Season 7 Ep 11 / 12 "Shattered" / "Lineage"

Season Seven, Episode 11 - "Shattered"


Let's Do The Time Warp Again...


On the surface, "Shattered" looks to be a fairly standard slice of Star Trek. There's an anomaly encountered, a mission to put things right, some fun along the way, and everything's alright in the end. Indeed there's something of a sense that this is exactly what happened in "Twisted", with the, ahem, twist being that on this occasion the warping of the ship happens in time rather than space. It's also a showcase episode for Chaoktay, but with a real ensemble feel to it, so everyone gets a little moment to shine, just like we've seen many time before on Voyager. While all of that is true, there a subtle, metatexual approach to this exploration of Voyager's history that's well worth taking a look at.

For one thing, there's some degree of presaging going on here. We see a specific threat to Voyager as a ship, and we see Janeway's specific reaction to it – there's a temporal something going on and when it comes to crunch-time, she says to hell with the temporal prime directive and does what she thinks is best in order to keep the ship safe. You know, just like "Endgame". And we see the only example in the whole of Voyager (minus it's conclusion, obviously) as to the ship's original, non "Endgame" timeframe, which means the glimpse we get of grown up Icheb and Naomi is the only little window into that future, and with Janeway, Chakotay and Seven euphemistically "missing" it's not one that sounds all that terrific. Still the fact that her actions here mirror those in "Engdame" means that the latter story already has some context within this season for the way Janeway behaves there and means that, as a conclusion, it doesn't rely on some vague implications from seasons ago to justify her actions, because we've seen them here, just twelve episodes earlier. Yet obviously a lot the purpose of this episode is looking back, rather than forward, and in this the gentle recontextualizing of some of that past gives the episode some real merit and an excuse to comment upon the series as a whole, as well as having lots of fun along the way. The clearest example of this is the relationship between Chakotay and Janeway. Up until "Resolutions" at the end of Season Three, there was a chance of a relationship between them, but since the events of that episode the chance of something developing between them has been increasingly remote, as he ended up pursuing a run of different women and Janeway turned to solitude and holograms. Here we get this potential storyline explicitly closed down for good - "there are some barriers we never cross" - in time for the show's conclusion (and in time for Chaktoay's romantic interests to take a decidedly different turn), even though this is in practice just stating something which has been implicit for at least the last four seasons. It's just a gentle confirmation of something we already know – that there's never going to be a big romantic flourishing between.

Meanwhile, elsewhere... she's baaaaaaack (Pt II)! Yes, the panto villain that just won't die was never going to allow herself to be left out of what amounts to a story-so-far of Voyager's history, so here's Seska again, as broad as ever and in full moustache-twirling mode. What's most worth observing about this is that when we last saw her, back in "Worst Case Scenario", she was at her most effective because there she was a literal panto villain – entirely fictional, and programmed (by herself) to be the big bad that everyone thought she was anyway. But here we see Seska at her most successful, at least in terms of her plans. This is where she's already won and taken Voyager, so here her somewhat arrogant self-confidence is to an extent justified, whereas traditionally it's been just not very good writing and/or acting. Here we see her, contextually, as she always should have been, intelligent enough to work out what's going on, smart enough to think she can use it, and arrogant enough to believe it will work. This actually makes for one of her best characterisations, and if Martha Hackett is playing things a bit more "Worst Case Scenario" than "Basics" then... well the character is being used in a bit of a panto way here and she's better at doing it this way anyway. Still, if her appearance isn't quite a full reconceptualization at least it's good actual characterisation, and given her place in Voyager's history and how terrible she's been in it, that's about as good as we could possibly hope for (the Kazon here are just stooges, but that's fine. That's all they're good for anyway). Seska's little appearances also fulfil another function though, which is to say that it's important not to just view the past through rose-tinted glasses. Again, we're near the end of the run here, so there's always going to be a tendency to look back with a warm nostalgic glow, and indeed Chakotay does get a lot of material that suggests that when he gets to reminisce about the past it's with good feelings. But Seska's an ever-present reminder that one needs to keep a sense of proportion while remembering the good things about the past – for all the friendships forged and battles survived there were some conflicts which did real, materal damage and she's representative of them here.

And so it goes on. Every single visit to the past, present and future gives us a chance to have a glimpse of how and why it exists (or will exist) as a part of Voyager, and moreover justify that presence within the context of the ongoing show. As with Harry in "Nightingale" we have here Chakotay's last attempt at helming an episode solo, and he does a very credible job, even given the broadly ensemble nature. This is a script that’s really able to use his sincerity well, giving the character a way of making this work without resorting to a lot of shooting and shouting, but also letting us see a little of the Maquis strategist as well (such as when he takes Janeway hostage with the hypospray), and it's good to get a reminder that this is a smart man in his own right just trying to deal with the situation that's thrown at him as best he can. There's hints of the wiser man that we've seen throughout the show (quoting Dante, which is something he's learned since being in the Delta Quadrant, suggesting his acquisition of wisdom is an ongoing process), but he's also relaxed enough that Beltran can bring back that old movie-star charm again to pleasing effect. Indeed Beltran turns in a game performance here and he gives Chaktoay plenty of inner life even as this episode is about exploring the show's history more than his own. Using Chakotay as the principal character here is actually an interesting choice given that he is, within the narrative of the show, the "other Janeway" - i.e. captain of the other crew that gets stranded out here. Thus, having them work together to resolve this problem means the episode is set up as a "two captains" scenario, but uniquely this time it's Chakotay who has dominance in the narrative, not Janeway. When we've seen this set up before - "Scorpion", say, or "Dark Frontier" - it's Janeway who's in charge, emphatically, and Chakotay who supports, or not. Here it's the other way round, and this switch of dynamic between them gives just a little extra frisson than if it had been Janeway to the rescue this time out rather than him. This also acts as something of a recontextualization, framing their seven-season long friendship from his perspective for a change, rather than from hers, and it's both satisfying emotionally and successful narratively. That's a pretty good trick for an episode that looks like it's going to be just another anomaly-of-the-week and it's in those moments that "Shattered" is really able to expand upon what seems like a pretty standard set-up. And what's more it does it by using that standard set-up effectively as well – for all the narrative juggling that's going on here, this is also a fun, exciting and straightforwardly entertaining episode of Voyager, making careful use of the show's action-adventure aesthetic to cloak what's going on under the surface in a way that doesn't sell either the narrative work or the action short. That's pretty good going for an anomaly-of-the-week, I would say.


Any Other Business:

• Harry's back in the Big Chair at the start of the episode! Though he can't really take the fall for this one...

• The frame of the dinner date between Chakotay and Janeway at the start and end of the episode is nicely sweet, and both Mulgrew and Beltran are really rather charming throughout it.

• OK, so to make it clear, the time zones visited here are: some time around the beginning of "Caretaker", before Voyager got lost; "Basics" Pt II when Seska has marooned the crew; "Scorpion" Pt II, when fully-Borg Seven is on-board; some occasion when Tom has been running the Captain Proton program (but for the sake of argument let's say "Night" or "Bride Of Chaotica!" as the strongest contenders); "Macrocosm" with the appearance of one of the macroviruses; Voyager's non-"Engdame" future with older Naomi and Icheb; some time a year before "Future's End" with the Doctor not having his mobile emitter; and finally the present as events continued to unfold contemporaneously, with Tuvok's death. Phew!

• Oh yea, Tuvok dies, but it's OK because he gets better in time for the end credits. Tim Russ does a credible job with a short scene and gets to repeat the usual Vulcan death-speech while Alexander Courage's theme tootles away in the background.

• Honestly, if only Seska has been written and used this well when she was actually in the show she would have been a much easier character to redeem. That her two best (well, least bad) appearances are after she's dead and written out is somewhat frustrating.

• This is the one, only, and single time the fact that Voyager has bio-neural gel-packs actually fulfils a proper, worthwhile plot function. We've seen them before explode or (oh dear) get infected by cheese, but here they're described as running through the ship like a nervous system, and thus the ship being "inoculated" against what's going on provides a simple, easy-to-understand, and internally consistent way of resolving the problem of the week. It's a terrific use of something that's been sitting there for seven seasons just waiting for someone to do something with.

• B'Elanna gets short shrift in this episode, which is a bit of a shame, but with so many regular characters to juggle someone was going to come up short, and at least there's a pretty strong emphasis on other female characters (Janeway and Seska in particular).

• Not much for Neelix to do here either. Same reason, same logic.

• Seska's defeat by deploying Seven and her Borg shielding is a nice way of having a back-up plan, and it's the only time these two characters share any screen-time together in the show.


Season Seven, Episode 12 - "Lineage"


Oh baby baby, how was I supposed to know...


"Lineage" struggles really, really hard to be a proper, feminist episode which centres around B'Elanna, her fears of pregnancy, what she had to go through as a child, and how this now feeds into her own prejudices. These are all worthwhile goals and worthwile aspects of B'Elanna to explore, and of course anything that gives Roxann Dawson the chance to spent time on screen is almost always objectively A Good Thing. But "Lineage" doesn't really come together, though it doesn't really come together in fairly obvious ways, which makes its failures rather annoying. The basic problem with "Lineage" is that the writing just isn't very good, even as what it's attempting to do is entirely worthwhile. It's not awful, it's not the sort thing that makes you want to jump off something high into something deep, but at it's heart it's basically just an episode of any random soap opera but set on a spaceship instead of a pub or boardroom.

So why adopt a soap opera approach here? Well for one soap operas and science fiction can work together, and describing something as being like a soap opera isn't necessarily a pejorative. After all, the meat and potatoes of a soap opera is an ongoing, unbroken storyline, which is basically all the much-vaunted developments in "serialized storytelling" of modern dramas from DS9 to BSG to Breaking Bad consist of. You have a bunch of regular characters who we check in on from day to day or week to week, sometimes one of them is the focus, sometimes a different one, the plots all flow into one, then there's a cliffhanger, and off we go to the next episode. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with that as a basic structure, and the parallels with any show that runs over the course of seven seasons should be pretty clear. The problem "Lineage" has is what soap it ends up emulating - this isn't the often dark-but-considered storytelling of EastEnders or the high camp insanity of Dynasty. It's more Emmerdale or The Waltons. Or to put it another way, there's nothing really distinguishing about it at all. EastEnders, likely the best current British soap opera, is often silly and has huge longueurs between whatever hot button topic it decides to address while things just tick over, but it's still rooted in very real world concerns, even if those concerns are greatly exaggerated through melodrama. And for all it's many, obvious flaws Dynasty remains an absolute camp classic, not "good" in any conventional sense but memorable and striking and absolutely about as far from business as usual as you could get. There's none of that scope or ambition in "Lineage", which picks its theme, runs it through some mostly standard plotting, then comes out the other end with a hug and forgiveness.

Perhaps that's a little unfair though, because as I mentioned at the start, there's an obvious attempt to do something properly feminist here. Everything in this episode is seen from B'Elanna's perspective – it's her fears, her problems, her extremes that get dealt with. Tom's present and allowed an opinion, but this isn't story, it's most emphatically hers. This is, on balance, a good thing. Equally, there's a few threads picked up from previous discussions around B'Elanna's past – we know her father walked out on her and her mother from "Barge Of The Dead", for example, but here we get to see the events that preceded that, a worthwhile exploration of the character's back-story without the need to linger fetishistically over continuity. This is also a good thing. The principal storytelling method here – revealing B'Elanna's issues via flashback – is where things fall down though. For one, it's both very cliched in a typical soap-opera way – lacking only harp strings and wibby-wobbly screen effects – and it's also exactly the same way we explored Chakotay's relationship with his father. Just as on Voyager, B'Elanna's viewpoint retains primacy in these flashbacks, as it should – the past is about exploring the feelings of guilt B'Elanna harbours about her father leaving, not about what led her father to leave – and this too is one of the things which remains in the episode's favour. This is entirely about a female perspective, and in this sense it's telling that it's a girl that she and Tom are going to have together, making even the decisions about what to do regarding the baby something which is female-relevant not male-relevant. When the Doctor talks of the baby inheriting B'Elanna's traits (as in the curved spine), he's clearly not just talking about potential birth problems, and B'Elanna's fear both that the child will end up like her and have to go through the same traumatic childhood experiences as her are clearly just as important, an obvious but relevant and meaningful parallel between the physical and the emotional.

The problem is that, by raising these concerns, the episode doesn't quite know what to do with them. B'Elanna's increasingly extreme reactions to not getting her own way are in-line with the way she's reacted before, but unfortunately seasons' before rather than episodes' before. This storyline might have played better somewhere in Season Three or Four, but B'Elanna's grown so much as a character this can't help by feel like something of a throwback. Yes, it's possible her fear and deep-seated guilt, coupled with the worry associated with becoming a mother, might force her back into old patterns of behaviour, but the episode doesn't address this in any way. A line from Tom about how she might have behaved before they got married, or from Janeway about how B'Elanna hasn't reacted like this since, say, "Extreme Risk" (the last time she over-reacted through guilt) would have gone some way to at least addressing this, but it's not there. Similarly, she commits a huge violation by altering the Doctor's programming to allow the genetic resequencing to go ahead, both a violation of trust by lying and manipulating her husband and by forcing the Doctor to do something against his expressly stated will, but then we get a big teary scene and it's all fine in the end. It's not that Dawson doesn't sell the teary scene – actually she's quite magnificently brilliant at it – it's just the scene itself flounders given the lack of any consequence. Yes, what she went through is terrible, and yes it's good that she's able to start the healing process, but that doesn't invalidate the huge breach of trust she committed and it's all just brushed aside so her and Tom are happy by the time the closing theme kicks in.

But, while this is mostly middling soap opera bland, it's not without a few saving graces which at least allow a little bit of redemption to creep in. I've mentioned Dawson and the female perspective, so I won't reiterate them, but thematically the running thread of Season Seven – prejudice – is present here as well. This time of course it's not about holograms but this still gives the episode some kind of thematic connection to the rest of the season, addressing the same theme but from a different angle. The overt prejudice about Klingons present in the flashbacks, paralleled by B'Elanna's own strong prejudices about her Klingon heritage, gives a gentle lean into the sins of the past being repeated in the future that is surprisingly subtle in its layering throughout the script. And most pleasingly of all, B'Elanna finds that, in the end, she's able to break the cycle and if this episode doesn't wash away all her problems then it at least shows the beginning of the process. As with the character push Seven received in "Imperfection" and the Doctor received in "Flesh And Blood" it's also great to see the season continue to push the characters on the show in new and interesting directions when it could just be falling back on a series of greatest hits. So, even if this isn't the most successful iteration of that (and it isn't) at least it's an episode which is still demonstrating some ambition with what it's doing with its central character and where it wants to take her, even if it doesn't quite manage to get there.



Any Other Business:

• One of the problems that this episode faces is that the flashbacks are basically all pretty poor (though there's some nice transitional editing to them). We're back in the Garden Centre Of Doom, for one, and none of the actors, adult or child, in the past are very good. That's not the script's fault, but it's very undermining.

• Equally we're told that the experiences that B'Elanna went through in the past were so traumatic that she ended up resenting herself for being half-Klingon and hating everyone around her. Yet all we really see is a dumb kids prank with a worm and one girl who actively sticks up for B'Elanna. The girl, her cousin Elizabeth, that sticks up for her is presumably meant to suggest the past isn't all black and white, but it mostly makes Young B'Elanna seem stroppy, unsympathetic and too self-involved to accept a clear and obvious hand of friendship, which is not a way of engendering sympathy for your character.

• Oh and of course the big incident is her telling her father that if he's so unhappy he should just leave, then twelve days later he does just that, and she blames herself. That's soap opera-level plotting right there, and not in the good way. It's clear what the script is going for, but it doesn't at all convince and just ends up looking like a petty temper tantrum. For all the flaws of "Extreme Risk" at least survivor guilt is an easy thing to understand from her perspective, here it just looks like she should have grown up and realized the truth ages ago, which, again, is not a great way of getting the audience on-side.

• To compound this problem, they even have Tom say exactly that! He points out there's absolute no way her off-handed temper-tantrum comment drove her father away, and her reply is, "can you be sure?" Well yes, because adults don’t just abandon years of marriage because of one stray comment from an obviously upset child, she's already aware that there's a big rift between her mother and father, and he comes across as broadly likeable and sympathetic, despite a few misjudged words.

• Tom is a bit of a problem here – this isn't by any stretch Robert Duncan McNeill's best performance and he's mostly reduced to stating lines while Roxann Dawson acts her socks off next to him. The two of them normally do these kind of couple scenes very well, but he's a bit checked out here. Bad timing.

• The running joke of everyone finding out that B'Elanna's pregnant, despite their desire to keep it private, manages to raise a few smiles at least, especially Chakotay's deadpan, "have you checked the warp core for radiation leaks today" "No, why?" "You have a certain... glow about you."

• I also quite like Janeway's reaction to B'Elanna trying to force the issues over gene sequencing the baby, which basically amounts to, "oh piss off and solve your own problems". Quite right too.

• The whole "maybe Tom will do what my father did and abandon us" thing kind of comes out of nowhere, and goes there as well.

• And though not nearly enough time is spent addressing B'Elanna's breach of trust, at least there's an actual scene between her and the Doctor where she apologizes and he accepts. It should be way more (and there should have been something with Tom), but it's better than nothing. I guess.