161 – The Void

Grade: C+

Summary

Voyager falls into some kind of void in space, which is shaped like a donut. Inside, there is nothing – no stars, no planets, no deuterium, or anything else. There are only marauding ships who attack any ship that is unlucky enough to fall in. After hearing arguments from Seven, Tuvok and Chakotay, who all want Voyager to resort to thievery and aggression in order to survive, Janeway decides to create an alliance that will work together to try to escape the void.

Commentary

I would have liked this more if I didn’t have the feeling that I’ve seen this story already. I mean a few seasons ago, there was Night, in which nobody saw any stars and it would have taken Voyager years to cross. Now we have the same kind of story again. The Delta Quadrant isn’t very creative, is it? Eh, whatever.

I was definitely confused at why Chakotay, Tuvok and Seven all argued that their only way to survive would be to resort to theft just like everyone else. That doesn’t sound very much like something they would say. When has Tuvok ever given this kind of advice before? What’s even worse, Janeway has to look in the Starfleet Handbook of Instructions to see if it allows Captains to resort to piracy in order to survive. Really? She actually had to look that up? Seriously? That’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s completely contrary to everything we’ve ever heard about Starfleet and the Federation to even consider plunder and destruction as a method of survival. I don’t know. It just didn’t seem natural to me. I guess that’s what bothered me the most about this episode.

There are also a lot of vignettes in which nobody says anything but we see characters preparing for an attempt to escape. That was a little odd.

The irony also doesn’t escape me that this is basically the entire series of Voyager in a microcosm. Janeway arguing that they have to stay true to their Starfleet morals, even though they’re 70,000 LY away, others arguing that they need to just survive and who cares how they do it. This really is what I expected to see from this series in the first place.

The moral of the story is that if you can get a bunch of people to work together on the same thing, you will have a greater probability of success. I wonder why they didn’t use this same storyline for the entire series.

Of Note

In one part of this episode, Janeway says “Captain to the bridge.” I thought that was pretty funny. Isn’t she the Captain? Who is she telling to go to the bridge? It was only after I laughed that I realized she was actually calling to the bridge. But don’t they usually just call out the bridge and not say who they are? Oh well.