Voyager Flashback: Concerning Flight

In any creative field, there can come a moment where even though the creator has set out to do one thing, the creation itself has taken on a life of its own and is suggesting that it go in a different direction. It's not always easy to hear that voice, and it's harder still to embrace it -- but truly transcendent art can come from creators who can. Star Trek: Voyager's "Concerning Flight" is, apparently, not one of these cases.

Voyager's main computer is stolen in an alien attack, along with other technology from the ship, including the Doctor's mobile emitter. When the crew arrives at a nearby planet to recover the stolen items, they discover that the Leonardo da Vinci character from Janeway's holodeck program now resides in the emitter... and may prove key in recovering what's been taken.

In my opinion, a television series really has to earn an episode built around a guest star character. Either that character has to have recurred often enough to feel like an extension of the main cast (the Deep Space Nine approach), or the story needs to be about how this character interacts with the majority of the main cast, showing that each of those different interactions is unique and interesting. Neither of those cases applies here. Da Vinci has appeared in only one Voyager episode before this. And only Janeway has meaningful interactions with him in the course of this story.

Now it does help that John Rhys-Davies is playing the character. Even though this episode aired before The Lord of the Rings was made, the actor still had plenty of fans from the Indiana Jones movies and Sliders TV series. He's bringing his distinctly boisterous performance style to this character too; he's broad and loud, and it's fun.

But ultimately, this episode is such a trifle. It's kinda-sorta the story of da Vinci awakening to the wider world outside the holodeck... except he never actually comes to understand where he is. If da Vinci actually had any character growth, it might be easier to overlook the myriad plot holes. Why does the alien Tau even activate the da Vinci hologram and become his "patron?" How does da Vinci manage to build a glider, by himself, far outside the city, in just 10 days? Why is he not absolutely dumbfounded by electricity (as opposed to casually starting to use it in his new workshop)? Why does Janeway not take back the communicator that Tau took from her after she knocks him out? Why doesn't Tau keep shooting at the glider once it's in the air? Why play around with da Vinci at all when you can just grab the emitter and take it back to the ship, scoring some kind of win?

The biggest question of all: why is the theft of Voyager's main computer processor treated as such a low stakes problem? This is such an existential crisis that it takes the ship 10 days to limp across one solar system. They absolutely cannot get home if they don't get the computer back. Yet everyone is regarding this as a light-hearted romp rather than "the absolute end of the road."

According to staff writer Joe Menosky, who hated this episode even though he wrote it, this was a consequence of the writers' room making wrong decisions (which he disagreed with) at every point in the story's development. In particular, he says their efforts to write "Leonardo da Vinci's Day Off" became overly fixated on figuring out how he gets off the ship in the first place. This is where the "stealing Voyager's technology" idea came from -- and in my opinion, it's the big moment where they failed to hear the story whispering to them that it was trying to become something else. They stuck to the light-hearted romp they set out to write, even though they'd now introduced story elements demanding a much more serious and somber tone.

Assuming you can just roll with it all, there are some funny moments here and there: Seven barking orders to Kim, Tuvok's reaction to da Vinci's mention of Vulcan (the island off Sicily, not the planet), the Doctor becoming desperate for hot gossip when he can no longer leave Sickbay. Plus they certainly threw a lot of money at this episode, filming out in at least two locations (a factory and a hillside), building an actual glider prop, and creating an interesting digital matte painting of the alien city. Still, all that just makes it "watchable" (ish) and not "good."

Other observations:

• When Voyager is firing wild shots in the beginning, they actually destroy one of the alien ships. They're lucky it's not the one with all their technology aboard!

• Janeway makes a priority of retrieving the emergency rations, specifically asking Neelix to focus on it. Quite a dunk on Neelix and his cooking.
  

• The reference to James T. Kirk meeting Leonardo da Vinci comes from the original series' late third season episode "Requiem for Methuselah."

If John Rhys-Davis weren't so damn charming, this would probably be Voyager's worst episode to date. As it is, I'd probably call it a C+ instead. Skippable, but not awful.