Voyager Flashback: The Thaw

Joe Menosky had been on writing staff of Star Trek: The Next Generation for most of its run, and was responsible for most of its wilder concepts. He would join the writing staff of Voyager as well, starting in season three. But before that, he worked remotely from France, occasionally lobbing scripts over the figurative wall. One of these was season two's "The Thaw."

Voyager encounters a planet recovering from a climate catastrophe, finding a small group in cryostasis, meant to have awakened to shepherd the recovery. Their system, which creates a shared simulated environment during their sleep, has not malfunctioned. Yet they simply haven't awakened. When Harry Kim and B'Elanna Torres enter the simulation to investigate, they soon learn why: the anxieties of the inhabitants have coalesced into a tormenting clown manifestation of fear, who holds them all hostage to continue his own existence.

Going up against literal Fear is exactly the sort of high concept that Joe Menosky was known for on The Next Generation. At its best, his writing sensibilities gave us "Darmok." At his not-so-best, he gave us "Masks." This episode falls somewhere in between. It does a decent job of explaining the situation (a few years before The Matrix would drop into the zeitgeist and give us all a shorthand). It addresses potential "quick fixes" with tight exposition -- you can't just unplug the simulation, you can't wake them up fast enough, you can't just transform "fear" into something else (stupid Neelix).

The metaphor, however, doesn't work nearly as well. There's good talk about the up sides to fear, and intriguing philosophy about what fear wants. But unless you happen to be afraid of clowns, I don't think the script does an especially good job of convincing you that our heroes are up against "Fear." There's danger here, for sure -- being at the eternal mercy of a whim-driven menace who utterly controls your environment... and wants it to be the same monotony, every day, punctuated by the occasional death threat? Yeah, sounds like hell. But while "dread" or "torture" might be close cousins of "fear," I'm not sure they're really the same.

But I think the episode comes out better than it looks on paper, thanks largely to two people. One is Michael McKean. Today, we have many roles (particularly, Chuck from Better Call Saul) hinting that "the guy from This Is Spinal Tap, Clue, and Laverne & Shirley" would be good in this sort of dramatic role. In 1996? Feels like a gamble. But someone suggested McKean would be right for this, and he was reportedly a longtime Star Trek fan happy to do it. To the degree that the clown is menacing, I chalk it up to the performance of McKean... him, and his mannerisms as often mimicked by the background performers (literal Cirque du Soleil performers who were hired as a group to fill the scene).

The other main contributor to this episode's success is the director, Marvin V. Rush. Rush was a regular director of photography on Voyager (as well as The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise). He knew Trek inside and out, and would occasionally be given an episode of his own. His work here is outstanding, suggesting that as as important as he surely was to daily production of the franchise, they really should have found more opportunities for him to direct.

The bulk of this episode takes place on a single set -- and a rather "classic Star Trek" set at that, tiny and brightly colored. Rush manages to expand the space enormously through inventive camera placement. He sells it all as a nightmarish fantasy through incongruous cutting that instantly moves the clown and his entourage from one place to another. He manages to keep focus on the central performances even while more background performers than Star Trek sometimes gets in an entire season are moving around wildly. And it all builds perfectly to a final scene that takes place in a quickly disappearing black void, simultaneously intimate and intense. Rush deeply understood what this episode needed -- to be, I imagine, what Deep Space Nine's "Move Along Home" was probably trying to be -- and delivered it perfectly.

Other observations:

• The opening scene (apparently filmed for and cut from an earlier episode) shows Harry Kim playing his clarinet. He actually performs a rather complex piece, and we can see that actor Garrett Wang really is doing the correct fingering -- it isn't faked with another person's hands coming in from below frame.
  

• Perennial Trek guest stars include Thomas Kopache (who later played Kira's father) and Carel Struycken (who played Lwaxana Troi's valet, Mr. Homn).

• The old age makeup on Harry Kim is far better than usual for Star Trek. Perhaps this is because we only see it for a moment, and actor Garrett Wang doesn't have to do much in it but look pained.
  

• The music in this episode is especially strong. It's allowed to be more brazen and obvious than usual, and it suits the environment of the simulation very well. That in turns adds to the impact of the final act, when Janeway enters the simulation and all that bombast recedes.
  

I didn't remember enjoying "The Thaw" quite as much before as I did this time, but I was really taken by the craft of it in this viewing. I'd give it a B+.