Voyager Flashback: The Killing Game

After Star Trek: Voyager delivered a two-part episode early in its fourth season that fans enjoyed, they decided to do it again with "The Killing Game."

Voyager has been captured by the Hirogen, and their unusual leader is forcing both his own crew and their captives to engage in various conflict scenarios on the holodeck. With neural inhibitors in place, the Voyager crew has no memory of their real identities, believing themselves to be their assigned characters in each scenario. As they play out the Nazi occupation of a French town in World War II, their only hope for escape is the Doctor -- forced to triage wounded combatants in Sickbay -- and Harry Kim -- one of the few people left as himself so he can repair and expand the holodecks.

"The Killing Game" actually has a fair bit in common with that earlier fourth season two-parter, "Year of Hell." Both depict Voyager beaten down and the crew struggling hopelessly. Both feature an alien captain with unusual motives that aren't made clear until deep into the story. But "The Killing Game" drops the audience right into the action -- so immediately, in fact, that we don't even know at first that the "Klingon warrior" we're watching is actually Katherine Janeway. The explanation of how we got here comes later, and slowly.

Smartly, the episode gives us fun things to latch onto as we wait for those explanations. The World War II scenario casts the roles familiarly, even though the characters don't actually know themselves: Janeway is a leader, friendly with Tuvok and butting heads with Seven of Nine. Paris and B'Elanna have a complicated romantic relationship. Neelix wants to help, but ends up being a liability. Even the Hirogen fit the narrative; they're cast as Nazis because they generally believe themselves to be better than the people they seek to exterminate. And the resistance outside the holodeck mirrors the reenacted one going on within.

But the fun's just getting started. Roxann Dawson's real-life pregnancy is incorporated into the script. Jeri Ryan gets to sing (and wear something other than the corseted cat suit). Ethan Phillips wears both Talaxian and Klingon makeup simultaneously. (Not exactly logical, but it looks fun.) We get hand-to-hand combat and gunfights too. And alongside the action, Harry Kim absolutely runs out of fucks to give, becoming a more compelling character than he's been in more than a season.

The production values are sky high. Much of the episode is filmed on a huge outdoor set, and director David Livingston uses every inch of it. There are many impressive shots -- including a long "one-er" of Neelix riding a bicycle through town that seems almost impossible when you remember that cameras on drones didn't exist in 1998. This first half culminates in a massive explosion of a great miniature, and fades out on a shot of a gaping hole spanning four decks inside the ship.

Other observations:

• I guess the show has already run out of seven-foot-tall actors and has exhausted the budget for shoe lifts; these Hirogen don't tower over the Voyager crew like the previous ones did.
  

• The hiding of secret messages inside a weather broadcast is one of several real-life details from World War II. Staff writer Joe Menosky returned to Star Trek after a long sabbatical in Europe, bringing with him the desire to do a "World War II story" somehow, and hoping to fill it with real details he'd learned.

• Harry Kim was reportedly left out of the holodeck action because at this point, episode writers Menosky and Brannon Braga didn't actually care for the character much. But the episode reportedly came in short, and it was too expensive (if not outright impossible) to go back and add more holodeck scenes to pad the run time. The result was extra moments showing Kim fighting for his own survival -- and Garrett Wang's embittered performance actually inspired the writers to put Kim at the center of the 100th episode when it came next season.
  

This episode is a lot of fun, and has decent roles for all the series characters. That said, it's less a cliffhanger than simply an incomplete story. By the end of part one, we're almost just getting started, with the characters only beginning to learn who they really are. So I think this tops out for me at a B+. But once again: another effective Hirogen story.