Season 6 Ep 2 / 3 "Survival Instinct" / "Barge Of The Dead"
Mar 10, 2016 6:58:56 GMT -5
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Post by Prole Hole on Mar 10, 2016 6:58:56 GMT -5
Season Six, Episode 2 - "Survival Instinct"
Drone A Little Drone Of Me
"Survival Instinct" is a bit of a strange one, to be honest. It makes a sincere attempt to do something interesting with Seven, it works hard to be a character piece, and it makes moves to have a decent, if generally functional, plot. But there's something that feels a little... off about it. Voyager has made so many great strides in defining its own voice over the last couple of seasons, and even when there's been a potential mis-fire, like say the wobbly-but-not-bad "Warhead", there's something about it that still makes it feel like it's unique to Voyager. It's not that the other branches of the franchise aren't capable of doing a story a story about a talking bomb or whatever, obviously, but there's something about even a middling episode like "Warhead" that feels irreducibly Voyager-ish. You couldn't just swap out the characters for the TNG cast, say, and have it work in the same way.
And that's why "Survival Instinct" feels like it's a bit strange, because almost everything about it feels like a DS9 script, but with the Voyager cast rather than the DS9 regulars. One glance at the name of the writer of this episode should explain why, because it's penned by Ronald D. Moore, DS9 supremo and eventual Battlestar Galactica re-envisioner. And it's not that he's written a bad episode, because "Survival Instinct" definitely isn't that, but everything about this just screams out for it to be set on a big, occupied Cardassian station in orbit round Bajor and not lost somewhere in the Delta Quadrant. So we have a substitute Deep Space Nine, the outpost Voyager's handily docked at this week, we have a scene where the Captain gets to yell at (definitely-not-Miles-and-Julian) Tom and Harry for being badly behaved with faux-macho dialogue ("well, did you win?" drawls Janeway in her most Sisko-esque line of the episode, though there are others), the Borg here could easily be swapped out for the Jem'Hadar, and so on. There's even a lot of urgently delivered dialogue, all carried out very straight-faced and with great sincerity at slightly below normal conversational levels, which works well in the brooding halls and darkened spaces of DS9 but rather less so in the brightly lit interiors of a normal Federation starship, where it's left looking more than a little overly-melodramatic. It's not that any of this is badly done, it just feels somewhat misplaced, and that uncertainty of tone means that the episode often feels like it's at war with itself in a way that isn't especially constructive. If the first episode of your season, after the big flash-bang-wallop two-parter has been concluded, is going to do something then it should probably be to engage the viewers with something that's going to be representative of the show going forward so they have some kind of hook or idea of what to expect. Season Five does this well with "Night" - a hugely Voyager-esque slice of ensemble fun – and Season Four did it with "The Gift" which sets the stage for the rest of the season while dealing with the fallout from "Scorpion". Having an episode which feels like it really belongs somewhere else just doesn't achieve this.
But what we do get broadly works. It's a little contrived that Seven was separated from the Collective on a previous occasion, it's true, but it sets up the moral dilemma well enough, and as ever, it gives Ryan scope to show off what a great performer she really is. She's done so many different takes on conflicted at this stage, but she is still able to find whole new ways of imbuing Seven with doubt, fear and uncertainty, and this time adding unalloyed guilt to the picture. If there's an oddity here is that Seven doesn't spent much time debating with Janeway, which is another thing which feels little strange. Usually when Seven has one of these conflicts it's an opportunity to explore not just Seven's own conflicted feelings on the situation, but also the ongoing, developing relationship that the two women share, and that's conspicuous by its absence here. The evolving dynamic between the two characters is one of Voyager's most compelling pieces of character work and, while Janeway is on hand here to drop in bits of advise here and there, it feels like a real loss that more isn't made of this. Yet Ryan is more than gifted enough to make all the beats here work – she's especially good at selling Seven's guilt once they work out what causing the interlink between the other drones and why their memories were deleted – and the broader character sweeps are more or less in line with what we would expect. Particularly good is her reaction to being faced with making the choice of what to do with the drones once it's clear that, should the Doctor operate on them, they'll only live a few weeks, and for them to survive longer they'd need to go back to the Collective. Ryan and Picardo work wonders out of that scene, and there's a sudden, real charge to a conflict which has until this point remained relatively abstract. By making the debate suddenly less about "whose fault this is" (which in all honesty isn't especially riveting, because the answer is deeply obvious - nobody's) and more about the very real issue of quality of life versus simple survival, the episode finds a way to dramatically up the scale and stakes of what's being discussed. It's a shame we need to wait till the thirty-five minute mark to get there.
One of the other things that works remarkably well is that this is another story that helps to feed the idea that this is a proper region of space that Voyager is traversing, and not just moving from one specific adventure to another. In this, this broad range of species' we see cluttering up Voyager's usually rather more depopulated corridors help to give the impression of this being a pretty densely populated region of space. The mixture of people, cultures and outlooks are skimmed over a bit, because this is obviously just a single forty-five minute episode, but the fact that there's some diversity in terms of the races we see helps to re-enforce the ending, whereby the three drones decide to take entirely different paths for their final few weeks of life. As individuals, all three of them come from different cultures, so of course all three of them do different things when finally given a chance to step away from each other. This goes a long way to supporting the idea of them as individuals – when speaking with their overlapping "Borg Greek chorus" it's logical that they feel indistinct as individuals, just as it feels logical that once the link is broken they're finally allowed the opportunity to demonstrate the difference between them. While it's extremely convenient that one of the drones is Bajoran (something else which ties into the unhelpfully DS9-ish feel to the script) Marika's declaration that she'll remain on Voyager because of how good it feels to be on a starship again is delivered so well, and with such a ring of truth about it, that it really acts as an excellent summation of that desire to touch something familiar before succumbing to the inevitable.
In the end, this episode definitely stands as more of a success than it does a failure, but it's really in spite of itself rather than because of it. It's frustrating, because had it been written more towards fully embracing Voyager or understand what the show could do this could have been something of a triumph, but it just keeps tripping over its own feet. Ryan is excellent, most of the guest cast is fine, the regulars are all on form, but the episode never manages to shake off its feeling of indistinctness, and there's just one too many massive co-incidences for it to all cohere. This isn't just the DS9 angle - we've seen Voyager visit way-stations before, we've seen Seven conflicted over her actions as a drone before, we've seen character studies delivered in urgent whispers before. While "Survival Instinct" doesn't do any of these things poorly, it also doesn't do enough with them to make it feel like any of those elements were worthy of being revisited in this context either. What the episode desperately needs is another idea - any idea - that would push what's being done here into something really worth watching because, as I've said a few times now, this absolutely isn't bad. It just isn't any better than "decent enough" either.
Any Other Business:
• Ronald D Moore has been pretty upfront in his criticisms of Voyager as a show, yet given then chance to really make his mark on a series he clearly though was under performing he singularly fails to do so (and he won't do any better in the next episode either). There's nothing about this story that captures the feel or voice of Voyager or that marks it out as interesting in its own right – it feels like recycling. With the perfect opportunity to really show what he meant with his criticisms and do something about them we instead get something really rather... generic.
• Even Tuvok delivering his security report feels unaccountably Odo-esque, despite Tim Russ putting his best metaphorical Betty Davis twin-set on to deliver his lines.
• Inevitably, more praise for Ryan, who's terrific here, and must have been really thrilled to get back into all that Borg make-up again...
• However the make-up for the three separated drones is really great, so some praise there for sure.
• The flashback structure doesn't quite come together here. Terry Windell, who directs the ship-bound material really rather well, doesn’t give much sense of pace or place during those scenes, and when we hear the Borg are in orbit it should be a big reveal that really impacts the people involved, not a run-away-a-bit moment.
• Nice scene round the fire, though, when the "biomatter" is ready and the four drones/emerging individuals gradually remember eating and the resultant memories that triggers.
• Picardo is terrific during this episode too, with only a relative small amount of screen time, but Bertila Damas as Marika/Three Of Nine should get plenty of credit as well, she does really sterling work and is the best of this week's guest cast.
Season Six, Episode 3 - "Barge Of The Dead"
Dial-a-cliche
This is the one. This is the one I've been dreading. More than "Threshold"'s salamanders. More than Harry's romances. More than Neelix's comedy. More than Chakotay's Native American ancestry. I've been living in mortal fear of having to review a damned Klingon story. I know this isn't a popular, or even common, opinion, but I find stories about Klingons deathly dull. One of the nice things about being stuck in the Delta Quadrant is, odd inexplicable Ferengi appearance aside, we've been largely spared a lot of the standard filler material that tend to clutter up DS9 and TNG whenever an ongoing plot needs to be stalled for a bit, or in order to hit the season's episode count. That's not to say Voyager has been free of filler episodes, because of course it has its fair share as well, but they haven't been able to fall back on the old standards in quite the same way, and even the unforgivably awful "False Profits" isn't quite doing the same thing as a standard Ferengi runaround (not least because it's a sequel to a story most people watching won't even remember). Well here all that comes to a crashing end as we explore the Klingon afterlife via B'Elanna's near-death experiences.
Problem is, Star Trek is littered with characters who explore their faith and/or culture via near-death experiences. Even in Voyager alone Janeway's done it ("Coda"), Chakotay's done it ("The Fight", amongst others)…. Even Harry's had a go ("Emanations"). So the question here is really, does "Barge Of The Dead" do anything to expand on those previous episodes' explorations of this phenomenon? Basically : no. OK, a slightly longer answer – it does what it does in a not-especially-terrible way, but it's all fur coat and no knickers. Which is to say, the episode gives the impression of reaching for something fundamental or important to say about ideas around belief and culture and ends up saying little of consequence about either. The debates around religion and the afterlife here are just window dressing for a bog-standard character conflict the likes of which we've seen plenty of times before. The episode tries very hard to give the impression of anchoring itself as a spiritual debate, and at least in this sense using Chakotay as the person who B'Elanna discusses her crisis of belief with makes sense. Even without his Native American heritage he's the oldest and wisest of Voyager's crew and here he's written as someone who understands spirituality without the need to refer to his specific brand of it, a good, strong piece of characterization for him. The problem is the time is split here between his advise and the unexpected return of the B'Elanna/Janeway mother/daughter relationship. This isn't bad characterization, in and of itself, but it's one that was put to rest thre or four seasons ago as B'Elanna grew out of it and developed a proper, adult relationship of her own (suggesting someone hasn't been keeping up with ongoing character developments) and having it return here feels decidedly out of step with the growth B'Elanna's gone through. As ever, Dawson and Mulgrew are terrific together, as indeed are Dawson and Beltran, but the time spent with either character would have been better served by picking one and sticking with it, rather than dividing between them.
There's also the return of the highly unwelcome lack of understanding between how someone would be treated as a civilian as opposed to how they would be treated as a member of a military organization. When Janeway tells B'Elanna she's not going to allow B'Elanna's desire to virtually kill herself in order to explore her spirituality, she's dead right and she's right to tell B'Elanna this isn't about expressing freedom of religion. As Janeway points out there are some reasonable limits that are placed on the expression of that freedom – she wouldn't let B'Elanna sacrifice a child in the name of her faith being the example given – and in a situation like Voyager's, lost and alone, to risk the life of the chief engineer of the ship is frankly irresponsible. In a civilian situation, this might be understandable – and it's in these grey areas that DS9 can play about in so fruitfully because of the inherent ambiguities there - but that's not what this is. The entire crew depend on B'Elanna's abilities to get them home – she's accepted the rank of Chief Engineer, so she has to accept the responsibilities that come with it. This is the quintessence of the episode's all fur coat and no knickers approach – it seems reasonable that B'Elanna wants to explore what happened to her, unless you actually stop and think about what the consequences of that could potentially be for even a moment. It would actually make a much more interesting story if she has the desire to undertake the potentially fatal undertaking but is genuinely prohibited from doing do. That would also create a crisis of faith and character conflict, but in a much more inventive and original way. But that's not what we get and instead B'Elanna gets to go through with it and we get an ending that basically comes down to "and it was all alright in the end".
Still, if the story's familiar mistakes and obviousness are deeply undermining, there are two places where this episode succeeds magnificently. One, it can scarcely be a surprise to discover, is Roxann Dawson, who rises to the challenge of having to essay B'Elanna's intense dislike of Klingon culture but a culture she is nevertheless forced to confront. She's great here. B'Elanna really runs the gamut of emotions and there's not one second where her performance is anything less than captivating. The other thing that saves this episode from the doldrums is the production, which is an absolute triumph on every level. This could have looked woefully inadequate on screen, but every single element of the production here combines to support the work Dawson is doing. Gre'thor, Klingon Hell, on paper isn't up to a lot – a bit of the ferry crossing the Styx here, a bit of lava and upside-down symbols there – but everything works terrifically, so the barge is a dark place of shadows lit by flame, just as it should be, and it creaks and moans, just as it ought to. This is significant because when it comes to one of the two Big Scenes, where B'Elanna has to face the accusing glares of her shipmates as phantoms of her own psyche, it's necessary for them to look convincing in this environment. That they do (and Neelix as ever is the best when lit properly, looking properly sinister again) helps the episode enormously even though we have, once more, seen this approach fairly recently (in "The Fight", in fact). Still, it works here, and everyone really commits to the scene, so when B'Elanna's racing round the circle identifying what the crew symbolize to her (lover, friend, mother) it looks real in a way it very easily might not have done, and as a result carries some emotional resonance for B'Elanna.
So this didn't quite end up being the nightmare I thought it was going to be. I still don't enjoy the Kingon material much, and the wheezing, groaning labours of the script to convince us that there's something intrinsically interesting about it don’t really come off. Much of the Klingon iconography comes of as fetishistic, as if a Bat'leth is itself worth of being on-screen for what it is, rather than what it represents. There is some attempt to view the superstitions of the Klingons through the prism of B'Elanna's own in-built prejudices and there are a couple of moments that this comes off quite well, such as when she casually mentions that the reason she's so down on her Klingon heritage is because of her father walking out. Dawson is so good at these naturalistic beats that it's an easy moment to overlook but it’s really an excellent way of demonstrating where her own prejudice originates for without the need to lumber over every detail in some big melodramatic reveal. In these quiet moments the script shines, but they occur far less often than they should, and Klingon dialogue itself, as ever, tends towards everything being declaimed at the audience, rather than shown or explained. This gets very dreary very quickly. That any of it works is a testament to the on-screen talent, and the behind-the-scenes people that put in the work to make a convincing world out of a boat and a bit of old CGI. In a show as profoundly feminist as Voyager, the idea of confronting the tensions of motherhood and daughterhood ought to be the ideal way for the feminist agenda to move forward, and if nothing else this does provide those first, shaky steps into developing a more rounded approach to feminism.
The Klingon stuff is still incredibly corny though.
Any Other Business:
• Everything about this episode feels very surface, hence the fur coat/no knickers. There's nothing here to remotely challenge the standard idea of Klingons as loud shouty people who are loud and shouty. Except this time on a mythological boat to the underworld, rather than a Bird Of Prey or whatever. It's all very tedious.
• Some nice work from Tim Russ, who gets to do "bad" Tuvok very effectively, and it's great to see a scene between him and B'Elanna where he's still trying to help tame her anger, as a follow-on from "Juggernaut".
• I didn't mention B'Elanna's mother in the review because, honestly, there's not really a lot to say about her. She trots out the usual tedious Klingon cliché's about honour and somesuch and... blah, blah, heard it all before. The relationship between her and B'Elanna isn't really given enough screen time to carry much weight either, despite Dawson's best efforts.
• Gre'thor, the Klingon Hell that all warriors (sigh) fear going to without honour or courage (sigh), seems to strongly resemble a middling level of 90s computer game perennial Quake.
• The name Gre'thor sounds very Beowulf...
• The barge really is excellently designed, so all praise to everyone who worked on it.
• And excellent work from whoever was on lighting duties this week as well – that can't have been an easy task, but the lighting adds enormously to the atmospheric feel of the episode, so much respect there.
• The "I'm so tired of fighting" line ought to have been woefully bad (and as written it is) but Dawson somehow sells the hell out of it anyway. What a trooper!
Drone A Little Drone Of Me
"Survival Instinct" is a bit of a strange one, to be honest. It makes a sincere attempt to do something interesting with Seven, it works hard to be a character piece, and it makes moves to have a decent, if generally functional, plot. But there's something that feels a little... off about it. Voyager has made so many great strides in defining its own voice over the last couple of seasons, and even when there's been a potential mis-fire, like say the wobbly-but-not-bad "Warhead", there's something about it that still makes it feel like it's unique to Voyager. It's not that the other branches of the franchise aren't capable of doing a story a story about a talking bomb or whatever, obviously, but there's something about even a middling episode like "Warhead" that feels irreducibly Voyager-ish. You couldn't just swap out the characters for the TNG cast, say, and have it work in the same way.
And that's why "Survival Instinct" feels like it's a bit strange, because almost everything about it feels like a DS9 script, but with the Voyager cast rather than the DS9 regulars. One glance at the name of the writer of this episode should explain why, because it's penned by Ronald D. Moore, DS9 supremo and eventual Battlestar Galactica re-envisioner. And it's not that he's written a bad episode, because "Survival Instinct" definitely isn't that, but everything about this just screams out for it to be set on a big, occupied Cardassian station in orbit round Bajor and not lost somewhere in the Delta Quadrant. So we have a substitute Deep Space Nine, the outpost Voyager's handily docked at this week, we have a scene where the Captain gets to yell at (definitely-not-Miles-and-Julian) Tom and Harry for being badly behaved with faux-macho dialogue ("well, did you win?" drawls Janeway in her most Sisko-esque line of the episode, though there are others), the Borg here could easily be swapped out for the Jem'Hadar, and so on. There's even a lot of urgently delivered dialogue, all carried out very straight-faced and with great sincerity at slightly below normal conversational levels, which works well in the brooding halls and darkened spaces of DS9 but rather less so in the brightly lit interiors of a normal Federation starship, where it's left looking more than a little overly-melodramatic. It's not that any of this is badly done, it just feels somewhat misplaced, and that uncertainty of tone means that the episode often feels like it's at war with itself in a way that isn't especially constructive. If the first episode of your season, after the big flash-bang-wallop two-parter has been concluded, is going to do something then it should probably be to engage the viewers with something that's going to be representative of the show going forward so they have some kind of hook or idea of what to expect. Season Five does this well with "Night" - a hugely Voyager-esque slice of ensemble fun – and Season Four did it with "The Gift" which sets the stage for the rest of the season while dealing with the fallout from "Scorpion". Having an episode which feels like it really belongs somewhere else just doesn't achieve this.
But what we do get broadly works. It's a little contrived that Seven was separated from the Collective on a previous occasion, it's true, but it sets up the moral dilemma well enough, and as ever, it gives Ryan scope to show off what a great performer she really is. She's done so many different takes on conflicted at this stage, but she is still able to find whole new ways of imbuing Seven with doubt, fear and uncertainty, and this time adding unalloyed guilt to the picture. If there's an oddity here is that Seven doesn't spent much time debating with Janeway, which is another thing which feels little strange. Usually when Seven has one of these conflicts it's an opportunity to explore not just Seven's own conflicted feelings on the situation, but also the ongoing, developing relationship that the two women share, and that's conspicuous by its absence here. The evolving dynamic between the two characters is one of Voyager's most compelling pieces of character work and, while Janeway is on hand here to drop in bits of advise here and there, it feels like a real loss that more isn't made of this. Yet Ryan is more than gifted enough to make all the beats here work – she's especially good at selling Seven's guilt once they work out what causing the interlink between the other drones and why their memories were deleted – and the broader character sweeps are more or less in line with what we would expect. Particularly good is her reaction to being faced with making the choice of what to do with the drones once it's clear that, should the Doctor operate on them, they'll only live a few weeks, and for them to survive longer they'd need to go back to the Collective. Ryan and Picardo work wonders out of that scene, and there's a sudden, real charge to a conflict which has until this point remained relatively abstract. By making the debate suddenly less about "whose fault this is" (which in all honesty isn't especially riveting, because the answer is deeply obvious - nobody's) and more about the very real issue of quality of life versus simple survival, the episode finds a way to dramatically up the scale and stakes of what's being discussed. It's a shame we need to wait till the thirty-five minute mark to get there.
One of the other things that works remarkably well is that this is another story that helps to feed the idea that this is a proper region of space that Voyager is traversing, and not just moving from one specific adventure to another. In this, this broad range of species' we see cluttering up Voyager's usually rather more depopulated corridors help to give the impression of this being a pretty densely populated region of space. The mixture of people, cultures and outlooks are skimmed over a bit, because this is obviously just a single forty-five minute episode, but the fact that there's some diversity in terms of the races we see helps to re-enforce the ending, whereby the three drones decide to take entirely different paths for their final few weeks of life. As individuals, all three of them come from different cultures, so of course all three of them do different things when finally given a chance to step away from each other. This goes a long way to supporting the idea of them as individuals – when speaking with their overlapping "Borg Greek chorus" it's logical that they feel indistinct as individuals, just as it feels logical that once the link is broken they're finally allowed the opportunity to demonstrate the difference between them. While it's extremely convenient that one of the drones is Bajoran (something else which ties into the unhelpfully DS9-ish feel to the script) Marika's declaration that she'll remain on Voyager because of how good it feels to be on a starship again is delivered so well, and with such a ring of truth about it, that it really acts as an excellent summation of that desire to touch something familiar before succumbing to the inevitable.
In the end, this episode definitely stands as more of a success than it does a failure, but it's really in spite of itself rather than because of it. It's frustrating, because had it been written more towards fully embracing Voyager or understand what the show could do this could have been something of a triumph, but it just keeps tripping over its own feet. Ryan is excellent, most of the guest cast is fine, the regulars are all on form, but the episode never manages to shake off its feeling of indistinctness, and there's just one too many massive co-incidences for it to all cohere. This isn't just the DS9 angle - we've seen Voyager visit way-stations before, we've seen Seven conflicted over her actions as a drone before, we've seen character studies delivered in urgent whispers before. While "Survival Instinct" doesn't do any of these things poorly, it also doesn't do enough with them to make it feel like any of those elements were worthy of being revisited in this context either. What the episode desperately needs is another idea - any idea - that would push what's being done here into something really worth watching because, as I've said a few times now, this absolutely isn't bad. It just isn't any better than "decent enough" either.
Any Other Business:
• Ronald D Moore has been pretty upfront in his criticisms of Voyager as a show, yet given then chance to really make his mark on a series he clearly though was under performing he singularly fails to do so (and he won't do any better in the next episode either). There's nothing about this story that captures the feel or voice of Voyager or that marks it out as interesting in its own right – it feels like recycling. With the perfect opportunity to really show what he meant with his criticisms and do something about them we instead get something really rather... generic.
• Even Tuvok delivering his security report feels unaccountably Odo-esque, despite Tim Russ putting his best metaphorical Betty Davis twin-set on to deliver his lines.
• Inevitably, more praise for Ryan, who's terrific here, and must have been really thrilled to get back into all that Borg make-up again...
• However the make-up for the three separated drones is really great, so some praise there for sure.
• The flashback structure doesn't quite come together here. Terry Windell, who directs the ship-bound material really rather well, doesn’t give much sense of pace or place during those scenes, and when we hear the Borg are in orbit it should be a big reveal that really impacts the people involved, not a run-away-a-bit moment.
• Nice scene round the fire, though, when the "biomatter" is ready and the four drones/emerging individuals gradually remember eating and the resultant memories that triggers.
• Picardo is terrific during this episode too, with only a relative small amount of screen time, but Bertila Damas as Marika/Three Of Nine should get plenty of credit as well, she does really sterling work and is the best of this week's guest cast.
Season Six, Episode 3 - "Barge Of The Dead"
Dial-a-cliche
This is the one. This is the one I've been dreading. More than "Threshold"'s salamanders. More than Harry's romances. More than Neelix's comedy. More than Chakotay's Native American ancestry. I've been living in mortal fear of having to review a damned Klingon story. I know this isn't a popular, or even common, opinion, but I find stories about Klingons deathly dull. One of the nice things about being stuck in the Delta Quadrant is, odd inexplicable Ferengi appearance aside, we've been largely spared a lot of the standard filler material that tend to clutter up DS9 and TNG whenever an ongoing plot needs to be stalled for a bit, or in order to hit the season's episode count. That's not to say Voyager has been free of filler episodes, because of course it has its fair share as well, but they haven't been able to fall back on the old standards in quite the same way, and even the unforgivably awful "False Profits" isn't quite doing the same thing as a standard Ferengi runaround (not least because it's a sequel to a story most people watching won't even remember). Well here all that comes to a crashing end as we explore the Klingon afterlife via B'Elanna's near-death experiences.
Problem is, Star Trek is littered with characters who explore their faith and/or culture via near-death experiences. Even in Voyager alone Janeway's done it ("Coda"), Chakotay's done it ("The Fight", amongst others)…. Even Harry's had a go ("Emanations"). So the question here is really, does "Barge Of The Dead" do anything to expand on those previous episodes' explorations of this phenomenon? Basically : no. OK, a slightly longer answer – it does what it does in a not-especially-terrible way, but it's all fur coat and no knickers. Which is to say, the episode gives the impression of reaching for something fundamental or important to say about ideas around belief and culture and ends up saying little of consequence about either. The debates around religion and the afterlife here are just window dressing for a bog-standard character conflict the likes of which we've seen plenty of times before. The episode tries very hard to give the impression of anchoring itself as a spiritual debate, and at least in this sense using Chakotay as the person who B'Elanna discusses her crisis of belief with makes sense. Even without his Native American heritage he's the oldest and wisest of Voyager's crew and here he's written as someone who understands spirituality without the need to refer to his specific brand of it, a good, strong piece of characterization for him. The problem is the time is split here between his advise and the unexpected return of the B'Elanna/Janeway mother/daughter relationship. This isn't bad characterization, in and of itself, but it's one that was put to rest thre or four seasons ago as B'Elanna grew out of it and developed a proper, adult relationship of her own (suggesting someone hasn't been keeping up with ongoing character developments) and having it return here feels decidedly out of step with the growth B'Elanna's gone through. As ever, Dawson and Mulgrew are terrific together, as indeed are Dawson and Beltran, but the time spent with either character would have been better served by picking one and sticking with it, rather than dividing between them.
There's also the return of the highly unwelcome lack of understanding between how someone would be treated as a civilian as opposed to how they would be treated as a member of a military organization. When Janeway tells B'Elanna she's not going to allow B'Elanna's desire to virtually kill herself in order to explore her spirituality, she's dead right and she's right to tell B'Elanna this isn't about expressing freedom of religion. As Janeway points out there are some reasonable limits that are placed on the expression of that freedom – she wouldn't let B'Elanna sacrifice a child in the name of her faith being the example given – and in a situation like Voyager's, lost and alone, to risk the life of the chief engineer of the ship is frankly irresponsible. In a civilian situation, this might be understandable – and it's in these grey areas that DS9 can play about in so fruitfully because of the inherent ambiguities there - but that's not what this is. The entire crew depend on B'Elanna's abilities to get them home – she's accepted the rank of Chief Engineer, so she has to accept the responsibilities that come with it. This is the quintessence of the episode's all fur coat and no knickers approach – it seems reasonable that B'Elanna wants to explore what happened to her, unless you actually stop and think about what the consequences of that could potentially be for even a moment. It would actually make a much more interesting story if she has the desire to undertake the potentially fatal undertaking but is genuinely prohibited from doing do. That would also create a crisis of faith and character conflict, but in a much more inventive and original way. But that's not what we get and instead B'Elanna gets to go through with it and we get an ending that basically comes down to "and it was all alright in the end".
Still, if the story's familiar mistakes and obviousness are deeply undermining, there are two places where this episode succeeds magnificently. One, it can scarcely be a surprise to discover, is Roxann Dawson, who rises to the challenge of having to essay B'Elanna's intense dislike of Klingon culture but a culture she is nevertheless forced to confront. She's great here. B'Elanna really runs the gamut of emotions and there's not one second where her performance is anything less than captivating. The other thing that saves this episode from the doldrums is the production, which is an absolute triumph on every level. This could have looked woefully inadequate on screen, but every single element of the production here combines to support the work Dawson is doing. Gre'thor, Klingon Hell, on paper isn't up to a lot – a bit of the ferry crossing the Styx here, a bit of lava and upside-down symbols there – but everything works terrifically, so the barge is a dark place of shadows lit by flame, just as it should be, and it creaks and moans, just as it ought to. This is significant because when it comes to one of the two Big Scenes, where B'Elanna has to face the accusing glares of her shipmates as phantoms of her own psyche, it's necessary for them to look convincing in this environment. That they do (and Neelix as ever is the best when lit properly, looking properly sinister again) helps the episode enormously even though we have, once more, seen this approach fairly recently (in "The Fight", in fact). Still, it works here, and everyone really commits to the scene, so when B'Elanna's racing round the circle identifying what the crew symbolize to her (lover, friend, mother) it looks real in a way it very easily might not have done, and as a result carries some emotional resonance for B'Elanna.
So this didn't quite end up being the nightmare I thought it was going to be. I still don't enjoy the Kingon material much, and the wheezing, groaning labours of the script to convince us that there's something intrinsically interesting about it don’t really come off. Much of the Klingon iconography comes of as fetishistic, as if a Bat'leth is itself worth of being on-screen for what it is, rather than what it represents. There is some attempt to view the superstitions of the Klingons through the prism of B'Elanna's own in-built prejudices and there are a couple of moments that this comes off quite well, such as when she casually mentions that the reason she's so down on her Klingon heritage is because of her father walking out. Dawson is so good at these naturalistic beats that it's an easy moment to overlook but it’s really an excellent way of demonstrating where her own prejudice originates for without the need to lumber over every detail in some big melodramatic reveal. In these quiet moments the script shines, but they occur far less often than they should, and Klingon dialogue itself, as ever, tends towards everything being declaimed at the audience, rather than shown or explained. This gets very dreary very quickly. That any of it works is a testament to the on-screen talent, and the behind-the-scenes people that put in the work to make a convincing world out of a boat and a bit of old CGI. In a show as profoundly feminist as Voyager, the idea of confronting the tensions of motherhood and daughterhood ought to be the ideal way for the feminist agenda to move forward, and if nothing else this does provide those first, shaky steps into developing a more rounded approach to feminism.
The Klingon stuff is still incredibly corny though.
Any Other Business:
• Everything about this episode feels very surface, hence the fur coat/no knickers. There's nothing here to remotely challenge the standard idea of Klingons as loud shouty people who are loud and shouty. Except this time on a mythological boat to the underworld, rather than a Bird Of Prey or whatever. It's all very tedious.
• Some nice work from Tim Russ, who gets to do "bad" Tuvok very effectively, and it's great to see a scene between him and B'Elanna where he's still trying to help tame her anger, as a follow-on from "Juggernaut".
• I didn't mention B'Elanna's mother in the review because, honestly, there's not really a lot to say about her. She trots out the usual tedious Klingon cliché's about honour and somesuch and... blah, blah, heard it all before. The relationship between her and B'Elanna isn't really given enough screen time to carry much weight either, despite Dawson's best efforts.
• Gre'thor, the Klingon Hell that all warriors (sigh) fear going to without honour or courage (sigh), seems to strongly resemble a middling level of 90s computer game perennial Quake.
• The name Gre'thor sounds very Beowulf...
• The barge really is excellently designed, so all praise to everyone who worked on it.
• And excellent work from whoever was on lighting duties this week as well – that can't have been an easy task, but the lighting adds enormously to the atmospheric feel of the episode, so much respect there.
• The "I'm so tired of fighting" line ought to have been woefully bad (and as written it is) but Dawson somehow sells the hell out of it anyway. What a trooper!