Season 5 Ep 19 / 20 "The Fight" / "Think Tank"
Feb 4, 2016 12:10:02 GMT -5
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Post by Prole Hole on Feb 4, 2016 12:10:02 GMT -5
Season Five, Episode 19 - "The Fight"
Hip To Be Rhombus
Well, points for trying at least. "The Fight" is a somewhat-frustrating game of two halves, the first of which concerns a load of old tosh about Chakotay's Native American heritage which stops the episode cold every time it comes up, and the second is a semi-surreal, borderline-psychedelic first contact situation inside Chakotay's mind as he's driven insane by the contact from the creatures that inhabit chaotic space. Yet there's a really interesting idea at the heart of the more-typically-dull Native American material and, for all its general brilliance, a few bits about it that drag down the mind sequences, so it becomes something of an episode of contradictions. See? Frustrating.
The Native American material is clearly the weakest part of the episode, as it almost always is. It's been a very, very long time since we've been burdened with this, which has been to both the show's and Chakotay's benefit, and here we have its return, so we're back on set in what looks like a slightly lush garden centre with a couple of actors wandering around trying to avoid knocking over the pot-plants while droning on about visions and understanding. It's not even slightly convincing. That's a shame, though, because the idea that one of the very real fears that Chakotay has is turning into a crazy old man as part of his "family curse" is an extremely compelling one, and Beltran delivers some really great work when trying to bring across just how scared he is of ending up like his rambling, deluded old grandfather. It's a really interesting character beat, and the idea the ship's survival hinges on him having to actively embrace the one thing that terrifies him more than anything, rather than trying to avoid it, makes for a genuinely powerful piece of conflict. This is as close as we ever come to Chakotay's Native American background actually serving a worthwhile plot point, and in this sense it does so remarkable well. It's just a shame about all that time in the garden centre, because the vision quest here, as usual, comes off as a lazy short-cut, and it's impossible not to think that this episode would have been better served by dropping all that "take your medicine!" flashback material and instead spending more time inside the rapidly deteriorating mind of Chakotay, or even ramping up the physical danger that Voyager is in. And it's not even that anyone's bad in those scenes, it's just that they feel completely unnecessary. Chakotay tells us in sick bay that he's afraid of the family curse of old age insanity, and that's really the only context we need - it's just not required to have that literalized by an old actor mumbling to himself amongst the shrubbery while trying to hang on to his dignity. So there's that first contraction - the Native American material doesn't really work, but at its core is a properly interesting piece of character insight.
On the flip side, once we actually get into the meat of Chakotay's visions and his attempts to make first contact, things become much, much more interesting. While it's true we haven't heard of Chakotay's interest in boxing, it doesn't seem inconsistent with his character so it's a little nod to expanding his range of interests that feels like the sort of thing he might actually enjoy, thus it works. And expanding this into the hallucinations Chakotay suffers works extremely well, and the design work of his dreamworld helps to support the hallucinations in a variety of effective ways - the swinging lightbulb might be obvious as shadows dance around, yet it still works, and the rhombus-shaped boxing ring adds a subtle, understated shift in perspective from the normal square ring we see Chakotay sparring in earlier, a nicely non-verbal way of re-enforcing how strange this environment is. Beltran again delivers a strong performance as the shrieking, terrified Chakotay and receives enthusiastic back-up - from a semi-evil Doctor, giving Picardo the chance to break out his more forceful side again as the doctor gleefully recites a list of traumas caused by being punched, and Neelix, who's also surprisingly effective here. The rhythm, editing and pacing of these scenes really helps to deliver a sense of momentum that drives the narrative of the episode, and what really makes these scenes effective is how lyrically unconventional they are for Star Trek, so the prize that Chakotay is fighting for isn't money or a trophy but instead the freedom that the ship depends on. Even "chaotic space" follows the same, somewhat dream-like, logic the episode has, standing as both a literal representation of the danger Voyager is in, as well as a more abstract reflection of Chakotay's state of mind, which is very much a "chaotic space" by the end of the episode. And developing on from this, Kid Chaos is a terrifically imaginative extension of the boxing analogy, where Chakotay's opponent isn't an actual person but instead the very nature of the space they find themselves in - which is just a lovely idea. These really are an imaginative blend of the literal and the more metaphysical aspects of the episode (especially with them being bound up in Chakotay's decreasing sanity and ability to tell the difference between reality and what's in his mind) and it's a compelling reminder that a more poetic approach to Voyager can really deliver great material. Where these sequences fall down a bit, is, of course, that Chakotay's contact with the aliens who exist in chaotic space is basically executed in the same way as the Orb experiences on DS9, which is a shame because even though we've seen this on the sister show, it still works really well here, and it feels effective that the dialogue that the aliens use to communicate with Chakotay is only lifted from this episode - there aren't clips from other episodes to fill in the gaps, which demonstrates a really smart writer understanding his own conceit and writing towards it. But still, we've seen this before, so there's another contraction - though this is generally effective and well done, it's something that's not exactly original, and indeed because it's a bit of a "signature sequence" on DS9 it can't help but feel derivative, even while it's still compelling.
Oh, and a general demerit across the whole episode is, naturally, the inclusion of Boothby, which is every bit as gratuitous and self-serving as it was back when he turned up during "In The Flesh". His inclusion here makes absolutely zero sense (as ever), is self-serving fan bait of the worst kind (as ever), and generally serves no useful purpose (as ever). Still, if I'm to say this is the best appearance of Boothby in Voyager I'm not exactly setting a high bar - I mean, it is his best performance, and Ray Walston generally tones down his down-home, gruffly-clichéd over-characterization so he sounds more like an actual person rather than a lost Duke cousin from Hazzard County. Nevertheless it's not any less pointless, and it's a shame because his inclusion serves as a distraction that the story could really do without. In the end, "The FIght" really ends up being an ideal title for this episode, because it does rather end up feeling like it's at war with itself. There's so much good material here, so many inspired ideas, and such generally excellent execution, that to see the episode held back by it's mostly-avoidable, obvious shortcomings feels like a real shame. It's an episode which is often obscure, and rarely linear, but rather than working as distracting obfuscation this gives the episode a unique, genuinely disconcerting feel - all the times we have been told there are strange, different aliens beyond human experience finally pay off and we actually get to meet one, and it turns out that taking this kind of abstract approach really delivers dividends. It's such a refreshing change from the normal alien-race-of-the-week, and the episode deserves some real credit for taking a chance on this approach. Yes, it's true that the Native American material doesn't really work, but it also doesn't take up too much time, and crucially it's ancillary to the episode rather than lying at the core of it, so it's fairly easy to ignore. "The Fight" is a real gamble and despite its shortcoming it does mostly come off, and even when it doesn't, I have nothing but praise for the producers for trying something as genuinely different and challenging as this script is. Would that Star Trek in general took more risks like this.
Any Other Business:
• Much praise for Robert Beltran here, whose fear at losing his mind is really well portrayed when it could have seriously soared over the top into scenery-chewing.
• Everyone is really good here, actually, even when, like Seven and Janeway, they're mostly on-screen to keep the exposition moving.
• Those fucking pan-pipes are back.
• There's a really sly piece of criticism about bafflegab in here as well, when Chakotay starts rambling on about rentrillic trajectories and nobody has the slightest idea what he's talking about because it's just random words without any context or meaning behind them.
• This is Boothby's final appearance in Voyager, and indeed in Star Trek. Thankfully.
• Chaotic space is represented by a few diamond-shaped filters, which can't exactly have broken the budget, but still look surprisingly effective.
• And it's nice that we do get a bit of an exploration of chaotic space as well, what with them flying round in circles, encountering gravity shears, discovering a ruined alien ship... the latter of which isn't just scene-setting but actually provides the answer as to why the aliens are able to contact Chakotay but nobody else. We could have stood a bit more of that, actually, rather than the Native American material.
• I do like Kid Chaos's on-screen realization as well - the same shifting diamond-space wearing a boxers gloves and gown. Really excellent.
• And at the end, having won his fight with existentialism, Chakotay is ready to get back in the ring (and apparently punch out the camera). Just another example of us being shown something without having to have it over-explained. Terrific.
Season Five, Episode 19 - "Think Tank"
When Butt Plugs Attack
"Think Tank" is a puzzle-box episode. In case you had even the most fractional doubt about this, the episode opens with everyone literally playing with a puzzle-box. It’s not the most subtle piece of writing in the world, but it does clearly telegraph where this episode is going and what it's going to consist of. Though the puzzle-box itself leads Janeway to the clue as to how to defeat the titular think thank, it never (quite) ascends to the level of Chekov's Phaser, and that near miss is demonstrative of what's going on in this episode because, although this is a generally entertaining slice of sci-fi nonsense, it often comes perilously close to slipping into something altogether more crappy. It's a thin line to walk.
So what does work here? Well actually the principal conceit is pretty good. We've just come off the back of two episodes which have been genuinely experimental in their approach to Voyager and the show and the season has felt all the richer for it. "Think Tank" isn't pushing against the show's boundaries in quite the same way, but in a season which even at this point still feels dominated by character work (for all its experimentalism even "The Fight" is really about exploring Chakotay). "Think Tank" still feels pleasingly unusual. If it has an analogy in this season then it's likely "Counterpoint", which also provided Janeway with a puzzle to solve, but the puzzle in "Counterpoint" was as much emotional as it was intellectual. "Think Tank" hedges no such bets - there's very little emotional engagement here beyond the satisfaction gleaned from the final solution - but then that's clearly not what this episode about. It's about puzzle and strategy, and taken on those terms it sets out its own course and follows it to its conclusion. So that principal conceit - a largely amoral group of scientists who get off on solving problems for a price - has to be an engaging enough concept to carry the audience's attention until the credits roll, and in this it largely succeeds. It's a curious set-up, and certainly in Voyager there seems to be little else similar so as to make it seem genuinely unusual - the only thing that feels even vaguely in the same wheelhouse is way back in Season One's "Prime Factors", where the locals helped people for their own gratification, but even there it's not really directly analogous. The oddity of this set-up makes for an engaging concept, and the fact that (once again, very much to an episode's benefit) the members of the think tank aren't just the usual collection of guest-actors-in-latex but instead a genuinely diverse group of people and types works wonders. This also adds to the general credibility of the think tank, since we only get to see them set up and solve one problem - Voyager's - but we hear of many achievements including curing the Viidian Phage, and seeing a collection of individuals with a noticeably different background from each other makes the plausibility of the scenario move up a notch and without the need for lots of pointed explanations (though we get a little of that as well as Kurros does his "introduce the band" routine when Seven and Janeway first pop over).
And if you're going to do a puzzle-box episode it goes without saying that the actual puzzle needs to be engaging enough to sustain interest over the course of the episode. This is another line "Think Thank" comes close to falling at but just about manages to keep going because, although the dilemma is compelling in the abstract - how will Voyager get out of this one? - we've had plenty of similar set-ups but with different resolutions. Worse, we're told a lot about how Voyager is being hounded through this region of space but no matter how hard they try, a few graphics in astrometrics just aren't all that riveting. The episode starts well, with the big gas explosion as an escape technique, but the episode really needed to maintain a level of more visceral action to contrast against the slower scenes either on-board the think tank itself, or the crew desperately trying to work out how to escape. When things switch to sitting around the mess hall and a weirdly corny "thinking montage" it just isn't good enough to match the early excitement of the episode, so everything sags. Where the episode does score here, however, is that the manoeuvrings between the three principal groups - the Voyager crew, the think tank, and the Hazari - is unusually complex and nuanced, which certainly helps make up some of the shortfall in action. The interactions between the three groups feels like a real, constantly-shifting environment which is no mean feat when something like the Hazari switching sides could so easily come across as a clumsy way to get the crew out of this week's problem. Instead it's written with enough depth to make the Hazari - who are generally very well-realized for a one-shot species-of-the-week - switching sides seem like something that's genuinely grown out of who they are, rather than just the situation they find themselves in.
It's maybe as well the Hazari are well portrayed, though, because the portrayal of the regular crew members is a bit... well, here we go again, but their portrayal isn't a failure but it's very uninspired, and comes perilously close to the same "just the right side of good and no more" that's haunting this episode. Well, there's one exception to that - Janeway's line to Seven, on seeing the jellyfish-like creature on-board the think tank is, "they must be studying it", which is just ghastly and wrong and stupid on just about every level - there's simply no way Janeway would make that kind of assumption. But, putting that aside, both she and Seven function as expected - but there's no real flair to this. Seven puts herself in the firing line in order to save Voyager which... yes ok fine, we know she's willing to do that because she believes in the importance of Voyager's survival, but it all feels a little... rote, I suppose. It's not wrong, or inconsistent, or even bad, really, but we've seen it before, and there isn't enough flair to the debates here to add any detail to what we already know. Similarly with Janeway - she gets to mentor Seven through her latest crisis, and it all plays out as another example of their pseudo-mother/daughter relationship, but it feels more like a reflection of it, rather than seeing the real thing. The details are right, but there's no depth. Similarly with the rest of the crew - Chakotay gets to do a bit of first-officering, Tom gets to do some nifty flying, Tuvok does some invesigate-y stuff... it's all fine, but the substance just isn't quite there.
That the episode feels a little under-cooked though is at least in part because it's very clear what bits are good and work, which can't help but throw the bits that don't quite work into sharp relief. Because in the end, the double-cross the think tank had planned all along is smart writing, the alliance forged through "the enemy of my enemy" is intelligently written, the bait-and-switch Janeway and Seven go through to defeat the think tank is pleasingly symmetrical with everything else going on in the story, and it's all well enough executed to feel like an appropriately satisfying ending. After all, if you're going to have a puzzle-box then the solving of the puzzle has to be fun enough to have made the effort of solving it worthwhile, and here it largely is. There's some good effort put into the design work (including the think tank's ship, which is a markedly unusual design), director Terrence O'Hara, in his only Voyager outing, does a decent-if-unflashy job... yea it's all fine. The unusualness of the episode eventually works to its advantage, and that edge is enough to mark the episode out as worthwhile, right to the end. Saying that, it is another slightly odd ending though - Voyager leaves the think tank to their (entirely deserved) fate, and high-tails it towards the Alpha Quadrant. Does this work? Yes. But guess what? Only just. The puzzle has been solved, the box has been opened, the task is done, and we can all move on. And like most puzzles, once you know how it's done, it's never quite as much fun again.
Any Other Business:
• The puzzle everyone is oh-so-subtly playing at the beginning is called Sheer Lunacy which is, if nothing else, an excellently-chosen name for those Rubik's Cube-type puzzles that can really get under your skin.
• I should mention This Week's Big Guest Star, Jason Alexander, fresh from Seinfeld. He's really good here, imbuing Kurros with a superciliousness and underplaying everything so he manages to be both patronising in the extreme and really very creepy (especially his habit of just turning up in places without so much as a sound effect to announce his arrival). It's a terrific performance.
• I'd again like to draw attention to just how great it is to have a jellyfish, an immobile artificial intelligence, and a space whale as members of the think tank.
• Though they are - theme of the episode once more - fine here, neither Ryan nor Mulgrew seem especially energized this week.
• Even the typical Davis-esque Tuvok line ("brace yourself") feels a bit rote this week. I keep saying this yet, you know, it's not a bad episode and I feel like I'm selling it a bit short. It's perfectly serviceable, middle-of-the-road Voyager, and it's an entertaining forty-five minutes of television. I don't know why I'm struggling to pick up much enthusiasm, because I really did enjoy re-watching it.
• But the ending really is smart enough to make it a successful puzzle box. The answer is clear and makes sense, it's logical and consistent with what we've seen, the solution is dependent entirely on elements we've already aware of, and there's no last-minute cheat or get-out-of-jail-free card. They really do out-think the think-tank.
Hip To Be Rhombus
Well, points for trying at least. "The Fight" is a somewhat-frustrating game of two halves, the first of which concerns a load of old tosh about Chakotay's Native American heritage which stops the episode cold every time it comes up, and the second is a semi-surreal, borderline-psychedelic first contact situation inside Chakotay's mind as he's driven insane by the contact from the creatures that inhabit chaotic space. Yet there's a really interesting idea at the heart of the more-typically-dull Native American material and, for all its general brilliance, a few bits about it that drag down the mind sequences, so it becomes something of an episode of contradictions. See? Frustrating.
The Native American material is clearly the weakest part of the episode, as it almost always is. It's been a very, very long time since we've been burdened with this, which has been to both the show's and Chakotay's benefit, and here we have its return, so we're back on set in what looks like a slightly lush garden centre with a couple of actors wandering around trying to avoid knocking over the pot-plants while droning on about visions and understanding. It's not even slightly convincing. That's a shame, though, because the idea that one of the very real fears that Chakotay has is turning into a crazy old man as part of his "family curse" is an extremely compelling one, and Beltran delivers some really great work when trying to bring across just how scared he is of ending up like his rambling, deluded old grandfather. It's a really interesting character beat, and the idea the ship's survival hinges on him having to actively embrace the one thing that terrifies him more than anything, rather than trying to avoid it, makes for a genuinely powerful piece of conflict. This is as close as we ever come to Chakotay's Native American background actually serving a worthwhile plot point, and in this sense it does so remarkable well. It's just a shame about all that time in the garden centre, because the vision quest here, as usual, comes off as a lazy short-cut, and it's impossible not to think that this episode would have been better served by dropping all that "take your medicine!" flashback material and instead spending more time inside the rapidly deteriorating mind of Chakotay, or even ramping up the physical danger that Voyager is in. And it's not even that anyone's bad in those scenes, it's just that they feel completely unnecessary. Chakotay tells us in sick bay that he's afraid of the family curse of old age insanity, and that's really the only context we need - it's just not required to have that literalized by an old actor mumbling to himself amongst the shrubbery while trying to hang on to his dignity. So there's that first contraction - the Native American material doesn't really work, but at its core is a properly interesting piece of character insight.
On the flip side, once we actually get into the meat of Chakotay's visions and his attempts to make first contact, things become much, much more interesting. While it's true we haven't heard of Chakotay's interest in boxing, it doesn't seem inconsistent with his character so it's a little nod to expanding his range of interests that feels like the sort of thing he might actually enjoy, thus it works. And expanding this into the hallucinations Chakotay suffers works extremely well, and the design work of his dreamworld helps to support the hallucinations in a variety of effective ways - the swinging lightbulb might be obvious as shadows dance around, yet it still works, and the rhombus-shaped boxing ring adds a subtle, understated shift in perspective from the normal square ring we see Chakotay sparring in earlier, a nicely non-verbal way of re-enforcing how strange this environment is. Beltran again delivers a strong performance as the shrieking, terrified Chakotay and receives enthusiastic back-up - from a semi-evil Doctor, giving Picardo the chance to break out his more forceful side again as the doctor gleefully recites a list of traumas caused by being punched, and Neelix, who's also surprisingly effective here. The rhythm, editing and pacing of these scenes really helps to deliver a sense of momentum that drives the narrative of the episode, and what really makes these scenes effective is how lyrically unconventional they are for Star Trek, so the prize that Chakotay is fighting for isn't money or a trophy but instead the freedom that the ship depends on. Even "chaotic space" follows the same, somewhat dream-like, logic the episode has, standing as both a literal representation of the danger Voyager is in, as well as a more abstract reflection of Chakotay's state of mind, which is very much a "chaotic space" by the end of the episode. And developing on from this, Kid Chaos is a terrifically imaginative extension of the boxing analogy, where Chakotay's opponent isn't an actual person but instead the very nature of the space they find themselves in - which is just a lovely idea. These really are an imaginative blend of the literal and the more metaphysical aspects of the episode (especially with them being bound up in Chakotay's decreasing sanity and ability to tell the difference between reality and what's in his mind) and it's a compelling reminder that a more poetic approach to Voyager can really deliver great material. Where these sequences fall down a bit, is, of course, that Chakotay's contact with the aliens who exist in chaotic space is basically executed in the same way as the Orb experiences on DS9, which is a shame because even though we've seen this on the sister show, it still works really well here, and it feels effective that the dialogue that the aliens use to communicate with Chakotay is only lifted from this episode - there aren't clips from other episodes to fill in the gaps, which demonstrates a really smart writer understanding his own conceit and writing towards it. But still, we've seen this before, so there's another contraction - though this is generally effective and well done, it's something that's not exactly original, and indeed because it's a bit of a "signature sequence" on DS9 it can't help but feel derivative, even while it's still compelling.
Oh, and a general demerit across the whole episode is, naturally, the inclusion of Boothby, which is every bit as gratuitous and self-serving as it was back when he turned up during "In The Flesh". His inclusion here makes absolutely zero sense (as ever), is self-serving fan bait of the worst kind (as ever), and generally serves no useful purpose (as ever). Still, if I'm to say this is the best appearance of Boothby in Voyager I'm not exactly setting a high bar - I mean, it is his best performance, and Ray Walston generally tones down his down-home, gruffly-clichéd over-characterization so he sounds more like an actual person rather than a lost Duke cousin from Hazzard County. Nevertheless it's not any less pointless, and it's a shame because his inclusion serves as a distraction that the story could really do without. In the end, "The FIght" really ends up being an ideal title for this episode, because it does rather end up feeling like it's at war with itself. There's so much good material here, so many inspired ideas, and such generally excellent execution, that to see the episode held back by it's mostly-avoidable, obvious shortcomings feels like a real shame. It's an episode which is often obscure, and rarely linear, but rather than working as distracting obfuscation this gives the episode a unique, genuinely disconcerting feel - all the times we have been told there are strange, different aliens beyond human experience finally pay off and we actually get to meet one, and it turns out that taking this kind of abstract approach really delivers dividends. It's such a refreshing change from the normal alien-race-of-the-week, and the episode deserves some real credit for taking a chance on this approach. Yes, it's true that the Native American material doesn't really work, but it also doesn't take up too much time, and crucially it's ancillary to the episode rather than lying at the core of it, so it's fairly easy to ignore. "The Fight" is a real gamble and despite its shortcoming it does mostly come off, and even when it doesn't, I have nothing but praise for the producers for trying something as genuinely different and challenging as this script is. Would that Star Trek in general took more risks like this.
Any Other Business:
• Much praise for Robert Beltran here, whose fear at losing his mind is really well portrayed when it could have seriously soared over the top into scenery-chewing.
• Everyone is really good here, actually, even when, like Seven and Janeway, they're mostly on-screen to keep the exposition moving.
• Those fucking pan-pipes are back.
• There's a really sly piece of criticism about bafflegab in here as well, when Chakotay starts rambling on about rentrillic trajectories and nobody has the slightest idea what he's talking about because it's just random words without any context or meaning behind them.
• This is Boothby's final appearance in Voyager, and indeed in Star Trek. Thankfully.
• Chaotic space is represented by a few diamond-shaped filters, which can't exactly have broken the budget, but still look surprisingly effective.
• And it's nice that we do get a bit of an exploration of chaotic space as well, what with them flying round in circles, encountering gravity shears, discovering a ruined alien ship... the latter of which isn't just scene-setting but actually provides the answer as to why the aliens are able to contact Chakotay but nobody else. We could have stood a bit more of that, actually, rather than the Native American material.
• I do like Kid Chaos's on-screen realization as well - the same shifting diamond-space wearing a boxers gloves and gown. Really excellent.
• And at the end, having won his fight with existentialism, Chakotay is ready to get back in the ring (and apparently punch out the camera). Just another example of us being shown something without having to have it over-explained. Terrific.
Season Five, Episode 19 - "Think Tank"
When Butt Plugs Attack
"Think Tank" is a puzzle-box episode. In case you had even the most fractional doubt about this, the episode opens with everyone literally playing with a puzzle-box. It’s not the most subtle piece of writing in the world, but it does clearly telegraph where this episode is going and what it's going to consist of. Though the puzzle-box itself leads Janeway to the clue as to how to defeat the titular think thank, it never (quite) ascends to the level of Chekov's Phaser, and that near miss is demonstrative of what's going on in this episode because, although this is a generally entertaining slice of sci-fi nonsense, it often comes perilously close to slipping into something altogether more crappy. It's a thin line to walk.
So what does work here? Well actually the principal conceit is pretty good. We've just come off the back of two episodes which have been genuinely experimental in their approach to Voyager and the show and the season has felt all the richer for it. "Think Tank" isn't pushing against the show's boundaries in quite the same way, but in a season which even at this point still feels dominated by character work (for all its experimentalism even "The Fight" is really about exploring Chakotay). "Think Tank" still feels pleasingly unusual. If it has an analogy in this season then it's likely "Counterpoint", which also provided Janeway with a puzzle to solve, but the puzzle in "Counterpoint" was as much emotional as it was intellectual. "Think Tank" hedges no such bets - there's very little emotional engagement here beyond the satisfaction gleaned from the final solution - but then that's clearly not what this episode about. It's about puzzle and strategy, and taken on those terms it sets out its own course and follows it to its conclusion. So that principal conceit - a largely amoral group of scientists who get off on solving problems for a price - has to be an engaging enough concept to carry the audience's attention until the credits roll, and in this it largely succeeds. It's a curious set-up, and certainly in Voyager there seems to be little else similar so as to make it seem genuinely unusual - the only thing that feels even vaguely in the same wheelhouse is way back in Season One's "Prime Factors", where the locals helped people for their own gratification, but even there it's not really directly analogous. The oddity of this set-up makes for an engaging concept, and the fact that (once again, very much to an episode's benefit) the members of the think tank aren't just the usual collection of guest-actors-in-latex but instead a genuinely diverse group of people and types works wonders. This also adds to the general credibility of the think tank, since we only get to see them set up and solve one problem - Voyager's - but we hear of many achievements including curing the Viidian Phage, and seeing a collection of individuals with a noticeably different background from each other makes the plausibility of the scenario move up a notch and without the need for lots of pointed explanations (though we get a little of that as well as Kurros does his "introduce the band" routine when Seven and Janeway first pop over).
And if you're going to do a puzzle-box episode it goes without saying that the actual puzzle needs to be engaging enough to sustain interest over the course of the episode. This is another line "Think Thank" comes close to falling at but just about manages to keep going because, although the dilemma is compelling in the abstract - how will Voyager get out of this one? - we've had plenty of similar set-ups but with different resolutions. Worse, we're told a lot about how Voyager is being hounded through this region of space but no matter how hard they try, a few graphics in astrometrics just aren't all that riveting. The episode starts well, with the big gas explosion as an escape technique, but the episode really needed to maintain a level of more visceral action to contrast against the slower scenes either on-board the think tank itself, or the crew desperately trying to work out how to escape. When things switch to sitting around the mess hall and a weirdly corny "thinking montage" it just isn't good enough to match the early excitement of the episode, so everything sags. Where the episode does score here, however, is that the manoeuvrings between the three principal groups - the Voyager crew, the think tank, and the Hazari - is unusually complex and nuanced, which certainly helps make up some of the shortfall in action. The interactions between the three groups feels like a real, constantly-shifting environment which is no mean feat when something like the Hazari switching sides could so easily come across as a clumsy way to get the crew out of this week's problem. Instead it's written with enough depth to make the Hazari - who are generally very well-realized for a one-shot species-of-the-week - switching sides seem like something that's genuinely grown out of who they are, rather than just the situation they find themselves in.
It's maybe as well the Hazari are well portrayed, though, because the portrayal of the regular crew members is a bit... well, here we go again, but their portrayal isn't a failure but it's very uninspired, and comes perilously close to the same "just the right side of good and no more" that's haunting this episode. Well, there's one exception to that - Janeway's line to Seven, on seeing the jellyfish-like creature on-board the think tank is, "they must be studying it", which is just ghastly and wrong and stupid on just about every level - there's simply no way Janeway would make that kind of assumption. But, putting that aside, both she and Seven function as expected - but there's no real flair to this. Seven puts herself in the firing line in order to save Voyager which... yes ok fine, we know she's willing to do that because she believes in the importance of Voyager's survival, but it all feels a little... rote, I suppose. It's not wrong, or inconsistent, or even bad, really, but we've seen it before, and there isn't enough flair to the debates here to add any detail to what we already know. Similarly with Janeway - she gets to mentor Seven through her latest crisis, and it all plays out as another example of their pseudo-mother/daughter relationship, but it feels more like a reflection of it, rather than seeing the real thing. The details are right, but there's no depth. Similarly with the rest of the crew - Chakotay gets to do a bit of first-officering, Tom gets to do some nifty flying, Tuvok does some invesigate-y stuff... it's all fine, but the substance just isn't quite there.
That the episode feels a little under-cooked though is at least in part because it's very clear what bits are good and work, which can't help but throw the bits that don't quite work into sharp relief. Because in the end, the double-cross the think tank had planned all along is smart writing, the alliance forged through "the enemy of my enemy" is intelligently written, the bait-and-switch Janeway and Seven go through to defeat the think tank is pleasingly symmetrical with everything else going on in the story, and it's all well enough executed to feel like an appropriately satisfying ending. After all, if you're going to have a puzzle-box then the solving of the puzzle has to be fun enough to have made the effort of solving it worthwhile, and here it largely is. There's some good effort put into the design work (including the think tank's ship, which is a markedly unusual design), director Terrence O'Hara, in his only Voyager outing, does a decent-if-unflashy job... yea it's all fine. The unusualness of the episode eventually works to its advantage, and that edge is enough to mark the episode out as worthwhile, right to the end. Saying that, it is another slightly odd ending though - Voyager leaves the think tank to their (entirely deserved) fate, and high-tails it towards the Alpha Quadrant. Does this work? Yes. But guess what? Only just. The puzzle has been solved, the box has been opened, the task is done, and we can all move on. And like most puzzles, once you know how it's done, it's never quite as much fun again.
Any Other Business:
• The puzzle everyone is oh-so-subtly playing at the beginning is called Sheer Lunacy which is, if nothing else, an excellently-chosen name for those Rubik's Cube-type puzzles that can really get under your skin.
• I should mention This Week's Big Guest Star, Jason Alexander, fresh from Seinfeld. He's really good here, imbuing Kurros with a superciliousness and underplaying everything so he manages to be both patronising in the extreme and really very creepy (especially his habit of just turning up in places without so much as a sound effect to announce his arrival). It's a terrific performance.
• I'd again like to draw attention to just how great it is to have a jellyfish, an immobile artificial intelligence, and a space whale as members of the think tank.
• Though they are - theme of the episode once more - fine here, neither Ryan nor Mulgrew seem especially energized this week.
• Even the typical Davis-esque Tuvok line ("brace yourself") feels a bit rote this week. I keep saying this yet, you know, it's not a bad episode and I feel like I'm selling it a bit short. It's perfectly serviceable, middle-of-the-road Voyager, and it's an entertaining forty-five minutes of television. I don't know why I'm struggling to pick up much enthusiasm, because I really did enjoy re-watching it.
• But the ending really is smart enough to make it a successful puzzle box. The answer is clear and makes sense, it's logical and consistent with what we've seen, the solution is dependent entirely on elements we've already aware of, and there's no last-minute cheat or get-out-of-jail-free card. They really do out-think the think-tank.
