"One"
Air Date: May 13, 1998
Star Date: 51929.3-51932.4
PLEASE NOTE: This file is frozen. I think we've done all we're going to do on it! You're welcome to send addition nits but they will be filed for future reference instead of uploaded.
Encountering a nebula hostile to biological life, Holodoc suggest the confinement of the crew to stasis chamber for one month during tranist. Janeway agrees and asks Seven to assist Holodoc in keeping the ship operational while everyone else goes to sleep. Unfortunately, ship's systems eventually begin to degrade, including Holodoc's mobile emitter and even Seven's Borg implants. Still Seven makes a heroic effort to keep the ship operation--even to the point of sacrificing life support at the end of the journey to insure that everyone on the crew survives. At the end of the journey, Seven discovers a new yearning to socialize more with the crew, taking her first real steps in treating them as her new family.
Brash Reflections
Evidently, my trees have more leaves than last year because I had to watch black-and-white radio again this week.
Just the obvious ones before I turn it loose . . .
And WHY wasn't Seven affected by this radiation when Holodoc stated that it affects all biological tissue. Are the creators attempting to give us a subtle hint that Seven's skin is really oh-so-smooth plastiflesh?!
Also, why did the crew have to be in statis chambers? In order to be effective the statis chamber had to screen out the radiation. If the tube screened out the radiation, why did the crew have to be unconscious? Why would being unconscious provide protection against radiation?
All in all, the episode had interesting possibilities but I found it very hard to get past the obvious, blatant holes in the plot. (Kind of reminded me of NextGen episode "The Next Phase" where Ro and La Forge become phased and can pass through walls but they seem to be able to walk across the floors just fine!)
Reflections from the Guild
(Note from Phil: I haven't verified these reflections but they sounded good to me!)
Johnson Lai: When the Doctor's program destabilized in engineering and he dematerialized, I didn't hear or see his mobile emitter drop to the floor.
Chris Booton: A very, interesting episode, with good character development for seven, and cool hallucination effects.
They were some nits including a 47 or two.
They appear to be going through the nebula at impulse, wouldn't warp speed be more realistic?
Two 47's At one point seven orders nutritional supplement 14Beta-7 Later she orders course 3.47 degrees starboard.
When Tom Escapes from his chamber seven checks his body temperature after he gets back into it and gives it as 96 degrees. Why would she give it in farenhight when normally they do Celsius or kelvin?She must be using Farenhight as 96 Kelvin is well below freezing , but if his temperature was 96 degrees Celsius just 4 more degrees and his blood would be boiling and he's likely spontaneously combust.
At One point janeway says they have a crew of 150? What about all the people that have died? Shouldn't they have more like 130 something?
When the doctor deactivates in engineering an we get a wide camera view, there is no sign of the emitter, that may have been one of sevens hallucinations though so it's hard to tell.
As soon as seven takes life support offline she collapses, but shouldn't the oxygen take some time to be lost?
Ron Saarna: Boy the creators are trying to make life hard for us nitpickers by giving us a string of Point of View episodes. How do you nitpick a Hologram Simulation, dream episodes, hallucinations etc... Still, I did manage to find one glaring nit, that when I spotted it just blew me away:
The Voyager is trying to fly through the Mutara Nebula?!? Wasn't this the same one they used in The Wrath of Kahn? I don't think it took Kirk and co. 60 years to get back for the Search for Spock, although they did start to look significantly older with this movie...How come Kirk never got any wierd facial burns when they battled in the Nebula? How come they couldn't come up with any other name for the Nebula, just for continuity's sake? And didn't the Nebula become the Genesis planet, after the device exploded?
OK, I will offer a cheesy explanation. The stellar cartographers in Kirk's day, or shortly thereafter, really missed having something to call by that name, so they went and found another one and named it the Mutara Nebula. Or the Mutara Nebula-A, and the crew just kept calling it the Mutara Nebula for short. Lame excuse, but it works for me.
Why does Seven, when asking the distance to the Nebula's edge, shorten the computer's 6 days and X hours, to "6 Days...sigh"? This is pretty un-exacting of her, considering she likes to get straight to the point. Other than that, good episode. As for Seven appealing strictly to the male demographic, she is oddly enough the main reason my girlfriend started watching Voyager with me. There is something interesting (other than catsuits) in watching a character develop over the course of a season, rather than the wooden cut-outs that Harry and Tom have become. Besides, every good Star Trek series needs a Pinnochio, and now this one has two.
Corey Hines: How did Holo-Doc get so much personal info about Kim and Torres to program it into a holodeck simulation.
Even before the second commercial break, 7o9 saves the day.
Janeway says that she expects 7o9 to follow the Holo-Doc's orders as if she was following her's. This obviously means that she isn't going to follow orders at all and Chakotey is the only person who can see this?
Chakotey's and Janeway's conversation - KMYF.
The name of the nubula is called Nutara. Could it have been that hard for the writer's to come up with a new name. Or did Mutara(Star Trek II) sound too cool.
One thing I've always wondered about some holodeck programs. Holo-Doc says 'freeze program' and oddly enough, Neelix and Janeway holo-characters didn't inquire why he said that before they were frozen.
There was a major problem with the time continuum, time slowed down greatly.(Actually, the show had some technical difficulties and needed to be re-cued.)
The Holo-Doc wondered why Jeffries tubes weren't made bigger. I though we saw some big ones in "The Hunted"(TNG).
I realize it was a dream, but 7o9 standing in the snow didn't look very real.
When Holo-Doc disappears, for some reason his mobile emitter also disappears.
When 7o9 was on the bridge, it took 41 minutes to get out of the nebula. When she gets to the cargo bay it takes 11 minutes to get out. Did it really take her half an hour to go from deck 1 to deck 14?
David T. Shaw, Hamilton Ontario: Saw "One"- this "One" I like! (Not without it's nits though).
I thought that this was a great episode- it allowed Seven to grow as a character, come to terms that she is an individual but she is able to adapt, and some bit of "What is really going on here?"
Two massive nits- the nebula is giving off "dangerous sub-nucleic radiation," stuff so dangerous that it nearly incapacitates the entire crew before they are able to reverse course, and actually kills a member. Nor do they really show much surprise that the Nebula is giving off this radiation- Janeway never orders anyone to examine why this particular Nebula is so dangerous. From this I gather, while this state might be rare, it is not unheard of. So why don't the sensors detect this stuff and start sirens hooting all over the place? If the creators really wanted to kill off a member of the crew, they could have sent Tom and him into the Nebula in a shuttle testing a new shield configuration, and have it fail (Tom is in critical condition, the engineer at the sensors, dies....)
Second massive nit- why isn't Tom dead? The edge of the Nebula was dangerous enough to kill a crew member in a minute, and yet in the middle Tom is able to get out of his stasis chamber, wander to a turbo lift, and get found by Seven, with no apparent burns or damage to himself (although enough to lose consciousness....). An even better question is why, if as the Doctor says, stasis has been know to fail before, do the caskets have alarms when the sleeper awakes ahead of schedule. And the best question is why is Tom stupid enough to get out of the casket and wander around, without even bothering to page the Doc or Seven? He must really hate enclosed spaces if he is willing to die just for a little elbow room (I think that the creators missed a golden opportunity here- if Tom kept on waking up, but couldn't bring himself to get back in without someone forcing him to, he would have called Seven of Nine. Then, instead of hearing voices at the beginning, she could have heard phantom communicator beeps with Tom begging for help- she runs to Deck 14 and finds him peaceably sleeping. It would have added uncertainty to the audiences thinking- was it a real call or not? Thus paralleling Seven's slide into Surrealism).
Other less serious nits- why doesn't the radiation affect Seven? The doctor could have said that her Borg nano-machines constantly repaired the cellular damage. Of course, that presents difficulties in new episodes, but it would have explained why Seven didn't die.
When Seven was pursuing her phantom alien invader, why was she carrying the phaser rifle with the big "Shoot me" light turned on? She has a Borg artificial eye, the ambient light should have been plenty (especially since the Borg cubes aren't exactly well lit...).
When the Doctor went off line, what happened to the mobile emitter- I didn't here it hit the deck nor saw it lying there.
And when Seven turned off life support, she shouldn't have collapsed immediately- Voyager is a fair sized ship, and the Oxygen and heat don't just disappear because environmental controls are not working- the oxygen must be used up and the heat must sleep out to space- neither of which would have happened in the eleven minutes left until they were out of the Nebula. And she could have turned off all environmental control except for one room, or maybe even hung out in a shuttle- but she can be forgiven for not thinking too clearly by this point.
For the not really nits:
Calling a nutritional supplement 14B7 seems very inefficient to me (of course it allows a "B" to split a forty-seven). This suggests that there are at least 20 other supplements (1 thru 13, 14A and 14B1 to 6) Since "taste is irrelevant" to Seven why does she need so many?
I noticed that Starfleet has gotten rid of minus and seconds when measuring things in degrees- all of the course corrections were given in a decimal of a degree (which gave us the second 47: .347 degrees correction)
I loved the dream vision of Seven all alone in a desert- it was a wonderful (if obvious) metaphor for her situation. And it finally answers the question "Do Borg drones dream of assimilated sheep?" with a resounding "NO!" (My apologies to the memory of Phillip K. Dick).
I also loved the hallucinations of Seven- the alien, who you weren't quite sure if he was real or not (I suspected he wasn't real, but I thought he might be and was going to stop Voyager so that he'd be the first through the Nebula). I loved not knowing what was going on.
I also loved the comments the hallucinations of the crew made "Blame me, I'm the one that trusted her." says Janeway, while Tuvoc makes some very uncharacteristic remarks about efficiency (he is normally all for it).
Best line, the Doctor to Seven: "Between thought and action there is a great body of tact that is begging for your acquaintance" (or words to that effect- I didn't get a chance to write it down).
I loved it- I wish they could all be so good.
Alex Otis: I liked this episode, from what I saw of it. Good Seven episode. My nit is about the UPN provider, not the episode. The news preview said they would have a segment from Tuvok on tonight. They said, "Find out what Voyager's Klingon has to say!" Well, what can you expect from non trekkers? Next weeks episode should prove promising
Matthew Patterson: I think I'm noticing a trend here. In each episode where Voyager practicaly turns into the "Seven of Nine Hour," there is a scene in the beginning with the Doctor or Janeway trying to teach her manners.
Doesn't Voyager have only 15 decks? If that is the case, why are the stasis units on deck 17?
2 (maybe) 3 47s. Supplement 14-beta-7 where the 4th digit is 7 (if you consider the beta a digit, and if you take out the beta it's 14-7), and .347 degrees starboard.
Isn't the definition of suspended animation a state where all body functions are brought to the brink of death? How do you recover from that on your own enough to open your own stasis chamber?
Seven reads Paris' body temperature in Fahrenheit, not Celsius.
Asking for Neelix's help on reconfiguring the warp field? Then again, he is a holo-Neelix, he knows whatever the computer does, but still . . .
Yea for continuity! They used the same biohazard warning symbol for the antimatter tanks as they did in First Contact!
Great idea, using Mutara again. The writers must have watched Wrath of Khan recently.
Wonderful scene when Seven is telling the Doctor that she won't let him down. You can tell that he and Tuvok are the only people she really cares about that much.
Fascinating look at Seven's dreams. I wonder if we'll get to see them again.
Thank goodness we're finally through the people who react with shock whenever Seven's Borgness is mentioned. I was getting sick of that.
I just love the way 7 deals with Trajis. "Let's play another game. Suppose the oxygen on the bridge has been depleted. What do you suppose the results might be?"
7 says that when she was a drone, she was separated from the collective for 2 hours. Could this maybe have been during "Scorpion," when they were in fluidic space?
I love the part where 7 hallucinates the Borg ship. Except I don't think we've ever seen that model of Borg before and when it speaks, it doesn't talk with the usual trillions of voices rolled into one. Actually, its voice is more realistic that way, but they don't usually do it this way. Usually they have the same voice no matter what size group.
Seven's vision of Janeway says that the stasis units are on Deck 14, but earlier they said 17.
Why did she cut power to the senior officers' stasis units? Kill the grunts, not our beloved characters!
Why does cutting the life-support suck out all the oxygen? there should still be plenty left, since Seven is the only one that has to breathe it.
Well, it took almost a season, but 7 FINALLY learned etiquitte! Yea! Now it's time for a real uniform instead of the brown and silver paint.