Voyager Flashback: Nemesis

Though Star Trek was about seeking out "new life and new civilizations," the franchise routinely discovered very human "aliens" who speak pretty much exactly like us. The reasons are obvious, of course. But occasionally, the writers would push a little further outside the norm for an episode. In Voyager's "Nemesis," this involved the creation of a unique and heightened language for the aliens of the week, the Vori.

Chakotay's shuttle crashes in a war zone, and he is taken in by a group of Vori soldiers. The more time he spends with the group, the more his sympathies with them develops. He learns of their evil enemy, the Kradin: the horrors they visit upon the Vori, and their campaign of extermination and desecration. His Starfleet ideals gradually give way to a sense of common cause.

The core idea of this episode could not be more "Star Trek." Making social commentary on the evils of propaganda, demonstrating how each side of a war can be made to believe lies about the other -- this kind of critique is Star Trek's bread and butter. There are also at least two fun and rather well-executed twists in this episode too: the reveal that Chakotay and his shipmates have each fallen in with opposite sides of the war, and the revelation that nothing Chakotay has experienced really happened (but was instead an elaborate indoctrination scenario).

Unfortunately, I think that's about all this episode has going for it. The execution hits me so wrong that were it not for those elements, it would easily be the worst episode of Voyager to this point.

The pacing of the episode is glacial. Despite there being plenty of action sequences, it feels slow. A long teaser shows people running around in a jungle set, and it takes a long time for them to show that it's Chakotay being chased. We're halfway through the episode before any main character other than Chakotay is shown. A platoon of unmemorable guest stars lean on Vietnam movie tropes for any sense of personality. (Could these soldiers not have included some women in their ranks to give us something a little different?)

And that's not the only thing that feels borrowed in this episode. The look of the Kradin aliens, specifically in this jungle environment, can only make you think "Predator." Withholding the bulk of the main characters for so long makes it feel more like a Twilight Zone episode than Star Trek. (From a modern standpoint, I'd say it feels like Black Mirror.)

Then there's dialogue spoken by these Vori. I gather it works for some viewers. It really doesn't work at all for me. It's basically a "find-replace" function in which words are replaced with the most awkward synonym that the thesaurus says still is a synonym. Fathom, glimpse, clash, sphere, fast-walk. It's impossible to speak this way without it coming off as over-the-top melodrama -- assuming it isn't just unintentionally funny. ("I was told to drill you, Chakotay, but it's you who drilled me.") The dialogue is cheesy as a baseline, and it only gets worse as Chakotay begins to adopt the dialect as his own. I get what it's supposed to be showing: he's slowly coming around to their way of thinking. But him barking "motherless beast" as he tackles an alien is an eye-roll moment.

Other observations:

• For the third episode in a row, we lose another shuttlecraft. Let's not even pretend this is a limited resource for Voyager anymore.

• This episode is the only one, after Jeri Ryan joins the regular cast, in which Seven of Nine does not appear. This episode was in fact filmed before "Day of Honor," but was bumped later so that the new character could be featured more before getting a week off.
  

The parable about hatred at the core of this episode is a good foundation. But if it weren't for the clever twists near the end, all you'd have here would be basically unwatchable to me. Because this episode does snatch something sort of like "victory" from the jaws of "defeat," I'll give it a C-. But it's a C- that was very nearly an F, if that makes any sense.