Voyager Flashback: Blink of an Eye

Star Trek isn't typically a show built around "high-concept" science fiction. But occasionally they dip their toe in that water, as they did with the sixth season's "Blink of an Eye."

Voyager enters orbit around a planet where time moves at a highly accelerated rate: one day on the planet is a mere second aboard the ship. When Voyager becomes stuck, its presence begins to affect the course of history for the aliens on the planet below.

I'm often down on Star Trek episodes that focus too much on the guest stars and not enough on at least one of the main characters. But this episode is a bit of an exception. It's a cool enough concept -- watching a society mold itself around Voyager over nearly a thousand years -- that it doesn't quite need a deeper emotional heft. The intellectual stimulation is enough. Hell, Star Trek fans get a full meal just in the debate over what the Prime Directive even means when they've been interfering with an alien culture for centuries.

And there are at least little tendrils of impact for some of the main characters. Chakotay flexes his often-dormant anthropological muscles. The Doctor is sent down to the planet at one point, and winds up enduring years of separation (by his reckoning). I wish even more could have been made of his experience, though. We're told he starts a family and has a son -- and we know firsthand how powerful the effect of having even a fake family had on him. Yet the only lasting impact of the experience seems to be that he misses watching sportsball and having someone to talk about it with.

But a story about time moving fast doesn't leave time for personal details, I suppose. And it's not like only the main characters are getting shorted there. The astronaut played by Daniel Dae Kim (here a few years before he broke through on Lost) has a truly interesting story, if only the episode had time to tell it. He volunteers for a space mission and winds up being gone so long that everyone he knew on his own planet ages and dies. Then he has to go back and persuade his government to pursue a particular course of action; how does he do it? What is the rest of his life like?

Despite all these things I'd really like to see more of, I really don't think their absence is where the episode falls a little short. Instead, it's that even streamlined like this, the episode calls for more than a weekly television show can portray convincingly. This episode calls for numerous alien sets: a pre-industrial Legend-of-Zelda type village, a Renaissance observatory, a crewed space capsule, and more. But the budget doesn't exist to render all these things (and all the associated props and costumes) with more than what could be raided from the studio vault.

Similarly, the episode calls for a lot of guest stars... and it seems that when you need to cast this many actors all in a single week, you're not going to be able to find good ones for every role. Daniel Dae Kim is solid, of course (and his is the most important role). But others are pretty weak -- one so bad, apparently, that his original vocal performance is obviously dubbed over after the fact by someone else. And all these people need an alien makeup too... which no doubt is why the production reached for an easier one, a sort of melted version of the Cardassian spoon forehead. Essentially, it seems impossible for "the best version of this script" to have been filmed on a television schedule -- and so what we get is by necessity "good but not great."

Other observations:

• There's another character scene between Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman, the latest of many. This has become such a thing that it's making me feel that Star Trek: Picard may have missed an opportunity somewhere by not following up on this relationship somehow, having Seven meet an adult Naomi at some point.
  

• CG may have been shorted in the budget this week to try to help the other departments. While the planet itself looks good enough, Voyager seems weirdly fake in many of the shots (especially the first shot of the episode), as though it wasn't given full render time to fill in all its usual details.
  

I should perhaps be more willing to look around the rough edges of this episode and give it a higher mark. But I'm going to call it a B+.