Season 7, Episode 17 / 18 "Workforce Pt II" / "Human Error"
Jul 28, 2016 6:42:44 GMT -5
Jean Luc de Lemur likes this
Post by Prole Hole on Jul 28, 2016 6:42:44 GMT -5
Season Seven, Episode 17 - "Workforce Pt II"
Cratering out
If the ending to "Workforce" Pt I was a little on the lacklustre side of things, at least the second part kicks off noticeably stronger, and it mostly remains noticeably stronger as well. One of the curiosities of Voyager two-parters is that, even when they're not of the strongest material the second part tends to remain stronger than the first. This is the opposite of TNG, whereby generally (not always, as the likes of "The Best Of Both Worlds" and "Chain Of Command" demonstrate) the second part tends to be weaker - think "Time's Arrow" or "Descent". Perhaps that's one of the benefits of having a less-than-inspiring cliffhanger here – whatever comes after is bound to look better.
That's a bit of disingenuous though, obviously, because while the ending to part one was weak as cliffhangers go, the material here seems noticeably and more confident, and not just in relation to what came before it. Or maybe it's just presented more confidently, because we have Roxann Dawson in the director's chair this time out, and she does a generally terrific job of helming an episode where she has a fair amount of screen-time into the bargain. Not, to be fair, that Allan Kroeker did a bad job the last time out, but the direction was pretty straightforward and house style, and there wasn't a lot that really enlivened the script. One of the things that stands out about the second part is that you can see there's effort being really put in to how shots are constructed, where the camera lingers, what it is the scenes want to convey. It's not a radical departure, but neither is it someone just going through the motions, and with fairly standard fare on the scripting front the fact that the direction is well handled gives everything a little lift that it really needs. So when we have scenes like Chakotay hiding in Janeway's apartment, lit almost entirely in shadow, Dawson is able to give a charge to these scenes, even though they're very familiar (very familiar indeed, for those of us that remember "Shattered" from a few episodes' ago and exactly the same "It's difficult to trust you when you're pointing a weapon at me" scene between exactly the same two characters). Similarly the scenes on Voyager as B'Elanna gradually regains her memories of her time on the ship ought really to be very simple, but there's a thoughtfulness to the way they're constructed that balances nicely with Dawson's own performance and draws out the slow pathos of what she's going through, helping to give something of an emotional core to the episode with out it just becoming schmaltzy, as her re-discovering her love for Tom could so very easily have become. And that emotional core to these scenes is important, because here we have the other flaw of this episode.
Because you know all of those big, heartfelt, emotional speeches here? Oh yea right, there aren't any. There's a lot of low-key emotional resonance from B'Elanna's recovery, that’s for sure, and there's a few moments of understated longing here and there, mostly from Janeway. But what's noticeably lacking here is any sense that this is impacting much of anything. One understated recovery is great, but when everything is understated it sucks a bit of the drama out of an episode that's not really built to be entirely low-key. Janeway is essentially meant to be choosing between a man she's fallen in love with and her desire to get home, and her choice is made clear in the very final scene of the episode, which is fine because she makes the choice we know she was always going to. But "is fine" and "is dramatic" are not synonyms of each other, and the scene immediately preceding this, when she and Jaffen face the fact they're going to separate, is all stiff-upper-lip from her and nice-guy-resigned from him and neither, in the end, seems all that fussed about it. And if they're not bothered, then why should we be? It's not that any of its bad – Mulgrew is better in this episode than the first, and there's more of a sense of a real relationship growing between Janeway and Jaffen, at least in part because we spend a bit more time with them – but it's fairly inert in terms of getting any actual emotional charge into proceedings. And, as with the first episode, there's a lot of talk about enforced labour and conditions and so forth, but it's still mostly just window dressing, a background for this week's story to play out over rather than something which is adding to the depth of the episode. It's not badly done by any means, it makes a refreshingly different backdrop from Yet Another War, and we do actually get to spend some time within the cultural set-up here. Sure, it's a power plant, an apartment block, and the galaxy's cleanest bar, but there's effort being made to draw a real, defined society here and then have our characters interact with it, which is the right way to build a society. It's just that it's never more than that, and with such obvious rich pickings being laid out in terms of the way this planet treats its employees/slaves the fact that it never amounts to anymore just has to feel wasteful.
And for the rest of the crew? Well it's a bit of a mixed bag really. Seven is... certainly in this episode. Neelix does a bit more sleuthing, which is always a good use for his character, but it doesn't really go anywhere. There's some more stuff between the Doctor and Harry which is more or less the same as first episode, but with a sort-of conclusion as they come to respect each other's perspective. How terribly original. Tuvok's conditioning gets broken and... well actually this is also slightly worth talking about because the strangest thing about Tuvok managing to break his conditioning is that it amounts to nothing. He struggles to avoid being re-converted into a good little worker and then everyone is rescued when Voyager sweeps in and picks everyone up. Him trying to break his conditioning literally contributes nothing to the overall storyline, except filling the viewers in on things they basically already know or are going to get told at some point. Russ is fine at going all crazy, sure, but so what? At least when Seven broke free during "The Killing Game" it was the impetus to start the rebellion that reclaimed the ship. Here it's just something that fills up some screen-time. And really, that's "Workforce" (both parts) in a nutshell. It's just something that fills up some screen-time. I sound like I'm being very harsh on this, but it's not like this is a difficult story to sit though. It's absolutely not, and there are odd moments when it manages to become genuinely compelling, though not necessarily a great number of them. But as the final, non-end-of-series Voyager two-parter this could just really stand to be so much stronger, and the agonizing thing is how close it is to realizing that. All the ingredients are there, they've just been left sitting on the counter rather than actually being cooked together. Voyager hiding out in the crater of a moon while desperately scrambling to get repaired so they can rescue the crew ought to be something that delivers some high-tension moments while Chakotay battles to free everyone on the planet, but it's mostly an excuse for some lame humour between Harry and the Doctor. The actual battle is well done when they get to planet, but until then they're basically left sitting in a crater in case they turn up too early and resolve this week's plot. Oh I'm doing it again, I'm sounding a bit harsher than I mean to, and that's still a bit uncalled for. Look, if you want to take away something redemptive from this then you could argue that getting to see the familiar characters in new circumstances, shorn of continuity, gives us a window into their character. And yes, that's fine, that's a reasonable, redemptive angle to take, and that's clearly at least in part what the script is angling towards. And this is stronger than the first half, that remains absolutely true. But if you're going to give us a window into the characters in unusual circumstances, perhaps it would be a good idea to open the curtains first?
Any Other Business:
Season Seven, Episode 18 - "Human Error"
Snap, Crackle and... Pop
Really, this episode should have been substantially worse than it is. I mean, on paper it really deserves to be. And, while what we have here isn't a lost classic, it's a remarkably solid piece of storytelling. Flawless? Absolutely not, and the script leans on one too many conveniences to quite power its way through the slightly predictable nature of the actual story. But the character work here is absolutely rock-solid, and the understanding of how, but more importantly, why Seven behaves in certain ways is indicative of an intelligent, considered approach to her that really is the hallmark of the episode. Because, despite the occasional clunky moment and a paint-by-numbers B-story, this is solidly about Seven and Seven alone.
Let's get the bad things out of the way first though, because there's not that many of them and it would be a shame to have them cluttering up the place. The "alien weapons testing ground" contributes basically nothing but a bog-standard Star Trek B-story and while it certainly isn't bad it's also functionally irrelevant beyond giving the very loosest of frames to hang the episode off. And the "awkward first date" trope has been done enough already. It doesn't usually end up being funny and it doesn't usually end up being worth doing when you could achieve the same thing another way. Oh, and the "Seven can't experience the full range of emotions because of Borg stuff" is a touch clunky, though this is something the show will return to, so it's rather more forgivable than just being an offhanded way of resolving the tensions of this episode. Um. Yea that's pretty much it for bad points I think. Most of this works remarkably well. The key to making the whole thing work here – and no surprises, obviously – is Jeri Ryan's performance, which manages again to tread the line between vulnerable and strong with remarkable grace, yet this exercise in dipping her toes into the waters of relationships is a far cry from the charming-but-derivative musings of "Someone To Watch Over Me" which, while a terrific episode in its own right, leans a little too heavily on its source material to be quite 100% satisfying. This episode is only about Seven's journey, it's not mapped on to an existing one in the manner of Eliza Doolittle, and thus feels a bit more satisfying because this is her story, without the need to rely on props from elsewhere. Ryan can do the vulnerable side of Seven pretty much in her sleep by now, but there's still something oddly satifying about the fact that the show is still finding new ways to explore the boundaries between her experiences on Voyager over the past four years and how they impact her emotional development, while still finding new territory for those two aspects to interact. Thus, the fact that this again relies on Seven feeling vulnerable doesn't feel like going over familiar territory, and it doesn't feel it's being exploitative either, because her vulnerabilities are never played as a weakness or failing of the character. Indeed this episode pulls quite the trick by establishing the exact opposite – here Seven's vulnerabilities are actually a source of strength because the character is able to acknowledge that she has them and thus address them directly, rather than simply ignoring them or allowing them to undermine her. Things don't quite go according to plan, naturally, but again because this is part of an ongoing process that has been running throughout this season (and Seven specifically refers to the events of "Unimatrix Zero" here as the start of this process of self-exploration) the fact that they don't go according to plan isn't contrived or plot-convenient but instead is part of an ongoing learning curve for the character.
And this is, in its own way, where the relationship between Seven and Chakotay starts. In episode eighteen of a twenty-six episode final season. That alone is something of a brave decision, but the fact of the matter is that the interactions here between Seven and Chakotay and Seven and "Chakotay" work surprisingly well. Certainly they're not an obvious pairing, but as I mentioned back in "One Small Step", the idea that this is something which has been in the back of Seven's mind, but only really sparked to life because of the events of "Unimatrix Zero", has at least a degree of plausibility within the history of the show. And there's a bit of a genuine spark between Beltran and Ryan, which goes a long way to making this seem credible when, on paper, this doesn't look like a natural pairing. Beltran slightly over-plays his scenes on the holodeck, which is absolutely perfect because of course he's not playing the real Chakotay there, just a holographic representation of him, so naturally everything is slightly different from the real thing. But he doesn't go so far over the top that it becomes obvious or difficult to watch, and the performance just helps to re-enforce the artificiality of what it is that Seven's engaging in. And of course "using the holodeck for relationships" is territory Star Trek has veered into before, but this avoids becoming some laboured "it's better to live in the real world than cling to a fantasy" lecturing that we've had from Reg or Geordi over on TNG, because this episode allows Seven to reach this conclusion herself as a natural outgrowth of her own experiences over the course of the episode, rather than as something that needs to be bluntly stated at her by someone else. Even the Doctor, used here largely as a supporting character for Seven's emotional journey, is tactful and respectful following his discovery of what she's been up to on the holodeck (a good, and surprisingly unusual, use of their friendship). What this really lends the episode is a degree of emotional maturity. Though this is someone who is falteringly attempting to explore their own emotional interior life, the way this is handled feels like it's something which is going on between a series of adults, rather than comparatively juvenile feel that, say, Reg's holo-fanasties had around Troi. Is it inappropriate for Seven to have a holo-Chakotay to try things out on? Yes, but this always comes across as relatable, because this is Seven tentatively trying to develop herself in the only way she really knows how, and without a full range of growth experiences in her past to support what she's trying to do (also of relevance – how much better Ryan is at delivering this kind of material than either Schultz or Burton).
It is true, though, that there are a few clumsy moments here. While it's easy to praise Beltran's slightly outsized holo-performance for enforcing the artificiality of what's happening the fact of the matter is that the "first date" is still pretty contrived. In a way, of course, that is sort of the point, because Seven has set this up according to her own parameters in the first place, but understanding that intellectually and actually having to sit through it aren't quite the same thing (it's also weird that her programmed version of Chakotay eats meat when we know he doesn't and she's a stickler for detail. But it's her fantasy, so fine, whatever). And, though I kind of excused it before, the Borg malfunction does seem a bit convenient in this episode, though the fact that it gives Seven an excuse to back away from her little experiment as a character moment rather than a plot contrivance (since the Doctor makes it clean that this is something that can be resolved, if not all that easily) is quite nicely handled and deflects it from being too laboured – there's never any sense of threat from her malfunction, but since it exists as a symbolic representation of her own ambivalence and repression that's OK. It could be better, but it's not actively damaging. The fact that there are still real, active strides being taken to move Seven forward and develop her character is, however, the greatest strength of this episode, and in giving Ryan a chance to move into new emotional territory for Seven there's no question that "Human Error" gets much more right than it gets wrong. The little bumps are forgivable, the character work is almost all great, and the sense that, even this late in the day, the show still has narrative momentum means that all of this feels like it has real purpose both for the character and for the larger show. For that alone, "Human Error" is worth of considerable praise.
Any Other Business:
Cratering out
If the ending to "Workforce" Pt I was a little on the lacklustre side of things, at least the second part kicks off noticeably stronger, and it mostly remains noticeably stronger as well. One of the curiosities of Voyager two-parters is that, even when they're not of the strongest material the second part tends to remain stronger than the first. This is the opposite of TNG, whereby generally (not always, as the likes of "The Best Of Both Worlds" and "Chain Of Command" demonstrate) the second part tends to be weaker - think "Time's Arrow" or "Descent". Perhaps that's one of the benefits of having a less-than-inspiring cliffhanger here – whatever comes after is bound to look better.
That's a bit of disingenuous though, obviously, because while the ending to part one was weak as cliffhangers go, the material here seems noticeably and more confident, and not just in relation to what came before it. Or maybe it's just presented more confidently, because we have Roxann Dawson in the director's chair this time out, and she does a generally terrific job of helming an episode where she has a fair amount of screen-time into the bargain. Not, to be fair, that Allan Kroeker did a bad job the last time out, but the direction was pretty straightforward and house style, and there wasn't a lot that really enlivened the script. One of the things that stands out about the second part is that you can see there's effort being really put in to how shots are constructed, where the camera lingers, what it is the scenes want to convey. It's not a radical departure, but neither is it someone just going through the motions, and with fairly standard fare on the scripting front the fact that the direction is well handled gives everything a little lift that it really needs. So when we have scenes like Chakotay hiding in Janeway's apartment, lit almost entirely in shadow, Dawson is able to give a charge to these scenes, even though they're very familiar (very familiar indeed, for those of us that remember "Shattered" from a few episodes' ago and exactly the same "It's difficult to trust you when you're pointing a weapon at me" scene between exactly the same two characters). Similarly the scenes on Voyager as B'Elanna gradually regains her memories of her time on the ship ought really to be very simple, but there's a thoughtfulness to the way they're constructed that balances nicely with Dawson's own performance and draws out the slow pathos of what she's going through, helping to give something of an emotional core to the episode with out it just becoming schmaltzy, as her re-discovering her love for Tom could so very easily have become. And that emotional core to these scenes is important, because here we have the other flaw of this episode.
Because you know all of those big, heartfelt, emotional speeches here? Oh yea right, there aren't any. There's a lot of low-key emotional resonance from B'Elanna's recovery, that’s for sure, and there's a few moments of understated longing here and there, mostly from Janeway. But what's noticeably lacking here is any sense that this is impacting much of anything. One understated recovery is great, but when everything is understated it sucks a bit of the drama out of an episode that's not really built to be entirely low-key. Janeway is essentially meant to be choosing between a man she's fallen in love with and her desire to get home, and her choice is made clear in the very final scene of the episode, which is fine because she makes the choice we know she was always going to. But "is fine" and "is dramatic" are not synonyms of each other, and the scene immediately preceding this, when she and Jaffen face the fact they're going to separate, is all stiff-upper-lip from her and nice-guy-resigned from him and neither, in the end, seems all that fussed about it. And if they're not bothered, then why should we be? It's not that any of its bad – Mulgrew is better in this episode than the first, and there's more of a sense of a real relationship growing between Janeway and Jaffen, at least in part because we spend a bit more time with them – but it's fairly inert in terms of getting any actual emotional charge into proceedings. And, as with the first episode, there's a lot of talk about enforced labour and conditions and so forth, but it's still mostly just window dressing, a background for this week's story to play out over rather than something which is adding to the depth of the episode. It's not badly done by any means, it makes a refreshingly different backdrop from Yet Another War, and we do actually get to spend some time within the cultural set-up here. Sure, it's a power plant, an apartment block, and the galaxy's cleanest bar, but there's effort being made to draw a real, defined society here and then have our characters interact with it, which is the right way to build a society. It's just that it's never more than that, and with such obvious rich pickings being laid out in terms of the way this planet treats its employees/slaves the fact that it never amounts to anymore just has to feel wasteful.
And for the rest of the crew? Well it's a bit of a mixed bag really. Seven is... certainly in this episode. Neelix does a bit more sleuthing, which is always a good use for his character, but it doesn't really go anywhere. There's some more stuff between the Doctor and Harry which is more or less the same as first episode, but with a sort-of conclusion as they come to respect each other's perspective. How terribly original. Tuvok's conditioning gets broken and... well actually this is also slightly worth talking about because the strangest thing about Tuvok managing to break his conditioning is that it amounts to nothing. He struggles to avoid being re-converted into a good little worker and then everyone is rescued when Voyager sweeps in and picks everyone up. Him trying to break his conditioning literally contributes nothing to the overall storyline, except filling the viewers in on things they basically already know or are going to get told at some point. Russ is fine at going all crazy, sure, but so what? At least when Seven broke free during "The Killing Game" it was the impetus to start the rebellion that reclaimed the ship. Here it's just something that fills up some screen-time. And really, that's "Workforce" (both parts) in a nutshell. It's just something that fills up some screen-time. I sound like I'm being very harsh on this, but it's not like this is a difficult story to sit though. It's absolutely not, and there are odd moments when it manages to become genuinely compelling, though not necessarily a great number of them. But as the final, non-end-of-series Voyager two-parter this could just really stand to be so much stronger, and the agonizing thing is how close it is to realizing that. All the ingredients are there, they've just been left sitting on the counter rather than actually being cooked together. Voyager hiding out in the crater of a moon while desperately scrambling to get repaired so they can rescue the crew ought to be something that delivers some high-tension moments while Chakotay battles to free everyone on the planet, but it's mostly an excuse for some lame humour between Harry and the Doctor. The actual battle is well done when they get to planet, but until then they're basically left sitting in a crater in case they turn up too early and resolve this week's plot. Oh I'm doing it again, I'm sounding a bit harsher than I mean to, and that's still a bit uncalled for. Look, if you want to take away something redemptive from this then you could argue that getting to see the familiar characters in new circumstances, shorn of continuity, gives us a window into their character. And yes, that's fine, that's a reasonable, redemptive angle to take, and that's clearly at least in part what the script is angling towards. And this is stronger than the first half, that remains absolutely true. But if you're going to give us a window into the characters in unusual circumstances, perhaps it would be a good idea to open the curtains first?
Any Other Business:
- No question, this is a bit of a disappointment for Voyager's last proper two-parter. As we move into the show's twilight little missteps like this start to matter more., even though this is simply middling rather than bad.
- The apartment block that Janeway and Jaffen live in looks, from the outside, to be a pretty crap tower block, like they're in the Projects or a council estate somewhere. It's not really clear if this is an intentional detail – poor building quality which the workers are conditioned to accept – or if it's a lack of connection between the art department and the script. Another example of where this episode falls short.
- Still, we have, not for the first time, a lovely, distracted performance from Roxann Dawson and though Voyager hanging around in a crater does come across as a bit time-waste-y the fact that the time is at leased used to show us her recovery means it's not a complete bust (it also makes the ending a bit less reset-button as well, since we're explicitly told the Doctor uses his experiences with her to help the crew recover from what happened to them).
- The little "reveal the conspiracy" sub-plot on the planet doesn't really add up to much of anything either, other than confirming that yes, lots of people are taken against their will, but not quite all of them. Which is pretty much just telling us what we already knew from Part One.
- The ending really is the worst thing about the episode, because it completely invalidates anything and everything that happens on the planet. Chakotay's infiltration, Neelix's sleuthing, Tuvok breaking the bonds of his conditioning... they might as well have stood around doing nothing until Voyager sweeps in and beams them all up. Only Janeway and Jaffen's infiltration contributes anything, and her conditioning isn't broken.
- Still, pretty great fight in the power plant when Janeway and Jaffen attempt to ride to the rescue, and it meshes nicely with Voyager's battle in space.
- Also great, the very final scene on the bridge when Chakotay asks Janeway if she regrets him turning up and her reply is, "not for a second". That's well handled too.
Season Seven, Episode 18 - "Human Error"
Snap, Crackle and... Pop
Really, this episode should have been substantially worse than it is. I mean, on paper it really deserves to be. And, while what we have here isn't a lost classic, it's a remarkably solid piece of storytelling. Flawless? Absolutely not, and the script leans on one too many conveniences to quite power its way through the slightly predictable nature of the actual story. But the character work here is absolutely rock-solid, and the understanding of how, but more importantly, why Seven behaves in certain ways is indicative of an intelligent, considered approach to her that really is the hallmark of the episode. Because, despite the occasional clunky moment and a paint-by-numbers B-story, this is solidly about Seven and Seven alone.
Let's get the bad things out of the way first though, because there's not that many of them and it would be a shame to have them cluttering up the place. The "alien weapons testing ground" contributes basically nothing but a bog-standard Star Trek B-story and while it certainly isn't bad it's also functionally irrelevant beyond giving the very loosest of frames to hang the episode off. And the "awkward first date" trope has been done enough already. It doesn't usually end up being funny and it doesn't usually end up being worth doing when you could achieve the same thing another way. Oh, and the "Seven can't experience the full range of emotions because of Borg stuff" is a touch clunky, though this is something the show will return to, so it's rather more forgivable than just being an offhanded way of resolving the tensions of this episode. Um. Yea that's pretty much it for bad points I think. Most of this works remarkably well. The key to making the whole thing work here – and no surprises, obviously – is Jeri Ryan's performance, which manages again to tread the line between vulnerable and strong with remarkable grace, yet this exercise in dipping her toes into the waters of relationships is a far cry from the charming-but-derivative musings of "Someone To Watch Over Me" which, while a terrific episode in its own right, leans a little too heavily on its source material to be quite 100% satisfying. This episode is only about Seven's journey, it's not mapped on to an existing one in the manner of Eliza Doolittle, and thus feels a bit more satisfying because this is her story, without the need to rely on props from elsewhere. Ryan can do the vulnerable side of Seven pretty much in her sleep by now, but there's still something oddly satifying about the fact that the show is still finding new ways to explore the boundaries between her experiences on Voyager over the past four years and how they impact her emotional development, while still finding new territory for those two aspects to interact. Thus, the fact that this again relies on Seven feeling vulnerable doesn't feel like going over familiar territory, and it doesn't feel it's being exploitative either, because her vulnerabilities are never played as a weakness or failing of the character. Indeed this episode pulls quite the trick by establishing the exact opposite – here Seven's vulnerabilities are actually a source of strength because the character is able to acknowledge that she has them and thus address them directly, rather than simply ignoring them or allowing them to undermine her. Things don't quite go according to plan, naturally, but again because this is part of an ongoing process that has been running throughout this season (and Seven specifically refers to the events of "Unimatrix Zero" here as the start of this process of self-exploration) the fact that they don't go according to plan isn't contrived or plot-convenient but instead is part of an ongoing learning curve for the character.
And this is, in its own way, where the relationship between Seven and Chakotay starts. In episode eighteen of a twenty-six episode final season. That alone is something of a brave decision, but the fact of the matter is that the interactions here between Seven and Chakotay and Seven and "Chakotay" work surprisingly well. Certainly they're not an obvious pairing, but as I mentioned back in "One Small Step", the idea that this is something which has been in the back of Seven's mind, but only really sparked to life because of the events of "Unimatrix Zero", has at least a degree of plausibility within the history of the show. And there's a bit of a genuine spark between Beltran and Ryan, which goes a long way to making this seem credible when, on paper, this doesn't look like a natural pairing. Beltran slightly over-plays his scenes on the holodeck, which is absolutely perfect because of course he's not playing the real Chakotay there, just a holographic representation of him, so naturally everything is slightly different from the real thing. But he doesn't go so far over the top that it becomes obvious or difficult to watch, and the performance just helps to re-enforce the artificiality of what it is that Seven's engaging in. And of course "using the holodeck for relationships" is territory Star Trek has veered into before, but this avoids becoming some laboured "it's better to live in the real world than cling to a fantasy" lecturing that we've had from Reg or Geordi over on TNG, because this episode allows Seven to reach this conclusion herself as a natural outgrowth of her own experiences over the course of the episode, rather than as something that needs to be bluntly stated at her by someone else. Even the Doctor, used here largely as a supporting character for Seven's emotional journey, is tactful and respectful following his discovery of what she's been up to on the holodeck (a good, and surprisingly unusual, use of their friendship). What this really lends the episode is a degree of emotional maturity. Though this is someone who is falteringly attempting to explore their own emotional interior life, the way this is handled feels like it's something which is going on between a series of adults, rather than comparatively juvenile feel that, say, Reg's holo-fanasties had around Troi. Is it inappropriate for Seven to have a holo-Chakotay to try things out on? Yes, but this always comes across as relatable, because this is Seven tentatively trying to develop herself in the only way she really knows how, and without a full range of growth experiences in her past to support what she's trying to do (also of relevance – how much better Ryan is at delivering this kind of material than either Schultz or Burton).
It is true, though, that there are a few clumsy moments here. While it's easy to praise Beltran's slightly outsized holo-performance for enforcing the artificiality of what's happening the fact of the matter is that the "first date" is still pretty contrived. In a way, of course, that is sort of the point, because Seven has set this up according to her own parameters in the first place, but understanding that intellectually and actually having to sit through it aren't quite the same thing (it's also weird that her programmed version of Chakotay eats meat when we know he doesn't and she's a stickler for detail. But it's her fantasy, so fine, whatever). And, though I kind of excused it before, the Borg malfunction does seem a bit convenient in this episode, though the fact that it gives Seven an excuse to back away from her little experiment as a character moment rather than a plot contrivance (since the Doctor makes it clean that this is something that can be resolved, if not all that easily) is quite nicely handled and deflects it from being too laboured – there's never any sense of threat from her malfunction, but since it exists as a symbolic representation of her own ambivalence and repression that's OK. It could be better, but it's not actively damaging. The fact that there are still real, active strides being taken to move Seven forward and develop her character is, however, the greatest strength of this episode, and in giving Ryan a chance to move into new emotional territory for Seven there's no question that "Human Error" gets much more right than it gets wrong. The little bumps are forgivable, the character work is almost all great, and the sense that, even this late in the day, the show still has narrative momentum means that all of this feels like it has real purpose both for the character and for the larger show. For that alone, "Human Error" is worth of considerable praise.
Any Other Business:
- Yes this should have been an absolute train-wreck, and that's what I was expecting going in. That this ended so well feels amazing, and was a real surprise.
- Weird pre-credits sequence, which is just thirty seconds or so of Seven's hands playing the piano before we see it's her (even though it's strikingly obvious), then we fade into the title music in a most peculiar way.
- Icheb is in this. Other than reminding you that he exists as a prelude to the next episode I have no idea why.
- Seven requesting a room and a uniform feels like a very natural extension of the character, so it's a shame she doesn't do the same thing in the real world as she does on the holodeck.
- I said that Chakotay eating meat on the holodeck was weird, which it is, but thinking about it, it may be there to tip off the audience that it's not the real Chakotay. But by the time this rolls round we're already aware of this, so it doesn't work either way. Still an odd mis-step.
- When the Doctor tells Seven she has "great taste", then says because it's her quarters are very well decorated, the unspoken line is because she chose Chakotay as her romantic interest, and it's excellently played by Picardo.
- Indeed the Doctor is very well deployed here, and it's again nice to see him being used for something other than comic relief.