11 – State of Flux

Grade: B

Summary

The crew are on an M-class planet, gathering food and restocking their supplies. Suddenly, Tom Paris detects a Kazon ship in orbit, so Janeway orders the entire away team back up to the ship. Seska is apparently missing from the group, so Chakotay goes to find her. He finds her in a cave, where she went to find mushrooms. Then they’re attacked by some Kazon soldiers.

Commentary

This is another very good episode from this season so far. It looks like the first season of this series is off to a good start. One thing that really makes this one of the better episodes is that it builds on the characters that have already been established. Plus it deals with some rather dark issues.

Tuvok is once again called upon to investigate an incident involving one of the Voyager crew. But this time, the evidence is clear – someone has given Federation technology to the Kazon. I liked watching the investigation in action. Tuvok and Chakotay worked together on this to find out who is working against Voyager and conspiring with the enemy. There really wasn’t any evidence of this in previous episodes, so this is a stand-alone event which will prove to have several drastic consequences in future episodes. But for now, I am left wishing that there had been a hint or two in previous episodes that something like this was taking place.

There were some excellent character moments in this episode, and the acting was also very good – better than usual. If all of Voyager’s episodes were as good as this one was, the entire series would have been much better received by the fans and critics.

Of Note

I loved this quote from Chakotay to Tuvok: “You were working for her, Seska was working for them. Was anyone on board that ship working for me?”

The scenery when Chakotay is looking for Seska looks a lot like the scenery in the Next Generation episode when Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher are telepathically linked and can read each other’s mind. I think they may have been filmed in the same place.