Season 5 Ep 5 / 6 "Once Upon A Time" / "Timeless"
Nov 26, 2015 15:03:04 GMT -5
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Post by Prole Hole on Nov 26, 2015 15:03:04 GMT -5
Season Five, Episode 5 - "Once Upon A Time"
We don't need no water / let the motherfucker burn
This is the worst episode of Voyager since "Favourite Son", back in Season Three. That's a bald statement to make, but sadly it's true. "Unforgettable" was just exactly the opposite of that, and I'm sticking by my sort-of defence of "Demon", but "Once Upon A Time" is actively bad in a way that neither of those episodes were. Though saying that, it does commit the same mistakes that both of those Season Four episodes do but all rolled into one episode - like "Unforgettable" it's incredibly dull and hard to care about, and like "Demon" it's crap. So let's try to parse out what went wrong here because, also like both of those stories, it's not difficult to work out why someone might think this was an idea worth trying, even when the end results turn out as badly as they do here.
Firstly, there's the obvious point that we've seen both Samantha and Naomi before. Voyager is into it's fifth season now so of course there's going to be a degree of self-referencing going on. It has, to be fair, been a while since we've seen these two particular characters, but still - they're both pre-established characters, and a big hullabaloo was made about Naomi being the first child born on Voyager, so indeed it seems perfectly sensible to return to that at some stage. It also gives the show some more connective tissue in terms of its own character continuity, which is also no bad thing. Samantha hasn't been on-screen all that much, but in her few previous appearances she's been perfectly likeable and refreshingly "normal", which is to say she seems like just a regular Joe (Jane?) getting on with her job as best she can in difficult circumstances. Nancy Hower brings an ever-so-slightly resigned, just-getting-on-with-business feel to Samantha, and it's both welcome and really rather refreshing. It's a shame she spends most of the episode injured in the shuttle, but she's an appealing on-screen presence and it's easy to see why her return would add something to an episode. Here she brings the same normality to the role that she's previously delivered and, for relatively little screen time, does well with what she's given. Of particular note is her exchanges with Tuvok over their children - both Russ and Hower play well off each other in scenes where both characters are forcibly separated from their children and need to have faith that those around their offspring will take good care of them until they're in a position to return and do it themselves. These are quiet, understated scenes, and give breadth to both characters, and in these little character-based moments it's possible to see what the episode is shooting for - a quiet, effective meditation on the difficulties of parenthood and responsibility when being the parent you want to be simply isn't possible. Thematically that's a good thing to reach for, and Voyager has proven in the past that it's capable of doing intimate, small-scale storytelling.
It shoots, it misses. Because those lovely, gentle scenes between Tuvok and Samantha are, regrettably, almost the only bit of the episode that works. The shuttle crash itself is contrived in the extreme (though there's something quite nice about it being caused by that old TOS favourite, the ion storm), but fine, we can take a quick hand-wave of a set-up if it leads to something more interesting - but it doesn’t. Back on Voyager we're stuck with a crappy Neelix plot (though "plot" seems like a generous description for the bulk of the episode, since very little of anything actually happens) as he tries to be a good godparent to Naomi while her mother is missing. Why would this seem like a good idea to anyone? Well, at least in part because Phillips has shown he's a good dramatic actor when given the chance, and it's here that the episode finds its only other successful conceit. Neelix fighting with Janeway in her ready room over whether to tell Naomi her mother is missing is terrific. Phillips gets let off the leash and delivers a wonderful performance, seething with anger at being told how best to deal with his goddaughter and resentful of the implication that he can't cope. Mulgrew's great - of course - but her and Phillips in this kind of scene together is a real rarity and it's to be savoured because both spark off each other incredibly well. And, on a purely storytelling level, giving Neelix someone to have an emotional connection with isn't the worst idea either - indeed his dedication to Naomi is really rather sweet, and there's an explicit line drawn here between his guilt over what happened to Alexia and his inability to prevent it or do anything about it, and his concern for Naomi and the desire to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to her. That's good, proper character work, and we get plenty of references to his past, his established character history and just how and why it drives his protective, or over-protective, instincts (this also tacitly suggests why he reacted quite so massively over-protective towards Kes, though she's not mentioned here). And all that comes to a head in the Janeway/Neelix face-off magnificently.
Everything leading up to it, and after it, though, is just rubbish. People have ragged on Scarlett Pomers as Naomi in the past, and I am not going to join their numbers - she's perfectly fine here, at her best when showing her fear of Seven (the most charming of all scenes in this episode) and she delivers exactly what's asked of her. It's not her fault she's stuck in a plodding, go-nowhere story that requires very little of her beyond mild concern or obliviousness. Of the, "it's easy to see why they wanted to do this" aspects of this story, including such a large role for Naomi is maybe the hardest to explain - Star Trek has a somewhat ignominious reputation when it comes to including children and/or teenagers on the show so to willfully include one isn't the most obvious choice to make. Still, it does give someone for Neelix to feel legitimately protective towards without some contrived "morale officer" overtones. And Naomi herself, against strictly in character terms, has the chance to give a different perspective on events, seeing things from a child's-eye perspective. This is the episode's biggest failing though, because at absolutely no point do we really ever get to see anything from her perspective, which is a shame as this really could have been the basis for a strikingly different episode of Voyager. Indeed it's telling that the one time we do approach this (the scene of Seven towering over her in the mess hall) it is by far and away the best one featuring Naomi in the whole episode, suggesting just how interesting this could have been. But instead of that we get endless, endless scenes on the holodeck that seem to go on forever, and which amount to a whole lot of nothing at all (sole exception: Neelix being terrified of his sister dying in the Metreon cascade, which turns out to be dream and so not the holodeck at all. Stupid). The use of Flotter and Trevis fits in with Voyager's more expansive use of holo-technology, in this case as children's entertainment, but the actual execution is horrible, and adds absolutely nothing. The fact that it's "educational" (in the loosest way possible) also adds to the tediousness of these scenes, since it's clear Naomi basically knows everything they have to teach her, and the audience don't need to hear anything the holo-characters have to say, so basically every scene set on the holodeck is rendered pointless. Often annoyingly, infuriatingly pointless.
Oh, but we're not done with the stupid yet, because the rescue of the Delta Flyer is also stupid as well. Well, maybe stupid isn't the right word, but its also tediously literal, as the crew just basically just dig it out. They dug out something that was stuck in a cave? Whoever would have thought it? Fine, fine, maybe that is how a rescue like that would work, but because we see so little of it, and because it seems to involve practically no effort (and, despite the running down of air inside the Flyer, absolutely no tension either) the scenes set there just feel like time-filling vamping until the credits roll. Which is exactly what they are. Again it's not like there wasn't potential here, but none of it comes to the surface (ha!) and in the end it doesn't amount to anything at all. So there, if you wish it, is your one-line summary of this episode: "Once Upon A Time": it's not like there wasn't potential here, but none of it comes to the surface.
What a crap episode.
Any Other Business:
• This feels especially disappointing because, really, it's been a very, very long time since we've had anything this bad, and even the lowlights of Season Four were better than this boring load of old rubbish.
• But yea, that scene between Naomi and Seven in the mess hall is at least great, and it's nice to see Seven's wry, dry sense of humour directed at something other than a one-liner or put-down.
• All the sympathy for Ethan Phillips this episode - his three minutes to shine in the ready room just shows how stupidly his character is wasted for the remaining forty-two.
• Welcome to the Voyager Irregulars Scarlett Pommers! Honestly, she's fine here - best in her scenes with Ryan, worst when asked to fake interest in some idiotic holo-program even she seems to have a hard time hiding her disdain for.
• Janeway says she's, "had enough" coffee. Wwwwwhhhaaaaaa?
• Flotter and Trevis are unbelieveably camp, which gives the Forest of Forever a not-inappropriate Wizard Of Oz feel, at least. Though that doesn't make those scenes any easier to sit through.
• Worst episode of Season Five, hands down, and I don't think there's an episode this bad left in the show, though this opinion may get revised when the Borg kiddywinks come on board. Oh wait, Harry gets to have a romance with another alien woman in eleven episode's time? Uh...
Season Five, Episode 6 - "Timeless"
Ice ice, baby
Well if "Once Upon A Time" showed how to waste the potential of a second-tier character with Neelix, "Timeless" acts as a corrective and shows just how well second-tier characters can be used when you actually bother to write towards their strengths. I'll come clean here and admit that "Timeless" is one of my favourite Voyager episodes, so even by my standards this review is going to be objectivity-free. Because, really, "Timeless" is magnificent, and if you'd told me even half a season ago that one of my favourite Voyager episodes would feature Harry as the lead character I likely would have laughed you out the airlock (the brilliance of "Emanations" not withstanding). Yet here we are, faced with an episode that features an older, disillusioned Harry at its core and it really is quite magnificent.
One of the best conceits of this story is that it's a time travel story that basically doesn't involve any time travel. That's a great trick for the episode to pull, and its approach to temporal mechanics is strikingly different to the usual temporal anomalies/floods of bafflegab that we normally get. Chakotay and Harry, fifteen years in the future, really are Chakotay and Harry fifteen years in the future, and the method of time travel plays entirely fair with the viewer because there's no cheat - this is the characters, as they would be in the future, given the events which occur during this episode. The only thing that actually time travels is the signal Harry sends back to alert Seven. The reason this is successful is that it allows us genuine insight into the older versions of the characters we know without ever having to cheat around it. So it's interesting to see Chaktoay in an actual proper relationship (something the show hasn't really given us yet, and no, I'm not counting "Unforgettable"), but the real revelation here is Harry. The bitter, ground-down version of his character is magnificent, and Wang is more than capable of delivering on it, but what's significant here, and often overlooked, is that Wang isn't just good at playing Old Harry. The scene he has in Engineering, when he fights to persuade everyone to follow his plan, shows him being just as good but delivering a great version of Current Harry, with all the frustrations he feels pushed up to the surface. This Harry is just as compelling as Old Harry, and it's a shame we don't get more of it, because this is by miles the best performance Wang has turned in since at least "The Killing Game" and quite possibly since "Emanations". For once we actually get to see why he was cast in the role, and he's terrific. I've been hard on Harry and Wang in the past, but credit where credit's due - he's absolutely impeccable here. The use of an older Harry (sans time travel) to get him to this point means that his character traits make sense - it's easy to see how the idealistic, puppy-dog version of Ensign Kim could so easily twist into the bitter, reproachful version in the future, so the no-time-travel-for-a-time-travel story really gives his character the space to change while remaining true to what might be a reasonable extrapolation of how Harry will end up. Even his ranting, "I can't fix it in three minutes!" scene at the end of the episode, which could have gone very badly wrong, is just great, as all Harry's frustrations over fifteen years of guilt come flooding out of him, and Wang doesn't falter for a second. There's a very real case to be made that this is the best performance he ever gives in Voyager.
The same quality of character work also holds true for Future Chakotay, though perhaps less dramatically. He's rather roguish in the future, but this feels less like a future version of the character than a past one. Dodging Starfleet and being on the run isn't just how we might imagine his Maquis days being, it is in fact exactly how we were introduced to the character in "Caretaker", and now, shorn of Starfleet we see him returning to his old ways. That feels right for him too, and the slight extra swagger Beltran brings to the role makes this seem like a convincing future for Chakotay. Even the risks he takes here feel like a slightly outsized version of what he'd do on Voyager, which works well in establishing his future recklessness. And while he doesn’t get to spend a vast amount of screen time with Christine Harnos she and Beltran have a fairly lived-in warmth together that makes them seem like a real couple, especially as they explore the frozen version of Voyager. Actually, the frozen version of Voyager almost feels like a character in and of itself, and it's a real credit to this episode that something that had the potential to be a bit cheesy and silly manages to carry real emotional resonance. There's something properly uncanny about Chakotay and Tessa exploring this forgotten, frozen relic from the past, and seeing the crew, dead and abandoned, is actually upsetting. Even Harry finding an unknown ensign frozen in a Jeffries Tube feels unaccountably sad, the body left there in place, alone, on a forgotten alien world. It's genuinely poignant and really rather haunting. Again this works because this isn't some hypothetical future or time travel shenanigans, this is what actually happens - their experimental drive fails and the entire crew is killed as a result, without any cheating or get-out. It adds real weight to these scenes, and of course makes its doubly pleasurable when the Doctor finally comes on line, a glimmer of hope amongst the cold, the dead and the forgotten.
And on a purely scripting level, one of the great successes of "Timeless" is just how well it's able to build to its dual conclusions. This could easily have been a very linear story - slipstream drive is launched, Voyager crashes, cut to fifteen years in the future - and that would have been fine, it still would be a terrific episode. But instead of taking such a narratively traditional stance the episode instead layers both the current storyline of the launch and the future storyline of Harry and Chakotay together, meaning at the point where we get to see Voyager crashing we also have the culmination of the attempts to stop the very crash we've just witnessed. This ends up doubling the tension and it gives a terrific sense of pace as Harry and Chakotay desperately struggle to cross the finishing line and get their message sent. The episode also starts relatively slow and small-scale, with the party in Engineering being literally slow since it's shot in slow-mo, and we're given a few comedy moments before we head into the drama of the episode properly. This at least is a fairly straightforward technique, but it still stops everything being too grim and provides a little lightness to get things going, as well as basically reminding us of everything that's lost due to the accident. These scenes are relatively long, as is the time spent exploring the frozen Voyager, but as we approach the climax both the scenes and the cuts we see get shorter and shorter, driving the tension and drama of the episode while never becoming too intrusive or flashy. The scripting here is, in other words, deft and there's a great sense of where and when to place emphasis, so for example it's one thing to have a character announce they need to extract something from Seven's cranial implants and quite another to see the Doctor standing there, holding half an artificial skull (complete with bionic eye!) as if it's a perfectly ordinary, everyday occurrence to be holding the head of your dead shipmate without comment. Indeed it's the fact that it goes uncommented on that really makes that scene work - Harry is too jaded to even care that this is, or was, Seven any more and now it's just a piece of tech that will help him fix his mistake. The Doctor's detachment makes a certain degree of sense, but it's Harry's that really brings home the reality of that scene, and by extension the change in his character. All without one single reference. It's that level of writing, and that understanding of where to place emphasis, that really lets this script deliver on its promise. And deliver it does, because (and there isn't really many stories you can say this about) there is literally nothing wrong here. There's not a single thing I would change about the way this episode is done - everything aligns perfectly, and the results speak for themselves. Quite brilliant.
Any Other Business:
• The slow-mo effect during the party scene in Engineering is a really artful way of indicating something is going to go wrong without tipping the audience off as to what it might be.
• This was Voyager's 100th episode, so the party in Engineering is of course terribly meta.
• Welcome back to the director's chair LeVar Burton! He does a really fantastic job here, and deserves considerable praise (compared to how things went in "Ex Post Facto" - not well - it's hard to believe this is directed by the same person).
• "Mr Neelix, you are an unending source of astonishment." Oh never change, Tuvok!
• And Seven being drunk at the party is great fun as well. "We are as one!"
• Kim's blunt, "They're having sex" when Tessa tries to be a little coy about the nature of the relationship between her and Chakotay is another really great moment of seeing how this Harry behaves in a way that the shy, sex-awkward Current Harry never would.
• See, Generations? This is how you crash a starship into a planet!
• I suppose we should mention Geordi is in this, and that we get (for the first time in Voyager) to see a Galaxy-class starship. So here, it's mentioned. Burton is fine as Captain La Forge, but he has about a dozen lines and really, it could have been anyone.
• So in an episode where the entire crew are wiped out, former peril monkey Harry is one of only two people to survive! Wow! Oh, and then we get to see the Delta Flyer exploding anyway, so he does in fact die. Ah well.
• And, though it had the potential to be really cheesy, the final scene with a message from Harry to Harry is really touching, moreso because Future Harry just bluntly states what's going on, without straining to be overly poignant, thus staying true to the character that's been established rather than trying to go for a big swelling-strings moment. Mulgrew's great in that scene too, by the way, incredibly poised and precise.
We don't need no water / let the motherfucker burn
This is the worst episode of Voyager since "Favourite Son", back in Season Three. That's a bald statement to make, but sadly it's true. "Unforgettable" was just exactly the opposite of that, and I'm sticking by my sort-of defence of "Demon", but "Once Upon A Time" is actively bad in a way that neither of those episodes were. Though saying that, it does commit the same mistakes that both of those Season Four episodes do but all rolled into one episode - like "Unforgettable" it's incredibly dull and hard to care about, and like "Demon" it's crap. So let's try to parse out what went wrong here because, also like both of those stories, it's not difficult to work out why someone might think this was an idea worth trying, even when the end results turn out as badly as they do here.
Firstly, there's the obvious point that we've seen both Samantha and Naomi before. Voyager is into it's fifth season now so of course there's going to be a degree of self-referencing going on. It has, to be fair, been a while since we've seen these two particular characters, but still - they're both pre-established characters, and a big hullabaloo was made about Naomi being the first child born on Voyager, so indeed it seems perfectly sensible to return to that at some stage. It also gives the show some more connective tissue in terms of its own character continuity, which is also no bad thing. Samantha hasn't been on-screen all that much, but in her few previous appearances she's been perfectly likeable and refreshingly "normal", which is to say she seems like just a regular Joe (Jane?) getting on with her job as best she can in difficult circumstances. Nancy Hower brings an ever-so-slightly resigned, just-getting-on-with-business feel to Samantha, and it's both welcome and really rather refreshing. It's a shame she spends most of the episode injured in the shuttle, but she's an appealing on-screen presence and it's easy to see why her return would add something to an episode. Here she brings the same normality to the role that she's previously delivered and, for relatively little screen time, does well with what she's given. Of particular note is her exchanges with Tuvok over their children - both Russ and Hower play well off each other in scenes where both characters are forcibly separated from their children and need to have faith that those around their offspring will take good care of them until they're in a position to return and do it themselves. These are quiet, understated scenes, and give breadth to both characters, and in these little character-based moments it's possible to see what the episode is shooting for - a quiet, effective meditation on the difficulties of parenthood and responsibility when being the parent you want to be simply isn't possible. Thematically that's a good thing to reach for, and Voyager has proven in the past that it's capable of doing intimate, small-scale storytelling.
It shoots, it misses. Because those lovely, gentle scenes between Tuvok and Samantha are, regrettably, almost the only bit of the episode that works. The shuttle crash itself is contrived in the extreme (though there's something quite nice about it being caused by that old TOS favourite, the ion storm), but fine, we can take a quick hand-wave of a set-up if it leads to something more interesting - but it doesn’t. Back on Voyager we're stuck with a crappy Neelix plot (though "plot" seems like a generous description for the bulk of the episode, since very little of anything actually happens) as he tries to be a good godparent to Naomi while her mother is missing. Why would this seem like a good idea to anyone? Well, at least in part because Phillips has shown he's a good dramatic actor when given the chance, and it's here that the episode finds its only other successful conceit. Neelix fighting with Janeway in her ready room over whether to tell Naomi her mother is missing is terrific. Phillips gets let off the leash and delivers a wonderful performance, seething with anger at being told how best to deal with his goddaughter and resentful of the implication that he can't cope. Mulgrew's great - of course - but her and Phillips in this kind of scene together is a real rarity and it's to be savoured because both spark off each other incredibly well. And, on a purely storytelling level, giving Neelix someone to have an emotional connection with isn't the worst idea either - indeed his dedication to Naomi is really rather sweet, and there's an explicit line drawn here between his guilt over what happened to Alexia and his inability to prevent it or do anything about it, and his concern for Naomi and the desire to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to her. That's good, proper character work, and we get plenty of references to his past, his established character history and just how and why it drives his protective, or over-protective, instincts (this also tacitly suggests why he reacted quite so massively over-protective towards Kes, though she's not mentioned here). And all that comes to a head in the Janeway/Neelix face-off magnificently.
Everything leading up to it, and after it, though, is just rubbish. People have ragged on Scarlett Pomers as Naomi in the past, and I am not going to join their numbers - she's perfectly fine here, at her best when showing her fear of Seven (the most charming of all scenes in this episode) and she delivers exactly what's asked of her. It's not her fault she's stuck in a plodding, go-nowhere story that requires very little of her beyond mild concern or obliviousness. Of the, "it's easy to see why they wanted to do this" aspects of this story, including such a large role for Naomi is maybe the hardest to explain - Star Trek has a somewhat ignominious reputation when it comes to including children and/or teenagers on the show so to willfully include one isn't the most obvious choice to make. Still, it does give someone for Neelix to feel legitimately protective towards without some contrived "morale officer" overtones. And Naomi herself, against strictly in character terms, has the chance to give a different perspective on events, seeing things from a child's-eye perspective. This is the episode's biggest failing though, because at absolutely no point do we really ever get to see anything from her perspective, which is a shame as this really could have been the basis for a strikingly different episode of Voyager. Indeed it's telling that the one time we do approach this (the scene of Seven towering over her in the mess hall) it is by far and away the best one featuring Naomi in the whole episode, suggesting just how interesting this could have been. But instead of that we get endless, endless scenes on the holodeck that seem to go on forever, and which amount to a whole lot of nothing at all (sole exception: Neelix being terrified of his sister dying in the Metreon cascade, which turns out to be dream and so not the holodeck at all. Stupid). The use of Flotter and Trevis fits in with Voyager's more expansive use of holo-technology, in this case as children's entertainment, but the actual execution is horrible, and adds absolutely nothing. The fact that it's "educational" (in the loosest way possible) also adds to the tediousness of these scenes, since it's clear Naomi basically knows everything they have to teach her, and the audience don't need to hear anything the holo-characters have to say, so basically every scene set on the holodeck is rendered pointless. Often annoyingly, infuriatingly pointless.
Oh, but we're not done with the stupid yet, because the rescue of the Delta Flyer is also stupid as well. Well, maybe stupid isn't the right word, but its also tediously literal, as the crew just basically just dig it out. They dug out something that was stuck in a cave? Whoever would have thought it? Fine, fine, maybe that is how a rescue like that would work, but because we see so little of it, and because it seems to involve practically no effort (and, despite the running down of air inside the Flyer, absolutely no tension either) the scenes set there just feel like time-filling vamping until the credits roll. Which is exactly what they are. Again it's not like there wasn't potential here, but none of it comes to the surface (ha!) and in the end it doesn't amount to anything at all. So there, if you wish it, is your one-line summary of this episode: "Once Upon A Time": it's not like there wasn't potential here, but none of it comes to the surface.
What a crap episode.
Any Other Business:
• This feels especially disappointing because, really, it's been a very, very long time since we've had anything this bad, and even the lowlights of Season Four were better than this boring load of old rubbish.
• But yea, that scene between Naomi and Seven in the mess hall is at least great, and it's nice to see Seven's wry, dry sense of humour directed at something other than a one-liner or put-down.
• All the sympathy for Ethan Phillips this episode - his three minutes to shine in the ready room just shows how stupidly his character is wasted for the remaining forty-two.
• Welcome to the Voyager Irregulars Scarlett Pommers! Honestly, she's fine here - best in her scenes with Ryan, worst when asked to fake interest in some idiotic holo-program even she seems to have a hard time hiding her disdain for.
• Janeway says she's, "had enough" coffee. Wwwwwhhhaaaaaa?
• Flotter and Trevis are unbelieveably camp, which gives the Forest of Forever a not-inappropriate Wizard Of Oz feel, at least. Though that doesn't make those scenes any easier to sit through.
• Worst episode of Season Five, hands down, and I don't think there's an episode this bad left in the show, though this opinion may get revised when the Borg kiddywinks come on board. Oh wait, Harry gets to have a romance with another alien woman in eleven episode's time? Uh...
Season Five, Episode 6 - "Timeless"
Ice ice, baby
Well if "Once Upon A Time" showed how to waste the potential of a second-tier character with Neelix, "Timeless" acts as a corrective and shows just how well second-tier characters can be used when you actually bother to write towards their strengths. I'll come clean here and admit that "Timeless" is one of my favourite Voyager episodes, so even by my standards this review is going to be objectivity-free. Because, really, "Timeless" is magnificent, and if you'd told me even half a season ago that one of my favourite Voyager episodes would feature Harry as the lead character I likely would have laughed you out the airlock (the brilliance of "Emanations" not withstanding). Yet here we are, faced with an episode that features an older, disillusioned Harry at its core and it really is quite magnificent.
One of the best conceits of this story is that it's a time travel story that basically doesn't involve any time travel. That's a great trick for the episode to pull, and its approach to temporal mechanics is strikingly different to the usual temporal anomalies/floods of bafflegab that we normally get. Chakotay and Harry, fifteen years in the future, really are Chakotay and Harry fifteen years in the future, and the method of time travel plays entirely fair with the viewer because there's no cheat - this is the characters, as they would be in the future, given the events which occur during this episode. The only thing that actually time travels is the signal Harry sends back to alert Seven. The reason this is successful is that it allows us genuine insight into the older versions of the characters we know without ever having to cheat around it. So it's interesting to see Chaktoay in an actual proper relationship (something the show hasn't really given us yet, and no, I'm not counting "Unforgettable"), but the real revelation here is Harry. The bitter, ground-down version of his character is magnificent, and Wang is more than capable of delivering on it, but what's significant here, and often overlooked, is that Wang isn't just good at playing Old Harry. The scene he has in Engineering, when he fights to persuade everyone to follow his plan, shows him being just as good but delivering a great version of Current Harry, with all the frustrations he feels pushed up to the surface. This Harry is just as compelling as Old Harry, and it's a shame we don't get more of it, because this is by miles the best performance Wang has turned in since at least "The Killing Game" and quite possibly since "Emanations". For once we actually get to see why he was cast in the role, and he's terrific. I've been hard on Harry and Wang in the past, but credit where credit's due - he's absolutely impeccable here. The use of an older Harry (sans time travel) to get him to this point means that his character traits make sense - it's easy to see how the idealistic, puppy-dog version of Ensign Kim could so easily twist into the bitter, reproachful version in the future, so the no-time-travel-for-a-time-travel story really gives his character the space to change while remaining true to what might be a reasonable extrapolation of how Harry will end up. Even his ranting, "I can't fix it in three minutes!" scene at the end of the episode, which could have gone very badly wrong, is just great, as all Harry's frustrations over fifteen years of guilt come flooding out of him, and Wang doesn't falter for a second. There's a very real case to be made that this is the best performance he ever gives in Voyager.
The same quality of character work also holds true for Future Chakotay, though perhaps less dramatically. He's rather roguish in the future, but this feels less like a future version of the character than a past one. Dodging Starfleet and being on the run isn't just how we might imagine his Maquis days being, it is in fact exactly how we were introduced to the character in "Caretaker", and now, shorn of Starfleet we see him returning to his old ways. That feels right for him too, and the slight extra swagger Beltran brings to the role makes this seem like a convincing future for Chakotay. Even the risks he takes here feel like a slightly outsized version of what he'd do on Voyager, which works well in establishing his future recklessness. And while he doesn’t get to spend a vast amount of screen time with Christine Harnos she and Beltran have a fairly lived-in warmth together that makes them seem like a real couple, especially as they explore the frozen version of Voyager. Actually, the frozen version of Voyager almost feels like a character in and of itself, and it's a real credit to this episode that something that had the potential to be a bit cheesy and silly manages to carry real emotional resonance. There's something properly uncanny about Chakotay and Tessa exploring this forgotten, frozen relic from the past, and seeing the crew, dead and abandoned, is actually upsetting. Even Harry finding an unknown ensign frozen in a Jeffries Tube feels unaccountably sad, the body left there in place, alone, on a forgotten alien world. It's genuinely poignant and really rather haunting. Again this works because this isn't some hypothetical future or time travel shenanigans, this is what actually happens - their experimental drive fails and the entire crew is killed as a result, without any cheating or get-out. It adds real weight to these scenes, and of course makes its doubly pleasurable when the Doctor finally comes on line, a glimmer of hope amongst the cold, the dead and the forgotten.
And on a purely scripting level, one of the great successes of "Timeless" is just how well it's able to build to its dual conclusions. This could easily have been a very linear story - slipstream drive is launched, Voyager crashes, cut to fifteen years in the future - and that would have been fine, it still would be a terrific episode. But instead of taking such a narratively traditional stance the episode instead layers both the current storyline of the launch and the future storyline of Harry and Chakotay together, meaning at the point where we get to see Voyager crashing we also have the culmination of the attempts to stop the very crash we've just witnessed. This ends up doubling the tension and it gives a terrific sense of pace as Harry and Chakotay desperately struggle to cross the finishing line and get their message sent. The episode also starts relatively slow and small-scale, with the party in Engineering being literally slow since it's shot in slow-mo, and we're given a few comedy moments before we head into the drama of the episode properly. This at least is a fairly straightforward technique, but it still stops everything being too grim and provides a little lightness to get things going, as well as basically reminding us of everything that's lost due to the accident. These scenes are relatively long, as is the time spent exploring the frozen Voyager, but as we approach the climax both the scenes and the cuts we see get shorter and shorter, driving the tension and drama of the episode while never becoming too intrusive or flashy. The scripting here is, in other words, deft and there's a great sense of where and when to place emphasis, so for example it's one thing to have a character announce they need to extract something from Seven's cranial implants and quite another to see the Doctor standing there, holding half an artificial skull (complete with bionic eye!) as if it's a perfectly ordinary, everyday occurrence to be holding the head of your dead shipmate without comment. Indeed it's the fact that it goes uncommented on that really makes that scene work - Harry is too jaded to even care that this is, or was, Seven any more and now it's just a piece of tech that will help him fix his mistake. The Doctor's detachment makes a certain degree of sense, but it's Harry's that really brings home the reality of that scene, and by extension the change in his character. All without one single reference. It's that level of writing, and that understanding of where to place emphasis, that really lets this script deliver on its promise. And deliver it does, because (and there isn't really many stories you can say this about) there is literally nothing wrong here. There's not a single thing I would change about the way this episode is done - everything aligns perfectly, and the results speak for themselves. Quite brilliant.
Any Other Business:
• The slow-mo effect during the party scene in Engineering is a really artful way of indicating something is going to go wrong without tipping the audience off as to what it might be.
• This was Voyager's 100th episode, so the party in Engineering is of course terribly meta.
• Welcome back to the director's chair LeVar Burton! He does a really fantastic job here, and deserves considerable praise (compared to how things went in "Ex Post Facto" - not well - it's hard to believe this is directed by the same person).
• "Mr Neelix, you are an unending source of astonishment." Oh never change, Tuvok!
• And Seven being drunk at the party is great fun as well. "We are as one!"
• Kim's blunt, "They're having sex" when Tessa tries to be a little coy about the nature of the relationship between her and Chakotay is another really great moment of seeing how this Harry behaves in a way that the shy, sex-awkward Current Harry never would.
• See, Generations? This is how you crash a starship into a planet!
• I suppose we should mention Geordi is in this, and that we get (for the first time in Voyager) to see a Galaxy-class starship. So here, it's mentioned. Burton is fine as Captain La Forge, but he has about a dozen lines and really, it could have been anyone.
• So in an episode where the entire crew are wiped out, former peril monkey Harry is one of only two people to survive! Wow! Oh, and then we get to see the Delta Flyer exploding anyway, so he does in fact die. Ah well.
• And, though it had the potential to be really cheesy, the final scene with a message from Harry to Harry is really touching, moreso because Future Harry just bluntly states what's going on, without straining to be overly poignant, thus staying true to the character that's been established rather than trying to go for a big swelling-strings moment. Mulgrew's great in that scene too, by the way, incredibly poised and precise.
