“The Fight”
Written by Michael Taylor and Joe Menosky
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 5, Episode 19
Production episode 208
Original air date: March 24, 1999
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. We open with Chakotay screaming in anguish in sickbay, begging for something for the pain. The EMH refuses, as he needs to let the aliens rewrite his neural pathways so they can communicate with him and help them get out of chaotic space.
Eventually we flash back to a few days earlier. Chakotay is on the holodeck, in a boxing ring. Boothby is his corner man, just as he was when Chakotay boxed as a cadet. He’s in the ring against a Terrellian. Chakotay sees an odd disturbance behind the Terrellian which distracts him long enough for the alien to deliver a knockout punch.
Chakotay wakes up in sickbay to the EMH treating him for a mild concussion and lecturing him snidely about how stupid boxing is. Chakotay mentions the odd disturbance, which the doctor chalks up to the typical hallucinations one gets after being cold-cocked, but Chakotay insists it was before he was hit. Further examination shows that the ganglia in his visual cortex are highly active, which wouldn’t happen from a punch. (The EMH asks if his boxing opponent used a directed energy weapon, but Chakotay allows as how they stuck with boxing gloves…)
Buy the Book
Fugitive Telemetry
The first officer is called to the bridge, but the EMH wants to run further tests. On arriving at the bridge (after taking the time to change into his uniform), Janeway informs Chakotay that there’s a spatial phenomenon that’s interfering with sensors. It’s also moving constantly, and they can’t seem to maneuver around it.
Then the distortion envelopes Voyager, covering it in distortion similar to what Chakotay saw on the holodeck. In astrometrics, Seven informs Janeway, Chakotay, and Tuvok that the Borg have encountered this before: it’s called “chaotic space.” It’s full of gravimetric distortions, subspace sinkholes, and other craziness. Voyager is now trapped in it, and Seven doesn’t know how to get out of it.
Chakotay starts to hallucinate events from the holodeck session, both aurally and visually, both in his quarters and on the bridge. At one point on the bridge, he starts actually boxing, and Tuvok is forced to take him down with a neck pinch.
The EMH explains that Chakotay has a genetic marker for sensory tremens. It’s genetic and inherited—Chakotay’s grandfather suffered from it—but it was suppressed in Chakotay up until now. Something in chaotic space has activated the gene.
Kim has reconfigured sensors so that they finally work, and they’re able to move forward. They come across another ship, which has a hull breach, and no life signs. They download the ship’s log. The vessel was stuck in chaotic space for a year before the hull breached, killing everyone. Also the captain and one of the engineers suffered from hallucinations similar to those suffered by Chakotay.
The EMH beams the captain over for autopsy, and learns that the captain’s DNA was also altered in such a way as to make him susceptible to hallucinations. Chakotay wants to go on a vision quest, which Janeway approves over the EMH’s objections.
He finds himself in a forest, and sees his grandfather, and immediately falls into what sounds like a very old, very constant argument over whether or not he took his meds. Then he goes into a cave, which oddly leads to a boxing ring, where he makes brief contact with some aliens.
Chakotay comes out of the vision quest knowing that Voyager can escape chaotic space by altering the warp field to a rentrillic trajectory. Unfortunately, nobody has the first clue what a rentrillic trajectory actually is. Chakotay is afraid to commune further with the aliens for fear of losing his mind the way his grandfather did.
Janeway convinces him to start up the vision quest again. He bounces from the boxing ring—where he’s to fight “Kid Chaos,” a boxer with blackness and stars for a face. Tuvok is also there with a security detail, but Chakotay calls them off. Paris tries to stop the fight, as does the EMH. Neelix becomes his trainer, and then he tries to avoid the fight, bouncing from the ring to engineering to the bridge and back to the cave, where he sits with his grandfather. Then he’s back in the ring, where the EMH histrionically tries to call the match for medical reasons.
Chakotay comes out of the vision quest, and he accuses the EMH of stopping the fight. The EMH is forced to sedate him. Chakotay is in an altered state of reality, mixing up the real world with his boxing hallucination. Sensors have found a frequency in chaotic space that can rewrite DNA, and this is what happened both with the other ship and with Chakotay. To the EMH’s chagrin, Janeway sends Chakotay back into the ring, so to speak, to continue the contact, which puts us back where we were in the teaser.
After giving himself over to talking to the aliens by entering the boxing ring with them, he’s able to make contact. He goes to the bridge, still half-in and half-out of reality, and reprograms the sensors to run through the deflector dish, which enables them to find a course out of chaotic space.
Then he collapses.
Janeway gives him a couple of days off, and Chakotay decides to spend some time in the holodeck boxing ring, blowing off some steam…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Chaotic space is apparently a place where the laws of physics don’t apply and are constantly changing. Someone should tell Scotty…
There’s coffee in that nebula! Twice Janeway overrides the EMH’s medical concerns about Chakotay because without his contacting the aliens, the ship is well and truly borked.
Mr. Vulcan. After being forced to subdue Chakotay on the bridge when he starts acting like he’s in a boxing ring, Tuvok comments to Janeway that the first officer has a mean left jab. Chakotay’s rejoinder is, “Never spar with a Vulcan.”
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. We don’t see the real Neelix at all in this episode, only an illusory version in Chaktoay’s vision quest where he’s the first officer’s boxing trainer, which makes about as much sense as Boothby being his corner man.
Resistance is futile. Seven is able to identify what chaotic space is, though it’s not much help, since only one Borg Cube has actually escaped chaotic space in one piece.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is snidely dismissive of boxing as a sport, and goes from wanting to protect Chakotay from the harmful visions to encouraging him to partake of the harmful visions to save the ship.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Based on Chakotay’s holodeck program, boxing gyms in the 24th century look exactly like boxing gyms did in 1923…
Do it.
“A hard shot to the head and neck collapses the carotid artery and cuts the flow of blood to the brain. The hook: the head and neck twist laterally, traumatizing the cerebral tissue. And who can forget the upper cut? The head snaps back, rupturing tissue in the cerebellum and upper spinal cord. Yes! And the result of all this poetry in motion? Neurologic dysfunction, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, loss of balance and coordination, loss of memory—starting to sound familiar?”
–Chakotay’s hallucination of the EMH in his vision quest outlining the various bits of cranial trauma available to a career boxer.
Welcome aboard. Ray Walston returns as the image of Boothby on the holodeck, in Chakotay’s vision quest, and in his hallucinations, having previously played the real Boothby in TNG’s “The First Duty” and an 8472 pretending to be Boothby in “In the Flesh.”
Ned Romero, who previously played a different Indigenous character in TNG’s “Journey’s End” and a Klingon in the original series’ “A Private Little War,” plays Chakotay’s never-named grandfather.
Carlos Palomino, a professional boxer, served as Robert Beltran’s boxing trainer for the episode, and also played Chakotay’s holographic Terrellian sparring partner.
Trivial matters: The Terrellians were created for TNG’s “All Good Things…” but the scenes with them were cut. The species was mentioned in DS9’s “Life Support,” and finally seen in this episode. They’ll be mentioned again in Enterprise’s “Future Tense.”
The idea of giving Chakotay a spotlight involving boxing was first proposed during a dinner among Robert Beltran, Kenneth Biller, Brannon Braga, and Joe Menosky. That notion was joined with a story by Michael Taylor—the first one he submitted after joining the staff, which was initially rejected by Rick Berman.
Chakotay’s love of boxing will be seen again in “Tsunkatse.”
Set a course for home. “It’s the fight you’ve been waiting for!” Yes, it’s The Inevitable Boxing Episode that every third TV show seemingly has to do. Science fiction shows aren’t immune from it, either, viz. Babylon 5’s “TKO,” Batman’s “Ring Around the Riddler,” Battlestar Galactica’s “Unfinished Business,” Buck Rogers in the 25th Century’s “Olympiad,” Future Cop’s “Fighting O’Haven,” Quantum Leap’s “The Right Hand of God,” etc.
Chakotay being a devotee of boxing is kind of out of left field, but there’s nothing in the character’s history that contradicts it. We’ve seen so little of the first officer’s leisure time, and when they have bothered to give him any, it usually involves vision quests or some other attempt at Indigenous culture provided by the show’s fake Indian advisor. And of course, we get a vision quest here, too, but at least in this one it makes sense with the plot.
The general story here is perfectly serviceable. “Chaotic space” is yet another bit of nonsense that sounds cool but isn’t based on any actual astronomical phenomenon, which by this point in Trek’s evolution had become depressingly commonplace. But the general storyline of two very disparate life forms trying to communicate with each other, and of the problem of the week being solved by talking, is very good to see, and nicely played out. Yes, we’ve seen this sort of thing before—the original series’ “Devil in the Dark,” TNG’s “Darmok” and “Night Terrors,” DS9’s “Emissary,” etc.—but it’s still a solid premise.
But man, did they not have enough story for an hour. While some of the repetition is to be expected given the nature of what Chakotay is experiencing, it grows very tiresome very quickly. (If I had to hear Majel Barrett’s computer voice say, “Begin round one” one more time, I was going to throw my shoe at the TV.)
And holy crap, what a total waste and misuse of Ray Walston! The role Boothby plays here is completely absurd, as there’s nothing in any of the stories we’ve been told of the character going all the way back to TNG’s “Final Mission” that indicates that the Academy groundskeeper moonlit as a boxing coach. That wouldn’t be so bad except he’s barely even used. What’s the point of bringing Walston back if he’s only going to have a few lines, all of which are right out of the Boxing Cliché Handbook? There’s virtually none of the character’s trademark sass.
At least some of the actors get to have fun. As usual, when actually given material to work with, Robert Beltran proves up to the task, as his agony and confusion and frustration are all palpable as madness takes its toll. Ned Romero is his usual dignified self, and both Ethan Phillips and especially Robert Picardo have a grand old time as the hallucinatory versions of their characters. Picardo is especially delightful, doing his best impersonation of Burgess Meredith in the Rocky movies as he tries to convince Chakotay not to fight.
For The Inevitable Boxing Episode, it’s not bad, though I can’t bring myself to go out of my way to call it good, either, especially given how it wastes Walston.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido is also writing about Falcon & The Winter Soldier for this site. Check out his brief history of the two characters in the comics, and look out for his review of episode one tomorrow.
I always kind of liked this episode, not because it is particularly good, but because I always thought Chakotay had the potential to be an incredibly interesting character, and that Robert Beltran had the chops to portray him as one, but the show just never gave him the chance to do it. I don’t think his love of boxing is completely out of left field, especially if you buy the theory that he taught the advanced tactical training course that Ro Laren was sent to. And unlike some of the other interests-of-the-week, this one will at least come up again in a future episode. From the bits and pieces we get of Chakotay’s backstory, we know he was a rebellious and angry young man, who (IMO) seemed to join up with Starfleet more to get away from home than anything else, and who was willing to turn on Starfleet and become a terrorist when he thought they were wrong. It seems reasonable to me that someone like that might find the boxing ring to be a fun place to be. I think it is far more in-character than when Hoshi Sato suddenly turned out to be a martial-arts expert after being a language teacher and spending most of her time on the Enterprise cowering in fear of everything.
Unfortunately, Chakotay mostly turns into a wet Graham cracker the minute he stepped on to Voyager. There are a couple good episodes where he gets to do things other than report that the shields are failing and spout off overtly-stereotypical “Native American” stories (and I hesitate to even call them that, given almost all the attempts at Native American culture in Voyager were just completely made up), but even they don’t usually give him all that much character development. My personal headcanon is that getting thrown into the Delta Quadrant gave him a major come-to-jesus moment, and he started to regret a lot of the things he had done in life and decided that life on Voyager was his chance to make amends for them. Which would explain why a man who gave up his whole life to fight over territory suddenly started spouting all that “a man does not own land” stuff. Of course, the script never bothers to actually tell or show us what caused this change, because that would actually have been interesting.
Still, it is an ok episode, although I will admit I actually like it when they run into weird areas of space that are completely trippy. The weirdness of the Delphic Expanse was one of the few interesting ideas ENT had, and I always like it when the crew is just completely befuddled by something.
You’d think I’d hate this episode, because I utterly loathe boxing as a sport; I find it barbaric, one of the only professional sports that actively encourages inflicting potentially crippling or fatal head trauma on another human being rather than trying to protect against it. I find it distasteful that the supposedly enlightened Federation hasn’t outgrown the sport, or at least made it safer by requiring protective headgear and/or banning blows to the head and neck.
And yet, despite myself, I kind of enjoy “The Fight.” It’s one of those classic Menosky premises revolving around symbols and metaphors as the threats to be faced or the puzzles to be solved, and the Doctor does an excellent job spelling out everything I hate about boxing, so at least the episode acknowledges both sides of the debate.
And yes, there’s another crazy spatial phenomenon, but the Delta Quadrant is littered with those, so at least it’s consistent. I tend to assume it’s an overall characteristic of that region. In The Buried Age, I suggested that all the subspace corridors and sinkholes and eddies and inversions and whatnot that populate the quadrant are the relics of an ancient, advanced galactic travel network that’s deteriorated over the ages.
A boxing holo is, I suppose, one of those situations where deactivating (or weakening) the holodeck’s default safeties seems reasonable, or at least necessary.
Kid Chaos’s Starfield Face makes him look an awful lot like a Marvel Comics Cosmic Being.
I think it was in this episode, but it was definitely within the last week (and knowing what was up with Course: Oblivion this time, I doubt I would have held it against the duplicate). But one thing I noticed was Bridge crew acknowledging Captain Janeway’s orders by saying, “Aye, sir.” I definitely remembered the conversation from Caretaker where she made a point to Kim (and Paris, I think) that she wasn’t stickler enough to the rulebook, and preferred “Ma’am” (when it was crunch time) and just “Captain” most of the time. Even if the problem of being in Chaotic Space classified as “Crunch Time”, I was surprised to hear the “Sir.”
What with Chekov taking a nasty header off the deck of an aircraft carrier and McCoy fixing it within seconds, apparently there’s little reason to worry about severe head trauma in the future. I mean, they never seem to bother with helmets or any other protective gear when going on away missions to strange new worlds, either.
I have to fight you on one point, Ray Walston is never wasted! One of the great mysteries of Voyager was how they couldn’t find ways to get better scripts that featured Wang & Beltran.
And yes, there’s another crazy spatial phenomenon, but the Delta Quadrant is littered with those, so at least it’s consistent. I tend to assume it’s an overall characteristic of that region. In The Buried Age, I suggested that all the subspace corridors and sinkholes and eddies and inversions and whatnot that populate the quadrant are the relics of an ancient, advanced galactic travel network that’s deteriorated over the ages.
Oh, yeah, I’d forgotten about that particular plot point from Buried Age.
It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about the tie-in literature (be it Trek or other): To do narrative welding and patching, even if it’s just for minor world building details.
@3 – But to the point you can still get knocked out and suffer a concussion? The safety controls in the holodeck are laughable at this point. Might as well not have even installed them.
@8 I think the argument would be that it adds authenticity. Especially since they can probably fix traumatic brain injuries and eliminate their cumulative effects.
As for the barbarity of boxing, well, how many times have we seen humans join in with Klingons and their ancient rituals? That’s to say nothing of at least two of the founding worlds of the Federation, Andoria and Vulcan, having their own ancient bloody rituals. Boxing by comparison is kid stuff.
@9 – You can still die before medical treatment can be applied. Though, if Seven wasn’t so stingy with her special Borg-resurrection skills…
Sadly, Chakotay focus episodes are generally a chore for me and while there are plenty of boxing movies I enjoy and I actually took boxing lessons as a kid (we all wear gloves and headgear), a boxing-centered episode of Trek sounds like a big snooze. I watched the beginning minutes of this episode but then gave up. This review isn’t really making me change my mind. I got through watching the BSG boxing episode all right because at least there I had some man candy to gaze at!
About the only sport more boring to me than boxing is baseball, which is probably part of why I found DS9 to be a snoozefest overall. Chakotay trying to box people on the bridge was amusing though.
@13: Chakotay tries to box people on the bridge?!? In which act does that occur or how many minutes in so I can fast-forward to it?
One thing I will add to my comments is that at least Chakotay was just doing straight-up boxing, not an attempt to do SPACE BOXING! the way Babylon 5 and Buck Rogers did……………………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@15/krad: I thought it was kind of clever in a cheesy way how Buck Rogers‘ Olympics tie-in episode tried to make sports more futuristic. Like the telekinetic wrestling match where the wrestlers never touched each other. It looked like the intention was that the gloves they were wearing had some kind of tractor-beam effect, but I like to think they were actual psychokinetics. After all, psionic-powered individuals were an established part of the universe, so it stands to reason that if that were an established phenomenon, somebody would find a way to base a sport on it.
How did B5 do space boxing? I forget.
One of Voyager’s all-time worst episodes.
All I will say about this episode is that as a former amateur boxer, I usually loved the boxing episodes when they turned up. This one was the exception. Even with the Ray Walston cameo, giving it a 5 is rather generous in my book.
@16 The B5 episode had a human boxer become the first human to take part in an alien MMA-type competition. Not exactly Space Boxing, but clearly not actual boxing either.
Star Trek has synthehol, maybe they have syntheconcussion for realistic simulated brain damage in sports. This was 1999… Wikipedia says “In 1983, editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association called for a ban on boxing.” It also refers to “Dementia pugilistica” so I guess even ancient Romans had it. :-) There are some indications that the Federation has different ethics on personal safety and welfare, maybe they say, it’s your brain, take it out and play football with it if you want to.
Like in TNG “The Neutral Zone”, Data finds some people frozen in the 20th century to be revived by future medicine and Riker is like, “You want to rescue them, why?” The captain is just as annoyed when the dead people are revived. If Data wanted pets then maybe a cat… My headcanon is that Trek doctors actually can cure anything or restore you from your Transporter records, but they hold that ethically, when you’re dead, you’re dead, or you could keep coming back to life forever and that’s cheating. Then there’s the Khan thing making defrosting just anyone a bad idea, but I don’t remember them mentioning him.
Anyway… I think that what every genre show specifically must have, apparently, but especially shows about secret special people (mutants, vampires, telepaths, whichever), is the illegal underground mixed martial arts club where the special people are made to fight to please rich people (or special and rich, mainly just rich) who enjoy that. Typically, a young woman asks the good guys to find out why her brother seemed to be suddenly earning unexplained good money, then disappeared, because he’s fighting in the secret club, of course. Or he was, but not for long. This seems to be included in TV Tropes category “Gladiator Games” but that is mainly for fighting conducted publicly in ancient Rome style, and they don’t mention it occurring secretly in “Mutant X”, or in 1990s “Charmed” at least twice (if I count “Witch Wars”). They do mention “Tsunkatse” and “The Gamesters of Deuterium”. :-)
“The fight’s been cancelled on medical grounds! I hear there’s some bear baiting at the arena next door! Have fun!”
I remember at the time that this one had a lot of negative reviews, one of which proclaimed it as even worse than “Gravity”. Well, I ended up quite liking “Gravity”, so I went into this one with an open mind and a degree of optimism. I came out of it thinking “My god, it actually was as bad as everyone said.”
(The other problem was that the BBC decided to show this one at teatime, nearly an hour and a half before its usual slot. There was probably a sporting event later, which would be ironic I suppose, but they might have just wanted to get it out of the way and hope as few people as possible saw it and gave up on the show. I ended up with my body clock out of whack going “Okay, I’ve already watched Star Trek. What do I do now?”)
So I sat down to rewatch it and tried to have an open mind and optimism again, but halfway through I went “No, it actually is that bad.” I remember on first viewing completely failing to realise until late on that someone had chosen for no good reason to show the events out of order, and thus spent it wondering why Seven had to tell them they were in chaotic space when they already knew that, and why it was taking them so long to realise that aliens were trying to contact them when they already knew that at the start. Watching it again knowing that, it still felt as though it degenerated into showing scenes in random order, and it still seemed like having to sit through 35 minutes for the characters to work out something we were told at the start. (My other memory from first viewing is my dad being convinced that, with all the references to fighting yourself, “Kid Chaos” was going to turn out to be Chakotay himself.)
And even without that storytelling gimmick getting in the way, the episode just isn’t that interesting, coming across as a mash-up of “Night Terrors” and “Parallax” and probably a few other episodes as well with very little new or interesting of its own. I’m not sure if I knew Voyager was going to run into its own beacon because I remembered it from previous viewings or because that always happens in episodes like this. Apart from Robert Picardo chewing the scenery as a hallucination of the Doctor, it commits the cardinal sin of being monumentally dull.
Ray Walston appears as his second (and third!) fake Boothby in the show, and personally I thought he was channelling Burgess Meredith from the Rocky films more than Picardo was. I must admit I’d completely forgotten the bit with Chakotay’s grandfather until Ned Romero’s name came up in the cast, sadly underused in a variant of the enigmatic Indian character he often plays. (Are we allowed to say that?) Except in TOS, where they cast him as a Klingon instead. Janeway says she failed to get an A in an exam despite only messing up one question: Starfleet really needs less strict marking, or to accept that B- isn’t actually a bad mark at all. (See “Parturition”.) Paris actually manages to out-logic Tuvok at one point, he probably circled the day on his calendar. There’s an odd scene where Tuvok, in command of the bridge, summons Chakotay to report a problem to him: Did Janeway have her “Do not disturb” light on?
@20/Robert Carnegie: I know, right? Why does every show these days have to have an Underground Fight Club Episode? I think we should talk about these fight clubs, but nobody wants to for some reason… ;)
@21 – Thanks for that comment about the BBC showing this at a weird time, explains why I never saw it the first time round (showing American sci-fi outside the daily 6:00 – 7:30 two episode slot? There’s no excuse for that, I don’t care what sport was on, unless it was first class or test cricket which it wasn’t because it was BBC2 and the BBC lost the cricket rights before they would have broadcast this episode, and anyway if it was cricket the episode would have been shown later, not earlier).
@8- By and large I agree. I tend to think of the holodeck safeties as a big light switch labeled “Fluffy safe baby fun time,” in the active position and “Cool kids,” in the inactive, based on how the characters tend to treat it.(1) I do give props to DS9 for not doing a “holodeck safeties are off,” episode, despite having an arguably much more justifiable set-up for it (no one would have been overly surprised to learn that Quark had cut corners on safety protocols, or even intentionally disabled them at the behest of paying customers looking for an illicit thrill).
(1) This is of course, ridiculous. Clearly such a control wouldn’t be a simple binary. It’d be a dimmer switch.
@23: Ah, their cunning plan obviously worked on you then! If memory serves, the episode was shown at 5:25 when the usual slot was 6:45 (on Sunday, Voyager’s usual day for much of its run). I know the show was often pre-empted for cricket around Seasons 2 and 3 but obviously this was later on, probably around 2000. I’ll see if I can find the exact date when I’ve got a moment.
@22: DS9 kind of had a holodeck safeties off episode in “Our Man Bashir” as the characters couldn’t die in the holosuite otherwise they’d die for real (and that wound Garak had when Bashir shot him seemed pretty real too). However, (as most things in DS9) it was handled in a much better way than normal.
@26- Hmm. I was specifically remembering that as a holodeck malfunction episode that didn’t pad its stakes with “Safeties off,” (and resolves with Bashir going ‘Wait, this whole scenario is made up and doesn’t matter!’) I guess I’ll have to rewatch it, which is hardly a hardship.
Well, I really don’t have much to add. @krad pretty much summed up my thoughts on this episode as if we’re in sync. The Fight isn’t as bad as The Disease, but it’s still the boxing episode. And it’s horrendously paced. It gets tiresome by the second act. Menosky once said this episode’s final result was ‘muddled’. I agree. Not really bad, but not that interesting either.
I agree the underlying idea of establishing peaceful contact with another unknown race, even if it means putting oneself in danger is classic Trek. Its heart is in the right place, and sometimes it’s the thought that counts. That still doesn’t prevent this episode from being a slog. And somehow, the writers recycled parts of In the Flesh in the process, an episode written only months before.
I like Boothby as much as the next person, but boxing coach is beyond forced. And as for the boxing itself, it’s surprisingly tame. Then again, this is Rick Berman Star Trek. And count me as someone who despises violent sports (I do appreciate the broader philosophies embodied by eastern martial arts, though). Never cared for boxing or wrestling or anything or the sort. And what I despise most about it isn’t the fighting, but the audience. A blatant display of bloodlust and greed (when it comes to betting). And boxing episodes always feel out of place. B5’s TKO is one of that show’s low points. BSG’s Unfinished Business would make sense if it was a recurring thing, but we never see it again.
At least, this one came from Beltran himself, which I can understand from his perspective. Sadly, someone at UPN noticed this and decided to make the writers inflict season 6’s Tsunkatse on us, a wrestling episode designed to promote their WWF brand.
@16/Christopher: The B5 episode wasn’t great, but it worked better than VOY, I think. It had more of a classic Rocky feel, which may be a cliché, but it felt more energetic and watchable. Plus, the fight was really the episode’s B plot, so it didn’t drag. TKO had a main Ivanova plot, one involving personal grieving, which served her character well.
@25 et al: Huh. Okay, memory does not serve. Having tracked the episode’s broadcast to 23rd July 2000 and checked the BBC schedules for that day, it seems it was shown only 10 minutes earlier than usual, in order to accommodate coverage of the Proms from 7:20…
@@@@@ 30 – Hmm, wonder why I missed it then. Unless I turned it on ten minutes in, realised it was a Chakotay episode and that life was too short to watch a Chakotay episode I’d missed the first ten minutes of, and immediately turned it off again.
Thought for a moment I might have been on cadet camp, but I did Easter camp that year, not summer camp.
Keith, as far as Inevitable Boxing Episodes go I’m surprised you left out Q-Less. After all, as you have pointed out a few times, SISKO DECKS Q!
richf: Yeah, but that wasn’t A Boxing Episode, it was just an episode that had brief dollop of boxing in it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I kind of felt like I spent a year in chaotic space while watching this episode.
Boxing bores me to tears and so does this episode.
Hi, comments on the preceding episode are closed.I wonder why. Not that I had a lot to add, comment 16 pretty much said it for me. I know I’m out of step with most of you. I don’t like that sort of story, it’s like ‘I woke up and it was all a dream’.
Didn’t hate this episode with the boxing, and the repetition and choppiness seemed to me to fit well with Chakotay’s confusion, though it did slow down the episode. Good to see Robert Beltrán a bit more energised than usual, and loved the doc. I’d give it a 7.
Thinking now there’s not much chance of finishing the whole series as Paramount UK launches on the 22nd so expect all ST will be pulled from Netflix.
This episode is about a sentient patch of stochastic spacetime that can only communicate through boxing hallucinations and yet my main problem with it is that it seems like a giant cliché.
Upvoted for likely Night Vale reference.
Did the (terrible) website redesign break this article? All it has past the first paragraph of the Captain’s Log is a (more…) link that doesn’t work.
I thought this was pretty terrible. It seemed slapped together, like a drunken/stoned first draft that got shot as is.
I also hated the boxing episode of BSG and basically any show that has one.
That said, the boxing episode of Masters of Sex was one of the few truly great episodes of Masters of Sex, so ya never know.
I generally like boxing stories despite finding the actual sport barbaric. But, man, this one tried my patience. The vision quest made me really uneasy, as portrayals of that kind of thing usually do. And it was pretty ancillary anyway. The doctor’s hyped litany of the effects of various punches was the only thing worth watching.