The frankness with which B’Elanna’s sincere depression is written in “Extreme Risk” is a compassionate and interesting story choice, structuring, in a way, one of the most plainly human narratives in the Voyager speculative world. As it falls in the trilogy of self-reflection and emotional pause that is the opening of Season Five of Voyager, it engages some degree less with the science-fiction setting, in the core themes, relying less on the details of the setting to set up the emotional characterization of B’Elanna. The frankness of the depiction denotes a sense of reality which grounds not only B’Elanna, but the narrative space as well—a reality which seems drawn almost entirely from the portrait of B’Elanna and makes the character-occupied story more an avenue for return than for imagining.
Several moments in the episode read as, first, human drama over speculative. Some part of this is due to Dawson’s performance, which communicates much of B’Elanna’s state of mind without her having to speak explicitly on it. Another part is the way each of the clues of B’Elanna’s depression is introduced, made bare without comment: adding the extra risk to sky-diving, disabling the safety risk in a fight simulation, and, emphasized, disinterest, disinterest in a project, in her own designs, in both her partner’s attentions and rival’s opinions. B’Elanna having to be physically dragged into honesty as well as her dead-voiced attempts to reach out to someone, with her visit to Neelix, are also immediately interpret-able by the audience. The moment when the camera centers B’Elanna listening as Tom and Harry discuss the “micro-fractures” in the hull of the ship, the viewer knows what exactly is catching her interest and why. There are few details about her emotional state that would need explaining in the speculative context. Her state is familiar and human.
Humanity is a frequent concern of B’Elanna’s—“humanity”, here used not in sync with the world of Star Trek, like “human” is a type of alien race, but rather more traditionally: as a word indicating a complex personhood with a certain protected value. And she really is protective of those she perceives needing it, with (non-exhaustively) her participation in a violent resistance, her attempt to grant reproductive abilities to robots, and her expressed anger at the polluting aliens in the void. She’s protective of a certain definition of “being human”, shown through her caution to assign this category the EMH or Seven, while still generallt acting in their interest and with compassion, granting health and autonomous movement to the EMH. She acts, in this way, as a champion of humanism—focused on the rights of people, on responsibilities one has to societies, on the betterment of societies, all through actionable choices.
To one thing I have made up my mind; if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.
Bram Stoker, Dracula / Pluribus (2025)
Flying women raise important questions about what exactly constitutes the heroic female. Traditionally in myth, folklore, and literature, the heroine is a good girl, one who knows her place in the patriarchal scheme of things and does well in the traditional female roles of passive maiden, self-sacrificing mother, or obedient and dutiful wife. In the classical tradition of ancient Greece, the main expression of female heroism is her death? and, to a lesser degree, giving birth. The heroine's death is decidedly female; she often dies indoors and in secrecy, not publicly, without witnesses, and by her own hand. The preferred means is that she hang herself (like Phaedra), "an act that evokes at once the adornments around a woman's neck (an erotic part of her body), the webs of deceit she traditionally weaves, and a yoke with which she is finally tamed in death." Male models of heroism break free of conventional experience to enter strange realms and return with the prize of newfound knowledge, wealth, or the won princess (as evidenced by Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Aeneas, Dante, and the heroes of sleeping beauty tales, to give just a few examples). The hero returns home renewed and enriched.? Contrarily, women who fly want to be somewhere else to stay there; they do not want to return to conventional experience, which they view as captivity. They require us to rethink our ideas about female waywardness.
Serinity Young, Women Who Fly
JANEWAY: B'Elanna, I'm worried about you. If there's something wrong, I want to help. TORRES: Nothing's wrong. Okay? JANEWAY: No. It's not okay. And until you decide to be more forthcoming you'll remain under the Doctor's supervision. Which means you're off the shuttle project. I'm sorry. TORRES: I'm not. JANEWAY: Now I know there's something wrong. "Extreme Risk," Voyager
Comparing this moment to the indulgent pride and matched curiosity of Janeway when she is, at first, helping a very eager B'Elanna study the recovered robot in "Prototype"--Janeway relies on B'Elanna to be interested and committed in her arena of expertise, Janeway share's B'Elanna's arena of expertise, B'Elanna and Janeway found trust in each other by engaging with the things generated in the space between their paired knowings, so B'Elanna indifferent to building something new is a particular confirmation to Janeway. Janeway, an equally dramatic and curious engineer and scientist, describes B'Elanna not wanting to build as "something wrong." She's like, What about our sameness? What about that?
Of course, Wuthering Heights has often, also, been seen as a subversively visionary novel. Indeed, Bronte is frequently coupled with Blake as a practitioner of mystical politics. Usually, however, as if her book were written to illustrate the enigmatic religion of "No coward soul is mine," this visionary quality is related to Catherine's assertion that she is tired of "being enclosed" in "this shattered prison" of her body, and "wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there" (chap. 15). Many readers define Bronte, in other words, as a ferocious pantheist/transcendentalist, worshipping the manifestations of the One in rock, tree, cloud, man and woman, while manipulating her story to bring about a Romantic Liebestod in which favored characters enter "the endless and shadowless here-after." And certainly such ideas, like Blake's Songs of Innocence, are "something heterodox," to use Lockwood's phrase. At the same time, however, they are soothingly rather than disquietingly neo-Miltonic, like fictionalized visions of Paradise Lost's luminous Father God. They are, in fact, the ideas of "steady, reasonable" Nelly Dean, whose denial of the demonic in life, along with her commitment to the angelic tranquility of death, represents only one of the visionary alternatives in Wuthering Heights. And, like Blake's metaphor of the lamb, Nelly's pious alternative has no real meaning for Bronte outside of the context provided by its tigerish opposite.
“Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell,” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
In part Catherine's new wholeness results from a very practical shift in family dynamics. Heathcliff as a fantasy replacement of the dead oldest brother does in fact supplant Hindley in the old master's affections, and therefore he functions as a tool of the dispossessed younger sister whose "whip" he is. Specifically, he enables her for the first time to get possession of the kingdom of Wuthering Heights, which under her rule threatens to become, like Gondal, a queendom, In addition to this, however, Heathcliff's presence gives the girl a fullness of being that goes beyond power in household politics, because as Catherine's whip he is (and she herself recognizes this) an alternative self or double for her, a complementary addition to her being who fleshes out all her lacks the way a bandage might staunch a wound. Thus in her union with him she becomes, like Manfred in his union with his sister Astarte, a perfect androgyne. As devoid of sexual awareness as Adam and Eve were in the prelapsarian garden, she sleeps with her whip, her other half, every night in the primordial fashion of the countryside. Gifted with that innocent, unselfconscious sexual energy which Blake saw as eternal delight, she has "ways with her," according to Nelly, "such as I never saw a child take up before" (chap. 5). And if Heathcliff's is the body that does her will-strong, dark, proud, and a native speaker of "gibberish" rather than English—she herself is an "unfeminine" instance of transcendently vital spirit. For she is never docile, never submissive, never ladylike. On the contrary, her joy—and the Coleridgean word is not too strong—is in what Milton's Eve is never allowed: a tongue "always going-singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same," and "ready words: turning Joseph's religious curses into ridicule… and doing just what her father hated most" (chap. 5). Perverse as it may seem, this paradise into which Heathcliff's advent has transformed Wuthering Heights for the young Catherine is as authentic a fantasy for women as Milton's Eden was for men. Nevertheless, her personal heaven is surrounded, like Milton's Eden, by threats from what she would define as "hell." If, for instance, she had in some part of herself hoped that her father's death would ease the stress of that shadowy patriarchal yoke which was the only cloud on her heaven's horizon, Catherine was mistaken. For paradoxically old Earnshaw's passing brings with it the end to Catherine's Edenic "half savage and hardy and free" girlhood. It brings about a divided world in which the once-androgynous child is to be "laid alone" for the first time. And most important it brings about the accession to power of Hindley, by the patriarchal laws of primogeniture the real heir and thus the new father who is to introduce into the novel the proximate causes of Catherine's (and Heathcliff's) fall and subsequent decline.
“Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell,” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Gen, 7.8k words, M for mild gore and brief sex.
Palinopsia (n.) – A type of visual hallucination in which an individual continues to perceive an image after the source of the image is no longer present. Kes has determined the source of the hallucinations plaguing Voyager, and how to stop them, but every other member of the crew has already succumbed. Around every corner are illusions of her loved ones that seek only to stop her from saving the ship. She can no longer trust her senses to tell her what is and isn’t real.
In case anyone wanted a Kes whump take on Persistence of Vision. The hurt is her inability to trust reality, and the comfort is Tuvok talking her through it.
She became the mirror. She became the placid glassy surface of the water. His presence was a lie, but she could see what was true. The warp core’s buzzing accelerated, charging the resonance pulse, and Kes was one with it, her own power swelling inside her. For a moment, she was beyond pain, beyond her own body, beyond life. She was Voyager, she was spacetime, she was the warp core at three million Kelvins. She tore the bronze web with a million hands, she collected everyone’s daydreams, and she reflected them away from the light.
Such a rich look into the concept of telepathy—the idea that having such an expansive mind as Kes’s can problematize something like trust in reality, if she can’t trust her control or power or discerning ability. Kes as always wanting more, Kes confronted with, momentarily, too much; and the story expressed with a sort of pulsing undercurrent of writing that, to me, matches Kes’s ruthlessly forward-moving character.
The pretense of moral innocence of the pluribus-hive refusing to pick the apple directly from the tree of knowledge--there are metaphysical implications to Carol telling them to pick a fucking apple.
Eventually, she tossed the apple core and then put a sticky hand on the bare back of Zosia’s many-skinned neck. One of Helen’s moles was tucked underneath the collar. Several more moles and freckles and scars of several others scattered under the dense hairline. “A thousand faces, this time,” said Carol, thinking of the way Helen looked in those jeans, looked like she’d just come in from the pine woods, dry mouth, granite hands holding a bundle of piñon. “And one ship.” “What do you mean?” muttered Zosia into Carol’s shirt. Carol said nothing but clenched the muscles in her apple-sticky hand. (x)
The apple motif is just interesting to me.
It's also, maybe, a question of acting moral purity. The willingness to starve the bodies you've stolen so as not to cause "harm." To nourish from the bodies you were unable to take so as not to cause harm. The utopic vision as always complicated by the materiality of food.
You say that I am a human being and yet, I am also Borg… Will you one day choose to abandon me as well?
Women fliers of the 1920s and 1930s were unperturbed by public opinion, as they described experiencing independence and freedom through flight. According to Louise Thaden (1905-1979), "Flying is the only real freedom we are privileged to possess." That sentiment finds an echo in the words of another early flier, Margery Brown (1902-1961): "A woman who can find fulfillment in the skies will never again need to live her life in some man's spare moments." They were, however, all topped by the witty and rhyming Lady Mary Heath (1896-1939), who famously flew solo between South Africa and England: "Woman's place is in the home, but failing that the aerodrome."
Serenity Young, Women Who Fly
Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realize this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d'Italia, because by it they must return to their homes. And he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love. To Margaret—I hope that it will not set the reader against her—the station of King's Cross had always suggested Infinity. Its very situation-withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St. Pancras-implied a comment on the materialism of life. Those two great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure, whose issue might be prosperous, but would certainly not be expressed in the ordinary language of prosperity.
E.M. Forster, Howard's End
She approached just as Helen's letter had described her, trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands. She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it. One knew that she worshiped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her-that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy. High-born she might not be. But assuredly she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her.
E.M. Forster, Howard's End
The opening of Voyager season 5 being, one after the other: Crisis of Leadership, Crisis of Self, Crisis of Belonging, focused in on Janeway, Seven, and B'Elanna, such that each topic can easily apply to all three characters while retaining the unique construction of each. The circumstances finally latch onto the psychology in an expressible way and each person ultimately can't be saved from their position but the ending figures as each episode wraps up have some directional point: Janeway, looking at a field of stars; Seven, returning to her reflection; B'Elanna, eating banana pancakes. They're answers to the thematic question, but they're not easy answers and not whole solutions, which is more satisfying.