Voyager S2E5 "Non Sequitur" Review by AnswerMan

Horrible:Meh:Adequate:Good:Fantastic

A entire show about Harry Kim....great. You know you're in an alternate reality when Kim is in bed with a serious babe, who happens to be his fiance. How in the world he got there, even he doesn't know. He was on a shuttlecraft, and luckily appeared on Earth in an alternate timeline instead of exploding with the shuttle (because all shuttle explode in Voyager, yada yada yada). He stumbles around trying to figure out when and where he is, but it isn't long before he loses his cool and starts babbling about how he is from another reality. Naturally, this raises suspicions from everyone around him about his sanity, and his loyalty.



Where this episode does get fun and interesting enough to hold my attention is the scenery of a modern regular city on Earth, and the way things work there. We're used to how things operate on a spaceship, but rarely get to see how modern Earth goes about its daily business. I found the public transporter system to be quite fascinating. I always wondered if transporters were as common on the planet as they were in space. For instance, does everyone have one in their home? Could you live in California and work in Hong Kong? Well in "Non Sequitur" we see that there is an underground transporter system with street access just like our current subway systems. Kim uses this to go to France and visit Paris, who is not in Star Fleet, and has become a bit of a loser. Here we go again with Paris as the bad boy, which just never works for me. I just can't see him in that light, and it follows that the writers really don't either, because it only ever lasts for a second before he's made hero again. Anyway, Paris tells Kim to get lost because his story sounds crazy and because Kim insults him for no reason.

When Kim gets back home, things have gotten worse as his girlfriend and his buddy have teamed up to sell him out, and an inquiry from Star Fleet is waiting there. Since Harry had used security clearance that he doesn't really have to look up things about Voyager, and now has fraternized with a known Maquis sympathizer, they think he's a spy or whatever. So they put a tracking ankle bracelet on him to monitor him while they figure it out. To add insult to injury, they put it over his pants leg, so I guess he can't change his clothes ever now either.

"Go home Paris, you're drunk."

Luckily, a guy on the street tells Kim what's going on. Out of the blue this guy just tells him that he was sent to watch Kim to make sure he was ok, which he clearly is not. He then goes on, "We exist in what you would call a temporal inversion fold in the space-time matrix. It's not necessary to understand. It only matters that there was an accident. Your shuttle intersected one of our time-streams and...boom! A few things were altered as a result of the accident. History and events were scrambled a bit, and you ended up here." Oh ok, well it's nice that it can be explained in 12 seconds. Does this dude know how to change things back? No, he hasn't a clue. Then the guy makes what I think is a very valid argument, which is that Kim is better off now. In this timeline, he dodged a bullet by not going on the doomed Voyager. He also has a great career and a fiance. Kim doesn't see it that way, and can only think about how some poor sap is in his place on Voyager, and that Paris is a drunk. Kim asks if he could just fly another craft into the time-stream to put things back, and the guy says that he's more likely to end up a billion years in the future, or stuck on a planet billions of years before light even existed. Harry takes this as a green light to try it, rather than just going home to his hot (yet admittedly vapid) girlfriend and doing some more boning.

He tampers with the ankle bracelet in order to begin his idiotic plan, and the fuzz immediately beam in to get him, but he escapes out the window. Paris shows up after a change of heart just in time to help out. Luckily he has a site-to-site transporter, so they can beam into headquarters and steal a prototype ship.

Ok, there's just so many things that I don't follow here. First, if the guy was sent to make sure Kim adjusted well to the change, why not give him a head's up on the situation from the start, rather than just making him coffee? Why do they need an ankle bracelet tracker? Don't they carry com badges that monitor where they are at all times already? And if he took it off, haven't they demonstrated that they can find a single person's life signs from thousands of miles away? Then, why in the world do they beam in security officers to chase him around on foot? Can't they just beam Kim directly into a holding cell? And why did Kim's security codes work? Aren't they personalized? Like, "Security clearance Riker Omega three." Additionally, if the guy doesn't have clearance here, some codes from an alternate timeline shouldn't help him, right?. Then Paris's handheld site-to-site transporter just opens up another whole can of worms. Imagine that thing in the hands of a thief! With this technology around how do they even maintain order at all? You could beam all the gold at Fort Knox into your living room. For that matter, why don't more aliens use transporters in space for nefarious purposes? I know it happens once in Voyager, but that's it. You'd think a cunning alien would just sidle up to a ship for friendly introductions, and then just beam their weapons out into space and take over. Being chased? Beam their warp core into a star. Or just beam a small piece of their hull onto your bridge and watch them all get sucked into the vacuum of space. I'm way off track here...

"How the hell should I know how a time-steam works, I'm
just the time-stream alien!"

In the end they fly into the time-stream and even though the aliens who know all about how to use it say this won't work, it does and everything returns to normal. The end. It's Meh. I know I've gotten a little bogged down in some details, which I realize will never make sense on a show like this, but this episode just really blew it in my opinion. An alternate reality plot could have worked just fine, but the lack of investment in pulling this thing together is astounding. They literally just told us that it's not important for any of it to make sense. Which would be fine if the other aspects of the story carried the water, but they don't. Kim's friend that is only using him for career advancement and a fiance that he can't wait to ditch just isn't enough. Kim should have struggled with the decision to leave, really wrestling over finally having his wish of being home versus abandoning his friends on Voyager. That would have made for a better story.

Published April 7, 2017