1x11 Asylum

[7.3/10] This isn’t a bad start to the season, but it doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know from the prior season finale. The Protostar is a weapon. Vice Admiral Janeway is looking for Chakotay, who was lost in the Delta Quadrant. We get to see slightly more of these things in action, but it doesn’t move the ball that much for what should theoretically be a momentous event.

That event is our heroes finally making it to a Starfleet comms station! The Protostar crew’s arrival does come with a fair amount of excitement. Their meeting with Barniss Frex, a low level officer banished to this far away station, has the thrill of firmly identifying (some of) the crew’s species, and suggesting that it’s mere paperwork to get them into Starfleet. (I guess they’’d be enlisted crew? That in and of itself is kind of cool since the mainline series tend to focus on the officers.) The detail that Starfleet Command knows Dal’s species, but it’s secret enough that they themselves need to be notified is tantalizing, and the prospect of our heroes’ good deeds being recognized by the institution they aspired to is a heartening one.

But then it turns into a pretty generic action set piece before there’s much time to deal with any of the implications of all this. The Diviner’s prophecy comes true, as the Protostar’s secret drive of evil or whatever causes the Starfleet comms station to turn its weapons against itself and steadily self-destruct. It’s a pretty simple “ultimate weapon” at the end of the day, but maybe that’s at the right level for a kids show. I’ll admit to some mild disappointment if we don’t discover other layers, but there’s plenty of time for that.

From there, it’s a pretty run-of“escape the about-to-explode thing” escapade. I appreciate the broader notions the showrunners bring into play here, about Rok-Tahk being an unsure but talented young scientist and Dal taking Holo-Janeway’s “leap of faith” wisdom literally. But I’ve reached the point in my crusty old age where I’d rather see my Star Trek crews thinking their way through problems than doing big stunts. Nonetheless, the young heroes’ leap toward the Protostar and save from Holo-Janeway’s tractor beam when they miss by a little is a solid sequence.

I’ll admit, in the time between episodes, I’d forgotten how rudimentary and, frankly, a bit ugly the show’s design aesthetic and animation is. The (otherwise decent) opening set piece, which pays homage to The Voyage Home with a whale rescue mission, looks like something out of a 1994 episode of ReBoot. And the awkward character designs and halting animation style seems particularly off when you have a scene featuring mainly humans. The holodeck flashback to Janeway and Chaktoay’s farewell looks like something out of The Sims. I don’t know if the show will get the impulse or the budget to upgrade here, and I got used to it in the initial batch of episodes, but it stands out when jumping back into this world.

Despite my gripes here, this was a solid return. I appreciate the throughlines the show offers for the character. Gwyn is still hung up on her dad to some extent, and Zero is understandably hesitant with her given how a reflection of the Medusan’s true form messed her up. Rok-Tahk wanting to be a scientist but not being sure which branch is for her is a good, age-appropriate arc to set her on. Jankom Pog deciding he’s royalty since Tellarites are founding members of the federation is fine for a few gags. And Dal trusting others, learning to work as a part of a team, and even hugging Holo-Janeway is some darn good stuff. Overall, this isn’t the rousing return I might have hoped for, but it still sets the young heroes on a good course.

This episode, and maybe the run generally, suffers from too-many-writers-syndrome. A third of this episode is an extended spaceship-goes-haywire riff which feels like somebody came up with a clever action sequence that required too much exposition and someone else shaved off the exposition and it didn't make sense any more. Maybe there's something special about the warp signature of the Protostar that explains why Janeway tracks it to the farther-from-the-Federation Tars Lamora instead of where the ship actually is, but that was too technobabbly and got cut? Maybe there's an explanation why you'd build a space station with just one escape pod that got cut? Maybe there's an explanation why the kids aren't disillusioned when the very first Starfleet officer they meet is an incompetent coward that got cut? Maybe there's an explanation why the transporters don't work that I missed? Why are the kids so worried about missing the jump and floating in space forever - even without a tractor beam, couldn't holo-Janeway, like, drive over to them and scoop them into the landing bay? (Also, isn't the original, no-tractor-beam plan terrible? Transporters and tractor beams seem to have inertia-cancelling properties but slamming into a starship driving around seems pretty deadly?)

Quibbling with the physics-physics of Star Trek is entertaining even if I'll still complain about it; it's ultimately the narrative physics that aren't working. It's not clear to me why we set up an elaborate memory loss subplot for Gwyn, with potentially interesting consequences for her relationship with Zero that would help round out that character, and then undid it less than an episode later? A lot of the motion from episode to episode in this show feels like the thing that happens in comics when a new writer takes over a book and ignores / quickly and ruthlessly cauterizes any open plot threads that don't serve their aims.

This episode serves just to remind us of where we are in the plot, and unspools the obvious consequences. There's promise in the overall arc: rebel good guys on the run from the other good guys is a classic, effective pulp complication, and if the Protostar now has to be on the run from the Federation to avoid hurting the Federation, that's a cool setup. I don't know why holo-Janeway hasn't tried to communicate with the Federation at any point so far, though? Seems like most of this could be sorted out with a conversation?

There's been a lot to love about the animation in this series (generally great environments, for one thing), but whoah this style really falls apart when there are a bunch of grown-up supposed-to-be-ordinary-humanoids in the scene. Janeway on the holodeck was painful to watch.

There is so much promise here (Jason Alexander voices like two lines!?) but I am coming to resent my completionist tendencies.