Star Trek Voyager Reviews Written by Someone Who Actually LIKES the Show! -- The Cloud

While they near this nebula, Chakotay talks to Janeway about his animal guide and offers to show her how to talk to her own guide. "It's a date," she says.

We see the nebula, seven AU's in diameter, as a swirling red cloud [hence the title]. They enter this cloud and head for those omacron particles. Unexpectedly, they run into an energy barrier. Transporters won't let them beam the particles through the barrier, so Janeway has Pairs punch his way through. Inside, things look mighty weird.

Neelix is fussing with his pots and pans and sees through the mess hall window that they've once again gone where no one with half a brain has gone before. Now, not being a Starfleet person, he bitches about the danger Janeway likes to put the ship in. Kes objects that it's all wonderful, and they kiss until strange gobs of goo pass right through Voyager's shields and slam onto the hull. This goo starts draining Voyager's energy.

Janeway sounds the retreat, but the barrier is harder to go back through than it was. They try pushing on it with thrusters, firing phasers, and finally use one of their thirty-eight (and counting) photon torpedoes to get through. They get out of the cloud with an eleven percent energy loss, the very opposite of what they had in mind. Janeway thinks about giving up coffee.

Kim is sleeping with a mask on his face when Paris comes in and wakes him. Kim talks about remembering his mother's womb, and Paris shows off his considerably less impressive-than-that holoprogram, Sandrine's. Sandrine is a real French woman Paris knew during his academy days and this is a recreation of her French bistro/pool hall where everyone knew his name. All the women fawn over him and the men all call him "buddy" or something like that. There's a gigolo, some famous pool players, and Ricky, this very boring woman who Paris says goes into all his holoprograms. Kim and Paris shoot a rack.

Torres analyzes that goo on the hull and confers with the Doctor. That goo has nucleogenic peptide bonds (but I'm still going to call it "goo").

Chakotay shows Janeway how to contact her spirit guide with his medicine bundle, which includes a feather and some rock and a hallucinogenic device that most of us, let's face it, would kill to get our hands on. Janeway ends up hallucinating about an seascape and meets a cute little lizard. Before she can ask it questions and we can see this thing talk, however, Torres comes in to announce that the goo is some organic element to a large creature. The nebula is no nebula!

Janeway and the others try to figure out how much damage they've done to this poor nebula who was just minding its own business before they came along. The Doctor offers his own unwelcome insight, and they all realize that the site of the omacron particles constitutes the equivalent of a vital organ. The hole Voyager made in the energy barrier is still open, and particles are bleeding out of it. With the Doctor's prompting, Torres figures out that nucleonic radiation beams might help the creature recover. Janeway orders Kim to figure out how to survive better in the cloud, Tuvok to work on getting the shields the work better, and Torres to get her beams ready, because they're all going back in to help undo the damage and say they're sorry before the nebula sues them all for damages.

Neelix has had enough of this and storms into Janeway's ready room to demand that he and Kes be put off the ship before Voyager destroys itself. Janeway gets the most irritated with Neelix we've ever seen and announces that if he's going to be in her crew, he doesn't get to cop out of the hard stuff. She then explains what "dismissed" means: a Starfleet expression for "get out."

Kim has worked out something to help the ship get through the cloud, and back in we all go. Once they reach the cloud's wound, however, a new defense system zaps Voyager into a free fall (well, they're in space, so it's not really a fall but an uncontrolled plummeting through space caused by the push of those defense systems). They eventually right themselves and realize they triggered the defense systems with their engines. Chakotay figures out that the cloud has a circulatory system, and Paris nudges Voyager into the slow current. Only on Star Trek or a Montana interstate is 200 kph considered slow travel.

With Kes in tow, Neelix comes on the bridge as the self-appointed morale officer, bearing trays of vegetarian munchies. Janeway actually has a taste of his stuffed cartaway leaves before Voyager makes it back to the wound. Paris gets the ship out of the current and Torres tries her beams.

With little effect. The Doctor comes on screen and suggests that Voyager could be used as a sort of suture to help close the wound if it got into the wound and used beams fore and aft. Janeway sends out a microprobe to distract the defense systems and Voyager does the suture thing. The wound closes and they all get the hell out of there.

Janeway doesn't think much of all this, since they lost 20% of their energy reserves and now have to go fourteen light years out of their way to try to barter some energy from a planet Neelix knows. Kim meets her in the turbo lift and invites her down to Sandrine's, where the whole command crew is checking things out. There, she is amused by the gigolo and pretends not to know about pool so she can run a game on Paris

CHARACTER
The plot on this one isn't all that much, though it's not bad, so it's nice that we get some interesting character development. For a change, we don't center on one or two characters. Instead, everyone gets a moment in the spotlight.

Kim's reference to his mother's womb is downright strange. I can't figure out exactly what is supposed to make Kim special, and I'm not sure the writers have done so, either. I applaud this little nugget about him because, well, it's strange. Does he have some sort of super memory? Does he have some really weird Oedipal complex? Did some psychiatrist fill him up with false repressed memories? Inquiring minds want to know.

Contrasted with this is Kim's failure to note the damage to the optical network in his status report (showing, I suppose, that he's new to the job) and a smart-alec exchange with Tuvok. Again, I need to know where all this is going to lead.

Paris' character development works better, with his attempt to dazzle Kim with his colorful past. Sandrine's is really one big Paris popularity pageant, and it's interesting that this is where Paris feels comfortable. We know he's been less than popular in real life. Half the people on the ship, including many of our key characters, don't like him much. Paris brings Kim, his only real friend right now, to this lair of made-up friends without seeming to realize how needy this makes him look. When Torres rejects that pool player and calls Paris a pig, Paris looks like a kid whose toys have been rejected by the other kids in the sandbox.

Of course, we're supposed to see that Paris is more at home with people who aren't stuffy Starfleet types like his admiral father, but it's more interesting that he's more comfortable with people he can completely control. No wonder Kim is such a good friend for him. The question will be whether Kim and Paris' friendship can even become more evenly balanced. And, if we ever do get an answer to that question, that will be very interesting indeed.

[What? Oh, hello. Julia Houston here. I was just in this strange library of little gray discs. This weird librarian guy told me I had to leave before the sun exploded and then shoved me into a doorway. Anyway, it's brought me back in time, and so I can tell you "Cloud" watchers that far into the distant future Voyager will beget a third season, and in that season there will come unto us an episode entitled "The Chute," in which this question about Paris and Kim's friendship gets partially answered. Want to know more? See my review then!...Hey, I don't belong in this past. I must return to my own time before my dinner gets cold. Hey! I can walk right through this wall!]

The Doctor's development works two ways. We find out about his programmer, Zimmerman, who looks just like him and lives at the Jupiter Station Holoprogramming Center. We also get to see him interact with Torres in an unexpected fashion, being both rude and encouraging towards her. Torres seems to like this. In fact, I wonder if she's going to get to like to Doctor himself in time.

Chakotay's animal guide business is a hoot. His line about Torres, "the only person I know who ever tried to kill her animal guide," reveals that he has a habit of spreading his people's spirituality around, which makes him the closest thing to an evangelist we've ever gotten from Star Trek.

Janeway's eagerness to explore the whole animal guide thing and her unapologetic rudeness to the Doctor mark her as someone quite different from our previous Star Trek captains. Picard would be polite to the Doctor until his back broke and wouldn't use a hallucinogenic device unless it were for some noble cause -- and even then I suspect he wouldn't enjoy it. Sisko might use the device, I suppose, but he'd just see Kira talking to the prophets or something. The lizard is definitely more intriguing.

There is also the moment where she tries to play nicely with the others at Sandrine's, but can't resist being better at pool than everyone else. I don't think Janeway is going to work as the sort of captain who hangs out in the holodeck with the crew, if for no other reason than Star Trek captains never work out that way. Now that she's shown she can whip them all whenever she wants to, I can't help but wonder if she'll ever be back to play.

Her discomfort with being a mere mortal is nicely on display when she tells the computer to delete her log entry "I only wish I felt larger than life." She can't be fallible, even to herself, and I wonder if that's going to cause her some real grief in the future.

Hmmm, did I get everyone? Oh yes, Neelix's reluctance to go along with Starfleet heroism seems right, as does Kes' wide-eyed enthusiasm.

SPECTACLE
The nebula was okay.

The freakiest moment for me was actually Janeway's seascape. It took me a while to realize she was just kneeling and that her legs weren't buried in the sand.

DICTION
Some good lines include:

"You don't care about your crew and introduce them to the specter of death at every opportunity." -- Neelix, who's obviously never heard of tough love.

"Somebody picked your pocket, on earth?" "Oh, they just do it for the tourists. They give it back, usually." Kim and Paris about -- you guessed it -- Paris.

"A hologram that programs itself. Now what would I do with that ability? Create a family...raise an army..." -- Doctor.

"Let's see, you ran your ship through it, fired phasers at it, and blew a hole in it with a photon torpedo. I'd say there was a pretty good chance that you did some fairly significant --" "Computer, delete audio." -- Doctor and Janeway sharing quality time.

"Paris, did you program this guy?" "Yeah, why?" "He's a pig, and so are you." -- Torres and Paris.


SONG
It's always lovely to hear that wonderful Star Trek score played by real musicians.

And now for the baggage...

STAR TREK ELEMENTS WE (OR I, ANYWAY) LOVE
We're so used to the whole thing that we are in danger of not noticing how our understanding of Starfleet idealism never puts us in Neelix's position. We know Voyager's crew will do all it can to help the cloud heal. We don't require speeches and explanations, and so we don't get any. Janeway doesn't even lecture Neelix about that when he objects. Instead, it's just a case of close the door, sit down, strap yourself in, and shut up!

It's great when the crew acts like people instead of statues. I really enjoyed the woman on the bridge who takes one of Neelix's munchies and then turns away in alarm when Janeway seems displeased.

STAR TREK ELEMENTS WE (OR I, ANYWAY) HATE
It's not fair to demand that the show never come close to anything it's ever done before, but some premises definitely have gotten tired. Sentient space anomalies are included.

Well, that's all for this one.

Star Trek Voyager Reviews

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