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| An alien woman (Lori Petty) is drawn to Tuvok. |
A shuttle carrying Tuvok, Tom, and the Doctor has fallen into a "subspace sinkhole," the intense gravity of this anomaly pulling them down to a desert planet. They encounter Noss (Lori Petty), an alien woman whose ship crashed 14 years earlier, leaving her to survive by hunting spiders and scavenging the many ships that fall afoul of the anomaly. She tells them that in the years she has been here, she has seen many ships come down - but none have gone back up again.
Back on Voyager, Janeway searches for the missing crew members and discovers the anomaly. A probe is launched through it, and quickly picks up the distress beacon of the crashed shuttle. Then Supervisor Yost (Paul Eckstein), the captain of an alien ship, arrives to announce that he will seal this rift to prevent more ships from being destroyed, allowing them only a few hours to attempt a rescue. The situation becomes even more complicated when they study the data sent back by the probe and realize that the intense gravity has created a time differential. While only hours have passed on Voyager, the shuttle party has lived for months on this planet... Time enough for Noss to fall hopelessly in love with Tuvok!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Attempts to negotiate with Yost for more time to rescue her people. When he refuses to even consider, she pushes her crew to find a solution in the time that's available.
Tuvok: This is basically a Tuvok episode... But as good as the ever-reliable Tim Russ is, the best scenes belong to LeRoy D. Brazile, playing a younger version of the character in flashbacks. Brazile does a splendid job conveying Tim Russ' vocal and physical characteristics. I knew the second the episode began that I was watching Tuvok as a child, before any dialogue was spoken and before the character's name was identified. This young Tuvok is going through a crisis, caused by an attraction to a classmate, leaving him rejecting the Vulcan insistence on denying emotion. His Vulcan Master (Joseph Ruskin) gently but firmly steers him back to control. These scenes help reconcile the supposed emotionlessness of the Vulcans with the obvious flashes of emotion we've frequently seen in the adult Tuvok... And are genuinely engaging in a way that the episode's main plot is not.
Tom Paris: His role is to lend a voice to the adult Tuvok's emotional side. With Tuvok denying any interest in Noss, it falls to Tom to vocalize the obvious temptation of being stranded with an attractive and capable woman. The episode pushes this a little far, having Tom seem bizarrely eager for (married) Tuvok to start a relationship with Noss when even from their perspective it hasn't been so long to just assume [I]Voyager[/I] has given up on rescue. This destroys the potential effectiveness of having the human character give voice to Tuvok's temptation. Well, that and the lack of any sense that Tuvok actually [I]is[/I] tempted, leading to the last problem...
Noss: Lori Petty is not at all bad as Noss. The voice she puts on grows irritating across the full episode, but she does a solid job of showing the woman's evolution from wariness at these new arrivals to attraction to Tuvok. I entirely believed in Noss' attraction to Tuvok. But Tim Russ shares no screen chemistry with her, and I never believed Tuvok was particularly interested in her - Which, combined with the overwriting of the Tom scenes, just destroys any potential effectiveness.
THOUGHTS
It's been a while since Voyager has offered a bad episode. The last truly wretched outing was near the very start of the season. Since then, episodes have ranged from flawed-but-watchable to outstanding, and the last several have been consistently strong.
Gravity isn't initially awful. The opening Act is promising, with the flashback teaser featuring young Tuvok well-written and well-shot. That promise extends to the first Act, which enlivens another tedious "shuttle crash" scenario by showing events from Noss' viewpoint, so that we are introduced to the planet, to her scavenging, and to the crash of the shuttle all through her eyes. We also only meet Tom, Tuvok, and the Doctor as she does. All of this works and works well, and for the first 15 minutes, the episode had me.
But after the commercial, the viewpoint reverts to Tom and Tuvok, and everything becomes much less interesting as an all too-familiar plot plays out in an all too-familiar fashion. With Tom's writing somewhere between "off" and downright bizarre, and a lack of chemistry between Tim Russ and Lori Petty, the Second Act proves a trial to plow through, and when we finally cut to Voyager, it's a relief.
Of course, once we're safely with Janeway and Torres and Harry Kim, we get a steady parade of Voyager's Greatest Hits: Buckets of meaningless Technobabble delivered at very fast speeds; pointlessly antagonistic aliens who make things difficult for no discernible reason; and a climax that depends on an arbitrary time limit so that the writers can pretend they are creating tension.
Keeping this from the depths are the genuinely arresting first Act and the (too few) flashbacks to Tuvok's time with a Vulcan teacher. The conversations between the rebellious young Vulcan and the patient Master carry a sharpness lacking in the main story's dialogue, and the two actors are so good that I would have happily watched a full episode just about them. By the end, I was wading through the main story while waiting for the next flashback - The exact reverse of most episodes that feature flashback subplots. The strength of these scenes is enough to raise my score by a full point.
Overall, it's still pretty weak, though. A disappointing anomaly in what has been a good season.
Overall Rating: 4/10.
Previous Episode: Bride of Chaotica!
Next Episode: Bliss
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