Plot – Characters sneakily snogging in the turbolift…finally some behaviour amongst this crew that I can believe in.
How the fuck can Star Trek ever regulate people’s personal lives? How can they tell people who they can fraternise with or not? The whole idea of any workplace being able to control your personal life to such an extent is just absurd.
Listen to Chakotay, Janeway and Wildman discussing the space protozoa…of what language are they speaking because it isn’t any kind of recognisable English. There’s technobabble and then there’s unintelligible sciencedegook.
Building a community on Voyager is a massive commitment and a fascinating one. The show does follow up on this promise with Naomi Wildman and the Borg kids and so it isn’t a potentially interesting idea that is just forgotten, just for a change.
Character – Neelix’s jealousy of Tom Paris’ attention of Kes has the honour of being one of the most tedious character threads in the entire Trek franchise. It takes an already annoying character and piles on even uglier traits. It makes Paris look smug, Kes look naïve and Neelix sound like an angsty teen. It does none of these fledging characters any favours.
Janeway suggests that having a partner on Voyager is a luxury that she doesn’t have. Ummm…why? The looks that Chakotay gives her in this episode and her sly answers about her personal life suggest that they are gagging for each other. I like the subtle mention of Mark and it’s nice that the series didn’t write him off entirely.
Kes going through this insane process is handled very awkwardly. The bombshell that she is two leaves a particularly nasty taste in the mouth when it comes to her relationship with Neelix.
Production – The CGI of the creatures was a highlight at the time and looks incredibly primitive now. Effects date more than anything else.
Worst moment – Voyager attempts farce as Kes tries to eat her way through her quarters and Neelix literally has to pick her up and drag her noshing all the way to sickbay. It’s a painful sequence, overacted and under directed.
I wish they hadn’t done that – A massive deal is made out of Kes eating bugs in the teaser…why wouldn’t her species eat bugs? We know the Ferengi do this and there are definitely parts of the Earth where this is common practice and so why is this such a surprise here? It would make a quirky character beat that this beautiful Ocompan noshes on a handful of bugs every now and again.
Making Neelix such an unbearable, bullish, jealous, pain in the arse. Ethan Phillips never stood a chance of making this tosser likable.
Voyager ducks the process of what a regular has to go through if they are pregnant and bringing a child into this potentially hazardous world through Kes’ bizarre Ocampan pregnancy process that means it has be dealt with in a hurry and can’t happen again. How nice to have a puberty process that last the lengths of an episode and has no ramifications beyond it. It gives them the chance to have all these hard questions brought up and to never have to worry about them again. Life simply isn’t like that. And it puts more distance between the audience and the Voyager crew.
The episode spends far too long worrying about what Neelix thinks about fatherhood, putting the emphasis on it being his choice. That’s a terribly misogynistic angle. Also, the line that Neelix would have nothing to teach a daughter because all he knows is survival techniques and romantic tricks…why on Talax wouldn’t a girl want to know that? Eventually we get around to what Kes thinks but only at the 11th hour. I find it difficult to believe that a woman had a firm hand in this script.
Massaging feet and swelling tongues, sheesh the Ocompans take all the fun out of having a baby.
Are you kidding me? The climax of this episode is the crew trying to make Voyager less sexually attractive to the giant space sperms that are trying to hump them? ‘It appears we have lost our sex appeal, Captain.’ I’ve heard of some out there ideas on Star Trek but this is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Nowadays you would need to hang a lantern on the huge co-incidence that a character has fallen pregnant at the same time that a space creature has become sexually attracted to Voyager. Just a line to say ‘is something in the air at the moment?’
How this episode offers a get out clause for Kes and Neelix and no hard choices is dreadful. How it focuses on Neelix’s disappointment and not Kes’ is unbelievable. The writers had great intentions here but they really fudged it. I just keep having to remind myself that morality in the mid-90s was very different to what it is now.
A reason to watch this episode again – Elogium has a grain of a fantastic idea at its core and it explores that in a brilliant scene where Janeway and Chakotay discuss bringing children into their journey home to Earth. The rest is painful viewing; featuring whacky alien puberty, space sperms that are trying to mate with Voyager and a twisted relationship between Kes and Neelix that features an overly simplistic dilemma of pregnancy and an insulting treatment of abortion. DS9 did a sex episode and used it to explore character and let everyone get their end away. Voyager’s alternative is to have a linked a and b plot (both sexually themed) and to pollute the show with some really odd writing and concepts. It’s when the writing moves away from the characters it is highlighting that it makes its most impact (Janeway talking about Mark, Tuvok talking about his children) but those are throwaway scenes in an agonising piece. The final Wildman bombshell offers promise that this theme might be handled again in the future…but make sure Taylor and Biller are away from the keyboard for those episodes.
* out of *****
Clue for tomorrow's episode:
Check out Random Trek if you are looking for a Trek podcast that studies Trek episodes in a terrific amount of detail but does so in an entertaining and brisk way. A podcast that has new guests on every week and they each bring a new perspective on the episode that has been selected for them and the franchise as a whole. I've trawled through many Trek podcasts, this is by far my favourite:
https://www.theincomparable.com/randomtrek/
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