'Look Dejected and Go to the Weed Patch' (The Delta Flyers, s2, e7)

I’ve been enjoying The Delta Flyers, the podcast Garret Wang and Robert Duncan MacNeill have been updating faithfully week-after-week for the past five months. Which on one hand is not surprising: they both certainly seem like affable company from the characters they played on Voyager, or intelligent guys from interviews over the years. But it’s not always a given that an actor will be good company in other contexts, particularly when the subject is his or her work, or a franchise to which he or she is attached, so it’s always a relief when it happens. 

Here they are both pleasant hosts and their insights into Trek, Trek Inc., storytelling, the biz, and the craft are all modestly and cogently delivered. I’m just glad they haven’t gotten sick of doing it.

This past week’s episode was devoted to: 

the seventh episode of Voyager’s second season, written by Thomas E. Szollosi and directed by Mr. Jonathan Frakes. Neelix is working out his jealousy of Tom; Tom’s working out his feelings for Kes. They crash-land on an away mission and discover a newborn dinosaur-bird-looking-thing, which activates a mutual instinct to keep it alive. Which they do until its parent returns (looking like one of the Cenobites) and, now friends, beam back to Voyager.

Ethan Phillips is a guest on the episode and is great fun. His chemistry with the guys is effortless, like they're just picking up what they were doing twenty years ago without missing a beat. The anecdotes from both the Voyager days and any back-in-the-day days are always fun on this podcast, but Ethan had some great ones. He revealed that the very first direction he ever received as an actor was “Look dejected and go to the weed patch.” This prompted McNeill to say something like it was inspiration that as an actor he never forgot and Ethan deadpans “(slight pause) I took it to heart.” I don't do it justice, it's a wonderful little bit. Still laughing about it, and my brain has filed it for something or other down the line.

Lots of great moments like that. I hope they get everyone from the cast sooner or later. Beltran's been on and I think they had a recurring guest star (apologies for no link - tough to quickly google this info) but I hope they reach out to Braga, Berman, Jeri Taylor, everyone.

Their reverie on the episode, too, made me wonder where it landed in my own rankings of season two and so I looked it up:

“I don't recall too much about this one besides being annoyed to discover I'd be spending my lunch hour with Neelix's goddamn jealousy issues. I did grade it, though, which is how I know where to place it in the countdown.”

Oh. That's right, I was unfortunately dismissive of Neelix until I don’t know, season six or so of my Voyager watch-through and there are plenty of snarky comments like that one. I feel bad about that now. This is the eternal peril of committing your snark-ass opinions to print ("print"). What do you do when you change your mind on something down the line? By the time I finally softened enough on the character to start to admire various things Ethan Phillips was doing I was practically done with the show. 

This slight will not stand, and so I plan to blog up those Neelix-centric episodes to which I previously gave short shrift. They'll all show up in this space sometime over the next few months. 

I figured I’d start with this one, since I enjoyed listening to them talk about it.

I like the general idea of two men overcoming their more violent impulses by mutually nurturing an alien infant. It’s not played for laughs or drama, and of course it all takes place between the forty-odd minute grid of episodic TV, but it all comes across warmly. A shuttlecraft hits the same kind of Berman-era storm and two characters working out some issues take refuge in a Berman-era cave. Like the one with Geordi and the Romulan, but with a dinosaur baby, and with more at stake as it's two principal cast members and not just one. I think it's McNeill who mentions during the podcast how Jonathan Frakes loves actors, so he's very attentive to things actor like to do or may need or want to avoid, etc. This is not a quality always present in a director, particularly the directors of episodic television. (So I'm told)

The performances flesh out the spirit of the title (which could be interpreted as "calving," which is kind of gross to us non-farm kids) quite well. They give birth to their friendship. And from here on out in the series Paris and Neelix are friends. So that’s nice. It's a little cheesy, I guess, but everyone involved does a good job. 

Much of the dialogue over the alien infant puzzled me though. Are reptiles really the same, planet to planet, quadrant to quadrant? Paris objects at one point to the idea of a cordazine shot. Fair enough but he says “We can’t pump it full of drugs without knowing its body chemistry.” Well – they have a working tricorder, so… they certainly do know its body chemistry. They don't know its drug interactions, sure, but that's different. I get that the alien is probably not in the database and all, but they already established some other baseline-terran-based-reptile stuff. This isn't just medical-tricorder-inconsistencies, though, here’s what I’m getting at: it’d have both added drama and seemed more Trekky to me had they gone with the cordrazine and then they had the added dramatic complication of a side effect and guilt.

Also: they lose a shuttlecraft. It's become something of a cliché to mention re: Voyager but one can't help but remark on it. Harry's talking about saving up replicator rations to make a clarinet at the beginning FFS but the ship cranks out replacement shuttlecraft on demand. I guess that's an appropriate hierarchy of demand; you wouldn't want to serve on a ship where that situation was reversed. 

I ranked it twenty-second out of twenty-six in my season two overview. I think I like it more than that on a second viewing. Let the record be corrected to reflect it is now my nineteenth or twentieth favorite episode of season two. 

Alert the media and inform the crew!