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| Chakotay finds himself in a war zone. |
THE PLOT
Chakotay manages to lose another shuttle. At this point, I'm thinking the only reason he's still allowed to fly them is that the ship's infinite supply makes their destruction irrelevant. This time, he crashes in the middle of a brutal war between the humanoid Vori and their "nemesis," the beast-like Kradin.
Chakotay is rescued by a squadron of Vori troops, who agree to take him to the crash site. He discovers only a small amount of wreckage. Mere seconds after making this discovery, he watches helplessly as one of the men with him is killed by a Kradin attacker. Despite the bloodshed, he insists that he will not get involved in the battle. He agrees to wear a Vori uniform to avoid attracting attention and to carry a gun for defense, but he maintains this is not his war.
Then the squad is ambushed by the Kradin, with Chakotay barely escaping to a nearby village. He is greeted as hero by the villagers. He is fed, his wounds are tended, and he is given directions to a station where he can communicate with Voyager and arrange for rescue.
Until the village is attacked, and Chakotay must decide whether he will fight this "Nemesis" - or whether he will leave these kindly villagers to be massacred!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Once it's clear that Chakotay's shuttle has crashed, she is determined to rescue him - but she is also determined to do so in a way that doesn't lead to massive casualties, working with the people on the planet to help recover him peacefully.
Chakotay: This is not just a Chakotay episode, but almost entirely a Chakotay episode. Outside of a couple brief cutaways to Voyager, he is constantly on-camera, with everything we see filtered through his viewpoint. As was true in Unity and Scorpion, Robert Beltran responds to the material by giving a genuinely good performance. The longer Chakotay is in this war zone, the more battered he becomes. By the two-thirds mark, he's bruised and bloody, and wearing an expression that's haunted and dazed. His performance in the final scenes is letter perfect, his nonverbal antipathy toward the Kradin ambassador coming across strongly even before he walks out of sick bay.
Tom Paris: Gung-ho to go in, guns blazing, to rescue Chakotay. Um... Weren't Tom and Chakotay supposed to be adversaries? Not that the series has bothered to remember that since Season Two, but the way Tom acts here, you'd think Chakotay was his best friend!
Neelix: Barely in the episode, but his one bit has him expositing about the brutal civil war on this planet. Um, didn't Fair Trade establish that the ship had passed the boundary of space he knew anything about? You know, half a season ago? Even without taking into account Kes throwing the ship 9.5 thousand light years forward, Neelix being able to say anything about this planet is ludicrous. Sloppy of writer Kenneth Biller, and even sloppier of the rest of the writing staff not to catch it.
THOUGHTS
This episode was produced before Day of Honor, but was moved back in production order, probably to maintain focus on Seven of Nine's integration into the crew. Given that she doesn't even appear in this episode, it might have been jarring to have aired it before her introductory set of episodes was complete.
Kenneth Biller's script is ambitious, though I don't think it's entirely successful. I find the first Act to be the weakest with, as Chakotay bonds with a collection of soldier cliches in a set that looks like a cheap version of Predator... an impression not helped by the Kradins' slight resemblance to the creature from that movie. This entire opening stretch falls flat for me, particularly when the leader, Brone (Michael Mahonen), pauses to deliver a loud, St. Crispin's Day-style speech to his men while they are presumably trying to avoid detection. What a surprise that the enemy attacks a second after he shuts up - He might as well have been setting off flares to give away their position!
The second half is much more engaging, as Chakotay stumbles across a Vori settlement and bonds with Karya (Meghan Murphy), a young girl whose brother went off to war. Chakotay knows the young man is almost certainly dead. He can't bring himself to tell her this, but he also doesn't lie to her, taking the letter she begs him to deliver and agreeing to do the best he can with it. The movement of the plot from this point is inevitable: Karya and the villagers are put in jeopardy, and Chakotay must fully join a war that he's thus far insisted is not his fight. This much is predictable, but it's effectively done.... and the ending upturns the story nicely, which adds a full point to my final score.
Beyond the trite first half, my only other complaint is the cutting away to Voyager. The Voyager scenes don't serve any narrative purpose; the small amount of plot information could be as easily delivered in the epilogue. Breaking away from Chakotay's viewpoint also breaks the atmosphere of the planet scenes, which director Alexander Singer infuses with a feel that's much more dynamic and much less safe than this show's norm. Every time we cut to the ship, that spell is broken and we're back in typical Voyager territory. Better to just stay with Chakotay until the end, getting the broader context at the same time he does. Shove a couple extra people into the background of the sickbay scene, if you really need to justify their names on the credits.
Assigning an overall score is difficult. The first half is fairly trite, and the shipbound scenes get in the way of the story. But the main plot improves as it goes, and the ending is flat-out terrific. Thanks to the episode's edgy atmosphere and the particularly good performance by Robert Beltran, I think the good outweighs the bad - if only slightly.
Overall Rating: 6/10.
Previous Episode: Day of Honor
Next Episode: Revulsion
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