Posted:
00:19:48 on January 18 2001
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: Reviews - Voyager
Reviews Ex Deus
Written for TrekWeb.COM by O. Deus
"Shattered"
Summary: Lots of Trek favorites return as Chakotay goes on a National
Geographic tour into Voyager's past.
In one sense Shattered is an amazing accomplishment, it's proof that you can
make a clip show episode without using actual clips. As Voyager nears the
end of its run, Shattered is an attempt at a self-congratulatory home movie
from a show that sees little enough congratulations from the outside. And so
we have a mild romp through Voyager's past, we meet some old favorites, see
crucial events in the past as Chakotay struggles to complete a task it seems
Harry Kim could pull off without blinking twice. This might not have been a
bad idea if the majority of the audience really had a strong emotional
attachments to Voyager and its past as might have been the cast with TOS or
TNG. But Shattered shares the same problem as the series it commemorates, it
has some merits but it doesn't inspire much emotion or feeling in its
audience beyond a raised eyebrow or two.
DS9 understood this when it decided to journey into TOS's past with its
Tribbles episode, rather than into its own past. TNG, DS9 and Voyager
compensated during their own voyages in All Good Things, The Visitor and
Before and After, by linking the journey into the pasts and futures with a
personal crisis on the part of a charachter we relate to and an urgent task
that must be completed. Shattered though only offers a lackadaisical journey
into Voyager's past, glacially paced and with little real enthusiasm and
less sense to the plot than one would find in an episode of Andromeda.
Finding himself in a temporally fractured starship, Chakotay for some reason
decides he needs an ally and the best one he can think of is a version of
Janeway from a period where they're enemies and who knows nothing at all
about their current state of affairs. He then gives her as much information
about the future of Voyager as he can and then halfway through invokes the
Temporal Prime Directive. Janeway willingly accompanies a man who kidnapped
and attacked her and becomes best friends with him within fifteen minutes,
even though she's the type of person who holds on to grudges forever and
never tolerates any abridgement of her authority. The Borg drone version of
Seven willingly follows Janeway and Chakotay's orders without once
considering the Borg's priorities or delivering the demands of the Borg as
she did in Scorpion 2.
Virtually everyone behaves in a way completely out of character and even
though there's a new crisis every 5 minutes, none of the crisis feel
particularly urgent or critical. It all just seems like a National
Geographic expedition. Follow your guide Chakotay as he takes you 3 years
into Voyager's past. Meet the Kazon and Seska. Next follow him into the
cargo bay and meet some Borg drones. Don't worry, they're friendly drones
and really great at parties. Stop by the corridor and get chased by a
Macrovirus and then see the Maquis in their leather outfits. It's cute but
only the Captain Proton sequence manages to be funny and only the Seska
sequence evokes any tension. Both Martin Rayner and Martha Hackett use their
last chanche to return to Voyager as an opportunity to chew as much scenery
as possible and so Dr. Chaotica and Seska can't help making an impression.
Dr. Chaotica declaims his speeches in a timbre that makes wannabe
Shakesperean actor, Robert Beltran flinch while Seska plays devious,
manipulative and ruthless as if she knows she has only 5 minutes of
screentime available.
If they had gotten the whole episode themselves or maybe gotten a chanche to
unite, pool their talents for evil together (imagine Seksa and Dr. Chaotica
together prepearing to fire the Death Ray at Voyager) this episode might
have had a focus. But they're just pit stops on Chakotay's tour of Voyager,
a tour aimed at Janeway and the audience. The clumsy goal of this tour is to
show Janeway what wonderfull things await her and to show us what wonderfull
things have happened but Shattered never produces a sense of wonder, rather
a sense of boredom since most of the things we're being shown were more
interesting in their original episodes. Basics, Scorpion and Caretaker were
much better episodes than Shattered and what made them work can't be
contained in a few minutes. And while some of Janeway's early responses are
amusing, she adapts too quickly and too easily to functioning in this
environment.
Once she does ponder keeping Voyager in the Alpha Quadrant and is easily
talked out of it by Chakotay's impassioned speech about the wonders of
Voyager. His speech though doesn't make very much sense. Voyager has
acquired new crewmembers but Neelix would exist whether or not he joined
Voyager's crew, Naomi would have been born on DS9. Seven and Icheb would
have remained with the Borg but was it worth to have Voyager lose dozens of
crewmembers including Janeway's actual first officer and Doctor just so
Voyager can have some neat adventures in the Alpha Quadrant? There are
plenty of adventures in the Alpha Quadrant too. The Enterprise D has managed
to go where no man has gone before without spending 7 years on the other
side of the galaxy, Voyager could have too. What exactly is so special about
the Delta Quadrant? What has Voyager accomplished here that it could not
have accomplished anywhere else?
Shattered has no answer and so Shattered ultimately comes off like a
customer who made a bad purchase trying to convince himself what a great
deal he got. It tries to praise Voyager but finds that there isn't that much
to praise. And so it limits itself to repeating "Look, see what a great time
we had" over and over again in the hopes that somebody will actually believe
it. Still Shattered does manage to accomplish one thing, it finally gives
Robert Beltran a Chakotay episode and makes it so that episode is about
everyone and everything but Chakotay. He must be shattered.
