In the twenty-fifth and penultimate episode of the sixth season of Voyager, I love few things more than a really good ghost story. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
I can honestly trace my love of horror, scary stories, and the weird back to one single source. There’s a reason why, in my strict Christian upbringing, I was allowed to watch The Twilight Zone. Why I was allowed to watch The X-Files in real time. Why when I started reading Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley and Brontë, my mother didn’t bat an eye.
It was because of that Reader’s Digest Mysteries of the Unexplained book.
I don’t know what became of Reader’s Digest in the modern age, but growing up, I always saw it as the adult version of those Scholastic Book Fairs. (Which, for the record, provided some of the happiest moments of my entire life. I hope those survived, too.) My mother subscribed to Reader’s Digest and purchased more anthologies than I could ever recall. That was how I was introduced to Poe; I was lucky enough that the RD anthology we had also had some haunting illustrations in it. My mom bought all the Gothic/Victorian horror and supernatural shit, as well as some others considered “classics” of literature. I believe I read Jane Austen because of some of those editions, though I may be misremembering that.
However, there was no single book I read more than Mysteries of the Unexplained. It was divided into sections dealing with specific unexplained phenomena, like creatures or UFOs or mysterious disappearances. The drawings unnerved me and traumatized me and I couldn’t stop. The photos? Oh, sometimes I’d stare at them for hours, thinking that my little child mind could unlock the mysteries of them and the world would appreciate my genius for it. So yeah, I was a little self-involved there, but that book inspired me to see out so much! It’s one of the reasons The X-Files appealed to me, and it’s the main reason I became obsessed with those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. (So much so that I have two tattoos from the Stephen Gammell illustrations on my body.) When the Goosebumps books rose to prominence, it was another important step in my evolution of loving horror.
There’s just something so appealing to me about a good scary story. It captures me in a way few other genres do, and I’ve long tried to chase that high of either reading or watching a truly effective horror tale. And when one is told well, it can be a transcendent experience! That’s part of the reason it was so fun watching “The Haunting of Deck Twelve.” While there’s certainly a lot here to appreciate in terms of suspense and terror, I found myself most amused and pleased with those four children. As Neelix related the story that explained why a certain part of Deck 12 was sealed off and why Voyager had to turn off all its power for a few hours, I, too, was captured by his story. Which is fascinating on a different level because it felt like he was using it to work through his own fears of the nebula they were in. That made him a better storyteller; he knew which elements were creepy, which details to leave out until later, which parts to slow down to draw out the dramatic tension.
In that sense, “The Haunting of Deck 12” has a lot in common with The Princess Bride, since the interrupting children (who later become completely enraptured with the storytelling) place a significant reason in why this is so good. Without their analytical minds, which are paired with a younger predilection for having active imaginations, this would have been a fairly straight forward tale. But it’s not. IT’S NOT AT ALL. Like I said before, this story also works because it features Neelix facing down his own fears after a traumatizing experience when he was a kid. Thus, there’s a level of the story that works as him teaching those kids the value of using fear to their own advantage.
But there’s one other thing I love about this episode: JANEWAY. Even if this is Neelix’s story, and even if the storytelling element is a large reason why it works, I can’t ignore the IMMENSE force that is Captain Janeway. Look, I am just never going to get over Janeway using her own stubbornness to win. I LOVE IT EVERY TIME. She literally faced imminent death and refused to hand over her ship to that unnamed EM organism. She’s written so consistently on this front, y’all, and I appreciate that kind of continuity. She will never give up Voyager by force, and it is entertaining to watch her do this EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
Basically, this is one of those episodes where a ton of things I enjoy just happen to be crammed into a single story. Thanks for that, Voyager.
The video for “The Haunting of Deck 12” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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