Star Trek Voy - Season 4 - Episode 24
Originally Aired: 1998-5-6
Synopsis:
An alien species tries to populate its planet by duplicating the Voyager crew. [DVD]
Problems
- Why did Janeway wait so long to deal with the fuel problem?
- Deuterium is extremely common. The writers must have mistaken it for dilithium. It's quite an oversight though.
Factoids
- Class Y planets are referred to as "demon" class.
- This episode features another ship landing.
Remarkable Scenes
- The doctor complaining to Chakotay regarding Neelix and his "squatters" only to have Chakotay blow off his complaint.
- The ship landing.
- Torres: "Take Seven of Nine with you." Chakotay, surprised: "You're recommending her?" Torres: "You said you needed cool heads, didn't you? Nobody's head is cooler than hers."
- The doctor and Neelix fighting with one another.
- Chakotay: "Looks like they went this way." Seven: "My tricorder isn't picking up any life signs. How did you reach that conclusion?" Chakotay: "Footprints. I guess you never assimilated any Indian scouts."
My Review
This episode is full of logical and technical problems, but I won't waste my time pointing them all out, for its the premise itself which is flawed. It makes no sense that Voyager would suddenly develop severe power problems out of nowhere. Rather than waste so much time on pointless details that don't make any sense anyway, the writers could have created a situation which justified the sudden power loss. That said, the plot doesn't interest me much. Most of the episode's thrill value is supposed to come from the danger of the planet itself, a manufactured danger. The oddities produced by the sentient "silver blood" fail to enhance the plot, and the revelation regarding what exactly is going on is realized far too late. An interesting note, look at the StarTrek.com description of this episode and the previous one. An interesting coincidence?
The following are comments submitted by my readers.
How is a class Y planet the "most inhospitable planet for humanoids"? At least it has a SURFACE! I mean there are plenty of planets that are solely gas giants and don't even have a solid surface. I would think that is more inhospitable than this class Y planet that simply has a bad atmosphere.
The Enterprise has saucer separation; Voyager has landing sequences. Janeway lands the ship WAY too damn much. She is extremely reckless.
The 'backup systems' in the environmental suits was a really cheap deus ex machina
I think it would have been pretty cool if the 'silver blood' was a colony of shapeshifters that had been dispersed here by the founders (as alluded to in ds9) and had made their home in the delta quadrant. Can you imagine the possibilities if Voyager had allied with some of the shapeshifters here and brought them back with them, only to find that the Federation had been at war with the Gamma Quadrant shapeshifters when they got back? Oh well. Just the dreams of a ds9 fan...
Harry gets a mudbath
Kethinov and Miller got it right, deuterium is not that horribly uncommon. And the planet itself only appear to be no worse than Venus.
Another detail I find unbelievable is that life support appear to take such an extreme amount of energy, we've heard it in other episodes also. As much as lasers, the warp drive and what's not.
In fact life support could only be a negligible amount compared to those systems - or to put it differently, several magnitudes less.
And so shutting down life support as here, and in a few other episodes should not make any significant contribution.
In short, you might skip this episode with extreme prejudice. Unless you're doing a study where ST loose track and derail completely.
The basic concept would have been interesting in TOS, less so here.
So Pete you wish that Voyager had brought back evidence of shapeshifters back from the delta quadrant.Personally the less Voyager had to do with a certain pile of overrated dog mess like DS9 the better,You can keep that rubbish.
Woah ho! Some fighting words from Alex!
I don't see why we need to see the build up to the power problems: that seems too nitpicky of a complaint and would have made for boring television. Things happen off-screen and between episodes all the time. I'd much rather be dropped into the story right at the point of dramatic tension than watch all the buildup. And honestly, Voyager needs more episodes like this: it's too much like TNG v2.0, with the whole "limited resources" thing taking a backseat to holodecks and frivolous side-trips and whatnot. Voyager's hulls needs scars and dents. It was refreshing to see them running in "gray mode" for once.
No, the real problem with the episode is it is poorly written. Janeway doesn't want to risk losing Chakotay by sending him down to the surface in a shuttle... so she decided to land the ship? (Seriously, writers, if you want to land the ship so badly just make it so their orbit was deteriorating and they didn't have power to correct it so they had no option. No captain in their right mind would put their entire crew at risk like that, and no officer on the bridge would ever let them) Then when the ship starts sinking into a mystery fluid on the surface, Janeway... goes to sickbay to check on Harry and Tom? C'mon Captain, your ship and everyone on it is in mortal peril: maybe you should be on the bridge trying to save them, i.e. DOING YOUR JOB.
In the hands of a better writer this premise could have made for a better than average episode, but, like Voyager in a pool of silver blood, this episode sank quickly. I'd rate it a 3.