“Ashes to Ashes”
Written by Ronald Wilkerson and Robert Doherty
Directed by Terry Windell
Season 6, Episode 18
Production episode 238
Original air date: March 1, 2000
Stardate: 53679.4
Captain’s log. A Kobali shuttle manages to escape from a larger Kobali ship and then seeks out Voyager. After speaking entirely in the Kobali language, the pilot, Jhet’leya, suddenly speaks English when she contacts Voyager.
For reasons that are not made clear, the communication from Jhet’leya doesn’t go to the bridge, but to astrometrics, where Mezoti is standing around unsupervised. She takes the call, but when she tries to reach to the higher part of the console that will enable her to transfer it to Janeway, she accidentally cuts the transmission off.
Tuvok discovers her, and chastises her for being there without permission, though he says he’ll let her off with just a warning, as it’s her first offense. Seven arrives moments later with Icheb, Azan, and Rebi. Seven left them unsupervised in the cargo bay, and Mezoti wandered off on her own. Seven’s complaining to Tuvok about how hard it is to be their caretakers is superseded by Mezoti mentioning the woman she was talking to.
When communication is reestablished, Jhet’leya recognizes Tuvok’s voice, and congratulates him on his promotion to lieutenant commander. She identifies herself as Ensign Lyndsay Ballard—a member of Torres’ engineering staff who was killed on an away mission almost three years earlier.
Kim is visibly disturbed by Jhet’leya’s claim, and asks to be in sickbay when she beams there and is examined behind a level-ten force field. Kim and Ballard were at the Academy together, were good friends, and were together on the away mission when she died.
The EMH examines Jhet’leya, and says that, while she is mostly alien, there are remnants of human DNA that matches that of Ballard. Jhet’leya explains that the Kobali found her corpse after she was shot out into space following her funeral (as she had requested in her will) and reanimated the body, transforming her into a Kobali, indoctrinating her in Kobali ways and being placed with a Kobali family. This is apparently how the Kobali reproduce. But while Ballard pretended to be Jhet’leya to keep up appearances, she longed to return to Voyager, and finally was able to do so.
Janeway decides to trust her, despite the many ways she could be deceiving them (Ballard lists some of those ways herself), and finally welcomes Ensign Ballard back on board.
The EMH can’t reverse the process that made her Kobali, but he can alter her appearance, at least, so she’ll look human. Kim gets her stuff out of storage (Tuvok encouraged him to recycle her belongings, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it) and she gleefully tosses it around her quarters messily. She and Kim play catch-up, including the revelation that Kim delivered the eulogy at her funeral.
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Seven begs Chakotay to take her off Borg kid guardian duty, as they are rebelling against her instruction, even though she has scheduled them for learning and recreational activity. However, the latter is awkwardly handled, as Azan and Rebi cheat in the game that the four of them play with Naomi, and when Seven punishes them for cheating, Icheb quits the game in disgust. Chakotay, however, doesn’t let her off the hook, and points out that rigid scheduling of activities they all do together isn’t that much different from what they did in the Collective, and to maybe loosen up a little.
Ballard has made a list of what she wants to do now that she’s back on Voyager, one of which is to impress Torres by showing up on time for a duty shift, something she never managed during her three-and-a-half years on the ship. She, in fact, shows up early, and solves an engineering problem in half a second that had been vexing the staff for weeks. When she does so, she uses a ton of Kobali terms without even thinking about it. She also finds that the Jiballian berry salad that she’s been looking forward to for three years tastes horrible to her. Kobali don’t have any concept of cuisine, as they just use food for fuel, and she’s lost her appreciation of fine food, apparently.
Kim approaches Ballard about going skating on the holodeck, but she has to decline, as she’s having dinner with the captain. That dinner gets awkward quickly, as Ballard asks about why she was picked for the away team when others were more qualified. Janeway bluntly asks if Ballard blames the captain for her death, and Ballard insists she doesn’t, saying that she was taught never to harbor anger toward those who brought you death, as they gave her the chance to live again. Realizing that that’s a tenet of Kobali philosophy, she leaves the dinner early, appalled and frightened.
Ballard then has a nightmare about attending her own funeral, and then goes to Kim for comfort. He offers to help her adjust any way he can, at which point he explains why he always rearranged his class schedule and learned to ice skate at the Academy: he’s crazy about her. (No mention is made of his fiancée…) They smooch and sleep together.
Seven has the Borg kids sculpt geometric shapes out of clay. The twins do cubes that are exactly 1/1000th the size of a Borg Cube. Icheb does a polyhedron consisting of various shapes. But Mezoti makes a very crude sculpture of Seven’s head. Icheb expects her to be punished for not following directions, but Seven takes Chakotay’s words to heart and encourages them to continue being disorderly.
A Kobali ship arrives with Q’ret, who identifies himself as Jhet’leya’s father, and he wishes her to come home. Ballard refuses, and Janeway respects her wishes. Q’ret says he won’t give her up without a fight, and he’ll bring backup for that fight.
Kim and Ballard talk in the mess hall, where the latter is eating the tasteless mush that Kobali prefer, and Kim’s outrage at Q’ret calling himself her father leads to the realization that Ballard has absolutely no memory of her human parents whatsoever. Then she doubles over in pain, her face starting to revert to her Kobali features.
The EMH checks her over and says he’ll need to up the treatments to twice a day at least to allow her to keep her human appearance. Ballard reacts badly to this, including some Kobali curses. She then runs out of sickbay.
Kim tracks her down in the Kobali shuttle. Kim urges her to stop the treatments—he doesn’t care if she looks Kobali or not—but it’s more fundamental than that. She doesn’t fit in on Voyager anymore. The woman Kim fell in love with died three years ago. She’s Jhet’leya now.
The Kobali return in force and attack Voyager. Ballard comes to the bridge and urges Janeway to give her over. Janeway won’t let her sacrifice herself like that, but Ballard insists it isn’t a sacrifice—she wants to go back to be with Q’ret.
Everyone says their goodbyes, with Kim being the last one. He beams her back, with her assuring him that Lyndsay Ballard died three years ago—but at least now they get to say a proper goodbye to each other.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Despite the dozens of times we’ve seen medical professionals do cosmetic surgery on people to make them appear like a different species (from simple stuff like what we saw in the original series’ “The Enterprise Incident” to more complex stuff in TNG’s “Homeward” and DS9’s “Apocalypse Rising“), it’s not at all clear why the EMH can’t do that with Ballard, instead being forced to resort to injections of stuff.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Ballard is of the impression that Janeway barely knew who Ballard was when she was on board—to make up for that, Janeway invites her to dinner, though it goes badly from both a conversation and culinary perspective: the replicator liquefies the pot roast. (It does provide one of the funnier lines in the episode, as Janeway mentions that Tuvok has found thirty-seven different ways to defend themselves against the Kobali, and Ballard asks if the pot roast is one of them.)
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok recommends that Seven try meditation to help discipline the Borg kids.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. After restoring Ballard’s hair, the EMH comments, “Hair is one of my specialties,” then adds ruefully, “despite evidence to the contrary.”
Half and half. Torres is impressed by Ballard arriving early for her shift, and again by her easy ability to fix the problem Torres assigns her.
Forever an ensign. Kim had the hots for Ballard at the Academy, and you gotta wonder what Libby thought about that. Also, he now plays the saxophone, and has twice had a fellow ensign die when he was on an away mission with them.
Resistance is futile. Seven is struggling with parenthood. It’s kind of hilarious.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. One of the items on Ballard’s list is to make Tuvok laugh, and to that end, Kim has modified a Vulcan program called The Temple of T’Panit so that the monks recite Ferengi limericks.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kim and Ballard smooch and sleep together, granting Kim a wish that goes back to his Academy days.
Do it.
“Vien’ke debala, Jhet’leya. I taught myself to speak a few words of Kobali.”
“That’s very sweet of you—but you just told me, ‘The comets are tiresome’.”
–Kim saying goodbye to Ballard
Welcome aboard. Kevin Lowe guest stars as Q’ret, while Manu Intiraymi, Marley McClean, and Kurt & Cody Wetherill establish themselves as recurring in this episode, appearing as Icheb, Mezoti, Azan, and Rebi following their introduction in “Collective.” They are joined by Scarlett Pomers, appearing as Naomi.
And then we have our Robert Knepper moment, as I was overwhelmingly thrilled to see Kim Rhodes—best known these days for her magnificent recurring role on Supernatural as the great Sheriff Jody Mills—plays Ballard/Jhet’leya.
Trivial matters: Ballard’s death, based on the stardate she gives, took place between “Hunters” and “Prey,” which fits with her death coming at the hands of the Hirogen. However, she is surprised by Tuvok’s promotion, which happened prior to that in “Revulsion.” Having said that, Ballard also doesn’t remember her own father, and memory loss is established as part of the reviving process the Kobali perform.
The Kobali appear again in Star Trek Online’s Delta Rising expansion, set thirty-four years after this episode. It’s established that they developed this method of reproducing after genetic engineering experiments rendered them sterile. In the game, the Kobali also find and reanimate the corpse of the duplicate Kim from “Deadlock” and make him a Kobali named Keten, who starts a relationship with Jhet’leya.
Paris points out that Kim has previously fallen in love with a hologram (Marayna in “Alter Ego“), a Borg (his fourth-season crush on Seven), and the “wrong twin” (Megan Delaney in “Thirty Days“). Paris made a similar speech to Kim in “The Disease.”
Tuvok’s holodeck program with the monks of T’Pranit was previously mentioned in “Riddles.”
There are now either twenty-two or twenty-three confirmed deaths on board Voyager (confusion due to it being unclear whether two or three died in “Equinox, Part II“), plus however many died in “The Killing Game, Part II.” The crew also has a net total of nine people added to it, between the five Equinox crew and the four Borg kids. (The addition of Seven and Naomi are offset by the subtraction of Seska and Kes.)
Set a course for home. “Fun will now commence.” Okay, if you’re gonna do a Voyager episode called “Ashes to Ashes,” it seems to me it should involve Paris become a drug addict, starting to obsess over the music of George Clinton, and no longer paying attention to personal hygiene. So we could say: “Ashes to Ashes,” funk to funky, we know Ensign Tom’s a junkie…
I’ll show myself out…
But seriously, folks: This is actually an excellent episode for many of the same reasons why TNG’s “The Bonding” is an excellent episode: it reminds us that there’s an entire crew on board. Dramatic television in general and Star Trek in particular are really lousy at treating characters who are dramatically background personnel as people, even though from the internal perspective of the show, they’re just as important as everyone else. So many one-off characters have died on this show whose deaths had little to no meaning, and this episode pushes back against that nicely.
What especially sells it is the great Kim Rhodes. Ballard is charming, funny, tormented, brilliant, confused, delightful—Rhodes imbues her with such a complete personality that it heightens the tragedy of her situation. (I’m still bitter that the proposed Supernatural spinoff Wayward Sisters starring Rhodes as her superlative Sheriff Mills didn’t go to series, as that would’ve been so fantastic…)
It comes with some issues. Kim had a fiancée in the Academy, as established in “Non Sequitur,” so his Academy crush on Ballard feels weird. Either they’re ignoring Libby or they forgot about her, neither of which really works. Also it’s repetitive: Ballard’s death follows the exact same beats as Jetal’s in “Latent Image.” You’d think Kim would be suffering some serious PTSD, having two people die on him on an away mission like that (especially since he wasn’t allowed to talk about one of them).
And then there’s the timing of her death, which creates more issues. The stardate of her death is right after “Hunters,” which means that Ballard probably got a letter from home in that episode like everyone else. And then she died, which means that the information Voyager sent through in “Pathfinder” likely included news of her death. Some of the conversations with Kim should’ve been about Voyager’s renewed contact with the Alpha Quadrant and ability to talk to her family—which would’ve heightened the pathos of the moment when we realize she has no memory of her human family even more.
Still, these are minor nits. The struggle Ballard has to find her identity is a compelling one, and makes for a powerful episode.
The subplot with Seven and the Borg kids is completely paint-by-numbers, and is only worth mentioning because it establishes that, unlike the Equinox crew, the Borg kids will continue to appear on the show.
Warp factor rating: 8
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I never understood why Ballard wasn’t just written as being Ensign Jetal, which would have made a lot more sense, had some actual continuity, and it at least would have been a character we had seen before and therefore had some kind of opinion about. Kim Rhodes (SHERIFF JODY!!!!!) in the make-up easily could have gotten away with the re-cast, and it would have gone a long way toward not making Kim and her’s relationship come out of absolutely *nowhere.*
I wish someone would help Seven out with those kids. Being a single parent is rough, especially when it is to 4 kids all at once, and Seven has an important job in helping run the ship. I like the character development of her learning to be more maternal, but seriously, there is no one else on the ship who can teach an elementary school-level art class to give her a break? One of the things I like about the Naomi Wildman character is that raising her is very much seen as something the whole ship contributes to, so it is kind of weird to see Seven having to drag the Borg kids all around the ship because no one else is helping her. Maybe they are off-screen, but still, help a girl out!
For me, the frustrating lack of continuity undermined what merits the episode had. Having this supposedly major character retconned into Harry’s and the crew’s life when there’s been no mention of her before is awkward.
Also, we get yet another alien species with a bizarrely convoluted way of reproducing itself that doesn’t make any sense — see also “Favorite Son” in season 3 and TNG’s “Identity Crisis.” Not a fan of those.
Voyager can’t maintain continuity in the present, yet mucks up the continuity in its own past several times this season (“The Voyager Conspiracy,” “Ashes to Ashes,” and “Fury”).
And yes, the concept of the Kobali reproducing by reanimating the dead comes across like an idea that someone on Voyager’s staff must have thought sounded nifty, but wouldn’t hold up under any amount of thought. For one, you’d think the Kobali’s neighbors might start disposing of their dead in manners that wouldn’t allow for reanimation rather than allowing these ghouls to continually rob their graves. And secondly, couldn’t the Kobali just reanimate their own dead every time a Kobali dies? An infinite population: each death is just one new life.
Have there been any major space jumps since when she died that would make them finding her body as ridiculous as I fee it would be?
Oh, that’s another excellent point. By my estimates, Voyager is about 20,000 light years from where they would have dumped Ballard’s body. There were jumps of sorts in “Night,” “Timeless,” “Dark Frontier,” and “The Voyager Conspiracy,” plus others I may be forgetting. Ridiculous that Lindsay would be able to catch up to them in a pissant shuttle, not to mention her “father” going back for reinforcements and then catching up again. And why was Voyager just sitting there waiting for the Kobali to attack? They should have been moving at high warp in the direction of Earth since they knew the Kobali might be coming after them.
I was surprised by how much I liked this one, but having this important friend that Harry’s never mentioned before is incredibly frustrating. I still enjoyed the episode, but it did bug me the entire way through. I’m not familiar with the actress, but she definitely does a terrific job carrying the emotional core of the episode.
The way the Kobali reproduce strongly reminded me of one of the species from Valente’s Space Opera. One species is essentially comprised of colonies of sentient parasites that will infest the corpses of other species and then reanimate the corpse to communicate with others. I wouldn’t have minded seeing more of Kobali culture. I love the STO addition to the canon! The idea that dead Harry from “Deadlock” was reanimated and ended up with Jhet’leya is hilarious to me. Finally, Harry has a happy ending to one of his relationships…
While this episode isn’t bad per se it’s always greatly annoyed me and so I take no pleasure in re-watching it. One of my major problems with it, and as others have pointed out, are the continuity issues. The first time I saw this episode I was distracted the whole time because the story treated Ballard like she was someone who was very significant to Kim and so I wondered if I had missed or simply forgotten an episode in which she was previously featured, if even in a small role. I later learned this was not the case. So this was a big ret-con in terms of Harry’s relationships on board (not to mention during his academy days when he was with Libby). Why couldn’t Ballard have been Ensign Jetal from “Latent Image”? She was, at the time this episode aired, recently introduced so there’s no reason we couldn’t have used a previously introduced character.
Another structural issue that bothered me is it felt like the guest star’s show. In general, it shouldn’t be that way on a Star Trek series, at least since the days that Michael Piller took over on TNG and mandated that the series be about the main cast and every episode highlighted a specific character. Yes, Kim was tangentially featured here, but it still never felt like he was the focus. So I feel like it’s a failure of storytelling where the guest star is the main star.
I was also bothered by the scene where Ballard and Janeway have dinner together. When Ballard speaks Kobali without even realizing it and seems startled by that, Janeway just gives her this look like she’s some kind of circus freak. Why not appear or say something to deflate the awkwardness of the moment and make your former officer feel more comfortable?
Really the only thing I really liked was the sci-fi premise of aliens who exist by repurposing the remains of other dead aliens was nifty if implausible. And for all that I decried how the episode focused too much on Ballard and seemed like the star of a series that’s not hers, Kim Rhodes definitely had “star” presence so I’m not surprised she’s gone on to have actual starring roles even through this is the only output I’ve only seen her featured in.
“Hey! Show some respect for the dead!”
This feels like it’s half a good episode, but that may be overestimating it. The first half is flawed but interesting. Voyager’s cavalier attitude to alien biology strikes again as we’re left wondering how exactly a species evolved that can only procreate by altering the bodies of other species. (Star Trek Online seems to have had a go judging by the trivia above, but the episode doesn’t seem to have put any more thought into it than “Because they’re aliens.”) And there is of course the problem that this character is meant to be Harry Kim’s one-time best friend on the ship but she’s never been mentioned before. But, there’s a decent sci-fi premise behind it and they’ve got a decent guest actress who actually has a bit of chemistry with Kim (although I’m not familiar with her from anything else, which seems to have bumped the score up a bit).
But things fall apart somewhat in the second half, which is largely down to the show’s format, since there’s never any chance of Ballard staying on the show, so a giant reset button gets hit. Basically, this is the story of Ballard spending years trying to get back to Voyager, spending a couple of days there, then deciding she doesn’t like it and wants to go back to that dull planet she hated. It’s almost a complete change of direction as if someone saw the run time and realised they need to wrap this up quickly. Oh, and we get Kim acting like a petulant child again and trying to blow up a Kobali ship without authorisation.
There’s some confusion over when Ballard died. We’re initially told she lived with the Kobali for two years, which ties in with her being killed by the Hirogen and the stardate given. But then both Q’Ret and Ballard say it was three years (are they talking Kobali years?), plus no-one comments on the fact Tuvok’s promotion, which she was apparently unaware of, occurred months before the stardate given.
Mezoti continues to be the most compelling of the Borg children by far. I’d actually forgotten the others were in this, probably because she’s the only one that really intersects with the A-plot: The others are largely confined to the “Seven’s a rubbish substitute teacher” B-plot, and Mezoti’s the best thing about that as well. I’m tempted to say Icheb would never have become so prominent if she hadn’t been written out, but to be fair, he’s got his focus episode coming up next, so maybe he’ll finally get a chance to shine then.
Paris’ list of Kim’s failed romances is getting so long he’s having to miss some out: He repeats the list from “Thirty Days” and “The Disease” with the dearly departed bolted on the end, forgetting to add a member of a xenophobic society. He’ll have another go in Season 7’s “Drive”, as I recall. Ballard actually gets to wear dress uniform: They’ve been reserved for the senior staff until now.
I didn’t have as much problem as some with the nature of the Kobali, although I think it makes sense to treat them as a culture rather than a species. I just imagined a scenario where Frankenstein’s Creature had learned to create his own bride- and finding reproduction by conventional means still impossible, had gone on to build himself a family one member at a time.
Kobali ships are so fast and have sensors so good, “do I stay or do I go” is something of a false choice. Ballard could always spend six months with the Kobali, catch up to Voyager again, spend a few months banging Harry, etc. Heck, Janeway could even designate Ballard the UFP Ambassador or special envoy or whatever.
“That dinner gets awkward quickly, as Ballard asks about why she was picked for the away team when others were more qualified. “
Ballard kind of misses the point by saying Tuvok has more experience leading missions and Torres has the specialty of dilithium extraction. In the short-term, it’s more efficient if experienced members of the military do everything. The actual military doesn’t do this, because part of the point is to develop tomorrow’s experienced members, and that’s especially true for Voyager who can’t get experienced crewmembers from the rest of the fleet. At the time of her death, Kim/Ballard were officers with at least four years in space, you have to start sending them on unsupervised away missions at some point. But I do love that Janeway just doesn’t remember why she chose Ballard and has to guess. It’s one of the most significant moments of Ballard’s life, for Janeway it was Tuesday.
@1/wildfyrewarning I wish someone would help Seven out with those kids. Being a single parent is rough, especially when it is to 4 kids all at once, and Seven has an important job in helping run the ship.
Yeah, I feel like Seven was mistreated here. It’s questionable enough that Janeway essentially told Seven she’s volunteering to try this, and by the way the volunteering isn’t optional (the dreaded “voluntold”). But when she wants out and Chakotay denies the request… well, if she just stops doing it, then what? They’ll reduce her in rank she doesn’t have? Relieve her of her other duties? Send her to the brig until she agrees to play house? Seven exists in sort of a gray zone, but unless they’re taking the position she’s a Starfleet conscript or something, I’m not sure how they can order her to do something like this. This is in stark contrast to the early clashes about Starfleet protocol– there’s a world of difference between “you have to watch these children” and “if you choose to work in the engine room, then you have to work under Torres’s command.”
There’s at least two known parents aboard, Tuvok and the elder Wildman, plus Neelix is good with kids, so Seven probably shouldn’t be doing this at all, and at minimum should have help. The very little she gains in rapport by all of them being XB’s is vastly outweighed by the fact she has no idea what she’s doing, which isn’t really good for her or the children.
Did Kim ask permission from Janeway before starting his relationship with Ballard/Jhet’leya as established in The Disease or was that requirement waved because she had fragments of Ballard’s DNA? Or did the writers simply forget what had been established in that episode?
Maybe this helps explain why Kim never got promoted, too many reprimands on his record. It makes you wonder why he’s the only one Janeway held to this regulation.
@10/dunsel: I would speculate that maybe the reason Seven’s the only one taking care of the Junior Borg Scouts is that she’s the only one they’ll accept. They’ve only just recently been liberated from the Collective, and we know how hard it was for Seven to accept not being part of it anymore. Maybe they just won’t listen to anyone else because they weren’t Borg.
@12 – If that’s the case they could have let us know with a single sentence to that effect.
Yea, the Borg kids don’t seem like they are overly disruptive, and they clearly aren’t clinging to Seven and refusing to leave (hence how one of them ended up in Astrometrics to begin with), they just need supervision like all children. Considering it is the middle of the day (or whatever passes for the middle of the day in space), you’d think the Voyager crew would devise some sort of schooling that could be rotated around to various officers. After all, there isn’t any shortage of knowledgeable people on the ship, there is no reason for Seven to have to try to teach them everything (especially not art class).
One of the things I’m trying not to get too worked up over is things that Voyager made it clear it wasn’t going to be doing anyhow. I’m trying to review the show as it actually was, not what it perhaps should have been. Which may be why I was more generous to this episode than a lot of the commenters.
Plus, I really love Kim Rhodes…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, still bitter that the CW didn’t pick up Wayward Sisters
It’s admittedly hard for me to look at an episode of Voyager and not lament what it could have been even after the series repeatedly demonstrated it was stuck in its comfortable, predictable groove. So I can’t help but point out stuff like the lack of internal consistency, characterization issues, gross scientific implausibilities, missed storytelling opportunities, and the squandering of its premise.
I think by 1999, the Star Trek franchise had fallen into a rut. Critical if not commercially popular Deep Space Nine had concluded its run, Star Trek: Insurrection was a critical and commercial disappointment following First Contact, and we were left with Voyager as the lone flag-bearer and it was bleeding viewers and not doing anything exceptional with its format. And then things would only get worse with Nemesis and Star Trek: Enterprise. But that era when First Contact was in theaters and both DS9 and Voyager were airing was pure Trek fan bliss.
@15/krad: But the thing is, Voyager did have better character continuity in its earlier seasons. They set up a number of recurring characters and largely stuck with them, e.g. Carey and Hogan. The stories may have been episodic, but at least they were reasonably consistent. Heck, at least they remembered that Libby existed. The extent to which this episode rewrote Harry Kim’s entire backstory is excessive even by Voyager‘s standards. It stood out even at the time, and it’s why I had trouble liking this episode.
@12-14: That doesn’t seem to be how it’s portrayed. In this episode alone, Mezoti accepts instructions from Tuvok, has a friendly conversation with Naomi until Seven butts in, and invites Harry to join her and the others on the holodeck.
@18/cap-mjb: Okay. So much for that idea, then.
@12 I would add that nobody on Voyager was the same species as any of the children. The only one with any similarity of background was Seven.
Really the only way to reconcile Harry’s plotlines with Libby’s existence is to figure that the events of “Non Sequitur” actually dropped Harry into an alternate timeline where he and Libby never had a relationship. Any mention of her after that episode would be due to half-remembered details of a former life and wibbly-wobbly space-time shockwaves or something.
Meh. I found the episode predictable because you know Ballard isn’t going to stick around—after 10 minutes I was wondering what excuse they’d make up for her not to be there next week.
More than that, though, there was no sense that Ballard had ever been there at all. Only Harry seemed to have any kind of relationship or even memory of her. A little bit of, “Nice to see you again,” or “I’m glad you’re back,” or “Remember the time . . .” from Paris or Tuvok or anyone would have gone a long way toward establishing her presence even if we never saw her before. I wondered if she was an alien pretending to be a crew member and everyone had some kind of brain zap thinking they remembered her, like in that TNG episode whose name I don’t remember.
Perhaps now that Seven is watching 4 children, that will give her something to do besides saunter into senior staff meetings as though she’s starfleet.
I liked the suggestion at the end of the episode of a possible uncle-niece-like relationship between Mezoti and Harry. Considering the way they met, with her being a creepy scary borg child catching him sabotaging the cube, infecting him with nanoprobes and putting his life at risk, and him trying to pull a phaser in self defense but couldn’t only because of the dampening field. Guess that’s all water under the bridge now.
I don’t think this episode necessarily means that they forgot about Libby. Harry was at the Academy for, what, 4 or 5 years? Do we know for a fact that he was with Libby from day 1? I think it is totally probable that he had a crush on Ballard for a year or two, lost hope and started dating Libby in year 4 or 5.
That being said, I liked the episode, but was quite distracted by the fact that this was not the same person as in Latent Image. To have two accidents that are sooo similar (Harry on an away mission with a young woman, she dies) just didn’t make sense to me.
@22: You’re referring to the TNG episode, “Conundrum.”
I know Starfleet sees and experiences a bunch of stuff, but where was the wonder that a former crewmate was resurrected? Nobody was in awe over this miraculous science. It was just, “Oh cool. Well, get back to work then.”
Was Paris in this episode at all?
@26/Austin: Paris has the scene where he lists off Harry’s failed romances. It’s the obligatory scene he has in any Harry romance episode.
During the Captain’s dinner, I am happy that the writers didn’t go with the trope, “Harry wanted you on the away mission, that’s why I assigned you”. It would have been such a predictable twist, I was genuinely surprised it didn’t happen. Another coat of survivor’s guilt applied on Ensign Harry, subverted.
The Kobali form a pretty extensive portion of Star Trek Online’s Delta Quadrant arc. The civilization they build it into retroactively fills in some blanks. The Kobali use this method of reproduction due to an error with genetic engineering they made ages ago. So resurrecting other species is the only way they can survive. They were apparently a nomadic species, which is logical as a species that needs the corpses of other species to reproduce would either need a symbiotic relationship with a species that can reproduce normally or they’d need to stay on the move, in STO they’ve only recently settled on a planet.I would say that the Kobali are therefore nomadic and the reason that Lyndsay caught up to Voyager is because the Kobali were generally following a similar course.
Their means of reproduction however has its ethics debated in game and is practically a base breaker among players. The Necromancers/Grave Robbers/etc are not particularly popular. Without spoiling it’s also key to the conflict that involves them in the game.
Also, Kim Rhodes is just as delightful reprising her role as Jhet’laya, but man that episode is a pain to play through.
One thing’s for sure: the Harry Kim backstory was always flawed. Libby never felt like a real character, and I never bought their connection, thus I was never invested in the idea that Kim had more desire to return home more than the rest of the crew. Rather, it’s Kim’s own experience in the Delta Quadrant with characters like Ballard and Jetal that really sells his potential for more meaty material (also his experiences in last season’s Timeless). Ashes to Ashes indirectly builds upon the events of Latent Image and retroactively makes Libby even more of a mistake. Why bother with the girlfriend back home when the really good stories are out here?
Ashes to Ashes is not perfect by any means, but having a guest character like Ballard written and performed this well certainly doesn’t hurt either – Rhodes giving it a humanity most secondary VOY characters could only dream of. She shines thoughout the episode and elevates the regular cast. Truth be told, she should have been seen in previous seasons. If Voyager had a better handle on its continuity, this could have been the case (I can forgive the Jetal episode since that was more of mystery for the EMH to uncover). I agree with @krad that the show should have spent more time developing secondary and tertiary characters on the ship. TNG did it well with the O’Briens, plus Alexander, Selar, Ogawa and others. There’s no reason Voyager shouldn’t have done likewise, but even the early seasons were hit and miss on that aspect (more miss than hit), so it’s no surprise they didn’t even bother later on, preferring to do these dead characters we’ve never seen before. It still works, given Voyager’s episodic structure.
And I liked the Kobali a lot. One of the better Delta Quadrant races, with well defined characteristics and cultural differences. Ballard’s journey is a tragic one, and hits all the right notes, making for an effective hour. Even the Borg kids subplot works well, as we start to see Icheb coming into his own.
@30 I agree, I always thought it would have been more interesting to make Harry (the young, idealistic new graduate) had been the one who was excited to explore the Delta Quadrant. But in order for that to happen, there would have needed to be a greater contrast with characters who were desperate to get back, which frankly Voyager never really excelled at. I wish they had made one of the main human characters a family man/woman, which would have allowed for more drama about being desperate to return home. Instead all of the main human characters are unmarried and have no kids (not that having kids/ a spouse is the only reason to want to get home, but it would have been a good way to portray that). Tuvok wants to get home to his wife, sure, but his Vulcan discipline was always going to make that something that only came up on occasion, instead of a major character motivation. It would have been interesting to see, say, how a character like Ben Sisko reacted to being thrown across the galaxy with likely no way to get back to his son.
@31/wildfyre: Janeway had a fiance, Mark, and a dog she was very attached to. She pined for Mark for the first two or three seasons, though I don’t think the dog was mentioned much after “Caretaker,” if at all. Still, I guess the reason they made it an engagement rather than a marriage was because they expected Janeway to move on eventually, possibly with Chakotay (though that idea didn’t outlast Jeri Taylor’s tenure).
It might’ve been interesting if the Starfleet crew had been more unattached, “married to the ship” and invested in exploring the Delta Quadrant, while Chakotay and the Maquis had had families and roots back in the DMZ that they wanted to get back to. It makes sense that Maquis would have strong connections to their homeworlds that they were fighting for, more so than Starfleet personnel who enlist out of wanderlust. It would’ve been a good source of tension between the Starfleet and Maquis worldviews, if the show hadn’t been so quick to minimize the differences between them.
Who’s to say that Kim & Libbey were’t planning on starting a polyamorous group? Perhaps Kim thought that Ballard would be interested in joining. One thing Trek has done is maintained, at least until Discovery with Stamets and Culber, is the “one man, one woman” sort of relationships. Single by choice, triads, group marriages and all other sorts of grouping should have been, if not commonplace, at least not considered unusual. Anything other than a traditional couple was assigned to aliens.
If Berman and Co. were so adamant about not showing gay human couples in the future, than polyamory was certainly out of the question. So it’s safe to assume that Kim wasn’t thinking about polyamory but was waiting for Libby to have an unfortunate transporter accident before pouncing on Ballard. But obviously he had no such luck.
@31/wildfyrewarning: Lt. Carey was established in the first season as a family man and that was his motivation for surprisingly aiding Torres and Seska in “Prime Factors” when they were violating the Prime Directive to get alien technology to get back home faster. So it’s a shame that he essentially went away after being built up in the first season and really should have been around a lot as, ya know, a part of of Torres’ engineering staff, and probable next-in-line for Chief Engineer.
@35 Yea, that’s one of those places where having a stronger B-cast throughout the entire series really would have helped. Carey, Samantha Wildman (obviously), and Ayala (off the top of my head) are all characters with spouses and/or kids they are separated from (and all played by reoccurring actors with speaking roles, so it isn’t like they would have had to pay extra), and yet relatively little comes from that (other than the incident with Carey that you mentioned). Every time Janeway stops so that Starfleet can chart it’s 11 millionth nebula, I always wonder if those characters are thinking “well, here’s another day I don’t get any closer to seeing my loved ones again.”
@36: A great season ending cliffhanger for Voyager would have been a mutiny Battlestar Galactica-style whereby a coalition of disgruntled Maquis members and Starfleet officers are pushed to the brink when Janeway stops the ship one time too many to study a comet.
Ayala really was just an extra though. He got name-checked a fair amount for sure and was seen a lot, but in the entire run of the series, the actor playing him only got four lines of dialogue, one of which was “Yeah.”
That would have been great! That’s honestly where I thought the series was headed in that episode with Carey the first time I saw the show, but then they made the (baffling, in my mind) decision to make Seska into a Cardassian spy and kill off anyone who wouldn’t toe the Starfleet line.
In fairness, that’s more personality than most of the 130+ non-main cast characters got. ;)
@34 – It’s true that TPTB wouldn’t have allowed it but it’s something that SHOULD have been done. But Trek by that time had become “a franchise” and the franchise must be protected at all costs. It’s that sort of thinking that gave us the Kelvin-verse where, instead of adult story telling, we get Kirk who grabs Uhura’s chest, hide under a bed and watcher her change and in STID, leers at Carol Marcus like he’s in junior high.
Reboot the whole universe and they can’t even come out and say in the movie that Sulu is gay. They overly subtle way they played it, his husband could have been his brother for all we know. I’ve seen siblings greet each other with more affection. Kirk gets to put it right in out face three times and Sulu is relegated to having a spouse and a child that we don’t even get to know the names of.
I do have to give props to Discovery for giving us the scene of Stamets and Culber bruising their teeth together. Direct, to the point and obviously a couple. Nothing over the top about it but also not cloaking it so much you’re not sure what you’re seeing. Well done. That’s one.
Discovery is great with Stamets and Culber’s relationship but they’ve done more than just brush teeth together (which was great and all) – they’ve kissed plenty of times too. And that was a first for two males on Star Trek period.
@32/CLB: As I recall, when Janeway gets the letter from home in “Hunters”, she notes Mark told her he found homes for the litter of puppies, although I’m not sure if we ever learn exactly what happened to Molly.
@40 – Yes, exactly. But for me it was the simple scene of them having a discussion while brushing their teeth that made them seem like a real couple. It was simple, direct and understated while not trying to disguise the fact that they were a couple.
And it was also long, long overdue.
@39 Okay I know that it’s a typo in your post but from now on I am going to refer to strenuous making out as “bruising your teeth together.”
@39 Okay I know that it’s a typo in your post but from now on I am going to refer to strenuous making out as “bruising your teeth together.”
Another point of view for the people who were eager to get home and/or resentful about Janeway stranding them there in the first place or exploring would be them being genuinely happy or enthused with Janeway when they made one of their massive jumps home. Whereas the Starfleet crew or the ones who’ve made peace with the situation may be freaked out by stealing alien technology, or making deals with shady individuals to get closer to home or just risking the ship’s safety, the Maquis and the homesick may applaud her in those situations for doing what needs to be done or keeping her eye on the ball, thus reversing the usual crew dynamics on occasion. As Janeway continues taking risks or at least make effective strides towards getting them closer to Earth to where it feels like they’re not going to die in the Delta Quadrant those people would over time acknowledge her as a worthy leader and not a “Starfleet fool” who got them trapped on the other side of the galaxy for some people they barely knew.
In that vein I’d be curious about the reaction of Maquis who are on a level grateful they were trapped on Voyager. If they had been at home, they’d be dead. Either the Cardassians would’ve killed them, or the Jem’Hadar would’ve annihilated them. Being taken out of that conflict saved their lives. For those who no longer have homes and families to go home to it would certainly be devastating, but for the more isolated people, the Maquis who were just starting out on their colonies and didn’t have strong ties yet, being on Voyager is the only reason they have a future. And that’s just as complex as the Survivor’s Guilt that it inverts. Survivor’s Relief is an angle worth dipping in to.
“Fun will now commence” is almost as funny as Worf’s “You may now give birth” to Keiko O’Brien in TNG‘s “Disaster.”
@garreth/7: I liked the fact that the guest character was the focus, showing, as krad pointed out, there are other people on the ship who are just as important as the main cast. That’s a feature, not a bug, especially given Voyager‘s situation.
This episode is better than I remembered, and that’s on the shoulders of Kim Rhodes, who gives us a complete, sympathetic character in one episode.
I would have loved if someone in the writers room had remembered Libby. There could have been a line, especially after Kim saying he didn’t like public speaking, where Ballard/Jhet’laya says something like, “Who was it who encouraged you to talk to Libby? The slob in the dorm across the hall, that’s who.” Something throwaway like that would wrap that nicely.
@46/dantehopkins: My problem with the guest character being the star of the episode was that she really was no longer a crew member of the ship. She was a former member and knowing the history of this series, I knew it was going to be a one shot appearance. So it was doubly annoying for me when I was confused as she was made out to be someone (retroactively) as so important to at least Harry and I wondered if I missed an earlier appearance by her in the series; and then knowing there was no way she was going to be staying on the ship by episode’s end, it just seemed like an inappropriate focus on her when the time could have been better spent on the main cast who are the actual stars of this series. I mentioned making exceptions for people like Barclay because he’s already been previously been established and also integral to the main plot line of getting Voyager home.
@garreth/47: That’s fair, but remember when we first met Barclay, he was the focus of his episode. We had no way of knowing Barclay was going to recur.
@48/DanteHopkins: True, but a few things: Barclay was heavy in that first episode but the main cast got a lot to do as well. It was partly a Geordi episode because you learn a lot about him in his dealings with Barclay, and you get interactions between Barclay with Riker and Troi, and to a smaller extent with Wesley and Picard. It was also an opportunity for most of the cast to play dress up and act totally different as their holo-counterparts. And finally, TNG had already at this point a decent history with at least a couple reoccurring characters like Guinan and O’Brien. So it wasn’t out of the realm for Barclay to reappear although I was pleasantly surprised when he did.
I know the universal translator is a handwave explanation about why everyone can always understand each other, but I don’t get why it doesn’t kick in when Ballard switches from English to Kobali. Also, I had to look up the actress who played Ballard after I watched it, because I knew I knew her from somewhere, and was quite happy to see it was Sheriff Jody Mills!
this! I can’t believe this is the only comment that mentions the Universal Translator.
That was one of several things that bothered me throughout the episode.
Our guest star was great, and everything else was dull and uninspired, aside from the pot roast line and the botched phone call. Those were fun.
I don’t think she has lost her taste for other cuisines; I think her physiology is so different, her taste buds have physiologically changed.
Appreciating this episode requires so many suspensions of disbelief, I ran out of fishing wire. Why couldn’t someone realize they are a halfling and be accepted for it? They didn’t let Seven out and that was portrayed as the right thing to do.
If her new father’s aim is to get her back and preserve all other life, why attack quickly and without communicating? Turns his whole race/culture into two dimensional bad guys. Why would he not fire a warning shot and then get on the radio, and stay on it throughout the attack? To him, he’s Janeway – bullheadedly standing up for what is right. He doesn’t act like it, just attacking Voyager until it’s nearly destroyed without pause for conversation.
Even the scene where Kim finds her sitting alone in the dark eating gruel – he doesn’t try to comfort her obvious distraught soul; he casually chats about the holodeck. The scene is written okay, but should have been played as him feeling for her and trying gently to cheer her up. Instead he comes off as surprised when she isn’t laughing at the idea. What about her makes that seem likely?
It all feels like weird rushed pacing, but a better episode has the same number of minutes and can pull off miracles.
I don’t buy the assumption that the UT is constantly active on board ship. Even the most advanced mechanical translation will be imperfect and risk losing nuances of meaning, and It’s unrealistic to expect a starship crew to rely entirely on technology with no backup in case it fails. Logically, everyone in Starfleet would be required to learn English at the Academy and use it aboardship, unless they were of a species whose vocal anatomy didn’t permit it. (Or some common language, but there have been many explicit references to the characters speaking English in a form comprehensible to people from the 20th-21st century.)
So I prefer to believe that when we see characters speaking English to each other, they actually are speaking English, unless the situation explicitly requires otherwise (like on a first contact or a clandestine visit to an alien planet). So the UT wouldn’t be engaged in those circumstances. Since people often use foreign words in their speech for deliberate effect, you wouldn’t want a translator to be constantly active and translating every foreign word the moment you said it.
I can believe that, though I think there have been numerous examples that contradict it. Like when someone unexpectedly winds up on the ship. Does the UT kick in instantly for anyone not wearing a comm badge? Did Neelix and Kes learn English immediately? Up till now, I was assuming it was just sort of on as part of Environmental Support, as an ambient vagueness, like a Somebody Else’s Problem field.
But inconsistent contradictions are true of any assertion when it comes to the UT so I can kind of wibbly-ize it as you describe for a spell.
While I find the idea of a race using others’ dead to “procreate” an interesting concept, SF Debris dissected its use here pretty well in his review of this episode.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just reanimate your own dead? Because that’s the kinda thing that’s gonna piss a lot of people off I think; grave-robbers usually are not welcome. Not to mention once again the question comes up with this: Why aren’t you using cloning? Anybody who can change one species into another, on top of the ability to raise the dead, should have the ability to create living beings from scratch and shake the DNA up to boot. Not to mention cure whatever catastrophe caused them to lose their pre-existing means of procreating.”
Yeah, I would think the Kobali’s neighbors would start disposing of their dead in manners that wouldn’t allow for reanimating, like cremation or vaporizing. And couldn’t the Kobali just reanimate their own dead? That should provide an infinite population; each deceased Kobali becomes a new Kobali
This Kobali reproduction, do they lay an egg in the corpse which then sort of eats it from the inside out, brain included, so what you get is a Kobali person made of reprocessed human, like I eat chicken and convert it to Robert.
I can imagine that they don’t tell the kids that until a lot later.
And it doesn’t work on their own species bodies because just because.
There’s an argument, which is probably refuted genetically but I don’t know where to check, that a caterpillar is a creature which seals itself in a cocoon and dies. Then a larva inside it eats the body and emerges as a butterfly. But not a butterfly that was a caterpillar, a butterfly that ate one. So Ballard either is a Human who was resurrected and raised as a Kobali, or is a Kobali who dreamed that she used to be a Human… or she is both, and/or is something in between.
If this story used the character from “Latent Image”, then however much of “Latent Image” they decided to bring up in this episode would be awkward, including none. My read of LI is that the Doctor is finally “cured” in that one when he decides that Captain Janeway’s headache symptoms are a priority, so maybe he’s over it, so perhaps they could have this story with the ensign that he didn’t save – or, in my theory, have this story with the alien life form that consumed her body – but nobody mentions his psychological difficulty after her death. And if a viewer doesn’t remember “Latent Image” then that doesn’t matter?
I’m pretty sure I saw this episode for the first time this week; by Season 6 of the original run I’d pretty much given up on the show.
When the premise (dead human reanimated and re-speciesed) was revealed, at first I thought it was a great one: a kindly people with a different definition of death and no model for how a human body should work resurrected Ballard and turned her into one of them. That’s vaguely reminiscent of what the Talosians did with Vina in “The Cage.”
But then they introduced the spectacularly moronic notion that the Kobali do this as a means of procreation, and I was reminded I was watching Star Trek: Voyager and not a better series. I knew everything that followed would be ahistorical with respect to the crew’s biographies, and that at the end of the episode Ballard would either be dead or gone. Reset button hit.
Kim Rhodes is really good (I’ve never seen Supernatural), but not good enough to save the mess that is this episode.
My chronological rewatch has some tough days ahead, doesn’t it?
The problem with this episode is The show itself.. even when watching the first time you knew Lyndsay was either going to return back to the Kobali or die.. this show just isn’t going to bring in a full time recurring character as a love interest for one of its Main cast, that would be far too much of a radical step, which is a shame as the character and actress are quite interesting.
Chalk down yet another missed opportunity to sit along side so many others.
@55/chadefallstar: I’m never convinced by the argument that “the story has no stakes if you know how it has to end.” I mean, yeah, you know she’s not going to stick around, but you also know that none of it is actually happening at all, that it’s just actors on a stage reciting scripted lines, so really, there are never any stakes to any of it. But you’re able to suspend disbelief about that, to set aside what you know and buy into the illusion that the stakes are real. So it should be possible to do the same when it comes to knowing the outcome.
I mean, if you’re incapable of enjoying a story whose ending you already know, how can you ever enjoy revisiting a story you’ve seen or read before? We buy into stories by identifying with the characters’ experiences and emotions. It doesn’t matter if you know how the story will turn out, because the characters don’t. The goal is to put yourself in the characters’ place, to imagine how it would feel to be in that situation. With a good story, you can do that every time even when you know the ending in advance. It’s always wrenching to watch Captain Kirk wrestle with whether to let Edith Keeler die, even if you’ve seen the episode fifty times. Heck, even to audiences in 1967, it was obvious that Kirk wouldn’t stay with her; what made the story compelling was the way it reached that outcome.
@56. The point is with DS9 it didn’t always do what you expect, Ziayl for example stuck around for a long while and that made her fate much more compelling in the end as you didn’t see it coming so it’s much more an emotional blow, it’s why DS9 was a much better show then Voyager and as a contemporary Voyager should have been learning from it.
To compare Voyager to TOS is comparing apples with oranges as that show existed in the same television sphere as shows like Bonanza where it was accepted that a girl Little Joe fell in love with was not seeing the final credits. By 2000 television was evolving and Voyager didn’t and neither did Enterprise, and that’s why the franchise went off the air for the best part of ten years.
@57/chadefallstar: “By 2000 television was evolving…”
Evolution is just change, not necessarily improvement. Serialized storytelling is not “better” than episodic, it’s just more fashionable these days. People have forgotten that there has always been serialized fiction. Charles Dickens’s novels were originally published as magazine serials, which is why they’re so long and episodic. There were plenty of serialized shows on radio and early television — soap operas, children’s adventure serials, and the like. The form has always existed; it’s not something that only recently “evolved.” The only thing that’s really changed is the perception of it. In the early days of television, serialization was seen as lowbrow because it was associated with soaps and children’s shows, stuff that had to be churned out rapidly without a lot of time to make it good. The classiest shows were the anthologies written by the noted playwrights of the day. So even shows with continuing casts aspired to be as anthology-like and continuity-free as possible, because that generation saw episodic fiction as more intelligent and sophisticated than serial fiction. Also because they didn’t have home video and barely had reruns, so it was harder to experience a series as a continuous whole and it was more important to make each individual installment as good as possible in its own right.
So it’s just elitist gatekeeping to pretend that episodic storytelling is inferior, no more valid than the opinion of our forebears that serial storytelling was inferior. It’s shortsighted to mistake fashionability for quality, because inevitably the fashions will shift a different way sooner or later. Good stories can be told in any format, and standalone stories are just as valid as continuing ones.
This has to be the stupidest form of reproduction. Surely a species whose medical technology is so advanced that they can not only reanimate the dead but also genetically manipulate them to become a different species entirely could easily produce by cloning.
But it was still a good episode.
I would have liked this one better if it weren’t for the continuity issues and if they had put more thought into Kobali reproduction. This could have had an easy fix; they establish the Kobali as “valuing all life,” so maybe they could just have said that they have a cultural practice of reviving any corpse that they can and integrating it into their society.
That said, I thought that Ballard/Jhet’laya was an absolutely fascinating character concept and I kind of wish that she had (re)joined the crew permanently.
When I first saw this episode on TV, i thought the girl really was a member of the crew earlier and i had just missed the episodes where she had appeared. With that assumption, the episode kinda worked for me. By now, after rewatching the whole series and knowing she was just invented for this episode, i find it again insulting on an intellectual level. I’m supposed to believe that she was so important for Harry, but we have NEVER seen her? we haven’t seen her getting killed? So why would i invest into her NOW?
I really don’t understand why they couldn’t keep a couple of regular actors around for some crew members. Then we could all have cared if anyone died and could have been excited if one gets resurrected…
@61/th1_: “I really don’t understand why they couldn’t keep a couple of regular actors around for some crew members. Then we could all have cared if anyone died and could have been excited if one gets resurrected…”
They actually did that in the early seasons, e.g. Mr. Hogan, who was a frequent background presence in season 2 and was killed off in “Basics.” And in season 1, Durst was introduced a week before he was killed off in “Faces,” which barely counts. But at least they did try. But over the years as showrunners changed, there was less effort to maintain consistency with what had come before.
Also, shows get more expensive the longer they run, as the regular cast and crew get annual raises, and ratings tend to drop off. So long-running shows have to cut their budgets to survive, and it’s harder to afford to hold onto a large supporting cast.
I think the writers missed a trick by not writing Ballard as one of the unfortunates killed when Voyager was pulled into the Delta Quadrant. After all, it’s not as if the plot relies on her friendship with Harry having developed on Voyager post-‘Caretaker’: it’s made clear they were friends, and that Harry had feelings for her, back in the academy together. And establishing her as dead by the end of the pilot episode would allow them to avoid claiming, in defiance of all evidence, that she was not only present throughout the first three seasons but also a really close friend of Harry.
Against that, the decision to establish her as killed in Season 4 would make sense if the writers were *trying* to show Harry’s feelings for her as a post-Libby development – a main character simultaneously having feelings for two women being more than 90s Trek was prepared to show. But again the dialogue establishes that Harry had feelings for her pre/while he was dating Libby- and anyway, there’s nothing in this episode to show any of the characters or writers remember Libby at this point.
More practically, I guess establishing her as dying in the pilot would have meant more distance for her travel to reunite with Voyager. But it’s clear the Kobali aren’t subject to the same speed/distance limitations as Voyager anyway. And okay, it would also mean there might be a couple of dozen other Voyager/Maquis deceased crew members reanimated and integrated into Kobali society. Which is a bit nightmare fuel-ish, but not I think an insuperable problem for the plot (“they all feel they belong with the Kobali now/none of them felt like they would be at home on Voyager now…”), especially as Ballard/Jhet’leya herself decides in the end that she cannot stay with Voyager.
@63 Marcellus: if she had died in the pilot, why would she care about the crew? new ship, new crew, not sure if she would be motivated to chase them for years…
Also, would be hard to imagine how she would catch up with them so easily having such huge distance and long time passed.
I found this episode to be interesting in concept, but terrible in execution. And that’s notwithstanding the excellent performance by the guest star.
As has been noted many times above, many many things (too many to mention again) had to “happen just right” or be contrived in the writers’ room to allow the story to even take place. And to make matters (much) worse, all of that implausibility was in the service of an outcome that was disappointing at best and deeply disturbing at worst.
Possibly the only thing that might have helped would’ve been if the doctor had stated at some point that she was continuing to evolve, both physically and mentally, into the alien species— in other words, that she was becoming more alien by the moment. As it stands, she simply changed her mind after everything she went through to get back to Voyager, and decided to go live with aliens she’d risked her life to flee earlier.
While that’s possible, it seems far less plausible than if they’d simply stated outright that everything about her was now alien, and the last vestiges of the old human her were slipping away. But they went for the (cheaper) emotional manipulation with Harry et al. Disappointing.
Huh. I thought this episode started off strong. The idea of a culture that reanimates the dead to continue their race is a fascinating one (and appeals to my goth side). But I felt it bogged down by the inevitability of Ballard having to return (or die). So that the middle stuff is just the old Trek thing about someone wanting asylum and another culture unwilling to let them go (which usually is resolved by the person returning to said culture, because we can’t add more crew members). Maybe I’m just grouchy.
I think it presents compelling questions, however, ones applicable to a number of different real life situations. I just wish it had found a different way to tell it.