If there's one thing they didn't do, it was play it safe. What I found particularly compelling was the extent to which the writers took this idea. Ransom has betrayed his uniform, and Janeway, being the only Starfleet captain within many thousands of light-years, is going to stop him. This obsession is the Janeway equivalent of Picard's obsession to stop the Borg in First Contact or, more similar, Sisko's obsession to catch Eddington in " For the Uniform." Watching Janeway take this situation so personally works every bit as well and for many of the same reasons as when Sisko took Eddington's betrayal personally. She launches into a single-minded obsession to stop Ransom at damn near any cost. The plot goals are clear, but how the episode gets where it's going is where things turn interesting-sometimes extremely interesting.įirst, foremost, and most attention-grabbing is what effect Ransom's escape has on Captain Janeway. There's something nice about the episode's underlying simplicity. So the primary outline for "Equinox II": Ransom wants those codes, and Janeway wants Ransom. The Voyager crew has temporarily shielded itself from the aliens, while Ransom finds he can't use his modified engine device because Seven had locked out the stolen techno-ma-whozit device with security codes. and of course, Janeway Was Going to Die-we love our pretentious cliffhangers. (I'm not sure exactly what to call these nameless aliens other than the CGI aliens the show never calls them anything except "the aliens" or "the lifeforms.") Ransom had escaped in the Equinox along with hostages Seven and Doc, while the Equinox's EMH, sans ethical subroutines, had smuggled himself aboard Voyager, where he began pretending to be the Voyager EMH. When we last left Janeway and her crew, Voyager was coming under attack by a swarm of aliens from another realm-aliens who were attacking in retaliation for being used as "fuel" for Ransom's jerry-rigged warp drive. "Equinox II" is ready to launch into its new action-oriented direction, but it's also ready to think about how it's getting there. Whereas " Equinox, Part I" seemed more focused on showing us who these Equinox crew members were, what they were hiding and planning, and the hell they'd been through that made them less likely to listen to their consciences, "Equinox, Part II" is essentially finished with that stage of the story the motives have been set in motion and the show launches into action mode. Given the preset stipulations-i.e., it must be resolved in an hour, regular characters cannot be radically changed or killed, the Equinox must be destroyed, peace with the aliens must be attained, and Captain Ransom must die (I just can't picture an ending where the writers would've let him live)-"Equinox II" manages to get a good amount of mileage out of the story. On a story level, "Equinox, Part II" manages to work fairly well, too. If you're a fan of Janeway in badass mode, you will probably revel in "Equinox, Part II," an episode that shows Janeway's teeth at perhaps their most sharpened-a captain who on this day is not taking any prisoners, conveyed by a Kate Mulgrew performance whose take-charge-of-a-scene attitude is capable of sending chills. Nutshell: A lot of good character work within a good action show, although there are enough questionable moments to hold it back. Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan "He'll break." - Janeway, defending roundabout torture Story by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
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