Night! Night! Night! Night! Night! Night! Hey Tuvok, I'm running diagnostics.....at night! Hey Tuvok, I'm realigning the spatial converters.....at night! Hey Tuvok, I'm technobabbling the main deflector dish to compensate for blah blah blah.....AT NIGHT!
The crew is going through a severe case of the doldrums as they pass through an enormous expanse of nothingness that will take over two years to cross. They each deal with the boredom in different ways. Paris goes all Captain Proton, much to the dismay of The Doctor. They even get Seven to play along for a minute. Tuvok meditates in astro-metrics, Torres fights with Paris, Neelix freaks the fuck out, and Kim plays the clarinet on the bridge. But perhaps most importantly, Janeway has gone missing altogether. She never leaves her quarters, as she contemplates all the bad decisions she's made that have stranded them all out there in the first place.
Harry Kim has the attitude that maybe they should just consider it a two year vacation, which everyone rolls their eyes at. But I think this notion has merit. I mean, which is better: two years of running into aliens that want to kill you, or two years of not running into aliens that want to kill you? Especially since they stopped worrying about running out of fuel sometime around the beginning of season two, I would certainly take the latter.
But Janeway comes out of seclusion in true badass fashion, phaser rifle in hand, to battle some void aliens that have boarded the ship and drained the power. Just as the aliens are retreating anyway, a good samaritan comes along and takes credit for saving them. However, his motives seem less than pure right off the bat, and the crew decides to get the other side of the story. It turns out that their Malon helper is a space trash man, who is using a vortex that only he knows about to transport theta radiation from his home world and dump it into the void. This radiation happens to be killing the void aliens, who actually turn out to be quite friendly. He isn't interested in technology that would solve their toxic problems, as he's enjoying a nice monopoly for disposing of it.Janeway comes up with a plan to get Voyager through the vortex, shaving two years off their journey, while she stays behind in a shuttle and closes the vortex after they're through to prevent the poisoning of the void aliens. In a dramatic scene, the crew refuses to comply with her orders. Instead they come up with a plan via technobabble to both get through the vortex and close it up forever. On their way they brutally kill the Malon trash man by targeting his volatile cargo when he tries to block their passage. But they make it through, and soon enough they can see star systems again.
"Night" is only an Meh episode. It's a decent season opener after a non-cliffhanger finale, but is difficult to get too excited about. It's nice to know that when given the time to reflect, Janeway regrets her decision to destroy the array that could have sent them all back home instantly. And there are some fun bits like Seven barely feigning following along with the stupid Captain Proton routine, and disabling the robot with a simple ripping of some wires whilst proclaiming "I am Borg!" But overall, not surprisingly, there just isn't enough substance in an episode about boredom to get me excited. Furthermore, the flippant manner in which the ethical dilemmas are dealt with is rather un-trek. Janeway immediately chooses sides in an encounter between two species, then offers to share technology with the bad guys, and THEN single-handedly goes about destroying forever the only shortcut through the void. Wow. Prime what now?Published December 16, 2017
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