When Voyager encounters a vast nebula that poses an extreme hazard to the crew's health, a plan emerges when they discover Seven of Nine is immune to the nebula's effects. The entire crew will be placed in stasis, with only Seven and The Doctor guiding the ship. But Seven is unaccustomed to such solitude, hard-pressed to keep up with the deterioration of the ship's systems, and may not actually be wholly immune to the effects of the nebula.
It's interesting that a writer would be in the director's chair for this episode, because to me this is a prime example of the writers of a show not realizing what the most interesting aspect of a story idea is. Here, there's a chance to really dig into what it's like for Seven of Nine to deal with isolation after life in a collective. That element is here, of course... but only centered near the very end of the episode, as she has the Doctor to interact with almost the entire time.
Seven's doubts and fears, as personified by hallucination of her own crew mates taunting her, feel like the real meat on the bones of this story. But most of the final acts are spent on her interactions with an alien (who turns out to be hallucinated too). Bryan Fuller, member of the writing staff, said in an interview that they were going for The Shining here. But the ominous threat of the alien seems a retread of the recent "Retrospect" episode, and the script seems more centered on the mystery of the alien than the psychology of Seven. I guess what it really is for me is: anyone would struggle with this level of isolation, and the episode doesn't get deeply enough into that, much less how hard that would be for Seven in particular.
But it's not like the episode is way off the mark. While Seven's isolation is undercut by the Doctor's presence, the fact remains that the Doctor and Seven make a good pairing. It plays to the Doctor's self-inflated ego that he thinks he's "mastered" social interaction enough to "teach" Seven. This makes for a great opening scene in which Seven bulldozes through a simulated conversation as though seeking the end of a quest. (Though if the holodeck can be used to simulate the crew for social interactions, why doesn't Seven do that to cope with isolation in the rest of the episode?) It also works for the rapport between the Doctor and Seven to fracture over time; they're cordial, but Seven isn't really "friendly" with anyone, and that's fun to explore. (Janeway even goes so far as to call her "insolent," though she softens it by saying "she wants to do well by us.")
Jeri Ryan anchors the episode well. She's in nearly every scene of the episode, and her arc of emotional decline is charted well over the hour. Her rapport with Robert Picardo as the Doctor is fun, as usual. And the rest of the cast seems to have a lot of fun playing the sinister, mocking versions of their characters as Seven imagines them. (I can believe that an entire "Collective" of mocking voices is what Seven would imagine.)
Other observations:
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan looms so large in Star Trek that it works to just call a nebula "Mutara class."
- It's interesting that the crew finds a month of stasis so unthinkable, when sleeper ships used to be the way people got around the galaxy. (Heck, you vaguely alluded to Khan in this very episode.)
- Nothing about Paris' claustrophobia in this episode makes sense to me. We've seen him wear a spacesuit before several times with no talk of this condition. And how is it possible to wake oneself out of stasis and leave the pod?
- It's a good use of the seldom-mentioned biological components in
Voyager to have the ship, in its own way, fall prey to the same disease as the crew.
I'd say overall that "One" is a good enough episode; I'd give it a B. But I feel like a more serious exploration of the psychology here, minimizing the mystery, could have made for a great episode.
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