Showing posts with label Alexander Singer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alexander Singer. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

4-13. Waking Moments.

Janeway has a nightmare - The first of many...
THE PLOT

The crew begins experiencing vivid nightmares. Tom is in a shuttle crash, unable to contact Voyager for an emergency beam-out; Harry sees a romantic encounter with Seven of Nine turn deadly; Janeway is horrified to discover the crew, mummified because she failed to get them home; and Tuvok reports to the bridge without realizing he is naked. None of them are eager to share their dreams... but when they do compare notes, they learn that all of their nightmares included the same mysterious alien, not acting on the dream, just watching.

The situation quickly proves to be a serious one. Six crew members, including Harry, never woke up from their nightmares. They are still asleep, with even direct cortical stimulation failing to wake them. Chakotay decided to use his Vision Quest techniques to go into a lucid dream. He meets with the alien (Mark Colson), who states he is acting in self defense. His species lives in the dream world, and have been hunted by those in the waking world. The alien tells Chakotay where the nearest border of this space is located so that Voyager can leave as quickly as possible.

At first, the alien seems to have kept his word.  All crew members awaken once Voyager crosses the border, and everything seems to be returning to normal. Then the ship comes under attack by vessels that are impervious to the starship's weapons. When a demand for surrender comes, the alien on the viewscreen is the same one from their dreams. Voyager has fallen into a trap - and now the real nightmare begins!


CHARACTERS

Capt. Janeway: As soon as multiple crew members report the same alien in their dreams, Janeway doesn't hesitate to start seriously discussing the situation. When it is revealed that several crew members did not awaken, she becomes determined to find a solution. When captured by the aliens, Janeway immediately begins searching for ways to escape and resist, eventually finding a way to turn their dream abilities against them.

Chakotay: Season Four may be remembered as the season that introduced Seven of Nine, but it's at least as notable as the season where Chakotay has come into his own. Scorpion, Nemesis, Year of Hell, Mortal Coil, and this - All episodes with a very strong role for this previously poorly-utilized character. Chakotay's background in Vision Quests (seen as recently as the previous episode) provide his way into the story, with his ability to keep control of his dreams allowing him to be the dominant figure of the episode in a way that feels consistent with his established character.

Doctor: As a hologram, he is immune to the dream aliens' influence. He is awake even when the entire rest of the ship has been put to sleep. Chakotay is able to use this so that his final confrontation with the aliens is fully supported. Seeing Voyager being run, apparently reasonably successfully, by just the Doctor and Chakotay not long after seeing Janeway piloting the ship solo in Year of Hell does beg the question: Why such a large crew if only a handful of them are actually needed? Is it really just to give Janeway a large pool of potential redshirts?

Harry Kim: So which of the regulars do you think ends up being unable to wake from the nightmare? And when a diversion is called for to draw the attention of the aliens, who do you think gets to be vocally blamed by Seven before being assaulted? Yes, Harry Kim is wandering around with a neon bullseye painted onto his backside. Then again, given that Harry deflects questions about his nightmare by shifting everyone's attention to Tuvok, he just might deserve all he gets. He continues to be attracted to Seven - but after his Seven-centered nightmare followed by her assault, he may be a bit gun-shy at this point (unless, of course, Harry likes that sort of thing. Which would actually explain a lot...)


THOUGHTS

Waking Moments is a fun episode.

It's not all it might have been, mind you. Though director Alexander Singer has proved a steady hand in the past, his direction here is disappointingly standard for a "dream" episode. There is little atmosphere, even in the sequences we are meant to recognize as a dream; it all just looks and feels like a standard Voyager episode.

Andre Bormanis' script does move along at a good pace, though, and keeps things engaging throughout. It would be nice if it were more surprising - The plot turns are disappointingly easy to see coming, and even a couple of attempted "jump" moments raise little in the way of surprise or tension. In addition, the dream aliens seem to have little motive for their actions, essentially being evil for the sake of it.  Even if the lead alien was telling the truth when he told Chakotay that they had been hunted, he certainly recognized by that point that Voyager's crew posed no threat.  So what motive was there for leading the starship into a trap, when letting them go both avoided conflict and was actually the easier option?  No satisfactory answer is ever given (indeed, no one in the episode even asks the question).

Still, it works as an hour of entertainment. It held my attention while watching. I may have seen most of the twists coming, but there was no point at which I lost interest in seeing it all play out. Even Janeway's "action movie moment," as she totes a Big Damn Gun while quipping about turning the aliens' dream into a nightmare, is just cheesy enough to be funny in the right way. Disappointingly conventional execution, both in the writing and the directing, keeps this from being a truly good episode. But it is at least a fun one - And I'm hardly inclined to complain about that.

Overall Rating: 6/10.

Previous Episode: Mortal Coil
Next Episode: Message in a Bottle


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Monday, February 17, 2014

4-4. Nemesis.

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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Sunday, September 25, 2011

2-09. Tattoo.

Chakotay experiences a case of deja vu.

THE PLOT

Chakotay leads an Away Team searching an uninhabited moon for a MacGuffin that's needed to keep the warp engines working (don't worry, it's not important - though at least the episode ends with them getting this needed thing, rather than having them fail but hoping we forget about their need by the next episode). They don't find any usable MacGuffinite, but Chakotay does discover a symbol - one that looks almost exactly like one he saw as a young man, exploring a Central American jungle with his father, Kolopak (Henry Darrow). The symbol belonged to a tribe from whom Chakotay and his father were descended, and they eventually made contact with the members of the tribe.  This was to the delight of Kolopak - but Chakotay chose to turn his back on his tribe, embracing a future in Starfleet and creating a permanent rift with his father.

In the present, Voyager detects a warp signature that leads from the moon to an "M" class planet. Chakotay leads another Away Team to the surface to investigate, hoping to make contact and gain some of the precious MacGuffin. On the surface, he finds one thing after another that reminds him of his trip with his father. But it soon becomes clear that the intelligence on the planet controls the weather. One after another, the Away Team are forced to beam out. Soon, Chakotay is left alone, to make contact with the alien - and confront his own past in the process.


CHARACTERS

Capt. Janeway: Encourages Chakotay's curiosity about the warp signature and the tribal symbol that he discovered. She is quick to point out that they do need the MacGuffinite for their warp engines and that they are explorers, so that he can justify to himself the pursuit of his personal curiosity.

Chakotay: Without a doubt the character's best episode to date. Flashbacks show the young Chakotay (Douglas Spain) as a skeptic, someone who has turned his back on the values of his tribe. His enlistment in Starfleet is a disappointment to his father (Henry Darrow), whose spiritual nature informs the adult Chakotay. We learn the origin of his facial tattoo: done to honor his father, probably at the same point at which he joined the Maquis to fight the Cardassians. For all of his efforts to adpot his father's spiritual sense, the adult Chakotay retains a dose of his youthful skepticism. Michael Piller's script actually treats Chakotay as a proper character, rather than the generic cypher of other episodes, and Robert Beltran rises to the occasion with his best performance in the series thus far.

The Doctor: Challenged by Kes, he programs himself to emulate an illness so that he can experience what it is like to be sick. His goal is not to gain compassion, but rather to show the crew that one doesn't have to become whiny and needy when ill. With that setup, it's very obvious very quickly where this "B" plot is going. It's still amusing, thanks in large part to Robert Picardo's glee in emphasizing the more insufferable aspects of the holographic doctor's nature. This subplot would have fit better earlier, though, simply because the doctor has already been more humanized than this in previous installments.

Kes: When she challenges the doctor by telling him that he has never known what it is to be sick, it is doubtful that she expects him to turn this into an opportunity to become even more insufferable. After he programs his 29-hour illness and then uses it to berate the crew for "whining," Kes becomes quietly disgusted by his behavior - and shows an unexpectedly devious streak in pulling the rug out from under him. The subplot's a throwaway, but I hope Kes is given more opportunities to show a more ruthless side.


THOUGHTS

In case you didn't guess by the title, this is a Chakotay episode. Which, on the "oh joy" meter, is just a hair above a Harry Kim episode. Mix in that it's yet another Chakotay episode that's all about his mystical, magical Native American background - with flashbacks! - and there's every reason to expect this to be dire.

Thankfully, Michael Piller's script takes these elements and manages to fashion them into something genuinely engaging. It's not a great episode, so it may be a measure of how unimpressive Voyager's second season has been thus far that I say this: Tattoo becomes not only a pleasant surprise, but the best episode of Season Two up to this point... though I certainly hope it isn't long before something betters it!

The script does a good job of moving between the flashbacks and the main story, in such a way that the flashbacks actually help to advance the story's pace. Director Alexander Singer further helps this by some artful transitions. Present day scenes and flashback scenes cut in and out of each other in a way that creates a moment's disorientation. One scene doesn't end and the next begin; they flow right in and out of each other. The second of confusion doesn't throw the viewer out of the episode. It's done artfully, in a way that sucks you further in, with the steady flow in and out of past and present contributing to the organic feel.

Previous episodes have become nauseatingly tedious as Chakotay has gone on vision quests with animal guides and the like. Here, we get something more evocative of the feel of a vision, from the alternating flashbacks to the unexpected structure in the jungle to the face in the sky. And it's done visually, through story and editing, rather than through a character droning on tediously about it, which makes it work.

Nothing special, but it's enjoyable and well-realized. In a season of episodes like Twisted, Non Sequitur, and Initiations, the overall competence on display here comes as a great relief.


Overall Rating: 7/10.

Previous Episode: Persistence of Vision
Next Episode: Cold Fire

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