Voyager Flashback: Eye of the Needle

Star Trek: Voyager reportedly began with an agreement among the writers not to reference any "Alpha Quadrant species" early in the show, while they were still establishing the series. But they decided to make an exception when former Next Generation intern Hilary J. Bader pitched them the idea for "Eye of the Needle."

The crew discovers a small wormhole leading to the Alpha Quadrant -- too small to allow travel, but sufficient to establish communications with someone on the other side. Janeway soon finds herself struggling to convince a skeptical Romulan of their situation before the opportunity to communicate with home vanishes.

While falling back on existing Star Trek villains is clearly a risk to telling a story like this, the greater risk is turning Star Trek: Voyager into Gilligan's Island; there are only so many times you can do "the crew may have found a way home, only to be thwarted" before the audience will get tired of it. But once is not too many, and I think this episode is actually the series' strongest one yet.

While technobabble still figures into the plot a great deal, it's handled much more deftly than other episodes so far. For one thing, they're having to figure this science out one step at a time, an endeavor the Romulan on the other end of the wormhole begins to help with. More importantly, the personal stakes remain in the foreground at all times -- Tuvok voices Vulcan caution against getting one's hopes up; Kim's eagerness to talk to home is contrasted with B'Elanna feeling that everyone she cares about is on Voyager; The Doctor faces the possibility that he might be left behind on the ship all alone.

Vulnerability is on display throughout. Without it seeming exploitative to put Janeway in a nightdress, we get an entire scene in which the captain must pop straight from bed to appeal emotionally to a Romulan whose name and face she doesn't even know. She eventually wins him over by drawing out his vulnerabilities, getting him to speak of a daughter so young that he hasn't seen her since leaving for deep space.

The Romulan, Telek R'Mor, is played by veteran Star Trek guest star Vaughn Armstrong (in one of his many alien roles). He gives us a surprisingly nuanced character, considering we don't even learn his name until very late in the episode. He starts off as suspicious as we expect a Romulan to be, but a throughline of scientific curiosity and that aforementioned scene of vulnerability softens him into a sympathetic character.

The final twist helps steers things away from Gilligan's Island territory. By having the wormhole be a passage not only through space, but 20 years into the past, it turns out this was never a viable path home to start with. Leaving it on the ambiguous note that Telek R'Mor died -- probably before ever delivering the crew's messages -- also avoids deflating the series' central premise just a half-dozen episodes in: so far as they know, there's still no one else who knows they're stuck out here.

The main subplot works well too, focusing on the Doctor's friction with the rest of the crew. The bookends are perhaps slightly off -- the character who mistreats him maybe should have been Maquis rather than Starfleet, and he doesn't look like a guy obsessed with working out (he sounds like a Crossfitter). But along the way, we get more of the solid Kes-Doctor rapport, good persuasion by Kes to get Janeway to take the hologram seriously, and genuine concern by the captain once she's been convinced. It's a great moment when Janeway asks the Doctor what he wants, and he's stunned silent by the question: he never figured anything would change, and so he's never given it any thought.

Other observations:

• Tom Paris introduced Kes to... spinach juice with a touch of pear? That has to have been Paris totally punking her, right? "No, really! Everyone on Earth loves this!"

• Way back when, the first Star Trek: The Next Generation episode to feature the Romulans dropped a little dialogue suggesting that they'd been in a decades-long period of isolation and that no one had heard from them. I'm guessing the writers wish they'd never said that, as it wasn't relevant to the plot there, already contradicted an earlier episode, and just made for multiple points down the road where they and other Star Trek series had to pretend it had never been said. (Although... maybe this would explain why Telek R'Mor is so skittish to be talking to the Federation here?)
  

• When Tuvok insists on following the Romulan the entire time he's aboard Voyager, Janeway immediately agrees. It's a refreshing change of policy regarding "advice from the security officer," compared to Worf getting endlessly shot down by Picard.
  

• The Doctor ends this episode on a poignant moment, declaring that he'd like a name. But the poignancy of that moment is undercut somewhat when you know that after seven seasons, he'd never get one.

• This is the first episode in which Neelix does not appear. (And it's the best Voyager episode so far. Coincidence?)
  

"Eye of the Needle" does a good job weaving a techno-problem with personal stakes. I give the episode a B+.