OVEG: Innocence

Description: There's a blank piece of paper before me, with "Innocence" written at the top. I've been staring at it for some time now. I have to start this episode some time, I know, but must it be now? Must it be me?

This episode sits on my face, smothering me. It's not just bad, that would be something I could deal with. I beat Twisted. I toppled Threshold. I pushed through Tattoo. But this, this one I dread having to start this episode again. There's nothing I can latch onto. Sure, Deadlock may have required me to turn my brain off to watch it without feeling insulted, but at least there was something happening!. This isn't just stupid - it's stupid and dull. Forty-five minutes of complete boredom, interspersed with the occassional moment of something actually happening.

I'll do what I can, for I must soldier on. But I must warn you, this is Star Trek: C-Span here. There are only so many ways of describing a complete lack of anything.

Anyway, our story begins with a goldshirt doing what goldshirts do best: dying a pointless death. Poor, dumb bastard. It seems that we have yet another shuttle crash; my God, their insurance must have the worst deductibles in the galaxy by this point. It's one of those old shuttles that are used only for the dangerous missions, so I guess he should've expected this. Tuvok comes running out with a medical kit, looking him over. "I can't feel my legs!" Sh, goldshirts don't talk. "Several of your vertebrae have been fractured," Tuvok politely informs him. Hm, you know, that probably should've been something to check before you hauled him out of the shuttle and dumped him on the ground, Tuvok. Seriously, the only explanations for this situation is that a) Tuvok decided to haul the guy with the back injury out of the shuttle and dump him a couple feet away without checking the extent of his injuries; b) The guy was fine, and somehow critically injured himself walking out of the shuttle; c) He was riding on the outside of the shuttle when they crashed. None of these paint a very good picture about the future of mankind's exploration of space.

The goldshirt bemoans his condition, how he's got no family back home, nothing. Geez, it's like you just want the script gods to kill you. He also keeps trying to get up - hey, idiot, your back is broken! How about holding still! We are not even a minute into the episode and already everyone has shown towering idiocy. Well, believe it or not, goldshirt dies. Tuvok takes out a thermos and sets it by the cadaver's hand, and a little energy field shimmers over him for a moment, and now he's in stasis. Um, any particular reason you didn't do that sooner, Tuvok? Ah, what does it matter.

Well, before that's even done, Tuvok catches a little girl running around with a green triangle painted on her forehead. Soon two more kids emerge, so Tuvok decides he'll have to take care of them, prompting the Kindergarten Cop moment while all the kids run up and hug him. I hope you like that, because there's going to be a lot of this.

Back on Voyager, Janeway's talking about making first contact with a new species, the Drayans, a race of interplanetary beekeepers. Chakotay, as usual, uses this as an excuse to tell a story, although this time it's a personal one, about how on his first such mission he unwittingly asked the delegate if they wanted to bump pelvises. Ah, it's good to hear that Kirk's diplomacy technique is still being practiced a century later.

Anyway, the Drayans beam over. "May this day find you at peace and leave you with hope," Alcia says. "That's a traditional blessing from our ancient scrolls." Chakotay quickly shoots back a platitude, since he's not getting upstaged when it comes to traditional blessings: "Om-nah-hoo-pez-nyeetz... It means 'peace in your heart, fortune in your steps.'" Unfortunately, in Drayan language, it means, "Hey, wanna bump pelvises?" Well, no, but it would've been something to break up the long boring scene.

Janeway starts the tour, and we get to watch the whole thing unfold, because Lord knows watching a tour of something we see every flipping week is very engaging. Alcia, however, takes offense at the first stop: the warp core. The Drayans were once brilliant scientists, but a reformation four generations earlier did away with all that silliness, and now they're xenophobes. For some reason, Chakotay smiles at all this, because isolationism is such a noble endeavor. This kind of stuff happens for a while, but frankly I'm just skipping over all of that. The Doctor does a thing in Sickbay to prompt more of this self-righteous crap until finally the Drayans leave without granting Voyager the chance to mine something off one of the worlds in their system, a problem that won't be resolved because between the pointless tour and Tuvok's daycare there's no time for it. Nobody cares, though; even if they did do it, it's just one technobabble solution to an artificial technobabble problem.

Meanwhile, on the planet, the Kindergarten Cop thing continues. Tuvok can't leave until he fixes the shuttle and figures out how to get past the electro-turbulence (that's even worse than regular turbulence!). Resolving this while taking care of the kids is pretty much the point of this episode: Vulcan must find a way to cope with and rescue non-Vulcan children. You know what that means, don't you? That's right, komedy! Some examples: a kid asks what "electro-turbulence" is, so Tuvok gives an even more technical explanation of what that is, so that the kids won't understand him! Oh, my sides! And the kids ask for food, but all Tuvok has are rations, which aren't what they want to eat! Oh, you kooky Voyager writers, what will you think of next?!

After all that crap is out of the way, Tuvok says he has to get to work, because the sun will set in four hours. The kids protest this, however, that they can't be here after dark because something lurks in the night, something that snatches them away. "That's when the Moron comes," the girl says, at least, that's what I think she says. It would explain why we haven't seen Neelix so far this episode. Tuvok scans the nearby cave, but can't detect the Moron at all, but that doesn't stop the kids from saying that it's in there. Monsters are usually immune to tricorders. He tries scanning again, but still doesn't detect the Moron. Try turning the tricorder around, Tuvok.

Tuvok takes this time to berate them for not detaching themselves from their emotions, thus showing his keen grasp of the psyche of non-Vulcan children. He decides that now is the time to teach them mental discipline rather than, you know, working on trying to escape. He has them picture the emotion the Moron makes them feel. "It's like this big, black cloud with lots of thunder and lightning all around us." Tuvok thus suggests the following remedy: "Then imagine a strong wind is pushing that cloud away. Watch as your fear grows more distant. It is no longer a part of you." Yeah, that works. Amusingly, I saw something once done by a charlatan on Penn & Teller almost identical: put all your stress into a pen, and then let go of it, and your stress goes away. Problem is, it doesn't work, just like this doesn't, it just sounds nice because it's easy to do.

Tuvok says that now that he's finished with an ineffective solution to their fear, he's going to get around to fixing the shuttle and looking for the other kids that are missing. He tells them that they'll need to sit quietly and not touch anything, which they agree to. Jump cut, and they're running around, screaming and touching things. Bet you never saw that coming, assuming you've never, ever seen an episode of television in your life. When one of the kids nearly burns the other's face off with a plasma torch, Tuvok intervenes, grabbing the kids and physically separating them. They still pester him with questions and one of them starts playing with a Class-2 Starfleet Ashtray, so Tuvok tries to get them to meditate, but surprisingly that's hard to do with the ritalin brigade. Eventually they pick up another ship coming in, a Drayan one. The kids are frightened, and they reveal the next big plot point: that they were sent here to die.

Well, as you can imagine, Tuvok finds it difficult to imagine that a society would kill its own children, and I have to agree. My first thoughts were that this was a kind of right of passage before they can have the honor of wearing the beekeeper outfits - the truth will be far, far stupider, of course. Anyway, Tuvok hides them until the search party leaves and promises to protect them until he can sort this out, causing another massive Kindergarten Cop hug moment. Meanwhile, on Voyager, Torres and the Moron -Neelix- show up, but there's no sign of Tuvok and Ens. Expendable, so Voyager heads off looking for them. This prompts Alcia to contact Voyager with indignation, bitching that by being there they desecrate the sacred blah blah of the bullshit bullshit. This is the first of many conversations that could resolve this without conflict if Alcia would just explain what's going on, but it's better to be an indignant xenophobe and having things screwed up instead of saying a few things to get these meddlesome people out of her hair. It's a plot so lame it seems like it belongs in season one TNG, when people battled to the death for dumb reasons and Aryan Wunderkind pranced about.

Back on the moon, the kids are lying around the fire, but aren't sleeping, which finally prompts Tuvok to literally sing a lullabye to them. Dear God, it hurts. Apparently it didn't do the kids any good either, because when morning comes all but one are gone. Tuvok can't find any evidence of what might happened, so when the girl insists that it was the Moron, Tuvok finally decides to go into the cave. He finds four sets of clothes, laid out as if the body had just evaporated, but no sign of life. Tuvok manages to get a signal through to Voyager, explaining the situation, but the signal cuts out. Janeway decides to contact Alcia and offers to help, but Alcia responds with the expected Drayan diplomacy: arrogant insults. Janeway finally announces that she's heading down personally, which again could be stopped if Alcia just explained what was going on, but because that would spoil the only attempt at a surprise this episode has, she decides to just pour on more indignation, instead of convincing Janeway to stop.

Anyway, the shuttle heads in, pursued by a Drayan ship. At the same time, Tuvok takes off with his own shuttle. Thus it's the dueling shaking cameras as the currents do their thing. Alcia shows up again, and it's more of the same crap from her, still not explaining what's happening. They even fire warning shots rather than explain what's going on. Tuvok is forced to land, Paris and Janeway show up, and the crap with Alcia now occurs in person. Finally, Alcia stops the subterfuge crap and we can close this damn episode out.

And this now leads us into the explanation, and it's a stupid one. See, the girl is going to die from old age, because Drayans age backwards. It's nice to see that not only have they rehashed all the jokes from old sitcoms, they've even rehashed the plots (aging backwards was used in Mork & Mindy when Jonathan Winters was added to the cast). Aging backwards is, frankly, stupid, because aging is perfectly logical: you grow in size until you are strong enough to create and defend your own offspring, and your body begins shutting down once you can no longer do that. Running the whole thing backwards means that you shrink as you go through puberty in reverse, your bones shortening, your teeth falling out so they can be replaced by tinier ones for those last few years when you're not actually reproducing. As far as twist endings go, this isn't exactly The Sixth Sense; hell, it wouldn't fit a little sense.

The explanation for the other kids is that they died of old age and the energy of their bodies emerged. I wouldn't expect Voyager to have the balls to show the bodies of dead children strewn about the cave, but this is such a lame work around. You realize, of course, that if all the energy of a child's body was released, say, 60 pounds, would be the equivalent of a five hundred megaton bomb. In this case, the body just evaporates, leaving the fresh smell of pine. (And before anyone protests, there's some things in the body that just can't magically evaporate away. At least spontaneous combustion tries to burn the remains away...)

Incidentally, Janeway and company completely buy into this, even though the girl is still protesting. How horrible would it be if it was all lies... especially such obviously stupid ones that led a young girl to her death because of their gullibility. Then again, if it finishes up the episode, I guess it's a small price to pay not to have to endure another minute.

Rating: 1

Burn, Baby, Burn: Tuvok's shuttle crashes on a moon thanks to technobabble rays. Notable exception: it can be repaired.

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