Coda
Stardate: 50518.6
Original Airdate: Jan 29, 1997
By Chakoteya
The Story
Neelix accosts Captain Janeway on her way
to the shuttlebay, to congratulate her on her performance last
night and ask if next time Tuvok can be kept busy elsewhere. She
is sure something can be arranged. On board Shuttlecraft Sacajawea,
Chakotay also compliments the Captain on her performance of the
Dying Swan, and hopes that she’ll reprise it next Talent
Night. Only once certain others have got up and performed in public,
she ripostes. Then they hit atmospheric turbulence, and crash
on a jungle planet. Janeway is knocked out, and stops breathing
for a while, but Chakotay drags her out of the shuttle and revives
her. He goes to get supplies and notices weapons burns on the
hull. They were shot down by Vidiians, who trap them in a cave
and kill them.
On board Shuttlecraft Sacajawea, Chakotay
compliments the Captain on her performance of the Dying Swan,
and then they both realise they have been here before. They check
for temporal anomalies, and find none, but a Vidiian ship comes
out of nowhere and attacks them. The warp core breaches before
they can dump it.
Back on the shuttle again, they scan for ships
and find two Vidiians coming after them this time. Janeway creates
a tachyon burst to disrupt any temporal phenomenon nearby while
Chakotay manages to contact Voyager. Their pursuers vanish and
they return safely to the ship. On the bridge, no one knows about
the temporal problems Janeway is talking about, not even Chakotay.
Confused, she goes to sickbay where the EMH informs her that she
has somehow managed to contract the Phage, the incurable disease
that has ravaged Vidiian society and turned them into organ thieves.
After a forty hour sleep, the EMH informs Janeway that he sees
no hope for her, so to avoid her having to suffer a prolonged
and painful death, he pumps a toxic gas into the containment area
against her wishes, and kills her.
Once more in the shuttle with Chakotay, she
sees an anomaly ahead of them, dragging them towards it. The little
ship struggles to escape, and blows up under the strain. Then
she is on the planet, watching as Chakotay tries in vain to revive
her. Voyager has just arrived in orbit and sent a shuttle down
to rescue them. On board in sickbay, Janeway watches as the EMH
and Kes attempt to bring her back to life, and fail. Her death
is recorded at 0320 hours.
Remembering that Kes could sense Chakotay’s
spirit when he was disembodied for a while, Kathryn goes with
her to the science lab, talking to her in the hope that she might
feel her presence and alert the rest of the crew to her situation.
She succeeds when Kes walks right through her. A meeting is called
of the senior staff and they discuss various possible scenarios.
Torres and Kim will scan sub-space while Tuvok works with Kes
to increase her mental range. Neelix will keep the crew’s
morale up as Chakotay and Paris keep the ship running. Pleased,
Janeway goes to Engineering to monitor progress, but just before
the scans begin, a light appears which only she can see, and a
figure emerges from it. It’s her father!
Scientific scepticism reasserts itself, and
she challenges the figure to identify itself. He claims that he
really is Admiral Janeway, who drowned on Tau Ceti Prime over
fifteen years ago, and whose presence the young Kathryn thought
she had felt while she was grieving for him all that time ago.
He tries to convince her that she really is a ghost too, and that
it is time for her to let go and cross over to ‘heaven’,
but she is not ready yet, and walks out of engineering to find
out how Tuvok and Kes are getting on in his quarters.
Three days later, and no one has had any success
in finding any trace of the Captain. Kes and Tuvok finally give
up their mental search, and Tuvok makes a touching log entry about
the loss of his irreplaceable friend. Admiral Janeway tells his
daughter that after tomorrow it will be easier for her to accept
the reality of her situation.
The memorial service is held in the mess hall,
and Torres explains how Captain Janeway gave her a sense of self-worth
and optimism about herself. Ensign Kim tells a story of an away
mission, his voice cracking with emotion until he can’t
go on. Kathryn watches, fighting back the tears herself, until
her ‘coffin ‘ is launched into space and the service
breaks up into a wake. Then her father tells her it is time to
leave her crew to get on with their lives, but she still isn’t
ready. She wants to stay with them on the journey, find out what
lies ahead for her crew. A Captain doesn’t abandon ship.
The Admiral becomes annoyed, and tells her the longer she stays,
the harder it will be to cross over. His insistence angers Janeway
then suddenly she has a vision of the EMH leaning over her on
the planet surface, treating her injuries. Then she begins to
realise that maybe that is the reality and this the hallucination.
She presses the Admiral for his reasons for needing her to accompany
him now. He sticks to his explanation of wanting to make it easier
for her, which is something her father would not do. He insisted
on her learning her own lessons and not protecting her from harsh
reality.
Another flash gives her more information.
Tuvok mentions an alien presence in her brain, and Chakotay keeps
telling her to fight it. Now she is sure of her ground, the alien
starts to tell some of the truth. That bright light is his Matrix,
a place that can be whatever she wants it to be. Hers is a dangerous
profession and one day she will come to his domain, where her
strong will shall nourish him for a very long time. The white
light has turned to red as he goes back into it and she is waking
up properly on the planet surface. The three men explain what
happened – the crash landing, the second shuttle coming
to help, the alien presence that had to be pushed out of her brain
before she could recover.
‘Captain's log, stardate 50518.6. The
Doctor has examined me thoroughly and pronounced me physically
fit, but I'll admit that it'll take a little longer to work through
the emotional impact of my experience.’
Physically recovered and back in her ready
room, Captain Janeway is keeping busy rather than dwell on the
experience. Chakotay doubts that the alien could be responsible
for all the recorded ‘near-death’ experiences and
Kathryn hopes that he is only indigenous to the Delta Quadrant.
Then she decides to celebrate her cheating of death by replicating
a bottle of champagne and taking Chakotay with her for a sail
on Lake George.
Review
There’s something vaguely unsatisfying
about this episode. It begins as a potential time-loop, but that
quickly gets torpedoed in favour of how many ways can we kill
Janeway and still seem plausible. Then in comes the soul-sucking
alien, in guise of her father. Frankly, he doesn’t come
across very well as a kindly character who only wants the best
for his daughter. Then again, maybe he isn’t meant to. In
some ways he reminds me of Gorgon, the evil entity from the Original
show ‘And the Children Shall Lead’.
What really gets me riled is the way Trek
is determined portray any sense of afterlife in terms of alien
influence. It isn’t the first time they’ve done this
and I doubt it will be the last. The determinedly humanist legacy
of Gene Roddenberry will be hard to get rid of, despite the inclusion
of Vulcan or Bajoran [or even Native American] spirituality.
On the upside, I enjoyed the description of
the Talent night, and the disparagement of Vulcan poetry. The
relationship between Captain and First office isn’t just
professional, they’re good friends too. Janeway is still
channelling Kirk, fighting against her own death and refusing
to let go of her family. I’m reliably informed that Jeri
Taylor’s book Mosaic is a source for a fair bit of the Janeway
back-story that we get here, and so this offering is a sort of
cross media tie in for the author.
After the Neelix episode last week, this one
falls slightly below that standard.
Grade: 5/10
Cast:
Kate Mulgrew as Kathryn Janeway
Robert Beltran as Chakotay
Roxanne Biggs-Dawson as B'Elanna Torres
Jennifer Lien as Kes
Robert Duncan McNeill as Tom Paris
Ethan Phillips as Neelix
Robert Picardo as The Doctor
Tim Russ as Tuvok
Garrett Wang as Harry Kim
Guest Cast:
Len Cariou as Admiral Janeway
Creative Staff:
Director: Nancy Malone
Written By: Jeri Taylor
