Attention on heck! Don’t try to adjust your viewscreens, person-hell and boo-tenants! What you’re seeing isn’t a creepy clone, a hellish hologram, or a strangely specific alternate universe! For the month of October, we’ll be taking a spine-chilling stroll through Trek’s most horror-iffic outings and spooky adventures! Now why don’t you sit back and try not to let that green blood of yours run cold! If things get a little too intense, don’t hesitate to ask Scotty to SCREAM you up! Hehehehehehehehehe!
Star Trek: Voyager – Season 6, Episode 25
Telling spooky stories around a fire is a camping tradition and one that Star Trek: Voyager curiously bases a spooky episode around. The Borg children are the audience to this scary tale told by Neelix and the episode has a lot of fun creating a dark, mysterious, and horror-tinged hour that hits a lot of familiar Star Trek beats.
Aside from the framing device of the scary campfire story, “The Haunting of Deck Twelve” leans into spookiness in several other ways, which is interesting. It’s not the most successful Spooky Trek, but it is the most intentionally spooky episode.
Right off the bat (heh) we get a tense and unsettling vibe as a fidgety Neelix is shutting down the lights in the mess hall. As he’s about to walk out he gets a jump scare by Seven of Nine walking in to let him know that main power will be shutting down soon, and that he needs to keep the Borg children occupied since the shutdown will interrupt their regeneration cycle/sleepy time.
On the bridge, the crew watches the viewscreen as they approach a nebula. Paris and Kim can’t help but guffaw over how creepy it looks. Even though it looks like any other nebula? To really drive the point home, Tom says it looks like something Edgar Allan Poe would have cooked up, and Harry thinks it looks like a bat. Tuvok sees “two Starfleet officers with juvenile imaginations.” LOL, what a dickbag.
All over the ship, every section shuts down and goes dark, illuminated only by lamps. Noticeably absent is any extraneous dialogue that explains what’s going on and why they’re cutting power. It creates some interesting mystery surrounding the plot as Voyager glides into the creepy cloud…
In the Borg children’s cargo bay, Neelix sets up a lamp in lieu of a campfire with cargo containers all around for them to sit on. The kids are intensely curious about what’s going on and because of their higher than average intelligence, they see right through Neelix’s bullshittery. They know that deck 12 has been cordoned off, and little Mezoti heard from Naomi Wildman that the deck is haunted. The conception of the Borg kids as super intelligent and somewhat robotic while still being curious and childish was usually handled well by the show.
They pressure Neelix to tell them what’s going on, and he gamely responds by having a seat and preparing to tell them a ghastly account of why they’re in this gass-ly anomaly. It started sometime before the kids ever came aboard Voyager, and we see the ship passing through a different nebula. The SFX are pretty good and make it look appropriately spooky.
The ship is gathering deuterium fuel from the nebula and is experiencing periodic shudders as it chugs along. Tuvok enters the mess hall and Neelix dissembles to him about the crew getting jittery about the turbulence, but it’s actually just him. He recalls how in his youth a big plasma anomaly passed through the Talaxian system and blotted out the stars and moons; ever since he hasn’t liked being in nebulas. This poor guy’s been through a lot, hasn’t he?
The turbulence from the nebula gets worse and on the bridge, Janeway decides to move the ship out and just as they’re about to leave, a bolt of energy zaps the ship. They clear the nebula with some minor damage to show for it, but a residual sparkling of energy is seen on the ship’s hull. Neelix forebodingly tells the children that a mysterious stowaway had come aboard Voyager…
The kids are endlessly curious and precocious in their own Borg way. They can’t help but postulate various possibilities for the lifeform, and Icheb even pokes holes in the technical details of Neelix’s account (neeeeerrrrdddd).
The damage to Voyager ends up being greater than it initially seemed, and problems are drifting around the vessel’s systems. In a funny bit, Janeway’s coffee gets replicated a second ahead of the cup and spills everywhere. The vantage point from the replicator’s POV makes for an interesting and off-kilter perspective.
Not so funny, is that the ship is travelling in circles. When they try to correct course, Voyager jumps to warp on its own. And communication goes down, so no one can reach anyone else. Chakotay heads down to engineering to confer with Torres, but his turbolift suddenly drops and we get a cool view of the car falling down the shaft.
Neelix describes it in excited detail, but we don’t actually get an inside shot of Chakotay inside the lift as it’s falling. It’s such an odd, lazy choice of the episode. It recalls Geordi’s violently eventful ride in an out-of-control turbolift in TNG’s “Contagion,” where he was thrown around inside like a rag doll. And in DS9’s “Crossfire,” we saw Kira, Odo, and Shakaar trapped in a free-falling lift as well. Both were tense and exciting sequences. Who among us hasn’t had that intrusive thought of what would happen if an elevator’s cables gave out as we’re riding around in one. It’s a terrifying thought!
Instead the episode just skips over all that potential nail-biting drama as Neelix mentions that the turbolift’s stabilizers kicked in and we see Chakotay stroll into engineering like nothing happened. Oh my god Voyager, you yada-yada’d over the best part! Was it a budget thing? Could they not find a stuntman who embodied Chakotay’s dull, wooden presence with enough stolid veracity? Oy. This show sometimes.
Anyway. Chakotay barely even mentions he was almost dead, and only seems mildly annoyed that his inert existence nearly came to a merciful conclusion. Torres thinks the problem is with the ship’s gel packs (which should be on the Voyager plot bingo sheet – again with the gel packs!). But when they inspect them, they see that the malfunctions have migrated elsewhere – to one of the cargo bays, where Seven is working. The very same cargo bay that Neelix and the children are now in, and they look around fearfully.
A stray bolt of energy wanders around the cargo bay unbeknownst to Seven, and then starts to fuck with the systems in the room. What looks like gas from the nebula they were in starts to seep into the room, and Seven is unable to call for help or open the door. She’s able to force it open manually and leaves the cargo bay, only to be trapped by forcefields as the nebula gas fills the space and incapacitates her.
Right on cue, the light in Neelix’s storytelling ring goes out and he has to switch batteries. The kids start bickering about which one of them is more afraid, and they get a good jump scare as Neelix flicks on the light right in front of his face. “I didn’t mean to scare you!” Neelix says in the creepiest way possible. LOL.
Chakotay and Torres find Seven unconscious and are able to bring down the forcefields trapping her. Voyager’s main power goes down and the bridge crew tries to get things running again. They seem to get engines up, but poor Tom gets a faceful of zap as the bridge’s environmental controls cut out, forcing everyone to evacuate the room.
In sickbay, the crew puts the pieces together that an alien energy lifeform is aboard the ship, trying to make the environment more hospitable to it and incapacitating anyone that gets in its way. Suddenly, another power failure puts the Doctor and sickbay out of commission, and Janeway moves everyone to engineering to set up a command post.
Kim wanders the corridors, which are flashing an eerie red. He runs into Crewman Celes who mistakenly attacks him think that he’s an invader. She references multiple attacks from Hirogen and Borg, and you get a small idea of how terrifying life on Voyager is. Kim seems kind of incredulous and annoyed with her, but why? This shit happens like every week!
This whole middle section of the episode really drags. It feels like a low-budget bottle episode with all the lights off. Given that the next episode is the first half of the season finale “Unimatrix Zero” I suppose this was intended to be a quick and easy episode. I can sorta appreciate what they were trying to do in making the ship a darkly-lit haunted house, but aside from a couple of moments it doesn’t really work. It’s been done much better in other episodes and there isn’t anything new or interesting here about it.
One of those things that does work is a legitimately unnerving sequence of a scared Neelix leaving the mess hall to find a set of doors down the hallway opening and closing on their own. Oh man, fuuuuuck that. The score churns up some tension as Neelix approaches the doors and we get a nice jumpscare of Tuvok’s oxygen-masked face appearing behind him. Tuvok explains the situation and that they have to get to engineering. To the kids, Neelix doesn’t hesitate to admit that the thought of crawling through all Jeffries tubes to get there was the most frightened he had ever been.
I don’t think that the episode has at this point earned the level of terror that it’s attempting to convey. Through Neelix’s storytelling to the kids, the episode is trying to tell us “Oh my god, this is so scary!” But… is it? Maybe if you’re a child or a coward like Neelix. It’s just dark aboard this ship that everyone has been living in for six years now and that they all know like the back of their hands. People are getting electrocuted, but that’s not really terrifying. I dunno, I’m not feeling it.
Neelix of course nervously blathers to Tuvok during their cramped journey to engineering. He can’t help but think about a doomed Talaxian freighter called the Salvoxia – a ship that lost life support and the crew had to draw lots in order to survive as their air supply dwindled. It ended up not mattering, as the vessel would remain adrift for 80 years before being discovered. Literal cool story bro I guess, but what does drawing lots for air mean in this case? Does the guy who draws the short straw get killed so he doesn’t hog all the breathing air? As Voyager often does, we’re being told rather than shown and it’s an interesting background detail but dramatically it’s kinda inert. It references the plight of the raft of the Medusa (immortalized in Théodore Géricault’s famous painting), a real life horror story on the high seas. Which is a little cool, I suppose.
The kids seem super interested in this aside, and Mezoti can’t help but wonder what condition the dead bodies were in when they were discovered and how decomposed they were. Icheb wonders what happened when their food ran out, and she suggests they ate each other. I love this little girl! Neelix regrets including this detail and moves past it. You’re yada-yada-ing over the best parts! Gahhhh.
Neelix and Tuvok discover a tube filled with more of the nebula gas they can’t cross. Meanwhile in engineering, Torres reports that the lifeform has broken free of the gel packs and is now running amok in the main computer, which I guess is bad. The computer pages Captain Janeway by voice, who leaps to the conclusion that it’s not the computer talking to her, but the lifeform using the vocal interface of it.
The whole particulars of this lifeform are kind of hard to parse and don’t exactly leap off the screen in an exciting way. It came from a nebula and is an energy lifeform, but the way that it’s stuck in the computer and communicates through it suggests that it’s some type of digital lifeform? But also needs to fill the ship with gas to survive? Seems like it’s doing fine inside the ship’s systems. I dunno. There are several competing ideas to it and the execution is pretty dry. Plus it’s appearing so late in the episode, which makes the structure of the story lopsided.
We’ve seen this sort of thing in Trek many times – the blue energy being (from a nebula!) that infected the Enterprise (and eventually Picard himself) in “Lonely Among Us,” that sparkly mucous thingie in “Cost of Living,” the attention-starved “PUP” computer program that latched onto O’Brien in DS9’s “The Forsaken.” The one in this episode has elements of all of these previous entries but not much that’s unique to it, aside from using the computer to talk. And its murderous rage, I guess. Uh, spoilers.
The lifeform instructs Janeway to go to astrometrics, who brings Seven along. Because it can only talk through the computer, there’s a weirdness and opaqueness to the lifeform that gives some interest. But not a whole lot.
In the Jeffries tube, Tuvok is still fiddling with the thingies so they can go, while Neelix is trying not to have a panic attack. Tuvok tries to help Neelix through his emotional turmoil with some guided meditation advice, which is actually nice of him for once. Tuvok suggests that Neelix recall a pleasant memory, and he thinks of his birthday in which the crew made his favorite meal. It’s an odd little sequence, and when he pulls up the dish cover it reveals a monstrous face made of nebula gas for another jumpscare. Spoopy!
In astrometrics, the lifeform peruses the ship’s navigational logs to locate its nebula of origin and returns helm control to Janeway. It allows her (and only her) onto the bridge to guide Voyager back to its home. When the ship drops out of warp at the correct coordinates, Janeway sees that the nebula is now gone, apparently having been totally dissipated by Voyager’s fuel-gathering efforts. In response, the computer immediately cuts power to life support and sounds the abandon ship alarm. Oh, it mad now!
Janeway frantically tries to convince the lifeform to allow her to find it another similar nebula, but it’s not in a listening mood. Meanwhile, Tuvok gets a zap face of his own via the lifeform. Nebula gas starts to leak into the conduit, and Tuvok orders Neelix to leave him behind. He of course refuses, and hauls the Vulcan to his feet and focuses on overcoming his fears. As Neelix looks at the approaching gas, it visually contorts into another scary face. I wish the episode had more touches like this to liven things up.
Janeway continues to talk to the computer and appeals to its sense of self-preservation: if it kills or drives the crew away from the ship, it will only be a matter of time until its systems start to break down, thus leaving the lifeform dead in space. It’s a decent argument, but the lifeform is not swayed and continues to order everyone to abandon ship. Janeway sends her crew to the escape pods, but the lifeform blocks her from leaving the ship and orders her to engineering. She refuses to be its prisoner and tells it that it will have to kill her. “Acknowledged,” the computer immediately responds and starts flooding deadly gas into her compartment. Ice cold!
It continues to order her to engineering, but Janeway refuses as she starts to asphyxiate, telling it that they’ll die together. Mulgrew’s acting here is pretty raw and gives the sense that Janeway is absolutely at her most frayed wit’s end. The lifeform doesn’t engender any sympathy in the way it’s acting. Sure, the ship accidentally destroyed its home, but it’s indiscriminately zapping, trying to coerce Janeway with the threat of death, and just being a dick overall. At the last second, the lifeform blinks first and withdraws all the gas, brings all the ship’s systems online again, and returns control to Janeway. Neelix explains that after a couple days of retrieving the crew who had left the ship, they set up a temporary home for it on… you guessed it, deck twelve.
The ship shudders briefly and main power comes back online. Neelix suggests that it was probably the lifeform finally leaving the ship. Some of the kids worry if the lifeform will want to get revenge, and Neelix tosses out that maybe he made the whole thing up. The kids swallow this whole and go back to their regeneration cycle.
Neelix pops into the bridge to report that the children are tucked into their alcoves. Janeway relays that the lifeform has been returned to its new home, the spooky nebula the ship approached in the beginning of the episode. Neelix hopes that it will live happily ever after. Sure, after trying to kill them all. Why not! Seriously, fuck this thing. We don’t negotiate with terrorists! I… would probably not make the best Starfleet captain.
For a Neelix-focused episode and one that features a bunch of kids, “The Haunting of Deck Twelve” is really not bad. It’s really not good either, and suffers from the typical flaws of Star Trek: Voyager as a whole: focusing on unexciting stuff while sidestepping potentially interesting plot points, recycled story elements from other episodes, and procedural plots that generally lack character development. But as far as Spooky Trek goes, I appreciate what the episode attempts. It has the bones of a good scary story and although the execution could have used some fine tuning, it’s a literal Star Trek ghost story with all the wacky appeal that entails. Neelix’s intense fear of nebulas is channeled to create a scary and harrowing tale that unlike most campfire stories, ends happily for all involved.
Stray Observations:
- Why are the corridors so empty? Harry and crewman Celes are just wandering around for hours with no sign of anyone else. I realize it’s for the spooky story effect, but it does not make sense given that there’s ~150 people aboard Voyager. No one’s even incapacitated or anything!
- Speaking of Celes, I’m absolutely shocked that she showed up again after being first introduced in “Good Shepherd” as one of Voyager’s underperforming “misfit” crewmembers. Not that I’m complaining! She’s super adorkable. But the show was generally not interested in recurring characters among the crew – certainly not all the ones that came aboard from the Equinox.
- Neelix’s fear of nebulas is very similar to his fear of the infinite nothingness in Season 5’s “Night,” and in both episodes he thinks about putting curtains up. I’m not sure if it’s a clever callback to that previous episode or a lazy retread. The two fears kind of interrelate as an overall anxiety of murkiness/emptiness, or it could be the writers just deciding to make him a coward once again, not remembering that they already did in a very similar way.