The 37's

The second season of Star Trek: Voyager began with "The 37's," an episode intended as the finale of season one, until network executives chose to hold it (and three other episodes) to start the next fall season weeks ahead of other networks.

Voyager discovers a group of humans in stasis, all abducted by aliens in 1937 and transported across the galaxy -- including famed pilot Amelia Earhart. Waking them and explaining their fates is not without incident, but the real conundrum comes when the Voyager crew faces the choice to abandon their journey home to settle permanently in the Delta Quadrant.

There are a lot of fascinating ideas in this episode that aren't particularly well executed. Or rather, it's more that there are at least three different points where the episode could settle and be "about" one thing, only to pass it up in pursuit of something else.

The mystery of how objects and people from Earth got to the Delta Quadrant seems like plenty of material for an entire episode. After all, there are so many unanswered (and unanswerable?) questions here! Is it pure coincidence that in all of space, Voyager happened upon this area? Why did aliens from the Delta Quadrant want these humans anyway? Why go all the way across the galaxy to get them? Why, after depositing humans on a planet, did they let loose a truck to float in space? Where did the aliens flee to?

Yet all television shows we know of are made for humans, of course. So perhaps these alien motivations wouldn't make for compelling drama. OK then, why not make more of a meal out of eight people from the 20th century waking up in the 24th? They're shown to be rather culturally diverse (certainly by 1990s TV standards); surely they'll all have different reactions to their situation. Why put Amelia Earhart here to do almost nothing with that? (And give the game away by showing her name in the opening credits?)

But okay, maybe the writers weren't interested in any of that because The Next Generation already made a (rather poor) episode along the same lines? So why not give us more about the story of humans who made a colony out of nothing and thrived halfway across the galaxy? The arrival of humans who actually come from Earth could be a real fracture point for their society -- how about give us the episode about that? These humans seem pre-warp, you could even throw a good old-fashioned Star Trek dilemma about the Prime Directive in there!

No... the writers aren't here for that either. We get essentially 35 minutes of setup for a 10 minute episode about whether the crew is going to settle in the Delta Quadrant and give up the journey back home. And admittedly, that could have been a good episode too! But we hardly get enough of it.

If there hadn't been so much budget needlessly squandered on landing the ship, they might have actually shown us the wondrous cities that we only hear about, that the human colonists created. Seeing them would have actually put something on the other side of the scale, making tangible the thing our heroes might consider staying for. Getting to this plot sooner than the final act would have left more time for scenes like the good one between Kim and B'Elanna, where they actually discuss "should I stay or should I go?"

But I think a more grievous error even than forcing a good story into too small a space is the way they chose to end it: having no one from Voyager choose the stay behind. That's ludicrous. 10 people can't agree on pizza toppings; 160+ people are all going to agree on what to do with potentially the rest of their lives? Maybe if this was like, the second episode, you could accept that everyone is still harboring hopes of getting back home to Earth. But they've been out there a while now. Think about how, after a few months of pandemic life, you were itching for anything different? Same thing here.

And while I'm sure it's meant to be unifying and inspiring that everyone chooses to stay with Janeway and Chakotay, I really don't think it plays that way. We get more than one scene of them expressing real doubt over how many people they're going to lose. Because they end up losing no one, to me this indicates a massive disconnect between "how they think it's going" and "how it's really going." Seems to me they really don't know their crew at all, which is not the sterling statement on their leadership the writers intended.

Other observations:

• The reactions to the truck backfire are pretty funny, especially Tuvok pulling his phaser. But the joke kind of relies on them knowing what a gunshot sounds like when they don't know what a truck backfire sounds like. Shouldn't both be equally foreign to them?
  

• It's funny: the whole reason there even are transporters on Star Trek is that for the original series, it would have been cost-prohibitive to show the ship landing all the time. But decades later when Voyager can do it... it's not only quite superfluous to this story, it looks plain goofy. Those tiny little landing pads look like something out of a 50s sci-fi movie. And how heavy must the back of the ship be for the whole thing to not just topple forward on the saucer when it touches down? (Although I'll admit, a blue sky out the conference room window is a striking visual.)
  

• Sharon Lawrence, then on NYPD Blue, was a big "get" at the time for Amelia Earhart. But it's kind of surprising how little she has to do in the episode.
  

There are a ton of interesting ideas here, enough to keep me from truly disliking the episode. And yet, the way the writers cruise right by the potentially good stuff, deftly avoiding anything with a whiff of actual conflict, is quite disappointing. I give "The 37's" a C+.