While the USS Voyager is without power for several hours, Neelix tells the Borg children a ghost story of the events that lead up to it...or is it more than just a story?
Summary
Voyager begins shutting down main power
Neelix, Voyager 's Talaxian chef and 'chief morale officer', shuts off the burners on the kitchen stove, straightens chairs and has the computer extinguish the lights in the empty mess hall. Seeming unsettled, he he walks to the doors to leave. They open and he walks into Seven of Nine, former Borg drone and the ship's head astrometrician as she is about to enter. He jumps in fright. Seven apologizes, not intending to scare him. She asks him to supervise the Borg children during the imminent ship-wide shutdown of main power.(VOY: "Collective")
On the bridge, Captain Kathryn Janeway, her First Officer Lt. Commander Chakotay, and the duty officers, watch the viewscreen, looking at a nebula the ship is approaching. Ops Manager Ensign Harry Kim and Flight Controller Ensign Tom Paris comment on its unsettling appearance, but the Vulcan Chief Tactical Officer, Lt. Commander Tuvok, is unimpressed. Captain Janeway gives the order to shut down main power.
Across the ship, panels and lights shut down. In Sickbay. the Doctor, the ship's holographic Chief Medical Officer, enters one final note into a PADD before deactivating himself. In Astrometrics, Seven of Nine is present as power is cut and the room goes dark. In Cargo Bay 2, power to the Borg alcoves cuts out, curtailing the four children's regeneration cycle. The children wake up, alarmed, their alarm increasing when the lights go out. Neelix, there with a lantern, tries to calm them down. In Engineering, Chief Engineer Lt. B'Elanna Torres works with her staff to safely shut down the warp core. All over the ship, the only light comes from portable lanterns. On the bridge, Kim reports that shutdown has been completed on all decks.
Voyager, now running only on inertia, glides into the nebula.
Act One
In Cargo bay 2, Neelix tries to soothe the still-alarmed children with an explanation as to why main power was cut. He tells them that it is to prevent EM emmisions from entering the ship from the nebula they were going through; a poor excuse since, as Icheb, the oldest, points out, the ship's shields will block any nebula discharge. The children continue to press Neelix with questions, until Mezoti, the only girl in the group, asks if the shutdown has anything to do with Deck 12, which Naomi Wildman had told her was haunted. Neelix tells them there's no such thing as ghosts. But they press him for an answer as to what is there, if not a ghost. He agrees to tell them the real story of Deck 12.
Several months earlier, he tells them, before they had come aboard, the ship was in another nebula gathering deuterium, the 'matter' in the matter/antimatter reaction that powers the ship's warp engines and other systems. In the mess hall, Neelix was startled as the ship jolted from the turbulence of the nebula's gases. When Tuvok walked in, Neelix sat down with him, and, attempting to hide his unease, he asks Tuvok how long they would be the nebula. Tuvok's answer of several days made his fear evident. He explained that as it was causing him to remember a horrid time when a huge plasma drift passed through the Talaxian system. For months the stars and moons in the Talaxian sky were blotted out by the fearsome-looking cloud.
A mysterious "stow-away"
On the Bridge, Captain Janeway, Chakotay and the duty officers also felt the jolt. Kim reported that nadion emissions from the ship's nacelles (Icheb points out to Neelix that the nacelles did not produce nadion emissions). were destabilizing the nebula. Chakotay suggested to Janeway that they be satisfied with having collected 80% of the amount of deuterium they wanted and leave. Janeway concurred, ordered Engineering to stop the collection and then ordered Paris to take the ship out of the nebula. But just as Paris was about to engage the impulse engines to carry out the order, the ship was shaken again. In the mess hall, those present saw an energy discharge spread over the ship for an instant, then disappear.On the bridge, sparks flew. Chakotay read aloud the report on the command console between the First Officer's and Captain's seat; an EM discharge had penetrated the hull. Damage appeared to be minor: power outages on three decks and the loss of the auxiliary subprocessors, no casualties. Janeway ordered repairs and the ship's course be resumed. Voyager moves away from the nebula, but, as she passes, an entity, looking like an energy discharge, can be seen crawling on the back of the saucer section. Neelix tells the children that everything seemed fine, but they now had a stowaway on board...
Act Two
The children try to guess the species of the creature, suggesting different possibilities. Neelix gives them the choice of continuing their attempts or listening to him. They ask him to continue, and he does, recounting the malfunctions that had begun to plague the ship after they had left the nebula.
Chakotay went to Janeway's ready room and presented the repair teams' report; damage had proven to be greater than initially thought: one of the ship's two personnel transporters was out, half the sonic showers were offline, and a deck had lost artificial gravity. Janeway listened and sipped her coffee, but found it tasted terrible. She instructed the computer to replicate another cup...and watched as it replicated the coffee without the cup, in a cup shape (of course on completion it collapsed into a spill), and then replicated the empty cup. Replicators were added to the list of damages. Chagrined, she walked to her windows and stood, looking out. As she looked, she saw a meteoroid cluster and drew Chakotay's attention to it. Chakotay saw nothing odd about it, but Janeway told him that they had passed that same cluster an hour before; the ship was going in circles. Immediately they went onto the bridge to find out why. Paris told them the navigational sensors appeared to be functioning normally, but, on Chakotay's order, Tuvok ran a diagnostic which revealed that they were indeed malfunctioning and the ship was going back from whence it had come. Janeway ordered all stop and reinitialization of the sensors. Paris obeyed, then turned around in the pilot's chair to speak to her. He had just finished when suddenly the warp engines engaged, seemingly of their own accord, and the ship surged forward at warp six. Attempts to shut them down failed. Janeway tried to call Engineering, but got no answer. Then, as suddenly as they had engaged, the warp engines shut down, and they came to all stop again. Janeway again tried to contact Engineering, and again got no response from Chief Engineer Torres. Chakotay instructed the computer to locate her; she was indeed in Engineering. But then the computer began to recite a litany of crew member locations that it had not been instructed to give. Increasingly annoyed, Janeway ordered Chakotay to go to Engineering and find out what was happening.
Chakotay boarded the turbolift and tried to get to Engineering. But when the lift stopped and he exited, he found that he was not on Engineering's deck, but the mess hall's. He re-boarded the turbolift, but the doors would not close. Making up his mind to walk, he tried to get off, but the doors suddenly closed, trapping him inside. Then the descent stabilizers failed and the turbolift car plunged eleven decks down the shaft at very high speed, pinning him to the ceiling. Had the stabilizers not suddenly reactivated at the last moment, the car would have crashed into the bottom of the shaft, killing him instantly and possibly damaging the hull. Finally arriving at Engineering, he conferred with Torres, who was working to trace the source of the problems with her staff. The source appeared to be a series of bio-neural gel packs on Deck 13.
In another part of the ship, Crewman Tal Celes was just about to run a diagnostic on a circuit panel when Seven of Nine stopped her. She moved aside as Seven began to run her own diagnostic to find a fault which she thought Tal had caused, and which had cut power to Astometrics. She was surprised when Tal told her she had not even started as yet, thus the fault could not have been hers.
On Deck 13, Chakotay and Torres examined the suspect bio-neural gel packs. They appeared to be in good condition, but Torres noticed on her tricorder an EM discharge which seemed to be moving from system to system through the bio-neural circuitry. She traced it as it moved to a series of gel packs interfacing with the environmental control systems of Cargo Bay 2, located just outside that cargo bay. The two officers hurried to get there before it moved again.
Seven doesn't know that the creature is right behind her
In Cargo Bay 2, Seven was at a terminal running diagnostics in an attempt to find the source of the systems malfunctions as Chakotay and Torres were doing. Absorbed in the task, she was unaware that the EM discharge Chakotay and Torres were tracking had entered the room. Behind her back it exited from a circuit panel, silently snaked across the floor and up into another panel. She only realized something was wrong when lights began to flicker. When that happened she looked up, picked up her tricorder and began scanning; this was yet another system malfunction, and she could perhaps find pertinent data here which would help her. But then she heard a hiss from the ventilation duct. She looked up toward the duct to see gases from the nebula pouring in. She tried to hail the bridge, but got no response. She went to the doors to leave, but they would not open. She looked back with mounting alarm as the deadly advancing cloud filled more and more of the room behind her, crackling with sparks of EM energy. She tried to open the doors from the control panel, but the panel beeped in denial. Her only hope was the emergency manual override built into a hatch in the floor. She opened it and pulled the switch, opening the doors. She quickly exited, but, on turning to go down the corridor, walked straight into a force field. She turned to go in the other direction. but found a force field blocking that escape as well. Trapped, she could do nothing as the gases, having filled the cargo bay, poured forth from the open doors and filled the space contained between the force fields. She collapsed, the life being asphyxiated out of her.
Act Three
As Neelix continues to regale the four enthralled children, the lantern goes out. He changes the power cell, inadvertently scaring them when they suddenly see his face in the harsh light. He continues.
First Officer Chakotay and Chief Engineer Torres reached the cargo bay deck after crawling through a series of Jeffries tubes, eschewing the turbolift after Chakotay's earlier experience. Rounding the last corner before the bay, they found Seven lying unconsious behind one of the force fields used to trap her. When attempts to have the computer drop the force field failed, Chakotay destroyed control panel with a phaser shot, cutting power to the field generators, dropping the field. They quickly took Seven to the Sickbay.
In the mess hall, Neelix was cooking in the kitchen while crew members, including Ops Manager Kim, sat, ate and talked. Then the lights began flickering. Kim tried to call Engineering; Neelix tried the bridge; both failed. Kim, the only officer in the room, ordered everyone to return to their stations. Neelix offered to go with Kim, but Kim told him to stay there, since the mess hall was his station. Kim then briskly exited, leaving Neelix in the mess hall alone, just as the lights went out, leaving the room in darkness. Neelix's unease was evident.
Tom Paris, after being hit by an EM discharge.
Neelix recounts that systems were failing all over, including environmental control. Neither warp nor impulse engines were responding; the ship was dead in space. On the bridge,according to Paris, the temperature was very uncomfortably hot, for all except Tuvok, whose home planet of Vulcan is a desert planet. The conn console began beeping. Paris checked it on Janeway's orders and found helm control working again. He sat down to try to get the engines back on line, but Janeway saw from a readout at the auxiliary tactical station that an EM surge was building in the conn console. She warned Paris, but before he could move away, he was struck in the face by an EM discharge and severely burned. Janeway and a duty officer rushed to his aid. She tried to call Sickbay; no answer. She asked Tuvok if the transporters were working, to transport Paris to Sickbay, but they were also offline. Then the computer began warning of oxygen depletion; air was being removed from the bridge. Attempts to reroute emergency power to restore the air failed, and Janeway ordered everyone to evacuate.
In Sickbay, the Doctor was re-activated to treat Seven of Nine as well as other injured crew members. Once it was ascertained that Seven of Nine suffered no serious injury, and she had recovered consciousness, she got up, intending to help Torres with repairs. Then Janeway and Tuvok brought Paris in, groaning in intense pain from his burns. He was laid on a bed and the Doctor rushed over to him, along with the Seven, Chakotay and Torres. The group began comparing notes: Paris was burned by an EM discharge and Seven was almost killed when she was trapped in an enclosed space that filled with lethal nebula gases. Chakotay informed them of two other crew members who had been brought in as patients; they had tried to vent nebula gases from Deck 7 and had been struck by EM discharges as well. It was beginning to look as if an intelligence was at work; they realized that the EM discharge that had entered the ship was actually a life form that had come from the nebula. It was trying to make the ship more like its native environment and attacking anyone who tried to interfere. Just then, the Doctor's holomatrix began to destabilize. They quickly transferred him to the computer to save him. Then, power began to fail in Sickbay. Janeway ordered everyone to evacuate to Engineering. deck by deck, Neelix tells the children, the crew was losing the ship. Crew members were scattered all over, with no idea what was going on.
Through the darkened corridors, lit only intermittently by blood-red emergency lighting, Kim walked, with a wrist-borne light, looking for other crew members. As he rounded a corner, a frightened Crewman Tal Celes hit him in the stomach, thinking he was an alien invader. He angrily assured her that the ship had not been invade by aliens and the two proceed together to Engineering, where those who were in Sickbay had gone.
Neelix recounts that for over 4 hours, he was alone in the darkened mess hall, with no idea what was happening. Then he began to hear noises from outside the mess hall. Armed with a phaser, which he always kept hidden in the kitchen for emergencies, and with a wrist-borne light, he slowly and nervously walked to the doors, calling, "Hello? Is anyone there?" He stepped outside, following the sound of the noise, and found it was the turbolift doors opening and slamming shut repeatedly. He turned to go back to the mess hall, and walked right into Tuvok, who had come to get him. He was wearing an oxygen mask, and looking very much like a hostile alien in the dark. Neelix screamed and nearly shot him. The Vulcan told him to calm down, explained the situation as far as he knew, and the two, like Tal and Kim, set off for Engineering.
Act Four
Neelix continues his story, offering snacks
Neelix goes on with his story. He and Tuvok made their way toward Engineering through the Jefferies tubes. To pas the time, and to counteract his fear, he attempted to make conversation with the Vulcan, but Tuvok, in the way of Vulcans, preferred to silently focus on the task at hand. They were making progress, but then found their way cut off by an inflow of nebula gases into a tube that was behind a closed hatch. Tuvok began trying to access environmental controls from a circuit panel to try to vent the tube.
Janeway and the others from Sickbay had gathered in Engineering, now one of the the few places left with light or any kind of working computer access. Chakotay told her that 90 other crew members were accounted for, in other areas of the ship. Seven of Nine worked with Torres to try to wrest system control back from the alien, but to no avail. Then, suddenly, the computer began reporting Janeway's location: in Main Engineering. It sounded like another computer malfunction, but Janeway had a hunch that it was the alien trying to communicate. She had Torres call up the system's syntax subroutines to show the alien how to respond to her words as she spoke. Her hunch proved correct. When Janeway asked why it had come aboard, it told her to go to Astrometrics. She went, taking Seven with her, hoping to negotiate with it to get control of the ship back.
In the Jeffries tubes, Tuvok attempted to teach his companion a Vulcan meditation technique to try to calm his fear. At first it seems to work; Neelix casts his mind back to a happy moment when the crew held a party for him and cooked his favorite foods. But so great was his fear that he envisioned nebula gas with a demonic face flying up at him when he uncovered the plate. Thus the attempted meditation failed.
Janeway and Seven arrived at astrometrics, where the alien called up the navigational logs to show them the nebula they had been collecting deuterium from. Janeway realized that the alien wanted to return to the nebula, its home, and the alien confirmed this, verbally using the computer system's syntax, and by returning helm control. It told Janeway to go to the bridge, but int instituted a level 10 security clearance to enter the bridge, which only Janeway had as Captain. This meant that Seven could not go with her; she had to go alone, which she did.
The captain, Neelix tells the children, had developed a fragile rapport with the alien. On the bridge, she threw the ship into warp and piloted it back to the nebula. But when the ship arrived at the nebula's coordinates, and she cut the warp engines, the viewscreen showed only stars; the nebula, having been destabilized by the ship's Bussard collectors, had completely disappeared. At this, the alien became furious. It cut life support on all decks and, through the computer, sent a ship-wide message to abandon ship. An eye for an eye. Voyager had destroyed its home. It intended to deprive the crew of theirs and take Voyager for itself.
Act Five
Janeway informs the crew to abandon ship
The Captain's only hope of keeping the ship, Neelix tells the children, was to try to reason with the livid alien. On the bridge, she tried to convince it to let her find it a new home, in another nebula. But the alien rejected her overtures. It overloaded the helm control circuits, destroying the ability to pilot the ship, and refused to even allow her to use the comm system to warn the crew to abandon ship; its warning using the computer was all the notice they would get. Janeway hurriedly left the bridge to return to Engineering to tell the crew members there that the warning was no computer malfunction; they had to abandon the ship.
In the Jeffries Tube, Tuvok was still attempting to vent the gas from the sealed tube that he and Neelix needed to go through. The alien, however, attacked him with an EM discharge as it had done to Paris and others, and released nebula gas into the tube where the two men were. Tuvok ordered Neelix to go on without him, but Neelix refused, picking him up and helping him continue forward.
On her way back to Engineering, Neelix recounts, Janeway tried to make the alien reconsider what it was doing. She told it that without a crew to maintain them, the ship's systems would eventually fail. This meant that it would drift through space, a wreck, until destroyed by some cosmic phenomenon such as an asteroid shower without shields to protect it or propulsion to get it out of the way, leaving the creature without a home, without which it could not survive. But the creature seemed bent on its course of action. Janeway, Neelix tells the children, could not afford to wait any longer. She returned to Engineering and ordered everyone to get to the escape pods and shuttles. Neelix and the injured Tuvok climbed out of a Jeffries Tube hatch just in time to join them. All shuttles and pods were launched but one, on which Chakotay was to leave with Janeway. Chakotay went first, but as Janeway was about to go through the door to get to the pod, it shut. Th creature had, in fact, listened to what she had said about the ship needing to be maintained, and it intended to keep one crew member aboard to do just that: Janeway herself. It told her to go to Engineering. Outraged, she flatly refused, telling it she would not be its prisoner; it would have to kill her, but she was not ever going to bow to its wishes. It attempted to force her by trapping her between two force fields and filling the space between with nebula gas. She remained steadfast as she sank to the floor, coughing and asphyxiating, telling the creature that they would die together; within two minutes of exposure to the gases, she would be dead and it would be on its own, with nobody to maintain she ship. Seeing that it was simply not going to get her to acquiesce, no matter what it did, even threatening her with death, the creature finally relented. It withdrew the gas, dropped the force fields and restored all the systems, giving her back the ship; it would accept her proposal of a new home in another nebula.
It took nearly two days, Neelix says for the entire crew to return. An isolated environment was created to contain the creature until another suitable nebula was found for it...on Deck 12. The creature has been there ever since, he concludes. Suddenly the ship is shaken. Then, a few seconds later, main power is restored. The lights come back on and the Borg alcoves power up again. Neelix tells them that it was probably the alien leaving the ship to take up residence in the nebula they are going though; the new home the Captain found for it. He has them return to the alcoves (the equivalent of human children being sent to bed). As they are about go back onto the platforms, another child, Rebi, asks him what if the jolt they felt was the creature coming to take revenge. Neelix then tells them that he made the whole thing up. Mildly chagrined, they mount, turn around, and close their eyes as their regeneration cycles kick in, the Borg equivalent of going to sleep. Neelix turns off the lantern and wishes them pleasant dreams.
Neelix then goes to the bridge, where all is back to normal. Seated in their respective command chairs, Janeway and Chakotay ask him how the children handled the blackout. Neelix says he kept them occupied with a story. Paris asks him if it was a 'Mother Goose' story, to which he responds absolutely not; some of those stories, with their ogres and such, can frighten children. He asks Janeway if everything is okay. She says yes; they were just taking some final readings before resuming course. She has Kim show him a final viewscreen image of the nebula. He looks at it, pleased, and then says:
- "Well! I hope it lives happily ever after."
Voyager cruises away at impulse, then goes to warp, leaving the area light-years behind in seconds.
Memorable Quotes
"Gather round, but I'm warning you: this is not a tale for the faint of heart."
"We are not faint of heart."
"Our cardiopulmonary systems are reinforced."
- - Neelix, Mezoti, and Icheb
"Did I ever tell you about the Salvoxia?"
"If I say yes, will it prevent you from telling the story?"
- - Neelix and Tuvok, while crawling through the Jefferies tubes right before the story is told
"What do you see, Tuvok?"
"Two Starfleet officers, with juvenile imaginations."
- - Tom Paris, Harry Kim, and Tuvok
"I won't be your prisoner. You'll have to kill me."
"Acknowledged."
- - Janeway and the computer under control of the class J nebula lifeform, prior to it releasing gas into the corridor.
"The turbolift started to fall faster and faster...! Anybody hungry?"
(Outraged) "Neelix!"
"You haven't touched your snacks."
"Snacks are irrelevant! Continue the story!"
- - Neelix and Mezoti
Background Information
- Zoe McLellan reprises her role as Tal Celes from "Good Shepherd".
- In this episode Neelix claims intent to install curtains, and even carries the fabric at one point. He has claimed this intent several times, but he never followed through.
- Some rarely seen, unique visual effects include: looking out the viewscreen as the ship jumps to warp, the replicator replicating the coffee before replicating the mug, and a look at the insides of the turboshaft.
- The special effects used to illustrate the 'ghost' on Deck Twelve are the same exact graphics used in "Macrocosm" when Janeway throws the antidote bomb in the holodeck after luring the macro viruses there. The smoke is colored orange here instead of the green color used in the season 3 episode.
Awards
- This episode was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series.
Links and References
Guest Stars
- Manu Intiraymi as Icheb
- Marley McClean as Mezoti
- Zoe McLellan as Tal Celes
- Kurt Wetherill as Azan
- Cody Wetherill as Rebi
- Majel Barrett as Computer Voice
References
Bussard collector; chadre'kab; class J nebula; class M; coffee; dark nebula; deuterium; Edgar Allan Poe; Class J nebula lifeform; Flotter; Galactic Cluster 8; Gibson (Crewman); McMann; meteorite; Mother Goose; Mulcahey; nadion; neural transceiver; plasma drift; Salvoxia; SIMs beacons; species 5973; Talaxian; Talaxian system; Tarkanian desert; Tera nut soufflé; Trumari; vampire bat; Vorik
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Star Trek: Voyager Season 6 |
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