3x23 Distant Origin

[7.8/10[ Can one bad scene mess up an otherwise stellar episode? I don’t know. “Distant Origin” is outlandish, featuring a reptilian Darwin searching for Voyager as his shield against a society of religious fundamentalist space dinosaurs. But it’s also startling in giving us an outside view of humanity and our heroes, and in its potent themes about scientific truth-telling running aground on dogma. It’s only in the episode’s last act, where the episode rubs our noses in that theme with hamfisted speech after hamfisted speech, that the air comes out of the balloon.

Until that point, this was in the running for being one of my favorite episodes of Voyager. I’m a sucker for a good format-bender, and doing an installment where we don’t even see the main cast for the first fifteen minutes, instead focusing on outsiders and how they might view Starfleet and humanity, is one hell of a hook.

Those outsiders are the Voth, a reptilian species in the Delta Quadrant. And our unexpected protagonist for the hour is Gegen, a paleontologist gathering evidence for his controversial theory that his people were not born in this region, but rather migrated there millions of years ago. He gets fuel from that fire when finding a human skeleton and discovering that it has a remarkable degree of overlap with Voth DNA.

Let’s get this part of the way -- the central scientific idea here is absurd. A Delta Quadrant species that’s fascinated to research humans because they challenge his society’s accepted take on the origin of life? Totally legitimate and even intriguing. A Delta Quadrant species that turns out to be the evolutionary result of a bunch of dinosaurs from Earth who traveled tens of thousands of lightyears and left no trace of their civilization? Patently ridiculous.

Ridiculous is a sliding scale in Star Trek. Kirk’s already fought space dinosaurs. Picard’s already found ancient aliens spreading DNA across the galaxy. Janeway’s already turned into a freakin’ salamander. If you wanted to argue this wasn’t more wild than plenty of other reveals in Star Trek, I’d be hard pressed to disagree.

But something about this “History Channel Junk Programming” theory of ancient sapient dinosaurs leaving for another part of the galaxy goes beyond plausibility and into absurdity. As a friend pointed out, co-writer Brannon Braga just loves his weird evolutionary concepts, and they basically never work.

You know what does work, though? Story choices that make us look outside ourselves. By its very nature, Star Trek offers a Federation-centric view of the galaxy. I’m not complaining. That helps us to relate to the characters and what they’re experiencing. But it’s downright refreshing to meet a species that’s making the same logical leaps our heroes do and ending up wrong, of being able to poke around and spy on Voyager as the technologically superior race, and to essentially have the ability to bat other civilizations around as a global superpower in the way the Federation does in most Star Trek adventures back in the Alpha Quadrant. This is a change of pace, and one that’s thrilling in those terms.

It’s also a thrill to recognize a little continuity! The fact that the Voth researchers appear to locate the skeletal remains on the planet from “Basics” is neat. Their run in with traders on the space station from “Fair Trade” provides a plausible explanation for how they’d get a reasonable direction for Voyager. And the warp plasma signature, while a little janky, is a nice means for them to track down the ship’s exact location. As silly as the space dinosaur stuff is, “Distant Origin” plays fair in the nuts and bolts of its plot.

Those nuts and bolts involve Gegen looking at the bones of some poor deceased crewman and speculating wildly (and often wrongly) about what humans must look and be like. He and his researcher cloak themselves and poke around Voyager, observing its crew like they’re wild animals to be studied. When Janeway and company get mixed up in this, the Voth supership pops over with their transwarp drive, beams the whole ship inside their vessel, and treats the crew’s efforts at resistance like gnats trying to pester an elephant. The shoe is on the other foot, for once!

Make no mistake, this is the kind of stuff Starfleet does all the time! It’s humbling, almost comical, to have Gegen make guesses about various “endotherms” and consider how wrong our heroes might be when they make similar leaps. It feels like a violation when Gegen and his assistant Veer skulk around Voyager and comment on our heroes in a condescending, patronizing tone, but that gives you perspective when Federation vessels do the same to pre-Warp species. And the way the Voth barge in, throw their weight around, and impose their morality on outsiders who happen to come into contact with them makes you think about the same thing when Starfleet does it, even if we tend to agree with the values behind the Federation’s morality.

In short, “Distant Origin” offers one of the most amazing things narrative art can accomplish -- to push us to see outside of our own perspective. Making outsiders the protagonists for the hour, seeing the main cast evaluated from afar, watching Starfleet be the force acted upon rather than doing the acting, is all marvelous, thought-provoking stuff that gives the audience reason to rethink some of the actions we’d been watching for thirty years. This episode represents the most committed the franchise had come to showing that outside perspective since TNG’s “First Contact”, and “Distant Origin” arguably goes further.

Part of that distance comes in the themes of scientific truth in the face of rigid doctrine. It doesn’t take a lot to see that Voyager is doing a Galileo riff with Gegen in particular -- someone who has an undeniable truth resisted by authority because of how it would rock society. And there’s also a component of the Scopes Monkey Trial in all of this, as the storyline mirrors contemporary debates about evolution that were taking place at the time and, unfortunately, continue to today.

On the whole, I like the inclusion of those themes here. It’s a bit of an odd fit, since the space dinosaur premise that Gegen argues so strenuously for is goofy on its face. But imbued with the tenor of the real life debates it’s meant to reflect, it creates a real philosophical and personal charge for “Distant Origin”. Some of Gegen’s actions are questionable, but when you cast them in the shadow of a sclerotic society whose leaders refuse to see reason that might undermine their role and station, you get why he does what he does. As with so much of Star Trek, it's a keen way to take current events and make us look at them differently by realizing them through the lens of speculative fiction.

But my god, the closing courtroom scene is just so so heavy handed. I was already on the fence during Gegn’s vociferous charge against the ruler, which was a touch too caricatured for my tastes, but is within acceptable tolerances for Star Trek’s penchant for speechifying. We got the point already, but it’s in the franchise’s nature to put a button on it, and I’m inured to that.

Then, sadly, Chakotay gives a rambling, writerly speech about how the Voth traversing the galaxy to found this society would actually be a beautiful story, not a heretical shame. And I have to admit that I tuned out about halfway through. The writers’ hearts are in the right place with it. It’s a nice attempt to rebuke similar sentiments in the real world. But the blunt and didactic nature is too much.

Frankly, it makes you miss Patrick Stewart, whose greatest gift to Star Trek was his ability to take cornball, over-the-top speeches and make them sound both convincing and inspiring with his performance and inherent gravitas. It’s no sin not to match that level of virtuosity, but Robert Beltran is not up to the challenge.

I do like where the episode lands, with Gegen standing firm and refusing to recant until the ruler threatens to destroy Voyager and imprison its crew for the rest of their lives. The whole episode has built up what this truth means to Gegen, so the fact that he’s willing to adulterate for the good of these innocent people, makes him that much more noble, and his mandated fall frog race that much more tragic. Guest actor Henry Woronicz sells the hell out of it, and the note of hope from Chakotay’s earth-like paper weight adds just enough to not make this one feel too dour.

With that closer, “Distant Origin” is a very good episode that could have been a great one. This is such a break from the normal way of doing things in Star Trek, its change in perspective and opportunity to look outside ourselves so outstanding that it immediately sets this apart as one of season 3’s high water marks. But beating the audience over the head with your themes and message in the closing moments hurts, rather than helps, what should be a crowning achievement, even for viewers who agree with both.