[7.4/10] The second half of “Caretaker” has everything the first half is missing: substance, intensity, character, and excitement. This still isn’t a perfect hour of television. The vibe remains a little too “random mid-season episode of The Next Generation” rather than a distinctive and riveting start to a whole new thing. But it does have those essential ingredients that make Star Trek feel like Star Trek.
Chief among them is the fact that Voyager being stranded 70,000 lightyears from home hinges not on a simple twist of fate, but on a moral choice. So much of the lack of drama in part one of the episode stems from the fact that nobody seems to care much that they’ve been blown halfway across the galaxy. But maybe there’s good reason for that when the being that brought you here is still around to send you back. Kirk made it out of the “Delta Triangle” with some help, and Picard convinced Q to send the Enterprise back to its original coordinates under similar circumstances. Maybe there’s an entire course at the Academy on staying calm when a demigod has launched you a lifetime’s distance away from home.
But that changes when Janeway, and the audience, learn that the Caretaker is dying, and the array he used to bring them here might fall into the wrong hands when he passes. The umpteenth mysterious energy being from the first half of the episode is, in fact, an explorer much like our heroes. There’s resonance in the fact that he screwed up a local planet, devastating its climate, and wants to use his powers to protect the people whom he’s wronged.
Those are the Ocampa, a species who live in an underground enclave and only live to be nine. The surface is populated by the Kazon, crops of warring tribes who each have one major resource and covet the others. Despite the Caretaker’s questionable methods, his aims -- to find a successor to carry on his work preserving the Ocampa, and protecting his technology from falling into the hands of the Kazon -- are sympathetic. The conflict has something going on under the hood: rival groups on the same planet, a species with conflicts between elder traditionalists and younger rebels, a being haunted by his mistakes trying to find any means to make things right.
So it’s meaningful when Janeway chooses to destroy the array that could send them home, lest the Kazon use it to decimate the Ocampa and steal the water they so covet. She’s unwilling to trade the deaths of innocent bystanders for her crew’s ability to return home. It makes Voyager’s stranding a noble sacrifice, rather than unfortunate happenstance.
Granted, Janeway could have, you know, talked with her crew before committing them all to this plan that will radically change their lives. Outside of some brief pushback from B’Elanna, no one seems to really object or even emotionally react to the fact that, with present abilities, it would take a lifetime for them to return home. Even the integration of the Maquis into the crew just sort of happens without anyone on either side griping or questioning it.
To some extent, VOY will have the chance to explore these things in more depth in later episodes (though candidly, never with the conviction it could have). And some leeway must be given to show’s setting the premise out as succinctly as possible so that uncertain viewers will have the info they need to decide whether to keep watching. But such momentous decisions and changes happen rapidly and easily in a way that leaves meat on the bone.
Still, this is, at a brass tax level, a more enjoyable hour of VOY than the first one. The characters bounce off one another with promising results. Janeway and Tuvok already feel like a Kirk and Spock-esque pairing with a certain built-in camaraderie. B’Elanna and Harry bond a bit as prisoners, and it’s a surprisingly effective pairing considering they don’t get many stories together once the show gets going. Tom and Chakotay’s frenemy dynamic is a bit too cute by half, but Paris is more likable here, both for going after Harry and for rescuing Chakotay when he doesn’t have to, even when he finds self-serving excuses to mask his altruism. The Doctor gets to be his huffy, lovably grumpy self. And god help me, I’m even a fan of Tuvok and Neelix’s “Bert and Ernie” esque-routine, which took root much earlier than I’d remembered.
(It’s kind of neat that Tuvok’s “I’m Vulcan” introduction and Neelix’s “I”m Neelix” response is the origin of Neelix’s “Mr. Vulcan” sobriquet for the security chief. I’d completely forgotten that!)
Speaking of which, in my memory, Neelix is mainly a clown and a bit of a nebbish. (Even though I like him approximately ten times more than the average Trekkie.) So it’s equal parts amusing and surprising to go back to the first episode and see that he’s a bit of a con artist, genuinely useful as a guide to this region of uncharted space, and even a little daring with his grifts and rescues. Neelix gets a bit of a bad rap in my estimation, so it’s fun to go back to the first outing and watch him be a tad, dare I say it, cool.
The second half of “Caretaker” is by no means perfect. Kes is, and sadly will remain, a big nothing out of the gate. The action scenes tend to run on too long, and somehow the CGI effects look more dated than Deep Space Nine’s do. From a moral standpoint, Janeway never seems to countenance the idea that the Kazon have as much right to survive and thrive on the planet as the Ocampa do, or wonder if the Ocampa might have turned as desperate and vicious had they not had a Caretaker to look after their needs for five-hundred generations. And again, for the time being at least, everyone seems surprisingly chill about being stranded in another quadrant and having to live and work on a joint Starfleet/Maquis ship.
And yet, there’s plenty of promise in the balance of “Caretaker”. What is frustrating about Star Trek: Voyager is that it had plenty of potential. The dynamics among the characters are more complicated and interesting in the initial setup than I’d remembered. The reasons for the Kazon’s antipathy toward the Ocampa, and the Ocampa’s internal divisions and ancient past, are more intriguing than anything that had lived on in my memory. Heck, even Janeway resolving to find the Caretaker’s companion or some other mechanism to bolt back home rather than simply resolving to fly back the long way is tantalizing in a way that didn’t hit me on my first watch through the series as a kid.
For first time watchers, I’m sorry to report that VOY does not necessarily live up to that potential. It finds tweaks along the way to make it an enjoyable and still important part of Trek. But what stands out returning to the show all these years later is how much possibility lay ahead of the show in this series premiere.
It still had to suffer stock archetypes and challenging questions of “How is this different from what we’ve already seen from Star Trek”? But it also offered viewers the tale of a strong captain making a bold ethical choice with dramatic practical consequences, charting a path through unknown space with its own cultural and political intricacies, and weaving two very different crews together. If anything, this first adventure makes it all the sadder that Voyager never flew higher, despite all it had to work with.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2022-10-25T04:27:06Z
[7.4/10] The second half of “Caretaker” has everything the first half is missing: substance, intensity, character, and excitement. This still isn’t a perfect hour of television. The vibe remains a little too “random mid-season episode of The Next Generation” rather than a distinctive and riveting start to a whole new thing. But it does have those essential ingredients that make Star Trek feel like Star Trek.
Chief among them is the fact that Voyager being stranded 70,000 lightyears from home hinges not on a simple twist of fate, but on a moral choice. So much of the lack of drama in part one of the episode stems from the fact that nobody seems to care much that they’ve been blown halfway across the galaxy. But maybe there’s good reason for that when the being that brought you here is still around to send you back. Kirk made it out of the “Delta Triangle” with some help, and Picard convinced Q to send the Enterprise back to its original coordinates under similar circumstances. Maybe there’s an entire course at the Academy on staying calm when a demigod has launched you a lifetime’s distance away from home.
But that changes when Janeway, and the audience, learn that the Caretaker is dying, and the array he used to bring them here might fall into the wrong hands when he passes. The umpteenth mysterious energy being from the first half of the episode is, in fact, an explorer much like our heroes. There’s resonance in the fact that he screwed up a local planet, devastating its climate, and wants to use his powers to protect the people whom he’s wronged.
Those are the Ocampa, a species who live in an underground enclave and only live to be nine. The surface is populated by the Kazon, crops of warring tribes who each have one major resource and covet the others. Despite the Caretaker’s questionable methods, his aims -- to find a successor to carry on his work preserving the Ocampa, and protecting his technology from falling into the hands of the Kazon -- are sympathetic. The conflict has something going on under the hood: rival groups on the same planet, a species with conflicts between elder traditionalists and younger rebels, a being haunted by his mistakes trying to find any means to make things right.
So it’s meaningful when Janeway chooses to destroy the array that could send them home, lest the Kazon use it to decimate the Ocampa and steal the water they so covet. She’s unwilling to trade the deaths of innocent bystanders for her crew’s ability to return home. It makes Voyager’s stranding a noble sacrifice, rather than unfortunate happenstance.
Granted, Janeway could have, you know, talked with her crew before committing them all to this plan that will radically change their lives. Outside of some brief pushback from B’Elanna, no one seems to really object or even emotionally react to the fact that, with present abilities, it would take a lifetime for them to return home. Even the integration of the Maquis into the crew just sort of happens without anyone on either side griping or questioning it.
To some extent, VOY will have the chance to explore these things in more depth in later episodes (though candidly, never with the conviction it could have). And some leeway must be given to show’s setting the premise out as succinctly as possible so that uncertain viewers will have the info they need to decide whether to keep watching. But such momentous decisions and changes happen rapidly and easily in a way that leaves meat on the bone.
Still, this is, at a brass tax level, a more enjoyable hour of VOY than the first one. The characters bounce off one another with promising results. Janeway and Tuvok already feel like a Kirk and Spock-esque pairing with a certain built-in camaraderie. B’Elanna and Harry bond a bit as prisoners, and it’s a surprisingly effective pairing considering they don’t get many stories together once the show gets going. Tom and Chakotay’s frenemy dynamic is a bit too cute by half, but Paris is more likable here, both for going after Harry and for rescuing Chakotay when he doesn’t have to, even when he finds self-serving excuses to mask his altruism. The Doctor gets to be his huffy, lovably grumpy self. And god help me, I’m even a fan of Tuvok and Neelix’s “Bert and Ernie” esque-routine, which took root much earlier than I’d remembered.
(It’s kind of neat that Tuvok’s “I’m Vulcan” introduction and Neelix’s “I”m Neelix” response is the origin of Neelix’s “Mr. Vulcan” sobriquet for the security chief. I’d completely forgotten that!)
Speaking of which, in my memory, Neelix is mainly a clown and a bit of a nebbish. (Even though I like him approximately ten times more than the average Trekkie.) So it’s equal parts amusing and surprising to go back to the first episode and see that he’s a bit of a con artist, genuinely useful as a guide to this region of uncharted space, and even a little daring with his grifts and rescues. Neelix gets a bit of a bad rap in my estimation, so it’s fun to go back to the first outing and watch him be a tad, dare I say it, cool.
The second half of “Caretaker” is by no means perfect. Kes is, and sadly will remain, a big nothing out of the gate. The action scenes tend to run on too long, and somehow the CGI effects look more dated than Deep Space Nine’s do. From a moral standpoint, Janeway never seems to countenance the idea that the Kazon have as much right to survive and thrive on the planet as the Ocampa do, or wonder if the Ocampa might have turned as desperate and vicious had they not had a Caretaker to look after their needs for five-hundred generations. And again, for the time being at least, everyone seems surprisingly chill about being stranded in another quadrant and having to live and work on a joint Starfleet/Maquis ship.
And yet, there’s plenty of promise in the balance of “Caretaker”. What is frustrating about Star Trek: Voyager is that it had plenty of potential. The dynamics among the characters are more complicated and interesting in the initial setup than I’d remembered. The reasons for the Kazon’s antipathy toward the Ocampa, and the Ocampa’s internal divisions and ancient past, are more intriguing than anything that had lived on in my memory. Heck, even Janeway resolving to find the Caretaker’s companion or some other mechanism to bolt back home rather than simply resolving to fly back the long way is tantalizing in a way that didn’t hit me on my first watch through the series as a kid.
For first time watchers, I’m sorry to report that VOY does not necessarily live up to that potential. It finds tweaks along the way to make it an enjoyable and still important part of Trek. But what stands out returning to the show all these years later is how much possibility lay ahead of the show in this series premiere.
It still had to suffer stock archetypes and challenging questions of “How is this different from what we’ve already seen from Star Trek”? But it also offered viewers the tale of a strong captain making a bold ethical choice with dramatic practical consequences, charting a path through unknown space with its own cultural and political intricacies, and weaving two very different crews together. If anything, this first adventure makes it all the sadder that Voyager never flew higher, despite all it had to work with.