In the twelfth episode of the fourth season of Voyager, STOP PUNCHING ME IN THE EMOTIONS. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Trigger Warning: For discussion of death, grief, suicide.
No, but seriously, it’s astounding to me that this show can affect me so profoundly. I’d argue that in many ways, “Mortal Coil†is the close relative of â€Sacred Ground†from last season. I’ve appreciated that Deep Space Nine has dealt with religion and spirituality through Sisko and Kira, but here? Seventy years or so from home, these characters deal with faith in a much more visceral way than I’m used to, and it’s so fulfilling.
And if you’ve been reading my reviews for a while now, then I’m guessing you’re not surprised that I related so much to Neelix’s story here. I have not gone through something similar to this, but a close friend of me did. They were in a coma and medically brain dead for weeks. When they suddenly regained consciousness, they confided in me that there wasn’t anything, that they experienced no afterlife, that it was just blackness and nothingness. Now, that’s not scientific evidence by any means, and I don’t interpret it as the kingpin of belief for me. I’d given up in believing in an afterlife many, many years prior to this. Instead, it served as an inspiration of sorts. If there was nothing to come, then what I did now mattered more than ever.
(Surprise, I really liked the end of Angel, too. SURPRISE.)
What I’ve described is far more attractive of an experience than what happens in “Mortal Coil†because Neelix is the one to go through this crisis. I merely watched someone else have it. Ethan Phillips gives perhaps his best performance in Voyager; it’s haunting, y’all. It’s one of those things where the only way I know how to explain it is to compare it to a voyeurism of sorts. This felt so intimate and personal that I felt bad that I was watching it.
That’s a credit to Bryan Fuller’s script (OMG HIS EPISODES OF THIS SHOW ARE SO CONSISTENTLY GOOD, I SHOULD NOT BE SURPRISED), which exists in extremes. Neelix doesn’t just have an existential crisis. He dies. FOR OVER EIGHTEEN HOURS. He is revived in a controversial manner, one which suggests that he might be the first Star Trek main character to have AN ACTUAL CHRONIC ILLNESS. He’s got Borg nanoprobes within him, and they’re the only thing keeping him from immediately necrotizing. LIKE, THAT IS SOME HARDCORE SHIT, Y’ALL. And Fuller’s script commits to this: what does it mean to experience death? How does Neelix deal with this when he also realizes that the faith he once had is incompatible with his experience?
No matter how much I may have related to this or appreciated the fact that Neelix essentially chose to live without faith, I couldn’t ignore how deeply heartbreaking this episode was. At times, it was subtle. We could tell something was wrong with Neelix from his facial expressions, from the way he moved around the ship, from his brief speech in the Mess Hall. Then, his outbursts and behavior become less subtle, which is not a criticism of the script. As Neelix contends with his deepening fears and disillusionment, he lashes out. He practically strikes Seven of Nine at one point; later, after his vision quest, he ignores and dismisses Chakotay, despite that he had agreed to consult him on what he’d seen during the quest.
AND HOW BRUTAL WAS THAT VISION QUEST. There’s a petty part of me that imagined it as a meta moment for non-Native characters: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DO VISION QUESTS. (Seriously, we don’t actually need them.) Everything he sees in it is a rejection of his faith. His sister tells him that he believed nothing but lies; the crew insists that life is without meaning. And how is someone supposed to react to that? Remember, for Neelix, life always had meaning. That meaning was informed by the Great Forest, in part, and to have that taken away from him was traumatic! Thus, Wildman’s daughter, Naomi, only serves to remind him of what was lost.
His interpretation of the quest, while upsetting, made sense to me. He felt like he had no point left for living. Actually, it was probably a step beyond that: he believed he should have died, that bringing him back was wrong. Thus, he designed a way to return himself to the nebula where he originally died so that he could finish the job. It’s here, though, that Fuller’s script does an amazing thing: Ensign Wilder reminds Neelix that he does have a purpose on the ship, one that Chakotay latches on to in order to convince Neelix to stay. What’s so fascinating about that scene is that Chakotay is the character who still has his religious beliefs, and he’s begging Neelix to stay alive for a reason that is not religious, at least not in a strict sense.
In essence, Neelix’s life has purpose because he has purpose on Voyager. It might be to boost morale, to serve food, or to offer a young girl solace before sleep. But that purpose is real, and both Chakotay and Wildman remind Neelix of that. Neelix can live without his faith, and I saw that as the choice he made at the end of the episode.
The video for “Mortal Coil†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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