Voyager responds to a distress call from another Starfleet ship, the Equinox. With the ship barely surviving on a skeleton crew, it seems only natural to combine onto Voyager. But as Janeway pushes this option, she meets with unusual resistance from the Equinox captain, Ransom. Soon she learns the reason why: the Equinox crew has been experimenting on alien life to fuel a new propulsion system. What Janeway doesn't realize is that the Equinox crew is even willing to double-cross Voyager in order to get home.
"Equinox" is a pretty solid season finale and cliffhanger. Not only does it provide an interesting gaze through the looking glass at how things might have gone differently for Voyager, it populates the story with interesting guest characters (and casts them with solid actors). John Savage brings traditional Starfleet stoicism to Captain Ransom. Titus Welliver is oily as his first officer Burke. Meanwhile, Rick Worthy as Lessing and Olivia Birkelund as Gilmore are both allowed to play genuine trauma that their characters have experienced and not recovered from. There's also the fun twist when the Equinox's EMH is activated, and turns out to be even more wicked than the rest of the crew.
The Equinox crew is interesting as a whole as well, and their decent into "evil" reasonably well presented. First is the subtle and simple hint of just how lax they've gone on protocol: they call each other by first names. In flashback, we see that their first alien kill was a true accident and not a malicious decision to essentially create fossil fuels out of a species not yet fossilized.
The way all these characters play off the regular Voyager characters is compelling as well. Seven of Nine finds herself in a situation far outside her comfort zone, when she has to provide comfort to Lessing. Chakotay empathizes with the extreme PTSD exhibited by Gilmore. Janeway and Ransom swap "war stories" about the Delta Quadrant (including a moment about the Prime Directive where you can see Ransom mentally calculate the answer Janeway wants him to give). And Burke has a former relationship with B'Elanna Torres (complete with the cutesy nickname "BLT"), perfectly calibrated to spur jealousy in Tom Paris.
There are perhaps a couple of weak spots in the script. (These are likely due to the breakneck pace at which it was reportedly written. This story idea apparently came so late that they blew past outlining it and went straight to script drafts, hoping to find the story in the process.) In order to draw contrast between Janeway and Ransom, any of the grey areas Janeway herself has entered are carefully avoided. Sure, you get a good moment when Ransom says his crew was only following his orders and she retorts coldly, "their mistake." And yet, Ransom would only need to spend a few minutes skimming Janeway's logs to find any number of past episodes of the show that would make Janeway's moral high ground seem not so high. Essentially, I think the Voyager crew (Janeway especially) isn't really forced to look hard enough about whether they would have behaved the same were the situations reversed.
Also, I can't help but wonder if, given even a little more time to work on the story, the writers might have found what seems to me to be a more compelling angle to approach it from. That's basically the one that, a few years later, Ronald Moore's revival of Battlestar Galactica would take with its "Pegasus" story arc: craft the story so that Janeway isn't in charge. "Pegasus" found tremendous friction in introducing a hard-assed leader who outranked Commander Adama, leading to an all-time great story arc for the series. Here, Janeway "outranks" Captain Ransom by virtue of having the superior ship, skating right by a fruitful chunk of story in which the Voyager crew might have bristled at Ransom calling the shots until Janeway makes the call to mutiny.
Other observations:
- The sets of the Equinox are all dark and moody and trashed in a way that looks great on screen.
- At one point, someone mentions that they're all 35,000 light years from Earth -- so, about halfway home from the pilot's original 70,000 figure.
- This is kind of the second of back-to-back "evil Doctor" stories.
Even if I could imagine a more interesting (more Battlestar Galactica-like) version of this episode, I will say this one is pretty good. I give "Equinox" a B+.
And that concludes season five of Star Trek: Voyager. My picks for the top 5 episodes of the season are: actually, this episode at #1, followed by "Relativity," "Someone to Watch Over Me," "Timeless," and "Dark Frontier." Basically, I think the season didn't have any A or A- "stand-outs," but did have a number of very solid B+ installments.
On to season six!
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