Non Sequitur
StarDate: 49009.9
Original Airdate: September 25 1995
By Christina Luckings
The Story
Harry is having a dream in which he can hear Captain Janeway’s
voice calling to him. Then he is woken by a young woman who tells
him it is time to wake up. Opening his eyes he gazes in disbelief
first at Libby, then out of the window at San Francisco on a
bright sunny day.
In a daze, he is hauled out of bed and pushed into the bathroom
while she tells him that he has a meeting at 0900 which he has
been obsessing about a for week, and she won’t have Lt.
Lasca blaming her for him being late. He emerges a little later
in his uniform to be told that the eggs are getting cold. Harry
asks her what the date is and she tells him it is 49011. So this
is the present, he muses, and it is too real to be a dream, so
that leaves a holodeck or an hallucination, some kind of trick.
His last memory is of piloting a shuttlecraft back to Voyager
he says as Libby interrupts him to say that they both have long
days ahead of them and could they play this game some other time.
Harry is staying with this line of reasoning, however, and tells
her to her face that it is not possible that she can be Libby
then he introduces himself as Ensign Harry Kim of the Federation
Starship Voyager. Libby does not find this at all funny. The
memorial service for Voyager was only two months ago and Danny
Byrd had been his best friend. She tells him to go to work and
walks away.
Harry leaves the building where his attic apartment is, and
shuts the door behind him. A banner from a lamp post is advertising
the Old Town Festival in the Mission District on August 14. He
wanders down the pedestrian-only street past neatly tended topiary
and various stalls until he is hailed by a store-keeper, who
ducks inside then re-emerges with a Vulcan Mocha, extra sweet,
which he hands to Harry. The store is a coffee shop, and it’s
owner, Cosimo, knows about Harry’s big meeting today about
the ship he is designing. He reminds Harry that he promised to
bring him a model that he intends to hang in his window and show
off to the rest of his customers. Harry asks Cosimo how long
he has been coming to his coffee shop. Since he left the academy
eight months ago, comes the reply, although not every day, as
Harry likes to sleep late on Sunday, and with a fiancée
like his, so would Cosimo. This is news to Harry, that he and
Libby are getting married, but Cosimo interprets his incredulity
as wonder at his good fortune. Another Starfleet officer calls
to Harry and asks him if he is ready to go. He takes his arm
and hustles him off to the subway to catch the transport to Starfleet
Headquarters. Harry tries to plead sickness but to no avail and
off they go.
At Starfleet Headquarters, four important looking people are
sitting on one side of a long desk while Harry and Lasca are
on the other. Lasca opens his PADD while Harry looks very uncomfortable,
and gets told to relax. If all goes well he will walk out of
this room a Lieutenant. Lasca asks to see the warp coil schematic
with the plasma flow equations but Harry does not have it. He
claims to have forgotten it, so Lasca says they will just have
to improvise. The doors open and Admiral Strickler strides in
announcing that he has a meeting at 1100 with the head of SF
security, and she doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Everyone
sits again and the meeting begins. Lt. Lasca goes to a display
panel and brings up an image of a new class of runabout – Yellowstone – that
has tetryon plasma warp nacelles. The Admiral wants to know how
they have solved the dilithium fracture problem, as tetryon plasma
tends to disrupt sub-space. This is the cue for Lasca to introduce
Harry as the most promising young engineer to come out of the
academy in a long time, and the designer of the Yellowstone’s
warp engines. Unfortunately Harry has no idea what anyone is
talking about so when the Admiral asks him if he is ill, he seizes
the excuse and asks to continue the presentation at a later date.
It will have to be when the Admiral gets back from his three
week tour of the Cardassian border, he is told, and the meeting
breaks up. Lasca is not pleased. He tells Harry that he had better
be dying before walking out of the room.
Harry finds his way to his own office at Starfleet HQ, and has
a good look around at the design table, the certificates on the
wall and the picture of himself and Libby on the desk before
settling down to interrogate the computer about his service record.
His request to serve on Voyager after he graduated had been denied,
so he had moved to the engineering corp and become a starship
design specialist. He had been awarded the Cochrane Medal of
Excellence for outstanding advances in warp theory. This does
not tally with his memories so he asks the computer if there
have been any temporal anomalies lately. Negative, is the answer.
Then he asks about USS Voyager, but that information is classified
for security level three or above. That is not a problem as it
is his ship, and he enters the appropriate code. The computer
accepts it and tells him that last contact with Voyager was on
48307.5. Then he asks who the operations officer was on board.
Ensign Daniel Byrd is the reply.
Harry returns to the area of his apartment but cannot remember
which building it is in, so when Cosimo asks what he is doing
back so early, he has to continue the sickness story and ask
him to remind him where he lives. Cosimo assumes he has come
back early simply to spend time with Libby but tells him he lives
on the fourth floor of a nearby building, apartment 4G. Don’t
worry, the Italian tells him, everything’s going to be
fine, trust me.
Back in the apartment, everything is bathed in a golden evening
light and Libby is wrapped in a towel fresh out of the shower.
They sit on the end of the bed and she is concerned because he
feels hot and tense. What can she do to help him, she asks. Just
tell me that you love me, he replies, pretend that we haven’t
seen each other for months. So she plays along and asks where
he has been. On a mission, but they got a little lost, he tells
her. You didn’t visit Risa on the way did you, she teases.
No, he assures her, and he thought about her every nano-second.
Then don’t ever leave me again, she tells him, and they
kiss.
Harry cannot sleep, and leaves Libby in bed to look around the
apartment, at the skyline and his clarinet on its stand, before
sitting at the console and calling up the Voyager crew manifest.
He sits and reads all the names out loud, Orlando, Parsons, Peterson,
Platt, Porter then suddenly realises that one is missing. Tom
Paris. He asks for Paris’s record, and all this talking
wakes Libby. The official record shows that Tom was paroled on
48702 and is currently in Marseilles. Libby asks what he is doing
at four in the morning so he claims he was catching up on work,
switching off the console before she can read the display. She
tells him that Lt. Lasca called her in the afternoon, concerned
about him, and tries to get Harry to tell her what is going on
with him. She reassures him that she trusts him, after all they
are getting married, so he gives in and tries to explain about
his ‘other’ life on Voyager, that he doesn’t
belong here in San Francisco with her. She puts it down to wedding
jitters at first and then suggests that he should see a counsellor
to find out if there is something wrong with him. He will, he
tells her, but first he has to go to Marseilles to see Paris.
Harry walks into the real Sandrine’s bar, which is remarkably
like Tom’s holodeck recreation on Voyager. He leans on
the pool table and is accosted by a scruffy Tom Paris who is
having a game. This Tom Paris has never met Harry Kim before,
but tries to suggest that maybe they served together at the academy
or on the Exeter. Try Voyager, suggests Harry, but Tom assures
him that he never set foot on that ship. He did get as far as
Deep Space Nine, but he got into a fight with a Ferengi, and
an unpleasant shapeshifter arrested him. Despite Captain Janeway’s
best efforts, his parole was revoked and Voyager left without
him. Harry asks if the Ferengi was trying to sell him Lobi crystals
and when Tom says yes, he tries to explain about the other version
of events, the one where there was no bar fight and the two of
them were on Voyager. Tom keeps sipping his drink and tells Harry
that it sounds crazy, and asks him what he wants. Harry asks
him to return to Starfleet headquarters and help him run a simulation
to find out what happened on the shuttle to make him end up here.
As the best pilot Harry has ever seen, he is sure Tom could figure
it out. But Tom just starts laughing at him and tells him to
go back and tell whatever Admiral put him up to this that he
is not interested in being a pawn in one of those games. Harry
tells Tom that he had told him once that he was afraid of what
would happen if he hadn’t taken Captain Janeway up on her
offer, and now he can see why. He’s a loser and a drunk
and that’s all he’ll ever be. Angry, Tom takes a
swing at Harry, but it is dodged and Tom ends up face down on
the pool table. He stays there as Harry leaves the bar.
Harry walks into his apartment to find two security officers
and Lt. Lasca there with Libby. Starfleet know that he has been
breaking into classified files with forged access codes, and
they are here to take him to Starfleet Headquarters for questioning.
Libby suggests that he tells them what he tells her and then
everything will be all right. Faced with no choice in the matter,
Harry leaves with the them.
At Starfleet, Harry is having his story recapped by Admiral
Strickler, who points out that there is no evidence for any of
this. As they are interrupted by someone bringing in a PADD for
the Admiral to read, Lasca leans forward and points out that
they have to consider all the options, such as him being delusional,
or had his memory changed, or even be an alien masquerading as
Kim. Harry suggests they check his DNA to prove that he is who
he says he is. The Admiral has finished reading the PADD and
has more questions. Why did he go to Marseilles to meet with
a convicted traitor and Maquis sympathiser? To help run a shuttle
simulation to find out how he got here and how he can get back,
is the answer. Harry realises they think he is a Maquis spy and
refuses to answer any more questions without legal counsel. Lasca
reminds him that the facts as they stand at the moment look bad
for him. The Admiral summons a security officer who fastens a
security anklet to Harry’s right leg while he is reminded
about the restrictions that go with it, including no off-world
travel and no tampering with the device. Then he is dismissed.
On his way back home, Harry meets Cosimo the coffee shop owner
again, who invites him to have coffee with him. As they sit at
a table, Cosimo tells Harry straight out that he was sent to
watch him and make sure that he was all right. His race live
in a temporal inversion fold in the space-time matrix. Harry’s
shuttle intersected one of their time-streams and the accident
caused a few things to change. They don’t know how or why
it happened, only that it did. This is not good enough for Harry,
who wants to know where this time stream is. Cosimo says that
it weaves through the galaxy like a thread. He could show Harry
how to find it, and then he could try to recreate the conditions
of the accident and fly back into it, but the results are not
guaranteed. Harry could end up changing reality again so that
he was a billion years in the future, or in the past before life
began, or right back where he started. Harry is determined to
try, even though Cosimo points out that he has a good life here,
a good job, a beautiful woman who loves him. Perhaps it is his
fate to be here. But Harry is concerned that Danny Byrd and Tom
Paris aren’t living good lives here. Cosimo sees his determination
and hands him a disc containing details of where the time stream
intersects this region of space, wishing him good luck because
he is going to need it. Unless he decides instead to stay, in
which case he will see him in the morning for his Vulcan Mocha,
extra sweet.
Despite the warnings, Harry tries to pick the lock of his security
anklet. Libby sees him and is angry. She cannot understand why
he suddenly wants to leave her and accuses him of having changed.
Harry denies it, and gives her an impassioned speech explaining
that he is the same person who took three weeks to summon up
the courage to ask her out, the same person who wakes up in the
night and says her name out loud. Then why is he trying so hard
to get away from her, she asks him. He doesn’t want to
leave her, but she should know better than most that once he
has made up his mind about something he cannot let it go. He
wants so much just be able to forget about Voyager and stay in
this reality, but that would not be him, and he needs her to
understand that. Before she can answer, the tamper alarm on his
anklet goes off. Knowing that security will be arriving within
seconds, he promises her that he will try to find a way to get
back for real, before dashing for the fire escape. The security
guards beam in behind a wicker screen and as Harry heads down
the metal stairs on the outside of the building, Libby gets to
the window first and closes it, telling the guards she is sorry
as she blocks their way.
One of the guards catches up with Harry on the stairs but he
punches him out before dropping to ground level, the other guard
dashes out the front door and gives chase down the street. They
run around corners and through groups of people before Harry
is finally rugby-tackled from behind and brought down. The guard
pulls his phaser and orders him to get up. Then someone says ‘Excuse
me’ to the guard and as he turns, punches him squarely
on the jaw, knocking him out. Grimacing with the pain of the
blow, Tom Paris picks up the guards phaser, helps Harry to his
feet and together they try to walk away nonchalantly.
Out of sight in an alley, Tom explains that he still has a few
friends at Starfleet who kept him informed about Harry’s
situation. It has been a long time since anyone cared what happened
to him, which is why he is here now to help Harry, a fellow suspected
Maquis sympathiser. The life Harry told him about on Voyager
sounds a lot better than the life he has on Earth, so he is willing
to take his chances helping him. Harry tells him that he thinks
he can get back to his reality, but he will need to break a ship
out of Spacedock to do it. So he’ll be needing a pilot,
says Tom, and he used to be pretty good and might still know
a few tricks. They should be able to access the runabout launch
codes from Harry’s office at Starfleet Headquarters. Tom
pulls a site to site transporter device from his pocket and Harry
gives him the co-ordinates – main complex level six subsection
forty seven. They will only have a few minutes before security
detect the transport and come for them.
In the office, Harry accesses his desk console and tells Tom
that to get back to his reality he will need to recreate the
conditions of the accident. Then he might get back to where he
started, but there are no guarantees. Security are only twenty
seconds away as Harry bypasses the security lockouts and Tom
prepares to beam them to the runabout. They duck behind the design
console as a phaser is fired at them, and beam from there to
the runabout. As Harry powers up the vessel, the computer announces
an unauthorised launch in progress and sounds the alarm. The
spacedoors start to close and Tom launches the runabout through
the remaining gap just in time. Harry puts the co-ordinates of
the time stream into the computer and they set off at full impulse
as a Nebula-class starship gives chase. Thinking that they are
stealing the Yellowstone prototype, the starship warns them to
stand down or be fired on. Tom tries to evade but the starship
is faster and phaser hits reduce their shielding. Despite being
new and improved, Yellowstone is not yet complete, particularly
the defence systems. As a hit weakens the anti-matter containment
field, they approach the co-ordinates of the time stream. Harry
suggests trying to slow down their pursuers by venting their
tetryon based warp plasma. Tom realises that would make the chasing
ship’s engines stall. With the starship at one tenth impulse
and their own containment field at critical, they try to recreate
the accident that brought Harry to this reality. Speed 140,000
kph, he thinks, while running a polaron scan at a radius of a
quarter million kilometres. But they reach the co-ordinates of
the time stream and nothing happens.
The starship is repowering its engines as Harry thinks hard.
Then it comes to him. The last thing he remembers is Captain
Janeway on the comm telling him that she was trying to beam him
off the shuttle. The starship scores another hit on the Yellowstone
and they have only twenty five seconds before a core breach as
Tom locks the transporter onto the time stream for Harry. Harry
is trying to shut down the core breach but Tom points out to
him that if he is right, everything will change back to how it
should be, and he will not be killed in the explosion. Harry
is unwilling to risk him if he is wrong, so Tom pushes him back
into the transporter area and energises. Yellowstone explodes.
Harry opens his eyes as he hears Captain Janeway’s voice
telling him to prepare for emergency transport. He is back on
the Drake, and he drops his shields as ordered, but Torres cannot
get a positive lock because of the sub-space anomaly. Tuvok cannot
boost the transporter signal but Janeway has an idea and asks
B’Elanna to tap the transporter into the main deflector
dish to extend the signal. It works and Janeway tells Chakotay
to analyse the sensor logs to find out just what happened out
there. Safe and sound in Transport Room two, Harry asks if Lt.
Paris is there.
When Harry returns to the bridge, Chakotay tells him they think
the shuttlecraft was caught in a temporal anomaly. A time stream?
asks Harry with a grin. He’s already been briefed, he tells
the Commander as he goes to see Tom at the helm, clapping him
on the shoulder and informing him that he owes him one.
Review:
Ensign Kim lurches from crisis to crisis as he attempts to make
sense of and resolve the strange situation he finds himself in.
Just as in Emanations, he is stranded where he should not be,
and forced to come up with his own solution to his dilemma without
any technical help from Voyager. And he does it, by sheer personality
and ingenuity. This is a good character story, nicely filmed
with location shots that give the viewer a glimpse of what our
cities could become one day.
Garrett Wang plays confused and baffled well, and tries to put
emotion into his scenes with Libby, although somehow they do
not quite come off. The conflict between being where he has been
dreaming of for the last season and knowing that he shouldn’t
really be there doesn’t quite come through in his body
language and voice, although it is there in the dialogue. The
static apartment scenes with Harry and Libby just sitting there
facing each other are, frankly, boring, and I don’t know
whether it is the actors or the director who is to blame.
Braga’s story hangs together well, although I am not entirely
happy with the sudden appearance of a hand-held site-to-site
transporter device to get our heroes from one place to another
quickly. Still, it served it’s purpose well in moving the
action along briskly. So, despite all it’s promise and
potential, this episode does not quite rise above average.
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:
Louis Giambalvo as Cosimo
Jennifer Gatti as Libby
Jack Shearer as Admiral Strickler
Mark Kiely as Lieutenant Lasca
Creative staff:
Director: David Livingston
Written By: Brannon Braga
