When B'Elanna has a near death experience in which she sees her mother on the fabled ship that transports souls to Klingon hell, she's determined to restore her mother's honor before it's too late. But it may mean a permanent trip back to the afterlife.
I'll get right to it: the personal significance of this episode was that I was there. Back in 1999, I had recently started working at Decipher, the maker of the game that began my career in games, the Star Trek Customizable Card Game. I was in San Diego to work at Comic Con, and I'm awakened one morning (before the convention had actually kicked off) by a phone call from a co-worker who says simply, "can you get up to Los Angeles by [ridiculous time only a couple hours from now]? If you can get up here to meet us, you can come tour the Star Trek: Voyager sets." They had used our company's connection licensing Star Trek to leverage the special visit, and I was being invited too.
Most car rental agencies won't rent a car to someone under 25. Northbound traffic between San Diego and Los Angeles on a weekday morning is a nightmare. But I wasn't going to let anything stand in my way of meeting my co-workers "at the Forrest Gump bench" on the Paramount lot at the appointed time. How I pulled it off is honestly a blur to me today, but somehow I did get a car, and somehow I did make it to the Paramount lot. What seemed most improbable of all to me was that my name was indeed "on the list," and I was allowed into the gate, where I found "the bench."
Even then, I wasn't as big a fan of Star Trek: Voyager as I was of Deep Space Nine or The Next Generation, but the set tour was still magical. The bridge was dark that day, with nothing being shot there, but we started by watching active filming in the mess hall, followed by a walk down the lit corridor to engineering, which was being set up for a shot later in the day. We also got to go to the separate sound stage where temporary sets for Voyager were always built, where the actual titular Barge of the Dead was standing in stunning, massive glory.
The filming we saw was truly weird. There's a nightmare sequence in this episode where B'Elanna sees visions of Klingon warriors killing off her friends and co-workers one by one. The production knew that some kind of special treatment was required here, but they wanted a few options to play with later in the editing room. So cast members were coming in, each in turn, to shoot their deaths at the hand of Klingons, multiple times each for a different film speed of slow motion.
As we walked in, Jeri Ryan had apparently just finished filming and was leaving the set. Now it was Ethan Phillips' turn. Readers will know that I don't like the character of Neelix. Nothing against Ethan Phillips, but I hated the writing for the character then, and I hate it now. So, appropriately, the thing I got to see on the day I visited the Voyager set was Neelix being killed.... again, and again, and again, and again. As many times as it took to get the right take for one speed of film, then as many times as it took to get it right for the next speed. In the final assembly of the episode, it's on screen for less than a second. It's motion-blurred the entire time. (I know, because I tried desperately to screen capture the moment to put on a card in the card game; but it was not to be.) But it's seared into my memory forever.
So that's my personal connection. Elsewhere, Star Trek as a franchise was losing a key creative force. Ronald D. Moore had been a staff writer on two prior Star Trek series, with his credit on 60 episodes before he transferred to Voyager. As I've mentioned in my last two episode reviews, Voyager basically "broke" him and he immediately left the franchise. This is the last episode his name appears on, in a "story by" credit because he'd tried to tell a version of this on Deep Space Nine before seeing it recycled here. (A "trip to Klingon hell" was discarded from a late series episode for being too expensive, complicated, and off-topic.)
I can't say whether I think there was a great episode somewhere in the idea. But the version as executed is pretty rough, and I can kind of see how it pushed an already-skeptical Moore out the door. So much of the Klingon mythology talked about here seems ad hoc and unconvincing. The "lesson" B'Elanna learns in the end -- to throw away her weapon and stop fighting -- seems at odds with Klingon cultural values as we've come to know them. The episode doesn't effectively ride the line enough between whether what B'Elanna experiences is "real" or all in her mind.
It doesn't work especially well for the character of B'Elanna either. She's spent five seasons resenting the Klingon part of herself that she inherited from her mother, but now goes "full Klingon" to help her. (You could imagine this story making much more sense if Worf were seeing his father Mogh in the afterlife.) The episode tries too hard to make Janeway into a mother figure for B'Elanna that she's never really been -- going so far that B'Elanna strangely embraces her and not Tom Paris (who's right there) when it's all over.
The episode misses on other characters too. The Doctor agrees too easily to help B'Elanna recreate a near-death experience. (And it's a missed opportunity for B'Elanna not to have to convince Tom to supervise the medical procedure, say, after the Doctor flat out refuses.) There's not nearly enough dialogue between B'Elanna and Chakotay, who have a deep friendship, about the meaning of her vision.
But there are still some fun moments. Much of the cast doesn't even appear as their real character, and everyone seems to be having fun playing a twisted nightmare version of themselves -- like a taunting Tuvok, or the Doctor and Seven singing a drinking song. There's also a good debate between Janeway and B'Elanna about how far the freedom of religion should extend. And the production is off the charts. That ship was as impressive in person as it looks on screen. The visualization of the Klingon afterlife is fantastic, from the lake of blood to the upside-down Klingon emblem above the gates of "hell."
Other observations:
- The opening shot is terrible, though. Looking into a shuttle cockpit as B'Elanna crashes, you can see smoke leaking out of the ship where the windshield should be, and the shot is framed so broadly you can see it for the "shake the camera" cheapness it is.
- When B'Elanna begins to suspect something is off, the first thing she says is: "Computer, end program." Yeah, that's totally what you'd do in a world with holodecks.
- Guest star Karen Austin, who plays B'Elanna's mother, is in real life only four years older than Roxann Dawson. That's Hollywood for you.
I'm possibly rating this episode too highly at C+. But my association of that very special day in 1999 colors the experience. (Meanwhile, I'm sure Ronald D. Moore has very unpleasant memories about this episode.) Anyway... that's "Barge of the Dead."
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