477. The 37sFORMULA: The Neutral Zone - 50 years
WHY WE LIKE IT: The hot Amelia Earhart.
WHY WE DON'T: Stock 30s characters. Too many humans this side of the border. Sights unseen.
REVIEW: If Learning Curve was a quiet season finale, The 37s is a REALLY quiet season premiere. Again, no real antagonists and the big outer space shot is of a rusting truck... IN SPACE!!! Very TOS, that. What directly follows is the usual scene where one character isn't a cabbage head (Tom Paris turns out to be a car buff) and everyone else seems incredibly badly informed about the 20th century (despite the number of holoprograms apparently made about this era).
Anyway, the crew follows an old S.O.S. to a planet where they find people who were abducted by aliens back in 1937. Sadly, their characterizations aren't really a step up from the 20th century stereotypes of The Neutral Zone. The one exception, I suppose, is Sharon Lawrence as Amelia Earhart. Hot off NYPD Blue, I remember this being a big deal at the time. Then she went and ruined her career with "40 and still sexy" and earthquake movies. In any case, Earhart was always an inspiration to Janeway, and there's a connection made there.
Then some aliens show up, but it turns out they're descendants of other 37s who had been thawed out centuries ago and put to work by the UFO aliens. It's too bad in a sense because those block-headed outfits were pretty distinctive. Tensions are quickly resolved once everybody figures out everybody's human. Humans long ago overthrew their alien masters and built a civilization for themselves, including three magnificent cities the crew visits, but we never see. This is really takes the air out of the episode's big dilemma: whether or not the crew should stay in this frontier paradise instead of risking a 70-year journey home. It's a good, courageous moment when no one shows up at the cargo bay to be put off the ship, but I'm not entirely sure how realistic it is (all the 37s want to stay, all the Voyager crew members want to leave).
If we'd seen the cities, maybe we'd have a better idea of the sacrifice, but the money apparently all went into designing Voyager's landing sequence. Yes, the ship can land. The only reason they never did in Star Trek is because of effects practicalities, but we're over that now, and despite the ship's dinky little legs, it still creates some striking shots, and gives the creators a chance to light the interiors differently as well.
Note that this marks the start of a couple of questionable trends for Voyager. One is the use or "urban legend" type factoids as a basis for an episode, in this case UFO abduction and whether or not Earhart could have been a victim of it. And the other is putting other humans in the Delta Quadrant, which frankly, makes Voyager less isolated. Not a good thing, thematically. If push comes to shove, they could always limp back to these human hotspots, couldn't they?
LESSON: There are 152 crew members aboard Voyager. Start the countdown.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: Everything looks pretty good (including Sharon), but that hardly makes for an exciting or though-provoking season premiere.
Comments
I won't even touch the notion of going across the galaxy for a labor force...
Sadly, they flirt with an idea that I think would have made for a much more interesting series.
Have Voyager stay and build an alliance of races patterned on the Federation in the Delta Quadrant. That would have made an interesting multi-year arc.
Basically following a DS9 model rather than a TNG one.
Of course, there are probably too many tourists as it is.
Gasoline not evaporated, hoses not dust, truck starts up first try (that didn't even happen in 1936) after being in the vacuum of space.
AM radio signals picked up INSIDE Voyager from a distance so great it takes Warp 6 to get there!
Voyager lands for God's sake.
If you are not even going to pretend to play the science game for known technologies, it's not worth watching because everything is "magic".
That's why this episode has the big show-stopping sequence - Voyager landing, which I personally liked - as well as the thematic full circle of the crew all electing to stay, committing to the journey home- an appropriate thematic way to close out the first season following the events of Caretaker.
(Not that it would have been a perfect finale- certainly the lack of seeing those cities does hinder that aspect of the story, along with other issues- but it's an interesting historical note for the intentions, and at least this would have made a bit more of a spectacle and appropriate book-ending epilogue to the first season, rather than Learning Curve. Not without flaw, but at least an improvement.)