OVEG Video: Innocence

[Sonnenburg]

We return to the other end of the bell curve as we see Lisa Klink deliver the godawful Innocence. Pretty much nothing interesting happens, then a twist ending that is idiotic arrives, the end. Painful.

Video

[FaxModem1]

I remember this episode, one of the 'kids' was the kid from Smart Guy.

Bad episode, good review.

[Steve]

That would work so much better if it was all an elaborate, crazy lie - a lie so massive and stupid it creates a minor "Big Lie" effect that's powerful enough to sucker the Voyager crew - and the kids were the offspring of executed political dissidents sent to die by the xenophobes or something......

[Zor]

I always considered this to be the outright dumbest episode of Voyager for that ending and i was wondering since i saw the Michael Jonas bit when you would tear it a new asshole in video format.

Zor

[Terralthra]

Another possibility for the guy at the beginning is that the rear door came open as the shuttle was about to crash and the guy fell out (since shuttlecraft operators don't wear seatbelts), breaking his back on impact.

[Darth Lucifer]

Thanks, I needed a good laugh today. Great review for a shit episode.

[Samuel]

This is the aging backwards episode, isn't it? Even if you know nothing about science it is stupid.

[Junghalli]

That would work so much better if it was all an elaborate, crazy lie - a lie so massive and stupid it creates a minor "Big Lie" effect that's powerful enough to sucker the Voyager crew - and the kids were the offspring of executed political dissidents sent to die by the xenophobes or something......

I'm thinking the monster in the cave is real and the Drayans periodically give it child sacrifices to feed on. Maybe they've made some kind of deal with it for something valuable it can provide them, or maybe they worship it. I like this idea myself because it makes the whole thing totally creepy.

Even setting aside the ridiculousness of the reverse aging the logistics of shipping every person dying of old age to this planet would be brain-breaking, unless their population was really tiny or they were very long-lived. Child sacrifices or exiles makes more sense just based on that alone.

[Patrick Degan]

Innocence? Sorry, but Lisa Klink is GUILTY:

[Glom]

Did I see a note that 'All Good Things...' is coming next week? I assume it's coming in many parts since it would be a crime to run through the entire episode in just a oner.

[tezunegari]

If considering for a moment that the "beekeepers of outer space" actually do turn into children when they become the senile old coots that most humans turn into: HOW DO THEY DISCERN THEIR OWN CHILDREN FROM THEM?! I mean they somehow have to reproduce and I doubt they give birth to fully grown people. (If they are looking like children when they are old, are they looking like age 90+?)

Another example why Voyager's concept should be called "Death to brain cells! All hail Stupidity".

Is there even a good Voyager episode (in the range of DS9's "pale moonlight" or TNG's "Tapestry")?

Did I see a note that 'All Good Things...' is coming next week? I assume it's coming in many parts since it would be a crime to run through the entire episode in just a oner.

Yes! Now where is my DeLorean time machine? I can't wait to see that review.

[Sonnenburg]

Not next week, August 1. I'm throwing my kids a birthday party on Saturday.

[Patrick Degan]

If considering for a moment that the "beekeepers of outer space" actually do turn into children when they become the senile old coots that most humans turn into: HOW DO THEY DISCERN THEIR OWN CHILDREN FROM THEM?! I mean they somehow have to reproduce and I doubt they give birth to fully grown people. (If they are looking like children when they are old, are they looking like age 90+?)

There was a TAS episode based on this idea: "The Counter-Clock Incident". The Enterprise with Ambassador Robert April (the ship's first captain) and wife Sarah are being conveyed to Babel for his retirement ceremonies when they detect a ship running at Warp 36 headed for a black hole. Locking a tractor beam onto the vessel to attempt to stop its suicide dive, the Enterprise is instead dragged into what is actually a gateway into a weird parallel universe in which time flows backward and people are born as senile adults and regress back into babies and cease to exist. The crew begins suffering reverse-ageing and this becomes a problem when it's time to attempt to exit through the gateway to return home.

Alan Dean Foster, in the ninth volume of his Star Trek Logs novelisations of TAS, expanded on this story with a novella in which their next mission after this encounter is to retrieve a brother/sister team of scientists, the Delminnens, from their outpost planet. They've just twigged onto some new, revolutionary formulae which could have huge ramifications for star travel and military applications and the Klingons are after them as well. Not surprisingly, a Klingon battlecruiser is in orbit and its captain also after the pair. The Klingons grab the brother, the Enterprise gets the sister, and a chase ensues which leads to a battle in which both ships cripple one another. Drifting through space with disabled engines, the Enteprise and the Klathas encounter a world travelling on a free trajectory through space but still somehow maintaining a class-M environment despite the lack of a sun. The Klingon captain proposes settling their dispute on the planet, which has a medieval society at best, and Kirk agrees. Beaming down, the inevitable clash ensues, and both captains find themselves on trial by the village elders. Spock, who has finally had a chance to evaluate everything they have been through since the incident in the parallel universe, concludes that they have all been subjected to a massive illusion because they have encountered too many phenomena which break every known law of physics, that the people they've encountered on this world behave nothing like any culture in their experience, that the culture of the parallel universe is impossible simply because the knowledge that they're degenerating would drive any people to madness, among other reasons why it's impossible, and that the very level of improbability they've had to accept is the clue that nothing they've experienced is real. The pilot of the warp 36 craft, Karla Five, reveals herself and confirms everything Spock has surmised. Her race are a people who are on the same level as the Organians, who have been evaluating the intelligence levels of the "local space-traversing dominants" and set up both situations as tests. The Klingon captain admits that his crew also encountered the time-backward parallel universe before receiving a communique about the Delminnens and orders to bring them back to Klingon space. The aliens manufactured that situation as well and two of their number impersonated the Delminnens. Karla Five expresses her disappointment that both crews too easily accepted the testimony of their own fooled senses for too long (even Mr. Spock) and that both resorted to violence to settle their dispute, and that neither race is as yet worthy of their further interest. When Kirk asks Karla Five why, she explains that her race traverses the galaxy hoping to find other races at or close to their level; "It is a lonely thing to be at the apex of creation, for an apex is always surrounded only by emptiness".

[18-Till-I-Die]

I figure the aging backwards to childhood is only in the last stages of their physical death, with some kind of "energy being" as the final step, if the dialogue is taken at face value (and frankly I don't see why not...stupid or not we have no evidence whatsoever it's some "sacrifice" bull, so just saying "I don't believe it" is useless).

It could be like dementia. At the start of the process they're still adults but becoming more childlike, but by the end their bodies "catch up" and they begin de-aging, possibly into some kind of pre-birth mush. But it would only be within the last few months, and they'd be in care homes or being prepped for the exile by that time so you wouldn't confuse them for "real" children...also if it IS like dementia, and that seems likely from the odd actions of the "kids", then they probably would be very obviously sick at that stage. They'd be remembering things from decades ago and mistaking people for their old school pals who died in the war sixty years ago, unlike a normal kid.

As for how they're born, that seems obvious. They have children in the "middle". Between birth and old age is teenagers, so they fuck and give birth in those times. The real children would obviously be kept away from the dying old-young people, for obvious reasons (like you don't want grand dad to confuse his granddaughter for his old sweetheart from elementary school and have some horrible incident or something...) and besides they probably ship them off when they start de-aging anyway. If I were to think harder about it than the writers I'd presume it was some rather cruel satire about how people ship their old, senile parents off when they can't or won't care for them anymore, at the end. Only it's in reverse for satirical reasons: the "old" children ship off their "young" dying parents at the end. Like a Bizarro rest home.

It's really wierd and I won't even begin to guess how that trait evolved, but it COULD work, logistics wise.

If i may digress, I liked Benjamin Button when I went to see it with my mom (who went to see it because she likes Brad Pitt). That was mainly explained due to magic. The guy in the town whose son died in WWI created a clock that ran backwards to try and "bring him back" by turning back time. The implication is, and we both thought this was fairly obvious, was that Benjamin was the reincarnation of the dead clockmaker's son, literally born again but in reverse due to the clock. So yeah, imagine a voodoo doll, only it's a clock.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Ghetto edit: also, a planet is fucking huge, so it's entirely possible they had tens of millions of old-young people down there and they'd be so spread out you would never see more than a handful here and there.

If you used the whole planet, you could spread out such a population far and wide and yeah you'd probably only ever see a small cluster here and there. There would be hundreds of thousands of square miles of open range.

[Samuel]

Ghetto edit: also, a planet is fucking huge, so it's entirely possible they had tens of millions of old-young people down there and they'd be so spread out you would never see more than a handful here and there.

If you used the whole planet, you could spread out such a population far and wide and yeah you'd probably only ever see a small cluster here and there. There would be hundreds of thousands of square miles of open range.

You'd have a constant stream of ships coming and leaving the planet. Nothing like this episode.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Well maybe not constant, not day and night. Obviously they wouldn't be dropped there all at once. And even if they were, it wouldn't require a constant stream since thousands of people can fit on a single ship, or even more if it's a dedicated carrier vessel. You can fit thousands of people on a Carrier and it's not even designed to be a transport but a warship first and foremost; a ship of similar size dedicated to transporting people could easily carry tens of thousands.

Plus, we have no idea how long these people live. It may be they die at a very slow pace...indeed the fact their aging process seems completely disconnected from normal biology (like the whole aging backwards deal) throws any human concept of age and lifespan up in the air. I could only presume (and thi is pure speculation) they have to age to normal old-age physically then de-age back in reverse, so if one of them only lives fifty years that'd be a century both ways and they only go to the planet near the end...judging by the kids, within the last few days or hours of their end. So it may be the ships need to go there every few decades or centuries only and Voyager caught the tail end of one die-off or another. But anyway that's assuming they only live fifty years...if one lives, for example, eighty years or a century then it may be even longer between drop offs.

I mean, that's stupid, but it could work nonetheless. The thing that gets me about this episode is that I can't imagine how this would have evolved naturally. My best guess is it's some kind of genetic engineering bullshit, like that TOS episode where they landed on a planet where evryone over a certain age died covered in blue sores...or something like that it's been a while since I saw it.

[Samuel]

Well maybe not constant, not day and night. Obviously they wouldn't be dropped there all at once.

Yeah, but that doesn't work with this episode.

Plus, we have no idea how long these people live. It may be they die at a very slow pace...

That is entirely irrelevant. The Life expectancy has no effect on the death rate.

like that TOS episode where they landed on a planet where evryone over a certain age died covered in blue sores...or something like that it's been a while since I saw it.

That works better actually. When you age your immune system weakens- it could be some sort of fungi that gets a hold when your immune system doesn't work well enough to beat it off.

[Setzer]

At least Benjamin Button started off an old baby and grew into a young man. The way the Drayans seem to be developed, they'd be giving birth to newborns that could be several feet tall.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Yeah, but that doesn't work with this episode.

I don't understand how doesn't it, could you explain?

That is entirely irrelevant. The Life expectancy has no effect on the death rate.

I seriously don't think every one of these people who dies for ANY reason de-age instantly, and if they did they'd juse turn all "energy being" like the ones in the episode did when they die. This isn't about people who died from a bullet wound or a broken neck after a fall or AIDS these peopel died from OLD AGE they were very specific. So yeah, it does in this case matter more than normal death rate. If disease, war, whatever all caused them to de-age then it would also make them evaporate like they did, so it would make this even easier since half of them would vanish instantly when they die. These people were "old" people on the last few hours or days of their life, not dying of disease or wounds.

That works better actually. When you age your immune system weakens- it could be some sort of fungi that gets a hold when your immune system doesn't work well enough to beat it off.

No these were people who, I believe, hit teenagerhood and died. It was some kind of bioweapon so it was designed to do that, but it went out of control. Or something like that.

At least Benjamin Button started off an old baby and grew into a young man. The way the Drayans seem to be developed, they'd be giving birth to newborns that could be several feet tall.

I'm...pretty sure that's what they mean't to imply here. I seriously doubt they're born adult, they probably grow up to adulthood and then age back down, which is actually what happened in Benjamin Button...in a round about way. I believe the same message here is the one in that movie: at the end we're all reduced to being in diapers, so don't get uppity about being young. The difference is Benjamin Button did it better and had the advantage of just saying "oh, it's magic" instead of presuming it evolved naturally.

[Samuel]

I don't understand how doesn't it, could you explain?

The kids were in a crashed shuttle.

No these were people who, I believe, hit teenagerhood and died. It was some kind of bioweapon so it was designed to do that, but it went out of control. Or something like that.

A bioweapon that targets puberty? Could work...you set it to go off when there is a certain chemical mix in the blood- no idea how you'd do that, but it can be done.

[Junghalli]

A bioweapon that targets puberty? Could work...you set it to go off when there is a certain chemical mix in the blood- no idea how you'd do that, but it can be done.

I believe he's talking about the TOS episode Miri. The disease in question there was a genetically engineered organism (or rather a series of them, actually) originally intended to dramatically slow the aging process. It worked, but had the unintended side effect of causing lots of nasty and apparently ultimately fatal side effects when you hit puberty (dementia, some sort of skin condition etc.). So you ended up with a planet full of children who took centuries to reach puberty and then died.

As far as the Drayans, if we take the episode at face value they have to be the result of sadistic bioengineering. Nothing else makes sense, except to conclude that they're lying.

[Samuel]

Patricks explanation from TAS books works and is awesome.

[NecronLord]

Patricks explanation from TAS books works and is awesome.

Particularly as it implies that the Voyager crew just failed an intelligence test.