“Cold Fire”
Written by Anthony Williams and Brannon Braga
Directed by Cliff Bole
Season 2, Episode 10
Production episode 126
Original air date: November 13, 1995
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. After a brief narrated segment reminding us of what happened in “Caretaker,” including the revelation that the title character had a mate out there somewhere, we jump to the present, where Tuvok is working with Kes on her telepathy. She hears the cacophony of thoughts on the ship, and then eventually is able to isolate Neelix’s as he’s getting a haircut. She also giggles, to Tuvok’s chagrin.
Their session makes her late for her medical instruction with the EMH. In the midst of their discussion of her progress, they hear a high-pitched whining, that turns out to be coming from the corpse of the Caretaker, which has been kept in storage in sickbay.
The EMH picks up life signs briefly, but they cease, and by the time Torres and Janeway report to sickbay to check it out, it once again reads as inert. But while they’re discussing it, it starts to make the noise again, and also shake. Torres is still reading the corpse as inert, but it’s resonating with sporocystian energy—and the Caretaker was a sporocystian life form. Janeway thinks they may have found the Caretaker’s mate.
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It doesn’t last long enough to get a fix on the energy reading, but Kim and Torres work to set up a way to trace it if it happens again. Meantime, Tuvok proposes the creation of a weapon that will debilitate a sporocystian life form, remembering that the crew was completely at the Caretaker’s mercy, and they could use an advantage this time.
The whining and vibrations happen again, and Kim is able to get a fix. Paris sets a course, and they find another array just like the Caretaker’s only way smaller. They hail it, only to find an Ocampa answering—and one who wants nothing to do with Voyager and tells them to bugger off.
Janeway brings Kes to the bridge, and she tries again. The Ocampa, Tanis, is running out of patience, but he softens upon seeing Kes. He agrees to beam over to discuss matters.
Tanis and his comrade explain their hostility: Voyager has gained a reputation in this region as a “ship of death,” based on their conflicts with the Kazon as well as their role in the death of the Caretaker. (The conflict with the Vidiians isn’t mentioned, but that probably doesn’t help.) Janeway tries to defend the ship’s rep, but Tanis asks to speak with Kes alone instead.
He offers to help her develop her telepathy, which is far more advanced than hers, and that of the Ocampa on the homeworld. Kes is shocked to learn that Tanis is fourteen—the Ocampa Kes grew up with usually only live to be nine at most. He starts to teach her how to develop her psychokinesis, demonstrating by accelerating the growth of everything in airponics. Then he shows her how to create great heat, and she winds up destroying everything in airponics. (The effect this has on the crew’s food supply is not mentioned.) He works a bit more with her, eventually getting her to show more control. He also offers to let her stay with them on the array among her own people.
The Caretaker’s mate, Suspiria, is the one responsible for this. When she left the Ocampa homeworld and the Caretaker behind, she took some Ocampa with her, and they have thrived on the array. Tanis agrees to ask Suspiria to manifest, which will take a couple of days. He returns to the array, saying he’ll return when she arrives.
Kes shares her experience with Tuvok, and attempts to re-create it. She is able to heat a mug of tea, but she loses control and superheats Tuvok’s blood, nearly killing him, though the EMH is able to save him. Kes is beside herself, but Tuvok reminds her that, while she nearly killed him, she didn’t actually kill him, and she should focus on that.
Tuvok, with help from Torres and the EMH, has come up with a way to disable Suspiria, should it become necessary.
Suspiria appears in engineering. Torres alerts the bridge, but then loses contact. Tuvok goes with a security team. Tanis, meanwhile, tries to inveigle Kes to come away with him. Kes refuses, and, after Tanis assaults Neelix, she attacks Tanis telepathically.
Janeway goes to engineering, only to find Tuvok and Torres suspended from the ceiling. (It is unclear what happened to the rest of the engineering crew or the rest of Tuvok’s security detail.) Suspiria blames Janeway for the Caretaker’s death, not believing her assurances that her mate died of natural causes. Suspiria attacks the ship itself, starting to disintegrate it, but then she’s distracted by Tanis’s pain at Kes’s attack. That gives Janeway the opportunity to hit Suspiria with the toxin.
But when she’s helpless before Janeway, the captain agrees to let her go. Surprised by the compassion, Suspiria buggers off, taking an anguished Tanis with her.
Voyager continues on its merry way. Kes no longer has the enhanced abilities she had when Tanis was around, and she’s grateful to a degree, as she didn’t like what she became with those abilities. Tuvok reminds her that without the darkness, we cannot appreciate the light.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, the Caretaker and Suspiria are sporocystian life forms. Whatever the hell that is.
Mr. Vulcan. After it’s been mentioned twice that Kes is training with Tuvok on the use of her telepathy (“Cathexis,” “Persistence of Vision“), we finally get to actually see them having their telepathic tutoring sessions.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Twice, the EMH snarks off Tuvok. The first time is to Kes by complaining that his telepathy training is making her late for her medical training with him. (“You’d think a Vulcan would be more attuned to punctuality.”) After Tuvok is injured by Kes, he prescribes bedrest, which Tuvok refuses, as his Vulcan healing techniques (seen way back in “A Private Little War“) are adequate to the task, prompting the second snark, that Vulcans make the worst patients.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. It is never made clear who is cutting Neelix’s hair. It’s rather difficult to credit that a ship that only had two people assigned to the medical staff had a barber assigned, equally difficult to credit that there was a barber in Chakotay’s Maquis cell. But maybe someone in one of the crews does it as a hobby. Still, it is an odd bit of business…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. In contrast to his past churlish behavior, Neelix is now totally supportive of Kes working on her telepathy, and is thrilled with her increased abilities under Tanis’s tutelage. He also makes it clear that he will go with Kes wherever she wishes, even if that means staying in Suspiria’s array.
Do it.
“If you are to succeed in honing your telepathic abilities, you must learn to control these emotional outbursts.”
“Outbursts? It was a giggle!”
“Tomorrow, I will teach you a Vulcan mind-control technique that will help you inhibit your—giggles.”
–Kes and Tuvok discussing her progress—this quoting of it fails to show just how perfect Tim Russ’s dry delivery of the final line was…
Welcome aboard. Gary Graham, best known prior to this as Detective Sikes in the Alien Nation TV series and followup movies, plays Tanis. Graham will return to Trek on Enterprise in the recurring role of Ambassador Soval. Norman Large also appears as another Ocampa, having previously appeared in “State of Flux” as a Kazon in an uncredited turn; Large also played Proconsul Neral in TNG’s “Unification” two-parter, an alien ship captain in DS9’s “Duet,” and Maques in TNG’s “Dark Page.” Lindsay Ridgeway plays the little-girl version of Suspiria, while Majel Barrett does triple duty, providing narration over the “previously on” segment, her usual turn as the computer voice, and is the voice of Suspiria.
Trivial matters: Suspiria was originally written into “Caretaker” as a sop to the executives at Paramount, who wanted a “get out of jail free” card to play in case the audience didn’t embrace the “lost in space” premise. However, the show was a success by this point, and after this episode, Suspiria is never seen on screen again.
Suspiria and the Caretaker’s species is identified in this episode as the Nacene. While they won’t be seen again, and will only be mentioned generally in connection with how Voyager (and, as we’ll see later, the Equinox) got stuck in the Delta Quadrant, the species is explored in the String Theory novel trilogy by Jeffrey Lang, Kirsten Beyer, and Heather Jarman.
This is the first time Voyager is referred to by the locals as “the ship of death,” an appellation that will dog them throughout their time in the Delta Quadrant.
The “previously on” segment explicitly dates this episode as being ten months after “Caretaker.”
Set a course for home. “Now you will know what frail, small creatures you truly are!” One of the frustrations that has often been expressed regarding Voyager over the last couple of decades has been that it doesn’t just hit the reset button, but jumps up and down on it several times. To make matters worse, too often the show doesn’t go to any effort to justify the resetting of the status quo, it just sort of happens because it’s the end of the episode. We’ve already seen it in “Faces” where the only reason why Torres had to be restored to her halfbreed status was because the EMH said so in a technobabble infodump at the last second. Nothing in the episode set up the restoration, it was just a fait accompli, justified only by made-up science.
It happens again here, only it’s worse, because Kes’s increase in powers doesn’t happen because Tanis is manipulating her abilities, it’s happening because he’s unlocking her potential. She’s become a much more powerful psychokinetic, powers she continues to manifest without Tanis’s presence, though she has less control without him around. In fact, she’s sufficiently powerful that she can hurt Tanis so badly that he needs Suspiria to save his ass.
And then at the end of the episode, those increased abilities are gone with absolutely no explanation. And it makes no sense whatsoever, based on what the episode itself provided. Just like “Faces,” it’s thrown in at the last minute as if Brannon Braga was most of the way through Act 5 and said, “Shit, I gotta restore the status quo!!!!!” and wrote the last scene with Kes and Tuvok to say she couldn’t do it anymore.
Which is especially annoying because everything else in that final scene is brilliant. Tuvok is supposed to have a long history as a teacher, but the only previous example we’d seen was in “Learning Curve,” about which the less said the better. But here, his advice to Kes is good and strong and useful. I particularly love his response to her never wanting to feel the joy she took from destruction: “Without the darkness, how would we recognize the light? Do not fear your negative thoughts, they are part of you. They are a part of every living being—even Vulcans. … The Vulcan heart was forged out of barbarism and violence. We learned to control it, but it is still part of us. To pretend it does not exist is to create an opportunity for it to escape.”
Way back on the original series, “The Naked Time” established that Vulcans aren’t emotionless but that they in fact tightly control their emotions, and “Balance of Terror” and “All Our Yesterdays” made it clear that Vulcans have a violent past. Too often, Vulcans are mistaken for emotionless rather than controlled, and Tim Russ’s performance in general and that speech in particular beautifully encapsulate that important truth.
It’s just a pity the rest of the episode doesn’t live up to what came at the end of it. The whole thing feels perfunctory. The producers had hung the Suspiria gun on the wall back in the very first episode, and they needed to fire it and get it out of the way so it wouldn’t be hanging over the show for the rest of its run. Suspiria believing that Janeway and the gang killed the Caretaker is a nice way to keep her from sending them home, at least.
But the whole episode just feels like paperwork. It doesn’t help that the script is lazy—besides the last-minute she-doesn’t-have-super-powers-anymore ending, there’s also the lack of explanation of what happened to the engineering crew and Tuvok’s security detail when Suspiria showed up—and that Gray Graham gives a surprisingly stiff performance. Graham, who will be one of the bright spots of Enterprise in showing the evolution of Soval from antagonist to ally, is just nowhere as Tanis, and he drains all the tension out of his scenes with Kes. What should be a relationship that goes from wondrous to awful instead just kinda sits there on the screen.
This is through no fault of Jennifer Lien, who does the best she can with the material, and she really sells Kes’s eagerness to learn, which has been the character’s hallmark from jump. And it’s nice to see Neelix being supportive of Kes instead of ignoring her telepathy or undermining her intelligence or being jealous every time she looks at anyone. Post-“Parturition” Neelix is way better, and I approve of the change.
But there are so many unanswered questions. How does the crew feel about the fact that they’ve had another shot at going home yanked out from under them? For that matter, how did the crew feel about going after Suspiria in the first place? The guarded excitement that we saw in “Eye of the Needle” and “Prime Factors” is completely absent here. Hell, I’d have settled for the hand-wringing we got in “The 37’s,” but there’s just nothing here.
Lien and Russ are superb, but that’s all this sodden mess has going for it.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido encourages all and sundry to support the crowdfund for the third book in the “18th Race” trilogy of military science fiction novels, To Hell and Regroup, which Keith wrote with David Sherman. It’s being jointly funded along with Christopher L. Bennett’s Arachne’s Crime, and it’s already reached the funding goal, so if you support it, you’re guaranteed to get the books! Check it out!
It is never made clear who is cutting Neelix’s hair. It’s rather difficult to credit that a ship that only had two people assigned to the medical staff had a barber assigned, equally difficult to credit that there was a barber in Chakotay’s Maquis cell.
Maybe, knowing they’d be away from Fed space for the foreseeable future, Janeway or Chakotay asked a crewmember or three to learn at least some rudimentary barbering skills.
Or they have a barber program on the holodeck. (Hell, why not?)
Or — and this is something I now desperately wish they had explored — the ship also came equipped with an EBH (Emergency Barbering Hologram).
Oh, good grief, “sporocystian energy.” Uggghhhh, one of the worst offenses of Trek technobabble in this era. When “Caretaker” called its title entity a sporocystian life form, it was presumably referring to an aspect of the species’s biology, as a sporocyst is a sac that produces spores, or a larval stage in certain worms. So it refers to a physiological structure. But “Cold Fire” ignored that and treated it like just another meaningless string of syllables for a kind of energy, which is just… so… dumb. So lazy and thoughtless and cavalier. Ugh.
I try to rationalize it as shorthand for “the unique type of energy associated with the sporocystian life form known as the Caretaker,” but it’s still just so dumb.
Otherwise, I like the episode reasonably well. It’s nice to see Kes trying to expand her abilities, something that should’ve been her character’s defining drive but that was too often overlooked as the writers just let her burn off large swaths of her short lifespan just hovering in the background in sickbay. I don’t mind that her abilities faded once she was no longer in touch with other Ocampa, since it’s reasonable to assume that the abilities of a telepathic people might be stronger communally than individually — particularly given that Tanis’s group had spent years learning to amplify their abilities, so we can surmise that Kes was piggybacking off their frequency, as it were.
One of the complaints I’ve seen online about this episode is that they keep the Caretaker’s corpse in a closet in sickbay, in essence, which is especially odd given Chakotay’s hand-wringing about disturbing the dead back in “Emanations.” I have to admit to being surprised by that because, well, isn’t sickbay where the morgue would be?
(This also brings up the question I asked in “Caretaker” — where are the corpses of all the crewmembers who died when the Caretaker took them?)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I don’t see Kes’ powers returning to a preset minimum after this episode. The events of “Cold Fire” give Kes a glimpse of how powerful she can become, and we do see progressions of her abilities in the next almost two seasons. (E.g., the pre-“Cold Fire” Kes would have not been able to stand up to the events of “Warlord”.) It’s just that she gets the significant boost all at once, which obviously she can’t control. The level of power she demonstrates in this episode is obviously what the mature Kes is able to do in the sixth season’s “Fury”.
Reminds me of certain action/anime series where the power reset button is pushed because the writers realized a certain character is way too powerful for the plot. Kind of like what happened in Heroes with Peter.
Where are the corpses of all the crewmembers who died when the Caretaker took them?
Sailing through space in torpedoes, I would imagine.
Suspiria was originally written into “Caretaker” as a sop to the executives at Paramount, who wanted a “get out of jail free” card to play in case the audience didn’t embrace the “lost in space” premise.
Which is kind of funny when you consider that DS9 rapidly made this idea fairly unworkable. DS9 didn’t conclude its run until Voyager was five seasons old, which means that getting Voyager home “early” would mean dropping them into the middle of the Dominion War or finding some contrived explanation for why they took no part in it. In the event they decide to reject their own premise, probably easier to keep the ship in the Delta Quadrant and just ignore their starting premise as much as possible… which is, of course, pretty much what they ended up doing.
@1: Or they have a barber program on the holodeck. (Hell, why not?)
I don’t see why not. It’s one thing to have Mott on the Enterprise when they have plenty of space and infinite reinforcements. Voyager is 50 crewmembers away from not being able to operate the ship at all. It doesn’t make sense to devote any time to haircuts or investing points in the haircut skill tree. There’s only 150 of them, figure the average person wants a haircut every three weeks. A 25-seat barbershop is well within the holodeck’s capabilities so having it “open” twice a week with rotating time slots should be more than enough.
The barber holodeck makes sense. I wonder, though, is there any skill the computer can’t duplicate? Hairstylists vary wildly in skill level, as there is something of an art form to it. Finding the right barber was essential for me.
@6/Nick: “Where are the corpses of all the crewmembers who died when the Caretaker took them?
Sailing through space in torpedoes, I would imagine.”
Well, that would be a waste. Considering the ship was supposed to be hard up for resources and food, the logical, dispassionate thing to do would’ve been to recycle the bodies as replicator stock. And before you say that sounds morbid or cannibalistic, is it really any different than burying a body in the soil so its biomass can decay and nourish the soil and grow new plants and so forth? The Earth is a closed ecosystem that recycles everything, and a space habitat or vessel needs to be as close to that as it can get if it’s to remain habitable for the long haul. So from a pragmatic standpoint, for a starship stranded by itself with no resupply bases on hand, jettisoning a usable source of CHON into space is an unconscionable waste.
@8/Austin: With all due respect to hairstylists, if the computers can simulate the level of skill necessary to perform expert surgery, they can proooobably handle tonsorial skills as well.
Maybe the quality of haircut Neelix gets is on par with the food he serves.
-9-
I never bought into that low on resources jazz. Hard to buy into ‘roughing it’ when holodecks are still operating.
But I’ll enjoy my naval traditions and you enjoy your Soylent power bar. ;)
Pretty easy to believe there was a barber in Chakotay’s crew, since many Maquis were civilians who presumably had occupations before joining the organization.
In my mind, it’s Chell, the Bolian, because I have my own headcanon about Mott and his species: there are no creatures with hair in their home planet. When the Bolians first made contact with an alien species, they were fascinated by the concept of hair.
Thus, many of them went to other planets to study to become barbers of hairdressers. Fastforward a couple of centuries, and there is grand tradition of Bolian hairstylists, barbers, etc all over the Alpha and Beta quadrants.
MaGnUs: My headcanon is now that Chell is Voyager‘s barber. Good work!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@12/MaGnUs: We’ve seen at least one Bolian with hair, Mitena Haro in TNG: “Allegiance” (she was an impostor, but nobody found it strange that she had hair).
00 / KRAD:
Suspiria and the Caretaker’s species is identified in this episode as the Nacene. While they won’t be seen again, and will only be mentioned generally in connection with how Voyager (and, as we’ll see later, the Equinox) got stuck in the Delta Quadrant, the species is explored in the String Theory novel trilogy by Jeffrey Lang, Kirsten Beyer, and Heather Jarman.
Yeah, I remember that was an aspect of the Trilogy I really enjoyed: The exploration of Nacene society and offering an in-story explanation (albeit via tie-in) as to why Voyager never ran into them again after this episode.
I found Cold Fire to be a very strong episode of an uneven first and second season. Susperia was an interesting character that should have returned. She was interesting and it would have been nice to delve deeper into the Caretakers people and their society.
And it was an amazing episode for Kes. A seriously underused character. This episode showed us what she and the Ocompa were capable of. This should have been explored more throughout the series. Kes and her developing powers.
@6 annd @9: This has no doubt been discussed many times elsewhere since Wrath of Khan, but – talking to you space experts – is the “burial in space” at all irresponsible as a danger to others? I remember reading about the true vastness of space so the odds of colliding with anything are terribly small, and I suppose most craft capable of space flight would be able to detect or deflect such things, but I also remember reading about how much of the Eagle lander on the Apollo missions was basically constructed of material barely thicker than aluminum foil for weight conservation. I love the callback to naval traditions, but seems to me that there might be better ways of honoring the dead than polluting space with their bodies, and hard-shell torpedo coffins. At least with burial at sea, the body was returned to the bottom of the sea with shot and merely a shroud, and the elements soon claimed the bodies anyway.
Yes, but we humans keep assuming that “vast” is equivalent to “unfillable” and just look what we’ve done to our own ocean and skies as a result.
Just wait until we figure out how to send our trash into space…
@17/fullyfunctional: The odds of an unplanned collision in space are minuscule. In orbital space, debris can be a significant risk, because paths are more concentrated, but in the depths of interstellar space it’s an inconsequential risk. Besides, starships have navigational deflectors and shields to fend off space debris.
Of course, in the first “Starfleet burial” we saw, in TWOK, Spock’s tube was intended to burn up in the atmosphere of the Genesis Planet, so it was essentially a cremation; but “the gravity fields were in flux. It must have soft-landed.” If later productions showed torpedo-tube “coffins” just left floating in space, that’s a reinterpretation of the practice.
@20- thanks CLB, all of that makes sense. Yes I would think that having the torpedoes set to self-immolate or disintegrate somehow after firing akin to cremation would be a better way than just littering the galaxy with bodies.
I knew I recognized Tanis! And I still miss Alien Nation. (another show Graham was much much better in)
@21/fullyfunctional: As I said, the “litter” is insignificant. Interstellar space is probably already packed with trillions of comets, asteroids, meteoroids, etc. on all scales from specks of dust to rogue planets.
Also, blowing something up in space makes it more dangerous, not less, because at spaceship velocities, even a tiny speck of dust can be destructive, so one relatively compact object is preferable to millions of widely dispersed fragments. That’s why efforts to deal with all the orbital debris that’s accumulated around the Earth are focused on capturing space junk rather than blowing it apart and making the orbital clutter even worse. Although if you have navigational deflectors, I guess it’d be the other way around — a cloud of dust would be much easier to deflect than a sizeable object. Although the odds of hitting the single object would be far lower too, so it kind of evens out.
CLB- interesting! I guess my pejorative term “litter” was poorly chosen for a couple of different reasons. I just don’t like the idea of bodies being shot out into space for anyone to encounter. If the point is to honor the dead in a very old and traditional fashion, I think it’s strange they would do so a way that does not guard against the possibility, however remote, that their remains could be found and disturbed by others.
Personally, I don’t attach any significance to my corpse after I go, except to the extent that some use could be made of it. I like the idea of having my cadaver being taken apart over a semester by medical students. :)
@24/fullyfunctional: It’s just hard for the human mind to grasp how infinite space is, and how infintesimal the odds of accidentally encountering any specific object in all that immensity. It’s like worrying about running into a single specific molecule somewhere on Earth, although even that’s probably more likely than accidentally hitting a coffin in deep space.
Anyway, I think a lot of people in Starfleet would like the idea of leaving their remains for far-future archaeologists to discover and study. Donating their bodies to science, as it were.
Cold Fire is decent enough as a Kes episode, with some good use of Tuvok in a supporting role. Of course, it’s easier to embrace the episode a few decades later, without having to live with the ever-present reset button. They had to get the Caretaker thread out of the way, regardless, especially if the show was going to live to its premise as being stranded 70K light years away.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the plotting is lazy and rushed. And focusing this much on Kes leaves no time to address how would the crew react emotionally to the chance of getting home. Suspiria is especially underdeveloped. Personally, I wish the show had spent more time debating Suspiria’s reasoning, and putting Janeway more into this question. She’s the captain. There should have been a longer debate regarding her role in the previous Caretaker’s demise. Boiling everything down to an action sequence feels shallow.
Thankfully we get some really good Kes/Doctor scenes out of the episode, which is why it’s still watchable to this day.
Regarding Voyager’s “reputation”, I have a hard time buying into the ship of death story thread. Not the idea itself, since it’s very believable that other races would mistrust a ship interfering with Delta Quadrant events the way Voyager has. My problem is with the execution. How can Voyager’s reputation possibly reach out to planets it hasn’t reached yet? Granted, we know subspace signals travel large distances faster than warp, but that doesn’t mean everyone is going to be sharing this information freely across the quadrant. Voyager has been travelling towards Federation space at high warp for 10 months. There is no way these Ocampa could already know about Voyager’s actions, especially given Kes’ own Ocampa city is light years away and they live inside the planet. And from what we’ve seen of the Delta Quadrant, not many ships travel faster than Voyager. So the chances of her reputation spreading this far across the quadrant are slim to none.
Not that it’s terribly significant but I think this was the first episode of Trek to do a “previously on…” narration that wasn’t part of a two-part or multiple-part episode. I can recall watching that narration in first-run perking up and thinking this was going to be a significant episode. And while it was in a way and it kept my attention, it was also disappointing and amounting to a whole lot of nothing in the end.
I thought Suspiria in little human girl form speaking in a Blair from The Exorcist voice was pretty laughable. I imagine the name “Suspiria” is meant to evoke horror? So Suspiria wanted to enact vengeance on the Voyager crew but in the beginning, before Tanis realized Kes was aboard, he was going to send Voyager away. So if that happened how would Suspiria have carried out her revenge plan?
Anyway, I do kind of wonder here Suspiria and her little band of Ocampa buggered off to? And if Tanis lived to be 14, then maybe Kes could have too?
Is this the debut of Jennifer Lien’s magnificently unusual scream on the series? I also remember being initially annoyed by it but now I think it just adds to the alien-ness of her character.
@26/Eduardo: Voyager has encountered a number of starfaring species already, some of whom are widespread in their travels, like the Kazon, Vidiians, Talaxians, Sikarians, and various others. Presumably these powers have subspace radio, commerce and communication with neighboring powers, etc. Why wouldn’t the information be shared? It’s news. News travels.
@27/GarretH: “I imagine the name “Suspiria” is meant to evoke horror?”
Oh, you mean like the 1977 Dario Argento film of that title? That never occurred to me before, because I guess I wasn’t aware of a movie by that name until I heard vaguely about the recent remake (or “homage” as Wikipedia calls it). I guess it would explain why they gave her a name that’s basically Latin for “sighs.” Although I think at the time I assumed it was more related to aspirations, hopes.
As Keith says, using the old Chekov metaphor (Anton, not Pavel), there being another lifeform like the Caretaker out there was a gun hung on the wall back in the first episode that needed to be fired at some point. Unfortunately, it’s never quite fired, just picked up and waved around a bit. Voyager tracks down Suspiria, she wants to kill them all, they convince her not to, then she clears off having had no real impact on anything. And so the gun is put back on the wall unfired, with Janeway vowing to find her again and convince her to help them. Except they never do.
This all feels rather disturbing in retrospect. Kes takes a few steps along the road that she’ll ultimately run headlong down when she leaves the ship in Season 4, and already it feels like the destination is disaster. If Suspiria and Tanis hadn’t wanted to hurt all her friends, she could well have gone with them here. But at least we get another example of her being a “powerful little thing”, as she easily takes down Tanis once he’s made her angry enough and even manages to do some damage to Suspiria herself.
Neelix seems to be learning: He’s clearly bristling when Tanis wants to take Kes away but manages to keep his counsel, and is supportive of her subsequently. Tuvok is a bit of a jerk towards her in the pre-credits: He’s surely taught enough non-Vulcans to know that they tend to have an emotional reaction to things. Still, he’s very forgiving about her nearly killing him, so I guess that makes up for it.
And yes, Gary Graham who will play the more prominent role of Ambassador Soval in the next Star Trek series. It’s always annoyed me a little that the recap features a made-up line for the Caretaker to sum it all up in a sentence or two. (They’ve left the array far behind by the time they contact Suspiria, by the way. Tanis stays on board the ship, hence him needing Suspiria to transport him away at the end.)
@29/cap-mjb: The playwright’s name is Anton Chekhov, not Chekov. That’s how you tell them apart.
@25 Not Chakotay. :)
And although I defer to your expertise as to the random odds of running into a sarcophagus adrift in space, when you consider how often Voyager encounters ridiculous things out there, like mid-20th century pickup trucks that still contain gasoline, or any one of a couple of dozen anomalies that no one has seen before or since, I wouldn’t be so cavalier about shooting coffins into the void because the odds are slim that anyone would find them. This is episodic sci-fi television. If something’s out there to be found, someone will find it. Especially if the discovery is likely to result in mortal danger to the crew….
I would assume burial in space via a torpedo isn’t that common when a ship is within or near the Federation. Different cultures, different rituals. But like CLB said, there’s plenty of room out there anyway.
@30/CLB: Good point. Well made.
@31/fullyfunctional: “when you consider how often Voyager encounters ridiculous things out there”
I’m not talking about the odds of detecting something in space, I’m talking about the odds of colliding with it. Voyager can detect plenty of things that are not in its direct path, because it has long-range sensors. The thing about space is that it has no horizons, so in theory just about everything is in your direct line of sight and you can theoretically find any object at any distance if your telescopes are good enough and you’re looking in the right direction. So that’s a completely, profoundly different subject from the probability of being accidentally struck by an object that you didn’t detect. By analogy, Earth astronomers have detected millions of asteroids, only a handful of which pose any potential risk of striking Earth in the future.
And of course, it follows that the sensors could detect anything that was in the ship’s path well before it actually hit. So once again, there is no reason to worry about accidental impacts.
@13 – krad: Glad to be of assistance. I came up with all this while playing a Bolian in an RPG game run by my son. Not that anyone cares, but he’s the first officer of the USS Bohr, and a first contact specialist.
@14 – Chris: Some Bolians take their fascination with hair to the extent that they’l wear wigs or get hair implants.
@12 – “In my mind, it’s Chell, the Bolian, because I have my own headcanon about Mott and his species: there are no creatures with hair in their home planet. “
You took the thought right out of my brain. Thank you!
@14 – Perhaps young Bolians are known for wearing wigs. Maybe it’s the equivalent of wearing chains and leathers just to freak out their parents. Or maybe it’s fetish wear. Just being a wig, Starfleet really doesn’t care as long as it conforms to regulations.
On burials in space:
It’s possible that military ships in Voyager’s time have a storage area/temporary memorial for the dead until they can be returned home (or not, I’m just raising the possibility).
The Caretaker, whose body is still being studied, on the other hand, is in the morgue.
It’s been announced that Garrett Wang and Robert Duncan McNeill are doing their very own Voyager rewatch. It’s a free podcast coming early next month so we all have that to look forward to.
@37 I am watching Voyager for the first time and have been bingeing so I am far ahead. There is a 6th season episode where a Voyager ensign who died and was given the torpedo burial comes back to Voyager 3 years later, having been reanimated by a race that procreate by altering the DNA of dead beings and bringing them back to life.
So burial in space seems to be standard operating procedure. Further, I think there was a suggestion earlier that Voyager’s crew would like the idea of their remains being studied by others, even without consent. We already know Chakotay would not be down with that. And in the episode I was referring to, Kim loses it, claiming that there was no right to tamper with and mutilate her remains…. so I’m thinking that is enlightened as everyone is in the 24th century, there is still a great significance attached to the sanctity of the body after death….
39, great point, here’s what Ballard has to say about it in “Ashes to Ashes”:
http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/617.htm
BALLARD: I woke up on a ship, in a stasis chamber surrounded by aliens. They told me they’d used their technology to reanimate me. I didn’t believe them when they said I’d died, but they showed me visual scans of my own corpse lying in the torpedo casing I’d been buried in. The Kobali said I’d been drifting for weeks.
@39, I would suggest that like today there are varied attitudes towards the correct treatment of human remains. Ranging from those who don’t really care what happens to the mortal coil when the Occupant is done with it to those with very precise and detailed ideas on the subject. Personally I belong to the former class but I firmly believe the wishes of the departed when accertainable, should be followed.
@41/roxana: Good point. Just because Chakotay and Kim are respectful of other cultures’ burial traditions, that doesn’t necessarily say anything about their personal preferences. You can respect other people’s opinions even when you don’t agree with them.
@9/CLB: I still think it’s a morbid thought, but what you’re saying makes a lot of sense for a ship hopelessly far from home and with dwindling resources and now a gutted airponics bay (although the scene where Kes incinerates everything was apparently there for dramatic effect and not part of the low resource narrative). It reminds me of Dune and the breaking down of the deceased for their water.
How much of a success was VGR in the ratings? As I understand it, it was never as successful as TNG (neither was DS9, for that matter) which brought in 10 million viewers on a regular basis while VGR’s were somewhere between 3-4 million, pitiful by comparison. Suspiria was introduced in case the show ever needed a get out clause, in preparation for premature cancellation. But in the end it turned out to be unnecessary because VGR managed to go the whole distance. Indeed, by the time of The Voyager Conspiracy, Janeway was completely disinterested in meeting Suspiria, or any other Caretaker, ever again.
Did Voyager’s reputation dog the crew throughout they’re time in the Delta Quadrant, or just until they cleared Kazon space? Janeway surmised in Dreadnought they were responsible for Voyager’s tarnished reputation in this quadrant, to prevent them from forging alliances.
It’s true that VGR has a great love of the reset button. When things get tough, it never passes up an opportunity to put things back to the way they were before, with Year of Hell being the most audacious example of it.
27: I think Persistence of Vision was the debut of Jennifer Lien’s tremendous scream but it is definitely inhuman. And I think it’s amusing that Gary Graham’s Ocampan is flatter than his Vulcan Ambassador Soval.
@44 – I’d say that being known as the ship that allied with the Borg and being able to cross their space would cause a lot of races to treat them with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Add in an “ex” Borg, implants and all, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to let them anywhere near their space.
45: That’s true, and they’re reputation was tarnished yet again in Live Fast and Prosper, by ironically using Voyager’s good name to con people out of their goods.
Did anyone notice the fly at 7:09?
My biggest issue that I’ve always had with this episode is the total lack of explanation for why Voyager did not try to go back to the Ocampan array after the climax. The Ocampa there are dependent on Suspiria and live on an array built with the same tech that brought them to the Delta Quadrant; surely Captain Janeway would try to make contact with them again and convince them to help either by talking to Suspiria again or using their technology.
In my opinion this is one of the biggest plot holes in Voyager’s entire run.