OVEG: Prototype

Description: The episode opens with a view of space, and then Voyager coming into view, with little bits of static and everything in black and white, kind of like watching a scrambled porn channel. We see the transporter effect and discover this is a POV shot from a dying robot... that's a good effective teaser. The upshot is that Torres is trying to fix it, but it's losing power and they can't replace it, so she has to work up a temporary fix with an EPS conduit. It works for the moment, but Harry says there's a problem with the flux capacitance... yeah, and I wonder if there's a problem with the scrinth lining its infinite improbability drive.

And now brace yourself as we return from the credits, because if any of you out there have turned technobabble into a drinking game, well, I'm afraid you will likely die before the credits finish. There's some superconducting plasma powering it (that's my particular favorite) - either they're saying that the plasma moves like it's superconducting (rather like saying you've got 120-volt water pipes) or that the plasma itself is superconducting, which begs the question "even if it were, what the hell does that have to do with anything?" Suddenly the robot starts spouting gutteral robot noises, including the word "Pralor." Torres says it must be trying to communicate, but Harry points out that it's just an assumption, that it could be broken or spitting out a recording or something. For once Harry seems to be outperforming her; Torres seems to be obsessed with this robot and imposing humanoid traits upon it. She tries to communicate with it, and Harry looks on, well, in the way that everyone else pretty much always looks at him, with embarrassed pity. (Incidentally; I'll probably slip into calling the robot a "he," simply because it uses a masculine voice. This isn't intended as sexism.) She's giving instructions to move its arm if it can hear her, and demonstrates the gesture. Of course, there's no way to know the thing can see or hear, if it can understand, or if it can move its arm. I don't know why she's obsessing over this thing -and we never find out why- because we don't really see her act this way over other bits of technology.

Still, one thing I must give credit to on this episode is that there's a more conscious effort to make the characters human. It's hard to believe that the Harry in this scene is the same one who was being transformed into a tree for so long, but we see him with far more dimension than he showed in Non Sequitur. Later we'll be seeing something similar between Chakotay and Tom, and when was the last time they had an exchange that wasn't Tom giving a report or Chakotay giving an order? Caretaker? The writer of this story also did the script for Deep Space Nine's Indiscretion, which showed similar strength of character. If only the episode itself was written to the same level.

Anyway, Torres orders Harry to bed (well, to go to sleep... no doubt lucky for our sexually-confused ensign) and she stays up most of the night drinking coffee and reading reports about the robot. She orders another pot of coffee but Neelix refuses, once again showing that he holds the keys to the kingdom and all must bow down before him! When Torres responds with surprise that he's declared coffee martial law Neelix offers a weird shrug... what's that about? Do you have a reason or are you simply being a dick? Apparently a shrug is enough to convince Torres, though it's not enough to convince Neelix to avoid another irritating anecdote. He compares the reviving of an injured member of what appears to be a highly-advanced robotic race to coming up with the recipe for his omlet (incidentally, one of the ingredients is "spit basal," bleh!). "That is... a very interesting story, Neelix," Torres offers when he's done, showing that she has seriously mellowed; a season ago she'd have sodomized him with the coffee pot. To further compound it, Neelix orders her to bed, showing some strange changes have been made to the Voyager heirarchy. I wasn't aware that the cook outranked the chief engineer.

So, Torres stops by the robot and knocks on his head, asking if there's anyone home. ("Think McFly! Think!" That's two Back To The Future references this episode.) She finally decides its time for bed, so puts on her red jammies and climbs in. Almost immediately, however, she jumps out and, still in her pajamas, rushes into Sickbay. She activates the Doctor... as you can imagine, he makes her life miserable over her appearance - this is why we love him. Torres asks for his help, hoping that he can provide a medical insight into treating the robot.

Now, if you thought superconducting plasma was good, you'll love this part: "It's some sort of chromodynamic module powered by a tri-polymer plasma." This is pretty much Voyager's approach to technobabble to a tee, because this is nothing more than words strung together that have nothing to do with each other. "Chromodynamic" refers to the theory of how quarks and gluons interact. Polymers are long chain molecules made up of small repeating units. Plasma is ionized gas. Put it together, and the robots are powered by ionized long-string molecules in a gaseous state that influence the quarks and gluons in a machine. If that's still sounds too jargonistic, here's an oversimplified analogy: try playing pool on a table of normal billiard balls while using Mars as the cue ball. Or, to put it another way, if someone was discussing a sporting event with you, you'd probably see through something like: "The ball was really airborne, but the short stop caught it on the forty yard line before delivering the goalie a seven-ten split." When the Doctor suggests the equivalent of a transfusion, she says she can't because it's made of elements she hadn't even known existed... eh boy, more super trans-Uranic elements. So the Doctor then suggests that they use plasma from the warp nacelles, but Torres says it's too highly charged. That's interesting, considering that plasma is neutral as an overall substance. This scene goes on and on like this, until finally Torres pieces together the technobabble solution that will allow it to use the warp plasma without breaking. Boy, I don't know what I was missing, not coming back for scenes like this.

So we cut down to Engineering and Torres and Harry are joined by Janeway no less in installing the new gizmo in the robot. More and more technobabble is spewed out while Harry and Janeway poke about in the robot's innards until finally the robot grabs Torres' arm. It identifies itself as Unit 3947 and thanks her for reactivating him. So, fourteen minutes of the episode that has consisted of Neelix telling stories and technobabble, and finally we have the robot up. What's the remaining half hour going to bring? Well... no more Neelix stories at least, though now the robot gives his. He was on board a mining pod that exploded, sending him hurtling through space. He doesn't remember the details of what happened, but he knows he's stationed on board a Pralor vessel. The robot is surprised that Torres was able to repair his power module and asks if she's a builder; it's revealed that the Builders created the robot's people, and that only they were able to create working power modules. Since they're all gone, there's no one to replace the old ones, and the robots are dying out.

Well, Torres is down in the ol' Ready Room, giving the case to Janeway. Unfortunately, Janeway sees helping the robots as a violation of the Prime Directive. Torres makes the case that reproduction is a basic right of any species, and that if an accident had rendered a humanoid species sterile, it would be no different if Voyager refused to help them. Janeway says she's not sure she'd help them either (is anyone really surprised?), an amusing point considering that this was precisely the same situation in the TNG episode When The Bough Breaks, and the Prime Directive wasn't even mentioned. Interestingly, we get a frightening look at the dogmatic issues underlying the Prime Directive, because when Torres points out that they are heading towards extinction, Janeway says, "Unfortunately extinction is often the natural end of evolution." God damn. I've heard, "A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" many times, but I've never seen anyone take the idea and run with it like Janeway does. And considering that the natural end of evolution is that the weak and sickly die, one must wonder how Geordi LaForge is allowed to survive, given that he's blind by birth. It's scary that you could so easily put lines like that into the mouth of a Cardassian tyrant or a Romulan villain.

Well, Torres pushes the point and Janeway delivers The Speech: "We know almost nothing about these creatures or the race that built them. What would be the consequences of increasing their population, both to their own civilisation and others in this quadrant. Who are we to swoop in, play God, and then continue on our way without the slightest consideration of the long term effects of our actions?" With that logic, then, shouldn't they kill the robot? Who knows what the consequences will be of returning a robot with a modified power module (after all, isn't controlling whether someone lives or dies "playing God?")? Remember that "We're already involved" was precisely the reason Janeway blew up the array in Caretaker, yet being involved now isn't worth talking about. Now, I will say that Janeway has a point about considering the long term effects of their involvement, but as I said the last time she trotted this out to justify genocide, with that logic you should never, ever, help anyone, because you don't know the consequences.

Torres explains to the robot what the situation is, and he doesn't agree with Janeway at all. Torres admits that she wishes she could help, but that she can't. Well, you can imagine where this goes. When the robot is ready to be beamed back, it kidnaps Torres and brings her along. Incidentally, it does so using a chromodynamic discharge, which sounds less like it would stun than it would reduce you to subatomic particles, but at this point you might as well just give up. They're spouting gibberish like a bum under a pile of newspapers, just leave them be. So, Janeway hails the Pralor vessel and tells them that if they don't return Torres then things are going to get ugly. When there's no response, she has Tuvok get ready to blast the crap out of them.

Meanwhile Torres wakes up in a lab, and rants for a bit, as per her usual idiom. The robot informs her that she'll be here to design the new prototype power modules so they can reproduce themselves. When Torres says Janeway won't let them, the robot informs her that Voyager's resistance would be a bad idea. Sure enough, we see Voyager fire a warning shot, only to get their ass kicked severely. This is your standard issue Voyager space fight we've seen over and over again, so I'm not going to dwell on it, not even on the quantum resonance charges, tempted though I am. With Voyager dead in the water and still being pummeled, Torres finally agrees to make the prototype, moving us into the next act of the story.

In the lab there's all kinds of junk everywhere and they start laying out what Torres needs to do. Thankfully it doesn't involve reams of technobabble again (yet), just the fact that all efforts to reproduce the power module have failed despite reproducing them exactly. The head robot comes down to lay out the expected added pressure, you know, the "your people will die if you fail" bit. So it's more repair scenes, and cut over to Voyager for their repair scenes... Yeah, this is starting to get a lit draining... if it's not a repair scene, it's talking about repairing, admiring the results of repairing, or something getting busted so it needs repairing. It's like American Chopper stripped of anything remotely interesting. So as they rattle shit off Chakotay says the repairs look like they'll take about six days, but Janeway doesn't want to wait that long, so they make fixing the warp engines a priority.

Back on the ship we get the robot equivalent of a MASH episode while Torres works on a module, finally getting to the problem. All the power modules are unique and thus aren't interchangeable, which is why the reproduced ones won't work. So she's got to whip up something else instead, and you can be sure it'll take less time than fixing Voyager, because in Trek design and development is a matter of hours. And back on Voyager, we see just that, complete with a round the table dialogue scene, with the characters each going from one person to next in a clockwise circle around Tuvok's station. It's like some kind of strange Greek chorus. Anyway, there's yet another technobabble solution, this time requiring a shuttle to fly right up to the shields of the ship to beam Torres off, the only drawback being the fiery death of those aboard the shuttle. While normally of scant importance, this would likely be Tom Paris, who flies all the most dangerous shuttle missions, and whom we've already learned is an expert on everything besides temporal mechanics AND provides the much needed post-viewscreen commentary after talking to aliens... there's no way the Voyager crew can send him to a certain death. Tuvok suggests a diversion to keep the robots from blowing Tom up, but nothing seems ideal. Tom finally says he doesn't need a distraction, he can do this solo if he has to. This is where that fairly natural dialogue bit between Chakotay and him comes in, but I particularly like Chakotay's remark: "I'd hate to lose another shuttle." Given all that will happen over the course of the series, well, as one person put it, "Then perhaps you should stay out of them."

tool #1 tool #2 tool #3

Three obviously way-different tools, huh?

Anyway, some more on the robot ship. When you spend so much time in an episode doing repair scenes like this, after a while the magic sort of dies. I can't help but see Torres holding a flashlight and shining it at a toy by now. Oh there's some banter between her and 3947, but that really doesn't change anything. One more scene of them spouting technobabble and playing with props. Then it's back to Voyager for yet another technobabble scene - besides the repair stuff Janeway discusses the diversion. Chakotay suggests a trick they used in the Maquis of linking a holo-emitter to the deflector to project an image of another ship. It's another one of those ideas that sounds good until you actually think about it: a hologram may fool your eyes, but that's it; the sensors should recognize it immediately as a trick. You may get a few seconds from that, but that's all, certainly not enough for the kind of distraction they'd need here. Fortunately, there's an alien ship approaching, so that should be something interesting.

And back to Torres and Pimp My Bot. Yet more technobabble, including adjusting the flux capacitance, but finally it pays off with the robot on the table sitting up, functioning and ready for programming... and you'll remember this because he won't shut up about it. But before the celebrations can begin, that other ship shows up, identical in shape to the robot one, and begins firing. Turns out it's manned by robots too, so Voyager decides they'll sit this fight out, in fact, Janeway thinks it's the distraction they need. She asks Harry about the warp engines, but they're still not on line, so she sends him down to handle it. You know, if I was Lt. Carey, I would be so f*cking bitter right now I'd beam Harry right into the warp core. It's not enough that despite being the senior engineer he was passed over for chief engineer for a hormonal Maquis lunatic who washed out of the Academy and can't identify feces without a tricorder, not only was he unfairly accused and confined as a traitor, not only has Janeway actively thwarted his efforts to bring them home, but now whenever Torres isn't available they send Harry -a guy a year out of the Academy no less- down to babysit him. Two episodes in a row? I'm surprised he hasn't shot off a memo to the captain. "Hey, I don't mind that you made a psychopath my boss, really, I don't, but could you stop undermining what tiny authority I may have with the rest of Engineering? Let me make you a deal: You stop making me answer to some ensign who's so green he should work in an Orion Strip Club and I won't tell you how to completely ruin our lives with your bottomless f*cking stupidity, okay?"

Anyway, despite not having warp Janeway decides they'll launch the rescue mission (apparently she just sent Harry down there to make Carey suffer). She sends Tom to the shuttlebay to begin the operation, and Chakotay is immediately assigned to the helm. First she sends Harry down to Engineering to run things, now she has the first officer flying the ship. "Dear captain, I understand that Tom Paris is the best pilot on board, so I expect him to get all the best missions. I just don't understand why you keep bumping me for someone who has crashed one shuttle, misplaced another, and flew his own ship into a vessel the size of a volcano? The only time I ever get to handle the controls is in the middle of the night when I'm told to maintain course and speed. Could you please re-assign me to a job where I can have more work to do, like unicorn ferrier or biographer of Ferengi Decathalon winners? Anyway, I can only hope that when you finally face your righteous end, quaking, naked and afraid, that you will know in the depths of your soul that no one ever really loved you."

Anyway, Tom is trying to technobabble his way through the shield, but he bounces right off ("hmm, it appears the robots are impervious to our bullshit physics"), so Tuvok tells him to change course to fly where the blasts are being fired and hope he doesn't die (incidentally, Chakotay is standing right next to Tuvok... now he's just taunting the relief pilot). Over on the Pralor ship, Torres asks what the hell's going on, so 3947 explains. These robots were built by another species that was at war with the Pralor. That species is extinct too, but the war continues between the robots. What's weird is that both the species had declared a truce before that, but by doing so it meant the robots were no longer needed. Faced with being shut down, the robots on both sides turned on their masters, seeing them as the enemy, then resumed the war. Torres realizes that the individualized power systems were created as a fail-safe by the builders to ensure that the robots couldn't replicate themselves, and she'd just unwittingly gotten around that fail-safe. She pulls a Basic Instinct on the prototype, stabbing it in the module with an ice pick to save the day.

Rating: 5

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"I could modify a series of anodyne relays, attach them directly to the robots power module. They could act as a sort of regulator to make the warp plasma compatible with the robot's energy matrix!" Torres