“Equinox Part II”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by David Livingston
Season 6, Episode 1
Production episode 221
Original air date: September 22, 1999
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. After a summary of Part I, we see Janeway being attacked by one of the aliens, but she dodges it thanks to Chakotay’s warning. Chakotay’s not so lucky—he’s wounded by a creature. Janeway manages to juryrig a shield strengthening, but it’s only temporary.
Equinox is buggering off, with Ransom ordering them to maintain course even thought they see that Voyager is being assaulted by the creatures.
Neelix finds the mobile emitter on deck nine and gives it to Janeway, who brings it to sickbay and activates the EMH—or, rather, the Equinox EMH (let’s keep calling him EMH-E), who bluffs as the Voyager EMH, and treats Chakotay.
When Chakotay recovers, he wants to try to communicate with the creatures—something Ransom and his people never did—but Janeway is focused entirely on tracking Ransom down, and not just because he still has Seven hostage.
On the Equinox, Ransom tries to convince Seven to join their crew, but she refuses. Burke discovers that the Voyager EMH was left behind in Equinox’s systems, and activates him to treat Seven for her injuries. When Ransom orders the enhanced warp drive activated, it fails to do so—Gilmore realizes that Seven encoded it, and she refuses to give up the code. Ransom deletes the EMH’s ethical subroutines, and he then is suddenly willing to basically take Seven’s brain apart to get the information.
Chakotay’s first attempt to communicate results in a pause in the creatures’ attacks, but only that. Janeway is unwilling to make a second attempt as she is focused completely on hunting down Ransom, which she is seemingly obsessed with doing at all costs, no matter how long it takes.
Equinox is hiding in the upper atmosphere of a planet while they effect repairs. Voyager is unable to find them. Chakotay recommends contacting the Ankari, the species that introduced the Equinox to the creatures. Janeway refuses, as they’re too far away, instead sending him to astrometrics. She’s been studying Ransom’s service record, and he has a tendency to hide when he’s being pursued.
Chakotay is able to find them in the atmosphere they’re hiding in and Voyager heads there, polarizing their hull to hide from sensors. Ransom has sent an away team of Lessing and another crewperson to investigate some deuterium deposits on the planet. Chakotay and Paris beam down and take the two of them prisoner. However, the EMH-E contacts the Equinox to tell them what’s going on, and they get into a brief battle before Equinox runs off after luring Voyager into the atmosphere, which weakens their shields enough to allow the creatures to attack.
Janeway interrogates Lessing, showing a willingness to lower the shields in the cargo bay so that the creatures will get through and attack him. Chakotay is appalled, and rescues Lessing, who admits that there’s an Ankari vessel following them. Janeway agrees to go talk to them, but she also relieves Chakotay of duty for flouting her authority.
When they rendezvous with the Ankari vessel, they don’t answer hails at first, so Janeway puts them in a tractor beam (to which Tuvok justifiably objects, and Janeway threatens to relieve him of duty as well). The Ankari are then willing to talk, and they agree to broker a conversation with the “spirits of good fortune.” The creatures insist on being allowed to take Equinox, and Janeway appalls Tuvok by agreeing to those terms.
On Equinox, Burke informs Ransom that they need more fuel, and Ransom finds himself annoyed by the euphemism. He goes to his quarters and uses the synaptic stimulator to pretend to be on a beach. To his surprise, a human version of Seven is there, which has never happened before—the stimulators only provide landscapes, not people. But Ransom is hallucinating Seven, which is not helping with his guilt.
Voyager catches up to Equinox. Ransom wants to surrender to her and try to achieve a rapprochement with the aliens. Burke says fuck that noise and assumes command, ordering Ransom to be put in the brig by Gilmore. Burke then engages Voyager. One of Equinox’s nacelles is destroyed, but then Gilmore reveals that she’s on Ransom’s side. She takes him to engineering where Ransom tries to take control of the ship. He also alerts Janeway to the fact that she has the wrong EMH on her ship.
With Ransom’s help, Janeway is able to transport a few of the crew off the ship, as well as Seven and their own EMH (with ethical subroutines restored). The EMH deletes the EMH-E, and now only Ransom, Burke, and a few others are left behind. Burke refuses to transport to Voyager. The aliens come on board and kill Ransom, Burke, and the remaining crew.
Seven promises to help the EMH come up with safeguards to prevent his ethical subroutines from being removed again. The five remaining Equinox crew, which includes Gilmore and Lessing, have all been reduced in rank to crewperson (which Lessing already was, but never mind), and they will be the lowest-ranking people on Voyager. Janeway says it will take a lot for them to earn her trust.
Janeway reinstates Chakotay and admits she gave him reason to stage a Burke-like mutiny, but Chakotay says that would’ve crossed a line.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? A parthogenic atmosphere can apparently occlude sensors. Not sure how, since they just made that word up and it’s a type of atmosphere we’ll never see again.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway inexplicably becomes completely obsessed with apprehending Ransom to the point where she throws all her ethics out the window.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is as appalled by Chakotay at Janeway’s actions, trying on several occasions to talk her down, to no avail.
Half and half. Torres tries to appeal to Burke based on their past relationship. She completely fails.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Apparently, deleting the EMH’s ethical subroutines completely changes his personality. And his loyalty. He comments at the end at being disturbed that someone can flick a switch and turn him from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, having apparently forgotten that that happened once before in “Darkling.”
Resistance is futile. Seven gets to sabotage Equinox, refuse Ransom’s offer of joining his crew, be tortured by the newly ethically challenged EMH, and sing a duet of “My Darling Clementine” with him.
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Fugitive Telemetry
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. The last thing Ransom does before he dies is activate the synaptic stimulator for one last walk on the beach.
Do it.
“You know, once we get our enhanced warp drive back online, we’ll be on our way home. But it’ll still take months to get there. You can spend that time in the brig, or you can become part of this crew. I’d prefer the latter.”
“I’d prefer the brig.”
“You know, Janeway’s not the only captain who can help you explore your humanity.”
“You would be an inferior role model.”
–Ransom trying and failing to recruit Seven.
Welcome aboard. Back from Part I are John Savage as Ransom, Titus Welliver as Burke, Rick Worthy as Lessing, and Olivia Birkelund as Gilmore.
Trivial matters: For the first time since January 1993, there is now only one Star Trek show in production instead of two, as DS9 ended in May 1999. This will continue from this point until May 2005, when Enterprise is cancelled.
With DS9 ending production, Ronald D. Moore came over to Voyager as a co-executive producer, though it will only last two episodes. Initially excited about reuniting with his erstwhile writing partner Brannon Braga, now Voyager’s show-runner, Moore clashed with Braga and the rest of the writers room and quit in disgust. He has been very vocal about his dissatisfaction with the way the show was run, though he and Braga later buried the hatchet.
While five Equinox crew are seen to be joining Voyager as crewpeople, they are never really seen or mentioned again on screen for the remaining two seasons. (The extra who plays one of them is seen again, but that’s it.) They are mentioned in the novelization of the series finale Endgame by Diane Carey, and Ilsa J. Bick’s short story “Bottomless” in the Distant Shores anthology focuses on Gilmore.
I’m not even going to try to guess what the crew complement of the ship is at this point, but Kim says two more people die, and we also see Paris pulling a sheet over someone in sickbay, though it’s not clear if that’s one of the two Kim was talking about or not. We’re never given their names, nor any reason to care who they are, nor even verification of whether or not it’s two or three. There are now either twenty-one or twenty-two confirmed deaths among the crew, plus however many died in “The Killing Game, Part II.” Two others departed (Seska, Kes), and now seven folks have been added to their numbers (Seven, Naomi, and the five Equinox crew).
Set a course for home. “What’s happened to you, Kathryn?” What a misbegotten piece of crap.
This should have been a great episode. There was a real chance here to show two parallel situations: Voyager’s captain and first officer clashing as the captain devolves into mania out of desperation and Equinox’s CO and XO doing likewise in the other direction. And we do get that, but it’s all surface with no depth, no rhyme, no reason.
It also requires three characters to make significant changes in character, and only one of those three is believable. John Savage sells Ransom’s change of heart, especially as he finds himself in a position to torture Seven for information, not to mention leaving Voyager at the mercy of the creatures.
But the other two are given no context, no reason, and no proper resolution. Burke suddenly goes full psychopath, relieving Ransom of duty and also not following the Evil Overlord Rules when he takes over. The charming, pleasant ex-boyfriend of Torres’ from Part I is gone, replaced by a hardened asshole, and we’re given no reason for the change, aside from the three-month gap in writing Part II after Part I.
However, the worst offender is the absurd behavior of Captain Janeway, who suddenly decides to go all crazypants on everyone. She rejects the notion of talking to the aliens, even though their animus against the crew is understandable, and also could be dealt with if they just talked to them. She relieves Chakotay of duty for disagreeing with her (and agreeing with the Starfleet principles that Janeway has steadfastly maintained most of the time for the past five years and, oh yeah, is mainly pissed at Ransom because he’s violated them). She threatens to do the same to Tuvok. She tractors a non-hostile ship just to get their attention. She agrees to condemn the Equinox crew to death in order to save her own ass.
Oh, and she also tortures Lessing.
I see what they were going for here, but it does not work because there is absolutely nothing anywhere in the episode that indicates that Janeway has been driven over the edge. We’ve seen Janeway losing it in a manner similar to this before, but it was in the “Year of Hell” two-parter after months of horrible-ness—and even then, the Janeway of that since-erased timeline was nowhere near as sociopathic as the one we get here. Being pissed at Ransom doesn’t go anywhere near enough to explain why she’s gone so far around the bend that her behavior is akin to Ransom’s.
And then in the end, she admits that Chakotay had reason to be pissed—she doesn’t even apologize—and then everything’s all back to normal. Oh, except they’ve got a few extra crew whom we’ll never see again.
In much the same way that I utterly despise the TNG episode “Homeward” because turned the Enterprise-D crew in general and Picard in particular into murderers, I also utterly despise this episode, because it turns Janeway into a psychopath for no compellingly good reason, and then changes her back at the last minute. In much the same way that I had trouble sympathizing with the Equinox crew in Part I because they committed mass murder, I have trouble sympathizing with Janeway in Part II because she commits acts of torture, acts of war, and acts of depraved indifference to murder. I can see her anger at Ransom compromising her judgment up to a point, and maybe having her act irrationally. We’ve seen this before, with Kirk in “Obsession,” with Picard in First Contact, and (in a situation with significantly lower stakes) with Sisko in “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.” But in each case, there was good reason for it—in fact, it was kinda the same reason for all three, a past trauma (Kirk’s self-perceived failure on the Farragut, Picard’s being made into Locutus, Sisko’s being tormented by Solok) warping their present-day selves. Janeway has no such excuse, she’s just met an asshole, and it has turned her into the same kind of asshole because the script says so.
(I didn’t even get into all the other problems, like Tuvok just raising token objections to Janeway’s behavior, even though he’s been willing to go much further to kick her back in-bounds in the past, and especially the EMH’s entire personality changing when his ethical subroutines are removed. In particular, it makes no sense that the EMH would suddenly follow Ransom’s orders, nor that he would just blithely torture Seven. Sure, he has no ethics now, but he’s still the person we’ve seen develop over five years. Wouldn’t he at least still be loyal to his friends? Doesn’t he still carry a torch for Seven?)
Warp factor rating: 1
Keith R.A. DeCandido just turned 52 yesterday. Please wish him a happy birthday!
Yes, I would have loved this more if there was actually a reason for Janeway to be acting this way, and what bothered me the most, and what keeps me from ever wanting to see this episode again, is what you said: —she doesn’t even apologize to Chakotay or Tuvok. The whole incident is quickly swept under the rug. Whereas the Doctor apologised for his actions even though they were beyond his control, unlike Janeway’s actions.
“I’m going to hunt him down, no matter how long it takes, no matter what the cost. If you want to call that a vendetta, go right ahead.”
Well, after the slow build-up of Part I, we can finally get to the meat of Voyager versus Equinox, and as Chakotay suggests, pitting the characters against another Starfleet crew gone rogue does allow this to feel more personal even though we’ve only just met these people. And again, there’s that feeling that things aren’t quite as black and white as we want them to be: Many of the Equinox’s crew seem to be basically good people who’ve convinced themselves that the ends justify the means, and Janeway seems to be heading in the same direction. Her attempted interrogation of Lessing falls down because she’s reduced the Equinox crew to the status of simple bad guys and not realised that they’re as loyal to each other as her crew are. The only problem with this is that the episode presents Janeway’s behaviour as out of character, when in fact this is how she behaved in much of the episodes last season. The only difference is this time she feels slightly bad about it.
While most of the ensemble are reduced to generic roles, with only Janeway and Chakotay really getting meaty roles, as with “Warhead” the episode again makes a point of sidelining the Doctor and Seven, by having the Doctor hijacked by the antagonists and Seven spend the climax comatose (although she does manage to put the Equinox’s new engines out of action first). In fact, in many ways the focus is on the Equinox crew. Ransom’s redemption is believable, although it’s a shame we had to have the rather hamfisted plot device of his change of heart being prompted by his imaginary friend telling him off.
The fate of Burke and his few remaining supporters is poetic, but I was slightly uncomfortable with the Doctor casually erasing the Equinox EMH: It feels a bit like murder, especially when he wasn’t entirely responsible for his actions. There’s no explanation for the Doctor’s sudden appearance in sickbay, seemingly with his ethical subroutines restored: Presumably Ransom did it, although it’s not clear why other than that the Doctor’s a main character. (Also, despite the recap claiming otherwise, unless I’ve forgotten something, Ransom doesn’t inform Voyager of their mole, allowing him to carry on sending Burke information for quite some time afterwards. I’d similarly like to point out that the “Shrieks” don’t directly kill Ransom: They simply damage the Equinox’s warp core and he dies piloting the ship away from Voyager to stop them being caught in the explosion.)
I didn’t realise until this rewatch that Janeway and Chakotay restoring Voyager’s bridge plaque mirrors Janeway and Ransom doing the same on the Equinox in Part I. Maybe it’s meant to symbolise that both ships were fighting for a cause that wasn’t entirely just?
Another missed opportunity with the episode having the Equinox survivors join Voyager’s crew only for them never to be seen again. (Memory Alpha claims one of the non-speaking crew reappears in Season 7, but I’m not sure whether that’s a genuine reappearance or just them using the same extra again.) I had Gilmore eventually having regained her commission and become Voyager’s assistant chief engineer some 20 years on. I assume Lessing saying the latest alien planet looks just like McKinley Park is an in-joke.
Oh, Equinox Pt. II– we hardly knew ye.
Since when?! On any other episode Janeway acting like this would have been an indication that she had been replaced by an imposter or possessed by an alien or something, and Chakotay would have been entirely in the right to relieve her of command and stage a mutiny. Other than “that’s not what the script says” I can’t think of a single in-universe reason why the Voyager crew shouldn’t think that their captain has been compromised, and react accordingly.
If they were going to have Janeway start going down a darker road- I would have been all for that- as a deliberate character choice. If they had bothered to make Chakotay seem at all like a terrorist leader up until this point, it would have been interesting to give them inversely correlated character arcs. Have Chakotay start to regain his faith in the Starfleet way of doing things, while having Janeway lose some of her certainty that those principles will actually get them home. That would have been interesting. Instead she acts like a raving lunatic for one episode, we are still supposed to mostly agree with her, and the reset button gets slammed hard and none of this ever matters again. No wonder Moore left.
I get the impression that the writing staff thought they were doing a Sisko- Eddington type thing here with Janeway and Ransom– but the reason that the tension between Sisko and Eddington worked over on DS9 was that it was deeply personal- and not just professional- on Sisko’s part. He was angry that Eddington had betrayed the Federation, sure, but he was also angry that Eddington had betrayed *him* personally when he defected (and Sisko’s angry “he’s just a man… and he beat me!” speech is so great at showing that). Even if the audience didn’t support everything Sisko did to get back at Eddington, we still understood why he was so motivated to go after Eddington even when it clearly started effecting his better judgement. Here, Janeway just starts acting like an absolute psychopath for no compellingly good reason.
Yeah, like Part 1, not an inherently bad idea, but even worse execution this time around. I can’t blame Moore for only quitting after handful of episodes.
Anyway, I suppose you could argue Janeway’s out-of-character wrath is psychological projection. We knew from “Night” and other episodes that she harbors deep ingrained guilt for stranding the crew in the DQ by destroying the Caretaker’s Array and ensuring they’ll almost certainly never see home again.
That to me is one explanation for her at-times fanatical (if not always consistent) adherence Federation ideals — to preserve that piece of home at all costs. And it’s kept them alive and going for 5 year. In Ransom, she sees herself beneath that and what she could have become by abandoning those ideals and taking the ‘easy’ way out — hence her anger and guilt exploding in rage.
Exactly, Mr. Magic. I think Janeway sees in Ransom what she unconsciously fears she could become — what she’s probably been tempted to become in her darkest and most desperate thoughts — and that’s why she has to destroy him utterly.
Happy birthday!
“He comments at the end at being disturbed that someone can flick a switch and turn him from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, having apparently forgotten that that happened once before in “Darkling.””
The Jekyll and Hyde part, yes, but not the “flick a switch” part. What happened in “Darkling” was the result of the Doctor’s self-experimentation. What he’s saying here is that it alarms him that someone else could do that to him so easily, which is massively scarier. It’s the difference between being afraid of starting a fire in your kitchen and being afraid of an arsonist burning your house down. You can take steps to manage the former risk, but there’s much more of a sense of helplessness with the latter.
On the matter of how easily the Doctor’s personality could be changed by switching off his ethical subroutines, this came up before with Data in TNG: “Descent, Part II,” and I’ll quote (and slightly update) what I wrote in the rewatch for that one:
I don’t think the ethical-subroutine thing is all that implausible. There are cases in real life of people who’ve had brain damage to just one part of the brain and undergone a radical shift in personality as a result. A 2007 study found that injury to a specific portion of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, can alter people’s moral judgment, making them less compassionate and more likely to favor choices that would entail sacrificing a life (at least in the hypothetical). We humans underestimate how easy it is to change our personalities or perceptions just by shutting down a part of our brains. It’s rather scary to realize how tenuous our cherished identities and values really are.
Besides, ethics isn’t just some short, simple list saying “Helping = GOOD, Murder = BAD” or something like that. It’s a complex set of behavioral, social, and interpersonal guidelines and dynamics, connecting to a lot of areas of thought and behavior. Ethical subroutines could take up a fairly large portion of the Doctor’s neural net and be intertwined with a lot of his behaviors and perceptions.
@2/cap-mjb: I presume the Equinox EMH was not actually sentient, just a programmed torturer, so I wouldn’t call it murder. The idea was supposed to be that the Doctor was unique in his self-awareness, though that got glossed over more and more where stories about other holograms are concerned, as we’ll see.
@2: What’s the in-joke? There are a bunch of McKinley Park’s in the U.S. but there don’t appear to be any in Southern California around where the show is produced.
I did like the on-location shooting so I’m curious where it was filmed. Vasquez Rocks?
You know, I had previously always liked this episode and the two-parter in general but I better recognize now that I was really just enthralled by the spectacle and action and the stakes and the guest cast. I can still enjoy it as entertainment but there are so many plot holes and most appallingly, the behavior of Janeway. It’s a great disservice to her character to make her act so wretched and inconsistent with her previous established behavior in order to advance the plot. As Ron Moore complained, what is this even about or say about these characters aside from being boiled down to a story pitch of “a battle of wills between two Starfleet captains.”
How did Voyager catch up to the Ankari when apparently the Equinox had leaped tens of thousands of light years with their enhanced warp drive so that they had caught up with Voyager? Remember, Equinox is only a few more weeks to the Alpha Quadrant once they make several more jumps. So the Ankari should be long gone in the opposite direction.
It would have been interesting if even a discussion had come up with Janeway regarding the dead “Shriek” she came across in the corridor of her ship to see if she was even tempted to use it to get home faster since it was already dead. It could have shown the audience how compromised she was morally at this point or if she would have just outright rejected the notion. But I suppose it’s just implied she wouldn’t cross that line because it’s not even brought up.
It’s a bit too obvious that now ee-vil Burke gets his comeuppance at the end by being killed by the aliens but it would have been far more interesting if he had been absorbed into the Voyager crew and the fallout from that. But then of course this show probably wouldn’t know or wouldn’t care to do anything with it. As it is, I always found it very disappointing that Lessing and Gilmore never returned on the show as they were already established and interesting characters, one who clearly had PTSD and one who had been defiant to and tortured by the captain. That’s got to make for awkward encounters whenever they pass by each other in the hallway!
Happy birthday, KRAD!
@8,
As it is, I always found it very disappointing that Lessing and Gilmore never returned on the show as they were already established and interesting characters, one who clearly had PTSD and one who had been defiant to and tortured by the captain. That’s got to make for awkward encounters whenever they pass by each other in the hallway!
A big missed opportunity there was to have put the Equinox survivors in the exact same position that Chakotay and the Maquis were in after “Caretaker”: Renegades integrated into a crew that really didn’t like them.
Would’ve made for some fascinating interactions, but alas…
@10 – Someone linked an in-depth interview in the last article that Moore gave about his time with Voyager and man, it was like me giving the interview. We had the exact same gripes about this show. This episode was a disaster from a writing perspective. Moore, in particular, was incensed by the reset button at the end (welcome to the party, pal!). They had Janeway going off the edge for no discernable reason. What an utter character assassination by the writers. I really wish that the first Trek female captain would have had a better show to star in.
Happy birthday, Keith! April 18 is the best birthday, am I right? (Yep, it was my birthday too!)
@11,
Yeah, as I said before, you can see the beginnings of BSG in Moore’s rage and frustration with VOY and his departure from Trek.
Happy birthday and thanks for the fun rewatch!
garreth: Lessing said that the Ankari had been keeping pace with Equinox since they left their homeworld. Presumably, they have super duper warp drive, too.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@15/krad: I apparently missed that line of dialogue. I wonder to what end that the Ankari are keeping up with Equinox though? To observe? To make sure the “Shreiks” exact vengeance? The Ankari haven’t prevented Equinox from killing more of the aliens and the Ankari haven’t taken any aggressive action directly against Equinox themselves. So what are they gonna do? Just follow Equinox all the way back to the Alpha Quadrant and maybe tell on them to the Federation Council and then be star witnesses in an interstellar genocide trial? That could be a good episode.
The funny thing is, minus the five crewmembers we never see again anyway, the entire two-parter is pointless. Suppose Voyager never came across the Equinox. Great, when we first met the ship the aliens were about to destroy them anyway, so that would have just sorted itself out. The Memory Alpha has a ton of background information and, basically, they wrote part 1 having no idea what they wanted to do or event he barest outline of part 2. Sometimes that works, and other times you get this.
It also requires three characters to make significant changes in character, and only one of those three is believable.
What’s funny about this is it’s an easy patch. Have Ransom stay on course, then have Burke be the one with a change of heart. That still leaves the problem of Janeway, but to fix that can of worms the entire episode would have to be rewritten. But apparently they were really attached to the notion that a Starfleet Captain would do the right thing in the end. Starfleet Commanders, I guess, are still allowed to be monsters.
Happy Birthday Keith!
You summed up my main two problems with this episode. While I “understood” Janeway really wanting to excise the stain of Ransom out of the Federation/get back Seven, I felt she went too far, too fast. I also have a hard time believing the complete 180 the doctor did with his ethical subroutines turned off. I acutally quite liked part 1 of this; but part 2 was a let down.
Minor point to edit – Chakotay didn’t flaunt Janeway’s authority, he flouted it.
@16 – The Ankari were following the whole time because the writing in this two-parter was atrocious and they needed a way to resolve the issue. Funnily enough, the whole deal with the aliens, including Janeways’ decision to sacrifice the Equinox, turned out to be pointless, as the Equinox basically destroyed itself. Maybe they needed to pad the runtime?
Happy Birthday!
@19 – Fixed, thanks!
@17 Having Burke have the change of heart would have made far more sense, especially since he is the one who already has a personal connection to one of the crew. It actually would have been a natural character development for him to see how Torres had managed to “redeem” herself in the eyes of Starfleet, and think that it was possible for him, too. Now that you point it out, it almost seems like the writers really went out of their way in this episode to avoid any logically character motivations.
@23: I don’t think Voyager was synonymous with logic after Michael Piller left the show upon the conclusion of the second season.
@7/CLB: It’d be nice to think that, and it’s certainly true that the Equinox EMH’s programme had been tampered with in order to make him more use to the crew. On the other hand, he’s been active aboard the Equinox for even longer than the Doctor has (they don’t seem to have any other medical staff) and shows more independent thought than a simple tool, coming up with a rescue plan for the Equinox’s crew on his own, then using his position aboard Voyager to send them a warning message about the ambush without any prompting. So I’m not really able to convince myself that he wasn’t sentient.
@8/garreth: Maybe I’m mistaken then. I thought it was a reference to the real filming location.
Yeah Janeways actions are so over the top that in any other episode it would be the result of alien possession. It’s even worse than toture it’s attempted murder because he didn’t crack and would have died had chakotay not come back in the room.
@24,
I’ve always felt bad for that aspect of Piller’s Trek legacy.
He co-created DS9 and VOY. But whereas DS9 ultimately achieved the latent potential built into its premise, VOY squandered it.
It’s like raising two kids and one achieves the Nobel Prize while the other one ends up serving fries at a fast food joint.
Happy Birthday, KRAD!
A Happy Birthday to you, Krad! To many more trips around the sun!
@25 – To me, any starship with a similar EMH computer system is automatically sentient. Humans are considered sentient at birth; the same goes for this computer the moment the components are put together and brought online.
@17,
The Memory Alpha has a ton of background information and, basically, they wrote part 1 having no idea what they wanted to do or event he barest outline of part 2. Sometimes that works, and other times you get this.
One could argue it was a Berman-era ‘tradition’ going back to “Best of Both Worlds” a decade earlier. Piller famously didn’t outline Part II when writing Part I because he assumed he’d be leaving TNG and someone else would resolve the cliffhanger.
But yeah, the Berman-era is ironically why I’m not fond of Seasonal cliffhanger endings: Too many instance of the payoff not equaling the setup or poor planning, etc.
I’m actually reminded of the template Stargate started using in its later years. I always liked how the preceding Season cliffhangers weren’t completely resolved in the Season Premiere and the narrative carried over into the new Season’s second episode.
I do like Ransom’s arc somewhat, and his visions of Seven on the beach are gorgeously filmed, having some of the show’s finest cinematography since last season’s Gravity.
That’s about it, though. I echo most of the sentiments here. Turning Janeway into a fascist persecutor could work had they given us enough of a motive to justify it. As it is, Equinox part II is yet another victim of the season-cliffhanging two parter curse that’s been part of the franchise since middle TNG. You’d think that a three month hiatus would give Braga and the staff enough time to really think things through.
But as pointed out, part 1 was more or less a complete story on its own that just happened to have a cliffhanger thrown at the last minute, needlessly dragging a story past its prime. Once the extent of Ransom’s crimes was laid bare last season, it should have been a short road to a conclusion, one in which Janeway and co. patches things up. It would have worked perfectly as a close-ended season finale, but instead we get this. You can see the broad strokes all across the plot. Since they wanted to redeem Ransom at the end, they had no choice but to completely assassinate Burke as a character in order to do so.
As for Janeway, she’s on righteous mode. The only difference between here and Tuvix is that the crew is at least questioning her calls (even though their effort to do so is half-hearted at best). As I understand, this episode was pretty much the reason Moore stepped away from the franchise, voicing legitimate concerns over the story’s direction. I can see why. Easily the weakest season opener of them all, more of less on the level of TNG’s Time’s Arrow part 2, and Descent part 2.
@7/Christopher: Let’s not forget Star Trek: Insurrection, which was made not long before this two parter. LaForge mentions that Data’s ethical subroutines could override his programming to the point of having him assess and classify Picard and Worf as being legitimate threats to the Ba’Ku, given the Federation’s support of the So’Na initiative.
@32: Ron Moore worked on and actually wrote both “Survival Instinct” and “Barge of the Dead” after this episode so I believe he actually left during “Barge…” once he felt his input was being ignored and never watched those episodes when they aired.
@32,
Moore also helped break the story for Part II and I think that was his first realization he’d made a mistake not exiting Trek with the rest of the DS9 Writer’s Room.
But given how much he loved the franchise, and how much he valued his old partnership with Braga, I can’t fault him for trying to hang on for another few weeks until accepting the situation was untenable.
@34 – According to that interview referenced earlier, not sure I would say Moore “helped break the story.” It sounded like all his input “fell on deaf ears.”
So, one Starfleet ship blowing up another Starfleet ship’s nacelle… was that a Wrath of Khan reference?
“What a misbegotten piece of crap.”
That’s a pretty succinct and fair assessment.
The Cynic’s Corner called the aliens “antimatter-farting piranhas,” which I always found hilarious.
@35/Austin: The process of breaking/outlining a story can entail generating and trying out a lot of ideas that end up not being used in the final script. So the fact that none of Moore’s ideas ended up in the script doesn’t mean he didn’t help with the breaking.
I must admit I’ve never really seen Burke as the charming, pleasant ex-boyfriend of Torres from Part I who suddenly turns into a full-on “baddie” in Part II. He might be charming and pleasant on the surface, but that’s as far as it goes. Unlike Gilmore and Lessing (the redeemable speaking characters who get to survive), he never voices any doubts about what the Equinox are doing. I think he only has two conversations with B’Elanna in Part I, and while the first one just seems to be a normal exes catching up chat, it’s slightly unnerving that he then carries on the chat in Engineering and tells her he’s glad that she’s happy with Tom, when the real purpose of the chat is to stop her noticing that he’s set up a tricorder to download Voyager’s database, as part of a plan to flee the scene and leave a defenceless Voyager to their fate.
@39: Burke’s and Torres’ initial chat seemed genuine at least. And in Part II he does tell her he wishes she wasn’t one of the people getting hurt so maybe that counts for something? Haha.
If the Doctor’s ethical subroutines were “turned off” then it would have caused a change in his personality, but does that mean he’s not sentient after all? Kind of like what happened to Data in “Descent?”
This might have worked better as a multi-episode story arc. Janeway goes into Captain Ahab mode and puts both Chakotay and Tuvok in the brig (then who’s her first officer? Harry? Tom?) or if it had happened during Part One. The ending is too convenient and the subject of her most serious disagreements with Chakotay and Tuvok are never brought up again.
I don’t see Burke as a character who might have been redeemed or who would have redeemed himself. I think for some time he was quite willing to single mindedly do Ransom’s dirty work. It’s just that between part 1 and part 2 the veneer of charm falls away. His regret that B’Elanna would be one of those getting hurt might be a final qualm, that’s all.
It wouldn’t be the first time the Evil Lieutenant is even more vicious than the Evil Overlord. His mutiny only reinforces that.
But B’Elanna seems to have a soft spot for bad boys. She just finally lucked out in getting one who had finally connected with his own better nature, and started bringing out hers.
And I can see Ransom, despite being a scumbag himself, also finally having qualms. There are reasons he keeps retreating into his beach program. Seven’s inexplicable insertion into it, the compromising of his last refuge, might well have been a factor in turning him.
As for Janeway … yeah, what everyone else said.
Happy birthday Keith!!
Hey krad – happy birthday !
@25/cap-mjb: “On the other hand, he’s been active aboard the Equinox for even longer than the Doctor has (they don’t seem to have any other medical staff)”
It wasn’t just the duration of the Doctor’s activity that caused him to develop consciousness, but the fact that Kes and eventually the rest of the crew encouraged him to develop and grow as a person. It seems likely that the Equinox crew treated their EMH more as a tool and didn’t care much about his personhood, given their willingness to reprogram him to suit their needs.
Recall “The Swarm” — when the Doctor’s personality grew too far, his program almost crashed, and the recommended solution was a factory reset, wiping all his memories and personal growth. Voyager‘s crew found a way around that (he lost a lot of memory but his consciousness remained intact), but if the Equinox crew had faced the same problem, they would probably have just reset their EMH to zero and said “Let’s not let that happen again.”
“and shows more independent thought than a simple tool, coming up with a rescue plan for the Equinox’s crew on his own, then using his position aboard Voyager to send them a warning message about the ambush without any prompting. So I’m not really able to convince myself that he wasn’t sentient.”
Sophisticated computer programs can operate independently within their preset parameters. Still, you have a point. Sentience or conscious thought isn’t an on/off switch, but a continuum. The Equinox EMH may have been analogous to something like an octopus or squid. Cephalopods are highly intelligent in potential, probably conscious, but very short-lived, so that they don’t have time to develop their intelligence to the same level as humans.
@41/mspence: I never claimed the Equinox EMH was non-sentient because his ethical subroutines were turned off. See my comments above about the kind of brain injury that causes a similar personality change in humans. My point was simply that the Voyager EMH’s sentience was supposed to be exceptional for holograms, a unique circumstance that evolved over time and was cultivated and assisted by Voyager‘s crew, rather than the default state of all EMH Mark I programs. Although the producers did seem to have forgotten that by this point.
Anyway, I doubt they really gave any thought to the parameters of AI sapience. They were just thinking “Let’s give Bob Picardo a chance to ham it up as a bad guy.”
I admit that I loved Janeway in her psychopathic-badass mode (the same mode she was in during the last few minutes of “Scientific Method” when she drove Voyager into the nebula-from-hell to kill the aliens and everyone else aboard).
My favorite shot of the whole episode was her facial expression when she slowly walked past Chakotay in the corridor, after Chakotay freed Loessing against her wishes.
But my issue is exactly what #3 put into words so perfectly:
“On any other episode Janeway acting like this would have been an indication that she had been replaced by an imposter or possessed by an alien or something, and Chakotay would have been entirely in the right to relieve her of command and stage a mutiny. Other than “that’s not what the script says” I can’t think of a single in-universe reason why the Voyager crew shouldn’t think that their captain has been compromised, and react accordingly. “
It did seem out of place for a Starfleet crew, especially with experienced officers Chakotay and Tuvok aboard.
I can’t be the only one who took a look at that header and thought it was one tagline away from a Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie poster, can I? (I’m DEFINITELY not the only one who took a look, then thought “… and then they kiss?” because this is The Internet and the reason computers come with cooling fans is so the fevered typings of the fan community don’t set their motherboards aflame!). (-;
Let’s say some captains have a history of regularly getting impersonated or mind controlled to do goofy things, and others not so much. Hmm… when did I last see a well-meaning crew, Starfleet or anywhere, go against a captain who turned out to be not mind controlled, impersonated, swapped from the mirror universe, unfit to command? Should I count “The Enterprise Incident”?
@47: How about this very episode when Burke stages a mutiny against Ransom?
Happy belated birthday, Keith! (I’ll comment on the episode later when I have time.)
Thanks to everyone who actually read the bio for the birthday wishes!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Happy (much belated) birthday!
I’m sad I’m not comment 52 :/
Sorry for being so late, but Happy Birthday Keith!!!
Once again, I’m a little surprised Seska didn’t come up with this idea on her own, finding a way to delete the EMH’s ethical subroutines when she was coordinating an attack, setting loose a psycho Mr. Hyde on Voyager’s interiors while she attacked it from outside. But Seska would’ve done one better. She would’ve activated any backup EMH’s and the other program that looked just like the Doctor and deleted all their ethical subroutines, and created a small army.
Interestingly enough, they didn’t need to do an EMH swap to benefit the Equinox. Just have a crew member or 2 casually walk into Voyager’s sickbay and delete the Doctor’s ethical subroutines. Voila! Instant mole!
@53/Quasarmodo: I doubt that deleting an EMH’s ethical subroutines is a simple operation. It would require a keen understanding of how the EMH software works. Yes, the episode showed Ransom doing it with the push of a few buttons, but remember that they’d already figured out how to do it with their own EMH. So he may have just re-run a pre-existing deletion program that it took them weeks or months to develop the first time.
We’ve been told numerous times that the EMH can’t be backed up, and that when he’s transferred into the mobile emitter, that’s the only copy of him extant.
We’ve also been told that the EMH’s program has expanded to include much more data space in Voyager‘s computers than was originally intended or had been allocated for him.
So, apart from the matters of how easy it should be to delete the EMH’s ethics, or why aspects of his loyalty and behavior would change after that deletion, what I want to know is:
1) Why would the “unethical” EMH-E feel any desire to save EMH by transferring him out of the mobile emitter into Equinox‘s computers? Wouldn’t EMH-E just delete EMH from the emitter?
2) How would EMH fit into Equinox‘s computer?
3) How did Voyager beam the EMH back home with Seven? Did they beam Equinox‘s computer over? How could Ransom then still fly the ship? Can they beam the EMH back as a data pattern? How would that work?
I know there are no answers to these questions. They’re just another set of things I hated about this episode, and I didn’t notice that any of the rest of you mentioned them, so I wanted to weigh in.
@55: Regarding your first point, maybe Equinox EMH had the foresight to know that should he be separated from the Equinox itself (as would actually happen), then there would still be the Voyager EMH to take his place on Equinox as that ship and crew still needed the medical supplemental support.
@55: First point has been answered above. Whilst the Doctor’s programme has been expanded, I don’t think it’s “No other starship has the memory space to contain his programming” expanded, we’ve seen him transferred elsewhere with no problem in the past. (To the Prometheus in “Message in a Bottle” for instance.) So I don’t see any problem with the Equinox’s computer being able to house his programme, especially when their own EMH wasn’t there anymore. Even though the scene is spectacularly confusing, I don’t think Ransom was meant to have beamed the Doctor or his ship’s computer over, he just transferred the Doctor’s programme back to Voyager.
@56: But why would EMH-E care whether Equinox had medical support? He’s eeeevil, remember?
@57: It seemed pretty clear to me in “The Swarm” that quite a bit of juryrigging had been necessary to make room for EMH’s expanded program.
@58: It seemed pretty obvious from the Equinox two-parter that that ship’s EMH was devoted to that crew, from supplying them with phasers when they were confined on Voyager to communicating with them ship-to-ship when he was undercover on Voyager. So of course he would still care that Equinox had medical support. Being evil doesn’t mean you don’t care about protecting your friends and crew.
Quoth garreth: “So of course he would still care that Equinox had medical support. Being evil doesn’t mean you don’t care about protecting your friends and crew.”
Except the entire episode is predicated on the Voyager EMH not caring about protecting his friends and his crew once his ethical subroutines were deleted, because he tortured Seven of Nine and betrayed the crew of Voyager after that.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@61/krad: Then I would submit that unlike the Voyager EMH, the Equinox EMH’s purge of his ethical subroutines was in fact not as complete as that of his counterpart. Therefore, his loyalty to his compatriots was still left intact by design. Voyager EMH had no such luck.
@61/garreth: Good point. The Equinox EMH had been reprogrammed to work for his crew without ethics getting in the way, while the Voyager EMH was reprogrammed specifically to work against his own crew without ethics getting in the way.
I think you’ve put more thought into this plot point than Voyager’s writers did! They didn’t even bother trying to explain how the Doctor was returned to Voyager. He wasn’t beamed over with the others. And if Voyager’s computer didn’t realize that the Doctor had been replaced, how exactly was “Computer, delete the Equinox EMH” effective?
@63: I think you’ve put more thought into this plot point than Voyager’s writers did!
This much, if nothing else, is true.
Voyager’s writers’ modus operandi was “whatever looks and sounds cool” and then just write around that, logic or internal consistency be damned.
@58: It’s all a bit technobabbly but the idea seemed to be that they reinforced the Doctor’s programme to hold more information, not that they expanded the computer to hold a bigger programme.
To me this episode was just yet another proof how bad Janeway is as a captain. I know, this is even taking her far beyond other episodes has taken her, but to me it fits the patterns to some extent – mostly that in any critical situation she’s not able to cooperate with her crew anymore and she’s taking extremely ridiculous steps that just work out fine because the script says so.
Rather than write another Jeremiad, I will keep my remarks short and sweet, as follows:
1. I agree very wholeheartedly with KRAD’s review;
2. This episode is one of many on Voyager that makes me want to convene a special grand jury to investigate Captain Janeway. I know some fans put Captain Janeway on trial. I’d like to see how that ancient body called the Grand Jury would deal with her. But that’s just me.