Voyager Flashback: Distant Origin

In the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the episode "First Contact" dared to tell an entire episode from the perspective of a planet visited by the Enterprise. Star Trek: Voyager played in a similar perspective-shifting space in its third season, with "Distant Origin."

The scientist Forra Gegen has found evidence that his reptilian species, the Voth, originated from the same planet as a strange spaceship of mammalian life forms that comes from across the galaxy. He is determined to find this Voyager to prove his theories... but his government stands in staunch opposition to his challenges to doctrine.

For a long-running television show, a break with format could be a welcome thing -- especially when producing a ludicrously high 26 episodes each season as this era of Star Trek routinely did. This episode gives us an alien society conceived in impressive detail, from language to politics to physiology to cosmology to morality. Star Trek staples are funneled through a new perspective: a "captain's log" becomes a letter to home; our heroes are spied upon just as Starfleet officers have previously spied on primitive culture. Supporting the premise that this is an episode of some other show, director David Livingston films it like one too. Unusual lenses and camera angles abound throughout, techniques that appear in just this one episode.

But I think the writers weren't quite fully committed to the gimmick. Yes, we get halfway into Act 2 before we even see one of the regular Voyager characters, but then rather than staying with the alien perspective, the episode is handed off. It becomes about Voyager dealing with a potential invasion before eventually settling into sort of being a Chakotay episode -- though he's dragged along through the plot more than having any agency in it.

The one scene in which he does seize the reins is pretty solid, though. Everything culminates in Chakotay delivering a classic Star Trek captain speech, each word chosen with diplomatic precision even as it exposes hard truths. So well written is this speech that Chakotay specifically talks about the nobility of heritage and ancestry without ever clanging insensitively on his heritage (which Voyager has not always handled well). It's far more nuanced than any past Chakotay episode, and Robert Beltran really steps up to perform it well.

Of course, the speech is nicely summing up the very Star Trek allegory of this episode: this is about the clash between religious doctrine and science. You might watch and think "theory of evolution," and that fits -- but it was even more specifically inspired by Galileo's treatment by the Catholic church (a suggestion reportedly made by executive producer Rick Berman, who didn't like the "shoot-em-up with alien lizards" that this episode was first shaping up to be). Rhetoric versus provable fact is unfortunately a timeless theme, though one detail of it feels especially current in today's political discourse: the Voth leader's real objection to this scientific theory is that it would mean all of her people are immigrants.

To get to all the good stuff, though, you do have to overlook a lot about the premise that just doesn't make sense. That another intelligent life existed on Earth before humans is tough to swallow. The episode posits that maybe the Voth existed solely on a lost continent, any evidence of them now buried on an ocean floor. But any species advanced enough to leave Earth by spaceflight would by definition be a global society. (Of course, you also have to look past the fact that in the 25 years since this episode was made, scientists have determined that dinosaurs in fact weren't cold-blooded, and were more similar to avians than lizards. But that hasn't stopped the Jurassic Park franchise.)

Other observations:

• The planet on which the Voth find a human skeleton is distinctly recognizable from the beginning of the season. (And they reuse an establishing shot on the volcanic surface to drive the connection home.)

• The Voth seem too advanced for us not to have heard of them before this episode. Among their advancements is a mastery of transwarp travel. I guess for them, evolving into a lizard isn't much of a consequence for breaking Warp 10.

• Love is in the air. We get some flirtation between Tom and B'Elanna (narrated like a nature documentary by the Voth), and even a tiny romantic subplot between the alien scientist's assistant and daughter.

The clash of religion and science is well conceived here, as is the speech Chakotay gives from the moral high ground. But the episode could have pushed even harder in focusing on its aliens -- aliens who were quite thoroughly conceived (except for the gaping hole that they actually could come from Earth). I'd give this episode an A for effort, but it does lose a little for me in execution. I give "Distant Origin" a B+.