Season 4, Ep 18 / 19 "The Killing Game"

Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once...


Season Four, Episode 18 / 19 “The Killing Game”

One of the continual benefits of a show with as flexible a format as Voyager is that there’s always the potential for constant surprise. If you’re moving through space at a fair old clip you just don’t know what next week is going to bring, which is a tremendous boon in terms of keeping your audience engaged. So after the unholy mess that constituted “Retrospect” it seems doubtful anyone watching the show would expect the next two episodes to be a cross between Call Of Duty 2, Star Trek and ‘Allo ‘Allo, yet here we are, and yes this is indeed precisely as strange as that description sounds. So we are faced with another bizarre mash-up as we once again get to see just how far “genre flexibility” can take the show. And this is a full-on genre collision as well, not faffing about at the edges of it – this is a script that is fully committed to slamming Voyager in to World War II via the Hirogens and Nazis and seeing what the results are.

Genre collisions really exist for two principal reasons. Firstly they allow us to shed new light on our regular premise to see if something interesting can be thrown up, and secondly it lets us see if our regular premise has anything it might usefully contribute to an understanding of whatever it is colliding with. So in “The Killing Game” we have two principal collisions – Star Trek into World War II and the Hirogen into the Nazis. The second of these is by far the most successful, and it’s in part because the comparison between Nazi philosophy and Hirogen philosophy fails. Not in a writing sense, I should add, but in two parallel scenes in the first and second episodes. In the first, the Hirogien Kapitan debates with his holographic Nazi stooge about the nature of the Nazi’s supposed superiority. The debate is framed in terms of one philosophy facing off against another – not that the Nazis and the Hirogen are in sympathy with each other, but quite the reverse. The Kapitan here is shown to be by far the smarter of the two – he respects his opponents, he reaches to understand them, and while they both show arrogant superiority it’s clear that the tenants of Nazism are found wanting, because, the episode suggests, they are based on nothing more than vague myths about farming the land or apparently degenerate races and a sort of manifest destiny whereby the Nazis believe they are superior merely because they think they are. It is here that the episode lands its most stinging rebuke to this kind of extremism – the whole point of this exercise is because the Hirogen Kapitan has seen the future and where all this will lead – extinction – and wants to do something to change that for his people, whereas the Nazi hologram just keeps spouting the same old “we are the superior race” lines and gets nowhere. In other words, there is some wisdom to the Hirogen Kapitan here – he is able to see beyond the blind recitation of received opinion and wishes to find a way forward, to act in a progressive rather than a regressive manner. This directly leads to the scene in the second episode, whereby the same holographic Nazi seduces and ultimately causes the Hirogen Karr to turn traitor with his talk of asserting superiority and not negotiating with inferior forms of life. And what is the result of giving in to this extremist philosophy? The Hirogen are of course defeated. This makes perfect sense in terms of Star Trek’s own moral framework, of course, but this episode draws clear, direct comparisons between the rigidity of prejudice and inflexibility against flexibility and open-mindedness, and it is the latter that leads the Voyager crew to victory. For all that this episode is, on the surface, another romp, there is a very clear, very prescient moral centre to it that never becomes clumsy or overbearing but nevertheless exactly lines up with how we would expect Star Trek to be. Progress, and a genuine, committed willingness to change and improve, is shown to be the superior approach.

Yet there is a potential problem here, and it’s a fairly straightforward one. If we are to use history as a setting for an action-adventure story, then it’s important that the history used is actually treated as history, rather than a (and sorry for borrowing this phrase from Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles) Heritage Themepark version of history. Using a World War II settings allows all sorts of narrative short-cuts in terms of setting up your premise – the audience doesn’t need to have who the Nazis are explained to them, or the occupation of France, and so on in the way that they do when coming across This Week’s Alien Race – but it also runs the risk of being crass. It may be growing increasingly distant, but historically speaking World War II is still a relatively recent event the effects of which still resonate today and so if you are to portray events from that period it’s important that, alongside all the action-adventure material, there is an acknowledgement that this was a very real conflict with very real consequences. In this, the use of the Hirogen is an extremely good move. Most obviously, we’ve seen what a serious threat they are over the past handful of episode, which means when they become Nazi stand-ins they’re actually Nazi stand-ins, right there in the uniform and everything, not some vague nasty-alien-they’re-a-bit-fascist-aren’t-they that we more typically get. Seeing the Hirogen strut around in Nazi uniforms has the potential to look incredibly silly but it’s actually extremely successful – the Hirogen are genuinely dangerous, and seeing them in Nazi uniforms helps quantify that danger without the need for exposition, even as the episode works to undermine the philosophy the Nazis themselves represent. Indeed, during the course of the first episode we only see Hirogen in Nazi uniforms until about the half-way point, when it then becomes jarring to see a human wearing one, which demonstrates how successful this approach is. All of this helps the episode avoid becoming Heritage Themepark World War II – the Nazis here are a real and palpable threat alongside the Hirogen, yet even the holo-characters aren’t written as stock Nazis and are given real, fleshed-out opinions and points of view, however repellent they might actually be. By establishing a joint threat between the holographic bad guys and the Hirogen we get the consequences the episode needs to avoid using its period setting crassly.

And even facing the racism issue, there are two interesting points to consider here. During his big rambling speech in the second episode about the superiority of the Nazis, the holographic Nazi suddenly starts talking about what a problem the Jews are and generally spouting the racist perspective that they are of course known for. What’s interesting here is that it’s taken the story this long to get a Nazi to actually come out and state openly all the bigoted things they stood for. It’s jarring, and what makes it even more jarring is that he’s saying it to a seven-foot alien that’s towering over him and could snap him in half without even thinking about it. It demonstrates another obvious juxtaposition – the Nazi goes on about the purity of Nazi blood while trying to corrupt an obviously superior being to his point of view. The result is that he’s left looking incredibly stupid, but this is, again, never lingered on or emphasized – his actions and his idiocy are allowed to stand by themselves and the audience can reach their own conclusions. Yet in the same episode we have another, incredibly understated but successful, beat on the subject of racism. When “Davis” (Tom) emerges from a Jeffries Tube and points a rifle at Harry, his first question is, “American?”, and not in a nice way. Because of course for someone from World War II, seeing someone of Asian descent wandering round a location assumed to be under enemy control would indeed prompt that reaction, especially given the extremely gung-ho way the American are portrayed here. But it’s also not lingered on – once Tom accepts Harry’s story that’s pretty much that, maintaining Tom as a sympathetic character in the “Americans Save Europe!” tradition from a certain type of war movie (and given Tom is basically a pre-programmed character at this stage, that’s exactly what he’s playing) while still actually being brave enough to raise the fact that Harry’s Asian descent would have been a legitimate concern contemporaneously. It’s a terrific beat, extremely well played by both Wang and McNeill, and the rest of the scene, which has Harry scrambling to remember what bit of Betty Grable he’s supposed to stare at, plays out as one would expect, a gentle riff on Tom’s general interest in 20th century history and how nagging his best friend about it actually proves to be useful (and if you want to make something of Harry not knowing what bit of a lady to stare at while his former prison bunk-mate interrogates him on the subject, well, I’m not going to stop you, though it doesn’t in any way play as slash – it genuinely comes across as friendly).

And remember how at the beginning of this piece I said that one of the things Voyager benefitted from was that potential sense of surprise? Well, here’s a big one – this episode successfully solves the problem of Harry, and what’s more it does it while still using him as a peril monkey. Harry’s really interesting in this episode – pushed to the margins and out of the main action, there’s no doubt at all that he’s back to being a peril monkey, which isn’t often the best use of him. But here he’s pushed about, beaten, abused, and generally put upon and the character absolutely shines. He never joins the main action, yet by giving him space to flit around the edges of what’s going on it’s possible to use him sparingly and usefully, and it allows him to have a narrative purpose distinct from the rest of the crew while still informing the main story. I’ve noted before how much better Wang is when Harry is on the back foot and boy is he ever on the back foot here. Looking battered and bloody helps as well – the character’s a lot easier to take seriously when he stops looking like a well-turned-out schoolboy – and the strain and pressure Harry has been put under brings the character to light in whole new ways. Especially impressive is the scene in the mess hall where Harry gets caught with a stray transmission (rookie mistake!) then has to bluff out his two captors. Wang brings so much anger and frustration to the role and it’s revelatory – a genuine, positive move for the character, and a real demonstration of how well he can succeed given the right material to work with. It wouldn’t be the sort of thing that you could do every week without him turning in to Kenny from South Park, but there’s no doubt about it – one of the great achievements of “The Killing Game” is finding a way of making his character work and work well. He’s even a proper hero! But for his efforts the Voyager crew might still be getting used and abused on the holodecks, yet he’s able to formulate the plan to get the neural transmitters turned off, which in turn leads to the big End Of Episode One Breakout. But even his one light scene, the one with Tom about Betty Grable, we see the Ensign of old is still in there, but crucially he never gets enough time in the scene to resort to type, so it works as a character beat but doesn’t undermine the good work the rest of the episode has done with him, it just gives those scenes a little more to contrast against. The list of great Harry episodes isn’t long, but “The Killing Game” should most certainly be on it.

But anyway, all this is taking “The Killing Game” terribly seriously, isn’t it? Because, as I mentioned at the start, there’s very definitely something of a video game aesthetic going on here as well. While I might joke about Call Of Duty 2 and its World War II setting there is seven years between this episode and the game – this was broadcast in 1998, Call Of Duty 2 was released in 2006. Wolfenstein might be a better point of comparison – it pretty much originated the “escape from the Nazis” genre as far as computer games were concerned back in 1981, but more importantly for our purposes Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992 and become one of the games most credited with popularizing the first person shooter, which “The Killing Game” owes a lot to (it was also produced by id software, who would go on to work on Call Of Duty). The game itself is a fairly typical runaround, but it was a huge hit and garnered good reviews on its release, and so killing Nazis was back on the agenda in a pretty big way. And big chunks of “The Killing Game” really do hold with this video game aesthetic. The initial advance of the Americans right at the end of the first episode looks like every French map in a WWII first person shooter you’ve ever seen, blowing the holodeck open across multiple levels right at the end of the first episode has all the hallmarks of finding a new, in-game hidden level to explore, and the mix-and-match approach to genres owes so much to so many games which play fast and loose with exactly what the concept of a genre even is. This lends a lot of the action scenes a sense of pace and place that Star Trek doesn’t always achieve with its big action set-pieces, but here, by invoking video game logic, “The Killing Game” is able to give some real drive and excitement to its action sequences by appealing to that lizard part of the brain that just insists that running around, blowing things up in 1940’s France, then seamlessly moving to running through a spaceship with a Luger handgun and a big alien hot on your heels is just a very cool thing to do. Oh, and then the Klingons show up. Because, you know, Nazis, space aliens, World War II and debates over comparative philosophy just isn’t ever quite enough, is it? Actually to be honest the inclusion of the Klingons here sticks fairly solidly to the video-game logic that the rest of the story is beholden to, but it’s not especially effective, and it’s the one place where “The Killing Game” falters a bit. Their mass attack on Saint Clare at the end of the second episode is fun in a silly, anything-can-happen sort of way, but they’re over-egging the pudding a bit. That’s in part because there is something deeply peculiar about seeing the likes of Janeway or Neelix as a Klingon (and not really in an interesting, uncanny sort of way, it’s just really strange without really adding or commenting on anything), and also because they’re just there as a string of fairly lazy Klingon cliché’s that don’t contribute anything until we get to the final showdown. Yes, they do give a solid demonstration that the World War II scenario isn’t the only one the Hirogen are running and of course it’s always better to be shown not told, but since, one fairly poor knife fight apart, we don’t get to see any mighty Klingon battles what we are instead left with is a bit of tedious comedy about how the Klingons are drunk all the time and are basically just loud-mouthed blowhards. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s something that it would have been fine to see once, to establish them, not something that we need to keep cutting back to time and again (and while Ethan Phillips isn’t actually bad at playing Neelix-as-a-Klingon, he’s very bad at playing Neelix-trying-to-act-like-a-Klingon, although the material here is weak at best so it’s not entirely his fault). The point of passing through a map in a video game and on to the next one is just that – you pass through it – all the other video game logistics advance the story to the next level, or map, but the cuts back to a few drunk Klingons on a ropey looking ledge serves to stall rather than enhance the action, and the one thing you should never do in this kind of video game is slow down the action.

But honestly this is one minor error in an episode that is otherwise hugely successful. Just solving the problem of Harry alone would have been an achievement worth noting never mind all the other things this episode does right. It’s notable that I’ve got this far through the review and, Garrett Wang aside, I haven’t even started to talk about how good the performances are here. In the face of a terrific script everyone once again rises to the challenges here, but the particular stand-out is Jeri Ryan, who’s ice-maiden chanteuse is delivered absolutely pitch-perfect (sorry about that), and squares of wonderfully against Katrine, in ways we have both seen before and yet never quite seen like this before. So, really, we have a hugely fun episode that makes no apologies for revelling in its own fun, which engages with a philosophical underpinning which gives the episode some real weight and bite, and where everyone seems, quite rightly, to be having a whale of a time delivering an episode that never stops moving and never loses its focus or edge. There’s a reason that Voyager is known for being the branch of Star Trek which uses two-parters the best – because it absolutely is, and this season we now have three for three with “Scorpion”, “Year Of Hell”, and “The Killing Game”. It’s a terrific achievement for the show, and the fact that such an oddball concept as Hirogens-vs-Nazis-vs-humans, and which is absolutely light-years away from the other two stories in this list in terms of set-up and execution, yet doesn’t come across as even slightly ridiculous, should give you an idea of just how great these two episodes are.


Any Other Business:

• All the World War II names the regular crew are given are a delight, but Mademoiselle de Neuf deserves special mention.

• Everyone really throws themselves into and embraces the setting and I’d happily watch a spin-off show with Mulgrew and Ryan run a café in war-torn France while dealing with the Nazis and the Resistance. Bonjour Bonjour, perhaps.

• Well Katrine is Bogart in Casablanca, isn’t she? Mulgrew really seems to be relishing the role.

• For once Roxann Dawson doesn’t have to hide the fact she’s pregnant and it’s actually written into the story! How a “holographic baby bump” is meant to work in the real world is anyone’s guess, but I’m sure she must have been glad to get out of standing behind suspiciously well-placed consoles for a while.

• There is just something utterly perfect about the way “Mademoiselle de Neuf” delivers the line, “when the Americans arrive and the fighting begins, I don’t intend to be standing by a piano singing “Moonlight Becomes You”. “

• Neelix the delivery boy – charming. Neelix the Klingon – not.

• Tom and Chakotay are a bit relegated in stock role as the Americans rolling into town to save the day, but Beltran is pretty good at playing a World War II captain. Davis and Brigitte’s romance is a little pat too, but then again this is World War II story, not reality, and those kind of contrivances turn up in those sorts of stories all the time, so of course the first bar Davis goes into is the one that holds his long-lost sweetheart. And McNeill and Dawson get one terrific scene together in the café when they try to remember what film they went to see at the cinema.

• Tuvok’s a bit off to the side as well, but as Janeway’s trusted right-hand man in the bar he’s well enough served.

• I love how well the theme of progress versus the static is articulated throughout this episode – sometimes blatantly (the Kapitan declaring, “Species who don’t change die”) and sometimes more subtly, as with the debates that range throughout both episodes.

• All praise to J. Paul Boehmer, who plays the Hirogen Kapitan. Like Tony Todd in “Prey” he underplays absolutely everything to terrific effect, yet he also underplays it in a completely distinct manner, a real achievement. His role as the only person with the vision and intelligence to see his people survive yet still being betrayed is tragic, yet he’s always shown as an extremely dangerous, vicious and cunning enemy for the crew. It gives him all sorts of depths and dimensions, and he’s a real stand-out character.

• The defeat of the Hirogen hunter at the end of the second episode, where his holographic gun fades out of view, is really smart thinking on Janeway’s behalf and again shows off the more strategic side of her thinking that we saw back in “Scorpion”. It’s great to see her used this way.

• The ending – Janeway giving the Hirogen holodeck technology – is a bit odd on the surface, but it makes sense in a way. While normally the Federation would never trade technology in this way, and indeed explicitly refused to do so with the Kazon, the situation here is very different. Here we’re told there’s a deadlock, that there’s no other resolution possible and so Janeway steps forward with the only real way out that doesn’t basically involve the death of everyone. Is it an ideal solution? Ah well, we’ll come to that later on…