Lynxmukka comprehensively reviews Star Trek Voyager's Course Oblivion.[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]

"There’s coffee in that nebula!” is perhaps one of the most famous and loved quotes of Star Trek: Voyager, despite it coming from the rather slow moving Season 1 of the series. This month and hopefully many thereafter through the FNS, I’ll be writing a review of some of the most loved episodes in the Star Trek Franchise. This not only serves as a content filler to make sure you have more content to read every month, but most importantly that it broadens your perspective of opinions on various subjects in Star Trek. Personally, I’d jump at the chance!

So getting down to business, this month I’ll be reviewing the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Course Oblivion” which originates from Season 5, episode 18. It starts off with the wedding of Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres. Now the eager fans of the series will know that they’re relationship hasn’t quite fully developed to marriage at this stage, but us Star Trek fans follow along with this storyline and the doctor makes one of his usual obnoxious orientated remarks due to Neelix’s confusion on what to do with the bags of rice. What is perhaps most notable about the opening scene is that it’s got quite a substantial character development element to it. We see the marriage of two crewmembers, and all of the script that comes with it, expanding every character in the process to make them seem more human to the audience.

By the end of the scene, the slow motion camera angles and the ever increasing suspicious music kicks in and starts to grab the attention of the audience back onto the Science Fiction element of the series. We learn right away that the ship is losing molecular cohesion, although to anyone on the street you would mistake it for the ship turning into a shaped ball of jelly. One of the interesting aspects of this episode is that the crew develop a method of warp travel that is much quicker and more efficient than the one they already had. Is the enhanced Warp Core causing the growing problem or is it something else, something more shocking than originally thought?

The episode continues and the crew begin to narrow down what exactly is occurring within the ship, with the help of some snazzy Astrometrics read-outs they discover the cause of their problems- the ship and its crew are all duplicate copies of the original Voyager, and were created from the deuterium entity seen in a previous episode. The fact that they’ve linked in this episode quite substantially in terms of the cause of the main plot with a previous one is something I quite like. Episodes such as these are quite rare in the Star Trek franchise, we only really saw them more often with the development of the Star Trek: Enterprise series.

After a sturdy speech by Captain Janeway, Tom Paris and Harry Kim fall into conversation with the Helms Officer, obviously feeling very saddened by the death of his wife. The acting I thought in this part was quite good and the Tom Paris character I can sympathise with greatly at this point, particularly since I think it’s what a lot of the audience might be feeling if they were in the same situation despite not necessarily saying it. The next scene continues with this theme by the growing confrontation between Janeway and Chakotay, who both disagree with what action to take. The director used this sequence of events to emphasise the ethics of the situation, making the audience unsure of which action they would prefer to take, greatly increasing the amount the viewer has to think which ultimately provides a better experience when watching the episode.

The death of Chakotay later on in the episode seems to turn the Captain’s mind around, and after much hesitation gives the order to turn the ship around and heads for the Demon Y Class planet that they were originally created on 9 months earlier. In a conference on the way back, Janeway orders the remaining crew to put together a signal beacon, known to you and me as a Time Capsule, in order to keep a record of their existence, despite being brief but distinguished as Janeway put it. With the death of the Captain only a few minutes later, the feeling of the episode changes from hope to despair as the ship slowly breaks apart; physically and emotionally.

The first time I remember watching this episode was many years ago on the UK channel BBC Two, and from the first few glimpses of watching it, I noticed it was quite an adaptable episode which had various themes but perhaps most prominently that Janeway acted quite irrationally throughout. The feeling of sorrow, doubt, and hope to get to the end were all present in this episode. I couldn’t help but feel that they pushed this theme a little too much with Voyager’s Captain, since towards the end before her death, she seemed a little too alien-like to the viewers.

The final act of the episode portrays Harry Kim as Acting Captain with only Seven, Neelix and a few other crewmembers alive. The launch of the time capsule is a failure after the destruction of the torpedo launchers, and the ship is in imminent failure with it’s attempt to hold out until the oncoming ship, recently detected, arrives. In a dire situation, they drop out from Warp to Impulse speeds in order to get into contact with the other ship, but the change seems too much for the ship to handle, and the duplicate Voyager disintegrates into ‘blobs’ just before the real Voyager arrives.

Overall I have to say this is one of the better episodes of the Star Trek: Voyager series, despite some of its shortcomings. Perhaps this is because of the ending which I thought was quite effective when the ‘real’ voyager discovers the broken down wreckage of the duplicate ship, which was only a few minutes before contact. I say this because of the feeling left behind with the viewers- that it is all so easy to erase a history that is so detailed in findings, in this case in relation to Voyager, and at this point its 5 year mission. The fact that the duplicate Voyager found a way to travel at much faster speeds that wouldn’t have had the same detrimental effects on the ‘real’ Voyager only emphasises this point further and leaves a well-rounded performance at the finish.

If only every episode of Voyager ended in such a dramatic way, but then again this is a Space Science Fiction, not Lost.