On another distraction from flying in a straight line back to Earth, Voyager finds a world thats been wiped out by natural disaster. But there are survivors; a small group cryogenically frozen in a controlled system designed to wake them up when the coast was clear. Nineteen years later, they’re trapped, asleep within the machine…
Four years past their scheduled release date, there’s been no breakdown, no malfunction. Yet five of the inhabitants are dead, the rest all very much alive and locked into a computer stimulation keeping them in a dream-world state. Bringing them on board the ship, Janeway is told that they can’t just switch the machine off as it’ll cause irreversible brain damage. But just like dialling into the Matrix, Voyager can plug into the redundant status chambers and hack their way in to talk to the survivors and bring them out of their long sleep.
The Thaw is weird. Partly as it’s fairly standard sci fi fare. And partly as that fairly standard sci fi fare was written by Joe Menosky who just makes everything a bit more weird than it really should be. The alien survivors managed to live thorough the natural disaster in stasis and kept themselves alive by plugging themselves into a virtual world. But in the nineteen years they’ve been trapped in there, the computer keeping them alive and sane has went a little bit odd. Becoming self aware, or rather very much aware that he only exists as a by product of the system, he’s bypassed everything and turned the temporary survival pods into a tomb; forcing them to stay in the virtual world so that he can continue to exist.
It’s not an entirely unique concept. The idea of an entity created by a collective force and becoming a parasite of sorts has been seen in a few different shows. Even British comedy Red Dwarf has done it with Legion, an entity that survives and feeds of the inhabitants of his station. In The Thaw, it’s a more whimsical villain, The Clown. Treating everything like a joke and dressing up the world like an unsettling carnival, complete with bizarre landscapes and sidekicks, the Clown could almost be a version of the Joker switching from oddball comedy and laughter to threatening malice on a whim.
Kim and Torres hook themselves up to say hello, and soon enough the Clown is greeting them with a menacing smile and the game begins. The Clown won’t release his prisoners or he’ll die. And you cant outsmart him. He’s the machine itself, the thing everyones plugged into. He knows how to expose everyone’s worst fears to have them terrified into submission. And with enough terror, they die – which is why there were spare chambers for an away team to drop by.
It’s one of those episodes thats a bit off the wall and shouldn’t work. But even the simplistic set design using plain geometric shapes to fill out an empty room and carnioval outfits that wouldn’t look out of place in a school play all craft an oddly unsettling feeling throughout. Michael McKeen as the Clown bringing all his skills from the deadpan comedy of Spinal Tap to the same callousness of more recent outings like Better Call Saul to really sell the threat within the bizarre.
In the end Janeway managed to outsmart the Clown. Sending in the Doctor, the one person who’s mind can’t be read seeing as he’s not a person, the negotiation begins to release his hostages. Since The Clown needs someone in status to keep him alive, the Doctor offers a trade: Janeway for the prisoners. And once the deal is done, the Clown realises why the Doctor was the one to make the offer. He was hiding the truth. The Janeway that enters isn’t the real deal. Just another hologram and slowly, calmly, the Clown’s world fades to black as he faces his own fear. Death.
Episodes like this can get silly really quickly. But for a weird and offbeat episode, it’s somewhat of a muted surprise. The story’s simple, the cast is excellent and the conclusion plays out perfectly to become a surprisingly fun episode to rewatch.
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