“The Haunting of Deck Twelve”
Written by Mike Sussman and Kenneth Biller & Bryan Fuller
Directed by David Livingston
Season 6, Episode 25
Production episode 245
Original air date: May 17, 2000
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Voyager is shutting down main power in order to enter a Class-J nebula. Unfortunately, this means that the regeneration alcoves in Cargo Bay 2 will also shut down, which means that the four Borg kiddos will awaken mid-cycle. Neelix is put in charge of them for the duration of the imposed blackout.
When Icheb, Mezoti, Azan, and Rebi awaken, they are full of questions about why they’re in a darkened cargo bay with Neelix, standalone lanterns providing the only light. Neelix says it’s just temporary, and his job is to occupy them while they get through this nebula.
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The kiddos aren’t interested in any of Neelix’s potential diversions, wanting instead to know why they’re powered down. Mezoti asks if it has to do with the ghost on deck twelve. Neelix points out that there’s no such thing as ghosts, but Naomi told them that the restricted part of deck twelve was because of a ghost.
Neelix is finally convinced to tell the story of the “ghost” on deck twelve. It starts before the kiddos came on board. They were in a Class-J nebula gathering deuterium. Neelix is reminded of a time when a plasma drift passed through the Talaxian system, and for months, the cloud blotted out the view of the moon and stars.
Kim reports that the nadion emissions from the Bussard collectors are destabilizing the nebula. (Icheb tartly points out that the Bussard collectors don’t emit nadions. Neelix continues with the story anyhow.) Janeway and Chakotay agree to leave the nebula, even though they only have about eighty percent of the deuterium they were going for. There’s an energy discharge that does damage to the ship on the way out, and also an energy-based life form that attaches itself to the ship.
Chakotay reports numerous malfunctions—artificial gravity out on one deck, sonic showers not working, and Ensign Mulchaey bumped his head—and then Janeway asks for coffee from the replicator. It provides coffee, and then the mug a few seconds later, resulting in a replicator soaked in coffee. They add replicators to the list of malfunctions…
And then Janeway notes that they’re passing the same meteoroid cluster they passed an hour ago: they’re going around in circles. Paris reports that navigation seems to be working, but Tuvok runs a diagnostic and it turns out to be faulty. They’ve actually turned around. Before Paris can do anything, the ship jumps to warp six, then comes to a stop. Attempts to communicate with Torres fails, and when Janeway asks the computer to locate Torres, it provides the location, not just of Torres, but several crewmembers in succession. Chakotay heads to engineering in person, but first the turbolift drops him at the mess hall and then plunges several decks, nearly killing him. He arrives in engineering all cranky, where Torres has traced the problem to some gelpacks that got hit with EM bursts in the nebula.
Seven stops Tal from running a diagnostic, as she did something to cut power to astrometrics. But Tal hadn’t actually done anything yet—she was just about to start her diagnostic when Seven arrived.
Torres determines that the EM discharge has moved off from the gelpacks and is now jumping from system to system. It moves into Cargo Bay 2, where Seven is trying to track the malfunctions. Suddenly, Seven is trapped in the cargo bay with nebular gas being leaked into the bay. She manages to get the door open with manual override, but then she’s trapped in a corridor by force fields. Chakotay and Torres, also tracking malfunctions, find Seven asphyxiating. The force fields won’t go down via proper commands, so Chakotay shoots the control panel, and then they get Seven to sickbay.
Power fluctuates on the ship, and Kim tells everyone in the mess hall to report to duty stations. Neelix is left alone in the mess hall, at which point the power goes out, to his chagrin.
On the bridge, environmental controls have made the bridge a sauna, making everyone miserable (except for Tuvok, who’s quite comfortable). Paris regains helm control for about two seconds before a massive discharge strikes him, covering him in burns. Transporters are down, so they carry him to sickbay. In addition to Seven, there are also two crewmembers in sickbay who tried to vent nebular gases from deck seven, and were also hit with EM discharges.
Just as they realize that there’s an intelligence at work—possibly a lifeform that got stuck on board from the nebula and is trying to re-create the nebula’s atmosphere on board—power goes out all over the ship. Neelix, after being alone in a darkened mess hall for four hours, ventures forth only to have the shit scared out of him by Tuvok wearing a breathing mask. Together, they head for engineering. Elsewhere, Tal jumps Kim in a darkened corridor, thinking he’s a Hirogen or Borg. Kim calms her down and they also head to engineering.
Tuvok and Neelix become trapped in a Jefferies Tube by nebular gases. Tuvok tries to get Neelix to meditate while he works on the environmental controls, to uneven effect.
In engineering, Torres and Seven try to gain control of the ship. The computer states that Captain Janeway is in engineering, and Janeway realizes that the life form is using the computer’s voice interface to try to communicate. The entity directs her to astrometrics, and Janeway goes there with Seven. Through the computer the alien makes it clear that it just wants to go home.
Voyager returns to the nebula, but it’s gone—the destabilization continued after they left, and the nebula has dissipated. In anger, the alien has the computer instruct the crew to abandon ship and also cuts off communications and helm control. Tuvok gets hit with an EM discharge, and Neelix insists on dragging him to sickbay.
Janeway returns to engineering, trying to convince the alien to let them find another home for it. If the alien kills everyone on board, the alien will be stuck there forever.
Eventually, after a lot of shouting and coughing by Janeway, the alien gives in.
They create a sealed environment for the alien on deck twelve—that’s the “haunted” section—and then continued on their way. They finally found another Class-J nebula and are placing the alien there. Main power is off just in case.
Power is restored, and the kiddos are dubious as to whether or not Neelix’s story was true—Icheb assumes not because of the nadion emissions thing. Once they’re regenerating again, Neelix goes to the bridge and sees a Class-J nebula on the screen with an electronic bit flitting through it.
Voyager then continues on its way home.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? When power is shut down, Kim looks at his console and says that all decks report that power is shut down. Since power is shut down, how was he informed of this, exactly?
There’s coffee in that nebula! In Neelix’s story, Janeway admits to sometimes talking to the ship to Chakotay. This is a trait we’ve never seen Janeway exhibit before or since, so Neelix probably made it up, though it makes for a funnier story, especially when Chakotay does the same after nearly dying in the turbolift.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok provides some meditation tips to help Neelix’s anxiety as the pair of them are crawling through Jefferies Tubes. At one point, Tuvok makes reference to Neelix filling his lungs, but Neelix only has the one lung, donated by Kes, since “Phage.” It’s out of character for Tuvok to forget that and for Neelix to fail to correct him (Neelix corrected Janeway during a similarly tense situation in “Macrocosm“).
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix prepared himself with snacks, games, and lanterns to occupy the kiddos. But all they want is the story of why they’ve gone to no power.
Forever an ensign. Despite being an ensign, Kim orders everyone in the mess hall to their duty stations when the power fluctuates. Everyone listens and says, “Aye, sir” and stuff. Sure.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. When the power starts to die all at once, Janeway tries to transfer the EMH to the mobile emitter (he’s in sickbay at the time), but he powers down before they can.
Resistance is futile. When the cargo bay fills with gas, Seven walks toward the door. Do Borg just not run?
Do it.
“I’m warning you: this is not a tale for the faint of heart.”
“We’re not faint of heart.”
“Our cardiopulmonary systems are reinforced.”
“So don’t leave anything out.”
–Neelix providing a content warning and Icheb and Mezoti being overly literal
Welcome aboard. Zoe McLellan is back as Tal, last seen in “Good Shepherd,” while recurring regulars Manu Intiraymi, Marley McClean, and Kurt & Cody Wetherill are all present as the Borg kiddos.
Trivial matters: The bulk of this episode is Neelix-told flashbacks to a time prior to “Collective.” The end of the episode makes it clear that something at least resembling Neelix’s story happened, though how many of the details are accurate is anybody’s guess.
Ensign Mulchaey is mentioned as having bumped his head. The character was introduced in “Drone,” and was the template for One in that episode. In addition, Ensign Vorik is mentioned, though not seen. We also get a mention of two crewmembers, Unai and Trumari, who’ve never been referenced before or since.
Set a course for home. “Snacks are irrelevant! Continue the story!” This is a great idea for an episode that is executed remarkably poorly. And it starts with the title.
Okay, it’s called “The Haunting of Deck Twelve.” So shouldn’t we see deck twelve being, y’know, haunted at some point? Mezoti mentions it at the top of the episode, Neelix finally explains it half-assedly at the very end, and that’s it? This is a prime example of why “show, don’t tell” is a writing truism.
The story itself is such an incredibly bog-standard Trek plot that the only reason why Neelix’s prediction is that it’s not for the faint of heart makes sense is if the viewers are like Iago in Aladdin, and expect to have a heart attack from being not surprised. Seriously, we’ve seen this nonsense how many times before? (“Wolf in the Fold,” “Home Soil,” “Evolution,” “Cost of Living,” “Emergence,” “Playing God,” and that’s just what I recall off the top of my head…)
Plus it’s not told in a manner that is in any way exciting or interesting. Half the interesting things happen off-camera, like Chakotay escaping the turbolift.
There are some good moments in the episode, but most of them come from the Borg kiddos pestering Neelix with questions. My favorite was Icheb correcting Neelix misstating the technobabble.
I will give the episode one piece of credit: the use of the computer’s voice interface, making use of its library of preprogrammed phrases and responses, is an incredibly clever method of communicating.
But that’s pretty much it. The episode itself is completely nowhere, and while the framing sequence tries very hard to cover up how nowhere it is, it mostly fails, too.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido has a story in the upcoming anthology Devilish and Divine, which features stories about angels and demons, which is now available for preorder from eSpec Books. Keith read his story, “Unguarded,” as part of his KRAD COVID readings series of short fiction readings on YouTube.
“The turbolift started to fall, faster and faster…Anybody hungry?”
I found this one great fun for two reasons. The first, as Krad indicates, is the framing sequence of Neelix telling the story to the Borg children. Their constant attempts to guess what’s going on, along with pointing out plot holes and scientific inaccuracies, really add to it. I think the twins get more lines here than in all their other episodes put together: I was quite wrong about them never speaking. It’s full of nice little moments, like when Mezoti assumes Seven’s about to be possessed because that’s what an ad break cliffhanger like that usually means or takes Neelix’s nightmare of being served a dish of spooky nebula gas literally. Or their discussion of what being stranded on a ship with no air for eighty years would really be like, possibly the most macabre thing on offer.
And the other reason is Tuvok, who is on fine form throughout, delivering a battery of dry one-liners, mostly at the expense of Paris and Neelix, from his literal response to Paris wondering if he ever sweats through to his attempts to deal with Neelix’s babbling. (“Did I ever tell you about the Salvoxia?”/“If I say yes, will it prevent you from telling the story?”)
Strip away those elements and, as the rewatch indicates, we’re left with a somewhat paint-by-numbers Star Trek tale of a mysterious powerful life form that just wants to go home but causes trouble for the crew because of an inability to communicate. It’s so familiar it could be the first two seasons of Enterprise, although it does get a few good moments, including Janeway trying to play chicken with the lifeform and nearly failing.
Vorik and Naomi are mentioned but not seen. Tal Celes makes her second and final appearance: It didn’t occur to me until recently that, if these events occur before the Borg children came aboard, this is her first appearance chronologically. Seven calls her “Crewman Celes” so apparently the Borg never assimilated Bajoran naming conventions: It should be Crewman Tal. Kate Mulgrew seems to be having a bad time: After the nonsensical “Three years ago” line in “Fury”, here she says dilithium instead of deuterium at one point. (Either that or she’d read the comments about the scientific accuracy online and decided to stage a protest!)
Kim is on the bridge when things start going wrong, then eating in the mess hall a few scenes later as if he decided to take his lunch break in the middle of a crisis: Maybe we can attribute that to Neelix being an unreliable narrator? Last appearance of the Borg children this season, which is a bit ironic given we’re about to have a big Borg-centric two-parter: It might have been nice to see their take on Unimatrix Zero. They’ll be back next season but only fleetingly in the case of all bar Icheb.
I’m really inclined to like this story, despite it’s weaknesses. I like the Borg kids, and it is kind of nice to see what happens to them when the Plot of the Week is going on (instead of just imagining that they must be terrified and getting thrown around as the ship shakes), and Neelix is the right person to have here (words I rarely say). I honestly wish we got to see more of Neelix in his role as caretaker for the kids, because 1. he is very good at it, and 2. it actually makes since for him to be doing this (instead of poor Seven trying to balance having four kids with her work). It would have been nice to see that as a more permanent role for him, since it provides for a lot more room for character development than his usual lethal chef/ odious comic relief schtick (I also would have enjoyed it because you rarely see men in those roles on TV, and it would be nice to see Trek explore that more). Ethan Philips is a good actor capable of some great emotion, and I think he does really well when he gets to be a compassionate, caring character.
It has all the faults that KRAD points out, for sure, but considering it actually tried to do something a little different with the perspective I am willing to cut it more slack than I do other episodes. If we were just stuck the the technobabble plot I wouldn’t like it half as much, but the framing (and the Borg kids!) really helps.
I just rewatched this episode last night. While it usually gets tossed in the garbage with the likes of “Fury,” “Fair Haven,” “Alice,” “Virtuoso,” “Spirit Folk,” and plenty of other dogs, I always thought this episode was okay. It’s not great by any means, but it wasn’t terrible either. Granted, there’s absolutely nothing about this episode that’s fresh or unique. We’ve seen plenty of times before, across numerous series, non-corporeal life form takes over the ship, computer malfunctions, and even having the main events of the episode being narrated in flashback is not unique, since we saw the same thing in “Macrocosm.”
Neelix imagining his “lungs” filling with air is a neat trick, as you mentioned, but even worse, this event was part of Neelix’ narration, so Neelix should have known better.
A couple of other observations:
1) Seven addresses Tal Celes as “Crewman Celes,” but Seven is always portrayed as accurate and precise, and should have known to address her as Crewman Tal. I don’t remember her making the same mistake in “Good Shepherd.”
2) Seven is trapped behind a force field, but it was established that Seven can walk through force fields due to some Borg tech hoohah.
3) Neelix’ lantern loses power, maybe, fifteen minutes into his story. Come on, even the lantern I used to take camping held up better than that. 😂
4) Neelix’ wok is left at full flame while environmental controls are down and oxygen is being depleted from the ship. Additionally, he isn’t cooking, so why is the wok left burning when all it’s doing is scorching the pan? 🤔
I for one enjoyed this episode. Though, it is a little weak it is a solid episode. I think it suffered from being the penultimate episode of the season.
The highlight was Janeway and her conversation with the computer/Alien.
The episode may have worked better if it weren’t told as a story but rather we were seeing the events unfold in real time.
@3 Ref 4, I assumed he was using it for illumination.
I like the idea of Neelix making sure Tuvok gets all the good lines in his story. I missed that Neelix had to be making up the bit about Janeway talking to Voyager but I’m glad they resisted the urge to weave in other embellishments. Some writers would have had Neelix playing up his role in the story because it would be “funny.” Instead, Neelix seems to be a fairly reliable narrator.
I probably would give this a 5 or 6 based on the episode as a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Better than just a mysterious space force episode or just a Neelix and kids episode.
ETA: Seven’s unhurried response to the gas in the cargo bay might also be Neelix added a little too much Borg sang-froid to his story. It’s very convenient to have an in-show narrator to blame any characterization or continuity problems on..
Niallerz1992: I dunno, the storytelling parts were the only parts of the episode I found bearable….. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Some people have been complaining about Neelix saying lungs instead of lung. However, Neelix is a good story teller and saying he had only one lung would then require an explanation to the kids about how that happened, and that would take them out of the story.
I, too, found Seven’s unhurried escape from the gas, complete with almost no visible reaction to finally being caught, as somewhat bizarre. I chalked it up to Borg stoicism. All in all, I found it to be a pretty entertaining episode. Nothing particularly bad or good about it, which is probably why I don’t really have any memory of having watched it before. I would probably be a little more generous than Keith and give it a 6 warp factor.
And while I liked the cleverness of the entity speaking the computer’s pre-programmed responses, it did get me wondering why the ship’s computer is basically a modern day Alexa. Shouldn’t it be more AI-ish? At least it shouldn’t be stuck with canned responses.
Little to say. I found this one a forgettable bit of fluff. I never liked the idea of the Borg children in the first place (Mezoti somewhat excepted), so I had little use for an episode focusing on them. The one thing I really remember is the annoying error with Tal Celes’s name.
@8/Austin: The computer may not be stuck with canned responses, but an alien entity learning to communicate through it might be limited to them.
Okay, I haven’t made it past the teaser, so this review validates that I’m not missing some hidden gem here and I can skip the rest of the episode. Lol
No, it’s worth watching at least once. Like I’ve said, it’s not great, but it’s not bad either. There are some funny bits of dialogue that have been mentioned. Neelix tells the children that his story is not for the faint hearted, and Icheb tells him that their cardiopulmonary systems are reinforced. And the bit with Tuvok asking if he says yes, will that prevent Neelix from telling him a story.
Re: Can We Just Reverse The Polarity
Even on current Navy ships they have Sound-powered phones that allow communication with the bridge/other departments even when the ship is totally without power. It’s essentially a ginned-up can on a string, but it works just fine. So it’s not far fetched at all that there’s some 24th century equivalent.
@9 – “The computer may not be stuck with canned responses, but an alien entity learning to communicate through it might be limited to them.”
Hmm, that may be true, but it wasn’t the impression I got from this episode or the series in general.
When my spouse and I watched this one, we called it, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?… in Space”
I’d have liked it better if there’d been real ghosts on deck 12. There have certainly been enough crew deaths!
Maybe the most unbelievable and unrealistic thing in the whole franchise is how loss of power is shown to be. They always lose light power which is bordering idiotic even to ordinary people who never studied physics.
Lights go out but artificial gravity stays on?! I have always managed to suspend disbelief for most of the lunacies in sci-fi but this one I can’t help but be totally put off and maybe even offended by how illogical it is.
Producing light is very energy efficient. Moving a star ship and even replicating a cup of coffee would equal a millenia of Enterprise’s light bulbs staying on.
Other than that, as Krad said, quite a boring episode but rather nice to watch because of the actors’ interactions.
@16/Ekblad: To be fair, television is a visual medium. It’s hard to convey the idea of the power being out if the lights are on.
As for the gravity, that can’t be helped, at least until we finally build a film studio in orbit. The Trek tech manuals handwave it by saying the gravity-generating stators just sort of keep spinning on momentum for a certain length of time after the power goes out, so there’s a lag of several hours before the gravity goes away. (Although why they call them “stators” when they rotate has always been a mystery to me.)
@@@@@ 14. Little_Rat When my spouse and I watched this one, we called it, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?… in Space”
Never thought of it that way. The prospective line, “Submitted for the approval of the Zero Hundred Hours Society, I call this story, ‘The Haunting of Deck Twelve,’” is substantially better than this entire episode itself. It’s funny how things work out.
I remember this one sort of fondly. It had a “she does not get eaten by the eels at this time” sort of vibe and I do love Neelix with the kids.
silly, but with the truth sort of there leaving you guessing at the end. When it ended, I remember turning to my husband to say, “that one was cute!” and I have been looking forward to your reviewing it.
@3:Seven never addresses Celes directly or refers to her by rank in “Good Shepherd”: It’s either Tal Celes or Celes.
@3 and @20
I wonder if Tal Celes was one of the Bajorans that either didn’t push the issue or perhaps changed her name to correspond to (for lack of a better term) “English” standards with the Family name last (which was brought up all the way back in “Ensign Ro” on TNG).
The Haunting of Deck Twelve, AKA the one where David Livingston cuts loose and delivers the best-looking Voyager episode in the show’s entire run. This episode is so atmospheric it ranks up there with the feature films. Hands-down some of the best cinematography ever seen in the Rick Berman era. Even though Voyager always had a tight episodic budget, this one implies otherwise. You certainly couldn’t do this episode back on TNG, or even during Voyager’s own first season. The technology and experience weren’t quite there.
Sure, there’s not much of a story there. It’s pretty much zombie blockbuster plot, with some character inconsistencies (though I think that’s partly the point; Neelix being an unreliable narrator factors into what we see and what we don’t see in this episode). But it’s still a competent piece of filmmaking, and it never gets boring. And I enjoy the framing device, giving the extra time to the Borg children, plus Neelix’s been underused as of late. You got to hand it to Livingston for delivering that final cut with this much commitment.
It’s part of what I call the penultimate episode trend. They tend to be more experimental, different from the rest of the season, but they’re almost always terrific episodes. TNG had Conspiracy, Peak Performance, Transfigurations, In Theory, The Inner Light, Timescape and Preemptive Strike. All delightfully unusual episodes (with only In Theory being the misfire). DS9 had Duet, Tribunal, Facets, Body Parts, In the Cards and The Sound of her Voice (Sound and Tribunal being the misfires; Dogs of War was a different serialized beast). VOY had Jetrel, Resolutions, Worst Cast Scenario, One, Warhead, and now Deck Twelve.
Okay, I actually watched the whole thing. It was okay to watch one time but I wouldn’t do it again. I liked the alien using the computer voice interface to communicate with Janeway and there were some tense moments when she was suffocating (although we know she wouldn’t actually die). But it would have been cool to see things that were only mentioned like Chakotay escaping from the turbolift and the escape pods launching. It was also nice to see crewman Tal back although she hardly acts as a professional. It’s a shame she wasn’t further developed and return repeatedly along with the other crewmen introduced in “Good Shepherd.”
@21: Memory Alpha was trying to claim that at one point but it was obviously written by someone who hadn’t watched “Ensign Ro” or indeed Tal Celes’ two episodes properly, since it was riddled with mistakes and misunderstandings. “Ensign Ro” didn’t say anything about Bajorans changing their names, it was about how the ignorant Federation types misinterpret their names. Ro corrected Picard and Riker addressing her as “Ensign Laren”, explaining about Bajoran naming conventions and how other Bajorans put up with their names being corrupted. When Picard met Keeve Falor, he addressed him as Mister Keeve, and Keeve complimented him on getting it right. It was never said that Bajorans go around westernising their names so people don’t get confused. So this just seems to be ignorance on Seven’s part. I would agree though that Celes doesn’t seem the type to correct someone, especially someone who’s being quite intimidating at the time.
@24/cap-mjb: It’s sadly ethnocentric, though, for Trek to assume that 24th-century humans are unfamiliar with surname-first name orders, when that’s the normal pattern in East and Southeast Asia (also Hungary) and thus should be practiced by a very high percentage of the human species. Not to mention that it’s generally assumed to be how Vulcan name order works, although I guess that’s not canonical. So Picard and Riker in “Ensign Ro” shouldn’t have reacted to it like it was some strange alien custom.
Also, when East Asians Westernize their names, they just reverse the order — for instance, the actress whose Chinese name is Wēn Míngnà goes by Ming-Na Wen in English, and Japanese actor Sanada Hiroyuki goes by Hiroyuki Sanada in the West. They don’t reassign their given name as their surname and vice-versa. The surname is always the surname, it’s just placed differently depending on the local convention. So if Tal Celes wanted to Westernize her name order, she’d go by Celes Tal. She wouldn’t be “Crewman Celes.” That’s just not how it works.
I’m reminded of a few early Enterprise tie-in novels that referred to Hoshi Sato as “Ensign Hoshi” in the mistaken belief that she was using Japanese name order and Hoshi was actually her surname. I guess the author was unaware that Hoshi is a common given name and Sato an extremely common surname.
@25/CLB: I think that’s what some people were theorising: That she’d reversed her name order so, when she was referred to as Tal Celes, Celes was actually her surname, hence the way Seven addresses her. But like I said, that’s not how it’s presented in “Ensign Ro”, and it’s not really how it was presented in “Good Shepherd” where she was addressed as Celes as if it was her individual name.
@26/cap-mjb: So you’re saying the idea is that by Bajoran name order, she really would be Celes Tal, and that Tal Celes would’ve been a Westernized name order all along. I’d say that’s exactly how “Ensign Ro” presented it, because Picard and Riker were used to Bajorans like Jas Holza who assimilated their name order to fit into Federation culture, and were thus surprised by the existence of Bajorans who kept their proper name order. It was later episodes that ignored that and had all Bajoran characters use surname-first order.
And of course, you’re right that “Good Shepherd” established her use of surname-first order and this episode just plain got it wrong.
Huh, I always thought that Bajorans weren’t *changing* their names, it was just that if a non-Bajoran called them by their given name instead of their family name, they just went with it and didn’t bother correcting them. And possibly that non-Bajoran computers might (for some reason, since as many other people have pointed out, this convention is pretty common even here on earth), automatically put names in the “RANK, FIRST NAME, LAST NAME” or “RANK, LAST NAME, FIRST NAME” convention without asking the individual if that was correct, leading to confusion from non-Bajorans. Ro Laren wasn’t the kind of person to put up with that either way, so her standing up for herself always made sense.
@28/wildfyre: Well, again, the issue here was that Trek was taking a custom that’s actually extremely common on Earth and treating it like some bizarre, mysterious alien thing, which was Anglocentric as hell. In real life, there are well-established customs that we can refer to as precedents. With Japanese names, they just reverse the name order depending on whether it’s in a Japanese-language context or an English-language context. In Chinese usage, either they invert the names the same way, or in many cases they adopt an alternate Western nickname that goes before the surname — for instance, the actor born Chan Kong-sang going by Jackie Chan.
If the Federation were really as inclusive as it’s supposed to be, and if the writers hadn’t imposed that regrettable Anglocentric assumption, then presumably Bajoran naming conventions would be well-understood, since they’re the same as the conventions used by maybe a quarter or more of humanity anyway, as well as Vulcans and probably a bunch of other civilizations. And a diverse Federation would be used to diverse naming patterns and would not impose Western human name order as a default expectation. So there’s really no excuse for how “Ensign Ro” portrayed it.
Kim ordered everyone to leave the mess hall because he was a senior officer. This was established all the way back in “Parallax,” when he was present in the briefing of the SENIOR officers when Neelix and Kes crashed it.
@27/CLB: I’d say that “Ensign Ro” presented it the way @28/wildfyre said: That Bajoran names are surname-first name, but that the insular Federation types didn’t realise that and said their names wrong, and that Ro was one of the few that corrected them instead of going along with it to fit in. As you say, later episodes present Bajorans within the Federation as using the same naming convention. I think the tie-in novels portray Jas Holza as using the same surname-first name convention as all other Bajorans.
@30: It doesn’t even matter that he’s a “senior” officer: He’s an officer, and there’s no reason to assume that he didn’t outrank everyone else in the mess hall. So yeah, I’m not sure why that’s an issue.
@31/cap: Yes, of course I know that’s how “Ensign Ro” portrayed it. I’m saying it shouldn’t have portrayed it that way, that it was a conceptual flaw to do so, because it makes no sense to say the Federation is unfamiliar with non-Western naming conventions. It’s part of the unfortunate tendency of too much Star Trek to portray Federation culture as equivalent to United States culture.
With the Paris-Tuvok exchange on the Bridge about him sweating, and Paris telling him to forget it, I half-expected Tuvok to come back with something akin to “I will gladly stop participating in this conversation, but I will undoubtedly not be able to forget it.”
I thought this episode was “fine”. But when Janeway is in the force fields suffocating, why is her oxygen mask just hanging out loosely around her neck? And why didn’t anyone ask this question when they shot it??
I wish the ep had more of an unreliable narrator touch. It could have been wonderful if we saw Neelix change the story to the whims and questions of the children, and rephrase what the various characters did and said in “Neelix talking to children” ways. I wish he had corrected himself after the kids harangued him, so we would watch repeated lines again. Or if one of the kids had asked about a prop or costume piece, Neelix would throw that in and we’d see the scene continue with a wardrobe difference or something.
I’d want it to be a lighthearted romp, a bit like Drunk History, but with an underlying real danger… and then in the end, when it turns out to be a true story (somewhat), that would have been more surprising, because we would’ve concluded by then that it wasn’t, and then we’d be left wondering how much of it was real.
It was also a lost opportunity to have a dialogue like:
“Try to imagine.”
“How can we imagine without our regenerating?”
“People who aren’t Borg, most of them can imagine without Borg technology!”
“Oh you mean the holodeck? But there’s no power!”
“No, look deep into your mind’s eye.”
“If we had power, we could look into any part of us.”
That kind of thing would be funny but also, ya know, meta and relata.
Ya know, I like Henry James. I like framing devices. I like ghost stories. But I don’t particularly like this episode. Part of the reason is that if you tell a story that is questionably true, the parts that are ambiguous should have some consequence. That’s the point of an unreliable narrator, to produce a doubt which fundamentally alters our understanding of characters or themes. And we know Voyager will never reference this episode again, so it’s unlikely to pay off in the future.
Instead it bogs down a (as Keith says) bog-standard plot.
On the other hand we get a view of the turbo lift shaft showing that the lifts move horizontally as well as vertically. That may be a first. Also, I do relish any interaction between Neelix and Tuvok that alters the usual situation. Actually, Tuvok gets some very good exchanges in this episode.
“On the other hand we get a view of the turbo lift shaft showing that the lifts move horizontally as well as vertically. That may be a first.”
It’s been established ever since the original series that turbolifts can move horizontally; TOS showed that with the light bars in the little window switching from vertical to horizontal movement, and the movies starting with ST:TMP showed it with a turbolift indicator light moving horizontally on the wall display showing a cutaway of the ship and the turboshaft network. If you mean this is the first time we actually saw a horizontal shaft, that’s probably true, although we saw plenty of them in Discovery‘s episodes that insanely showed the turbolifts moving through some vast funhouse dimension that somehow existed inside the ship.