66 – Displaced

Grade: C-

Summary

Tom and B’Elanna have been wasting time on the holodeck in some kind of Klingon workout program. She doesn’t like it, apparently, though Tom does. While they’re arguing, an alien suddenly materializes in front of them and asks why he’s here. When they take the alien to sickbay, they find out that Kes was abducted at exactly the same time that this alien appeared.

Commentary

It’s sometimes hard to write these summaries and reviews, but the worst ones to write are the ones which are the most mediocre, since they’re neither good nor bad. Displaced is quite possibly the most mediocre episode of Voyager ever produced.

Let me put it this way: everything about this episode is just about average. The storyline is very average. It’s about some aliens who take over the ship by 1) beaming over and pretending not to know what they’re doing there, and 2) beaming off the ship’s officers one at a time. Then, once there are enough of the aliens on board, they’ll chase and kill off the remaining Voyager crew and fly away. Eh, so that’s a little different, but once it is obvious what they’re doing, the story becomes very tedious and boring. We’ve seen a thousand of these episodes before. The only thing that’s different is that these aliens do it while playing dumb.

I thought the last 15 minutes or so were pretty lame. Why would the aliens chase Torres and Paris inside the frozen habitat, when they are so susceptible to the cold? In general, there were some good parts and some bad parts. It all adds up to be a really mediocre episode.

Of Note

Early in the episode, Janeway says it’s 45 degrees on the ship. Assuming that’s Celsius, that would be 113 F. She should be really sweating a lot. I was reminded of “All Our Yesterdays” when Paris and Torres went into the frozen wasteland.