VOY: Mortal Coil Review

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

One thing I like about this episode is that it decides against making a grand pronouncement about faith or spirituality. The episode doesn't even tell us Neelix's childhood beliefs were wrong- which is admirable restraint compared to a lot of the preachy, one-sided argument the franchise puts forward at its worst. This is much more of a character piece. It's about Neelix, his psychological state, and the emotional toll his situation takes on him.

The problem, of course, is that this is Neelix. He has a history of being an annoying, one-note character. We know nothing about his beliefs or how they affect his life. This sort of story would be much stronger in a serialized show dealing with the established faith of a better character.

As it is, it's an episode that most people tend to forget even exists.

[Artabax]

Chuck says Neelix knows Proto-matter??? Well at least he knows more about proto-matter than he knows about bathing. Wrong, VOY episode 1 shows Neelix in the bubble bath. my eyes! my eyes!

AGAIN with the cheese? That is Star-fleet's fault. Writers asked what is this week's Stupid neelix Moment? It was Friday afternoon, so they wrote he poisons the ship with cheese and then the Writers went home.

Who the fuck sits down and deliberately designs a spaceship that can be killed with cheese???

Load the Limburg launchers.
Charge the Cheddar cannon.
Prime the Parmesan postillion.
Grab the Gruyere grenades.

Oy! That Naomi actor, she is loathsome. I'm glad they replaced her with Scarlett Pomers.

[Hiccups]

See, normally, I hate Neelix. Not as much as Chuck, but that's sort of by default. For that matter, Voyager is still my least-favorite Star Trek series by a long shot. But I am rather fond of this episode, maybe its because when I first saw it, I'd been through something similar to Neelix. Nothing spiritual, nor a near-death experience, but I'd recently discovered that someone I trusted had been lying to me for a long time, so I saw some reflection there with Neelix realising a lifelong belief was perhaps false.

The episode is of course, far from perfect (for example, and I do feel bad complaining about a child actor, but the kid playing Naomi this episode just doesn't hold a candle to Scarlett Pomers). Even as far as Voyager goes, this is maybe my fifth-favorite episode at best. Though I do think that tackling a subject matter like loss of faith was an incredibly brave subject matter to try to handle, especially for Berman-Era Trek.

[clearspira]

Chuck says Neelix knows Proto-matter??? Well at least he knows more about proto-matter than he knows about bathing. Wrong, VOY episode 1 shows Neelix in the bubble bath. my eyes! my eyes!

AGAIN with the cheese? That is Star-fleet's fault. Writers asked what is this week's Stupid neelix Moment? It was Friday afternoon, so they wrote he poisons the ship with cheese and then the Writers went home.

Who the fuck sits down and deliberately designs a spaceship that can be killed with cheese???

Load the Limburg launchers.
Charge the Cheddar cannon.
Prime the Parmesan postillion.
Grab the Gruyere grenades.

Oy! That Naomi actor, she is loathsome. I'm glad they replaced her with Scarlett Pomers.

You are not wrong about the cheese, it is TERRIBLE design and is an informed ability at best as to how awesome it is compared to conventional circuitry. But where I would say that it is Neelix's fault is that he did not run any kind of safety check on this bacteria he was cultivating which should have been step one when acquiring an alien foodstuff. Remember: it could have been the crew dropping dead instead of the ship very easily.

[Artabax]

But where I would say that it is Neelix's fault is that he did not run any kind of safety check

Why should anyone expect you need a safety check? It's cheese. Who designs a ship that can be killed with cheese? Who expects that anyone would design such a ship?

I eat cheese every week. Do you know how many space-ships I have killed? How many? In round numbers? HINT it is a very round number.

[clearspira]

But where I would say that it is Neelix's fault is that he did not run any kind of safety check

Why should anyone expect you need a safety check? It's cheese. Who designs a ship that can be killed with cheese? Who expects that anyone would design such a ship?

I eat cheese every week. Do you know how many space-ships I have killed? How many? In round numbers? HINT it is a very round number.

You are missing the point. It is alien cheese, made with alien ingredients, with alien bacteria from a newly discovered world. The cheese you are eating has been perfected for your consumption since at least 8000 BC. Do you think that in-universe the NX-01 had a decon chamber just for heavy petting? And this BTW is the Star Trek universe, where encountering shit that can bend the laws of physics is a weekly occurrence so don't go trying to make out the risk is small.

[bronnt]

This episode actually bothered me because of its conclusion. I don't mind that they basically tore Neelix's religion to shreds, but the fact that they made him suicidal was an issue.

The conclusion leaves him without any real hope. "Naomi is depending on you," is pretty damn weak for several reasons-first of all it's not giving him something to live for, it's giving him an extra burden he has to carry. And it's an unfair one at that-he's not her father, she lives with her mother, and there's an entire crew's worth of decent father figures for her. He doesn't find hope, and he doesn't find anything positive and exciting to live for at the end of the episode. He has no family of his own, he seems to suffering from PTSD, his girlfriend dumped him last year and she was last seen transforming into pure energy. Nobody around him has known him for more than 3 years. And they leave his religion as a flesh-rotting corpse in his psyche without anyone doing anything to give him hope in that regard.

Basically, I don't see any reason why he's not going to wait about a week and then find a new way to commit suicide. This episode ends on a depressing as hell note, and the fact that he seemingly has nothing to live for is never again brought up.

[Darth Wedgius]

...
As far as the episode goes, I think SFDebris said it best: Voyager is a show where good ideas go to die. I think the Justice League cartoon did a better job of handling faith in The Terror Beyond - not in a logical way (Diana has met at least one of her gods, so I'm not sure how much faith applies to her), but as far as emotional impact goes. With a story like this, in a setting like this, I think ignoring the logic and going for how faith affects people might, oddly enough, be the more logical approach.

As I understand the REAL Greek religion of the day (and I may well be wrong I am no expert), the underworld was neither Heaven nor Hell as we would understand the term today, it was merely a place where people went after death. This is probably a less traumatic place to lose faith in as Neelix was expecting to see all of his murdered friends and family whereas an actual Greek would be expecting much less. Of course, given how ''rapey'' the actual Greek gods were, I cannot see feminist Diana actually worshipping them. DC is not alone in reinventing the Greek gods to be much nicer than they actually were - it gets real silly in films such as Disney's Hercules cartoon where Zeus was reinvented as basically the all-loving Christian god but with less power.

The Terror Beyond was the episode with not-C'thulhu, where Hawkgirl and Diana discussed faith. The episode with the afterlife was The Balance, where faith wasn't really a topic --
though The Balance was where Diana was shown meeting Hermes.

The Greeks had a few different versions of the afterlife. Hades (the place, not the god), the Elysian Fields, the DMV (land of eternal lines, but it has air conditioning), etc.

[ChrisTheLovableJerk]

I, by the by, though him being the villain in the first live-action movie was HILARIOUS. Maybe a little mean-spirited, but HILARIOUS.

Fun Fact: Warner Bros forced that twist on the crew of the live action Scooby Doo movie. Originally it the ultimate antagonist was supposed to turn out to be old man in the Luna Ghost costume from the beginning of the movie, which is why the Luna Ghost's shadow is so prominent on all the posters and vhs/dvd covers. Tim Curry was actually supposed to play the villain role that Rowan Atkinson had (Curry is a big Scooby Doo fan) but when he was told that the script was being rewritten to include Scrappy in the movie he quit.

And Scrappy's only mention in an that draft was that he had been 'put to sleep'. Personally I never hated Scrappy, kinda weirded me out when I found out just how many people disliked him,

[Jonathan101]

This episode actually bothered me because of its conclusion. I don't mind that they basically tore Neelix's religion to shreds, but the fact that they made him suicidal was an issue.

The conclusion leaves him without any real hope. "Naomi is depending on you," is pretty damn weak for several reasons-first of all it's not giving him something to live for, it's giving him an extra burden he has to carry. And it's an unfair one at that-he's not her father, she lives with her mother, and there's an entire crew's worth of decent father figures for her. He doesn't find hope, and he doesn't find anything positive and exciting to live for at the end of the episode. He has no family of his own, he seems to suffering from PTSD, his girlfriend dumped him last year and she was last seen transforming into pure energy. Nobody around him has known him for more than 3 years. And they leave his religion as a flesh-rotting corpse in his psyche without anyone doing anything to give him hope in that regard.

Basically, I don't see any reason why he's not going to wait about a week and then find a new way to commit suicide. This episode ends on a depressing as hell note, and the fact that he seemingly has nothing to live for is never again brought up.

Did I mention this episode aired just before Christmas?

Also, fun fact- Bryan Fuller agrees that the episode was nihilistic af, but said he thought it was less bad because it happened to Neelix (not because he disliked Neelix, but because Neelix was a funny little alien- "Because it's this little hedgehog guy from outer space doing it, then it's much more palpable").

Fuller, Braga and other writers have all said they loved the episode and liked the ending too.