1.1&2 — “Caretaker”

1.1&2 — “Caretaker”

Plot: A new crew assembles under the command of Capt. Janeway to take the U.S.S. Voyager on her maiden voyage, a mission to search for a Maquis ship lost in the Badlands. A strange energy pulse sends the ship over 70,000 light years across the galaxy, where it finds the Maquis ship, a strange sensor array, and a mystery relating to the erratic behavior of the intelligence behind the array and its efforts to aid the inhabitants of the fifth planet of a nearby system.

Thoughts: I fell asleep. That’s bad, right? My overall impression is that the first episode of Voyager is a sloppy mess, which doesn’t bode well for the series.

There are bright spots! So much is new in the premiere episode of a new series. While I like several of the new characters (and the actors portraying them), the clear standout is the Emergency Medical Hologram. A sharply defined character right out of the gate! Kate Mulgrew’s Janeway is also promising. “Ma’am is acceptable in a crunch, but I prefer Captain.” “It’s not crunch time yet, Mister Kim. I’ll let you know when.”

I wonder at Janeway’s severe hairstyle, which almost seems Victorian. Maybe alternatives seemed too feminine for the first woman starship Captain? But I can overlook this.

I like seeing the new ship and new bridge, although I don’t have a great mental picture of the bridge design. The bridge is the most distinctive set on TOS and TNG, and has a strong look on DS9; this looks like a something thrown together, its details obscured by low light. Perhaps more character will emerge over time.

More alarming is the sloppy mess made of the plot and story details. The idea of a supreme being in space watching over dependent people on a planet is lifted from TNG 1.8, “Justice.” The setup on the planet inverts the arrangement in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), where the Eloi live in paradise on the surface and the Morlochs toil in misery underground. These elements are not so much reworked into a new science fiction narrative as thrown against a wall with a bunch of other half baked ideas, in the hope that at a distance they will resolve into a larger painting.

The Kazon on the surface. Why are they there? They aren’t planet-bound, or native, yet they live in a place where water and resources have been made inaccessible. Their justification is given in a throwaway line by Neelix that I would not have remembered if I had not looked it up: “The rich cormaline deposits are very much in demand.” Either they are going to play the role of pirates when the Ocampa emerge from underground or they aren’t. I don’t see how destroying the array changes anything.

I can’t decide if Neelix is miscast or just underwritten. We have no explanation as to how he meets the Kazon or comes to interact with them long enough to meet their prisoner Kes and fall in mutual interspecies love with her. Said love doesn’t stop him from stealing the Kazon’s water (?) and decamping to the debris field where Voyager finds him, with no indication he is working on a rescue plan. Why and how does Kes care for him? Kes is literally given no voice in this. We know she wants to leave her people and run away with Neelix because when the men around her say so, she doesn’t contradict them.

How long has she lived with the Kazon? I get the impression it’s only been a long weekend, but I don’t think they say.

Harry Kim and B’Elanna Torres are given diseases that the all-powerful Caretaker can’t cure merely as a pretext to send them to the planet, and then this plot point is brushed aside. I guess the Holographic Doctor cured them with the first wave of his medical tricorder. And the tunnels: first they are sealed, then sometimes they aren’t, but then we learn the Caretaker is sealing them for real, but then Kim and Torres can get out only with “days, maybe even weeks” of digging, and then no problem, it’s just an easy climb up a staircase (well, not so easy for Tom Paris and Chakotay).

Paris and Chakotay’s backstory is just as underbaked. Chakotay is really mad at Paris… for some reason. Their dialogue is awkward, at best. I can accept Paris attempting to bridge the cultural gap by exposing his ignorance with cracks like “can’t you turn into a bird and fly us out of here,” but this “you owe me your life now” crap just seems patronizing and tone deaf, at best.

When Voyager is flung across the galaxy, we never hear how many crew died, how damaged the ship is, or what it will take to repair it. We are told the ship is 70,000 light years from its starting position, but not until Janeway’s final speech do we learn it will take 75 years to reach home on maximum warp. We never learn how many Maquis crew survived, or what challenges they have. This is extremely bad storytelling, and undercuts Janeway’s big decisions, like integrating the Maquis crew and making Chakotay a second officer. It’s as if the writers started with a promising outline, but decided to fill in all the wrong details, and in a slapdash manner.

I hope for improvement, or it will be a long seven seasons.

2 of 5 holographic banjos.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Caretaker_(episode)