Season 5 Ep 17 / 18 "The Disease" / "Course: Oblivion"
Jan 28, 2016 12:56:30 GMT -5
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Post by Prole Hole on Jan 28, 2016 12:56:30 GMT -5
Season Five, Episode 17 - "The Disease"
Mustafa better episode
If "Dark Frontier" was so close to being excellent as to actively hurt because of it's just-one-too-many flaws, "The Disease" performs the opposite trick, whereby it's almost entirely rubbish apart from a couple of bits - heh, bits - which aren't. There aren't nearly enough of those bits - ohhh, stop it, vicar - to save the episode, not anywhere close to it, but the surprising thing is that, an episode which once again features Harry falling for the wrong girl, there are any good bit in it - in it! Nudge, nudge! - at all. So I guess we should be grateful for that?
It's hard to know where to begin, really, or even why to begin. The story is as straightforward as it needs to be to provide the framework to hang Harry and Tal's star-crossed lovers routine from, which is to say (does this really bear repeating?) Voyager is helping a generational ship get back on the road again, but there's a faction on board the craft who don't want to be there any more, and naturally Harry's girl is responsible for fermenting the rebellion. That's it. That's the entire story for a forty-five minute episode we're asked to sit through. It's not hard - tee hee - to get a story that simple right, and there aren't any gaping holes - oh, now come on - in story logic or anything, but that's scarcely enough material to flesh out - phrasing! - a five minute DVD extra, never mind an actual episode. Still, let's, for some reason, give this episode the benefit of the doubt, since "The Gift" admirably proved you don't need a story to make an episode function successfully. Sadly, however, the benefit of the doubt here will be of no use at all because the episode spends so long being tied up - phowarr! - in the demonstrably less-than-fascinating romance at its core that the actual story just trundles along until it stops, in the least engaging way it possibly could. Though, to be really fair, this is a rare occurrence in Voyager where there's a rebellious faction who actually manage to rebel against authority, succeed in their mission, are allowed to go their own way, and there's no casualties - it's not often Star Trek portrays a successful revolution. That's a small, worthwhile little moment, though it's terribly undersold and should have been played up much more to give the episode some kind of dramatic stakes. Or anything of interest at all, really.
So let's discuss the romance and get it over with. What's the point of it? It has absolutely nothing to say about inter-species relationship beyond "follow the rules", and who ever lost sleep over worrying about Starfleet's rules regarding getting your end away - oh matron! - with an alien? Just as well that rule book, which Janeway informs us is "three centimetres thick" (itself an odd expression for her to use, since we only see books as objects of history, with everything else being read off a PADD), wasn't in force during TOS or Kirk's love-life would have taken a severe beating - oh, stop it missus - and the series would have been about half as long. So, what else is there? Doomed romances are ten a penny in Star Trek, and this script doesn't have anything even fractionally enlightening to say about them. And as a development for Harry? Well I guess that's mostly what it's going for, the idea that he can break the rules a bit, shake his character up a bit, and give him a bit of a nudge forward in terms of some definite progression. In theory this isn't a bad idea, but in practice it's a Harry romance, so in fact it ends up being a terrible idea instead. In fact this ends up being a much more interesting character piece for Janeway, as she confronts her own prejudice over the fact that it's Harry who's overstepped the mark, and why she reacts differently to him behaving this way than she would any other member of the crew. While it's plainly intentional that this is part of what's going on in the story it's also plainly not meant to be the focus of the episode, yet it remains the most compelling aspect of what's presented here. This is in part because of one of the episode's few redeeming features, which is Kate Mulgrew's performance, isn't quite like anything we've seen from her before. There's a lot of very subtle work on show here, often edgy and clearly keeping her own feelings in check as best she can for as long as she can, but also direct and forceful - ding dong! - when needed. It's certainly a very different performance (and written from an unusually different angle, to be entirely balanced) from the usual shout-out-the-crewmember-who's-misbehaved-this-week scenes we normally get in the ready room, and it's to he real credit that that she's able to bring such variegation to the material.
Ah, but what of Harry? Well, Wang - wang! har har - is somewhat variable here. There's a few moments when he genuinely shines, and they tend to be the moments he's on the back foot (no surprise there) and underplaying (no surprise there either), and he's curiously effective when getting his first reprimand from Janeway, cowed but not exactly apologetic. In these scenes Harry flourishes and actually seems to come alive as a character, with depth and dimension. What a shame, then that they account for about two minutes of screen time tops, with the rest spent watching him behave incredibly stupidly for reasons that aren't brought to life enough to make that behaviour seem even slightly reasonable. Crewmember falls in love with alien? Fine, obviously that is motivation, but as ever there's precious little spark between the two lovers and what there is tends to come more from Musetta Vander, who finds a laid-back, somewhat flippantly playful way of delivering her lines that works well for the character, and contrasts sharply with Harry's pouting over-sincerity. This slightly sardonic delivery at least helps to mitigate against what could otherwise be a pretty corny, rote part and marks Tal out as a bit different from the usual episodic romance characters. It's a mitigating factor in the episode though, not an actual defence, since the episode isn't actually about her but rather her impact on Harry. And though Harry gets a good shot across the bows at Janeway - his whole "would you take a pill to dull the pain of losing your fiancée" speech - Wang unfortunately yells it rather than playing it with simmering resentment, so we're immediately cast back to the usual immature ensign rather than the quieter, more successful moments seen earlier in the episode. He really lets it all hang out - stop tittering at the back - in that scene but it just doesn't work because Harry's back to looking like a petulant schoolboy, not a grown man trying to throw off the chains that are holding him back. Yet, frustratingly, in the final two scenes in sick bay and the mess hall, we return to the quiet, underplayed side of the character, and it's immediately more successful and believable. What a waste.
There are other issues raised in the episode which amount to exactly nothing as well. The bioluminescent skin as a result of sex between Harry and Tal suggests that there's going to be some point made about safe sex or transmittable diseases, but other than to literalize the pain of separation in the most clunky way possible, this never emerges, so the titular - ohh, er, missus -disease never actually contributes anything to the episode (and it's a rubbish metaphor into the bargain). Mind you, all things considered that's probably a good thing. The last thing we need is a lecture on sexually transmitted diseases revolving around Harry. But then, why bother raising it if you're not going to do anything with it? Similarly, during the Big Confrontation Scene in the briefing room, Tal raises the issues of the rights of minorities to be allowed to behave in a way that's true to them, and not being forced to always comply with the majority. A parallel with gay rights, perhaps? Or the rights of women to make their own choices? It could be either of these things but coming - oh now, really - in the middle of that scene it's just one sentence, then never ever mentioned again. So... again what was the point? There's clearly a through-line in the episode about people being able to make their own choices about their lives rather than having decisions enforced upon them, but as with everything else here, it'd muddled at best and just lost at worst. This doesn't make "The Disease" the worst episode of Voyager ever, but it's a low point for Season Five, and after a pretty hot streak that's consisted of most of the season so far that feels monumentally disappointing, so let's put it behind us - help yourselves! - and move on. Oh, and you might have noticed a certain puerile tone during this review. Well, it is, after all, just in keeping with the tone of the episode.
Any Other Business:
• You know, Carry On Voyager would have been a lot more interesting than this tired old re-tread. Carry On Up The Quadrant, perhaps.
• The opening shot, a loooooong pull into the ship, is really excellently directed. Shame it ends in Harry having a quick snog and a fumble, but still, credit where it's due.
• But a couple of other moments of quality that are at least worth mentioning - there's a lovely, naturalistic scene on the bridge when Chakotay asks Tuvok how he gets Tom to stop pestering him after only two minutes, which has a couple of sweet grace notes for the Vulcan and the first officer. And Chakotay gets another charming, also naturalistic, scene with Janeway when they share dinner and his questions quietly probe Janeway - hur hur - about why she over-reacted to Harry's disobedience.
• Seven's inclusion, on the other hand, is far more clumsy and her Borg "jokes" (if that's the right word here) are far too on-the-nose. Though her final, "get well... soon" in the very last scene is excellently delivered by Ryan, especially with that slight, fractional pause between "well" and "soon", a really great line reading.
• "Going after impossible women: a hologram, an ex-Borg, the wrong twin, and now a girl from a xenophobic species!" Because that's how people talk.
• And then Harry asks Seven, of all people, for romantic advise? There is literally nobody less qualified on the ship! No wonder Tom asks him, "haven't you learned anything from me after five years?"
• These are some of the least captivating aliens we've ever encountered.
• Another excellently directed moment when Harry's ordered to sick bay in the briefing room, Janeway storms on to the bridge, Harry follows, then she ordered him into the ready room for their big "the pain" speech, all done in a single, fluid take. Terrific work, so all credit to David Livingston, who really turns in above-average direction here.
• The computer graphics for the silicon-based parasites are hilariously crap.
• "You're beautiful when you're scanning," Harry tells Tal, by the light of a Class 3 nebula. Oh, fuck off Harry.
Season Five, Episode 18 - "Course: Oblivion"
Warped Speed
"Course: Oblivion" is a tragedy, in the proper, literature sense of the word, and a magnificent one too. A brave, startlingly unusual episode, the primary purpose of "Course: Oblivion" is to explore the unintended consequences of actions and what develops from them, and so we get to discover exactly what happened to the biomemetic life-forms Voyager helped to bring sentience to back in the far-from-fan-favourite episode "Demon". If that doesn't sound like the most obvious set-up for an episode, that’s because it's not, but it’s the very unusual nature of the episode that makes it such a daring step into doing something genuinely different.
In a literary sense, tragedy has a few defining characteristics. Most commonly, there is tragic ending, whereby our characters are faced with dire circumstances to overcome, yet fail to do so, resulting in loss, death, or some other kind of negative, downbeat conclusion. That is, basically, the essence of a tragic arc. We see this crew facing the events of this episode with a stoic determination, even a kind of nobility, yet in the end it is all for naught and everything is lost - no record of the ship, the crew, or their accomplishments is in any way preserved. While that is obviously as downbeat an ending as it's possible to have - everyone dies - there are also the very human flaws that make up a tragic character. In this, we have Janeway as the tragic character at the heart of this story - her fatal flaw here is her inability to acknowledge that the discovery of what they are changes the circumstances they find themselves in. Tom is correct when he flatly informs Janeway that everything is different once they know what they are, and Chakotay is correct that, "home isn't Earth". Janeway's tragedy that it takes Chakotay's death to change her mind and turn tail for the nameless Demon-class planet, yet there's a grand irony that by the time she does acknowledge her own tragic flaw, it's already too late - a very Shakespearian type of tragedy, as opposed to, say, Greek tragedy. Would the ship have made it home if they'd started their run back immediately after their discovery? There's no way to know, but they fall short of their target by such a very small margin it seems reasonable to hypothesize they would have done at least in some form, so it's the tragedy of Janeway that is played out and costs this crew everything. The tragic flaw of character supports and informs the tragedy of the story (especially the ending) and vice versa, the tragedy of events driving the tragedy of character. We are also denied any catharsis with these characters as well - they struggle, they overcome, and they fight for their very survival but in the end all that's left of them is a slowly-expanding cloud of grey matter on a monitor screen. There's no release, no happy ending, not even one moment where a cathartic purging of emotion can be achieved as, one by one, we lose each and every character until there is nothing left at all. It is astonishingly bleak.
The calamity of course takes time to unfold, and in this, the gradual escalation of events is vital to the construction of the episode and its successful embracing of the tragic. So starting with Tom and B'Elanna's wedding, a unique moment of happiness in this episode, gives a solid foundation from which to build the tragedy out, and of course it's B'Elanna's heart-breaking death that really drives home the stakes of the episode. This isn't really a what-if story as such, since these are distinct individuals even as they are based on the crew we know, and this gives the episode the space and time to allow the events to have a real consequence. One of the reasons this ends up being quite such a bleak episode is because nothing here is undone, as you would have in a traditional what-if story (for example, time resetting in "Year Of Hell"), so when B'Elanna dies here that's it - she's really dead, and in case that wasn't clear enough we actually get to see her body liquefy on screen, just in case anyone was in danger of thinking this was going to get walked back by Seven's ever-handy nanoprobes or something. The scene between her and Tom, as she lies dying in sickbay, is, incidentally, a series-best from McNeill and Dawson together, and it's because of the power of that scene that we really get to be invested in each subsequent character death. This is all the more impressive, because when Chakortay dies, it's off-screen, yet we feel the impact of the death partly because of Janeway's reaction, and partly because we've already seen the full impact of what happens on B'Elanna. In fact this is an incredibly smart move, because another death-bed scene between Janeway and Chakotay would most likely come across as milking it and lean towards wallowing and self-indulgence, but because we explore only the reaction to his death, it becomes that much more powerful, as well as leaving space for Janeway's admission that she was wrong. And following this, Janeway's own death, slumped in her command chair having gambled and lost everything, becomes even more anguished and painful. Janeway's death manages to be striking because it's played in the opposite direction to B'Elanna's - while B'Elanna gets the big farewell with Tom tearfully describing their honeymoon, Janeway just slips away quietly in her chair, the moment of her passing not even noticed as they survive just one more crisis. It's an almost absurdly touching moment, and a powerful moment of real loss.
Technically (very technically) this is a Voyager ensemble piece, whereby everyone gets their moment, yet in another way it's also the opposite of a typical ensemble piece, with one member of the crew after another being lost to the degradation caused by the enhanced warp drive. All of the principal cast get their moment to be impacted by the events here, but one by one they fall away until there's only Harry left and then he, too, is gone. It's all so very far from the happy scenes of him playing his clarinet at the reception for Tom and B'Elanna, standing, alone on the bridge, no longer to even communicate with Seven in Engineering (nor even sure if she survived the ejection of the core). That pre-credits scene, where everyone really is there and part of the ensemble just helps to re-enforce how increasingly few people are left as the episode proceeds, right up until that final moment. There's something strange about seeing the bridge not empty but noticeably depopulated, and it's discombobulating in all the right ways, something spending time at the wedding just helps to shore up, moving from a packed mess hall to the quiet of an increasingly deserted bridge. That sense of the uncanny permeates all parts of the episode, from seeing the rice slip through the floor at the wedding to big globules slewing off the ship as it crashes out of warp at the end of the episode. Everything about this episode is set up to make the audience feel that something is very wrong, and it also functions as an excellent example of to do a "how are they going to get out of this one", because of course they don't, even though we as the audience are desperate for them to find a way regardless. The feeling of something being fundamentally wrong here is, as much as the tragedy of character and events, vital in convincing us that what's happening is really going to be something different, and its impact not just some normal occurrence. And ironic reversals, again very Shakespearian, are part of the key to this episode, but none moreso than just how close Harry gets to finding the real Voyager and thus a potential solution. But he doesn't make it. Not quite. We get to spend about a minute and a half with the actual crew of Voyager, and for them it's just a normal day - distress call received, turn up, nothing left of the ship, back on course to the Alpha Quadrant. All in all a normal, uneventful day. But we know it wasn't. We know that somewhere out there, the struggles and lives of very real people, who mattered to each other, were fought and lost.
And nothing of them remains.
Any Other Business:
• Hands down the bleakest episode of Voyager in all seven seasons. And it is magnificent.
• The title of this episode is, as far as I can work out, the biggest episode title=spoiler of the whole show.
• It's a real gamble to spend only a minute or two on the "real" crew, but it absolutely pays off.
• There's some fantastic little clues early on in the episode that this isn't the regular crew, some of which are incredibly subtle. Tom being referred to as "Lieutenant" (because the events of "Thirty Days" didn't happen to this crew) is great but underplayed, but even better is the discussion between Janeway and Chakotay about Seven misbehaving and Chakotay telling Janeway to let her first officer handle personnel, whereas with our crew, Janeway would have been the first to deal with Seven.
• The slowed-down direction at the wedding reception is the same technique used to suggest something was wrong in "Timeless".
• The idea that captains "at sea" can marry people is, as I guess is fairly well known now, a complete myth. Captains have never been allowed to do this.
• The scene between Tom and B'Elanna in sickbay is just incredibly powerful, so all praise to McNeill and Dawson.
• Janeway's slipping away in her chair in the bridge actually reduced me to tears this time out.
• The frustrated, angry Harry of "Timeless" is back as he desperately tries to keep things together on the bridge in the final few moments, a great performance from Wang, who modulates Harry's conflicting feelings very well throughout this episode. More like this please, Garrett!
• The somewhat-vast chance of the Silver Blood Voyager finding the real Voyager is something of a Dickensian co-incidence, but it works perfectly within the episode.
• And then there's just an expanding grey cloud on the real Voyager's monitor. Astonishing.
Mustafa better episode
If "Dark Frontier" was so close to being excellent as to actively hurt because of it's just-one-too-many flaws, "The Disease" performs the opposite trick, whereby it's almost entirely rubbish apart from a couple of bits - heh, bits - which aren't. There aren't nearly enough of those bits - ohhh, stop it, vicar - to save the episode, not anywhere close to it, but the surprising thing is that, an episode which once again features Harry falling for the wrong girl, there are any good bit in it - in it! Nudge, nudge! - at all. So I guess we should be grateful for that?
It's hard to know where to begin, really, or even why to begin. The story is as straightforward as it needs to be to provide the framework to hang Harry and Tal's star-crossed lovers routine from, which is to say (does this really bear repeating?) Voyager is helping a generational ship get back on the road again, but there's a faction on board the craft who don't want to be there any more, and naturally Harry's girl is responsible for fermenting the rebellion. That's it. That's the entire story for a forty-five minute episode we're asked to sit through. It's not hard - tee hee - to get a story that simple right, and there aren't any gaping holes - oh, now come on - in story logic or anything, but that's scarcely enough material to flesh out - phrasing! - a five minute DVD extra, never mind an actual episode. Still, let's, for some reason, give this episode the benefit of the doubt, since "The Gift" admirably proved you don't need a story to make an episode function successfully. Sadly, however, the benefit of the doubt here will be of no use at all because the episode spends so long being tied up - phowarr! - in the demonstrably less-than-fascinating romance at its core that the actual story just trundles along until it stops, in the least engaging way it possibly could. Though, to be really fair, this is a rare occurrence in Voyager where there's a rebellious faction who actually manage to rebel against authority, succeed in their mission, are allowed to go their own way, and there's no casualties - it's not often Star Trek portrays a successful revolution. That's a small, worthwhile little moment, though it's terribly undersold and should have been played up much more to give the episode some kind of dramatic stakes. Or anything of interest at all, really.
So let's discuss the romance and get it over with. What's the point of it? It has absolutely nothing to say about inter-species relationship beyond "follow the rules", and who ever lost sleep over worrying about Starfleet's rules regarding getting your end away - oh matron! - with an alien? Just as well that rule book, which Janeway informs us is "three centimetres thick" (itself an odd expression for her to use, since we only see books as objects of history, with everything else being read off a PADD), wasn't in force during TOS or Kirk's love-life would have taken a severe beating - oh, stop it missus - and the series would have been about half as long. So, what else is there? Doomed romances are ten a penny in Star Trek, and this script doesn't have anything even fractionally enlightening to say about them. And as a development for Harry? Well I guess that's mostly what it's going for, the idea that he can break the rules a bit, shake his character up a bit, and give him a bit of a nudge forward in terms of some definite progression. In theory this isn't a bad idea, but in practice it's a Harry romance, so in fact it ends up being a terrible idea instead. In fact this ends up being a much more interesting character piece for Janeway, as she confronts her own prejudice over the fact that it's Harry who's overstepped the mark, and why she reacts differently to him behaving this way than she would any other member of the crew. While it's plainly intentional that this is part of what's going on in the story it's also plainly not meant to be the focus of the episode, yet it remains the most compelling aspect of what's presented here. This is in part because of one of the episode's few redeeming features, which is Kate Mulgrew's performance, isn't quite like anything we've seen from her before. There's a lot of very subtle work on show here, often edgy and clearly keeping her own feelings in check as best she can for as long as she can, but also direct and forceful - ding dong! - when needed. It's certainly a very different performance (and written from an unusually different angle, to be entirely balanced) from the usual shout-out-the-crewmember-who's-misbehaved-this-week scenes we normally get in the ready room, and it's to he real credit that that she's able to bring such variegation to the material.
Ah, but what of Harry? Well, Wang - wang! har har - is somewhat variable here. There's a few moments when he genuinely shines, and they tend to be the moments he's on the back foot (no surprise there) and underplaying (no surprise there either), and he's curiously effective when getting his first reprimand from Janeway, cowed but not exactly apologetic. In these scenes Harry flourishes and actually seems to come alive as a character, with depth and dimension. What a shame, then that they account for about two minutes of screen time tops, with the rest spent watching him behave incredibly stupidly for reasons that aren't brought to life enough to make that behaviour seem even slightly reasonable. Crewmember falls in love with alien? Fine, obviously that is motivation, but as ever there's precious little spark between the two lovers and what there is tends to come more from Musetta Vander, who finds a laid-back, somewhat flippantly playful way of delivering her lines that works well for the character, and contrasts sharply with Harry's pouting over-sincerity. This slightly sardonic delivery at least helps to mitigate against what could otherwise be a pretty corny, rote part and marks Tal out as a bit different from the usual episodic romance characters. It's a mitigating factor in the episode though, not an actual defence, since the episode isn't actually about her but rather her impact on Harry. And though Harry gets a good shot across the bows at Janeway - his whole "would you take a pill to dull the pain of losing your fiancée" speech - Wang unfortunately yells it rather than playing it with simmering resentment, so we're immediately cast back to the usual immature ensign rather than the quieter, more successful moments seen earlier in the episode. He really lets it all hang out - stop tittering at the back - in that scene but it just doesn't work because Harry's back to looking like a petulant schoolboy, not a grown man trying to throw off the chains that are holding him back. Yet, frustratingly, in the final two scenes in sick bay and the mess hall, we return to the quiet, underplayed side of the character, and it's immediately more successful and believable. What a waste.
There are other issues raised in the episode which amount to exactly nothing as well. The bioluminescent skin as a result of sex between Harry and Tal suggests that there's going to be some point made about safe sex or transmittable diseases, but other than to literalize the pain of separation in the most clunky way possible, this never emerges, so the titular - ohh, er, missus -disease never actually contributes anything to the episode (and it's a rubbish metaphor into the bargain). Mind you, all things considered that's probably a good thing. The last thing we need is a lecture on sexually transmitted diseases revolving around Harry. But then, why bother raising it if you're not going to do anything with it? Similarly, during the Big Confrontation Scene in the briefing room, Tal raises the issues of the rights of minorities to be allowed to behave in a way that's true to them, and not being forced to always comply with the majority. A parallel with gay rights, perhaps? Or the rights of women to make their own choices? It could be either of these things but coming - oh now, really - in the middle of that scene it's just one sentence, then never ever mentioned again. So... again what was the point? There's clearly a through-line in the episode about people being able to make their own choices about their lives rather than having decisions enforced upon them, but as with everything else here, it'd muddled at best and just lost at worst. This doesn't make "The Disease" the worst episode of Voyager ever, but it's a low point for Season Five, and after a pretty hot streak that's consisted of most of the season so far that feels monumentally disappointing, so let's put it behind us - help yourselves! - and move on. Oh, and you might have noticed a certain puerile tone during this review. Well, it is, after all, just in keeping with the tone of the episode.
Any Other Business:
• You know, Carry On Voyager would have been a lot more interesting than this tired old re-tread. Carry On Up The Quadrant, perhaps.
• The opening shot, a loooooong pull into the ship, is really excellently directed. Shame it ends in Harry having a quick snog and a fumble, but still, credit where it's due.
• But a couple of other moments of quality that are at least worth mentioning - there's a lovely, naturalistic scene on the bridge when Chakotay asks Tuvok how he gets Tom to stop pestering him after only two minutes, which has a couple of sweet grace notes for the Vulcan and the first officer. And Chakotay gets another charming, also naturalistic, scene with Janeway when they share dinner and his questions quietly probe Janeway - hur hur - about why she over-reacted to Harry's disobedience.
• Seven's inclusion, on the other hand, is far more clumsy and her Borg "jokes" (if that's the right word here) are far too on-the-nose. Though her final, "get well... soon" in the very last scene is excellently delivered by Ryan, especially with that slight, fractional pause between "well" and "soon", a really great line reading.
• "Going after impossible women: a hologram, an ex-Borg, the wrong twin, and now a girl from a xenophobic species!" Because that's how people talk.
• And then Harry asks Seven, of all people, for romantic advise? There is literally nobody less qualified on the ship! No wonder Tom asks him, "haven't you learned anything from me after five years?"
• These are some of the least captivating aliens we've ever encountered.
• Another excellently directed moment when Harry's ordered to sick bay in the briefing room, Janeway storms on to the bridge, Harry follows, then she ordered him into the ready room for their big "the pain" speech, all done in a single, fluid take. Terrific work, so all credit to David Livingston, who really turns in above-average direction here.
• The computer graphics for the silicon-based parasites are hilariously crap.
• "You're beautiful when you're scanning," Harry tells Tal, by the light of a Class 3 nebula. Oh, fuck off Harry.
Season Five, Episode 18 - "Course: Oblivion"
Warped Speed
"Course: Oblivion" is a tragedy, in the proper, literature sense of the word, and a magnificent one too. A brave, startlingly unusual episode, the primary purpose of "Course: Oblivion" is to explore the unintended consequences of actions and what develops from them, and so we get to discover exactly what happened to the biomemetic life-forms Voyager helped to bring sentience to back in the far-from-fan-favourite episode "Demon". If that doesn't sound like the most obvious set-up for an episode, that’s because it's not, but it’s the very unusual nature of the episode that makes it such a daring step into doing something genuinely different.
In a literary sense, tragedy has a few defining characteristics. Most commonly, there is tragic ending, whereby our characters are faced with dire circumstances to overcome, yet fail to do so, resulting in loss, death, or some other kind of negative, downbeat conclusion. That is, basically, the essence of a tragic arc. We see this crew facing the events of this episode with a stoic determination, even a kind of nobility, yet in the end it is all for naught and everything is lost - no record of the ship, the crew, or their accomplishments is in any way preserved. While that is obviously as downbeat an ending as it's possible to have - everyone dies - there are also the very human flaws that make up a tragic character. In this, we have Janeway as the tragic character at the heart of this story - her fatal flaw here is her inability to acknowledge that the discovery of what they are changes the circumstances they find themselves in. Tom is correct when he flatly informs Janeway that everything is different once they know what they are, and Chakotay is correct that, "home isn't Earth". Janeway's tragedy that it takes Chakotay's death to change her mind and turn tail for the nameless Demon-class planet, yet there's a grand irony that by the time she does acknowledge her own tragic flaw, it's already too late - a very Shakespearian type of tragedy, as opposed to, say, Greek tragedy. Would the ship have made it home if they'd started their run back immediately after their discovery? There's no way to know, but they fall short of their target by such a very small margin it seems reasonable to hypothesize they would have done at least in some form, so it's the tragedy of Janeway that is played out and costs this crew everything. The tragic flaw of character supports and informs the tragedy of the story (especially the ending) and vice versa, the tragedy of events driving the tragedy of character. We are also denied any catharsis with these characters as well - they struggle, they overcome, and they fight for their very survival but in the end all that's left of them is a slowly-expanding cloud of grey matter on a monitor screen. There's no release, no happy ending, not even one moment where a cathartic purging of emotion can be achieved as, one by one, we lose each and every character until there is nothing left at all. It is astonishingly bleak.
The calamity of course takes time to unfold, and in this, the gradual escalation of events is vital to the construction of the episode and its successful embracing of the tragic. So starting with Tom and B'Elanna's wedding, a unique moment of happiness in this episode, gives a solid foundation from which to build the tragedy out, and of course it's B'Elanna's heart-breaking death that really drives home the stakes of the episode. This isn't really a what-if story as such, since these are distinct individuals even as they are based on the crew we know, and this gives the episode the space and time to allow the events to have a real consequence. One of the reasons this ends up being quite such a bleak episode is because nothing here is undone, as you would have in a traditional what-if story (for example, time resetting in "Year Of Hell"), so when B'Elanna dies here that's it - she's really dead, and in case that wasn't clear enough we actually get to see her body liquefy on screen, just in case anyone was in danger of thinking this was going to get walked back by Seven's ever-handy nanoprobes or something. The scene between her and Tom, as she lies dying in sickbay, is, incidentally, a series-best from McNeill and Dawson together, and it's because of the power of that scene that we really get to be invested in each subsequent character death. This is all the more impressive, because when Chakortay dies, it's off-screen, yet we feel the impact of the death partly because of Janeway's reaction, and partly because we've already seen the full impact of what happens on B'Elanna. In fact this is an incredibly smart move, because another death-bed scene between Janeway and Chakotay would most likely come across as milking it and lean towards wallowing and self-indulgence, but because we explore only the reaction to his death, it becomes that much more powerful, as well as leaving space for Janeway's admission that she was wrong. And following this, Janeway's own death, slumped in her command chair having gambled and lost everything, becomes even more anguished and painful. Janeway's death manages to be striking because it's played in the opposite direction to B'Elanna's - while B'Elanna gets the big farewell with Tom tearfully describing their honeymoon, Janeway just slips away quietly in her chair, the moment of her passing not even noticed as they survive just one more crisis. It's an almost absurdly touching moment, and a powerful moment of real loss.
Technically (very technically) this is a Voyager ensemble piece, whereby everyone gets their moment, yet in another way it's also the opposite of a typical ensemble piece, with one member of the crew after another being lost to the degradation caused by the enhanced warp drive. All of the principal cast get their moment to be impacted by the events here, but one by one they fall away until there's only Harry left and then he, too, is gone. It's all so very far from the happy scenes of him playing his clarinet at the reception for Tom and B'Elanna, standing, alone on the bridge, no longer to even communicate with Seven in Engineering (nor even sure if she survived the ejection of the core). That pre-credits scene, where everyone really is there and part of the ensemble just helps to re-enforce how increasingly few people are left as the episode proceeds, right up until that final moment. There's something strange about seeing the bridge not empty but noticeably depopulated, and it's discombobulating in all the right ways, something spending time at the wedding just helps to shore up, moving from a packed mess hall to the quiet of an increasingly deserted bridge. That sense of the uncanny permeates all parts of the episode, from seeing the rice slip through the floor at the wedding to big globules slewing off the ship as it crashes out of warp at the end of the episode. Everything about this episode is set up to make the audience feel that something is very wrong, and it also functions as an excellent example of to do a "how are they going to get out of this one", because of course they don't, even though we as the audience are desperate for them to find a way regardless. The feeling of something being fundamentally wrong here is, as much as the tragedy of character and events, vital in convincing us that what's happening is really going to be something different, and its impact not just some normal occurrence. And ironic reversals, again very Shakespearian, are part of the key to this episode, but none moreso than just how close Harry gets to finding the real Voyager and thus a potential solution. But he doesn't make it. Not quite. We get to spend about a minute and a half with the actual crew of Voyager, and for them it's just a normal day - distress call received, turn up, nothing left of the ship, back on course to the Alpha Quadrant. All in all a normal, uneventful day. But we know it wasn't. We know that somewhere out there, the struggles and lives of very real people, who mattered to each other, were fought and lost.
And nothing of them remains.
Any Other Business:
• Hands down the bleakest episode of Voyager in all seven seasons. And it is magnificent.
• The title of this episode is, as far as I can work out, the biggest episode title=spoiler of the whole show.
• It's a real gamble to spend only a minute or two on the "real" crew, but it absolutely pays off.
• There's some fantastic little clues early on in the episode that this isn't the regular crew, some of which are incredibly subtle. Tom being referred to as "Lieutenant" (because the events of "Thirty Days" didn't happen to this crew) is great but underplayed, but even better is the discussion between Janeway and Chakotay about Seven misbehaving and Chakotay telling Janeway to let her first officer handle personnel, whereas with our crew, Janeway would have been the first to deal with Seven.
• The slowed-down direction at the wedding reception is the same technique used to suggest something was wrong in "Timeless".
• The idea that captains "at sea" can marry people is, as I guess is fairly well known now, a complete myth. Captains have never been allowed to do this.
• The scene between Tom and B'Elanna in sickbay is just incredibly powerful, so all praise to McNeill and Dawson.
• Janeway's slipping away in her chair in the bridge actually reduced me to tears this time out.
• The frustrated, angry Harry of "Timeless" is back as he desperately tries to keep things together on the bridge in the final few moments, a great performance from Wang, who modulates Harry's conflicting feelings very well throughout this episode. More like this please, Garrett!
• The somewhat-vast chance of the Silver Blood Voyager finding the real Voyager is something of a Dickensian co-incidence, but it works perfectly within the episode.
• And then there's just an expanding grey cloud on the real Voyager's monitor. Astonishing.
