VOY S2E7 "Partuition" Review By AnswerMan

Horrible:Meh:Adequate:Good:Fantastic

On this week's episode of Saved By The Bell, Zack and Slater are forced to stop fighting over Kelly and work together to care for a surrogate baby for Home Ec class. Wait! That's not right, I don't review Saturday morning teen comedies, I review Star Trek. Sorry. It's just that even the characters within this episode seem cognizant of he show's tired old tropes. "Partuition" doesn't even try to take itself seriously. For instance, Neelix actually tells Paris that he doesn't need to hear his technobabble. He actually uses the word "technobabble" in the episode. But fast forward 30 seconds later when things go wrong, and Paris is all "blah blah babble babble tech" anyway. Another example of phoning in the tropes is when Voyager seems to be in a jam with an attacking ship, and Janeway just looks to Tuvok and says:

She doesn't even bother to concern herself with the situation, because she's seen the show before and knows that the resident Vulcan will technobabble their way out. Holy shit this is bad! It's so bad that I actually quit watching the episode a little more than halfway through so that I can start to write this review. I don't even care how it ends, because I already know where it's going, and how we get there is irrelevant.

Anyway, to catch you up here... Paris is falling in love with Kes, and Neelix knows it. They physically fight. Then they are put together on an away mission to a planet to see if it has food. Paris suggests that the redshirt Ensign Baytart pilot the shuttle instead, since no one will care if he dies since he's never been on screen. But no, it has to be Paris for his piloting skills, and it has to be Neelix for his food knowledge. Since they are in a shuttle, of course they crash. Paris is in charge, and even though 20 seconds earlier he was ready to abort the mission, he now thinks that finding a plant is important enough that they should leave the shuttle and go into a cave where their beacons are so useless they just decide to switch them off. Great plan for rescue!

There they find lizard babies, and Neelix guilts Paris into taking responsibility for them. Meanwhile on Voyager, a ship has fired on them, and taken a defensive posture protecting the planet. We can assume that these two things are related.

So let me make my predictions:

• Paris and Neelix make up
• The aliens back off when they realize the crew is not a threat to their lizard babies

Well I guess I have to watch the rest of this thing now....brb.
                                                                               

Ok, that wasn't as bad as I thought. The make up scene between the two boys was more touching than I expected, and the aliens were less accommodating. But for the most part, my predictions were right on.

There are a couple interesting takeaways here. One, of course, is the debate between Neelix and Paris over whether they are now responsible for the lizard babies. Paris points out that most lizards lay their eggs and don't return to care for them anyway, which is a fair point. However, Neelix counters that birds (who are lizards, by the way) do meticulously care for their young, but may desert them if an intruder has tampered with the nest. I have run into scenarios like this in my life when I've stumbled-upon eggs, baby birds, and baby rabbits. Once you're in that situation, you feel responsible for the lives, but nonetheless know that you are ill-equipped to raise them. In this case, the fact that they are an intelligent species wins over, and they decide to take action. But if they weren't the equivalent of human babies, would just leaving and hoping for the best be alright, ethically? I mean, mother nature is a bitch. Regardless, I think the Prime Directive is clear on the matter, and they should not have further interfered, even if it meant the babies die. The Prime Directive is heartless like that as well.

The other takeaway is the scenario that Kes finds herself in. Two people that she cares about are fighting because of her. The Doctor quips that she should feel lucky, and kind of condescendingly remarks that she is only two years old and doesn't fully understand the situation. He's not wrong though, especially since she failed to recognize that Paris was genuinely falling for her. But she doesn't feel lucky, she feels awful. After the two dopes go missing, she even feels guilty, though she's done nothing wrong. Here The Doctor actually gives some decent insight and tells her that since she's not done anything to precipitate the situation, she need not feel responsible for resolving it. It was an interesting thought experiment for me to look at this from the female perspective. Of course it sucks for her, and all she did was be pretty and act nice.

The careful handling of patching things back together, which incorporated part of a longer story arc for Paris of trying to be a better person with the second chance that he's been given, and the thoughtful conversation with Kes saved this episode from a horrible rating. However, it is still only Meh at best for not even bothering to build a plot around the situation that they wanted to construct.

Published March 21, 2018