Voyager Flashback: One Small Step

The original Star Trek arrived in the late 1960s, a time when crewed space travel captured much more of the public's imagination. Later Star Trek series would air in times where space seemed more like "just another setting" in which to tell stories. But occasionally, we'd get an episode aiming to romanticize the exploration of space. Voyager's "One Small Step" is very much one of those.

Voyager encounters an unusual cosmic phenomenon that gathers up space debris, and soon discovers that inside may be the remains of Ares IV, one of the earliest crewed missions to Mars. As the Voyager crew sets themselves on retrieving the historic vessel, Seven of Nine struggles to understand the relevance of the endeavor.

This episode has a wall of on-screen writing credits -- often the sign of a troubled behind-the-scenes process and a harbinger of rocky results. In this case, however, the issues didn't stay behind the scenes; actor Robert Beltran was very public in his criticisms of this episode over the years, basically offering it as Exhibit A in how the character of Seven of Nine took over Voyager and led to the sidelining of other characters.

If Beltran tells it true, this was first conceived of as a Chakotay story. You see traces of that in the finished project, and it fits with the character's back story. He's long been attuned to history and traditions, and it's not such a leap to make him interested in early human space flight. However, a late script rewrite gave this episode to Seven, transforming the story into one about her expanding humanity as she must confront feelings of nostalgia and historical context.

On paper, this does work as a Seven story. But there are several problems too. A big one is timing; this would have been a good story to tell soon after Seven was separated from the Collective, but coming at this point, after she's had more than two years to explore her humanity, she really should have evolved beyond this deep a level of confusion. She can still personally feel nothing. She can still argue that the risks of retrieving Ares IV aren't worth the potential gains. But her bewilderment at the mere fact that humans feel confusing emotions just doesn't track here. (She's had many chances to explore emotional attachments already.)

I can understand Robert Beltran's feelings about the episode. Not only was this story taken from his character and given to someone else, but his character is "benched" in a most unceremonious way to allow that to happen. Chakotay is so irrationally set on recovering Ares IV that he's literally willing to die for it (?!), gets himself critically injured, and spends the rest of the episode in a sick bed.

And Chakotay isn't the only character getting short shrift. Rather than giving the main cast more screen time, we instead get a series of flashbacks to the Ares IV mission itself. It's a weird choice that I assume was made to help the history feel "more real" to Seven and the audience. Yet so much time is spent on it that I honestly felt for much of the episode like there was a chance the Voyager crew would at some point come upon astronaut John Kelly, somehow still alive after centuries. (It doesn't help that they cast actor John Norris in the role. He's far from a household name, of course. But he's enough of a "that guy" that when you see him, you recognize him and assume his role in the story will be more significant.)

Other observations:

• The fourth crewed mission to Mars takes place in 2032. So we don't have many years left here to somehow fit in the first three. (Fitting it in around World War III and the Eugenics Wars, if you're a stickler for Star Trek continuity, of course.)

• Speaking of Trek continuity, the mention of the London Kings baseball team and their star player Buck Bokai picks up threads woven in both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. 

• The "graviton ellipse" in this episode resembles a giant space-borne ravioli.

• The Doctor mentions a mission to an "Arrakis Prime." Dune fans totally know what's being referenced here.

• Maybe I'm as clueless as Seven, but I don't understand why they go to such lengths to retrieve John Kelly's body only to turn around, load him into a torpedo, and shoot him out into space again. He was already "buried at sea," effectively. And arguably more honorably, having "gone down with the ship."
  

• It probably should be worth more than a mention that this episode was directed by cast member Robert Picardo... but I simply don't have anything to say about the fact.

It's unclear to me just what this episode is trying to say, and more unclear whether they're saying whatever it is about the right character. The results aren't "bad" as such, but they aren't very compelling either. I give "One Small Step" a C+.