Season Six Ep 18 / 19 "Ashes To Ashes" / "Child's Play"
May 5, 2016 9:39:30 GMT -5
Jean Luc de Lemur likes this
Post by Prole Hole on May 5, 2016 9:39:30 GMT -5
Season Six, Episode 18 - "Ashes To Ashes"
Trust To Trust
"Ashes To Ashes" is a rather meditative episode which, while not carrying the flash-bang-wallop of something like "Tsunkatse" or "Memorial", manages to be more compelling that many of the last few episodes by allowing things to slow down and take their time to ponder. It's also an episode which continues Season Six's running theme of the exploration of history, this time dealing with personal history as Harry has to deal with the emotions brought up by the return of an assumed-dead crewmember. It's an episode where almost everything is understated and given room to breathe, and as a result it's really rather good.
But let's get the most obvious elephant in the room out of the way first, because while this isn't exactly a Harry-has-a-romance episode in the traditional sense, it also pretty much is that as well, just from a rather unusual angle. And while it would be fair to assume that this would likely be a recipe for disaster, as it has been with every other Harry-has-a-romance episode, actually here it isn't. I mentioned in the last episode that Wang had fallen back into all the old, lazy ways he used to portray Harry, yet here just one episode later (and with noticeably stronger material) he's back on form again. Crucially everything here is underplayed by Wang – scenes of intimacy are played as intimate, not a horny schoolboy, scenes of emotional resonance are played with a degree of maturity we haven't really seen from him before, and so on. Wang really is good here, and deserves some praise for finding a way into this episode that just makes Harry seem more believeable than we're used to seeing him. It helps, of course, that This Week's Guest Star, Kim Rhodes, is someone who is both great in the role as the returning Ballard and someone Wang has genuine rapport with – not something we can say about any of his previous paramours. Scenes which once would have seemed clumsy and awkward come across as genuine and caring, and that in itself feels like something of a minor revelation. The best example of this is probably the scene when Harry kisses her in bed for the first time since she returned. Apart from being near-unique in one way – Harry actually asks her if it's Ok for him to kiss her, rather than just doing it! - it's also sweetly affectionate where it could have been cloying and clumsy, and it's a measure of how good Wang is here that he's able to make a scene like that really work in the way it's meant to. There's lots of moments like that scattered throughout the episode and they manage to make everything seem much more lived-in, and like Harry and Lyndsay had an actual, proper relationship prior to her death.
Because, naturally, if there is one obvious flaw here, it's that we've never actually seen Lyndsay before. That's a little bit of a shame, because if we had seen her before it would give that extra little frission to her return, as well as a little extra dimension to her realtionship with Harry. Though there is something vaguely appropriate that the returning character is just some no-nothing redshirt we've never heard of before, there's definitely a sense that this episode could be just that little bit more if only we'd actually seen Harry and her share any screen time prior to the opening titles of this episode. Yet while that would have been nice it does not, somewhat surprisingly, really damage anything here either, it just would have taken what's already a strong episode to just that little bit of a higher place. Because Rhodes, who plays Lyndsay as flippant, sarcastic, and eminently likeable, has the same great rapport with every member of the crew, we get a real sense that she was actually integrated as part of the Voyager crew, even if we haven't seen her before. For this episode to remain credible that's really important, and Rhodes gets this aspect of her character 100% right. All the regular cast she spends any significant time with deliver performances that really feel like there was a real, genuine pre-existing relationship, and that easy conviction really makes what could have seemed like a clumsy "we lost someone dear to us" story come alive in ways it easily might not have done with a less believable actor in the central guest role. Indeed Rhodes really is an excellent presence throughout this episode, and scenes of her, for example, spitting out Kobali dialogue really make it feel like she's speaking a real, alien language, and not just a few randomly scribbled syllables on this week's scripts (which is not an easy thing to do). What gives extra dimension to Lyndsay as well is that, as well as exploring personal history via Harry's feelings towards her, she also has her own personal history to explore, not just via her time with the Kobali, but also with the Voyager crew themselves. So scenes of her semi-accusing Janeway for causing her death, or looking forward to Neelix's cooking, help give the character agency and depth away from just her relationship with Harry, so she doesn't just exist as a way to explore what's going on with whatever member of the crew needs a starring role this week. And, of course, it's pleasing from Voyager's feminist perspective that we get to have a female character be fleshed out in this way, rather than the lumps of wood that, say, Chakotay normally gets stuck trying to act opposite, so we get a fully rounded, fully engaged character who exists as a person in her own right.
All this character work does, however, rather mean that the plot, such as it is, takes something of a back seat, and the ending, whereby Lyndsay goes back to the Kobali, is a little bit on the rote side. Not so bad that it undermines the character work, but it's all a bit narratively predictable. We have what amount to thirty minutes of plot-free character work, almost all of which is good-to-great, then the Kobali turn up, provide a (very) little bit of threat, then Lyndsay leaves with them. It gives the end of the episode a somewhat perfunctory feel which it didn't really need to have – indeed this might be one of those episodes where it would have been better if we'd never seen the Kobali at all just explored them through Lyndsay's descriptions, then have her leave to explore her own identity rather than because Voyager was under direct threat. This is almost what we get anyway, so it's a shame they didn’t go a bit further in that direction. However, it feels a bit churlish to be overly-critical on that front, because what we do get works – it's just obvious. There's a bit of a sub-plot (if that's the right description) about Lyndsay trying to look human again, and there's the whole "looks don’t matter in affairs of the heart" line of thought that's a bit obvious as well. But the episode does well by this kind of familiar material because it's Harry that gets the "it doesn't matter" speech and he (and Wang, again) are surprisingly mature in the way they deal with it. It's not just laid out as a cliché, and while you couldn't go so far to say that it's subverting anything, it manages to handle familiar material in an engaging way, and this is how the final five minutes or so should really have been dealt with. Still the plot shenanigans aren't really the central focus of this episode, even as they need to be addressed, and it's refreshing, after a run of episodes which have had little to do with the personal, to come across "Ashes To Ashes" and spend some time exploring character. It's not a perfect episode, but it's sincere, it's genuine, and it goes miles in showing how this kind of episode can work for Harry while still having its central role be a real, proper character in her own right and not just be there to reflect Our Heroes Plight This Week. That's quite the achievement in and of itself, and if "Ashes To Ashes" gets a bit forgotten in the course of this season that's a shame, because, like Lyndsay, it deserves to be celebrated even as we move on from it.
Any Other Business:
• We get another pre-credits sequence which shows none of the regular crew, and just has Kim Rhodes machine-gunning out Kobali dialogue. She's very good at it, and it’s the one time the fact we haven't seen Ballard before works, because we as the audience don’t know who she is, so it provides a decent cliffhanger into the title sequence.
• There's a whole B-story here about Seven getting to grips with the Borg children and exploring her maternal side. It's... OK. It's certainly never as interesting as the A-story, but it provides a few good moment ("fun will now commence"), and keeps the thread of the Borg children running, so they're not just forgotten about, a decent piece of between-episodes continuity.
• On the same lines, the Borg kiddiewinks are surprisingly non-annoying for the second episode in a row, though they very nearly are during the Kadis-Kot game. Though again this is saved by a good gag - "you will implement punishment protocol 9-alpha".
• Lovely scene between Lyndsay and Janeway when she invites her to dinner in the captain's quarters, and very well played by both Rhodes and Mulgrew.
• Good make-up too, for the Kobali.
• It's a measure of how much better things have gotten with Harry romance episodes because the last time we had one ("The Disease"), Tom got an appallingly awful line where he reels off the list of wrong women Harry's fallen for and it was dreadful. Here he gets more or less the same line, but instead of it sounding like an incredibly stupid piece of clunky exposition it instead comes across as relaxed banter between two people who are actually friends. What a difference it makes.
• It's hard not to feel sorry for Harry when Lyndsay decides to leave. Whoever would have thought that was possible?
Season Six, Episode 19 - "Child's Play"
"Outside?"
It's difficult to know what to make of "Child's Play" really. It's heart is certainly in the right place, and it makes a proper attempt to continue the expansion of Seven's maternal side, and begin the path of developing the characteristics of the Borg children, in this case Icheb. And there's a sense that, by allowing us to explore something of Icheb's background and family we'll get to care about him more as an individual because we'll understand him from a perspective other than "Borg survivor". And that's fair enough, it's a completely acceptable strategy to undertake, and it ought to at least elucidate something about his character, either as an individual or how he relates to the rest of the people around him. It's a strategy which has worked in the past with Seven (although not just with Seven) so there's definitely grounds to think and believe that it would work again.
But it doesn't work. Why? Because this is dull. Dull, dull, dull. Even veteran cult TV star Mark Shepard (who's now been in, among others, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Supernatural, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, The X-Files...quite the CV) can't manage to make this seem like an episode worth watching, which is quite the achievement, although not in any way a good one. This also contains the most perfunctory use of the Borg to date, who turn up to be token bad guys at about the thirty-seven minute mark, are quickly put out of commission by some half-hearted photon torpedo shenanigans, and that's that. Not. Impressive. Even the Borg Trombonestm can’t add any tension. There's also lots and lots of logical inconsistencies. If Janeway or Seven are worried about returning Icheb to a society which may be threatened by the Borg because of a nearby transwarp conduit, why not collapse the conduit? They did it in "Dark Frontier" and the Prime Directive obviously doesn't apply, yet this is never brought up or the possibility even referred to. Equally, it seems at least a little improbable that after all the medical scans Icheb must have been through to remain on the ship, the Doctor apparently never noticed that he was bred to be a weapon. That... seems unlikely. Or the idea that the Borg half assimilated a colony without finishing it off (but without explanation as to why, not even after the disease revelation which could have been indicative of them being scared away). There's just way too many moments like that throughout the episode that prevent it from ever taking flight, because just a fractional moment's thought and it all collapses, and it's not as if there's any flash-bang-zoom stuff going on to distract you from the lumbering, poorly-thought-out plot. If you're going to do a character piece it's important to make your characters engaging and, other than Seven, absolutely nobody here is. Icheb is fine, I don't really want to be overly dismissive and Manu Intiraymi does a reasonable job with what is in the end a fairly limited role, but Icheb is never written as anything more than a cypher, and one who's essentially just buffeted by the opinions of those around him. Even when it comes to his Big Decision he doesn't even get to say that he's decided to stay with his parents in the end, Seven says it and he silently confirms her deduction. That makes him look passive and rather dull, rather than conflicted or questioning, as was presumably the intent of the script. The idea of him being adrift in other people's opinions is fine, but the reality isn't well written enough to deliver on this. Similarly, his parents have an obvious point of conflict – his father can't really face sending him back to the Borg, his mother insists that they have to – but this ends up being reduced to a couple of lines and nothing more. Here there was more chance for interesting material and it's wasted. The conflicts of parental wishes for their child, even at odds with each other, might tie in quite nicely to the familial themes Voyager is developing, and the fact that it's Icheb's mother that's certain he must be returned to the Borg might prove an interesting contrast to Seven's maternal instincts, which are developing in the opposite direction – overly protective, rather than overly callous.
But no. We just scroll through forty-five minutes of largely undistinguished, largely unengaging stuff. I was going to use this episode as this season's Any Other Business episode, but there's not enough that goes on here to even flesh that out. The relationship Icheb has with the other Borg children is given a bit of a prompt, but it amounts to very little. "Janeway is to Seven as Seven is to Icheb" is set up almost like a mathematical formula, another relationship that could be fruitfully exploited for drama, or at the very least irony, but no, a mathematical formula is all too prescient as a description and just as passionless as a few numbers on a page. Ryan and Mulgrew do try to work to make this seem like there's an emotional core, but they can't sell it, and given how many mother/daughter scenes these two have played together by now, it really says something that they can't find any real angle to give this some kind of investment. But it's not surprising either, because this is just dull. It's not as bad as "Spirit Folk" because honestly, how it be? But while "Spirit Folk" was bad enough to angry up the blood at the mere thought of it, this swings in the other direction and is just so nondescript it's hard to even get angry at. Everything here is just so incredibly surface – we have a whole society that, unusually, we get to see in situ, pleasingly avoiding the more typical two-corridors-and-a-square issue and with some rather great location shooting, and they're still about the last interesting race we've ever met. A society that's been decimated by the Borg, struggled to constantly rebuild itself, and which sits in the constant shadow of their threat, ought to be a bit more interesting than two dull-as-ditchwater parents, half a dozen extras and a couple of leftover bits of set from the airponics bay. To be very strictly fair, the one scene that does work – where Icheb's father points out the constellations in the sky, as they reach a tentative bond – works pretty well, but it's about a minute long (and it's about the only time Mark Sheppard's natural on-screen charisma is allowed to come through). A one minute oasis of interesting in a forty-five minute desert of dullness just isn't good enough.
I honestly didn't come here to bury "Child's Play". Actually sitting down and watching the episode is mostly boring but it wasn't so infuriating that I didn’t think I'd be unable to find a redemptive angle somewhere, but I just really can't. There's no real thematic resonance, there's no real points of interest, and there's no real character work. I'm not actually sure how you even have a forty-five minute episode of television which is specifically about one character and not have any character work, but that seems to be what we end up with. This is just something that exists between "Ashes To Ashes" and "Good Shepard", an outing which helps Season Six hit its episode count and does absolutely nothing else. The conclusion of all this smear of nothingness is also a return to the status quo - it's not a reset button as such, but by the time the closing credits roll absolutely nothing about Icheb's situation has changed. He's still on Voyager, he's still mildly conflicted about his place in the Universe, and unless you want to make something of his teeny tiny rebellion about being sent to bed on time (well, to regenerate, but you know what they're saying), there's not really any meaningful change in his relationship with Seven. Or Janeway. Or the other Borg children. Or the other crew members. Since developing his relationships with other the other people who actually populate this starship, as informed by his experiences on the planet, seems to be the point of the exercise it's impossible not to see this as a failure, and indeed "Child's Play" is exactly that – a failure. Not an embarrassment. Not a catastrophe. Not a series-ruining nightmare. But it is, quite definitely, a failure.
Any Other Business:
• I don't even know what to write here. It's already been a struggle to find this many words to say about "Child's Play".
• Um, there's a good beam-in shot where Seven, Janeway and Icheb materialize in front of a waterfall.
• It's a small point of continuity, but it's nice that the show takes the time to join the dots between the destruction of the Cube Icheb and the other Borg children were discovered on and his nature as a biological weapon, without it being too heavily underscored.
• Yea, how do you have Mark Sheppard of all people not be charismatic in your show?
• Mind you, Icheb's mother isn't any better. In fact, she's a lot worse.
• Oh who cares. Next!
Trust To Trust
"Ashes To Ashes" is a rather meditative episode which, while not carrying the flash-bang-wallop of something like "Tsunkatse" or "Memorial", manages to be more compelling that many of the last few episodes by allowing things to slow down and take their time to ponder. It's also an episode which continues Season Six's running theme of the exploration of history, this time dealing with personal history as Harry has to deal with the emotions brought up by the return of an assumed-dead crewmember. It's an episode where almost everything is understated and given room to breathe, and as a result it's really rather good.
But let's get the most obvious elephant in the room out of the way first, because while this isn't exactly a Harry-has-a-romance episode in the traditional sense, it also pretty much is that as well, just from a rather unusual angle. And while it would be fair to assume that this would likely be a recipe for disaster, as it has been with every other Harry-has-a-romance episode, actually here it isn't. I mentioned in the last episode that Wang had fallen back into all the old, lazy ways he used to portray Harry, yet here just one episode later (and with noticeably stronger material) he's back on form again. Crucially everything here is underplayed by Wang – scenes of intimacy are played as intimate, not a horny schoolboy, scenes of emotional resonance are played with a degree of maturity we haven't really seen from him before, and so on. Wang really is good here, and deserves some praise for finding a way into this episode that just makes Harry seem more believeable than we're used to seeing him. It helps, of course, that This Week's Guest Star, Kim Rhodes, is someone who is both great in the role as the returning Ballard and someone Wang has genuine rapport with – not something we can say about any of his previous paramours. Scenes which once would have seemed clumsy and awkward come across as genuine and caring, and that in itself feels like something of a minor revelation. The best example of this is probably the scene when Harry kisses her in bed for the first time since she returned. Apart from being near-unique in one way – Harry actually asks her if it's Ok for him to kiss her, rather than just doing it! - it's also sweetly affectionate where it could have been cloying and clumsy, and it's a measure of how good Wang is here that he's able to make a scene like that really work in the way it's meant to. There's lots of moments like that scattered throughout the episode and they manage to make everything seem much more lived-in, and like Harry and Lyndsay had an actual, proper relationship prior to her death.
Because, naturally, if there is one obvious flaw here, it's that we've never actually seen Lyndsay before. That's a little bit of a shame, because if we had seen her before it would give that extra little frission to her return, as well as a little extra dimension to her realtionship with Harry. Though there is something vaguely appropriate that the returning character is just some no-nothing redshirt we've never heard of before, there's definitely a sense that this episode could be just that little bit more if only we'd actually seen Harry and her share any screen time prior to the opening titles of this episode. Yet while that would have been nice it does not, somewhat surprisingly, really damage anything here either, it just would have taken what's already a strong episode to just that little bit of a higher place. Because Rhodes, who plays Lyndsay as flippant, sarcastic, and eminently likeable, has the same great rapport with every member of the crew, we get a real sense that she was actually integrated as part of the Voyager crew, even if we haven't seen her before. For this episode to remain credible that's really important, and Rhodes gets this aspect of her character 100% right. All the regular cast she spends any significant time with deliver performances that really feel like there was a real, genuine pre-existing relationship, and that easy conviction really makes what could have seemed like a clumsy "we lost someone dear to us" story come alive in ways it easily might not have done with a less believable actor in the central guest role. Indeed Rhodes really is an excellent presence throughout this episode, and scenes of her, for example, spitting out Kobali dialogue really make it feel like she's speaking a real, alien language, and not just a few randomly scribbled syllables on this week's scripts (which is not an easy thing to do). What gives extra dimension to Lyndsay as well is that, as well as exploring personal history via Harry's feelings towards her, she also has her own personal history to explore, not just via her time with the Kobali, but also with the Voyager crew themselves. So scenes of her semi-accusing Janeway for causing her death, or looking forward to Neelix's cooking, help give the character agency and depth away from just her relationship with Harry, so she doesn't just exist as a way to explore what's going on with whatever member of the crew needs a starring role this week. And, of course, it's pleasing from Voyager's feminist perspective that we get to have a female character be fleshed out in this way, rather than the lumps of wood that, say, Chakotay normally gets stuck trying to act opposite, so we get a fully rounded, fully engaged character who exists as a person in her own right.
All this character work does, however, rather mean that the plot, such as it is, takes something of a back seat, and the ending, whereby Lyndsay goes back to the Kobali, is a little bit on the rote side. Not so bad that it undermines the character work, but it's all a bit narratively predictable. We have what amount to thirty minutes of plot-free character work, almost all of which is good-to-great, then the Kobali turn up, provide a (very) little bit of threat, then Lyndsay leaves with them. It gives the end of the episode a somewhat perfunctory feel which it didn't really need to have – indeed this might be one of those episodes where it would have been better if we'd never seen the Kobali at all just explored them through Lyndsay's descriptions, then have her leave to explore her own identity rather than because Voyager was under direct threat. This is almost what we get anyway, so it's a shame they didn’t go a bit further in that direction. However, it feels a bit churlish to be overly-critical on that front, because what we do get works – it's just obvious. There's a bit of a sub-plot (if that's the right description) about Lyndsay trying to look human again, and there's the whole "looks don’t matter in affairs of the heart" line of thought that's a bit obvious as well. But the episode does well by this kind of familiar material because it's Harry that gets the "it doesn't matter" speech and he (and Wang, again) are surprisingly mature in the way they deal with it. It's not just laid out as a cliché, and while you couldn't go so far to say that it's subverting anything, it manages to handle familiar material in an engaging way, and this is how the final five minutes or so should really have been dealt with. Still the plot shenanigans aren't really the central focus of this episode, even as they need to be addressed, and it's refreshing, after a run of episodes which have had little to do with the personal, to come across "Ashes To Ashes" and spend some time exploring character. It's not a perfect episode, but it's sincere, it's genuine, and it goes miles in showing how this kind of episode can work for Harry while still having its central role be a real, proper character in her own right and not just be there to reflect Our Heroes Plight This Week. That's quite the achievement in and of itself, and if "Ashes To Ashes" gets a bit forgotten in the course of this season that's a shame, because, like Lyndsay, it deserves to be celebrated even as we move on from it.
Any Other Business:
• We get another pre-credits sequence which shows none of the regular crew, and just has Kim Rhodes machine-gunning out Kobali dialogue. She's very good at it, and it’s the one time the fact we haven't seen Ballard before works, because we as the audience don’t know who she is, so it provides a decent cliffhanger into the title sequence.
• There's a whole B-story here about Seven getting to grips with the Borg children and exploring her maternal side. It's... OK. It's certainly never as interesting as the A-story, but it provides a few good moment ("fun will now commence"), and keeps the thread of the Borg children running, so they're not just forgotten about, a decent piece of between-episodes continuity.
• On the same lines, the Borg kiddiewinks are surprisingly non-annoying for the second episode in a row, though they very nearly are during the Kadis-Kot game. Though again this is saved by a good gag - "you will implement punishment protocol 9-alpha".
• Lovely scene between Lyndsay and Janeway when she invites her to dinner in the captain's quarters, and very well played by both Rhodes and Mulgrew.
• Good make-up too, for the Kobali.
• It's a measure of how much better things have gotten with Harry romance episodes because the last time we had one ("The Disease"), Tom got an appallingly awful line where he reels off the list of wrong women Harry's fallen for and it was dreadful. Here he gets more or less the same line, but instead of it sounding like an incredibly stupid piece of clunky exposition it instead comes across as relaxed banter between two people who are actually friends. What a difference it makes.
• It's hard not to feel sorry for Harry when Lyndsay decides to leave. Whoever would have thought that was possible?
Season Six, Episode 19 - "Child's Play"
"Outside?"
It's difficult to know what to make of "Child's Play" really. It's heart is certainly in the right place, and it makes a proper attempt to continue the expansion of Seven's maternal side, and begin the path of developing the characteristics of the Borg children, in this case Icheb. And there's a sense that, by allowing us to explore something of Icheb's background and family we'll get to care about him more as an individual because we'll understand him from a perspective other than "Borg survivor". And that's fair enough, it's a completely acceptable strategy to undertake, and it ought to at least elucidate something about his character, either as an individual or how he relates to the rest of the people around him. It's a strategy which has worked in the past with Seven (although not just with Seven) so there's definitely grounds to think and believe that it would work again.
But it doesn't work. Why? Because this is dull. Dull, dull, dull. Even veteran cult TV star Mark Shepard (who's now been in, among others, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Supernatural, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, The X-Files...quite the CV) can't manage to make this seem like an episode worth watching, which is quite the achievement, although not in any way a good one. This also contains the most perfunctory use of the Borg to date, who turn up to be token bad guys at about the thirty-seven minute mark, are quickly put out of commission by some half-hearted photon torpedo shenanigans, and that's that. Not. Impressive. Even the Borg Trombonestm can’t add any tension. There's also lots and lots of logical inconsistencies. If Janeway or Seven are worried about returning Icheb to a society which may be threatened by the Borg because of a nearby transwarp conduit, why not collapse the conduit? They did it in "Dark Frontier" and the Prime Directive obviously doesn't apply, yet this is never brought up or the possibility even referred to. Equally, it seems at least a little improbable that after all the medical scans Icheb must have been through to remain on the ship, the Doctor apparently never noticed that he was bred to be a weapon. That... seems unlikely. Or the idea that the Borg half assimilated a colony without finishing it off (but without explanation as to why, not even after the disease revelation which could have been indicative of them being scared away). There's just way too many moments like that throughout the episode that prevent it from ever taking flight, because just a fractional moment's thought and it all collapses, and it's not as if there's any flash-bang-zoom stuff going on to distract you from the lumbering, poorly-thought-out plot. If you're going to do a character piece it's important to make your characters engaging and, other than Seven, absolutely nobody here is. Icheb is fine, I don't really want to be overly dismissive and Manu Intiraymi does a reasonable job with what is in the end a fairly limited role, but Icheb is never written as anything more than a cypher, and one who's essentially just buffeted by the opinions of those around him. Even when it comes to his Big Decision he doesn't even get to say that he's decided to stay with his parents in the end, Seven says it and he silently confirms her deduction. That makes him look passive and rather dull, rather than conflicted or questioning, as was presumably the intent of the script. The idea of him being adrift in other people's opinions is fine, but the reality isn't well written enough to deliver on this. Similarly, his parents have an obvious point of conflict – his father can't really face sending him back to the Borg, his mother insists that they have to – but this ends up being reduced to a couple of lines and nothing more. Here there was more chance for interesting material and it's wasted. The conflicts of parental wishes for their child, even at odds with each other, might tie in quite nicely to the familial themes Voyager is developing, and the fact that it's Icheb's mother that's certain he must be returned to the Borg might prove an interesting contrast to Seven's maternal instincts, which are developing in the opposite direction – overly protective, rather than overly callous.
But no. We just scroll through forty-five minutes of largely undistinguished, largely unengaging stuff. I was going to use this episode as this season's Any Other Business episode, but there's not enough that goes on here to even flesh that out. The relationship Icheb has with the other Borg children is given a bit of a prompt, but it amounts to very little. "Janeway is to Seven as Seven is to Icheb" is set up almost like a mathematical formula, another relationship that could be fruitfully exploited for drama, or at the very least irony, but no, a mathematical formula is all too prescient as a description and just as passionless as a few numbers on a page. Ryan and Mulgrew do try to work to make this seem like there's an emotional core, but they can't sell it, and given how many mother/daughter scenes these two have played together by now, it really says something that they can't find any real angle to give this some kind of investment. But it's not surprising either, because this is just dull. It's not as bad as "Spirit Folk" because honestly, how it be? But while "Spirit Folk" was bad enough to angry up the blood at the mere thought of it, this swings in the other direction and is just so nondescript it's hard to even get angry at. Everything here is just so incredibly surface – we have a whole society that, unusually, we get to see in situ, pleasingly avoiding the more typical two-corridors-and-a-square issue and with some rather great location shooting, and they're still about the last interesting race we've ever met. A society that's been decimated by the Borg, struggled to constantly rebuild itself, and which sits in the constant shadow of their threat, ought to be a bit more interesting than two dull-as-ditchwater parents, half a dozen extras and a couple of leftover bits of set from the airponics bay. To be very strictly fair, the one scene that does work – where Icheb's father points out the constellations in the sky, as they reach a tentative bond – works pretty well, but it's about a minute long (and it's about the only time Mark Sheppard's natural on-screen charisma is allowed to come through). A one minute oasis of interesting in a forty-five minute desert of dullness just isn't good enough.
I honestly didn't come here to bury "Child's Play". Actually sitting down and watching the episode is mostly boring but it wasn't so infuriating that I didn’t think I'd be unable to find a redemptive angle somewhere, but I just really can't. There's no real thematic resonance, there's no real points of interest, and there's no real character work. I'm not actually sure how you even have a forty-five minute episode of television which is specifically about one character and not have any character work, but that seems to be what we end up with. This is just something that exists between "Ashes To Ashes" and "Good Shepard", an outing which helps Season Six hit its episode count and does absolutely nothing else. The conclusion of all this smear of nothingness is also a return to the status quo - it's not a reset button as such, but by the time the closing credits roll absolutely nothing about Icheb's situation has changed. He's still on Voyager, he's still mildly conflicted about his place in the Universe, and unless you want to make something of his teeny tiny rebellion about being sent to bed on time (well, to regenerate, but you know what they're saying), there's not really any meaningful change in his relationship with Seven. Or Janeway. Or the other Borg children. Or the other crew members. Since developing his relationships with other the other people who actually populate this starship, as informed by his experiences on the planet, seems to be the point of the exercise it's impossible not to see this as a failure, and indeed "Child's Play" is exactly that – a failure. Not an embarrassment. Not a catastrophe. Not a series-ruining nightmare. But it is, quite definitely, a failure.
Any Other Business:
• I don't even know what to write here. It's already been a struggle to find this many words to say about "Child's Play".
• Um, there's a good beam-in shot where Seven, Janeway and Icheb materialize in front of a waterfall.
• It's a small point of continuity, but it's nice that the show takes the time to join the dots between the destruction of the Cube Icheb and the other Borg children were discovered on and his nature as a biological weapon, without it being too heavily underscored.
• Yea, how do you have Mark Sheppard of all people not be charismatic in your show?
• Mind you, Icheb's mother isn't any better. In fact, she's a lot worse.
• Oh who cares. Next!
