3.1 basics (part 2)

While the marooned crew of Voyager deal with food shortages, giant snake beasts and angry Neolithic tribes, Tom Paris convinces the unenthusiastic Talaxians to help him retake Voyager, promising that he will have a plan (although he admits to himself that he doesn’t have one yet). Meanwhile, the doctor detects the presence of Suter and devises a plan to slow the ship down – and Suter has to deal with having to kill again, after he had almost found complete peace. Paris contacts the doctor in a coded message and coordinates his plan, but Seska realizes the doc is sabotaging the ship, and, believing his story that he is working alone, blasts the holo-emitter, and disables the computer from accepting any Starfleet voice commands. This leaves Suter alone, and he has to kill everyone in engineering to complete his task. Well, almost everyone – one of the Kazon kills him just as he presses the button.

Back on the planet, Chakotay saves one of the cave women from a lava flow; the leader of the tribe reciprocates by treating Ensign Wildman’s feverish baby with a poultice that immediately makes it get better. Together, the two very different tribes watch as Paris returns triumphant with Voyager, having taken the ship by overloading the systems – this overload killed Seska, and the other Kazon escaped.

This episode marks the death of 3 crewpersons: Ensign Hogan from engineering, Seska, and Suter.

A couple of nits:

1) The doctor’s holo-emitter is blasted by Seska. When Suter returns to sick bay, he tries to invoke the doctor, but instead a tape plays that the doctor made in case he was disabled. In this message, the doctor explains that Suter is on his own. Two questions arise: if the computer was disabled from all Starfleet voice commands, why did it respond to Suter’s voice and play the tape? Two: although we saw Paris explain to the doctor what he specifically needed to do (and when) to enable Paris’ attack on the ship to succeed, we never saw how or when the doctor shared this info with Suter, making me wonder how Suter now knows what to do.

2) When Janeway is searching for a place to camp, she walks into a cave, looks around, and says, "This is the most defensible position we’ve seen so far. The overhang should provide us with shelter, and the breeze should keep insects away. Alright, let’s make camp." I don’t know about you, but if I was going to set up a campsite for about 80 or so people, I might make my first priority that it be near water – especially in this case, since the crew doesn’t have any containers for carrying liquid!