[VOY] Jammer's Review: "Waking Moments"
Jamahl Epsicokhan
Warning: This review contains significant spoilers for the episode "Waking
Moments." If you haven't seen the show yet, beware.
Nutshell: A reasonable diversion, but not a whole heck of a lot more.
Plot description: The crew members begin having nightmares at the same
time, and in each dream is a consistent element: a mysterious alien, which
may have a basis in reality.
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Star Trek: Voyager -- "Waking Moments"
Airdate: 1/14/98 (USA)
Written by Andre Bormanis
Directed by Alexander Singer
Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan
Rating out of 4: **1/2
"...and the next thing I knew, I was being boiled alive in a pot of my own
leota root stew."
"Talk about a nightmare."
"But it *was* perfectly seasoned."
-- Neelix and B'Elanna
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An alien appears in the dreams of the Voyager crew members. By what can't
be a coincidence, everybody has nightmares on the same night, and the same
alien appears in everybody's dreams. Ensign Kim and several other crew
members are locked in sleep--physically fine, but the Doctor can't wake
them. What does it mean? Chakotay goes to sleep to find answers, to ask
what this alien wants, if anything. Using pseudo-hypnosis, he devises a way
of forcing lucid dreaming (that is, knowing that a dream is really just a
dream) so that he can wake himself up when he has the answers, hopefully
avoiding the fate of Kim and the others.
Chakotay finds the alien, a person from a race that, when asleep,
apparently exists as combined figments of their own and other people's
dreams. Sound implausible? It is. Border on fantasy? It does. The episode
avoids discussing how this existence is possible. But I'm not going to hold
that against "Waking Moments." You sort of have to take these things on the
given terms. Besides, I have bigger fish to fry.
Like "Random Thoughts," "Waking Moments" is the type of Voyager offering
that seems to indicate what the series sees itself as: an hour-long
diversion that specializes in featuring this week's (somewhat) unique alien
race which bears a (somewhat) unique property, which leads to a (somewhat)
interesting plot-based adventure for Our Heroes. Unlike "Random Thoughts,"
however, this installment doesn't ask a whole lot of questions, so all
we're left with for critical analysis are the superficial plot machinations
and their pure intrigue level.
"Waking Moments" is what they call "average." It's agreeably fun, but it
doesn't have enough meat to it to be the slightest bit more than that. The
plot turns are certainly watchable, but not really all that compelling. And
even though I can't think of a source reference offhand, this premise seems
strangely familiar and could probably be accurately called "derivative."
(And now that I think about it, shades of TNG's "Night Terrors" come to mind.)
The basic question I think "Waking Moments" is getting at here goes
something like, "What if a society existed in reality as a mental state
that we consider fantasy?" The question has possibilities. Unfortunately
for this episode, the lame answer supplied seems to be, "They'd commandeer
the starship Voyager for no discernible purpose."
I think that about sums up my biggest complaint about "Waking
Moments"--there's simply nothing substantive about these aliens that
justifies their actions (beyond perhaps extreme paranoia). As the plot
progresses and takes on some intriguing complexity, it turns out the
Voyager crew members have all fallen asleep and are dreaming the same dream
from their own point of view--interacting in a web of unified thought that
Seven aptly labels "collective unconsciousness." But can somebody tell me
why the aliens, who apparently control the entire dream-like state with
some sort of technology, stage the dream as a shipwide takeover? What is
their motivation for holding the crew captive in sleep? I've tried to find
one, but as far as I can tell, it's inexplicable. It's yet *another*
example of the Hard-Headed Alien of the Week Syndrome [TM]. The whole
episode builds to a finale that lives or dies on "how is it can we defeat
the cardboard bad guys *this* week?"
My fault; the alien *does*, technically, give Chakotay a reason for why his
people have decided to take Voyager's crew captive: "For centuries you've
come and found us in a state that you call sleep and tried to destroy us.
But not any more. One by one you will fall asleep and enter our reality,
where it is you who will be destroyed." You decide what it means; I'm
calling it an unintelligible utterance of bad dialog. I was practically
waiting for an Evil Laugh after the alien said this.
The whole "motivation problem" dominates most of the story if you think
about anything for more than 0.68 seconds (as Data once put it). Under
scrutiny, the plot begins to fall apart. The only way this works is if you
turn off your brain and go with the flow. If you can do that, "Waking
Moments" comes with some stuff to recommend.
For starters, this episode has fun bending reality. I suppose it can be
said that the real reason for the aliens' takeover of the ship is so that
the story can sidetrack us with a false plot long enough so that when the
real truth comes around we'll get novelty out of the shock value. Chakotay
wakes up from his dream--and then later he wakes up again. It can be
confusing if you don't think about it; but if you do think about it a lot
of the plot pulls together on its own terms by the time the show
ends--until your thinking process begins finding the gaping holes in the
aliens' logic and contrived motivation.
The plot does a reasonable job of explaining itself so that we always know
pretty much what's going on (even though the explanations aren't always
believable), and every once in a while comes a time when Chakotay has to
question whether he's dreaming or really awake. I like shows that bend
reality (such as "Projections" and TNG's "Frame of Mind" and "Ship in a
Bottle" and DS9's "Whispers"); they can be fun--although "Waking Moments"
doesn't push the idea far enough for it to really take hold and overcome
the stupidity of the takeover scheme.
But for what this episode is, it was very nicely executed by director
Alexander Singer. The pacing is up, which keeps the show watchable even
though it's shallow. The episode opens with one of the most interestingly
assembled teasers in recent memory, as the story crosscuts between each
different character and their respective dreams ... and only slowly reveals
that what we're watching are dreams.
Also, the use of Earth's moon--as a mental image to alert Chakotay that
he's sleeping--really worked for me. When Chakotay saw the moon in the
cargo bay (after believing he was already awake), the show generated a
spark of creativity that made me take notice. Chakotay's subsequent
awakening (Doc: "You're awake!" Chakotay: "Are you sure?!") also had me
eagerly awaiting to see where the story was headed--too bad it took such a
conventional road, because the possibilities for something much better were
there. The most effective use of the moon comes when Chakotay sees it on
the viewscreen--and after he wakes up he sees the alien planet on the
viewscreen instead. I'm not sure why, but I was quite taken by the
transposition. It felt very genuine, and at that moment I could fully
identify with the confusion Chakotay was feeling in trying to identify
reality from unreality.
Another good idea that could've been taken farther (but which still
benefits the episode even in its limited use), was the idea of the way the
brain skews reality when dreaming. Things are always off-kilter in dreams,
but you rarely notice the off-kilter elements until after you wake up.
There's a moment concerning a warp core breach that touches upon this (a
breach should destroy the ship, but in this dream world it doesn't).
Touching upon the idea was good, but why wasn't there a *lot* more of this?
The whole episode could've been a puzzle of characters trying to determine
what was and wasn't real around them--and, because it was all a dream,
having them accept as real what we the audience would see as obviously
*not* real. It may have been a riskier story idea conceptually, but it
would've been much more interesting than another routine takeover plot.
A few quick asides:
-- Not to nitpick, but the "identical brain waves" clue that is supposed to
account for the fact that everybody is having the same dream doesn't seem
plausible to me, even on Trek-level plausibility terms. Everybody's having
the dream from their *own* perspective, so why would their brain patterns
be the same?
-- If you look closely at the scene where B'Elanna exits the smoke-filled
engineering set, you will briefly glimpse a very pregnant Roxann Dawson.
Shooting around Dawson's pregnancy is a technical concern that proves
amusing if you look at the way the she's cleverly positioned on the screen
in every scene. Maybe we should dub this game the "B'Elanna watch." Okay,
maybe not.
-- Torres: "And if the aliens try to stop us?" Janeway: "Then we turn this
dream world of theirs [grabs a big, bad gun] into a nightmare." ARRRRGH!
No, no, no. This line takes the cake as awful B-movie lines that try to be
Badass Taglines [TM]. I actually laughed at how bad it was. It's a miracle
that Kate Mulgrew was able to deliver the line with a straight face--but
then again, she's had lots of practice, as the writers give all the lines
of this type to her. (Cf. "These lab rats are fighting back," "Time's up,"
etc.) Enough already.
-- What are those strange pins on B'Elanna's uniform supposed to denote? I
realize the uniform itself was created to hide the actress' pregnancy, but
what, if anything, are the pins in story terms?
-- I was amused by a lot of the light character dialog--and especially the
notion that Tuvok's nightmare is showing up for his duty shift naked. Who
*hasn't* had that dream?
That's about all from this corner. "Waking Moments" is like last season's
"Displaced" in many ways. The show lives and dies on plot execution, the
storyline is more or less routine, the aliens are stubborn and paper-thin,
and in the end we're supposed to pat Our Heroes on the back for their
ingenuity. Unlike "Displaced," however, "Waking Moments" maintains its
entertainment value with a brisk pace and good execution, as well as
benefiting from some nicely worked-in character moments.
This is the epitome of so-so.
--
Next week: Romulans, an LMH, and alien predators. Is this part one of a
Voyager story arc? We'll see shortly...
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Copyright (c) 1998 by Jamahl Epsicokhan, all rights reserved. Unauthorized
reproduction or distribution of this article is prohibited.
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Jamahl Epsicokhan -- epsi...@uiuc.edu
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The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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