Post by Prole Hole on Jan 7, 2016 11:35:06 GMT -5
Season 5, Episode 13 - "Gravity"
Gravity Always Wins
Exploring a new environment feels like something it's been a long time since we've done on the show, and that's because it has been. This season's tendency to concentrate on a single character per episode has led to a lot of good, strong character work, but this fairly singular focus has meant other aspects of the show have been rather put on hold, and the chance to explore new environments has definitely been one of those aspects. In retrospect this makes the first half of the season feel a touch claustrophobic - there's only a very few episodes when we do get to step off the ship, and the couple of times we actually get to interact with another environment, the nature of those environments ("Night", "Thirty Days") precludes the possibility of doing it outside the ship. Indeed not since "Demon" have we really had the crew actually step off the ship and wander around a new landscape, and that's over half a season ago. So "Gravity" has something immediate, striking, and different about it in comparison to any other episode this season.
That environment, as it turns out, is simply another stretch of overly-familiar desert, yet "Gravity" makes a real effort to try and make it seem like it's something else. Voyager helpfully informs us it's Class-D, which, at least where Our Heroes crash, amounts to little in the way of either vegetation or animal life, and arid, hot conditions that make survival a proper challenge, rather than an inconvenience. The hostile nature of the environment, to put it another way, acts as a proper motivating factor for the characters caught up in the events seen here - for Tuvok and Tom to risk a friendship with Noss, and for Noss to take a chance on two strangers when she more than anyone knows what a dangerous place this is, and how dangerous the people who subsist there can be. It's always the indicator of a good writer who pays attention to these kind of implications - here the environment isn't just a bit of scene dressing the action takes place in front of, it's key to how and why our characters behave in a certain way. Even the relative isolation they find themselves in is what leads Tom to niggle Tuvok over Noss's obvious attraction to him, again using their circumstance to drive the character work (and it's interesting how there's never a hint of attraction between Tom and Noss - they're clearly friends by the end, but there's not once a suggestion of something more). This story, with its two stranded lead characters, its remote environment, and its desperate struggle to survive and escape, also gives everything here a very TOS feel, with Tuvok occupying the Spock role and Tom taking on McCoy. The conversations between them feel strongly reminiscent of the exchanges in, for example, "The Galileo Seven", with Tom and McCoy both needling their Vulcan companion about their feelings or lack thereof, at least in part as a cover for their own insecurities, and both lacking the insight to understand quite what it is that makes their compatriot stand apart.
But for all the exploration of the exterior environment that we have here, it's the exploration of the interior of Tuvok and who he is that's really the centre of this episode, and the subject around which everything revolves (smooth link!). The insights into Tuvok aren't necessarily revelations as such - though he "fell off the wagon" as a young man and succumbed to his emotions, only to be trained out of them by a Vulcan Master is perfectly fine - but they do allow an exploration of a character that, piece by piece, allows us insight into who he is as a person and what it is that has brought him to where he is. The fact that it was a woman that brought him to his moment of emotional crisis as a young man is of course ironic given his rejection of Noss's feelings towards him here, but it's also consistent and, well, logical with the character as he's been up till now. We've had a couple of glimpses of Tuvok's wife during the run of the show, and his dedication and loyalty to her, even here in a potentially hopeless situation, Is really rather touching, but it also shows the strength of will Tuvok has to draw on, while Tom clumsily plays matchmaker - despite temptation, Tuvok is not going to give in. This is all allowed to play out as a natural extension of everything that's going on around them - their isolation, the desperate situation - and so Tuvok's responses to what’s going on around them function well for the character. It's also nice to see him actually get to use some of his tactical skills - he's able to outwit their initial attackers and defeat them in hand-to-hand combat in the sort of moves we're sometimes told that he's capable of but don’t get to actually see all that often, so it's refreshing to see him cope with a situation in a way that's actually redolent of his training and position (another indication of a writer who's really paying attention to their character).
There's also something strikingly unusual about Noss, and the fact that she's so different from the more typical characters we come across on a week-to-week basis makes it pretty easy to buy Tuvok developing feelings for her, and her for him. For one, they obviously share survival techniques and abilities, so there's immediately common ground between them (that's obviously lacking with Tom and the Doctor), and her gradual, developing feelings seem real in a way that's all too uncommon with guest-romance-of-the-week storylines. As played (really rather well) by Lori Petty, Noss's emotional fragility is never played as a weakness on her behalf, and her vulnerability, matched with Tuvok's calm, controlled exterior, makes it obvious why she would find herself attracted to him. What's more remarkable is that Petty is able to bring across the multiple layers of Noss's personality with very few words, and what words she does learn are delivered haltingly, as someone who's learned a language out of necessity but without any fluidity to the way she speaks. This could have been a terrible conceit that badly misfired and easily could have become wearing, but Petty succeeds in being able to deliver her dialogue in an artificial way but without it becoming grating, which is no mean feat. Her use of language also works well in delineating the time-scale the bulk of the episode plays out over - the Doctor is able to get things going, language-wise (another very nice conceit, by the way, with the Universal Translator being built into his program), but everything else takes time - people aren't fluent in a new language over the course of a couple of months, so Noss's continuing struggle with English is a really interesting way of showing how much time has passed, yet also how little. We too often don't get characters this unusual, but also this thought through, in Star Trek so all praise for the effort put into having one here.
Some praise, also, for the direction here. Terry Windell directed this, and his approach feels fresh and challenging after a season where, confined to the bounds of Voyager, there's only so much that can be done to jazz up shots of the bridge or whatever. Here the direction lends itself to developing the environment, so quiet shots of the inside of Noss's wrecked ship feel of a piece with the wise open vistas of the planet. Windell is a relative newcomer to the director's chair, but for now it's worth noting how, without ever being flashy, the direction subtly works to support the script. It's especially difficult to ratchet up tension in the closing few minutes, when Voyager is experiencing events taking place over seconds and minutes, while the planetary action plays out over hours and days, so the fact that he manages to build the tension in two separate time zones simultaneously also feels like a real achievement. There's a few lovely shots here - Tuvok meditating on a stone ledge, backlit by the sun, for example - which show someone trying to get the script and direction pointing in the same direction, but the intimate moments are given time and space to develop at their own pace, rather than hurrying on to the next action sequence. In this, the flashbacks to Tuvok's time with the Vulcan Master are especially well-realized, intimate but not intrusive, and allowed to tell their own separate tale in support of the main narrative. As with everything in this episode, those scenes have enough space to define themselves, but not so much that they lose the narrative momentum of the story, but instead inform it. "Gravity" is, in its character analysis, in line with most of what this season has been trying to do, and in line with most of this season, it's been a real success.
Any Other Business:
• I didn't really say much about the Vulcan flashbacks, but they're really well realized and Joseph Ruskin, as the Vulcan Master, deserves a real pat on the back for an excellently delivered role.
• Saying that, though, the pre-titles scene, plays it as a big surprise that the young, black Vulcan lad we spend three or so minutes over turns out to be Tuvok. What other black Vulcan was it going to turn out to be?
• Yup, back in the desert again. Hurrah? Ohh, but there's... a filter!
• It takes a good three quarters of the episode before we get a scene on Voyager, which really helps to increase the sense of isolation Tom and Tuvok are going through.
• Where does Noss get all her candles from?
• Though it's been previously established that Vulcans are vegetarian, we have to assume that to survive Tuvok eats the spiders here. That's not quite inconsistent with this particular Vulcan - he ate a burrito in "Future's End" - but it's still unusual.
• That shot of Tuvok meditating on the ledge really is lovely, but how wise is it, given the potential number of hostiles in the area?
• The scenes on Voyager are a bit perfunctory in terms of scripting but there's a surprisingly amount of tension wrung from those last few moments while they try to beam Tom and Tuvok off the planet, which as I said in the review I'm putting down to Windell's direction.
• They really had to work hard to get Neelix into this episode didn't they? One "why is he even in this scene" at the end and that's it (though actually Phillips is rather charming during it).
• Lovely final scene between Noss and Tuvok when he mind-melds with her and she "understands". Very well handled indeed.
Season Five, Episode 15 - "Bliss"
Lightning Fuse, Power Cut
"Bliss" is a deeply strange episode of Voyager. Not strange in the, "Noss talks a bit funny" sort of way but really, actually strange in a way that makes precious little sense. The first half of the episode is essentially a mystery, which is fine. And the second half of the episode is discovering how that mystery functions, why it functions, and what to do about it, which is also fine - that sounds like a pretty straightforward set-up. But the "what's the mystery" first half mostly involves Seven running about the place, trying to figure out what's going on while the galaxy's most convenient mass delusion controls the rest of the crew, and the second "solve the mystery" part involves Seven, Naomi (!), and an Ahab stand-in trying to take out some enormous space-dwelling life-form. You know, like you do. The result of this is a very odd mish-mash of styles, tones and approaches, some of which work better than others.
Let's divide the episode up, then, into it's two principal constituent parts and see... ah you know, that would be the conventional approach, but for all the many things "Bliss" could be accused of, "conventional" isn't one of them, so since the episode is so messy let's take a similar approach and just dive into stuff as it occurs to me. And I'm first going to tackle the Issue Of Naomi. Because her inclusion here does seem entirely random, and not even in an "everyone else has had their moment in the spotlight this season, so why not her?" sort of way. Yet she does actually function within the story, as a sort of symbolic representation of Seven's maternal instincts, and as an extension of that, Seven's desire to protect the ship. Though we've had a few scenes of Seven and Naomi before now, this is the first time they spend any meaningful amount of time together, though the time they've spent before does mean that what occurs here is part of a developing relationship, not just dropped in out of nowhere, which is to be appreciated. But the development of a maternal side to Seven is definitely something we haven't seen before, so using Naomi in this way, to draw out Seven's protective instincts, works well and works as a way to expand her character. The Issue, if indeed it is An Issue, is how wise it is to have a child as a part of the regular or semi-regular cast, given Star Trek's not exactly glowing track record when it comes to this. Though many do, I have no real problem with Scarlett Pomers in the role - she does what she needs to, and she gets a few good moments, such as pointing out that "two heads are better than one" is also the Borg philosophy - and she doesn't really have any painfully cringe-inducing moments (though it's a near-miss when she's lamenting over Neelix's unconscious body). But really, Naomi exists here as a way to push development in Seven, rather than anything more, and in this her use is largely successful. That doesn't make it any less peculiar that is her that's included in the "save the ship" second half, but really, her use is fine here.
Seven's move towards developing maternal instincts over the course of this episode is actually fairly soft-pedalled - this isn't delivered as some big out-of-the-blue revelation, but instead is played gently, her protective instincts developing organically out of the situation. This makes those feelings seem genuine, and we get to observe how protective Seven becomes over Naomi over the course of the episode, rather than being told about it or having her give a big speech about how she's found a new aspect of her humanity. As well as giving purpose to Naomi being in the story, it's a different approach to developing Seven as a more human figure, and an altogether successful one, so even tiny moments like Naomi admitting she doesn’t want to be alone, and Seven, without a word, making it clear she understands that feeling (some excellent work from Ryan there) really help move things forward. With all the other random stuff going on in the episode this could have been easily swamped out, but it's to both the writing and Ryan's credit that it's left visible as a natural piece of character development.
But if Ryan is able to successfully underplay Seven's protectiveness, W. Morgan Sheppard as Qatai veers in entirely the other direction, charting a course into Seska levels of scenery chewing and never once looking back. He's actually really rather good at it, and his crusty old sea dog routine fits with the obviously Captain Ahab inspired nature of his character. In a fitting piece of design matching character, even his old ship rattles around like a sailing ship lost at sea, with the entire set apparently mobile rather than just shaking the camera and having him lurch about (which is not to say there's none of that either), and of course his single-minded approach to hunting down the beast that destroyed his ship needs little in the way of further explanation. It's all good stuff, it feels quite traditional in a TOS sort of way (that's two episodes in a row that have done that now) and it's largely entertaining. It's just all good stuff that belongs in an entirely different episode altogether, because what any of that section has to do with either the Seven/Naomi character development, the sci-fi big-space-monster plot, or the exploration of wish fulfilment is anyone's guess. It simply has no thematic, character, scripting or other connection to the first port of the episode it's been bolted on to. It's not bad, it's misplaced. The exploration of wish-fulfilment, and how that can lead us to be blind to otherwise-obvious faults isn't exactly sold to us as the thematic core of the episode as it is - the issues is raised when Seven questions Tuvok and suggests his logic has been compromised - but it never really develops into anything, and Qatai adds nothing to the debate. We see a few of the fantasies that the crew had "fulfilled", but there's no revelations there either - unless the idea of Neelix being an ambassador to quadrupeds is your idea of a revelation - so while it's sweet to see Tuvok with his wife, or touching when B'Elanna believes her Maquis comrades are still alive, it's not building to anything. What else was Janeway going to fantasise about other than seeing Earth? Who is surprised that Tom wants to be a test pilot by a lovely Australian beach? These are all character consistent but they don't actually tell us anything we don't already know. And then it becomes a big fight against a 2,000 kilometre long space monster with some random guest star of the week and it's all dropped anyway. It's all very strange.
But, well, the truth is that "Bliss" is never less than entertaining, it's just that there's so little consistency as to how and why it's entertaining from moment to moment that it makes it a difficult episode to pin down in any meaningful way. Seven's mother issues will be explored much more fully in the next episode, "Dark Frontier", so I suppose you could see this as foreshadowing of sorts, though that feels like a fairly generous interpretation. But even so it's clear the script has a good handle on Seven as a character, and while there's nothing here that really adds to her in, say, a feminist way, she's well-written and consistent, and Ryan excels at delivering the role (as ever), so the entertainment factor is kept up. All the characters are well drawn in fact, even fairly minor parts, like how clearly furious Tuvok is at having his logic questioned without actually saying a word. It's pretty deft characterization, even if it's just one well-written scene that, once again, doesn't really connect to anything. The fairly straightforward ending, whereby they escape by making Voyager "taste bad", feels very old-fashioned - though there's a bit of bafflegab about venting antimatter and whatnot, it's really just a very simple solution that works, which... fine, but it's a bit of a shrug of an ending. It's not that it doesn't make sense - it does - but it's still not massively dramatic. Oh and after Our Heroes are safely out and on their way, there's a capper scene, where Qatai flies back into the creature again because...? And that's really the best summary of the episode there is.
Any Other Business:
• OK that last line is a bit harsh. Qatai clearly flies back in because he wants to kill the monster, but it still feels very peculiar, which is fitting for this episode I suppose.
• Speak of Qatai, he gets the entire pre-credits sequence to himself, which is extremely unusual, and is then unceremoniously dropped until the halfway point. Which is also very peculiar.
• Still, if you want to find a reason to check this episode out then Ryan is really, really great here, as is everyone really. There's not a dud performance to be seen, and though again I can't really explain it, the look of pride Neelix has when he tells Seven he guesses Starfleet thought he'd have a flair for quadrupeds never fails to make me smile.
• The mass hallucinations don't make a lick of sense. Not even slightly.
• Beltran does a good job of overly grinning and seeming just a bit off when he tells Seven, "resistance is futile", some nicely understated work from him.
• Naomi's pitcher plant analogy is really the parallel that the story needs to explain the space-bourn obstacle, but (one more, with feeling) what does that actually add to the story?
• Some of the shots inside the creature are very well realized - like the lightning crackling off Voyager's hull - and some of them very much aren't (the "mouth" closing as Voyager enters for the first time).
• We get to see a corridor with windows! The direction isn't quite tight enough to prevent it being clear that it's not really a corridor, but still, points for trying.
• I like, I guess, the way Seven just buggers off for a snooze at the end of the episode. The ship has been put in danger, the entire crew knocked out, a vast alien life-form nearly ate them, and they only survived with the help of one strange space captain, yet rather than explain all this to Janeway, Seven says she'll fill her in after she's regenerated. And Janeway just goes with it! If it were my ship I'd want an explanation tout suite!
Gravity Always Wins
Exploring a new environment feels like something it's been a long time since we've done on the show, and that's because it has been. This season's tendency to concentrate on a single character per episode has led to a lot of good, strong character work, but this fairly singular focus has meant other aspects of the show have been rather put on hold, and the chance to explore new environments has definitely been one of those aspects. In retrospect this makes the first half of the season feel a touch claustrophobic - there's only a very few episodes when we do get to step off the ship, and the couple of times we actually get to interact with another environment, the nature of those environments ("Night", "Thirty Days") precludes the possibility of doing it outside the ship. Indeed not since "Demon" have we really had the crew actually step off the ship and wander around a new landscape, and that's over half a season ago. So "Gravity" has something immediate, striking, and different about it in comparison to any other episode this season.
That environment, as it turns out, is simply another stretch of overly-familiar desert, yet "Gravity" makes a real effort to try and make it seem like it's something else. Voyager helpfully informs us it's Class-D, which, at least where Our Heroes crash, amounts to little in the way of either vegetation or animal life, and arid, hot conditions that make survival a proper challenge, rather than an inconvenience. The hostile nature of the environment, to put it another way, acts as a proper motivating factor for the characters caught up in the events seen here - for Tuvok and Tom to risk a friendship with Noss, and for Noss to take a chance on two strangers when she more than anyone knows what a dangerous place this is, and how dangerous the people who subsist there can be. It's always the indicator of a good writer who pays attention to these kind of implications - here the environment isn't just a bit of scene dressing the action takes place in front of, it's key to how and why our characters behave in a certain way. Even the relative isolation they find themselves in is what leads Tom to niggle Tuvok over Noss's obvious attraction to him, again using their circumstance to drive the character work (and it's interesting how there's never a hint of attraction between Tom and Noss - they're clearly friends by the end, but there's not once a suggestion of something more). This story, with its two stranded lead characters, its remote environment, and its desperate struggle to survive and escape, also gives everything here a very TOS feel, with Tuvok occupying the Spock role and Tom taking on McCoy. The conversations between them feel strongly reminiscent of the exchanges in, for example, "The Galileo Seven", with Tom and McCoy both needling their Vulcan companion about their feelings or lack thereof, at least in part as a cover for their own insecurities, and both lacking the insight to understand quite what it is that makes their compatriot stand apart.
But for all the exploration of the exterior environment that we have here, it's the exploration of the interior of Tuvok and who he is that's really the centre of this episode, and the subject around which everything revolves (smooth link!). The insights into Tuvok aren't necessarily revelations as such - though he "fell off the wagon" as a young man and succumbed to his emotions, only to be trained out of them by a Vulcan Master is perfectly fine - but they do allow an exploration of a character that, piece by piece, allows us insight into who he is as a person and what it is that has brought him to where he is. The fact that it was a woman that brought him to his moment of emotional crisis as a young man is of course ironic given his rejection of Noss's feelings towards him here, but it's also consistent and, well, logical with the character as he's been up till now. We've had a couple of glimpses of Tuvok's wife during the run of the show, and his dedication and loyalty to her, even here in a potentially hopeless situation, Is really rather touching, but it also shows the strength of will Tuvok has to draw on, while Tom clumsily plays matchmaker - despite temptation, Tuvok is not going to give in. This is all allowed to play out as a natural extension of everything that's going on around them - their isolation, the desperate situation - and so Tuvok's responses to what’s going on around them function well for the character. It's also nice to see him actually get to use some of his tactical skills - he's able to outwit their initial attackers and defeat them in hand-to-hand combat in the sort of moves we're sometimes told that he's capable of but don’t get to actually see all that often, so it's refreshing to see him cope with a situation in a way that's actually redolent of his training and position (another indication of a writer who's really paying attention to their character).
There's also something strikingly unusual about Noss, and the fact that she's so different from the more typical characters we come across on a week-to-week basis makes it pretty easy to buy Tuvok developing feelings for her, and her for him. For one, they obviously share survival techniques and abilities, so there's immediately common ground between them (that's obviously lacking with Tom and the Doctor), and her gradual, developing feelings seem real in a way that's all too uncommon with guest-romance-of-the-week storylines. As played (really rather well) by Lori Petty, Noss's emotional fragility is never played as a weakness on her behalf, and her vulnerability, matched with Tuvok's calm, controlled exterior, makes it obvious why she would find herself attracted to him. What's more remarkable is that Petty is able to bring across the multiple layers of Noss's personality with very few words, and what words she does learn are delivered haltingly, as someone who's learned a language out of necessity but without any fluidity to the way she speaks. This could have been a terrible conceit that badly misfired and easily could have become wearing, but Petty succeeds in being able to deliver her dialogue in an artificial way but without it becoming grating, which is no mean feat. Her use of language also works well in delineating the time-scale the bulk of the episode plays out over - the Doctor is able to get things going, language-wise (another very nice conceit, by the way, with the Universal Translator being built into his program), but everything else takes time - people aren't fluent in a new language over the course of a couple of months, so Noss's continuing struggle with English is a really interesting way of showing how much time has passed, yet also how little. We too often don't get characters this unusual, but also this thought through, in Star Trek so all praise for the effort put into having one here.
Some praise, also, for the direction here. Terry Windell directed this, and his approach feels fresh and challenging after a season where, confined to the bounds of Voyager, there's only so much that can be done to jazz up shots of the bridge or whatever. Here the direction lends itself to developing the environment, so quiet shots of the inside of Noss's wrecked ship feel of a piece with the wise open vistas of the planet. Windell is a relative newcomer to the director's chair, but for now it's worth noting how, without ever being flashy, the direction subtly works to support the script. It's especially difficult to ratchet up tension in the closing few minutes, when Voyager is experiencing events taking place over seconds and minutes, while the planetary action plays out over hours and days, so the fact that he manages to build the tension in two separate time zones simultaneously also feels like a real achievement. There's a few lovely shots here - Tuvok meditating on a stone ledge, backlit by the sun, for example - which show someone trying to get the script and direction pointing in the same direction, but the intimate moments are given time and space to develop at their own pace, rather than hurrying on to the next action sequence. In this, the flashbacks to Tuvok's time with the Vulcan Master are especially well-realized, intimate but not intrusive, and allowed to tell their own separate tale in support of the main narrative. As with everything in this episode, those scenes have enough space to define themselves, but not so much that they lose the narrative momentum of the story, but instead inform it. "Gravity" is, in its character analysis, in line with most of what this season has been trying to do, and in line with most of this season, it's been a real success.
Any Other Business:
• I didn't really say much about the Vulcan flashbacks, but they're really well realized and Joseph Ruskin, as the Vulcan Master, deserves a real pat on the back for an excellently delivered role.
• Saying that, though, the pre-titles scene, plays it as a big surprise that the young, black Vulcan lad we spend three or so minutes over turns out to be Tuvok. What other black Vulcan was it going to turn out to be?
• Yup, back in the desert again. Hurrah? Ohh, but there's... a filter!
• It takes a good three quarters of the episode before we get a scene on Voyager, which really helps to increase the sense of isolation Tom and Tuvok are going through.
• Where does Noss get all her candles from?
• Though it's been previously established that Vulcans are vegetarian, we have to assume that to survive Tuvok eats the spiders here. That's not quite inconsistent with this particular Vulcan - he ate a burrito in "Future's End" - but it's still unusual.
• That shot of Tuvok meditating on the ledge really is lovely, but how wise is it, given the potential number of hostiles in the area?
• The scenes on Voyager are a bit perfunctory in terms of scripting but there's a surprisingly amount of tension wrung from those last few moments while they try to beam Tom and Tuvok off the planet, which as I said in the review I'm putting down to Windell's direction.
• They really had to work hard to get Neelix into this episode didn't they? One "why is he even in this scene" at the end and that's it (though actually Phillips is rather charming during it).
• Lovely final scene between Noss and Tuvok when he mind-melds with her and she "understands". Very well handled indeed.
Season Five, Episode 15 - "Bliss"
Lightning Fuse, Power Cut
"Bliss" is a deeply strange episode of Voyager. Not strange in the, "Noss talks a bit funny" sort of way but really, actually strange in a way that makes precious little sense. The first half of the episode is essentially a mystery, which is fine. And the second half of the episode is discovering how that mystery functions, why it functions, and what to do about it, which is also fine - that sounds like a pretty straightforward set-up. But the "what's the mystery" first half mostly involves Seven running about the place, trying to figure out what's going on while the galaxy's most convenient mass delusion controls the rest of the crew, and the second "solve the mystery" part involves Seven, Naomi (!), and an Ahab stand-in trying to take out some enormous space-dwelling life-form. You know, like you do. The result of this is a very odd mish-mash of styles, tones and approaches, some of which work better than others.
Let's divide the episode up, then, into it's two principal constituent parts and see... ah you know, that would be the conventional approach, but for all the many things "Bliss" could be accused of, "conventional" isn't one of them, so since the episode is so messy let's take a similar approach and just dive into stuff as it occurs to me. And I'm first going to tackle the Issue Of Naomi. Because her inclusion here does seem entirely random, and not even in an "everyone else has had their moment in the spotlight this season, so why not her?" sort of way. Yet she does actually function within the story, as a sort of symbolic representation of Seven's maternal instincts, and as an extension of that, Seven's desire to protect the ship. Though we've had a few scenes of Seven and Naomi before now, this is the first time they spend any meaningful amount of time together, though the time they've spent before does mean that what occurs here is part of a developing relationship, not just dropped in out of nowhere, which is to be appreciated. But the development of a maternal side to Seven is definitely something we haven't seen before, so using Naomi in this way, to draw out Seven's protective instincts, works well and works as a way to expand her character. The Issue, if indeed it is An Issue, is how wise it is to have a child as a part of the regular or semi-regular cast, given Star Trek's not exactly glowing track record when it comes to this. Though many do, I have no real problem with Scarlett Pomers in the role - she does what she needs to, and she gets a few good moments, such as pointing out that "two heads are better than one" is also the Borg philosophy - and she doesn't really have any painfully cringe-inducing moments (though it's a near-miss when she's lamenting over Neelix's unconscious body). But really, Naomi exists here as a way to push development in Seven, rather than anything more, and in this her use is largely successful. That doesn't make it any less peculiar that is her that's included in the "save the ship" second half, but really, her use is fine here.
Seven's move towards developing maternal instincts over the course of this episode is actually fairly soft-pedalled - this isn't delivered as some big out-of-the-blue revelation, but instead is played gently, her protective instincts developing organically out of the situation. This makes those feelings seem genuine, and we get to observe how protective Seven becomes over Naomi over the course of the episode, rather than being told about it or having her give a big speech about how she's found a new aspect of her humanity. As well as giving purpose to Naomi being in the story, it's a different approach to developing Seven as a more human figure, and an altogether successful one, so even tiny moments like Naomi admitting she doesn’t want to be alone, and Seven, without a word, making it clear she understands that feeling (some excellent work from Ryan there) really help move things forward. With all the other random stuff going on in the episode this could have been easily swamped out, but it's to both the writing and Ryan's credit that it's left visible as a natural piece of character development.
But if Ryan is able to successfully underplay Seven's protectiveness, W. Morgan Sheppard as Qatai veers in entirely the other direction, charting a course into Seska levels of scenery chewing and never once looking back. He's actually really rather good at it, and his crusty old sea dog routine fits with the obviously Captain Ahab inspired nature of his character. In a fitting piece of design matching character, even his old ship rattles around like a sailing ship lost at sea, with the entire set apparently mobile rather than just shaking the camera and having him lurch about (which is not to say there's none of that either), and of course his single-minded approach to hunting down the beast that destroyed his ship needs little in the way of further explanation. It's all good stuff, it feels quite traditional in a TOS sort of way (that's two episodes in a row that have done that now) and it's largely entertaining. It's just all good stuff that belongs in an entirely different episode altogether, because what any of that section has to do with either the Seven/Naomi character development, the sci-fi big-space-monster plot, or the exploration of wish fulfilment is anyone's guess. It simply has no thematic, character, scripting or other connection to the first port of the episode it's been bolted on to. It's not bad, it's misplaced. The exploration of wish-fulfilment, and how that can lead us to be blind to otherwise-obvious faults isn't exactly sold to us as the thematic core of the episode as it is - the issues is raised when Seven questions Tuvok and suggests his logic has been compromised - but it never really develops into anything, and Qatai adds nothing to the debate. We see a few of the fantasies that the crew had "fulfilled", but there's no revelations there either - unless the idea of Neelix being an ambassador to quadrupeds is your idea of a revelation - so while it's sweet to see Tuvok with his wife, or touching when B'Elanna believes her Maquis comrades are still alive, it's not building to anything. What else was Janeway going to fantasise about other than seeing Earth? Who is surprised that Tom wants to be a test pilot by a lovely Australian beach? These are all character consistent but they don't actually tell us anything we don't already know. And then it becomes a big fight against a 2,000 kilometre long space monster with some random guest star of the week and it's all dropped anyway. It's all very strange.
But, well, the truth is that "Bliss" is never less than entertaining, it's just that there's so little consistency as to how and why it's entertaining from moment to moment that it makes it a difficult episode to pin down in any meaningful way. Seven's mother issues will be explored much more fully in the next episode, "Dark Frontier", so I suppose you could see this as foreshadowing of sorts, though that feels like a fairly generous interpretation. But even so it's clear the script has a good handle on Seven as a character, and while there's nothing here that really adds to her in, say, a feminist way, she's well-written and consistent, and Ryan excels at delivering the role (as ever), so the entertainment factor is kept up. All the characters are well drawn in fact, even fairly minor parts, like how clearly furious Tuvok is at having his logic questioned without actually saying a word. It's pretty deft characterization, even if it's just one well-written scene that, once again, doesn't really connect to anything. The fairly straightforward ending, whereby they escape by making Voyager "taste bad", feels very old-fashioned - though there's a bit of bafflegab about venting antimatter and whatnot, it's really just a very simple solution that works, which... fine, but it's a bit of a shrug of an ending. It's not that it doesn't make sense - it does - but it's still not massively dramatic. Oh and after Our Heroes are safely out and on their way, there's a capper scene, where Qatai flies back into the creature again because...? And that's really the best summary of the episode there is.
Any Other Business:
• OK that last line is a bit harsh. Qatai clearly flies back in because he wants to kill the monster, but it still feels very peculiar, which is fitting for this episode I suppose.
• Speak of Qatai, he gets the entire pre-credits sequence to himself, which is extremely unusual, and is then unceremoniously dropped until the halfway point. Which is also very peculiar.
• Still, if you want to find a reason to check this episode out then Ryan is really, really great here, as is everyone really. There's not a dud performance to be seen, and though again I can't really explain it, the look of pride Neelix has when he tells Seven he guesses Starfleet thought he'd have a flair for quadrupeds never fails to make me smile.
• The mass hallucinations don't make a lick of sense. Not even slightly.
• Beltran does a good job of overly grinning and seeming just a bit off when he tells Seven, "resistance is futile", some nicely understated work from him.
• Naomi's pitcher plant analogy is really the parallel that the story needs to explain the space-bourn obstacle, but (one more, with feeling) what does that actually add to the story?
• Some of the shots inside the creature are very well realized - like the lightning crackling off Voyager's hull - and some of them very much aren't (the "mouth" closing as Voyager enters for the first time).
• We get to see a corridor with windows! The direction isn't quite tight enough to prevent it being clear that it's not really a corridor, but still, points for trying.
• I like, I guess, the way Seven just buggers off for a snooze at the end of the episode. The ship has been put in danger, the entire crew knocked out, a vast alien life-form nearly ate them, and they only survived with the help of one strange space captain, yet rather than explain all this to Janeway, Seven says she'll fill her in after she's regenerated. And Janeway just goes with it! If it were my ship I'd want an explanation tout suite!