To The Journey 296: Oppenheimer’s Gambit

ChrisWelcome back, everyone, to To The Journey, our dedicated Star Trek: Voyager podcast. I'm Christopher Jones and with me as he always is, is my esteemed co-host, Matthew Rushing. And Matthew, I took the liberty of scheduling a metabolic scan for you this morning. The Doctor's going to help me with that. But don't worry, it's just a precaution and nothing to worry about. I just thought that I heard you had been in the vicinity of Rinax, so I was a little concerned.

MatthewOh, oh, I mean, sure. Now I'm incredibly worried and feeling very anxious. And hopefully this turns out to be nothing because, yeah, I mean, could this be fate? Is there anything really to worry about, Chris?

ChrisI wouldn't worry too much. I mean, you've eaten so much leola root, if anything was going to kill you, that would be it.

MatthewAre you trying to just tell me you're sure it's fine? Is that what you're saying?

ChrisYeah, I'm sure it's fine. Don't worry about it. No problem.

MatthewOkay, great.

ChrisAlright everyone, we're going to continue our 30th-anniversary rewatch today with "Jetrel." It's episode 14 of season 1, and here is a quick rundown of the story.

When a Haakonian shuttle hails Voyager and asks to speak with Neelix, the ship's cook and guide is shocked. The caller is Dr. Ma'Bor Jetrel, and they have a past. Jetrel designed the Metreon Cascade, a weapon that killed more than 300,000 Talaxians, including Neelix's entire family, and left him without a home. It turns out the scientist is dying from a disease caused by the Cascade, and Neelix may be as well. Jetrel says he's come to offer medical help. Neelix does not want to have anything to do with him. But after Jetrel comes aboard, both men discover that the secrets they have been carrying go deeper than they want to admit.

ChrisSo, Matthew, we've got a very serious episode of Voyager here as we get close to the end of the season. And surprisingly, after we had a character episode with B'Elanna, we get one with Neelix. Now, were you expecting, as you were watching through the first time, to dig into Neelix's character given who he had been up to this point in the show?

MatthewUh, no, I don't think that I was expecting really to be diving into Neelix in this way in this episode, especially with there only being one episode left in the season. But I mean, I'm not opposed to it in that sense. I mean, I definitely think that, of all the characters on the show at this point, Neelix is probably the one in desperate need of some help. I think that he's the one.

ChrisYou mean in terms of the character development for the viewers?

MatthewExactly. Yeah, I think that, you know, this is the character that I'm least likely to connect with right now. In all honesty, I would say that even just rewatching the episodes, I'm not connecting with him. For the most part, I find him to be pretty obnoxious, as most people did, I think, at the beginning.

And yeah, so to do this, I think, is a good idea. Can we find a way then to bring this character to life that doesn't just feel like he's always going to be there for comic relief or always going to be there for pining after Kes and being jealous of her in really creepy ways?

ChrisMm-hmm. Right. Yeah.

MatthewThere is something incredibly, as I rewatch this, the whole aspect of the fact that Kes is this young girl and Neelix is a middle-aged man is just a really strange dynamic to me that I do not like at all.

I just don't think it works. And a big part of that is because I don't really find them to have a ton of chemistry on-screen. And so I just feel like this is a good opportunity to take Neelix to another level. How do you feel about that? Especially, you know, I know we've both seen these episodes a few times, at least usually. How were you feeling originally about Neelix? Were you kind of in the same boat at this point?

ChrisWell, yeah. I mean, I don't think Neelix bothered me originally in the same way that he did you. He was never my favorite character or anything, but he was fine. I think Ethan Phillips plays the character well. He's a good actor. So it's just that the stuff they give Neelix to do is sometimes a bit odd.

The Kes thing is interesting because I don't remember being bothered by it as much at the time, because obviously I was much younger at that point. And also, just the world was different. And I think I just took it as purely a sci-fi concept of, you know, they're both aliens and her species lives this long and all. It's a creative decision that they made that I think has not aged well at all and looks really bizarre to us today. And especially when you watch it when you're older and you're actually thinking more about the relationships and what all this stuff means, it's really something that I think they should have gone back to the drawing board on.

But, and especially what we've seen up to this point, most of the time is him being jealous of Tom Paris and Kes and things like that.

MatthewRight.

ChrisNow, in this episode, they do use Kes effectively, I think, in drawing something out of Neelix and helping him make some important decisions in the story and doing it in a serious way that, if you set the age difference aside, then at least the characters interacting with one another makes sense.

MatthewSure. Yeah. Again, when you asked about is this the right time to do a Neelix episode, and I think that this really is the time to do a Neelix episode because even kind of thinking back to my thought process then, but then what has been reinforced, I think, in my rewatch now, this character needs help. It needs something to make it come alive in just a different way, a way that feels more interesting and worthwhile to have on the show.

And so I think that's the thing that has been missing so far.

ChrisWe're always on the ship, we're always going to different places, and the stories are not quite as serious and heavy as Deep Space Nine was becoming at the time that this was being—well, the development of this maybe started before DS9 got too heavy, but by the time this aired, we were very much into a much more serious DS9. And so I wonder if they felt like they wanted to have this kind of comic relief character. I mean, Quark is kind of that on Deep Space Nine, but Quark is not the typical comic relief.

MatthewRight.

ChrisLike he's not straight comedy, right?

MatthewYeah.

ChrisHe has a different side to him.

MatthewYeah.

ChrisSo I don't know if that was something that played a little bit into maybe they wanted to have a Quark-like character, but they wanted him to just be a lighter character. And so they came up with Neelix. But I think at this point, we're almost at the end of season 1. But in reality, this came in terms of writing more around the middle of season 1, because a lot of the season 2 episodes were actually written for season 1. And then they cut the season short.

MatthewYeah, yeah, yeah.

ChrisSo I guess they were getting past the halfway point and feeling like, yeah, we need to start fleshing out these characters a bit more. So we got "Faces" with B'Elanna and then we get this with Neelix.

MatthewYeah, I think so.

MatthewThis episode has a real historical feel to it in the sense that it is very much referencing our past here. This episode is like Oppenheimer's gambit, right? Jetrel is a stand-in for the historical character of Oppenheimer, who of course helped create the atomic bomb. He was the major force behind it. Of course, everybody at this point has seen Christopher Nolan's film on it, which is great. So we're playing with the idea of what happens to a scientist who is so preoccupied with if he can do a thing, he doesn't think about if he should do a thing. And it leads to this weapon being used and this war between the Talaxians and the Haakonian Order.

So that is, I think, when we talk about, okay, should we have a Neelix episode here? Should we get deeper into this character? Well, that definitely seems like almost as deep as you can go by playing with that.

ChrisRight. Right. I think the choice to build this framework for the story around a parallel of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes sense for giving Neelix a backstory that actually has some real impact on him that you could potentially play with a lot along the way to unpack why he's the way he is. Which they do a little bit in this story. And eventually they return to the impact of it a bit more, I guess, like in the seventh season. But they had the potential to do more by giving him this backstory.

And just from a science fiction point of view, it's something that I appreciate because it's social commentary, it's looking at our own world and then grafting that onto alien cultures so that you can then talk about it a bit more. But it's something that we can look at and understand that, yeah, this happened in our own world and it had an impact on individual people. It's something that, you know, maybe in more recent years with things like the film that you mentioned and such, and more discussion about it, there's a bit more understanding of the impact on people of those attacks during World War II.

But I think that the country I live in—Japan—very much feels the impact of what it meant on a personal level to people. From the other side, I don't know that that was always the case, because it's more viewed as one moment in a broader conflict. George Takei was here in Tokyo back in October or November to speak to us at the Foreign Correspondents Club about his book, a children's book that he's released in Japanese. He told the whole story about his grandparents and the impact of firsthand being out of town—I believe it's Hiroshima—being out of town when the bomb went off and coming back and finding the disaster and all. And so it's just a really incredible personal story. And so it's a strong historical moment to build some background for a character from.

MatthewYeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that you had mentioned just in the outline for this episode very clearly kind of feels as though it's a play that's talking about a thing that feels much closer to what happened on 1940s Earth than 24th-century Delta Quadrant politics, because Jetrel will say things like "his country" or "the world." And it's very much a reminder of the way in which this power that was unleashed on the world by Oppenheimer and his creation is a force to be reckoned with. And what it did to our planet is the same thing in many ways that it did to this area of the Delta Quadrant and the war between these two species. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it is a really interesting idea to build an episode on.

ChrisYeah. It might feel a bit on the nose to some people, I suppose, but I think it works here.

MatthewYeah, I mean, I think it is. But at the same time, you know, all of Star Trek and most of our stories, in some ways, are referencing some sort of historical aspect to kind of build out whatever they're doing. That's just a part of storytelling. We utilize the human experience as a whole to create other stories to hopefully help teach and show us things that you might not see just by looking at a history book. Reading a story, we might be able to pick up more readily on it.

ChrisEspecially like The Next Generation's "The Game," where everyone gets addicted to a device, playing games on it.

MatthewYou know, as funny and silly as "The Game" was at that point, I do think it is hilarious that this idea that everybody is just in a scrolling haze—that's what that game is. And they even rightly talked about the idea that everybody is feeling this way because of the dopamine hits that they're getting with what happens in the game and how it rewards them.

ChrisYeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

MatthewI mean, they nailed it. I don't think there's any way in which I would ding the episode for having the references to what's happened here in our history to tell the story here. I think, more than anything, it kind of just comes down to, do they execute it well? I think those are the questions that, as we talk about the episode, it'll be more important than whether or not they should be utilizing this as a way to tell a story.

ChrisWell, how do you feel about that? Like, I feel that to this point, what Ethan Phillips had been given to work with on the show was so silly and comedic, and it wasn't a serious role, right? And suddenly, what they've done to try to build his character here is, they've just stripped him of that comic relief that had defined him up to this point. And they throw him in this situation where he may be facing death. And because he can see that—and also because the whole catalyst for the situation that he's in is what happened 15 years earlier, and then he's being faced with the scientist who created the weapon, and it brings up these memories that he lost his family, and he feels this guilt. And so, he's got this whole grandiose story about how he fought in the conflict or he was in the service and he has this regret he wasn't able to stop it.

And then we find out that it's all just a made-up story. It's something that he never would have normally revealed. And so it's such a serious situation for him. And I feel Ethan Phillips plays it really well for just being thrown suddenly into a serious role where he has to play that role—not just as an actor who does a new movie or a new role or something where you can switch gears, but he has to play the character of Neelix, believably, but without all the normal wrappings of the character.

MatthewYeah, I think that he does a good job here. Look, I think he's normally been the clown on the show.

ChrisYeah. Tears of a Clown, I called it this section, by the way.

MatthewExactly. And so now he is going to have the tears of a clown and I think does that work. And again, I think Ethan Phillips does a pretty good job here with what he's given in this episode. And to just basically turn 180 degrees from who this character's been and to do this is pretty impressive. I think he's done a really good job there.

MatthewAnd, you know, I think that one of the most challenging aspects of this too for the character was that he had to play somebody who is also regretting his choice.

He's regretting his choices here. You know, he is somebody who has portrayed himself as being a real hero and somebody who was willing to fight fire with fire, was willing to be the guy that everybody would want to be. And in the end, what we find of Neelix—which I think you're right in some ways does kind of have a lot to do with the character at large—is that he is a character who has no bravery. He is a character who has no thought really outside himself, because he really only cares about his own survival. He wasn't willing to be self-sacrificial and join the army, and he utilizes the idea of being a conscientious objector to be able to get out of that, and he realizes that now, that that's what he was doing. And to me, that's a great opportunity then to say, hey, this is what the character arc for this character is. This character's arc is going to be one in which we have to get them from a place to which they are completely self-focused and self-centered to being a character who is willing to be more like our Starfleet characters, which are selfless. And if we're going to do that, this is kind of the road you have to take. And so I think that's the thing that's pretty strikingly interesting then about this character.

ChrisSo it's an interesting parallel because this episode falls in the same slot as "Duet" on DS9. It's the next-to-last episode of season 1. And what you just described for Neelix is somewhat similar to the situation that Kira faces in "Duet," in that she's having to face some beliefs, thoughts that she's had in the face of coming face-to-face with someone, and the fallout of those interactions set the character on a different trajectory.

MatthewYeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I love that you call that out because it truly is a one-for-one in the sense of the comparison of what they're doing with the characters.

ChrisAnd the setting in that it's very much like a bottle show.

MatthewYes.

ChrisI mean, it is a bottle show.

MatthewYes.

ChrisThey were trying to save money.

MatthewYes.

ChrisBut it has that very intimate feel.

Matthew100 percent.

ChrisYeah.

MatthewBut I think the thing that's interesting here is that "Duet" is a great episode, and I think this is a pretty good episode for the most part.

But really what you judge "Duet" by and you will judge "Jetrel" by is what they do with the character as you move forward. And so that is really going to be, I think, the hallmark. We've been talking about the promise of Voyager. Is it living up to its promise? One of the promises that this episode makes is that the character of Neelix has a ton of depth to him. There's a lot of psychological issues here. There's a lot of things that need to be worked through, and there's a lot of character growth that needs to happen with this character.

ChrisYeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

MatthewAnd will they do that? We know from Deep Space Nine—and this is not the Deep Space Nine rewatch—we know that Kira's character is going to have a massive character arc from start to finish at this point. The question is going to be for us in this rewatch: are they going to do that with Neelix?

ChrisYeah.

MatthewAnd I do think that that's a really interesting question.

And I'm not going to say yay or nay here because that's the fun of doing this rewatch with you.

ChrisYeah, we're going to see how it unfolds.

All right. Well, one other thing I wanted to throw in there, just talking about Neelix's character and building it and all is that, as you know very well, Matthew, Jeri Taylor wrote a book called Pathways, in which she provided background to all the main characters of the show. And in the section for Neelix, in Neelix's story in that book, we learn a lot more about his background on Rinax, the devastation of the Metreon Cascade, the impact of losing his family. That's all fleshed out there. So I do recommend, if anyone wants to add more depth to viewing this episode, go back and read that book and it'll fill in some stuff for you from the creator of the show.

MatthewAnd they're about to talk about it on Literary Treks.

ChrisYeah. Yeah. Yeah.

ChrisAlright. Well, any last thoughts on this one, Matthew, and what's your rating?

MatthewThis is one of those episodes where there's that whole moment of forgiveness at the end, and I think you get that moment right of forgiveness. And I think a lot of that comes from the fact that Neelix realizes that Jetrel is not the guy that he thought he was. But Neelix also realizes, I'm not the guy that I pretend to be. And therefore, I need to not only forgive him, but I need to forgive myself if I want to be able to move forward. And I think that's one of the things where it really does a lot for the character. It does a lot for the episode.

I would say, though, final thoughts for the episode is that one of the things that kind of makes this episode fall apart a little bit is just this whole idea of trying to bring back the people that were lost in this cascade.

And there's no way they're going to be able to make that work and to make that happen. And so there is a little bit of a letdown that this whole episode is kind of building around a thing that, in the end, it can never actually be. And so that's a little bit … it's not surprising, but it does take the episode and make it—I don't know—there's just something about it where it doesn't feel like the whole thing really comes together in the way they would want it to. Comparing it to "Duet," this is not "Duet." Everything about that episode was kind of picture-perfect. And I think that the reason is that this episode is a little bit too focused on the technobabble at the end that they're trying to solve instead of just the character story. "Duet," on the other hand, never does that. The whole thing is just the character story for both of them.

And that is the hallmark of Deep Space Nine—really knowing how to, if we're going to talk about the characters, dig into the characters. If we're going to let you behind the curtain of these characters, then those episodes, man, it's going to be all about the characters. And there are many episodes of Deep Space Nine that I can mention. I could think of "In the Pale Moonlight" or "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" as just two great examples of ones where every single thing about the episode is reinforcing the character moments. And that's the thing that I just think the thrust of what "Jetrel" is trying to do kind of takes away from a little bit.

So I'd say I'm still going to give this a very generous four out of five stars. I still think that this is a good episode. And again, it's going to be a really fun experience as we watch the show—are they going to take all of the pieces here that they've laid out about this character of Neelix and capitalize on that? I'm kind of excited to see what they do with that.

So what about you, Chris?

ChrisYeah, well, it's interesting that you bring up that bit about the transporter, because that's something people have talked about being kind of unnecessary, perhaps. And what's interesting for me with this one is, when I think back now, I always kind of mix up that moment in this episode with "Daedalus" on Enterprise, where you've got the inventor of the transporter itself trying to use the transporter to bring his son back.

MatthewMm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Yep. Yes, it's very similar in that sense.

ChrisSo on the timeline, yeah, that came after this. But on the timeline, "Daedalus" comes first, those actions come first in-universe. So I always kind of get those mixed up in my head a little bit. And then the other point you talked about with Neelix, and "sorry" seems to be the hardest word, but he comes through at the end. And I suppose what I did like about that ending is that it leaves it kind of vague for the viewer.

MatthewYeah.

ChrisYou're not sure if Neelix really means it or not. My reading of it has always been that I don't think Neelix actually forgives him. But Neelix finds this humanity. Sorry, Klingons, I don't mean to offend you.

MatthewOr to Talaxians or Vulcans or … oh my gosh … so speciesist.

ChrisYou know, he finds his Talaxinity to ease Jetrel as he's dying and just give him that last little moment.

And if you view it that way, if you view it in that sense of, well, he probably doesn't really mean it, but it is something that he would then carry forward with him—and it should influence how he develops as a person from this point on—I think that's good as well.

Comparing it with "Duet" as I did, it's certainly not as strong an episode as "Duet." But I do think it's still a very strong episode and one of the stronger Voyager episodes. And it's probably the strongest Neelix episode in the series in terms of really digging into the character and getting this kind of raw exploration of what's going on in the series. So I'm going to go ahead and give this one eight cascades.

ChrisAll right, everyone, we would love to hear your thoughts on "Jetrel." There are many ways for you to share those with us. Perhaps the easiest way is to go to Facebook and join the Babel Conference. That is our listeners group. It's there to extend the conversations beyond the podcasts. So if you're joining for the first time, please do answer the questions and agree to the rules of the forum so that I can let you in. You'll find a post there on the timeline for this episode, and you can share your thoughts with Matthew and me right there. You can send us email, if you'd like. Go to our website, trek.fm/contact, use the form you find there, choose to send to a show, and choose To The Journey. And that will come back to us through the transwarp conduit, back here to the Alpha Quadrant. And you can also find us on social media. Our username everywhere is trekfm. And if your podcast app of choice allows you to leave a rating and a review, we would love to get that from you as well.

Now, Matthew, when you're not trying to figure out how to dismantle an atomic bomb, where can people find you?

MatthewWell, you can find me, Chris, all over the place on social media under the name mattrushing02. Of course, you can find me here on the network in The 602 Club outside of all of our great Star Trek talk with all the other great franchises that we love. So check all that out. You can also find me on The Nerd Party Network with a couple of shows. One's called Owl Post, talking about every single chapter of the Harry Potter series. And you can find me on Aggressive Negotiations with John Mills as we talk about Star Wars each and every week.

But Chris, you know, if people are a little bit worried about you playing with uranium in your backyard, where can people find you?

ChrisThank you. Wow. I thought I was keeping that secret, but wow. I guess it's all the glowing at night, right? So, yeah, well, when I'm not doing that, you can find me elsewhere on the network doing all the podcasts with you, of course. You can find me in the back catalog on a wide range of shows. Got The Ready Room going again a little bit now with Larry Nemecek, and you can find me in social media. My username everywhere is C Bryan Jones, letter C and Bryan with a Y. Bluesky is where I'm most active, but you can find me everywhere, so drop me a line, I'd love to chat with you. And if you would like to help us keep this rewatch and everything we're doing on the network going, we could definitely use your help to find out how to support the network, how to get involved. Please visit patreon.com/trekfm. We would not be here without your support. So thank you so much to everyone who is helping us now.

Well, Matthew, I hope you're ready next time because we got to be quick. We got to get that cheese to sickbay as we talk about "Learning Curve."

MatthewOh, Chris, who moved my cheese? Set course for home.