Season Six Summary S6.26/7/01 "Unimatrix Zero"
Jun 2, 2016 1:27:16 GMT -5
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Post by Prole Hole on Jun 2, 2016 1:27:16 GMT -5
Season Six Summary
Season Six Cast
At the end of the Season Five summary I asked the question if Season Six could make the same, strong showing as Seasons Five and Four have managed. Sadly, the answer is no. Season Six is the weakest season of Voyager since Season Two. That's a bald statement to make, but watching these twenty-six episodes it's obviously true. That's not, to be clear, a synonym for it being either bad or as bad as Season Two, but there's no denying that that Season Six just doesn't have the same flare that the three seasons which precede it do have. Season Three was bright, primary-coloured action-adventure. Season Four was an often grim meditation on trauma and responsibility. Season Five delved into character in an unprecedented way, while experimenting and pushing the boundaries of what the show could do. And Season Six... is there. It does have a single, unifying theme – history – which I'll get to in a moment, but the issues here are less to do with the unification of purpose and just a sense of ennui. There's not a lot of direction to Season Six, and it often feels more than a little untethered as a result. Then there's the repetition, whereby a lot of the episodes in the second half of the season feel like they're covering the same ground as the first half. Sometimes this is relatively explicit - "Spirit Folk" is obviously written as a direct, deliberate sequel to "Fair Haven" - and sometimes not - "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" and "Virtuoso" hit almost exactly the same notes (sorry) as each other, just as different points in the same season (and "LIfe Line" isn't a million miles away from either of those either). That leans into the feeling of uniformity this season has, and demonstraes a lack of variety.
Still, as I've repeatedly mentioned throughout this season and the thing which gives Season Six much more bite than, say, Season Two, is its obsession with history. History is everywhere in this season, and the embrace of a multiplicity of different approaches and perspectives on what history is and how history functions is new a direction for Voyager to strike out in. That the season is able to tackle personal history ("Fury", "Barge of The Dead"), Big Picture history ("Blink Of An Eye", "Memorial"), meta-history ("Live Fast And Prosper"), historiography ("One Small Step") and so much more shows a willingness to engage with a single concept and subject it to analysis across the whole span of the season to see how relevant these differing approaches are to the show both textually as it affects the characters and paratextually as it affects Voyager the show and Star Trek in general. Not all of these episodes are knock-outs, but they all have something of significance to add to the debate, and that gives them a reason to be even when they're not the strongest of episodes. If history is going to be engaged with as an abstract concept then its necessary for the episodes which do this to really understand what it is they're meditating on, and in this, at least, Season Six is almost always successful. It may have problems in others ways, but the engagement with history is never an issue. It is this thematic underpinning that helps gives Season Six a much stronger angle than Season Two and provides a through-line for the whole twenty-six episodes which the season badly needs.
Because, lets be honest, there's a lot of weak material here. I mean, obviously the Space Irish are crap, and the first two episodes of the season badly misunderstand what it is to be an episode of Voyager, rather than Generic Star Trek Episodetm. But there's not a lot of weight to much of the material, and even though it's rarely bad ("Spirit Folk" aside, obviously) it too often content to just be good enough. That's especially frustrating because when this season does knock it out of the park it does it so well the ball practically lands in the next field. "Muse" is almost without parallel and shows just how its possible to be inventive and smart and intelligent without the needs for big special effects and space battles. "One Small Step" manages to be history, be about history, deal with character growth and plausibly be the beginning of the Seven/Chakotay romance of next season, all in the space of forty-five minutes. Even "Dragon's Teeth" proves that there's plenty of mileage left in Voyager's action-adventure aesthetic, assuming the scripts pay enough attention to detail and don't just go for flash-bang-wallop for the sake of it. Yet too often these gems are lost in the rough and end up surrounded by material that is just shown to be wanting by comparison. Sometimes these mis-steps are understandable - for all its flaws "Fair Haven" is an attempt to deal with Janeway's loneliness in a way that simply hasn't been tried up to this point, and though it's in no way a good Voyager episode, "Barge Of The Dead" makes a sincere, proper attempt to interrogate the past of B'Elanna and what it means to her as a character. Yes they fall short of their target but at least they obviously had a target, and that's a lot more than you can say for Season Two's ramshackle collection of whatever's.
It's also maybe an obvious point, but there's something else Season Six lacks and it's this – there's no two-parter here. The season starts, trots its way through twenty four episodes (obviously the first and last episodes are each one half of two-parters), then stops again. That means that, whereas in previous seasons there's been a big moment to lead up to and away from, here everything just proceeds at basically the same pace for the entire run of the season, then stops again. Season Five's "Dark Frontier" isn't the best two-parter Voyager has ever had, but it provides a nice dividing line between the character work of the first half and the experimentalism of the second. Season Four has two two-parters, "Year Of Hell" (which is the best two-parter Voyager has ever had, or at least one of them) and "The Killing Game", which both take different approaches to a similar standpoint, viewing it from different angles. These all fulfil different functions within their respective seasons, but in broader terms they also provide an anchor for the season, something which allows some kind of definite statement about what is, or will be, going on. That's what Season Six really misses – any definite sense that there's more happening than just a bunch of episodes. The slender, tentative contact with Earth falteringly begins to provide this and gives a slight sensation that the end might be in sight, but it's only two episodes so there's not quite enough there for this to function (though we'll see how well it can function in Season Seven). "Dragon's Teeth" was going to be the two-parter, and it's a great shame that it got compressed down to one, because though the end result of that episode is excellent, there's no shaking the feeling that the season as a whole would have benefited it from it being two, and it would have helped (given that it also has a lot to say about history, both personal and in terms of society) to provide some definition and focus for what goes on around it.
This absence couldn't have come at a worse time for Voyager. As I mentioned during the review for "Equinox" Voyager is now the only branch of the franchise being broadcast, and that means it carries a certain weight of expectations. DS9's final season is pretty divisive but there's no denying that, both critically and in fan circles, the show was, and remains, extremely highly regarded (and quite rightly so, of course). And so naturally once it comes to an end it makes sense that fans of Star Trek are going to pop over to the sister show to see what's going on. And what do they get? This largely average, unremarkable season of episodes that absolute compounds the party line of what Voyager is seen as being – perfectly competent but largely unremarkable. In some ways this is just as damaging as the gratingly miserable lows of Season Two because, had people switched on and found the quality of any of the last three seasons then the perception of what Voyager could be would be quite different. These hypothetical viewers would have found a show firing on all cylinders, delivering episode after episode of interesting, engaging, challenging material. Instead what they get is fucking "Spirit Folk". No wonder people looked down on this show. So yes, there's no way that this season can carry that weight of expectation. Maybe those expectations are unfair – DS9 isn't just great Star Trek, it's one of the great sci-fi shows of all time, and any show is going to have trouble measuring up to that – but it doesn't really matter because the expectations are there anyway, so it's almost as if this season didn't even try. The good episodes are stunning, but the mediocre ones dominate. The engagement with history is genuinely fascinating, but it needs to come in a stronger run of episodes for it to really have the kind of impact it needs to. This all sounds quite negative, and that's maybe just a little unfair as well – with one notable, obvious exception there's little here that's egregiously abysmal. But really – this season needed to be so much better and it just isn't. We're into the last gasp of the show now, and it will be interesting to see if the final season can pull it all back together again. Here's hoping.
Season Six, Episode 26 / Season Seven, Episode 1 - "Unimatrix Zero"
Suspended In Gaffa
Around about the halfway point of the second episode there is a scene between Susanna Thompson as the Borg Queen and Kate Mulgrew as Janeway. It is utterly electric, two predators circling each other, furiously trying to work out who will strike first, who can gain the tactical advantage. Everything in this moment is exactly as this kind of scene should be played, and it carries the same visceral charge as it did the last time these two faced off against each other. That was back in "Dark Frontier" when they fought over their adopted daughter, Seven, with each woman laying claim to her. Here they fight over the abstract idea-space of Unimatrix Zero, a matrix (in both the Doctor Who and "… Starring Keanu Reeves" senses of the word) where drones can retain their individuality while unconscious, a symbolic stand-in for the liberation that Voyager hopes to bring to the Collective and for the individuality that the Federation values in opposition to the Borg's monomaniacal psudo-Communism. Every single second of this scene, and indeed every scene where Mulgrew and Thompson share time together, is both a magnificent demonstration of Voyager's female-centric approach to character and conflict, and straightforwardly brilliant drama. It is everything a conflict between ideologies stated by implacable enemies should be.
Nothing else in these two episodes comes close to being this good. The very fact of the quality of these scenes highlights just how flat much of this story is, in fact. The second episode is substantially better than the first one which starts, toddles along for forty-five minutes, reaches an allegedly "dramatic" climax, then stops. The second episode feels like it at least has some stakes and some drama, but most of the first is just exposition to get us to that big climax, with much of the rest of the time spent trying, with limited success, to convince us why any of this might be important. As I've observed a number of times across a whole range of different episode types, both World War II and Cold War stories continue to hold a relevant place in Star Trek's history, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. Given the original show's origins during the Cold War (many of the cast and crew served during World War II) this absolutely makes sense. Sometimes those parallels are made obvious - "The Killing Game" literalizes the World War II aspects about as directly as is possible – and sometimes less so – the creeping paranoia of something like "Resistance" suggesting the Stasi as much as aliens from another world. These kinds of story, in other words, represent a certain kind of Star Trek archetype, and we find them across all branches of the franchise. To an extent "Unimatrix Zero" fits into both these archetypes. The nature of Unimatrix Zero itself is analogous to a French Resistance cell hiding in some village (more Secret Army than Allo, Allo at least, and Janeway explicitly references them as a "resistance"), and the Queen's attempts to hunt down the "subversives" within the Collective suggest Cold War purges of exactly the type the KGB or Stasi carried out, in the mould of a Le Carre thriller. This is fruitful territory for both Star Trek in general and Voyager in particular to cover, because both speak to the history of the show and both archetypes are near-infinitely flexible ways of telling a story.
The problem lies in the story's inability to pick a team and play it through to the end. The Cold War aspects of the story are well handled, with the Queen taking the ultimate scorched-earth approach to rooting out the subversives in her Communist paradise, but there's relatively little time spent on it, and much of it is either Susanna Thompson talking to herself, or the Borg Queen making straw-man arguments to Janeway. The resistance storyline, which embodies the World War Ii aspects, gets the most screen-time and we get to spend a fair amount of time in Unimatrix Zero itself, but this then becomes a problem too – Unimatrix Zero isn't especially compelling, and neither are the characters that populate it. Ohh look, a growly Klingon who stamps about the place in stock costumes and make-up! Eh. A couple of children frolicking carelessly about the place as a clumsy symbol of childhood innocence stolen by the Borg! Eh. A wet-as-you-like love interest for Seven! Eh. There's a lot of "eh" in Unimatrix Zero, and not a lot else. Part of the problem is that Unimatrix Zero never convinces as a location – either a real-world environment or a computer-simulated landscape – and that makes an already abstract concept stretch to breaking point. This ought to either be a literalized location (and some location shooting might have helped here) or swung in the other direction and gone for something a bit more daring, like a Tron-equse, intentionally-digital and artificial environment. What we have instead is another outing to the Garden Centre Of Doom, where it appears for all the world like a few Borg have popped in to pick up some compost and maybe a nice ficus tree to brighten up their alcove. This is a place that we as the audience are invited to really care about, but there's zero imagination put into realizing it and it ends up looking like every other set we get when the money's run out and they can't afford to visit a strip of California desert. It's just so normal, and that makes it almost impossible to engage with, especially since the people we find there are so startlingly unremarkable. If the location isn't in synch with the concepts that underlie it, and the people don't seem worth the bother, then how are the audience supposed to invest in what actually happens there? Especially when what does happens there, at least for the first episode, is just Seven turning up to have a bunch of stuff explained at her. There's no sense that the World War II or Cold War aspects of the script have any bearing, and that lack of ability to understand or engage with its own core concepts is hugely undermining to the episode, even at it seems that these aspects are exactly what the script is going for.
Still, one thing you can say for "Unimatrix Zero" is that, for all that the location itself is a bust, elsewhere the production is generally excellent. There's some lovely effects work which, contrary to my usual stance, I'm going to draw attention to, just to show how far we've come. Of particular note is the shot where the Borg have acquired Voyager's access codes, open fire, and blow a chunk out of the forward section. It looks, frankly, magnificent, and here (at least) we get some real tension and drama as the production is able to deliver some really sharp moments as Voyager runs like hell in the opposite direction. It's another case of the effects working to really support the ideas the script holds, because for the rest of the story Voyager is functioning like a submarine, mostly lit in darkness, just barely out of range of the ship its hunting, and desperately trying to effect repairs. In other words, it's doing a Das Boot, which is an excellent source to draw from if you're going for the whole World War II vibe, and the effects work here really help to increase the dramatic impact because we really get to see the damage done beyond a few loose cables on the bridge and some ominous red alert lights. Here, the concepts of the script and what we actually get on screen line up and the difference it makes is massive. This all happens in the second episode and it is one of the reasons this episode is so much stronger than the first - it also doesn't hurt that it gives the rest of the crew some actual relevancy to the story, rather than simply side-lining them (even though it's kind of doing that as well, but at least in a plot-relevant way). When plot, concepts and execution everything comes to life as it should.
Because one of the more ignominious achievements of the first episode is this – is manages to make the Borg really rather boring. Voyager takes a fair amount of flak for over-using the Borg, but to be honest I haven't really found that to be the case going through the whole series. They function well as an occasional recurring villain when used correctly, and giving Janeway an ongoing female adversary both helps shore up Voyager's feminist credentials and provide a compelling baddie that's just straightforwardly fun to watch when she shows up. We saw in "Child's Play" that the presence of the Borg themselves is not enough to warrant threat or interest – they turn up at the thirty-eight minute mark and are then easily hand-waved away – and thus, sadly, it proves to be the case here. I'm going to praise Susanna Thompson again, because she gets a few terrific moments, and she just inhabits the Borg Queen so well that the character enlivens every scene she's in, even when just talking rhetorically to drones or the odd severed head. And oh yea, those heads are a proper, nasty piece of characterization for the Borg, and the clinical lack of interest the Borg Queen has in the fact that they were once either people or drones is a chillingly effective way of establishing just how little she cares about small picture, and does so much more effectively than all that stomping around and telling us about it. These moments, though, are few and far between, and for the rest of the time the Borg are mostly just there, a threat that needs to be dealt with this week and little else. The Borg Queen doesn't get to interact with any of the regular crew in the first episode and it's a glaring weakness that's made all the more telling by how great she becomes when she gets to face off with Janeway. Thompson can make these scenes work, but there's plenty where she's not present, and there's not a lot she can do about those. I have to also criticize Allan Kroeker here – he directed the first episode (and directs thirteen episodes of Voyager in total) and there's just nothing about his direction that draws out either the thematic elements of the script nor any tension from environments. It's just point and shoot. I guess everyone can have an off-day – this is the guy who directed the first episode of "Year Of Hell" after all!, but for whatever reason his talents fail him here. The second episode is directed by another stalwart, Mike Vejar and the difference is sharp and apparent – here we have a real feeling of threat, and a real sense of danger. For the first half – not so much.
And what of Seven, given her first major stab at character development for basically a whole season? "Survival Instinct" was the last episode that specifically focussed on her development as a character, rather than something like "Tsunkatse" in which she is simply the lead character, and it's nice to see her coming to the fore again. There's an honest attempt to push Seven into places where she is both uncomfortable – and it's always good to see Seven brushing up against unfamiliar elements because Ryan is so good at selling Seven when she's conflicted – and really develop a side of her character which we haven't much seen before, which is her romantic side. I've used the expression "real, sincere attempt" a few times in recent reviews because a genuine attempt to move a character forward is always appreciated, and I'm going to use this expression again, because it's clear that there is a real effort put in to changing the way we see Seven by allowing a previously unexplored aspect of her character to come to the surface. She's given an actual, proper romance here, and is shown to have had these aspects in her past as well as her present, which goes at least some distance to helping us see Seven even more as a full human being and not just a former drone/trauma survivor. This works better in the abstract than it does in reality because, sadly, Axum can be added to the list of love interests that various members of the Voyager crew have who lack any spark whatsoever with the person they're allegedly in love with. There's just nothing in the scenes between him and Seven that suggests either a past relationship or the potential for a current one, and instead the two characters are left standing there, stating lines at each other in the hopes that some kind of passion might ignite. it doesn't. The real, sincere elements (there it is!) do given Seven a shaky second step into the world of romance, and things here are at least far more developed than events of "Someone To Watch Over Me" (this isn't, after all, Seven's first brush with this aspect of her humanity). But "Someone To Watch Over Me" was charming and easy to like in all the right ways, and treaded softly to allow Seven's faltering first steps into dating come to the fore without feeling laboured or forced. The exact opposite approach is taken here, where we're just told the two characters were romantically involved, and though the second episode tries to suggest a bond slowly forming between them, Seven is right when she plaintively cries, "I've wasted our time together". The "two people who don't at first like each other then fall in love" storyline is just a lazy cliché, and though there's some attempts to frame Seven's lack of interest as her usual defensiveness in unfamiliar situations this never really convinces, since it's clear from the first moments they spend together where this is going to go. They even get a hackneyed final scene together where they delare their love for each other atop a crashing cliff (the "I'll find you!" is inexcusably awful and corny) before being separated forever. This isn't the windswept passions of a Wuthering Heights – it's got about as much passion as a "Love is..." postcard. Ryan, to be fair, does her best, and it's quite nice to see her free of her Borg implants and dressed in something other than This Week's Catsuit, but nobody could make such obvious, predictable material work. Over the course of Season Seven we'll see far more interesting and better handled aspects of Seven's romantic side, and though watching in order we can't know that's what's coming, it's certainly easy enough to intuit that this kind of thing could, and should, be done so very much better than the half-hearted series of paint-by-numbers relationship beats she gets here.
Over the course of this review I've been fairly harsh on "Unimatrix Zero". Part of the reason for that is that Voyager is generally excellent at handling two-parters – it's the thing it does better than any other branch of the franchise - so to see something of the slipshod, that'll-do quality of "Unimatrix Zero" feels rather disheartening, especially coming on the heels of what has been a less-than-brilliant season. This ought to see out Season Six on a big high, and the cliffhanger, with Janeway, Tuvok and B'Elanna being assimilated, does struggle hard to drum up this kind of interest, but because it follows forty minutes of exposition and standing around it's just too much for it to carry. It's not that it's a bad cliffhanger – it isn't – but there's no way for it carry the weight of what's come before, or what's going to come after. We know this isn't going to be the end for these characters, which is fine, so the question becomes not if they get out of it but how. In this case the how, while making perfect sense within the set-up of Voyager, feels fairly... pedestrian, maybe. Despite being a common complaint, this doesn't weaken either the Borg or assimilation – Borg propaganda aside, we know assimilation is something that can be recovered from. Picard gets better. Hugh regains his individuality. Seven recovers from the trauma of it. The Borg children on Voyager find their way back from it. All this story does, with the recovery of Janeway, Tuvok and B'Elanna, is make explicit what has always been implicitly true, and what's more does it in a way that explains they can recover because they were prepared before it happened (so the recovery is quick). No, the problem here is that the resolution is just too pat, and that's true of basically everything in "Unimatrix Zero". It's all just too pat. While the second episode is, clearly, substantially better than the first, it's no lost classic either, and it gets Voyager's final season off to a pretty average start. Not a bad one, just an average one. "Unimatrix Zero" carries all the sins of Season Six with it. Let us hope that Season Seven is able to dispense with them.
Any Other Business:
• Another nice shot at the beginning of the first episode as the Borg Queen is assembled, different again from both First Contact and "Dark Frontier" (i.e. it's new footage, not recycled effects work).
• Though speaking of recycled effects work, its unfortunate that they always use the same establishing shot for the Unicomplex, with the little shuttle zooming in at the bottom left of the screen and a Borg Cube crossing in the top left. It makes it look like this activity is all that ever happens there.
• Tom is promoted. Harry's indignant response, "I didn't see any box on my chair" gives him a decent little chuckle as well.
• The decapitation and exploration of the heads of the drones by the Queen is a proper, nasty piece of development, and the story could have done with a lot more of that to play up the very real dangers. One of the heads-on-a-stick is modelled on Brent Spiner, being the "head" they used every time Data lost his.
• Nice effects work for the ruined colony that Voyager finds, even though it's just on-screen for a few seconds.
• One thing going for the first episode is that it's good it takes the time to point out and remind audiences that when they've fought the Borg before, Janeway and Chakotay are often at complete loggerheads as to how to proceed. It's a good bit of character background for them. Nice reflection of this when Tom serving as "unofficial first officer" gives Chaktoay the same hard time Chakotay gave Janeway in the past.
• When the Doctor is discussing romance with Seven in the cargo bay, there's some lovely, resigned acting from Robert Picardo, who brings across the pain of being rejected by someone he deeply cares for while still trying to be a good friend and advise her, all with just facial expressions. It's one of the highlights of the first episode, and it's great to see Picardo deliver something other than the outraged comedy that most of Season Six expected of him.
• For me, at least, this settles it. We again have reference to someone being assimilated at the Battle of Wolf 359, whereby that Cube was destroyed at the end of "The Best Of Both Worlds". I headcannoned (or fanwanked, if you prefer) back in "Unity" that they must have had the battle, assimilated at least some of the crew from the destroyed ships, then sent a Sphere or Probe back to the Delta Quadrant (to analyse their new drones, perhaps), while the main Cube carried on to Earth only to be defeated by an unexpected case of narcolepsy. There's really just no other explanation for the number of people who got assimilated during the battle but who survived the destruction of that Cube.
• There isn't a single interesting character we meet in the whole of the Unimatrix Zero (the location, not the episode). Axum is just dull. The Klingon, Korok, is a Klingon and absolutely nothing else. Everyone else just fades into the background. The sole interesting moment in the location is when the Borg Queen visits it, and that mostly because Susanna Thompson is just brilliant.
• Because really, she is. She's just so fantastic at playing the Borg Queen.
• It's an welcome, but unusual, tic that it's Tuvok who ends up being the weak link in the away team who beam to the Cube, and it would be interesting to speculate that it's easier for the Borg Queen to hear his thoughts because Vulcans are telepathic, which gives her a way in she doesn't have with a (half) Klingon or human.
• After the Borg Queen forcibly takes over Voyager's communications she signs off by saying, "we'll see you soon, Harry," and Harry responds by asking, "What did she mean by that?" Yes, what did she mean by that? it's never referred to or followed up on again.
• The Borg Queen destroying vessel after vessel because she can't hear the thoughts of just a couple of drones is another re-enforcement of the way she only sees the big picture, and it's very well done.
• The conceit of the holographic Janeway speaking to the Borg Queen after being forced into a regeneration alcove works incredibly well, and as I mentioned at the start of the review, every single second of their screen-time together is just phenomenal. It's great to see Janeway working as a tactician again as well.
• And Janeway's furious, contemptuous, "I don't negotiate with Borg," spat out by Mulgrew and causing the Borg Queen to whirl round and lash out to choke her, only to remember it's a hologram, is the best moment in the whole hour and a half by miles.
• Korok riding to Voyager's rescue is a bit cliché'd but it manages to raise a bit of a smile at least. Handy someone from Unimatrix Zero was so nearby, and it turns out to be someone we know!
• It's also nice that, given he was more assimilated during the away mission than the others, the Doctor explicitly states that Tuvok's recovery is going to take longer.
• And though the romance between Seven and Axum may never have convinced, the final scene between Janeway and Seven, where they both admit where they've been vulnerable, at least ends things on a strong note, and as ever Ryan and Mulgrew shine in their scene of quiet intimacy, just two people able to admit to each other what's really going on.
Season Six Cast
At the end of the Season Five summary I asked the question if Season Six could make the same, strong showing as Seasons Five and Four have managed. Sadly, the answer is no. Season Six is the weakest season of Voyager since Season Two. That's a bald statement to make, but watching these twenty-six episodes it's obviously true. That's not, to be clear, a synonym for it being either bad or as bad as Season Two, but there's no denying that that Season Six just doesn't have the same flare that the three seasons which precede it do have. Season Three was bright, primary-coloured action-adventure. Season Four was an often grim meditation on trauma and responsibility. Season Five delved into character in an unprecedented way, while experimenting and pushing the boundaries of what the show could do. And Season Six... is there. It does have a single, unifying theme – history – which I'll get to in a moment, but the issues here are less to do with the unification of purpose and just a sense of ennui. There's not a lot of direction to Season Six, and it often feels more than a little untethered as a result. Then there's the repetition, whereby a lot of the episodes in the second half of the season feel like they're covering the same ground as the first half. Sometimes this is relatively explicit - "Spirit Folk" is obviously written as a direct, deliberate sequel to "Fair Haven" - and sometimes not - "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" and "Virtuoso" hit almost exactly the same notes (sorry) as each other, just as different points in the same season (and "LIfe Line" isn't a million miles away from either of those either). That leans into the feeling of uniformity this season has, and demonstraes a lack of variety.
Still, as I've repeatedly mentioned throughout this season and the thing which gives Season Six much more bite than, say, Season Two, is its obsession with history. History is everywhere in this season, and the embrace of a multiplicity of different approaches and perspectives on what history is and how history functions is new a direction for Voyager to strike out in. That the season is able to tackle personal history ("Fury", "Barge of The Dead"), Big Picture history ("Blink Of An Eye", "Memorial"), meta-history ("Live Fast And Prosper"), historiography ("One Small Step") and so much more shows a willingness to engage with a single concept and subject it to analysis across the whole span of the season to see how relevant these differing approaches are to the show both textually as it affects the characters and paratextually as it affects Voyager the show and Star Trek in general. Not all of these episodes are knock-outs, but they all have something of significance to add to the debate, and that gives them a reason to be even when they're not the strongest of episodes. If history is going to be engaged with as an abstract concept then its necessary for the episodes which do this to really understand what it is they're meditating on, and in this, at least, Season Six is almost always successful. It may have problems in others ways, but the engagement with history is never an issue. It is this thematic underpinning that helps gives Season Six a much stronger angle than Season Two and provides a through-line for the whole twenty-six episodes which the season badly needs.
Because, lets be honest, there's a lot of weak material here. I mean, obviously the Space Irish are crap, and the first two episodes of the season badly misunderstand what it is to be an episode of Voyager, rather than Generic Star Trek Episodetm. But there's not a lot of weight to much of the material, and even though it's rarely bad ("Spirit Folk" aside, obviously) it too often content to just be good enough. That's especially frustrating because when this season does knock it out of the park it does it so well the ball practically lands in the next field. "Muse" is almost without parallel and shows just how its possible to be inventive and smart and intelligent without the needs for big special effects and space battles. "One Small Step" manages to be history, be about history, deal with character growth and plausibly be the beginning of the Seven/Chakotay romance of next season, all in the space of forty-five minutes. Even "Dragon's Teeth" proves that there's plenty of mileage left in Voyager's action-adventure aesthetic, assuming the scripts pay enough attention to detail and don't just go for flash-bang-wallop for the sake of it. Yet too often these gems are lost in the rough and end up surrounded by material that is just shown to be wanting by comparison. Sometimes these mis-steps are understandable - for all its flaws "Fair Haven" is an attempt to deal with Janeway's loneliness in a way that simply hasn't been tried up to this point, and though it's in no way a good Voyager episode, "Barge Of The Dead" makes a sincere, proper attempt to interrogate the past of B'Elanna and what it means to her as a character. Yes they fall short of their target but at least they obviously had a target, and that's a lot more than you can say for Season Two's ramshackle collection of whatever's.
It's also maybe an obvious point, but there's something else Season Six lacks and it's this – there's no two-parter here. The season starts, trots its way through twenty four episodes (obviously the first and last episodes are each one half of two-parters), then stops again. That means that, whereas in previous seasons there's been a big moment to lead up to and away from, here everything just proceeds at basically the same pace for the entire run of the season, then stops again. Season Five's "Dark Frontier" isn't the best two-parter Voyager has ever had, but it provides a nice dividing line between the character work of the first half and the experimentalism of the second. Season Four has two two-parters, "Year Of Hell" (which is the best two-parter Voyager has ever had, or at least one of them) and "The Killing Game", which both take different approaches to a similar standpoint, viewing it from different angles. These all fulfil different functions within their respective seasons, but in broader terms they also provide an anchor for the season, something which allows some kind of definite statement about what is, or will be, going on. That's what Season Six really misses – any definite sense that there's more happening than just a bunch of episodes. The slender, tentative contact with Earth falteringly begins to provide this and gives a slight sensation that the end might be in sight, but it's only two episodes so there's not quite enough there for this to function (though we'll see how well it can function in Season Seven). "Dragon's Teeth" was going to be the two-parter, and it's a great shame that it got compressed down to one, because though the end result of that episode is excellent, there's no shaking the feeling that the season as a whole would have benefited it from it being two, and it would have helped (given that it also has a lot to say about history, both personal and in terms of society) to provide some definition and focus for what goes on around it.
This absence couldn't have come at a worse time for Voyager. As I mentioned during the review for "Equinox" Voyager is now the only branch of the franchise being broadcast, and that means it carries a certain weight of expectations. DS9's final season is pretty divisive but there's no denying that, both critically and in fan circles, the show was, and remains, extremely highly regarded (and quite rightly so, of course). And so naturally once it comes to an end it makes sense that fans of Star Trek are going to pop over to the sister show to see what's going on. And what do they get? This largely average, unremarkable season of episodes that absolute compounds the party line of what Voyager is seen as being – perfectly competent but largely unremarkable. In some ways this is just as damaging as the gratingly miserable lows of Season Two because, had people switched on and found the quality of any of the last three seasons then the perception of what Voyager could be would be quite different. These hypothetical viewers would have found a show firing on all cylinders, delivering episode after episode of interesting, engaging, challenging material. Instead what they get is fucking "Spirit Folk". No wonder people looked down on this show. So yes, there's no way that this season can carry that weight of expectation. Maybe those expectations are unfair – DS9 isn't just great Star Trek, it's one of the great sci-fi shows of all time, and any show is going to have trouble measuring up to that – but it doesn't really matter because the expectations are there anyway, so it's almost as if this season didn't even try. The good episodes are stunning, but the mediocre ones dominate. The engagement with history is genuinely fascinating, but it needs to come in a stronger run of episodes for it to really have the kind of impact it needs to. This all sounds quite negative, and that's maybe just a little unfair as well – with one notable, obvious exception there's little here that's egregiously abysmal. But really – this season needed to be so much better and it just isn't. We're into the last gasp of the show now, and it will be interesting to see if the final season can pull it all back together again. Here's hoping.
Season Six, Episode 26 / Season Seven, Episode 1 - "Unimatrix Zero"
Suspended In Gaffa
Around about the halfway point of the second episode there is a scene between Susanna Thompson as the Borg Queen and Kate Mulgrew as Janeway. It is utterly electric, two predators circling each other, furiously trying to work out who will strike first, who can gain the tactical advantage. Everything in this moment is exactly as this kind of scene should be played, and it carries the same visceral charge as it did the last time these two faced off against each other. That was back in "Dark Frontier" when they fought over their adopted daughter, Seven, with each woman laying claim to her. Here they fight over the abstract idea-space of Unimatrix Zero, a matrix (in both the Doctor Who and "… Starring Keanu Reeves" senses of the word) where drones can retain their individuality while unconscious, a symbolic stand-in for the liberation that Voyager hopes to bring to the Collective and for the individuality that the Federation values in opposition to the Borg's monomaniacal psudo-Communism. Every single second of this scene, and indeed every scene where Mulgrew and Thompson share time together, is both a magnificent demonstration of Voyager's female-centric approach to character and conflict, and straightforwardly brilliant drama. It is everything a conflict between ideologies stated by implacable enemies should be.
Nothing else in these two episodes comes close to being this good. The very fact of the quality of these scenes highlights just how flat much of this story is, in fact. The second episode is substantially better than the first one which starts, toddles along for forty-five minutes, reaches an allegedly "dramatic" climax, then stops. The second episode feels like it at least has some stakes and some drama, but most of the first is just exposition to get us to that big climax, with much of the rest of the time spent trying, with limited success, to convince us why any of this might be important. As I've observed a number of times across a whole range of different episode types, both World War II and Cold War stories continue to hold a relevant place in Star Trek's history, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. Given the original show's origins during the Cold War (many of the cast and crew served during World War II) this absolutely makes sense. Sometimes those parallels are made obvious - "The Killing Game" literalizes the World War II aspects about as directly as is possible – and sometimes less so – the creeping paranoia of something like "Resistance" suggesting the Stasi as much as aliens from another world. These kinds of story, in other words, represent a certain kind of Star Trek archetype, and we find them across all branches of the franchise. To an extent "Unimatrix Zero" fits into both these archetypes. The nature of Unimatrix Zero itself is analogous to a French Resistance cell hiding in some village (more Secret Army than Allo, Allo at least, and Janeway explicitly references them as a "resistance"), and the Queen's attempts to hunt down the "subversives" within the Collective suggest Cold War purges of exactly the type the KGB or Stasi carried out, in the mould of a Le Carre thriller. This is fruitful territory for both Star Trek in general and Voyager in particular to cover, because both speak to the history of the show and both archetypes are near-infinitely flexible ways of telling a story.
The problem lies in the story's inability to pick a team and play it through to the end. The Cold War aspects of the story are well handled, with the Queen taking the ultimate scorched-earth approach to rooting out the subversives in her Communist paradise, but there's relatively little time spent on it, and much of it is either Susanna Thompson talking to herself, or the Borg Queen making straw-man arguments to Janeway. The resistance storyline, which embodies the World War Ii aspects, gets the most screen-time and we get to spend a fair amount of time in Unimatrix Zero itself, but this then becomes a problem too – Unimatrix Zero isn't especially compelling, and neither are the characters that populate it. Ohh look, a growly Klingon who stamps about the place in stock costumes and make-up! Eh. A couple of children frolicking carelessly about the place as a clumsy symbol of childhood innocence stolen by the Borg! Eh. A wet-as-you-like love interest for Seven! Eh. There's a lot of "eh" in Unimatrix Zero, and not a lot else. Part of the problem is that Unimatrix Zero never convinces as a location – either a real-world environment or a computer-simulated landscape – and that makes an already abstract concept stretch to breaking point. This ought to either be a literalized location (and some location shooting might have helped here) or swung in the other direction and gone for something a bit more daring, like a Tron-equse, intentionally-digital and artificial environment. What we have instead is another outing to the Garden Centre Of Doom, where it appears for all the world like a few Borg have popped in to pick up some compost and maybe a nice ficus tree to brighten up their alcove. This is a place that we as the audience are invited to really care about, but there's zero imagination put into realizing it and it ends up looking like every other set we get when the money's run out and they can't afford to visit a strip of California desert. It's just so normal, and that makes it almost impossible to engage with, especially since the people we find there are so startlingly unremarkable. If the location isn't in synch with the concepts that underlie it, and the people don't seem worth the bother, then how are the audience supposed to invest in what actually happens there? Especially when what does happens there, at least for the first episode, is just Seven turning up to have a bunch of stuff explained at her. There's no sense that the World War II or Cold War aspects of the script have any bearing, and that lack of ability to understand or engage with its own core concepts is hugely undermining to the episode, even at it seems that these aspects are exactly what the script is going for.
Still, one thing you can say for "Unimatrix Zero" is that, for all that the location itself is a bust, elsewhere the production is generally excellent. There's some lovely effects work which, contrary to my usual stance, I'm going to draw attention to, just to show how far we've come. Of particular note is the shot where the Borg have acquired Voyager's access codes, open fire, and blow a chunk out of the forward section. It looks, frankly, magnificent, and here (at least) we get some real tension and drama as the production is able to deliver some really sharp moments as Voyager runs like hell in the opposite direction. It's another case of the effects working to really support the ideas the script holds, because for the rest of the story Voyager is functioning like a submarine, mostly lit in darkness, just barely out of range of the ship its hunting, and desperately trying to effect repairs. In other words, it's doing a Das Boot, which is an excellent source to draw from if you're going for the whole World War II vibe, and the effects work here really help to increase the dramatic impact because we really get to see the damage done beyond a few loose cables on the bridge and some ominous red alert lights. Here, the concepts of the script and what we actually get on screen line up and the difference it makes is massive. This all happens in the second episode and it is one of the reasons this episode is so much stronger than the first - it also doesn't hurt that it gives the rest of the crew some actual relevancy to the story, rather than simply side-lining them (even though it's kind of doing that as well, but at least in a plot-relevant way). When plot, concepts and execution everything comes to life as it should.
Because one of the more ignominious achievements of the first episode is this – is manages to make the Borg really rather boring. Voyager takes a fair amount of flak for over-using the Borg, but to be honest I haven't really found that to be the case going through the whole series. They function well as an occasional recurring villain when used correctly, and giving Janeway an ongoing female adversary both helps shore up Voyager's feminist credentials and provide a compelling baddie that's just straightforwardly fun to watch when she shows up. We saw in "Child's Play" that the presence of the Borg themselves is not enough to warrant threat or interest – they turn up at the thirty-eight minute mark and are then easily hand-waved away – and thus, sadly, it proves to be the case here. I'm going to praise Susanna Thompson again, because she gets a few terrific moments, and she just inhabits the Borg Queen so well that the character enlivens every scene she's in, even when just talking rhetorically to drones or the odd severed head. And oh yea, those heads are a proper, nasty piece of characterization for the Borg, and the clinical lack of interest the Borg Queen has in the fact that they were once either people or drones is a chillingly effective way of establishing just how little she cares about small picture, and does so much more effectively than all that stomping around and telling us about it. These moments, though, are few and far between, and for the rest of the time the Borg are mostly just there, a threat that needs to be dealt with this week and little else. The Borg Queen doesn't get to interact with any of the regular crew in the first episode and it's a glaring weakness that's made all the more telling by how great she becomes when she gets to face off with Janeway. Thompson can make these scenes work, but there's plenty where she's not present, and there's not a lot she can do about those. I have to also criticize Allan Kroeker here – he directed the first episode (and directs thirteen episodes of Voyager in total) and there's just nothing about his direction that draws out either the thematic elements of the script nor any tension from environments. It's just point and shoot. I guess everyone can have an off-day – this is the guy who directed the first episode of "Year Of Hell" after all!, but for whatever reason his talents fail him here. The second episode is directed by another stalwart, Mike Vejar and the difference is sharp and apparent – here we have a real feeling of threat, and a real sense of danger. For the first half – not so much.
And what of Seven, given her first major stab at character development for basically a whole season? "Survival Instinct" was the last episode that specifically focussed on her development as a character, rather than something like "Tsunkatse" in which she is simply the lead character, and it's nice to see her coming to the fore again. There's an honest attempt to push Seven into places where she is both uncomfortable – and it's always good to see Seven brushing up against unfamiliar elements because Ryan is so good at selling Seven when she's conflicted – and really develop a side of her character which we haven't much seen before, which is her romantic side. I've used the expression "real, sincere attempt" a few times in recent reviews because a genuine attempt to move a character forward is always appreciated, and I'm going to use this expression again, because it's clear that there is a real effort put in to changing the way we see Seven by allowing a previously unexplored aspect of her character to come to the surface. She's given an actual, proper romance here, and is shown to have had these aspects in her past as well as her present, which goes at least some distance to helping us see Seven even more as a full human being and not just a former drone/trauma survivor. This works better in the abstract than it does in reality because, sadly, Axum can be added to the list of love interests that various members of the Voyager crew have who lack any spark whatsoever with the person they're allegedly in love with. There's just nothing in the scenes between him and Seven that suggests either a past relationship or the potential for a current one, and instead the two characters are left standing there, stating lines at each other in the hopes that some kind of passion might ignite. it doesn't. The real, sincere elements (there it is!) do given Seven a shaky second step into the world of romance, and things here are at least far more developed than events of "Someone To Watch Over Me" (this isn't, after all, Seven's first brush with this aspect of her humanity). But "Someone To Watch Over Me" was charming and easy to like in all the right ways, and treaded softly to allow Seven's faltering first steps into dating come to the fore without feeling laboured or forced. The exact opposite approach is taken here, where we're just told the two characters were romantically involved, and though the second episode tries to suggest a bond slowly forming between them, Seven is right when she plaintively cries, "I've wasted our time together". The "two people who don't at first like each other then fall in love" storyline is just a lazy cliché, and though there's some attempts to frame Seven's lack of interest as her usual defensiveness in unfamiliar situations this never really convinces, since it's clear from the first moments they spend together where this is going to go. They even get a hackneyed final scene together where they delare their love for each other atop a crashing cliff (the "I'll find you!" is inexcusably awful and corny) before being separated forever. This isn't the windswept passions of a Wuthering Heights – it's got about as much passion as a "Love is..." postcard. Ryan, to be fair, does her best, and it's quite nice to see her free of her Borg implants and dressed in something other than This Week's Catsuit, but nobody could make such obvious, predictable material work. Over the course of Season Seven we'll see far more interesting and better handled aspects of Seven's romantic side, and though watching in order we can't know that's what's coming, it's certainly easy enough to intuit that this kind of thing could, and should, be done so very much better than the half-hearted series of paint-by-numbers relationship beats she gets here.
Over the course of this review I've been fairly harsh on "Unimatrix Zero". Part of the reason for that is that Voyager is generally excellent at handling two-parters – it's the thing it does better than any other branch of the franchise - so to see something of the slipshod, that'll-do quality of "Unimatrix Zero" feels rather disheartening, especially coming on the heels of what has been a less-than-brilliant season. This ought to see out Season Six on a big high, and the cliffhanger, with Janeway, Tuvok and B'Elanna being assimilated, does struggle hard to drum up this kind of interest, but because it follows forty minutes of exposition and standing around it's just too much for it to carry. It's not that it's a bad cliffhanger – it isn't – but there's no way for it carry the weight of what's come before, or what's going to come after. We know this isn't going to be the end for these characters, which is fine, so the question becomes not if they get out of it but how. In this case the how, while making perfect sense within the set-up of Voyager, feels fairly... pedestrian, maybe. Despite being a common complaint, this doesn't weaken either the Borg or assimilation – Borg propaganda aside, we know assimilation is something that can be recovered from. Picard gets better. Hugh regains his individuality. Seven recovers from the trauma of it. The Borg children on Voyager find their way back from it. All this story does, with the recovery of Janeway, Tuvok and B'Elanna, is make explicit what has always been implicitly true, and what's more does it in a way that explains they can recover because they were prepared before it happened (so the recovery is quick). No, the problem here is that the resolution is just too pat, and that's true of basically everything in "Unimatrix Zero". It's all just too pat. While the second episode is, clearly, substantially better than the first, it's no lost classic either, and it gets Voyager's final season off to a pretty average start. Not a bad one, just an average one. "Unimatrix Zero" carries all the sins of Season Six with it. Let us hope that Season Seven is able to dispense with them.
Any Other Business:
• Another nice shot at the beginning of the first episode as the Borg Queen is assembled, different again from both First Contact and "Dark Frontier" (i.e. it's new footage, not recycled effects work).
• Though speaking of recycled effects work, its unfortunate that they always use the same establishing shot for the Unicomplex, with the little shuttle zooming in at the bottom left of the screen and a Borg Cube crossing in the top left. It makes it look like this activity is all that ever happens there.
• Tom is promoted. Harry's indignant response, "I didn't see any box on my chair" gives him a decent little chuckle as well.
• The decapitation and exploration of the heads of the drones by the Queen is a proper, nasty piece of development, and the story could have done with a lot more of that to play up the very real dangers. One of the heads-on-a-stick is modelled on Brent Spiner, being the "head" they used every time Data lost his.
• Nice effects work for the ruined colony that Voyager finds, even though it's just on-screen for a few seconds.
• One thing going for the first episode is that it's good it takes the time to point out and remind audiences that when they've fought the Borg before, Janeway and Chakotay are often at complete loggerheads as to how to proceed. It's a good bit of character background for them. Nice reflection of this when Tom serving as "unofficial first officer" gives Chaktoay the same hard time Chakotay gave Janeway in the past.
• When the Doctor is discussing romance with Seven in the cargo bay, there's some lovely, resigned acting from Robert Picardo, who brings across the pain of being rejected by someone he deeply cares for while still trying to be a good friend and advise her, all with just facial expressions. It's one of the highlights of the first episode, and it's great to see Picardo deliver something other than the outraged comedy that most of Season Six expected of him.
• For me, at least, this settles it. We again have reference to someone being assimilated at the Battle of Wolf 359, whereby that Cube was destroyed at the end of "The Best Of Both Worlds". I headcannoned (or fanwanked, if you prefer) back in "Unity" that they must have had the battle, assimilated at least some of the crew from the destroyed ships, then sent a Sphere or Probe back to the Delta Quadrant (to analyse their new drones, perhaps), while the main Cube carried on to Earth only to be defeated by an unexpected case of narcolepsy. There's really just no other explanation for the number of people who got assimilated during the battle but who survived the destruction of that Cube.
• There isn't a single interesting character we meet in the whole of the Unimatrix Zero (the location, not the episode). Axum is just dull. The Klingon, Korok, is a Klingon and absolutely nothing else. Everyone else just fades into the background. The sole interesting moment in the location is when the Borg Queen visits it, and that mostly because Susanna Thompson is just brilliant.
• Because really, she is. She's just so fantastic at playing the Borg Queen.
• It's an welcome, but unusual, tic that it's Tuvok who ends up being the weak link in the away team who beam to the Cube, and it would be interesting to speculate that it's easier for the Borg Queen to hear his thoughts because Vulcans are telepathic, which gives her a way in she doesn't have with a (half) Klingon or human.
• After the Borg Queen forcibly takes over Voyager's communications she signs off by saying, "we'll see you soon, Harry," and Harry responds by asking, "What did she mean by that?" Yes, what did she mean by that? it's never referred to or followed up on again.
• The Borg Queen destroying vessel after vessel because she can't hear the thoughts of just a couple of drones is another re-enforcement of the way she only sees the big picture, and it's very well done.
• The conceit of the holographic Janeway speaking to the Borg Queen after being forced into a regeneration alcove works incredibly well, and as I mentioned at the start of the review, every single second of their screen-time together is just phenomenal. It's great to see Janeway working as a tactician again as well.
• And Janeway's furious, contemptuous, "I don't negotiate with Borg," spat out by Mulgrew and causing the Borg Queen to whirl round and lash out to choke her, only to remember it's a hologram, is the best moment in the whole hour and a half by miles.
• Korok riding to Voyager's rescue is a bit cliché'd but it manages to raise a bit of a smile at least. Handy someone from Unimatrix Zero was so nearby, and it turns out to be someone we know!
• It's also nice that, given he was more assimilated during the away mission than the others, the Doctor explicitly states that Tuvok's recovery is going to take longer.
• And though the romance between Seven and Axum may never have convinced, the final scene between Janeway and Seven, where they both admit where they've been vulnerable, at least ends things on a strong note, and as ever Ryan and Mulgrew shine in their scene of quiet intimacy, just two people able to admit to each other what's really going on.
