“Extreme Risk”
Written by Kenneth Biller
Directed by Cliff Bole
Season 5, Episode 3
Production episode 197
Original air date: October 28, 1998
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Torres is doing orbital skydiving on the holodeck, albeit with the safeties disengaged. In mid-free-fall, she’s summoned to engineering, but she fobs off her duties onto Seven, to the latter’s surprise.
Voyager is launching their fancy-shmancy new multispatial probe, incorporating Borg design elements Seven has provided. However, while it’s gathering data, a Malon freighter snags it in a tractor beam. Tuvok is able to command the probe to send a polaron burst to shake off the tractor beam, at least, but the Malon refuse to respond to hails, and Voyager is two hours away. Kim is able to direct the probe into a gas giant; the Malon follow and are destroyed—the Borg shielding keeps the probe safe.
They set course for the gas giant. The crew discusses options for retrieving the probe. Torres is unusually terse and makes no substantive contribution to the discussions, which wind up focusing on the Delta Flyer, a shuttle Paris has designed, incorporating notions from Seven, Tuvok, and Torres. They can build it and use it to salvage the probe.
Torres has continued to go to the holodeck and engage in dangerous programs with the safeties disengaged, including one where she fights off several Cardassians.
At one point, Paris, Tuvok, Torres, Kim, and Seven are in the holodeck working on the design of the Delta Flyer. Seven points out a flaw in Torres’s hull design, and Torres accepts it without an argument, and promises new specs for Paris later.
Later, Torres brings the specs to Paris’s cabin. He asks her to stay for dinner, but she declines.
By the time Voyager arrives at the gas giant, they’ve got two problems. One is that the probe, which is stuck in an atmospheric layer of the gas giant, isn’t responding to commands from Voyager. And the other is that there’s another Malon ship nearby. This one hails Voyager and Controller Vrelk informs Janeway that they are claiming the probe for salvage.
The race is on. The Malon are also constructing a ship that will allow them to salvage the probe, and so Janeway orders the crew to devote all resources to getting the Flyer up and running.
Torres goes to an empty mess hall and asks Neelix for some banana pancakes, as she remembers them fondly from her youth. Neelix asks for some from the replicator, and Torres only remembers to eat some when Neelix reminds her. After halfheartedly eating the one bite and telling Neelix it’s delicious, she leaves without another word.
Tuvok and Paris are concerned that the atmospheric pressure of the gas giant will cause microfractures in the hull. Torres volunteers to test the hull on the holodeck, which she once again does with the safety protocols disengaged. She discovers that the microfractures are too voluminous to be safe, but she’s rendered unconscious by the atmospheric pressure before she can shut the program down.
Upon learning that the Malon’s shuttle is likely to be constructed sooner than the Delta Flyer, Janeway orders production sped up. When Chakotay calls Torres and she doesn’t reply, the computer informs him that she’s on the holodeck. Chakotay goes down to rescue her before the holographic Delta Flyer‘s hull breaches. Chakotay ends the program and brings her to sickbay.
Janeway chews Torres out when she wakes up four hours later, as the EMH has found dozens of injuries, not all of them recent, and has diagnosed her with clinical depression. Torres refuses to talk about it, and Janeway removes her from active duty and the Flyer project.
The captain then talks to Paris and Chakotay. Paris has no idea what’s wrong with her, as she’s been distant lately. Chakotay promises to go through her holodeck programs.
Chakotay then goes to Torres’s quarters and takes her to the holodeck, where he runs a program that she ran for 47 seconds after they got the news about the Maquis being wiped out. Since then, she’s run ever-more-dangerous programs, all with the safeties disengaged. She finally comes clean to Chakotay: She’s trying to feel something. She’s not angry that their friends were massacred—she’s numb. All her life, she’s lost people. Her father walked out on her and her mother when she was a kid, she was kicked out of Starfleet Academy, and she was forcibly separated from her life and her cause when they fell down the Caretaker’s rabbit hole.
Vrelk attacks Voyager with an antimatter barrage, which is meant to distract them from the fact that they’ve launched their shuttle. Torres begs Chakotay to put her back on active duty and let her be part of the Flyer‘s launch. He accedes to her request, and gives her the toolbox he was going to take on board.
The Flyer‘s maiden voyage takes it into the gas giant, and sure enough, there’s a hull breach from both the atmosphere and the Malon shuttle attacking them. Before it cracks open completely, Torres is able to MacGyver a force field using bits from the transporter and a hand phaser, which enables the Flyer to survive long enough to retrieve the probe.
Janeway orders them to leave orbit as fast as possible. Torres tells Chakotay she’s feeling better and thanks him for the kick in the ass—and also says that if he barges in on her holodeck programs again, she’ll break his neck. Then she goes to the mess hall and chows down on some banana pancakes and, for the first time all episode, smiles.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Delta Flyer is a “hot rod” shuttle designed by Paris and incorporating design elements from several crew members. He also includes console interfaces inspired by the Captain Proton holodeck program, to Tuvok’s chagrin.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is appalled to realize that Torres has been endangering her life on the holodeck.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok resists every one of Paris’s attempts to make the Delta Flyer look cool, whether it’s fins on the hull or the old-fashioned console.
Half and half. Torres’s normal state is to be angry, so when given news that would normally make someone angry, she instead becomes numb. Her constant attempts to harm herself are a desperate attempt to feel something, and she’s healing her physical injuries herself (badly) to avoid it being reported by the EMH in sickbay.
Forever an ensign. Kim is as sick and tired as anyone about how Paris has been going on about the Delta Flyer design, but the minute Janeway authorizes its construction, Kim jumps in with both feet.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is thrilled when Torres comes to see him, though he has no more luck than anyone else in helping her. He is doing training in security, and Neelix does a very good impersonation of Tuvok when talking about the training to Torres.
Resistance is futile. Both the probe and the Delta Flyer have many enhancements that come from Seven’s knowledge of Borg technology.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Torres has been pushing Paris away, not confiding in him or even really spending much time with him, to his chagrin.
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Fugitive Telemetry
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: WHY DOES THE HOLODECK HAVE SAFETIES THAT CAN BE DISENGAGED?????? WHY AREN’T THE SAFETIES FUCKING HARDWIRED?????????????
Do it. “Well, if we can’t transport it out, we’ll just have to fly in and grab it.”
“Perhaps you weren’t paying attention when the Malon freighter imploded.”
Paris making a suggestion and Tuvok bringing the sass.
Welcome aboard. The great character actor Hamilton Camp plays Vrelk. He also played the Ferengi psychopath Leck in DS9‘s “Ferengi Love Songs” and “The Magnificent Ferengi.” Plus recurring regular Alexander Enberg is back as Vorik.
Trivial matters: The episode’s story was inspired by conversations Roxann Dawson had with the producers about how Torres would deal with depression, in particular through self-harm.
The Malon are firmly established as recurring antagonists in this episode. They’ll be back in “Think Tank” (kind of) and “Juggernaut.”
The Maquis were wiped out in the DS9 episode “Blaze of Glory.” Torres and Chakotay found out about it when the crew got letters home through the Hirogen communications relay in “Hunters.”
This episode introduces the Delta Flyer, the super-duper shuttlecraft hot rod of Paris’s design, which will be Voyager‘s primary support craft for this and the following season before it’s destroyed in “Unimatrix Zero.” Its creation was foreshadowed by Seven in “Drone.” A new one will be constructed in “Drive.”
After Voyager returns home in “Endgame,” the Delta Flyer will inspire the design of a new class of shuttlecraft, called the Flyer-class, as seen in (among other places) the Titan novel Over a Torrent Sea by regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett.
The orbital skydiving suit Torres wears is of the same design as the one worn by William Shatner as James T. Kirk in a scene that was filmed for Star Trek Generations that was ultimately cut from the final film, in which Kirk also engaged in that activity.
Set a course for home. “Warning: Disengaging safety protocols presents extreme risk of injury.” For the second time in three episodes, we have a member of the crew suffering from clinical depression, except this time we’re told it explicitly. In Torres’s case, it manifests through dozens of attempts to hurt herself in order to actually feel something.
What makes this episode work is Roxann Dawson’s stellar performance. Torres has always been grouchy, and to see her apathetic is heartbreaking. Seeing her as the wallflower in a confab about building a new ship is mind-boggling, and Dawson plays her indifference beautifully.
And for all that the Paris-Torres relationship is strong and excellent, writer Kenneth Biller made exactly the right decision in having it be Chakotay who gets her out of it. Chakotay is the one member of the opening-credits crew who knows what she’s going through, because he went through it also. Chakotay is her mentor and the one who brought her to the Maquis, and it’s the destruction of the Maquis that’s doing this to her. Chakotay pretty much dragging her into the Maquis-slaughter holodeck program is the bucket of ice water in her face she needs.
What makes this episode not work is the timeframe. This needed to happen within a few weeks of “Hunters.” Instead, it’s been more than seven months (it was five months between “Hunters” and “Hope and Fear,” and the ship spent two months in the void in “Night“). How have we not seen any evidence of this behavior before now? The dialogue in this episode implies that this has been going on since they got the letters from home.
There are two factors at work here that sabotage the episode, only one of which is in everyone’s control: Dawson spent much of season four pregnant, which precluded her doing an action-heavy episode like this; and it didn’t occur to anyone on the writing staff to even consider showing Torres (or any of the other Maquis crew) suffering PTSD from finding out their comrades were all massacred until Dawson brought it up. Indeed, Biller said in an interview with Cinefantastique that he considered this episode’s greatest flaw to be that it relied on a past episode, which was a spectacularly wrong statement to make, as that’s the episode’s strength. The serious issue here is that we haven’t seen more stuff like this and Janeway’s depression in “Night.”
Well, okay, there’s a third thing. On the one hand, it’s a long-established aspect of holodeck technology; on the other hand, this episode, more than any other, points up how unutterably stupid the very concept is. There is no way it makes any sense that a holodeck would have safeties that could be disengaged.
The gabfests where Paris, Tuvok, Seven, Kim, and a nearly somnambulant Torres design the Delta Flyer are very entertaining, and it’s especially fun to watch Paris and Tuvok butt heads over aesthetics. But the main plot is something that should’ve come up sooner, and should’ve been a bigger part of the character’s overall through-line.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido recently talked about Star Trek on Russ’s Rockin’ Rollercoaster alongside fellow scribe Derek Tyler Attico (Strange New Worlds 2016, Star Trek Adventures) and Jarrah Hodge (Women at Warp, TrekkieFeminist.com), in a broad-ranging conversation hosted by author Russ Colchamiro. Check it out!
Depression knows no timeline.
It’s an important thing to note that little things, like someone being distant lately, can often be red flags of suicidal ideation and we don’t recognize them until later. The times I wish there was a damn ship’s counselor on board, sigh.
Otherwise, all excellent points as usual!
TA: That is a good point about the timeline of depression. And yes, they damn well needed a counselor….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@TA: while that is true, it is explicitly mentioned in the episode that she ran the Maquis hologram once right after she got the news and then started running very dangerous programs right after that. So it sounds like she had the depression for a long time, and I’ve always agreed with KRAD’s viewpoint that they should have addressed it much sooner. Come to think of it, more members of the crew should have had these issues all seven seasons because even just their isolation is enough to cause such depression.
I actually find one of the weaknesses you listed as a strength of the episode. I’m afraid that if it had taken place immediately after “Hunters”, her depression would have been written off as grief and it would disappear as soon as she accepted her grief. Having it be something she’s dealing with privately and that has been steadily worsening over time seems more realistic. Of course, it would work even better if we got some hints of it in other episodes, particularly “Night.” I also appreciate that it ends with Chakotay asking if she’s feeling better and her responding with an “I don’t know. Kinda? Maybe? Let’s see.”
100% agree about the holodeck safeties! At least add an authorization code to it and log it somewhere. This episode made me think of the holodeck as a very expensive version of Futurama’s suicide booths.
Yeah, for all its flaws, this is one of my favorite VOY episodes of Season Five, let alone the entire series (between the character work with Toress and Chakotay and of course the debut of the Flyer).
I have to say that despite Starfleet having a counsellor on board some of their ships, they have a pretty poor mental health and wellbeing strategy for their crew. Starting with resiliency training and screening, which we have only ever seen as cadets being put through a surprise high casualty scenario and absolutely no therapist on scene to help mitigate the high chance of PTSD, they are kind of thrown out there to be injured and/or killed in a million different ways without any trauma support.
How many times have the bridge crew watched some nameless red shirt get blown in half by an exploding control panel or eaten by a viscous fog and not being given a mandatory after action session, or even scheduled follow up with medical (as correctly, identified by @1, depression and trauma have no timelines)? I get that medicine has advanced so much by this point but we would not have evolved beyond the ability to be impacted by trauma. They even have episodes where they clearly show it still affecting officers (The Wounded, Hard Time, etc…).
Only now we are seeing episodes dealing with PTSD, and even then too infrequent compared to the experiences characters are going through.
@6
I seem to recall Troi helping Picard immediately after his torture from Cardassians. We also see her helping LaForge after his brainwashing from Romulans. And we see her speaking to Worf after he took Data’s place after his “death.”
At least this time the computer warned her (giving us the episode title). That’s never happened before.
I’m a fan of this episode. Dawson’s performance is great, the Malon are easy to root against, tie-ins to previous episodes as well as DS9, and the inception of the Delta Flyer. I seem to remember enjoying most of the episodes centered around the Flyer so I’m hoping that holds true this time around, too.
You can squabble over timelines, but I really don’t think it hurts the episode. Depression doesn’t have to hit all at once, and escalating self-harm as they realize it is not unrealistic. Sure, it would have worked better with some hints in other episodes (think Paris’ bad behavior ruse in the Kazon arc), and there are some possible plot holes (did Paris really not notice all of these injuries to her during this time? Their relationship certainly seems serious enough…) but I really don’t think they bring down the episode by itself.
Honestly, the worst part of the episode is that it serves as yet another reminder that Voyager really didn’t ever do enough with the Maquis crewmembers and their storylines. B’elanna might feel numb, but the viewers do, too, because we weren’t made to care enough about that backstory.
@9/brandonw: Trust me, it’s perfectly possible for Paris not to have noticed B’Elanna’s self-destructive behavior or its consequences. In a relationship, people tend to, for better or worse, form an image of who their partner is all the time, and Paris likely saw B’Elanna as superhuman, however inadvertently. Paris probably believed, however unconsciously, that B’Elanna was impervious to feeling sad or depressed.
A lot of the holodeck safety issues could probably be resolved by just adding a little more technobabble. Instead of telling us that someone’s disabled the safeties, have someone say “And you’ve compromised the inertial sensors, so if anything had gone wrong, you would have hit at X ridiculous velocity. These safety measure are there for a reason.” Make it clear that these are clever workarounds, and not just a function as intended of the holodeck.
I’m with the others — it is not at all implausible that it took months for B’Elanna’s depression to manifest. Clinical depression is gradual and insidious, like cancer. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It comes on so gradually and unpredictably that you’re in its clutches before you realize it.
As a chronic sufferer of clinical depression, I greatly appreciated this episode for how well it handled the condition. It rang very true to me. The only problem I had with it was the perennial Voyager problem that it wasn’t followed up on in later episodes. Depression isn’t something you can cure overnight. Often it’s something you just have to live with and learn to manage.
Also, it’s incorrect to equate clinical depression with PTSD. They’re two distinct psychological conditions. PTSD tends to be characterized by traumatic memories and flashbacks, anxiety attacks, avoidance of situations that remind you of your trauma, difficulty remembering the traumatic event, etc. B’Elanna’s symptoms are those of clinical depression — dulled emotions, lack of enjoyment, lack of caution and self-care, etc. And it’s in response to learning that her friends died, which is sad, but I don’t think it constitutes a trauma of the sort that causes post-traumatic stress (like suffering violence or abuse).
I have mixed feelings about the Delta Flyer plot. On the one hand, it’s good to see how they build new shuttles, a nice response to the perennial fan whinings about where the new shuttles come from (a question whose answer should be obvious given the existence of replicators). On the other hand, the Flyer is kind of redundant, because the ship was designed with a comparable auxiliary craft, the Aeroshuttle, whose outline you can see on the underside of the saucer section. The fact that they need to build an equivalent craft requires ignoring that the Aeroshuttle ever existed — not that it ever actually got mentioned in the show, though. But its outline is right there on the bottom of the ship, so it should be there. (One of the Voyager pitches I developed back in the ’90s was designed to require the use of the Aeroshuttle, to give them an excuse to build the miniature at last, like how “The Galileo Seven” was written to give TOS an excuse to build its shuttlecraft. It didn’t sell, though.)
@9:
“…and the inception of the Delta Flyer. I seem to remember enjoying most of the episodes centered around the Flyer so I’m hoping that holds true this time around, too.”
Yeah, the Flyer was such a great addition to the series.
And as I’ve said throughout the re-watch, it’s also long overdue, too. Given no Starfleet support and the rate they went through normal shuttlecraft, the Flyer should’ve been developed earlier in the series.
cw: suicide
@3 I had the same thought. If the first version of holodecks didn’t have hardwired safeties, the second version would. Not that space is lacking in ways to kill yourself but the holodeck would just make it ridiculously easy.
They could have showed Torres showing up with a scratch or bruise over a few episodes to seed the idea for this, as they’ve seeded other plots. On the other hand, she doesn’t need to go sub-orbital sky diving to get a pain/adrenaline fix if the ship is about to blow up like it usually does.
it would have been nice to show that depression doesn’t necessarily start with highly obvious withdrawal but it can be going for a long time with things that aren’t obvious from the outside. And I have to add the obligatory complaint about mental health issues being solved in a single episode
In regards to why the holodeck safeties can be disengaged, Starfleet does use the holodecks for crew training, so maybe it’s for when they need to train their personnel for operating in extreme environmental conditions.
I remember this episode – at the time I had assumed that the depression had just been manifesting in little ways at the time, then started spiralling – it would have been incredible if they HAD thought of this and you could have looked back over several episodes or even seasons and went ‘A-ha’ at all the clues – but that was never going to happen on this show.
As far as the holodeck safeties – well yeah. Now IF they had not been ‘disengaged’ many times before, it WOULD have made perfect sense that of anyone, Torres was the one who would figure out how to do it in a never ending quest for more risk.
This is one episode of Voyager which I connected with on a personal level while watching – although when I self-harmed it wasn’t to feel something but actually to stop feeling. To support other people’s comments, I was able to hide the fact I was doing this for years, even from those I was closest to, and even those I eventually told had no clue – so I can very much see B’Leanna being able to keep this hidden for how long she did (even from the viewer).
This is one of those sad truths that exist in our time but once again Star Trek has been able to highlight using the SF genre. While watching I regularly thought how far I would go if I had access to a no-safety Holodeck and a dermal regenerator… I doubt I would go for the orbital sky-diving though :)
I’ll echo the others in saying I wish there was a couple more hints that B’Elanna was struggling with depression. Considering it was a major plot point for Janeway two episodes, it would have been easy to show it effecting B’Elanna without giving away that it was a longer-term issue than just being stuck in the Void, instead of the usual her and Tom sniping at each other. And agree that this should be the problem with *a lot* of the people on board. One drawback with having all the major characters be unmarried and with no children is that the show really glazes over the fact that a good chunk of the crew must be struggling not just with being lost, but with knowing they might never see their kids again. This is all a big adventure for, say, Tom Paris, who has very little he wants to go back to (and even says in season 7 that Voyager *is* his home, as far as he is concerned), but it must really suck for people who have to wonder if their spouse has moved on, or if their kids will even remember them if they manage to get home.
Call me a contrarian, but I think this should have happened not long after they learned that the Maquis had been wiped out for the simple reason that this was a one and done episode. Now, if they wanted to make it a reoccurring problem, then sure, it’s somewhat plausible that her depression only manifested now. But the way it is presented feels tacked on.
Anybody else find it hilarious that Torres sarcastically asked Chakotay if he was the ship’s counselor? After all that debating here about the ship badly needing a counselor!
This is what Star Trek does best – tackling an issue in a strong way. Depression is real and knows no timelines. B’Elanna was the perfect choice to explore it, especially with the news of the Maquis arrived last season. Roxanne knocked the episode out of the park. She brought her A Game and made us feel everything she was experiencing.
Final comment I find disgusting and would like you to change – that there were no signs of the depression since “Hunters” – Depression knows no timelines and I would like you to change that perspective of your review. It is hurtful to someone who has depression.
@20/Niallerz: Agreed about the timeline. Depression is not a constant state. It comes and goes unpredictably. Me, I have up phases and down phases, and they last as long as they last.
Thinking back this may have been one of the first times I had seen any TV work tackle depression. It’s certainly the one that sticks out in my mind. “Family” introduced me to PTSD as a concept and this psychological character piece hit home with me as well. Roxann Dawson is to be commended for raising this as a story idea.
One thing that wasn’t touched on is that B’Elanna is half Klingon and she has different neurochemistry, emotional structure, and cultural norms (even being someone who generally rejects Klingon culture). If someone said that Worf was distant, stand offish, running dangerous holoprograms, and hiding injuries, people might ask if he’s training for his birthday. If she were like Kurn, Martok, Sirella, or Grilka, I could see her trying to do something constantly while thinking of avenging her comrades. Survivor’s Guilt must be a catastrophic emotional state in a Klingon.
Then there’s the Delta Flyer. I can’t knock the style on the ship, though I’ve only recently come to understand how the internal volume is actually arranged (thank you internet for cutaways) because on the show I could never figure out how the back end compartment actually fits into the space.
Perhaps you can justify the tardiness of this storyline by saying she was somewhat depressed but not that noticeable up until the episode where they went through the starless section of space two weeks prior which then compounded her depression and she just couldn’t climb out of it after that.
@23 John – why does Night have to relate to anything in this story. There is no “standard” timeline for depression or equivalent so how is there a “tardiness” in telling such a story?
@21
I think the perspective of the review is that of wanting some consistency in this series. I mean, if they’re going to follow Seven’s recovery from the trauma of being a Borg over many episodes, it would’ve been nice to see something of that in Torres over at least a couple.
Not so much about timelines but rather storylines, which, for a series about a long journey, is something Voyager could’ve done more with.
@24/JLP: No, John has a point. Lots of things can trigger depression, including outside conditions (think of seasonal affective disorder). You can be managing it, maintaining your equilibrium, but then experience a setback or a bad experience that makes it harder, and things can snowball from there. It’s like carrying a lot of weight around and then having something more dropped on your shoulders.
So given the proximity between “Night” and “Extreme Risk,” it’s plausible that the former could’ve triggered a downward spiral in B’Elanna, destroying what equilibrium she’d been managing to hold onto before.
@25/Benny: Well, yes and no. I don’t agree that this story needed to be close to “Hunters.” Giving it time to build up makes sense. But as I said, I think there should have been followup afterward, and maybe some foreshadowing for a couple of episodes beforehand.
@26
Uh, being close to “Hunters” wasn’t my comment.
@27/Benny: But you were commenting on the original review, which did make that suggestion. It’s all connected…
@28
Count me out.
“I’d say we’ve got an old-fashioned space race on our hands.”
Voyager’s episode nature causes it to come a cropper again. This is almost a role reversal of “Vis-à-Vis” for Tom and B’Elanna. But whereas with that episode we could at least convince ourselves that Paris’ dissatisfaction with life on Voyager had sprung up since the previous episode, here we’re explicitly told that this has been going on since “Hunters”, fourteen episodes previous, so the arguments that “Depression doesn’t have a timeline” are missing the point. This isn’t a case of a delayed reaction, we’re told that Torres has been running these simulations constantly since then and has injuries that are weeks or months old. Yet there has been absolutely no indication of it. (Has Torres really never had a medical examination in that time? What about “The Killing Game”?) And of course, it has to all be resolved by the end of the episode, so Torres’ months of depression and self-harming are solved by a dose of tough love from Chakotay and a life-and-death situation. Which…isn’t the way it works.
Ah well. It’s nice to see Paris doing some captainy stuff aboard the Delta Flyer and Torres McGuyvering up a forcefield. The Malons continue to be written as a different sort of Star Trek villain, possibly akin to how the Ferengi were originally meant to be.
Seven is in a senior staff meeting again for no real reason. (Torres did tell her to take charge of the probe launch but that’s the same problem. I get the feeling that around this time the decision was taken to ignore the fact that Seven’s effectively a civilian specialist and just start acting as though she’s something important on board because she’s on the main titles.) Torres asks Neelix for banana pancakes and he… gets some from a replicator. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of him being there? Paris says they need an extra hand and Janeway sends Chakotay. Torres volunteers to take Chakotay’s place then, when she gets there, she sends Vorik away as well. So they didn’t need an extra hand? Vorik makes the first of two Season 5 appearances.
@30/cap-mjb: ” so the arguments that “Depression doesn’t have a timeline” are missing the point. This isn’t a case of a delayed reaction, we’re told that Torres has been running these simulations constantly since then and has injuries that are weeks or months old. Yet there has been absolutely no indication of it.”
As has been commented already, depression isn’t always obvious to loved ones. They can fail to recognize the signs, or the person can hide it from them. And presumably B’Elanna started out smaller and it’s been getting worse over time.
“And of course, it has to all be resolved by the end of the episode, so Torres’ months of depression and self-harming are solved by a dose of tough love from Chakotay and a life-and-death situation. Which…isn’t the way it works.”
As I said, I don’t blame that on this episode, but on later ones for not following up on it. Which is hardly surprising for Voyager at this point.
Also, why do so many people think there’s a “u” in “MacGyver?” This is the second time I’ve seen that in a matter of hours. Is it because it sounds like “guy?”
To Voyager not having a counselor: originally, Voyager’s mission to the Badlands was only supposed to last a few weeks, with a ship that isn’t really designed or crewed for long-term exploration but rather for shorter-term missions within (or very near) Federation space. For a city-with-warp-drive like the Enterprise-D, with 1,000+ crew and civilians on board and longer-term missions outside of known Federation space, having a counseling staff is a necessity, but for Voyager it makes sense to me that Starfleet would think any crew who needed a counselor would be within subspace range of their usual mental health professional for a remote session, given the ship’s usual mission profile, rather than needing a dedicated counselor for a crew of less than 150.
I have always believed that a number of the problems Voyager suffered from came from Paramount executives who hated serialize storylines.
I love this episode and was very happy as well that Chakotay was the one to help Torres. And I like how it was handled from beginning to end, both his aggressive moments and his compassionate moments.
A good handful of my favourite Tuvok moments are in here, too. We all love the “hot-rod” line (and it’s soooo funny that he’s the first one to bring up the term), but also:
“Proposing the same flawed strategy over and over again will not me it more effective”
“That is perhaps the most illogical statement you’ve ever made”
@33/ra_bailey: It wasn’t Paramount execs, because Paramount was simultaneously producing Deep Space Nine, which embraced serialization. My understanding is that it was UPN execs — the network, not the studio. They were both Paramount-owned, but were different ends of the supply chain, with different staffs and priorities. DS9 was a syndicated show, so it didn’t have network bosses to answer to, only Paramount studio bosses, and thus was freer to take chances. But Voyager was the flagship show of the fledgling UPN network, the anchor of their entire broadcast strategy, so they were determined to play it safe with the show and keep it nice and stable and risk-free.
@31/ChristopherLBennett
Wait there’s not a U???? The Mandala effect strikes again. I remember the theme song note for note, but I could’ve sworn there was a U.
As for the lack of a counselor, I would think that it would be a simple matter to say they died in the transit to the Delta Quadrant.
Considering how Enterprise ended, I’m getting a retroactive sensation that UPN was the worst thing to happen to Star Trek.
@35, CLB — Now that I think about it, it’s truly ironic that Voyager, the show with a a stable timeslot on a network, was the one that rejected continuity, but DS9, which was subject to the scheduling whims of the various outlets that ran it, had very tight continuity. There were times when my local outlet preempted DS9 for a baseball game or something, and then I had to search the TV listings to find that I could catch it at 11pm that night. In light of modern TV’s trend toward serialization, looking back you’d think that UPN would have wanted each episode of Voyager to end on a cliffhanger to keep viewers coming back.
–Andy
@37/Andy: “In light of modern TV’s trend toward serialization, looking back you’d think that UPN would have wanted each episode of Voyager to end on a cliffhanger to keep viewers coming back.”
That trend was still just getting started back then. And even relatively serialized shows like Babylon 5 didn’t end every episode on a cliffhanger, but just had ongoing story threads and character development.
Frankly I think that ending everything on a cliffhanger is the lazy way to earn audience loyalty. It’s basically holding their attention hostage to force them to come back. The best way to get an audience to come back is simply to be good — to given them a complete experience every week, but make it satisfying enough that they want to see the next one. Relying entirely on cliffhangers means there’s less incentive to simply do good work. It’s also a way to avoid having to come up with effective endings, because everything just drags on and on.
@31/CLB:
One possibility: confusion with Guyver: The Bioboosted Armor (manga, anime 1986 and 1989, live-action adaptation with Mark Hamill in 1991). At this late date the plot is a tad obscure, but I’m guessing the distinctive title has a life on its own, as a byword for the kind of splatter-violent super-armor anime that incited pearl-clutching conniptions among Americans for a while.
Or it could just be muscle memory for the trigraph “g-u-y.”
@39/phillip: Yeah, a connection with The Guyver is what I’ve traditionally assumed, but it’s more obscure now than it was back in MacGyver‘s heyday, yet the error remains just as common in the era of its remake. So the “guy” thing seems more likely.
As for relationships, Tuvok is married with kids back home, Harry Kim had a girlfriend, I don’t remember if Captain Janeway has a guy at this point… all back in the Alpha Quadrant, of course.
The holodeck safety program may be unreliable and inconvenient for some activities so that turning it off isn’t automatically outrageous. Maybe like going on a date, but your mom and your dad are along, also. Did anyone write Worf practising close quarters fighting with safeties on… assorted enemies jostling him and saying “Excuse me.”
Although the show is always about human beings as we have limited experience of non-human identities, Klingons are not humans, and Torres is “half human half Klingon”, so there could be differences. Being injured or killed is normal behaviour for Klingons. Hiding it, perhaps not. Do you hide it from an enemy or do you boast you have only one leg and you still will kick them in the confrontation…
My understanding of what PTSD is relates to something you’ve experienced, which, thanks to the 47 seconds holodeck program, Torres has. Maybe the holodeck safety program should / does include things like that.
Not the same thing but who else was put off watching a Space Shuttle launch after that one time… which you didn’t have to replay in your mind because television did that for you.
@41/Robert Carnegie: It is explicitly stated in the episode that the Doctor diagnoses B’Elanna with clinical depression. So it is a factual error to call it PTSD, just as it would be a factual error to say a character had a broken ankle if the Doctor said it was a sprained ankle. It’s not something to rationalize an excuse for, it is simply wrong.
@41:
I don’t remember if Captain Janeway has a guy at this point… all back in the Alpha Quadrant, of course.
Yes, “Caretaker” established Janeway was engaged at the time they got pulled into the DQ.
By the time they re-established contact in “Hunters”, Janeway learned her fiancee, believing she had died in the Badlands, had eventually re-married during the interim.
On the subject of the Maquis: I have always wondered why they are in this series. Maybe just to provide some variation to the crew avoiding puttting only StarFleet people on the ship. Their identities play such a small role in the plot that one can only wonder why the Maquis were chosen specifically.
They could have put some colonists or something. People who miss the Alpha quadrant but not Earth and who don’t care about Starfleet. The Maquis are all about Cardassians, Bajor, etc. What do they do in the Delta q. and why no writer cares about them?
@44- It’s a promising set-up. We have a distinct subsection of the crew who aren’t Starfleet, who don’t necessarily share Starfleet’s values and ethics, but who are set up to share a strong desire to return to the Alpha Quadrant. There’s definite potential there, both to generate plot driving conflicts, and to create alternate lenses through which to view other stories.
The show’s record in effectively utilizing that potential, on the other hand…
@44/Ekblad: “On the subject of the Maquis: I have always wondered why they are in this series. Maybe just to provide some variation to the crew avoiding puttting only StarFleet people on the ship.”
Basically. Since Roddenberry’s rules (at least in the strict way that Rick Berman interpreted them) said that Starfleet personnel were idealized and well-adjusted and didn’t fight with each other, the producers wanted to include non-Starfleet characters as a source of conflict and tension. It had worked on DS9 with characters like Kira, Odo, Quark, and Garak, so they wanted to do something similar with VGR.
Still, it was a weird choice. As you say, it’s strange to create them based on Alpha Quadrant politics if the intent was to take them out of the AQ at the start of the series. I think the idea was to give them a reason to mistrust or clash with Starfleet, because the Federation made a treaty that screwed them over and Starfleet enforced it. So they probably wanted the conflict to be less about the Cardassians and more about Starfleet itself. But they ended up not doing much with that tension, perhaps because of UPN’s resistance to ongoing plotlines. So ironically, even though the Maquis were created for Voyager, they ended up being more relevant to DS9.
@44 Yea, I think they were attempting to create some of the tension that DS9 had- one station, but many different factions (Starfleet, Bajorans, former terrorists, Cardassians, Klingons, Quark, etc.) that required a delicate balance to keep all working together. I think it certainly could of worked on Voyager, but they hamstrung themselves by making the two most prominent Maquis characters have Starfleet ties (Chakotay having spent a good chunk of his adult life as a Starfleet officer, and B’Elanna having gone to the Academy), and then by killing off (or retconning into spies) any other Maquis who happened to have strong negative feelings about Starfleet. After the first couple seasons there was basically no functional difference between the Maquis and the Starfleet crews, and the whole premise of the show basically became a relic. I mean, seriously, other than B’Elanna and Chakotay, the most prominent Maquis who actually survived most of the voyage was Ayala- who spoke all of 6 lines in 7 seasons on the show and had absolutely no character development.
Which really is too bad, IMO. One of the things I loved about DS9 was there were always so many different perspectives, so many different ideas of what was right or wrong, so many cultures all coming together and doing the tough work of actually getting along. I loved TNG, but a lot of the time they would talk about how the Federation’s strength was in it’s diversity, but frankly everyone seemed to agree for the most part on what was the right or wrong thing to do. Occasionally Worf would do Klingon Stuff(TM), but other than that everyone was on the same page. On DS9, you got to see that “our strength is our diversity” is a nice bumper sticker, but it actually requires a whole lot of hard work (and occasional compromises of your principles) to actually make a reality. I think Voyager had the potential to really explore that- to take both the Starfleet officers who signed onto Voyager for a proverbial 3-hour tour and the Maquis out of their comfort zone both physically (by throwing them into the Delta quadrant) and mentally (by making them work together). Instead of the Maquis just getting assimilated into Starfleet (since anyone who didn’t toe the company line conveniently got zapped by the enemy of the week), it would have been nice to see a real merging of the crews- with the Starfleet officers understanding that the Maquis actually might have a useful perspective on how to survive when you are in a hostile area, far from resupply, and often out-manned and out-gunned. They might have been removed from the actually conflict back in the Alpha quadrant, but the people who found themselves on Voyager had vastly different ideas about politics, about the Federation, about what kind of force was morally justified, and just about what kind of lives that wanted to lead. I think that’s an inherently interesting premise, the writing staff on Voyager just didn’t seem all that interested in exploring it.
I think that’s an inherently interesting premise, the writing staff on Voyager just didn’t seem all that interested in exploring it.
Yeah, I’ve said this before, but one of the more interesting What Ifs of VOY for me is what would’ve happened if Ronald D. Moore had joined the Writers Room in Season One.
Moore’s said that when TNG wrapped, he was given the choice of jumping over either to DS9 and VOY. He seriously considered the latter both to continue working with Braga and because of the appeal of starting with a series out of the gate instead of jumping int partway through (which he’d done with TNG and which would’ve happened with DS9). But Behr ultimately convinced Moore to come over to DS9 — and thank the Prophets he did.
Anyway, it’s a given to me that Moore would’ve embraced that kind of character exploration on VOY (especially in retrospect given the development and reception of BSG).
But at that point in his professional career, with Berman wearing the Captain’s Pips on VOY and UPN’s own conservative micro-management of the series…yeah, I don’t know how effective it would’ve been to have had Moore on the Staff that early. Moore’s few Season 6 episodes at least give us a glimpse of what it might’ve looked like, but I don’t think he’d have lasted long on VOY even in the beginning.
@41 I actually worked at SeaWorld Orlando when the first launch after Columbia went up, and they played the audio of the launch over the PA. I was working retail outdoors. And because of Challenger I held my breath until T+2:01 and “SRB separation”.
@45/cuttlefish
Yeah, I can see that: so let’s just call it potential not realised and not think about it too deeply
@46/ Chris
Since I saw DS9 first and I have never been into trivia that much I did not know the Maquis were created for Voyager! I always thought they just took them from DS9 because they (The Maquis) were very popular over at DS9 at the time of the start of VOY.
Ekblad: Nope. The Maquis were specifically created on both TNG and DS9 for the express purpose of setting up Voyager. The episodes “Journey’s End,” “The Maquis” two-parter, “Preemptive Strike,” and “Tribunal” were all done at the direction of Rick Berman to make the Maquis a thing to prepare the ground for Voyager.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@51/krad: They even used Richard Poe’s Gul Evek as a recurring character tying together the Maquis arc, appearing in all the episodes you mentioned and finally in “Caretaker” (where it seemed he might have been killed, though he turned up alive in the novels).
Christopher: Not just Evek, but (to a lesser degree) also Natalia Nogulich’s Admiral Nechayev, who’s in both “Journey’s End” and “The Maquis.”
Which also was why I made sure to use both of them in my Maquis story in The Brave and the Bold Book 2.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Chris, Krad,
Thank you, that was quite enlightening!
I can believe B’Elanna’s issues would take time to manifest. Depression isn’t an ironclad condition where everyone reacts on the same timeframe.
On paper, Extreme Risk should have been perfect. In terms of execution, I think it’s a bit of a letdown. Not a bad episode, per se, but a flawed one. B’Elanna’s depression and attempt at feeling something is a great hook, especially coming on the heels of finding out about the demise of the Maquis. The problem is the episode doesn’t really do anything meaningful with it. A few scattered scenes of Torres being AWOL in the middle of duty isn’t compelling enough. Too reminiscent of TNG’s Hollow Pursuits. It’s treated more of a problem for the crew to solve, just like the Malon plot. That approach might work on a comedy episode involving Barclay’s holo-addiction. Not here. It would have been more interesting to have more scenes involving B’Elanna’s flirting with danger, getting a better sense of her own mind. It’s a recurring flaw on Kenneth Biller scripts. They’re too watered down and shallow to really cause an impact (minus a few exceptions, such as Jetrel).
Plus, having to share screen with the Malon plot doesn’t do the A story any favors. They did it right with DS9’s The Wire, by making Garak’s issues be front and center. The action plot is okay, by-the-numbers, but it doesn’t really enhance the B’Elanna story in any way. Her being in danger as she defuses the situation is not much of a climax, since we know she’s not going to be dying on some crisis of the week scenario.
But otherwise, Extreme Risk‘s heart is in the right place. Of course, B’Elanna would be having a hard time dealing with that loss. Though Biller doesn’t do it any favors with his behind-the-scenes comment decrying continuity. Just because he’s used to episodic storytelling, it doesn’t mean characters can’t be affected by previous events. It’s almost as if he’s playing studio politics (no wonder season 7 was so shallow and uneventful).
I too think that the action plot doesn’t do any favours for B’Elanna’s arc. The Malon B-plot was completely unnecessary, with the seemingly high stakes ‘space race’ not creating much tension as those stakes weren’t clearly defined. The Voyager crew was (strangely, but understandably) very apathetic towards the Malon freighter that got destroyed but their blasé attitude towards the Malon shuttle struggling to get out of the gas giant was outright disturbing. I wish they eliminated that storyline and had taken a more introspective route instead. Voyager hasn’t really had many purely character driven episodes so it would have made a novel approach and one fitting to the subject matter. Speaking of, I do appreciate the subject matter but there’s something lacking in the execution. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s because of how the episode clumsily combines both its plots and then rushes haphazardly to their completion. I’m also very critical of Chakotay allowing B’Elanna on the mission. If he had been wrong in his judgement of her mental state, he would have put four members of the senior staff in great peril. Of course, they are also in the show’s main credits so they are all safe at the end.
@55,
I can believe B’Elanna’s issues would take time to manifest. Depression isn’t an ironclad condition where everyone reacts on the same timeframe.
Yeah, I remember the String Theory Trilogy (which bridges “Hope and Fear” and “Night”) went that same route with setting up “Extreme Risk”.
Been a while since I read the Trilogy, but I remember right, the events of the Trilogy (and the opening book in particular) finally forces B’Elanna to confront her grief about “Hunters” (which she’d been trying to deny and suppress since mjd-Season Four)…and to do it in the most unhealthy way possible.
This was also just as Voyager began to transverse the void from “Night”, so the subtle implication was the subsequent ship-wide malaise was another reason why nobody picked up something was wrong with B’Elanna (and if there was, it could be chalked up to the voyage into the long night).
The fact that Biller said relying on continuity was this episode’s flaw sadly says a lot about the writing of Voyager.
I might be a little late to the party, but there are so many things wrong with the episode, I felt compelled to list them.
Star Trek’s history showing mental health issues is… flawed at best, and this episode is one of the worst among them all. For all that TNG went on about human and civil rights, and that Janeway cared about Starfleet principles, all of those are walked all over here.
It starts when, after Chakotay takes Torres to sick bay, the EMH diagnoses her with clinical depression without even talking to her properly (since she won’t say what’s going on), not to mention that the diagnosis is outside his area of expertise, seeing as he isn’t a counsellor. Janeway and Chakotay then violate her privacy by telling the entire senior staff about what happened; furthermore Janeway takes her off duty without consulting the doctor, whose entire job it is to judge whether a crew member is fit for duty.
After everyone does the good old “but there were no signs!” routine, Chakotay further violates B’Elanna’s privacy by going through her private holoprograms and files, again without consulting either B’Elanna or the doctor. He finds her Maquis simulation and decides the best way to cure Torres – again, without consulting the doctor, who has already tried his hands at being a counsellor and is at least slightly less unqualified than Chakotay – is to force her to come to the holodeck with him and violently retraumatise her by forcing her to watch her friends get massacred all over again.
And somehow, having her privacy violated and being forcibly retraumatised by her best friend, all based on a premature diagnosis, magically cures B’Elanna.
I wouldn’t call Chakotay’s action a “needed bucket of ice water” as much as I would call it kicking someone who’s already on the ledge. B’Elanna’s takeaway would likely be “I have to get better at pretending to be fine” and she’d find other ways to badly cope that don’t draw as much attention.
Trek has many messed up mental health episodes, but this is one of the worst offenders in the entire franchise, and there’s plenty to pick from.
I have a few minor nitpicks besides the ones already mentioned in the review and the comments. I thought it was spectacularly stupid of the first Malon freighter to just barrel into the gas giant just to immediately implode! Were they truly that inept as to the danger? With a bit of reworking, the plot could have easily omitted that part and just have had the two freighters be one and the same. Actually, my use of the word, “inept” segues into my second nitpick which is Neelix’s impression of Tuvok. Tuvok can bring the sass with the best of them, but I doubt he would be so outright insulting by suggesting that Neelix was, or has ever been inept at something. I don’t think that’s the word he would use. Of course, it may not have been a direct quote. Neelix may have misremembered or was embellishing in an effort to get B’Elanna to crack a smile.
This was really good. I echo the sentiments of everyone who says that depression has no timeline. Also, there were several episodes prior where Tores was not present (due to Dawson’s pregnancy). The in-universe explanation could be that she was already withdrawing then and begging off certain assignments or doing just what was necessary. While that is hand-wavy, since there’re no explicit references to her absence, it does work. Anyway, I identified a lot with her needing to feel — that’s depression. Too often in entertainment “depression” because a synonym for “sad.” This is what depression is.
The Malon are interesting foes, driven by capitalist egoism — like blue-collar Ferengi. They’re not malevolent for the sake of malevolence. Their whole design seems very Terry Gilliam inspired too, which fits.
Also, props to Paris for wanting real, analog controls. Whenever I see anyone piloting a shuttle craft, I wonder how they can steer by just tapping panels. Maybe that’s 20th-century bias, on my part.
I was a little bothered by Chakote getting so physical with Tores. While she did need a little intervention, it felt really wrong.