Voyager S1E6 “Eye of the Needle” Review by AnswerMan

Horrible:Meh:Adequate:Good: Fantastic

"Excuse me, I have senseless jabber to add as well."

Good news everyone ™! There’s a wormhole nearby, and hey, maybe it leads to the Alpha Quadrant! The bridge officers point out that there is a one in four chance that it connects with their home quadrant, but Tuvok counters with the argument that there’s also a 75% chance that it doesn’t. Now this seems like maybe a strange nit for me to pick, but this exchange immediately rubbed me the wrong way and set the tone for a kind of lousy episode. What evidence do they have that wormhole’s end points are always evenly distributed among the four quadrants? Just because there are four possible options doesn’t mean that each outcome is equally probable. Perhaps 99% of Delta Quadrant wormholes lead to the Beta Quadrant. Or maybe 60% of all wormholes connect two points within the same quadrant. Or who knows? It just seems overly optimistic to me to even think that there’s a 25% chance that this particular wormhole will point them home, and I would think that Tuvok of all people would have pointed out the flaw in the math.

Anyway, none of this really matters because it turns out that the wormhole is only 30 centimeters in diameter, which isn’t even as wide as fully dilated Klingon birth canal. Perhaps they could send a 1:16 scale model of Voyager through it, but that’s about it. But the crew comes up with a better plan, and they decide to launch a “micro-probe” into that sucker. Am I the only one that didn’t know we had micro-probes? They seem to be uniquely suited to work in this very specific application, so I’m glad we do. So they launch the itty bitty probe into the insanely tight wormhole, and naturally it gets stuck, much to the chagrin of any micro-aliens that might use the micro-wormhole to commute to their tiny little jobs.  What’s worse is the whole thing is collapsing, so the porthole to another part of space as well as the probe that is monitoring it will soon be no more.

I guess at this point I’ll point out that this episode contains an even greater amount of technobabble than any other episode of Trek that I can think of. I’m used to the usual solving of whatever the disaster of the week is by utilizing technology that is over the viewer’s heads and therefore can’t be proven wrong. That I get. Go ahead and re-modulate the main deflector dish yet again to blah blah blah blah bloo all you need in order to wrap up an impossible situation. Fine. But this episode starts with the nonsense early, and it seems to protrude into the plot itself, rather than just being utilized as a nice clean resolution tool. Ten or fifteen minutes in I was thinking, “Holy crap when are they going to stop rambling on about the technicalities of this situation and move on to actually forming a plot?” It gets ridiculous.

The highlight of the episode for me was the character development of The Doctor. Kes notices that people don’t treat him like a person, and he complains that sometimes people shut him off while he’s in the middle of something, and other times leave him on for long periods unnecessarily. Kes talks to the captain, who has a heart to heart with The Doctor where she agrees to a number of things, including what will become an ongoing gag: that he should have a name. All of this results in him becoming more confident in his role, and he actually stands up to one rude member of the crew who goes from refusing to directly address The Doctor at all to leaving sick bay with a “Yes Sir!” after a bit of a dressing-down from the newly assertive doctor.

"Say my name."

Anyway, as luck would have it, the jammed probe does help to establish communication with a Romulan science vessel on the other side, which does indeed lead to the Alpha Quadrant. After some convincing, the Romulan captain, Selek, believes their crazy story, and becomes extremely willing to help. The crew prepare personal messages for him to pass on to their families, but meanwhile Torres is working on something even better. She believes that they should be able to beam themselves through the wormhole and onto the Romulan ship. The Romulan captain is strangely willing to help evacuate the crew, but he would have to send for a proper transport vessel to haul them. He then agrees to test the system himself by beaming over to Voyager. It works, but plot twist….he’s from 20 years in the past. Of course. Because time just doesn’t seem to ever go in a straight line in the Delta Quadrant. The crew realizes that they can’t risk any number of temporal issues by showing up at home 20 years before they left. The ever eager to help Romulan offers to help make sure that they never set off on their fateful voyage at all, but they agree that this could cause who knows how many problems as well. He does agree to pass on their messages after waiting the necessary twenty years. After he leaves, Tuvok, always the Debbie Downer, says that he Googled Selek and it turns out that he croaks long before he could ever pass on their messages. Bummer.

"I'm going to miss those late-night
chats with that nice Romulan!"

What I don’t understand is how willingly the crew would just trust a random Romulan to get them home. If this plan had worked, would they really have abandoned Voyager? Would they just leave it there, or self-destruct it? We do know that they wouldn’t be leaving it in the hands of The Doctor, because he asks Kes to make sure that he gets deactivated if everyone leaves. What in the world gives the crew the confidence that they would be in good hands with the Romulans? I just don’t see the whole plan as very promising.

Because of the reliance on technobabble, and for centering around an implausible plan that we knew from the beginning wasn’t going to happen anyway (I mean, it’s season one, they’re not going home), I rank this episode as just Meh.

Published Mar 16, 2017