“Drive”
Written by Michael Taylor
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 7, Episode 3
Production episode 249
Original air date: October 18, 2000
Stardate: 54058.6
Captain’s log. Paris and Kim are taking the new Delta Flyer out on its shakedown cruise through an asteroid field. A woman named Irina pulls up alongside them and challenges them to a drag race. Paris, of course, accepts.
Irina’s vessel has an accident, and Paris and Kim offer to take her back to Voyager for repairs. She accepts, saying she needs it fixed for the race.
Paris’ query of “what race?” leads to Irina telling them all about the Antarian Trans-Stellar Rally, a two-billion kilometer race that’s held annually commemorating—and extending—the peace among the species in the region. They used to all be at each others’ throats, now they all compete in a race instead of fighting wars.
The Flyer would have to be modified, but they can participate in the race. Tuvok is, of course, against it, but Janeway thinks it’s a great idea. Chakotay points out that the Flyer doesn’t fit the specs, but Irina has offered a fuel converter, and they can make other modifications to make it work.
When Paris goes to sickbay to ask for time off, the EMH says he’s already approved it for his weekend excursion. That’s when Paris belatedly remembers that he and Torres planned a weekend-long getaway in the holodeck. Torres had traded holodeck time with half the crew—including the EMH—to get an entire romantic getaway weekend.
Paris goes to engineering, abashed, and even expresses a willingness to back out of the race, but Torres says it’s fine, though she’s obviously lying, and Paris misses that completely. Later in the mess hall, Torres confides in Neelix that she doesn’t think she and Paris are truly compatible. They love each other, but it’s not enough. She’ll wait until the race is over—she doesn’t want to distract him—and then break up.
Janeway and Chakotay meet with Ambassador O’Zaal, who approves the Flyer’s entry in the race. Janeway also helps with a diplomatic crisis, as the Aksani want to host the post-race ceremony, which has already been promised to the Chessu. Janeway solves the problem by offering Voyager, as neutral a party as there is, to host all the ceremonies. O’Zaal gratefully accepts.
During the opening ceremonies in the mess hall, Paris tries to talk to Assan, who brushes him off, and he and Kim also meet Irina’s copilot, Joxom. Meanwhile, Torres finds Seven in astrometrics seeking out more efficient race routes for the Flyer. She shares Tuvok’s skepticism about the point of their participating in the race, but she also feels that helping Paris will aid in improving her working relationship with Paris. Torres decides to take this notion to heart with regard to her own more personal relationship with Paris.
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And so she takes Kim’s place as Paris’ copilot in the race, to Paris’ surprise and confusion.
O’Zaal asks Janeway to start the race. She orders Tuvok to fire a low-yield torpedo, and they’re off to the races! (Sorry…)
The Flyer is in third place behind Assan and Irina, which is unsurprising because they’re the only contestants with speaking parts. Torres is confident that they can take the lead, but she only skimmed the race specs, and missed the Möbius Inversion, a nasty little wormhole. When they go through the inversion, the ships all fall off sensors.
Torres takes it upon herself to make some engine modifications and they burst ahead into first, their shields “scraping” Irina and Assan’s shields (a maneuver Assan performed earlier).
But right after they come out of the inversion, there’s an explosion on Irina’s ship. All racers are told to hold position. Joxom is beamed to Voyager, where the EMH treats his burns. Tuvok investigates and discovers a component on Irina’s ship that was modified to explode.
O’Zaal is aghast. This kind of terrorist act against the race could destroy the peace. There have been constant threats of this kind before, but this is the first time such a threat has been successful. O’Zaal wants to cancel the race, but Irina points out that, if he does, the terrorists win.
Kim, who has taken a shine to Irina, offers to take over as her copilot. Once repairs are complete on Irina’s ship, the race re-commences. Torres comments on how well Kim and Irina are getting along, and the unspoken implication is that they work better as a couple than Paris and Torres do.
On Irina’s ship, Kim notices some issues and tries to fix them, but Irina keeps making feeble excuses for his not doing so. He then narrowly avoids the same fate as Joxom by dodging another exploding console, and when he recovers, Irina is pointing a weapon at him. Kim manages to get the weapon away from her, but even at gunpoint, she won’t say why she sabotaged her own ship. Eventually, though, Kim figures it out, especially since Irina is very invested in the Flyer winning the race—she almost goes into a panic when the Flyer suddenly stops, allowing Assan to take a commanding lead. Irina is one of those people they discussed in the briefing room who wants to destroy the race and go back to the old hatreds. She’s sabotaged the Flyer to blow up when it crosses the finish line. However, she has disabled communications, so Kim can’t tell anyone what’s happening.
The Flyer stopped because Paris and Torres got into an argument, as Paris read between the lines of Torres’s complimenting of Kim and Irina’s good chemistry (irony!). On top of that, they’re both visibly upset, him with her inserting herself into the race, her with him for being upset about that, as she thought them doing something together might bring them closer together.
Finally, he goes to a full stop. They have it out, and in the end, Paris actually proposes to her. But before Torres can answer, they detect a modulating pulse from Irina’s ship that’s in Morse Code. They discover that Irina sabotaged the fuel converter she gave to the Flyer and it’s going to cause a warp core breach; the ejection systems are also sabotaged. Paris takes the Flyer far away from everyone, and then Torres manages to get the ejection systems back online. They spit out the core, which goes boom, but doing no harm to anyone.
Once they recover from the shockwave, Torres says yes.
Assan wins the race. The post-race celebration is held on Voyager, while Torres and Paris get their weekend off as planned—but it’s on the repaired Flyer and it’s their honeymoon, as “JUST MARRIED” has been painted on the stern as they go off, sipping celebratory champagne.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The race supposedly only goes at impulse speeds. This means it all has to be within the same solar system. Said solar system apparently has K-class anomalies, dwarf star clusters, and a Möbius Inversion all inside it. Sure.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is all for participating in the race, seeing it as an opportunity to make friends.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is completely disinterested in the race, going so far as to try to submit a security report while the race is on, which Janeway puts off so she can watch the race. However, even the staid Vulcan becomes interested when the ships go into the Möbius Inversion and go off sensors.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Busy episode for Neelix, who gets to play sounding board for Torres and then takes over as the announcer for the race.
Forever an ensign. Kim is the one who figures out Irina’s diabolical plan, mostly by deduction and reading her body language, since she doesn’t actually tell him anything—including that she first approached them in the asteroid field and drag-raced with them to get them to join the race and be her Trojan horse. He also comes up with a clever way to get a message to Paris and Torres.
Half and half. Torres reconsiders whether she should even stay with Paris, given that he’s a thundering dumbass who keeps going off on his own without talking to her first, but she decides to marry him instead.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH has taken up golf, thus maintaining a human medical tradition going back centuries. The holodeck time he gives up for Torres and Paris’ weekend getaway was a tee time. Instead, he golfs into a glass in sickbay.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kim falls for Irina pretty much instantly, which is not surprising given that she’s played by a former member of the Pussycat Dolls. Paris at one point even compliments her, saying that she wasn’t a Borg, a hologram, or dead, so it’s a step up. But because Kim can’t have nice things, she turns out to be evil.
Do it.
“Warp core breach in twenty seconds.”
“So what’s your answer?”
“My answer?”
“Will you marry me?”
“Warp core breach in fifteen seconds.”
“You’re proposing now?”
“It’s a good a time as any.”
–Paris proposing to Torres on a deadline
Welcome aboard. Three past DS9 guests show up here: Brian George, who played Richard Bashir in “Doctor Bashir, I Presume?” plays O’Zaal; Patrick Kilpatrick, who played Reese in “The Siege of AR-558,” and who also played Razik in “Initiations,” plays Assan; and Cyia Batten, who was the first of three women to play Tora Ziyal (in “Indiscretion” and “Return to Grace“), plays Irina. Batten will next appear in Enterprise‘s “Bound” as Navaar.
Trivial matters: We don’t actually see Paris and Torres get married, though we already saw their silver-blood duplicates tie the knot in “Course: Oblivion.” This is the fifth marriage of regular characters we’ve seen, following the O’Brien-Ishikawa wedding in TNG’s “Data’s Day,” the Lwaxana-Odo wedding in DS9’s “The Muse,” the Dax-Worf wedding in DS9’s “You Are Cordially Invited,” and the Sisko-Yates wedding in DS9’s “‘Til Death Do Us Part.” The next one we’ll see is the Riker-Troi wedding in Nemesis. The Torres-Paris wedding is the only one we don’t see any of the ceremony for.
This is the second time Torres has had to have Morse Code explained to her, the previous time being in “The 37’s.” When Paris does so, he doesn’t mention that five-year-old mission, but instead says that he and Kim use it for the Captain Proton holodeck adventures.
This episode establishes that the Delta Flyer was rebuilt following its destruction in “Unimatrix Zero.” We already saw the new Flyer in “Imperfection,” but that episode also has Paris wearing his wedding ring, so it likely takes place after this episode, in which Kim and Paris are giving the ship a shakedown cruise.
Torres mentions that Paris was expelled from Starfleet Academy—except he wasn’t. That’s the backstory of Nicholas Locarno, another Robert Duncan McNeill Starfleet fuckup character from TNG’s “The First Duty.” Paris’ backstory had him already graduating the Academy and serving in Starfleet as a junior officer for a while before doing his stupid-ass thing that got people killed, as opposed to Locarno, who did it as a cadet.
Paris cites three of Kim’s past crushes: Seven (throughout early season four), Marayna (“Alter Ego“), and Ballard (“Ashes to Ashes“). For whatever reason, he neglects to mention the women who tried to turn him into an alien (“Favorite Son“) or the woman who made him sick (“The Disease“).
Set a course for home. “I kind of like the sound of Tom Torres.” The final scene in this episode makes me crazy for two reasons. One is that the tradition of the woman changing her name to that of her husband—a tradition that is rooted in the notion that a woman becomes her husband’s property upon marriage—is one that has been increasingly less common for the past fifty years or so. Not anywhere near being completely eliminated, of course, but at this point, it’s not even unusual to see a woman keeping her name when she marries (nor is it unusual to see a woman changing it; still rare to find a man changing his name, but progress is a process…). So to even have a conversation about it in a twenty-fourth-century setting where one of the participants isn’t even from Earth is absurd—and to have Paris’ response to the notion of his changing his name be an appalled, “I hope you’re kidding” makes it worse. Paris runs the gamut in this episode from self-centered douchecanoe to good person trying to do right by the woman he loves, and he had done so well putting himself in the latter camp before that “I hope you’re kidding” comment.
Also: the only reason you put cans and stuff on strings behind a vehicle being used by newlyweds is to slow the vehicle down. It’s completely meaningless in space.
Anyhow, this episode is—fine? I guess? The notion of a sporting event to take the place of a war is a good one—sports rivalries tend to be pretty passionate, but also mostly violence-free (soccer/football match aftermaths in Europe notwithstanding)—and Voyager taking on the role of neutral party (and provider of medical help) is the perfect one for them to take.
Indeed, this is the sort of thing Voyager should’ve been doing more of (see also the station on the edge of the Nekrit Expanse in “Fair Trade” or the Markonian Outpost in “Survival Instinct“), and it’s good to see it here.
It just would’ve been nice if the plot wasn’t so paint-by-numbers. Of course the woman Kim falls for turns out to be the bad guy, especially since it kinda has to be either her or Assan, and Assan’s a bit too obvious a candidate.
Having said that, I do like that Kim pretty much singlehandedly saves the day. And the progress of the Torres-Paris relationship mostly works, though the cliché of the couple almost breaking up right before they tie the knot was tired when they did it with Miles and Keiko on TNG and is really tired here. But Roxann Dawson in particular plays Torres’ uncertainty quite well, and McNeill sells both Paris’ depth of feeling as well as his being completely out of his depth when getting the nuances—though he does make the effort to bridge the gap in the end.
It’s a good premise, it’s decently executed, and we do get Paris and Torres married at the end of it. While geographic progress though the Delta Quadrant has been a thing, character progress for anyone who isn’t a hologram or ex-Borg has been vanishingly rare on the show, so seeing it here is heartening.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be a guest at the virtual Treklanta on Saturday the 7th of August. The all-day online event will also include Trek actors J.G. Hertzler and Tracee Lee Cuocco and Trek screenwriter/novelist David Gerrold. Keith will be doing a Q&A at 2pm Eastern Time. Full details and signup information here.
As always, heh, I look at the scene where Janeway declares that if they’re in the race, they’re in to win…and then I think of how SF Debris put it:
“Alright, everyone find a partner and start cutting brake cables!”
Anyway, B’Elanna’s favorite VOY character after the Doctor and the payoff here to her and Tom’s relationship…eh, could’ve been better executed, but still decent enough.
Ugh, I screwed up the hyperlink in the previous post.
Eh, I’ll just blame it on Irina’s sabotage.
I think the old tradition of cans on the wedding car is a variant of shivaree and the notion is to make noise, not slow the car down.
However equally meaningless in space!
“The race supposedly only goes at impulse speeds. This means it all has to be within the same solar system. Said solar system apparently has K-class anomalies, dwarf star clusters, and a Möbius Inversion all inside it. Sure.”
It could be in something like a stellar nursery, where there would be a lot of newborn stars, radiation hazards, and cosmic turbulence in proximity to each other. Heck, at this point, Voyager should be on the edge of the galaxy’s central bulge, where stars are much more closely packed than they are in our part of the galaxy. It would probably be mostly on the order of light-months or light-weeks than light-hours, but there could be tight clusters here and there.
“Also: the only reason you put cans and stuff on strings behind a vehicle being used by newlyweds is to slow the vehicle down. It’s completely meaningless in space.”
I always thought it was just to make noise and advertise the marriage. It’s a tradition, so it doesn’t have to serve a practical function; the symbolism itself is reason enough to do it. I mean, throwing rice started because it’s a symbol of rain and fertility. How practical is that?
KRAD and #3: I had a similar thought about the wine bottle at the beginning of “Generations.” Conceptually it was a fun way of nodding to nautical traditions, but visually it looked a bit too silly in space, starting the film off-tone.
As someone who is a fan of cars and racing and such, I have always had a soft spot for this episode. Sure, it’s a bit cliche and predictable, but it’s still fun. I also like Tom, B’Elanna, and the romance between them, so it’s nice to see that take the next step as well.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that Tom has gotten excited about something and agreed to it before remembering a date; it’s certainly not intentional or malicious, but it might have been nice to see things the other way around for once. Why couldn’t B’Elanna have something exciting come up and have her be the one to change the plans? You could even stick with the race concept, and have her want to design an engine for it or something. A simple little flip would have made some of the concepts feel less stale.
“Instead, he golfs into a glass in sickbay.”
Semantics, but hes practicing putting. Love to see Doc tee off with a driver in sickbay.
Also: the only reason you put cans and stuff on strings behind a vehicle being used by newlyweds is to slow the vehicle down. It’s completely meaningless in space.
That’s not the reason at all. But I do appreciate the Pythonesque diversion of taking issue with the drag coefficient of newlywed vehicles in space.
@7 That could be fun with forcefields
joyceman: My intense loathing of golf means I am less familiar with the nuances of the specific terms. I used “golf” as a generic verb there for that reason. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@7
Well, the entire sick bay is outfitted with holoprojectors. He could use a holographic golf ball that’s programmed to disappear just before it hits something.
Come to think of it, why didn’t they make use of the sick bay’s holoprojectors more often? Even just for a gag – like one of Paris’s homebrew holodeck programs malfunctions and we get a scene where the EMH is peeved at him because now Sick Bay looks like the inside of Proton’s Rocketship, or something.
@10,
That include no love for Mini Golf, Keith? ;)
Well, everyone already beat me to the point re: cans….
Torres isn’t from Earth, but she did grow up on a Federation world, with her father and other humans amongst the colonists. Seems like the Earth marriage traditions might have worn off on her as much as on Tom.
As for changing surnames, we have seen plenty of evidence that this practice *does* still exist in the 24th century, at least among humans. Jennifer Sisko, Beverly Crusher, Beverly Picard (in All Good Things), Keiko O’Brien, Captain Silva La Forge (Geordi’s Mom), Helena Rozhenko, Yvette and Marie Picard, etc. It’s not like this is the first time we’ve seen a woman on Star Trek take the surname of her husband.
A mediocre episode, starting a long string of mediocre episodes that will stretch for weeks, until “Lineage” at around the midpoint of the season
European soccer hooligans are pikers: El Salvador and Honduras went to war over a soccer game…
@16. They went to war for a lot of reasons. The game (and attendant cross border riot) was the inciting incident though. Which kinda proves your point, frankly. At least until English Football hooligans riot across the Scots border and break up the UK….
I remember The Football War for the speed with which Honduras was getting its butt kicked by El Salvador (and the relative size of the armies would not suggest that degree of lopsidedness) and the fact that Honduras didn’t ask Dad (the OAS) to negate the El Salvadoran win in Mexico City.
@14/grenadier: Yes, of course a lot of Trek showed traditional patriarchal naming practices persisting in the future, just as a lot of TOS depicted 1960s sexism and racial preconceptions, 1980s-90s Trek practiced relentless heteronormativity, etc. Just because it was factually the case doesn’t mean it was good to do it that way, or that it was a plausible depiction of a supposedly more egalitarian future.
@18 Agree with all of that. I’m just saying that there already was a precedent, not whether or not the precedent was a good one. In-world, it still happens, and there are plenty of examples of it happening. Whether or not it was a good idea is of course, highly debatable.
It would have been nice at some point to find out that “Troi” (for instance) is Lwaxana’s family name, and not her father’s surname. But it’s a little late for that one.
Maybe Discovery will manage to work it in at some point that the customs have changed, given their time jump. Another few hundred years ought to do it, right?
@5. Don S: I understood the bottle-breaking in GENERATIONS to have occurred in the shipyard (presumably in planetary orbit), rather than in outer space, so while it’s a little odd one didn’t find it inherently off-putting (though GENERATIONS has one of my favourite overtures, so that might affect my attitude to the rest of the title sequence).
This episode frustrated me in that it was yet another example of VOYAGER taking a fun premise and studiously, almost deliberately, going out of their way not to have too much fun with it.
I mean, okay, an interplanetary drag race is not the most sophisticated or “cerebral” premise for an episode, but if you’re going to go there, commit to it. Do an exciting drag race ep with lots of spills and adrenalin. Instead, we get yet another long conference room scene, discussing the political ramifications of the situation, before we FINALLY get to the actual race, and then the race itself ends up playing second fiddle to Tom and B’Elanna’s relationship issues.
I’ll spare you a long rant, but VOYAGER kept doing this. It’s almost as though, at times, they thought modern TREK was above cheap thrills and excitement — even when doing an episode about a space drag race!
@21/Greg: To be fair, they probably didn’t have the visual-effects budget to do full justice to the concept of a spaceship drag race.
I think maybe they could’ve gotten by without many effects shots to make a space race exciting. A matter of editing, I suppose. Fast cuts between the faces of the racers and Neelix calling the race like an insane soccer announcer could’ve helped. Also computer readouts showing us their positions. I mean, “The Wounded” and “Defiant” managed to get by with dots on screens.
I always thought the race had been inspired by the pod-race from The Phantom Menace, which, I believe, had recently been released.
@24/bgsu98: The Phantom Menace came out nearly a year and a half before this episode, so it’s conceivable. Still, there have been plenty of race stories in fiction, and a space race is rather different from one on a planet surface. It seems like a stretch to me (no pun intended).
bgsu98: More likely that this episode and that scene in TPM were both inspired by the fact that stock car racing is one of the most popular sports in the country. In fact, the doofy flight uniforms Paris, Torres, and Kim were wearing look a lot like what NASCAR drivers wear…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This was a fun episode, pretty cliche in some 90’s ways, but the acting made up for it. B’elanna’s insecurity about the forgotten weekend getaway could have been really grating, but they play her thought process out in a rational way, and Paris’ explanation how her Clingonyness often doesn’t appreciate human romcom behavior at least gave it a less cliche spin.
One plus for having aired Imperfection before this episode, in that one they had Paris ordering Janeway around during the firefight, so it foreshadows that he takes the leadership role in the pilot seat pretty seriously, provides some continuity with how he reacts to B’elanna not taking orders during the race here.
The last name banter was very tedious. As a woman I’ve had male partners who actually seem to like the idea of taking my last name, as they didn’t like their family and shedding their family name seemed to appeal to them. The scene has already aged poorly even for only 20 years, nevermind a few centuries.
Can I just say I love that they mixed up Paris’s backstory with Locarno’s. We all know that’s who he really is, even the writers can’t keep up the charade.
Expulsion isn’t necessarily permanent. Entirely possible Tom Paris was expelled for some reason we’re unaware of, then applied for readmission after a rehabilitation period, and then… okay, no, I can’t even complete this retcon with a straight face.
@26/krad: You may have a point about NASCAR’s popularity influencing “Drive,” but I think George Lucas’s interest in racing probably comes from much further back, considering he directed American Grafitti four years before Star Wars.
@27/karey: Heck, I thought the patriarchal naming convention was antiquated back when this episode came out. I think it was back in the ’70s that the idea of women keeping their birth surnames started to gain traction (at least within my lifetime), but as with a lot of things, the societal trend reversed somewhat in the ’80s and ’90s.
I found this mess up particularly funny, as I have always found Nick Locarno to be far more sympathetic than Tom Paris (at least as they were first presented to us), at least in part because Locarno *was* a cadet, and it made no sense to me why he and the rest of the squad were allowed to do what is essentially stunt flying without even a full Starfleet officer present. Sure, they weren’t supposed to be doing that particular move, but stunt flying of any kind is still incredibly dangerous, and probably the sort of thing that should have more oversight than just “make sure you file a flight plan.” Also while Locarno did talk Crusher et al into doing this stupid thing, he didn’t directly kill that kid the way Tom directly killed his passengers, and his body count was higher, and he didn’t have the excuse of being a young, dumb college kid. Sure, an officer’s first duty is to the truth and whatever, but I never found the fact that Paris (who lied to save only himself and then came clean) fessed up to be more sympathetic than Nick (who lied to save himself and the other 3 from disaster, and then took complete responsibility for it to spare them).
Hahaha, the staff writers can’t even keep Nick Locarno and Tom Paris straight. This isn’t the first instance of this happening either as there was some dialogue from Paris earlier in the series run where he was giving Locano’s backstory.
I hadn’t realized until recently that Ciya Batten had numerous Trek roles so that’s nice, and I never knew she was a Pussycat Doll (non-pop group version).
This was a ho-hum episode. Interesting that the silver duplicate versions of Tom and B’Elanna got married a whole two seasons earlier than the “real” versions. Maybe the duplicate version of Voyager had a lot less adventures to keep the crew distracted so B’Elanna and Tom got hitched faster out of nothing else better to do.
(29)
You’re right, Lucas is a gearhead from way back. If I’m remembering right, he nearly died when he wrecked his hot rod as a young man.
I’ll just assume that Tom Paris entered the academy under an assumed name, because he didn’t want to be associated with his father. Then upon ruining his life there, changed it back to Tom Paris to screw his father some more, and joined the Maquis.
“There’s a Klingon phrase my grandmother used to use. Mok’tah. It means bad match.”
This one just about manages to balance the fun and touching sides, which pretty much sums up Paris’ character: An insensitive hothead on one hand, but insecure and vulnerable on the other, and there’s no doubt that he cares deeply about B’Elanna for all that he might treat her bady at times. The fact that she doesn’t seem to realise this is perhaps a weakness, because he’s shown it plenty of times over the years, but maybe she’s affected by his latest moment of thoughtlessness. It doesn’t help that forcing their way through their competitors’ shields is the sort of thing he’d come up with himself, so he just comes across as sore that she thought of it. But there’s a reason that they’re probably the most solid couple in Star Trek history and once they actually stop and talk, they’re not only back on the same page but turning that page to the next chapter.
Harry Kim’s latest doomed romance turns out to be a bit of a non-starter, but at least he gets to play the hero and save the day. (It’s not entirely clear what happens to him and Irina after the explosion: Presumably they’re not still sat there waiting for someone to notice them.) Paris and Tuvok’s mutual shock at Janeway agreeing to the race is one of the episode’s funniest moments. As is Tuvok getting caught up in the race with everyone else. Neelix shows his serious side as a confidante for Torres, then gets to play at being a race commentator. Seven seems to have given a great deal of thought to how to get on with Paris: Somewhere there’s a parallel universe where they’re a thing. Chakotay has four lines.
Paris’ list of Kim’s failed romances has got even more truncated as he just mentions the Borg, the hologram and the one that was dead, leaving out both the wrong twin and the member of a xenophobic society. Torres indicates she and Paris have been together for three years: For once, that seems about right.
I took the cans thing to be a sop to Paris’ 20th century obsession adapted to the 24th century. And I guess I can shrug off Torres claiming Paris was expelled as a joke not meant to be taken literally. It’s not quite Jeffrey Combs and JG Hertzler turning up but hey, Tora Ziyal and Julian Bashir’s father!
I’m trying to come up with a comment on the idea of changing your surname that isn’t going to get me hit so here goes: To be honest, I don’t think I know one woman in real life that hasn’t taken her husband’s surname, so this may be one of those things which is less controversial in the UK than in other English-speaking countries. (Like monarchs. And school uniforms, judging from the lengthy and rather cross-cultural debate in one of the Short Treks threads.) If a woman feels comfortable with taking her husband’s surname, I don’t see anything wrong with that. If she chooses to keep her birth name, I don’t see anything wrong with that either. And of course, the same should apply to men and their wives, so perhaps we shouldn’t look too badly on Paris if he’s not comfortable with the idea of changing his name. If we do achieve equality by the 24th century, then I guess the decision will have moved beyond whether or not you’re a supporter of the patriarchy or a traitor to the sisterhood. Yeah, I’m going to get hit…
The list of marriages for regular characters might include Leonard McCoy and Natira, in FTWIH&IHTTS. There was a ceremony of sorts with The Oracle officiating, and later on Natira calls McCoy her husband. Their union may not have been consummated, but they made the commitment, more so than Spock and T’Pring.
As for the cans on the Delta Flyer, they could make it more difficult to generate a warp field, and thus slow it down.
@26/krad: @25/Christopher: Bryan Fuller has gone on record saying that Michael Taylor had been itching to do an homage to Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 for years. That was the starting point in the writing process.
Making it a Paris episode was a no-brainer. But I was surprised this turned out to be a major step in the Paris/Torres relationship as well. If there’s another aspect that separates season 7 from the rest – besides it being run by Biller; and my views on Seven’s overall arc last Monday – is the increased focus on them as a couple. In a way, this reminds me of TNG’s final season, when the writers tried unsuccessfully to pair up Worf and Troi – in one of the rarer occurences of serialized storytelling on that show. Needless to say, the Torres/Paris material is without a doubt more effective. Paris might be a bit all over the place, but I still feel his relationship to Torres brings out the best in him.
The plot itself is pure pulpy sci-fi. Predictable from page 1, right down to the culprit behind the explosions, but still effective overall. It helps that it has Kolbe of all people directing. He nails the style and pacing. I enjoyed this one. It shows us a different side of the Delta Quadrant, and it’s a nice touch to see Janeway and Voyager engaging in these affairs.
@35/BeeGee: Keith was only counting marriages between two regular or recurring characters, not a regular and a guest star. Although half of his entries are between a main-title regular and a recurring guest. The only marriages between two main-title regulars are Paris-Torres, Dax-Worf, and Riker-Troi. Although there have been some in alternate timelines, e.g. Picard-Crusher in “All Good Things…,” Troi-Worf in “Parallels,” and Kes-Paris in “Before and After.”
Out of curiosity, I watched the episode again—for the first time in a long time—and it has more of the elements I suggested @23 than I remembered. In fact, it has all of them. But still, why is it so dull? Must be the editing and music. Trek during that time had a real problem in those areas.
Anyway, the cylinders weren’t all firing. I give it a 3.
I can’t remember the last time anyone had any difficulty planning holodeck time (they all just use it whenever they want). So it was a little weird seeing Torres have to be negotiating for putting together holodeck time for her and Tom. And of course that was for the sole purpose of making Tom be more of an asshat for forgetting about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if arranging holodeck time is never an issue again.
@19/Grenadier
I thought Troi WAS Lwaxana’s family name. I also thought that Picard’s Mr. Troi crack in Nemesis was in fact a jab at that fact. Hence why Deanna’s children are Troi-Riker. Lwaxana is a Betazoid noble, so she can’t actually discard her last name. It would also explain why Deanna’s father is referred to as Ian Andrew Troi. If his unmarried name (Bachelor name? Yeah) was just Ian Andrew.
@35 The list of marriages for regular characters might include Leonard McCoy and Natira, in FTWIH&IHTTS.
If we’re doing that, we’d also have to include Kirk and Miramanee from The Paradise Syndrome in the same season, even if as an episode it’s a gross insult. And there’s no doubt that that particular union was consummated.
But we’re not doing that …
@40 Lwaxana is a Betazoid noble, so she can’t actually discard her last name.
We’re assuming Earth (and specifically, Western) customs for an alien society. Although in this case it may be reasonable*, we fell into that trap big time with Bajorans, whose naming custom was stupidly made out to be unusual but actually resembles that of a significant portion of Earth’s population.
*(Aristocratic families in some societies here like to keep the family name that goes with the title, even if the title is inherited in the female line; note the high incidence of hyphenated names in the British aristocracy. And there’s a lot of suggestion that Betazoid society may have a matriarchal streak.)
@41 – Hyphenated names in the British aristocracy are very rarely due to a title being inherited in the female line, as very, very few titles can be inherited in the female line; the standard Letters Patent wording for a title is “heirs male of the body”, and special remainders are required to permit a title with that wording to go through the female line. The prevalence of hyphenated names is due to a combination of a) men marrying above themselves and the father-in-law insisting on the wife’s name being added so the grandchildren wouldn’t look like plebs, b) the woman’s family being of no particular status but very, very rich and the man’s family being in desperate need of money and willing to add the name to get it, and c) illustrious family names being in danger of going extinct, and thus being joined to the husband’s name when a daughter of the family married as a condition of the marriage.
It’s not about keeping the right name with the right title in the British system, it’s about showing off ancestry and recognising the consolidation of family wealth and influence.
“The Great Starship Race”
Someone should write a book…
@43
I always assumed this episode was partly inspired by that TOS novel which, iirc, had an almost identical plot.
@44/a-j: The producers of the shows paid very little attention to the novels. As Eduardo said, “Drive” was more of a riff on Death Race 2000.
Trek is a huge franchise. With so many hundreds of stories, it’s all but inevitable that any given one will have some coincidental resemblance to another one.
Regarding name change, I took my husband’s name when we married for a few reasons. F is earlier in the alphabet than S; I didn’t want any confusion when we had kids from us having different last names; and his is easier to spell than mine (also for future kids’ sake, since I had trouble spelling my name when I started school).
I did not take my husband’s name. We’ve been married nearly 18 years and have kids, and it’s all worked out fine. I do have to go through a fair bit of saying “I’m A.B., C.D.’s mother” to doctors and school officials, but otherwise, it’s not been an issue.
The current US Vice President is another example of a woman retaining her birth name after marriage.
@41 Doh! I forgot all about Kirok.
Since we’re on the topic, I do recommend everybody just keep their name when they get married. The IRL Senator Warren is a great cautionary tale of how silly this can get. Born as Elizabeth Herring, she took the name of her first husband, some guy with the last name Warren. Then they divorced in 1978. When she remarried, she elected not to change her name again, which I understand, but it’s pretty preposterous she’s running around with the surname of some guy she divorced 40 years ago. Don’t do this, it’s your name, keep it.
It’s also worth noting that, much like the order you put your name in, women changing their last names after marriage is far less common on some parts of earth (including, possibly, the human part of B’Elanna’s heritage), and so the fact that almost every women we see in the future changes hers is a bit silly.
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It’s not that preposterous. There could all sorts of reasons she kept the name. It could be something as simple as she likes the sound of that name over the previous one, like in the sense of a stage name. Susan Sarandon divorced Chris Sarandon back in 1979 and yet has kept the name for apparently actorly reasons. Well, it does have a better alliterative flow than Susan Tomalin.
KRAD wrote:
It’s still the law of the land in Japan, according to a Supreme Court ruling in June … but Japan isn’t exactly a paragon of gender equality among “advanced” countries. (Not that Japan’s relevant to the milieu, since Trek’s future-culture always seems to be American-derived, rather than any country/ethnicity that outnumbers Americans, or any other UFP founding member world, or any synthesis thereof.)
@52/phillip: What’s your point? It’s still practiced in a lot of places around the world, so singling out one country for criticism seems gratuitous. Especially when you admit yourself that it’s not relevant here.
Another example: Jack White. He and Meg White divorced in 2000 but he still goes by Jack White.
@41/MarkVolund
I’d also like to point out that as an alien noble, it might be odd for her to suddenly have a human last name. Especially when she introduces herself, LWAXANA TROI, DAUGHTER OF THE FIFTH HOUSE, HOLDER OF THE SACRED CHALICE OF RIXX, HEIR TO THE HOLY RINGS OF BETAZED! To Betazoids that might sound a bit funny if it isn’t a Betazoid clan name. I know have a smile on my face remembering Majel’s delicious Ham and Cheese bombastic arrivals.
Quasarmodo: The specific issue here was the amount of holodeck time — Torres wanted an entire weekend for her and Paris. That’s what required the horse-trading.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@49/dunsel: You brought up Elizabeth Warren. Let’s not forget Jeri Ryan – formerly married to Republican politician Jack Ryan. Their divorce and subsequent developments are theorized as one of the main reasons for Obama managing to achieve the presidency. I didn’t even know her family name before finding this out.
@40 and others: I always took the “Mr Troi” joke to be exactly that, a joke, similar to Paris and Torres’ banter about taking each other’s surnames here, not an indication that that actually was the Betazoid naming custom. Hyphens are fine, but not really sustainable in the long term: If everyone’s surname gets used, then within two generations you’ve got children with four surnames.
@58 I mean, maybe they aren’t sustainable if you just keep adding on, but cultures like the Spanish have proven that it is quite possible to keep hyphenating names down through the generations.
There should have been a pie fight for some reason. The biggest pie fight ever, filling the entire ship, maybe started with the confections created for the wedding.
@59: Oh yes, true, but that does mean surnames get dropped in later generations. You can have two of the grandparents’ surnames carried on, but not all four, and one of those two will be dropped for the next generation. (…Pun not intended.)
I remember when Siddig El Fadil changed his name to Alexander Siddig sometime during DS9’s run. He gave an interview to TV Guide explaining he got tired of hearing people stumble over the pronunciation. He seemed pretty chill about it, though.
@62/G.Spiggott: I always felt that was a shame that Siddig felt he had to Westernize his name for the convenience of people too narrow-minded to learn how to handle foreign names. I mean, “El Fadil”? That’s not hard at all. It’s not that they couldn’t pronounce it, just that they didn’t want to try.
On the other hand, his name comes from a culture that doesn’t use Western-style surnames, and his real name is Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abdurrahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi, so I guess “Siddig El Fadil” was almost as much a fiction as “Alexander Siddig.”
@60,
There should have been a pie fight for some reason. The biggest pie fight ever, filling the entire ship, maybe started with the confections created for the wedding.
Hey, if it worked for John Ford’s How Much for Just the Planet?, it could work for TV Trek, heh.
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I suspect it was his agent’s idea. And probably some silly feedback from casting directors. Meh, showbiz. [shrug]
With the cast of DS9, I always had the most trouble figuring out how to pronounce Rene Auberjonois. It wasn’t until many years later on Youtube that I heard someone say it out loud in an interview. Finally!
I knew Ob-er-JON-is must be wrong. :-)
Regarding changing names: A college friend of mine did something I’d never heard of before and have never heard of since, but it was certainly innovative. He and his wife both changed their names to a new name that they came up with together. It was their way of expressing to each other and the world that their marriage was a new beginning.
@67/richf
That is absolutely beautiful.
I like this one. It’s a ride, a bit of meaningless fluff. Sure, the discussion of last names would be outmoded in the 24th century, but Tom’s a 20th century guy.
Also, the only real point of putting tin cans behind a car is that it’s a 20th century tradition, and Tom’s a 20th century guy (seriously, put some tin cans behind my Kia Soul and it’ll make a clatter, but it won’t slow it down). There are all kinds of rituals we participate in that are outmoded, so it seems silly to knock this episode for having one.
Actually, the point is to put a smile on the face of the audience. And at least for this audience member it worked.
If I have a real problem with this episode it’s the plot convenience of technology interrupting conversation — or vice versa. But that’s a Trek thing. Can’t really complain.