Post by Prole Hole on Apr 21, 2016 12:20:08 GMT -5
Season Six, Episode 14 - "Memorial"
The First Victim Of War Is In Your Pants
So far, the majority of Season Six has had a comparatively light touch. That's not to say that all the episodes have been light in tone – that's obviously not the case – but even when it's engaged with more serious aspects there's been a general deftness to the way episode's have dealt with their themes. That all comes to a crashing end with "Memorial", a terribly serious meditation on the nature of remembrance and how we choose to both honour those who have gone before us, and how we commemorate those who have been lost. "Memorial" is many things, but subtle is not one of them, but it is able to wield it's bluntness in a surprisingly effective manner. The lack of subtlety is replaced instead by an anger which tips over into the characterizations of the regulars, taking the four principal characters here (Neelix, Chakotay, Tom and Harry) and pushing them way out of their familiar comfort zones. What we find, though, is something both entirely different from the norm, and something strangely familiar.
The familiar is yet another episode of Season Six that finds new ways of interrogating what we think of "the past" and "history". The different is the way in which our four leads are really jerked around by their experiences here, and how little is done to sugar-coat what they go for here. In fact we've seen this with Chakotay before – his experiences in "Nemesis" are also of an alien war, and both Chakotay and Beltran are good at delivering this "Vietnam vet" side of his character. I mentioned in "One Small Step" that Beltran is the only (remaining) member of the regular cast who by default underplays, so it's all the more shocking when he does actually snap and lose his temper or yell at someone. Here, he's given plenty of chance to fit back into the military role, and he does so with the same conviction that we've previously seen. But in a way the fact we've seen Chakotay behave like this before only highlights how starkly different the behaviour of the other three are. Harry might be hallucinating when he "kills" the two innocent survivors in the tunnels, but Neelix certainly isn't when he takes Naomi hostage in the kitchen, and nor is Tom when he screams at B'Elanna in their quarters (the second time he's got to do that this season, and it's just as effective and disconcerting here as it was the first time out). Indeed in many ways the scene with Naomi is the key one of the episode, encapsulating everything that's going on – we have a character suffering terribly from PTSD, we have the capture of someone innocent swept along in the conflict, we have an attempt at resolution, and we have an eventual conclusion reached when the pain of the conflict is acknowledged. That scene is the core of the episode writ small, and it's exceedingly effective at encapsulating everything that's going on here, helped no end by what is probably Scarlet Pomers's best performance to date – she seems genuinely afraid – and a great turn by Ethan Phillips as a panicked, terrified Neelix.
One of the best tricks the episode pulls is having a broad circumstance for the action to play out in, without the need to go into a lot of specific details. This broadness of approach means that, rather than defusing the episode into nothing, it instead seems like it could be applicable to multiple situations and makes the feeling of allegory that much stronger. The sketched out details we do get – some colonists need to be evacuated, apparently against their will, and as a result of their reticence to go the evacuation ends in a massacre – could apply to any number of real-world events, everything from the enforced deportations of the colonial eras through to resettlements on the West Bank/Gaza and many more besides, and it's all too often in the news that we hear of civilians getting caught in ideological crossfire. This also allows the experiences the crew go through to be seen from multiple perspectives – some accusing the colonists of starting the trouble, others saying nothing justified what actions were taken – and this is important because often in the heat of such conflicts it really can be very unclear just who is responsible or why. Equally, we see the aftermath, as Janeway witnesses the vaporising of the bodies and demands to know if it were the colonists fault why the evidence is being destroyed. This allows the episode to both have its cake and eat it – it's not entirely clear who started the trouble and there are arguments on both sides, but it's quite clear who ended the trouble, and even they seem to have realized that it's all gone too far (hence the need for a cover-up). By allowing us to see enough detail to understand the events, but not so much that the specificity undermines the allegory, we get a revelation which never cheats the audience by holding back, and never sells short the horror of the events whicih have been seen, regardless of who started it.
And as ever, if you're going to deliver a serious-minded meditation on the nature of conflict (and what's remarkable here is that it's not even especially clear that there's a war going on – this is a conflict alone) then of course it's vital that your script understands how historical perspective can alter interpretations of events. In this, the use of the memorial's synaptic transmitter is especially interesting, because we can assume that the experiences Neelix, Tom, Harry and Chakotay go through here (as well as the rest of the affected crew) would be the same as any other ship that came into range of the transmitter. The transmitter itself is trying to remove the act of interpretation, even as the script lays out the possibility of multiple interpretations. Even more interestingly, it is given to Neelix to really understand what it is that's going on here. He is, after all, someone who comes from a planet devastated by a weapon of mass destruction - one that cost him the life of his sister - and so can understand the need to build a memorial to events more than anyone else on the crew. The key here is the reason – the memorial is being built not out of anger or glorification, but out of a desire to stop an atrocity like this ever happening again. The crew go through terrible trauma here, but the motivation behind what happens to them is held up to be in line with the kind of core belief we expect from Star Trek – that the people who built the memorial were not motivated by revenge or a desire to inflict this pain on others, but instead to try and ensure nobody else ever has to go through such a terrible event. These events are lost to history – somewhere between two and three hundred years – but the power they carry and the message that they speak to is something that cannot be lost, for fear of repetition. Neelix – always one of the most compassionate members of Voyager's regular crew – is the one that really, truly understand this, so of course it's given to him to argue so vehemently that the transmitter cannot simply be switched off (even in the face of Chakotay, who as both a Maquis and a Native American really ought to understand the necessity of learning from forced relocation). He's lived through this pain twice now – the original events on Rinax, and what he experiences here – and is better placed than anyone to know how such things cannot simply be forgotten simply because remembering them is inconvenient or painful (another excellently subtle piece of writing, equating both the physical pain and the trauma of PTSD with the mental pain and desire to shy away from hard truths). Of course remembering traumatic events is painful. They should be painful, because it's through that pain that we gain understanding – it's how we progress. It won't be an easy path, because the path to progress is never easy, but it's still always worth walking. Because in one way, what this episode is arguing is one of the simplest rules of history that there is: those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.
Any Other Business:
• Following the lightweight "Virtuoso" it's remarkable how straight and serious "Memorial" is, and a testament to how flexible Voyager remains that watching the two side by side doesn't feel tonally inconsistent at all.
• Considering that we're back in the Garden Centre Of Conflict and a few stock ship sets, this manages to feel extremely claustrophobic, thanks to some great direction from Allan Kroeker.
• Some real praise for Garrett Wang here too – he's really excellent in this, especially during his big scene in the tunnel when he panics and ends up killing the civilians. Harry on the back foot – still always so much better.
• Saying that, everyone's great here, and fun though Tuvok's Betty Davis is (see last week's Big Eyeroll Of Stupidity) it's also nice to see him play straight as well, as he does here in a relatively minor but effective role.
• Yes for the second time Tom gets to really let loose at B'Elanna, to great effect, and his heartbroken, "I'm sorry" immediately thereafter is very affecting.
• If there's any problem here (and broadly speaking there isn't – this episode is a real lost gem to be honest) it's maybe a bit of a shame the script feels the need to widen out the trauma to half the crew, rather than keeping the focus more tightly on the original four that went on the survey mission. Though Mulgrew is typically great as she accuses the soldiers of covering up evidence, the scene would be even more powerful if it were genocide-survivor Neelix that got to deliver the contemptuous, condemning speech about trying to cover up an atrocity.
• It's also a real mark of the power of this episode that there's no happy ending, and the Doctor can do nothing to cure the people who have suffered the PTSD, only help them through it. Just as it should be – there's no quick fixes in a situation like this, and some things just need to be survived.
Season Six, Episode 15 - "Tsunkatse"
Solid As The Rock
Time makes fools of us all, it would seem. Once, this episode was remembered largely for the viewer-bating, stunt-casting that was Dwane "The Rock" Johnson, an over-muscled fighter largely known for his WWE appearances and very little else, at the start of what was mockingly referred to at the time as his "acting career". Other than a couple of minor appearances (unless you want to call a guest-spot on That 70's Show as something other than "minor"), he'd basically done no television and this episode was a handy piece of cross-promotion for the WWE. How were we to know, back in those innocent, halcyon days of the year 2000, that he would go on to be the star of one of the biggest movie franchises the world has ever seen (The Fast And The Furious) and that, far from being a sad little footnote from a wrestler approaching the end of his career and fishing about for something else to do this would, instead, be the start of something that led him to vast fame and fortune. Time, eh?
Still, as we know, I'm all about reviewing in context, and the truth of the matter is that Dwane "The Rock" Johnson (and tellingly, he's credited as simply "The Rock" - neither Dwane nor Johnson get a look in) is barely even in this episode. He gets about one bout with Seven, makes a couple of signature moves, and that's about it. If you didn't know who he was he'd just be another anonymous competitor in the ring and who is then immediately forgotten about. He's not important to this at all, but his presence has had a somewhat distorting view on how this episode has been seen, both because of who he was and who he's become. It needn't though, because functionally his appearance here is basically irrelevant . The problem is that "Tsunkatse", which functions as a sort of inverse of "Memorial" isn't... well, it isn't a bad episode but it's another of Season Six's ho-hum nice try's. If "Memorial" took the idea of conflict and remembrance in deadly earnest, then "Tsunkatse" attempts a different approach to violence, this time a sort of not-very-effective satire on pay-per-view and the rise of on-demand entertainment, the idea of gaining pleasure from watching two competitors beat each other, and more broadly what kind of society would sanction watching violence as a legitimate form of entertainment. Now, lest I start of sounding too negative, I would like to make it clear that, while the satire here doesn't have a lot of bite, there are serious points to be scored for at least making the effort. Back in "The Fight" we were introduced to Chakotay's interest in boxing, and having this followed up here makes this seem like a proper character trait rather than something dropped into one episode to get things going. But in "The Fight", and despite the Doctor at point narrating the list of injuries a boxer could expect to receive, his interest in it as a sport was presented as relatively self-evident. Here there's a real attempt to show another side to violence as competition and if not every satirical blow lands (sorry about that) the mere fact that the episode tries to engage with this helps give it dimension. The whole "forced to fight in the ring" thing is more than a little obvious, as is the fact that Seven would end up battling her mentor, but there are a few moments of real bite, none more effective that the cut when we realize the match being show is a transmission and we cut from the roar of the ringside crowd to a silent, empty ring with just the slap of feet on deck and growled conversations. With the roar of the crowd suddenly gone the scene shifts from an adrenaline-pumping match to what it really is – two people just trying really, really hard to hurt each other. It's the episode's strongest moment.
It's a shame there aren't more scenes like that, because in those moments the script really seems to understand what it's getting at and is able to stick the execution. The attempted satire of on-demand entertainment is prescient, at least, when back then it was cable pay-per-view and now it's anything from YouTube to Netflix. But it's all a bit clumsy really – it's lovely to see Jeffrey Combs in Voyager, of course it is, turning up to do his usual sleazy Uriah Heep impression, and he's just as effective here as he is in DS9 and Enterprise, but the dialogue he's given can be very clunky – all that stuff about imagining how many people will tune in to watch Seven die given how many tuned in to see her injured lacks only a twist from his very silly moustache to complete the pantomime villain act. Mwa-ha-ha-ha. And just as silly is the idea that nobody apparently seems to realize that some of the matches they're watching are to the death. That might be fine as an attempt to up the dramatic stakes of what Seven faces, but it's undermined partly by the fact that the Hirogen has apparently survived nineteen years, and partly by the fact that it just seems vastly improbable. Nobody has twigged that once one fighter is knocked down and then never, ever, ever seen again might indicate more than a few fractured ribs? Really? Ok Our Heroes might not realize – they've only been in orbit for a few days. Or are we being asked to believe that a whole population are willingly watching people fight to the death? Neelix gets an effective Casablanca-esque moment after attempting diplomatic channels (when he relates that the authorities were shocked to discovery gambling, ahem, I mean forced fighting going on in their matches), but the whole thing just seems ridiculous. To take a relevant example – if The Rock were knocked down in a WWE bout, then never seen or heard of again, wouldn't someone notice?
Still, this is a pretty decent outing for Seven, if nothing else. Despite what one might expect the actual physicality of Seven isn't something which has been explored at this point in the show. We've had a few references to her being superior in certain areas (the rings game in "Fair Haven", to take a recent example) but as often as not references to her physicality have been negative rather than positive – the way her technology is slowing failing and exposes the vulnerabilities of what she has now become, separated from the Collective. "Tsunkatse" reverses this to quite some degree, giving her plenty of fight scenes where she gets to show off her physical prowess and skills in the ring, yet it also shows her vulnerabilities in other ways. It's telling that the moment Seven really cuts loose and attacks her Hirogen mentor isn't when he calls her weak, but when he calls her imperfect. That's the insult that lands and that’s the one that drives her fury. Even this distant from the Collective that vulnerability is still something that scares Seven, and that fear drives the fury of her final attack. It's a considered character moment for her, even as it doesn't look like one in the midst of all those punches, but it captures exactly the heart of Seven's anxiety. Yet it’s the final moment, given over to her, that manages to provide her most effective moment, as she wrestles with guilt and shame borne out of fear that she's lost everything she has accomplished over the last few years, only for Tuvok to calmly inform her that in fact her feelings prove the exact opposites. In those moments, "Tsunkatse" finds it's purpose, far away from the punching and yelling of the ring, but instead in quiet moments between two people when it matters the most. This contrast lends unexpected power to the final few moments – the alleged satire of the events we witness fading away, and a moment of real emotional honesty is instead allowed to close the episode out. As is our theme this review, it's a shame there aren’t more moments like this scattered throughout the episode, because they're well done in a way that lets them stand head and shoulders above the rest of the material here. So while "Tsunkatse" is never quite as great as it could be, there's at least enough material to make it forty-five minutes well spent, but they can be occasionally frustrating minutes because of the glimpses of what we could have gotten, had this been just a little more considered. What we have is good but (and here comes the crappy boxing pun you've all been waiting for) it's no knock-out.
Any Other Business:
• Mike Vejar, in the director's chair, does his best with the material he's got, but there's no disguising how much the ring looks like what it is – an inexpensive studio set surrounded by a bunch of extras in alien-of-the-week make-up, with a few flashy disco lights. Some of the fights are very well directed, though.
• The pre-credits sequence is very odd – we get to see a couple of minutes of the fight, then pan round to see B'Elanna and Chakotay watching it, as if this is meant to be surprising. The effect of which is rather spoiled because one of the cuts to the audience before we see B'Elanna and Chakotay is of someone in a Starfleet uniform. It would have been more surprising if there hadn't been anyone else there.
• For the first and only time in the history of Voyager, we get to see B'Elanna sitting in the captain's chair.
• Easy week for Kate Mulgrew, though she does get to sweep in and save the day in a fairly unlikely fasion (unlikely in the scripting sense, I mean).
• Yea it's lovely to see the immediately-identifiable Jeffrey Combs make his only Voyager appearance.
• That final scene between Tuvok and Seven really is terrific – such a highlight, and so well played between Russ and Ryan.
The First Victim Of War Is In Your Pants
So far, the majority of Season Six has had a comparatively light touch. That's not to say that all the episodes have been light in tone – that's obviously not the case – but even when it's engaged with more serious aspects there's been a general deftness to the way episode's have dealt with their themes. That all comes to a crashing end with "Memorial", a terribly serious meditation on the nature of remembrance and how we choose to both honour those who have gone before us, and how we commemorate those who have been lost. "Memorial" is many things, but subtle is not one of them, but it is able to wield it's bluntness in a surprisingly effective manner. The lack of subtlety is replaced instead by an anger which tips over into the characterizations of the regulars, taking the four principal characters here (Neelix, Chakotay, Tom and Harry) and pushing them way out of their familiar comfort zones. What we find, though, is something both entirely different from the norm, and something strangely familiar.
The familiar is yet another episode of Season Six that finds new ways of interrogating what we think of "the past" and "history". The different is the way in which our four leads are really jerked around by their experiences here, and how little is done to sugar-coat what they go for here. In fact we've seen this with Chakotay before – his experiences in "Nemesis" are also of an alien war, and both Chakotay and Beltran are good at delivering this "Vietnam vet" side of his character. I mentioned in "One Small Step" that Beltran is the only (remaining) member of the regular cast who by default underplays, so it's all the more shocking when he does actually snap and lose his temper or yell at someone. Here, he's given plenty of chance to fit back into the military role, and he does so with the same conviction that we've previously seen. But in a way the fact we've seen Chakotay behave like this before only highlights how starkly different the behaviour of the other three are. Harry might be hallucinating when he "kills" the two innocent survivors in the tunnels, but Neelix certainly isn't when he takes Naomi hostage in the kitchen, and nor is Tom when he screams at B'Elanna in their quarters (the second time he's got to do that this season, and it's just as effective and disconcerting here as it was the first time out). Indeed in many ways the scene with Naomi is the key one of the episode, encapsulating everything that's going on – we have a character suffering terribly from PTSD, we have the capture of someone innocent swept along in the conflict, we have an attempt at resolution, and we have an eventual conclusion reached when the pain of the conflict is acknowledged. That scene is the core of the episode writ small, and it's exceedingly effective at encapsulating everything that's going on here, helped no end by what is probably Scarlet Pomers's best performance to date – she seems genuinely afraid – and a great turn by Ethan Phillips as a panicked, terrified Neelix.
One of the best tricks the episode pulls is having a broad circumstance for the action to play out in, without the need to go into a lot of specific details. This broadness of approach means that, rather than defusing the episode into nothing, it instead seems like it could be applicable to multiple situations and makes the feeling of allegory that much stronger. The sketched out details we do get – some colonists need to be evacuated, apparently against their will, and as a result of their reticence to go the evacuation ends in a massacre – could apply to any number of real-world events, everything from the enforced deportations of the colonial eras through to resettlements on the West Bank/Gaza and many more besides, and it's all too often in the news that we hear of civilians getting caught in ideological crossfire. This also allows the experiences the crew go through to be seen from multiple perspectives – some accusing the colonists of starting the trouble, others saying nothing justified what actions were taken – and this is important because often in the heat of such conflicts it really can be very unclear just who is responsible or why. Equally, we see the aftermath, as Janeway witnesses the vaporising of the bodies and demands to know if it were the colonists fault why the evidence is being destroyed. This allows the episode to both have its cake and eat it – it's not entirely clear who started the trouble and there are arguments on both sides, but it's quite clear who ended the trouble, and even they seem to have realized that it's all gone too far (hence the need for a cover-up). By allowing us to see enough detail to understand the events, but not so much that the specificity undermines the allegory, we get a revelation which never cheats the audience by holding back, and never sells short the horror of the events whicih have been seen, regardless of who started it.
And as ever, if you're going to deliver a serious-minded meditation on the nature of conflict (and what's remarkable here is that it's not even especially clear that there's a war going on – this is a conflict alone) then of course it's vital that your script understands how historical perspective can alter interpretations of events. In this, the use of the memorial's synaptic transmitter is especially interesting, because we can assume that the experiences Neelix, Tom, Harry and Chakotay go through here (as well as the rest of the affected crew) would be the same as any other ship that came into range of the transmitter. The transmitter itself is trying to remove the act of interpretation, even as the script lays out the possibility of multiple interpretations. Even more interestingly, it is given to Neelix to really understand what it is that's going on here. He is, after all, someone who comes from a planet devastated by a weapon of mass destruction - one that cost him the life of his sister - and so can understand the need to build a memorial to events more than anyone else on the crew. The key here is the reason – the memorial is being built not out of anger or glorification, but out of a desire to stop an atrocity like this ever happening again. The crew go through terrible trauma here, but the motivation behind what happens to them is held up to be in line with the kind of core belief we expect from Star Trek – that the people who built the memorial were not motivated by revenge or a desire to inflict this pain on others, but instead to try and ensure nobody else ever has to go through such a terrible event. These events are lost to history – somewhere between two and three hundred years – but the power they carry and the message that they speak to is something that cannot be lost, for fear of repetition. Neelix – always one of the most compassionate members of Voyager's regular crew – is the one that really, truly understand this, so of course it's given to him to argue so vehemently that the transmitter cannot simply be switched off (even in the face of Chakotay, who as both a Maquis and a Native American really ought to understand the necessity of learning from forced relocation). He's lived through this pain twice now – the original events on Rinax, and what he experiences here – and is better placed than anyone to know how such things cannot simply be forgotten simply because remembering them is inconvenient or painful (another excellently subtle piece of writing, equating both the physical pain and the trauma of PTSD with the mental pain and desire to shy away from hard truths). Of course remembering traumatic events is painful. They should be painful, because it's through that pain that we gain understanding – it's how we progress. It won't be an easy path, because the path to progress is never easy, but it's still always worth walking. Because in one way, what this episode is arguing is one of the simplest rules of history that there is: those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.
Any Other Business:
• Following the lightweight "Virtuoso" it's remarkable how straight and serious "Memorial" is, and a testament to how flexible Voyager remains that watching the two side by side doesn't feel tonally inconsistent at all.
• Considering that we're back in the Garden Centre Of Conflict and a few stock ship sets, this manages to feel extremely claustrophobic, thanks to some great direction from Allan Kroeker.
• Some real praise for Garrett Wang here too – he's really excellent in this, especially during his big scene in the tunnel when he panics and ends up killing the civilians. Harry on the back foot – still always so much better.
• Saying that, everyone's great here, and fun though Tuvok's Betty Davis is (see last week's Big Eyeroll Of Stupidity) it's also nice to see him play straight as well, as he does here in a relatively minor but effective role.
• Yes for the second time Tom gets to really let loose at B'Elanna, to great effect, and his heartbroken, "I'm sorry" immediately thereafter is very affecting.
• If there's any problem here (and broadly speaking there isn't – this episode is a real lost gem to be honest) it's maybe a bit of a shame the script feels the need to widen out the trauma to half the crew, rather than keeping the focus more tightly on the original four that went on the survey mission. Though Mulgrew is typically great as she accuses the soldiers of covering up evidence, the scene would be even more powerful if it were genocide-survivor Neelix that got to deliver the contemptuous, condemning speech about trying to cover up an atrocity.
• It's also a real mark of the power of this episode that there's no happy ending, and the Doctor can do nothing to cure the people who have suffered the PTSD, only help them through it. Just as it should be – there's no quick fixes in a situation like this, and some things just need to be survived.
Season Six, Episode 15 - "Tsunkatse"
Solid As The Rock
Time makes fools of us all, it would seem. Once, this episode was remembered largely for the viewer-bating, stunt-casting that was Dwane "The Rock" Johnson, an over-muscled fighter largely known for his WWE appearances and very little else, at the start of what was mockingly referred to at the time as his "acting career". Other than a couple of minor appearances (unless you want to call a guest-spot on That 70's Show as something other than "minor"), he'd basically done no television and this episode was a handy piece of cross-promotion for the WWE. How were we to know, back in those innocent, halcyon days of the year 2000, that he would go on to be the star of one of the biggest movie franchises the world has ever seen (The Fast And The Furious) and that, far from being a sad little footnote from a wrestler approaching the end of his career and fishing about for something else to do this would, instead, be the start of something that led him to vast fame and fortune. Time, eh?
Still, as we know, I'm all about reviewing in context, and the truth of the matter is that Dwane "The Rock" Johnson (and tellingly, he's credited as simply "The Rock" - neither Dwane nor Johnson get a look in) is barely even in this episode. He gets about one bout with Seven, makes a couple of signature moves, and that's about it. If you didn't know who he was he'd just be another anonymous competitor in the ring and who is then immediately forgotten about. He's not important to this at all, but his presence has had a somewhat distorting view on how this episode has been seen, both because of who he was and who he's become. It needn't though, because functionally his appearance here is basically irrelevant . The problem is that "Tsunkatse", which functions as a sort of inverse of "Memorial" isn't... well, it isn't a bad episode but it's another of Season Six's ho-hum nice try's. If "Memorial" took the idea of conflict and remembrance in deadly earnest, then "Tsunkatse" attempts a different approach to violence, this time a sort of not-very-effective satire on pay-per-view and the rise of on-demand entertainment, the idea of gaining pleasure from watching two competitors beat each other, and more broadly what kind of society would sanction watching violence as a legitimate form of entertainment. Now, lest I start of sounding too negative, I would like to make it clear that, while the satire here doesn't have a lot of bite, there are serious points to be scored for at least making the effort. Back in "The Fight" we were introduced to Chakotay's interest in boxing, and having this followed up here makes this seem like a proper character trait rather than something dropped into one episode to get things going. But in "The Fight", and despite the Doctor at point narrating the list of injuries a boxer could expect to receive, his interest in it as a sport was presented as relatively self-evident. Here there's a real attempt to show another side to violence as competition and if not every satirical blow lands (sorry about that) the mere fact that the episode tries to engage with this helps give it dimension. The whole "forced to fight in the ring" thing is more than a little obvious, as is the fact that Seven would end up battling her mentor, but there are a few moments of real bite, none more effective that the cut when we realize the match being show is a transmission and we cut from the roar of the ringside crowd to a silent, empty ring with just the slap of feet on deck and growled conversations. With the roar of the crowd suddenly gone the scene shifts from an adrenaline-pumping match to what it really is – two people just trying really, really hard to hurt each other. It's the episode's strongest moment.
It's a shame there aren't more scenes like that, because in those moments the script really seems to understand what it's getting at and is able to stick the execution. The attempted satire of on-demand entertainment is prescient, at least, when back then it was cable pay-per-view and now it's anything from YouTube to Netflix. But it's all a bit clumsy really – it's lovely to see Jeffrey Combs in Voyager, of course it is, turning up to do his usual sleazy Uriah Heep impression, and he's just as effective here as he is in DS9 and Enterprise, but the dialogue he's given can be very clunky – all that stuff about imagining how many people will tune in to watch Seven die given how many tuned in to see her injured lacks only a twist from his very silly moustache to complete the pantomime villain act. Mwa-ha-ha-ha. And just as silly is the idea that nobody apparently seems to realize that some of the matches they're watching are to the death. That might be fine as an attempt to up the dramatic stakes of what Seven faces, but it's undermined partly by the fact that the Hirogen has apparently survived nineteen years, and partly by the fact that it just seems vastly improbable. Nobody has twigged that once one fighter is knocked down and then never, ever, ever seen again might indicate more than a few fractured ribs? Really? Ok Our Heroes might not realize – they've only been in orbit for a few days. Or are we being asked to believe that a whole population are willingly watching people fight to the death? Neelix gets an effective Casablanca-esque moment after attempting diplomatic channels (when he relates that the authorities were shocked to discovery gambling, ahem, I mean forced fighting going on in their matches), but the whole thing just seems ridiculous. To take a relevant example – if The Rock were knocked down in a WWE bout, then never seen or heard of again, wouldn't someone notice?
Still, this is a pretty decent outing for Seven, if nothing else. Despite what one might expect the actual physicality of Seven isn't something which has been explored at this point in the show. We've had a few references to her being superior in certain areas (the rings game in "Fair Haven", to take a recent example) but as often as not references to her physicality have been negative rather than positive – the way her technology is slowing failing and exposes the vulnerabilities of what she has now become, separated from the Collective. "Tsunkatse" reverses this to quite some degree, giving her plenty of fight scenes where she gets to show off her physical prowess and skills in the ring, yet it also shows her vulnerabilities in other ways. It's telling that the moment Seven really cuts loose and attacks her Hirogen mentor isn't when he calls her weak, but when he calls her imperfect. That's the insult that lands and that’s the one that drives her fury. Even this distant from the Collective that vulnerability is still something that scares Seven, and that fear drives the fury of her final attack. It's a considered character moment for her, even as it doesn't look like one in the midst of all those punches, but it captures exactly the heart of Seven's anxiety. Yet it’s the final moment, given over to her, that manages to provide her most effective moment, as she wrestles with guilt and shame borne out of fear that she's lost everything she has accomplished over the last few years, only for Tuvok to calmly inform her that in fact her feelings prove the exact opposites. In those moments, "Tsunkatse" finds it's purpose, far away from the punching and yelling of the ring, but instead in quiet moments between two people when it matters the most. This contrast lends unexpected power to the final few moments – the alleged satire of the events we witness fading away, and a moment of real emotional honesty is instead allowed to close the episode out. As is our theme this review, it's a shame there aren’t more moments like this scattered throughout the episode, because they're well done in a way that lets them stand head and shoulders above the rest of the material here. So while "Tsunkatse" is never quite as great as it could be, there's at least enough material to make it forty-five minutes well spent, but they can be occasionally frustrating minutes because of the glimpses of what we could have gotten, had this been just a little more considered. What we have is good but (and here comes the crappy boxing pun you've all been waiting for) it's no knock-out.
Any Other Business:
• Mike Vejar, in the director's chair, does his best with the material he's got, but there's no disguising how much the ring looks like what it is – an inexpensive studio set surrounded by a bunch of extras in alien-of-the-week make-up, with a few flashy disco lights. Some of the fights are very well directed, though.
• The pre-credits sequence is very odd – we get to see a couple of minutes of the fight, then pan round to see B'Elanna and Chakotay watching it, as if this is meant to be surprising. The effect of which is rather spoiled because one of the cuts to the audience before we see B'Elanna and Chakotay is of someone in a Starfleet uniform. It would have been more surprising if there hadn't been anyone else there.
• For the first and only time in the history of Voyager, we get to see B'Elanna sitting in the captain's chair.
• Easy week for Kate Mulgrew, though she does get to sweep in and save the day in a fairly unlikely fasion (unlikely in the scripting sense, I mean).
• Yea it's lovely to see the immediately-identifiable Jeffrey Combs make his only Voyager appearance.
• That final scene between Tuvok and Seven really is terrific – such a highlight, and so well played between Russ and Ryan.