Star Trek Voy - Season 5 - Episode 19
Star Trek Voy - 5x19 - The Fight
Originally Aired: 1999-3-24
Synopsis:
An alien race communicates with Chakotay through hallucinations. [DVD]
Problems
- Janeway orders Chakotay to the bridge. But apparently he didn't think her order was all that important or anything, despite the red alert, because he felt he had time to change into uniform first.
Factoids
None
Remarkable Scenes
- Boothby appearance.
- Confused Chakotay attempting to box with Tuvok. I love Tuvok's swift Vulcan neck pinch.
- Confused Chakotay hallucinating a highly sadistically critical EMH on the concept of boxing.
- The disjointed images and words of the crew, representing the aliens communicating with Chakotay.
- Chakotay figuring a way out of chaotic space.
My Review
A decent attempt at an episode, but too much time is wasted on confusion and fighting. The "chaotic space" was also slightly absurd, but the general idea behind a region of space inhabited by aliens that are too different for us to interact with is a nice idea and is nicely, if briefly explored here. I really liked the end of the episode where Chakotay is having DS9 style prophet-like visions in order to speak to the aliens, but I think ultimately the aliens were not sufficiently explored at all and the episode suffers from it as it seemed to drag on needlessly.
The following are comments submitted by my readers.
It's really not such a bad episode. It advances the Star trek scientific framework pretty solidly, and deserves to be canon - although it clearly did not come off as the writers intended. The notion of "chaotic space", where the laws of physics are in constant flux, is a rich and plausible one. Boothby is a great character. But the narrative is sluggish and unconvincing in several spots, as if poorly edited. Beltran's performance is somewhat stilted, with way too much dissonance with Chakotay's established character traits.
God, utterly awful. The previous episode about the doomed clones was way better than this.
An episode that amounts to an over-emoted hallucination in a boxing ring? No thanks Star Trek.
I have no interest in watching this episode again, but if I did I'd time the hallucination sequences to see how much of the episode they took up (answer=too much). I'm sure hallucination sequences are fun to shoot and edit together, but they sure are a drag to watch.