It only took about 2 days for us to get around to watching...
"Thirty Days"
I agree completely that the look of the episode is great. There are even some unexpected camera angles in some of the shots that make it stand out.
First, I'll tell you what I thought this episode would be about: Voyager passes through a system where coffee is a controlled substance. The ship is stopped and raided by drug enforcement officers, who catch Janeway mid-cup. She's forced to spend 30 days in a rehab center, where she imparts a motherly influence to a younger patient and develops a love interest with a hunky alien before learning that maybe she needs to rethink her coffee addiction.
Needless to say, that's not the episode they shot.
We start with Paris being demoted and taken to the brig. Janeway is not amused.
The episode takes place as a flashback, told within the framing device of Tom's letter to his dad from the brig. Here's where I start to have some issues.
First, we pause the episode and have a 5-minute conversation about how Paris as a bad boy just doesn't translate. He just seems so clean-cut and affable, you just don't see him as a hardened ex-con. Plus, what we know about the Federation just doesn't make prison life seem that awful in the 24th century. Besides the fact that he apparently didn't use the toilet for 30 days, Paris didn't seem to have it so awful. He wasn't really in solitary confinement--he had a guard standing right across from him 24 hours a day, had his iPhone to play with, and was getting visitors at least once a day.
When I think of solitary confinement, I think of Steve McQueen in
Papillon or something from
Oz.
Speaking of OZ, we then had a short discussion of who from
Oz would have made a more convincing rogue character. There were a few actors in that age range, including
Kirk Acevedo,
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje,
Dean Winters, and
Christopher Meloni who might have pulled it off. I wonder if Dean Winters read for it? On yet another side note, from Garrett Wang's commentary that every male Asian actor in Hollywood read for Harry Kim, I wonder if B.D. Wong did?
So, back to the episode. We had a hysterical moment that I'll share: Paris starts off his letter from jail, "Dear father," then "Admiral Paris," then pauses. My wife says, "Hey Dad!" and a split second later, Paris says, "Hey Dad!"
Not a real badass thing to say, is it? Unless you say it in a creepy way, like Eric Bana saying "Christopher" in ST09.
The framing structure of the letter from prison, for me at least, calls to mind Martin Luther King, Jr., so it sets the bar high. What is he in prison for 30 days for?
Turns out that, ever since he's been a kid, Tommy has dreamed of the high seas. My wife and I turn to each other and go "WTF?" simultaneously. I thought he was into Camaros and 1930s scifi serials. When he was at his lowest ebb emotionally, he sought refuge in restoring a holo-classic car, not sailing. At the beginning of this very episode, he's doing the Captain Proton thing. If this had been a first season episode it might have made sense, but we've known Tom for five years and I can't recall him ever mentioning the lure of the sea. It's like they just swapped out "James Dean" for "Horatio Hornblower."
A planet of hot-rodders might not have been as dramatic, but it would have been more true to the character.
That said, it's a pretty cool episode--the water "planet" is realized so gorgeously that it looks like a feature film. The aliens are unique-looking too. My wife recognizes one of them immediately from
Sex and the City.
They get to do some pretty cool stuff with getting the Delta Flyer down into the ocean. It turns out the problem is a kind-of rote "you're ruining the environment" thing, and naturally the "powers that be" refuse to listen. So Paris defies a direct order and tries to blow up their oxygen extraction plants.
Again, this is the kind of plot that requires the "antagonist" to be an idiot. I can't imagine that if someone arrived on Earth with a way to use the earth's geomagentism (for example) to create power in an efficient and cost-effective way, that people would really refuse to experiment with it and would continue to use coal and oil. You figure that a traditionally nomadic society is used to change, and obviously they were able to adapt to the "water world" 300 years ago. Maybe some conservatism has crept in, but faced with the fact that their habitat's being lost, you figure they wouldn't be block-headed.
Despite my quibbles, it was still one of the better episodes, if only because of the great, ambitious look. And Janeway gets to show us who the real bad ass on Voyager is.
My wife and I each detected a nit-picky mistake, but I thought of ways to explain away each of them.
Her: Little Tommy in the dream sequence has brown eyes. Adult Tom, as we know, has blue eyes.
Treknobabble counter-argument: Teenage Tom's eyes were "damaged" when he witnessed a photo-plasmic explosion while touring a starbase under construction with his father, cf Doctor Who,
The Horror of Fang Rock.
Me: At the end, Paris suggest that Torres meet him for a nice big dinner at 0700 hours. Which is seven in the morning.
Counter-argument: Torres was working night-side that week, and Tom was discombobulated from his time in the hole, so morning was just as good a time to have a big dinner as evening.
Did we catch it,
AMG?
Kate Mulgrew
that when she's in frame you notice "anything" else. 
