“Prophecy”
Written by Larry Nemecek & J. Kelley Burke and Raf Green & Kenneth Biller and Michael Sussman & Phyllis Strong
Directed by Terry Windell
Season 7, Episode 14
Production episode 260
Original air date: February 7, 2001
Stardate: 54518.2
Captain’s log. Voyager is being fired upon by a cloaked ship. They get enough sensor readings when it briefly decloaks to fire to determine that it’s a Klingon ship, and one that’s almost a century out of date. Once they realize that, they’re able to penetrate the cloak and fire.
His ship now badly damaged, Captain Kohlar is willing to talk, if for no other reason than to give his crew time to fix the ship. He doesn’t believe Janeway’s assertion that the Klingon Empire and the Federation have been allies for eight decades, seeing only the ship of the empire’s enemy. Janeway insists that she has a Klingon in her crew, and a skeptical Kohlar agrees to beam over and meet her.
Upon meeting Torres and noting that she is pregnant, Kohlar is suddenly very urgent to return to his ship, just barely remembering to take a copy of the Khitomer Accords with him. He gives his word that he will not fire on Voyager again.
He informs his crew that their quest is finally ended: they have found the kuvah’magh, the prophesied child who will be the savior of the Klingon people. Kohlar’s great-grandfather set out a hundred years ago to seek the kuvah’magh, having unearthed some sacred texts containing prophecies about the savior.
Torres and Paris’ fetus matches several of those prophecies: the child was conceived in the right month, the mother is an offworlder who has suffered many hardships and who won a glorious victory against 10,000 warriors (she helped destroy a Borg Cube), and the father is an honorable warrior (stretching it with Paris, but what the hell). Also it is said that “You would know me before I know the world,” which tracks with encountering her before she’s born, and that she’ll be found after two warring Houses have made peace, for which the Khitomer Accords qualify.
The warp core on the Klingon ship breaches, and Voyager has to rescue all two hundred people on board of various ages before it goes boom. Janeway angrily asks why Kohlar scuttled his ship—sensor scans reveal that the breach was not due to Voyager’s weapons fire as he claimed—and Kohlar admits that their duty now is to follow the kuvah’magh.
Now Voyager has two hundred extra people on board. Crew members double up in quarters (including Tuvok stuck rooming with Neelix), and there are issues in the mess hall, with Kim and Neelix having to break up a fight over stolen food.
Torres needs a security escort, which doesn’t thrill her, and she’s constantly being hounded by Klingons to the point where she beams back to her quarters rather than walk from engineering.
Janeway then informs her and Paris that several Klingons have engaged in a hunger strike until they get to talk to the kuvah’magh‘s mother. Torres reluctantly agrees.
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It isn’t until then that Kohlar’s second-in-command, T’Greth, learns that Torres is only half-Klingon and that her mate is fully human. (How he managed to miss this when Klingons have been stalking Torres for days is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
After T’Greth storms off in a huff, Kohlar speaks privately to Janeway, Paris, and Torres. It turns out that Kohlar himself isn’t entirely convinced that Torres’ daughter is the kuvah’magh, but at this point, he doesn’t care. He just wants their endless journey to end. He wants Torres to lead them to a planet where they can settle down and get on with their lives instead of bopping around a strange quadrant for decades on end.
Torres reluctantly agrees to study the texts to find ways to make it believable that she’s carrying the savior. (This is where they come up with the rationalization that helping destroy a Borg Cube counts as winning a glorious victory against 10,000 warriors.) She then tells tales of her grand victories and such (in a very exaggerated manner) to the gathered Klingons. T’Greth, however, is less than impressed, and he reminds everyone that the prophecies also say the kuvah’magh‘s father is an honorable warrior. Paris points out that he hasn’t turned down a challenge yet, and T’Greth says he hasn’t made one yet—but he is now. To Torres’ horror, Paris accepts T’Greth’s challenge to fight to the death.
In Janeway’s ready room, Torres castigates her husband and begs the captain to not let him go through with it—which Janeway absolutely agrees to. She will not have a death match on her ship. Kohlar proposes a compromise: a fight with blunted bat’leths, whoever falls three times loses. T’Greth calls it a coward’s fight, but apparently it was how Emperor Mur’eq insisted challenges play out during his reign so that warriors would only die in service of the empire instead of in petty duels. (Smart dude, was Mur’eq.) T’Greth reluctantly agrees.
After some quickie off-screen training by Kohlar, Paris faces off against T’Greth—but then the Klingon collapses. He’s suffering from nehret—indeed, all the Klingons have the dormant version of the virus. It’s also contagious, albeit only among Klingons, and Torres and the fetus now have it as well.
Seven has found a suitable planet for the Klingons to colonize. T’Greth—who refuses to remain in sickbay, preferring to die on his feet—conspires with several Klingons to seize Voyager. He doesn’t believe that Torres is carrying the kuvah’magh, and he wishes to strand Kohlar and his supporters on the planet along with Voyager’s crew, and then continue their search on the starship.
Their attempted takeover during the beam-down fails rather spectacularly, despite the fact that Janeway didn’t actually shut down all transporters the minute Tuvok detected weapons fire in the transporter room. T’Greth’s attempt to take over the bridge is stymied by Janeway and the rest of the bridge crew. (But not Paris—he mostly hides behind the helm console.)
The stunned T’Greth wakes up in sickbay only to be informed by the EMH that he’s not going to die. The stem cells from Torres’ fetus were able to cure nehret. T’Greth is gobsmacked to realize that the unborn child really is their savior…
The Klingons all beam down to the planet to live happily ever after. Kohlar gives his great-grandfather’s bat’leth to Torres as a present for her daughter. Torres promises to tell her all about Kohlar and his people.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Amazingly, Kohlar’s hundred-year-old cloaking device is still effective against Voyager’s sensors—at least until Chakotay orders Seven to use metaphasic scanning, whatever that is.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway kicks all the ass on the bridge, making T’Greth seriously regret trying to take over her ship.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok gets to share his quarters with Neelix. Just when Neelix has learned a whole bunch of Klingon drinking songs, too!
Half and half. Torres is extremely uncomfortable with the notion of her unborn daughter being a messiah, and doesn’t like anything that happens in the episode—especially the deadly disease that the Klingons gave her. However, there is one moment that she appreciates, when Kohlar invites her to make a plea for the dead, honoring the sacrifices of their ancestors.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. When it is suggested that the Klingons be kept in the shuttle bay, it’s Neelix who has to remind them that they’re a generation ship of families. (Well, his exact words are “there are women and children,” yet more proof that Talax is exactly like the 1940s United States, since apparently women are all helpless and need to be saved…) He also prepares lots of Klingon food, to the rest of the crew’s chagrin.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kim breaks up a fight in the mess hall, and the woman who started it, Ch’rega, spends most of the rest of the episode pursuing him, to his agony. Neelix steps in and berates Kim publicly in front of Ch’rega, thus causing her to switch her pursuit to Neelix. Their subsequent liaison trashes Tuvok’s quarters.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH gets to give Kim permission to mate with an alien species, the same permission Kim never got in “The Disease.” Kim, however, doesn’t want permission. (He also tells the EMH that the wound on his cheek was from cutting himself shaving. The EMH is skeptical…)
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Paris and T’Greth fight in a cave on the holodeck, because apparently that’s the only place Klingons re-create on holodecks when they want to fight (cf. “The Killing Game,” “Day of Honor,” DS9’s “Blood Oath,” etc.).
Do it.
“I see fear in your eyes, human!”
“The only Klingon I’m afraid of is my wife after she’s worked a double shift.”
–T’Greth and Paris talking smack before their fight.
Welcome aboard. Several past Trek guests in this one: Wren T. Brown, last seen as the shuttle pilot in TNG’s “Manhunt,” plays Kohlar. Sherman Howard, last seen as Endar in TNG’s “Suddenly Human” and Syvar in DS9’s “Shakaar,” plays T’Greth. And Paul Eckstein, last seen as two different Jem’Hadar on DS9, two different Hirogen on Voyager, and Supervisor Yost in “Gravity,” plays Morak. Plus we have Peggy Jo Jacobs as Ch’rega.
Trivial matters: The original pitch for this story by the husband-and-wife team of Larry Nemecek and J. Kelley Burke was made in the early days of the show’s development, before “Caretaker” even aired. It was purchased and shelved, not used until this final season, when the story was rewritten by one set of staffers and the script written by another set.
Nemecek is a Trek historian and the author of The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion (an official book he was hired to write after writing several TNG concordances on his own), which he updated twice, once after the show concluded, and again after Nemesis was released; The Making of Star Trek: First Contact, with Ian Spelling and Lou Anders; and Stellar Cartography. He has also written extensively for various Trek magazines, nonfiction works, and exhibits, and currently hosts The Trek Files podcast.
Janeway and Chakotay reference the Khitomer Accords, stated as being signed eighty years ago. That happened shortly after The Undiscovered Country (which was 84 years prior to this, but rounding off is definitely a thing), and the treaty was named in DS9’s “The Way of the Warrior.” (The treaty was also abrogated in that episode, but it was reinstated in “By Inferno’s Light,” and Voyager’s now-regular contact with Starfleet through Project: Pathfinder means they’re aware of the fact that, at this point, the treaty is intact.)
The Klingons’ ancestors set out a hundred years before, which would be during the time period between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan. Not enough is known about that time period in Klingon history to indicate why they decided the empire was corrupt enough to warrant this long-term mission.
The notion that Torres and Paris’ daughter is the kuvah’magh will continue to be explored in the post-finale Voyager fiction, most notably in the Spirit Walk duology by Christie Golden, and the various novels by Kirsten Beyer, particularly Full Circle and The Eternal Tide. It’s also part of the Star Trek Online storyline, where the grown-up Miral Paris joins Starfleet, and her status as the kuvah’magh leads to many other Klingons joining Starfleet as well.
This is the only onscreen mention of the Emperor Mur’eq, though your humble rewatcher established that the recurring character of Kor was of the same House as that emperor in his novella “The Unhappy Ones” in Seven Deadly Sins. That family connection is also seen in regular commenter Christopher L. Bennett’s Enterprise novel Live by the Code.
Set a course for home. “There will be no death matches aboard my ship.” There’s a good episode buried under the muddle here, but it’s fighting to get out from all the nonsense. There are several different stories here, and none of them get enough room to breathe, and it makes it hard for any of them to be convincing.
We’ve got the Klingon messiah storyline. We’ve got the Klingon refugees all trying to fit on Voyager. We’ve got Tuvok and Neelix sharing quarters. We’ve got Kim being pursued by Ch’rega. We’ve got a disease-of-the-week. We’ve got T’Greth being an asshole and challenging Paris. And we’ve got the inevitable take-over-the-ship storyline.
That last is particularly ham-fisted. The minute phasers are fired in the transporter room, the transporters should be shut down, but Janeway doesn’t try that until minutes later, when the Klingons have locked them out. People are supposedly beamed off the ship, but we don’t see that, and then T’Greth beams onto the bridge where the Klingons only hit one person and the Starfleet crew hit everybody and it’s all over. It’s the most boring ship takeover sequence in the history of Trek, just full of idiocy on both sides.
Not that any of the rest of it is any good. This era of Trek wasn’t great at whimsy, and the Kim-Neelix-Ch’rega storyline needed the goofiness of a Tex Avery cartoon (“Little Rural Riding Hood” comes to mind), not the tiresome cliché we got. We’re promised some Odd Couple-style shenanigans with Neelix and Tuvok and then get precisely none of it, aside from a sock-on-the-door scene at the very end. Almost no attention is paid to the fact that Voyager has doubled its complement, aside from one lame mess-hall fight, which is only there to set the sexy hijinks plot in motion.
Also, the notion that T’Greth somehow missed that Torres was only half-Klingon until the end of Act II is hilariously ridiculous, and makes it really hard to take T’Greth seriously as a character. (It doesn’t help that Sherman Howard mistakes shouting for acting, for the most part.)
There are two aspects of this episode that work. One is Torres’s complete frustration with every nanosecond of this whole thing. She doesn’t want to be the Virgin Mary equivalent in a Klingon cult, she doesn’t want to have to have a security guard on her at all times, she doesn’t want her husband to fight to the death, and she especially doesn’t want a deadly disease. Even when she does go along with Kohlar’s plan, her recitation of her great deeds is somewhat less than convincing. Roxann Dawson plays it perfectly as someone who is incredibly uncomfortable with this manner of boasting but trying her best. (Contrast this with the story Kor tells at the top of DS9’s “The Sword of Kahless,” which John Colicos tells with verve and panache. But Kor is used to being a bombastic Klingon, Torres really really isn’t.)
The other is Kohlar himself. Wren T. Brown imbues the character with great gravity and also significant exhaustion. He wants very much for this quest to be over with, but he’s not being stupid about it. His plan is actually a good one, and he’s earnest in his desire to do right by his people, both by the terms of the prophecy and in terms of getting them to stop being nomads on a fruitless quest.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido is going to be part of The Gold Archive, a series of monographs on various episodes of Star Trek, from the original series to the current spate of programs on Paramount+. Keith will be writing about TNG‘s “Birthright” two-parter for the series, which will be out some time in 2022.
I like this one because I like Torres and Roxann Dawson’s acting (she also looks particularly fetching in her Klingon get-up, which makes me once again wish we got to see their characters out of uniform more often without it being for holodeck shenanigans), but large parts of it feel like a TNG story (in no small part due to it’s passing resemblance to “The Emissary” during the first part of the episode) or a DS9 one. It also contains one of my least favorite Voyager tropes- the ship stumbling upon stuff from the Alpha Quadrant completely by accident. That said, generational ships are one of my favorite SF tropes, and I like that they used a race we are familiar with- it makes the Klingons seem more like the diverse people and not a planet of hats.
Them having to double up makes me wonder what the normal room assignment is. We see in “Good Sheppard” that some people have roommates, but you would think that on a ship that has lost people (and a ship where people *have* to be hooking up and forming long-term partnerships), there would be enough rooms that the 3rd in command of the ship wouldn’t be forced to share with the line cook, even if everyone else had to double up.
@1- “you would think… there would be enough rooms that the 3rd in command of the ship wouldn’t be forced to share with the line cook, even if everyone else had to double up.”
True, although as someone observed about the brig last episode, it’s possible that some of that space has been utilized for other projects, or that some crew quarters have been enlarged.
It’s also seems entirely plausible that Neelix rigged the roommate lottery in a continuing attempt to bond with Mr. Vulcan.
I don’t remember what I thought about most of this episode, but I do remember being extremely impressed by Wren T. Brown as Kohlar. He has a fabulous voice and played the character very well, as you say. I’m surprised to hear a low opinion of Sherman Howard’s acting, since I know him as one of the greatest screen Lex Luthors, in the Superboy TV series. Maybe he didn’t have good material here?
I wasn’t pleased that the post-finale novels chose to treat the whole kuvah’magh prophecy as if it were genuinely real. The attitude of this episode seems to be that it was nonsense, a bit of mythology that the characters had to stretch and handwave like crazy to associate with Torres and her child. Even Kohlar didn’t really believe it, he was just using his crew’s belief to bring their fruitless quest to an end. The child “actually” saving them at the end was a coincidence.
It’s probably for the best that they waited until season 7 when the ship was more than halfway home to do this one. It’s conceivable, perhaps, that a Klingon ship could’ve made it 70,000 light years in 100 years, but it’s more plausible if it’s just 30,000 or so.
Thought for sure that was Avery Brooks pulling a cameo until I looked it up.
joyceman: When Jammer reviewed this when it came out, he noted the similarities between the voices of Brown and Brooks, also.
Christopher: I’m right there with you on Howard’s Luthor, and he was good in “Suddenly Human” on TNG, too, but he was just awful here.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
My huge issue with this episode is that it makes absolutely no sense given the events that happened in Barge of the Dead. That episode was – to a certain extent – about Torres becoming “born again” in the Klingon religion. Yet Torres presents herself as a total skeptic who believes nothing whatsoever about Klingon religion here. So once again Voyager totally forgets that continuity exists.
@6 Eh, that didn’t bother me. Just because you start going back to church as an adult doesn’t mean you are going to suddenly buy into the Klingon People’s Temple just because they also happen to be religious. These people seem like they are fringe even among Klingon believers. Alternatively, considering how little we know about Klingon religion, there could be some kind of Sunni-Shia, Catholic-Protestant, Roman Catholic- Eastern Orthodox thing going on here.
@6/Karl Zimmerman: I didn’t see “Barge of the Dead” as being about B’Elanna becoming religious, just about B’Elanna coming to terms with her mommy issues. She didn’t really know if what she experienced was genuine, but if there was any chance that it was, she felt an obligation to try to save her mother’s soul. Becoming open to the possibility is not the same as becoming a devout worshipper. Especially when what moved her was not the faith itself, but her sense of guilt about her mother. We saw no sign that she continued to practice Klingon religion after that episode.
@6 that bothered me too. Torres started out the series being pretty disconnected from her Klingon heritage, and over the course of some episodes was coming around to it, particularly in Barge of the dead. I would have thought she’d take on at least some decor in her quarters in honor of that turnaround in her beliefs. I felt they went too far the other way in this episode, that she was practically back to being Klingon in genes only. But it was a nice moment to have her starting to recall how to recite some prayers with Kohlar. Was also pretty funny to have her go from being upset about being the only Klingon around only 2 episodes ago, to having 200 of them around.
It seems unlikely the the tribe would be happy with settling down on a planet while the messiah continues on Voyager. Surely they had done all this because they wanted to be in the messiah’s camp of sorts, one of their first followers. Why would they just settle on a planet now that they’ve bumped into her mother? What exactly was the purpose of their mission?
“200 Klingons on board poses a security risk”. Understatement of the season. They outnumber the crew now by a significant margin.
This was a watch once and never want to see again kind of episode for me. I was turned off from the very beginning when it was yet another prominent Alpha Quadrant species that Voyager ends up encountering in the Delta Quadrant, and of course it’s the Klingons. No one even seems to bat an eye at the implausibility. There’re the lame attempts at comedy hijinks with the stuff with Tuvok and Neelix, and with Kim and Neelix and the Klingon woman.
Was it even suggested by Janeway or the Klingons themselves that they remain on Voyager so they could all return to the AQ together? I know that type of continuity would never be considered going forward but at least the question of it would have been appreciated.
@9 The resolution didn’t click for me either. They spent 100 years looking for Jesus, they find her about to be born, and then her mom says go live over there and never see her again? Who’s gonna take that deal?
I’ll agree with Krad’s take; I liked Torres rolling her eyes at everything, I liked Kohlar, and the rest is chaff. Kohlar really is one of the more likeable Klingons I think we’ve ever met. He’s a good leader and doesn’t play into the stereotypes we always expect from Klingons. Honestly it would have been kinda cool to have a Klingon ship link up with Voyager and return home with them. There are only a dozen episodes left, they probably could have pulled off a new cast of recurring Klingons for that short a time, and it would have made both the ending make sense and the episode itself seem less pointless.
Amazingly it’s even worse than that– Kohlar at one point references how he’s trying to get his people home just like Janeway is, so they were told off-screen that Voyager isn’t just another Federation ship, they’re stranded and headed home. So the father must either be aboard the ship or a Delta Quadrant native since left in the dust, but Janeway said she has a Klingon serving on board, as in one Klingon. So, therefore, the father obviously must not be Klingon and yet this still comes as a shock. I guess in theory the father could be a since-deceased second Klingon, but come on– this is the first and most obvious question to ask, not a fact to be stumbled on.
Not that we needed any other confirmation, but the ending also serves as an amazing case of Status Quo Is God. Do any of the Voyager crewmembers want to give up this crazy life and take a shot at being a colonist with a bunch of Klingons? Alternatively, are any of the Klingons not that into being colonists and want to join up with Voyager? They obviously managed to keep their ship running for a hundred years, so it sure seems like some of these lot could be useful. But that would involve either having a secondary cast of characters that can be shredded, which we don’t have, or introducing a new recurring character, which they’re not going to do, so forget it. Some good ideas in here, but overall what a mess.
“I was hoping our daughter would be special but I never dreamed she’d turn out to be the Klingon messiah.”
It’s a bit odd to have another episode focusing on Torres’ pregnancy just two episodes after “Lineage”, but I guess they wanted to get this one in quickly. And, unlike the majority it seems, I think it’s actually a pretty good episode all told. Bringing the Klingons in might seem like an unlikely coincidence, but curiously I find myself more willing to give this one a pass than them being back in an area full of Hirogen in “Flesh and Blood”, since at least the episode acknowledges that they’re a long way from home and allows for the several generations of travel it would take for them to get there, something that other episodes would have done well to bear in mind!
Kohlar is an interesting character, something of an agnostic when it comes to the quest: He’s not expecting their saviour to appear in a blaze of blinding light, but he thinks maybe this child can be their saviour if he can just make the details fix. I’d never really thought until now about the fact that at the end of this episode there’s a Klingon colony in the Delta Quadrant, it feels like there’s story potential in there somewhere although it’s never really been revisited. (The Voyager Relaunch novels played with the idea of some Klingons seeing Paris and Torres’ daughter as a messiah, but that was back in the Alpha Quadrant.)
It’s nice to see Paris getting a chance to be badass, having a bat’leth duel and being the only person other than Janeway to be any use defending the bridge. (Despite Krad libelling him in the plot summary, he personally takes down T’Greth and another Klingon while the security guards’ only contribution is to stand there and get shot. Ducking behind the console pretty much makes him the smartest person in the room.) And it’s rather amusing that the Doctor almost derails the fulfilment of the prophecy by being unable to resist trying to take the credit, until he gets a warning growl from Janeway. It occurs to me that Voyager was out of contact with the Federation the whole time their alliance with the Klingons was broken, which would explain Janeway seeing it as so solid here.
I think this is the only episode other than “The Disease” to mention needing permission from the captain and medical officer to mate with an alien: Assuming the Doctor isn’t being facetious, it seems it does refer to any species, even your well-known Alpha Quadrant ones, rather than just new species. Unfortunately, this is one of those plotlines that was in bad taste in 2001 and even worse taste in 2021, as the idea of Kim being forced into non-consensual sex is played for laughs. Neelix offering himself up as a willing substitute is an acceptable solution, but the punchline of him wrecking Tuvok’s quarters in the throes of passions isn’t remotely funny, despite the episode thinking it is.
@9 et al: The prophecy claims that the kuva’magh is going to lead them to a new home, and Torres and Kohler manage to make a planet fit the description. Despite colloquial references to “the messiah”, it seems she did what they expected her to do and they were happy with that. (And after all, there was some debate about what the Judeo-Christian messiah was actually meant to do, so…)
Klingons are a warrior race, right? So now they’re stranded in the Delta Quadrant without a ship on a planet and I don’t think Janeway gave them any shuttles. They’re only 200 or so people strong so they can’t afford to divide into houses and fight each other. Hopefully there’s at least native boar and deer for them to hunt and earn glory and an honored place in Stova’kor.
garreth: Klingons are a culture in which warriors hold the highest place in society. Not quite the same thing. (An actual “warrior race” would probably die out inside a few generations.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@13/cap-mjb: “curiously I find myself more willing to give this one a pass than them being back in an area full of Hirogen in “Flesh and Blood”, since at least the episode acknowledges that they’re a long way from home and allows for the several generations of travel it would take for them to get there, something that other episodes would have done well to bear in mind!”
But surely both those things apply to the Hirogen far more than they apply to the Klingons. Hirogen are nomadic, so by definition they’re all a long way from wherever their original home was and a long way from other Hirogen. And their civilization in its current form is at least a thousand years old, so they’ve had at least ten times as long to travel the galaxy as this group of Klingons has.
I know, I know… the ratting is the LEAST important part… but you say a lot of nice things and then only rate it a 5, something doesn’t add up.
I truly enjoyed this post, no matter how wrong your rating is (I kid, I kid), and I’m glad there’s more to Miral in the tie-in fiction.
But KRAD, the Klingons have been described on Star Trek as a warrior race. Was it not Locutus himself who upon encountering Worf on the Enterprise stated: ”Worf. Species: Klingon. A warrior race.” And the Borg know best ;o)
@16/CLB: At the risk of rehashing an old argument, my issue with “Flesh and Blood” wasn’t just that they ran into some Hirogen, but that the episode was written as though they were still in the same area as space as “The Killing Game”, with Hirogen who knew about Voyager, knew Janeway by name and had holographic technology. Here, you’ve got a group of Klingons in an antiquated spaceship, whose knowledge of the Empire and the Federation is decades out of date and who have their families on board with them: That makes sense.
@18/garreth: Yes, characters in the show have claimed that the Klingons are a “warrior race,” but just because somebody asserts something doesn’t make it an absolute cosmic truth. The things people say only reflect their opinions and beliefs, which are not necessarily correct or accurate.
Keith’s point is that the concept of an entire species being nothing but warriors is a ridiculous oversimplification, that no society could possibly function that way. Warrior is a single role within a society, and it needs other roles to support and supplement it. If nobody knows how to do anything but fight and kill, who grows the food? Who makes the clothes and the tech? Who raises the children? Who repairs the roads? Yes, the Klingons in the warrior caste claim they’re a warrior race because it suits their beliefs and ideology to think that. But it’s obvious nonsense. And we’ve seen in episodes like ENT: “Judgment” that it’s an oversimplification, that the warrior caste rules Klingon society and elevates itself above the others, but is not the exclusive role within that society.
@19/cap-mjb: “my issue with “Flesh and Blood” wasn’t just that they ran into some Hirogen, but that the episode was written as though they were still in the same area as space as “The Killing Game”, with Hirogen who knew about Voyager, knew Janeway by name and had holographic technology.”
Which is a completely different set of objections from the ones you made in the previous post.
Again, though, why wouldn’t they know about Voyager and have the technology? The whole point of how “The Killing Game” ended was that the technology was meant to be shared with all Hirogen, no matter where they were in the galaxy, so that their whole society would have a chance to grow beyond hunting. It was never meant to be limited to that one local group. And even without the subspace beacon network Voyager accidentally destroyed, subspace radio still exists. I argued the last time this came up that it’s entirely reasonable that the information could’ve been shared across all of Hirogen civilization within a matter of weeks or months at most, just by each individual concentration of Hirogen passing it along to its immediate neighbors, who then passed it to more neighbors, etc.
“Here, you’ve got a group of Klingons in an antiquated spaceship, whose knowledge of the Empire and the Federation is decades out of date and who have their families on board with them: That makes sense.”
I’d say it’s the other way around. Hirogen have been spreading through the Delta Quadrant for thousands of years, so the odds of running into more Hirogen are quite high. As I pointed out before, they were clearly designed to be an enemy that could plausibly be encountered anywhere along Voyager‘s path because of their wide nomadic spread. But there’s only one Klingon ship in the entire Delta Quadrant, so the odds of Voyager just happening to bump into it are insanely low.
I can only imagine that the Klingons have been sold the idea that it’s their job to become the followers their messiah will need when she begins her ministry or hero quest or whatever the heck she’s supposed to do and that she will come for them when she’s ready. Kohlar probably isn’t the only one who really wants this quest to end.
The Klingon empire will probably be delighted to learn they have a foothold in the Delta Quadrant where there are plenty of enemies to fight.
Perhaps the Nehret was the real reason this group had to set sail away from Klingon society. Its a band of lepers? In that case the baby curing them would have a lot more meaning and reason for them to stop shuffling around aimlessly. They say it like they left because the Klingon empire had strayed from the path of righteousness, but they didn’t seem to disagree enough to stop firing on any federation ship they encounter.
Prophecy is no Rightful Heir, to be sure. That TNG episode is still the benchmark for Klingon beliefs and religion.
Obviously, it maintains season 7’s focus on Torres/Paris as its only substantial longterm arc. Not that the episode changes them in any significant way. Torres is rightfully annoyed at the whole ordeal, and there’s nothing in here that reshapes her views on being Klingon.
As pointed out, there’s too much clutter in this, and very little in this episode actually works. Kohlar is the exception – he’s a pretty good example of a DS9-era Klingon, one who’s enough of a complex character, that he goes past the usual Klingon histronics, and who’s able to see the futility in the ongoing fruitless quest, while still hoping to do right by his people.
I finally watched this episode for the very first time last night. For whatever reason, I just had never seen it before and had never been really compelled to watch it before, and afterwards, that apathy about watching it felt totally justified. There was nothing particularly compelling about this episode, and it felt absolutely jumbled with way too many story elements, and none of them held much interest to me. I have never been a huge fan of Klingon-centric episodes, even on DS9, and this felt like another example of Voyager doing something of much lower quality than DS9 had previously done. For example, the treatment of Bajorans in “Flesh and Blood” and here, Klingons in “Prophecy.” Also, thank you for putting the image of the Klingon woman doing the pole dance with Neelix in my mind.
Also, I do agree that in some instances, the actor who played Kohlar did sound a little like Avery Brooks. Not the all the time, but a few instances when I was like, Damn, that sounds like Sisko!
By the way, if anyone is relying on Netflix to keep up with this rewatch, be aware that Netflix is losing Voyager (along with the Original Series and Enterprise) at the end of the month. They will presumably still be available on Hulu and Paramount+.
@6 and @9 Religion is complicated even for 21st century human terrans and feelings about family and group membership is a big factor. You have people who identify as Catholic but might only go to mass once a year on Christmas and maybe if they’re staying with Aunt Dolores who goes every week. You have Jews who keep kosher in their homes but not when they eat out at a restaurant (or vice versa, you eat kosher food at Grandma’s but your own house has bacon in the freezer).
@20/CLB: You can rationalise it, but it feels as though the episode didn’t. It was just “Right, let’s bring back the Hirogen and continue that storyline from three seasons and 30,000 light years back as if Voyager’s still only just down the road.” Whereas this one actually seems to have put some thought into what a Klingon ship that far out from where they last encountered Klingons would look like. Yes, it’s a big coincidence that Voyager runs into them, but once you get that out of the way, it seems more thought-out.
@26/cap-mjb: As I’ve said in the past, I think it’s unfair to blame the season 7 producers for finally picking up a story thread that the season 5-6 producers should’ve picked up but didn’t. It’s the previous showrunner’s fault that it was put off so late. It would’ve been worse just to leave it unresolved. The season 7 staff just did the best they could with the mess they inherited, and I’m glad they did.
And as I’ve explained, it still makes a thousand times more sense to run into the Hirogen this far away than it will for the Talaxians a bit more down the road.
@27/CLB: I don’t agree that it was a plot thread that needed to be “resolved”. It was a plot thread that could have been followed up on, but it wasn’t something that was needed. It’s not as though anything was even “resolved” in that episode: Presumably there’s still plenty of Hirogen hunting holograms with potentially disastrous consequences across the 30,000 light years Voyager’s just flown through. It didn’t even really feel as though Janeway learned anything from the experience or changed her behaviour afterwards. It was just a toy that they took out of the box, played with for an episode or two, and then left to gather dust again.
Even if a follow-up to the Hirogen arc was a good idea (and I’m not saying it’s a bad idea), there are better ways to handle it than one throwaway comment from Chakotay about not seeing the Hirogen in a while. If the idea is that different Hirogen sects have been passing it on to their neighbours across tens of thousands of light years, then the episode should have said that instead of hoping the audience don’t notice or leaving them to come up with their own explanations. Instead, they double down by having a Hirogen technician who knows Voyager and Janeway by name, rather than having heard a vague chinese whispers rumour that a distant party of Hirogen took the technology from a ship they encountered. It’s just all very small universe, which is why I maintain that this episode put more thought into the distances involved than that one did.
And “Homestead” is definitely a subject for another time, and I’ll be making my thoughts quite plain when we get there, don’t worry.
@28/cap-mjb: I still see those problems as a consequence of the previous showrunners’ delay in following up on the story, and so it’s unfair to blame their successors for it.
And I don’t see the use of arguing whether stories are “needed.” That’s specious rhetoric. Fiction isn’t about “need,” it’s about what’s interesting and worth exploring. A story about Janeway’s gift to the Hirogen having unintended consequences is certainly worth telling. No, the way they told the story isn’t perfect, but I consider those imperfections minor and forgivable in this case, certainly not a reason to dismiss the worth of the entire story.
@29/CLB: Given that you referred to it as “a story thread that the season 5-6 producers should’ve picked up but didn’t”, I thought that was exactly what you were saying, but I don’t feel strongly enough to argue the point. I’m just saying that, for me, “Flesh and Blood” had more credibility problems, which could have been fixed or at least lessened with very little effort, than this episode does.
This episode has some fun moments once you suspend all disbelief about AQ folks showing up. I wish about half of the subplots had been cut to give us more time with the good.
As to the Hirogen: the notion that the people spread out over thousands of light years have to only have knowledge spread by courier post and dark whispered rumors strikes me as far more absurd. Are the Hirogen supposed to lack any sort of news or tech related media? And someone in charge of programming and maintaining the holodeck tech should *especially* be familiar with the Voyager and the circumstances that lead to holodecks being adopted.
@31/Skada: For what it’s worth, the Klingon Empire is Beta Quadrant, not Alpha Quadrant, and Voyager is pretty close to the Delta/Beta border at this point. Like CLB said upthread, having a Klingon ship make it ~30k light years in a hundred years doesn’t really take all that much suspension of disbelief.
@32/Idran: I agree with your second sentence but not your first. On the scale of the galaxy as a whole, the difference between the Alpha and Beta Quadrant sides of Federation/Klingon/Romulan/Cardassian/Breen/etc. territory is inconsequential, like worrying about which part of London is in the Eastern or Western Hemisphere. If we assume Voyager‘s usual conceit of a starship being capable of about 1000 light years per year, then the difference in travel time between a ship starting from Qo’noS and a ship starting from, say, Cardassia or Tholia would be a matter of a few months at most.
I’m going to say it again. There’s no canonical evidence to support the notion that the Klingon Empire is in the Beta Quadrant, and a ton of canonical evidence that it’s in the Alpha Quadrant, the primary evidence being Chancellor Gowron repeatedly referring to his being in the Alpha Quadrant on DS9.
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido
The Klingons have traveled from the region that Voyager is herself bound for. I’d have cut half the stupid subplots for just a line or two of dialogue where Janeway asked Kohlar for their logs, so Voyager‘s crew could prepare for the road ahead. That would have been both practical and reasonable.
Another thing: the Klingon vessel is called a “generation ship,” but none of the adults say anything about having been born onboard, or about being Klingons who have never seen Qonos or interacted with the heart of Klingon society. We know Klingons can live long enough for some of the original crew to still be onboard (we aren’t told that everyone eventually gets the retrovirus); I’d have been interested to learn if that were the case.
Wow. Maybe I’m just in a good mood, but I particularly enjoyed this episode — and I generally hate prophecy episodes. I’ll grant the takeover was irksome (yet mercifully brief). But the rest of it just worked for me and achieved a kind of electric pace while having a bit of heart stuff in it too with Tores. I’m also a sucker for anything to do with Klingon mating rituals. I was glad to see Neelix get some too.
Also, Kohlar is the most handsome Klingon ever.
It’s a wonder that no Trek show ever used the title of “Prophecy” before. Seriously, we made it all the way through DS9, which was basically prophecy central, and it was never used.
Oh, yeah, and the whole part where they run into yet another Alpha Quadrant thing made me realize that Voyager is basically an 18th-century novel, where everything and everyone comes around again, geography and circumstance be damned.