Voyager detects a nebula with Omichron particles, which can be mined as an energy source. They set course for the nebula, but discover some unusual barriers within. It ends up taking all of the crew's abilities simply to get back out again.
Shortly after, as the doctor and Torres analyze organic residue from the nebula, they come to a conclusion very disturbing to Janeway. The cloud was no nebula. It was actually a living being, one that was severely damaged by Voyager's intrusion. Faced with having unintentionally harmed a living creature, Janeway orders the ship back to the nebula to repair the damage - at the cost of further substantial power drains to the ship!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Feels that in the ship's current predicament, she needs to "form a family" with the crew, and doesn't know how to balance that with being the captain. She could take a page from Picard's book, and focus on being a good captain first and foremost - The feeling of "family" will arise naturally with time if she succeeds in being an actual leader. Then again, Janeway isn't actually that great a captain so far, so she might be better off following Archer's lead: Focus so much on bonding with a few key members of the crew that they'll feel enough like a family to compensate for and cover up her shortcomings.
Chakotay: In my last review, I stated that Chakotay's characerization basically begins at ends at his facial tattoo. How remiss of me! It was also established at great length in the pilot that he's Native American. So this episode decides that since he's Native American, he must also be a follower of the Traditional Ways of the Genericosa Tribe. To that end, he has a medicine bag (naturally), and instructs Janeway on finding her "animal spirit" in a scene so straight-facedly silly that I couldn't help dissolving into laughter while watching. No wonder Robert Beltran wanted out!
Tom Paris: Paris is a rogue, you know. You can tell because he smiles a lot, delivers bad one-liners at the drop of a hat. Oh, and he's used the ship's holodeck to recreate a (would-be) seedy Marseilles pool hall, with a girl hanging on either arm. Oh, and there's pool hustlers and gigolos on-hand too. Pretty weak stuff for a confirmed rogue, but then Paris may well be the blandest rogue this side of The Outrageous Okana.
Neelix: After starting up a galley without permission, it turns out he's a lousy cook too. So, um, exactly what use is he? Given that his beautiful girlfriend hasn't dumped him yet, one can assume he has hidden talents not appropriate for broadcast, but that hardly makes him of value to the ship. And a handful of episodes in, I have yet to see him providing anything of value to Voyager. When he whines at the captain and she finally tells him to "get out," I'm left wondering why she doesn't add, "After this is over, we'll prepare your ship and send you on your way."
THOUGHTS
Just when Voyager lulls me into saying a few nice things about the series, it delivers this episode to remind me... Well, to remind me that I'm watching Voyager.
There's the potential for a decent episode in The Cloud. The show starts by remembering that the ship is low on power, a situation that got them into their last scrape and looks likely to be an ongoing issue. The idea of exploring something genuinely unknown is always appealing and far too rare in all of Trek's permutations. That the cloud is actually a living being, and that the ship has to undo the damage that it did to that being, is also a plot turn that has potential for drama. Effectively, Voyager has done exactly what the aliens in Phage did to Neelix - gone into another creature's body looking to take what it needs from that creature, and done serious damage in the process.
If only anyone on the writing staff had thought to make such a connection between episodes! As it stands, I suspect that connection is entirely accidental. Instead of some serious emotional dilemmas, we get garbage with Janeway using Chakotay to explore her "animal spirit," while Tom Paris runs a brothel on the holodeck... only not a proper brothel, because that might itself be interesting and we can't have that, can we?
Speaking of which... Why is the holodeck in operation at all? Three of the episodes thus far have made a point of spelling out how low the ship is on power reserves. The events of this episode drain those reserves precipitously. Surely the holodeck is a massive power drain, and one that is entirely a luxury - even moreso than the replicators! I'd expect Kim to comment on this when Paris wakes him up to show him his program, if only to explain why this is an acceptable use of the ship's limited energy stores. But no. Smack in the middle of a script structured entirely around Voyager's lack of power reserves is a holodeck subplot whose very existence would seem to suck energy from the ship much as it sucks energy from the episode!
This could all be saved if there was some good character work in what's clearly designed to be a character-based episode. But there really isn't. Because Chakotay is Native American, of course he's effectively a medicine man. Janeway angsts over coffee and balancing being a good captain with "forming a family" with her crew - though the coffee comes across as more important to her. Neelix is even more annoying than in the previous episode, though it's hard to argue with him when he calls the Voyager crew idiots, particularly when the doctor rather amusingly echoes Neelix's complaints. It's thin stuff, which doesn't bring the characters any more to life than was already (largely not) the case.
The effects aren't even all that good, with the shots of the ship caught in the cloud creature coming across more like graphics from a bad videogame than anything else. On the whole, a bad episode.
Overall Rating: 2/10.
Previous Episode: Phage
Next Episode: Eye of the Needle
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Within the first few episodes the Senior Staff were trying to figure a way to tie in the Holographic generator with actual energy reserves. They couldn't do it. So... that might be why. Then again I may have misunderstood it. Oh well, its just something I thought would be good to think about.
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