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| Janeway as a cafe owner in Nazi-occupied France. |
The Hirogen have taken control of Voyager. The Hirogen Alpha, Karr (Danny Goldring), is intrigued by the possibilities of the ship's holodeck, has outfitted most of his Starfleet prisoners with neural interfaces, replacing their identities with those of characters within their holodeck programs. Effectively, the [I]Voyager[/I] crew become different people, within deadly simulations of historical battles, with Karr studying their behavior as the situations unfold.
Janeway has been made into the owner of a cafe in the Nazi occupied French village Sainte Claire. Tuvok is her bartender, Seven a singer. They are all members of the French Resistance, secretly paving the way for American forces to liberate the village. But the Hirogen Beta, Turanj (Mark Deakins), has become impatient with his commander's game. He wants to begin the proper hunt - stalking the members of the Voyager crew and killing them all!
CHARACTERS:
Capt. Janeway: One of the pleasures of this two-parter is seeing the regulars in different roles, yet still true to their natures. Even stripped of her identity, Janeway is completely in charge. Her interactions with Tuvok and Seven are instantly familiar, with Tuvok the trusted advisor and Seven the person she wants to trust despite strain and tension. The main difference between Janeway with the neural implant and without it is that, with her identity returned, she is able to deal with the larger threat of the Hirogen. I wish there had been more interaction between her and the Hirogen Alpha in Part Two, as I enjoyed the scenes in which the two commanders reasoned with each other, two intelligent officers finding common ground in the midst of chaos.
Seven of Nine: Is the first crew member to regain her identity, thanks to her Borg plot devices, and gets the most prominent supporting role. Again. I'd complain if I actually thought any of the other regulars would be preferable, but Seven's strained interactions with Janeway inject an extra layer of tension into the first part. Within the simulation, Janeway's Resistance leader worries that Seven may be a traitor and is prepared to kill her. This leaves Seven working to return Janeway's identity to her, even as the woman she's trying to save is pulling her gun to shoot her as a traitor. Part Two gives her much less to do, allowing some strong moments for the rest of the cast, though she still gets a memorable bit in which she stands up to Turanj, showing no fear at his threat of execution.
The Doctor: Is forced to collaborate with the Hirogen Alpha. He really has no choice. With the crew thrust into violent holographic simulations with the safeties turned off, the Doctor's options are to patch up the crew so that they can continue to "play the game," or to refuse and watch his shipmates die horribly. He does remain alert for an opportunity to do more, however; and when Seven is brought to him with severe injuries, he is able to neutralize her neural implant so that she can get the rest to start fighting back.
Harry Kim: Gets his best episode of the season - probably his best episode since The Chute. He shows both cleverness and grit in his interactions with the Hirogen, aiding first the Doctor and then Janeway while convincing his captors that he is doing their bidding. Garrett Wang rises to some decent material with a genuinely strong performance. Plus, it's the only episode thus far this season in which Harry couldn't have been seamlessly replaced by a paperclip.
Hirogen: "Species that don't change die! ...We've allowed our predatory instincts to dominate us... We've spread ourselves too thin. We're no longer a culture, we have no identity. In another thousand years, no one will remember the name Hirogen!" Karr recognizes that the inability to think beyond the immediate hunt is leading his species on a slow path to extinction. His motives for subjecting the Voyager crew to a series of holographic horrors lend him a shade of gray that has been absent from previous Hirogen. At the same time, we see that the Hirogen are not just aggressors - They are also victims of their own, inflexible ideology. Appropriately, in Part Two, Turanj is talked back to the traditional Hirogen path by a holographic simulation of a Nazi in the dying days of World War II - one failed ideologue inspiring another to self-destructive aggression.
THOUGHTS:
The Killing Game is written by Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky, who partnered for the superb season-bridging Scorpion. This two-parter is not of that quality, nor is it trying to be. This is a large-form example of a tendency both writers share: Playing games with the show's "reality," putting the characters into bizarre situations to see what might happen. This can result in a terrible episode (Braga's Genesis springs to mind, as does Menosky's Masks) - but when these writers are on form, the results can also be a lot of fun.
Happily, I found The Killing Game to be tremendously entertaining... albeit, only for about 70% of its running time. Like a lot of two-parters, there isn't quite enough to really fill two episodes, and the last half of Part Two starts to feel more than a little stretched out. Notably, there are at least two too many cutaways to another holodeck, in which Neelix and the Doctor have "comedy" dealings with some holographic Klingons.
But for at least an episode and a half, it is very entertaining. I particularly enjoyed seeing how the regulars' personalities kept showing through, even without their memories. It might have been more off-the-wall fun to have had them in very different roles - But it feels more "right" to see the characters paralleling their familiar roles even when given different identities and memories.
The use of the Hirogen is clever, too, developing them beyond their previous "Predator meets Star Trek" status. I find myself hoping that the events of this episode are followed up in the next Hirogen episode, and genuinely intrigued to see where they might be taken from here.
Overall Rating: 7/10.
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