“Fair Trade”
Written by Ronald Wilkerson & Jean Louise Matthias and André Bormanis
Directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño
Season 3, Episode 13
Production episode 156
Original air date: January 8, 1997
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Neelix, who apparently isn’t busy enough with being the ship’s cook and morale officer and local guide, is bugging both Tuvok and Torres about the possibility of putting in time with both security and engineering.
He’s then summoned to the bridge where Janeway shows him a massive cloud barrier, which Neelix identifies as the outer edge of the Nekrit Expanse. He doesn’t know that much about it—no one does, apparently—but he does know there’s a station on the border which would be a good place to resupply and gain intelligence. (The expanse is too big to go around, so they’re gonna have to go through…)
They head to the station, and the administrator, Bahrat, agrees to let them shop for supplies, though he insists on monitoring all their communications and also to take a 20% cut of any deal they make. Janeway reluctantly accepts.
When they arrive at the station, Chakotay and Paris check out the local shopping center—including a merchant named Sutok who offers them narcotics, which they very firmly turn down—while Janeway gives Bahrat her shopping list.
Buy the Book
Remote Control
Neelix is looking for a map, unsuccessfully, as apparently nobody has mapped the Nekrit Expanse due to its extreme instability. While searching, Neelix bumps into a fellow Talaxian, Wixiban, an old friend. They go for a drink, and Neelix expresses his gratitude. The pair have a criminal past, apparently, involving a species known as the Ubeans, and Wix was caught and imprisoned for something they both did, but Neelix himself got away. Wix insists that he doesn’t hold a grudge. Neelix—after initially talking up how awesome life on Voyager is—admits that he’s worried. His greatest value to Janeway is as a local guide, but he’s never been beyond the Nekrit Expanse. He’s worried that Janeway will kick him off the ship, since they don’t really need a cook. (He doesn’t mention his role as morale officer, but frankly, that’s for the best…) Wix, meanwhile, is in much deeper straits. His ship has been impounded by Bahrat, and he’s broke.
Later, Neelix is meal-prepping in the mess hall when Chakotay brings Wix in to say hi. Turns out that Wix helped Chakotay track down some magnetic spindle bearings. Neelix is concerned that Wix did something underhanded, but Wix assures him that it was all above-board. However, he does have a line on some pergium and a map, but he needs to borrow one of Voyager’s shuttles to make the exchange, and he also wants to keep it on the down-low, as Wix can’t afford to lose the 20% Bahrat would take from an above-board deal. This means Neelix can’t tell anyone on Voyager about the deal.
Neelix agrees, and they head off to obtain the medical supplies that they will trade for the pergium. They meet Sutok in a dark room in the underbelly of the station, and Neelix realizes that the “medical supplies” are actually the same narcotics that Chakotay and Paris were offered earlier. Sutok also tries to renege on the deal, firing a weapon at them; Wix fires back with a phaser he took from the shuttle, killing Sutok, and then they beam back. Neelix is livid, but Wix convinces him that everything will be okay and they can’t tell anyone about their role in it.
Janeway announces to the crew that there was a murder on the station, and the investigation revealed that a Federation phaser was used, which had to have come from Voyager. Tuvok investigates everyone who came to the ship from the station, which includes Wix. Tuvok asks Neelix to accompany him on Wix’s interview, and Neelix says nothing as Wix lies through his teeth.
After Tuvok is done, Neelix says he wants to have a drink with his friend. When they’re alone, Wix reveals that his client—the Kolaati—are pissed that he lost the drugs. They’re threatening to kill Wix unless he supplies them with some of Voyager’s warp plasma.
Reluctantly, Neelix agrees. He talks with Paris about the circumstances that led to his imprisonment, and Paris says that it all happened because he lied—if he’d told the truth in the first place, all would’ve been well, but he lied and covered it up, and that was why he went to New Zealand. Neelix then goes to engineering to steal the warp plasma, but finds he can’t do it.
And then Bahrat arrests Chakotay and Paris because they were seen talking to Sutok. Janeway and Tuvok are livid, as this is the most circumstantial of evidence, and Janeway insists that Tuvok be present for any interrogation.
Neelix and Wix then go to Bahrat with an audacious plan: the truth. The Kolaati have been operating under Bahrat’s nose for ages. They’ll give him the Kolaati boss, Tosin, if they get to go free for killing Sutok, which was in self-defense. Bahrat agrees, and also provides them with warp plasma, which isn’t as pure as Voyager’s, but will do.
They meet with Tosin, who realizes instantly that the warp plasma isn’t what he asked for. But Neelix says he disengaged the safeties on the canister. If Tosin fires the weapon he’s now pointing at them, the plasma will ignite. Bahrat then arrives to arrest them, but Tosin decides to call Neelix’s bluff, and fires.
Except he wasn’t bluffing. Neelix is rendered unconscious by plasma fire, and wakes up in sickbay. There he confesses everything to Janeway, who is furious—and also stunned that Neelix would think that she’d put him off the ship just because he doesn’t know what lays ahead. She assures him that he’s part of the family and he’s not going anywhere—but he also has to be punished for his actions, and she sentences him to clean out the ship’s exhaust manifolds for two weeks.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? If you fire an energy weapon near exposed warp plasma, there’s a big-ass explosion. So don’t do that.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway herself takes her shopping list to Bahrat rather than trusting it to a subordinate—considering that Bahrat is taking 20%, I guess she wants to make sure she makes it clear how important it is.
She also yells at Neelix for being an idiot at the end of the episode, and the amazing part is that she hasn’t yelled at him more often for that reason.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is tasked with investigating where the phaser that was used came from. Interesting that there apparently isn’t an equivalent of a ballistics test that can identify a particular phaser from its sensor readings upon discharge—if there was, they’d know which phaser it was. Ah, well.
He is also mostly indifferent to Neelix’s desire to put in time with security.
Half and half. Torres is equally indifferent to Neelix’s desire to put in time with engineering, though she apparently is okay enough with it that Neelix is able to convince Vorik to let him crawl around a Jefferies Tube.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is frightened to death that he will be put off Voyager because they’re out of his experience range. As with most of Neelix’s assumptions, it’s completely wrong.
Do it.
“Actually, I’m interested in maps of the Nekrit Expanse.”
“You must be a stranger here, or you’d know there aren’t any maps of that region.”
“Surely there’s an astrometric chart or a database that would help me plot a safe course?”
“The Nekrit Expanse is too unstable to chart.”
“No matter—he never could plot a straight course anyway.”
–Neelix haggling with a merchant, and Wix showing up at the end to make fun of his old friend
Welcome aboard. Alexander Enberg debuts the recurring role of Ensign Vorik, which will continue throughout the series; he previously played a reporter in “Time’s Arrow, Part II” and the similarly named engineer Taurik in “The Lower Decks,” both on TNG.
Past Trek guests Carlos Carrasco and James Horan appear as Bahrat and Tosin, respectively. Carrasco played two different Klingons on DS9 in “The House of Quark” and “Shattered Mirror,” and will also play Krole in DS9‘s “Honor Among Thieves.” Horan played Jo’Bril in TNG’s “Suspicions” and Barnaby in TNG’s “Descent, Part II,” and will play Ikat’ika in DS9’s “In Purgatory’s Shadow” and “By Inferno’s Light” and have the recurring role of “future guy” in Enterprise’s first two seasons.
James Nardini plays Wix, Steve Kehela plays Sutok, and Eric Sharp plays the map dealer.
Trivial matters: This story was originally purchased for season one, but was postponed for production due to the staff preferring “Jetrel” as a Neelix-focused episode. Jeri Taylor thought the concept worked better in the third season, as by this time they would be reaching the edge of Neelix’s knowledge base in the Delta Quadrant.
André Bormanis was the science consultant for TNG’s seventh season and for all of DS9 and Voyager, and was a story editor on Enterprise during its first season. This is his first writing credit for Trek, though far from his last, as he’d continue to contribute both stories and teleplays for Voyager and Enterprise through to the latter’s final season.
It’s never made clear why Alexander Enberg’s character wasn’t the already-established Taurik, since there’s no discernible difference in personality or job between the two. Taylor—who is also Enberg’s mother—suggested that the pair be twins, and in fact, the tie-in fiction (which has continued to use both characters, with Taurik still serving on the Enterprise, now as deputy chief engineer under La Forge in the post-Nemesis fiction, and Vorik continuing to serve as an engineer on Voyager after she got home in “Endgame”) has gone with that notion.
Vorik was created primarily to be used in “Blood Fever,” but as with Durst in “Cathexis,” he was introduced a few episodes prior (here and in “Alter Ego,” which was actually produced prior to this one) to make him established by the time his spotlight came.
Neelix mentions to Wix that Janeway was talking about making him an ambassador, which just happened in the previous episode, “Macrocosm.”
Voyager‘s journey through the Nekrit Expanse will go through the next four episodes, through to “Unity.”
Pergium was first seen in “The Devil in the Dark” on the original series, and will be seen again in DS9’s “Prodigal Daughter.”
Janeway’s line to Neelix about how the first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth mirrors what Picard said to Wes Crusher in TNG’s “The First Duty.”
Neelix’s backstory with Wix is spelled out in Jeri Taylor’s novel Pathways.
Set a course for home. “I don’t remember you ever being so squeamish about twisting the truth.” Episodes like this are so frustrating, because it shows that Neelix could have been a good character if they didn’t insist on making him into the class clown. On those vanishingly rare occasions when the writers take him seriously as a character, it’s so much better than when he’s a doofus. “Jetrel” is the gold standard, but even when he has a supporting role like he does in “Resistance” and “The Chute,” it’s significantly more interesting. And we get that again here, as Neelix’s journey in this episode is a very compelling one, something I haven’t been able to say since “Jetrel.”
Best of all, Ethan Phillips is more than up to the task. It would’ve been nice if the writers went with this interpretation of Neelix, as someone incredibly insecure, more often because it puts his grating personality into focus. He’s always trying too hard because, even after two-and-a-half years, he’s convinced that Janeway will toss him out an airlock the moment he’s no longer useful. It explains why he’s constantly looking for more jobs to do on the ship, when any one of them—cook, morale officer, TV talk show host, native guide, engineer, security guard—could easily take up all his time, and he wants to do all of them. This episode shows that to be driven by fear, which makes for a much more compelling character study.
And then we get a little guilt alongside it. We don’t get the specifics of what happened with Neelix, Wix, and the Ubeans, but it was enough to get Wix thrown in jail, and it’s obvious that Neelix feels pretty terrible about it. So much so that he’s willing to betray the trust of his friends.
The result is a pretty simplistic and straightforward crime story, but it works, all the way to the final scene, where Neelix looks like he’s exhaling a breath he’s been holding all episode when Janeway makes it clear she’s not kicking him off the ship.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido can be seen talking about his upcoming work for eSpec Books on one of the “Hot Off the Press” panels from Con-Tinual: The Con that Never Ends on Facebook, alongside Danielle Ackley-McPhail, James Chambers, Megan Mackie, and Robert E. Waters. He was also interviewed at Pensacon in February for “Got a Minute.”
BTW, over the weekend (after I wrote this post), my wife and I binged Avenue 5 on HBO, and Ethan Phillips is in that as a retired astronaut named Spike Martin. He’s hilarious, much more effective than he was overall as Neelix, mostly because when the script wants him to be funny he actually is……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Totally love what Ethan Phillips does in this episode. This is one of my favorite Voyager episodes because of how well Ethan does here and how Neelix isn’t portrayed as a doofus.
And because — I must admit — I have guilty pleasure seeing Janeway with justifiable (yes, justifiable) anger towards Neelix, considering that so many times before this he was a “goody-two-shoes.”
Okay, okay, okay, yes, after the first 15 minutes Neelix had an understandable and forgivable problem of “What do I do now? How can I fix the mistakes I made?” He made things right in the end. But I can’t justify him for his initial fear and his initial hiding the truth — for not walking into Janeway’s ready room and saying “Captain, I don’t know anything about space beyond this region, but I don’t want to leave. You’re like a family to me. Isn’t there anything I can possibly do to stay useful to all of you?”
And before you tar and feather me, I did like that Janeway forgave him and that he got to stay. And I reiterate — marvelous Ethan Phillips moment.
Jeri Taylor’s novel Pathways fleshes out Neelix’s backstory with Wixiban, revealing that Neelix was a drug addict in the wake of the Metreon Cascade and Wix was the one who forced him to get clean — giving Neelix even more reason for guilt about abandoning Wix when he was taken into custody by the Ubeans.
I heard somewhere that Taurik was changed to Vorik because the producers thought “Taurik” sounded too much like “Tuvok” (although it sounds even more like “Torres”).
This is a pretty effective dramatic turn for Neelix, but the rest of the story didn’t work for me that well. In particular, I hate the misinterpretation of “warp plasma” as some pre-existing substance that can be stored and traded. No. Warp plasma is what results from the matter-antimatter reaction and is channeled through the power transfer conduits to the nacelles. It only exists for the brief period of time that it passes from the M/AM reactor to the warp coils and is then used up. If it were somehow collected and given time to cool down, it would cease being plasma, because plasma is superhot, ionized gas. So the science here is utterly idiotic.
Question: Sometimes during an episode, I do the internal math and it doesn’t really add up. In this episode, they said the station was about 3 light years away and then it seems they almost immediately arrive (though I’m sure some time passed). But if it takes 70 years to travel 70,000 light years, that’s 1,000 light years per year, which breaks down to about 2.7 light years per day. So shouldn’t it have taken about a full day to get to the station? Or is that based on an average speed and Voyager can make it make it much more quickly going 9.7 warp speed?
I am a fan of this one, too! It actually makes them seem like they are moving through space, there is some conflict with one of the non-Starfleet people on board, and there are some nice details (I like that the other side of the Expanse is Borg space, which explains why so few people know about what’s out there, and I like that the maps they show are cylindrical, reflecting that space maps should be 3d). It also at least addresses the question of “why are we keeping Neelix around, exactly?” I agree that Neelix is at his best when he is a little bit shady- more Han Solo, less of a clown. It makes total sense that someone with his past would know some colorful characters and have done some less-than-legal things, and he would have been a much more interesting character if him becoming more like Starfleet had been a result of him being around Starfleet officers, instead of him already being a good guy 95% of the time.
Is this entirely accurate? Hadn’t Paris basically gotten away with it until he confessed? I get that “if you keep your mouth shut you might get away with killing people” isn’t a good moral, but this sounds like something that would be true about Nick Locarno, not Tom Paris (and it wouldn’t be the first time a line in VOY gave that impression, later on B’Elanna mentions him getting kicked out of Starfleet Academy, which was Nick, not Tom). I guess it is technically true that if he had immediately confessed things might have been easier on him, but it is also true that if he had said nothing at all he wouldn’t have gotten into any trouble, because his cover-up was that good. I don’t get the impression that Tom knows what Neelix is up to, so it doesn’t seem like he is telling him what he needs to hear, and he completely leaves out that him joining the Maquis was *also* part of what landed him in prison, so even though it is a nice scene, it doesn’t really mesh well with Paris’ established backstory.
I think the reason they created a new character rather than reusing Taurik is that it meant they didn’t have to pay royalties to the writers of the TNG Lower Decks episode.
Christopher: Thank you for the reminder about Pathways — I’ve edited the post to add a mention of that in the Trivial Matters section.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@.-@ @austin Probably based on average speed. A lot of episodes in Star Trek as a whole make the point that going at top speed for extended periods of time is dangerous.
In any case, I’m sure the producers weren’t “doing the math” all the time but simply trying to quickly put together a story. Ronald D. Moore, for example, said that the power of phasers was inconsistent for story reasons (phasers should have been able to blast rocks, but instead, rocks made decent cover.) Or the Klingon language — they didn’t always use the official dictionary that was made for Star Trek III.
So, in this case, maybe they they just decided it wasn’t worth trying to decide how long it would take the ship to reach the station.
@4/Austin: Keep in mind that the ship has to stop from time to time, so its average speed over the full journey would be lower than the actual speed it’s capable of in a single uninterrupted trip.
Also, warp drive always goes at the speed of plot. The behind-the-scenes handwave is that effective speed varies with the local conditions of space and subspace, so a given warp factor can be considerably faster in some regions of the galaxy than others.
@6/Philip: “I think the reason they created a new character rather than reusing Taurik is that it meant they didn’t have to pay royalties to the writers of the TNG Lower Decks episode.”
No, because Ronald Wilkerson & Jean Louise Matthias were the writers of that episode’s story as well as co-writing this one’s teleplay.
Janeway “yells at Neelix for being an idiot at the end of the episode, and the amazing part is that she hasn’t yelled at him more often for that reason.”
Agreed, 100%.
@9/Christopher
But Alter Ego was the first episode produced (but not aired) in which Vorik appeared and that was written by Joe Menosky, who was on staff and a Producer. And given his small role in this episode, it’s possible that he was inserted by Bormanis/ the writing staff to build up to his bigger role in Blood Fever.
I haven’t seen this one, but from the looks of that last photo I’m assuming we learn the secret of the ooze, yes?
I don’t know if it’s what was intended, but the set-up of the Nekrit Expanse feels like a move to reboot the Exciting New Discovery and Exploration aspects of the show. We’re off the edge of the map here, beyond the ken of anyone we’ve met in the Delta Quadrant, and, while ultimately pointed back towards Federation space, for the moment we’re plunging into the unknown.
It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out across the next couple episodes.
I’m glad to hear this is a good episode, I’ve been putting it off once I knew which one it was because I’m not sure I want to sit through an episode of Neelix screwing up. Even if it’s well done.
Despite season 3’s choice to abandon long-term storytelling, Voyager hasn’t completely forgotten how to do them effectively. Vorik and the Nekrit Expanse were well introduced and followed upon without affecting the individual stories of the surrounding episodes (if anything, it made the upcoming Blood Fever more effective).
Fair Trade is a fair episode. It represents another turning point for Neelix, Letting go of Kes was step one. Letting go of his insecurity and become a more valuable asset to the crew was a necessary step.
The trading plot itself doesn’t do much for me. It reminds me too much of an early Data/Riker TNG discussion about the Ferengi and theirconstant reference to Yankee Traders. It’s the one aspect of gangster films that’s always elluded me. That every conflict revolving around trade issues always seems to be resolved by both parties agreeing on a similar, but slightly different deal, and I have a hard time figuring out whether anyone actually benefitted from it. Too convoluted for its own good, and I think Krad’s synopsis of the episode only makes it clear just how much of that is spinning wheels.
In the end, the plot is only a means for showcasing Neelix’s particular problem. That alone is enough for me, and made the episode worth viewing. Plus, Phillips always knows how to make the audience care for Neelix, especially when the story is good enough (though I really can’t say the same about Wix; it tries to make a complicated charater out of Neelix’s past, but the plot really doesn’t sell it).
Speaking of which, the Nekrit expanse problem is a little to derivative of Voyager having to circle around an alien empire’s own space during the events of The Swarm. From their POV, they aren’t getting home for another 68 years. Why should go around the area be that much of a problem?
Overall, episodes like this are a nice fit for season 3. I definitely prefer shows like this than having to deal with jealous Neelix on Parturition, or anything Kazon-related.
@15- The comparison to The Swarm occurred to me as well, but I think this one works a little better, at least for me. In The Swarm they were facing A) a specific, active threat, and B) what appeared to be the claimed sovereign territory of a group that clearly didn’t want them there. There were strong reasons for why they ought to have gone around the long way.
Here they’re considering heading into an uncharted and potentially dangerous territory, but given everything they’ve run into thus far, they have no particular reason to believe it’s dangerous wildly out of proportion with what they might expect to encounter while going the long way ’round. What’s more, the mission that Voyager set out on was to head into a difficult to navigate and chart area. albeit a smaller one- and they’re going to pass out of the areas Neelix can tell them about sooner or later.
I always had a soft spot for this episode as I’m a sucker for stories where someone screws up royally and gets caught out. Which, thinking about it, is why I like characters like Paris. Neelix drove me batshit crazy the first couple of seasons and I think this was the first episode where I didn’t want to see someone punch him out.
To this day, I wonder why the exhaust manifolds need cleaning. What the hell does a ship in the 24th century exhaust exactly? :P
I think I just re-read in a novel (granted not canon) that they can’t do “ballistics” on type1 or type 2 phasers because they are replicated en mass. Wish I could remember which novel I read this in…
@17
The impulse engines maybe?
There’s a decent premise behind this one. It makes sense that with Voyager powering through the Delta Quadrant, and having now left Kazon space behind them, that they’d be coming to the end of Neelix’s field of knowledge. And as has been pointed out, Neelix works better in a serious role than as a bad boyfriend or laboured comic relief. Here he gets involved in what seems to be a perfectly decent trade only to find himself mixed up in a drug deal and dragging his new friends from Voyager into it with him.
Bahrat is decently characterised as a rather hide-bound administrator. Wixiban is well acted but the character seems to switch from unscrupulous criminal to Neelix’s loyal friend in the middle of a scene when the plot requires it. Chakotay and Paris falling foul of alien law is mostly kept off screen but Paris gets a good scene with Neelix reflecting on his own poor life choices. And it all builds to a tense climax as Neelix plays chicken with a bunch of criminals holding an unstable device…which then actually goes off!
First episode without Harry Kim: Given some of the comments on other episodes, I wonder if this was down to some real-life misbehaviour by Garrett Wang. First appearance of Ensign Vorik, with a surprising amount of screen time. I think he appears quite a lot in Season 3 but his appearances get more and more sporadic as the show goes on. First time the Doctor doesn’t use his mobile emitter since it was introduced.
Spoilers for this episode said Neelix and Kes were going to break up in it, so I was rather confused when this didn’t happen. As has been mentioned several times, a scene of Neelix visiting Kes just prior to his showdown with the Kolaati, potentially saying goodbye and admitting they’ve grown apart, was filmed for the episode but cut. As a result, Kes only appears briefly in the last scene and the news of their break-up comes out of nowhere somewhat in “Darkling”.
Rather weird end to the pre-credits with Neelix naming the Nekrit Expanse in a voice of doom!
Nitpick of the episode: It’s actually one of Tosin’s companions that decides to be dumb and fire a weapon in the middle of a cloud of flammable gas, not Tosin himself. I am struggling to remember the details but I don’t think Vorik’s on Voyager anymore in the most recent novels: I think he ended up on another ship in the Full Circle Fleet (which was destroyed?) and was last seen back on Earth.
@5: It’s…partly true. It’s certainly true that Tom was kicked out of Starfleet, as established in the pilot. Otherwise, as you say, he could possibly have got away with it by lying better or for longer, but that was kind of the start of his decline. If he’d admitted his mistake instead of falsifying records, then he probably wouldn’t have been thrown out of Starfleet and so wouldn’t have joined the Maquis in the first place.
@20/cap-mjb: Garrett Wang’s misbehavior does begin in the third season but as I understood it, he was punished in the following season by not having an episode that was a “Kim” episode (and being denied the opportunity to ever direct on the show AND his character never being promoted). So I’m not sure if he’s punished already in the third season. He currently has a podcast (with Robert Duncan McNeil) that’s making its way through the Voyager episodes but they’re still in the first season with their recaps. Perhaps once they’re into the 3rd season recaps Garrett will shed more light on his bad deeds and the resulting fallout.
@20, My bad, I meant that B’Elanna says Tom was kicked out of Starfleet Academy (in “Drive” she says Tom was “expelled”), specifically, which Tom wasn’t. I always found the Locarno-Paris thing to be incredibly stupid, made all the more so by the producer’s insistence that Locarno was “irredeemable,” when the major difference seems to be that Locarno was a cadet, his actions contributed to one person dying, he covered it up to save himself and his friends, and then he took the fall for it. Whereas Paris was a grown man and a commissioned officer, his actions got multiple people killed, he covered it up to save his own skin, and then he eventually took the fall. Out of the two, I always found Locarno to be more sympathetic, backstory wise.
I won’t disagree that things might have gone easier on Tom if he hadn’t lied, but I imagine gross negligence that leads to the deaths of your shipmates is the kind of thing that gets you the boot from Starfleet even if you don’t lie about it (it landed Ro Laren in jail, too). It’s also just a weird, “true from a certain point of view” kind of way of talking about what happened. Tom didn’t get in trouble purely because he lied, he got in trouble because his actions got a bunch of people killed and then he became a terrorist. That’s kind of a lot of contributing factors to boil down to “honesty is the best policy.” I think the scene would have made more sense if Tom had an idea that Neelix was doing something underhanded, and was trying to encourage/guilt him into coming clean without saying it outright, but instead it comes off as Tom sort of minimizing his own actions, which were pretty dire.
I’m meh on this episode in general but I absolutely love Neelix’s speech at the end. How he took one step that seemed reasonable and then another… until he had gone too far without even realizing it. I think we tend to judge people who have gotten into trouble or have a “past,” without understanding how they got there. His speech shows how often it can happen where an individual doesn’t intend to become a criminal, they just convince themselves to do one questionable thing and it turns into a mess. Best part of the episode in my op
If I remember correctly, the reason Robert Duncan McNeill was playing Tom Paris and not Nick Locarno has to do with money. If it was Locarno, then someone else would have gotten a little money every time he appears instead of the creators of Voyager. I’m guessing the same thing applies to Taurick/Vorick.
Can anyone verify that?
@20/21 If you don’t mind me asking, what was Garrett Wang’s misbehavior? I’ve seen allusions to it, but wasn’t aware at the time and am curious as to what happened.
@22: As I recall, Ro Laren got people killed by disobeying orders. Similarly, Locarno got someone killed not through an error, but through deliberately violating regulations and peer pressuring a friend into doing the same. I admit I am struggling to think of an instance of a Starfleet officer getting someone killed by a mistake and remaining in the fleet. The closest thing I can think of is Kirk’s back story from “Obsession”, where he froze during a crucial moment and crewmembers subsequently died, although they backtracked on that one and said it didn’t make any differnce. There are errors of judgement but that’s not really the same thing.
@24: Nothing confirmed, as far as I know, but in regards to the issue of story credits, there was a fairly recent interview with DS9’s Ira Steven Behr, discussing that show’s Maquis two parter. According to Behr, there was an uncomfortable situation during production where Rick Berman forced an inclusion of a separate story credit for him, Piller and Taylor for those two episodes, as a means of securing their authorship over the Maquis concept. Behr was insulted at the notion that Berman feared he (and fellow DS9 writer/producer James Crocker) might try and take credit for the Maquis, and by extension Voyager.
It should be noted First Duty is credited to Ron Moore and Naren Shankar, while Lower Decks is attributed to René Echevarria (based on a Wilkerson/Matthias story, just like Fair Trade).
The way I see it, I doubt Moore and Shankar would try and ask for credit over Locarno, had they used him on Voyager (even though they could). Both were employees on TNG and DS9 and wouldn’t challenge a sister show like that. But I can see someone like Rick Berman safeguarding against such a possibility.
There was also a recent podcast with Echevarria where he mentions Berman’s unwillingness to allow the writers to move up on producer ranks because he didn’t want to share the Executive Producer title with others (hence Berman named Echevarria and Hans Beimler co-supervising producers on DS9; no TV show uses that title).
@27/Eduardo: “There was also a recent podcast with Echevarria where he mentions Berman’s unwillingness to allow the writers to move up on producer ranks because he didn’t want to share the Executive Producer title with others”
Wow. That’s an alien concept these days, when many shows have a dozen or more Executive Producers of various types, including showrunners, high-ranking writers, co-creators, copyright owners, on-staff directors, production company execs, financial partners, prominent lead actors, etc.
@25/brightbetween: It was reported that Wang would be consistently late to set which of course pisses everyone off because it throws off the shooting schedule and they already work long hours. And then he badmouthed the show to TV Guide which Berman was none to pleased about and in turn refused Wang’s request to direct on the show – the first and only actor refused the opportunity to direct. He was going to be canned in the 4th season but then he got named one of People Magazine’s Most Beautiful People that year which was considered positive publicity so that saved him and Jennifer Lien got the boot instead to make room for Jeri Ryan
I don’t have very clear memories of this episode, but it makes me wonder why Neelix wouldn’t have taken his own ship on the trip rather than one to Voyager’s shuttles. Of course, if that had happened, there probably wouldn’t have been a Starfleet phaser on board to drive the rest of the plot forward.
—And
@30/AndyHolman: While we did see Neelix’s ship (later named the Baxial) in “The Chute,” we only saw one wall of its interior, suggesting they didn’t build any more of the set than that. This episode needed a couple of long scenes to take place on the ship in question, and I would guess that they didn’t have the budget to build a complete interior set for Neelix’s ship.
As for the in-story reason, Wixiban suggested that a shuttle with transporter technology would let them complete the task more quickly. Granted, though, it’s a little unclear why that would’ve mattered to Neelix. But Neelix had been boasting to Wix about the super-advanced, cushy ship he was serving on now, so maybe he just wanted to show off by using a Starfleet shuttle.
@29/garreth: Pure speculation on my part, but it could be that someone lost their patience on this episode, saw how few lines Kim had anyway and went “Right, he’s not here, shoot the senior staff meeting without him and just don’t show Ops in the bridge scene.” (Chakotay scans for the station, which would usually be Kim’s job.) I’m not sure if that would affect Garrett’s appearance or repeat fees, given that he’s credited anyway?
@25 Bright Between I’ve also read in multiple sources that Wang showed up either intoxicated or severely hungover from partying too hard the night before. He was suspended in “Fair Trade” and “Blood Fever,” which is why he didn’t appear. He was given so little to do, it didn’t impair his performance.
I definitely think this is a good episode, although I’m not sure I buy the central premise. I find it difficult (but not impossible) to accept that after nearly 3 years, Neelix would seriously believe he’d be put off the ship simply because he has no clue what’s beyond the Nekrit Expanse. It makes Neelix seem obtuse considering all he’s been through with Voyager’s crew. It does play into the episode very well, though, and shows how fear can be a powerful force and turn rationality on its head, even in the face of common sense. My favorite part was when Neelix seemed like he was going to steal the warp plasma and then didn’t. I remember when this episode first aired, I really believed he was going to do it.
This is a fine episode ruined by chronology. After a couple of thousand light-years travel (a reasonable estimate of Voyager’s progress to date), the number of stars within that distance of the Ocampan homeworld is on the order of magnitude of hundreds of millions! The idea Neelix would have any idea what’s this far out, and keep bumping into (former) friends, is ludicrous.
Plus I wholeheartedly agree that by this time there is no way Neelix would fear being thrown off the ship having outlived his “usefulness” to the point where he would steal from Voyager. That’s equally ludicrous.
This episode should have been maybe episode 6 or 7 of season 1. It would have made perfect sense then, and the resonance of Neelix and Kes learning something powerful about their new companions could have really hit home.
@35/jmwhite: There are probably thousands of small towns between, say, New York City and Chicago, but most people just fly or drive straight from one big city to another without systematically surveying every single location in between them. I’m sure the same goes for star travel — you hit the big, prominent, connected worlds rather than choosing your destinations in increasing order of distance from your starting point. So the total number of stars in that volume of space is irrelevant. Only the number of significant centers of civilization would matter, and since this region of the Delta Quadrant has been established all along as relatively sparse in major civilizations, there’s really no inconsistency at all.
And Neelix’s fear of being thrown out is supposed to be irrational. That’s been a consistent aspect of his personality all along, that he’s far more insecure than he has any objective reason to be. He was obnoxiously jealous about Kes because he feared being unworthy of her and losing her, even though she never gave him any reason to be afraid of that. His insecurity comes from his traumatic past, the destruction of his homeworld, his guilt at being a deserter, and if you go by the novel Pathways, his history of drug addiction. Neelix considers himself unworthy of approval by others. It is perfectly plausible that he would be unreasonably afraid of being put off Voyager, because that crushing insecurity is one of his defining character traits and always has been.
And really, I think it’s not so much that he expected Janeway to kick him out as that he didn’t believe he’d deserve to stay aboard if he served no useful purpose. that they’d be better off without him in that case. Because of Neelix’s insecurity, he has a powerful need to be needed, to feel that he’s useful to other people so that they have a reason to value him. He wasn’t afraid of being physically expelled so much as being deemed irrelevant by the people he cared about.
@35/jmwhite: I agree. And as Krad mentioned, this story was already purchased for season 1 and could have been used then to more realistic effect but instead Jeri Taylor went with the absurd notion that Neelix has a knowledge base that spans two and a half years travel at high warp from Ocampa. Uh huh.
@36/CLB: As I said in my comment, I found Neelix’s fear to be hard to believe, but not impossible. I don’t read Trek tie-in fiction so thanks for the look into his past from Pathways. That definitely helps make his fear more believable to me.
@36/CLB The total number of stars certainly is relevant, because the more stars you have the more of those big, prominent, connected worlds you’ll have. Even if they’re more common in some areas of the galaxy than others, over the scales we’ve seen so far in Voyager you’d expect that doubling the volume would roughly double the number of stars, and would roughly double the number of those worlds.
Voyager has been travelling in a straight line for over two years and has seen many, many spacefaring worlds. If we make the eminently sensible assumption that their path is about average, and that they’d have typically expected to bump into as many spacefaring worlds in any direction, then we know that within this distance of Ocampa there must be (quick back-of-the-envelope-maths) a minimum of hundreds of thousands of such places. Neelix is just one fella, and his life has only been so long, it just stretches credulity that he’s been to this exact place before, and knows somebody there.
I agree that Neelix’s insecurity is perfectly within character, I just don’t think his actions caused by that are. He’s just too loyal to Janeway and the crew by this point to have done what he did. If after this time he’d have faced a more introspective crisis then I could easily believe it, and that might have made an interesting character story, but this episode at this point had me going “oh come on!”.
@@@@@39/jmwhite: I have to disagree on your point about Neelix’s actions straining belief. Yes he is loyal to Janeway, but he’s only been aboard Voyager for roughly three years. He is a person with a past that undoubtedly included many friends and acquaintances that he knew for a great deal more time than Voyager‘s crew. And then there’s the Wix character whom Neelix betrayed and has a burning desire to make amends to. With all that in mind, I can easily believe Neelix capable of the things he did in this episode, even in the face of his loyalty to Janeway.
Endgame was a disappointing ending for Voyager, one that seems to contradict its own character development. A time travel plot was entirely unnecessary; Janeway could’ve struggled with her ethical decisions in a linear timeline. The finale glosses over Janeway’s obsession over saving Seven despite Earth’s future being cozy and safe and also ignores the humanity given to the Collective in favor of big explosions killing thousands of drones. Speaking of Seven, the confrontation with the Borg Queen should’ve been HER story. Remember how Seven’s dad is a drone serving the Queen, anyone? This should’ve been Seven’s moment of triumph but instead she’s relegated to Chakotay’s girlfriend [which, itself happens completely of nowhere and takes a massive dump on her connection with The Doctor]. None of the rest of the crew seem to matter this episode and the show spends too much time celebrating a non-existent timeline at the beginning while providing no indication of the outcome of Voyager’s questionable crew upon returning to Earth significantly sooner and with technology from the future [armor plating and the mobile holo-emitter]. The episode ends abruptly and while that would be acceptable for a one-off time travel episode [didn’t this exact plot happen every season], the audience is left with no real takeaways about the crew’s future and with contradictions regarding the moral messages in Voyager.
whoops I wrote this on the wrong episode page
Matador: you also wrote it about 15 months too early…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
However guilty Neelix might have felt about Wix getting the short end of the stick in their previous dealings, it doesn’t make sense that if he’s so afraid of losing his standing on VOY, he will help Wix use a shuttle for his ilegal dealings.
@5 – wildfyrewarning: You’re right. Paris was arrested during his first Maquis mission. The lying and covering up was what got him kicked out of Starfleet (along with his original piloting error).
@3 – Chris: I guess the drug addiction is one of the things that were never used once Jeri Taylor left the show, because it would have made much more sense if they’d used it in some capacity in later episode.
@12 – JFWheeler: Hah! I just saw an article on Tokka and Rahzar today, so that was extra funny.
@29 – garreth: That story always sounded fishy to me. I doubt the show would have suffered any actual backlash for firing “one of People Magazine’s Most Beautiful People”. Being included in that list certainly did nothing good for Wang’s career, beyond that rumor. And perhaps, he probably would have benefited from being fired from VOY.
@35 – jmwhite: I don’t see a problem with Neelix knowing what’s around up to this point, and bumping into old friends. He’s had several years to travel around, nothing said up to this point (to my recollection) suggests that he spent all those years buzzing around Ocampa’s vicinity.
@44/MaGnUs: I don’t think they feared “backlash” for firing Wang, they just wanted to capitalize on the publicity of having a “Most Beautiful” person on their show. Sex sells, after all. A lot of people watch shows because they think the actors are hot. Heck, that’s why they put Jeri Ryan in a catsuit.
Well, perhaps I used the word “backlash” wrong, it’s too strong. But I don’t really see the show’s ratings suffering because Kim is no longer in it.
@46/MaGnUs:
I don’t either, but then I’m a male so Garrett Wang doesn’t do much for me, haha.
@46/MaGnUs: What I’m saying is, it’s not that they feared the ratings sagging because of Wang’s departure, it’s that producers and execs want to take advantage of any possible ratings boost they can get. I believe the show’s ratings were already declining due to other factors, and so they wanted to do whatever they could to hold onto viewers or draw in new ones to compensate for that.
Gotcha.
I know there is count going on to work out how many crew members make it to the end of the series but I am making a count of the number of glaring opportunities missed to get rid of Neelix.. with this one it is up to about four now. (although to be fair this is one of the better Neelix episodes)
I think there’s something rather disturbing about Janeway’s refusal to let Neelix leave the ship, even if he did want to. Why does Janeway say Neelix has been aboard Voyager for two years when it’s more like two and a half by this stage?
1: I must admit that I do hate Avenue 5, but at least we get to see Phillips as he really is. 3: I didn’t know you were so versed in ST’s made-up science. 5: The first two years were a bit lacking in direction and S3 is the first one of VGR where they seem to be making progress towards the AQ. Some of Starfleet’s ideals begin to rub off on Quark but that horrifies him. I think Nick Locarno was supposed to be on VGR originally but they deemed him as beyond redemption (or they just didn’t want to pay the extra royalties). 9: Why do you think they didn’t reuse Taurik?
17: Uhura referred to tailpipes in ST VI. 18: Didn’t they perform a ballistics test on a projectile weapon in Field of Fire? 20: I think Neelix was excessively naive because the plot demands it. Vorik makes three appearances this season. Warlord was really the episode that dealt with Neelix and Kes’s breakup and that wasn’t even Kes doing the dumping. Neelix says Nekrit Expanse in such a grim voice because the day he’s been dreading for over two years has finally arrived – they’ve reached the endpoint of Neelix’s knowledge of the DQ. 21: Demon was probably the closest thing to a Kim episode in S4.
22: How many people died in that accident due to Tom’s recklessness? 34: Did the cast know someone was going to be let go? If so, you could interpret Neelix’s fear as Ethan Philips’ own that once VGR moves beyond the Nekrit Expanse, his usefulness as a character will come to a sudden end. 39: It depends on how well-travelled they are. 40: It’s more like two and a half years. 41-42: I was about to write “What does any of this have to do with Fair Trade?” before I clocked your second comment. 43: So Endgame in December then? Do you always plan that far ahead, Krad?
44: Neelix (naively) believed that Wixiban’s scheme was all above board. After VGR, Wang just seems to have vanished. I doubt being fired would have changed that. I’m not sure how long Neelix was kicking around the Ocampan sector before he encountered Voyager (and found the time to start dating Kes). 45: They started to sexualise Jennifer Lien towards the end (her new outfits were a direct precursor to Seven’s). 48: The show would certainly have survived without Wang and they must have been considering that at this point in the show’s history before the sudden turnaround of losing Kes instead. 50: They did the next best thing by minimising his screentime.
@51/David Sim: “Why does Janeway say Neelix has been aboard Voyager for two years when it’s more like two and a half by this stage?”
Remember, season 1 was short. “Fair Trade” actually aired slightly less than two years after “Caretaker,” and the show tended to match its in-story time references to the real-life passage of time. The stardates roughly track too — “Caretaker” was stardate 48315, and the episode right before this one was 50460, so just a little more than two years story time.
@51/David Sim: Well forgive me for not being precise enough for you! When one has not watched a show for a long time, I think my estimate of “roughly 3 years” is a pretty damn good one
Perhaps contributing to Neelix’s insecurity aboard the ship was that he’d gotten Hogan killed just half a season ago.
Good thing Paris is front and center on the Bridge so he can always comment on how the person on the viewscreen is such a “pleasant fellow.”
@54/Quasarmodo:
Right?! That was almost as bad as the Shuttle Crash™ cliche throughout Voyager’s run!
I’m a self-professed Neelix fan, even when he is primarily being used as comic relief, so I really appreciate those rare times when he gets to be the center of attention and explored as a character. So I really liked this one.
Finally, a good Voyager episode. :) And yeah, i agree that Neelix has often been a wasted opportunity – interesting character, good actor: why not give him more depth and more important things to do more often…meh. But I have no problems with this episode at all, it was intelligent enough, not too much technobabble, logical storyline, people logically acting in their characters, character development etc etc.