Tuvok is plagued by a repressed memory from childhood, of watching a girl fall to her death. To explore the memory, he mindmelds with Janeway. But their inner journey leads not to Tuvok's boyhood, but to the bridge of the U.S.S. Excelsior during the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Captain Sulu is attempting a rescue of Kirk and McCoy, as young Tuvok is realizing that living among irrational humans is not what he wants to do with his life. And somehow connected to it all is that mysterious memory of the dying girl.
While there's a heavy dose of nostalgia here -- including appearances by George Takei as Sulu, Grace Lee Whitney as Rand, and several of the actual secondary actors from Star Trek VI -- this episode can stand on its own from its "Paramount wanted us to make an anniversary episode" origins. That's because the real origins of the story came even sooner; the writing staff was already trying to do "time travel without time travel," and had concocted the idea of a mindmeld for Tuvok to explore his youth with Janeway. When the executive edict came down to do something special for the 30th anniversary, it wasn't much of an adjustment to incorporate the idea of jumping into parts of Star Trek VI (both unseen and previously seen).
In fact, it's almost wild how long it takes for the episode to even reach the bridge of the Excelsior. Long early scenes of Neelix waxing poetic about juice and Tuvok playing Vulcan Jenga seem to be delaying our gratification here -- at least, until you hear that these were late additions to the script, after Nichelle Nichols turned down an invitation to appear (on a viewscreen call) as Uhura. Though George Takei personally called Nichols to ask if she'd join, she felt the small scene wasn't substantial enough to be worth the time.
In that, she was right -- at least, in contrast to the roles given here to Takei and Whitney. This whole episode is a stunt, to be sure, but there are nice character moments for both Sulu and Rand here. Sulu gets to give a lovely captain's speech about some obligations being more important than duty, while Rand actually gets to be a supportive and efficient first officer (who gets to do a hell of a lot more than bring coffee around like in the original series). Both get nice comedic moments, from Sulu knowingly commenting on the Vulcan sense of humor to Rand ribbing young Tuvok about an effort to suck up to the captain. (Janeway's button on that latter scene is the best line of the episode: "You never brought me tea.")
Indeed, you get enough of a taste of the Excelsior here that George Takei began lobbying as much as he could for this to be seen as a backdoor pilot for a "Captain Sulu TV series" he was eager to star in. If only the modern streaming model was there 25 years ago, he might well have gotten his wish; Paramount + is busily serving up one Trek series after another these days.
Re-creating the Excelsior bridge was something of a miracle here. They had the design blueprints from the movie... but the set had originally taken 12 weeks for a movie crew to build. This version was simplified a little in order to go up in under two weeks -- but it still looks really great. The visual effects department gives us photon torpedoes that radiate shafts of light in the movie style. The Klingon ship model is hauled out for new shots. Everyone is watching the details.
And the proceedings get a boost from director David Livingston, who made an effort to reuse a lot of the same camera angles from the movie. Indeed, he peppers the entire episode with unusually showy, Alfred Hitchcock-inspired camera work, including a very long push-in on the Voyager bridge (going from Paris' station all the way to a close-up on Tuvok), and a spiraling pull-out from Tuvok's eye (after he collapses in engineering).
It's nice that while the Excelsior scenes are certainly what the fans are here to see, this is still a solid episode of Voyager. Tuvok's character is fleshed out enormously; we get a huge component of his back story, including his shifting attitudes toward humans over the decades, an attempt to study Kolinahr (as Spock did in Star Trek: The Motion Picture), and how he met his wife (a reference to ponn farr, from the original series). Janeway and Kim get to wax poetic about Starfleet days gone by, a nice bonding moment between the two characters. And the "memory virus" is a pretty clever little conceit, with a fun visual payoff at the end when the Doctor eradicates it.
Other observations:
- Here's a wild fact to make longtime Star Trek fans feel old. This year, this episode is as old (25 years!) as the franchise itself was in the year Star Trek VI was made (1991).
- Word of this episode leaked to fans early. In fact, George Takei and Grace Lee Whitney both say they heard from fans that they'd be on an episode of Voyager before the production officially reached out to them. (And writer Brannon Braga says he didn't actually begin the script until they had both of them on board.)
- There's more nostalgia, of course, in Michael Ansara's appearance as Kang. He was not in Star Trek VI originally, though he had appeared in the original series, and reprised the role on Deep Space Nine.
- Neelix has such a bad track record with his cooking that early on, you're kind of led to wonder if that juice he forced on Tuvok is what led to his medical crisis.
It's probably the longtime Trek fan in me, but I think this is the best episode of Star Trek: Voyager yet. It still doesn't quite reach the "A grades" for me (it's not as good as "Trials and Tribble-ations," which I gave an A-). But it's a very solid B+.
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