After spending some time covering characters, the group moved on to one of the more relevant plot points of this episode.
Tim – I was curious about your thoughts regarding the challenges between the Maquis and Voyager crew. To me this is where Voyager could have been years ahead of its time: the modern Battlestar Galactica of the mid-90s. But man did they tie up that resolution pretty quick…and while there seems like there might be a promise of future troubles (and I believe there are), they certainly get shunted away after this episode for the immediate future.
Ryan – The showrunners really made it clear with this episode that tensions between the crew were not going to be their focus at all for this season. They seemed to want to wrap that up as quickly as possible. Is there any argument at all (to play the Devil’s advocate, because I agree they really missed an opportunity there for some rich inter-Star Ship politics) to made that smoothly over those conflicts as quickly as possible better fits Star Treks model of sort of “an adventure a day” programming?
Seth – Wrapping things up quickly definitely brings them closer to a TNG type model, which had a lighter touch with continuity and usually limited itself to one overarching (external) concern per season. It might have also been intended as a counterbalance to DS9’s heavy use of political plots. It’s just awkward to see them tripping over their own premises, because they didn’t *have* to have the Voyager be a mix of Starfleet and Maquis crew, and so far it seems to be more trouble than it’s worth. And having to raise up and resolve these internal issues so quickly contributes to the rushed feeling of the episode.
There were other introduced details that seemed to help make up for the jettisoning of the conflict between crew members, though.
Tim – I actually rather enjoyed that there seemed to be some setup that the Voyager wasn’t completely self-sufficient. Giving Kes the project to grow food and implying that the Food Replicators might not hold out, there be some promise! But then, that’s me and my wishing-for-terrible-circumstances-to-drive-drama again.
Ryan – I appreciated the tension between Chakotay and Janeway. I found the tonal shifts from an officers meeting to shouting orders in a shuddering bridge a little abrupt, but no question the minutiae of running a starship is valuable stuff to help flesh out a sci-fi epic in space.
Tim – See, I found that tonal shift to be an interesting aspect of their characters. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but it felt to me like these are both “professionals” in the way Steve Buscemi would use it in Reservoir Dogs. These are people who are accustomed to assuming the command of a vessel at a moment’s notice, no matter what might be going on around them. That was my take on it, at least.
Ryan – Oh, I didn’t read it into the characters at all. I read it as a moment of sloppy storytelling, of the writers probably trying to get away with too much in one episode.
Seth – I think the attention to resource needs in the officer meeting was a great bit of setup, but it was yet another necessary detail that was crammed into the episode.
Tim – Well, based off of how other things are handled, you’re probably right on that front.
Seth – The Enterprise was always checking in at and refuelling at star bases, but the Voyager doesn’t have that luxury. They also had to establish that for some unfathomable reason, the generators for the holodecks are completely isolated from the rest of the ship’s power grid (Read: The writers want to use holodecks without raising questions about power rationing).
Tim – Oh of course. It’s not a Star Trek series without Holodeck episodes.
Ryan – I look forward to the inevitable Western episode.
And then there was the inclusion of a factoid that was dropped into the episode, which spawned a rather intriguing discussion about the eponymous ship.
Ryan – Is the Voyager really only 100 meters across?
Seth – According to Memory Alpha, it’s 343 meters long, The physical model for the Voyager is about 5 ft x 2 ft, which would confirm that the Voyager is only about 100 meters across based on the 343 meter length figure.
Ryan – How does that compare with other ships?
Seth – It’s a little bigger than the Enterprise from the original series, but only about half as long as the Enterprise D from TNG. For another comparison, the Enterprise D had a normal crew complement of just over 1,000, while the Voyager left space dock with just 142 crew members. The original Enterprise carried about 430 crew.
Ryan – Ah, alright, so we’re definitely dealing with a much smaller craft.
Seth – So we’re looking at a relatively small ship with a noticeably small crew; I’d imagine a lot of space on the Voyager is taken up by advanced equipment
Ryan – Some of the smaller crew is certainly due to the fact that they never intended to leave on an exploratory mission?
Seth – According to Memory Alpha, that’s a normal crew complement for an Intrepid-class starship. You’re probably right that this class wasn’t designed for long exploratory missions, though. I’d guess that they’re intended to follow up on phenomena discovered by probes or larger cruisers like the Enterprise.
Ryan – Excellent. Thank you!
Tim – Actually, just to cause a bit of debate, the article I pulled up said that Intrepid-Class starships -were- intended for long-term exploration.
Seth – Okay; it’s possible that those bio-gel systems they allude to allow for a greater degree of automation by the computer, so crew requirements aren’t as high.
Ryan – They would have sent a long-term exploration spacecraft on a mission after the Maquis…?
Seth – Presumably, they thought the advanced sensor technology would help them track ships through the Badlands. Starfleet also likes to make flexible ship designs.
Ryan – …I feel myself teetering on the edge of a very dark hole getting deep into debating the minutiae of a fictional world.
And, of course, time was left over for consensus building!
Tim – So what would you guys say is the consensus on this episode? Me? I think, on the whole, I enjoyed it -slightly- better than the Pilot, but only because it focused more on Janeway and Torres.
Seth – I concur with Tim; the focus on Janeway and Torres made for a more engaging plot. The episode definitely suffered exposition crunch. Hopefully the pacing will even out within a few more episodes as they get all the necessary info across.
Ryan – Well, yeah, like I mentioned at the beginning, for a relative Star Trek newcomer like myself, this episode is kind of emblematic for me of what a good episode of Star Trek can mean (my nit-picking aside): the crew comes together to overcome a quasi-scientific but nevertheless compelling space phenomena.
Join us next week for another installment of Roundtable Voyager! We’ll be discussing Star Trek: Voyager s01e04 “Time and Again” if you would like to watch the episode ahead of time and contribute your own thoughts in the comments.We’d love to have you help shape our discussion! Or, if you’re more interested in “Parallax”, was there anything you feel we missed, or theories about the episode that you would like to share? Feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments section below!
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I am so in on this. *starts re watching Voyager*
So to make a quick point, it was vaguely mentioned in the pilot that the Voyager was being sent because of its small size and maneuverability in the scene where (paraphrasing) Paris says that he would not advise Janeway go to the badlands because Federation ships are to big and clunky to maneuver safely.
This is where I enter personal speculation.
The Intrepid class was originally meant for long range science missions, but at some point it was also heavily armed (nearly as well if not slightly better than the Enterprise… Perhaps due to the war like state the Federation has been in?) This (I can only assume) means that when the shield, and weapon systems are being used heavily, the antimatter power system is depleted much faster than the designers originally intended a peaceful science ship to use fuel.
Needing to replicate so many repair parts to fix the ship after the damage done in the pilot would be taxing enough already on the Antimatter / Dilithium supply. What we might consider to be unlimited power is in reality a running balance game that is is just as finite as our fuel tanks on cars when given the scope of star ships.
Except it’s more like a car motor is powering a car -and- a semi truck sized refrigeration system that is designed to draw power off a semi sized engine. Sure it works for a while…But you eventually need to sacrifice something here, to get full power there, after a while of running the system hard it needs to be tuned up and fuel gets low fast.
This is what we are running into in the officers meeting. They know the ship is in bad shape and are trying to figure out how to make it last.
When Voyager is fully fueled and fully repaired it can be argued that it is the most bad ass ship in the fleet (I say no to defiant because of it’s obvious design flaws.). But when it is less than perfect, it is vulnerable. What this ship lacks in staying power it makes up for in maneuverability, technology, and adaptability.
Literally a crew of two or three people can run this ship if the need arises and it can be overhauled repaired and upgraded at nearly double the speed of a huge galaxy class ship.
The problem here is just because the Federation designs a ship to do something does not make it what that ship will eventually be used for. I mean look at the Galaxy Class Enterprise, it was designed a flag ship for exploration and families.. It mostly ends up as the Federation’s most seasoned combat ship.
Just as Voyager was intended to sit around and chart star systems, but was for some reason fitted with enough firepower to seriously challenge the Enterprise if Voyager’s shields would hold.
The Federation talks peace, but they silently scream war. And this tendency has saved the crews of both the Enterprise and the Voyager multiple times.
Thus I explain way a long range ship is so suddenly worried about power consumption. (beside the obvious distance home)
Over all the plot as was suggested is rather cramped.
I believe the scene with the doctor is intended to make the viewer start to identify themselves with his predicament, much like we did with Data. Next Generation created the plot crutch of using something that is not human, but disparately wants to become more human, and slowly does so, as a way to engage the audience and provide a steady feeling of progress in a serial day to day episodic show.
It is key to make us feel like the different writing styles of each of the shows all fit together. I tend to cringe when characters do something out of character and then are right back to their old selves in the next episode and this consistent progression of a single character can help to smooth the rough spots because it has very simple rules that must be followed to make the non humanness apparent every time (such as Data’s speech patterns or the Doctors pre-programed one liners.
I feel the playing down of crew conflict is because the writers realized early on that they had created something that would possibly detract from where they had intended to go with their show and did not want to put the work and show time into fixing it for fear of being canceled in the first season for not being Sci-fi enough. To much interpersonal drama and not enough external phaser shooting conflict makes for a boring space exploration show. (at least for that masses, I find it more interesting when not a single shot is fired in a episode) Perhaps that is why I liked Enterprise more than most people and the late season bad-assery where they take the ship into a personal vendetta/war never quite clicked with me.
Over all There are a few painful moments in this episode, (Ala Paris,)but I still give it a good rating.