A great episode. Possibly Voyager's best?
I love the premise of a planet where time travels at a different rate. Surprised it wasn't done before.
Did the species ever get named? And what might they be doing now (assuming roughly twenty Earth years have passed). Have they joind the rest of the galaxy yet?
Supplemental: If I ever get a cat (I still hope to), I've officially settled on calling it Gottana-Retz.
Since I do a lot with photography (on an amateur level), the concept of episode bothered me in relation to the planet and it sun. If time on the planet was going as it supposedly was, which according to memory alpha:
"One day on the planet is slightly more than one second long (1.03 seconds) in normal time, so three years on the planet would only be 18.9 minutes in normal time"
The planet spun 58 times per minute.
Human eyes would have only seen darkness on the surface level and probably the doctor as well, if adjusted to their time frame (or your spinning 58 times a minute and flung off the planet), because the light from their star would be miniscule. If any of you own a digital camera, set the shutter speed to 1/1500 or 1/2000 or however high you can make it. Then step out in a clear sunny day and try to take a picture of anything. Did it turn out pitch black? If so, congrats, that's the same it would have looked on the planet with your normal eyes (in photographic terms, ISO sensitivity).
(Photographers use big flash lights that output a stupendous amount of light in a tiny, tiny burst of time for these shutter speeds that constant lights cannot hope to match. It's used to stop motion.)
Furthermore, just to put it in normal terms, each year outside the planet is equivalent to ~83,872 years on the planet. Since the planet's sun wasn't noted as special or burn up Voyager or anything by it's sheer brightness, I assume it was around the same as our sun in energy output. But the planet somehow made do with one solar year of energy falling on them to power theirs for nearly 84,000 years of activity.
Earth is solar powered. From the climate, to the trees, to all the food we eat whether ocean or land, to oil and gas all of solar origin originally (petrified and pressured vegetation and what not). This planet made do with 1/84,000 the energy. That planet should have been colder and deader than Pluto. If anything, Voyager should be studying them for their breakthrough in efficiency :/
If they made the whole solar system with this dilated time, I could have suspended my belief. The aliens wouldn't see stars (way too dim) and Voyager would be the first "Star" or at least celestial object. But just a planet? Nah. It didn't work for me. Just really bad science. I'm not going to even go into the centrifugal forces and just assume a time dilation magic effect of the planet that doesn't extend to the light emitted from the local star with a normal time.
