[7.3/10] Like most Star Trek duologies, the payoff of “Equinox” isn’t as good as the setup. There’s a number of reasons for that, but the biggest is simple -- Janeway and Ransom’s personalities change overnight, in ways that Voyager never really earns. Their shifts in personality are the heart of this half of the story, and when that doesn’t work, it’s hard for anything else to either.
What made the first half of “Equinox” so compelling was the idea that five years’ worth of experiences in the Delta Quadrant had turned these two captains into very different people, which made it hard for either of them to understand the other’s perspective. Janeway held fast to her principles (mostly) and kept her ship in good enough working order not to have to make too many compromises. Ransom seemingly had a much rougher time of it, and came out more mercenary and pragmatic in a place Starfleet regulations were arguably never meant for.
But now, all it takes is one betrayal and suddenly Janeway is willing to throw away all of her principles in pursuit of the Equinox. And now, all it takes is...frankly, I’m not even sure...and Ransom remembers that, by gum, he’s a Starfleet officer. It took five years of being stranded for the two captains to forge their perspectives and dispositions. “Equinox” tries to undo them in forty-five minutes, and the results are unconvincing and unsatisfying.
All of that said, the episode has a lot going for it in its concept, which makes this watchable and exciting enough to avoid falling into “bad” territory.
First and foremost, this is one of the rare times we see a Starfleet vs. Starfleet showdown. Kirk seemed to run into a rogue captain every other week, and later shows have riffed on similar ideas. But it’s rare to see two motivated, capable Starfleet crews working against one another, so “Equinox pt. 2” can up the thrill factor based on that alone.
It also does a good job of mixing and matching the crewmembers. Despite her vengeful fury, Janeway is still smart enough to anticipate Ransom’s moves, which means she’s able to capture Noah Lessing and gain some insight into her opponent’s tactics. At the same time, unbeknownst to her, the Equinox EMH has replaced The Doctor and is feeding intel to Ransom and company.
On the other side of the divide, Ransom has Seven as a hostage of his own, but she’s also sabotaged his engines via an encryption code only she knows. Oh, and he has Voyager’s EMH at his disposal, who proves useful once he deletes The Doctor’s ethical subroutines just like he did for the Equinox EMH.
To be frank, a lot of the material with the Doctor(s) makes no sense. Dr. Zimmerman doesn't seem like the type to allow randos to tamper with the ethical subroutines with a few keystrokes and no safeguards, but whatever. Maybe Ransom got good and efficient at it after tinkering with his own EMH. But it seems silly that he can just make Doc not only amoral but loyal to him rather than Janeway in five seconds. (Heck, if anything, it seems like deleting Doc’s ethical subroutines could backfire by making him ruthless in neutralizing Ransom.) And the way Doc just shows up and deletes the evil EMH with basically no obstacles in anticlimactic. Plus why does transferring him back to Voyager just automatically reinstall his ethics programming? None of this stuff passes the smell test.
But if you can set that aside (and it’s a bunch of nitpicks more than anything), the cat and mouse game here is good. Both sides have members of the opposing crew as hostages. Both sides have saboteurs on board. Both sides have a bead on their opponents, whether it’s Janeway figuring out Ransom’s hide-and-seek strategy or Burke using his intel from the evil EMH to break through Voyager’s shields.
As befits a conflict between two Starfleet crew, the sides seem evenly matched with clever strategies and ingenuity on both sides. And the presence of hostages and underminers on each ship heightens the challenge each crew faces, apart from the battle. So the big problem is that the two leaders here have character trajectories that both seem way too sudden.
Once The Doctor is restored, he says to Seven that, “It's quite disconcerting to know that all someone has to do is flick a switch to turn me into Mister Hyde.” Well, that's what feels like happened with Captain Janeway. One minute, she’s the tough but upstanding moral leader of Voyager; the next she’s willing to torture and kill people in order to wreak vengeance upon Captain Ransom.
The charitable read on all of this is the old “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster” quote from Nietzche. In trying to bring someone who strayed from the Starfleet code to justice, Janeway herself begins to sway. There’s something to that idea.
But everything here happens so fast and feels so exaggerated. There’s no progression of Janeway being willing to make more and more compromises until suddenly she’s become the thing she’s fighting against. And what’s worse, the script takes her choices to cartoonish extremes that make her feel more like a Saturday morning cartoon villain than a righteously angry person taking things too far.
I’m not saying that Janeway could never reach a point where she’d rather attack an enemy than help a victim, or resort to brutal methods because she’s so affronted by what a supposed ally has done. We’ve seen the steel and the resoluteness before. But you have a real Anakin Skywaler/Daenerys Targaryen problem here, where it’s not implausible that a character might turn to the darkside, but does strain credulity that they’d go from zero to pure evil in five minutes.
I do appreciate that Chakotay is the one who stands up to her and tries to convince her to pursue a diplomatic solution with the aliens rather than focus all her energies on revenge. It mirrors their dynamic from “Scorpion”, and as much as I remain meh on Chakotay in terms of both character and performance, the first officer as a countervailing voice of reason is a good use for him. I just wish the way “Equinox” deployed that conflict wasn’t so swift, so corny, and so over-the-top.
Things are no better on the Equinox side of the equation. Captain Ransom is self-justifying, ready to kill innocent beings to fuel his trip home, and happy to steal from Voyager to get it done. But now he’s suddenly having second thoughts?
Where did this come from? Charitably, you could say that Janeway’s lecture and recriminations got through to him. Maybe it’s that when it takes harming a human like Seven, rather than a random group of aliens, the reality of the sins Ransom is committing hit home for him in a way they didn’t before. The worst possibility, and one that seems lightly implied, is that he has the hots for Seven and that's part of his deal here?
I don’t know. At best, it’s muddled. At worst, it’s unmotivated. Either way, Ransom seems like an entirely different person than the one we met in the last episode. You need to show that kind of character development, ideally in a gradual way over time, for it to have a real impact. Instead, Ransom just has a change of heart, spurred by...I don’t know...guilt hallucinations? Alien interventions? Who knows. And boom, he’s a better man.
What’s worse is that Janeway buys it instantly. She’s at her most unyielding. He’s just finished trading blows with Voyager after lying to its captain and evincing a ‘by any means necessary” attitude. And yet, when he says, “I surrender, I swear,” Janeway doesn’t have even a hint of doubt. She’s cured; he’s cured, and they’re both ready to sing kumbaya together.
Despite my glibness about how both captains find detente without issue, I actually like what follows. Ransom going down with the ship, a metaphorical penance for his crimes, while using the synaptic stimulator in his final moments has a certain lyricism to it. Burke being killed by the aliens as he tries to complete the plan anyway is a bit of the poetic justice Janeway talked about earlier. And Janeway integrating the remaining members of the Equinox into her crew with limited privileges and robust supervision could be a chance to redo the whole Maquis integration tack that was barely explored in Voyager’s early seasons. (Though fair warning, I don’t remember that amounting to much.)
Heck, there’s even a good contrast between the first officers. When Ransom has a change of heart, Burke doesn’t buy in. He stages an “I learned it from watching you, dad!” mutiny that sticks to the mercenary cravenness he learned from Ransom, giving the story a true villain. By contrast, Chakotay intervenes to save Noah’s life and is relieved of duty for it, but even when Janeway’s seemingly gone off the deep end, he trusts her to find her way back and doesn’t undermine the Captain. It speaks to a level of trust between him and Janeway, even when they’re at complete odds, that doesn’t exist aboard the Equinox.
My favorite scene in this is the final one, where Janeway acknowledges, in her own way, that she’s gone too far, and offers her own sort of thanks to Chakotay for acting as a moral bulwark and not losing faith in her. The restoration of Voyager’s plaque is symbolic of the restoration of the Captain’s soul, poised again to confront what the Delta Quadrant has to offer. It’s good that she’s doing so, once more, with her morals intact; I just wish the “Equinox pt. 2” did a better job of accounting for how she lost them in the first place.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-07-30T21:34:25Z
[7.3/10] Like most Star Trek duologies, the payoff of “Equinox” isn’t as good as the setup. There’s a number of reasons for that, but the biggest is simple -- Janeway and Ransom’s personalities change overnight, in ways that Voyager never really earns. Their shifts in personality are the heart of this half of the story, and when that doesn’t work, it’s hard for anything else to either.
What made the first half of “Equinox” so compelling was the idea that five years’ worth of experiences in the Delta Quadrant had turned these two captains into very different people, which made it hard for either of them to understand the other’s perspective. Janeway held fast to her principles (mostly) and kept her ship in good enough working order not to have to make too many compromises. Ransom seemingly had a much rougher time of it, and came out more mercenary and pragmatic in a place Starfleet regulations were arguably never meant for.
But now, all it takes is one betrayal and suddenly Janeway is willing to throw away all of her principles in pursuit of the Equinox. And now, all it takes is...frankly, I’m not even sure...and Ransom remembers that, by gum, he’s a Starfleet officer. It took five years of being stranded for the two captains to forge their perspectives and dispositions. “Equinox” tries to undo them in forty-five minutes, and the results are unconvincing and unsatisfying.
All of that said, the episode has a lot going for it in its concept, which makes this watchable and exciting enough to avoid falling into “bad” territory.
First and foremost, this is one of the rare times we see a Starfleet vs. Starfleet showdown. Kirk seemed to run into a rogue captain every other week, and later shows have riffed on similar ideas. But it’s rare to see two motivated, capable Starfleet crews working against one another, so “Equinox pt. 2” can up the thrill factor based on that alone.
It also does a good job of mixing and matching the crewmembers. Despite her vengeful fury, Janeway is still smart enough to anticipate Ransom’s moves, which means she’s able to capture Noah Lessing and gain some insight into her opponent’s tactics. At the same time, unbeknownst to her, the Equinox EMH has replaced The Doctor and is feeding intel to Ransom and company.
On the other side of the divide, Ransom has Seven as a hostage of his own, but she’s also sabotaged his engines via an encryption code only she knows. Oh, and he has Voyager’s EMH at his disposal, who proves useful once he deletes The Doctor’s ethical subroutines just like he did for the Equinox EMH.
To be frank, a lot of the material with the Doctor(s) makes no sense. Dr. Zimmerman doesn't seem like the type to allow randos to tamper with the ethical subroutines with a few keystrokes and no safeguards, but whatever. Maybe Ransom got good and efficient at it after tinkering with his own EMH. But it seems silly that he can just make Doc not only amoral but loyal to him rather than Janeway in five seconds. (Heck, if anything, it seems like deleting Doc’s ethical subroutines could backfire by making him ruthless in neutralizing Ransom.) And the way Doc just shows up and deletes the evil EMH with basically no obstacles in anticlimactic. Plus why does transferring him back to Voyager just automatically reinstall his ethics programming? None of this stuff passes the smell test.
But if you can set that aside (and it’s a bunch of nitpicks more than anything), the cat and mouse game here is good. Both sides have members of the opposing crew as hostages. Both sides have saboteurs on board. Both sides have a bead on their opponents, whether it’s Janeway figuring out Ransom’s hide-and-seek strategy or Burke using his intel from the evil EMH to break through Voyager’s shields.
As befits a conflict between two Starfleet crew, the sides seem evenly matched with clever strategies and ingenuity on both sides. And the presence of hostages and underminers on each ship heightens the challenge each crew faces, apart from the battle. So the big problem is that the two leaders here have character trajectories that both seem way too sudden.
Once The Doctor is restored, he says to Seven that, “It's quite disconcerting to know that all someone has to do is flick a switch to turn me into Mister Hyde.” Well, that's what feels like happened with Captain Janeway. One minute, she’s the tough but upstanding moral leader of Voyager; the next she’s willing to torture and kill people in order to wreak vengeance upon Captain Ransom.
The charitable read on all of this is the old “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster” quote from Nietzche. In trying to bring someone who strayed from the Starfleet code to justice, Janeway herself begins to sway. There’s something to that idea.
But everything here happens so fast and feels so exaggerated. There’s no progression of Janeway being willing to make more and more compromises until suddenly she’s become the thing she’s fighting against. And what’s worse, the script takes her choices to cartoonish extremes that make her feel more like a Saturday morning cartoon villain than a righteously angry person taking things too far.
I’m not saying that Janeway could never reach a point where she’d rather attack an enemy than help a victim, or resort to brutal methods because she’s so affronted by what a supposed ally has done. We’ve seen the steel and the resoluteness before. But you have a real Anakin Skywaler/Daenerys Targaryen problem here, where it’s not implausible that a character might turn to the darkside, but does strain credulity that they’d go from zero to pure evil in five minutes.
I do appreciate that Chakotay is the one who stands up to her and tries to convince her to pursue a diplomatic solution with the aliens rather than focus all her energies on revenge. It mirrors their dynamic from “Scorpion”, and as much as I remain meh on Chakotay in terms of both character and performance, the first officer as a countervailing voice of reason is a good use for him. I just wish the way “Equinox” deployed that conflict wasn’t so swift, so corny, and so over-the-top.
Things are no better on the Equinox side of the equation. Captain Ransom is self-justifying, ready to kill innocent beings to fuel his trip home, and happy to steal from Voyager to get it done. But now he’s suddenly having second thoughts?
Where did this come from? Charitably, you could say that Janeway’s lecture and recriminations got through to him. Maybe it’s that when it takes harming a human like Seven, rather than a random group of aliens, the reality of the sins Ransom is committing hit home for him in a way they didn’t before. The worst possibility, and one that seems lightly implied, is that he has the hots for Seven and that's part of his deal here?
I don’t know. At best, it’s muddled. At worst, it’s unmotivated. Either way, Ransom seems like an entirely different person than the one we met in the last episode. You need to show that kind of character development, ideally in a gradual way over time, for it to have a real impact. Instead, Ransom just has a change of heart, spurred by...I don’t know...guilt hallucinations? Alien interventions? Who knows. And boom, he’s a better man.
What’s worse is that Janeway buys it instantly. She’s at her most unyielding. He’s just finished trading blows with Voyager after lying to its captain and evincing a ‘by any means necessary” attitude. And yet, when he says, “I surrender, I swear,” Janeway doesn’t have even a hint of doubt. She’s cured; he’s cured, and they’re both ready to sing kumbaya together.
Despite my glibness about how both captains find detente without issue, I actually like what follows. Ransom going down with the ship, a metaphorical penance for his crimes, while using the synaptic stimulator in his final moments has a certain lyricism to it. Burke being killed by the aliens as he tries to complete the plan anyway is a bit of the poetic justice Janeway talked about earlier. And Janeway integrating the remaining members of the Equinox into her crew with limited privileges and robust supervision could be a chance to redo the whole Maquis integration tack that was barely explored in Voyager’s early seasons. (Though fair warning, I don’t remember that amounting to much.)
Heck, there’s even a good contrast between the first officers. When Ransom has a change of heart, Burke doesn’t buy in. He stages an “I learned it from watching you, dad!” mutiny that sticks to the mercenary cravenness he learned from Ransom, giving the story a true villain. By contrast, Chakotay intervenes to save Noah’s life and is relieved of duty for it, but even when Janeway’s seemingly gone off the deep end, he trusts her to find her way back and doesn’t undermine the Captain. It speaks to a level of trust between him and Janeway, even when they’re at complete odds, that doesn’t exist aboard the Equinox.
My favorite scene in this is the final one, where Janeway acknowledges, in her own way, that she’s gone too far, and offers her own sort of thanks to Chakotay for acting as a moral bulwark and not losing faith in her. The restoration of Voyager’s plaque is symbolic of the restoration of the Captain’s soul, poised again to confront what the Delta Quadrant has to offer. It’s good that she’s doing so, once more, with her morals intact; I just wish the “Equinox pt. 2” did a better job of accounting for how she lost them in the first place.