Demon Planet is one of the worst of Voyager

[DarthTom]

Demon Planet or what ever the episode's name is, was on last night on Spike.

this episode really has to go into the top 10 worst of Voyager for a number of reasons:

*Harry and Tom apparently magically survive for hours or days on their 'emergency back up life support system' in heretofore never heard of and never used despite the need for it a 1000 other times when the crew is running out of air.

*The non sentient then suddenly sentient life form magically retrieves people's memories from their DNA?

*Harry and Tom [duplicates] have an unexplainable desire to return to the planet

*The ship is sinking into solid rock that from puddles of 'metallic goo'

*The ship lands with minimal power and suddenly is able to leave

*Tuvok asks Nelix to conserve power by taking away his pillow, his book, and his favorite blanket.


I could go on. What exactly was the point of this episode? No character development, nothing new about the quadrant.

Seems like not only a wasted opportunity to at least have a 'halo-deck episode' and some character development but worse most of the premises were stupid and several break Trek canon and Voyager canon.

Thought

 

[david g]

Ive never understood the animosity towards this episode. I think it's very Trekkian, one of the few eps to deal with the Voyager situation (the difficulties of survival in the DQ), and full of great fx. I find it wonderfully atmospheric and eerie.

 

[DarthTom]

david g said:
Ive never understood the animosity towards this episode. I think it's very Trekkian, one of the few eps to deal with the Voyager situation (the difficulties of survival in the DQ), and full of great fx. I find it wonderfully atmospheric and eerie.

Well, as I said, for me the episode breaks a lot of the canon in general the plot premise uses 'magical solutions' to solve the problems presented to the crew.

No power - suddenly power
Magical backup air supply
Sinking voyager into the rocks

And so on.

The crew might have as well pulled out their Harry Potter broomsticks and flew off the planet in the ending sequence.

 

[Squiggy]

The no power thing was explained. One of the Tom/Harry duos got about 20 kilos of deuterium, which was enough to power the major systems.

The other stuff...yeah, a bit much. Earlier in the season, in "Day of Honor", B'Leanna and Tom are adrift in space and running out of O2, no mention of the back up systems. In fact, quite the opposite...constantly referring to death and all.

The goo under the ship. I liken that to water hitting dirt, turning it to mud, and sinking whatever is on it. It’s a stretch but it’s all I got.

 

[Christopher]

The treatment of deuterium in the episode is its biggest problem as I see it, aside from the "backup life support" (which shouldn't have made any difference, since the problem was that the suit seals were eroding, not that the power was running out). Deuterium is hydrogen with an extra neutron in the nucleus. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, so deuterium, as a rule, would not be something that would ever become scarce. Now, maybe there could be some freakish property of that region of the Delta Quadrant that created a lack of deuterium except on Class-Y planets. But hydrogen, even deuterium, is extremely lightweight, so hydrogen on a planet's surface or interior would tend to outgas and escape into space unless the planet was either very, very massive or very, very cold. The demon planet was neither of those things, so it should've lost all its deuterium ages ago.

Also the talk about "liquid deuterium" was screwy. Liquid hydrogen could only exist at immensely cold temperatures or immensely high pressures, and again, neither of those conditions were met here. Now, maybe they meant a liquid compound containing deuterium, but the most common such compound is heavy water. Nobody would call water "liquid hydrogen." It's not the same thing.

Of course, this isn't the writer's fault. Andre Bormanis, who wrote the episode, was the show's science advisor, and he knows what deuterium is. He actually intended the precious substance on the planet to be dilithium. I think it was Braga who changed it to deuterium because he liked the gag about the ship "running out of gas." But unfortunately, nothing else about the episode was changed in order to make sense of that change.

 

[DarthTom]

Christopher said:
But unfortunately, nothing else about the episode was changed in order to make sense of that change.

Thanks for the insight, from a writers point of view. The other parts that bothered me was that in The Year of Hell Parts I and II we find Voyager remarkably more damaged than being simply 'out of gas' as you said -but crippled almost beyond belif - yet this episode would have us believe that they suddenly had to abandon virtually the entire ship based on a fuel consumption problem?

 

[Smiley]

I don't find any of the issues mentioned here to be detrimental to the story. Trek technology is all made up anyway, so I don't get too worked up if bits of it are inconsistent. "Demon" had enough mystery, excitement, and character moments to qualify as a good episode.

 

[DarthTom]

Smiley said:
I don't find any of the issues mentioned here to be detrimental to the story. Trek technology is all made up anyway, so I don't get too worked up if bits of it are inconsistent. "Demon" had enough mystery, excitement, and character moments to qualify as a good episode.

Perhaps it's just me but my Sci-Fi has to follow it's own rules and when they break their own rules it starts to suck.

 

[Christopher]

^^Yeah -- the problem is that the episode contradicted itself. It said the native environment was lethally hostile and corrosive, that even spacesuited people couldn't survive it for long. It said that Tom and Harry's suits were starting to rupture and let in the toxic atmosphere. And yet we later were told that somehow the suits had survived completely intact for hours with no harm coming to Tom and Harry, just because of some sort of "backup life support." That just makes no sense in the context of what was established earlier in the same episode. A story that changes its rules in mid-stride is not playing fair.

And whether it's science fiction or not makes no difference. It's a myth that the underlying rules only matter in SF. If you write a story where Act II depends on the hero's car's gas tank getting shot full of holes in the middle of the desert, you don't have him suddenly jump into the car and drive off in Act IV. Okay, there have certainly been stories that have featured inconsistencies like that, but it's still a huge storytelling flaw, regardless of genre.

 

[stj]

The choice in this episode was whether to give the new life forms a chance to live. Thematically, it was Devil in the Dark except with creepy doppelgangers in lieu of little spheres and a big rock. I also think it very Trekkian and quite nice. The climactic shot of the new people was very cool.

If I remember correctly, when Seven was near a pool of the silver blood there was scare music as if the pool was going to grab her. I think it was supposed to refer back to when the pool grabbed Kim and/or Paris. But they couldn't get the FX finished or it was too expensive or whatever. The stuff was specifically mentioned as 12K, so I imagine that Kim and Paris were just thawed out by the EMH in the original script. Or, not survival but revival. As pointed out, the surviving lines are just gibberish.

There never was any sense in the mystical copying powers, whether it was deuterium or dilithium. It was just another one of Voyager's nutty premises. If you could accept it, the story was pretty good apart from the spacesuit nonsense. What I can't get is the apparent difficulty in accepting it for one episode when Odo and the Founder routinely did the same kind of copying for years. Saying DNA did it is pretty obvious nonsense, but so were the Founders.

It is also odd to see complaints about the B story. Their energy conservation methods were nonsense of course but all that stuff about scarce resources was ridiculous. If there's enough energy for warp drive, the wastage is enough for everything else.

The real plotting error if I remember correctly was them not setting the spaceship down in the first place.

 

[Ezri]

It was bad. Yes that is true. But hey, that is Voyager for ya.

 

[Christopher]

stj said:
The real plotting error if I remember correctly was them not setting the spaceship down in the first place.

I dunno. Leaving aside the old Trek nonsense about a ship "falling out of orbit" when it loses power (gee, how does the Moon stay up, then?), the fact is that it would take a lot less energy for an orbiting ship to stay in orbit (which would require no thrust whatsoever) than it would for it to try to land safely (which would require a great deal of thrust). So if the issue is insufficient energy, landing is by far the worse choice.

 

[TimelessTrek]

I liked the Demon Planet episode and then the followup episode a few seasons later --- it may have not been everyone's favorite but Voyager always threw these weird eps in here and there when you didn't expect it. Like 11:59 - I loved that episode but it's one of those eps that I can easily imagine a lot of people not appreciating.

 

[Jack Bauer]

Aside from the science it's biggest flaw was that it was booooooooooooring.

 

[DarthTom]

Christopher said:
A story that changes its rules in mid-stride is not playing fair.

Why would a TV show that cost nearly $1 million per episode make such a stupid mistake?

 

[Christopher]

Well, first of all, I believe it cost at least 1.5 mil per episode. Second, to be fair, in the rush of producing 26 expensive episodes of television in a 9- or 10-month period, there's always a rush on and producers are juggling multiple different episodes at once in various stages of development, so the occasional mistake is inevitable. But this wasn't a mistake, this was a story cheat.

 

[Malcom]

Other than Voyager landing - it lands in this one, does it not? - this episode stinks.

 

[exodus]

TimelessTrek said:
I liked the Demon Planet episode and then the followup episode a few seasons later --- it may have not been everyone's favorite but Voyager always threw these weird eps in here and there when you didn't expect it. Like 11:59 - I loved that episode but it's one of those eps that I can easily imagine a lot of people not appreciating.

I agree.

Voyager did what I call "What if?" eps because they could and it doesn't screw up anything that happens anywhere else in the Trek Universe.

On a side note: I think 11:59 is a great and often underrated ep. The acting is wonderful and it allowed Mulgrew to be someone other than Janeway for awhile.

 

[Casper]

hmm i liked both the demon ep and the one that followed on from it......

however....the voyager writers are certainly not perfect and there are at least three things i think of off hand that should been dealt with, fixed or changed, so that things make sense.....but hey..the writers are human so we can't expect them to be perfect

 

[Jack Bauer]

At least it spawned one of my favorite episodes of the show Course: Oblivion so it wasn't a total loss.