79 – Concerning Flight

Grade: C

Summary

Janeway has been using up her Holodeck time hanging around Leonardo DaVinci’s workshop again. Apparently she wants to know why he hasn’t finished his last projects. Suddenly, Chakotay tells her that the ship is under attack. Voyager’s shields go down, and several pieces of technology are transported off the ship.

Commentary

After a rocky start, this episode settles into a bit of typical Voyager nonsense. One piece of technology that disappears from the ship is the Doctor’s mobile emitter. And for some reason, since the DaVinci program was running at the time of transport, the computer downloaded him into the emitter. So now DaVinci is wandering around on the planet, believing to have been sent to the American continent.

In general, this episode is OK, but there are a lot of little things that just ruin the experience for me.

What’s bizarre and never explained is that the main computer processor is gone. How could anything on the ship work at all without the main computer processor? Well, whatever. Things are not always explained on Voyager, but that has usually bothered me about its screenplays. I have a hard time just ignoring details like this when they are missing.

The villain in this episode reminds me of the one in Future’s End who steals future technology and then sells it a bit at a time. Both villains are really just businessmen trying to make a living.

The city landscape is cheap-looking and unimpressive. The entire episode looks like a knock-off of a 1979 Buck Rogers episode. Probably didn’t have very much money in the budget to produce it, and that’s why the scenery and sets are so distracting.

One last thing – the end with Janeway flying off into the sunset with DaVinci is beyond ridiculous. Sometimes I can’t believe what passes for great entertainment in this series. I remember it being bad, but not this bad.

Of Note

Captain Janeway says in this episode that James T. Kirk claimed to have met the real Leonardo DaVinci. I don’t think this was ever mentioned in the Original Series, but given how often Kirk went into the past, I’m not surprised.