Post by Prole Hole on Feb 18, 2016 13:30:22 GMT -5
Season Five, Episode 23 - "11:59"
Hey, Doctor Who's On This Evening!
And so, as Season Five enters the home stretch with the final four episodes, it still continues to bring surprises, and none moreso than what's essentially a science-fiction free version of the past. Other than the handful of scenes set on Voyager, this episode has no sci-fi conceit, no aliens, no anomalies... no nothing, except forty-five minutes of musing, exploring the past, and how our concepts of history can be shaped as much by what we want them to be as they are by facts. I seem to be repeating myself somewhat over the last few episodes, but this is once again a surprisingly experimental approach to Voyager (something this episode deserves a lot more credit for), and it's an audacious move that stands a real risk of alienating (ha!) the audience. As with "Course: Oblivion" we spend very little time with the actual crew, and what we do spend is mostly them lounging around, relating bits of family history in an effort to get a line this week (the Doctor and B'Elanna come out bottom of the pile in this regard). It's an episode, to put it another way, that admits that every week on-board a starship isn't going to be drama-filled, so finds instead interesting ways to play around in the cracks.
There's something very time-locked about "11:59" and the time it's set is, in some ways, the dying final gasp of an "old" way of seeing history and falls just short of how things will become. The episode was broadcast just a little before the Millennium, so the idea of big public works projects like London's Millennium Dome were very much in the public eye, as indeed were questions of past vs future, which this episode takes some time to ponder. All this felt appropriate at the time of broadcast and, while references to something like the Y2K bug (remember that? Anyone?) were timely then, they obviously speak to a very specific period and ground the episode firmly in it. But it’s not all that historical detail that adds to Captain Janeway's understanding of her past, it is in fact the exact opposite - a stray photograph, a few lines here and there, are all she's able to track down of her past and it's from those little bits of ephemera that she's constructed her notion of the past. But just six years after this episode was broadcast, an event took place that really did change the way we look at history and how we view the past, and that was the launch of YouTube. More than just about anything, YouTube, with the advances in technology and network access that went alongside it, made it possible to record, preserve and maintain just about any single event that could occur. Something that would have still seemed like science fiction even when this episode was broadcast would, in just a couple of years, revolutionize the amount of physical data that would describe the world around us. Many, many other services would follow in YouTube's path of course, but it was YouTube that started this revolution and it has an inevitable impact on the way the past is viewed, because no longer do we need to rely on dusty newspaper archives and yellowing family portraits above the mantelpiece. Now we have an almost incomprehensibly vast amounts of data on everyone and everything. Imagine what this episode would have been like if Shannon O'Donnell had a Facebook page Janeway could have found and looked back over. But the launch of Facebook is five years away from "11:59", so of course she doesn't. We're still too close to the "video revolution" (if you want to call it that) to understand the full implications of how it will change the way we view the past, but the change itself is seismic.
But the episode goes at least some way to suggesting that the lack of data isn't necessarily a bad thing - would knowing what the real O'Donnell still inspire Janeway to take to the stars? Probably not, but the episode is generally very smart in the way that it handles information from the past. The implication, repeated through Henry Janeway's love of his books and the past, O'Donnell's love of the future, and Janeway's analysis of her past, is that the quality of information and what it inspires is more important than the quantity of it (though the episode couldn't have known it at the time, this is especially prescient in a post-YouTube world). Henry Janeway is a perfect example - someone who knows everything yet understands nothing. He's so hidebound to the past that he's incapable of looking forward. He understands what it must be like to stroll down the Boulevard Saint-Germaine but has never even left his home state. He perfectly symbolizes someone lost to the past. O'Donnell is of course the other side of the coin - forever reaching to the future. Yet the way the characters make this work, and the point of the episode really, is that it's by acknowledging that the past and future both have contributions to make to the now it allows understanding and compromise, and ultimately progress. The past and the future aren't in opposition to each other at all - they compliment each other. This is mirrored in the romance between Janeway and O'Donnell. It's extremely telling that there's a significant age gap between the two characters - the noticeably older Henry Janeway symbolizing the past and the younger O'Donnell symbolizing the future, and the full blossoming of their romance the coming together of both perspectives. What's also nice, and really very charming, is that not once is the age gap between the two characters ever referred to on-screen. These are just two people who happen to fall for each other, and the age difference just doesn't matter - which says enough in and of itself.
The bridge between the past and the present is represented by Jason Janeway, and he straddles the two different perspectives. He clearly loves both his father and the shop, but is also immediately drawn to Janeway and her laptop as a symbol of a future he longs to embrace. He's obviously taking on responsibilities in excess of his relatively few years, but from the scene where he rather bashfully admits he does the shop's books and answers the phone, he obviously doesn't really mind the responsibility either. He has fealty to the past, and to family, yet is not bound by it. But the chance and opportunity that a future with the Millennium Gate and all it promises is also a powerful lure, and in this we see the desire to move forward as well. In some ways Jason is wiser than his history-locked father - Henry may be able to drop classical allusions at any moment or vaingloriously put himself in the position of Rome standing against the barbarians, but Jason actually seems to understand that to save the past also sometimes means moving forward, that the two don't have to be contradictory. It's this understanding that finally has O'Donnell persuade him that he can get a shop in the new Millennium Gate, "somewhere quiet where nobody will disturb you", that the past will continue to exist even as it embraces the future. It's a bracingly intelligent approach to history and progress.
Yet with all this going on, we shouldn't lose sight of just how lovely "11:59" is, because it really is an absolutely charming episode. Kate Mulgrew, given the chance to turn in yet another variation on Janeway (or O'Donnell) finds whole new ways of playing a character that's close enough to "our" Janeway yet still recognizably distinct. O'Donnell is clearly more vulnerable and emotional than Captain Janeway, but she's also warm, immensely likeable, and her gently persuasive nature and vulnerability make her an easy character to enjoy spending time with. Mulgrew also has great rapport with Kevin Tighe, which, since the entire episode is predicated upon their romance looking convincing, is just as well. Tighe himself is terrific as Henry Janeway - as stubborn as our Janeway, but with a twinkle that makes it very easy to see why O'Donnell might fall for him, even in such a relatively short space of time. His interest in books and history feels real in the way that some this-week's-guest-character traits don't always, and the real passion he's able to put into his historical references really help bring the character alive. But even with a touch of corporate sub-plot arm-twisting, this is a gentle, coaxing episode which helps carry you along, and the (slender) plot and characters do all the work that's needed without an over-inflated sense of drama, despite the looming deadline of the millennium. A sci-fi free sci-fi romance is not, let's be honest, an obvious approach for Voyager to take, yet when the results are this great it's impossible to argue it's not a good thing, and once again we see taking risks with an episode working. This is an intelligent, well-written script that's happy to take its time and lay out its thesis in any damned way it wants. It's hard to imagine either Janeway finding fault with that, and I most certainly can't.
Any Other Business:
• "11:59" really is just wonderful, like buying a normal bottle of wine only to discover it's a vintage of unimpeachable quality. On paper, a romance between two characters we've never seen before, and will never see again, with an abstract conflict between past and future, sounds like a recipe for disaster, yet what we get is a strikingly memorable forty-five minutes. Top marks to all involved.
• Much, much praise for Mulgrew, who really gets a chance to show off her acting chops in a markedly different way.
• But let's not under-sell Kevin Tighe's contribution either, which is one of the best one-shot guest performances in Voyager. And I cannot tell you how great it is to have the age gap between him and Mulgrew completely unremarked upon, quite aside from the representations of past and future. People fall for each other simply because they do.
• There's something very strange about seeing Mulgrew accepting a cup of coffee that's decaf and not having a fit about it not being the real thing.
• This episode is provides proof, if proof were needed, that the Star Trek universe is not our universe. I hope it doesn't break anyone's heart to discover this, but there is no one-kilometre tall Millennium Gate in Indiana.
• There's something rather nice about the lunar module hanging from the rear-view mirror of O'Donnell's station wagon, though it really ought to be a bit clichéd.
• That laptop O'Donnell is lugging around with her is vast, and it must weigh a tonne. Compared to the Mac Book Air I'm writing this on, it's amazing to see just how far technology has come in a tiny amount of time.
• Still, it's extremely unusual that the corporate stooge, here played (well) by perennial hey-it's-that-guy John Carroll Lynch, not only offers O'Donnell a job but actually ends up being a man of his word and offering it to her even when she fails to persuade Janeway to sell, rather than being just the usual sleazeball. Very refreshing indeed.
• The approach to history here is just magnificent, even down to tiny details like Janeway being frustrated by not being able to find out more about O'Donnell searching the database, only to discover oral history is important as well, as Tom (who has a long-established interest in history) knows the name of all the people involved in the space program from the 70s onwards, and O'Donnell wasn't a name he recognised.
• The conceit of O'Donnell dictating into a tape recorder as a sort of "Captain's log" is great, especially in an episode where Janeway herself makes no log entries, but I wonder what happened to the tapes? It seems there's no transcript of them in the future for Janeway to discover, and equally it seems like the audio recordings themselves don't survive either.
Season Five, Episode 24 - "Relativity"
Dead On Time
Quintessentially Voyager? Why yes, I think "Relativity" probably is. It's a time-travel episode, for one, the two main characters are Seven and Janeway, there's a fair old amount of bafflegab, the story is twisty and fast-paced, and it all ends up more or less making sense by the time we gasp our way to credits. "Relativity" is real rollercoaster ride, and all the better for it. The last couple of episodes have been somewhat slower-paced, which makes the shock of the narrative speed of "Relativity" strike even harder than it might otherwise, but even without that contrast this is still a story that starts fast and doesn't let up. It's also fairly self-indulgent, though not really in a bad way, which is rare enough. There's lots of continuity stuff going on here, exploiting Voyager's past without leaning on it too heavily. It's all good, solid fare, with a solid time travel centre.
Time travel is a fairly abused concept in Star Trek, so whenever we come across it, it's right to be leery. Here time travel is very much the engine of the plot, so if the story here is to succeed time travel needs to be used in a way that works with the story, rather than against it. The use of the Relativity from "Future's End" is in this instance inspired, because rather than our usual anomaly-of-the-week or some other handy workaround, we have the concept resting on a pre-established piece of continuity - a fully-functional 29th century time machine. This helps to gloss over any amount of bafflegab an anomaly or something similar might have generated and just lets the fact of time travel stand as it is - these people are from the future, they can do it, done. No great effort needs to be expanded on how this works, because it's not relevant to the story being told and would waste time better spent dealing with what's actually going on. It's a lesson other time-travel episodes could stand to learn (just wait till we get to "Endgame"...). But we also have the introduction of a new time travel element, which is temporal psychosis, a condition which prevents someone travelling too often because the cumulative effects are debilitating and eventually fatal. This is necessary because of one of the most obvious problems with time travel is being addressed - if Seven fails, what's to stop her just going back and trying again? Which... is fine really, it's not a spectacular solution to the problem but it works well enough at putting a limiter on things, and it does come into play as first Braxton, then Seven, are increasingly debilitated by their travels. If there's an issue with this, it's that it doesn't really amount to anything - when Seven actually does die, they just go back and get an earlier version of her, rendering the whole thing a bit moot. Still, good effort, and all that.
But for the rest, well there's just not a mis-step to be found here. What radiates through this script is the sheer fun of playing around with a puzzle-box and just seeing how far things can be pushed in any direction and still work. The joie de vivre is incredibly infectious, and it's clearly visible just how much fun the cast are having with this. Seven has rarely been more dry-witted, and of course Ryan excels at this side of Seven, patiently putting with the increasing insanity around her, while still understanding that she's got a job to do. In this, the script falls just short of becoming a complete romp (though it still largely is) and gives enough space for the drama of what's occurring to come through. For all the time travel shenanigans going on here, there's a very real and present danger to Voyager, one that takes time to parse out, and that danger is never allowed to diminish or become overwhelmed. While yet another destruction of the ship might seem like overkill it does at least keep focus on the threat that's being explored, and if it's a bit melodramatic (and it is) it still works. It's the same when Seven "dies" near the start of the episode - we get a big zoom in on her prone form, a dramatic sting from the incidental music, fade to black... all very melodramatic, but it still works, because it's never allowed to become silly.
But really, I'm nitpicking here, because the act of sitting down and watching the episode makes it clear just what a fantastic story this is, and everything just works . That's why I described it at the beginning as quintessential, because everything we see here we've seen before in Voyager but it's all done as good as it's possible to do here. That isn't to say that "Relativity" is unoriginal, because that would be a terribly unfair criticism to range against it, it's more that it just takes what works and does it that much better than we've yet seen. it's one of those episodes where, after you've seen it, you wonder why there hasn't really been an episode quite like that before, and there's no really good answer to that. We've had time travel, we've had Seven, we've had the Relativity just sitting there waiting to be picked up again, we've had the chance, yet it's taken until now to get all the bits appropriately aligned. Still, it was more than worth the wait, so I'm not going to complain too hard (or at all, really). Even the character work here is well deployed which, given this episode is really another expression of Voyager's action-adventure aesthetic, isn't necessarily guaranteed, yet it's clear that all the characters have been thought about, and even the small details ring true. So, for example, Tom teasing Seven into the ping-pong tournament by appealing to her ego (taunting her that she can't beat B'Elanna) makes sense, because Seven and B'Elanna have frequently been at each other's throats, and Tom's just enough of a cad to know what to say to get under Seven's skin. What's even more delightful is that Seven acquiesces to the tournament, even though she knows full well she's being manipulated - despite her protestations, she really has become human enough again to have an ego to appeal to. It's a small beat of course, but it paints a bigger picture, as all these little character beats ought to, and its demonstrative of how well-thought-out everything is here, not just the big time-travel plot aspects but the little character moments as well. The same is true of Braxton - his reaction to the events of "Future's End" feel right with the small amount we learned about him here, and if the idea of him being arrested for crimes he's going to commit is a bit Minority Report, well, that doesn't feel out of place here either. Indeed, in terms of temporal causality, it seems likely that his capture and removal from command here triggers his resentment to Voyager, which in turn leads to him trying to destroy the ship - the perfect Pogo Paradox, as described in this episode.
And it all ends with multiple version of Braxton, Janeway, Seven, timelines being cleaned up, warning to avoid time travel in the future (as if), and it all feels very satisfactory, because it is. It’s another story where everything could have collapsed into a bathetic ending because there are a lot of balls to juggle here, yet everything just keeps on working right up until the end. It's a time travel story, so there are always going to be holes in the temporal mechanics, and of course if you think about it too hard there are always, "but what if...?" questions, which is inevitable. But the script does its best to play fair with the concepts of time travel as established here, and both the story and the characters fold together to provide an absolute delight of an episode. Putting up with an occasional wonky bit of temporal mechanics is always the price of entry to a story based around time-travel. During one scene, Seven and Ducane discuss different kinds of paradoxes, with the Dali Paradox and the Pogo Paradox getting name-checked. But really, the only paradox here is that all time-travel episodes aren't this good, because "Relativity" is nigh-on perfect.
Any Other Business:
• For the first, one, and only time in the whole of Star Trek, we get to visit the actual Utopia Planitia shipyards, rather than a picture or holographic representation. It's a lovely shot, with Voyager still under construction.
• Both Ryan and Mulgrew deserve their usual praise here, taking a script which could have been scenery-chewiing just seriously enough for the drama to work, but just flippant enough to be aware of how much fun it all is. And a lovely little moment from Ryan where, after her occular implant is occluded she gingerly touches her face as if acutely aware of its absence.
• Obviously this isn't the same Captain Braxton from "Future's End" and here he's played by Bruce McGill, who does a good job as a replacement. He's very good at snapping out his lines as well: "you pedantic drone!"
• Captain Braxton, at the conclusion of "Future's End", tells Janeway that because he didn't experience the timeline of him being stranded on Earth he doesn't remember it, yet here he does. This is, I suppose, a continuity error, though I prefer to go for a simple explanation - he lied in "Future's End" in the hopes of avoiding exactly what's going on here (though this is pure headcannon - there's nothing on screen to support this reading, it's just my preferred way of viewing it).
• Seven describes Voyager's briefing room as "an efficient design" when asked about it by Janeway while she's hiding out on the ship prior to its launch. I strongly disagree, that briefing room looks horrible to work in (all Star Trek briefing rooms do, actually).
• Lots of nice details as Janeway wanders round her ship for the first time, especially her quiet surprise at just how big the bridge seems even though she's studied the schematics inside out.
• Hey, remember Lieutenant Carey from Season One? Here he is again! Making a pass at Seven this time, and getting knocked back.
• Slight retcon as to why Janeway wanted Paris on-board here - in "Caretaker" it's because he can help find Maquis bases, here it's because he's an excellent pilot. Neither reason contradicts the other, as such, it can be that both are true and he's both a great pilot and can help find the bases, but it's not quite phrased that way.
• All together now: "There's no time like the past!" There's a host of cheesy time-related one-liners in this episode- just go with it is my advise.
Hey, Doctor Who's On This Evening!
And so, as Season Five enters the home stretch with the final four episodes, it still continues to bring surprises, and none moreso than what's essentially a science-fiction free version of the past. Other than the handful of scenes set on Voyager, this episode has no sci-fi conceit, no aliens, no anomalies... no nothing, except forty-five minutes of musing, exploring the past, and how our concepts of history can be shaped as much by what we want them to be as they are by facts. I seem to be repeating myself somewhat over the last few episodes, but this is once again a surprisingly experimental approach to Voyager (something this episode deserves a lot more credit for), and it's an audacious move that stands a real risk of alienating (ha!) the audience. As with "Course: Oblivion" we spend very little time with the actual crew, and what we do spend is mostly them lounging around, relating bits of family history in an effort to get a line this week (the Doctor and B'Elanna come out bottom of the pile in this regard). It's an episode, to put it another way, that admits that every week on-board a starship isn't going to be drama-filled, so finds instead interesting ways to play around in the cracks.
There's something very time-locked about "11:59" and the time it's set is, in some ways, the dying final gasp of an "old" way of seeing history and falls just short of how things will become. The episode was broadcast just a little before the Millennium, so the idea of big public works projects like London's Millennium Dome were very much in the public eye, as indeed were questions of past vs future, which this episode takes some time to ponder. All this felt appropriate at the time of broadcast and, while references to something like the Y2K bug (remember that? Anyone?) were timely then, they obviously speak to a very specific period and ground the episode firmly in it. But it’s not all that historical detail that adds to Captain Janeway's understanding of her past, it is in fact the exact opposite - a stray photograph, a few lines here and there, are all she's able to track down of her past and it's from those little bits of ephemera that she's constructed her notion of the past. But just six years after this episode was broadcast, an event took place that really did change the way we look at history and how we view the past, and that was the launch of YouTube. More than just about anything, YouTube, with the advances in technology and network access that went alongside it, made it possible to record, preserve and maintain just about any single event that could occur. Something that would have still seemed like science fiction even when this episode was broadcast would, in just a couple of years, revolutionize the amount of physical data that would describe the world around us. Many, many other services would follow in YouTube's path of course, but it was YouTube that started this revolution and it has an inevitable impact on the way the past is viewed, because no longer do we need to rely on dusty newspaper archives and yellowing family portraits above the mantelpiece. Now we have an almost incomprehensibly vast amounts of data on everyone and everything. Imagine what this episode would have been like if Shannon O'Donnell had a Facebook page Janeway could have found and looked back over. But the launch of Facebook is five years away from "11:59", so of course she doesn't. We're still too close to the "video revolution" (if you want to call it that) to understand the full implications of how it will change the way we view the past, but the change itself is seismic.
But the episode goes at least some way to suggesting that the lack of data isn't necessarily a bad thing - would knowing what the real O'Donnell still inspire Janeway to take to the stars? Probably not, but the episode is generally very smart in the way that it handles information from the past. The implication, repeated through Henry Janeway's love of his books and the past, O'Donnell's love of the future, and Janeway's analysis of her past, is that the quality of information and what it inspires is more important than the quantity of it (though the episode couldn't have known it at the time, this is especially prescient in a post-YouTube world). Henry Janeway is a perfect example - someone who knows everything yet understands nothing. He's so hidebound to the past that he's incapable of looking forward. He understands what it must be like to stroll down the Boulevard Saint-Germaine but has never even left his home state. He perfectly symbolizes someone lost to the past. O'Donnell is of course the other side of the coin - forever reaching to the future. Yet the way the characters make this work, and the point of the episode really, is that it's by acknowledging that the past and future both have contributions to make to the now it allows understanding and compromise, and ultimately progress. The past and the future aren't in opposition to each other at all - they compliment each other. This is mirrored in the romance between Janeway and O'Donnell. It's extremely telling that there's a significant age gap between the two characters - the noticeably older Henry Janeway symbolizing the past and the younger O'Donnell symbolizing the future, and the full blossoming of their romance the coming together of both perspectives. What's also nice, and really very charming, is that not once is the age gap between the two characters ever referred to on-screen. These are just two people who happen to fall for each other, and the age difference just doesn't matter - which says enough in and of itself.
The bridge between the past and the present is represented by Jason Janeway, and he straddles the two different perspectives. He clearly loves both his father and the shop, but is also immediately drawn to Janeway and her laptop as a symbol of a future he longs to embrace. He's obviously taking on responsibilities in excess of his relatively few years, but from the scene where he rather bashfully admits he does the shop's books and answers the phone, he obviously doesn't really mind the responsibility either. He has fealty to the past, and to family, yet is not bound by it. But the chance and opportunity that a future with the Millennium Gate and all it promises is also a powerful lure, and in this we see the desire to move forward as well. In some ways Jason is wiser than his history-locked father - Henry may be able to drop classical allusions at any moment or vaingloriously put himself in the position of Rome standing against the barbarians, but Jason actually seems to understand that to save the past also sometimes means moving forward, that the two don't have to be contradictory. It's this understanding that finally has O'Donnell persuade him that he can get a shop in the new Millennium Gate, "somewhere quiet where nobody will disturb you", that the past will continue to exist even as it embraces the future. It's a bracingly intelligent approach to history and progress.
Yet with all this going on, we shouldn't lose sight of just how lovely "11:59" is, because it really is an absolutely charming episode. Kate Mulgrew, given the chance to turn in yet another variation on Janeway (or O'Donnell) finds whole new ways of playing a character that's close enough to "our" Janeway yet still recognizably distinct. O'Donnell is clearly more vulnerable and emotional than Captain Janeway, but she's also warm, immensely likeable, and her gently persuasive nature and vulnerability make her an easy character to enjoy spending time with. Mulgrew also has great rapport with Kevin Tighe, which, since the entire episode is predicated upon their romance looking convincing, is just as well. Tighe himself is terrific as Henry Janeway - as stubborn as our Janeway, but with a twinkle that makes it very easy to see why O'Donnell might fall for him, even in such a relatively short space of time. His interest in books and history feels real in the way that some this-week's-guest-character traits don't always, and the real passion he's able to put into his historical references really help bring the character alive. But even with a touch of corporate sub-plot arm-twisting, this is a gentle, coaxing episode which helps carry you along, and the (slender) plot and characters do all the work that's needed without an over-inflated sense of drama, despite the looming deadline of the millennium. A sci-fi free sci-fi romance is not, let's be honest, an obvious approach for Voyager to take, yet when the results are this great it's impossible to argue it's not a good thing, and once again we see taking risks with an episode working. This is an intelligent, well-written script that's happy to take its time and lay out its thesis in any damned way it wants. It's hard to imagine either Janeway finding fault with that, and I most certainly can't.
Any Other Business:
• "11:59" really is just wonderful, like buying a normal bottle of wine only to discover it's a vintage of unimpeachable quality. On paper, a romance between two characters we've never seen before, and will never see again, with an abstract conflict between past and future, sounds like a recipe for disaster, yet what we get is a strikingly memorable forty-five minutes. Top marks to all involved.
• Much, much praise for Mulgrew, who really gets a chance to show off her acting chops in a markedly different way.
• But let's not under-sell Kevin Tighe's contribution either, which is one of the best one-shot guest performances in Voyager. And I cannot tell you how great it is to have the age gap between him and Mulgrew completely unremarked upon, quite aside from the representations of past and future. People fall for each other simply because they do.
• There's something very strange about seeing Mulgrew accepting a cup of coffee that's decaf and not having a fit about it not being the real thing.
• This episode is provides proof, if proof were needed, that the Star Trek universe is not our universe. I hope it doesn't break anyone's heart to discover this, but there is no one-kilometre tall Millennium Gate in Indiana.
• There's something rather nice about the lunar module hanging from the rear-view mirror of O'Donnell's station wagon, though it really ought to be a bit clichéd.
• That laptop O'Donnell is lugging around with her is vast, and it must weigh a tonne. Compared to the Mac Book Air I'm writing this on, it's amazing to see just how far technology has come in a tiny amount of time.
• Still, it's extremely unusual that the corporate stooge, here played (well) by perennial hey-it's-that-guy John Carroll Lynch, not only offers O'Donnell a job but actually ends up being a man of his word and offering it to her even when she fails to persuade Janeway to sell, rather than being just the usual sleazeball. Very refreshing indeed.
• The approach to history here is just magnificent, even down to tiny details like Janeway being frustrated by not being able to find out more about O'Donnell searching the database, only to discover oral history is important as well, as Tom (who has a long-established interest in history) knows the name of all the people involved in the space program from the 70s onwards, and O'Donnell wasn't a name he recognised.
• The conceit of O'Donnell dictating into a tape recorder as a sort of "Captain's log" is great, especially in an episode where Janeway herself makes no log entries, but I wonder what happened to the tapes? It seems there's no transcript of them in the future for Janeway to discover, and equally it seems like the audio recordings themselves don't survive either.
Season Five, Episode 24 - "Relativity"
Dead On Time
Quintessentially Voyager? Why yes, I think "Relativity" probably is. It's a time-travel episode, for one, the two main characters are Seven and Janeway, there's a fair old amount of bafflegab, the story is twisty and fast-paced, and it all ends up more or less making sense by the time we gasp our way to credits. "Relativity" is real rollercoaster ride, and all the better for it. The last couple of episodes have been somewhat slower-paced, which makes the shock of the narrative speed of "Relativity" strike even harder than it might otherwise, but even without that contrast this is still a story that starts fast and doesn't let up. It's also fairly self-indulgent, though not really in a bad way, which is rare enough. There's lots of continuity stuff going on here, exploiting Voyager's past without leaning on it too heavily. It's all good, solid fare, with a solid time travel centre.
Time travel is a fairly abused concept in Star Trek, so whenever we come across it, it's right to be leery. Here time travel is very much the engine of the plot, so if the story here is to succeed time travel needs to be used in a way that works with the story, rather than against it. The use of the Relativity from "Future's End" is in this instance inspired, because rather than our usual anomaly-of-the-week or some other handy workaround, we have the concept resting on a pre-established piece of continuity - a fully-functional 29th century time machine. This helps to gloss over any amount of bafflegab an anomaly or something similar might have generated and just lets the fact of time travel stand as it is - these people are from the future, they can do it, done. No great effort needs to be expanded on how this works, because it's not relevant to the story being told and would waste time better spent dealing with what's actually going on. It's a lesson other time-travel episodes could stand to learn (just wait till we get to "Endgame"...). But we also have the introduction of a new time travel element, which is temporal psychosis, a condition which prevents someone travelling too often because the cumulative effects are debilitating and eventually fatal. This is necessary because of one of the most obvious problems with time travel is being addressed - if Seven fails, what's to stop her just going back and trying again? Which... is fine really, it's not a spectacular solution to the problem but it works well enough at putting a limiter on things, and it does come into play as first Braxton, then Seven, are increasingly debilitated by their travels. If there's an issue with this, it's that it doesn't really amount to anything - when Seven actually does die, they just go back and get an earlier version of her, rendering the whole thing a bit moot. Still, good effort, and all that.
But for the rest, well there's just not a mis-step to be found here. What radiates through this script is the sheer fun of playing around with a puzzle-box and just seeing how far things can be pushed in any direction and still work. The joie de vivre is incredibly infectious, and it's clearly visible just how much fun the cast are having with this. Seven has rarely been more dry-witted, and of course Ryan excels at this side of Seven, patiently putting with the increasing insanity around her, while still understanding that she's got a job to do. In this, the script falls just short of becoming a complete romp (though it still largely is) and gives enough space for the drama of what's occurring to come through. For all the time travel shenanigans going on here, there's a very real and present danger to Voyager, one that takes time to parse out, and that danger is never allowed to diminish or become overwhelmed. While yet another destruction of the ship might seem like overkill it does at least keep focus on the threat that's being explored, and if it's a bit melodramatic (and it is) it still works. It's the same when Seven "dies" near the start of the episode - we get a big zoom in on her prone form, a dramatic sting from the incidental music, fade to black... all very melodramatic, but it still works, because it's never allowed to become silly.
But really, I'm nitpicking here, because the act of sitting down and watching the episode makes it clear just what a fantastic story this is, and everything just works . That's why I described it at the beginning as quintessential, because everything we see here we've seen before in Voyager but it's all done as good as it's possible to do here. That isn't to say that "Relativity" is unoriginal, because that would be a terribly unfair criticism to range against it, it's more that it just takes what works and does it that much better than we've yet seen. it's one of those episodes where, after you've seen it, you wonder why there hasn't really been an episode quite like that before, and there's no really good answer to that. We've had time travel, we've had Seven, we've had the Relativity just sitting there waiting to be picked up again, we've had the chance, yet it's taken until now to get all the bits appropriately aligned. Still, it was more than worth the wait, so I'm not going to complain too hard (or at all, really). Even the character work here is well deployed which, given this episode is really another expression of Voyager's action-adventure aesthetic, isn't necessarily guaranteed, yet it's clear that all the characters have been thought about, and even the small details ring true. So, for example, Tom teasing Seven into the ping-pong tournament by appealing to her ego (taunting her that she can't beat B'Elanna) makes sense, because Seven and B'Elanna have frequently been at each other's throats, and Tom's just enough of a cad to know what to say to get under Seven's skin. What's even more delightful is that Seven acquiesces to the tournament, even though she knows full well she's being manipulated - despite her protestations, she really has become human enough again to have an ego to appeal to. It's a small beat of course, but it paints a bigger picture, as all these little character beats ought to, and its demonstrative of how well-thought-out everything is here, not just the big time-travel plot aspects but the little character moments as well. The same is true of Braxton - his reaction to the events of "Future's End" feel right with the small amount we learned about him here, and if the idea of him being arrested for crimes he's going to commit is a bit Minority Report, well, that doesn't feel out of place here either. Indeed, in terms of temporal causality, it seems likely that his capture and removal from command here triggers his resentment to Voyager, which in turn leads to him trying to destroy the ship - the perfect Pogo Paradox, as described in this episode.
And it all ends with multiple version of Braxton, Janeway, Seven, timelines being cleaned up, warning to avoid time travel in the future (as if), and it all feels very satisfactory, because it is. It’s another story where everything could have collapsed into a bathetic ending because there are a lot of balls to juggle here, yet everything just keeps on working right up until the end. It's a time travel story, so there are always going to be holes in the temporal mechanics, and of course if you think about it too hard there are always, "but what if...?" questions, which is inevitable. But the script does its best to play fair with the concepts of time travel as established here, and both the story and the characters fold together to provide an absolute delight of an episode. Putting up with an occasional wonky bit of temporal mechanics is always the price of entry to a story based around time-travel. During one scene, Seven and Ducane discuss different kinds of paradoxes, with the Dali Paradox and the Pogo Paradox getting name-checked. But really, the only paradox here is that all time-travel episodes aren't this good, because "Relativity" is nigh-on perfect.
Any Other Business:
• For the first, one, and only time in the whole of Star Trek, we get to visit the actual Utopia Planitia shipyards, rather than a picture or holographic representation. It's a lovely shot, with Voyager still under construction.
• Both Ryan and Mulgrew deserve their usual praise here, taking a script which could have been scenery-chewiing just seriously enough for the drama to work, but just flippant enough to be aware of how much fun it all is. And a lovely little moment from Ryan where, after her occular implant is occluded she gingerly touches her face as if acutely aware of its absence.
• Obviously this isn't the same Captain Braxton from "Future's End" and here he's played by Bruce McGill, who does a good job as a replacement. He's very good at snapping out his lines as well: "you pedantic drone!"
• Captain Braxton, at the conclusion of "Future's End", tells Janeway that because he didn't experience the timeline of him being stranded on Earth he doesn't remember it, yet here he does. This is, I suppose, a continuity error, though I prefer to go for a simple explanation - he lied in "Future's End" in the hopes of avoiding exactly what's going on here (though this is pure headcannon - there's nothing on screen to support this reading, it's just my preferred way of viewing it).
• Seven describes Voyager's briefing room as "an efficient design" when asked about it by Janeway while she's hiding out on the ship prior to its launch. I strongly disagree, that briefing room looks horrible to work in (all Star Trek briefing rooms do, actually).
• Lots of nice details as Janeway wanders round her ship for the first time, especially her quiet surprise at just how big the bridge seems even though she's studied the schematics inside out.
• Hey, remember Lieutenant Carey from Season One? Here he is again! Making a pass at Seven this time, and getting knocked back.
• Slight retcon as to why Janeway wanted Paris on-board here - in "Caretaker" it's because he can help find Maquis bases, here it's because he's an excellent pilot. Neither reason contradicts the other, as such, it can be that both are true and he's both a great pilot and can help find the bases, but it's not quite phrased that way.
• All together now: "There's no time like the past!" There's a host of cheesy time-related one-liners in this episode- just go with it is my advise.