An odd spike in nightmares aboard Voyager becomes a more serious problem when suddenly, more and more crewmembers no longer wake up from sleep at all. A nearby alien race is found to be responsible, but how can Voyager fight them on their own turf: a shared dream world where they operate apart from reality?
Pun very much intended, but I found this episode to be a bit of a snooze. The jeopardy never feels all that great (partly due to the very playful tone struck by some of the nightmares in the opening scenes). The solution to the problem feels like one always resting near the top of the Star Trek toolbox -- "we'll blow everything up if you don't let us go." There's no addressing a core issue of doing a double fake-out: if you thought you woke up from a dream but were really still in another dream, then how can you ever know that you've really awakened from that dream?
Still, while the plot overall isn't particularly exciting to me, it's actually a pretty good episode for the ensemble, with lots of characters getting nice little moments throughout. The opening nightmares do illuminate interesting facets of several of their personalities. (And even though Tuvok's "showing up to work naked" nightmare kind of wrecks the tone of the episode, it is fun to see a Vulcan in that situation. Tim Russ seems not to be playing embarrassment so much as chagrin at having breached decorum.)
The crew teaming up on a "police sketch" of the alien from their dreams is a fun scene. The idea that Chakotay can invoke lucid dreaming offers a nice gestalt of spirituality without doing anything insensitive in regards to his Native American heritage. Seven being the character to hypothesize that they're all in a "collective unconsciousness" makes good use of her Borg history in a collective consciousness. The idea that aliens attack you by locking you in sleep until your bodies atrophy and starve is quite chilling. (If only the episode had found a way to show that consequence rather than talk about it in the abstract.)
But there are almost as many elements that don't work so well for me. I haven't been a fan of the "Harry Kim has an awkward crush on Seven of Nine" story line, and it's kind of at its apex here. When Chakotay disappears, everyone already seems to be onto the notion that they're in a dream -- yet they seemingly have to discover this fact a second time when Janeway risks her life in Engineering. The dopey ending with all the guys hanging out in the mess hall with insomnia is such a strange slide whistle ending to the episode.
Other observations:
- This episode marks the debut of B'Elanna's "engineer's jacket" with tools sticking out the top of a chest pocket. This was introduced to hide Roxann Dawson's real-life pregnancy, but it seems like a practical idea to me, and I kind of feel like it could have stuck around long term.
- They actually brought a live deer onto the Voyager sets to film parts of Chakotay's dream. It must have been a weird day on set.
- Near the end of the episode, there's a neat shot depicting a huge cave full of sleeping aliens. Well... I can imagine it looks pretty neat, if you could see it in HD. Voyager has never been remastered from the original film (and a visual effect like this may well have been achieved using "computer rendering of the time" anyway). There's only so much you can really make out.
- Breaking logic a bit, we get exterior shots of Voyager flying through space at times when the crew are actually inside their dream.
"Waking Moments" isn't really a bad episode; it's just not particularly exciting, and doesn't bring much new to a table where several dream-themed Star Trek episodes were already seated. I give it a C+.
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