Despite problems, I kind of enjoyed this. It shows the Voyager crew interacting and working together in a way that feels like old friends, maybe for the first time I've really noticed so far in the entire show. While it's not perfect - Tom and Harry's playful dialogue and joking is absolutely atrocious - it feels warm and genuine. Better are the scenes with Neelix of all people, as he spars with both Tuvok and the Doctor.
The stuff on the planet is where the episode surprised me, because I didn't see a lot of it coming. Unfortunately it does take a very long while to get going, and all of the really interesting stuff happens in the final 15 minutes or so. The "demon class" planet is an intriguing notion but the episode deals with it in odd ways. Chakotay tells us that even going into orbit around the planet is suicide, but Voyager appears to overcome that immediately, and then shuttles and even people are going down to the surface without much fuss. If it's that easy then class Y planets wouldn't have the fearsome reputation Chakotay seems to imply.
Surprise surprise, Janeway throws the ship into danger again without too much thought of the consequences and somehow makes it seem justified. I was thinking that the crew didn't even get the deuterium they needed to survive another week, but there is a throwaway line about getting some hidden in there.
The ending is odd and kind of cool, but wrapped up EXTREMELY quickly. I also had to kind of laugh at the show's first attempt to give Harry some kind of character development since the first few episodes of season 1 - I wonder if that will be followed up on at all?
[6.8/10] Doggone it, Star Trek: Voyager is trying. This is the kind of story I ask for from the series. The ship is in trouble due to running out of fuel! The crew is having to make sacrifices to conserve, and it’s leading to tension among the ship’s denizens! The lack of resources is forcing Janeway to take chances and push limits she wouldn’t otherwise indulge if she had Starfleet’s resources at her disposal! And it leads to a high concept sci-fi conundrum with profound ethical considerations. This is the stuff good Voyager episodes should be made of.
Instead, “Demon” is...fine. It has its moments. Watching the Voyager crew have to scrape and scrap a bit is engaging. The fact that the Captain is willing to order a mission to a “Demon Class” planet, so called for its deadly inhospitable environment, in order to recover more fuel shows the stakes and dangers at play. And it isn’t all problem solving and desperation; there’s personality and character built into the interactions among the crewmembers addressing these problems.
Which is all to say that the construction of “Demon” is sound. It checks the right boxes not only for a quality Voyager episode, but for quality Star Trek in general: a tough problem, a unique challenge, and a character-focused element tied to both. You can’t fault the show for missing any major elements here.
And yet, it still tops out somewhere around “solid.” The challenge of finding more deuterium for a depleted ship is a good one, but a lot of the problem-solving feels clinical and mechanical. The friendly banter between Harry and Tom as they work to find more is well-intended, but comes off corny and tin-eared. The slice-of-life glimpses we get of the others on the ship dealing with these obstacles are good, in principle, as a way to show how this is affecting everyone, but in practice, are pretty unavailing. And the sci-fi problem our heroes encounter, a mimicking goop that develops sentience, is an interesting one, but the exploration is too superficial and compressed to reach its full potential.
“Demon” does everything right on paper. It’s only in the execution that the episode reaches plenty of notes of “respectable” but can’t quite reach ones of “extraordinary.”
The exception is in the production design. If you have a “Demon Class” planet, it better look like hell, and this one does. The Martian crags and crevices, the bursts of smoke and steam, the blood red skies, all give off of the sense of a place absolutely hostile to life. The design team does a great job of adding a real sense of atmosphere to the planet. And on the special effects side of things, the metallic goop du jour stands out as intriguingly alien, and the little bits of mimicry we get to see in real time catch the eye. Plus, this is only the second time we’ve seen Voyager land, which comes with an appropriate level of fanfare and peril. However solid-but-unspectacular the rest of the proceedings are, the visuals are where this one really shines.
Likewise, the only true misfire in the episode is the comic relief subplot where Neelix aims to bunk with the Doctor in Sickbay for the duration of the energy shortage. “Demon” is largely a desperate, grave sort of story to tell, so I get the writers wanting to lighten the mood. But the odd couple routine between Doc and Neelix is full of the broadest, sitcommiest shtick. It isn’t funny; it isn’t charming, and the episode sorely needs that extra time to dig deeper into its high concept twist. The best you can say for it is that it ends on an uplifting note, with Neelix being genuinely grateful for the prickly physician’s hospitality.
That twist is a compelling one, even if it ought to have a little more breathing room. (No pun intended.) The notion that the deuterium-filled goo made contact with Harry and Tom, duplicated them, and doesn’t want Voyager to leave now that it’s had a taste of sentience, comes with all sorts of intrigue. And the headfake at play, where Chakotay and Seven think they’ve rescued their comrades, only to discover their doubles, comes with the requisite amount of impact.
We just don’t get enough of either. We get a little bit of Goo Harry talking about what it feels like to have both the real Harry Kim’s memories but also a connection to the planet. We get a little bit of Goo Tom admitting this whole situation is as strange and confusing for him as it is for everyone. We get a little bit of Janeway considering the moral implications of having accidentally created life and it asking for fodder to make more. But all of these interludes only skim the surface of what’s otherwise an enthralling idea.
The energy drags. The structure and pacing of the episode both feel a bit scattershot. Most of the elements are good. B’Elanna’s conversations with Chakotay where she recommends he bring Seven along on the rescue mission, and her chat with Vorik about “keeping their cool” are both nice little moments. Janeway and others brainstorming how to find their needed resource is strong boardroom material. But it all feels somewhat stitched together, like the creative team had plenty of good ideas but wasn’t entirely sure how they fit.
What’s strange is that, in many ways, “Demon” feels like a throwback to The Original Series. The crew goes down to the planet-of-the-week because they need resources. There, they encounter some weird phenomenon that throws a monkey wrench in their plans. And then, they have to bargain with the weird thing they encounter there. That’s a formula Kirk’s Enterprise went with again and again.
Maybe that’s part of why, despite its flaws, “Demon” comes off as sturdy at worst. Not every element makes sense and not every idea in play is realized to its full potential, but the episode remains watchable and interesting from beginning to end. Getting the basics right isn’t always a surefire recipe for glory, but it does give you a higher floor. Even if the execution isn’t perfect, I’d be glad to see Voyager attempting more outings like this one.
(SPOILERS for later in the series: I think I’m a little more forgiving of how rushed the ending solution seems since I know we get a chance to revisit the goo duplicates later. Still, I wish we got to spend longer with Janeway mulling over the situation. There’s a lot of moral implications from creating sentient life, and even more from asking your crew to consent to make duplicates of themselves. Just as Commander Riker!)
I enjoyed this one but feel a big part of the story was omitted.
Did thet get the deuterium in the end?
They make a huge deal about how dangerous the planet is, and then they really have no problem with it and even land the ship on it. They said just going into orbit was dangerous. It's one thing to be inconsistent with other episodes or series but to be so inconsistent within the same episode is just sloppy. And it's not really necessary. They could have made the point that the planet was dangerous without all the extra emphasis. I guess they really wanted to use the term "Demon" for some reason and they needed to hype it up.
Tom and Harry lost the air in their suits and were unconscious on the planet for hours, at least. Pretty convenient they managed to survive, thanks to some fierce hand waving.
If they only copied the crew's DNA why were the "clones" at the end wearing all the different Starfleet uniforms? Also DNA alone isn't really sufficient to copy a human being. That detail seemed unnecessary. Couldn't they have just agreed to let them copy the crew and not talk about or show the details of how they did it?
Still the concept of copying the crew and leaving them behind, and for this to come up again in a later episode is pretty neat.
500 Kelvin hot? Did anyone actually bother to do some elementary school math? That is only about 440 Farenheit. My oven gets hotter than that. It's not even hot enough to set paper on fire.
The inconsistent danger of the Y class planet is very annoying, but otherwise a halfway decent concept.
The writers should have been better with DNA vs memory. We have known DNA does not contain any memory in the conventional sense for several decades before this episode was written
We established in episode 1 that we can't use Holodeck power for anything else (its incompatible); now first sentence of this episode and "replicator, holodeck, and all other nonessentials are off-line"!
That's a massive thing they did here. Dozens of copies of Voyager crew and we just go on our merry way and not even talk about the implications this will have.
I do like they finally showed us that Voyager reached a point where there's no energy to waste even if they turned that part a bit into a comedy.
It's odd that Harry suddenly developes an eagerness to grow. And as much as I usually like him Tom and him together the humor really was flat.
Shout by Alexander von LimbergBlockedParent2022-05-08T19:38:23Z
World building is above average. Stakes are high. That's how it's meant to be: Voyager is too often in too good shape although they take hits and can't rely on supply by the Federation or its repair docks. Voyager lands on a planet surface. Nice to see that again. Even the "enemy" is intriguing. Still, I don't like this episode. For some reason it's boring most of the time. It's oddly paced. The explanation of the phenomenon is given very late in the episode. The finale is nice and memorable but doesn't save the episode. It's strange to see them try again to add some personality to Harry Kim - they of course fail and it seems silly to even try. Perhaps the only interesting thing is that this material reminds me of the stuff that Odo and the Founders are made of. Is there a connection?