“Hope and Fear”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 4, Episode 26
Production episode 194
Original air date: May 20, 1998
Stardate: 51978.2
Captain’s log. Seven and Janeway are playing Velocity on the holodeck. Seven is frustrated by the fact that Janeway is doing better than her. Given her physical and mental acuity thanks to being a former drone, she should defeat Janeway every time. Seven wants a rematch, but Janeway refuses.
Janeway has continued to try to decode the message from Starfleet they downloaded from the Hirogen communications network, to no avail. Chakotay informs her that Paris and Neelix are back from obtaining supplies, and are also requesting permission to take on a passenger who helped them out.
That passenger, Arturis, is an alien with a facility for languages. Seven recognizes him as a member of Species 116, whom they were never able to assimilate. Arturis’ linguistic facilities are such that he also can translate encryptions, so Janeway asks for his help with the Starfleet message.
Arturis is partly successful and they see a particular set of coordinates. They get there to find a Starfleet ship with a unique configuration, the U.S.S. Dauntless. It has a quantum slipstream drive that kicks in unexpectedly, yanking the ship and its boarding party of Chakotay, Tuvok, and Paris many light-years ahead. It takes Voyager two days to catch up.
In those two days, Arturis is able to decode more of the message from Starfleet, including a message from Admiral Hayes: the Dauntless is an experimental ship that will get them home way way faster, assuming they can figure out how it works.
The crew gets to work learning the Dauntless systems, and also working to see if they can install the slipstream on Voyager. Janeway doesn’t wish to just abandon Voyager and bugger off on the Dauntless if they can avoid it, though the latter ship can accommodate the entire crew.
Seven is ambivalent about whether or not she wants to accompany the crew back to the Alpha Quadrant. Janeway refuses to just abandon her in this region of space, but Seven expects that everyone in the Federation will have the same revulsed reaction to her that Arturis has.
Janeway is also suspicious of Arturis, as they’ve suddenly gotten everything they wanted as soon as he came on board. She has Tuvok investigate him further. Meanwhile, she tries to work on the part of the message that Artruis claimed was too degraded to decode. Sure enough, a new algorithm does the trick and it’s another message from Hayes saying they have no way of getting them home faster, but he’s sent along everything they have on the Delta Quadrant. Janeway realizes that Arturis has been lying to them and created a false message from Hayes.
During a test run, Kim detects some anomalous readings, eventually discovering alien technology behind a bulkhead. He alerts Tuvok, and now they have double proof that Arturis’ pants are on fire. Janeway beams over with a security team, but Arturis is able to resist (Tuvok’s phaser fire barely affects him), revealing that the Dauntless isn’t a Starfleet ship. He puts the away team into a force field, but Kim is able to beam people out one at a time. He gets everyone except Janeway and Seven before Arturis kicks in the slipstream drive and they fly away.
Chakotay has Torres bring Voyager’s attempt at a slipstream drive online and Paris sets a course to fly after the Dauntless.
Arturis reveals that this is all an elaborate revenge scheme against Voyager for striking a deal with the Borg to fight against Species 8472. After they defeated 8472, the Borg finally were able to assimilate Arturis’ people. He’s one of the few survivors of his species, and he disguised his ship as a Starfleet vessel and has been following Voyager for the last nine months, gathering data and figuring out a way to use their fervent desire to get home against them. He had hoped to get the entire crew onto the Dauntless and then deliver them to the Borg to be assimilated, but he’ll settle for the two he has.
Buy the Book
A History of What Comes Next
Janeway and Seven are placed in the brig while the Dauntless heads toward Borg space. Janeway is able to modify Seven’s cranial implant so she can create the nanoprobes necessary to allow her to pass through the force field. They then sabotage the slipstream drive, sending the Dauntless in a new direction inside the slipstream and freezing the navigation controls so the ship can’t be stopped. Just then, Voyager catches up and fires on the Dauntless.
Chakotay beams Janeway and Seven back to Voyager and then has Paris make a U-turn, leaving Arturis (who refuses Janeway’s offer to come back to Voyager with them, a pretty generous offer, all things considered) to be assimilated by the Borg.
Eventually, the slipstream drive burns out, but it gets them three hundred light-years closer to home. Janeway and Seven go to the holodeck for a Velocity rematch.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Quantum slipstream drive is significantly faster than warp drive, doesn’t require dilithium or antimatter, and is easy enough for Paris to figure out how to navigate in it in a few days. Pity the plot requires that it only work for the duration of this episode…
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway believes that Arturis’ help is too good to be true, and it’s to her credit that she’s right. She also tries to teach Seven a lesson in trusting your instincts, which is tough, as she doesn’t really have any.
Mr. Vulcan. When Janeway asks Tuvok why she isn’t more enthusiastic about finding a way home, Tuvok dryly replies, “Perhaps my mental discipline is rubbing off on you.” His security detail also completely fails to restrain one single alien.
Forever an ensign. Kim tries to convince Seven that she’ll love Earth, really. Seven is skeptcial.
Half and half. We discover that Torres speaks very little Klingon when Arturis apologizes to her in that language and she doesn’t recognize the phrase.
Resistance is futile. Seven admits eventually to Janeway that she’s frightened of going to Earth, as she doesn’t know what she’ll face there.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Velocity is played on the holodeck, involving firing phasers at a flying disk.
Do it.
“That’s strange, I thought we already recovered this part of the message.”
“Perhaps it is an addendum from the admiral. You did designate him a windbag.”
–Janeway and Seven upon recovering the real message from Hayes.
Welcome aboard. The great Ray Wise, probably best known for his role as Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks (not to mention his great work as the devil in Reaper), plays Arturis in his second Trek appearance, having previously played Liko in TNG’s “Who Watches the Watchers?” Jack Shearer reprises his role as Admiral Hayes from First Contact, a role he will reprise once again in “Life Line.” Shearer previously played a different admiral in “Non Sequitur,” as well as a Bolian and a Romulan on DS9, in, respectively, “The Forsaken” and “Visionary.”
Trivial matters: This is the second time Voyager ends a season not on a cliffhanger, the previous being the first with “Learning Curve.” It won’t happen again until the series finale, “Endgame.”
Janeway made the deal with the Borg to join forces against Species 8472 in the “Scorpion” two-parter, which is when Seven was severed from the Borg Collective, and also when her cranial implant’s ability to manufacture nanoprobes was disabled. Seven became part of the crew in “The Gift.” Those episodes are established as taking place nine months prior to this one. The message from Starfleet was received in “Hunters,” which is stated as being five months previous.
This episode establishes that Admiral Hayes survived the Borg attack on Sector 001 in First Contact, even though his flagship was destroyed.
The game of Velocity is first seen here, and will be mentioned several more times in the future (as soon as the very next episode, “Night”).
Voyager will continue to experiment with the quantum slipstream drive, taking another shot at using it in “Timeless.” In the novels that have taken place in the years following Voyager’s return home in “Endgame,” the Federation has used Voyager’s data to finally create a working quantum slipstream drive, used in the Vesta-class ships (introduced in the Destiny trilogy by David Mack), among others. Using the slipstream drive, a fleet led by Voyager was sent back to the Delta Quadrant in the novel Full Circle by Kirsten Beyer and its nine sequels.
Set a course for home. “You belong with us.” I keep going ’round and ’round about this episode. On the one hand, it’s a perfect coda to the season that started with “Scorpion.” I like seeing Voyager suffer the unintended consequences of their dubious alliance with the Borg in that season-spanning two-parter, and the message from Starfleet really needed to have been decoded already. And Ray Wise is a great actor, and he’s much better in this part than he was in the awful “Who Watches the Watchers?” He gives Arturis a subdued anger and a simmering hatred that he plays really well.
But his plan is also remarkably complicated, and depends on Arturis being incredibly ridiculously skilled. He’s able to, first of all, find Voyager. Keep in mind that very shortly after their alliance with the Borg was sundered, Kes was kind enough to vault them 10,000 light-years. Now thanks to the quantum slipstream drive, he could obviously catch up to them—not to mention getting them back to the heart of Borg space in this episode—but that doesn’t explain how he found them. How did he know where to look? Heck, how did he even find out about Voyager’s alliance? It was made in a region of space that was pretty well dominated by the Borg. I mean, I supposed word could still have traveled—gossip is the only thing that travels faster than the speed of light on its own, after all.
And he’s so perfectly able to re-create Starfleet tech and listen in on Voyager’s communications, so much so that it honestly strains credulity. I mean, yes, these are people who resisted the Borg for quite some time, and they have tech way in advance of the Federation’s, but still.
On top of that, while it’s good that the crew is confronted with those aforementioned unintended consequences, there’s no apology, no regret, no recrimination. Janeway’s alliance with the Borg was directly responsible for a genocide. Probably multiple genocides, given that it’s, y’know, the Borg. Now it’s possible Species 8472 would’ve been worse, but we really have no way of knowing. All we know for sure is that they were defending their territory from a Borg incursion into fluidic space. On the other hand, we know what the Borg does, and it’s not very nice. Some guilt on the part of our heroes would not have been untoward, is what I’m saying, and there’s none of it.
Also Seven’s through-line in this episode is whiplash inducing. The previous episode ended with her willingly sitting down in the mess hall and gossiping with Torres, Kim, and Paris, and now here she is going on to Janeway about how she wants to leave the ship and they all suck for being ungrateful to her, and the Alpha Quadrant sounds horrible, thanks.
I like the fact that Janeway is skeptcial and less than enthusiastic, partly because they’ve been down this road before and had a way home yanked out from under them (as indeed happens this time), and I especially like the conversation that she and Chakotay have near the top of the episode agonizing over what might be in the coded message.
But it would’ve been nice to see what the crew is thinking about this possible trip home. Most of it is geebling over the new technology. What I found especially mind-boggling is Torres’s complete 180 on the subject of getting back to the AQ. Back in “Eye of the Needle,” she evinced no enthusiasm for going home, saying that her only real family were the Maquis on Voyager. Now it’s several years later, she’s in a happy stable relationship, she’s found a job and purpose she’s good at, and, oh yeah, the Maquis have been utterly destroyed. And what’s her response to Seven’s query about going home? “I’d rather face the music back home than spend the rest of my life in the Delta Quadrant.” What’s changed? Why this complete reversal when externally it looks like she’s actually found purpose and happiness on Voyager? Why is B’Elanna “screw the consequence, just get shit done” Torres suddenly okay with facing the music?
(The least charitable answer is just that scripters Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky forgot about that particular aspect of Torres’s character, which is not a good look for two of the top guys on the writing staff.)
Having said all that, the episode itself works nicely as a season finale, has some fun mysteries to solve and twists and turns and things. I like Janeway and Seven’s discourse on instincts versus sheer intellectualism, reminiscent as it is of Spock and McCoy’s arguments on similar subjects on the original series, and Janeway’s conversations with Seven, with Chakotay, and with Tuvok are some of the best material in the episode. And it nicely brings closure to two of the biggest themes of the season, the addition of Seven to the crew and finally making contact with the Alpha Quadrant.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest novel was just released last week: Animal, a thriller he co-authored with Dr. Munish K. Batra about a serial killer who targets people who harm animals.
Velocity at least seems to be less dangerous than parisses squares.
As far as Arturis finding Voyager, given Janeway’s repeated insistence in crossing dangerous or foreign sovereign territory in a straight line pointed at Earth, they’re probably not that hard to track.
I can understand Seven’s trepidation at heading directly to a planet that recently experienced a major Borg attack, but I’m not sure about the larger question of whether she’s likely to find more acceptance in the Delta Quadrant then the Alpha. Then again, by Picard, ex-Borg are being more or less openly hunted for parts, so maybe she was onto something.
Enjoyable episode and good coda to the season, the season of “Seven.” It was nice they didn’t end on a cliffhanger for once as we had gotten used to that in TNG-era Trek at this point and here it really wasn’t necessary.
I was always bothered though by the implausibility of Arturis catching up to Voyager, knowing about their deal with the Borg, constructing the Dauntless and disguising it as Starfleet tech, being able to manipulate the messages from Starfleet (what would have been his plan at deception if Starfleet never sent Voyager the messages), and on top of that being a master of languages, impervious to phaser fire, strong enough to resist a couple of security officers, and be a skilled actor. It’s all too much for just one (alien) dude. Good performance by Ray Wise though.
Yes, Janeway didn’t really give Arturis an apology which would have been nice. She did at least offer to take him back with her to Voyager and away from the Borg which shows she’s at least sympathetic to him and willing to forgive his particular actions.
I didn’t find Seven’s actions/dialogue here whiplash inducing in relation to her progress in the previous episode. Yes, she became better at socializing with the crew and accepting Voyager as her new collective. But here, the prospect of returning to Earth and being shunned and her new family being split up was believably frightening to her to override any progress in her development up to this point such that she would elect to remain in the Delta Quadrant.
But I do agree that Torres’ way of thought is a complete 180 from her character before and if anything she should be relating to Seven and how they have both found family and a measure of happiness on Voyager and neither needs to replace that back on Earth/the Alpha Quadrant.
“And he’s so perfectly able to re-create Starfleet tech and listen in on Voyager’s communications, so much so that it honestly strains credulity”
My guess here is that he didn’t recreate it– it actually was Starfleet tech. Voyager has lost a bunch of shuttlecraft and didn’t always get the debris back, I don’t think, plus the Equinox is also out there. So maybe he found a Starfleet computer with a working version of FederationOS and made it work on his own hardware. Still quite implausible given its perfection, but at least better.
“His security detail also completely fails to restrain one single alien.”
I didn’t notice this when the episode first aired, but the whole confrontation is also completely unnecessary. Obviously the transporters work, in that Janeway, Seven, and “””security””” beam over. But, there’s no need to actually do this– instead of beaming over, just beam Arturis back, ideally directly to the Brig, and you can interrogate him at your leisure. So the back third of the episode really shouldn’t have happened…
“Quantum slipstream drive is significantly faster than warp drive, doesn’t require dilithium or antimatter”
Funny enough, one would expect that in 800 years, Starfleet would have been able to crack the technology, and thus avoid the Burn…
KRAD, you hit the nail right on the head about what bothers me in the episode- it inspires no further reflection on the part of our crew or Janeway in particular. Starfleet has so many rules about who and what and when you can interfere in other people’s business to avoid a situation exactly like this one. Janeway’s actions directly helped shift the balance of power in at least part of the Delta Quadrant, and she shifted it deliberately, knowingly, in the direction of the freaking Borg. This episode is one that is even worse to me on re-watch, knowing what happens in “In The Flesh.” It is one thing for Janeway to have to choose between a rock and a hard place, but as we will learn in Season 5, species 8472 is perfectly rational, and responsive to diplomatic overtures. So basically it makes it seem that Janeway rushed into a deal with the Devil, assuming that because Species 8472 could beat the Borg, that they must therefore be worse than the Borg, which turned out not to be the case at all. I’m all about the writers having Janeway make tough decisions- even the wrong decision!- and learn from it and grow from it. But I can’t remember this ever really coming up again, and it certainly doesn’t seem to change the way she acts (“Living Witness” tells us that the actions Voyager is taking can have profound impacts on the Delta Quadrant civilizations even without leaving them at the mercy of the Borg). This episode is the one I always think of when Janeway starts getting all high and mighty on Captain Ransom.
Ray Wise acts his part perfectly, and it makes it hard to see what the counter-argument is. Janeway had the opportunity to just go the long way around Borg space, or to stay out of the conflict between Species 8472, but she chose to involve herself with no real thought of how it would effect any of the people who actually live in the Delta Quadrant.
“I’d rather face the music back home than spend the rest of my life in the Delta Quadrant.” What’s changed?
Uh, have you seen the Delta Quadrant since then? Sure, the Alpha is no picnic either, particularly with the war going on, but I don’t blame her for wanting to get away from the DQ. It’s a bad neighborhood.
@6 In fairness, in the Alpha Quadrant she is likely looking forward to life in prison. The Delta Quadrant isn’t a walk in the park, but she at least is able to walk around without an ankle bracelet. That’s one of the things I really wished they had addressed at some point- the fact that the Maquis aren’t going home to resume their old lives, or pick up the fight against Cardassian oppression- they are going to the Auckland Penal Colony. And sure, maybe Starfleet would decide to count being on Voyager as time served, but there is no guarantee of that. It should be a pressing concern for all the former Maquis, especially people like Paris and Torres, who have a good life on Voyager and little to go back to.
The episode started off on a bad foot for me, with Arturis supposedly picking up languages from a few phrases. That’s…not how that works. That’s not even close to how it works. My favorite language learning method is still the scene from The 13th Warrior where it shows Antonio Banderas’ character is paying close attention to everyone talking over a period of time as it slowly starts slipping into English for the viewer. Love that scene.
@7: No! The president of the Federation would give pardons to all of the Voyager Maquis crew members for their role in protecting the Federation by destroying the Borg hub network, thwarting a galactic purge from Species 8472, neutralizing the development of a vast mount of Omega particles, and otherwise flying the Federation banner around the Delta Quadrant and making good relations and spreading good will amongst the natives. :o)
@8 I totally agree. As an English teacher living in Russia — that is, I’m learning Russian and studying English in-depth — I wonder if Arturis actually studied Talaxian and the other xenon-based language ahead of time as part of his elaborate plan. I doubt his language skills were SO good as to speak both languages flawlessly after only hearing a few phrases. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he really is gifted, and that those two languages really were simple.
Could he possibly grasp the syntax and grammar after only a few phrases? Sure! Could he learn new pronouns, verbs and verb endings after only a few phrases? Sure!
But Neelix and the other lifeform couldn’t have said more than 50 words to each other. Unless Arturis was extreeeeemely lucky and heard the words “this,” “there” and other survival words before the universal translator went offline… well… how can you know the word “container” or “ship” in a foreign language without hearing it from the speaker’s mouth in the first place?
Anyways, I really enjoy this episode. I agree that there really should have been a lot more regret from Janeway, but it’s a fun ride, and I loved seeing all the shiny new technology and Arturis’s burning desire for revenge.
On the topic of Torres, as discussed by the review and a few comments: The situation has changed in the AQ and they know it. At this point, Starfleet is at war with Cardassia anyway, they’re not going to hold too much of a grudge against Maquis who got a head start. As long as Torres didn’t actually kill any Federation citizens, she’s likely correctly thinking she’ll get a pardon and move on with life. Of course, “moving on with life” at this time would likely mean “fulfilling your service obligation by serving on a starship currently fighting the Dominion War,” so maybe this also isn’t the best idea. Which actually also kind of raises a disconnect– apparently nobody is too concerned that the moment they get home they’re all fighting a war.
One of the things that drove me mad about Voyager was that I got the sense the writer’s room didn’t have a clear ‘voice’ for Janeway. Especially once Seven of Nine joins the cast, it feels like Janeway & Seven flip-flop to whatever attitude is most convenient for the plot of that episode.
Kirk’s a career officer who only really functions as captain of a starship.
Picard’s the elder statesman who’s trying his damndest to make sure everyone plays the good neighbour.
Sisko struggles with rebuilding a life after grief & loss and the duality of Commander/Emissary, but embraces being a Bajoran messiah at the last.
Archer’s the member of the Old Boys Club who has to learn on the job when the job’s just been invented, but somehow rises to the occasion.
Janeway? Is a scientist who got rerouted while saving her crewmember from an uncover assignment gone bad and tries to get as many people home as she can. Before encountering the Caretaker, what were Janeway & Voyager going to be doing? Were they explicitly going to be part of an anti-Maquis campaign, hence Tuvok’s infiltration & being given a ship better able to navigate regions of space like the Badlands? Much like the missing crewmembers whose deaths are immediately ignored from the pilot onwards, it feels like once the decision to strand Voyager in the Delta Quadrant was made, everyone collectively decided that was the starting point for this ship & crew, nothing before the actual events of the pilot matters.
I don’t remember my reaction to this episode. The idea of confronting the crew with the consequences of their borgain with the Barg — err, you know what I mean — was a good one in theory, but it’s true that the episode didn’t force the crew to confront it to the extent that they should have. But Ray Wise did an effective job at selling Arturis’s anguish, grief, and rage.
@3/Rick: “My guess here is that he didn’t recreate it– it actually was Starfleet tech. Voyager has lost a bunch of shuttlecraft and didn’t always get the debris back, I don’t think, plus the Equinox is also out there. So maybe he found a Starfleet computer with a working version of FederationOS and made it work on his own hardware.”
Good thought. We saw in “Distant Origin” how the Voth tracked down Voyager and gathered evidence they left behind. Arturis could’ve used similar methods.
And really, since they’re going in a roughly straight line, it isn’t that hard to find them as long as you can go faster than they do.
@4/Sam: “Funny enough, one would expect that in 800 years, Starfleet would have been able to crack the technology, and thus avoid the Burn…”
That was addressed in “That Hope is You, Part 1.” Quantum slipstream relies on benamite crystals, and according to Book, they’re even scarcer than dilithium. Which is consistent with the statement in “Timeless” that the crystals are extremely rare and unstable.
@7/wildfyre: ” In fairness, in the Alpha Quadrant she is likely looking forward to life in prison.”
Not necessarily life. Remember, in the Federation, prison is humane and rehabilitative, not harsh and punitive. The goal is not just to warehouse people for the rest of their lives, but to help them become productive members of society again. Prison in the Federation is probably nicer than prison practically anywhere else in the galaxy.
Plus there’s the pardon thing garreth mentioned.
@13/Christopher- Unless your facility has recently been taken over by the inmates and/or mad scientists, but that hardly ever happens these days.
This was an amazing episode. Perfect end to one of the strongest seasons in the Star Trek franchise. Voyager went from strength to strength from season 1 to 5. The introduction of Seven brought a whole new dynamic to the show.
This episode was a nice bookend to the season and was a semi-follow-up to Scorpion Part 2, The Gift and Prey and brought Seven full circle to call Voyager her home. And a a non cliffhanger season finale it worked really well – bringing season 4’s story arc to a conclusion.
The whole Janeway/Seven parent/teacher, mother/daughter arc throughout not just this season but during all of the latter four seasons was one of the best things about this series. And it wasn’t just with Seven, Janeway definitely gave off a maternal relationship with Kim, Torres, and Kes as well. With Paris she was the respected authority figure. With the EMH it was as a respected colleague. With Tuvok it was as long-time close friends. Neelix was her comic relief I guess. And Chakotay was her respected right-hand man with thick sexual tension that they’d only act on when stranded alone together on deserted planets.
Not as strong a season finale as Scorpion, but still one of the better ones for Voyager. Hope and Fear works a nice bookend to Seven’s early character arc, rediscovering her humanity, grappling with her Borg past, as well as her ongoing mother/daughter relationship with Janeway. I particularly like the way Kolbe shot that final scene, as Seven shoots straight at us and we cut to the credits. Easily the most playful edit of a season finale. Great score too.
I disagree somewhat in regards to the crew not having any guilt over their actions on Scorpion. Janeway did try and apologize to Arturis, claiming she couldn’t have known what was going to happen. Of course, she should have as Captain, but that’s a different issue. The point is she still recognized her mistake. Could the episode have gotten more mileage out of discussions between Janeway and Chakotay over her actions last year? Absolutely. But it still works for me.
I have more of a problem with the episode’s omission of emotional repercussions for the crew losing their biggest chance at getting home since Eye of the Needle. This was probably intentional, in order for the episode to have that uplifting sense of conclusion at the very end in regards to Seven and Janeway. In reality, there should have been a greater sense of loss after the slipstream drive blows out. Relegating it to a log entry isn’t the best call. And I’m positive Braga caught it too, because he did a complete 180º and wrote season 5’s opening episode Night as a direct result of that loss. Janeway isolating herself over guilt in this whole slipstream scenario is exactly what should have happened at the end of Hope and Fear.
I have less of a problem with Arturis’ ability to track down Voyager and map all of her past year’s actions. He was well written enough to be convincing as a character who’s lost everything and is willing to push himself harder than ever before to seek vengeance. Besides that, I think the episode works remarkably well as an action/chase set piece. The way the crew mistrusts Arturis and is able to pick apart the holes in the plot is worth the story. And of course Seven would have issues in whether reaching Earth is a good outcome for her (and we see in Picard that the future isn’t always rosy).
By this point, Braga and Menosky were used to crafting these event episodes. No wonder Braga was chosen to take over the franchise at this point (between these big VOY shows and his work on First Contact, the conditions were set). But I never quite understood why Taylor chose to retire at this point. It was obvious Voyager was going to last the next three years secure in the network. And from what we know, she ran a stable ship these last two seasons, unlike what happened with Piller earlier on. Why leave the show she created after only four seasons? At least she still wrote Nothing Human next season, a very interesting little one-off episode.
@8, I agree that Arturis can’t have learned languages as quickly as he claims, and that likely this is the result of an obsessive hunt for Voyager over a period of months. Why he has a big high-tech ship and no other members of his species with him is left is as an exercise to the watcher, I suppose.
I should like this one more than I do. It just feels like a one-two punch of establishing the series as disinterested in actual consequences, despite the episode being focused on them. Because not only does the plight of Arturis’ people seem of relative disinterest to the crew, the consequences of their deal with the Borg won’t come up again except indirectly. What Voyager did is arguable worse than if they’d time-traveled and allied with the Nazis against Stalinist Russia: their actions led to multiple genocides, or whatever you’d describe Borg assimilation as. If Janeway hadn’t seemed so motiveless in working with the Borg against an unknown foe in Scorpion, maybe this would be less galling.
But the follow-up punch is even worse. Sure, Janeway offers to take Arturis with her. But when that doesn’t happen, well, he’s off to be assimilated by the Borg. Meaning that they get all his knowledge. Like all the research he’s done on Voyager, plus whatever he found out over the course of this episode. Do the Borg take advantage of that early next season? Of course not. Why have consequences from a past season when you can have a transporter accident that creates life, to bring the Borg back into an episode?
Eduardo: In 1998, Jeri Taylor turned 60 years old and had been working in television for twenty years. While I personally have never worked on a TV show in the writers room, I have several good friends who have (one of whom is Discovery and Picard‘s Kirsten Beyer; another is my former collaborator on the Farscape comic book, Rockne S. O’Bannon), and from them I know that working on the writing staff of a TV show is a 37-hour-a-day, ten-day-a-week job. It’s exhausting, and she may have decided, upon becoming a sexagenarian, that she wanted to retire, especially given that she’d been working straight through every single TV season since she joined the writing staff of Magnum, P.I. in its eighth season in the fall of 1987.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@17: I’m pretty sure Janeway’s isolation and the crew’s relative depression in “Night” isn’t a result of events in “Hope and Fear” as it’s played in the former episode. In “Night” everyone is despondent because they have been traveling in a pitch black void for some time and believe they’ll still be traveling through it for years as I recall. So what the crew is feeling is supposed to be the result of events in the present episode, not tying back to the prior season’s finale.
@19/Krad: Well put. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Working network TV writing and producing 25+ shows a year has to take its toll.
@20/Garreth: Indeed, Night doesn’t play Janeway’s isolation as a natural outgrowth of what happened three months before. But it should have. The pitch black area of space still works as a visual metaphor for depression and loneliness, but that episode would have worked better had they incorporated Hope and Fear’s mission failure as a plot point.
“If we are assimilated, our thoughts will become one and I am sure I will understand perfectly. A joke, Captain. You yourself have encouraged me to use my sense of humour.”
A decent end to the season. It looks like it’s going to be another attempt to get home, and placing it in this position means there’s a chance that they could actually do it and we might be looking at a very different set-up for Season 5. In the end, it turns out to be something very different, acting as a sequel to the season premiere. Arturis is an obsessed fanatic, but manages to be tragic with it. It’s a shame that the wimpification of Species 8472 next season makes it look as though he was right and Janeway chose the wrong side. She doesn’t back down here though and in the end Arturis’ actions only mean one less of his species roaming free. Ultimately, his plans fails because Voyager aren’t what he was expecting: They’re not as single-minded about a way home as he thought. The Borg bothering to assimilate a ship with a single occupant shows a certain obsessive compulsive attitude that hasn’t been obvious before, but it’s a poetic ending.
Unfortunately, Seven’s inability to remember the lessons she’s learned, even ones that she learned last episode, resurfaces. Her tantrum towards Janeway is understandable from a character point of view: As Janeway guesses and as Seven later confirms, it’s born out of fear at being surrounded by billions of individuals and she doesn’t even have a clear plan about what to do if she leaves Voyager. But unfortunately, the pay-off is another “Oh yeah” moment as she concludes she doesn’t want to go back to the Borg. Again.
It’s been a while since Tuvok’s been cast in the role of Janeway’s confidante, but it’s him she turns to here when debating whether or not to trust Arturis. Tuvok’s dry humour in evidence again: As Chakotay and Paris enthuse about how the slipstream works, he responds “Fascinating. Can you stop it?” It would be the zinger of the episode if not for Seven’s one to Janeway (see main quote above). There’s a nice scene where Kim makes a typically feeble attempt to extol the virtues of Earth to Seven, then, in an insightful moment about what she’s contemplating, says it wouldn’t be the same without her: It’ll be interesting to see if the dynamic between them changes going forward.
Quite a few timeline issues here. The message was received in “Hunters” and Starfleet didn’t find out about Voyager until the previous episode so…just how long were they working round the clock on a solution before giving up and sending a message saying “Sorry, we can’t help you”? Arturis says he saw Seven reconfiguring the algorithms in Astrometrics two days ago: If that’s meant to be when he first translated the message, then given it took Voyager two days at high warp to travel the fifteen light years of Dauntless’ first jump, and they had to travel ten light years to Dauntless in the first place, and they’ve been poking around finding out about Dauntless and installing new engines on Voyager…that should be more than two days ago. Paris says they’re a few minutes behind Dauntless and at maximum speed, then Arturis increases speed…and they still catch him.
The dates given here suggest that the last twelve episodes covered more time than the previous thirteen. (Of course, “Year of Hell” never happened so…) Admiral Hayes having survived Star Trek: First Contact definitely seems like a retcon: Not only were we told his ship had been destroyed, but Picard was able to take command without opposition, so it seems he wasn’t even in a condition to give orders.
cap-mjb: If Hayes was floating around in Earth orbit in an escape pod, he probably wasn’t in any shape to give orders. Hell, he may have been unconscious in said pod….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad: Well, yes, that’s certainly possible. I’d say that the implication of the film was that he’d been killed, but there’s enough of a grey area that the franchise could bring him back if they wanted to.
I think B’Elanna’s 180 on the subject was exactly because her circumstances changed. She is a respected professional with friends and a significant other. She has a safety net and it is easier for her to imagine that good things await for her in the Alpha quadrant, e.g. she knows that everyone aboard Voyager will do anything possible to get the Maquis pardoned, she probably wants to explore her relationship with Paris without being stuck on a starship etc.
” Hope and Fear” probably my favorite episode when it came out. Primarily because I’m a ship nerd and I loved the Dauntless and the Quantum Slipstream Drive. After Enterprise came out I was…amused by the fact that the Dauntless was the NX-01-A. The Slipstream Effect was incredible, specifically revolutionary to the visual effects since it was completely reused for all Transwarp Effects going forward. Honestly I found that quite annoying.
I loved Arturis and was very annoyed that they never gave his people a proper species name. Species 116, basically imposes their Borg identity on them forever. Ray Wise knocked it out of the park though, you could sense his desperation to get some kind of justice or reckoning. And while he was able to hunt Voyager down, since it was all he had to do with his life, it also seemed that he was way out of his depth at times. Like he’d never killed anyone before or done anything cruel. I don’t know, something in his voice. I find Arturis to be a particularly tragic kind of character. He threw his life and his ship away for revenge, when preserving his people’s memory should’ve been his highest priority. Their culture, their name, their music. I’m also fascinated that they didn’t try to evacuate. Especially if they had years of holding off the Borg to plan, Arturis’ species of all the civilizations should’ve had the easiest time leaving their homeworld behind and relocating outside of the Borg Sphere of expansion. The El-Aurians seem to have been the only people who thought running was a valid survival strategy. Though I’m probably wrong about that, as there are probably hundreds or thousands of ships full of Arturis’ people who have fled to safety that he never knew about. His despair is also evident in his non-reaction to ending up right back where he started, if I’m not mistaken, his home system, now overrun by the Borg. By seeking revenge he only cursed himself to the fate he despised most. He destroyed himself, which was sad. To quote our dearly departed Black Panther, “Vengeance has consumed you.” Honestly, I feel that the person who Arturis was before this, probably deserved better than that end.
As for Janeway’s responsibility for the assimilation of Arturis’ people, I can understand sympathy, but taking responsibility for the Borg’s actions are a bit much. And I always felt that Species 8472 was not going to stop with the Borg as was stated in Scorpion. It would’ve been trading assimilation for obliteration.
As for Torres, I think she understands at this point that all of the happiness she has onboard Voyager right now is fragile. They just had to spend a month in suspended animation, before that the ship was “running out of gas” (eyeroll). While Voyager is doing pretty well on the whole, that’s today. With her life looking up, taking that and going back to stability is a pretty attractive option. BUT it seems that they were much more interested in keeping Torres and Seven antagonistic, which is a bit of a shame, since having them agree on some things more often would’ve…enriched their bickering.
It’s not fair to point out continuity errors over different ST series—but I will always wonder why in 900(?) years, Starfleet hasn’t worked out the bugs on slipstream drive so they would not be as dependent on dilithium after Disco’s Great Leap Forward. You would think that would be enough time for a couple different technologies to have been created or discovered along the way.
@27/Birlan: Slipstream drive was mentioned in Discovery‘s season 3 premiere. Book said that the benamite crystals it depends on were even scarcer than dilithium, so hardly anyone can use it — which is consistent with what “Timeless” established about their rarity and instability.
Still, there are plenty of other technologies they could’ve perfected by then — transwarp, coaxial warp, space folds, artificial wormholes, interstellar transporters, you name it. Heck, you could use the technology from “Lifesigns” to download people’s minds into holographic bodies and just beam them to other planets through subspace, as long as there were mobile emitters available at the other end.
Isn’t the “Starfleet tech” on Dauntless holographic? The ship interior, maybe exterior, is one big holodeck?
Maybe Arturis has a Q buddy who helped him with tricky parts of his scheme, such as learning about Voyager and catching up with the ship and creating Dauntless, before the episode started. Though a Q could create a Dauntless that isn’t a hologram, or could run behind the ship pushing it.
I may be too fond of “A Q did it” as an explanation.
The internal continuity issues on the handle that the writers had (or didn’t) on their characters, is the reason Ron D. Moore cited for his very short stint working on “Voyager.” I warned you that this would happen at the beginning of the rewatch. You’re welcome.
I knew something was amiss as soon as the magical universal translator had a blip. Obviously the only way for that to happen would be for a crazily-detailed revenge-plotting alien to have tinkered with it.
I knew something was amiss as soon as the alien character was revealed to being played by Ray Wise. 😉
When she first heard about the fate of the Maquis in “Hunters,” B’elanna expressed a desire for revenge against the Dominion; later, in “Extreme RisK,” it’s revealed that B’elanna is suffering from major depression as a result of this news, and that one of her symptoms is self-destructive behaviour. It’s possible that part of her motivation for suddenly wanting to return to the Alpha Quadrant is because she wants a crack at the Jem’Hadar, though it would have been nice if this had been said explicitly.