[9.0/10] To be frank, I didn't think Voyager had the chutzpah to do an episode like this one. For a solid half of its runtime, this episode has no imposing villain, no deadly anomaly, no ticking clock, no major crisis of any sort. Instead, it centers on the kind of thing you don’t get much of on network television, but would presumably be a tremendous part of any extended journey through the vastness of space -- the oppressiveness of monotony.
How does the crew react when they have nothing to do? When there’s no stars in the sky to look at? When the captain is remote and closed off? When the lack of challenges and differences in their day-to-day lives also comes with a lack of purpose? When the ship offers relative comfort but no excitement? When you have nothing on the docket but to sit and wait and think and stew?
I remember “Night” from childhood, and I have to admit, it hits differently after the pandemic and lockdown. The unchanging days, the isolation, the testiness, the anxiety, the random diversions to pass the time, the little “hacks” to get a sliver of normalcy aboard Voyager, all hit home when much of the world experienced the same thing in recent years.
Which is to say it’s relatable when the ship’s holodecks are in high demand because it’s all there is to do. (Appropriately enough, I watched a lot of Star Trek during lockdown.) It’s understandable when Tom and B’Elanna and even Neelix are getting short with one another amid the tedium. It’s sympathetic when Neelix starts to have panic attacks and bouts of cabin fever. It’s familiar when Tuvok tries to meditate in astrometrics as a substitute for the outside world. And it’s recognizable when Harry has nothing else to occupy him amid the doldrums and so pours his feelings into a sonata for clarinet. (Some of us pen reviews of classic television instead.)
I can't pretend that Voyager fully commits to this. The back half of “Night” goes into full “moral and practical crisis” mode while hitting some pretty familiar Star Trek beats. And even in the first half, we get the debut of the “Adventures of Captain Proton” holodeck tribute to the sci-fi B-movies of old. (Which I remember being more fun than either Janeway’s Victorian pastiche, Chez Sandrine, the resort set, or da Vinci’s workshop as Voyager’s holo-diversions go).
But for a solid couple acts, Voyager is downright languid, reflective, unbothered by the need for dramatic incident in a way we’d never really seen in thirty years of Star Trek. Leaning into that, examining what the torpor of monotony would feel like aboard a starship traversing a vast void, is bold in a way that I just don’t expect from this series.
As if to cement that “Night” is an outlier among Voyager episodes, this may be the finest hour of the series for Chakotay, and by extension, Robert Beltran. Chakotay has never been more complex or sympathetic than when he’s trying to manage the daily functions of a ship, the morale of a stir crazy crew, the moods of guilt-ridden captain, and his own struggles under the tediousness of life aboard Voyager. Hell, the show even pulls off a strong scene between him and Tuvok, rooted in their fraught history and shared admiration for the Captain.
More than anything, Chakotay feels like a real person flustered but steadfast in an impossible situation, with Beltran showing layers of the character we’ve never really seen before. The show’s usual stars shine here, but for once Beltran came to play, and it’s a glimpse at who and what this character could have been under the right circumstances.
But Chakotay is only pressed into such circumstances thanks to the self-blaming spiral of Captain Janeway. One of the coolest choices writers Joe Menosky and Brannon Braga make here is to keep Janeway from the audience for much of the early stretch of “Night”. We feel her absence in the same way the crew does, and especially for a season premiere, the delayed gratification of a Captain in absentia makes for another bold move that heightens the sense of frustrating listlessness aboard the ship before the fireworks start.
What I love most is that without the ongoing risks posed by the Kazon or the Vidiians or the Borg, the only enemy Janeway has left to fight is herself. The lack of excitement means the Captain resorts to soul-searching, reflecting on the choices she made that left everyone stranded in a faraway place for years, with the promise of decades more to come. This is probably a reach on my part, but given how she’s shot and lit, there’s an almost Colonel Kurtz-like quality to Janeway in her seclusion.
The idea that when the music stops, when the momentum that's sustained the crew grinds to a halt, the weight of their circumstances falls on Janeway in a more concentrated, demoralizing sort of way is the kind of engrossing personal hardship and reckoning that, frankly, Voyager should have done more of in its first season when the wound was fresh. I’m glad that with new leadership at the helm, the creative team is doing it now.
Of course, the quiet meditation and moral reflections can't last forever. So of course, our heroes run into some locals from “The Void” who manage to shut off Voyager’s power, board the ship, and attack from the shadows. It’s a nice little horrorshow in between the two major sections of the episode. Seeing the ship go completely without power and light is striking as a change of pace. And the all-black, scaly aliens who hiss and emerge from the darkness have a much creepier design and vibe than the similar spooks from TNG’s “Identity Crisis”.
Plus hey, it’s enough to convince Janeway to spring back into action. She needs a crisis of her own to spur her to rise to the occasion and become active once again. And the fact that she reverts to her badass space marine guise, as she did in “Macrocosm” doesn’t hurt either.
What follows is pretty standard, but well done stuff. Another ship in the void fends off the Night Aliens’ ship, and offers to lead Voyager to a vortex that could spare them another two years in the void. Only, its pilot, Emck, is cagey about why he’s there and what he wants. Naturally, it turns out the Void Aliens are misunderstood indigenous people who’ve been taught to fear strange ships polluting their territory, and Emck is a craven waste-merchant willing to sacrifice lives to make a buck.
There’s elements worth holding onto there. The idea that people who attack reflexively may not be evil, but responding with learned behaviors from other aggressors, is an interesting one, especially in the context of Star Trek. Guest star Ken Magee does a great job as Emck, giving him an appropriately slimy quality while giving the sense that he could just be a harmless local eccentric. And the idea that another operator would be so cruel as to reject civilization-changing, life-saving technology, because stopping deadly pollution would hurt his bottom line, makes Emck into something of a Captain Planet villain, but also a good vessel for societal critique.
Still, that material is largely set-dressing for the larger point here. The big idea of “Night” is a simple one -- this is a referendum on the choice Captain Janeway made four years ago. The scenario the episode presents is the same one Janeway faced with the Caretaker in miniature. Either you do the self-serving thing and take the shortcut so as to spare your crew a long journey, or you do the altruistic thing and destroy it, consigning your crew to the wilderness for longer still.
Granted, it’s not exactly the same. Two extra years in the Void is a lot shorter than seventy years through the Delta Quadrant. One chump with a radioactive tanker is a far cry from a dying demigod. And at this point, you’re talking about making the choice just for your own crew, not for the Maquis you’d be stranding alongside you.
The broad contours, however, are the same. What’s striking is that this time, Janeway would still do it all again, but won’t subject her crew to the consequences of her actions. She’d rather stay behind in the Void and send Voyager on so she can destroy the vortex alone. She’s still honor-bound to save the Night Aliens from cruel extinction, but she wants to be a martyr for the cause, bear that weight alone, rather than imposing it on her subordinates. There is a nobility in that, a brand of self-reflection and questioning that the series frankly should have interrogated in more depth when it launched.
The heartening part of “Night”, though, is that her crew, and more importantly her friends, won’t go along with it. You can quibble about how the stakes aren’t the same here as they were in the beginning of the show. But again, the upshot is plain. Every member of the main cast affirms that they would rather be stranded for longer in this miserable empty expanse than be without their captain. (Except for the extras, who are, amusingly, still pecking away at their control stations in the background while this grand, dramatic stand is going on.)
It is, in many senses, a ratification of Janeway’s original choice, the one that put all these people here in the first place. It’s a sign that they admire the Captain’s commitment to doing the right thing, even at tremendous cost. It’s a sign of how much they value her specifically. And it is an affirmation that, even if they’d rather not be stranded lightyears and lightyears from home, if it meant following Kathryn Janeway, they’d do it all again.
The rest of the episode is, frankly, kind of perfunctory and a little cheap. The opposing captain boasts that he could destroy Voyager in ten seconds, and yet the Federation starship puts up a standard fight without issue and finds a convenient weakness in Emck’s vessel. The Night Aliens have their Big Damn Heroes moment, showing well-timed trust in Janeway’s ability to be a captain of her word. And the science team figures out a way to have their cake and eat it too -- to both make it out of the vortex while destroying it in the process.
All of it feels like a zip to the finish, where the solutions are not particularly earned, and the big choices our heroes make have less impact because no one ever has to deal with the consequences of them. But that is less Voyager’s retreating to its usual reset button and more the inexorable inertia of 1990s network television.
So I’m apt to forgive it, especially when the point stands. Janeway need not torture himself. Her crew believes in her, trusts her principles, and would follow her through hell and back again. If season 4’s “Scorpion” was a turning point for Voyager, that divided the series’ eras into “Before Seven” and “After Seven”, then “Night” is a re-pilot. In some ways, the season 5 premiere relitigates the very beginnings of the series, offering a more complex and personal take on them, while also reaffirming Janeway’s righteousness, and the love she’s earned from the men and women who serve with her. That's a hell of a way to kick of off the fifth year of Voyager’s mission.
As I write this review, it’s been long enough since lockdown that the whole thing feels like a strange fever dream. I can remember the same lulls, the same sense of restlessness, the same need for distraction, the same self-questioning in the quiet spaces with nothing else to do. Despite coming out decades before, “Night” captures the feeling of that period better than any other piece of media I’ve experienced.
But I also remember how hard it was to do the right thing sometimes: to keep a safe distance from loved ones and strangers alike to protect their safety, to postpone favorite activities and celebrate holidays through computer screens, to be diligent about protective gear for the sake of others, to upend our whole lives during a crisis no one had an end date for. There were times I wanted to give up trying to do the noble thing and just give in, and if I’m being honest, times that I did.
I can't pretend that the steadfastness of Captain Janeway in “Night” is what kept me on the side of the angels. But one of the things I love about Star Trek is that there was always a set of ethics behind it. Not every moral stance is right, and not all of them have aged perfectly. And yet, time again, the franchise has given us stories of people doing the right thing even when it’s hard, even at great personal cost, because as a great Starfleet officer once put it, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
There is a cost to doing the right thing. Seeing the crew squabble and fracture confirms that. Seeing the captain beat herself up confirms that. But there is also something rousing about a group of people banding together in the name of mutual support and doing what’s right. That's the sort of ideal that sticks with you, whether you’re a middle school kid enjoying your favorite space-bound stories, or a grown adult trying to find the strength to weather your own storms. If you’re lucky, the stars still shine brightly on the other side of the darkness.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-05-01T05:54:07Z
[9.0/10] To be frank, I didn't think Voyager had the chutzpah to do an episode like this one. For a solid half of its runtime, this episode has no imposing villain, no deadly anomaly, no ticking clock, no major crisis of any sort. Instead, it centers on the kind of thing you don’t get much of on network television, but would presumably be a tremendous part of any extended journey through the vastness of space -- the oppressiveness of monotony.
How does the crew react when they have nothing to do? When there’s no stars in the sky to look at? When the captain is remote and closed off? When the lack of challenges and differences in their day-to-day lives also comes with a lack of purpose? When the ship offers relative comfort but no excitement? When you have nothing on the docket but to sit and wait and think and stew?
I remember “Night” from childhood, and I have to admit, it hits differently after the pandemic and lockdown. The unchanging days, the isolation, the testiness, the anxiety, the random diversions to pass the time, the little “hacks” to get a sliver of normalcy aboard Voyager, all hit home when much of the world experienced the same thing in recent years.
Which is to say it’s relatable when the ship’s holodecks are in high demand because it’s all there is to do. (Appropriately enough, I watched a lot of Star Trek during lockdown.) It’s understandable when Tom and B’Elanna and even Neelix are getting short with one another amid the tedium. It’s sympathetic when Neelix starts to have panic attacks and bouts of cabin fever. It’s familiar when Tuvok tries to meditate in astrometrics as a substitute for the outside world. And it’s recognizable when Harry has nothing else to occupy him amid the doldrums and so pours his feelings into a sonata for clarinet. (Some of us pen reviews of classic television instead.)
I can't pretend that Voyager fully commits to this. The back half of “Night” goes into full “moral and practical crisis” mode while hitting some pretty familiar Star Trek beats. And even in the first half, we get the debut of the “Adventures of Captain Proton” holodeck tribute to the sci-fi B-movies of old. (Which I remember being more fun than either Janeway’s Victorian pastiche, Chez Sandrine, the resort set, or da Vinci’s workshop as Voyager’s holo-diversions go).
But for a solid couple acts, Voyager is downright languid, reflective, unbothered by the need for dramatic incident in a way we’d never really seen in thirty years of Star Trek. Leaning into that, examining what the torpor of monotony would feel like aboard a starship traversing a vast void, is bold in a way that I just don’t expect from this series.
As if to cement that “Night” is an outlier among Voyager episodes, this may be the finest hour of the series for Chakotay, and by extension, Robert Beltran. Chakotay has never been more complex or sympathetic than when he’s trying to manage the daily functions of a ship, the morale of a stir crazy crew, the moods of guilt-ridden captain, and his own struggles under the tediousness of life aboard Voyager. Hell, the show even pulls off a strong scene between him and Tuvok, rooted in their fraught history and shared admiration for the Captain.
More than anything, Chakotay feels like a real person flustered but steadfast in an impossible situation, with Beltran showing layers of the character we’ve never really seen before. The show’s usual stars shine here, but for once Beltran came to play, and it’s a glimpse at who and what this character could have been under the right circumstances.
But Chakotay is only pressed into such circumstances thanks to the self-blaming spiral of Captain Janeway. One of the coolest choices writers Joe Menosky and Brannon Braga make here is to keep Janeway from the audience for much of the early stretch of “Night”. We feel her absence in the same way the crew does, and especially for a season premiere, the delayed gratification of a Captain in absentia makes for another bold move that heightens the sense of frustrating listlessness aboard the ship before the fireworks start.
What I love most is that without the ongoing risks posed by the Kazon or the Vidiians or the Borg, the only enemy Janeway has left to fight is herself. The lack of excitement means the Captain resorts to soul-searching, reflecting on the choices she made that left everyone stranded in a faraway place for years, with the promise of decades more to come. This is probably a reach on my part, but given how she’s shot and lit, there’s an almost Colonel Kurtz-like quality to Janeway in her seclusion.
The idea that when the music stops, when the momentum that's sustained the crew grinds to a halt, the weight of their circumstances falls on Janeway in a more concentrated, demoralizing sort of way is the kind of engrossing personal hardship and reckoning that, frankly, Voyager should have done more of in its first season when the wound was fresh. I’m glad that with new leadership at the helm, the creative team is doing it now.
Of course, the quiet meditation and moral reflections can't last forever. So of course, our heroes run into some locals from “The Void” who manage to shut off Voyager’s power, board the ship, and attack from the shadows. It’s a nice little horrorshow in between the two major sections of the episode. Seeing the ship go completely without power and light is striking as a change of pace. And the all-black, scaly aliens who hiss and emerge from the darkness have a much creepier design and vibe than the similar spooks from TNG’s “Identity Crisis”.
Plus hey, it’s enough to convince Janeway to spring back into action. She needs a crisis of her own to spur her to rise to the occasion and become active once again. And the fact that she reverts to her badass space marine guise, as she did in “Macrocosm” doesn’t hurt either.
What follows is pretty standard, but well done stuff. Another ship in the void fends off the Night Aliens’ ship, and offers to lead Voyager to a vortex that could spare them another two years in the void. Only, its pilot, Emck, is cagey about why he’s there and what he wants. Naturally, it turns out the Void Aliens are misunderstood indigenous people who’ve been taught to fear strange ships polluting their territory, and Emck is a craven waste-merchant willing to sacrifice lives to make a buck.
There’s elements worth holding onto there. The idea that people who attack reflexively may not be evil, but responding with learned behaviors from other aggressors, is an interesting one, especially in the context of Star Trek. Guest star Ken Magee does a great job as Emck, giving him an appropriately slimy quality while giving the sense that he could just be a harmless local eccentric. And the idea that another operator would be so cruel as to reject civilization-changing, life-saving technology, because stopping deadly pollution would hurt his bottom line, makes Emck into something of a Captain Planet villain, but also a good vessel for societal critique.
Still, that material is largely set-dressing for the larger point here. The big idea of “Night” is a simple one -- this is a referendum on the choice Captain Janeway made four years ago. The scenario the episode presents is the same one Janeway faced with the Caretaker in miniature. Either you do the self-serving thing and take the shortcut so as to spare your crew a long journey, or you do the altruistic thing and destroy it, consigning your crew to the wilderness for longer still.
Granted, it’s not exactly the same. Two extra years in the Void is a lot shorter than seventy years through the Delta Quadrant. One chump with a radioactive tanker is a far cry from a dying demigod. And at this point, you’re talking about making the choice just for your own crew, not for the Maquis you’d be stranding alongside you.
The broad contours, however, are the same. What’s striking is that this time, Janeway would still do it all again, but won’t subject her crew to the consequences of her actions. She’d rather stay behind in the Void and send Voyager on so she can destroy the vortex alone. She’s still honor-bound to save the Night Aliens from cruel extinction, but she wants to be a martyr for the cause, bear that weight alone, rather than imposing it on her subordinates. There is a nobility in that, a brand of self-reflection and questioning that the series frankly should have interrogated in more depth when it launched.
The heartening part of “Night”, though, is that her crew, and more importantly her friends, won’t go along with it. You can quibble about how the stakes aren’t the same here as they were in the beginning of the show. But again, the upshot is plain. Every member of the main cast affirms that they would rather be stranded for longer in this miserable empty expanse than be without their captain. (Except for the extras, who are, amusingly, still pecking away at their control stations in the background while this grand, dramatic stand is going on.)
It is, in many senses, a ratification of Janeway’s original choice, the one that put all these people here in the first place. It’s a sign that they admire the Captain’s commitment to doing the right thing, even at tremendous cost. It’s a sign of how much they value her specifically. And it is an affirmation that, even if they’d rather not be stranded lightyears and lightyears from home, if it meant following Kathryn Janeway, they’d do it all again.
The rest of the episode is, frankly, kind of perfunctory and a little cheap. The opposing captain boasts that he could destroy Voyager in ten seconds, and yet the Federation starship puts up a standard fight without issue and finds a convenient weakness in Emck’s vessel. The Night Aliens have their Big Damn Heroes moment, showing well-timed trust in Janeway’s ability to be a captain of her word. And the science team figures out a way to have their cake and eat it too -- to both make it out of the vortex while destroying it in the process.
All of it feels like a zip to the finish, where the solutions are not particularly earned, and the big choices our heroes make have less impact because no one ever has to deal with the consequences of them. But that is less Voyager’s retreating to its usual reset button and more the inexorable inertia of 1990s network television.
So I’m apt to forgive it, especially when the point stands. Janeway need not torture himself. Her crew believes in her, trusts her principles, and would follow her through hell and back again. If season 4’s “Scorpion” was a turning point for Voyager, that divided the series’ eras into “Before Seven” and “After Seven”, then “Night” is a re-pilot. In some ways, the season 5 premiere relitigates the very beginnings of the series, offering a more complex and personal take on them, while also reaffirming Janeway’s righteousness, and the love she’s earned from the men and women who serve with her. That's a hell of a way to kick of off the fifth year of Voyager’s mission.
As I write this review, it’s been long enough since lockdown that the whole thing feels like a strange fever dream. I can remember the same lulls, the same sense of restlessness, the same need for distraction, the same self-questioning in the quiet spaces with nothing else to do. Despite coming out decades before, “Night” captures the feeling of that period better than any other piece of media I’ve experienced.
But I also remember how hard it was to do the right thing sometimes: to keep a safe distance from loved ones and strangers alike to protect their safety, to postpone favorite activities and celebrate holidays through computer screens, to be diligent about protective gear for the sake of others, to upend our whole lives during a crisis no one had an end date for. There were times I wanted to give up trying to do the noble thing and just give in, and if I’m being honest, times that I did.
I can't pretend that the steadfastness of Captain Janeway in “Night” is what kept me on the side of the angels. But one of the things I love about Star Trek is that there was always a set of ethics behind it. Not every moral stance is right, and not all of them have aged perfectly. And yet, time again, the franchise has given us stories of people doing the right thing even when it’s hard, even at great personal cost, because as a great Starfleet officer once put it, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
There is a cost to doing the right thing. Seeing the crew squabble and fracture confirms that. Seeing the captain beat herself up confirms that. But there is also something rousing about a group of people banding together in the name of mutual support and doing what’s right. That's the sort of ideal that sticks with you, whether you’re a middle school kid enjoying your favorite space-bound stories, or a grown adult trying to find the strength to weather your own storms. If you’re lucky, the stars still shine brightly on the other side of the darkness.