Mortal Coil

DVD, Voyager S4 (Mortal Coil)

Neelix has always been something of a trickster. Not a fraud or a conman (at least not to any great extent), but in the way that he hides his true, strong emotions under a veil of eagerness to please, eccentric pleasantness and optimism - why, the first time we met him everything he did was a blind in order to solicit Voyager's help to rescue Kes from the Kazon! In the first season we found out why he keeps his real feelings bottled beneath such a genial exterior when we learned that he's lived with his own stigma of cowardice ever since his homeworld, including all family and friends, was massacred by a genocidal weapon. Partly, his desperation to always be in people's good books, the man who cheers all he meets, could be seen as a penance he charged himself with to make up for past sins, and partly he is genuinely a loveable, cheery fellow resolved to make the best of whatever situation he finds himself in. With Voyager he found the perfect, accepting environment for his varied talents, and a haven for Kes and he to settle in. This episode is about what hope Neelix had in life being taken from him, and to what depths it drives him. His conflicted nature has always proved what a deep and complex character he is - the main reason I think viewers generally didn't warm to him, is because he's not in the typical hero mould of Starfleet characters. They see the bumbling, insecure side; the jokey, silly exterior, and don't look any deeper. But you only have to witness episodes such as 'Fair Trade' where his loyalties are tested and his weaknesses come to the fore, or the Season 2 arc of jealousy over Kes and Paris' friendship, to see what a tempestuous figure of extremes he is.

The Guiding Tree in The Great Forest where all his loved ones will be waiting for him when he dies, and watch over him while he lives, has been his constant hope and solace for all the things that have gone wrong, all the frustrations in his life, and in this episode he's forced to confront those long-held beliefs as apparent falsehood. If there were any episode that appears to have a strong anti-Christian agenda, this would be an easy contender, for it seems to say that Heaven (or the Talaxian version of it, in an unsubtle parallel), is being openly denied, a dig at all those who have real faith in life after death. But this was Bryan Fuller's work, and while I don't know if he considers himself a Christian, he's certainly drawn strong connections between the Christian worldview and Trek's ("There is a strange Christian quality, in its purest form, to the Roddenberry universe" - Star Trek Magazine #183, p.7), in interviews of recent years. I think the story is not actually about confirming or denying a belief system, but examining how a person copes when their faith is tested. And it couldn't be tested much more than by dying. Unless it were by dying and being brought back to life by Borg nanoprobes (one of the first instances of the fix-all solution Seven of Nine's bloodstream added to the series' dramatic toolbox: Holodeck malfunctions, Transporter accidents and nanoprobes).

The story could easily have gone in a completely different direction to the personal storm Neelix endures. Watching this series' pilot, 'Caretaker,' on original transmission, my Mother (not a big Trek viewer), really found it appealing for it feeling so close to 'TOS,' presumably for its bright, accessible sense of fun and adventure. While 'TOS' featured all those things, it also had a morbid, creeping horror to its stories, so many monsters and so much evil out there in unexplored space. Arguably, while the other series' incorporated that colour to their palette of storytelling, 'Voyager' was the one that recreated the haunting, bloodcurdling sense of the horrible, the best. Another approach to this episode could have been a 'Frankenstein' ripoff, with Neelix, usually such a kind, unthreatening individual whose clothes and appearance made him cuddly and approachable, becoming the monster, assimilated internally. Granted, we've seen that story plenty of times ('Genesis' on 'TNG,' or 'The Alternate' on 'DS9' for two examples). If this had been in the 'Kelvin Timeline' (the Abramsverse by any other name), that's exactly the kind of action-packed zombie horror we'd have got. And as interesting as 'Impulse' was on 'Enterprise,' it lacked the psychological chills this episode achieves. It is curious that the creepiness of having nanoprobes forcibly injected into you in order to save your life isn't addressed (except for Neelix' initial revulsion to the idea), but there's only so much time, and faith crisis was the observable avenue of direction they chose to visit.

Still, there's a reason I've often remembered this as a horror episode above anything, and that's for the nightmarish vision quest in which the things he loves are twisted on their heads, and rather than comfort and joy, the members of his Voyager family join in confirming his fears of oblivion and hopelessness. The experience was supposed to take him to a place where he was at his most relaxed and contented, but at that party he was far from peaceful! Even worse, we see his sister, Alixia, who not only taunts and rails against him, but outright denies the afterlife, angrily spouting that life is pointless; it was all lies created in response to the fear of death; you are alone; all the torturous arrows of suicidal thought, and spoken creepily in Naomi's nasally child's voice as if to twist the knife even further, before disintegrating like a dusty corpse (perhaps signifying the Metreon Cascade, the effects of which we saw a version of in 'Jetrel'). I didn't think the scene began scarily enough, with a recreation of the Prixin party in the Mess Hall which was bright and full of happy music, but then his friends turn on him as he tries to speak to Alixia and though there's a halo glow around everything, it may be that the jolly atmosphere was designed to create greater incongruity with what's actually happening.

There's also a morbid moment when Neelix breezily wants to see the Holodeck recreation of the accident as Chakotay's about to run it. For one thing, it's fascinating that the computer automatically records everything that's going on in the shuttlecraft (presumably it doesn't have records of every room and corridor on Voyager or that would be rather disturbing!), though perhaps it only saves the last few hours in case of a necessary investigation? Chakotay appears surprisingly thoughtless in allowing Neelix to join in so soon after his ordeal, and the cold, hard visuals of what happened only confirm the Talaxian's views and lead him to his breakdown, though it also allows Chakotay to step in and assist his friend. The vision quest is only one aspect of the story that Fuller brings back from the characters' backstories, and once again gives me hope that 'Star Trek Discovery' will be a series heavily based within Trek continuity. We're really taken back in time to the early seasons, particularly Season 2, I would say, with Neelix having a flower from Kes' airponics garden, Samantha Wildman and her baby daughter (named Naomi for the first time in this episode), Neelix talking about his past as a trader, and those he lost in the Talaxian war, that it shows what an encyclopaedic mind Fuller must have to be able to work all these pieces in. We're reminded of all the pain Neelix went through eleven years ago losing his family, and I don't think we'd seen such a powerful acting performance for Ethan Phillips since 'Jetrel,' and probably never again - definitely one of his best episodes!

One of the biggest loose ends of the series must be Naomi, whom we saw as a baby and now appears to be a young girl (explainable by her Ktarian heritage, and nothing to do with production being easier with a minor than a baby!). Brooke Stephens is the second (unless there were multiple babies 'performing' the role previously), of three to play the role (unless you count future Naomi), and is much more of a conventional child actress than Scarlett Pomers would be, but it works fine for this story as Neelix is simply a reassuring presence to the tot, giving her something he himself is in desperate need of, and probably the main reason he comes back from the brink, even if he didn't necessarily think of the parallels between him and Naomi. I always liked when they brought in recurring characters, it made Voyager seem more like a real family crew instead of a small group of officers who nod to the others as they pass in corridors. Samantha wasn't the richest character, a career Starfleet officer who became a Mum in one of the worst environments, with no way to contact her alien husband on 'DS9' (I wish we'd seen him on that series so there was more of a crossover between them). I hate to make reference to her blonde hair, but she's remarkably dense in not noticing the charged atmosphere in the Transporter Room as Neelix is about to beam himself 'up' - she wanders in and starts chatting away, and even when she sees things aren't quite right, Chakotay successfully talking him down, she just frowns slightly and doesn't seem to think anything of it when Neelix goes off with her to tuck Naomi in! Maybe they aren't good enough friends that she could discuss it?

In defence of the story to approach such subject matter as suicide and the afterlife, I would make a few points about the direction things take. For example, the most obvious anti-faith moment comes when Alixia claims life is hopeless and there's nothing more, but she's also representative of the fear and anger in Neelix, a villainous apparition, immediately marking that point of view as a negative one. It's also true that the other characters don't really have much input on the subject of death and what it entails, the closest we come to a definitive answer being Chakotay's agnostic observation that there's still so much we don't know about death, and even suggesting (and this is a key point), that just because Neelix 'died' for eighteen hours and doesn't remember anything, he doesn't know everything there is to know on the subject (although, saying that, it would have been appropriate for him and Spock to have a conversation since they would both have a common frame of reference, something that prevented a discussion of Spock's insights with Dr. McCoy in 'Star Trek IV'!). Chakotay doesn't say this, but I thought it: Neelix didn't die permanently, so maybe he didn't go through a transformation that would have led him to the way things were described by his people. Then there's the fact that he may simply not be able to return to life with those memories of another place, a gulf between that existence and our own. It's the same argument Chakotay used in 'Emanations' when other afterlife beliefs were challenged because of lack of hard, physical evidence about ethereal matters.

It is noticeable that the other characters don't chime in with what they think, the writers probably not wanting to pin them down, and because most appear to be secular humanist, at least in creed, if not in hardline belief, and would be most likely to believe in nothing after death. The closest we come to discussion on the subject by anyone else is when Tuvok and Seven talk about the Borg having a form of immortality because a drone's memories and experiences will remain in the Collective after the irreparable unit has been discarded. She actually admits to it being something of a relief that even though she's no longer Borg, part of her will live on in the Collective, though we don't really hear anything about Vulcan views on the afterlife, which I imagine would be quite potent since we know Vulcans tend to have their katra (spirit), captured and preserved separate to the decomposition of the body. Seven's role in the piece is rather interesting because she shows such determination to carry out what might best be described as the regeneration of the dead Neelix. She marches brusquely into Sickbay and makes irrefutable statements about what must be done and how she will do it. As ever, there's no real emotion or connection between her and Neelix, she merely wishes to help a member of her new Collective for the greater good of the ship, to salvage an important component rather than save a life, referring to Neelix in cold terms and claiming she'd have done the same for any member of the crew.

On the other side of the coin, Neelix continues to be a good friend to her - while he does blow up in her face, the stresses getting too hard and Seven not understanding personal space, he later apologises and reassures her that she's in a place where people care about her. The B-story is her lack of social skills, seen in both the Prixin event, failing miserably at small talk (maybe this was where the Doctor first got the idea to school her in such etiquette?), and with the personal boundaries mentioned above with Neelix. It's made clear in the course of the episode that both he and Seven have an important part to play in this family, one that accepts them even though they're vastly different and at divergent stages of development. The main contribution Neelix would go on to make was in giving reassurance and love to the various children or childlike characters, able to speak on their level, so it's fitting that he realises this calling during the episode, influencing his final decision. One thing he says early on when Seven shows disdain for the seasoning of her food is, why settle for sufficient? That's the difference between them, one is function and directness, the other is relaxed and delights in lack of order. It's strange that the other characters only show mild disappointment at Neelix' death, rather than shock and horror, but they've all seen death before and they're professional, and if there were any doubt how much he meant to them it vanishes when Janeway talks of observing the week of mourning Talaxian custom demands - you feel they'll do whatever they can to honour him, which only makes it sadder.

There is a slight problem with Seven being able to bring someone back to life many hours after death (the Doctor bestows the accolade of a new world record, but which world? It makes me imagine 'The Guinness Book of Galactic Records' - how many Tube Grubs one Ferengi could fit in its mouth, or highest number of punches withstood by a Klingon, etc!). In the same 'vein' as 'Star Trek Into Darkness' and its miracle Khan blood, simply injected into a dead host to restore them to living colour (so I guess there was a precedent even for that!), it gives a writer too much power. Actually, it takes away the power of the writer, because it means there's very little drama to be mined from a situation if we know Seven can bring anyone back to life at any time. Somehow, I don't remember this ever affecting the series, either positively or not, but that may be because we forget about the technical side of the story as we delve into the personal: the Talaxian cost. I don't even remember Seven bringing others to life, so maybe they sidestepped that in future by restricting the amount of nanoprobes Seven could donate, or that as she becomes more human she has less dependence on them. There's actually a moral question right there that isn't even lightly addressed, which is, would it be best to keep Seven as Borg-like as possible in order to use her unique abilities and knowledge to the full? A less Starfleet ship would probably have kept her as a slave (if it could do anything against her will!), and used her as a nanoprobe farm.

Though Seven was the means to save Neelix' physical existence, she had less power even than he did to save his mind or soul. She's the worst person he could have gone to in an hour of emotional need. She has her duty to perform, monitoring the nanoprobes, but he practically explodes at her, fiercely demanding she leave him alone, in a display of rage thoroughly out of character and more disturbing for it. Seven remains unperturbed, in the same manner as later when she's visited by the regretful Talaxian. Again, she's too unfamiliar with individuality to comprehend this is Neelix saying goodbye before he tries to kill himself. Chakotay, on the other hand, excels himself and is the perfect man to talk the distraught Neelix down from the Transporter Pad where he's about to initiate the site-to-site transport out into the nebula where he was first zapped to death, and where he's decided he belongs - it's an interesting subversion of the usual outcome of someone resolving to live a better life after nearly dying. Chakotay's a firm rock throughout the episode, offering his guidance and reassurance to a Morale Officer in desperate need of morale, but I can't decide if Chakotay could have done more, or should have known Neelix better than to let himself be fobbed off with phoney comments about being at peace, Neelix telling him everything he thinks the Commander wants to hear. He couldn't do much more than set a time to talk to Neelix again when he gets off shift. But he has the running of the ship to attend to, his own life, and doesn't see through the facade, assuming he'll have plenty of time to allay the man's fears later.

I think Janeway would have seen right through him, but she isn't as present, again perhaps because she would likely be more secular in outlook and unable to offer the security and understanding of a fellow man of faith (and for the fact he wouldn't be able to fool her, thus rendering the drama moot). So there are flaws in the faithless Starfleet code, but at the same time Neelix doesn't necessarily get the best guidance from Chakotay, the vision quest the very thing that pushes him off the deep end! If Chakotay led him up the garden path with that, he did manage to say the right thing at the crucial moment: not to throw away a lifetime's worth of faith and hope on one assumption, one 'anomalous incident,' as he puts it. I never had the impression Neelix was a particularly dedicated follower of his people's spiritual customs, being a futuristic rag-and-bone wanderer, perhaps casting himself out of his race's company for the guilt and memories of happy times when his family still lived. It's at this point, reacting to his death, Neelix is at his most honest - he admits he has a crisis of belief, seeks help and understanding, but when that doesn't provide a quick fix, dark thoughts get the better of him. It's deeply moving to see the guy who tries hard to keep everyone else happy with his upbeat, inclusive presence, going through such a lonely ordeal within himself.

He puts a brave face on it, but you can see a bitterness in his eyes at the Prixin festival which celebrates family, the crew making speeches (specifically Tuvok with his traditional Talaxian speech, characteristically longwinded and annoying for that race, and reminding me a lot of Hobbit culture!), and having a good time in honour of his people's customary party, hopelessness and disappointment held in check, though it looks like he's almost ready to decry the whole thing and storm away - but that would be to show his true face, and he's too proud for that, maybe he even thinks it's unfair to the others to ruin their fun, or maybe that's what he tells himself, when really it's the pride of keeping the turmoil to himself. And so he's even more alone in the midst of his adoptive family than in his quarters. He takes the first out that springs up, putting Naomi Wildman to bed, but even there his once-cherished beliefs are raked up by the guileless child wanting to hear them again, and he can barely force out a repeat of the magical story he told before. A complex mental battle was being waged, in some ways he was almost convincing himself to go through with suicide as punishment for believing what he had for so long. But I don't think he wanted to do something that selfish, it was just a strong reaction to the confusion, bitter anger of stolen hope, the anguish of living around people who couldn't understand his position. So it's a pleasant ending when we see the final scene, Naomi dreaming contentedly of sitting under the Guiding Tree, Neelix' warmhearted tales having inspired one little mind, even if it's left the teller uncertain. In the end, it's a sense of duty to Naomi as Godfather that wakens him to himself, balancing him at the edge of despair: a reminder he's valued, his family need him (even Seven said his role was diverse), and, as Chakotay says, even if them being his family isn't enough for Neelix, it is enough for them.

That's as far as the resolution goes and if there was one criticism I would level at the story it would be the lack of conclusion. I don't think we ever explored Neelix' mind or belief system again, nor learned whether he gave it up, continued as before, or became stronger in his faith (it also fails to address his nanoprobe dependency, and considering how proud he is, shown in his lungless existence in 'Phage,' and that when he had Kes as comfort, this would be a big deal, so I don't know if that was addressed again or left in the background, too). It's left for us to imagine, not entirely satisfactory, but unlike many of the series' conclusions, it feels much closer to the ambiguousness of 'DS9' (interestingly, Chief O'Brien went through the same contemplation and attempt in a similar mid-Season 4 slot). Maybe a lifetime is needed to resolve his issues, but I'd have liked to know. I expected the family element to be played up, the message of the episode to be that even though death 'may' be the end, the people who are living now need us, as we need them, and accepting life is the answer rather than cowardly suicidal escape. A kind of secular happy ending. But that isn't the conclusion I draw, merely that family was a strong reason not to pull the trigger on this existence. In the end it doesn't explore the afterlife in any way, treading safer ground on the position of faith in life, and how hope is such a strong basis for living, and I find it a fascinating hefting up of the Neelix stone to see what's underneath, and a reminder how great a character he is through a terrific, rough and uncompromising drama.

Neelix claims the cylinder he had was almost lost to the Kazon, but it looks identical to the one he used in 'Fair Trade,' which was much later. The Kazon also provide us with the first recorded incident of Borg bigotry, with Seven saying the Borg deemed them unworthy of assimilation! To me, this seems ridiculous (if funny - an inside joke about how weak many people felt the Kazon were as villains). But the Borg have never been seen to be fussy before! Maybe the Delta Quadrant branch are purer, closer to their Queen and the centre of Borg space, and so they can afford to reject some, but I would have thought any living creature could be Borgified for use as a drone in service of their goals, rather than allowed freedom (maybe they killed them?). There's some beautiful CGI work, mainly on the nebula, like the Badlands injected with rainbows - sadly, the shuttle interior remained dark, they should have opened the side hatches for a better lighting effect (but more work). Like the previous episode there's the technical achievement of freezing a character: unless Robert Duncan McNeill is really good at holding still! The Alixia disintegration was terrific and shocking in its day, but wasn't as striking now, obviously unreal, and probably would have worked better as practical makeup, though it may have been too gruesome for Trek. And lastly, Janeway's assertion that no one had been resuscitated from death after that length of time before, must be wrong - surely there are incidences in Starfleet records! How long did it take Spock's body to regenerate on Genesis?

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