Star Trek Voyager Reviews Written by Someone Who Actually LIKES the Show -- Sacred Ground

Okay, this is a review of the Star Trek Voyager episode "Sacred Ground," and contains many spoilers. It is intended solely for the enjoyment of those who like the show and can make leaps of faith if they want to, but would much rather put their hand in a basket to get bitten by a spirit creature. It's hallucinogenic and there's no messy clean-up! Those who prefer their entertainment to be a bit more earth-bound should go elsewhere.

How about some Furniture Porn?

No? The KFC fried rat story is there....Well then...

INITIAL VIEWER EXPERIENCE
Curiosity killed the Kes...Oh, it's the spiritual episode where we delve into our souls...If Chakotay is into his spirit guide and all that, why is he such a nay-sayer to spiritual things?...The Guide is pretty cool, but I think I know just where this is going...no I don't...Interesting, but would we expect Janeway to act any differently?

PLOT
Torres, Kim, Neelix, and Kes are visiting some holy places on Nechani, and Kes sticks her nose into a Nikani shrine because it's so "pretty." Well, an attitude like that must be punished, so she's zapped by a bio-neural field and falls unconscious.

In sickbay, the Doctor can't cure her when he doesn't understand exactly how this whole bio-field thing works. Unfortunately, the Nechani won't let anyone scan the shrine, and the ship's sensors aren't having much luck through all that rock -- did I forget to mention that the shrine is underground? Even the Magistrate, who wants to help, can only offer sympathy. Only Nechani monks, who have gone through some sort of ritual where they speak to the Ancestral Spirits, can pass through the field. Kes didn't do that so Kes must die.

Janeway [Surprise!] doesn't accept that and sends Neelix off to the Nechani library. He returns with a story of a prince who walked into a shrine without permission and was saved by his father, King Nevid, who pleaded with the Spirits for his son's life. As captain, Janeway feels equally responsible to Kes as a king/father would to a son/prince, and so she asks the Magistrate if she can go through the ritual. He promises to ask the monks.

In the ready room, Chakotay asks Janeway if she's really going to go through the ritual, and she scoffs about talking to the Ancestral Spirits. The important thing, she figures, is the ritual itself, which perhaps involves creating some sort of change in her blood chemistry [insert peyote joke here] which will protect her from the energy field. If they could find out about such a substance, then they could perhaps cure Kes. Chakotay agrees that there's doubtlessly some sort of rationale behind the religion, and complains that his mom ruined the magic of vision-quests by explaining the science behind them. [If you ask me, Chakotay spent a lot of time getting faced as a teenager.] Janeway expects the ritual will involve some sort of physical challenge, and her manner suggests smugly, "I'm more than up to it."

Now, if Janeway had only read her handy Star Trek manual, she would know that she is really, really asking for it.

But she hasn't read the book, and when the Magistrate tells her that her petition has been accepted by the monks, she's quite happy. Before she beams to the surface to meet her guide, Kim and the Doctor rig up a sub-dural micro-probe with a homing beacon in Janeway's arm. In addition to keeping tabs on her, it will send information about Janeway's blood chemistry to the Doctor. Too bad she's in a hurry, or they could give her the deluxe version that also makes its own ice.

Janeway is both good and bad as a petitioner. She knows better than to take her phaser, but it takes her a real long time to realize that the woman who fixes the lights and boosts Janeway's tricorder is also her Guide. Once she's got her bearings, however, she assures the Guide that she'll do whatever it takes to help Kes. The Guide keeps the mumbo-jumbo to an absolute minimum and seems a little amused by Janeway's approach to the whole thing. Janeway is respectful, but obviously uncomfortable, and when some women show up to change her clothes and hair, the whole thing seems to give Janeway the creeps.

Janeway is eager for the ritual to start, but the Guide says she herself doesn't know what is going to happen. She also tells Janeway she knows about the micro-probe, but doesn't care. Then she takes Janeway to a small room where three old coots are sitting on a bench. Janeway talks to them for a while, clearly confused by their assertion that they are "waiting." She has seen the monks around the place. Many of them are young. They didn't have to wait in here. The old people shrug at her and suggest she just sit down and wait with them a spell. They're really a combination of friendly gossips and grumpy farts, like some bathrobed Bob Dole convention.

Janeway tries to get the door open to pass through the room. It sticks. "I told you," says one of the old men to another old guy. "I told you it was locked."

Janeway tries knocking instead, however, and the door opens to reveal the Guide, waiting patiently. Janeway says that she wants to get on with the ritual. The Guide takes her to another room and asks her, "Do you realize that all of this is meaningless?" Janeway must concentrate on finding a connection with the Spirits. Janeway nods earnestly. The Guide puts a big rock in her hand and makes her stand uncomfortably for hours.

While the Doctor continues to monitor her, Janeway paints (her sister, she says, is the real artist), then climbs a rockface, then holds the rock some more. Finally, she thinks she may have seen something.

The Doctor explains to Neelix that changes in Janeway's blood chemistry are indeed occurring. Neural peptides are on the rise; perhaps they will cause a barrier of sorts to the neural energy of the shrine.

Janeway sits wearily in the room with the Guide, who gives her some water and presents her with a basket. Inside the basket is a nasty-sounding creature that travels in some fashion to the spirit realm. Janeway, showing less sense than we've come to expect from the captain, puts her arm in the basket, gets bitten, and passes out. The Guide puts her in a stone coffin very similar to the one we saw in Stargate, but not as comfy-looking.

Three days of ritual have gone by when Chakotay tells Tuvok and the Doctor he wants Janeway out of there. The Doctor explains that a toxin in Janeway's blood may be just what they're after. It's also hallucinogenic, so we now get to see Janeway back at the ocean she enjoyed so much when she was trying to contact her spirit guide in Season One. But instead of the lizard we have the Guide, and Janeway realizes it's now time to plead for Kes' life. The Guide tells her she already has what she needs to help Kes. Happy, she wakes up as the Guide gets her out of the coffin and gives her back her clothes.

In sickbay, the Doctor fusses over Janeway and uses the knowledge gained from her experience to start a treatment for Kes. It's a great treatment, except that it doesn't work at all. The Doctor apologizes to the captain, because everything she went through was "meaningless."

This word sounds familiar to Janeway, and she returns to the Guide [instead of being royally PO'ed like yours truly would be]. Not only does the Guide remind Janeway that yes, it was all meaningless, she lets her know that all those ritual challenges were just made up to satisfy Janeway's need for a challenge. Janeway says she's not giving up, even though she's no longer sure what she's seeking. The Guide, of course, is greatly pleased by this humbling admission, and takes her back to the room with the Florida retirement community fugitives.

Janeway realizes that these old people are themselves the Ancestral Spirits...if that's their real name. It's never made clear, although the old woman of the group does tell her, "We're good company." The whole point, Grasshopper, is to let go of the need for such certainty. The Spirits find out from Janeway that her true faith lies in science, in believing that everything can ultimately be explained. To save Kes, she's going to have to let go of that notion. She's going to have to kill Kes again by taking her back into the neural field at the shrine. As long as Janeway believes in the Force, she and Kes will be fine, but if she has any doubt, it won't be pretty.

Janeway never says no to a challenge, and there's only a few minutes left in the show, so she has Chakotay beam down with Kes. When Chakotay learns she's going into the energy field, however, he considers relieving her of duty. The Guide is nicely displeased that such interference is possible, and assures Janeway that she's not crazy.

So Janeway picks up Kes and carries her into the shrine, and if you're surprised that this brings Kes back, then you're probably still in suspense about why the chicken crossed the road.

Back on Voyager, the Doctor figures out some technobabbly version of the "real reason" why Kes was saved and Janeway wasn't killed, but Janeway tunes him out pretty thoroughly. She makes captainly remarks, but wonders what...really...happened.

CHARACTER
Well, it's not exactly a surprise who the focus of this one's supposed to be, and that might be the main problem here. I liked this episode okay, but in terms of character, Janeway acted just like I thought she would, so it wasn't exactly riveting. Much has been made of Janeway's scientific orientation and her desire to figure everything out, but could any of us doubt for a minute that she wouldn't be willing to make an irrational leap of faith to save Kes' life? If she had to, Janeway would put her head in a bucket and dance the Macerena to save one of her crew, let alone walk into some holy shrine when she's been given proof that others have done it safely before her.

We do learn some interesting stuff, like the information about her sister. Why don't we hear more about this sister? Where's her picture?

[Julia Houston here, and I've just fallen through a disruption in the time-space continuum. In my world, we've seen "Macrocosm," and we know that the painting scene is extra significant. Seems Janeway decides to take this up as a personal hobby. Whoops! The rift is closing. I must return to my own time now.]

The idea of the challenges coming from Janeway's own mind is hardly original, but it does suit her character well. It's interesting to think of it as the flip-side to her unflinching sense of duty. She does have a tendency to make things harder than they have to be as long as she's the one who takes on the brunt of the burden. Her decisions to blow up the Caretaker's array and to put the ship in front of Dreadnought reflect her attitude that personal sacrifice should be a matter of no hesitation. This is something we see a lot of in Starfleet. The Prime Directive itself stresses the need for sacrifice of personnel over something as intangible as cultural harm. Because Janeway always looks for the hard road, the idea that she could just walk into a room and easily talk to the Spirits would, it seems to me, truly never occur to her.

I want to know what that ocean site is all about.

Chakotay's character shows off his "I'm super-devoted to Janeway" side, but of more interest is that yet again he's very non-spiritual for a guy I thought originally was going to be some sort of Indian-guru-hey-let's-go-meet-your-animal-guide guy. I can't tell if this is inconsistency by the writers or all part of some larger understanding of Chakotay that just hasn't come into focus yet. Let's wait and see.

The characters of the Spirits are shallow, but fun. I like the idea of Ancestral Spirits who look and sound like Aunt Hester and Uncle Bob. They seem somehow wonderfully content in that room, being good company for whoever comes along. I also like that we don't find out for certain that they are the Spirits. Let them be old people who sit in there and pretend to be Spirits instead, as long as they get the job done.

SPECTACLE
Did everyone notice that the Guide's hair and hairstyle are a lot like Janeway's own? The Guide actually seems quite appropriate for Janeway in many ways, and the similar hair underscores that subtly.

DICTION
Not really a show devoted to good lines. The best one, "I told you it was locked," I already mentioned.

The double meaning of the word "meaningless" works well. Taken strictly in their literal sense, most religious rituals are "meaningless." It's what we put into them that matters. Since Janeway expects to find nothing in the ritual at first, she finds nothing.


SONG
Always great to have a score done by real live musicians.

Now for the baggage section...

STAR TREK ELEMENTS WE (OR I, ANYWAY) LOVE
One of the reasons I like Voyager so much is that it does what none of the other Trek series have managed to do as often: visit strange new worlds and seek out new life, new...you know. These people and their Spirits are interesting. I like the attention to detail with the Magistrate explaining his people's separation of church and state. The costumes had a definite, consistent style, and I could easily imagine that this really was a workable society.

STAR TREK ELEMENTS WE (OR I, ANYWAY) HATE
Much as I love these worlds, however, I wish they wouldn't all have something funny with their faces on the bridge of their nose. I realize it's difficult to come up with different alien faces, but can't they just be bald or something every now and then? Or just make them look human. We know lots of aliens only show their differences inside. Mention they've got eight hearts or something like that.

I think I must be the only person who dislikes seeing guest stars on Star Trek in more than one role. It's okay if I can't really tell under all the make-up, or if it's someone, like Tim Russ, who was just an extra the first time. But every time I look at the Magistrate, I'm wondering about whatever happened to Tin Man. Maybe he/it could get Voyager home!

Hmmm, I think that wraps this one up.

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