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| Chakotay leads a Maquis mutiny! |
THE PLOT
Chakotay and his former Maquis crew members stage a mutiny, taking control of Voyager while Janeway is off ship making contact with a friendly species. Chakotay has planned well, and within minutes has secured the ship. He imprisons the senior officers in the brig, the rest of the crew in a cargo bay, and makes his ultimatum: Join him, or be put off at the next habitable planet. They have fifteen minutes to decide...
This isn't real, of course. It's a holodeck simulation - an unfinished one, which Torres discovered while purging old files. The program was created by Tuvok back when the Maquis first came onto Voyager, when he feared a mutiny was a likely result. He abandoned it once it became clear the two crews were working well together, and believed it deleted.
Now that it's been discovered, Janeway urges him to finish the story, with help from Tom Paris. When they go to the holodeck to program an ending, however, they discover someone else has already beat them to it: Seska (Martha Hackett) programmed a trap before she left the ship, and now that trap's been activated!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Rather than being offended by the simulation, she encourages Tuvok to finish it. She observes that, cut off from the new art and literature being created at home, the people on board will need to create their own. When Tuvok objects that a simulated mutiny might cause friction among the crew, she snaps at him to "loosen up," finding the program to be really nothing more than some harmless fun (with it hinted that she's been playing the simulation herself).
Chakotay: The villain within the simulation, carefully orchestrating a Maquis overthrow of Voyager while Janeway is away from the ship. Though his disloyalty is not accurate to the "real" Chakotay, the rest of his traits are consistent. He is not needlessly cruel or violent. He stuns Starfleet officers fighting on Janeway's side, and has Janeway loyalists put off the ship on a habitable world rather than killing them. When Janeway returns to the ship, he tries to reason with her, pointing out that there is no reasonable scenario that will allow her to retake Voyager. Though the real Chakotay objects to being the villain, Robert Beltran seems to have enjoyed it - It's the most engaged performance he's given since Unity.
Tuvok: I guessed fairly early on that Tuvok had to be the writer of the program. It had to be someone who knew the senior officers well enough to capture their basic personalities, and also someone able to secure their identity too well for even Torres to break through. Honestly, that didn't leave a lot of potential suspects. I figured it had to be either Tuvok or Seska, and Seska wouldn't have written herself in such a villainous light. As a writer, Tuvok believes that a fictional scenario needs to spring from accurate representations of the characters - a view that I share wholeheartedly.
Tom Paris: Believes that good fiction is propelled by plot twists, and doesn't much care whether those twists are based in character or not (which essentially makes him Brannon Braga). When he volunteers to finish writing the program, among his ideas is to have Janeway turn into a sadistic autocrat who executes anyone who stands in her way... Which maybe shows that Tom has been paying attention to character, after all! One of the pleasures of the episode is watching Tom and Tuvok work together, Tom's instinctive actions complementing Tuvok's logic to good effect.
Torres: Her relationship with Tom is still progressing, as it's a planned date that leads Tom to discover the program Torres has stumbled across. B'Elanna's curiosity leads her to finding Tuvok's old program. She also works with Janeway in the second half to make changes to Seska's scenarios, lending aid to Tuvok and Tom as they struggle to survive.
Seska: Martha Hackett's Seska may have gotten bogged down in a bad arc in Season Two, but even then she remained a consistently enjoyable antagonist. Her return as a holographic villain is a clever way for writer Kenneth Biller to bring her back into the series while using the show's own continuity in a fun way. This is the first season Seska, before she was revealed as a Cardassian spy. She's presented as a Bajoran member of the Maquis, with no indication that she's anything other than that. She remains ruthless and manipulative, and emerges as the full villain well before the episode's end. I'm guessing this will be the last time we see her - but it's a far better final bow for the character than Basics was, showing her as a formidable villain her own right in a way that has no ties at all to the horrible Kazon arc.
THOUGHTS
Credit where it's due: This episode gets off to a fantastic start. We open with Chakotay sounding out Torres for a mutiny, a warning about being on the right side "when the shooting starts" hooking us into the titles. Said shooting starts very quickly after we come back from break. As the mutiny unfolds, it becomes obvious that what we are seeing is set during Season One (Bajoran Seska, Chakotay relatively new to the post of First Officer, Kes in her old outfit and hair style), but it's only as we go into the next break that we realize that the scenario we're witnessing isn't "real," but rather a fiction within the story.
It's a fast-paced, clever opening. It creates momentum from the start, which sustains through the second Act, as Tom plays through the scenario in an entirely different way. Then the program runs out at a climactic moment, effectively leaving the characters stuck in the midst of a cliffhanger with no resolution, itself a very amusing take on the (many) series that end on unresolved cliffhangers. It's a good plot turn, one that allows the episode to reinvent itself in its second half.
...Which, all too predictably, is when it goes downhill. The gags with Tuvok and Tom arguing over how to finish the scenario are predictable and unfunny, and the pace is already starting to flag. The plot turn involving Seska's trap promises to re-energize things, but nothing terribly interesting is done with it. In the end, neither the simulated plot involving Chakotay's mutiny nor the subplot involving Seska's trap are convincingly resolved, leaving both strands not so much wrapping up as running out.
I think Biller's script would have benefited from focusing on either one strand or the other. If this is going to be an episode about Seska wreaking havoc from beyond the grave, then introduce that idea much sooner - Maybe by planting it in a more traditional holo-novel, only for our characters to gradually discover that they're trapped in someone else's game. Alternatively, if the episode is going to be about Tuvok's unfinished scenario, just let the second half play out along those lines: With Tuvok and Tom unveiling the finished product and the characters responding to the representations of themselves. It would be smaller-scale, but it would at least feel like a single, unified episode.
Much like Coda and, to a lesser extent, Darkling, we are left with what feels like the first half of one episode stitched to the second half of another, to the detriment of both. A pity - For a good half of the running time, I was thoroughly enjoying this.
Overall Rating: 5/10.
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