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| Harry gets a surprising wake-up. |
THE PLOT
Harry Kim awakens to find himself in San Francisco, with his fiancee, Libby (Jennifer Gatti), and a steadily advancing Starfleet career. It is not a dream: It's too vivid, everything is too solid. It's also not the past. It's the present. A present in which Harry Kim was not assigned to Voyager, and was therefore able to continue in his Earth-bound life. It's not some alien projection or hallucination. Reality itself has changed, and in Harry's favor.
But Harry can't help but look the gift horse in the mouth. Told that his best friend had taken his place on Voyager, Harry finds himself compelled to search the crew manifest. Finding that Tom Paris also never made it onto Voyager in this timeline, he can't help but visit Tom. The combination of accessing restricted files and visiting a Maquis convict brings Harry to the attention of Starfleet authorities, and Harry soon finds himself suspected of being a Maquis spy.
Now the only way left to secure a future that doesn't involve prison is to find a way back to his own reality - a slim hope, unless he can convince the bitter, dissipated Tom to help him!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Comes up with some Technobabble to boost the transporter's signal in order to attempt beaming Harry out of the anomaly. Otherwise largely absent, though her effect on Tom is evident when the alternate Tom tells Harry that Janeway's offer was a lot more attractive than the life he faced without the Voyager mission. We also learn that after Tom got into trouble on Deep Space 9 in this alternate timeline, Janeway did attempt to secure his release. Even at that early point, she had enough loyalty to him as a member of her crew that she didn't just fly off without him, even though doing so would have been fully justified.
Harry Kim: Writer Brannon Braga turns the spotlight on Harry... and we get to see that he really is as bland and wooden as he seems! Wang's performance is, frankly, wretched. Wooden as oak, stiff as rigor-mortis personified. If this episode centered on either Tom or Janeway, I have no doubt that it would be compelling stuff. But just by being a Harry Kim episode, it's crippled - and the fault this time lies not with writer Brannon Braga, whose script tries very hard to fill in some of the blanks of Harry's character. No, this time the fault lies squarely with Garrett Wang, who is given a real chance to shine - but who just plain isn't up to the challenge.
Tom Paris: Robert Duncan McNeill has some fun playing the disipated Tom Paris of this alternate timeline. Tom has continued on the path set for him before Janeway made her offer, and he's much farther gone than he was at the start of Caretaker. When we first see him - much too late into the episode - he's drunken and embittered, but there's still a spark of something that makes him listen to Harry's story about an alternate reality. Though he shuts down once Harry mentions taking him back to Starfleet, suspecting some sort of trap, he is intrigued enough that he obviously asks some questions of some of his remaining friends, enabling him to help Harry at the crucial moment.
THOUGHTS
A Harry-centric episode. Given Harry's general blandness, along with the quality of the last Harry episode, I couldn't help but brace for the worst.
The good news is, Non Sequitur isn't half-bad. It's well-produced and nicely helmed by director David Livingston. It's rather a relief to get footage that is actually outside for a change! There are some good scenes and entertaining moments, and the entire first Act - in which we are just as confused as Harry as to what is going on here - is just extremely well-done.
The bad news is, the episode never really manages to build on that. Harry's character remains as flat and dull as ever. Jennifer Gatti, as Harry's fiancee, is even more wooden than Garrett Wang - which in a way makes them the perfect couple, but certainly doesn't make them a very watchable or interesting pair on screen. Their scenes together drag the episode to a screeching halt, and it takes a very long time for the story to build up any momentum at all.
The story does manage to spark some interest in the late going, once Tom Paris enters the action. Robert Duncan McNeill has shown that he can do well when given good material, and Paris' scenes provide some quite good material - yet another reason why I wish this had been Tom's episode, as Tom's alternate timeline is far more interesting than Harry's. But Tom doesn't really enter into the episode until well past the halfway mark, meaning that there is a lot of relatively dull material to get through before things start taking off.
Passable without ever really living up to its potential, the best that I can say for Non Sequitur is that it's well-made. But with a weak central actor leaving a void at the heart of the episode, there's nothing terribly compelling on a character level. I didn't have a bad time watching this story. But I never cared about the story, or about Harry, which leaves this another weak episode of a thus-far very disappointing second season.
Overall Rating: 5/10.
Review Index
You may be a little too harsh on season two. For all intents and purposes its so far been an average and moderately enjoyable season. There's been no horrid episodes and the general range has been 4-7 in score. As I said previously, season two is often very frustrating. Ideas that have a lot of potential fall flat either due to characters just behaving 'wrongly' in the situation. This season, however, will get progressively better. The Kazon will become more prevalent again and the episodes will get better as the season goes on.
ReplyDeleteYou may be disappointed with it now, but the quicker you get through the bland filler material in this season, the quicker you get to some things at are relatively satisfying. There are a number of episodes that will be not only generally enjoyable, but greatly so. Persistence of Vision, Cold Fire, Maneuvers, Resistance, and Prototype are genuinely enjoyable episodes. One's a Seska/Kazon episode, two are Kes episodes, and the other two are B'Elanna episodes. These are not perfect episodes, they have their flaws, but in my opinion they will be a far better string of episodes than the first six episodes.
The script was poor - unbelievable, in many ways. Garrett Wang couldn't act, so things got worse. Who ever hired him in the first place? that means poor casting. every sentence has a pause so wide at its beginning, you could drive a Mac truck through it - so bad directing. Sole redeeming quality: robert McNeill as Tom Paris. Non Sequitor was the opposite of riveting, in fact, it sucked mighty bad!
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