Weren't duplicates able to breathe only on their home planet? This really got me confused because I clearly remember that Tom's and Kim's duplicates were suffocating on Voyager and could only breathe the planet's atmosphere. How were they able to take off then and be in contact with other species? Assuming they adapted the ship, they still wouldn't be able to roam around. It was a good episode nevertheless.
I don't know if they always intended to follow up on this story but I'm glad they did as this was too much to just leave it behind.
If you pay close attention you actually notice that something is off because Tom's still a Lieutenant. Some other things didn't add up as well, like the enhanced propulsion system but here Voyagers inconsistency actually was favorable. They've thrown other things in without precursor before.
One thing I find highly interesting is that copy Janeway is as stubborn and thickheaded as the original. She accepts what they are yet still refuses to turn back and instead heads on to Earth. Could have saved them all by turning back earlier. Couldn't happen of course but that's beside the point.
Me at the start of this episode:
- What the hell, B'Elanna and Tom are getting married? When did this all happen?
- Tom's a Lieutenant? He was demoted. How stupid are the writers on this show?
- Voyager has a new warp core? Why is this the first we're hearing of it?! I hate this show.
And as it turns out it's all a deception, nicely done. I did not see it coming. That still doesn't change the fact that the episode is all just a bit shit, really. It's got to be one of the most depressing ones, too. The crew's generally subdued reactions to finding out they're not who they think they were, Tom being the one angry crew member and suddenly becoming an arsehole bad boy (like the series initially set him up to be, but forgot about), these things just don't ring true.
The makeup effects also look very silly, and I honestly couldn't stop laughing as the episode progressed. The performances didn't help either, with Janeway mostly coming across as sleepy, Neelix looking like a leprechaun and Harry looking like a frog.
On the positive side, I like that the episode picked up a storyline from a previous one and I was impressed that Jeri Ryan still looked gorgeous even with the "melting" makeup. The ending is really dark and final, something which I wasn't expecting.
Good episode but sad, really sad...
Episodes like this are garbage. 45 minutes of anticipation with zero resolution. Waste of time.
Love the episode concept. It was told well and for the most part the crew behaved fairly close to what would be expected, except the copy of Janeway fails to make the right decision to protect her crew and return to the Demon planet. And when they find a potential alternative planet, instead of firing back to protect the ship, Janeway waits as usual for Voyager to take hit after hit after hit after hit before taking any action. Chalk up another two failures for Janeway. Even the copy makes horrible decisions.
An unexpected touching episode. I liked it.
Well... that was depressing.
It's nice that they follow up on one of the more crazier episodes. Otherwise it's a pretty boring episode. You realize pretty quickly that's not the real Voyager crew you watched in the episodes before. The ending is also not very satisfying. Surprisingly sad given they are only duplicates. I really wanted them to reach their home. Back home, they could have learned why the copies were sent off from the demon planet in the first place. Why was that important to the inhabitants of the demon planet? And how did they copy the ship? As I remember the episode, they just copied the DNA and created copies of the crew. They did not copy technology did they? And what happened then? These guys watched the real Voyager take off. Thus they knew who is real and who's the copy. Does that mean they copied (themselves) again and have implanted the second batch the idea that they were the real deal? Hmmm.... I should not think too hard about it.
Not sure why they had to meet the real Voyager in the end. Was that just to show that everyone understands that the real crew (who we accompanied in the last episodes) is totally unaffected by the copies' voyage? I mean, in the real world, Tom isn't an Lt, is still a bachelor, and Voyager has never invented a new propulsion system, right? We only meet the copied ship and its crew in this one episode, right? Every other episode told the voyage of the real Voyager, right?
I actually kind of liked that the episode had a sort of sad or somber ending. Often everything in the ST universe works out perfectly, so it was a nice change of pace to see that they were just too late to be saved.
Didn't Tom and Harry already know they were duplicates? The saw themselves on the planet. Were the dups duplicated as well? Overlooking this...cool episode.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-06-29T22:16:17Z
[7.6/10] One of the big complaints about Voyager is that the show constantly pushes the reset button. There have been a few changes to the status quo -- Seven joining, Kes exiting, a shift from the Kazon and the Vidiians to the Hirogen and the Borg -- but for the most past, the show maintains its status quo. Major characters probably won’t die. The ship probably won’t get wrecked. The crew probably won’t make it home in a random mid-season episode.
And it’s frustrating, because that means that Voyager is constantly in some kind of stasis. The dirty little secret is that's true for pretty much all of pre-Discovery Star Trek. It’s just how network television worked at the time. Even Deep Space Nine, the most narratively ambitious show of the era, only went so far when it came to changing the day-to-day of the show’s basic premise. But it stands out more in a show like Voyager, that is much more centered around an essential series arc than DS9, TNG, TAS or TOS were.
So that makes “What if?” episodes like this one extra precious, because the writers can do things with the characters and with the ship they couldn’t under normal circumstances. When there’s essentially no tomorrow, you can make radical changes without breaking the show. It’s paid dividends for VOY in everything from “Before and After” to “Year of Hell”. So why should “Course: Oblivion” be any different?
It is, and it isn’t. It shares common stock with those episodes in its ability to draw the pathos from characters dying and play out existential threats to the ship in a way that a normal Voyager episode couldn’t. And it isn’t because whatever alternate universe possibilities we’ve seen in past episodes, everything is set right by the end. But here, all we get is tragedy.
“Course: Oblivion” also earns distinction for being a secret sequel to another episode. It follows up on “Demon”, the outing from last season where our heroes encounter some silver goop on an inhospitable planet, inadvertently give it sentience, and then agree to provide more crew DNA samples for this new form of life to explore with. Part of my complaint with that episode is that creating new life and giving it seeds of yourselves to grow with is a big decision that “Demon” pretty well glosses over.
Making “Course: Oblivion” a follow-up to that story not only strengthens the episode but building upon something the series already established, but retroactively improves “Demon”, by making the exploration of those big choices not something left incomplete by the series, but rather explored in a setting where those consequences have time to breathe.
Despite those bona fides, the episode starts out as a bog standard mystery, and it’s a little tedious. Full disclosure, I remembered the twist to this one. So maybe, if you’re not wise to the reveal, seeing the crew gradually realize what’s truly going on has more juice than it does for a rewatcher. Thankfully, the episode pulls the trigger on explaining what’s going on fairly quickly.
But not before exploring some of the things that would be tricky for the show to pull off under normal circumstances. Tom and B’Elanna’s wedding has the rhythms of a sitcom, but there’s some genuinely touching moments in it. B’Elanna’s vows in particular tug at the heartstrings in a way I wasn’t expecting. And while B’Elanna’s death loses a little something knowing what’s coming, this is, for all intents and purposes, still Tom losing the woman he loves, right after he and B’Elanna plan to spend the rest of their lives together. There is pathos in that, even if they’re not our Tom and B’Elanna.
That's really the point of “Course: Oblivion”. What would it be like to discover that you’re a copy, and that the original is still floating around out there somewhere? The Next Generation made great hay with that idea in “Second Chances”, and Voyager doesn’t quite reach those heights, but plays admirably in the same space.
Once it’s revealed that the crew aboard this Voyager are silver goop-based replicas, rather than the real deal, a divide emerges. Half of the crew takes the Prestige approach, and embraces the idea that, clones or not, they’re essentially the same people on the same mission and shouldn't abandon it. Half of the crew takes a different approach, that knowing what they know, they shouldn't be bound by old power structures or quests, and should simply return to where they came from and do as they please.
I love that. I wish we got more of it. You can see both sides of the debate. Whether you’re made of deuterium or carbon, what difference does it make if you have the same memories and the same personality. None of us chooses who we are when we’re thrown into this world. The Demon dupes may have been thrown at a later stage, but they’re no different in substance. The things they believed, the experiences they shared, the goals they have beforehand are no different than when they learn the truth. You can understand Janeway being as devoted to her cause and wanting to uphold the same values she would regardless.
And you can also understand the likes of Tom and Chakotay reflecting on this destabilizing information and thinking, “Why should we abide by anything from these other people’s lives?” It’s hard to follow the chain of command or adhere to Starfleet protocols when you know that the you who sits at the helm today was never inducted into Starfleet. Wondering how much you should be bound by the strictures of a borrowed life, versus charting your own path on your own terms, is an equally valid perspective.
Frankly, I wish we had a deeper exploration of it. We get a few solid scenes, but for the most part, they hit many similar beats, and it doesn't feel like we get to spend as much time with how each member of the senior staff feels and reacts to different scenarios knowing what they now know. If anything, I wish the writers spent less time on the initial mystery and seeding how proud Tom is to be a “local” of Earth, and more time digging into the meat of the premise.
Granted, some of the premise stretches the bounds of plausibility. Magic goop that can turn into people is already a lot, so what more is duplicating a starship, I suppose? But something about the goo being able to turn into a fully functioning starship, with replicators and holo-emitters and a warp drive seems specious for reasons that are hard to articulate. Plenty of Star Trek episodes require a “just go with it” mentality. “Course: Oblivion” certainly does, though thankfully it uses that bit of a stretch for good ends.
One of them is the sheer neatness of watching the ship melt and contrast. The production team goes all out here, and I can appreciate the novelty of watching corridors warp or the hull of the ship ripple as it flies through space. In the same vein, the makeup team doesn't skimp on making our heroes look grotesque as their molecules begin to destabilize. It helps convey the sense of many of them straining to hold on despite plain biology demanding that they do otherwise. Kate Mulgrew, as always, sells that notion like gangbusters with a vulnerable performance, but the look of our heroes as they degrade does too.
And therein lies the tragedy. Whether or not they are the “real” Voyager crew or not, these people lived, they had experiences, adventures, personal moments that matter. They are sentient beings who deserve to live, and to survive. Watching them cling desperately to their unmoored existences, as ill-fortune robs them of their lives and their legacy, is gut-wrenching. There is a bitter irony to the fact that they never saw the destabilizing radiation coming, because it wouldn’t affect regular humanoids.
Seeing them struggle and fail, as they lose more and more of their friends and more and more of the ship, becomes a lot. Maybe too much in places.
Because “Course: Oblivion” becomes one big gut punch. Janeway nobly aims to download their ship’s logs and turn it into a beacon, so that whatever happens, her and her crew will be remembered. It is an understandable means to want to say to the galaxy, “We were here.” The launch fails and the beacon crumbles. Hope comes in the form of the real Voyager, a distress call goes out, a hail is sent, if the ship could only hang on for a few minutes more, maybe they could be rescued, or maybe they could at least be seen and recorded and memorialized.
Instead, all our heroes find is diffuse smattering of goo in the recesses of space.
The reset button of Voyager is frustrating because it prevents change. It prevents progress. It’s a reminder that, no matter what Janeway and company get up to within the hour, whatever distance they traverse, in some respects they are cosmically stuck in place. That is good for a television network that wants consistent and accessible programming and frustrating for viewers who want genuine stakes and open possibilities.
But there is also a sense of safety, of protection, inherent in that. Our heroes are favored by the gods (i.e., the writers) to not suffer too badly, to overcome the worst the universe can throw at them, with an expectation that all will be fine by the end of the hour.
The descendents of the Demon Planet are cursed. They have no such protections. And despite the fact that they are nominally and spiritually the same, possessed of the same ingenuity, the same compassion, the same connections to one another, they are fated to fail, to fall to nothing and be forgotten. That is sad, and it is heavy.
This deliriously good high concept premise provides for such things. You couldn’t kill off all of Voyager at once in a typical episode. You couldn’t let them fall to ruin. You couldn’t let the audience experience what the worst case scenario would look like. (Ironically, not even in “Worst Case Scenario).
But you can here. A “What If?” setup allows the creative team to explore, to take chances, to make moves that would defy the demands of continuing television series. But they also give the writers and opportunity to be bleak in a way Star Trek does not typically provide for, and to use that possibility and imagination to do what Voyager so rarely does -- break our hearts.