Season 7 Ep 13 / 14 "Repentance" / "Prophecy"
Jul 14, 2016 11:00:48 GMT -5
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Post by Prole Hole on Jul 14, 2016 11:00:48 GMT -5
Season Seven, Episode 13 - "Repentance"
The first cut is the deepest
There is really only one single thing wrong with "Repentance" and it is this – aesthetically it's an episode of DS9 not Voyager. What I mean by this is that this episode consists of exactly the gnarly grey areas of morality that DS9 played about with so effectively, and the idea of a Federation crew helping to transport prisoners they helped save to their execution sounds like exactly the sort of ethical quandary that the sister show would have done well. And to be clear when I say "aesthetically" I mean both in terms of the thematic aspects of the show and the look as well – the principal set we have here is a darkened corridor of prison cells, far closer in appearance to the moody corners of DS9 than the more brightly-lit sets of Voyager. This presents a slight tonal disconnect – one of the problems with Season Six was that there was very little sense, week to week, of a consistent aesthetic between episodes, and this is one of the aspects that made the run of seasons from Three to Five work so well. It's been a bit ragged, but Season Seven has returned to a more unifying aesthetic both visually and thematically, pushing characters forward in a consistent way, exploring what it means to gives rights and equality, and doing it in such a way that feels distinctly Voyager-esque rather than DS9-ish. "Repentance" feels out of step with the aesthetic developments of this season, while not really connecting to any earlier iteration of Voyager aesthetics either.
Still, it's broadly an interesting idea – this is at its heart another form of genre collision, but rather than the more typical form of genre collision whereby other forms of literature or television crash into Voyager to see what happens, we instead get two different and often opposing aspects of Star Trek colliding with each other. The results are, largely speaking, successful, with the caveat of the aesthetic mis-match. And that mis-match is important because one of the purposes of doing a genre collision is to see if the collision can shed light either on the source material or on the show into which it is colliding – and this doesn't really happen. Unusually for this kind of episode what we have is largely an ensemble piece and that's normally something that Voyager excels at, but here a tighter focus might have been beneficial. Seven's the one that gets the emotional journey here, after all. Or the Doctor, possibly. It could be Neelix, maybe? Or Iko. Or all of the above. That's the problem – this distributed kind of progress isn't really what Voyager excels at - when given the chance to expand its roster of characters Voyager tends to flourish better when we get to spend a whole episode on one specific character. That's distinct from DS9, which, because as we've previously discussed its fixed location means it doesn't need to spend the same amount of time on set-ups, and can get straight into character work, meaning more time can be spent on more characters. It's not that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but they are necessarily different, and they produce different results.
And yet this does work. Iko's literal growing of a conscience is an interestingly different take on doing something with Seven's nanoprobes, the ethics of the situation are given enough weight to make what we see feel meaningful without crushing out the character work, and the character work itself is handled skilfully enough that what happens feels like it matters. Key to this is Iko, because if he's not someone that's going to become sympathetic then the whole exercise is going to come tumbling down. His introduction – mentioning the names of the guard's children as an implied threat – is a bit too on-the-nose, but at least here it's clear the prison tropes are being used as genre shorthand so we can get to the more interesting stuff once he gains a conscience. A little ungainly, yes, but forgivable. Iko benefits from a terrific, understated performance from Jeff Cober, who's able to bring real animation to the internal struggles Iko's going through. Scenes like his declaration that he deserves to die could so easily tip over into hackneyed melodrama or over-the-top screechings, but by constantly underplaying everything, Cober is able to give the impression the character is really internalizing everything, rather than externalizing it by screaming or throwing things. Equally his relationship with Seven needs to be believable to the extent that she would have enough of an understanding of what he's going through to sympathize or want to help, and by picking the guilt that Seven still feels for the damage she did as a drone the episode successfully lands on something that can establish that bridge between them. For the first time in simply ages references to what Seven did as a Borg drone actually have a dramatic and character purpose, rather than just being raised when she needs to make a point about something. That bond between the two characters, and Seven's ability to invest in it, is what gives her attemps to help him some real credibility, and it works very well indeed. That's especially since at the end of the episode, equating Seven's loss of twenty years as a prison sentence, the episode is able to quietly underscore an anti-capital punishment stance (though this episode isn't really about capital punishment per se, so much as about the ideas of justice, and it makes its stance on the subject clear without being hectoring) while still giving Seven her moment of character work and another angle on the guilt she suffers due to her actions as a drone.
And, in a pleasingly challenging conclusion, there's no happy ending here. For all the hard work Seven puts in, for all the moral arguments Janeway gets to win, Iko is still executed. And, importantly, he's executed within the run-time of this episode – he's referred to as having been executed in the final scene rather than, as would be more common, that he's going to be, so the idea that there could ever be a happy ending to this is closed down completely. Janeway's back to respecting the legal framework of other planets and there's no to-hell-with-it ride to the rescue – events are allowed to take their course, and the conclusion allows Seven to gain a modicum of understanding even as we're aware she got that understanding from a less-than-desirable place. "It's unfair," she states, referring both to her own lack of punishment and tacitly to what happened to Iko, even though she says that's not what she means. This sense of disillusionment is equally what Neelix goes through, conned by an apparently-friendly prisoner who eventually turns out to be just using him. This is on the surface a fairly typical B-story, yet Phillips delivers a great performance, also understated as almost everything is here, and, really importantly, Neelix is never made to look or seem stupid by trying to find the best in someone, even a convicted murderer. It's the best use of his character for an absolute age, even if it is only the B-plot. He gets to score one real knock-out point, when Tom points out that everyone in the Federation penal system had a story, only to have Neelix rebuke him by pointing out that none of them stood to lose their lives, and we get to see his tenacious, investigative side as he dives into just how the Benkarans are treated. Yet his final disillusionment (a real look of contempt, and a great moment) with Joleg just underlines that he was still trying to do the right thing, and that for all Joleg was playing him in the end, there were still real injustices towards his species regardless. As well as having obvious racial shading – the fact that Benkarans are ten times more likely to be executed for their crimes and are disproportionately over-represented in the prison population – this helps provide a real sense of depth to the cultures being explored this week, and the fact that Neelix isn't shown to be wrong for trying to help means that this part of the story never becomes overly bleak or nihilistic. That's a tricky balance to strike, but "Repentance" gets it right time and time again. Even the Doctor, who's mostly just a supporting character here, gets his own little moments to shine and connect to the main plot in a way that's more that just "inject the nanoprobes". The understatement of everything here means this is a fairly muted episode, but it's strong in all the right areas and never loses the thread of what it is the episode is trying to do. Now if only it had been an episode of Voyager instead of DS9...
Any Other Business:
• Yes this is all largely understated and quiet, with lots of muttering about the rights of prisoners and thoughtful interrogations about what it is to punish someone. It's massively more successful than the last time DS9 crashed into Voyager at the start of Season Six...
• Great scene when Iko is shot by Tuvok because he doesn't realize the Doctor is a hologram and thus can just be shot through.
• Also nice that Seven is able to get herself out of the situation, so she's not reduced to being a peril monkey, even though that's implied what she would be in the pre-credits sequence. She's perfectly able to disarm him on her own, thankyouverymuch.
• We get to see a security squad (well, two guards) be successful! When Iko's getting beaten up they storm in, stop the beating, and actually do their job! Awww ye!
• The Doctor's belief, stated early in the episode, that it's wrong to kill someone for any reason, would carry a bit more conviction if we hadn't seen him shoot someone a couple of episodes ago in "Flesh And Blood"…
• Seven's slightly half-hearted arguments in favour of capital punishment, such as they are, fall back on a lot of cliché's, and they're really just straw-man arguments to allow the Doctor to adopt an anti-capital punishment stance. Which is fine, we would expect Star Trek to be explicitly anti-capital punishment, but it's a little weak in the writing which only really stands out becausese most of the rest of the discussions around this are so well handled (the script kind of admits this by having Seven say she sees both sides of the argument, but's it's not really a great piece of hand-waving).
• Yup, just to reiterate, Neelix is used really well here, and by having him in the B-plot it means that we get an effective paralleling of the themes. He's made to look smart and resourceful by finding things out, even though Tom is ultimately right that he's being sold a line he's still not stupid for trying, and all without taking up too much screen-time. Very nicely handled.
• Chakotay's back at tactical during the brief skirmish with the alien ship. He's quite good back there!
• Lovely last scene between Iko and Seven in astrometrics, chatting about constellations. His sad acceptance of his fate, despite appeals to the family of the person he murdered, is a real highlight of the episode.
Season Seven, Episode 15 – "Prophecy"
Klingon on to hope...
If it was strange that "Repentance" was an episode of DS9 shrouded in the skin of Voyager at least it was, for the most part, a good episode of DS9. "Prophecy" has all the hallmarks of coming from somewhere else – it could easily be retooled to be about Worf or Martok or (shudder) the Duras sisters – and, while not terrible, just has absolutely no place being an episode of Voyager. It's deeply peculiar, and watching everything in sequence, as is often the case, just makes its peculiarities stand out even more. The next episode, "The Void", is a quintessentially Voyager episode, and an excellent restatement of basic principals. The last episode, "Repentance", showed that doing episodes that feel like other branches of the franchise can work, even if it didn't quite manage to demonstrate why this was an approach worth taking . But this? Well sorry to be blunt, but this just makes fuck all sense.
Which is not to say that it's bad, exactly. A lot of the inevitable attendant clichés that come with the Klingons are present, so there's talk of honour and legends, Kahless gets name-checked, the Bat'leths gets another outing, all the bits and pieces you'd expect. There's not exactly a lot of subversion going on here, but none of it's egregiously awful either, and the big fight scene where Tom is supposed to defeat another warrior in combat is at least undercut by having that warrior fall over and collapse rather than handing Tom an improbable victory, which is at least a little against expectations. No, the real saving grace of this episode is the guest turn from Wren T Brown as Kohlar. He's able to bring some dimension and interior life to the character, and the character itself is scripted pretty smartly. This is clearly an intelligent man who has reached a conclusion that isn't just plot-convenient but actually seems to be something he's put real time and thought into considering. The destruction of the Klingon battle cruiser is a bit stupid – both on a character and scripting level – but other than that this is someone who has examined his position and that of his crew and has found it wanting. Using B'Elanna's child as a get-out clause for a pointless, go-nowhere mission started by people long dead makes sense from his perspective, and as played we get a slightly quieter, more considered approach that really helps sell the thoughtfulness of the character. While you could never call a Klingon character like this "understated" it's close enough. This works especially because all the other Klingon character are basically the same old glowering clichés - Sherman Howard does a reasonable if unremarkable enough job with T'Greth, but it's a role that doesn't give him anything to do but stamp around the place and shout loudly, which he dutifully does, and there's really only so far you can take that.
So great, it's nice that we have a solid central performance, but that doesn't really answer the question of what the point of doing this in the first place is. And that's because I honestly can't work it out. What is the point of doing this? For one, the plot hinges on co-incidences so vastly improbable even Dickens might have commented they were taking things a bit too far. This is the sort of thing that DS9 could just about get away with because hugely improbable circumstances might be directed by the Prophets/Wormhole Aliens, but there's none of that here. We're just expected to believe that one old Klingon battle cruiser has been ambling round the Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta quadrant for the better part of a century, then bumps into Voyager, like you do, and that's all there it to it. This can't even really be passed off as a Klingon religious guiding hand because everyone's basically admitted that B'Elanna's baby isn't Kuvah'magh after all, and though there's a bit of an attempt to lampshade the whole thing with Tom and B'Elanna's final conversation as they discuss whether this was actually fate it's not really convincing. Similarly it seems vastly unlikely that nobody would comment on B'Elanna's non-100%-Klingon origins until the battle cruiser had been set to self-destruct and they'd all been rescued (and Kohlar put a lot of trust in Janeway that she'd be able to save everyone, by the way), but it does make sense if you find your episode needs a bit of contrived drama to drive a wedge between two of the characters. Had nobody else even seen B'Elanna at that stage? There's a lot of these types of gaps in the story and there's just too many of them to handwave away, and they don't answer the "but why" question at all. They're meant to, one gets the impression, but mostly this episode looks like a cheapy to re-use stock sets and costumes while money gets spent on more interesting things elsewhere in the season, a financial decision coming before a creative one.
Because if you wanted to save a few quid by re-using stock costumes and sets then, well, there has to be a better way of doing it than this. As I said earlier, it's not even that this is bad, it just makes bugger all sense. "Barge Of The Dead" was badly mis-conceived as an episode of Voyager, but if you simply had to have another Klingon episode, why not build on the work that's already been done there? Equally we've already addressed ideas around B'Elanna's fear of pregnancy and what her Klingon heritage might do to her child just a couple of episodes ago, so it's not like doing a bit more with the Klingons is coming out of nowhere, yet this episode doesn't connect with either "Lineage" or "Barge Of The Dead" at all. Or anything. It's just... there. The conclusion is especially strange in this regard. A couple of hundred Klingons (well, alleged Klingons – we don't see more than about twenty in the cargo bay) get beamed down to a planet to start a colony with too few people to have a viable population, assisted by a few blue barrels of whatever Voyager could spare, and everyone treats this as if it's somehow the perfectly natural to conclusion to the previous forty-five minutes of whatever-it-is-we've-just-watched. Yes the thread of looking for a world to settle on is mentioned a couple of times in the episode, but it still feels like it's just some random conclusion to get a bunch of Klingons off the ship lest they run the risk of becoming regulars (it feels like this because, of course, that's exactly what it is). Kohlar's relief at their holy mission being over is well played by Brown, but no amount of good acting can quite manage to cover what a bizarre ending this is. It's not like anyone was really hoping that a few Klingons might be added to the regular cast, but then again that's why it was a stupid idea to destroy their ship in the first place. How long are they going to last? I'm sure they're resourceful, but it's not like any of them could have been experienced as farmers or ranchers, could they?
I'm getting carried away. But then that's the problem here. While everything is basically OK on a scene-to-scene basis, stopping and considering anything that happens, or more importantly why it might happen, just makes the episode collapse, and the more you start to pick at the threads the harder it becomes to stop. There's little flashes of brilliance – Dawson does the "pray to honour your ancestors" scene where she tries to recall a prayer from her childhood quite magnificently, and to be fair it is a well-written scene – but for every moment like that there's three more that make you wonder how anyone thought this made any kind of sense. Neelix being quite into Klingon women and getting laid? Surprisingly it's actually quite funny, especially since the start of that little story looks like it's going to be another inappropriate-woman-for-Harry bit, only for it to take a sharp turn when he and his paramour end up smashing Tuvok's quarters up thanks to their vigorous lovemaking. The fermented rebellion against Kohlar that T'Greth triggers? Utterly pat, obvious and predictable. To say this is an episode of contrasts would be something of an understatement, but nothing ever emerges from those contrasts and they don't shed light on anything. By the time the credits roll, the only question left is, "what was the point of that?" And, unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be a good answer.
Any Other Business:
• Well we won't be seeing any of these Klingons again, so it's not all bad news.
• Pleasingly, there's a good gender mix of male and female Klingons in the mess hall when Harry first gets assaulted/picked up.
• And we get to see a few Klingon children as well, so we get the impression of the Klingon cruiser as a proper generation ship without having to have it overly spelled out to us.
• But it is a shame that, other than Kohlar, every other Klingon is the usual two-dimensional growling cliché, and even Neelix's little tryst, funny though it is, is just an extension of that.
• Still, Ch'Rega is quite the sharp contrast to Kes. Guess he's moved on in a pretty big way... and I dunno, it's hard not to be pleased for him getting to be happy for once, and Phillips plays Neelix's obvious pleasure at what happened coupled with his not-quite-bashfulness really rather well.
• Other than three minutes screen-time, what did the retrovirus sub-plot add? T'Greth doesn't really seem completely converted by the fact that it's hybrid stem-cells that saved him, and while it's nice that it led to the slight subversion of his fight with Tom ending in a non-obvious way it's really very, very small fry.
The first cut is the deepest
There is really only one single thing wrong with "Repentance" and it is this – aesthetically it's an episode of DS9 not Voyager. What I mean by this is that this episode consists of exactly the gnarly grey areas of morality that DS9 played about with so effectively, and the idea of a Federation crew helping to transport prisoners they helped save to their execution sounds like exactly the sort of ethical quandary that the sister show would have done well. And to be clear when I say "aesthetically" I mean both in terms of the thematic aspects of the show and the look as well – the principal set we have here is a darkened corridor of prison cells, far closer in appearance to the moody corners of DS9 than the more brightly-lit sets of Voyager. This presents a slight tonal disconnect – one of the problems with Season Six was that there was very little sense, week to week, of a consistent aesthetic between episodes, and this is one of the aspects that made the run of seasons from Three to Five work so well. It's been a bit ragged, but Season Seven has returned to a more unifying aesthetic both visually and thematically, pushing characters forward in a consistent way, exploring what it means to gives rights and equality, and doing it in such a way that feels distinctly Voyager-esque rather than DS9-ish. "Repentance" feels out of step with the aesthetic developments of this season, while not really connecting to any earlier iteration of Voyager aesthetics either.
Still, it's broadly an interesting idea – this is at its heart another form of genre collision, but rather than the more typical form of genre collision whereby other forms of literature or television crash into Voyager to see what happens, we instead get two different and often opposing aspects of Star Trek colliding with each other. The results are, largely speaking, successful, with the caveat of the aesthetic mis-match. And that mis-match is important because one of the purposes of doing a genre collision is to see if the collision can shed light either on the source material or on the show into which it is colliding – and this doesn't really happen. Unusually for this kind of episode what we have is largely an ensemble piece and that's normally something that Voyager excels at, but here a tighter focus might have been beneficial. Seven's the one that gets the emotional journey here, after all. Or the Doctor, possibly. It could be Neelix, maybe? Or Iko. Or all of the above. That's the problem – this distributed kind of progress isn't really what Voyager excels at - when given the chance to expand its roster of characters Voyager tends to flourish better when we get to spend a whole episode on one specific character. That's distinct from DS9, which, because as we've previously discussed its fixed location means it doesn't need to spend the same amount of time on set-ups, and can get straight into character work, meaning more time can be spent on more characters. It's not that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but they are necessarily different, and they produce different results.
And yet this does work. Iko's literal growing of a conscience is an interestingly different take on doing something with Seven's nanoprobes, the ethics of the situation are given enough weight to make what we see feel meaningful without crushing out the character work, and the character work itself is handled skilfully enough that what happens feels like it matters. Key to this is Iko, because if he's not someone that's going to become sympathetic then the whole exercise is going to come tumbling down. His introduction – mentioning the names of the guard's children as an implied threat – is a bit too on-the-nose, but at least here it's clear the prison tropes are being used as genre shorthand so we can get to the more interesting stuff once he gains a conscience. A little ungainly, yes, but forgivable. Iko benefits from a terrific, understated performance from Jeff Cober, who's able to bring real animation to the internal struggles Iko's going through. Scenes like his declaration that he deserves to die could so easily tip over into hackneyed melodrama or over-the-top screechings, but by constantly underplaying everything, Cober is able to give the impression the character is really internalizing everything, rather than externalizing it by screaming or throwing things. Equally his relationship with Seven needs to be believable to the extent that she would have enough of an understanding of what he's going through to sympathize or want to help, and by picking the guilt that Seven still feels for the damage she did as a drone the episode successfully lands on something that can establish that bridge between them. For the first time in simply ages references to what Seven did as a Borg drone actually have a dramatic and character purpose, rather than just being raised when she needs to make a point about something. That bond between the two characters, and Seven's ability to invest in it, is what gives her attemps to help him some real credibility, and it works very well indeed. That's especially since at the end of the episode, equating Seven's loss of twenty years as a prison sentence, the episode is able to quietly underscore an anti-capital punishment stance (though this episode isn't really about capital punishment per se, so much as about the ideas of justice, and it makes its stance on the subject clear without being hectoring) while still giving Seven her moment of character work and another angle on the guilt she suffers due to her actions as a drone.
And, in a pleasingly challenging conclusion, there's no happy ending here. For all the hard work Seven puts in, for all the moral arguments Janeway gets to win, Iko is still executed. And, importantly, he's executed within the run-time of this episode – he's referred to as having been executed in the final scene rather than, as would be more common, that he's going to be, so the idea that there could ever be a happy ending to this is closed down completely. Janeway's back to respecting the legal framework of other planets and there's no to-hell-with-it ride to the rescue – events are allowed to take their course, and the conclusion allows Seven to gain a modicum of understanding even as we're aware she got that understanding from a less-than-desirable place. "It's unfair," she states, referring both to her own lack of punishment and tacitly to what happened to Iko, even though she says that's not what she means. This sense of disillusionment is equally what Neelix goes through, conned by an apparently-friendly prisoner who eventually turns out to be just using him. This is on the surface a fairly typical B-story, yet Phillips delivers a great performance, also understated as almost everything is here, and, really importantly, Neelix is never made to look or seem stupid by trying to find the best in someone, even a convicted murderer. It's the best use of his character for an absolute age, even if it is only the B-plot. He gets to score one real knock-out point, when Tom points out that everyone in the Federation penal system had a story, only to have Neelix rebuke him by pointing out that none of them stood to lose their lives, and we get to see his tenacious, investigative side as he dives into just how the Benkarans are treated. Yet his final disillusionment (a real look of contempt, and a great moment) with Joleg just underlines that he was still trying to do the right thing, and that for all Joleg was playing him in the end, there were still real injustices towards his species regardless. As well as having obvious racial shading – the fact that Benkarans are ten times more likely to be executed for their crimes and are disproportionately over-represented in the prison population – this helps provide a real sense of depth to the cultures being explored this week, and the fact that Neelix isn't shown to be wrong for trying to help means that this part of the story never becomes overly bleak or nihilistic. That's a tricky balance to strike, but "Repentance" gets it right time and time again. Even the Doctor, who's mostly just a supporting character here, gets his own little moments to shine and connect to the main plot in a way that's more that just "inject the nanoprobes". The understatement of everything here means this is a fairly muted episode, but it's strong in all the right areas and never loses the thread of what it is the episode is trying to do. Now if only it had been an episode of Voyager instead of DS9...
Any Other Business:
• Yes this is all largely understated and quiet, with lots of muttering about the rights of prisoners and thoughtful interrogations about what it is to punish someone. It's massively more successful than the last time DS9 crashed into Voyager at the start of Season Six...
• Great scene when Iko is shot by Tuvok because he doesn't realize the Doctor is a hologram and thus can just be shot through.
• Also nice that Seven is able to get herself out of the situation, so she's not reduced to being a peril monkey, even though that's implied what she would be in the pre-credits sequence. She's perfectly able to disarm him on her own, thankyouverymuch.
• We get to see a security squad (well, two guards) be successful! When Iko's getting beaten up they storm in, stop the beating, and actually do their job! Awww ye!
• The Doctor's belief, stated early in the episode, that it's wrong to kill someone for any reason, would carry a bit more conviction if we hadn't seen him shoot someone a couple of episodes ago in "Flesh And Blood"…
• Seven's slightly half-hearted arguments in favour of capital punishment, such as they are, fall back on a lot of cliché's, and they're really just straw-man arguments to allow the Doctor to adopt an anti-capital punishment stance. Which is fine, we would expect Star Trek to be explicitly anti-capital punishment, but it's a little weak in the writing which only really stands out becausese most of the rest of the discussions around this are so well handled (the script kind of admits this by having Seven say she sees both sides of the argument, but's it's not really a great piece of hand-waving).
• Yup, just to reiterate, Neelix is used really well here, and by having him in the B-plot it means that we get an effective paralleling of the themes. He's made to look smart and resourceful by finding things out, even though Tom is ultimately right that he's being sold a line he's still not stupid for trying, and all without taking up too much screen-time. Very nicely handled.
• Chakotay's back at tactical during the brief skirmish with the alien ship. He's quite good back there!
• Lovely last scene between Iko and Seven in astrometrics, chatting about constellations. His sad acceptance of his fate, despite appeals to the family of the person he murdered, is a real highlight of the episode.
Season Seven, Episode 15 – "Prophecy"
Klingon on to hope...
If it was strange that "Repentance" was an episode of DS9 shrouded in the skin of Voyager at least it was, for the most part, a good episode of DS9. "Prophecy" has all the hallmarks of coming from somewhere else – it could easily be retooled to be about Worf or Martok or (shudder) the Duras sisters – and, while not terrible, just has absolutely no place being an episode of Voyager. It's deeply peculiar, and watching everything in sequence, as is often the case, just makes its peculiarities stand out even more. The next episode, "The Void", is a quintessentially Voyager episode, and an excellent restatement of basic principals. The last episode, "Repentance", showed that doing episodes that feel like other branches of the franchise can work, even if it didn't quite manage to demonstrate why this was an approach worth taking . But this? Well sorry to be blunt, but this just makes fuck all sense.
Which is not to say that it's bad, exactly. A lot of the inevitable attendant clichés that come with the Klingons are present, so there's talk of honour and legends, Kahless gets name-checked, the Bat'leths gets another outing, all the bits and pieces you'd expect. There's not exactly a lot of subversion going on here, but none of it's egregiously awful either, and the big fight scene where Tom is supposed to defeat another warrior in combat is at least undercut by having that warrior fall over and collapse rather than handing Tom an improbable victory, which is at least a little against expectations. No, the real saving grace of this episode is the guest turn from Wren T Brown as Kohlar. He's able to bring some dimension and interior life to the character, and the character itself is scripted pretty smartly. This is clearly an intelligent man who has reached a conclusion that isn't just plot-convenient but actually seems to be something he's put real time and thought into considering. The destruction of the Klingon battle cruiser is a bit stupid – both on a character and scripting level – but other than that this is someone who has examined his position and that of his crew and has found it wanting. Using B'Elanna's child as a get-out clause for a pointless, go-nowhere mission started by people long dead makes sense from his perspective, and as played we get a slightly quieter, more considered approach that really helps sell the thoughtfulness of the character. While you could never call a Klingon character like this "understated" it's close enough. This works especially because all the other Klingon character are basically the same old glowering clichés - Sherman Howard does a reasonable if unremarkable enough job with T'Greth, but it's a role that doesn't give him anything to do but stamp around the place and shout loudly, which he dutifully does, and there's really only so far you can take that.
So great, it's nice that we have a solid central performance, but that doesn't really answer the question of what the point of doing this in the first place is. And that's because I honestly can't work it out. What is the point of doing this? For one, the plot hinges on co-incidences so vastly improbable even Dickens might have commented they were taking things a bit too far. This is the sort of thing that DS9 could just about get away with because hugely improbable circumstances might be directed by the Prophets/Wormhole Aliens, but there's none of that here. We're just expected to believe that one old Klingon battle cruiser has been ambling round the Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta quadrant for the better part of a century, then bumps into Voyager, like you do, and that's all there it to it. This can't even really be passed off as a Klingon religious guiding hand because everyone's basically admitted that B'Elanna's baby isn't Kuvah'magh after all, and though there's a bit of an attempt to lampshade the whole thing with Tom and B'Elanna's final conversation as they discuss whether this was actually fate it's not really convincing. Similarly it seems vastly unlikely that nobody would comment on B'Elanna's non-100%-Klingon origins until the battle cruiser had been set to self-destruct and they'd all been rescued (and Kohlar put a lot of trust in Janeway that she'd be able to save everyone, by the way), but it does make sense if you find your episode needs a bit of contrived drama to drive a wedge between two of the characters. Had nobody else even seen B'Elanna at that stage? There's a lot of these types of gaps in the story and there's just too many of them to handwave away, and they don't answer the "but why" question at all. They're meant to, one gets the impression, but mostly this episode looks like a cheapy to re-use stock sets and costumes while money gets spent on more interesting things elsewhere in the season, a financial decision coming before a creative one.
Because if you wanted to save a few quid by re-using stock costumes and sets then, well, there has to be a better way of doing it than this. As I said earlier, it's not even that this is bad, it just makes bugger all sense. "Barge Of The Dead" was badly mis-conceived as an episode of Voyager, but if you simply had to have another Klingon episode, why not build on the work that's already been done there? Equally we've already addressed ideas around B'Elanna's fear of pregnancy and what her Klingon heritage might do to her child just a couple of episodes ago, so it's not like doing a bit more with the Klingons is coming out of nowhere, yet this episode doesn't connect with either "Lineage" or "Barge Of The Dead" at all. Or anything. It's just... there. The conclusion is especially strange in this regard. A couple of hundred Klingons (well, alleged Klingons – we don't see more than about twenty in the cargo bay) get beamed down to a planet to start a colony with too few people to have a viable population, assisted by a few blue barrels of whatever Voyager could spare, and everyone treats this as if it's somehow the perfectly natural to conclusion to the previous forty-five minutes of whatever-it-is-we've-just-watched. Yes the thread of looking for a world to settle on is mentioned a couple of times in the episode, but it still feels like it's just some random conclusion to get a bunch of Klingons off the ship lest they run the risk of becoming regulars (it feels like this because, of course, that's exactly what it is). Kohlar's relief at their holy mission being over is well played by Brown, but no amount of good acting can quite manage to cover what a bizarre ending this is. It's not like anyone was really hoping that a few Klingons might be added to the regular cast, but then again that's why it was a stupid idea to destroy their ship in the first place. How long are they going to last? I'm sure they're resourceful, but it's not like any of them could have been experienced as farmers or ranchers, could they?
I'm getting carried away. But then that's the problem here. While everything is basically OK on a scene-to-scene basis, stopping and considering anything that happens, or more importantly why it might happen, just makes the episode collapse, and the more you start to pick at the threads the harder it becomes to stop. There's little flashes of brilliance – Dawson does the "pray to honour your ancestors" scene where she tries to recall a prayer from her childhood quite magnificently, and to be fair it is a well-written scene – but for every moment like that there's three more that make you wonder how anyone thought this made any kind of sense. Neelix being quite into Klingon women and getting laid? Surprisingly it's actually quite funny, especially since the start of that little story looks like it's going to be another inappropriate-woman-for-Harry bit, only for it to take a sharp turn when he and his paramour end up smashing Tuvok's quarters up thanks to their vigorous lovemaking. The fermented rebellion against Kohlar that T'Greth triggers? Utterly pat, obvious and predictable. To say this is an episode of contrasts would be something of an understatement, but nothing ever emerges from those contrasts and they don't shed light on anything. By the time the credits roll, the only question left is, "what was the point of that?" And, unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be a good answer.
Any Other Business:
• Well we won't be seeing any of these Klingons again, so it's not all bad news.
• Pleasingly, there's a good gender mix of male and female Klingons in the mess hall when Harry first gets assaulted/picked up.
• And we get to see a few Klingon children as well, so we get the impression of the Klingon cruiser as a proper generation ship without having to have it overly spelled out to us.
• But it is a shame that, other than Kohlar, every other Klingon is the usual two-dimensional growling cliché, and even Neelix's little tryst, funny though it is, is just an extension of that.
• Still, Ch'Rega is quite the sharp contrast to Kes. Guess he's moved on in a pretty big way... and I dunno, it's hard not to be pleased for him getting to be happy for once, and Phillips plays Neelix's obvious pleasure at what happened coupled with his not-quite-bashfulness really rather well.
• Other than three minutes screen-time, what did the retrovirus sub-plot add? T'Greth doesn't really seem completely converted by the fact that it's hybrid stem-cells that saved him, and while it's nice that it led to the slight subversion of his fight with Tom ending in a non-obvious way it's really very, very small fry.