Do you enjoy extremely low-action scenes involving people casually strolling through hallways and occasionally bumping into other people and having polite conversations about how they're all lost? Then you'll love "Twisted," but for the rest of us, it sucks. The episode is almost literally 45 minutes of that exact scene over and over. They come across a spatial anomaly, Tuvok jams the ship in it like a moron, and then the whole ship gets wonky and all rearranged. They try to travel from one section to another, but end up in places which are not on the way at all. Kes points out that private quarters that are on separate decks are somehow now side by side in the same hall. No one can get where they're going, and everyone is confused. The one place that none of them ever end up is the bridge, so naturally Kim leaves the bridge to find the captain and then gets cut off from the bridge. Just to make sure that absolutely no one is in charge of the ship, Tuvok then leaves the bridge to find the captain and also gets cut off from the bridge. Sigh. Did I mention communications are down? Because of course they are.
There are a series of interpersonal sequences throughout the episode. Some of them work, some of them don't. Neelix is suffering from jealousy issues again when Paris gives Kes a wildly inappropriate birthday gift that only a boyfriend should be giving. By the way, Kes just turned two years old (Earth years, of course). We're more than a year into the show. So what was she, like six months old when Neelix started touching her? Eww. Anyway he confides in Chakotay that he's having jealousy issues, and Chakotay responds that most people who have been in love have been jealous at one time or another. Neelix immediately takes this to mean that it's perfectly acceptable to be insanely jealous and act like a possessive dick whenever he feels like it to his two year old girlfriend. Problem solved! I guess we know why Janeway didn't pick Chakotay for ship's counselor.Next we have Janeway telling Kim that he's always been her favorite, followed by The Doctor being annoyed by other less sentient holographic people. Then there's Chakotay and Tuvok having a bit of a cat fight. Throughout the show Tuvok continues to use logic to make one lousy decision after another, and Chakotay is quick to point this out. Eventually the two have a heart to heart where they admit that they can't stand each other yet share a mutual respect. Tuvok even sort of admits that he wasn't completely thrilled with Chakotay being picked as first officer over him. It's kind of a culmination of a season and a half of unspoken tension that is only sort of satisfying to watch, because it could have been so much more. How about an actual fight, rather than carefully-worded underhanded remarks?
Anyway, Janeway is knocked out because she stuck her hand in a blurry thing, and they're all in the holodeck trying to figure out what to do. Since they've all been carrying around tricorders that are tracking their locations, they decide to combine the data together to get a picture of what the ship looks like now. And, it's just a slightly twisted ship, which doesn't explain the mixed-up things that they've been witnessing at all. I think they really dropped the ball here on a potentially disturbing visual. Tuvok thinks that the best thing to do is just sit tight and embrace the horror, while Chakotay is partial to Torres's plan to technobabble their way out. After a tiff, they go with Chakotay's plan since he is the gosh darned boss, after all. It fails miserably and speeds up the destruction. They have no choice but to ride it out like Tuvok suggested. So they all sit around waiting for death in their own way. They all get a little blurry, and....everything is fine. No damage, no injuries. The spatial distortion was apparently either a life form itself, or a device that another life form uses to communicate, because a bunch of information has been dumped into the computer, and all of their information was copied as well. Janeway says that maybe they were just trying to say "hello."
Published June 25, 2017
FIX THE EPISODE, BABY!
ReplyDeleteI gave my 12 year old, who fashions himself an animation artist, a fifteen second synopsis of what was happening to the ship in this episode, and asked him to draw what he thought it might look like. He is an imaginative young lad, and I think he nailed it. He pictured the large alien as a baby, with the ship as his toy in his crib, and he's just pummeling and breaking it, leaving it a twisted mess. This is the first thing that I would do to fix this episode. Come up with a visual that matches the story!
The next thing I would do is drop all of the personal interactions except for the Chakotay/Tuvok conflict. I would play this up much more intensely, perhaps having Tuvok make a play to relieve Chakotay of duty. We'll keep most of the ending, but in our version the mutineer Tuvok eventually relents and goes with Chakotay's plan, which still fails, and so they go with Tuvok's plan, which actually works because Tuvok is much smarter than Chakotay. The two are forced to make up because they're glad to be alive, and because Chakotay has to admit that it was Tuvok that saved them. Oh and, less corridors. And no strange alien information dump, it was just an alien that didn't understand its own power, perhaps a baby in a play pen.