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Star Trek Voy - Season 4 - Episode 11

Star Trek Voy - 4x11 - Concerning Flight

Originally Aired: 1997-11-26

Synopsis:
Janeway gets help from Leonardo da Vinci. [DVD]

My Rating - 3

Fan Rating Average - 4.78

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Problems
None

Factoids
- The aliens use a "translocator" to steal stuff from people's ships, the same type of technology used in Voy: Displaced. It is believed that this translocator is stolen. I wonder if they got it from the aliens in Voy: Displaced?
- Voyager's computer processor technical specifications: "Simultaneous access to 47,000,000 data channels. Transluminal processing at 575,000,000,000 calculations per nanosecond. Operational temperature margins from 10 degrees Kelvin to 1790 degrees Kelvin."

Remarkable Scenes
- Da Vinci in "America."
- Tuvok: "Vulcans do not make small talk."
- Da Vinci: "This fascinating conversation has left me as dry as Vulcan." Tuvok: "Vulcan?" Da Vinci: "An island off Sicili, have you been there?" Tuvok: "No."
- Tuvok objecting to leaving the Da Vinci program running on the mobile emitter.
- The doctor forcing Seven of Nine to recount the argument she had with Torres in the mess hall.
- Da Vinci: "These fortresses, I've been to half a dozen of them. All are similar but each is different."
- The glider flight and the beam up.

My Review
This episode was ill constructed. The idea to set Da Vinci loose in the "real world" for some comedy was a good idea and the idea to have Voyager pirated by an alien race was also a good idea, but the two good ideas are a mismatch in this episode. That said, there are some entertaining moments. I especially enjoyed getting technical specs regarding Voyager's computer processor. Other than that a big miss.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Ed Flinn on 2009-04-18 at 8:44pm:
    I'd count addressing Leonoardo as Mr. Da Vinci as a problem: da Vinci was a desriptor, not the man's name.
  • From pbench on 2015-09-04 at 4:34pm:
    a fun enough romp for being such a messy episode. the big problem i see is setting this precedent of all hologram characters being potentially fully- or mostly-sentient--if this is the case, you would think this would cause the crew consternation and potentially make every reset of a holodeck scenario or deletion of characters a murder/genocide. there's obviously ways around this, but it would've been nice to explore some of that--the differing levels of consciousness that a hologram could experience. i believe tuvok referred to this when he said da vinci was 'limited', but in all behavior and action his only real limitation is his understanding of place/context; in all other ways he seems to be an autonomous being. just food for thought.

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