This episode of Star Trek: Voyager throws us straight in media res, disorienting and confusing us, but that's fairly common for a science-fiction program. We suspend our judgment until we find out what's going on, but it's explained only gradually, and then unsatisfyingly.
The Hirogen, an alien hunter species the USS Voyager has encountered recently, have taken over the Voyager. We don't see this battle, nor do we see flashbacks to it, nor is it even described. They then discovered the Voyager's holodeck technology, and the Hirogen leader realized its potential.
You see, the Hirogen are hunters. They usually hunt in small groups, just a few of them aboard a starship, locating some prey target, usually an intelligent being, and pursuing them until they're able to kill them and take trophies. Occasionally, such as this time, several Hirogen ships band together to take down something larger, such as the Voyager, apparently. But they haven't always lived like this. They used to have a civilization, until their self-imposed scattering throughout space isolated them into small groups. The leader thinks that if his people could use the Voyager's holodecks to satisfy their hunting instinct, allowing them to hunt simulated prey in scenarios taken from the vast computer databanks, they could live together in communities and have a civilization again. This kind of makes sense.
His second-in-command disagrees with this plan, because he likes the way things have been his entire life, but he's going along with his leader because he's the leader. This also makes sense.
What they did next doesn't make sense: they put neural implants into several members of the Voyager crew (our main cast members) that interact with the holodecks and make them think they're actually the characters whose roles they're playing. Where they got these neural implants is unclear - apparently from the Voyager, but how they knew the Voyager had these implants and what motivated the Hirogen to look for them are undescribed. Also undescribed is the reason behind using them at all. The Hirogen leader's plan doesn't require that there be any actual prey, or indeed any real participants other than the Hirogen themselves, and they wouldn't be using neural implants. This makes no sense.
The Hirogen expand the holodecks aboard the Voyager, essentially making the ship one large holodeck, and turn off the safety settings, so real people can in fact be injured and die during simulations. And they start experimenting with the neural-implanted crew, sticking them into one scenario after another taken from the databanks, for reasons that are never adequately explained.
The Hirogen dig through the historical archives in Voyager's computers and find some data about World War II, deciding for some reason that it would be a great scenario to play out. Our main cast members now all think they're in a French town that's been invaded by Nazis - some are resistance members, some are American soldiers trying to drive the Nazis out of the town. The Hirogen are in the scenario as Nazis, and there are of course many hologram Nazis, Allied soldiers, and civilians. But we can easily see the Hirogen as themselves, Tuvok as a Vulcan, Seven of Nine as a Borg, B'Ellana as a half-Klingon, etc. The holograms don't notice that they aren't human, and the neural-implanted real crew members don't notice that they don't fit into the scenario either. What's happening makes sense; why the Hirogen are doing it doesn't. It doesn't satisfy their hunter-prey instincts, and it doesn't move the leader's plan forward either.
The entire two-part episode, unusual in that both episodes were originally aired back-to-back, seems to have been made just because the producers wanted to do a bunch of cool stuff on screen. There isn't any high science-fiction concept here. They wanted to blow up a building and show Klingons fighting Nazis when the barriers between holodecks come down. Everything looks great, and the actors do a fine job with the mess of a script they were given. But the writers just never really had any idea why any of this was happening. They were just told to make it happen, so they did.
This is not to say that there aren't some fine moments. The comedic moments when Neelix, having realized that he isn't actually a Klingon, has to lead the Klingons to fight the Nazis by attempting to act Klingonlike, are quite funny, but all too brief. The Doctor is similarly amusing as he encourages Neelix - kind of. We have the privilege of hearing Jeri Ryan sing. And one of the holographic Nazi officers, a true believer in the Third Reich cause, gives a bone-chilling speech that highlights the true evil of Nazism while simultaneously encouraging the #2 Hirogen to mutiny against his leader.
In the end, there is little resolution to all of this. Of course the Voyager crew take their ship back, or there wouldn't be more episodes. Janeway had made a deal with the Hirogen leader: leave Voyager, and she'd give him the holodeck technology he needed to carry out his plan. But the leader was killed by his second-in-command, who in turn was killed by Janeway, so the rest of the Hirogen don't even know whether they want this holodeck gizmo. Will they use it, as their leader originally intended? We don't know; they take it and go away. They return in a later season to answer that question, but here in this episode we don't find out.
As I said, this episode contains some amazing scenes, great acting, strange scenarios, and so forth, but the writers are forgetting that the plot must come first, and it must make sense; you can't just string together a bunch of scenes and call it a story. They're also forgetting the cardinal rule that having Nazis on Star Trek always goes badly. We're also suspending our disbelief yet again that Starfleet hasn't chucked the entire idea of holodecks into a star by now, considering that in every single episode featuring the thing, the holodeck somehow goes horribly wrong.
It's clear that they had about one episode worth of material but stretched it out into two in order to justify the expense of all the sets and costumes they had to bring in for this one. In terms of the overall arc of the series, we were expecting there to be some sort of final confrontation with the Hirogen, who had been causing Voyager problems in recent episodes, but we didn't expect it to happen like this - defeating the Voyager and its crew in a battle we never get to see, then turning it into a giant spacegoing LARP. I was vastly unsatisfied by this episode, but not as badly so as with "Year of Hell," which made me stop watching Voyager when it was on the air.
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