“Maneuvers”
Written by Kenneth Biller
Directed by David Livingston
Season 2, Episode 11
Production episode 127
Original air date: November 20, 1995
Stardate: 49208.5
Captain’s log. Chakotay and Torres’s hoverball game on the holodeck is interrupted by Voyager detecting a beacon broadcasting a Federation carrier wave—using a security code that wasn’t scheduled to be implemented until a month after Voyager was sent to the Delta Quadrant. Optimism that this might be the Federation trying to find them suffuses the ship, but it’s dashed when they arrive at the beacon to find a Kazon ship firing on them.
Indeed, the Kazon ship’s firing pattern is very specific, targeting a single spot on their shields and poking a hole in them, despite all attempts to remodulate the shields. A Kazon shuttle goes through that hole and crashes into the cargo bay on deck four, penetrating the hull and letting on a boarding party. Tuvok’s security detail fails to contain all of them, and two Kazon head to the transporter room, steal a transporter module, and beam back to their ship.
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With the hull breach, Voyager can’t go to warp, but Chakotay is able to snag the Kazon ship in a tractor beam. Only then do the Kazon hail them: It’s Maje Culluh and Seska, and the specific knowledge they had of Voyager‘s operations comes to light. Seska is able to program a feedback loop that disrupts the tractor beam, and the Kazon bugger off.
Voyager can’t pursue until they extricate the Kazon shuttle from the hull. Neelix points out that they don’t have to pursue the Kazon, but Janeway refuses to allow Federation technology to stay in the hands of Culluh and his Nistrim sect, as it will affect the balance of power among the Kazon. Neelix comes around.
Torres figures out how to track the transporter module, and once the cargo bay breach is sealed, they go on their merry way. Chakotay is more than a little bit beside himself with annoyance, as he takes Seska’s betrayal of the crew personally.
On Culluh’s ship, he meets with Maje Haron, the leader of the Kazon-Relora, to discuss an alliance. Haron feels that the Nistrim are too weak to handle this advanced technology, and suggests Culluh simply give it to him and the Relora will share some of the spoils with them in return. Culluh’s response is to beam Haron and his aide into space.
Voyager is tracing Culluh’s ship’s warp trail. There’s a gap in it, and when they investigate, they find the bodies of Haron and his aide. The EMH finds a transporter trace on them, and Neelix identifies the markings on their outfits as belonging to the Relora. Janeway amends her initial theory—that this was a transporter accident when the Nistrim were playing with their new toy—to Culluh using the transporter as a murder weapon.
Once Torres gets the scanner working that will detect the transporter module, Chakotay absconds with it and steals a shuttlecraft. Janeway is appalled to realize that he’s going after Seska alone.
Culluh is angry about how negotiations with the Relora deteriorated. He’s even angrier when Seska reveals that she contacted the other, smaller sects on his behalf to invite them to a summit. The Relora are too powerful, but this technology can unite the smaller sects into a powerful force behind the stolen Federation tech. Seska has to suck up to Culluh to get forgiveness.
Chakotay arrives at Culluh’s ship. (How his shuttle arrives so far ahead of Voyager is left as an exercise for the viewer.) He manages to mask himself from the Kazon sensors for a time, but eventually Seska detects him and stops him from destroying the transporter module remotely. Seska tractors the shuttle in, but when the Kazon board, they find it empty—Chakotay beamed himself off the shuttle and is able to take out the module with a phaser, at which point he has the shuttle send out a message to Voyager. Then he’s taken prisoner and tortured.
Voyager receives his prerecorded message, which says that, if they get this, he’s been captured or killed, but has taken care of the module. He urges Janeway not to rescue him. Janeway ignores this and goes after him.
Unfortunately, by the time they’re in sensor range, they detect a crapton of Kazon ships—Seska’s summit of the lesser Kazon sects is underway. Culluh covers his lack of transporter technology with the fact that he has Chakotay as prisoner—he has Voyager‘s command codes. However, he has not yet given them up, though Culluh hasn’t told the other Kazon that.
Voyager moves in to try to beam Chakotay out, but Torres can’t get a lock on him. The other Kazon call Culluh’s bluff by trying to get him to use the command codes to strike at Voyager; he claims they’re having trouble interfacing the technology, and he asks the majes to join the battle. Voyager gets pounded by the other Kazon ships. Seska has surrounded Chakotay with a dampening field that keeps a transporter lock off him, but the field is only on him. So Janeway has Torres instead beam the majes into the transporter room, where Tuvok holds them at phaserpoint until they free Chakotay and release the shuttle.
Janeway puts Chakotay on report, but takes no other disciplinary action. He receives a message from Seska announcing that she took a sample of his DNA while he was her prisoner, and she intends to have a kid with him.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, simple possession of a transporter module, a piece of technology never mentioned before or since, allows one to utilize transporter technology, and the destruction of that module—which can be sitting out in the open when you’re using it, it would seem—will eliminate that ability. Sure.
Also, Voyager uses the transporter during the climax while shields are up, er, somehow.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway refuses to give up on Chakotay and also comes up with the brilliant solution of beaming the majes off the Kazon ship.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is utterly ineffectual in stopping a bunch of Kazon from boarding the ship and stealing technology.
Half and half. Torres advocates passionately on Chakotay’s behalf after he’s stolen the shuttle.
Forever an ensign. Kim’s excitement at what they think is a Federation beacon is tamped down by Janeway, saying his optimism is premature, but she softens the blow by saying that it’s also infectious.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix earns his nonexistent pay as Voyager‘s local guide in this episode, as his knowledge of the Kazon continues to prove useful.
For Cardassia! Seska’s appearance is reverting to her original Cardassian looks, er, somehow. (I can’t imagine that Kazon medical technology is really up to the task, but whatever.) She’s the power behind the throne with Culluh, only occasionally pretending to suck up to him to placate him.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Seska’s past with Chakotay comes up several times, including her assuring him he wasn’t that good.
Do it. “I had you right where I wanted you.”
“What are you talking about? I was ahead 19-7!”
“I was just lulling you into a false sense of security.”
“Sure you were.”
Chakotay talking smack while getting his ass kicked in hoverball and Torres not buying it.
Welcome aboard. Martha Hackett and Anthony DeLongis are back as Seska and Culluh, respectively, last seen in “State of Flux.” They’ll both be back in “Alliances.” Terry Lester and John Gegenhuber play the other two majes with speaking parts.
Trivial matters: We see the Kazon-Relora—mentioned in “Initiations“—for the first time, and this episode also establishes the Kazon-Hobii, the Kazon-Oglamar, and the Kazon-Mostral.
Martha Hackett was newly pregnant when this episode filmed, and the plan had been for Seska to become newly pregnant at the end of this episode, so the timing was fortuitous. (It’s less clear how she was able to impregnate herself with the DNA of another species using only Kazon tech, which isn’t exactly geared toward high-quality medicine, but whatever.)
Hoverball was first established in TNG‘s “Captain’s Holiday,” and will be seen in multiple Voyager episodes going forward (and also in Kim Sheard’s short story “Winds of Change” in Distant Shores).
Set a course for home. “Flattery, devotion, sex—she has a lot to offer a man.” This really should be a much better episode than it actually is. David Livingston’s directorial resumé for the Trek spinoffs includes some excellent action/thriller episodes (“The Mind’s Eye” and “Power Play” on TNG, “In the Hands of the Prophets,” “The Maquis, Part I,” “Crossover,” “The Die is Cast,” “Homefront,” and “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” on DS9), so the flaccid direction here is a surprise and a disappointment. The opening space battle is a mess, Chakotay’s one-person raid on the Kazon is disjointed, and the climactic conflict is weak.
Kenneth Biller reportedly wanted to have Chakotay suffer real consequences, but that’s not a thing Star Trek does, really. Spock kidnapped a captain, forged orders, stole a ship, and assaulted several people in service of violating a general order that came with the death penalty, the Defiant went to the Gamma Quadrant to rescue Odo against orders, Agnes Jurati murdered her lover in cold blood, Worf abandoned his post to kill someone, and Tuvok did a back-room deal with the Sikarians against orders, and none of them suffered any real consequences, so it’s probably disingenuous to ding this episode in particular. But the scene where it happens is so weak, with Janeway coming out and copping to the fact that the consequences are meaningless when she says, “I’m putting you on report, in case that means anything anymore,” and Chakotay’s assurance that it does rings completely hollow.
There are also far too many storytelling shortcuts here that undermine the episode, starting with the magical transporter module that somehow bestows full transporter technology to its user, yet can sit out in the open and get shot at. Then there’s Torres beaming people onto the ship while shields are raised, which has never been possible on Star Trek since the beginning. Plus, somehow Culluh and Seska are able to gather all the sects in this region of space which is ten months’ travel away from the Ocampa homeworld, all in the time it takes Voyager to repair a hull breach. Speaking of that hull breach, man, does the Voyager crew look like idiots in the opening. The nanosecond that the Kazon showed up after luring them with information that only could have come from Voyager‘s computer (the security code was one that was on file but not yet implemented), everyone’s first thought should have been of Seska, yet they’re all surprised to see her with Culluh, even though she was last seen buggering off to a Kazon ship after sabotaging Voyager.
Worse, after giving us some promising development of the Kazon in “Initiations” (also written by Biller), we get almost none of that here. The beats with Culluh and Seska’s attempt to unite the wimpier Kazon factions are all rote and boring and show none of the, well, maneuvers or jockeying or much of anything. Biller is said to have patterned the Kazon structure as being akin to street gangs, and what we needed here was something like the summit meetings among the gangs we used to see on Hill Street Blues, not this bloodless posturing.
The episode isn’t a total disaster. I like Chakotay’s slow burn, and Robert Beltran plays his coolness under torture nicely. I love Janeway’s elegant solution of beaming the majes off the ship and trapping them in the transporter room with deactivated weapons. And Martha Hackett is superb, as Seska manipulates events perfectly. I particularly like how she plays Culluh like a two-dollar banjo. Even in defeat, Seska feels like she comes out ahead in this—Culluh’s the one who lost face, not her, and she’s still in her position of playing Wormtongue to Culluh’s King Théoden. (Or would it be more appropriate to say she’s the Daenerys to Culluh’s Khal Drogo?)
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido encourages all and sundry to support the crowdfund for the third book in the “18th Race” trilogy of military science fiction novels, To Hell and Regroup, which Keith wrote with David Sherman. It’s being jointly funded along with Christopher L. Bennett’s Arachne’s Crime, and it’s already reached the funding goal, so if you support it, you’re guaranteed to get the books! Check it out!
I’m always kind of ambivalent about Seska. She’s probably Voyager’s most memorable recurring antagonist until the, IMHO, deeply misguided introduction of the Borg Queen (about which, much ranting later, but I don’t think that’s ultimately Voyager’s fault). None of the Kazon or Hirogen made much of an individual impact on me, anyways.
Her origins as a deep cover Cardassian agent were a nice synergy with a similar plot point in Deep Space Nine, and fitting with the deeply paranoid and duplicitous nature of Cardassian intelligence services, but something about her plots were a little…
Okay, so, she’s a Cardassian agent stranded light years from home among hostile warring factions. Her biggest asset is her knowledge of Voyager’s technology and security procedures, and she uses that to leverage herself into a position of power! Grand! But her secret plot is to have Chakotay’s baby? And there’s a scene where Chakotay tries to drive a wedge between her and her Kazon partner by explaining that… *gasp* Seska has had sex before?! Was any of that really necessary?
(Also he relies on a specific physical characteristic he remembers from their time together to lend credence to his claim, which is odd given that she’s had her appearance extensively (re)altered since then, but I guess she kept the mole/beauty mark/birthmark?)
Cuttlefishbenjamin: I didn’t see that as her “secret” plot, it was her backup plan, which was only implemented because she lost the transporter, the shuttle, and Chakotay himself. Hell, it wasn’t even a plan, since she had no idea that Chakotay himself would come along to try to cowboy a rescue mission. It was more of an opportunity she took advantage of to mess with the crew’s heads and also provide an heir for herself, useful given how far from home she is.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m several episodes ahead in my re-watch and it’s hilarious how often Voyager gets its ass kicked. You would think a ship designed to explore unknown space would have better fighting capabilities. But I guess the enviable technological superiority only applies to replicators and transporters.
Krad, Admittedly, it’s been quite a while since I’ve watched this one, so your reading is probably more accurate than mine. And I suppose we might argue that if she’s looking for a biological heir, she might be better off with a human (the complications of Cardassian/Human hybrid biology having probably been encountered and recorded at some point, as opposed to the risk of a Cardassian/Kazon pairing presenting unforeseen problems).
“Then there’s Torres beaming people onto the ship while shields are raised, which has never been possible on Star Trek since the beginning.”
Except in the climax of “Caretaker,” when Voyager did exactly that to beam Chakotay’s crew aboard before their ship was destroyed. I’d forgotten that they made the same mistake this time too.
I’m surprised — I thought this would be the beginning of the multi-part arc involving the Kazon and the shipboard traitor, but that’s still a few episodes away. They took more time setting the Culluh-Seska thing in motion than I remembered.
Everybody, please read Keith’s bio at the end this time, and follow the Kickstarter link! We could use your support!
@3/Austin: “You would think a ship designed to explore unknown space would have better fighting capabilities.”
I don’t recall Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso being festooned with weapons. Darwin’s HMS Beagle was a 10-gun brig-sloop, very lightly armed compared to the rest of the Royal Navy at the time. If anything, it’s a bad idea for an explorer to be too heavily armed, because then it’ll be mistaken for a warship and provoke more conflict rather than less.
@6 – Normally you’re right, but the Federation has enough experience to know that they’re going to get into some scraps.
Thanks for the tip about the bio! I normally overlook that.
Once Torres gets the scanner working that will detect the transporter module, Chakotay absconds with it and steals a shuttlecraft. Janeway is appalled to realize that he’s going after Seska alone.
The way this plays is absolutely horrible– they don’t even know the shuttle is missing until Janeway asks the ship where Chakotay is and it responds that he’s not aboard. The shuttle theft we’re all used to, but somehow Chakotay is able to steal a shuttle without anybody noticing. One would think that even if the shuttlecraft doors were forced open, the sensors would notice a nearby ship going to warp! Between that and the Kazon attack that really shouldn’t have worked, the entire plot just makes the crew look spectacularly incompetent. And then, of course, they should have beamed Seska aboard along with the Kazon and refused to give her back. No way should she end the hour of this episode as a free woman.
@1 They’ve been establishing that the Kazon are a pretty chauvinistic (misogynistic? patriarchal?) culture, and that such weaknesses will work against them most likely. Chakotay likely chose the angle he did describing Seska’s past behavior because it would get under Cullah’s skin, not because he himself is actually into slutshaming or holds those values.
@7/Austin: “Normally you’re right, but the Federation has enough experience to know that they’re going to get into some scraps.”
Sure, but the focus should be on defense, and avoidance where possible. Again, too much emphasis on combat readiness is just provocative and counterproductive. Even experienced combatants (and Sun Tzu) will tell you that the best option in any fight is to avoid it altogether if you can. So it’s not “better fighting capabilities” that Voyager could use, it’s better defensive capabilities. Except the only reason the ship’s defenses were breached in this case was because Seska had inside knowledge, and thus it wasn’t a typical combat situation.
@2 / KRAD:
It was more of an opportunity she took advantage of to mess with the crew’s heads and also provide an heir for herself, useful given how far from home she is.
Yeah, that at least does fit with Seska’s ”This is why Janeway sucks’ speech from “State of Flux”.
Regarding Seska’s characterization from late Season One onwards, my head canon has always been it was a combination of the usual Cardassian cultural attitudes combined with her snapping after realizing she’d she’d never see Cardassia again in her lifetime. But again, that’s just my take.
@@.-@:
She also may not have wanted to bind herself too closely to the Kazon and certainly not to a particular sect. Just keeping all her options open.
Austin (and everyone): the bio changes almost every time. When it doesn’t change it’s because of something ongoing. Either way, there’s always something there, not just a link to my web site. Always read the bio!!!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who really wants to hit the next stretch goal
There is only one exception I can recall to this. Miles O’Brien is able to beam himself through the shields of the Phoenix in the Next Generation episode The Wounded. They took the trouble to explain it with a bit of technobabble about the shield frequency and how there was a narrow window that a hot shot transporter jockey like O’Brien could exploit. The lack of a similar explanation here seems lazy.
Meh, I liked Seska better when she was a member of the crew. Less so as a villain. She’s like the Joker combined with a Jerry Springer ‘I’m having your baby, baby’ schemer of the week.
@14: Back in TOS’s first season in the episode A Taste of Armageddon Ambassador Fox and his aid were able to transport onto Eminiar VII while the Enterprise was in an emergency situation with shields raised. Scotty even said that he would not lower the shields to let Fox beam down. Fox and his aid just magically transported down to the planet.
You can excuse TOS, especially in their first season. VOY, being the fourth Trek show, after several seasons of Trek saying you can’t beam with shields up, does not get that pass.
1) Tuvok sucks at security (points ahead to Deadlock).
2) When Chakotay destroys the stolen transporter module the Kazon still have possession of the Voyager shuttle with its transporter technology. No one brings this up?
3) Regarding Seska using Kazon technology to restore her natural appearance and impregnate herself, it’s not truly Kazon technology. What they have they stole from their previous overseers, the Trabe.
4) I like Seska and all, but as has been stated here and before, the Voyager is now 10 months out from the region of space in Caretaker presumable traveling at high-warp in a straight line back to the Alpha Quadrant (with the occasion stop for a weekly adventure) and yet here we are with Seska, and Maj Culluh and their Kazon buddies all catching up to the ship. It really strains credulity and makes one believe Voyager is going in circles and never left the Ocampa neighborhood.
Otherwise this is an entertaining enough episode. It’s not boring but it doesn’t show the Voyager crew at its best. I also have thoughts about the Seska pregnancy plot but I’ll save that for Basics, Part II.
GarretH: no, as I said in the plot summary, Voyager got the shuttle back, along with Chakotay.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@18, in addition to 19, Chakotay mentions he wiped the shuttle’s computer and therefore the shuttle is supposedly worthless. He really should have set it to self-destruct though just to be sure. If it blows a hole in the side of the Kazon ship, that sounds like their problem.
Oddly enough, the sect of Kazon in Initiations also seized a shuttle also piloted by Chakotay, one with a functional computer, but didn’t realize what a prize they had.
@14: Yeah, that’s a more justified example, given O’Brien’s expertise with transporter technology and general engineering mastery; it seems perfectly in-character for him to be able to pull something like that off.
@17: Agreed. It’s much easier to chalk up the use of transporters in “A Taste of Armageddon” to Early Installment Weirdness (as TVTropes puts it), as the rules hadn’t been firmly established by that point.
@20: “Oddly enough, the sect of Kazon in Initiations also seized a shuttle also piloted by Chakotay, one with a functional computer, but didn’t realize what a prize they had.”
That’s because the Kazon are idiots, and among the worst villains Trek has ever produced.
@21 – I mean, the Kazon are a species with warp technology that has trouble finding water…(an idea quickly forgotten, thankfully).
And so begins the season’s main arc, with the return of Seska and Cullah. The opening sequence of them launching a daring and highly successful raid on Voyager does at least establish them as a threat, although it does seem a bit too easy. I get that Seska’s a Cardassian intelligence operative who has experience as a Maquis, but didn’t they change the security codes when she left the ship? (As mentioned, it’s also a bit odd that Janeway and Chakotay are surprised to see her with Culluh: Where did they think she was?) And what happened to the Kazon Tuvok shot in the cargo bay? Even if Tuvok forgot his phaser had a stun setting, the blast only seemed to hit him in the shoulder. Do Kazons have a vital organ there or something?
I’m in two minds about Chakotay destroying the transporter equipment and then calmly handing his phaser over to Seska. I guess he saw it as a one-way mission and he’d already rendered his shuttle and only escape route apparently useless. (I’m not sure that wiping the memory core would mean the Kazon couldn’t make use of the physical technology, but fortunately this is one occasion when Voyager remembers to retrieve a shuttle.) He really doesn’t know Janeway if he was expecting her to leave him behind though.
It’s a good one for Chakotay and Torres’ friendship, from them socialising together at the beginning to Torres fighting Chakotay’s corner throughout. I know we’d all like to erase it from our minds, but we’re only three episodes on from “Persistence of Vision”, so Roxanne Biggs-Dawson is probably still portraying Torres as secretly in love with Chakotay at this point: Her reaction to Janeway saying she’s a good friend seems laden with subtext, as is her joking that he has lousy taste in women.
As cool a moment as Voyager beaming the Kazon majes aboard is…how did they identify them? Did they target the conference room, or go by their proximity to Chakotay? Either way, they’re lucky they didn’t get four Kazon underlings that no-one was going to miss.
Still, in my opinion the ending of this is one of the better “Janeway chews crewmember out” scenes, with Chakotay noting that it matters to him that he’s let Janeway down. The ending is one of those moments that loses its impact when we know the plotline involved gets a pat resolution in “Basics”.
At least two reference books claim Kes isn’t in this episode which is clearly nonsense: She’s on screen as much as the Doctor is. (Memory Alpha claimed it too at one point but has since been corrected.) Haron becomes the third person to refer to the ship as the Voyager. (Seska and Culluh beaming him and his aide into space is a chilling idea by the way, which stops them going too far into panto villainy, and seems to be the moment where Chakotay takes it upon himself to stop them, taking responsibility for bringing Seska out there in the first place.)
@19: I meant the Kazon removing the components while they still had possession of the shuttle, but as @20 mentioned, I guess that doesn’t matter since Chakotay wiped the shuttle computer. But even with a wiped computer, you still have the components and can reverse-engineer the technology. Anyway, it’s a moot point since Voyager recovered the shuttle.
I’m more forgiving of Livingston. He gives an honest effort directing it, giving it a much needed sense of urgency. But it can’t save this sorry excuse of an episode. By this point, Initiations aside, the Kazon were simply not working, and this episode only exacerbates the problem. The street gangs analogy is problematic enough, but Biller’s script doesn’t even commit to that idea. Culluh is a classic misogynistic stereotype with zero depth. And the other Kazon are just there.
And then there was Biller’s desire to have Chakotay face actual consequences, which simply can’t fly under Rick Berman’s watch (and it doesn’t help that Taylor was never a head writer to really challenge the status quo either). And if Piller wanted to shake up Voyager’s second season, he really should have picked a different hostile Delta Quadrant race. It really should have been the Vidiians.
The narrative shortcuts are bad enough, magical transporters and all, but the worst offender is that ending. Seska getting impregnated with Chakotay’s DNA is both lazy and forced. It’s soap opera plotting of the worst type. Hackett honestly tries, but even her performance can’t save pure character assassination. There is no way the Seska from Prime Factors would do this. What is her goal by getting pregnant? Other than taunt Chakotay and the crew, I can’t see a plausible endgame. And then it gets worse then it turns out the baby was Culluh’s rather than Chakotay’s (because once again, the powers that be are allergic to consequences; imagine the first officer in a flagship network show raising a baby out of wedlock???).
@10, Christopher Bennett, not only that, but remembering the following dialogue between Janeway and Paris back in “Caretaker”:
PARIS: I’ve never seen a Federation starship that could manoeuvre through the plasma storms.
JANEWAY: You’ve never seen Voyager.
That right from the start gave me the impression that the primary tactical strength of the Voyager was going to be her speed and maneuverability, not necessarily her strength of offensive weapons.
(Where it got to be a bit of a stretch was when they got into Borg territory and were somehow surviving repeated encounters/engagements with one or more Borg Cubes, only one of which was shown to have been able to wipeout an entire fleet of similar and even more formidable Starfleet vessels at both the Battle of Wolf 359 (“Best of Both Worlds”) and Sector 001 (“Star Trek: First Contact”).)
Scotty and laForge were beamed off of the Jeolan when keeping the shields up was a plot point as they were the only thing keeping the door open.
Like the PD, the transporter does whatever the plot requires, regardless of any limitations mentioned previously. It even manages to somehow capture Picard when he’s been turned into an energy pattern, a trick that will be repeated on Enterprise with an energy pattern that’s decades old.
@26/David Young: “(Where it got to be a bit of a stretch was when they got into Borg territory and were somehow surviving repeated encounters/engagements with one or more Borg Cubes, only one of which was shown to have been able to wipeout an entire fleet of similar and even more formidable Starfleet vessels at both the Battle of Wolf 359 (“Best of Both Worlds”) and Sector 001 (“Star Trek: First Contact”).)”
“Dark Frontier” established that the Queen had let Voyager survive as part of her Fiendish Master Plan, arranging for Seven to stay aboard as an embedded asset so she could study the people of the Federation and learn how to overcome their resistance to assimilation. After that, their further survival was largely due to Seven providing Borg tech upgrades to Voyager and intel on Borg tactical weaknesses. Also the Borg were weakened going in by their long war with Species 8472.
Still, there were some cheats, no doubt. “Q Who” established that Borg cubes were so decentralized and uniform that it was impossible to identify any discrete systems like weapons, shields, power, etc. But in VGR, battles with the Borg followed the same “target their X systems and fire” logic as every other space battle.
@28: Ah, yes, the old “My prior displays of incompetence were simply another layer of my master plan” chestnut. Yeah… unless the villain’s name in question is David Xanatos, I don’t really buy it. The losses the Borg took to 8472 also don’t really justify it, considering a single cube is enough to wipe out entire fleets and assimilate whole planets by itself.
@18:
I like Seska and all, but as has been stated here and before, the Voyager is now 10 months out from the region of space in Caretaker presumable traveling at high-warp in a straight line back to the Alpha Quadrant (with the occasion stop for a weekly adventure) and yet here we are with Seska, and Maj Culluh and their Kazon buddies all catching up to the ship. It really strains credulity and makes one believe Voyager is going in circles and never left the Ocampa neighborhood.
Yeah, in hindsight, the Kazon really should’ve only worked as the Big Bad of Season One. Jeri Taylor even acknowledged this:
“The Kazon have never been particularly interesting as adversaries, and we just did them and did them and did them and did them. It created the curious implication that we are standing still in space, when our franchise is that we are going at incredible speeds toward the Alpha Quadrant – we keep running into the same people over and over again! It was just an oddity, and I don’t think the Kazon have served us well. And […] it is my intention to leave them behind and to find new and I hope more interesting aliens.”
If anything, the Sikarians should’ve been used as the trajector tech made them a more plausible long-distance villain.
@29/Devin Smith: In fact, we rarely saw Voyager getting into direct combat with Borg ships, and it was never shown to hold its own against a fully functioning cube. The cube in “Unity” was dormant and ultimately self-destructed. In “Scorpion,” they were caught by a cube and only survived through Janeway’s deal with the Borg, and later it was 8472 that destroyed the cubes. In “Dark Frontier,” they destroyed a small Borg scout by beaming a torpedo aboard, and at the end they destroyed a smallish Borg vessel by collapsing the transwarp conduit it was passing through. In “Collective” the Cube they faced was run by a handful of children and they still had to talk their way out. In “Unimatrix Zero,” they attacked a Cube as a diversion and did essentially no damage to it, and all the cube destructions in the episode were self-destructs initiated by the Queen; the main way Voyager‘s crew did damage was by liberating the Unimatrix Zero drones. In “Q2” they got creamed by three cubes until Q put a stop to it.
The only time Voyager was ever shown to be effective in direct combat with Borg cubes was in “Endgame,” using the transphasic torpedoes and ablative shields that Admiral Janeway brought back from the future. And those only worked because the Borg hadn’t seen them before and didn’t have time to adapt.
So the Borg were just as powerful as ever in a direct fight; it’s just that the situations were contrived to let Voyager avoid direct fights through luck or strategy.
@26, @28-29 and @31: As you say, the show managed to avoid putting Voyager in a one-on-one situation with one of those mega fleet-destroying Borg cubes and just had them beating smaller ships. And really, they were just following in the footsteps of First Contact, where Picard manages to direct a fleet to destroy a Borg cube in a matter of seconds with a simple “Concentrate your fire here” and then the Enterprise takes out one of those Borg spheres Voyager tended to best with one shot.
I’ve been reading the bios for years. They’re (at least to me) a natural extension to the recaps. They help keep track of what conventions Krad is attending (during normal times) or his latest projects. I thought everyone did.
Wow does the Voyager crew look really dumb here. As Krad pointed out, the moment they picked up a so-called Federation signal, everyone should have basically said “Seska” in unison.
People give Robert Beltran a lot of shit for Chakotay (the failures of the character are on the writers, not the actor), but I enjoyed his performance here. His confident soft-spokenness is something I’ve always appreciated (especially being soft-spoken myself), but here he gets to cut loose a little, and its great to watch.
I once read something saying the producers (read: Berman) didn’t want Janeway’s first officer to be like Riker so Janeway wouldn’t be outshined. I know, it’s stupid, but it sounds like a very Rick Berman thing to do. So that’s yet another thing weighing Chakotay down.
Martha Hackett is also great to watch here. I don’t fully agree with where the writers went with Seska, but Martha Hackett is always compelling (she does the best she can with the whole pregnancy thing, which is kind of ick, but again, the failures are on the writers).
Finally, B’Elanna’s fierce loyalty is on full display. Another plus for an episode that is overall watchable, if not great.
@28,@29 et al: Also, the “It was all part of a cunning plan” justification only really applies to “Scorpion” and “Dark Frontier”. In between, I think Voyager only goes head to head with the Borg once, in “Drone”, and then it’s only one of the similar-weight-category spheres and it’s One that destroys it anyway.
@32/cap-mjb: “one of those Borg spheres Voyager tended to best with one shot.”
That never happened. In “Dark Frontier” they raided a sphere that was already damaged and barely got away. In “Drone,” as you say, it was One who destroyed the Sphere from inside. In “Child’s Play” they smuggled a Trojan-horse torpedo aboard the Brunali vessel a sphere was assimilating, yet only heavily damaged the sphere. The only time they ever destroyed a Borg sphere by firing on it was with a transphasic torpedo from the future in “Endgame,” and that was technically not “with one shot” because it was after the sphere had been attacked by the Starfleet armada waiting in the Alpha Quadrant.
The only time Voyager was ever depicted destroying a Borg sphere with a single shot was in “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy,” and that was just a holodeck fantasy of the Doctor’s that the Hierarchy potato people mistook for reality. Even that was consistent with the usual rules, though, because it required the imaginary “photonic cannon” superweapon to do it after normal torpedoes proved useless.
@35 …. “Hierarchy potato people”
Today’s “spit out my coffee laughing” moment. :) Perfect.
Well, we were never given an actual name for their species, so as far as I’m concerned, they’re the potato people.
I think they’re an offshoot of the Sontaran.
@22 – Austin: I’m seeing people with computers and internet claim that drinking a substance similar to bleach cures all diseases… oh, and the president of one of the world’s most powerful countries saying COVID-19 can be cured by injecting sick people with disinfectant. Now I have less trouble believing the Kazon have warp drives but trouble finding water.
@38 – LOL!
@38/MaGnUS: Well, to be fair, he only asked if injecting disinfectant was worth looking into. Although I’m sure he’ll keep asking no matter how many times he’s told “no.”
The episode has one of the tropes that completely drives me up the wall – a character is removed/leaves an organization, but somehow their codes/ID card/retina scan (just rewatched Minority Report!) still works for some unknown reason. Double annoying when the character is a traitor/wanted criminal/arrested (whether actually guilty or not). I have no problem with Seska knowing how the system works or how the crew thinks, but NO ONE thought to change the frelling codes after she sabotaged the ship then was ‘Seska Out!’???
And her line about knowing Chakotay would use the tracker beam – I can’t double check the ep right now, but wasn’t that Janeway’s idea?
I did really like that Torres went for a 100% emotional based plea for Chakotay that was also 100% ‘big picture’ in her scene with Janeway.
treebee72: Yeah, plus the laughable notion that Chakotay’s command codes would still be any good once he was captured…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@38,
Thanks. I needed that laugh this morning. :D
@38: And don’t forget that he also attempted to tackle the Operation: Annihilate conundrum: how do we inject sunlight into the human body.
@42 krad – oh yeah, that also drove me up the wall. This whole episode was a master class of how NOT to do security!
@35/CLB: Oh, for goodness sake, will you actually read the whole sentence instead of quoting an out-of-context fragment of it and saying it’s wrong? I didn’t say Voyager took it out with one shot, I said the Enterprise did. (I may be wrong there as well but it was one salvo at most.)
@46/cap: “I didn’t say Voyager took it out with one shot, I said the Enterprise did.”
What you said was “then the Enterprise takes out one of those Borg spheres Voyager tended to best with one shot.” That’s misleadingly phrased if you were referring to the Enterprise.
@47/CLB: I accept it wasn’t entirely clear but there was a reason the Enterprise was mentioned in the sentence. The point of the post was that long before Voyager got their hands on the Borg, First Contact had already blown away the idea of their ships being invincible by having two destroyed in the first half hour, one by a Federation fleet and one by the Enterprise on its own. And it was the latter type that Voyager tended to be portrayed as a match for.
@48: On First Contact, Starfleet was losing that battle against the Borg cube. Even the Defiant wasn’t able to penetrate its defenses. It wasn’t until the Enterprise arrived, and Picard ordered the fleet to fire on one specific weak spot no one else knew of (likely due to Picard having remnants of Locutus’ commands within his mind).
And the second ship was a glorified escape pod with weapons. It probably had no defensive capabilities, which is why the Ent-E was able to destroy it so easily with torpedoes.
@48/cap-mjb: Mentioning something in a sentence doesn’t do any good if you don’t put the words together in the right order. There’s a reason writers need editors. We often assume a sentence is clear because we know what we meant, but sometimes it’s completely confusing to everybody else.
@49: Yes, but can you say cheap plot device? In theory, every time Starfleet encountered a Borg cube from then on, they could just call Picard and say “Okay, which bit do we fire at to blow it up straightaway?” (Okay, Voyager don’t have his number, but they’ve got Seven who possibly knows the Borg just as well.) Not to mention, the whole thing blowing up if you hit that one weak spot seems to make Borg cubes as badly designed as a Death Star. As for the smaller ship, it had enough combat capability to fire on and damage the Phoenix launch site, so you’d expect it to have some way of protecting itself.
@50: I understand. I agree with you. The sentence could be interpreted either way.
@49 In that instance, he was hearing the voice of the Collective instructing the drones to repair that section where the shields were destabilising – rather than pre-existing knowledge, this was new knowledge – presumably even after having his implants removed there was still residual nano probes or modifications to his brain which enabled him to tune into the collective…. possibly similar to the Borg Resonance Signal that Seven picked up in ‘The Raven’.
In Drone, the sphere was crushed by the gravity of the porto-nebula (less said about the science of that the better), but it wasn’t Voyager’s weapons that destroyed it.
In Dark Frontier the Borg Ships both had shields down – the Probe in the teaser was resetting them when Voyager beamed a torpedo into the centre of the ship, and the Sphere was recovering from Ion Storm damage.
There’s examples even today of defenses which are excellent from the ‘front’ but not so much from behind (Maginot line anyone?) – it’s not so much of an assumption to assume that Borg vessels (or any vessel) has a similar problem – set off an explosion outside the shields, or even on the hull, shrug it off; set off an explosion beside a key system – e.g. Warp Core, Plasma Conduit etc. and create a chain reaction which destroys the ship.
@51/cap-mjb: “In theory, every time Starfleet encountered a Borg cube from then on, they could just call Picard and say “Okay, which bit do we fire at to blow it up straightaway?””
You’re forgetting the most fundamental rule of the Borg: they adapt. They never anticipate new attacks, so anything new will work against them once or twice — but once they observe an attack, they quickly develop a defense against it and render it useless. This was established from the beginning in “Q Who” — the first one or two drones they shot with phasers fell instantly, but all subsequent drones deployed phaser-proof shields. In “Endgame,” the reason the transphasic torpedoes and ablative armor worked was because they were from the future and the Borg hadn’t seen them before. But they actually did adapt to the ablative armor during the battle, rendering it useless, and given time they would’ve adapted to the torpedoes as well. (In the novels’ Destiny trilogy, Starfleet was reluctant to authorize the use of transphasic torpedoes prematurely, because they knew the Borg would adapt to them faster the more often they were used, so they wanted to keep them in reserve as a last resort.)
In re the command codes, really the command codes should cease to be “good” any time someone is off the ship, whether it’s just an away mission or it’s their turn to be captured by hostile aliens. The codes can be reactivated when they’re back. Too high of a risk they’ll be captured, encounter a hostile telepathic alien, or otherwise, and just why the heck do they need a working admin account when they’re off-ship? And of course the codes should change periodically, so that a starship has the same level of security as your work computer. Of course, in Non Sequitir, Harry’s command codes were somehow good, so the writers might have been thinking the entire ship shares a password or something.
@49 / On First Contact, Starfleet was losing that battle against the Borg cube. Even the Defiant wasn’t able to penetrate its defenses..
Yeah, I think that’s something people tend to forget about the First Contact battle.
Data’s exposition from that scene established Hayes’ armada had inflicted serious outer hull damage to the Cube during the running firefight, which in turn disrupted their power grid.
That’s what Picard was able to exploit and had the Big E been part of the initial engagement, the circumstances that created that Achilles Heel wouldn’t have appeared.
@51 & 53 – Then the Borg should have anticipated Picard targeting a particular spot on the cube in First Contact. It was established that he was still in contact with the collective, however remotely. And in BoBW, we’re told flat out that if Picard knows about a plan, the Bork know about it as well. But the writers of the movie ignored that because they wanted to get Picard into the battle. Basically, they turned a weakness into a strength through a ret-con. It wuld have been interesting to see Picard’s reaction when it came out that Starfleet was correct in keeping him out of the battle as the Borg adapt to each battle plan as soon as Picard is informed. He want revenge against the Borg but he’s the one thing keeping Starfleet from destroying them. Would have played into his Ahab story where he keeps going after the target of his anger even though that’s the one thing that he’s actually fighting.
They could still do the time travel element (ugh) but Picard notices since he’s cut off from the main battle and everyone else is too engaged to see what’s happening. His frustration becomes a moment of triumph once the sphere commits to travelling to the past. Movie continues as before.
Given how little Chakotay was given to do throughout “Trek,” (and Beltran’s acting running the gamut from teak to oak) I think it would have been better to kill Chakotay off in this episode and been done with it.
When stating their terms, why didn’t they ask for Seska back along with their first officer and the shuttle? She was part of their crew as well, not to mention the poor attitude of the Kazon towards women. And her plan wasn’t very successful. It could have solved all their issues.
First of all, Jurati was cleared from the murder charge because she was the victim of alien-induced temporary insanity.
Hackett is great to see, but she just makes the Kazon seem less threatening/interesting in comparison. They could have tried to explain why the various sects were close by, like Discovery did in its premiere; say it was the farthest extent of the Kazon empire back before they were conquered by the Trabe, or the midpoint between sects that served as hallowed space (Vaes Dothrak, if we’re sticking with Game of Thrones stuff). It almost feels like they drag Seska down, though it also feels like she’s too powerful/smart to defeat the entire crew/ship on her own.
The Kazon never had an empire, not in space, at least. The Trabe conquered their homeworld and enslaved them, and all their starfaring technology was taken from the Trabe when they rebelled and escaped. Implicitly, they were a pre-spaceflight people, possibly even preindustrial.
It looks like only five majes attended the summit, out of 18 Kazon sects in all. It’s not that unreasonable that 5/18 of the leaders would be close enough to reach the site in time. I don’t think it was specified how long the episode took.