Neelix babysits, while Janeway maybe accidentally committed a genocide.
“The Haunting of Deck 12” is a perfectly nice episode. It’s a small story, a bottle episode by any definition: no new sets, a lot of recycled special effects, the only guest stars are recurring characters. It’s a pleasant way to spend 45 minutes.
Which makes it odd that this is the penultimate episode of the season. It feels like, having blown the budget on special effects in “Fury” and costumes in “Muse”, the Voyager producers suddenly realised they needed to save a few bucks for the season finale. Even the lights are switched off.
Even in the age of serialised television, a season’s penultimate episode need not be a big action-fest. Discovery nearly always had a quieter episode before the finale, putting pieces in motion and checking in with the character arcs before everything was resolved in the next episode.
But this was 2000, the age of sweeps, when shows would pull out all the stops for specific periods — the beginnings and ends of seasons, largely — where advertisers paid close attention to ratings as they prepared to set their budget for the next season.
In this context, “The Haunting of Deck 12” feels lazy. Everyone knew Voyager would get a seventh season, and that would be its last. Voyager has nothing left to prove. This could have led to a new confidence in its storytelling and characters, but instead gave us the complacency and repetition of season 6.
There are a lot of serious problems with the contemporary streaming model, but one thing I appreciate about a ten-episode season is that every episode has to justify its existence, whether through advancing a serialised plot, as in Discovery, or presenting a new and exciting story, as in Strange New Worlds. They’re not always successful — season 4 saw Discovery spin its wheels for episodes at a time1, while Strange New Worlds all too often justifies its existence by going, “Look! Something you recognise from another Star Trek!” — but at least it doesn’t feel like I, the audience, am being taken for granted.
All this aside, I quite like “The Haunting…”
We don’t learn anything new about a single character, but it’s an opportunity to revisit and cement ideas we’ve seen before:
- Neelix is claustrophobic
- Mezoti is a Deadpan Evil Child, and if we ever encounter her as an adult in one of the spin-offs, I nominate Aubrey Plaza for the role
- Janeway is on speaking terms with Voyager; the relationship is mostly not mutual
- Crewman Celes is still struggling with her confidence
- Harry is not especially patient with her, which may seem surprising, because Harry always comes across as a nice guy, but makes perfect sense when you consider what an outrageously high achiever he is — and consider, also, that his sometime BFF Lyndsay Ballard was also sometimes failing in the competency department, but rarely lacked self-confidence
At its best, this is solid, bordering on internal continuity.
At its worst, we get dialogue we’ve already heard: in “Night”, Neelix tells the Doctor, “First thing in the morning, I’m replicating some curtains.” Here, Tuvok tells Neelix, “Perhaps you can ask Captain Janeway for permission to put up curtains.” It’s a cute line, both times, but I’m also suffering from déjà vu.2Please don’t go through my AO3 account to find all the times I’ve reused lines, I could not bear the humiliation.3
The ensemble is (mostly) used effectively
This is a Neelix story, featuring the Borg kids, but everyone has a moment — except for B’Elanna, whose job this week is technobabble. Which is rough, but she had the spotlight just a couple of weeks back … on the other hand, she also spent part of “Fury” being dead. Had Roxann Dawson offended someone?
Of particular note is Chakotay’s turbolift adventure, which leaves him wondering if Voyager is trying to kill him. Well, sir, you were just flirting with her captain right in front of her salad.
Did Voyager … commit a genocide?
It should not be a twist that a nebula is alive or is home to living creatures. Frankly, “we mined this seemingly inert resource and accidentally killed something” was a tired plot by the time Voyager did “The Cloud”, way back in season 1. It boggles my mind that this is still a shocking twist as of season 2 of Strange New Worlds.
(Shout out to season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery, which is essentially “The Devil in the Dark” from the Horta’s point of view, giving us the first fresh twist on the story in decades.)
Truly, at all times, Starfleet should be assuming that any rich source of mineral or technobabble resources is either a habitat or alive itself. But no! Janeway sees a source of deuterium and immediately transforms into Gina Rinehart. She’s digging that shit up and selling it to China, and she will not be paying taxes, thank you very much.
Okay, so Voyager picks up a life form along the way. Innocent mistake. Could happen to anyone. They capture it under a glass and try to take it outside, only to find that their mining operation has caused the nebula to dissipate.
The question no one asks is, “How do we know that the life form now in residence aboard Voyager was the only one in that nebula?” And I think the reason no one asks is because the answer is, “Uhhh, we have no information but it actually seems quite unlikely, and, er, we may have sort of committed genocide.”
That awkward moment when.
other observations
- I think the moment when the computer produces Janeway’s coffee, then her coffee cup, might be the only entirely new special effect in the episode
- Okay, but CONCEPT: what if the nebula alien stayed on Voyager, living in the computer and became a regular character? Anyone? ANYONE?
In conclusion
As much as this is a weird choice for the penultimate episode of the penultimate season, and as much as I have questions w/r/t possible genocide, I do actually like this episode. Three and a half nebula aliens out of five.