Friday, January 24, 2025

Star Trek: Persistence of Vision

Episode: "Persistence of Vision"
Series: Star Trek: Voyager
Season 2, Episode 8
Original Air Date: October 30, 1995

via Memory Alpha

The Captain is running herself ragged.  She's distracted, exhausted, not eating well, etc.  The Doctor orders leisure time so she heads to the holodeck to indulge in her holonovel.  Unfortunately, the Gothic story within a story proves less than stress-relieving when her employer, Lord Burleigh, declares his love and makes a pass at her.

The plot thickens once Janeway exits the program.  Elements from the holonovel - cucumber sandwiches, a coffee cup, Burleigh's voice - start popping up in the "real" world.  Soon the entire crew is suffering hallucinations, some indulging fears or anxieties, others deep desires.  Memorably, Torres and Chakotay indulge in a passionate tryst.  This is all due to the meddling of a malevolent being.

While there is decidedly less comedy involved, the episode reminds me of TNG's "The Naked Now" and its own inspiration, TOS's "The Naked Time."  Why stretch out character development over time when you can dump the entire notebook into a single episode?  There isn't much of lasting meaning on offer here.  Paris has daddy issues - huge surprise.  A Torres/Chakotay romance will never be pursued - thank goodness.  The writers saw "Persistence of Vision" as a meaningful exploration of Janeway's need to move on from her life with Mark, her fiancĂ© back home.  

via Memory Alpha

The one genuine treat: Carolyn Seymour, one of this blogger's favorite recurring guest stars, makes her last of five Star Trek appearance, this time as Mrs. Templeton, the evil housekeeper in the holonovel.  In one of Janeway's hallucinations, Mrs. Templeton appears at the doorway to the Captain's quarters, clearly intent on stabbing her.  The two tussle.  Evidently, the scene was great fun for both actresses.


Acting Notes

via Memory Alpha

Michael Cumpsty (Lord Burleigh) was born in Wakefield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, though he spent much of his childhood in South Africa.  He moved to the states for college, graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Most of Cumpsty's high-profile work has been on stage.  Broadway credits include Artist Descending a Staircase, Racing Demon and Copenhagen.  He won a Tony for his role in End of the Rainbow.  In fine Trek tradition, his Shakespeare credentials are stellar, including the title roles in Timon of Athens, Richard III and Hamlet.  Television work includes One Life to Live, All My Children and L.A. Law.  Films include The Ice Storm, Flags of Our Fathers and The Visitor.  

6 comments:

  1. This was an early attempt to have a look at home. We also glimpse Tuvok’s wife. Paris’s dad becomes a much bigger deal later as part of Barclay’s attempts at helping Voyager get home, so this in effect is a preview. Different actor, though.

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    1. The series could/should have done a lot more with the "missing home" idea. This particular episode just feels like sloppy storytelling.

      Tony, I want to like Voyager more than I do - much as I wish I liked McCartney's solo work or the Star Wars prequels more than I do. And I want to do more than simply gripe over individual installments. Some of the ideas are good ones, no doubt.

      That said, lack of meaningful follow through on much of anything is a serious issue. They float a concept for a bit, then scrap it in favor of the next experiment. They could have stuck with two very simple threads from the beginning: get home and assimilate the crew. They don't devote nearly as much material as one would imagine to the first. They treat the second like a forbidden third rail: every time they inch too close, they back off. They're terrified of straying too far from the ideals of Picard's Enterprise: whatever the temporary crisis, at the end of the day, everyone is happy and getting along. We could have lived on a much sharper emotional edge with Voyager than we were allowed to do. Getting back to an earlier discussion, that is what I actually DO appreciate about Discovery.

      "Persistence of Vision" feels like a notebook dump. By Season 2, we deserve better than that.

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    2. The whole integration of the crew complaint never made sense to me. It always assumed the Maquis were only terminally uncooperative, the complete opposite of Starfleet officers. But a lot of them were ex-Starfleet, an idea we saw play out when the idea itself was introduced, both in Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. We're told Chakotay and Torres both had Starfleet time behind them, and at which points they diverged, and for what reasons. We don't need a ton to explain Chakotay's thought process, and we see whatever else we need to know play out in real time. Torres, meanwhile, her problems were always personal problems, and we saw those play out throughout the series. We didn't really need the series full of Joe Maquis explaining personal gripes or butting heads with Starfleet personnel, and besides, this was an era still very much attune to Roddenberry's basic ideals, and Voyager itself was the ultimate representation of them, the seeming impossibility of these two crews getting along...getting along. The real obstacle played out in Seska's arc, which took two seasons and was easy to draw on whenever the series wanted to remind viewers it'd happened.

      And it was also episodic, and it was also far more interested in exploring the personal lives of the crew than any previous Star Trek other than Deep Space Nine, and the fact that this occurred under extreme circumstances would be very relevant when it got to them, and it would. "Persistence of Vision" was a very early look at that happening, and pretty darn quickly after Janeway offered them the chance to leave the ship behind in "The 37s." Personally, since I did have a decent look at the Battlestar Galactica reboot and experienced how dreary a whole series of moping about fate could play out, I'm very glad Voyager didn't go that route. First and foremost Voyager was a traditional episodic Star Trek series, but it had plenty of arcs that played out, the most important of which turned out to be the one that wasn't even planned from the start, Seven's recovery from being a drone in the Borg Collective. Nothing like it existed before, or has been seen since, in the franchise.

      I'm just too familiar with the traditional criticisms to worry too much about them.

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    3. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on some of this. I think they passed up - or failed to follow through with - meaningful story possibilities. I also think that overall, the writing and the acting simply were not as good as they were for DS9. In fact, it's not even close.

      I absolutely agree that Seven is the real prize for the series - indeed, a game-changer for the franchise, as you suggest. And the character still resonates. It wasn't just the right character. It was the right actress, too. Jeri Ryan deserves enormous credit.

      We've got a ways to get there, though, and there will be painful struggles along the way.

      And there will be a lot to talk about once we get there including jettisoning the wrong character to make room.

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  2. Hello, I'm back to work on the blog.
    I hope you're well!
    Another post about your cult series! I enjoyed the review!

    ReplyDelete