Season 5 Ep 1 / 2 "Night"/ "Drone"
Nov 12, 2015 13:46:22 GMT -5
Jean-Luc Lemur and rimjobflashmob like this
Post by Prole Hole on Nov 12, 2015 13:46:22 GMT -5
Season Five, Episode 1 - "Night"
Night
After the relatively low key ending to the last season, "Night" has the relatively unusual job of picking up where the last season left off without the benefit of being a second part of a two-part story to launch into. Rather than a gosh-wow big bang into the next season, though, "Night" instead takes an approach which is every bit as thoughtful and considered as "Hope And Fear", but in a rather different way. All the lessons of what make Voyager work here are present in "Night" and deployed expertly, so lets take a look at a few of them and see how they function in getting this season off to a start.
Perhaps the first and most obvious place to start is the fact that this is a full-on ensemble piece. Voyager has proved itself terrific at using ensemble pieces in the past, and thus it proves to be the case here. Yet because (at least until about three-quarters of the way through) this isn't really an action driven episode, what we instead get are a series of meditations on each character, with each given a moment to be reflected upon and the audience actively invited to see how far they have come since "Caretaker". There's a lot of nods back to "Caretaker" here, so the approach "Night" takes to starting the season is one of reflection - showing how far things have come, and also signposting how far they can go in the future. The essence of this is the same approach as "Hope And Fear" adopted, but over the course of the whole show, rather than a single season. And the character work we get here shows what a strong bench of characters Voyager has, particularly when the writers are paying attention. We know, for example, that Janeway isn't the most stable of people when pushed to extremes ("Year Of Hell" demonstrated that quite clearly, but it's not the only example) but here we get to see the inverse - what happens to her when there's no external stimuli, and we see her reacting in an equally extreme way, but in the opposite direction, locking herself away and refusing to engage with anyone. With nothing to distract her, she's in a position to finally stop and analyse her own behaviour, and she doesn't like what she finds, declaring her choices in "Caretaker" as "short-sighted" and "selfish". Her vignette, so pointedly self-critical, is an expert piece of characterization because it's exactly in line with the kind of behaviour we've seen her exhibit before even though we've never seen her behave in this way before. Yet Janeway's introspection (and eventual swing into action) isn't the only part of this ensemble piece that succeeds, and this is the real strength of the ensemble approach here. Neelix, still sometimes a problematic character, is an absolutely phenomenal presence throughout this episode, lost in his nihilophobia, terrified of nothingness, yet his fear feels appropriately disconcerting coming from a more typically comedic character and lends a real feeling of something being wrong when the lights go out (and it helps that Phillips delivers one of his finest performances in the role). Harry, still Voyager's biggest problem, gets a moment playing his clarinet on the bridge, and though we've known he plays this is the first time it actually feels like part of the character, not a box-tick (and as with Phillips, Wang takes a good time to turn in one of his better performances). And so on. Everyone gets their moment, and it's proof positive just how strong these pieces can be.
So that's the first aspect that works - the characters. The second is the embrace of Voyager's action-adventure aesthetic, but what's so clever here is that it embraces the second part of that first, rather than the other way around. So the adventure part of the aesthetic is what's initially developed, as we're faced with the ship's power failing and a tentative exploration of the cause, allowing mystery and tension to develop, before finally resolving this with the action side of the equation. This is actually a surprisingly uncommon approach - most action-adventure in Voyager focuses on the action side - but it's a measure of how well this episode grasps the show's potential that it's able to flip this and make it work to the benefit of this story. When the action does arrive, it's everything we expect - exciting space battles, big explosions, a rush to the finish line - but this occupies a relatively small amount of screen time, so it's only going to be successful if it acts as a cathartic release to everything that has run up to it. Which it does. The introduction of the Malon here, a not-exactly-subtle comment on environmentalism, works well for the context of the episode, giving Voyager a big bully to play off against, but it more abstract terms they give Janeway something specific she can finally react against. Well, that, and coming storming out of her quarters the second her ship comes under a very real threat. Dropping some action into the episode at this point gives the episode a real jolt, and the pacing here is just what it should be, continuing an escalating tension that allows for a burst of action but doesn’t - yet - diminish the claustrophobia of the darkened ship. The adventure beats - exploring the dead ship - merge with the action beats - Janeway springing to life - and the aesthetic, once separate, coheres into one to drive the rest of the episode forward.
And of course spectacle has always been part of both Star Trek and Voyager's appeal and we have it in spades here, but once again it's played in an unusually different way. The parallel between the Captain Proton holodeck program, rendered in glorious blcak and white, and the dark, shadow-drenched corridors of a powerless Voyager are never overstated, but we are, nevertheless, invited to draw parallels between them. In this context, Seven facing off against "Satan's robot" is both a funny joke but also has the added sting of contextual relevance, since the Borg are basically the late 20th century equivalent of a Flash Gordon-esque robot. They're even both played by someone in a robot costume, it's just that the costumes now look a little more sophisticated. Indeed, having Captain Proton be a Flash Gordon style adventure story asks us to draw direct comparisons between the fairly straightforward morality plays of the 20s, their direct route into the Star Trek of the 1960s, and thusly to the Voyager of now. This acts as a kind of in-show historiography, tracing the iconography of science fiction from its earliest days right up until the present (ray guns to phasers, robots to Borg), and what’s more manages to this in the context of already-established character traits in Tom's love of 20th century ephemera. So the spectacle that once caused punters to flood into the movie theatres to see how their dashing hero manages to escape certain doom is implicitly linked to the same spectacle that gets viewers to tune in to Star Trek week in, week out (the fact that many of the Flash Gordon serials were also screened on a week-by-week basis just heightens the comparison). That it's done with such obvious love and reverence for the source material is just an added bonus.
And that's the three main pillars of just why this succeeds. The characters, the action-adventure, the spectacle. There's more besides that - there's the debate over the philosophy of compassion in Janeway's decision to destroy the Caretaker's array, there's the compassion extended towards the inhabitants of the Void, there's the discussion of loneliness, forming a rather nice conceptual line back to "One", except this time extending to the whole crew rather than a single individual... In fact, the links to Voyager's past are, in many ways, what also allows the show to move forward from this point, and put certain points to rest. Janeway's self-flagellation over her decision to destroy the Caretaker's array has always been a part of her character, if not a heavily-emphasized one, and we've seen her regret before. One of "Night"'s great strengths is how it manages to confront this head-on without either weakening the decision Janeway made, nor retconning it. Janeway is made to face up to her actions, but more importantly, as Tuvok points out, she's not the only one that has had time to re-evaluate the past. This comment stands for both the characters and audience, because "Night" acts as a fine summary of what Voyager has been thus far, and a fine summary of what it can be in the future. And that's about as successful an opening episode of a new season as you could possibly hope for.
Any Other Business:
• Welcome to the bench of recurring aliens, the Malon! As an environmental parallel they are, as I mentioned in the review, not exactly subtle, what with all their dumping toxic waste somewhere convenient for them but not for the local population, but they're also a kind of alien we've never seen before on Star Trek and that's worth some praise.
• Yea, The Adventures Of Captain Proton is a brilliant addition to the holodeck, yet also so obvious you wonder how come nobody did it before now. The music, the sets, the guy in the unconvincing robot outfit with air-duct arms... all realized just perfectly. Mwah-ha-ha!
• The direction and sound design on this episode are absolutely terrific, and wring every single piece of tension out of the script. Really, really excellent work, and in fact this might be one of the best-directed episodes of Voyager overall.
• And, just in case we need another example of it, Janeway's first appearance, hidden entirely in shadow while Chakotay attempts to draw her out, is another stand-out moment for her, and for the direction.
• Doesn’t Engineering look fantastic rendered in just torchlight, with the warp core off?
• Again, so much praise for Ethan Phillips in this episode. His explosion at Tom and B'Elanna in the mess hall before he has his seizure, full of genuine fury, is fantastic.
• All together now: "Time to take out the garbage".
• The explicit conclusion of this episode - that the crew understand why Janeway took the actions she did in "Caretaker" and forgive her for it - is a lovely piece of understated compassion and understanding. Even if it did inconvenience the Voyager crew, they made the right choice for the right reason, and one shouldn't feel bad about that. It's a very constructive conclusion for the episode to draw.
• The crew refusing Janeway's orders on the bridge one by one is fun, but best of all is Seven's, "I will not comply."
• And then they emerge into the light. Lovely.
Season Five, Episode 2 - "Drone"
Damn mosquitoes!
The exploration of individuality, and what it means to be an individual, has always been one of the pre-eminent themes in Star Trek. Every version of the series has at least one character who qualifies as an "outsider" character, who not only provides an alternative perspective for analysing the human crew but who can also be used to explore what it means to be an individual, especially when placed in a society which isn't necessarily one's own. Spock, Data, Odo, Seven, T'Pol - they're all used to this end. In many ways this strikes at the heart of another aspect of Star Trek, which is colonialism, or more specifically, whether Star Trek represents an American Colonialization tradition. I discussed this during my review of Star Trek: Insurrection (you can find it here), so I'm not going to overly repeat myself, but the essence of my conclusion was, in fact, despite having come in for criticism in this regard, Star Trek has remained very anti-colonial, and indeed stridently so at many points in its history. Yet the outsider character introduces a further complication in this analysis beyond a simple good/bad dichotomy, because it approaches ideas of assimilation (help yourself to the parallels there) and how far cultural assimilation should be taken - if an immigrant (which is in essence what at least Spock, Odo and T'Pol equate to) lives within a particular community, how far do they need to assimilate into that culture, and what responsibility do they have to the culture they've left behind?
It should be comparatively obvious how this fits in with "Drone". One, the Borg drone/immigrant in question, is expected to fit in with the society he finds himself in - the crew of Voyager - but cannot help but express interest in the society that spawned him, yet cannot entirely find a way to resolve the conflict between who he is and where he is expected to live either. The fact that what spawned him was as something as monstrous as the Borg doesn't diminish the point - both One and Seven have been returned to humanity through what amounts to cult deprogramming, and parallels with people returning home from, say ISIS, Al Qaeda or indeed even something like Scientology, are both obvious and to be encouraged. One of the strengths of "Drone" is that it allows One to be fully curious about where he came from, but despite the danger and some initial misgiving he is, significantly, ultimately not discouraged from exploring these elements of his past. This allows "Drone" as an episode to fall in line with Star Trek's broadly anti-colonial/pro immigration sentiments - One is allowed to explore and discover who and what he is, and Janeway has enough faith in their culture to conclude he will want to remain a part of it, rather than surrendering his individuality to the Borg. This is the same conclusion that Picard drew at the end of "Emergence" - the life form created there came from the hopes and dreams of the crew of the Enterprise, so shouldn't they have faith that what was created would ultimately prove to be good as a boiled down essence of what that culture produced?
Yet what's obvious here is that there is also a passing of the torch - just as Janeway carefully stewarded Seven's return to humanity over the course of the previous season, now Seven has the chance to do the same for One, and indeed is more or less told to do exactly that by Janeway (Seven's rather shocked, "you expect me to teach him about humanity?" gives Jeri Ryan another chance to show off her comedic chops, as well as clearly articulating the point). Not only, therefore, does Janeway have faith that One will be able to adapt (there's that Borg language again) to live on-board Voyager, but she's confident enough that she has already succeeded well enough with Seven to trust her to bring One into the fold. This makes sense in light of the final conflicts of Season Four, but especially "Hope And Fear", which settles Seven's ambiguous desire to return to the Borg more or less for good, and here we see an expression of that settlement, with Janeway fully confident in her trust of Seven. It's been a hard won victory to get to this point but it is a point which has been, finally, reached. And what's more important, of course, is that it works. One's contacting of the Borg isn't something he consciously does - it's portrayed on screen as a reflex action as much as anything - but regardless of the reason for it, once One becomes aware of what he did he accepts responsibility for it and takes direction action to resolve the situation, which he does successfully. But in fact the episode goes one step forward, not only having him take responsibility for this outcome (the arrival of the Sphere), but also the responsibility for any future problems his existence might cause, by refusing the Doctor's treatment and ultimately giving up his life for the safety of the ship. It's a mark of how far he becomes part of the crew that he's prepared to go to this extreme to protect them - Seven succeeds far beyond any initial expectations she had. One successfully integrates, but not at the expense of what makes him unique.
There's also something almost unbearably poignant about One's journey. While it has clear parallels with Seven's, and while it would have been easy to give him a similar arc to shed light on her situation, what works here is that One's journey really is One's journey, it doesn't exist to prop up the arcs of existing characters. This is actually very cleverly deployed in the episode, because the Seven/Janeway scene where Janeway tells Seven to mentor One makes it look like this is exactly what's going to happen, yet the subversion of this is what really helps to focus the direction the episode takes, as One gradually grows in stature and self-confidence, and Seven gradually reduces. One's story arc, thusly, is allowed to stand without overshadowing Seven, but the two scenes that top and tail the episode, Seven staring at her own reflection, allow her to have emotional resonance with One (as does the rather more on the nose, "you're hurting me") and have the experience impact her without it being specifically about her. After quite a number of episodes which have focussed on Seven's development in this regard it's actually something of a smart development to have the same arc applied to a different character, especially when Seven herself still gets a big chunk of screen time. Of course none of this would mean anything if the two central roles here - Seven and One - weren't delivered pitch-perfect, so all praise then to Jeri Ryan and J Paul Boehmer for being able to articulate the material quite as well as they do. Ryan we know can turn in a great performance at the drop of a hat, but this is still one of her best performances in the role as she brings a whole new range of emotional vulnerabilities to Seven. But the real triumph here is J Paul Boehmer, who gives One the child-like wonder of discovery that the character so desperately needs to be successful, but at the same time delivering a performance that doesn't undermine the fact that this is still a massively sophisticated Borg drone that's stamping around the ship, and that's extremely dangerous. He strikes exactly the right balance between the two, and it's amazing how something as simple as a direct stare can denote the sheer joy of data assimilation or the unspoken threat of an uncomprehending drone. That he and Ryan have excellent rapport together (not always the case with guest stars of the week and their paired regular, as "Unforgettable" proved so lack-of-memorably) just enhances everything that happens between the two characters. One gets to have an entire emotional journey in the space of a forty-five minute episode, yet his sacrifice at the end, despite just being a one-shot character, really carries a weight to it that should be wholly unexpected given that One's existence is a clear and present danger to the ship, but which in fact just makes it all the more affecting when it occurs. "Drone" is, in every regard, a triumph for both Voyager and Star Trek and delivers everything you could possibly hope for in a forty-five minute guest-shot character piece. I really cannot recommend it highly enough.
Any Other Business:
• J Paul Boehmer was a Nazi Kapitan back in "The Killing Game” and, while he was terrific there, this performance is leagues apart - really, quite excellent.
• Ah, a story kicked off by a transporter malfunction - how pleasingly traditional!
• On board the small shuttle near the beginning of the episode, Seven suggests to Tom and B'Elanna they design and build a new shuttle. That's a nice little piece of foreshadowing.
• The 29th century Borg is noticeably less clunky-looking than "our" drones, but it’s a good costume design.
• One's "walk" is... well, a little less successful. It's easy to see what they were going for - he's still learning to walk properly, or at least naturally, as a sign of how new he is - but it does look increasingly silly on screen.
• It's hard to imagine now, but "Drone" marks the very first proper appearance of a Borg Sphere on the small screen, though of course it's been seen before in Star Trek: First Contact.
• That new realm of emotional fragility that Ryan brings is just a wonder to behold. The, "you're hurting me" line really ought to read like emotional manipulation, but she delivers it in such a way that you really, really feel it. Bravo.
• Presumably the Doctor harvests his mobile emitter from One's corpse in between the ending of this episode and the start of the next. Which is gruesome.
Night
After the relatively low key ending to the last season, "Night" has the relatively unusual job of picking up where the last season left off without the benefit of being a second part of a two-part story to launch into. Rather than a gosh-wow big bang into the next season, though, "Night" instead takes an approach which is every bit as thoughtful and considered as "Hope And Fear", but in a rather different way. All the lessons of what make Voyager work here are present in "Night" and deployed expertly, so lets take a look at a few of them and see how they function in getting this season off to a start.
Perhaps the first and most obvious place to start is the fact that this is a full-on ensemble piece. Voyager has proved itself terrific at using ensemble pieces in the past, and thus it proves to be the case here. Yet because (at least until about three-quarters of the way through) this isn't really an action driven episode, what we instead get are a series of meditations on each character, with each given a moment to be reflected upon and the audience actively invited to see how far they have come since "Caretaker". There's a lot of nods back to "Caretaker" here, so the approach "Night" takes to starting the season is one of reflection - showing how far things have come, and also signposting how far they can go in the future. The essence of this is the same approach as "Hope And Fear" adopted, but over the course of the whole show, rather than a single season. And the character work we get here shows what a strong bench of characters Voyager has, particularly when the writers are paying attention. We know, for example, that Janeway isn't the most stable of people when pushed to extremes ("Year Of Hell" demonstrated that quite clearly, but it's not the only example) but here we get to see the inverse - what happens to her when there's no external stimuli, and we see her reacting in an equally extreme way, but in the opposite direction, locking herself away and refusing to engage with anyone. With nothing to distract her, she's in a position to finally stop and analyse her own behaviour, and she doesn't like what she finds, declaring her choices in "Caretaker" as "short-sighted" and "selfish". Her vignette, so pointedly self-critical, is an expert piece of characterization because it's exactly in line with the kind of behaviour we've seen her exhibit before even though we've never seen her behave in this way before. Yet Janeway's introspection (and eventual swing into action) isn't the only part of this ensemble piece that succeeds, and this is the real strength of the ensemble approach here. Neelix, still sometimes a problematic character, is an absolutely phenomenal presence throughout this episode, lost in his nihilophobia, terrified of nothingness, yet his fear feels appropriately disconcerting coming from a more typically comedic character and lends a real feeling of something being wrong when the lights go out (and it helps that Phillips delivers one of his finest performances in the role). Harry, still Voyager's biggest problem, gets a moment playing his clarinet on the bridge, and though we've known he plays this is the first time it actually feels like part of the character, not a box-tick (and as with Phillips, Wang takes a good time to turn in one of his better performances). And so on. Everyone gets their moment, and it's proof positive just how strong these pieces can be.
So that's the first aspect that works - the characters. The second is the embrace of Voyager's action-adventure aesthetic, but what's so clever here is that it embraces the second part of that first, rather than the other way around. So the adventure part of the aesthetic is what's initially developed, as we're faced with the ship's power failing and a tentative exploration of the cause, allowing mystery and tension to develop, before finally resolving this with the action side of the equation. This is actually a surprisingly uncommon approach - most action-adventure in Voyager focuses on the action side - but it's a measure of how well this episode grasps the show's potential that it's able to flip this and make it work to the benefit of this story. When the action does arrive, it's everything we expect - exciting space battles, big explosions, a rush to the finish line - but this occupies a relatively small amount of screen time, so it's only going to be successful if it acts as a cathartic release to everything that has run up to it. Which it does. The introduction of the Malon here, a not-exactly-subtle comment on environmentalism, works well for the context of the episode, giving Voyager a big bully to play off against, but it more abstract terms they give Janeway something specific she can finally react against. Well, that, and coming storming out of her quarters the second her ship comes under a very real threat. Dropping some action into the episode at this point gives the episode a real jolt, and the pacing here is just what it should be, continuing an escalating tension that allows for a burst of action but doesn’t - yet - diminish the claustrophobia of the darkened ship. The adventure beats - exploring the dead ship - merge with the action beats - Janeway springing to life - and the aesthetic, once separate, coheres into one to drive the rest of the episode forward.
And of course spectacle has always been part of both Star Trek and Voyager's appeal and we have it in spades here, but once again it's played in an unusually different way. The parallel between the Captain Proton holodeck program, rendered in glorious blcak and white, and the dark, shadow-drenched corridors of a powerless Voyager are never overstated, but we are, nevertheless, invited to draw parallels between them. In this context, Seven facing off against "Satan's robot" is both a funny joke but also has the added sting of contextual relevance, since the Borg are basically the late 20th century equivalent of a Flash Gordon-esque robot. They're even both played by someone in a robot costume, it's just that the costumes now look a little more sophisticated. Indeed, having Captain Proton be a Flash Gordon style adventure story asks us to draw direct comparisons between the fairly straightforward morality plays of the 20s, their direct route into the Star Trek of the 1960s, and thusly to the Voyager of now. This acts as a kind of in-show historiography, tracing the iconography of science fiction from its earliest days right up until the present (ray guns to phasers, robots to Borg), and what’s more manages to this in the context of already-established character traits in Tom's love of 20th century ephemera. So the spectacle that once caused punters to flood into the movie theatres to see how their dashing hero manages to escape certain doom is implicitly linked to the same spectacle that gets viewers to tune in to Star Trek week in, week out (the fact that many of the Flash Gordon serials were also screened on a week-by-week basis just heightens the comparison). That it's done with such obvious love and reverence for the source material is just an added bonus.
And that's the three main pillars of just why this succeeds. The characters, the action-adventure, the spectacle. There's more besides that - there's the debate over the philosophy of compassion in Janeway's decision to destroy the Caretaker's array, there's the compassion extended towards the inhabitants of the Void, there's the discussion of loneliness, forming a rather nice conceptual line back to "One", except this time extending to the whole crew rather than a single individual... In fact, the links to Voyager's past are, in many ways, what also allows the show to move forward from this point, and put certain points to rest. Janeway's self-flagellation over her decision to destroy the Caretaker's array has always been a part of her character, if not a heavily-emphasized one, and we've seen her regret before. One of "Night"'s great strengths is how it manages to confront this head-on without either weakening the decision Janeway made, nor retconning it. Janeway is made to face up to her actions, but more importantly, as Tuvok points out, she's not the only one that has had time to re-evaluate the past. This comment stands for both the characters and audience, because "Night" acts as a fine summary of what Voyager has been thus far, and a fine summary of what it can be in the future. And that's about as successful an opening episode of a new season as you could possibly hope for.
Any Other Business:
• Welcome to the bench of recurring aliens, the Malon! As an environmental parallel they are, as I mentioned in the review, not exactly subtle, what with all their dumping toxic waste somewhere convenient for them but not for the local population, but they're also a kind of alien we've never seen before on Star Trek and that's worth some praise.
• Yea, The Adventures Of Captain Proton is a brilliant addition to the holodeck, yet also so obvious you wonder how come nobody did it before now. The music, the sets, the guy in the unconvincing robot outfit with air-duct arms... all realized just perfectly. Mwah-ha-ha!
• The direction and sound design on this episode are absolutely terrific, and wring every single piece of tension out of the script. Really, really excellent work, and in fact this might be one of the best-directed episodes of Voyager overall.
• And, just in case we need another example of it, Janeway's first appearance, hidden entirely in shadow while Chakotay attempts to draw her out, is another stand-out moment for her, and for the direction.
• Doesn’t Engineering look fantastic rendered in just torchlight, with the warp core off?
• Again, so much praise for Ethan Phillips in this episode. His explosion at Tom and B'Elanna in the mess hall before he has his seizure, full of genuine fury, is fantastic.
• All together now: "Time to take out the garbage".
• The explicit conclusion of this episode - that the crew understand why Janeway took the actions she did in "Caretaker" and forgive her for it - is a lovely piece of understated compassion and understanding. Even if it did inconvenience the Voyager crew, they made the right choice for the right reason, and one shouldn't feel bad about that. It's a very constructive conclusion for the episode to draw.
• The crew refusing Janeway's orders on the bridge one by one is fun, but best of all is Seven's, "I will not comply."
• And then they emerge into the light. Lovely.
Season Five, Episode 2 - "Drone"
Damn mosquitoes!
The exploration of individuality, and what it means to be an individual, has always been one of the pre-eminent themes in Star Trek. Every version of the series has at least one character who qualifies as an "outsider" character, who not only provides an alternative perspective for analysing the human crew but who can also be used to explore what it means to be an individual, especially when placed in a society which isn't necessarily one's own. Spock, Data, Odo, Seven, T'Pol - they're all used to this end. In many ways this strikes at the heart of another aspect of Star Trek, which is colonialism, or more specifically, whether Star Trek represents an American Colonialization tradition. I discussed this during my review of Star Trek: Insurrection (you can find it here), so I'm not going to overly repeat myself, but the essence of my conclusion was, in fact, despite having come in for criticism in this regard, Star Trek has remained very anti-colonial, and indeed stridently so at many points in its history. Yet the outsider character introduces a further complication in this analysis beyond a simple good/bad dichotomy, because it approaches ideas of assimilation (help yourself to the parallels there) and how far cultural assimilation should be taken - if an immigrant (which is in essence what at least Spock, Odo and T'Pol equate to) lives within a particular community, how far do they need to assimilate into that culture, and what responsibility do they have to the culture they've left behind?
It should be comparatively obvious how this fits in with "Drone". One, the Borg drone/immigrant in question, is expected to fit in with the society he finds himself in - the crew of Voyager - but cannot help but express interest in the society that spawned him, yet cannot entirely find a way to resolve the conflict between who he is and where he is expected to live either. The fact that what spawned him was as something as monstrous as the Borg doesn't diminish the point - both One and Seven have been returned to humanity through what amounts to cult deprogramming, and parallels with people returning home from, say ISIS, Al Qaeda or indeed even something like Scientology, are both obvious and to be encouraged. One of the strengths of "Drone" is that it allows One to be fully curious about where he came from, but despite the danger and some initial misgiving he is, significantly, ultimately not discouraged from exploring these elements of his past. This allows "Drone" as an episode to fall in line with Star Trek's broadly anti-colonial/pro immigration sentiments - One is allowed to explore and discover who and what he is, and Janeway has enough faith in their culture to conclude he will want to remain a part of it, rather than surrendering his individuality to the Borg. This is the same conclusion that Picard drew at the end of "Emergence" - the life form created there came from the hopes and dreams of the crew of the Enterprise, so shouldn't they have faith that what was created would ultimately prove to be good as a boiled down essence of what that culture produced?
Yet what's obvious here is that there is also a passing of the torch - just as Janeway carefully stewarded Seven's return to humanity over the course of the previous season, now Seven has the chance to do the same for One, and indeed is more or less told to do exactly that by Janeway (Seven's rather shocked, "you expect me to teach him about humanity?" gives Jeri Ryan another chance to show off her comedic chops, as well as clearly articulating the point). Not only, therefore, does Janeway have faith that One will be able to adapt (there's that Borg language again) to live on-board Voyager, but she's confident enough that she has already succeeded well enough with Seven to trust her to bring One into the fold. This makes sense in light of the final conflicts of Season Four, but especially "Hope And Fear", which settles Seven's ambiguous desire to return to the Borg more or less for good, and here we see an expression of that settlement, with Janeway fully confident in her trust of Seven. It's been a hard won victory to get to this point but it is a point which has been, finally, reached. And what's more important, of course, is that it works. One's contacting of the Borg isn't something he consciously does - it's portrayed on screen as a reflex action as much as anything - but regardless of the reason for it, once One becomes aware of what he did he accepts responsibility for it and takes direction action to resolve the situation, which he does successfully. But in fact the episode goes one step forward, not only having him take responsibility for this outcome (the arrival of the Sphere), but also the responsibility for any future problems his existence might cause, by refusing the Doctor's treatment and ultimately giving up his life for the safety of the ship. It's a mark of how far he becomes part of the crew that he's prepared to go to this extreme to protect them - Seven succeeds far beyond any initial expectations she had. One successfully integrates, but not at the expense of what makes him unique.
There's also something almost unbearably poignant about One's journey. While it has clear parallels with Seven's, and while it would have been easy to give him a similar arc to shed light on her situation, what works here is that One's journey really is One's journey, it doesn't exist to prop up the arcs of existing characters. This is actually very cleverly deployed in the episode, because the Seven/Janeway scene where Janeway tells Seven to mentor One makes it look like this is exactly what's going to happen, yet the subversion of this is what really helps to focus the direction the episode takes, as One gradually grows in stature and self-confidence, and Seven gradually reduces. One's story arc, thusly, is allowed to stand without overshadowing Seven, but the two scenes that top and tail the episode, Seven staring at her own reflection, allow her to have emotional resonance with One (as does the rather more on the nose, "you're hurting me") and have the experience impact her without it being specifically about her. After quite a number of episodes which have focussed on Seven's development in this regard it's actually something of a smart development to have the same arc applied to a different character, especially when Seven herself still gets a big chunk of screen time. Of course none of this would mean anything if the two central roles here - Seven and One - weren't delivered pitch-perfect, so all praise then to Jeri Ryan and J Paul Boehmer for being able to articulate the material quite as well as they do. Ryan we know can turn in a great performance at the drop of a hat, but this is still one of her best performances in the role as she brings a whole new range of emotional vulnerabilities to Seven. But the real triumph here is J Paul Boehmer, who gives One the child-like wonder of discovery that the character so desperately needs to be successful, but at the same time delivering a performance that doesn't undermine the fact that this is still a massively sophisticated Borg drone that's stamping around the ship, and that's extremely dangerous. He strikes exactly the right balance between the two, and it's amazing how something as simple as a direct stare can denote the sheer joy of data assimilation or the unspoken threat of an uncomprehending drone. That he and Ryan have excellent rapport together (not always the case with guest stars of the week and their paired regular, as "Unforgettable" proved so lack-of-memorably) just enhances everything that happens between the two characters. One gets to have an entire emotional journey in the space of a forty-five minute episode, yet his sacrifice at the end, despite just being a one-shot character, really carries a weight to it that should be wholly unexpected given that One's existence is a clear and present danger to the ship, but which in fact just makes it all the more affecting when it occurs. "Drone" is, in every regard, a triumph for both Voyager and Star Trek and delivers everything you could possibly hope for in a forty-five minute guest-shot character piece. I really cannot recommend it highly enough.
Any Other Business:
• J Paul Boehmer was a Nazi Kapitan back in "The Killing Game” and, while he was terrific there, this performance is leagues apart - really, quite excellent.
• Ah, a story kicked off by a transporter malfunction - how pleasingly traditional!
• On board the small shuttle near the beginning of the episode, Seven suggests to Tom and B'Elanna they design and build a new shuttle. That's a nice little piece of foreshadowing.
• The 29th century Borg is noticeably less clunky-looking than "our" drones, but it’s a good costume design.
• One's "walk" is... well, a little less successful. It's easy to see what they were going for - he's still learning to walk properly, or at least naturally, as a sign of how new he is - but it does look increasingly silly on screen.
• It's hard to imagine now, but "Drone" marks the very first proper appearance of a Borg Sphere on the small screen, though of course it's been seen before in Star Trek: First Contact.
• That new realm of emotional fragility that Ryan brings is just a wonder to behold. The, "you're hurting me" line really ought to read like emotional manipulation, but she delivers it in such a way that you really, really feel it. Bravo.
• Presumably the Doctor harvests his mobile emitter from One's corpse in between the ending of this episode and the start of the next. Which is gruesome.
