Repression

DVD, Voyager S7 (Repression)

A bit of a crowd-pleaser, this one. It cheers up people missing DS9 with some Bajoran references, and sneakily weaves some ret-conning into established Voyager characters. Then we get to see the Maquis take over the ship wearing their old clothes from 'Caretaker'! There are a lot of flaws in the story, including glaring ones like what would be the gain for Teero? He implements this takeover, long-planned, but for what? The ship will take at least thirty-five years to get home as far as he knows, and by then he could be dead. The reason given in the episode is that he wanted the Maquis to survive, and he was fanatical enough not to care where or how. But the Maquis have been destroyed, the conflict is over, and when last he had dealings with them they kicked him out! So is he trying to preserve the last remnants of the Maquis or do the opposite and make them into wanted criminals again?

The main concern is the speed at which the Starfleet crew allow themselves to be taken over. This can be glossed over - surprise attacks... allies becoming enemies... fully armed... etc, but we've seen this kind of thing happen before, and it would be inevitable that some people would be alerted and form a resistance group. Maybe they did, but we don't hear about it, in which case they lost chances to show crewmembers battling throughout the ship, instead of the walkover that was shown. It also seemed a stretch that Chakotay and the others would be so completely overwhelmed by Teero's conditioning and Tuvok's awakening that they hate their Starfleet colleagues, and where such things have been done more realistically in previous episodes or other series', this seemed too simple.

The resolution was far too rushed as well, with a hurriedly pressed reset button, without much difficulty. The early part of the episode with Tuvok investigating himself (another concept done well previously; eg: DS9's 'The Alternate') could have been shortened, so as to allow more time for the troubles with the Maquis to be filled in better. Ignore the flaws, because it's such a good celebration of  the recent 'Star Trek' years. We also get a few Maquis faces from the past, including the Bolian Chell, someone I don't think we've seen since the first season. There's also the familiar face that's been in the background since the pilot, who I can't remember the name of.

I thought the Bajoran guy was the one from 'Learning Curve', but it appeared not, and there's the surprise appearance by at least one Vulcan woman - I could be wrong but I thought there were none aboard which was why there was all the trouble for Tuvok and Vorik! Unless... she's the first Romulan in the service. Funny, we haven't heard of her before... This isn't the first time Tuvok's been spurred to opposition thanks to the Maquis, since he gained a murderous desire to kill after melding with Suder in Season Two. It's a well used idea, but always a source of good tales, and there's some crazy delight in seeing Tuvok fight the crew, especially Chakotay, although again, they could have made more of that set-piece, ranging round the Cargo Bay instead of in a tight little corner of the room behind some barrels!

Paris' delight in the archaic brings a smile when Torres points out he's made a 3D image project a 2D image, only to turn it back into 3D using the glasses (and there's a mistake at one point when they show part of the first film in black and white, without the blurring of 3D). Better than the other episodes so far this season, when the series delights in its heritage this way it can't go too far wrong, but when you know who the attacker is the story is a bit less impressive since they haven't moved the characters along as much as some Trek series', so the short character scenes aren't as poignant as they once were or could be.

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