1.10 — “Prime Factors”
Plot: A distress call lures Voyager to the planet of the Sikarians, who live for pleasure. Sikaria has the technology to fold space in ways that have the potential of bringing Voyager home, but their laws forbid sharing the technology with outsiders, in a manner similar to the Federation’s Prime Directive. Can Janeway persuade them to share this technology? If she can’t, can she control her crew?
Thoughts: I had mixed feelings about this episode, which puts the best and worst of Voyager, as we know it so far, on display. The worst comes in the form of a creatively uninspired alien species inhabiting the same uninspired white sound stage visited on every other Voyager away mission. Harry Kim again plays the role of the aggressively normal guy who can’t help falling in love with the first native woman he meets, who holds the key to the weak dilemma of the week. Or do I just feel like this always happens because it happened last episode in 1.9, “Emanations?” In the episode before that Tom Paris fell in love with the native girl, so I concede there has been some variety.
I guess the writers are still finding the characters, but the dialogue is quite tired. It’s not so much dialogue as a string of heteronormative clichés that haven’t aged well, if they could even pass muster in 1995. The Delaney Sisters, indeed. You mean those sex-mad objectified harridans? Don’t give them too much of your virtue, Harry! Just enough! Janeway’s interactions with Gathoral Labin are scarcely better. He grabs on to her in public in ways that make me want to yell TIME’S UP!
Just when I think I’m going to pan the episode completely, it veers into the kind of story that is uniquely Voyager, of Janeway impotent, unable to control her crew, utterly vulnerable with no tools available but moral reasoning and persuasion after she her betrayal, separately, by B’Elanna and Tuvok. The closing scenes as Janeway confronts her officers are so powerful, I want to watch them again. What, indeed, is stopping Voyager from turning pirate, 70 light years away from anyone who knows them? Far beyond trafficking with smugglers and underworld types (which is what I think they were trying to suggest with the stories for tech exchange), what’s to stop them from taking what they want by force?
Let’s say that B’Elanna, Seska, and Joseph Carey had succeeded in getting the phlebotinum to work. Would mutiny have followed? Would it have been necessary to depose, maroon, or kill Janeway to override her objection and conceal their crime? Episodes like this reveal what a thread Voyager is hanging on, and Kate Mulgrew’s performance shows how well Janeway understands this.
Seeing the Prime Directive from the other side is a clever idea. The concept isn’t
butchered as badly as it could have been, although I still yearn for a thorough, thoughtful exploration of the idea. The sunrise on Alastria is beautifully realized. And yet, the technobabble is worse than ever, and so many plot details range from sloppy to completely implausible. So far we’re getting the good with the bad in Voyager Season One.
3.5 of 5 spatial trajectors.
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