Voyager Flashback: The Fight

As I've been working my way through Star Trek: Voyager (watching it in its entirety for the first time since it originally ran), one of my memories of the later seasons of the show is being challenged. My recollection was that once Seven of Nine arrived on the series, she basically took over. Every episode from then on was either about her or the Doctor (or perhaps, occasionally, Janeway), and all the other characters were sidelined. I'm finding that's not quite true. Other characters were still getting their own episodes; it's just that those episodes weren't really as good or memorable as the ones about Seven of Nine or the Doctor. And the character who got it worst of all was Chakotay. "The Fight" could thus be called the "worst of the worst."

When Voyager becomes trapped in a "chaotic space" phenomenon, Chakotay begins to have more and more intense visions incorporating his holodeck boxing scenario. As he comes to realize these might be a message from aliens, he becomes the ship's only possibility of escape.

This episode is kind of a remake of The Next Generation's "Night Terrors," itself a not-great episode that's a rough place to start from. But what really makes "The Fight" the opposite of a chef's kiss is the dopey way that the boxing motif is woven throughout the episode. The narrative of a boxing match being a metaphor for your internal fight feels pretty played out (even at the time of this episode; Rocky had won Best Picture two decades earlier). Having your "corner man" literally tell you this moral in dialogue, lest the audience miss the metaphor, is just bad writing.

Of course, there's plenty more bad writing here to go around. Plucking for some reason Boothby out of Trek lore to be in this episode? I can believe that everyone liked working with Ray Walston before, but it simply makes no sense to turn the groundskeeper into a coach. Nor does it work for Chakotay to be genuinely questioning his sanity here because of a similarly afflicted grandfather we've never heard about before. Character attitudes shift without explanation; one moment, Janeway is practically begging Chakotay to go into one of his hallucinations, but the next it's Chakotay begging to go back in and everyone else saying no.

We get a lengthy, overwrought dream sequence that meanders without reaching a point. (Just like a real dream. And just about as much fun as hearing someone else describe theirs to you in elaborate detail.) We get that hackneyed trick of starting in the middle of the action and then jumping back in time to see how we got there. Oh, and let's not overlook the sheer silliness of the name "chaotic space."

Bad writing leads to bad directing; the dream sequences are an "everything at the buffet" collection of Dutch angles, harsh lighting, handheld camera, and weird lens choices. Bad acting too: it's too hard for Robert Beltran to sell screaming technobabble at the top of his lungs. (And Robert Picardo seems to forget at a few points that he's playing the real Doctor and not "dream Doctor," as he behaves quite strange and over the top in multiple scenes with Chakotay.)

Other observations:

• How does boxing on the holodeck even work? Do you have to turn the safety protocols off?

• The shimmering effect of chaotic space on the astrometrics lab screen is very well done. It looks just like the image that precedes me getting a migraine, and I do not want to look at it.

• They mention that this genetic predisposition for hallucinations was turned off for Chakotay before birth. How is that not a kind of eugenics that's forbidden in the Federation?

• The idea of the aliens speaking one word at a time, taken from earlier scenes in the episode, is pretty fun. Sort of like the Prophets from Deep Space Nine, turned up to 11.

• Seven of Nine mentions that only one Borg ship has ever escaped chaotic space. So... shouldn't she know how they did it?

For me, this episode "surpasses" the terrible "Nemesis" (another Chakotay episode) to become the worst episode of Star Trek: Voyager. (So far, at least.) I give it a D+... which is maybe a little high when you consider that while watching The Next Generation, I did give out a couple of lower marks to that show. Perhaps I just expected more of them than I do of Voyager? In any case, this one's only for the completionists.