Harry gets his first command and immediately breaks the Prime Directive. That’s our boy!
I really struggled with “Nightingale”.
Not because I did not enjoy watching it. I mean, I have problems with the predictability and sitcom logic of the character beats, but that’s just your standard late-era Voyager nonsense.
My problem is that I am having trouble reconciling this story with, uhhhhh. Star Trek.
Like, you guys know I am not a Prime Directive fan. In the early scene, where Seven is like, “Um, you know that responding to this distress signal would violate the Prime Directive,” I was shouting, THAT IS DEEPLY UNETHICAL AND IMMORAL! THE WHOLE OF THE EXPANSE LITERALLY BEGINS BECAUSE IT’S WRONG FOR A SHIP TO IGNORE A DISTRESS SIGNAL!
However. By the time we get to “Harry has taken command of this alien ‘medical’ transport and is helping its crew break a military blockade,” I felt like maybe this was … problematic.
To pick a comparison which won’t be even slightly inflammatory, imagine if a small US Navy vessel decided to smuggle food and medical supplies into Gaza. That would be the morally correct thing to do, because allowing genocides to happen is bad (huge if true), but also it would open multiple cans of worms and the commander of that hypothetical naval vessel would not have a job for much longer.
Here, Harry violates the Prime Directive in a fairly unambiguous way, persisting with the mission even after he learns he’s really smuggling a cloaking device, not vaccines, onto the colonised and blockaded planet. And I think he’s right to do so! But the lack of consequences is wild. I didn’t want another “30 days of solitary confinement in the brig” situation, but I expected Janeway to at least be maternally not-angry-but-disappointed. I mean, Voyager was almost attacked as a result of Harry’s decisions! That warrants a stern talking-to, surely!
But for some reason, “Nightingale” is less interested in the genuinely complex morality play in front of it, and more concerned with a sitcom plot where Neelix gives Harry bad advice, culminating in Harry needing to learn an important lesson about delegating and trusting his crew.
And that … is a Lower Decks plot. I mean, it’s literally the plot of “In the Cradle of Vexilon”, the third episode of Lower Decks‘s fourth season: newly promoted Lieutenant Boimler leads his first away mission, T’Lyn needs to tell him to trust his team to do their jobs. Voyager even has Seven in the role of “voice of leadership wisdom”, a job for which she is laughably unqualified.
Icheb gets friendzoned
Back on Voyager, the B-plot follows Icheb around an equally predictable set of scenes: he is assigned to work alongside B’Elanna, she shows a minimum of polite friendliness, he assumes she is in love with him.
This is all deeply uncomfortable. There’s the secondhand embarrassment of watching Icheb flounder, but also B’Elanna’s point of view: she is polite to a young man, and he sexually harasses her. Worse, he is a teenager whose sexual harassment takes the form of telling her off for her “interest”.
I do think there was a way to tell this story without being gross, and to explore the fact that Icheb has no peers on board Voyager. But this, coming from a series which has had an episode about how “women who lie about sexual harassment should be punished”, felt ugly.
other observations
- the leader of the friendly aliens is played by the excellent Ron Glass
- this is a sub-mediocre episode, but Glass and Wang’s performances are good enough that I cannot call it bad
- once again, the costume department is doing excellent work
In conclusion
No. Go watch “In the Cradle of Vexilon” and have a nice time. Two infatuated teenagers out of five.