Season 6 Ep 16 / 17 "Collective" / "Spirit Folk"

Season Six, Episode 16 – "Collective"


Green A Little Green Of Me


It seems strange to decide to start a review of an episode which introduces a bunch of Borg kiddywinks for no readily apparent reason by saying, "well, that actually went quite well", but you know what? That actually went quite well. The Borg kids (Borg-ettes? Petit Borg? Borg Light? I Can't Believe It's Not Borg-er?) are mostly presented as a threat, but the reason this works well is because everything is seen through Seven's lens on both humanity and the Borg, rather than from the children's' perspective. Seven's return to humanity is complete by this stage in the show – that's not to say that she doesn't still have a lot to learn, of course, and she still has some degree of emotional development to go through, but the days of her wanting to be part of the Collective, or betraying Janeway and the crew, are gone ("Dark Frontier" more or less hammered the final nail into that particular coffin). But the growing she does still have to do is expanded on here in a relatively subtle way. This is really about addressing Seven as a woman more than anything else, and in this using the surrogate children as a way to engage with her maternal side, without some obvious sub-pregnancy analogy ("Elogium") or Seska-esque DNA theft, is both subtle and incredibly effective. I'd hesitate to call this feminist, but there's no question that this is an expansion of Seven's female nature and that it specifically addresses the female side of her, rather than her humanity in general.

The most significant scene in this regard is given relatively little emphasis and allowed to stand on its own, and it's the one the Borg maturation begins to fail and the baby inside almost dies. It's incredibly important that this scene isn't over emphasized, because if the moment tips over into out-and-out melodrama, as these scenes are so often wont to do, then this isn’t going to work – it's going to end up looking emotionally manipulative. Seven walks through the scene with a degree of urgency, and she responds naturally to the threat the baby is under as anyone would, doing what she can to save it, cycling through one potential solution after another until eventually the baby is delivered to the Doctor's care and survives. Ryan plays this scene absolutely perfectly, and it's around this delivery that everything works – she gives a performance which is urgent, thusly re-enforcing the danger the baby is in, but she also slightly underplays it, which gives a naturalism to the performance and is what stops the whole thing tipping over into melodrama. Seven's compassion is on display, as indeed is her efficiency in doing all she can to rescue the child, but everything is written as being natural and self-evident, rather than in need of forced musical cues or more overt dialogue to tell the audience what they should be feeling, and the camera is relatively stable, only moving to take in the unfolding scene, rather than to (over) emphasize proceedings. Thus we get to see Seven's developing compassion, her maternal and protective instincts, and her ability to do something about the situation. The lightness of touch masks a genuine expansion of her character, using her established character traits (efficiency, determination) to layer in something additional, and allowing us to glimpse her continuing emotional development. In this regard we also get so see what use Naomi has been to Seven – while Naomi hasn’t always been deployed successfully in individual episodes (though she sometimes has - "Dragon's Teeth", for example), the relationship between them over the past season or so gives an anchor to the idea that Seven has already been developing more protective and maternal instincts, so when we see her here moving further in that direction during "Collective" this isn't something which is unprecedented – quite the reverse. We've seen the roots of this develop slowly over the season, and now we see them flower as she fights to save the baby.

Her time with Naomi also means that, because she's accustomed to dealing with children (well, a child), she can find a way to speak to them and reach them, using both her Borg and human side. This is also important because the children need to be enough of a threat that Seven can't just shut them down or turn them off, but vulnerable enough that they can be reached through means other than technological. They also need to not be annoying, so the audience actually has a reason to care about what happens to them. Remarkably for the inclusion of children in Star Trek, this last aspect more or less holds, although it helps that they remain predominantly Borg for the bulk of the episode, and their threat level is convincing enough to render the need to reach them emotionally a viable solution. It's also interesting to see another parallel here – back in "Survival Instinct" we saw a pre-Voyager Seven separated from the Collective respond in exactly the same way the children do here – with fear of what they are becoming, certainty that the Borg will rescue them, and conviction that what they are doing is the correct course of action. So if anyone can understand what it is they're going through, it's Seven, because her reactions in the same situation were identical. The understanding she's able to broach with all but on of the children is therefore reflective of what she's drawn from her own experiences – understanding the fear means that she knows the correct things to say to reach the an understanding with them – and how she's been able to integrate those experiences into her day-to-day life. What she's gone through isn't just a series of strung together evens but something which is actually now amounting to more than the sum of the parts, and she's able to use the experience of her own trauma as a source of strength to reach out and help others. In Season Four, we had Seven's recovery from trauma as one of her most compelling character aspects, but now, two seasons on, we now see a broadening of both her character and her response to trauma in a way that intelligently moves our understanding of her as a character. And of course there's the obvious parallel with Janeway as well – Janeway always held maternal instincts towards the crew in general, but towards Seven in particular with their mother/daughter relationship, and now we see Seven following in Janeway's maternal footsteps (and all this achieved without some lazy maiden-mother-crone cliché of womanhood). Janeway always hoped that Seven would develop in her own image – now she really has.

The other significant thing that "Collective" does is expand Voyager's crew compliment by adding the children. For a show one now less than one and a half seasons from its conclusion, this does reflect a measure of ambition – rather than just depending on what's worked before we see new, and potentially destabilizing, elements still being introduced. Though to an extent it's difficult not to wish this had been carried through via the remaining crew of the Equinox, the children's inclusion as part of the semi-regular cast means that we retain a mirror for Seven's developing maternal side, which at least gives them a function beyond "stick some kids on the ship for some reason" (though it's hard to deny there's a bit of that as well). In some ways "Collective" is to the Borg children what "The Gift" was to Seven – the episode in which they were introduced but which we don't spend a lot of time exploring their human side because that will emerge at a later point. This suggests that the ambition of adding the children is going to be something which is measured rather than rushed, just as Seven's introduction was. It's going to take a little time before we can conclude how successful that way of bringing them on board will be, but for now we at least get to see a show that isn't resting on its laurels and is still prepared to take a chance on shaking things up a bit. While "Collective" will, understandably, always be remembered as the episode which introduced the Borg children, that really is only part of the story here, and it deserves to be remembered much more for the intelligent, understanding way in which it expands Seven's womanhood. For that alone, this episode really is something of a success.



Any Other Business:

• So yea... Borg children. They're mostly pretty good here, with Icheb being the obvious standout. Nice "wobbly voice" on his vocal sub-processor too, before Seven repairs it.

• Fairly cool opening scene, with Harry, Tom, Neelix and Chakotay hanging out playing cards, before Tom's jaw drops at seeing a Cube outside the Flyer.

• Beyond Seven and femininity, the other thing that makes this episode work is that, while it never feels too threatening, there's certainly a fair amount of tension, and some great shots (like seeing the Delta Flyer hanging inside the Cube while Harry peers out) make the episode feel a bit more expansive than it probably is.

• It's been a long time coming, but Harry is back in full peril monkey mode here.

• The death of First is a bit perfunctory, or at least predictable. He's unable to make the leap that Seven did to reclaim his... well not humanity, but whatever species he was from.

• And I guess we can assume the Borg cube really did explode, though we're not even given a bit of stock footage as proof.

• Sweet final scene, but why would the Borg have kept "limited biographical data" on the drones they've assimilated?



Season Six, Episode 18 - "Spirit Folk"


The only way to get through this episode


It seems I have unintentionally deceived you. Way back, when discussing "Once Upon A Time" I might have suggested we were past the worst episode of Voyager and that we would never again be presented with such obviously poor material. Ohhhhh boy was I wrong. "Spirit Folk" is... well these are redemptive reviews and so on and so forth, but, well, this is basically irredeemable. What an absolute pile of shit. A vaguely pastoral tale of deeply patronising Irish stereotypes, patterned after gentle-and-tedious rural dramas in the Ballykissangel vein, "Spirit Folk" somehow manages the neat trick of being even more catastrophically dreadful than "Fair Haven". I mean, I think I did a reasonable job of at least trying to find something in "Fair Haven" that made it not totally, soul-shudderingly awful, even as it was never actually good, and at least in giving us a window into Janeway's loneliness it had a bit of character work to ground its general idiocy. Not here.

It's hard to know where to begin, really. But I have to choose somewhere, so let's start with the accents, because why not? Is it possible that the writer and/or casting director for this episode had never actually heard an Irish accent before? Because if they had there seems to be precious little evidence of it on screen. Really, I know that accents aren't easy to do and that getting together a bunch of actors who had probably never worked together before, doubtless had little rehearsal time, and then expecting them to do all roughly the same accent is a bit of a stretch for a workday, single-episode shot like this. But surely they could have managed better than this? Seamus, as played – if that's the right description – by Richard Riehie, is especially lamentable, which is a problem as, other than Michael Sullivan, he's the biggest guest role by some distance. He sounds like he's swallowing ball-bearings while trying to gargle his lines out, and it's just physically impossible to take his character seriously. Not just in terms of his actual spoken lines or characterization, but in terms of his very existence – there are Church Hall Under-12 Am Dram societies than can probably boast better performances (and less wobbly accents) than this. That was true back in "Fair Haven" as well, but he only had a small handful of lines and wasn't expected to basically carry an entire sub-plot on his own. What makes this worse is that there actually appears to be a couple of genuine accents in the mix somewhere at the back, as if a couple of actually-Irish people got cast by mistake, and it just throws the bad accents even more into focus. It undermines almost every character at every turn and renders the whole endeavour insurmountably difficult to take seriously.

And we have a return to "comedy". Not comedy, but "comedy". Straining so hard to be funny you can practically hear the seams ripping, not a single gag, joke, "funny" line or routine lands here. It's excruciating. Haha, the Irish are mostly stupid peasants and think magic is real! Harry kisses a cow! What merry japes these are! Oh fuck off. Look, I know this is meant to be a light-hearted episode, but the difference between this and, again, "Fair Haven" is that, despite attempting a bit of threat, "Fair Haven" knew its role was to be inconsequential and thus it was. It was amiable, and if not great then at least pleasant enough in a vaguely-Irish-screensaver sort of way. Here, by attempting to be funny and failing, "Spirit Folk" takes away one of the tiny number of redeeming features "Fair Haven" had, and that leaves us with... nothing. The slight lightness of touch that episode had is gone, replaced be leaden comedy that goes nowhere. Indeed, back in "Fair Haven" I suggested that perhaps that episode would have been better off dropping the space weather material and just get on with being a light, no-stakes story. Here, it seems they took my advice. I withdraw it forthwith, because without the space weather stuff it means we get to spend more time in the town of Fair Haven and that Is. Not. A Good. Thing. Come back ion storms, all is forgiven!

It's bad enough that the Irish clichés are brought back at Force 10 - somehow even more straightforward and patronising than their last outing - but we also have string of incredibly tedious Star Trek clichés thrown into the mix as well. So a character become self-aware (just like Moriarty in TNG), and the holodeck safeties go off-line (just like... well basically every holodeck story in TNG) and they have to mount a rescue, and on and on and on... It's not just that we've seen this material before, it's that it's presented in a completely unchallenged way. If there had been some attempts to subvert the obvious clichés (and there are enough here to choose from) then their inclusion could have been justified on the grounds that the episode was trying to do something interesting with them, but nope. They just stand as they are, laboured and predictable and utterly uninteresting. It was sweetly delightful when holodeck safeties actually worked in "Pathfinder" (cliché subverted!) but here? Same old same old. The intersection of technology and a more primitive society actually could have worked, and the fact that there is at least one person who could see beyond the immediate limitations of his own perspective suggests that there could have been at least something in the material that would have lent a more progressive angle to what we see here. And in this, Sullivan is of course the obvious candidate. His brief tour of the ship with Janeway is actually at least a little charming and suggests that an allegory – that progress is linked to the ability see beyond your own horizons, regardless of how frightening that can sometimes be – might have provided fruitful ground for an alternative perspective from "Fair Haven", which is pretty unchallenging in its presentation of the town and its people. That would give a reason for a sequel to exist. This does not.

So is there anything worth redeeming in this episode? Any single aspect that might be worth exploring? Nope. Well, that's not quite true. Kate Mulgrew is better here than she was in "Fair Haven", finding a more sure-footed balance between the slightly winsome aspects on display in the former episode and the more actively attracted mode she's in here. Her scenes with Fintan McKowen have a relaxed ease about which, as last time, doesn't exactly suggest the passions of Irish literature but at least manages to look like they genuinely do get on together, which helps. Of course they have fewer scenes here, so this covers less ground than before but still – it's something. And Mulgrew gets the more playful side of Janeway better this time out as well – all that "my boyfriend's got a malfunction" stuff on the bridge is pretty good, and she gets a couple of massive eye-rolls as well, which work. It's not worth watching this episode to see the performance – it's not that good – but at least it stops things sinking to "Parturition" levels, though not by much. Because in truth I can't think of a single other thing which is better here than it was in "Fair Haven" and "Fair Haven" was rubbish. The Doctor gets a couple of moments which play to his more sanctimonious side, and in this casting him as a fire-and-brimstone priest is mildly amusing, with Picardo delivering a suitably turned-up-to-11 performance to match. But this also strips him of his father-confessor role which was one of the only things that really worked in "Fair Haven", especially since his big "SINNERS!!!" speeches here don't actually achieve anything, either when first introduced or when he tries to use them to rescue the Tom and Harry from the church. So another wasted opportunity. And oh yes, Tom and Harry, who are the two nominal lead characters here. I should say something about them, but it's very hard to know what. McNeill's Ok as Tom, but he's given virtually nothing to work with and slouches through the role. And Harry is just crap. Wang has been getting progressively better since about "Demon" - not by big leaps and bounds, but just in little details that seem to suggest he's unclenched in the role a bit, and though he remains better when Harry's under pressure (even if he returned to peril monkey mode in "Collective" Wang does pretty good with what he's given there) he's definitely gotten better at delivering the other material as well. So it's incredibly disheartening to see him slide back into his worst tendencies here, lazily drawling out one line after another as if wondering how long it is until he can get off set and go do something more interesting (which, given the episode, I can't really blame him for). Nothing about Harry works here, and the whole kissing-the-cow thing... well the less said the better. Really, this is just garbage, I cannot think of a single other thing to say about it, and I don't want to waste one second more of my life thinking about it. Fuck off, "Spirit Folk".



Any Other Business:

• I mentioned during "Fair Haven" that, though rubbish, it wasn't even in my ten worst episodes of Voyager. This is. Around the number 2 spot, in fact.

• Really. Just thinking about "Spirit Folk" makes me angry. We have a show where we can go almost anywhere and explore the vastness of space and this is the shit we're expected to put up with? It's just insulting.

• There's a hilarious moment in the pre-credits sequence – the only one in the entire episode and it's entirely unintentional – when Tom tells Seamus he's going to Castle O'Dell, and Seamus looks "up" as if glancing at the castle. It is, naturally, entirely out of shot and never seen once.

• Seamus really is awful. One of the worst performances in the whole of Voyager.

• But then, other than McKowen, who's merely decent, the entire guest cast are awful as well.

• You'd think comparing Janeway to a "Faerie Queen" would get at least a slight smile. But you would be wrong.

• Apparently included just so that everyone in the regular cast gets a line this week, Seven and Neelix are in precisely one scene during this episode. Lucky them.

• At one point B'Elanna asks why they don't just pull the plug, and the reply is that the program would be lost forever, which makes no sense. If you run a game on your PC or console and literally pull the plug from that wall does that mean you can never, ever play the game again? Of course not. Or did Tom forget to press CTRL-S? Either way, if it gets rid of Fair Haven I'm all for it, whether it makes sense or not.

• We will never return to Fair Haven. So that's one good thing to come out of this shoddy, pathetic, lazy, worthless excuse for an episode.