Season 7, Episode 15 / 16 - "The Void" / "Workforce Pt I"
Jul 21, 2016 6:10:54 GMT -5
Jean Luc de Lemur likes this
Post by Prole Hole on Jul 21, 2016 6:10:54 GMT -5
Season Seven, Episode 15 - "The Void"
The void
So far in this season we've had a few episodes which have attempted recontexualization. "The Void" takes this one step further, recontexualizing not only Voyager and it's own history but the very nature of Star Trek itself. This feels like the season really stretching itself, increasing the range and scope of what's being discussed this year, and contextually this makes sense. If you're going approach Voyager and its context why not go the whole hog and do the same thing for the whole show? The most important aspect of this, however, is whether within that context Voyager is able to justify its continued existence as part of the continuum of what Star Trek is. That's potentially a risky move because if the episode that tries to do this comes up short in some way in the arguments it presents, or if it's just not a terribly good episode even while making valid points, then it's likely to be extremely damaging. That "The Void" turns to to be not only arguably the best episode of the season so far but also a bracing reminder of what it is that Star Trek exists and stands for is therefore a considerable relief.
Because, if I may briefly lapse into hypotheticals here, this could have been awful. There's a lot of material to cover in forty-five minutes here, and a lot of set-ups to get through. We need to establish the nature of the anomaly, the nature of life within it, build alliances and co-operation, discover a whole new species, get in some decent character work, and manufacture an escape that doesn't look convenient or too bafflegab-y. That sounds like a recipe for disaster, and especially given that this is an ensemble piece it would have been easy for this to crash and burn in to one big mess. That it doesn't is obviously attributable to the writing, but there are a lot of adroit moves here that go far beyond the basics of the set-up and character work. Now the most obvious thing here is that Janeway gets to build her own little mini-Federation here as a method of showing why the principals the Federation is built on (basically, liberal humanism) are worth sticking to and defending. This could have lapsed into some cheesy flag-waving rah-rah session, and it equally could have gone the other way and embraced an ends-justify-the-means faux-darkness, but it does neither and steers a course down the middle ground. We've seen Janeway walk up to the line of darkness before, after all, and here, lost, isolated and alone, it would have been the perfect time for her to go all Captain Ransom. But then this isn't "Equinox" and she isn't Ransom. When push comes to shove, Janeway isn't a creature of darkness either, as he was. By laying out what the founding principals are, and then building a story out from them, rather than having a story then sticking in a few bits of self-justification, "The Void" is able to use the past of Star Trek to define why it's still relevant to Voyager today. This isn't some conveniently reflexive self-justification, in other words, but instead is using the actuality of the show's history to explain why that history deserves to be continued into the future. There are little nods to the past of Voyager - there's a Vaadwaur ship from "Dragon's Teeth" in the anomaly, and we've encountered the Hierarchy before, back in "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" - but these nods to the past serve to layer Voyager's own narrative history on top of the history of Star Trek itself. And why does that history deserve to be continued? Well because it's shown to work. In-fighting, theft, murder – these lead down dead-ends, self-defeating in their own nihilism, whereas co-operation, understanding and tolerance are what eventually allow a few ships to work together and escape the anomaly. The anomaly itself – empty, without light, barren – thus functions as an effective metaphor for the darkness that the likes of Valen embraces, while on the opposite side we have light, stars and matter – our galaxy acting as the same metaphor for the other side of the equation, the one which Star Trek itself belongs to. For, however much Star Trek might play around in the darkness, it is ultimately not a show that will ever be consumed by it. And that's a pretty big metaphorical implication for just one anomaly to represent, isn't it?
So if the Alliance represent the material nature of what Star Trek is, what does Fantome represent? Well, really, the answer is compassion. It's always one of the core element of Star Trek, and here compassion is the key to their escape alongside co-operation. Because without Fantome and his fellows (we never do get a species name for them) the attacking ships at the end might indeed have prevented the Alliance from leaving the anomaly. Yet by extending compassion without expecting reward there is a very visible demonstration of what the principals laid out in the episode mean. We've had a lot of talk around rights, freedoms and respect this season but here, rather than by implication or metaphor, we see them getting put into direction in the way that Fantome is treated, and we see the benefits of that compassion. Help others and just maybe they'll help you. This is underscored pretty heavily in the mess hall scene where Bosaal describes Fantome and his type as "vermin", and later Janeway comments on his "bigoted reaction" - even the use of the word "bigot" is unusually direct and it carries a considerable punch when Mulgrew delivers it. The point here is that there's a real sense in which arguments which have been bubbling along and building all season are here brought to the surface, and by doing so we get more than just a treatise on how working together helps everyone – a political position – and how extending compassion and understanding to all peoples helps everyone – a moral or ethical position. So we have the coming together of the social and moral and ethical in two separate but dependent and intertwined threads within the story. And that's a pretty big metaphorical implication for an extra in a body-stocking, isn't it?
And of course it's important that the episode kicks off with a representation of the Federation's economy of plenty, as we get in the scene where Seven prepares a meal. Interesting there's no implicit criticism of this within the episode. It's generally presented that the idea everyone has enough of what they need for a level of comfort is, in many ways, what society is trying to move towards, and thus while Seven's meal for the crew looks indulgent there's nothing inherently wrong that, assuming everyone is able to sustain that same level. Instead it serves as a representation of something quite different. The principals and beliefs of the Federation aren't dependent on being able to keep a full belly or set a nice table – those beliefs are shown here to be self-evidently something true and become even more important when one's table is not completely full, and when the struggle to survive depends on more than just dialling up another bottle of Pinot Noir from the replicator. It's only by sharing and co-operating when people have less than what they need that they can get to a point where everyone has enough, whether that's food on the table or an escape from This Week's Anomaly. The Federation's economy of plenty, in other words, isn't the source of their beliefs, but in fact it's exactly the other way round – it's those beliefs that allow the economy of plenty to exist at all. The times you need to depend on your beliefs rather than abandoning them is exactly when you are in trouble. This is the same message we've seen a few times in Voyager - it's the same conclusion "Alliances" came to, for example – but it's never been stated with quite so much vigour and power as it is here. About one third of the way through the episode, Valen tells Janeway that her principals won't help keep her fed, or keep her warm. But he's wrong. Absolutely, completely wrong, because it's exactly those principals which help her and the Alliance escape. And that's pretty good going for forty-five minutes of some of the best Voyager there is, isn't it?
Any Other Business:
• "The Void" is in my top-ten episodes of Voyager. Re-reading what I've written, that's pretty obvious I guess.
• Lots of darkened sets again, and of course everything is very dark outside, which lends an appropriately gloomy air to everything whist still feeling like it's part of Voyager.
• Yet the visual gloom just helps to act as a contrast to the inherent optimism of the script. That the optimism on display here never becomes overbearing or smug is a real achievement, so all credit to the writers.
• Some great line deliveries from Mulgrew this week, but especially, "vultures eat the dead, Mr Paris" and, "I'm soooo glad we taught them the value of co-operation".
• Obviously there are a fair few parallels between this and the Season Five opener, "Night", including a star-less void, a near-impossible-to-detect alien, and a big rush to the finish line while under fire. Both episodes are about restating basic fundamental principals - "Night" of Voyager, "The Void" of Star Trek - but there's no sense of this being derivative of the earlier episode. Similar approaches, different territory.
• Fantome, whose source is obvious and (somewhat un-necessarily) explained on-screen, is nevertheless a terrific creation, as is the ingenious way Seven and the Doctor find to communicate with them. A properly alien culture with a new way of communicating that cant be Universal Translator'd around, on top of everything else going on here. Is there nothing this episode can't achieve?
• Well, yes, one thing. It can't quite make a montage look convincing. But that's the lone mis-step in the whole episode, and it's entirely forgivable in context - not bad, just not quite as good as everything else around it.
• And they all get to jump to warp together at the end. Awww.
Season Seven, Episode 16 - "Workforce Pt I"
Don't Fence Me In
So far, covering all the two-parters Voyager has thus thrown at us, I've always treated them as a single story, partly because it makes them easier and more coherent to write about and partly because... well they're whole stories, so it makes sense write about them as a whole. But over the course of these reviews I've put an emphasis on how important context is in the course of an ongoing show and, the three "TV movies" aside ("Dark Frontier", "Flesh And Blood" and "Endgame") the two-parters were of course not watched as whole stories when originally transmitted but either split across two weeks, or a few months if they happen to be end-of-season. So to engage with this side of the series I'm going to write the review for "Workforce Pt I" without having re-watched the second part since it originally aired back in 2001.
The first and most striking thing about watching the first episode of "Workforce" is how similar so much of it is to "The Killing Game". We have an in media res opening, the crew are acting not quite out of character but certainly not in their normal way, Voyager is under-crewed and under-staffed (and Harry is again largely responsible for getting things up and running), and it all ends in a big cliffhanger that's at least partially built on someone in the crew trying to regain their personality. "The Killing Game" is three seasons adrift now, so it's not like this structure is being over-used, but the similarities remain. Yet "The Killing Game" was an exercise in genre collision, crashing Nazis and Hirogen together to see what happens, and genre collision is one thing "Workforce" is definitely not. What it is however, at least from the first episode, is harder to divine. There's talk – lots of talk – about how the planet the crew are abducted on is suffering a labour shortage. And there's talk about how the workers are well-treated, safe, and secure, even though they're an unknowing slave labour force. And so on. None of this material is bad, or uninteresting even, but one of the problems is that it doesn't connect to anything, at least not yet. Stating that forcing people to work in your power distribution plant (and by extension, any form of slave labour) isn't an acceptable way to behave is a perfectly valid point to make, it's not like anyone in the audience is going to disagree with that, but it's also a pretty unremarkable one to be trotting out in 2001. We know slavery is A Bad Thing. If this is to carry any impact it needs to have some kind of thematic or character resonance, and that is, at least so far, the big thing that "Workforce" is missing. It's using the veneer of issues around labour, slavery, workers rights, and individual respect as something to insert an out-of-character romp into, but it's not really making any of those parts move in tandem with each other. There's a contrast between the enforced labour in the power plant (where people are happy, well fed, and safe) and the labour on-board Voyager, where there isn't even life support by the time Harry, Neelix and Chakotay find the ship (so people who are stressed and in constant danger), but that contrast doesn't really make any point.
Yet a lot of the character work is pretty good here. Tom trying to wheedle himself into a job in a bar feels about right for the character, Janeway has a fairly charming romance with a planet worker, Tuvok's terrible at telling jokes... that all sounds about right. What putting the characters in these positions does is give us a chance to examine them from another perspective because, although I said they're acting out of character, they're not really. They're just behaving in their normal way, but with the entirety of their Voyager back-story removed. That's quite an interesting idea, so Tom tending bar feels like something he might have ended up doing once he got out of the Federation prison camp he was in at the start of the show (and also makes sense with the time he spent at Sandrine's), but it's obviously not something we've seen him do. We get a little bit of that roguish side of his personality, we get to see him turn on the charm offensive... it all provides a different context to see the character in and thus see how the character functions. Similarly, Janeway's low-key romance with Janffen hints at how her relationship with her fiancé must have been – it's sweet, it's affectionate, and though it's not a world-shattering event or anything it give us some context to a part of Janeway we don't often see (and compare and contrast with her malfunctioning holo-boyfriend in "Spirit Folk" if you want an example of how much better things are here). This isn't a full recontextualization of the characters, but it does give us a chance to see them in a different light, and it's in these moments, little vignettes that shed light on people we've spent almost seven seasons watching, that "Workforce" is at its most effective.
But again this brings us to the frustration of the episode, because though the character work is for the most part sweet, it doesn't yet connect to the main plot. Tuvok's gradual break from the conditioning he's under feels just as character-consistent as Janeway's romance, but then at some point someone has to realize what's going on here so the plot can move forward a bit, just like the Doctor was able to get through to Seven at the end of the first episode of "The Killing Game" (so more parallels there, then). Indeed, and I've talked about this before, there's a certain sense that the cliffhanger at the end of the episode is very much being written towards and that's distorting the narrative shape of the episode. Tuvok can't have his Big Revelation until the final few minutes because otherwise the plot is going to get resolved too quickly, and yet there's one too many scenes of Tom being nice to B'Elanna so they feel like padding until we get to The Big Moment. Even the attempts at repairing Voyager itself go on just a bit longer than they should, though they should be praised for taking the time to show us the ship being repaired, rather than just telling us that it has been. There's a fair bit of vamping going on, in other words, to get us to the point of B'Elanna's abduction and Chakotay's flight from the authorities. What does this vamping have to do with labour conditions or enforced work? Bugger all, if this episode is anything to go by. There's a simulacrum of drama here but it doesn't amount to anything yet, and that feels pretty frustrating. I've gone through this episode in a fairly linear fashion to gauge a sense of what it was like on first transmission, but the answer I've come back with is "frustrating", which wasn't really what I was hoping for. It's not that anything here is bad, really, and the character moments work well, but watching it like this makes me wonder if this would really provide enough of a gripping resolution to get viewers to come back next week, and I'm not sure a slightly-too-long shot of Robert Beltran in alien make-up standing in front of a bit of old set would really achieve that. It's a pretty minor threat to end your episode on (no offence to Robert Beltran or Chakotay) if you want to hook your viewers in for the next episode, and that so far really encapsulates a lot of why this episode has struggled – it feels pretty minor. There is, obviously, nothing wrong with episodes dealing in the small scale, indeed quite the reverse, it's a good idea to anchor the space opera melodramatics with the smaller scale from time to time so we get an idea of what the point of all this is. And we have plenty of examples as to how well this small scale can work in Voyager, but here the small-scale feel of the episode actively works against what it's trying to achieve. Everything feels minor, when the loss of the ship and the brainwashing of the crew should be anything but.
Any Other Business:
• Absolutely lovely opening shot of Janeway on her way to work, especially the elevator she steps on to which then plunges out of site, and it helps to give a fair sense of scale to the city we're in, even though we mostly get to see a few rooms. It's an establishing shot which does a great job of actually, you know, establishing.
• Some nice uses of Neelix here, getting into the bar to get some more information from Tom, using his ship as a way for him and Chakotay to sneak in... Yea, he's well deployed here, and Phillips is pretty decent.
• This is technically an ensemble piece, though because of the very clear lines drawn between the characters, it might be the oddest ensemble piece Voyager ever really attempts.
• Seven is an "efficiency officer" in the plant. Of course she is. She gets the least to do here by some distance.
• And Tom offering to be a friend to B'Elanna, rather than just constantly hitting on her, is a nice little subversion of what we might expect from him.
• Great to see the return of the Emergency Command Hologram from "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", a nice use of in-series continuity, though the bickering between him and Harry as to who should really be in charge is a bit strained.
• Though it's lovely to get to see another side of Janeway, the truth is Mulgrew is better at doing the commanding side of Janeway than she is the romantic side. It's good to see both character and actor get a bit of variety, but I'm glad it doesn't come out too often.
• There's a discussion about whether Chakotay should go to the planet to look for the crew and the Doctor points out that he's already been seen by several people in authority, so instead they give him reconstructive surgery to hide what he looks like. Why not just send Harry instead? Or is Chakotay's opinion of Harry so low he thinks he'll screw it up (not impossible by any stretch)?
• OK so that's part one out of the way. Let's hope part two can pull it all back together...
The void
So far in this season we've had a few episodes which have attempted recontexualization. "The Void" takes this one step further, recontexualizing not only Voyager and it's own history but the very nature of Star Trek itself. This feels like the season really stretching itself, increasing the range and scope of what's being discussed this year, and contextually this makes sense. If you're going approach Voyager and its context why not go the whole hog and do the same thing for the whole show? The most important aspect of this, however, is whether within that context Voyager is able to justify its continued existence as part of the continuum of what Star Trek is. That's potentially a risky move because if the episode that tries to do this comes up short in some way in the arguments it presents, or if it's just not a terribly good episode even while making valid points, then it's likely to be extremely damaging. That "The Void" turns to to be not only arguably the best episode of the season so far but also a bracing reminder of what it is that Star Trek exists and stands for is therefore a considerable relief.
Because, if I may briefly lapse into hypotheticals here, this could have been awful. There's a lot of material to cover in forty-five minutes here, and a lot of set-ups to get through. We need to establish the nature of the anomaly, the nature of life within it, build alliances and co-operation, discover a whole new species, get in some decent character work, and manufacture an escape that doesn't look convenient or too bafflegab-y. That sounds like a recipe for disaster, and especially given that this is an ensemble piece it would have been easy for this to crash and burn in to one big mess. That it doesn't is obviously attributable to the writing, but there are a lot of adroit moves here that go far beyond the basics of the set-up and character work. Now the most obvious thing here is that Janeway gets to build her own little mini-Federation here as a method of showing why the principals the Federation is built on (basically, liberal humanism) are worth sticking to and defending. This could have lapsed into some cheesy flag-waving rah-rah session, and it equally could have gone the other way and embraced an ends-justify-the-means faux-darkness, but it does neither and steers a course down the middle ground. We've seen Janeway walk up to the line of darkness before, after all, and here, lost, isolated and alone, it would have been the perfect time for her to go all Captain Ransom. But then this isn't "Equinox" and she isn't Ransom. When push comes to shove, Janeway isn't a creature of darkness either, as he was. By laying out what the founding principals are, and then building a story out from them, rather than having a story then sticking in a few bits of self-justification, "The Void" is able to use the past of Star Trek to define why it's still relevant to Voyager today. This isn't some conveniently reflexive self-justification, in other words, but instead is using the actuality of the show's history to explain why that history deserves to be continued into the future. There are little nods to the past of Voyager - there's a Vaadwaur ship from "Dragon's Teeth" in the anomaly, and we've encountered the Hierarchy before, back in "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" - but these nods to the past serve to layer Voyager's own narrative history on top of the history of Star Trek itself. And why does that history deserve to be continued? Well because it's shown to work. In-fighting, theft, murder – these lead down dead-ends, self-defeating in their own nihilism, whereas co-operation, understanding and tolerance are what eventually allow a few ships to work together and escape the anomaly. The anomaly itself – empty, without light, barren – thus functions as an effective metaphor for the darkness that the likes of Valen embraces, while on the opposite side we have light, stars and matter – our galaxy acting as the same metaphor for the other side of the equation, the one which Star Trek itself belongs to. For, however much Star Trek might play around in the darkness, it is ultimately not a show that will ever be consumed by it. And that's a pretty big metaphorical implication for just one anomaly to represent, isn't it?
So if the Alliance represent the material nature of what Star Trek is, what does Fantome represent? Well, really, the answer is compassion. It's always one of the core element of Star Trek, and here compassion is the key to their escape alongside co-operation. Because without Fantome and his fellows (we never do get a species name for them) the attacking ships at the end might indeed have prevented the Alliance from leaving the anomaly. Yet by extending compassion without expecting reward there is a very visible demonstration of what the principals laid out in the episode mean. We've had a lot of talk around rights, freedoms and respect this season but here, rather than by implication or metaphor, we see them getting put into direction in the way that Fantome is treated, and we see the benefits of that compassion. Help others and just maybe they'll help you. This is underscored pretty heavily in the mess hall scene where Bosaal describes Fantome and his type as "vermin", and later Janeway comments on his "bigoted reaction" - even the use of the word "bigot" is unusually direct and it carries a considerable punch when Mulgrew delivers it. The point here is that there's a real sense in which arguments which have been bubbling along and building all season are here brought to the surface, and by doing so we get more than just a treatise on how working together helps everyone – a political position – and how extending compassion and understanding to all peoples helps everyone – a moral or ethical position. So we have the coming together of the social and moral and ethical in two separate but dependent and intertwined threads within the story. And that's a pretty big metaphorical implication for an extra in a body-stocking, isn't it?
And of course it's important that the episode kicks off with a representation of the Federation's economy of plenty, as we get in the scene where Seven prepares a meal. Interesting there's no implicit criticism of this within the episode. It's generally presented that the idea everyone has enough of what they need for a level of comfort is, in many ways, what society is trying to move towards, and thus while Seven's meal for the crew looks indulgent there's nothing inherently wrong that, assuming everyone is able to sustain that same level. Instead it serves as a representation of something quite different. The principals and beliefs of the Federation aren't dependent on being able to keep a full belly or set a nice table – those beliefs are shown here to be self-evidently something true and become even more important when one's table is not completely full, and when the struggle to survive depends on more than just dialling up another bottle of Pinot Noir from the replicator. It's only by sharing and co-operating when people have less than what they need that they can get to a point where everyone has enough, whether that's food on the table or an escape from This Week's Anomaly. The Federation's economy of plenty, in other words, isn't the source of their beliefs, but in fact it's exactly the other way round – it's those beliefs that allow the economy of plenty to exist at all. The times you need to depend on your beliefs rather than abandoning them is exactly when you are in trouble. This is the same message we've seen a few times in Voyager - it's the same conclusion "Alliances" came to, for example – but it's never been stated with quite so much vigour and power as it is here. About one third of the way through the episode, Valen tells Janeway that her principals won't help keep her fed, or keep her warm. But he's wrong. Absolutely, completely wrong, because it's exactly those principals which help her and the Alliance escape. And that's pretty good going for forty-five minutes of some of the best Voyager there is, isn't it?
Any Other Business:
• "The Void" is in my top-ten episodes of Voyager. Re-reading what I've written, that's pretty obvious I guess.
• Lots of darkened sets again, and of course everything is very dark outside, which lends an appropriately gloomy air to everything whist still feeling like it's part of Voyager.
• Yet the visual gloom just helps to act as a contrast to the inherent optimism of the script. That the optimism on display here never becomes overbearing or smug is a real achievement, so all credit to the writers.
• Some great line deliveries from Mulgrew this week, but especially, "vultures eat the dead, Mr Paris" and, "I'm soooo glad we taught them the value of co-operation".
• Obviously there are a fair few parallels between this and the Season Five opener, "Night", including a star-less void, a near-impossible-to-detect alien, and a big rush to the finish line while under fire. Both episodes are about restating basic fundamental principals - "Night" of Voyager, "The Void" of Star Trek - but there's no sense of this being derivative of the earlier episode. Similar approaches, different territory.
• Fantome, whose source is obvious and (somewhat un-necessarily) explained on-screen, is nevertheless a terrific creation, as is the ingenious way Seven and the Doctor find to communicate with them. A properly alien culture with a new way of communicating that cant be Universal Translator'd around, on top of everything else going on here. Is there nothing this episode can't achieve?
• Well, yes, one thing. It can't quite make a montage look convincing. But that's the lone mis-step in the whole episode, and it's entirely forgivable in context - not bad, just not quite as good as everything else around it.
• And they all get to jump to warp together at the end. Awww.
Season Seven, Episode 16 - "Workforce Pt I"
Don't Fence Me In
So far, covering all the two-parters Voyager has thus thrown at us, I've always treated them as a single story, partly because it makes them easier and more coherent to write about and partly because... well they're whole stories, so it makes sense write about them as a whole. But over the course of these reviews I've put an emphasis on how important context is in the course of an ongoing show and, the three "TV movies" aside ("Dark Frontier", "Flesh And Blood" and "Endgame") the two-parters were of course not watched as whole stories when originally transmitted but either split across two weeks, or a few months if they happen to be end-of-season. So to engage with this side of the series I'm going to write the review for "Workforce Pt I" without having re-watched the second part since it originally aired back in 2001.
The first and most striking thing about watching the first episode of "Workforce" is how similar so much of it is to "The Killing Game". We have an in media res opening, the crew are acting not quite out of character but certainly not in their normal way, Voyager is under-crewed and under-staffed (and Harry is again largely responsible for getting things up and running), and it all ends in a big cliffhanger that's at least partially built on someone in the crew trying to regain their personality. "The Killing Game" is three seasons adrift now, so it's not like this structure is being over-used, but the similarities remain. Yet "The Killing Game" was an exercise in genre collision, crashing Nazis and Hirogen together to see what happens, and genre collision is one thing "Workforce" is definitely not. What it is however, at least from the first episode, is harder to divine. There's talk – lots of talk – about how the planet the crew are abducted on is suffering a labour shortage. And there's talk about how the workers are well-treated, safe, and secure, even though they're an unknowing slave labour force. And so on. None of this material is bad, or uninteresting even, but one of the problems is that it doesn't connect to anything, at least not yet. Stating that forcing people to work in your power distribution plant (and by extension, any form of slave labour) isn't an acceptable way to behave is a perfectly valid point to make, it's not like anyone in the audience is going to disagree with that, but it's also a pretty unremarkable one to be trotting out in 2001. We know slavery is A Bad Thing. If this is to carry any impact it needs to have some kind of thematic or character resonance, and that is, at least so far, the big thing that "Workforce" is missing. It's using the veneer of issues around labour, slavery, workers rights, and individual respect as something to insert an out-of-character romp into, but it's not really making any of those parts move in tandem with each other. There's a contrast between the enforced labour in the power plant (where people are happy, well fed, and safe) and the labour on-board Voyager, where there isn't even life support by the time Harry, Neelix and Chakotay find the ship (so people who are stressed and in constant danger), but that contrast doesn't really make any point.
Yet a lot of the character work is pretty good here. Tom trying to wheedle himself into a job in a bar feels about right for the character, Janeway has a fairly charming romance with a planet worker, Tuvok's terrible at telling jokes... that all sounds about right. What putting the characters in these positions does is give us a chance to examine them from another perspective because, although I said they're acting out of character, they're not really. They're just behaving in their normal way, but with the entirety of their Voyager back-story removed. That's quite an interesting idea, so Tom tending bar feels like something he might have ended up doing once he got out of the Federation prison camp he was in at the start of the show (and also makes sense with the time he spent at Sandrine's), but it's obviously not something we've seen him do. We get a little bit of that roguish side of his personality, we get to see him turn on the charm offensive... it all provides a different context to see the character in and thus see how the character functions. Similarly, Janeway's low-key romance with Janffen hints at how her relationship with her fiancé must have been – it's sweet, it's affectionate, and though it's not a world-shattering event or anything it give us some context to a part of Janeway we don't often see (and compare and contrast with her malfunctioning holo-boyfriend in "Spirit Folk" if you want an example of how much better things are here). This isn't a full recontextualization of the characters, but it does give us a chance to see them in a different light, and it's in these moments, little vignettes that shed light on people we've spent almost seven seasons watching, that "Workforce" is at its most effective.
But again this brings us to the frustration of the episode, because though the character work is for the most part sweet, it doesn't yet connect to the main plot. Tuvok's gradual break from the conditioning he's under feels just as character-consistent as Janeway's romance, but then at some point someone has to realize what's going on here so the plot can move forward a bit, just like the Doctor was able to get through to Seven at the end of the first episode of "The Killing Game" (so more parallels there, then). Indeed, and I've talked about this before, there's a certain sense that the cliffhanger at the end of the episode is very much being written towards and that's distorting the narrative shape of the episode. Tuvok can't have his Big Revelation until the final few minutes because otherwise the plot is going to get resolved too quickly, and yet there's one too many scenes of Tom being nice to B'Elanna so they feel like padding until we get to The Big Moment. Even the attempts at repairing Voyager itself go on just a bit longer than they should, though they should be praised for taking the time to show us the ship being repaired, rather than just telling us that it has been. There's a fair bit of vamping going on, in other words, to get us to the point of B'Elanna's abduction and Chakotay's flight from the authorities. What does this vamping have to do with labour conditions or enforced work? Bugger all, if this episode is anything to go by. There's a simulacrum of drama here but it doesn't amount to anything yet, and that feels pretty frustrating. I've gone through this episode in a fairly linear fashion to gauge a sense of what it was like on first transmission, but the answer I've come back with is "frustrating", which wasn't really what I was hoping for. It's not that anything here is bad, really, and the character moments work well, but watching it like this makes me wonder if this would really provide enough of a gripping resolution to get viewers to come back next week, and I'm not sure a slightly-too-long shot of Robert Beltran in alien make-up standing in front of a bit of old set would really achieve that. It's a pretty minor threat to end your episode on (no offence to Robert Beltran or Chakotay) if you want to hook your viewers in for the next episode, and that so far really encapsulates a lot of why this episode has struggled – it feels pretty minor. There is, obviously, nothing wrong with episodes dealing in the small scale, indeed quite the reverse, it's a good idea to anchor the space opera melodramatics with the smaller scale from time to time so we get an idea of what the point of all this is. And we have plenty of examples as to how well this small scale can work in Voyager, but here the small-scale feel of the episode actively works against what it's trying to achieve. Everything feels minor, when the loss of the ship and the brainwashing of the crew should be anything but.
Any Other Business:
• Absolutely lovely opening shot of Janeway on her way to work, especially the elevator she steps on to which then plunges out of site, and it helps to give a fair sense of scale to the city we're in, even though we mostly get to see a few rooms. It's an establishing shot which does a great job of actually, you know, establishing.
• Some nice uses of Neelix here, getting into the bar to get some more information from Tom, using his ship as a way for him and Chakotay to sneak in... Yea, he's well deployed here, and Phillips is pretty decent.
• This is technically an ensemble piece, though because of the very clear lines drawn between the characters, it might be the oddest ensemble piece Voyager ever really attempts.
• Seven is an "efficiency officer" in the plant. Of course she is. She gets the least to do here by some distance.
• And Tom offering to be a friend to B'Elanna, rather than just constantly hitting on her, is a nice little subversion of what we might expect from him.
• Great to see the return of the Emergency Command Hologram from "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", a nice use of in-series continuity, though the bickering between him and Harry as to who should really be in charge is a bit strained.
• Though it's lovely to get to see another side of Janeway, the truth is Mulgrew is better at doing the commanding side of Janeway than she is the romantic side. It's good to see both character and actor get a bit of variety, but I'm glad it doesn't come out too often.
• There's a discussion about whether Chakotay should go to the planet to look for the crew and the Doctor points out that he's already been seen by several people in authority, so instead they give him reconstructive surgery to hide what he looks like. Why not just send Harry instead? Or is Chakotay's opinion of Harry so low he thinks he'll screw it up (not impossible by any stretch)?
• OK so that's part one out of the way. Let's hope part two can pull it all back together...