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| Neelix gets too close to the truth. |
THE PLOT
Capt. Janeway has approved A Briefing with Neelix, a morning show for the Talaxian morale officer to extoll the day's good news for the benefit of the crew. The show's debut coincides with the beginning of a run of bad news - starting with the departure of Tom Paris. The discontented Paris has responded to being relieved of duty by asking to leave the ship entirely, and arrangements have been made for him to join a Talaxian convoy.
Not long after, Voyager learns that the Talaxians were attacked by the Kazon. No supplies were stolen. The Kazon were after only one thing: Tom. That's when Neelix discovers that transmissions have been sent from Voyager, transmissions that have been expertly deleted. The ship has been home to a traitor - and all the evidence points to Tom Paris...
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Remains compassionate toward her crew, but practical at the same time. She appreciates Neelix's "tribute to Tom" broadcast after Tom leaves the ship, but she doesn't hesitate to ask about replacements for him. When Neelix's investigations implicate Tom, she takes him into her confidence regarding the deception. It's only then that she tells Chakotay the truth, as well. When Chakotay bristles, she responds that she needed "a good performance," but it does raise a question that I would love to see more fully addressed in future scripts: Does Janeway really fully trust her ex-Maquis First Officer?
Tom Paris: He tells Neelix and, later, Seska that he has genuinely tried his best to fit in on Voyager, but that he just can't make himself be a proper Starfleet officer. He has always regarded himself as a drifter, and he muses about having self-sabotaged every opportunity that has come his way. It's no surprise that his behavior is an act... but it would be good character work to build on those elements anyway, as there's a feeling of truth to it when he talks about these feelings.
Neelix: Season One's Jetrel showed how good Ethan Phillips can be when Neelix is written as a proper character, rather than a sketch comedy creation. Though I had issues with the episode itself, Phillips was superb in showing a thoughtful and 3-dimensional version of Neelix who nevertheless still possessed all the character flaws so evident in the rest of the series. We see some of that again here. This episode's Neelix is intelligent and dogged. He can see that something about the communication logs is off, and he is determined to figure out what. We also see his much-touted but rarely-glimpsed survival skills, as he handles himself quite well in the ending fight with Jonas and is able to quickly and confidently shut down Jonas's sabotage afterwards.
Doctor: What do you do for annoying comedy relief in a Neelix-centric episode in which Neelix is mostly pretty well-written? Apparently, you take one of the characters who's normally among the show's most reliable and regress him into irritating comedy relief. The writers of this episode have taken the Doctor's vanity and turned it into his defining trait. The result is a rarity: a Voyager episode in which I cringed any time the Doctor came on-camera.
Michael Jonas: The end of the Michael Jonas plot. Which is a surprise, as I honestly thought this thread would run until the season finale. Jonas is a villain, but not an unambiguous one. He thinks about killing Neelix to stop the investigation, but he hesitates for quite a long time before the opportunity finally passes. He sets up Tom to take the blame... but then, Tom has already left the ship at this point. Even at the finale, he clearly doesn't want to hurt Neelix, practically begging him to just stay out of the way. He only finally grapples with Neelix after the Talaxian has initiated the fight.
THOUGHTS
"A Neelix episode. Oh, joy."
This was my first thought as the teaser unfolded. I figured we were in for a bad comedy episode, in which the writers would double-down on making Neelix as insufferable as possible.
Instead, the Voyager creative team have done something quite clever: They've hidden the payoff to a multi-episode arc inside a Neelix-centered script. Not unlike when DS9 tucked its first references to the Dominion within a Ferengi episode. The result is a pretty decent suspense/adventure episode. And for the first sustained occasion since Jetrel, we see how good Ethan Phillips can be when he's not being forced to do bad comedy.
One thing Jeri Taylor's script does very well is to keep others' reactions to Neelix consistent with the rest of the series. Neelix is on the right track with his investigation, he follows it up seriously, and the discrepancies he's found are genuine. But the crew instinctively react to his efforts as a trivial annoyance. Torres doesn't even bother to hide her impatience with him. This has the effect of putting us more on Neelix's side, when in most episodes we would agree with Torres that the best thing the Talaxian could do would be to just keep out of the way.
Though the Jonas plot is wrapped up, it's clear that Seska isn't about to stop trying to take control of Voyager. As she said last episode, she's not about to let her child be born on a Kazon ship. With the season finale only a handful of episodes away now, I'm guessing that's going to come to a head very soon.
Overall Rating: 7/10.
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