3-11. The Q and the Grey.

Q (John de Lancie) drags Janeway into a Q Civil War!

THE PLOT

Janeway and the Voyager crew are privileged to witness a supernova at the closest distance of any Starfleet vessel in history. Janeway is very pleased as she heads to her quarters... only to be dumbfounded when she finds those quarters changed into a tacky honeymoon suite, with a bathrobe-clad Q (John de Lancie) waiting for her.

Q wants a child, and he has hand-picked Janeway to be the mother. Janeway's disinterest doesn't dissuade him in the slightest, and he begins an amorous pursuit that includes cajoling, puppies, and even fake sincerity. I think the Revenge of the Nerds cast escaped the quest to get laid with more dignity.

Needless to say, this is a smokescreen for a greater agenda. It turns out that the suicide of Quinn (from the last Q episode, Death Wish) has set off a civil war within the Q Continuum, between the forces of conformity and the rebels, led by Q himself, who wish to break with tradition. So Q whisks Janeway off to the Continuum, represented through the imagery of the American Civil War. Q is the leader of the rebels, so he naturally is wearing... blue, the color of the union army. Then he lays out his full intent: To stop the war by introducing a new Q - His child!


CHARACTERS

Capt. Janeway: Q is an omnipotent being with the power to send Voyager home or trap it in the heart of a comet, all within the blink of an eye. So naturally Janeway treats him as a minor annoyance from the moment he first appears. When Q dangles the prospect of returning the ship home in front of her, she brushes him off. Fair enough if she decides not to act as Q's brood mother in exchange for the ship's safe return... but I can't believe that she wouldn't at least take a moment to consider the offer, if only for the sake of her crew. Once in the Civil War, she shows her moral superiority to the entire Q Continuum, right down to making a speech at gunpoint. I actually cheered for the enemy Q general (Harve Presnell) when he decided to go ahead and execute her after the speech.

Chakotay: Gets some halfway-decent moments opposite the female Q (Suize Plakson). When she is still on Voyager after it rides out the shockwaves of a supernova, he knows that something has happened to her powers. He brushes aside her sneers and lays out the blunt situation for her: With no powers, she is reliant on Voyager to help her. 

Hot Omnipotent Space Babe of the Week: Suzie Plakson is the female Q, apparently "our" Q's mate. If the notion sounds a bit lame, don't worry - The reality is worse. Plakson struggles gamely with trite "jealous lover" dialogue opposite Q and Janeway, then with snootiness opposite the Voyager crew. But the dialogue is so bad that she really can't do much to sell it. At one point, she condescendingly tells Torres how much she likes Klingon women for their "spunk" - a phrase that belongs in a 1940's "B" movie, not a 1990's television series. Her dialogue is unfunny, her chemistry with John de Lancie is nonexistent, and I sorely hope this character is non-recurring.

Q: Is this John de Lancie's worst performance as Q? Sure, he had some badly-acted moments in Hide and Q, but he also had a wonderful exchange with Picard about the potential of humanity. Here, there are no wonderful exchanges to allow de Lancie to show his chops. Q is presented as a sitcom comedy character, and de Lancie plays him as such, overacting every line and facial expression, mugging for laughs that just aren't there. He still has screen presence, which goes a long way toward making this episode watchable - but neither the charm nor the wit that mark Q's best portrayals are in evidence here.


THOUGHTS

Season Two's Death Wish introduced Q to Voyager in fine style. The episode gave us the most revealing look we'd had to date at Q, both the species and the character. We saw the Q as a race made stagnant by its own omnipotence, and saw Q in particular as a man who had been scared into abandoning his own rebellious nature - and finally being pushed into embracing that rebellion again. It was the first truly great Voyager episode, and possibly the best Q episode in the franchise.

That The Q and the Grey is a lesser episode than Death Wish is hardly a surprise. It's tough to follow up something that good. But this episode doesn't even try. While ostensibly following up on the events of the previous episode, writer Kenneth Biller takes the safest and laziest path available. Instead of treating the Q seriously, he counts on John de Lancie's comic abilities to carry the episode. To that end, what should be a fairly dark and dire situation is turned into a screwball comedy. 

This doesn't have to doom the episode. Deja Q, in TNG's third season, was a comedy, but it was a smart one that made Q work as a three-dimensional character, earning its laughs by having the Enterprise crew react to a powerless Q exactly as they should have: with suspicion and irritation. This script doesn't have anything like that level of intelligence, though. It's more along the lines of Qpid, right down to using Q's presence as an excuse to dress up the regulars in period costumes.  Except Qpid, weak though it was, managed some stray laughs - something this episode does not.

The Q and the Grey is an insult to its excellent predecessor. There's genuine potential in the concept of a Q civil war arising as a result of Death Wish. Instead of examining that seriously, however, the script wastes almost half the running time on bad comedy, then gives the "true" story only the most superficial (frankly nonsensical) treatment. What might have been a good drama is instead reduced to a bad comedy.

One that isn't even funny.


Overall Rating: 3/10.

Previous Episode: Warlord
Next Episode: Macrocosm


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