Voyager Flashback: Nightingale

Watching Star Trek: Voyager for the first time in two decades, and now being on the last season, I've been finding that the show is generally better than I remembered. That's a topic I'll explore more fully, I imagine, when I reach the finale. But today, I'm here to discuss an episode that's exactly the kind of thing I thought I remembered, "Nightingale."

When Harry Kim rescues an alien starship from attack, its passengers install him as their captain. But a humanitarian mission to deliver medical supplies is soon revealed to be hiding something darker. And Harry Kim is soon revealed to have much to learn about command. Meanwhile, aboard Voyager, Icheb mistakenly believes that B'Elanna has feelings for him.

One of my criticisms of Star Trek: Voyager -- particularly coming on the heels of Deep Space Nine as it did -- was that most of the characters generally felt so limited and one-dimensional. That may not be entirely true across the board, but it's true enough to make an episode like "Nightingale" not work. The Voyager characters are so constrained in their range of behavior that when they behave at all out of character, they don't feel true to themselves.

Harry Kim's aspirations for higher rank and starship command have been a runner throughout the series. He's even been commanding night shifts aboard Voyager for several seasons now. Why then is he so inept in this command scenario? Is he still so naive, after nearly seven years, that he actually thinks strangers will blindly follow his orders without question? Why, after he final turns his failure into success in the end, does he then decide that he's actually ready for command after all? Hell, the writers can't even remember that they've established he plays clarinet; he brings a saxophone aboard the alien ship to decorate his ready room.

Kim is hardly the only one behaving out of character. Seven of Nine has far too much intelligence about social cues and leading people than she should; literally any other character on the show would have made more sense to pair with Harry aboard this ship (though, of course, literally any other character -- but the Doctor (?) -- would have outranked him). B'Elanna is creepily nice in this episode simply to facilitate Icheb's misreading of the situation. She never treats anyone as kindly as she does Icheb in this episode (and certainly not a Borg drone, as we've seen from her interactions with Seven); it's no wonder Icheb thinks she has a crush on him. (She's even still nice when she lets him down easy in the end rather that verbally crushing him like a bug.) The Doctor, for once, is not the perviest character on the show -- instead, he's the voice of reason who says that the social signals Icheb is picking up might be just signs of friendship instead.

Even the one-off aliens of this episode don't behave believably. After ousting Kim as their captain, they quickly make him their captain again! (And don't oust him again when he goes right back to barking orders without explanation.) Plus, the concept of "Star Trek itself" is kind of off its game here, as the episode never interrogates whether these aliens are telling the truth. They claim they're oppressed by the others who are hunting them down. But they lied about their cloaking device technology actually being "medical supplies," so are they telling the truth about anything else? Who are really the oppressors here? And how good is this cloaking device anyway? In the opening sequence, their ship can seemingly be detected and fired upon even while it's cloaked.

The story may be poorly written, but some aspects of the episode do work. LeVar Burton directs, and when an actor directs other actors, you usually get stronger performances. It's also nice to see Ron Glass here as a guest star (only shortly before he'd return to science fiction on the short-lived Firefly.) There are great visual effects, including Voyager set down for repairs, and the Delta Flyer running from an attacking ship.

Other observations:

• Okay, Neelix is still behaving in character. His terrible advice about command is that you have to know your answer to everything (even what you want to eat), and never show indecision or solicit advice.
  

• The captain's chair aboard the alien ship is ugly: olive green, with alternating corduroy and leather stripes.

• When Tom challenges Icheb to a friendly car race, Icheb interprets it as competition over B'Elanna. Were this episode made today, a far more interesting angle to take would be if Icheb thought Tom was also into him, or hinting at a poly relationship, or some such.

This is another point I'll likely touch on when talking about the series finale and summing up Star Trek: Voyager -- but even when it's bad, the series usually isn't that bad. Performances, production value, and pace are all fine in this episode... so it is essentially "watchable." It's just not an episode I expect to ever re-watch again. I give this episode-long justification for "why we haven't promoted Harry Kim" a C-.