Voyager Flashback: Thirty Days

Across the many series in the Star Trek franchise, there were occasional "big deal" moments in which a regular character received a promotion in rank. But Star Trek: Voyager featured one of the rare instances in which a character was demoted, in the fifth season episode "Thirty Days."

Tom Paris is busted down to ensign and thrown in the brig for 30 days. There, he contemplates the actions that led him to this, involving the people of a planet made entirely of water... and their refusal to do anything to stop a looming environmental catastrophe.

If you'll pardon the digression, I have an odd direction I want to come at this episode: by way of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. Throughout the run of that series, creator Ronald Moore released audio commentary tracks each week to share insights on the making of new episodes. (Today, we'd recognize it as equal parts commentary and podcast.) I vividly remember his talk about the second season episode "Black Market." It was a turkey of an episode, he admitted that frankly, and he spoke in detail about how that had happened and what efforts had been made to try to salvage it.

In the process, Moore confessed to a writer's trick he'd used on more than one occasion to pump up episodes that had come in short, were lacking in tension, or both: open the episode deep in the story, hoping to draw in the audience by teasing the moment of greatest tension. Then flashback to "48 hours earlier" or whatever, using that tease to pull the audience along through the slow parts of your too-short script. Now it's true that writers sometimes choose a flashback structure from the outset, and that structure can be used to great effect and not simply as a cheap trick. But ever since I heard Ronald Moore characterize flashbacks as a trick (one he uses freely), I can't help but be on my guard every time I see "XX hours earlier" appear on screen in the opening two minutes of an episode of television.

So, back to Star Trek: Voyager, and "Thirty Days." This episode opens with Captain Janeway demoting Tom Paris. He's then sent to the brig, and his introspection there becomes a framing device for the flashbacks that follow. Well, guess what? "Thirty Days" came in short when it was originally filmed. Ridiculously short -- 10 whole minutes, or nearly one-quarter of its necessary run time. Everyone just missed entirely on how much screen time it would take to tell this story, and when they got all the footage to the editing bay, they learned they had a big problem.

Time for a version of that trick Ronald Moore spoke of. They decided to open with Tom Paris getting perp walked, then devoted an entire day of filming to get new scenes of him in the brig writing a letter to his father. And they might actually be the best scenes of the episode. The character growth of Paris is articulated clearly: he's always been mouthy and flippant, but here he's put his irreverence toward a good cause. (This is restated from the other solid scene of the episode, in which it's his girlfriend B'Elanna who essentially nudges him toward his insubordinate course of action.)

But padding for time and underscoring the main theme doesn't change the fact that this story was so poorly understood in the first place that it came out 10 minutes short. Why does Paris suddenly care about this one obstinate alien culture so deeply that he defies the captain? Why is Janeway suddenly so disinterested in any diplomatic efforts of any kind? (Don't give me "Prime Directive"; these aliens already invited Voyager in.)

More to the point: how can a "soup" that contains so many interesting ingredients come out so bland? Perhaps because every cool thing is just slightly undermined at the same time. There's an obvious parable here about doing large scale environmental damage to a planet... but the aliens at the core if this story look too much like Dr. Seuss "Whos" to take seriously. We finally see the oft-mentioned but never-before-seen Delaney Sisters... and Tom Paris grossly tells Harry there's no real difference between them. The episode delivers on a lot of challenging CG surrounding this water planet... but doesn't really have enough money left in the budget to make the giant underwater monster look good. Paris really has to confront unresolved feelings toward his father... and in the course of doing so has the dumbest and most TV cliche dream about being a kid who's getting yelled at.

Other observations:

• Janeway says that Paris' punishment is going to be 30 days of "solitary confinement." He ends up receiving so many visitors in the course of the episode that this seems a gross mischaracterization. Which is good, I suppose, in the sense that solitary confinement is actually torture, and Starfleet shouldn't be using torture as punishment. (Definitely not in sending Neelix to deliver all your meals. Zing!)

• I'm not sure that actor Willie Garson was widely recognized at the time he guest starred in this episode, but his later work on Sex and the City would certainly change that.
  

• Seven of Nine has an excellent line about going along with the group: "It is in my nature to comply with the collective." (That said, she sure gets standoffish more often than she should if that were true.)
  

• At the climax of the story, when they have to stop the weapon Paris intends to fire, Tuvok describes what sounds like using a torpedo as a depth charge that will go off nearby and cause concussive damage. But what we see is basically one perfectly timed torpedo intercepting another mid-shot.

• Right at the end of the episode, there's a "dinner" at "0700 hours." That's not right at all. 

There are some interesting ideas and even a few compelling scenes scattered throughout "Thirty Days." But that barely salvages an episode that feels false and forced, like it was time to do a "Tom Paris episode" and this was the best they could come up with on short notice. I give the episode a C+.