2.6 — “Twisted”

2.6 — “Twisted”

Plot: The Voyager runs into a spatial anomaly during a surprise birthday party for Kes, which knocks out shipboard communications and causes the corridors to rearrange themselves so that the crew gets lost trying to walk around to the bridge and other locations.

Thoughts: This episode is almost pure technobabble. The ship flies into a jingle jangle that causes floofy doos, while the crew wanders around doing nothing impactful, occasionally spouting earnest-sounding nonsense about their state of non-peril. At the end of the hour the unreasonable things happening for no reason stop, for no reason. Nothing is learned, no one is tested.

And those are the good parts. To fill the rest of the time we have Neelix acting like a jealous troll again. Which the writers want us to see is unjustified, but, I guess so that he not look too stupid, they have Tom Paris give Kes a drastically inappropriate birthday gift. The locket prop procured for filming does not look half as special as the lines of dialogue written to describe it.

The character of Neelix has completely lost his way. In the first episode, “Caretaker,” he tells Janeway “You need a guide? I’m your guide. You need supplies? I know where to procure them. I have friends among races you don’t even know exist. You need a cook? Oh, you haven’t lived until you’ve tasted my angla’bosque. It will be my job to anticipate your needs before you know you have them. And I anticipate your first need will be me.” But at this point his “help” is invariably worthless, his cooking always described as terrible, and he is a plague, not a helpmeet, to Kes. Kes–with whom he does not share quarters, nor sexual relations, nor a drop of chemistry. +sunny jim says “Neelix is the Jar-Jar of Star Trek.”

Memory Alpha reports that executive producer Michael Piller agreed, telling the authors of Captains’ Logs Supplemental “After ‘Twisted,’ I was terribly concerned about Neelix. I was afraid we were going to destroy this character if we made him the buffoon of the ship. If all he is is comic relief, we’re in trouble. The jealousy he was showing toward Kes was becoming irritating, so we wanted to put that to bed quickly.”

Perhaps we will get a course correction, but it is telling that when the cast members pair off at the end of the episode, fearing they are about to die, the writers place Kes with EMH, while Neelix is off somewhere, nobody knows why.

I confess that I did get some enjoyment out some of the other character bits, such as Tuvok and Chakotay going over their differences, and Janeway praising Harry Kim’s performance in the Jefferies tube. But this episode is a dog.

1.5 out of 5 holographic accordion players.

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