“Worst Case Scenario”
Written by Kenneth Biller
Directed by Alexander Singer
Season 3, Episode 25
Production episode 167
Original air date: May 14, 1997
Stardate: 50953.4
Captain’s log. Torres is walking down a corridor when Chakotay approaches her. He never calls her by name, and is talking about how lots of people are fed up with Tuvok, and also with Janeway, and how there may be a mutiny happening on board.
On the bridge, Janeway and Paris are going off on a rendezvous with the Rukani. Once they’re out of range, Chakotay starts his mutiny, with Torres—whom he calls “Ensign” at one point—assisting, going so far as to stun Kim.
Chakotay sends Torres with Seska—who is alive and back in her Bajoran guise—to round up the off-duty crew who were all trapped in their quarters, including Kes—who has her original hairstyle.
The officers loyal to Janeway are brought to a cargo bay, where Chakotay explains that this is no longer a Starfleet ship and they’ll be focused on getting home as quickly as possible, and screw Federation ideals.
Then Paris walks into the cargo bay, and the other shoe drops: this is a holonovel, called Insurrection Alpha. Torres found it when she was purging the database of old files. She has no idea who wrote it. In the program, you play an ensign in security. Paris says he wants to try it, and he jumps in. He tells Chakotay right off that he wants in on the mutiny, but when the mutiny itself starts, he’s on Janeway’s side, which gets him captured and put in the brig with Tuvok, Kim, and others.
We get further in the program, seeing Janeway and Paris return in their shuttle and boarding the ship to try to take it back. At one point, Paris confronts himself—
—and then the program ends. Turns out it’s incomplete.
Torres had mentioned the program to the EMH, who mentioned it to Neelix, and it becomes the most popular holoprogram on the ship, to the point where it comes up as a point of conversation at the end of a staff meeting.
Over the course of the conversation, Tuvok admits that he is the author of the program, but it’s not a holonovel. It’s a training exercise that he started when Janeway brought Chakotay and his Maquis cell on board, meant to be used by his security personnel in case there was a Maquis mutiny. However, once it became clear that the crews were integrating smoothly, he abandoned the program unfinished, and deleted it. However, while he did press “delete,” he forgot to then empty the trash, and it was still buried in the archives for Torres to find.
Now, though, everyone wants to know how it ends. Paris volunteers to write the ending. He’s working on it in the mess hall, with Tuvok, Neelix, and Torres all kibitzing, and the EMH later doing likewise. Paris says he can do it himself, but Tuvok insists on being part of the process, since he wrote the original program—also, Tuvok himself is the only one authorized to add to the program. Paris gives in at that point.
However, once Tuvok instructs the computer to open the narrative protocols to add to the program, everything changes. The scenario activates with Paris and Tuvok in the brig. On Voyager, transporters have gone down, and the holodeck has been booby trapped, the safety protocols disabled.
On the holodeck, Seska walks into the brig. Apparently, about a month before she buggered off with the Kazon, Seska found Tuvok’s program and added this little coda to it, triggered to go off if he ever decided to add to it. The Seska avatar proceeds to torment Tuvok and Paris, making them run around the ship, and seeing every attempt to gain the upper hand be stymied, from holo-Janeway’s phaser rifle overloading and blowing up to the scenario EMH treating Paris’s wound by trying to inject him with nitric acid, and so on. Janeway and Torres work to rewrite the program on the fly, but there are limits to what they can add. They do occasionally give them bits of help, like providing a plasma extinguisher to save them from a plasma fire and an attack by the Rukani, but that’s the best they can do.
At one point, Tuvok and Paris gain the upper hand, but Seska triggers the self-destruct—while it won’t destroy the real Voyager, it will blow up the holodeck, killing Tuvok and Paris, and doing significant damage to the ship.
Tuvok, therefore, hands over his phaser rifle to Seska, who disables the self-destruct—and then when Seska fires her phaser rifle, it overloads and blows up in the same manner as holo-Janeway’s.
The program finally ends. Everyone gathers in the mess hall for a toast celebrating their conquering of the program, and there is much speculation on what Tuvok and Paris’s next holonovel might be…
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway works fast and furious to add to the scenario to help keep Tuvok and Paris alive until they can bring the program to a close. Meanwhile, holo-Janeway gets to kick ass by tricking holo-Chakotay into blowing up her shuttle, which she uses as cover to beam herself and holo-Paris over to Voyager. But then, in the end, she’s blown up by a sabotaged phaser rifle.
Buy the Book
Remote Control
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is not happy that his abandoned program has been turned into a game, and he tries to convince everyone to just delete it. Janeway, however, tells him to loosen up, and so he agrees to work on it with Paris, though Paris himself isn’t really looking for a collaborator.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. When the EMH joins Tuvok and Paris on the holodeck to add his own notes on the holonovel, Tuvok disables his self-activation routine and sends him back to sickbay, for which Paris is understandably extremely grateful. Meanwhile, the Seska-enhanced version of the EMH in the program is extremely violent and kicks the crap out of Paris and Tuvok after injecting the former with nitric acid.
Half and half. Torres is the one who found the program and enjoys running it, and her talking about it makes it the hit of the ship.
Forever an ensign. Kim works his ass off to fix the transporters after Seska’s program sabotages them. He gets them up and running two seconds after the program ends. Good timing, there, kid.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. In the original program, Neelix joins Chakotay’s mutineers. The real Neelix, meanwhile, thinks that Tuvok doesn’t really understand his character…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. In Seska’s addition to the program, she and Chakotay are passionate lovers.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Most of the episode takes place on the holodeck, and Seska’s coda somehow manages to disable the transporters, booby trap the holodeck, and remove the safeties. I keep saying this—why is it even possible to disengage the safeties on the holodeck? Why isn’t that automatically hardwired?????
Do it.
“You never should have crossed her, Tuvok.”
“She has been dead for over a year now. There would have been no way to predict this turn of events.”
“I guess we should’ve known Seska wouldn’t let a little thing like death stop her from getting even.”
–Paris and Tuvok discussing the episode’s twist.
Welcome aboard. The only guest in this one is Martha Hackett, last seen in “Basics, Part II,” in which Seska was killed, returning as the image of Seska continuing to torment Voyager’s crew from beyond the grave. She’ll be seen again, this time thanks to time-travel shenanigans, in the seventh season’s “Shattered.”
Trivial matters: The stardate Torres gives for when Seska altered the program is 48671, which she says is one month before Seska departed Voyager, but the episode where that happened, “State of Flux,” has a stardate of 48658. This is why you probably shouldn’t even pay attention to stardates…
It’s not clear whether or not the Rukani are a real species that Voyager encountered during their early days or if Tuvok made them up. They’re never referred to in any other episode.
Tuvok’s initial writing of the program, and his deciding to abandon it, during the timeframe of the early first season is dramatized in Robert Greenberger’s “Command Code” in the anthology Distant Shores.
When the crew is discussing what other kind of holonovel Tuvok and Paris might collaborate on, two possibilities are a Western and a mystery, likely nods to two of TNG’s holodeck scenarios, the “ancient West” program from “A Fistful of Datas” and the Dixon Hill program introduced in “The Big Goodbye.”
Set a course for home. “If you think I will allow you to turn this novel into a parody, you are sorely mistaken.” What an absolute delight of an episode. It makes perfect sense that Tuvok would have written the Insurrection Alpha program in the early days of their Delta Quadrant sojourn due to concerns over whether or not Chakotay and his people would integrate with the crew.
It also makes perfect sense that he’d abandon it unfinished, since the crew integrated pretty dang well. And it makes perfect sense that Seska would find it and booby-trap it.
The result is a very entertaining romp. It’s fun seeing Tuvok’s interpretation of how a Maquis insurrection would go, Robert Beltran is obviously having great fun as a much grouchier Chakotay than the real one, Robert Duncan McNeill and Tim Russ do their entertaining double act that they showed off in “Future’s End,” Robert Picardo kills it as the Seska-altered version of the EMH who still talks like himself while he’s beating the crap out of people and injecting them with acid, and Martha Hackett makes a most triumphant return.
The show didn’t do nearly enough with Seska in the first two seasons, as tethering her to the Kazon didn’t do the character any favors, but this use of her is brilliant. A great way to bring her back effectively, and Hackett does a fantastic job.
I particularly love how the episode starts in the middle of the holodeck scenario without explanation, leaving the viewer to wonder what the heck is going on. The hints are all there—Chakotay’s dialogue sounds very much like Voyager’s situation is new, not three years old, Tuvok refers to Chakotay as a newly installed first officer, Chakotay calls Torres “Ensign,” and then we see Seska as a Bajoran and Kes with her old haircut, and you wonder what’s going on. Is this time travel? A holodeck scenario? An alternate reality?
I also adore the whole middle bit with everyone trying to get in on finishing the storyline, a process every writer (especially every TV writer who works in a writers room like, say the writers of Voyager did at the time…) can nod their heads at and go, “Yup.”
It’s not necessarily the best episode of Voyager, but I’m pretty sure it’s my favorite. Just an absolute joy to watch.
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido did a whole mess of programming at the virtual Dragon Con earlier this month. Click here for videos of just about everything he did, including a reading and panels on a wide variety of subjects ranging from the Beatles to movies from 1985 to Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Who to superhero movies in the wake of Batman ’89, plus him reading from his novels Alien: Isolation and To Hell and Regroup.
I also greatly enjoyed this. Especially Tom being more enthusiastic than good about writing a holo-novel. The cut line I thought was a nice touch since Star Trek often has issues with only making literary references that the audience would get regardless of how out of place they would be in the 24th century.
Even if disabling safety protocols are a thing, it makes little sense for the holodeck to actually produce working phasers. It seems like a recipe for blowing up part of the holodeck.
I wonder if this inspired the Doctor to write his novel later in the series. Or inspired the writers to have the Doctor write a novel about Voyager (not!Voyager in the Doctor’s case but close enough).
Huh, I have very mixed feelings about this one. To me it was always too many reminders of the things that the show frankly should have been dealing with, but weren’t, and this always kind of felt like it was mocking that. So many of my pet peeves with Voyager are actually dealt with in Tuvok’s program (the Maquis are wearing their regular clothes, because OF COURSE THEY ARE, there is actual tension between the crews, they remember that Paris was both a criminal and a member of the Maquis, and I love the touch of Neelix being more of a pragmatic opportunist than just a goofy chef)- but then it is basically all just one big joke, in-universe, until Seska’s modifications start causing problems.
It’s well-acted (it really does highlight how fun Beltran could be when they gave him something to work with) and well-written, and I love any excuse to get Martha Hackett back on the screen, but to me it was always hard to get over the fact that the premise was basically “Tuvok thought that bringing terrorists on board and letting them run all over the ship might be bad, and he was incredibly wrong!” I think it would have resonated a lot more for me if the first couple seasons really had been about them struggling to try to form a cohesive team, and the fact that they could all play this “holonovel” and laugh about it was a sign of how far they had come, but the fact that they all got along basically fine from the jump just kind of takes some of the punch out of it.
This is an episode that I’ll watch by itself and really enjoy (I loved the little hints that it isn’t actually a holonovel, like “Tuvok” telling Paris they might have to stay in the brig for weeks), but if I’m re-watching the season it just kind of bugs me.
I love this episode. Only nitpick that I could never wrap my head around: What would have happened if the real Seska was still on the ship when the crew discovered her booby-trapped masterpiece? Did she somehow just know that she would be gone when they stumbled on it? Seems like an awfully stupid way to have your cover blown…
This was a really fun episode. However, was it really necessary to go through the entire scenario with Paris that we just saw Torres go through at the beginning of the episode? I mean, it literally went through the entire scenario, from the elevator, to the mutiny on the bridge, and it was exactly the same.
I love that teaser. The way it puts the viewer in the middle of the story with no explanation. It’s as close as Voyager’s ever gotten to do a Mirror Universe episode. Chakotay in rebel mode is a delight.
Of course, Worst Case Scenario is also a reminder of how Voyager decided to ignore the Maquis element entirely for the show’s seven season run. This was the first of what I like to call the ‘Remember the Maquis?‘ episodes. One episode per season, just to remind us of what could have been. Every other week it’s as if they never existed.
While it’s fun to see Seska operating in the holodeck’s equivalent of God Mode, we have to accept that this is a pure supervillain with no nuance. The fact that Seska decided to implement this featute into Tuvok’s program before the whole Prime Factors/State of Flux fiasco only reinforces that pure evil mindset. Back then, Seska was a little more complicated and more sympathetic. I said back then that making her a covert Cardassian operative was liability, since her choices to pursue Voyager using the Kazon ran against her desire to make it back home. There’s no logical reason for her to rewrite Tuvok’s program unless she already considered betraying Voyager back then. It’s best not to try and make sense of it, because it doesn’t. If anything, it makes her purely homicidal. Maybe it’s seven seasons of DS9, but I like my Cardassians to be a little more three-dimensional than that.
Putting that nitpick aside, the episode is tremendously fun. Evil sadistic EMH is even more fun than Jekyll/Hyde EMH. I love it that the whole crew, Janeway included, is a sucker for just playing through the story, being able to put the moral issues of mutiny aside. This is a good use of the holodeck setup. Plus, the action sequences were likely the inspiration for next season’s Killing Game two parter.
This is a nice example of the 25th episode effect. As we know, Berman-era shows had 26 episode seasons. And ever since TNG’s superb Conspiracy, there’s this trend of penultimate episodes in a season turning out to be surprisinsgly great entries. Conspiracy, Peak Performance, Transfigurations, Inner Light, Timescape, Preemptive Strike, Duet, Facets, Jetrel and Body Parts. There are exceptions such as TNG’s below-average In Theory, but I like that these episodes – made late in a season when everyone’s burned out – manage to be memorable stories when they should be phoning it in, while gathering stamina for the big finale. Worst Case Scenario is almost as fun as DS9’s In The Cards, which aired shortly after this.
Austin: it wasn’t exactly the same, though. Chakotay’s response to Paris was different because he enthusiastically asked to join, as opposed to the reluctance Torres showed. The differences were subtle, but they were there. It was a nice touch.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As far as the holodeck doing other things (except the safety protocol), I figured there were multiple little virii hidden in ship systems, when the holodeck code was altered it activated other code hidden in the transporter systems, etc.
That said – why would the holodeck (in addition to the aforementioned safety protocol issues) have a self-destruct mode? What could possibly go on in there that would require that kind of response. (Now, I could see a version of a medical research holodeck have some kind of sterilization mode).
And I still have my core issue with the holodeck (and EMH concept). If they can produce force fields with the level of granularity necessary to simulate everything they do in there, why is this technology never used anywhere else? Imaging a holographic based equipment repair center – holo hydroponic farming (remember when they were running out of food?) – etc.
@7 Any high energy system can be rigged to explode given a clever enough mechanic.
The mutiny scenario feels like a look at what Voyager would have been like during the darker and grittier era of TV SF (yes which DS9 foreshadowed but Voyager usualy refused). Granted, the scenario we’re presented with wouldn’t be a good basis for a season-long arc but it has the right feel.
@3/Iron Rob: Yes, yes, yes! I was going to write about the same major nit but you already pointed it out. It just doesn’t make any sense for Seska to lay these booby traps unless she anticipated leaving the ship beforehand but that’s not how things played out in “State of Flux” where she does leave after basically being found out. Also, her whole vendetta against Tuvok seems incredibly forced. I mean, she’s not an actual Maquis but a Cardassian spy, so I never got why she should take such extreme offense at Tuvok designing a well-intentioned security program. As much as I enjoy Martha Hackett and Seska, her involvement plot-wise was the weakest part of the episode and perhaps some other conflict could have come to the foreground without the jeopardy-of-the-week plot. But yes, overall it was a fun episode. I’d give it a 7.
I completely love this episode and it’s easily Voyager’s second-best holodeck episode. Of all the reasons a holodeck could run amok, purposeful sabotage is the easiest to swallow. The fact that it’s Seska gunning for Tuvok is all the better. That conference room meeting is probably my favorite scene, where we see once again how impossible it is to keep a secret on Voyager, and the reveal that Tuvok is the author is just delicious.
I also like the notion that the most popular holoprogram on the ship features a significant portion of the crew as “bad guys” and yet everybody loves it. I guess it’s not as offensive as “Photons Be Free” since the holo-versions weren’t outrageously evil (and it wasn’t published throughout the Federation). In reality Tuvok would be right and the program itself would probably cause more harm than good. At the very least, it wouldn’t be just Neelix that had something to say about his character.
3/9, Valid point. But, basically, Seska is a magical hacker and her program somehow magically adapts to every other circumstance. So maybe the program checked in on what Seska’s current status is and surely the ship knows she’s dead. If she’s dead or otherwise outed, the program goes nuts and holographic Seska is a full on villain. If the program checks and Seska is in good standing, either it doesn’t execute at all, frames someone else, or otherwise engages in behavior that wouldn’t implicate Seska. That’s actually less hard to swallow than a lot of other stuff the program actually does, so…
I remember thinking of this as a middle-of-the-road episode — a cute idea, but very contrived. I did find the first act kind of off-putting with all the “continuity errors” and anachronisms popping up.
The high point was the interplay between Tom and Tuvok as the “writers” and everyone else trying to kibitz, which I can empathize with. But any story whose spine is “your recreation center is trying to kill you” is hard to take all that seriously, in part because there’s no real antagonist, just some code left behind by Seska. (“The Killing Game” is different because there are active adversaries merely using the holodeck as a tool.)
And yes, the Maquis-mutiny aspect did leave me thinking something along the lines of, “Why didn’t they actually do this at the time?” So many Voyager episodes feel like the writers are using holodecks, alternate futures (“Before and After,” “Year of Hell”), or duplicate ships (“Course: Oblivion”) to tell story arcs they wanted to do for real but weren’t allowed to.
I definitelt get what you’re saying about the holodeck safeties, Keith, but my favorite Trek death, Lieutenant Naomi Basner, happened in the books because the holodeck safeties were off…thanks Peter David
A fun adventure. I enjoyed this one.
Bobby
@3/9/11 if Seska was still member of the crew, I would think somewhere between Torres first discovering and playing this program and it becoming everyone favorite game and pressure Tuvok into finishing it, at least several days if not weeks would pass. I mean consider, Voyager only 2 holodecks, and about 200 crew members. And since Seska would hear complaints about no conclusion to everyone’s new favorite game, she would realize it would be just matter of time till Tuvok caves in under everyone’s pressure and access it to finish it. So she will just hack back in and delete her booby traps. Super easy!
@15/Masha: Okay, sure. But that still doesn’t get around the loony fact that Seska in the first place created the booby traps that reveals she’s the culprit while she was still a member of the crew! It only makes sense if she had a departure plan already in place. And getting back to my other point, I don’t get what got her so offended to begin with because she was never a real Maquis so it’s not an affront to her personally.
@16/garreth: “But that still doesn’t get around the loony fact that Seska in the first place created the booby traps that reveals she’s the culprit while she was still a member of the crew!”
But she only revealed it to whoever was inside the program, which she only expected to be Tuvok, and she didn’t expect him to get out alive to tell anyone. True, we saw Kim figure out from outside that Seska had hacked the program, but that’s because he already knew she was a spy and had dealt with her sabotage before. In the scenario where Tuvok edited the program while Seska was still a crewmember in good standing, it would look like he was killed in a holodeck malfunction and nobody would know how it happened. Seska herself could’ve volunteered to “investigate” it to cover her tracks.
“And getting back to my other point, I don’t get what got her so offended to begin with because she was never a real Maquis so it’s not an affront to her personally.”
Maybe claiming she was a Maquis out for betrayal was just the excuse she used to tell Tuvok why she was about to kill him. In reality, her motive was probably to deprive Voyager of its security chief, who was a threat to her. But rather than admit within the simulation to being a Cardassian spy, it was simpler just to pretend that she was doing it as a vengeful Maquis. Why overcomplicate things if she was going to kill him anyway?
This is an extremely fun episode. Lots of great bits, the whole opening sequence where we’re dropped into the scenario without explanation, Tuvok being all embarrassed that his program was found, Tom and Tuvok sparring, the evil EMH acting just like the Doctor except for the homicide, Seska being back and in full cackling villain mode. Just delightful.
I thought it was very funny and indeed in character for Tom Paris to think that what makes a good story is wild plot twists. That’s totally what he would do as a writer, proper plotting and development be damned! Probably why he enjoys Captain Proton so much, I bet that stuff is built on absurd action and nonsensical twists.
I always wondered why people assumed that the Maquis wanted to go back to the Alpha Quadrant. They’d be facing prison time and most of them probably cut their ties to their family and friends when they joined the Maquis. I always felt that any conflict should have come from the Starfleet people wanting to return home to their families and the Maquis wanting to stay in the Delta Quadrant to avoid prison.
So because I’m the kind of dork who sees “Security training turned popular novel turned death trap,” and thinks about the legal implications… I’m interested in the parallels between this and Meridian- Tuvok’s intentions are certainly less salacious than Quark’s, and he probably doesn’t need as… anatomically precise models of the crewmen as Quark was seeking. But there was a clear sense underlying Meridian that Kira had a right to control her images and the uses to which is was put.
Maybe it’s as simple as what those uses are- there’s a big difference between leaking someone’s nudes and posting a picture of their face. Then again, there’s a difference between posting a picture of someone’s face and using their mugshot for target practice, as at least one sheriff’s department in the US has been found doing.
The reason this episode is great is because this is EXACTLY the sort of thing a crew lost in space would do – they have a LONG voyage and the greatest enemy isn’t the Kazon or whatever – its boredom. And this is what bored people do to have fun. They play games. The write a novel. They argue over trivialities. Its fun. This humanizes the crew.
@19/Michael: “I always wondered why people assumed that the Maquis wanted to go back to the Alpha Quadrant. They’d be facing prison time and most of them probably cut their ties to their family and friends when they joined the Maquis.”
That doesn’t follow. The whole reason the Maquis existed was to defend their homes, to fight for their right to live on their chosen planets. And their families and friends on those worlds would still be in danger from the Cardassians, so they’d still want to get back in order to resume defending them.
@20/Benjamin: Tuvok created the program as a security simulation, not a recreational work for public consumption or sale. So there’s no likeness-rights issue there. Once the crew found out about it, if anyone had objected to the use of their likeness, I’m sure the program could’ve been changed; but presumably everyone was so glad for a break from their boredom (yeah, the boredom of facing mortal danger and reality-bending anomalies on a weekly basis) that it didn’t bother anyone. I mean, it was all within the “family” anyway.
“I don’t care what sort of story it is as long as I’m not the bad guy this time.”
I think possibly the biggest thing that came out of this episode for me was that I went “Hmm, what if Janeway, Chakotay and Seska really did all die right at the start of the series? That’d put me in charge!” And so started an alternate reality series (ostensibly the result of the programme still running in active memory) which, twenty plus years on, is still dragging its heels somewhere around the end of season two.
But enough about me. It’s quite some way into the episode before we learn we’re on the holodeck but anyone with a passing knowledge of the show is instantly clued up that we’re not dealing with reality here: Torres is portrayed as a Starfleet-affiliated ensign, Seska and Jonas are alive, Kes still has her old hairstyle and outfits, Chakotay says it’s the first time he’s been left in charge of Voyager and Tuvok indicates he’s only just been made first officer.
What follows is a fun romp, from the characters exploring this alternate scenario through the rather fun briefing scene and another brilliant Tuvok/Paris double-act (following on from their similar team-up in “Future’s End”), especially in that mess hall scene where they’re beset with unwanted advice and both look equally exasperated.
Seska’s motivation is a bit hard to work out. It makes sense that she’s not gunning for Chakotay (as some reviews at the time suggested) if this was done before “State of Flux” when they were still on fairly friendly terms. If she was a Maquis fanatic, then it might make sense for her to target Tuvok and Paris, both of whom betrayed the organisation, but she’s not. Possibly she still has a grudge about being fooled anyway, but if this happened when she was still alive, assassinating the chief of security in a pretty public manner would have seen her shut in the brig, so I can only assume she already had the Kazon primed to snatch her away when she set all this up. (Of course, Seska was never a genius when it came to forward planning… I can’t see her covering this up: The people outside the holodeck know instantly what’s going on and can even see what’s happening on the monitor. Plus, if “Galaxy’s Child” is to believed, they just have to press playback to see Seska’s evil gloating.)
But anyway, the climax with Tuvok and Paris trying to survive the holodeck programme from hell as Janeway tries to outwrite the computer programme is still fun and exciting if you have your brain switched off enough.
In Torres’ run-through of the programme, it seems it gets to Chakotay making his “Join us or get booted out” pretty quickly, but in Paris’ first run-through, he claims to have been left waiting in the brig for an hour. (Even though when he convinced Torres to let him try the programme, he said he had to be on duty in less than an hour…)
Paris is seen in a gold uniform while playing the holodeck programme. (The fact that he’s still in his Maquis dress after the programme’s turned off is something of a puzzler: Is the holodeck still generating that appearance or is he somehow really wearing it?) Paris and Torres had a lunch date (although she still balks at the idea of their holonovel selves having a romance). Tuvok is able to transfer the Doctor back to sickbay without his consent.
The real Kes doesn’t appear in this episode, with Jennifer Lien only appearing as her holonovel self and only getting a few lines (although she is present in the other cargo bay scenes). Possibly the need to have her appear in her old make-up played a part, although she’d already appeared in both make-ups in “Before and After” where she was in nearly every scene.
First appearance of Seska since “Basics” and first time she’s appeared without the Kazon since “Prime Factors”. As noted, she’ll make one more appearance in Season 7. Tuvok states she died over a year ago, which echoes the dating of Hogan’s death in “Distant Origin” but again conflicts with the “each season is a calendar year” rule adopted by most reference books. Opinions seems to differ on whether the voice of Jonas heard over the comline is actually Raphael Sbarge or not: The actor isn’t credited either way.
@19: Federation prison sentences don’t seem to be all that long. (Garak only got six months for sabotaging the Defiant. Kasidy served less than a year for providing material support to a terrorist organization.) And the Voyager Maquis in particular would have a lot of mitigation evidence if they were brought to trial (since they would presumably each have dozens of Starfleet personnel, including a Starfleet captain, that they bonded with on the return trip who would testify as to their good character and how helpful they were in getting Voyager home), so the Voyager Maquis would almost certainly get off very lightly upon their return to the Alpha Quadrant and that’s if they were even prosecuted at all. (It’s easy enough to imagine the Federation authorities deciding that the Voyager Maquis had already “done their time” if they were stuck in the Delta Quadrant for several years before getting home.)
So why would any Maquis crew member prefer permanent exile in the Delta Quadrant over what would at worst probably be nothing more than a few months in a cushy Federation rehabilitation center?
“Maybe claiming she was a Maquis out for betrayal was just the excuse she used to tell Tuvok why she was about to kill him. In reality, her motive was probably to deprive Voyager of its security chief, who was a threat to her. But rather than admit within the simulation to being a Cardassian spy, it was simpler just to pretend that she was doing it as a vengeful Maquis. Why overcomplicate things if she was going to kill him anyway?”
@17, this doesn’t really scan. If the goal is just to kill him, then just have the program kill him without the rant– as you allude to, he’s dead either way so who cares? If she actually does want to go for revenge and do a Bond villain motive rant, it doesn’t make sense to lie about why she wants revenge, since she’s outing herself as a traitor either way.
@25/Rick: All Tuvok needs to know before he dies is that Seska is responsible. As for the lies within lies, have you met Cardassian spies? That’s their whole deal. Even when they “out” themselves, they’re still hiding some deeper layer of secrets. It’s second nature to the Obsidian Order.
Besides, I’m not sure I buy the premise that Seska wouldn’t feel betrayed because she wasn’t really a Maquis. I mean, she was a deep-cover sleeper agent. That’s not a mask you wear superficially. You have to train yourself to immerse yourself completely in the role, to think and feel like the person you’re pretending to be. So I can see Seska feeling betrayed on some level that Tuvok was a spy, even though she was a spy herself. After all, in some people’s minds, it’s only wrong when someone else does it to you.
@@@@@ The Maquis Uniform-
I’ve sort of assumed that holodecks have built in replicators, so that, for instance, you could have a couple drinks at your tropical resort or Vegas showroom and not get weird hiccups and gas as the liquid disappears from your digestive tract on your way out. Now, over in DS9, we several times see Bashir and O’Brian already geared up on their way into the holosuites but I assume that that is both because they’re geeks who enjoy designing their costumes ahead of time, and that Quark probably charges an unreasonable fee for removing anything from the holodeck replicator system.
Now how does this fit with Voyager being on limited power and rationing replicator privileges? I don’t know, but that’s only an issue in the show when they want it to be.
@27/Benjamin: You’re right. Per the TNG Technical Manual, p. 156:
However, it also claims that holocharacters are “composed of solid matter arranged by transporter-based replicators and manipulated by highly articulated computer-driven tractor beams,” which obviously isn’t the explanation the franchise ultimately went with.
So, I’ve been thinking about your ongoing musings about why there’s a way to disable the safeties on the holodeck. Recently, I saw someone remark that zombie movies should have people who run TOWARD the zombies since, now, in the pandemic, there are people who refuse to follow safety protocols (masks, maintaining a safe distance, etc.), often citing their “rights” or other specious logic. Maybe THIS thread of humanity plays a role in the feature you find so odd?
@29/Rich: Whenever I see someone make that crack about how zombie movies “should” show people in unreasonable denial of the threat, I see someone else point out that almost every zombie movie in existence already does exactly that, and that the people saying that have evidently never seen a zombie movie. I mean, that’s part of the basic vocabulary of both monster movies and disaster movies — the fact that the public and/or the authorities ignore the warning signs until it’s too late.
Still, I don’t see a connection between that and the failure to design adequate safety features on a piece of equipment. I mean, the very fact that holodecks are built with safeties in the first place implies that the designers are trying to make them safe. So why install safeties yet also make them removable, or capable of being deactivated without the entire system automatically shutting down as a failsafe?
It’s also a question as to the level of safety in the holodeck. I’m pretty sure that a martial arts program that didn’t cause bruising wouldn’t be very effective if one intended to learn serious fighting and not just a sport or exercise. But it’s also reasonable the holodeck shouldn’t stub your toe while you’re wandering around Sandrine’s (sp?).
Though I’m sure an argument could be made that the possibility of broken bones is important for authenticity or some other reason. Easier to make in the 24th century since a broken bone is easier to treat.
But the idea that the holodeck can be actively allowed to kill you if you’re blown out a holographic airlock or set on fire is absurd.
@31/noblehunter: I don’t think the safeties are meant to protect against minor bumps and bruises, just serious or life-threatening injuries.
“But the idea that the holodeck can be actively allowed to kill you if you’re blown out a holographic airlock or set on fire is absurd.”
Yes. What gets me is the bit where bullets become real and solid if the safeties are turned off, a trope that goes back to the very first “safeties off” instance in TNG: “The Big Goodbye.” I mean, why does the holodeck bother to simulate bullets in the first place, when their flight is invisible to the naked eye?
As someone who ghostwrites law firm blogs professionally, I’m amused by the thought of my 24th-century counterparts writing keyword articles for “holodeck product liability lawyers.”
One thing I would point out: In current U.S. law there is a principle known as the “government contractor defense.” Basically, you cannot sue a private contractor for providing defective equipment to the military, provided the equipment was designed to the military’s specifications. So if we were to apply a similar rule to the Federation, you could avoid a strict liability claim if Starfleet told its holodeck contractor to make it possible to disable the safeties.
The problem is that real-life engineers have an incentive to make technology safer, whereas writers of adventure fiction have an incentive to make technology more dangerous.
The idea that there’s a switch you can flip where the holodeck decides it’s now okay to kill you does speak to some serious oversight in the safety consideration department. It bothers me a little less in a case like this where it’s the result of a malicious attack, because I can pretend that it’s not that the program is trying to kill them, it’s that SuperHacker Seska has interfered with its ability to determine what actually does and does not harm crewmembers.
The equivalent here would be something like the Stuxnet worm- it didn’t activate a self destruct function on centrifuges, it just gave them a series of commands that caused them to operate in an unsafe manner.
@35/Benjamin: Yeah, I think that was the original intent, that the safeties would go offline as the result of a massive malfunction or sabotage. But then it was established, I think, that Worf could order the safeties deactivated with a verbal command for his Klingon calisthenics program, and that just didn’t make sense.
You would also think there would be some Starfleet regulation prohibiting crew members from deliberately disabling the safeties. Or at the very least, you would need the captain’s express authorization.
@37: Well, Worf was security chief by that point, so if anyone would have the authority, he would. The problem is the assumption that the safeties are designed to have deactivation as an option in the first place.
@27: The idea that you have to suit up in advance goes back at least as far as “The Big Goodbye”, where Picard finds himself playing Dixon Hill in a Starfleet uniform (which the holodeck characters view as unusual dress), realises his mistake and gets dressed up properly before going back. Maybe no-one on the Enterprise bothered to read the manual, or maybe Voyager has the upgraded version. (Their holodecks do at least one thing that Gene Rodenberry apparently insisted was impossible: See Doctor Chaotica.)
@37: I seem to recall there’s a scene in “Descent” where Data wants to disable the safeties in order to properly recreate his fight with the Borg, but it needs the authorisation of two (senior?) officers and Geordi refuses to help him.
In one of the NEW FRONTIER novels by Peter David, one of the first things Captain Shelby has to deal with is her security officer being killed in a holodeck accident due to being hit with Thor’s hammer (it’s an Avenger’s progam without using the names of the comic book characters). Shelby’s immediate response is to ban turning off the safeties in the holodeck. So, clearly plenty of authors have thought the issue was one that should have been addressed before.
I remember when that guy broke his arm in a white water rafting exercise and Crusher chided him for it. At the very least as a Captain I’d say, “This is interfering with your duties.” I totally believe Worf makes sure that the monsters trying to kill him in his programs are really trying to kill him, though.
@34, CLB: The problem is that real-life engineers have an incentive to make technology safer, whereas writers of adventure fiction have an incentive to make technology more dangerous.
@34, CLB: The problem is that real-life engineers have an incentive to make technology safer
As a general rules, sure but there’s lots of examples of engineers cutting corners or prioritizing other goals. The recent 737 MAX situation shows that. Also the GM ignition switch coverup, the Ford Pinto gas tank situation and many others.
A mixed episode for me. I do love how the holonovel shows how great this series could have been if it had gone down another road & I always enjoy how good Robert Beltran is when they actually let him do something!
I didn’t care for the gleeful attitude the crew had about a holonovel based on mutiny and how much the two crews had it in for each other. To paraphrase James Kirk: as a captain, Janeway, of all people, should be aware of the danger of reopening old wounds—I think it would be bad for morale to risk stirring up old unresolved grievances.
@43/owlly72: “I didn’t care for the gleeful attitude the crew had about a holonovel based on mutiny and how much the two crews had it in for each other. To paraphrase James Kirk: as a captain, Janeway, of all people, should be aware of the danger of reopening old wounds—I think it would be bad for morale to risk stirring up old unresolved grievances.”
I think the idea was that the crew has bonded so well by now that nobody takes the scenario seriously. They all know it would never happen in real life.
However, Worf, as security chief, may have written a subroutine that allows him (and I presume only him, though he might have included Picard and Riker) to disable the safeties by verbal command. Since he wanted that sense of real danger during his workouts, I can imagine him doing so.
@45/costumer: But a robustly designed safety system wouldn’t allow disabling through mere software commands. You’d think military hardware in particular would be designed with defenses against sabotage by enemy hackers. So it shoudn’t even be possible to do that, no matter what clearance or programming expertise you have.
@3, etc
I don’t think the changes to the program make much sense if Seska was planning them as a way to sabotage Voyager. But they might make more sense if you think of them as a trapped Seska living a lie in the middle of her enemies fantasizing about being able to tell them what she thought of them.
This reminds me of the fact that up until last year, the U.S. military used a system based on 8-inch floppy disks to secure the nuclear launch codes “precisely because it was created before the advent of the internet,” and thus impossible to hack from the outside.
@48/smoliva: “Until last year?” Oh, great. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about from unfriendly foreign hackers.
What if there’s a fine line in what is required for the simulation? For instance, a sky diving program. The Holodeck can simulate this via manipulation of the Inertial Dampener system to generate not just the motion of wind in someone’s face, but that actual tangible sensation of falling and acceleration. If the simulation failed via say power failure, then that could result in someone experiencing the sudden stop and being injured. In fact in that scenario just being suspended in the air and then dropped to the ground when the holodeck goes offline could result in an injury.
But there are more scenarios where the safeties going off line really doesn’t make sense, like the aforementioned bullets. A holographic phaser should never be able to kill, I suppose drowning should be possible if the computer actually fills a pool with real water, suffocating because of a breach in your EV Suit doesn’t make sense, as that would require the Holodeck to actively remove ALL the air from the space.
There are other malfunctions that should happen but don’t. A failure of processing means that the environment doesn’t scroll and someone smashes into the real wall. A misaligned force field means you fall through a bridge or off of a roof and get a concussion. And I wonder if Holodeck safeties actually account for what two people do. If two people have smokers (an organized boxing match) and they’re punching each other can the holodeck actually protect them from severely damaging blows?
@50/Mr.D: I doubt the holodeck can stop two people from hurting each other — just from being hurt by something holographic.
Seeing as the holodeck uses forcefields, you could most certainly prevent people from hurting each other. Encase each person in an air permeable field and make it basically skin tight, similar to the life support belts.
“Who says deus ex machina is an outdated literary device?” -Janeway
You can tell the writers had a lot of fun poking at themselves in this one.
@50
I’ve wondered for a long time about the limitations of the holodeck. I’ve never actually checked all the episodes to find out, but I am really curious if there is any instance where we see 2 people in a holodeck simulation who are farther apart from each other than the distance from wall to wall inside the room. Would that be possible? Could the holodeck manage to fake perspective for each user so that people could appear to be hundreds of feet apart when they’re actually standing a few feet away? I know that in at least one episode (“Emergence” is the one coming to mind) someone went from a lower level to an upper level area while the others stayed below. How sophisticated would the holodeck have to be to simulate that, to make that plausible for all inhabitants of the room simultaneously? The computer that runs these simulations must have the most complex software in the galaxy outside of Data’s brain.
@54/erictheread: “Could the holodeck manage to fake perspective for each user so that people could appear to be hundreds of feet apart when they’re actually standing a few feet away?”
Yes, the TNG Technical Manual explicitly states that it can, using holographic projections and light-distorting fields. And “treadmill” fields on the floor to make people think they’re traveling farther than they are.
“How sophisticated would the holodeck have to be to simulate that, to make that plausible for all inhabitants of the room simultaneously? The computer that runs these simulations must have the most complex software in the galaxy outside of Data’s brain.”
Doesn’t seem much more complex from what an MMORPG does today, showing a scene from multiple players’ POVs at the same time in different windows. It’s all a single simulation; the computer just has to track each player’s movement and gaze and calculate how that simulated environment would appear from that angle. Pretty standard stuff.
Just imagine that each person in a holodeck is surrounded by forcefield “screens” that project a 3D wraparound image of their own POV.
Really, it’d be simpler just to stick everyone in a VR helmet and bodysuit, but the creators of TNG didn’t think of that, as the concept of VR was still pretty new.
The one thing that doesn’t work for me is DS9: “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.” With two full baseball teams, managers, the catcher and umpire, etc., you’re talking over 20 people in the suite at the same time, and the usual set for Quark’s bare holosuite isn’t large enough to accommodate that. Were they in a larger suite we hadn’t seen before, or were they networking between two or more suites?
The one that always bothered me was Star Trek Generations, when Worf and Crusher fall into the water, even though in the next scene we see that the holodeck arch–and thus the floor–is level with the deck of the wooden sailing ship Enterprise. Not sure how the computer managed to pull that one off.
I always liked this episode and cements my belief that writing out Martha Hackett as Seska was a huge error, she is magnificent here. Also the discussion between Tuvok, Paris, Torres and Neelix in in the dining room is perhaps one of the funniest scenes in the entire series run.
A clever use of the holodeck and of Voyager’s past. Tuvok deactivating the Doctor’s self-activating routine is a violation of the Doctor’s rights… but we’ll get to that later in the show.
@13 – Matt: Funny enough, Naomi Basner was named (and her comic book hobby taken from) after a Marvel Comics writer who worked on Defenders.
@20 – CuttlefishBenjamin: Starfleet crew probably have to sign waivers to allow use of their likenesses in training simulations. And Maquis… are terrorists in that scenario. :)
@40 – C.T Phipps: That’s the Basner character Matt referred to in comment #20.
To add to the list of clues at the episode’s beginning, Janeway is wearing her old bun hair.
Another Paris and Tuvok adventure. They did like pairing them together after Future’s End, didn’t they? Some say Seska was brought back (albeit in holographic form) because of Martha Hackett’s dissatisfaction with the way she died at the end of Basics, Pt II. She jumped at the chance to reenact her departure from VGR all over again, and this time get it right. “This is why you probably shouldn’t even pay attention to stardates.” I don’t even know how they work, Krad. How did Paris survive an injection full of acid? Worst Case Scenario isn’t my personal favourite but it’s a fun penultimate episode before the double-whammy of Scorpion.
4: I think the whole point is having a new player in the same scenario but making different choices to affect the outcome. 5: WCS isn’t VGR’s Mirror equivalent – that’s Living Witness. Seska became increasingly disillusioned with Janeway’s style of command and saw the Kazon as a way of ensuring safe passage through this part of the quadrant (much like Jonas in S2). 12: VGR loved the reset button and when the scenario has no bearing on the show as a whole, it allowed them to become more adventurous.
15: Voyager’s crew complement always falls within the vicinity of 150+. 18: The evil Doctor commits attempted homicide. 19: Why would the Maquis want to spend the rest of they’re lives in the DQ? And I doubt that Starfleet would lock up the remaining Maquis after spending seven years there. 23: “Seska was never a genius when it came to forward-planning.” Like when she failed to anticipate Chakotay wiping the shuttle’s memory core in Manoeuvres. Paris probably replicated his uniform (or borrowed one from an ex-Maquis?). And that was definitely not Raphael Sbarge over the comm.
27: Voyager only has shortages whenever the plot demands it. 31: What’s sp? 43: The show wouldn’t properly explore any “unresolved grievances” until the S7 episode Repression. 53: Yep, VGR is pretty fond of that (plot) device. 55: I think The Killing Game was the only time we get an example of them expanding the hologrids by having to cut through the bulkheads first. 59: Tuvok didn’t deactivate the EMH, he just transferred him back to Sickbay. 60: The Bun of Steel, according to some!
I always liked this episode and cements my belief that writing out Martha Hackett as Seska was a huge error, she is magnificent here.
As I brought up back in the “Basics Pt. 2” talk back, Piller’s pitch was that Seska would live while her baby died (as a thematic counterpoint to Naomi’s birth). But Berman and Taylor vetoed him (and also the alternate proposal of Seska dying and the infant’s survival).
Even with this episode’s performance, I don’t know how Season Three would have played out with Seska remaining aboard as a prisoner. I’m not sure how much more mileage they could have gotten out of her after the end of Kazon arc.
It would have been not unlike what happened with Dukat on DS9 after “Sacrifice of Angels”. To this day, I still think that should have been his last appearance or they just should have subsequently killed him in “Waltz”.
If the whole point of the program Seska wrote was to kill Tuvok, why did she care about deactivating the self-destruct? Why did she care about the aliens being called off? It doesn’t make much sense to me.
Similarly with the holodecks, it seems way too easy to sabotage a weapon simply by pressing a few buttons. However, even after all these years knowing the ending, I still get a kick out of holo-Seska’s comeuppance!