Voyager Flashback: Emanations

Star Trek writer Brannon Braga had reportedly been wanting to do an episode "about death" since he first joined The Next Generation. But he never quite found an angle on it until season one of Voyager, when he wrote "Emanations."

While investigating an alien burial site at a planetary ring system, Harry Kim is involved in a transporter accident that sends him to the aliens' homeworld. There, he's seen as the first being to return from the afterlife, setting off a local crisis of faith. Meanwhile, the Voyager crew tries to understand the strange spatial phenomena that are transporting these dead bodies from who-knows-where, in the hopes they can find and rescue Kim.

"Emanations" is a decent enough episode, but I think it does bear the marks of a long gestation period that began on a different Star Trek series. Harry Kim's defining character traits at this point in the show are his youth and "naiveté," and this story doesn't really make much use of them. Put another way, I'm not really sure how this story would unfold much differently if the crew member sent to the alien world had been Paris, or B'Elanna, or Kes. You have to think hard to read much about Kim here: he's bold (willing to hop into an alien machine and be killed on the chance Voyager will rescue him).

The episode is much more interested in the sci-fi concept and the alien culture. The alien Hatil gets a parallel protagonist's story line complete with multiple scenes that don't include any Voyager main characters. Another alien, Ptera (I kept hearing "Pantera," and therefore, "Cowboys From Hell"), is the character going through the most emotional turmoil: she's confronted with the fact that she died and experienced nothing, destroying her entire belief system.

The focus is so much on the aliens that some basic and obvious trappings of Star Trek: Voyager -- that you'd certainly think would come up -- aren't even touched upon. The Prime Directive isn't mentioned at all, even though this is clearly as great a violation of it as there could be. And while it is novel that we never learn where the alien homeworld is actually located (maybe it is in another dimension), you'd think the Voyager crew would want to establish concretely that it's not in the Alpha Quadrant and that these "vacuoles" don't represent a possible way home.

And yet... this alien culture, and what this story is able to explore with them, is interesting. With only minimal sci-fi trappings, their idea of an afterlife is quite close to a Christian vision of heaven, yet the episode steps gingerly through the minefield of not offending real-world religious sensibilities -- even as it depicts the destruction of a key article of faith. The issue of euthanasia is also given meaningful space.

There are a few nice little moments for the main characters. There's Kes trying to comfort P[an]tera by talking about her own views of the afterlife. Janeway advises Kim to reflect on his experience lest the extraordinary become routine. Neelix... again isn't in an episode, seeming to cement early on that his character is hard to use in serious situations that aren't happening to him.

Chakotay's respect for alien burial traditions is given a lot of space, complete with a back story for his beliefs that isn't about his heritage. But I think it goes too far and is ultimately a disservice to the character. He raises his objections to disturbing a burial ground; fine, even commendable. But then he presses the point so far that he makes everyone put their tricorders away, becoming a Skyler White (Breaking Bad). No matter how valid a perspective the character may have, they're actively standing in the way of the point of the show. (Okay... in Skyler's case, sexism certainly played a role in the fan reaction.) We're trying to "seek out new life and new civilizations" here, and Chakotay's saying "let's not do that." Then he just becomes a hypocrite; he whips out his tricorder the moment a subspace Macguffin shows up, and personally runs scans from Voyager later in the episode.

Other observations:

• Rocks within a planetary ring system, able to individually hold their own atmospheres? Sounds far-fetched, but I guess whatever. The production savings of not wearing spacesuits are obvious.
  

• If all the "spun silk" in the caves gives you the initial impression that you're going to see a giant spider, you're in for a disappointment. (Or maybe not, considering what a giant spider probably would have looked like on mid 90s television.)
  

• Jerry Hardin is one of those actors who shows up everywhere. Including as two different characters already on The Next Generation.

• There is something really creepy about these four-nostriled aliens. Who knew nostrils were a portal to the uncanny valley?

"Emanations" is a mix of good and not-so-good. I could imagine there being a much stronger execution of the concept, but I'd call it a decent-ish B- as it is.