The Sound of Her Voice

[Photon]

I liked the show, esp the 2ndary plot w/Quark and Odo but.............................

The whole time-shift communications thru the barrier was stretching things even in a Trek universe. Can someone provide even a tacet explanation of this phenomnea, Miles' explanation was a little vague.

 

[anti-matter]

Yeah I pretty much agree with you...esp the B story line. On it's own I wouldn't have watched 'the Sound of her Voice' a second time...almost ashamed to say I found her annoying.

For me one of the charms of DS9 was its ensemble case with its varied and intertwining story lines...rarely did they put all there eggs in one basket.

 

[Targ_of_Kahless]

The barrier surrounding the planet was basically acting like a wormhole, thus her messages were travelling 3 years into the future.
I quite liked the way she cheered up all the crew; they all needed to talk to someone but couldn't go to their friends because of the war and she made them realise the importance of talking and friendship.

 

[Geck]

I always found the sci-fi time distortion thing hugely unnecessary here. The episode was a quiet piece with the characters at its core; it didn't need the plot twist thrown in. It should have been a straight rescue. As it was, I felt a bit cheated.

 

[HRHTheKING]

I liked this episode and it was a real surprise at the end.

 

[Mysterion]

Dislike the "Cosmic Space Wobbly of the Week" (tm) plotline, but we did get some really nice character development for the regulars out of the deal.

 

[scorpius1701]

It was magic.

 

[erastus25]

I liked the show, esp the 2ndary plot w/Quark and Odo but.............................

The whole time-shift communications thru the barrier was stretching things even in a Trek universe. Can someone provide even a tacet explanation of this phenomnea, Miles' explanation was a little vague.

Voyager did the same thing in Eye of the Needle.

All of the situations make more sense if you think of it in terms of the Theory of Relativity (i.e. we're traveling through time and space simultaneously).

 

[Photon]

It was magic.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa.........its magic...ya know....see and believe its like sooooooooooooooooo"

 

[chancellorjake]

Debra Wilson (of Mad TV) voiced Captain Lisa Cusack, so I love this episode. Especially that part where she is eaten by a horrible monster, because Dr. Bashir wasn't paying attention. Though, the ending was very shocking and sad.

 

[Ro_Laren]

I loved this episode- one of my favorite. My only beef is, why didn't someone have looked up the Olympia (the Captain's ship) in the Starfleet database? They would have seen that the ship was way overdue to come back from its eight year exploration mission to the Beta Quadrant. That would have been a dead giveaway that things weren't really as they seemed.

Remember the Chief's conversation with the Captain about Ship's Counselors? Do you think they were trying to pave the way for the appearance of Ezri Dax the following season?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The funny thing with this episode is that the time anomaly is usually what spoils it for most people, when it was the entire basis for the plot when Ron Moore pitched it! In the end, though, I think it was a pretty superfluous twist--it required the crew to fail, but through no fault of their own. It was a little annoying to basically take all the consequences off of them like that, making the entire mission in vain.

 

[JM1776]

The reason this ep in part doesn't work is because they literally arrived just as she was losing consciousness (or, rather, three years afterward), which was absurdly contrived.

It would have been far more compelling (and wonderfully surreal) if Cusack had still been speaking to Kira and company in orbit (through the barrier) even as Sisko et al. found her body. Then, upon the latter's return to Defiant, they would've either determined a way to park a shuttle just off the barrier and contrive a technobabble method to beam her aboard, thus violating the Temporal Prime Directive ... or, failing to discover a way, actually have to tell her she'd already been dead, in their timeline, for quite a while; and because of the war's demands, subsequently leave her behind to die alone.

This story, while more artificially melodramatic, was far, far less daring than it could have been. Watching Sisko make the heartless but necessary decision to abandon her as a Jem'Hadar task force approached would have made for some real drama.

As it was ... "The Sound of Her Voice" was a decent episode—with more wasted potential than perhaps any other in the series.

 

[erastus25]

The reason this ep in part doesn't work is because they literally arrived just as she was losing consciousness (or, rather, three years afterward), which was absurdly contrived.

It would have been far more compelling (and wonderfully surreal) if Cusack had still been speaking to Kira and company in orbit (through the barrier) even as Sisko et al. found her body. Then, upon the latter's return to Defiant, they would've either determined a way to park a shuttle just off the barrier and contrive a technobabble method to beam her aboard, thus violating the Temporal Prime Directive ... or, failing to discover a way, actually have to tell her she'd already been dead, in their timeline, for quite a while; and because of the war's demands, subsequently leave her behind to die alone.

This story, while more artificially melodramatic, was far, far less daring than it could have been. Watching Sisko make the heartless but necessary decision to abandon her as a Jem'Hadar task force approached would have made for some real drama.

As it was ... "The Sound of Her Voice" was a decent episode—with more wasted potential than perhaps any other in the series.

Wow. Excellent scenario. I don't like your idea of beaming her aboard, temporal prime directive, etc. as it does not seem all that heart wrenching. The idea of the crew being forced to tell her they are in a different time frame and there's no way to save her - that's great stuff.

 

[Chris_Moderato]

If I may, I'd suggest they arrive and discover the truth, but rather than telling her what has happened, they feign some sort of communications problem and decide to leave the area to avoid the aforementioned task force. Perhaps the command staff is divided over whether or not to tell her, and Sisko makes the gut-wrenching decision to "abandon" her.

Further, perhaps the episode closes with them warping out of the area and a member of the staff who wanted to tell her the truth is seen listening to her over the comm., like earlier in the episode.

 

[Harvey]

I liked the show, esp the 2ndary plot w/Quark and Odo but.............................

The whole time-shift communications thru the barrier was stretching things even in a Trek universe. Can someone provide even a tacet explanation of this phenomnea, Miles' explanation was a little vague.

Voyager did the same thing in Eye of the Needle.

All of the situations make more sense if you think of it in terms of the Theory of Relativity (i.e. we're traveling through time and space simultaneously).

True, but Voyager set up the reveal over the course of the episode. In the Sound of Her Voice, it doesn't feel like the culmination of anything--it's just tacked on. If they really wanted her to die a the end, couldn't they have just said that she succumbed to poisoning right before the Defiant got there? What's the point of the anomaly of the week, besides the kewl factor?

 

[JM1776]

Wow. Excellent scenario. I don't like your idea of beaming her aboard, Temporal Prime Directive, etc. as it does not seem all that heart-wrenching.

I tend to agree. It's more a TNG than DS9 conclusion—more quintessentially Trek, but less effective dramatically, in this situation.

The idea of the crew being forced to tell her they are in a different time frame and there's no way to save her ... that's great stuff.

Alternately, we could combine the endings: O'Brien, in typically uber-competent and innovative TNG fashion, theorizes a method of retrieval he's certain will work. Setting it up will take, say, nine hours, minimum. Six hours into the reconfigurations, sensors detect an approaching Jem'Hadar battle group. Sisko delivers the bad news, and Cusack cheers him with the knowledge that she might be able to somehow survive until a starship can return and finish the job. They work feverishly in the hopes they can squeeze time off the process, but are forced to depart before an attempt can be made. As Defiant's warping out of orbit, though, O'Brien detects with a final long-range scan that transporters are being activated aboard one of the Jem'Hadar ships/they're launching a shuttle: One way or another, they've sent down a patrol to investigate. Her death is now a certainty in both time frames. Miles does not reveal this on the bridge (perhaps he simply frowns and keeps his mouth shut, revealing only to the viewers that something's terribly wrong); instead, he bides his time and tells Sisko in private. Then our good captain decides to keep his mouth shut ... and orders O'Brien to do the same. O'Brien somehow manages to lie convincingly to Bashir, who's still hopeful of Lisa's survival. We see how conflicted Miles is at the deception. Fade to black.

 

[JM1776]

If I may, I'd suggest they arrive and discover the truth, but rather than telling her what has happened, they feign some sort of communications problem and decide to leave the area to avoid the aforementioned task force. Perhaps the command staff is divided over whether or not to tell her, and Sisko makes the gut-wrenching decision to "abandon" her.

Further, perhaps the episode closes with them warping out of the area and a member of the staff who wanted to tell her the truth is seen listening to her over the comm., like earlier in the episode.

Intriguing emendations.

I do think, however, that Sisko has the steel to tell Cusack of her destiny. In my opinion, he'd give a fellow captain, especially one he liked and respected, the opportunity to face Death head on.

 

[Timo]

While I find your version far more compelling than the one that was aired, I'd like to add that dropping the time trickery altogether would have made less logical and dramatic sense than either of the versions.

If the heroes merely arrived just after the nick of time, we would be left to wonder on this cosmic coincidence. Why didn't they arrive two minutes earlier, when she could have been saved? Hell, they should by all accounts be able to revive her several hours after her death. Cusack would have to have been dead for days for the sad ending to make any sense. And they can't make her go silent days before the final act, because her voice is the thing that carries the episode.

Thus, IMHO the surprise twist in this sense is quite logical and effective. It also reminds us that this is Star Trek, from the science fiction genre. But having Cusack faint when she does is a bit too "merciful" - for the audience more than for her.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JM1776]

I guess that's in some measure why I thought having Lisa babbling happily about rescue with Kira, interspersed with shots of Sisko and company finding her body, er ... simultaneously (to use the word uniquely), would have been much more effective than what we saw.

Hours, days, weeks, months or even years wouldn't have mattered, so long as she didn't gasp and slump unconscious just as they were parkin' the Defiant above. It set off my bullshit detector.