Star Trek Voy - Season 2 - Episode 09
Originally Aired: 1995-11-6
Synopsis:
Chakotay is stranded on a planet. [DVD]
Problems
None
Factoids
- Captain Sulu supported Chakotay's entrance into Starfleet.
Remarkable Scenes
- The Doctor listing the descriptive words for pain.
- Chakotay and Janeway discussing the absurdity of religion.
- The Doctor sneezing.
- Neelix and Tuvok have something in common. They breed orchids. :)
- The Doctor at the height of his symptoms.
- Paris: "The ship might make it with no inertial dampeners, but we'd all just be stains on the back wall."
My Review
What the crap? Another alien species, from the Delta quadrant no less, has visited Earth many years ago. How many does that make now? How much of a cliche has this become by now? Seriously, what is so interesting about Earth? Well, I at least found Chakotay's flashbacks interesting. Another interesting detail is Janeway's affinity for ship landings. This is her second attempt at landing the ship, she suggested doing it in another episode before this one, totaling three episodes that involve at least a mention of a ship landing. I enjoyed the Doctor's sickness too, but really the most enjoyable things about this episode were the sub plots and not the main plot. An exploration of Chakotay's Native American heritage is cool, but not when it's done with cliche++.
The following are comments submitted by my readers.
Janeaway is a fucking idiot for wanting to land the ship. Let's see, how many times did the enterprise land? Oh! 1 time, when it was destroyed. She's already going for a second attempt in one season. It was completely unneccesary and a complete lack of judgement on her part. Putting the ENTIRE crew at risk to maybe land and help Chakotay. Why didn't they just replicate another shuttlecraft ;) They did it so many times in the series, seeing as they started out with 2.
But yeah, Janeaway is a stupid dumbass. I put the ship landing thing in the same category as Sisko using the Defiant every time he wanted to leave the station. Completely unneccesary.
When Kes was pissed at the Doctor and said she wished that the he could feel pain for once, I said to myself: "well, he has, in Projections". It's a waste that he didn't mention this. It was only 6 episodes (weeks?) ago.
I realize that this is a really small nitpick, but the use of the word DAMPENERS is not correct. When the inertial momentum of the vessel is compensated for, this is DAMPING, which is an absorption of energy (usually in relation to oscillations). A DAMPENER would be something like a shower or hose. A seriously insignificant nit to pick but since the technical advisors work so hard on other things it would seem that they could keep this consistent.
Pete Miller - Voyager is a new kind of ship, maybe it's easier and safer to land it, so the decision is not necessarily stupid.
Yeah, this ep was... kind of WTF. It's especially cringe if you know about how the supposedly Native American consultant they had for Voyager was a phony. But cultural insensitivity aside, it's kind of astonishing to imagine that a bunch of extremely Earth-specific things would be localized to this tiny region of the other side of the galaxy. Well... maybe not "a bunch", but between this and "The 37s", it's really pushing, even for Star Trek.
One little detail I liked was how without his communicator, Chakotay couldn't understand the aliens until they gave him their own UT. Kes adding a couple hours to the Doctor's illness program was fantastic. I love Kes.
This show has a lot of potential, and a lot of great moments so far, but it so badly wants to be TNG that it isn't finding an identity of its own.
Voyager is designed with landing capability, so the previous commenter's complaints about it landing are invalid. (What IS a valid complaint is how imbalanced it looks when it's on the ground, like it's about to tip over.)