Star Trek (DS9): The Sound of Her Voice

[J!!]

Opinionated DS9 Episode Guide follows the crew as they try to rescue the sole survivor of a doomed mission.

[J!!]

ok, how fucking brutal would it have been if they were still getting transmissions after finding the body? having to tell her that they can't save her after all, maybe try to explain the whole time-displacement thing, all while staring at her desiccated corpse.

[Mickey_Rat15]

Time anamoly episides make my head hurt. OK, the field around the planet is delaying Lisa's transmissions into the future, but how does their return transmissions get to her time frame?

What's worse, that died with a forlorn hope for rescue, or that she would know that she has been dead for three years from the Defiant's perspective?

[Trinary]

ok, how fucking brutal would it have been if they were still getting transmissions after finding the body? having to tell her that they can't save her after all, maybe try to explain the whole time-displacement thing, all while staring at her desiccated corpse.

JESUS .... that'd be DARK. Even for DS9!

I remember really liking this episode and it's premise and I still do. Maybe I was just fortunate enough to not be aware of all the other stories and such that use this kind of trope. But Lisa was a really likeable, interesting character and liked that even a one-off could have such an impact on our show regulars. Kind of like with Ensign Muniz back in "The Ship" or Bilby in "Honor Among Thieves." Actually, now that I think about it, O'Brien was the one who kicked things off again with Lisa here. Is this just a thing with him? To encounter really interesting people, form a connection to them, and then have to deal with them dying? Poor guy.

Even though she isn't mentioned again, you can just feel the impact she has on the crew in the here and now. How many times has someone, a redshirt or whathaveyou, bitten the dust in Trek and had zero impact on the show leads? The episode was a tragedy, but they handled her funeral made it a bit uplifting too. So I like this episode.

[Rocketboy1313]

ok, how fucking brutal would it have been if they were still getting transmissions after finding the body? having to tell her that they can't save her after all, maybe try to explain the whole time-displacement thing, all while staring at her desiccated corpse.

That is how I remember it ending.

[SuccubusYuri]

I agree with Chuck that I'd have liked to see more Quark and Jake dynamic. It was a very natural master and grasshopper relationship, whether or not you wanted to play it straight or have it be a master scheme. It would also fit with DS9's overall mission of "merging" Gene's vision with real life. If Ferengi are supposed to be Americans, have Nog and Jake both meet in the middle. Just a little nudge, just a liiiittle acknowledgment that bridges can be built between the two ideas. Or hell, I'd read an after-series where Jake has learned Quark's ways and becomes the next Harry Mudd.

[SabreMau]

Time anamoly episides make my head hurt. OK, the field around the planet is delaying Lisa's transmissions into the future, but how does their return transmissions get to her time frame?

I picture it being like light refraction.



Her signal enters some weird anomaly field, gets temporally refracted while traveling through it, and emerges three years later. But when they're beaming subspace radio back towards her, it's getting refracted in the opposite direction and emerges on the inside of the field three years in the past.

[Darth Wedgius]

ok, how fucking brutal would it have been if they were still getting transmissions after finding the body? having to tell her that they can't save her after all, maybe try to explain the whole time-displacement thing, all while staring at her desiccated corpse.

Well, if Dax had been there she'd have figure out a way to channel a transporter beam through the temporal anomaly. This was just really bad timing on Lisa's part. Um, no pun intended.

[excalibur]

The plot hole for me was, why didn't the DS9 crew search the crashed ship's name in their database? Every ship in the fleet has at least basic information of pretty much every single active and inactive ship (including destroyed or missing) in the fleet plus even ships of allies. We usually see this in some episodes where they put on the screen for the briefing of the ship's name to reiterate for the audience, crew compliments and of course, the captain. In this episode, to not give it away, they didn't have anyone on the ship curious about why there's still a long range exploration ship still flying around during a war and no one's asked what the date is or let slip the date. I mean, it can't be the exact same stardate for Captain Lisa. No one even tried to look up an image of Lisa on records so they can put a face to who is talking to them and it would tell them she and her crew were MIA. Of course, that would give up the twist.

But my happier ending would have been they were landing, still picking up her transmissions and she even calls out that she can see a shuttle coming down to get her, ending the transmission and then when the DS9 crew gets down, they found the crash site empty, no bodies but everything looked like they've been here for many years and then once they got back to the Defiant, another ship shows up, also named Olympia but B or A or C, captained by an older Lisa. She said that another ship rescued her and to preserve the timeline, she spoke nothing about a future war with the Dominion and waited for a new ship to command, requesting the same name and then to come to this exact planet at this exact time after years of researching and following the stories of a new ship called Defiant captained by Sisko. And to explain away the plot hole, in my version, they DID search for a ship named the Olympia captained by Lisa but once found it, they didn't realize it was another ship with the same exact name commanded by the same captain and didn't look deeper into her records because there was no need. They needed an image of the ship and a face to Lisa. We might even throw in a foreshadowing about them asking why is the Olympia on the other side of the sector from where it was supposed to be according to records.

She would have came aboard to finally meet the people who "saved" her and maybe throw in a plot about how the doctor helping her rationing her meds actually extended her chance of getting rescue at the last minute, just not by them but the people in her timeline.

There could be a nice scene where she quietly followed the careers of everyone she's talked to over the passed 3 years, wanting to stop in to say something, meet them but to preserve the timeline and even herself, she thought to wait.

[J!!]

I prefer my ending




One little thing I really liked was the thing about draining the phasers to increase the Pimphand's integrity fields. We were told about these design flaws way back in The Search, and how O'Brien had to come up with some hacks to keep it from ripping itself a new one, so it's nice to see that actually be relevant for once.