2.12 — “Resistance”
Plot: An ambush during an away mission leaves Tuvok and Torres in prison on an alien planet, while Janeway, lost in the city, must find a way to communicate with her ship. Meanwhile, she has to deal with a crazy old man who purports to think she is his daughter.
Thoughts: This feels to me like a badly told Star Wars story, featuring a conspicuously unrealistic depiction of mental illness.
I believe this is the first time in Star Trek history where aliens have been reduced to guys in black helmets. It makes it so easy: they are thoroughly dehumanised, and you can just tell at a glance they’re evil. They are the equivalent of Stormtroopers, more targets than characters (complete with the moustache-twirling Grand Moff Tarkin/Orson Krennic commandant), although their uniform looks more like Death Star gunners. https://www.sideshowtoy.com/collectibles/star-wars-death-star-gunner-hot-toys-902803/
To be clear, I love Star Wars, but it’s a pew pew franchise that deals with good and evil as an abstraction, not a vehicle for exploration of serious science fiction ideas about culture. In my view, Voyager is not well suited to space opera adventure. It’s increasingly unclear if it can manage to be just good Star Trek.
Why does the crew keep running into people who have heard of them? Aren’t they flying away from the Delta Quadrant in a straight line at speeds that exceed local capabilities? If communication over interstellar distances across cultures is so easy, why can’t they find some better way to buy tellerium? How in the bejeezus can they still be travelling through places that Neelix knows people?
I am amazed Trek would decide to do another torture story, after the high-minded and carefully wrought “Chain of Command Part I & II” in TNG, and yet toss it off so cavalierly. DS9 had 3.21, “The Die is Cast,” which also included torture (that’s the one where Garak is forced to torture Odo), but still took the matter deadly seriously. Here it seems like something they threw in to fill space, or worse, for titillation, like Janeway’s impersonation of a prostitute, which calls to mind low moments like TNG’s 7.4-5, “Gambit Part I & II,” and 7.25, ”Preemptive Strike.”
The torture scene does lead to what may be the most interesting aspect of the show, should it be developed in future episodes, which is the conversation between Tuvok and Torres about what it means to be guided by emotion.
Voyager just feels very rudderless to me right now. Maybe “trying to go home” isn’t a sufficient premise to sustain a Trek series. They seem to try to avoid confronting this subject as much as possible (to easy to solve in a series that is better at inventing magic technology than confronting realities of interstellar travel?) and pretend it is an exploration show instead.
The motivating idea behind “Resistance,” I learn from reading Memory Alpha, was to do a Don Quixote story, where a character (originally Torres) gets attached like Dulcinea or Sancho Panza to a Don Quixote figure. They cast Oscar- and Tony-winner Joel Grey to play Caylem, so that the Quixote cognate would not be devoid of charisma.
The trouble is that I don’t believe for a moment that Caylem thinks that Janeway is his daughter. This is not how mental illness works (and it’s not how Don Quixote works, either). If he does think this, it’s beyond obvious that he is a danger to himself, a danger to Janeway, and a serious liability. The scenes where Janeway discusses this with him go in circles and are boring.
I like the scene where Caylem distracts the guards to rescue the resistance fighter by using his known fragility as stealth weapon and source of strength. We could have used more of that. He could have used this to distract the prison guards later, instead of the plan of having Janeway try to seduce the guards with her feminine wiles when she is literally an alien trapped inside an alien culture. And then it falls on the crazy guy to thwack the guards on the head? The logic of this situation is upside down.
Caylem says earlier in the episode that the prison has “Lots of guards. The Mokra make a big show of it, always bragging about how no one has ever escaped.” Then it turns out there are actually no guards except the two standing outside and the Third Magistrate of the planet and his entourage waiting inside.
All this buildup so that Caylem can stab somebody, and get stabbed in return. Don Quixote this is not.
1 out of 5 black helmets.
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