Equinox, Part II

 DVD, Voyager S6 (Equinox, Part II)

A new era dawns. The era of 'Voyager' striking out on its own as the only Trek series in production after seven years of two series' running concurrently, as this is the first episode made post the finale of 'DS9.' It also sets the tone for what I remember to be the problems with the final couple of years of the series: when you look at what 'DS9' was doing at the beginning of its sixth season it was pulling off a ground-breaking major six-part serial which featured the scale and scope of the entire Federation being at stake and the station occupied by enemy forces. In comparison we have one little starship under a despot Captain chasing another little starship under a despot Captain. See the difference? And this comes from someone who can't stand the self-important melodrama of Galactic stakes and proportions of too much of the current Trek era. Usually I'd be glad of a small, personal story, but the trouble with 'Equinox' is that it doesn't make time for the personal, it remains small in more ways than one, and certainly in my eyes it began the failure to follow through on Season 5's good use of the ensemble - there's a moment at the end of the episode when everyone's trooping out of the Briefing Room and Tuvok politely waits for others to leave, and it's just he and Janeway in the frame and you think he's going to turn to her and discuss their recent experience and her extreme behaviour, but there's not even a flicker of that, he simply walks out on the heels of everyone else.

That's due to the fact this is about to be a Janeway/Chakotay scene, fair enough, that was equally as needed, but the fact she was so dismissive of her Security Chief and he used to be her confidante, there really needed to be a scene where they talk over what happened so that Tuvok can seek some understanding or provide some wisdom, but no. And what we do see between the Captain and her First Officer is merely papering over the gulf that developed between them that seemed more severe during the episode when Chakotay was opposed to alliance with the Borg during 'Scorpion'! For that to be brushed aside, Janeway suspending him from duty, and now just sort of admits she went over the top, well, it wasn't enough. That's my general feeling towards the episode as a whole, there's much that remained unexplained, but rather than being a subtle omission designed to allow speculation it appears to be merely a lack of attention to detail. The most bizarre of these was how the Doctor went from having his ethical subroutines deleted, not disabled, deleted (!), to somehow rescuing Seven, or not even that, he just reappears back on the ship almost as if nothing had happened, he's back to his old self although the last time we saw him he was happy to carve his protege up to get the information she had! Unless I missed something that was a huge unexplained moment  of transition there.

I think of Season 6 as the one where they largely abandoned some of the characters, namely Tuvok, Neelix and Chakotay. I already mentioned a scene where I expected the Vulcan to have some closure or response to what happened, but I don't even remember Neelix appearing at all. If he did it must have been brief and of no consequence. The only one of the three that is visible and an important part of the episode is Chakotay, and even then he's weakened to the point he can't do anything about Janeway's startling decisions. That's not quite true, he does go in and rescue Lessing when she's tied him to a chair and left the room unshielded so the aliens can swoop in. While on the subject of them swooping in, that was a pretty soft way to conclude the cliffhanger we were left with at the end of Season 5: Janeway is shown to be under attack and falls out of frame, but here she's shown to be merely bruised (or the equivalent), the alien failing to do her more damage than a slightly melted cheek, so up she pops and continues as if nothing had happened. Surely the point of a cliffhanger is to provide an exciting resolution, not find a way out of it as quickly as possible. I don't know what they could have done, but perhaps have a character leap in and prevent her death at the cost of severe damage to themselves. It couldn't have been Chakotay, he was too central to the conflict between Janeway and Ransom, but someone, maybe Harry or Tom? I've since read a contemporary interview where Kate Mulgrew was sending mixed messages - she'd said in a press release at the start of the year (about halfway through Season 5), she wasn't sure she'd be staying with the series, perhaps family troubles, the discontent over Jeri Ryan's part in the series, and a need to blow off steam, and she later clarified she wouldn't be leaving, but it sounded a bit tentative and I suspect this cliffhanger was meant to give fans cause for concern, though of course she did come back.

It's usually the case that second-parters are never as strong as the story that set them up, and I know I originally thought this was great on original transmission, though in seeing it again on DVD in the past I'd already downgraded it in my own mind. When you've been treated to so much with 'DS9,' the expert use of the characters, the building up of the recurring cast, the stories, the action, the whole thing puts an episode like this in the shadow, when 'Voyager' should have been showing what it was capable of! It's not even that it's a bad episode, it is pretty good with some nice ship effects, the chase handled well and plenty of drama. But do we need to have Janeway go off the rails, nearly killing a crewman, hunting down Ransom like 'Ahab gotta go and hunt his white whale,' to quote Lily Sloane in 'First Contact'? They did it again with Captain Archer in 'Enterprise' when he threatened to push someone out of an airlock to get what he needed, so the implication seems to be that it's okay to go to extremes if the situation requires it. Of course in both cases the worst doesn't happen and especially here Janeway is looked on with horror, so it's not that Trek is suggesting this is good, but surely this should all be part of the holding on to your principles no matter what? She acts no better than Ransom himself! And I was with her at first, the fact she essentially saw herself as the only force in this entire Quadrant that could police Ransom and bring him to justice was right and good, even if it meant wasting resources chasing him down, but she goes too far and is not justified.

I understand she's got two crew-members trapped on the Equinox so it's not purely about stopping Ransom, that's further incentive, but even so she goes wild in a way that had become a little too typical of the character: inconsistency. And what about Ransom himself? Are we supposed to take from the visions of Seven he sees in the beach scenes of his personal 'Holodeck' that he's cracking up, that his conscience is getting to him? Is it because he's drawn to this woman, which would be typically self-serving, given what we've seen of his relentless quest to return himself and his crew home, or has his Starfleet training finally got through? It's hard to believe after he's in so deep, it's not like he can get out of this now, he's killed so many of these aliens for fuel and left a fellow Starfleet ship (the only other Starfleet ship in the Quadrant, to boot!), at the mercy of their vengeance, and now he suddenly has qualms? It's not that there shouldn't be redemption, even at the last moment, but I found it hard to believe that he'd come this far and only now does he decide to call it a day and give himself up. His First Officer is more depraved than he, and again, this is supposedly a Starfleet officer, acting in such a way, it's pretty terrible. He has absolutely no care for anyone, his former friend B'Elanna tries to talk him out of it and he has no reaction to her at all! Should Janeway have allowed Ransom to go down with his ship? I know that's the poetic end to it all and a kind of justice for his crimes, but he may not be entirely stable, should he not be captured and held until they can return to the Federation? It would also have thrown up a whole lot of new moral quandaries if Ransom hadn't had the easy way out - the ship itself had to be sacrificed to the aliens, that was the deal, but what if they decided they wanted Ransom, too, and Janeway refused to give him up to summary justice, requiring fair trial and due process instead of what would amount to vigilante or mob 'justice' from the aliens?

Things might have been very different if they could have banded together and worked in tandem, that would have been a fascinating development for the series to begin a new season, one of hope and new promise. There is a tiny degree of that in the handful of Equinox crew that come aboard, reduced to Crewmen, but they don't feature ever again, another story resource discarded for the sake of convenience. That's a real shame as both Gilmore and Lessing could have been interesting new characters to play around with, seeing them integrate with their new crew, try to adjust to their new positions, come to be accepted, and eventually excel because they had the will and the training to prove themselves. What a waste. They could have skipped the Borg children we'd get later in the series and explored these people instead. What we do see in the episode are the beginnings of the triumvirate that would take the lion's share of the stories and scenes to come: Janeway, Seven and the Doctor. The latter two duet again, but in a far different way from their performances in 'Someone To Watch Over Me,' a very creepy moment. At least they were given the courtesy to resolve this moment of horror between them at the end, even if, much like Garak almost killing Nog in 'DS9,' the Doc was effectively under the influence and not himself. It was a good idea and one that could have been explored, but as it stood it was really just there for shock value, another plot detail thrown in without much beyond its purpose for jeopardy.

Come to think of it you'd have thought the Doctor's program would be locked so no one could interfere with it so easily. And what happened to his evil twin from the Equinox? I think they said he was deleted, but isn't there a case for keeping him in the database, disabled, as another prisoner to face justice should they eventually reach Federation space? Might he not be more than merely a holo-character as we discovered with our EMH? That in itself could have provided a later sequel where this evil Doc somehow gets out and causes havoc. Not that we haven't seen plenty of Evil Doctor (just recently in 'Warhead' for one, then the first part of this story, and 'Darkling'), but they seemed ever eager to move on from each new story rather than fully explore potential. And while we're on the subject of technological details, shouldn't Voyager be ideally suited to travelling into a planet's atmosphere? It is designed for landing on planets, after all, yet it sustains a lot of damage following Ransom in! I understand that this could be because they were already damaged so it wasn't going to do the ship any good having that extra strain, but even so... And was the Voyager plaque falling down meant to be a symbol of Janeway's fall from grace? She says it had never fallen down before in all these years and Chakotay says time to put it back up again, showing his support for her continuing as Captain now that she's come back to her right mind? It could have worked except it was all too pat and easy.

Mind you, they could hardly have run with Chakotay secretly plotting mutiny against her over the course of the season, enlisting various people and ordering a court martial or some other hearing to look into Janeway's behaviour. Actually that throws up another question: usually if the Captain is acting erratically or against ethical norms they have the Chief Medical Officer to fall back on as someone who can relieve them of duty, but what if, as in this episode, the CMO is also out of action or compromised? A tricky question and one I'm not sure has ever been addressed in Trek. Early in the episode Chakotay has a funny line saying Janeway would make a great First Officer, but I wonder what the series might have been like if she'd voluntarily downgraded her own rank and put Chakotay in charge - he basically was at the start of Season 5 when in 'Night' Janeway had become a recluse, but that wasn't official and he wanted her to get back to being the leader she should be. But it would have been interesting to explore that dynamic of Chakotay as Captain. And I did like that Chakotay warns her about her behaviour, as is right and fitting of a good First Officer, a position that requires obedience to the Captain, but also has a responsibility to measure the best interests of the crew if the Captain should stray beyond the bounds of protocol.

The episode is only forty-two minutes long, I don't know if this was the new standard length, but it seems a bit short, and when you factor in the recap at the start, it's no wonder the story comes across as rather truncated and unfinished. They could easily have added scenes explaining or addressing the various elements I've mentioned, Chakotay ping-pongs from First Officer to suspension, then back to First Officer and there's very little sense of progression. They could have done with a more positive scene of the crew relaxing at Neelix' party, more reflection was needed, perhaps B'Elanna could have confided in Paris about her incredulity that Burke would calmly sentence her to death along with everyone else on Voyager. There needed to be something more to it. Even the value of the lesson learned is hard to pick out. From what Ransom says to Seven early in the episode about how Janeway clung to her morality at the expense of her crew, you'd think that would be it, but Janeway can hardly take the moral high ground with her actions in this episode and I wonder if Ransom knew what he'd caused her to do, would he have been relieved he isn't the only Captain to bend or break his moral code to achieve his ends, or even more horrified with the situation he'd wrought? I noticed that Jeri Taylor (whose book, 'Pathways,' I'm currently enjoying as one of the best Trek novels), was listed as Creative Consultant in the opening credits. I have to wonder how much input she had on this one. Ron Moore also contributed in his short stint with the series, and I had to agree with the comments he made (see Memory Alpha), such as: "It has no coherence. You're not sure what's really going on," and "Why are we doing this episode?" I wouldn't be quite as harsh, but his criticisms were very valid and it's a real shame the writers couldn't take such things onboard as the series with Moore would have been a much better one than it was without.

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