An alien scientist named Dr. Jetrel contacts Voyager with news that Neelix may be suffering a fatal cellular degeneration. But Neelix is loathe to accept help, as Jetrel is the creator of the horrifying weapon that killed Neelix's entire family in a Talaxian holocaust. And he may right to be suspicious, as Jetrel is not being forthright about his true motives.
Two different interviews that two different executive producers gave about this episode provide a good hint as to why it doesn't quite work. Jeri Taylor said, "It's pretty clear that it was a Hiroshima metaphor." Michael Piller countered, "You can't say that every show
is making a comment. It's not." Clearly, the creatives weren't on the same page here... and while I agree that not every Star Trek episode needs to serve up insightful social commentary, I certainly don't think you should pick an episode with such a clear allegory -- complete with a guest character modeled after J. Robert Oppenheimer -- as the episode where you're not going to make a comment.
To be fair, I'm not sure what sort of insight really could have been offered here. But I imagine it would have been more compelling than the outsized time spent trying to fake out the audience. The bulk of the episode presents Jetrel as unrepentant and unfazed by his role in a mass murder, only to reveal much later that he's in fact profoundly upset by it and trying to atone. Dramatic as that behavior may be for the story, it makes no sense for the character as a tactic for getting the help he needs from the Voyager crew.
In the version of this story where Jetrel isn't needlessly cagey about his intentions (to try to "resurrect" the victims of his weapon), there would have been time for Neelix to get more fully invested in the idea of seeing his family again. Instead of scene after scene of Neelix nursing an anger ranging from passive-aggressive to openly hostile, we could hear his memories of his family when they were alive. Over time, we could see his hopes begin to rise... only for him to effectively lose his family all over again in the end when Jetrel's experiment fails.
Better still than Neelix telling us about his family would have been to see them. Sadly, Voyager didn't have the budget that would have allowed any flashbacks to Neelix's past, but the strange pool hall nightmare he has is no substitute. We could have met those siblings, or seen him on his homeworld looking up as the moon is devastated... any number of scenes that could have been more effective than another monologue. (Even though it is nice to see actor Ethan Phillips downshift to a less manic pitch for his performance here.)
Other observations:
- Another problem with the "Neelix is going to die" bait-and-switch is that the only other episode so far to feature Neelix was also about him being at death's door. So they can't play it here for many scenes or any intensity, for risk of retreading the same ground. The scene in which Neelix confesses something like happiness to die before Kes is interesting, but doesn't go nearly deep enough.
- James Sloyan is a multi-episode Star Trek veteran. He does solid work again here.
- Neelix's nightmare isn't a great scene, but the burn victim makeup they put on Jennifer Lien is marvelously gruesome.
- It's so gruesome, in fact, that it opens the door to more: I wish that when they were attempting to transport the victim back to life, that they'd gone a little farther in suggesting the person was in pain. Twist the knife a little more.
Though my review here may seem largely negative, I think the issue here is more that "Jetrel" has a lot of shortcomings. There is decent acting, and the frame of an interesting story... just not told well. It's hardly a disaster of an episode. I give a C.
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