Delta Quadrant scientist, had already discovered it. Did no other Alpha Quadrant civilization ever discover the molecule? Why always have a human make the big discovery?
But the worse part, to my mind, is that the episode’s “solution” seems utterly irrational. The explosion of a single unstable Omega Molecule has a devastating effect in both real and subspace, and the amount Voyager has on hand would shut down subspace across the whole quadrant, but dropping a suped-up photon torpedo on the molecule chains is not only completely safe, it solves the problem? For that matter, Voyager can prepare a single torpedo with enough explosive force to destroy a small planet? Why weren’t they shooting those at the Borg? Never mind that the story asserts that Federation principles all get suspended under these specific circumstances, the approach taken to “resolve” the problem makes no sense from beginning to end and the operation of the Omega Molecule itself is so poorly defined it should just be named the Maguffin Molecule.
And if the whole procedure is top secret, why sound the alarm on every screen of the ship, with an Omega? The computer knows where the Captain is, so why not just inform her privately? The story needs more stabilizing than the Molecules. On the plus side, it would work pretty well for Mystery Science Theater 3000:
>JANEWAY: For the duration of this mission, the Prime Directive has been rescinded. (grim) Let’s get this over with.
TOM: You mean Starfleet Captains can just rescind the Prime Directive when they feel like it?
MIKE: We owe some big apologies to Kirk and Picard.
Ah. I read Destiny when it was published but forgot that part of it. (Googles) Holy crap. Destiny was twelve years ago. Time flies.
I also didn’t like how this Omega Directive seemingly is at odds with the Prime Directive. Voyager and its leader, Janeway, are the aggressors here. She is merely passing through in territory that she does not govern so what right does she have to impose Federation ideals when she’s not in Federation space?
The whole thing with the ship freezing up by design when it detects the Omega Particle is also ridiculous. What if Voyager is in the middle of a battle? That’s certainly bad timing.
I did like the idea of a super powerful particle though and how it’s top secret and must be neutralized as well as how meaningful it is to the Borg and Seven in particular. It nicely sets up another conflict between her and Janeway.
On a more superficial note, I don’t like Janeway’s hair here. I like it down in general but in this instance it appears flat and lifeless. In later appearances it’ll achieve its true perfection when it looks fuller and poofier like Worf’s! Haha.
RIP to your friend, Krad.
The Borg has encountered the omega molecule—an incredibly powerful but destructive force—several times, and almost was able to stabilize for a fraction of a second, which is better than anyone else has managed.
It seems like Voyager can’t get its story straight about what the Borg are. Seven describes it as follows: “On one occasion, we were able to create a single Omega molecule. We kept it stable for one trillionth of a nanosecond before it destabilised. We didn’t have enough boronite ore left to synthesise more, but the knowledge we gained allowed us to refine our theories.”
In other words, it sure sounds like the Borg were conducting scientific exploration and investigation… which, per Scorpion, is exactly what they can’t do, hence making them helpless against 8472. (“What they can’t assimilate, they can’t understand . . . But we don’t assimilate, we investigate, and in this case that’s given us an edge.”)
I think this conception is better, because the “they can’t investigate” thing never made sense in the first place– worst case scenario, they’ve surely assimilated somebody who knew how to investigate, so therefore they should have that knowledge too and then they can modify their own nanoprobes without Voyager’s help. But it seems like an odd departure when it was a major two-parter and the launching point for Seven being on the show in the first place.
I actually like this episode a whole lot in spite of its flaws, especially since Chakotay successfully reasoned with the Captain and changed her mind about working alone. A huge breath of fresh air for me after watching “Scropion”
I disagree with Keith — I don’t think even the idea was good. I’m sick of stories driven by “Hey, let’s come up with excuses for the Federation to compromise its ideals,” and I have a lifelong contempt for any story driven by the concept that There Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Suppressing knowledge is anathema to everything the Federation stands for. Classifying “dangerous” knowledge is pure authoritarianism, an excuse to exert control, nothing more.
And it is objectively stupid to think that the way to protect against a threat is to keep people ignorant of it. No. Ignorance of a threat makes people more likely to run afoul of it, not less. If you don’t want people to risk destroying subspace by experimenting with omega molecules, then you absolutely need to inform them of the risk BEFORE they try experimenting with them! If they don’t know of the danger, then that makes them far, far more likely to trigger it by accident! Come on, that’s screamingly obvious. If there’s a vial of nitroglycerine on the shelf in a chem lab, you absolutely do want to label it “WARNING, HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE, DO NOT HANDLE.” Keeping it unlabeled and forbidding anyone to advertise the fact that it’s explosive would be insanely, idiotically counterproductive. And the same goes for omega molecules. The threat should be loudly advertised, not concealed. The whole premise of this episode is cosmically stupid.
I’m also not crazy about the idea of the Borg worshipping omega. I don’t like seeing the Borg anthropomorphized, given anything resembling a culture. They’re not a civilization, they’re a single individual hive consciousness.
In 2006, there was an attempt made to produce a Star Trek animated web series called Final Frontier, set in a 26th century where the Federation had been fragmented by an accident that detonated omega molecules across much of known space, rendering warp travel impossible in many regions. The show was abandoned when the Bad Robot movies came along, but when I first heard about “the Burn” in Discovery‘s current season, I wondered if they’d resurrected that idea. I still suspect they were influenced by it, even if they altered the mechanism of the catastrophe.
Christopher: We agree more than you think. I wasn’t clear: the idea of an Omega Directive in general is one with potential. Having it be what it was — suppressing knowledge — was how it screwed the pooch. I think there’s a good story to be told about a general “omega directive,” but this wasn’t it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
For that matter, what if it had been Janeway who died when they fell down the Caretaker’s rabbit hole and Lt. Commander Cavit survived and was in charge of the ship. Would he have known what to do when they reached this part of space?
I’m no Starfleet information policy wonk, but it would make sense to me for the computer to have a set of protocols if someone below the rank of captain is put in permanent command (and thus receive the brevet rank of captain) that would execute on the official transfer of the command codes, and include a briefing on “stuff we only let captains know” like the Omega Protocols.
@6/David Ainsworth: “TOM: You mean Starfleet Captains can just rescind the Prime Directive when they feel like it?
MIKE: We owe some big apologies to Kirk and Picard.”
That’s actually the way it’s supposed to work — captains have the discretion to determine whether and how the Prime Directive applies. In deep space, they’re often the highest Federation authorities around, so making those calls is part of their duty, not a dereliction of it as people mistakenly assume.
The TOS and TNG writers’ bibles both specified that the PD could be suspended when vital Federation interests were at stake, e.g. in wartime. The TNG bible also said it could be suspended when the survival of the ship’s crew was at stake, sort of a retroactive codification of Kirk’s actions in “A Taste of Armageddon,” “The Apple,” “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” etc., although later TNG took it in a stricter direction.
@12/krad: I dunno, I’m still skeptical of the idea of a directive that must be obeyed to the exclusion of all others. Even the Prime Directive is meant to have exceptions, as I said. The only way it might work is the way wildfyrewarning suggested — Janeway debates with herself whether to obey the directive at all, because it doesn’t apply in Voyager‘s exceptional circumstances, and she ought to be better than just blindly obeying orders that make no sense in context.
@8 – “She is merely passing through in territory that she does not govern so what right does she have to impose Federation ideals when she’s not in Federation space?
Because that’s what Starfleet always does when they feel like it. Starfleet knows best and everyone else in the galaxy is either evil, amoral or stupid.
Oh for an episode like Errand of Mercy where the Federation and the Klingons are shown that they’re both wrong and for the same reasons. The Federation is always right is tiresome and smacks of imperialism. Give me a Starfleet that’s out there to learn new things and meet people as equals instead of telling them what they’re doing wrong.
Talk about timing. When Seven said they stabilized the molecule for “one trillionth of a nanosecond,” I scoffed and thought there’s no way to measure such an infinitesimal amount of time. But wouldn’t you know it, just this October scientists claimed they measured a “zeptosecond,” which is exactly the time stated here: one trillionth of a nanosecond. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/54631056
@14,
You know, I keep bringing up Charles Sonnenburg and SF Debris throughout the Re-watch and usually its for comedic purposes.
But Chuck did this extended analysis of the Prime Directive a couple of years back as a companion piece of his review of ENT’s “Dear Doctor”.
You reminded me of this specific excerpt, of how the PD changed from TOS to TNG:
“The Prime Directive has good intentions in place: it’s to protect other peoples from us, and to protect us from being embroiled in affairs that shouldn’t concern us. Like many aspects of [TOS], it was something latched onto as a sign of enlightenment of the Federation. But, as so often happens, support lead to devotion and devotion lead to worship, and something went from ‘good idea’ to ‘inflexible dogma.'”
See, now this is the kind of subject matter that could theoretically make a Section 31 or, as I would prefer, a Starfleet Intelligence series compelling to watch — the ethical questions concerning the control of information and dangerous materials in a free society and how that affects other societies. But I fear it will be a lot more melodrama, shooting, and the Emperor hissing at people. Sigh.
Anyway, though it’s not a favorite, I do like this episode. In particular, I like the new angle it gives the Borg and how its cult-like worship of “perfection” could be taken down to the subatomic level.
I don’t know the particulars of what Diggs and Kay originally pitched, but the way it comes across, The Omega Directive feels like a reverse-engineered concept, one that started with the premise of doing a story where only Janeway has access to a top secret assignment that no one else is privy to.
The problem, of course, was coming up with a plausible scenario to make that story work. While there is a potentially good premise involving Omega particles worth a story somewhere, it makes little sense to build a threat that only Captains and Admirals have access to. It might make for some interesting conflict between captain and crew, but it really makes little sense in the long run.
And I’m usually wary of stories that keep characters in the dark when their superiors invoke the “need to know” excuse. The easy way out for those with ranking privileges to not disclose important and relevant info. It’s as credible as when governments censor public info in the name of ‘national security’. A more clever show like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. can build its whole premise around that notion, making for some interesting stories about the pitfalls of maintaining such needless secrecy. But it’s never been a good fit for Star Trek, a universe that thrives on characters collaborating together on solving a common problem. A story like this might work if this were a show about Tal Shiar, Section 31 or Obsidian Order operatives. But here? There is no reason for Janeway to keep this secret from Chakotay and crew, which makes for the early acts an exercise in waiting for the inevitable reveal and resolution.
But at least we get some meaty Seven/Janeway material out of it, which is never a bad thing. It isn’t a total loss, plus Seven having as close it gets to a spiritual/religious experience. Ryan sells it, as usual.
With regards to Seven’s insubordinate attitude- do we have an idea of what Seven’s legal status vis-a-vis Starfleet is at this point? Unlike the Maquis crew, she doesn’t seem to have adopted a Starfleet Uniform* or rank- she seems to be something like a civilian specialist. This doesn’t excuse insubordination, per se- insofar as she’s permanently living and working on the ship, she’s under Janeway’s command- but I do wonder where she fits in on the org charts.
*The metatextual reasons for which we need not venture into again here.
@19
Considering how often Starfleet officers are taken over by non-corporeal entities, influenced by weird Space Drugs, unknowingly affected by telepathy, had their bodies switched, ect., you would think that there would be a rule *against* only one person knowing something, even if it was the captain. Heck, even just things like depression, mental illness, or (as the Orville pointed out), extreme drunkenness could allow a captain to do things that put the ship in danger without letting anyone know why. If you were a first officer or security chief, you would spend half you time wondering if your Captain was 1. incapacitated in some way, 2. actually *was* on a top secret mission, or 3. just a weirdo if they started giving strange orders.
@11: It sounds like an well-built Omega Bomb can wipe out most of the galaxy (just the one?) I’m pretty happy with as few people in the universe as possible knowing about that. Especially if it fits in the “Delta Flyer” on autopilot at warp continuity-get-behind-me, on a timer.
As for the Prime Directive: My take is that it circumscribes what you’re allowed to do to affect other cultures, but mainly about cultures who have less technology than you, and sharing it with them and disrupting their economy and society. (Are there stories about the Prime Directive and Federation concepts… oh, “A Piece of the Action”.) If the other culture has an Omega Bomb, even if they don’t realise that that’s what it is, then the technological advantage is on their side.
On the other hand, if you are a survivor rescued from a planet-disfiguring crater, arguing that your world still needs to use this technology will probably inspire the vaporized atoms of your next-door neighbor and their family to coalesce just enough to be breathed in by you and cause choking, from their sheer annoyance.
Afterthought: Maybe Starfleet officers are like clownfish. They all learn the captains-only knowledge about several things like this but are mentally conditioned to not remember it, until they accidentally end up in command and/or the computer sets off the alarm. And… if the ship isn’t at yellow or red alert when omega is detected, is that one of the conditions for the unexpected halt? Maybe long range scanners aren’t in use then anyway. And maybe things that destabilise omega include flying past it at warp speed, or rebooting your workstation. One more reason to dread Windows Update firing off unexpectedly.
@21:
If you were a first officer or security chief, you would spend half you time wondering if your Captain was 1. incapacitated in some way, 2. actually *was* on a top secret mission, or 3. just a weirdo if they started giving strange orders.
Hmmm, I’m sending a Lower Decks episode in that premise. I mean, they followed up on some other unlikely stuff, and honestly this whole thing is so silly it’s probably better for a comedy vehicle anyway. Captain Freeman vs. Omega, gogogo!
@22/Robert Carnegie: ” It sounds like an well-built Omega Bomb can wipe out most of the galaxy (just the one?) I’m pretty happy with as few people in the universe as possible knowing about that.”
That’s not the way physics works. You don’t just stumble across such things through trial and error. The knowledge of the possibility would arise from pure mathematics, from extrapolations of known physical law. You’d have to have the theory before you could actually conduct the experiment.
And all physics is interconnected. You couldn’t prevent people from knowing nuclear weapons are possible without suppressing all knowledge of atomic physics and relativity, and that would be unconscionably evil and oppressive if it were even feasible. So it’s ridiculous to suggest suppressing the knowledge. You can’t prevent people from knowing it’s possible, nor should you. All you can do is prevent them from acting on the knowledge by actually building nuclear weapons.
The Prime Directive is not solely about technology. It’s about not forcing your beliefs, politics, or customs on other cultures. The Prime Directive kept Starfleet from intervening in the Klingon Civil War until they knew it was a Romulan plot, and similarly kept them from intervening in the Circle coup on Bajor until they learned it was a Cardassian plot. It was also Janeway’s reason for not helping the androids in “Prototype” develop the ability to reproduce. These are advanced powers, sometimes older than the Federation. But the PD still applies, because technological advantage is not the only way to be coercive toward another culture.
I loved this episode, though I agree it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny on the issues. I can see why the Omega Directive would be so all encompassing and I thought that the case was well made. Someone screwing up with Omega especially the amount in this episode, would actually not just cripple, but annihilate starfaring civilization as the Federation knows it permanently and prevent it ever being reestablished. Frankly that is something that the Federation would consider being worth going to war over. While I doubt that the Klingons would ever go deep enough into particle physics to make it, I can imagine the Romulans doing it…I can also imagine them stealing the Federation’s data and thinking, “nahh I don’t think we’ll go that route.”
Now the question of establishing diplomacy is the problem. Voyager did provide aid to the scientists caught in the explosion so there was some basis. The desperate straits of this civilization is something that Starfleet should absolutely chime in on. There must be quite a few advanced technologies between societal collapse and using the an unstable god molecule to gain unlimited power.
Maybe it’s just Jeri Ryan’s acting, but “For 3.2 seconds, I… saw perfection.” was just wonderful. Though I don’t necessarily assign that as the Borg having religious reverence for Omega. The Borg have their same driven assimilate at all costs attitude towards Omega. But Seven is a human now. All of her former Borg directives and mental functionings are filtered through her new human individual lens, including our tendencies to anthropomorphize or deify things. The Borg see Omega as a tool to bring them closer to perfection, but Seven alone in her human mind, sees Omega itself as perfection, and seeing it with her own eyes for that brief moment, had an emotional reaction a small reconnection to that part of herself that was once Borg, and also a singular moment where she witnessed something she felt was greater than herself. It was a beautiful moment as was the denouement.
“I won’t risk half the quadrant to satisfy our curiosity. It’s dangerous and it’s irresponsible.”
This one starts off as an intriguing mystery, with Janeway being secretive and the rest of the crew being shut out of the truth about what’s going on, but we get the basic facts pretty quickly, although it’s a while later before we get the full story of how dangerous the Omega Directive is. Given how dogmatic Janeway is about destroying Omega, it’s surprising how little doubt there is that she’s right. Most of the crew just go along with their orders. Seven objects but not too strongly. The danger is ultimately presented as being too great to even attempt to make Omega safe.
The aliens who created Omega are mostly ciphers but there must have been a really difficult conversation with them after Voyager blows up their research and then arranges for them to be sent home: It probably needed more than just a log entry to cover it! The Borg having an obsession with Omega feels like another thing introduced for one episode and then forgotten about. To be fair, the Borg don’t seem to have done a lot of research beyond assimilating people who already knew about Omega: Maybe they were just copying what someone else did.
Chakotay expresses a rare negative opinion of Starfleet Command when referring to them as duty-crazed bureaucrats. Seven indicates that the Leonardo hologram is somehow still around (did the move to France not work out?), although we don’t see him. (Ensign Wildman also gets a namecheck.) Seven explicitly attends a senior staff meeting in this episode: She does have specialist knowledge of Omega but oddly doesn’t say much. Torres isn’t there: Did they ever bother to fill her in? Seven refers to kal-toh as “Vulcan kal-toh”: Does that mean there’s another type?
I know I liked this episode well enough when I last saw it. I liked the idea of an Omega molecule, some substance so dangerous that its mere existence constitutes a crisis. And it’s a good bit of character building for Seven, which automatically gives the episode a bonus for me.
But remembering it now through this rewatch, I do realize that it’s a very poorly done idea. Voyager just jaunting in and stealing stuff from people they’ve never met is just wrong. Solving the problem by blowing it up with a super-torpedo makes it seem like a pretty minor problem after all if that’s all it takes. And yeah, restricting the knowledge of Omega to captain rank and above is dumb for all the reasons previously stated.
Also, maybe I’m not remembering some line that makes it make sense, but how the hell does Omega work anyway? It’s a molecule that can only exist in nature for such tiny spans of time that the feat of stabilizing it for a zeptosecond is considered the best anyone has done. But then how does anyone detect it if it’s so fleeting? How does Voyager know there are hundreds of molecules? Shouldn’t they have destabilized already by the time you detect them? And if they are destined to explode and destroy reality then how does anyone intend to harness energy from them? And how can Voyager hold on to these molecules in their containment unit in order to dissipate them if they only exist for miniscule time periods? Like I said I must be missing something because this is self-contradictory.
I really liked the concept behind this episode, as it reminded me of Judgment Day, by L. Sprague de Camp, a story that revolves around the idea of knowledge so dangerous it will inevitably destroy the world if it is ever revealed. To be honest, my main problem with the execution was that they didn’t make the Omega Particle seem dangerous enough. If they had made the Omega Particle far more dangerous, as well as more volatile, I think it would have made the reaction of both Janeway and Starfleet far more understandable. The Prime Directive seems far less important when a single civilization is risking the destruction of hundreds, possibly thousands of others by tinkering with forces they cannot control.
I wonder how the Federation would have reacted if a species who destroyed their homeworld with protomatter came across Regula One and blew it up. Take out an entire planet with one prototype torpedo? Sounds pretty dangerous to me.
@25: That’s an awfully categorical statement given the thousands of years of ‘huh, that’s funny’s that’ve resulted in new ideas in all sorts of areas, physics included. X-rays, f’rexample, are famously an accidental discovery.
I thought the whole exercise was rather overdone. From the super-seekrit Omega on the computer screens to the super-duper torpedo thing. They transported the molecules into a containment chamber; since the transporter essentially breaks down matter into energy and reassembles it later, the molecules can be easily taken care of by the simple expedient of only half-way transporting them.
Also, Captain is a rank, but its also a position held by the ship’s commander. A Lt Commander, for instance, would be called Captain when in command of a ship. The Omega Directive, as stupid at it is, might apply to anyone in command. Which only makes Janeway being the only one on the ship to know it even stupider.
@26/Mr. D: “Someone screwing up with Omega especially the amount in this episode, would actually not just cripple, but annihilate starfaring civilization as the Federation knows it permanently and prevent it ever being reestablished. Frankly that is something that the Federation would consider being worth going to war over.”
As is always the case, war is the worst possible way of cleaning up a problem that could have been avoided in the first place with a little intelligence. If you don’t want them to do that, then tell them ahead of time about the risk, so they’ll know better than to try. After all, any civilization that causes an Omega accident will cripple themselves along with anyone else, so of course they wouldn’t want to risk doing that.
If it’s something that you can set off by accident, as Kettaract did, then keeping the risk secret is the dumbest, most counterproductive possible way to deal with it. If there’s a huge hole in the ground and you don’t want people to fall into it, then you post clear, prominent signs around it warning them that it’s there. Keeping it secret would just guarantee that people would fall in.
The only kind of government that would a) think it’s a good idea to keep such a danger secret and then b) go to war to clean up the consequences they only created by keeping it secret is an authoritarian government that values its own power and control more than it values people’s lives, rights, and safety. It’s obscene to suggest that the Federation would operate this way.
You make an excellent point about Seven, though. The Borg have no culture or sentiment, but she’s a human trying to filter her Borg memories through her individual perspective.
@28/erictheread: The idea, I think, is that if Omega molecules could be stabilized, if someone could make a breakthrough that allows them to exist for longer than a zillionth of a second, then they could be used as a sustainable power source. But nobody’s ever managed to make them stable. It’s like nuclear fusion. We’ve been trying for 60 or 70 years to make it practical as a power source but have never managed to sustain a reaction for more than a few moments. But we keep trying because of the value it will have if and when we ever stabilize it. (Although the difference from Omega is that, contrary to what a lot of fiction claims, a fusion reactor can’t explode if it fails.)
@31/foamy: There is a big difference between discovering something by accident and inventing something by accident. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t just slap a few random parts together and go “Oops, I built an atom bomb.” The physicists of the Manhattan Project had to know it was theoretically possible to create an atomic explosion before they could do the work of making it happen.
Omega was not presented as a naturally occurring phenomenon that could be stumbled across, but as the creation of an intricate experiment. The theoretical foundations for its creation must have existed long before that experiment could’ve been conducted. The only unexpected discovery was how damaging it was to subspace, but I find it implausible that there was no way to predict that risk from theory. At most, I can believe that the experimenters were aware of the theoretical risk but believed it was minimal and could be contained — much like how the scientists of the Manhattan Project had some concern that setting off the first atomic explosion would ignite the atmosphere and kill everyone on Earth, but deemed it a low enough risk that they proceeded anyway.
@33/ChristopherLBennett
I wasn’t advocating war as being the best first response, I was saying why war would be seen as an available response, or an acceptable consequence as any civilization’s failure could be actually cataclysmic for numerous civilizations that have no say in the experiment or its outcome. Education and collaboration would hopefully be the easiest and most effective outcomes.
Warning people about the dangers would be the most prudent course of action, though in this situation the bell is already rung. Most civilizations could probably be forgiven though as the Federation itself was also completely blindsided by the cataclysmic effects of Omega.
But the secrecy is definitely a system of control, no doubt. I’m honestly not sure where I fall on it. Anyone who theorizes Omega has the potential to begin creating with no data from other polities saying it’s dangerous with no treaties in place governing its creation then they would go on with the experiment until Starfleet detects it and then swoops in and destroys it without so much as an explanation. Inversely, with it being common knowledge there will always be the next person thinking they’re Zephram Cochrane and they’re smart enough to solve the unsolvable problem and could end up sealing off an entire sector or worse if they screw up. It’s not isolytic subspace weapons where it’s highly unpredictable and destructive but has a relatively small footprint as far as we know, it can have effects far beyond local space.
On the other hand secrecy caps off any potential for problem solving. My first step would be to work on reliably repairing the subspace damage to the Lantaru sector. If that can be accomplished then experimenting with Omega while dangerous would become manageable. Starships powered by an Omega Molecule or two would make The Burn a moot point.
It’s sad really, as this species seemed to be ahead of The Borg and The Federation on Omega Technology.
Frankly the scale in itself is a problem, something that could affect an entire octant or quadrant of the galaxy at a time is a little extreme as a story telling tool.
Thinking about it further there are a couple of things that aren’t locking in for me. I don’t like the term plot holes, it’s greatly overused, but there are some inconsistencies to me. Voyager was hit by a shockwave from an Omega Detonation but were still able to use Warp to travel the light year to the planet. The subspace destruction was highly localized instead of total destruction. The result of possibly effective containment? Otherwise there’s no real way that hundreds of molecules detonating would’ve been less devastating than the Lantaru Sector experiment which which with one omega molecule created damage spread over several light years.
Spoiler Alert: A Star Trek Online note: Omega Molecules are a key component of the Solanae Dyson Sphere arc. Along with the Jenolen Dyson Sphere both are found to have been constructed under the auspices of the Iconians. The Solanae Sphere is constructed as an Omega Molecule Refinery, that had an industrial accident. Coincidentally this incident is one that forced a species to become solanogen based and forced them to retreat in to subspace, that being the species from “Schisms”. The Iconians use the Omega Molecules to power their Gateway network. The conflict in the sphere is against the Voth who wish to harness the Omega Molecules, not for power, but to detonate, wishing to create a sundered subspace barrier between The Voth and The Borg who they are losing a prolonged conflict to. The Voth find the isolation that Omega Detonations would create to be acceptable.
Whether they’re controlling information or sneaking around on covert missions, like with cloaking devices and metagenic weapons for example, it seems either way you’re going to get some degree of authoritarianism out of Starfleet. Because for better or worse they’re the authorities in this space cop gunboat diplomacy future.
I mean, you can allow everyone to know about the slingshot time travel effect, but then how the heck do you monitor and control such a thing? There are a lot of stars and a lot of warp capable craft out there, not to mention all those powers and bad actors who couldn’t care less about preserving the timeline.
Let academic research grant boards know about the danger of Omega, which maybe they did, then any proposal to do research in that area just doesn’t get funded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past (1956) is a story by Isaac Asimov in which the careful restriction of allowed scientific research nearly works…
@34/Mr. D: My problem with the idea of war as an “acceptable consequence” is that it’s an avoidable consequence. Sure, it’s possible that you could warn someone of the danger and they’d assume you were lying or just ignore the risk and proceed anyway. At that point, intervening by force might be the only way to stop it. But it should be a last resort if all else fails. If you keep the whole thing secret, then you’re arbitrarily and pre-emptively removing nonviolent options from the table.
“Warning people about the dangers would be the most prudent course of action, though in this situation the bell is already rung.”
Not at all. The experiment is underway but hasn’t triggered an explosion yet. That’s exactly the time when you should inform them of the risk — when it’s most urgent to do so.
“Anyone who theorizes Omega has the potential to begin creating with no data from other polities saying it’s dangerous with no treaties in place governing its creation then they would go on with the experiment until Starfleet detects it and then swoops in and destroys it without so much as an explanation. Inversely, with it being common knowledge there will always be the next person thinking they’re Zephram Cochrane and they’re smart enough to solve the unsolvable problem and could end up sealing off an entire sector or worse if they screw up.”
I just don’t buy that. First off, a reaction like that couldn’t be completely unpredictable by theory, as I said. That’s just not how physics works. Whatever physical phenomena cause the explosion would be part of the same physics that underlie Omega in the first place, so it would be possible to extrapolate it from the math. At most, as with the fear of nuclear weapons igniting the atmosphere or of the Large Hadron Collider creating a micro-black hole that would eat the Earth from within, it would be a case where you can predict the theoretical possibility that it could happen but don’t have a solid enough knowledge of the exact physical parameters to be absolutely certain if it would really happen or not. It couldn’t be something that would come completely out of the blue without anyone having a clue it was possible.
And second, physics on that level isn’t something you can do in your basement working alone. It would be a major undertaking with a lot of participation and oversight. So the chance of such an experiment happening with nobody knowing about it would be slim, as long as there’s communication and openness between governments.
As for interstellar treaties, we know that such things can work. Remember “Time and Again” and polaric ion power? According to that episode, the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans agreed on a treaty to ban its development — just two years after “Balance of Terror,” at which point relations between those three powers were as bad as they could get, yet they still appreciated the danger enough to agree to outlaw it. So given that precedent, it’s kind of ridiculous for “The Omega Directive” to suggest a totally different approach for dealing with this even more dangerous research.
@26/Mr.D Your paragraph about Seven filtering her Borg memories through her new humanity actually changed my mind about an aspect of this episode that I’ve always hated before. This episode always seemed too stuffed to me; you’ve got the super secret Omega Directive, the space-destroying mega-weapon, an alien species dying of something or other, and then also Seven’s “spirituality”. It makes sense that the Borg have a single-minded devotion to perfection. It doesn’t make sense that they would worship it and Seven’s behavior here always felt a little out of left field for that reason. But your reasoning makes a ton of sense and actually makes me like that part of the episode in hindsight.
I can’t stand the rest of the episode though. I can’t excuse everyone except Kim just going along with Borg designations either. That actually infuriates me more than anything else in this one.
Shouldn’t the Omega warning display be a tattered American flag?
I’m assuming Seven had some cybernetic brain enhancements, considering all the knowledge she retained from the Borg (Harry called her the most intelligent human in the universe). She claims in this episode that she has an eidetic memory, which is a common trope in movies and TV shows. But fun note, scientists have not proven the existence of an eidetic memory. Studies have shown that even people who claim to have this so-called “photographic memory” remember details wrong. Even more interesting, the closest thing to true eidetic memory shows up in kids and is almost non-existent in adults.
That being said, I’m unsure what to think about Seven filtering Borg memories through the lens of humanity. I assume her organic brain experienced everything when she was Borg and, now free of the Borg implants, is only now coming through? I’ve never really understood what makes her “human” now, other than biological function returning.
@40/Austin: Seven/Annika is human by birth and biology. As a Borg drone, she had no independent thought; her brain was just one of trillions of subprocessors comprising the collective mind. Now she’s free to think and act for herself, and naturally that means thinking and feeling as a human, because that’s what she is.
@37/ChristopherLBennett
I concur with everything except the statement that an explosion hasn’t occurred. The shockwave that kicked off the episode was caused by an Omega Detonation of multiple molecules, so there was already a failure. But I agree that was the prime time to intervene diplomatically. The words of a severely injured and in shock scientist that they were too desperate to stop the experiments shouldn’t have been the end all assessment of these people’s position. And Like I said, if they’d in such a terrible position with energy production, surely Voyager could’ve shared some power generation technology.
@38/Fry08
Happy to be of service. The great redeeming feature of online forums and comment threads is gaining different perspectives and perceptions of the same events and pieces of work. That part really resonated with me. It was the first time we got to see Seven in awe. I find that awe is far to rare in people nowadays. Cynicism gets expressed more often than not as if it is cool to not let something amaze you. Or maybe I’m just to easy to amaze…
One detail that annoyed me extremely was in the conversation between Janeway and Seven. When the theory was brought up, that Omega could have been the “power source” behind the big bang.
That is so utterly nonsense – a molecule is by definition a conglomerate of atoms. Most likely Omegawwould need to be combined of more complex elements than hydrogen, that will not form anything else than H2 all by itself. And that should be the power source for the creation of all matter in the universe!? That’s just one hell of a chicken-and-the-egg problem…
@44/-TM-
Made all the worse from the fact that in Seven’s description of the Borg’s attempts with Omega they were stopped because they ran out of Boronite. So a substance that existed before the universe is made out of a rare mineral ore IN the universe. I know that’s not actually definitive Boronite could just be the substance that can be most readily broken down into Omega, but how could a complex baryon have- Yeah Chicken and Egg. Nevermind that Omega detonations destroy subspace yet subspace is quite extant.
@44/-TM-: There are some theories that a sufficiently intense burst of energy within one universe could trigger an inflationary expansion of a bit of its spacetime into a new, offspring universe. Maybe that’s what they meant, that our universe’s creation was triggered by an Omega explosion in our parent universe.
I once wanted to write a story around the idea that the high-energy technology that human civilization used to power its FTL drives might be spawning new universes every time it’s used, exploring the ethical questions that raises. But I could never figure out how to make it work.
Add me to the roster of those who think this had the beginnings of a good episode, but failed to stick the landing – although one would like to add that it’s interesting to wonder how the Omega Directive, with all its dysfunctional tendencies, has been kept on the books as is for over a century.
One can only suspect that the Knowing Ones of Starfleet & the UFP Government reacted with raw dread and terror at the time – it’s difficult not to suspect Section 31 having at least something to do with shaping the Directive – and that the sheer secrecy of the whole business (quite possibly exacerbated by either no or very few Omega Incidents occurring within Federation reach during that century) kept it from being reconsidered.
@47/ED: Well, this is the same civilization that clings to a ban on genetic engineering based on 400-year-old fears, which makes even less sense.
Yawn!
This should be an interesting story, but we spend most of it watching Janeway cling to orders from half a galaxy away that make no sense. Then we watch Seven obsess over wanting to see the Maguffin Molecule, and give her team Borg designations. Finally it all culminates in Voyager invading a species’ sovereign space and stealing their research. And the whole thing is just meh.
@46/ChristopherLBennett
Reminds me of the marbles in Men in Black. The Galaxy is in the Enterprise’s Wake.
The episode certainly does fall apart under scrutiny (I constantly have to remind myself of Bellisario’s maxim: “Don’t examine this too closely”), but I’ve always liked it. I’d watch it whenever I was taking a course that had a lot of chemistry in it.
I never understood how Voyager could travel (in a reasonable amount of time) to the site of the explosion, which is said to have occurred within 1.2 light-years of the ship. If subspace were destroyed, would the ship not have to travel at sublight speeds? Maybe the distance was substantially less than 1.2 light-years, and that was simply the computer’s threshold for detecting or reporting the explosion. After all, Barclay does say in “Endgame” that the Borg transwarp conduit is less than a light-year from Earth, even though it appears to be practically in our solar system. That’s still less than a light-year, but to me it’s an absurdity of scale, like saying I’m less than a kilometer tall. And I guess we’re supposed to assume that the steroidal torpedo somehow neutralized the subspace-destroying properties of the remaining omega molecules so that their being destroyed doesn’t also constitute their own explosion in a way that would destroy subspace. Somehow, the molecules are destroyed, and Voyager returns the alien scientists to the moon and then resumes course for home. It seems like subspace in the area is just fine, then. (Omega destroys subspace; pi destroys waistlines.)
When Voyager reaches the moon and we’re shown the site of the explosion, I kept wondering how any structure is standing at all. Someone mentions that over 300,000 square kilometers was destroyed. Wouldn’t an explosion of the magnitude described have easily vaporized pretty much everything? Or are most of the effects just largely shifted into subspace, where the real damage occurs? (Speaking of affecting subspace: I always wished the show had gone into more detail about the tricobalt devices from “Caretaker” [and elaborated on in “The Voyager Conspiracy”]—just how and why did the ship have those? Does any tie-in fiction go into detail on this?) The establishing orbital scene on screen is nice, but maybe it’s for dramatic effect. Having only a massive crater or a mostly vaporized moon wouldn’t reveal much, I suppose. But if Voyager itself can make a torpedo that can destroy a small moon, wouldn’t a detonation of even a single omega molecule be at least that strong? Yeah, I know: The plot doesn’t work if we pay too much attention.
Even so, it’s fun to watch this one. I love Seven’s impatient sigh and then her breezy line, “Elementary spatial harmonics. Are you ready now?” And Carol Marcus is one of my favorite characters, so when this episode first aired, I took a moment of silence to remember her. I enjoyed the novelizations of Star Trek III and Generations because they included Marcus. And one of the Genesis Wave novels, if I remember right, but I haven’t read them in a while. I see she appears in others, too. I’ll need to read those.
Any directive which effectively shuts down the ship and locks everyone out seems like a huge tactical flaw. Youre in the middle of a pitched battle with the Jem Hadar and suddenly the ship comes to a grinding halt? Youre going to have a bad time. And since the Borg new about this flaw in starfleet ships software, if they were able to stabilise an Omega molecule they would likely proceed to merrily wipe out star fleet with no effort.
I can’t tell you how many missions we went on where only the CO knew the mission. Oh boy, we all just loaded up and went with no one knowing the plan, no contingencies in place, no one aware of what we were doing.
In fact, every parachute mission ran the same. Because an uninformed team is the best functioning team.
This episode, aside from Ms. Ryan’s acting, was dreck.
Anyone else play the RTS game “Star Trek: Armada?” (It features an Omega particle along with Picard, Worf, Admiral Sela, Toral, the return of Locutus, etc.) The game has its flaws, but I thought the Single Player Campaign was really fun to play through once, and the graphics / gameplay were decent for a year-2000 game!
This episode aired right after DS9’s “In The Pale Moonlight,” another episode about a Starfleet captain keeping a dangerous secret. Par for the course, DS9 did it much better. I wonder how Janeway would have approached the bring-Romulus-into-the-War problem?
As to this wretched story, in any other episode it would be established that Omega was too complex or hazardous to be teleported. Since they actually beamed it off the moon, I’m with @@@@@32 ragnarredbeard: why not just delete the pattern?
I know, I know, it’s because that would kill the story—but that it never occurred to the writers even to make up some hand-wavy technobabble to explain why they couldn’t illustrates a chronic problem with the series as a whole: no one ever cared enough to make it as good as it could be.
I do like the retcon that the Borg have a sense of aesthetics, because there seems no reason that they wouldn’t; in fact, the belief that they’re perfect, or that they’re working to approach perfection, would almost seem to demand it.
That said, I dislike just about everything else about this episode, particularly given the near mythological status that Omega has taken on in some parts of the fandom.
Don’t the Omega molecules begin to stabilise at the end? When do they reset to an unstable form? Who exactly does “Federation flag officers” refer to? This episode reminds me of what Chakotay told Janeway in Alliances – he isn’t sure Starfleet’s directives were ever intended for situations like Voyager’s.
This episode is also another example of how Starfleet sees it as their duty to police the galaxy. I’m not sure how Seven is allowed to get away with being insubordinate, whether she’s in a Starfleet uniform or not, and Seven still hasn’t fully abandoned the Collective’s way of doing things so that’s probably why Chakotay could see the funny side of it.
2: That does seem silly to announce something top secret to an entire ship’s crew. I think there’s some self-interest on Janeway’s part, and that’s why she can’t ignore the Omega Directive, because if she does and there’s an Omega explosion, Voyager will never reach the Alpha Quadrant. Time and Again, not Time and Away.
3-4: Maybe the Borg are attracted to Omega’s power and that’s why they hold it in such high esteem. 6: Starfleet always acts like it invents new technologies like warp drive when they’ve only just become aware of them. How many Omega molecules were destroyed by the time Voyager fired its super duper torpedo at them? It’s all a bit of a grey area.
The Borg usually adapt to most weapons (unless they’re Species 8472’s). Stealing technology is a way to invite war on yourself and we know how the Federation hates that so it doesn’t make much sense to me either. Who’s Mike?
8: It’s like what Janeway tells Paris in Thirty Days, “We can’t expect an entire race of people to change just because we think they should.” 9: The fact the Borg must rely on assimilation to gain knowledge doesn’t track with they’re early appearances; they adapted to phaser fire without having to assimilate anyone or anything.
10: Did you skip all of the episodes after Scorpion? 11: If you don’t like episodes where the Federation is forced to compromise its ideals, you must hate half the episodes of DS9.
In Men in Black, K argues with J that keeping the human race in the dark about the existence of aliens is for their own protection because they’re much too panicky to deal with the truth in a rational manner, and that’s why they recruit new members one person at a time.
I think the ST writers individualise the Borg with characters like the Queen and Locutus to give the audience something to personalise with rather than make them all the same.
18: I like the idea of Section 31 masquerading as Starfleet Intelligence when they really were SI all along. I can believe the Borg would consider a powerful molecule perfection what with their nanotechnology taking over the body from the inside out.
20: I don’t know why Seven isn’t in a Starfleet uniform either, except that they had to have Jeri Ryan in a sexy catsuit instead for four years. 27: Chakotay’s negative opinion of Starfleet is what led to him joining the Maquis in the first place. Why would Leonardo not still be around? Although I think this is the last time we see his workshop.
Because of the Borg’s experience with Omega, it makes sense that Seven would be asked to participate in the briefing (like Guinan in Q Who). I’m sure Torres would’ve been there if Roxanne Dawson hadn’t gone into labour during filming. I think there is only one kal-toh.
28: I’ve always wondered that if you blow up Omega, wouldn’t that cause the sort of disaster Starfleet is trying to avoid? 34: They must never have found a way to repair the damage to subspace (like the rift Serova created in Forces of Nature) and that’s why Starfleet still enforces the Omega Directive. 39: Or a tattered Federation flag?
40: I think it was Vis à Vis where Seven declared she had an eidetic memory. If you’ve ever watched The Paper Chase, Professor Kingsfield loudly remonstrates one of his law students for proudly showing off his photographic memory with not a clue of how to use it. 42: I doubt they would want Voyager’s help after stealing their technology.
45: Is there such a thing as subspace? I thought it was just more of Star Trek’s made-up science. 48: Was it 400 years or 200 years? 51: Bellisario? I don’t know how they returned the scientists to their people without it sparking a major incident.
52: I think the Borg would prefer to assimilate Starfleet rather than destroy it. 53: What company were you with?55: If Omega were that unstable, it should be classified as the nitroglycerin of the universe. I prefer the title The Omega Mandate.
@45/Mr. D: “Nevermind that Omega detonations destroy subspace yet subspace is quite extant.”
They destroy subspace locally, not universally. The Kettaract experiment’s explosion created a subspace dead zone around the station, impassable to warp ships.
Some 15 years back, there was a plan for an animated Trek series that would do something similar to Discovery‘s third season, jumping forward to the 26th century or so after a series of Omega molecule explosions had created large areas of destroyed subspace that warp ships couldn’t pass through, fragmenting the Federation. I’ve often wondered if the Burn was inspired by that concept.
@57/David Sim: “Who exactly does “Federation flag officers” refer to?”
Flag officers are senior commanding officers, in this case admirals or commodores. By tradition, commanding officers at that level have their own flags to denote their command posts. It’s the same derivation as “flagship,” the ship from which the commander of a fleet or task force flies their flag (in the proper naval sense of the word, not the vernacular sense Trek uses to refer to the Enterprise as a “flagship”).
Thanks 58-Christopher L. Bennett. I’m not too familiar with the military command structure.
It’s rather fitting that this aired immediately following DS9’s “Inquisition,” since both are about shady directives/organizations that circumvent everything the Federation stands for in order to protect “the greater good.” However, where that story was at least well-made, this one is not. It’s just silly. The physics is silly. The world building is silly. The plot is silly. And not in a good way, like The Killing Game.