1.9 — “Emanations”

1.9 — “Emanations”

Plot: An away team led by Chakotay explores the interior of an asteroid and discovers mummified bodies wrapped in biopolymer residue. These bodies are being deposited into their “afterlife” from the Vhnori homeworld which exists on the other side of subspace vacuoles in another dimension. What happens when Ensign Kim is sucked to the other side?

Thoughts: Whoa! According to my spellchecker, biopolymer is a real word. So we’ve got good scientific grounding this time. We saw the mummies wrapped in spiderwebs and Jim said “It’s Planet Mirkwood!”

I have to give the episode points for trying. Brannon Braga’s script takes on euthanasia, alternate dimensions, and questions of faith and belief.

Why isn’t it more compelling, then? Is it the weight of nonsense technobabble? The Vhnori drop their dead into plentiful naturally-occurring dimensional rifts they have never bothered to explore. The bodies decay into magic unknown elements that attract the Voyager. This setup is pure throw-stuff-at-the-wall-without-caring-how-it-sounds.

Then we have the oh-so-casual first contact scenes on Vhnori. Are both sides really so bored to encounter unknown advanced civilizations? It sounds momentous and dangerous to me.

Janeway’s last line also rubs me the wrong way, because she sounds like she’s prosthelytizing:

KIM: Are you saying you think they do have an afterlife? That the energy field is where they exist at a higher level of consciousness, just like they believe?

JANEWAY: I’m not certain, but I am certain about this. What we don’t know about death is far, far greater than what we do know.

Is there really so much we don’t know about death? Who says? And I thought they were supposed to be talking about the Vhnori? Or does she mean that if they’ve discovered Vhnori heaven, there’s probably a heaven for Earthlings too? That’s even less scientific than the theory of subspace vacuoles. It does remind me of Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which has much more interesting things to say about polycosmos and communication between dimensions than this script.

Garrett Wang (Harry Kim) was excited by the script. He saw Ensign Kim’s choice to die on Vhnori and risk everything to make it back to Voyager as a big step forward for his innocent, inexperienced character. It remains to be seen if the writers go along with this.

At least VOY is doing better than DS9 lately.

3 out of 5 subspace vacuoles. That vacuum the vacuous to vacation on Vhnori.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Emanations