Star Trek: Voyager 1-01: Caretaker, Part 1

Episode:

1

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Writer:

Michael Piller & Jeri Taylor

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Director:

Winrich Kolbe

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Air Date:

16-Jan-1995

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the 343rd story in the Star Trek franchise, Caretaker! It also the first story of Star Trek: Voyager, the fourth live-action Trek series and the successor to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The episode gives a 'story by' credit to Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor, who were also the show's three creators. Each of them apparently had an equal amount of input and control, so the series had three captains at this point. Berman had succeeded Gene Roddenberry as the executive producer of the entire franchise, and had worked with Piller to create Deep Space Nine. Piller had been the saviour of Next Gen, coming in as the new head writer during season 3 to fix it, and had been running DS9 for the last two and a half seasons. Taylor had also been a Next Gen showrunner, as she'd taken over from Piller for its final (disappointing) season. So they were definitely the three most obvious candidates to create a Trek series at this point.

With Next Gen over it made sense to make this another Trek show about a Starfleet crew flying around on a starship, but the three creators made things difficult for themselves by choosing to isolate it from almost everything established during the earlier shows. They couldn't fall back on the classic iconic villains, like the Romulans, Ferengi, and evil admirals. Plus their premise of a ship on long journey meant they had to give viewers something new every week. They also had to deliver an action-packed tale of survival in deep space, without being too bleak and dark for the studio. And they had a network looking over their shoulders now, as the series was airing on UPN, unlike Next Gen and DS9 which had been made for syndication. The potential was there for something great though.

Caretaker was filmed as a feature-length story, not a two-parter, but I'll be tackling it in two parts for the sake of my sanity. I'm going to be recapping and screencapping the whole story in addition to my commentary, so there's a lot here for me to cover. There's also going to be HUGE SPOILERS... but only up to January 16th 1995. I might spoil a episode like Where No One Has Gone Before or The First Duty, but I'll never say the words "Spore drive".

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The episode begins with dramatic music and blurry scrolling text, just like Deep Space Nine's first episode does. I hope you remember all that text, because it's the only information we'll be getting about what "The Maquis" actually are. I mean in this episode, though maybe in the rest of the series too?

If this had been a Star Wars movie the shot would've lingered around on the stars for a moment, then panned down to some spaceships, but Star Trek spaceships are impatient and they come flying in before all the text has disappeared off the top of the screen.

It's a beautiful Cardassian Galor-class cruiser chasing a tiny Maquis ship! The camera pans around to follow the ships as they fly by, which was probably a pain for the visual effects team to figure out as the two models would've been filmed separately. To make it worse they were probably more or less the same size as each other as well.

The Cardassian vessel is bristling with pyramid-shaped turrets (there was a lot of Egyptian influence in its design), but it sometimes it decides to fire a beam out of the navigational deflector instead, just to keep things interesting.

And the very first line of dialogue on Star Trek: Voyager is "Damage report!" spoken by this guy:

I mean the guy in the foreground, Chakotay, not the Cardassian on the screen (that's Gul Evek, making a return appearance from Deep Space Nine).

Shields are at 60% apparently and I'm going to have to get used to hearing that a lot in this series. I'm going to be hearing it more in this scene as well, as Evek is really putting on the pressure. There's explosions and smoke everywhere as the outlaw crew tries to get enough power to reach the relative safety of the Badlands in one piece. Though not a lot of shaking I noticed.

This is the second pilot to begin with a space battle, but it's a little less epic than Emissary's Battle of Wolf 359. This time it's just two ships rather than the most famous battle in Federation history and it doesn't quite have the emotional impact either.

Poor Robert Beltran had to get that tattoo drawn on his forehead every morning of filming for seven years, and to be honest I don't even notice it anymore.

Chakotay's ship is a redress of DS9's Runabout set by the way. They've tried to hide it by putting a computer monitor in the window next to Tuvok, but I'm onto them.

The Maquis were invented for Voyager, with their earlier appearances in Next Gen and DS9 part of a plan to get them established for the new show. I did a little research and it turns out that the Badlands were invented for Voyager as well, which surprises me considering how often they show up on DS9. It's a region of space filled with dangerous swirly plasma storms that you don't want to get anywhere near, so the more agile your ship is, the more chance you'll survive a trip inside.

There's a lot of smoke and drama going on, but the Maquis raider does actually make it into the Badlands! Though it's not a safe haven just yet as Evek turns out to be stubborn and crazy enough to follow them inside with his giant brick of a ship.

It doesn't work out for him.

The camera's really shaking on the Maquis ship's bridge at this point, but it seems like no one told the actors. In fact they feel like they can hang around here for a while and get some repairs done; it's like they can't even hear that the music's still in full drama mode. Unfortunately the ship soon passes through a coherent technobabble beam and suddenly there's a displacement wave chasing them. Star Trek problems.

The wave catches up, there's a white flash and... that's the end of the teaser.

Hang on, where's the hero ship? Where's Captain Janeway? Generally in a Trek series you're going to meet the main character within the first minute, but Voyager's making a real exception here.

OPENING TITLES

Alright, here's Voyager's logo, looking very similar to Deep Space Nine's logo. It seems like there was an effort being made at the time to unify the branding, with both series using the same font as the Original Series movies (more or less). Though not that much of an effort, as the the Next Gen movies were currently doing their own thing with their logos.

One thing DS9 did differently is to drop the famous opening narration and Voyager has followed its lead. In fact every series that came after followed its lead, so Trek is now a opening monologueless franchise. Though I've got hopes for Strange New Worlds.

Voyager is kind of a divisive series, but I think people generally agree that it has a pretty good theme tune; much better than the Next Gen theme. I mean the original unused Next Gen theme, the one that was scrapped due to sounding a bit too cheesy. The Next Gen producers ultimately decided to use part of Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek: The Motion Picture score instead and that worked out pretty well.

This time around the Voyager producers didn't mess around: they gave Jerry Goldsmith a call and paid him to come up with the show's original theme. What they got is a tune that can stand up against the best of Trek themes, though it's more relaxed, less in a hurry.

You know what else is good? The pretty space imagery that goes along with the theme.

There's our ship at last! Like with Star Trek: Discovery, you see the hero ship in the opening titles before it appears for real.

The USS Voyager is introduced boldly flying under a solar flare (hey I did that in one of the Gradius games). Then after the logo is revealed it chills out for a bit in this cloud, making von Kármán vortices as it goes. It's a great looking effect, spoiled very slightly by the way that it's obviously only the bow of the ship that's interacting with the particles, not the warp nacelles or the rest of the ship.

There's a reason why Voyager's opening is so much prettier and more dynamic than earlier series, and that's because it was made in the mid 90s, when the CGI effects you could achieve on a TV show finally reached a level of quality that the Trek producers were happy with. They'd been experimenting with CGI visuals since the pre-production of Next Gen, but here they were able to mix shots of the real physical model and rendered shots of the digital model without there being an obvious difference. (It helped that they were able to take photos of the physical model to put onto the CGI model). Some modern series like The Orville and The Mandalorian use the same hybrid approach to great effect, allowing them to achieve both photo-real establishing shots and dynamic action shots.

Okay the ship's being reflected in the rings here so that seems like a real giveaway that it's the CGI model... but it's apparently the physical model this time. The episode's cheating a bit by having a low resolution and video artefacts, but I'm genuinely struggling to tell the models apart here.

There were actually two CGI Voyager models at this point, one by Amblin Imaging made in Lightwave and one by Santa Barbara Studios using Dynamation. All three CGI shots in the intro were done by Santa Barbara, but the model you see most often in the series is the Lightwave one.

Also this isn't the most obscure bit of Voyager trivia, but the reflection gives us a reference for the size of those rings and they are surprisingly tiny. This YouTube video did the maths and figured out that the rings are only 13.4 km across. Which means that the planet is only 6.2 km in diameter. For comparison, the diameter of Saturn is 116,460 km.

Okay this shot is definitely the CGI model. There are four tells I could spot:

• It casts shafts of light as it passes in front of the star (in space, somehow).
• It stretches as it goes into warp at the end.
• The windows under the shuttlebay are lit up (the physical model had no lights in there).
  
• There are missing textures on the bottom of the ship. Seriously, the dark grey squares behind the phaser strip aren't supposed to be there. But it looks fine so no one ever noticed.

It's still a beautiful shot though, and the ship's not bad either. A surprising number of people aren't keen on Voyager's design, I've heard a few times that it looks like a spoon, but it's one of my favourite Star Trek vessels. She's a fantastic, fast looking ship that can't be mistaken for anything else in the series but absolutely fits in with Starfleet design. She's got the graceful curves of an advanced 24th century Starfleet ship, but the lines aren't quite as organic as those of the Enterprise D. The design's a little bit more utilitarian, this isn't the flagship, but she's still clearly meant to look good while she's getting things done.

Photo borrowed from The Art of Star Trek

The ship's design nearly went in a different, pointier, direction, with a secondary hull that looked just like a scaled-up runabout. This is the study model built to give a reference for what the final model would look like, and when the producers saw it they decided to go in a slightly different direction. Jeri Taylor apparently asked for a curvier Voyager, a bit more like a Lexus, and that's what we got. Thankfully.

By the way, I love that they put tiny people standing next to the airlock. It really shows off the scale of it.

ACT ONE

Alright, about five minutes into the episode we finally meet the episode's true protagonist: Thomas Eugene Paris. Also Captain Kathryn Janeway's finally here, and she's wearing a space station uniform for some reason. DS9 was pretty consistent about starship crews dressing in Next Gen uniforms for years after Voyager debuted, but the Voyager crew is the exception I guess. I'm actually a little surprised they didn't contrive a reason to introduce a third uniform for them to set the series apart.

Anyway, Janeway's here in a New Zealand rehab facility (played by Griffith Park), to give Paris the Rambo 2 offer: she'll get him out of this cushy prison if he'll help her track down his old 'friend' Chakotay's ship. This scene really illustrates what kind of picturesque low-stress hell Chakotay and his friends are in for if they get caught. It's also all we'll get to see of the home the crew will be so desperate to return to, which is an interesting choice.

The teaser was all action, but this one's all exposition. It establishes that Janeway is a former science officer turned captain, while Paris is a former Maquis turned captive. He was only with them for a few weeks though, just long enough to be an even bigger disappointment to his high-ranking dad. Paris is kind of combination of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, both the charming rogue and the viewpoint character. He's also the Wesley Crusher in a way, as Wesley was Gene Roddenberry's middle name and Eugene was his first name. Hey, that might explain why Paris is such a shameless womaniser.

The scene also establishes that Voyager is something special: a Starfleet vessel nimble enough to manoeuvrer through the plasma storms of the Badlands. Okay the Defiant could probably do it too, but that ship's busy on another show.

By the next scene Paris is in his 'Starfleet observer' uniform on a shuttle heading to Deep Space 9. It's a bit of a shame I reckon that he's not in civilian clothes, as then we'd get to see him earn his uniform back. He hasn't gotten his Starfleet sideburns yet at least.

Paris keeps trying to make the moves on the Betazoid pilot, Lt Stadi, which is a bit uncomfortable to watch, seeing as all she wants to do is introduce their ship.

The Voyager is Intrepid-class, capable of a cruising speed of warp 9.975, which is way way faster than the Enterprise D or Defiant. I suppose that makes sense, seeing as she's a brand new ship, 8 years more advanced than the Enterprise. She can even ignore the warp speed limits that Starfleet implemented in Next Gen season 7, but then everyone does.

Also she's just called Voyager, not the Voyager, which set a trend for the franchise going forwards. Captain Archer commands Enterprise, Captain Lorca commands Discovery... thankfully Captain Freeman broke that trend with her ship, the Cerritos and I guess I'll have to wait to see what happens with the USS Protostar.

The ship has bio-neural circuitry, organic processors that give it quicker response times, 15 decks and a crew of 141. Hey that's fewer than 10 crew members per deck! The important thing here is that there's a lot of bragging about how awesome the ship is. They're not setting it up to be an underdog and it doesn't have design flaws to overcome like the Defiant.

Wait... that's an Enterprise D shuttle! I don't just mean it's using an older model, I mean it's got 1701-D on the side! It had a different number on it a moment ago. Voyager would soon gets its own variation of this shuttle design in Parallax and an even sleeker shuttle in Threshold, but the series carried on using this Enterprise D shuttle design as well. All the way up to season 7 in fact.

Here's a question, did Paris and Stadi travel all the way from Earth in a shuttle? Seems a bit slow, especially as DS9's supposed to be on the frontier. Maybe the were dropped off nearby.

Awesome, the number on the shuttle's been fixed. I'm glad they worked that out. Also this is definitely the physical Voyager model this time: the windows under the shuttlebay are dark.

We've seen the Enterprise D docked up here before and Voyager looks quite a bit smaller by comparison. In fact I've heard people describe her as being a small ship, but I'm not sure that's really true. If you accept the official length of the Original Series Enterprise of 289 meters, then Voyager's actually longer at 343 meters, and apparently has three times the volume! She's absolutely massive compared to the Defiant and about 75% the size of the Excelsior. Kind of raises the question of why she has such a small crew.

Anyway, the episode cuts to inside...

But DS9 fans will have realised that we're not inside the ship. We're actually on the station, in Quark's Bar. First thing we get to see here is a screenful of Morn's face, followed by a cameo by Quark himself!

Quark's here to pass the torch from DS9 to Voyager (kind of), like how Dr McCoy made a cameo appearance on Next Gen and Picard made a cameo appearance on DS9. Quark also made a cameo in Next Gen and almost appeared in Star Trek: Insurrection as well, so they just really loved putting Quark in scenes.

This scene also serves the purpose of showing how naive Ensign Harry Kim is, as he almost gets swindled by the Ferengi entrepreneur. Fortunately Paris comes to his rescue, forming an indestructible bond between the characters that lasts at least until the end of the episode. I don't want to commit to more than that at this time.

The scene does raise a question though: why couldn't we have had Quark on the ship instead of Neelix?

Alright, now we're inside Voyager herself and the first set we visit is sickbay. It's an upgrade of the sickbay set from Next Gen, which itself was a modification of the set built for The Motion Picture. It eventually made it back to Next Gen and back to movies when First Contact and Insurrection needed a sickbay to film in, but it was torn down before Nemesis had a chance to use it.

This is Voyager's doctor by the way and I don't think he ever gets a name. All I know about him is that he's a bit of a jerk and he's played by the guy who played super soldier Roga Danar in the Next Gen episode The Hunted. Oh, plus his sideburns may be fake. I've heard that a lot of the regular cast had fake pointy sideburns as they apparently couldn't grow them naturally.

Anyway, Paris and Kim are just here to report in and get a hint about Paris's dark backstory. The doctor really doesn't like him.

Then we get to see what Voyager's corridors look like! Well, kind of; the scene's it's not really showing them off.

The corridors have the same layout as Next Gen's set (they were built in the exact same place), but they've got a lot of that grey military sterility that Next Gen was deliberately trying to avoid. No one ever accused Voyager of looking like a hotel... even if it does have carpets everywhere. The producers really wanted to make certain there were no footsteps, as it can really hurt the illusion that they're on a high-tech spaceship if you can hear the wooden boards under their feet (see: Babylon 5).

Meanwhile Janeway's having a chat with her fiancé Mark, who can't be on the ship with her as Voyager doesn't have any civilians aboard. Either Starfleet has considered that idea to be a huge mistake, or it's only for giant Galaxy-class sized ships which can support an entire community.

I suppose this counts as a second glimpse of the home they're leaving behind, and the only glimpse of any of their families. This also gives us a glimpse of what Janeway's like when she's not playing the role of captain, which is immediately contrasted by the second half of the scene when Paris and Kim turn up.

Janeway makes it clear that she doesn't want to be addressed as "sir", and "ma'am" isn't a favourite of hers either (too many viewers confusing it for 'mum' perhaps). She prefers "captain", and there's no doubt that's what she's going to hear from people. She's smiling a lot more than Picard did in his first episode but she projects just as much authority.

Kate Mulgrew is perfect for the role, which is why it's a bit weird that she didn't get it. Geneviève Bujold was the actress they picked, but it became obvious very quickly that she wasn't right for the series and the series wasn't right for her, and the producers were relieved when she made the decision to leave. Though it did mean expensive reshoots, as they couldn't just composite Mulgrew into the scenes they'd already shot with Bujold.

Then they had more expensive reshoots as the studio wasn't happy with Janeway's hair! Most Voyager episodes took around a week to film, this one took a month in the end.

Kim and Paris finally make it onto the bridge, with Kim looking around in wonder as if he didn't just walk through the room to get to Janeway's ready room.

It is a really nice bridge set, but the episode doesn't seem to share Kim's eagerness to take it all in. In fact the director isn't making any effort at all to show these sets off and give us an idea of the geography, which is a real contrast to Encounter at Farpoint. It's almost like they were deliberately trying to keep a bit of mystery about the sets so they could reveal them throughout the episode.

Unfortunately this means you can't see here that the bridge has two captain's chairs side by side, like in The Orville. I've never been a fan of that, as I feel like they should've given her a proper captain's chair in the centre of the bridge, raised up a bit, so she doesn't look like the co-captain.

First officer Cavit shakes both the officers' hands, but he definitely hesitates with Paris. Seems like the only two people on the ship who want him around are Janeway and Kim. It also seems like there's no one on this ship with the rank of commander, as the chief medical officer and first officer are both lieutenant commanders. I guess there'll be plenty of room to give characters promotions over the next seven seasons!

Kim is the ship's main operations officer, like Data was on the Enterprise D, and he gets this huge station at the back. Though hang on, why is an ensign on his very first day out of the academy running ops? Data was a lieutenant commander from episode one, which is three ranks higher. I could understand if he took over during the third shift or when everyone's out on an away mission or whatever, but literally everyone on the ship has more experience than him, including the observer they just got out of prison.

Uh, what was this episode about again? Oh right, they're hunting down a Maquis ship in the Badlands.

Hey the ship has self-illumination! That spotlight illuminating the name was introduced with the movie Enterprise back in 1979, but don't remember the Enterprise D or Defiant having this feature. This was probably the point that it became standard for the TV side of the franchise, though on the shiny metallic CGI vessels that came later the spotlights tend to just make a nice reflection rather than lighting anything up.

Incidentally Voyager's hull has a weirdly monotone paint job (duck egg blue in case you were wondering). In fact the hull is so dull that they had to break it up with a big sensor pallet at the front that makes it look like a piece of the ship's fallen off.

It's a beautiful model otherwise though and I like how it matches the sets pretty closely. You've got the ready room and briefing room on either side of the bridge at the top. One deck below you've got the mess hall, then the row of windows below that belongs to Janeway's quarters. They cut out that whole sloping section just so she didn't have to have angled windows like Picard has. In fact no one has angled windows, so there's cut out sections all over the ship.

ACT TWO

The ship gets underway and Paris gets down to the mess hall to grab some food. That means we get a rare glimpse of this wall of replicators, and Paris gets a glimpse of Cavit and the doctor telling Kim what his new best friend did to make everyone hate him. What he didn't know is that the actors were actually joking around to make newbie actor Garrett Wang feel more at ease. (check)

When the two of them leave, Paris sits down and confirms that the story's true. We don't learn the specifics but he was responsible for an accident and covered it up. Then he changed his mind, confessed, and got kicked out of Starfleet. So basically the same backstory as Nick Locarno, the character he played in an episode of Next Gen called The First Duty.

It really raises the question of why they didn't just make this guy Nick Locarno! Some people have suggested it was because Locarno was irredeemable, but the only difference between them is that Paris got three times as many people killed! Other people have suggested it was a way to avoid paying royalties to Locarno's creators, but he was created by Next Gen staff writers who wouldn't have been entitled to any... I think. Personally I'm going to pretend that Nick Locarno is a name he took to hide that he's the son of Admiral Paris, and he dropped it when he got kicked out.

Fortunately Kim's not going to let other people chose his friends for him, so they're still space bros!

Voyager arrives at the Badlands and calculates the route that Chakotay's ship would've taken through the plasma storms. It's all going well until they detect a coherent tetryon beam like they did. Suddenly a displacement wave's coming right at them and all the technobabble in the world isn't enough to disperse it.

That means that this is the fourth pilot episode so far about a crew investigating what happened to another ship and getting caught in the same situation, after The Cage, Where No Man Has Gone Before and Beyond the Farthest Star.

It becomes obvious they won't escape, so Janeway orders the crew to brace for impact.

Cavit, what the hell are you doing? Do you even know what 'brace' means? Here's a hint: it doesn't mean 'sprint from one end of the bridge to the other'.

Voyager is flung around pretty hard and when people wake up they find that their beautiful bridge is now a smoking wreck. It's not a big shock that Cavit died, but they lost Stadi too! She had an excellent location for bracing, as she was the conn officer at the front, but Paris is destined to be the ship's pilot so the original pilot had to die. He's not the pilot just yet though, as he only gets to press buttons for a few seconds before Janeway gently pushes him aside to take over.

The bad news is that they've ended up over 70,000 light years away, on the other side of the galaxy, next to a mysterious space station that keeps firing energy pulses. The other bad news is that the bit of ceiling hanging down on the left has apparently been composited in and it's kind of obvious. There isn't currently any good news.

This isn't the furthest that any Starfleet ship has ever travelled though, as that record probably belongs to the Enterprise D after Where No One Has Gone Before. Plus the DS9 crew travel this far fairly often thanks to their wormhole. But it's still pretty damn far.

This means I get to drag out and update an old map I made for my review of Emissary a few years back:

Alright, the Bajoran wormhole goes from the yellow dot all the way over to Gamma Quadrant. I don't think they ever narrowed down exactly where in the Gamma Quadrant the other side comes out, but it has to be somewhere in the purple zone.

Now Voyager has been sent over 70,000 light years away to the Delta Quadrant, so they're somewhere in the orange zone. In the absolute best case scenario they're basically next door to the wormhole and they can be home in twenty minutes! Spoiler: they don't head to the wormhole, so it's probably not all that close.

But here's the question, why do they head for home instead of heading to the wormhole in the Gamma Quadrant? I've heard several people ask this question and it confuses me every time. Okay, assuming you're currently 200 miles from your home and you live next to an airport, do you take the train back or ride the train to another airport 200 miles in another direction and fly home from there instead? Bear in mind that the other airport is near to hostile alien space.

ACT THREE

The crew split up to take on the various crises around the ship, with Janeway heading to engineering to stop a warp core breach while Paris and Kim head to sickbay. Gotta write the all the important sets into the pilot script or they might not get built.

That means Kim gets to put giant gloves on and put out a fire with a hose! Unfortunately this exploding piece of wall took out their unnamed doctor and their unseen chief engineer is dead as well. The episode's pulling a Where No Man's Gone Before in fast-forward, killing off half of the candidates to be regular characters in the first 20 minutes. In fact the only senior staff members left alive now are Janeway and Kim!

Kim's firefighting action is followed by a clip of Janeway striding down a corridor, fixing her hair. Then she walks into engineering... from the turbolift. The clip was added to explain why her hair is suddenly intact again and I think they get away with it. I definitely never noticed it was a turbolift until now.

Then we get our first look at Voyager's warp core, though it's not much of a look. It's about to blow up or something, but Janeway seems to be on top of it.

Like most of the other sets, main engineering was built right where it had been in The Next Generation and The Motion Picture, though they made it look bigger by giving the whole thing a second floor instead of just the bit around the core. They also went back to the Motion Picture warp core effect for some reason.

The warp cores in the Enterprise D and the Defiant both used a series of neon tubes in a relay, but Voyager's core contained rotating aluminium balls and lights. Each ball was turning on a different axis angle and the Plexiglas tube had rear screen projection material on the inside, so when the light hit the balls the reflections formed swirling shapes. The downside was that there were four balls with four motors and anyone on set could hear them. Also it made the warp core look 100 years out of date.

Back in sickbay, Kim activates the Emergency Medical Holographic program, played by Robert Picardo. He's one of the few Star Trek actors I already knew about before the series, from the movies Innerspace and Total Recall, but he's been a ton of stuff. He's also the third Robert in the main cast, after Robert Beltran and Robert Duncan McNeill.

I don't know where they writers got their inspiration from, but this guy's got the same name as the Doctor from Doctor Who, the holographic nature of Rimmer from Red Dwarf, and the artificial nature of Data from Next Gen. They've mixed them together in way to make someone entirely different however: an entity designed to be snarky and steal scenes. He's already standing out in his very first scene, with the way he's apparently more interested in finding out when a replacement doctor will arrive than he is in finding out what happened to all the wounded being brought in. Plus I'm impressed with how slick he is at loading a hypospray; the actor must have been practicing.

The Doctor is also the only main character allowed to wear a blue colour uniform, which really throws the balance off. They should've pulled a DS9 and made Kim the science officer instead of just operations to add some blue to the bridge.

A few seconds later everyone finds themselves standing outside a farmhouse being offered lemonade and cookies, which is a bit weird. So they all get out their tricorders and go walking around, which is a shame because it always looks a bit ridiculous to me when the characters do that. They stopped doing simultaneous tricordering in DS9 pretty early so I'm surprised to see it happen here.

It seems like every pilot episode has to whisk characters away to some inexplicable recreation of Earth though. The Cage took Captain Pike into an illusionary Mojave, Encounter at Farpoint brought the bridge crew to a post-atomic courtroom, Emissary brought Sisko into his memories and now the crew are in a holographic environment within that array next to the ship.

Suddenly the neighbours drop by for a party, all dancing to a tune played by an old man with a banjo. I have a feeling filming this was more fun for the extras doing the dancing it was for the extras playing the confused Starfleet crew. Also we learn later that the banjo man is the avatar of the entity who brought them here, so I have to wonder if he's doing all this just because he wants an audience for his banjo playing. I mean the hologram clearly isn't calming down his visitors at all. If anything he should've created a holographic hospital.

ACT FOUR

Janeway sends Paris and Kim off to search for a generator, but they find something more interesting: sporocystian life signs! Well, it's interesting to them. One of the neighbours tries to distract them with her charms and it works on Paris for a bit, but Kim's all business and leads them to a barn.

Inside the barn he detects more life signs: a Vulcan and several humans. So no Bajorans then? Not even a Bolian or a Betazoid or a B'Elanna Torres? (Chakotay's crew turns out to be a little more diverse than they've set up here.)

The woman gets a bit more violent at this point, punching Paris to the ground, and then they're surrounded by folks with pitchforks. Janeway arrives with whoever was nearby, and whoever's puppeteering the holograms tells them it'll have to move things up ahead of schedule.

Honestly this was a pretty terrible waiting room distraction. It could've put them on a replica of their own ship, that would've confused them for ages! Or maybe a featureless white room with no door and no barn.

The back wall of the barn disappears revealing Chakotay's entire crew lying in some kind of high-tech stabbing facility, designed to stab them with huge needles. Unfortunately it wasn't designed to give them something to lean their arms on, so they've just been hanging off the side like that for an entire week. Unless they spent most of the week at the banjo party, eating cookies and enjoying themselves.

This is a bit of a creepy X-Files alien abduction moment, but that makes sense as The X-Files was huge at the time.

So the good news is that they've found Chakotay; that's part 1 of the mission completed! The bad news is that they get teleported onto beds themselves as now it's their turn to be stabbed with giant needles. Janeway kind of downplays it, Kim screams his head off.

That's a much better screencap of engineering! You can get a good look at the layout here, with the whole room getting an upper floor. You can also see that they took out the 'pool table' so they have to find somewhere else to gather around when they do their engineering.

Anyway, everyone wakes up in the same places they were beamed up from. The array entity could've just beamed them all into a cargo bay or something, but it put in the extra effort and that was nice of them. They've even got their own clothes back.

Turns out that Voyager had been left here defenceless and abandoned for three days, so they're pretty lucky no one came along and hijacked it. Not everything's as it should be though, as Paris notices that they're missing Ensign Kim.

Janeway checks to see how many others are unaccounted for and then calls Chakotay up to see if he was beamed over there by mistake. Turns out that Chakotay is missing someone as well: his engineer B'Elanna Torres.

It's interesting that Janeway comes straight out with the fact that she was sent to hunt him down. He had no reason to assume that she had any business with the Maquis whatsoever, but she's not holding anything back from him. I guess that's one way to build trust.

She invites him to beam over to her ship so they can solve their problem together... and he agrees.

Well okay she held one thing back: Chakotay's buddy Tuvok is actually her chief of security, the one she mentioned to Paris at the start of the episode. He's not all that happy to find out he had a spy on his crew, but he keeps his composure enough to stop Ayala from punching him. That's Ayala behind Chakotay by the way. His actor, Tarik Ergin, holds the record for having the most appearances as an extra in Star Trek history. He appears as Ayala in 125 episodes.

It's been about half an hour since we've seen these guys but they had the teaser all to themselves and they were heroic underdogs, so they've earned a little audience sympathy. We're definitely not meant to see them as villains, though we're given the impression that's how Chakotay sees Paris.

Janeway breaks out the phaser rifles and just beams right back over to the array again!

The guy with the banjo is the only person there and seems surprised to see them, so I guess he really does just like playing a banjo. He's a bit annoyed they're here though, as his tests showed that they don't have what he needs. But Torres and Kim might...

He's a pretty good actor this guy, even though he's playing an frustratingly cryptic character who'll only give them fragments of information. He has no time left! He does understand responsibility. He must honour a debt that can never be repaid. His search hasn't been going well.

One thing's clear: he's not going to send them back home, because the process is complicated and he's in a rush. Instead he just sends them back to Voyager's bridge. It wasn't a wasted trip though as now Janeway has a reason to take notice of the energy pulses being fired off from the array.

Meanwhile, somewhere else, Kim wakes up to find a pair of telepathic doctors hovering over him (not literally). They tell him he's ill and the bumps on his wrists and chest seem to confirm that.

Torres wakes up in the bed next to him and has a more violent reaction, beating a doctor up and making a run for the door. Two more doctors restrain her and the first doctor is able to stun her with a remote control to the neck.

Then we finally get the first captain's log voice over in Voyager! It's Stardate 48315.6 and they've traced the pulses from the array to a planet in a nearby system. That means that the episode takes place between the season 3 DS9 episodes The Abandoned and Civil Defense.

Tuvok's in his uniform now, and he's a Worf so he wears gold. Unfortunately Kim isn't around so he's also the one stuck doing the science for the time being it seems, and he's discovered that the pulses from the array are getting faster.

Meanwhile Janeway's been doing a little science of her own and has discovered that the destination of pulses is kind of like an M class planet, except it has no rivers, oceans or nucleogenic particles, which is a real word no matter what my spell checker thinks. They've got pretty good sensors on these Starfleet ships to be able to determine that from outside the star system! The lack of these particles means that the planet is incapable of producing rain (and I imagine the lack of water is a contributing factor). There must have been an environmental disaster to cause something like this, and they'll investigate further once they finish repairs and head out there.

Tuvok also talks her into getting some sleep. Turns out that he's always been her trusted advisor. It also turns out that Tuvok has a family back home and actor Tim Russ is really good at playing a Vulcan. He even put up with shaving off a tiny bit of hair above his forehead to achieve an unnaturally smooth Vulcan hairline.

Anyway, come back next time as the crew visits the weird planet and hopefully gets Kim and Torres back. Maybe they'll even get the ship home! I mean that's how it usually works in Star Trek.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO

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TOMORROW

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the second and final part of my Caretaker review. Get hyped for some Neelix!

Feel free to leave a comment by the way, share your thoughts on the story so far.