User Reviews

This episode opens with Harry being dropped down the titular chute. At the bottom he is set upon by a large group of aliens, as he tries to stagger away he sees a friendly face: Tom Paris. Strangely however when he goes to Tom, he beats him as well. We soon learn that they have both been accused of a terrorist bombing and their new home is a subterranean gaol. There are no guards and the prisoners will kill each other for the meagre rations they are given. When Captain Janeway asks what has happened to her crewmen she is told that Voyager is to be boarded and the rest of the crew arrested as the trilithium bomb material could have been made from Voyager's dilithium fuel. Voyager leaves at speed and sets about looking for the real source of the explosives. Back on the planet things aren't going well; their attempts to deactivate the force field protecting the chute have failed and Tom has been seriously wounded in a knife fight. Harry's second attempt succeeds but when he gets to the top of the chute he makes a startling discovery that will make escape much harder.

This was a good episode, it may have lacked spectacular special effects laden action but the prison was suitably claustrophobic and the mind-effecting clamps they were forced to wear added to that feeling. While one knows that they will ultimately get out their method was never clear, especially when we learn the nature of their prison. This episode gave Garrett Wang chance to shine as Harry Kim while Robert Duncan McNeill's Tom Paris took the secondary role after getting wounded.

Tom and Kim are prisoners in a brutal penal colony.

How did they get here? Why has Voyager made yet another unnecessary stop, and allowed their two officers to be tried and convicted of a crime they didn't commit? We'll never know, since it all took place before the beginning of the episode! Yes, another nightmarish premise from outer space is off and running!

Kim is the wimpiest washcloth of a human being I've ever seen, and with him leading the breakout effort you can be sure you'll be in prison for a loooong time. This episode does get bumped up a full letter grade for the scene in which Harry finally climbs to the top of the chute and finds that he's actually imprisoned in a floating space-station penal colony, a bad dream come true if ever there was one.

Eventually Janeway slides down the chute and saves both of their sorry asses. Why couldn't they have just started the episode here? GRADE: B-

I'd read several critiques of Voyager citing that Janeway was very inconsistently written. Up to this point, I didn't think her attitudes varied too much outside the range of a believable complex character. But in this episode, her behavior is just stupid.

Going from refusing to be boarded in one scene to using the exact same lines the planet leader used when she found the terrorist/freedom-fighter's ship had me face-palming. She then hauls off to the planet preparing to turn a fourteen year old girl and her big brother over to a regime that obviously doesn't deal with criminals in a fair and just manner without even any of the moral angsting she's so fond of. Then, when the planet leader is inexplicably uncooperative (you'd think he'd be more interested in the actual terrorists), she demands the big brother tell her how to get into the prison since he just happens to have the access codes (and a small cargo ship that resembled Neelix's - so why he never carried out his own rescue mission is unknown). Then, when he demanded to be allow to rescue his own people, she threatened to send them to the planet out of hand. Rather than pointing out the obvious fact that she would thereby sacrifice both her bargaining chips and the only people remotely willing to help, he capitulated and gave up his only bargaining chip.

Then Janeway jumps blindly down a chute into an unknown hostile environment. I know there's no Riker demanding she stay safe on the ship, but COME ON. Tuvok doesn't have a SWAT team he can call into action in situations like this so the next best thing is to send the CAPTAIN?? THEN they fly off into the sunset without a backward glance at the political prisoners of a corrupt regime being beaten, starved, tortured, and murdered.

REALLY?!? The only saving grace of this show was the environment inside the prison. They averted the noble sympathetic local forehead with Mr. Manifesto. He was exactly what you'd expect a philosophical political activist to be after years in an environment designed to make him crazy.

Although I am a huge fan of Star Trek Voyager, the episode "The Chute" (3.3) is definitely not one of my favorites. It is a rather predictable story of wrongly convicted crew members sentenced to harsh confinement at a dark and violent alien prison; I did not find it very entertaining.

This is a cheap episode; cheaply written and cheaply produced. The so-called "Chute" that dumps new prisoners inside, is a poorly disguised air conditioning duct that moves as people try to crawl through it.

Most disappointing however, is that this episode adds absolutely nothing to the understanding of any characters in the show, other civilizations, or anything about Voyager's saga through the Delta Quadrant. Consequently, the best thing about "The Chute" is that it is an episode worth skipping; there's nothing you'll miss!

I swear I was awake during my watch through of this episode but I failed to grasp the overall message and theme of this episode beyond a bond of friendship between Harry and Tom?

What is the ultimate point of the ship prison? If it is a experiment, what is the goal of it? Will prisoners turn violent when you plant a chip that elevates aggressive tendencies? The answer would be yes.

Is it a commentary on how prisoners are treated like animals? Perhaps a commentary on how prisons strip away humanity? If this is the point then why introduce the control device at all?

The message is mangled in this episode.

I got the impression, while watching this episode, that the writer got sick or something, leaving the script unfinished, and they had to have another writer come in to complete it, but the new writer didn't even bother reading the existing script! Tom Paris and Harry Kim are in a hellhole of a prison, full of violent inmates with a very "every man for himself" attitude. Tom and Harry have been convicted of a terrorist bombing they didn't commit, apparently having been framed by a government that doesn't care about who is really guilty, but only that it has found a scapegoat in the two aliens and a narrative, that these foreigners have been helping the (native) terrorist faction get the materials it needs to build its explosives, materials which can't be found in the local star system.

There's a heavy focus on the violence in the prison; the inmates are mostly left to themselves and are not protected from each other by guards, and they are all forced to wear implants that apparently increase aggression as well as making one itch (according to Tom Paris). (As in many biomedical plot devices in 1990s Star Trek, the pseudoscientific attempt to explain the implants' mechanism of action is absurdly oversimplified; they do better when they come up with fictionalised bio-Treknobabble using completely made-up concepts, similar to the more developed engineering-based Treknobabble.) Supposedly, attempting to remove the implant will kill you (although once Paris and Kim are at last rescued, the EMH has no problem with it). Things are seeming really bleak, with the two Voyager dudes tense and easily angered as a result of the effects of their implants, and most of the other prisoners are vicious; they'll happily kill you for your clothes or an extra bit of the unappetising looking food - or for no reason at all!

The two Voyager crewmembers meet one guy who, unlike the rest of the prison population, is relatively calm and spends most of his time writing. Kim and Paris, in contrast, are having an increasingly difficult time concentrating, making it even more difficult for them to come up with an escape plan. This new guy says he has come up with a way to overcome the implants and invites him to read his 'manifesto.' He seems a little goofy, believing the government is using the implants to perform a behavioural experiment on them (although given what we've seen of his government, it's not so hard to believe this story), but his ideas about preventing the implant from driving you crazy seem to have merit, in light of his own much more laid-back behaviour and ability to concentrate enough to write.

This, IMO, is where the episode really starts to break down. Harry has had some success using his tech skills to get past the force field that keeps them from reaching the chute through which food and the occasional new prisoner are sent into the prison. He has discovered, as a result, that they're on a space station, and not underground as they had been led to believe, which means they can't just escape by getting the hatch open. Tom has been wounded and isn't much help; also, he is succumbing to the implant and increasingly tries to undermine Harry rather than encouraging him. This is where I think the story takes a sharp turn and seems to lose its appeal. While the new character sounds a little goofy, it seems to me that Harry would be wise to try listening to him and reading his 'manifesto.' Instead he rejects him and refuses to cooperate with him, treating him as an enemy. The guy seems pretty pointless as a character as a result; if anything he only helps to underscore the other flaws in the story.

Meanwhile, Voyager hunts down the actual terrorists (with little difficulty), but the government on the planet that is holding Paris and Kim shows no interest; they claim that their conviction of the two humans is proof that Voyager has been assisting the terrorist movement and demand to impound and board the _Voyager_ to find the proof they are sure is there (Janeway's refusal only makes them more certain that she must be hiding something) of Voyager's complicity in the terrorist act. It's a nice example of the willingness to violate people's rights, employ torture, invent a false narrative about who is to blame for the attack (usually emphasising "foreigners" while downplaying the failure of government to prevent the attack despite advice from intelligence sources), etc., in situations where the public is very frightened and paranoid.)

Rather than trying to work with them, Janeway offers to give up the two bombers - a brother and sister, the latter a teenaged girl - in exchange for her own people. This doesn't work, as the government representative insists that the Starfleet prisoners are guilty at least of aiding the bombers. It is only then that the captain agrees to help her own two prisoners, and she only agrees, in exchange for their showing her where the prison is located. The brother tries to get her to help his imprisoned comrades in the guerrilla group to escape along with her two men, but she refuses, and although she was clearly bluffing (she needed his knowledge of the prison's location), the youth buckles and agrees.

This seems pretty ruthless of Janeway; she is already involved in this planet's internal conflict, she easily could have rescued the other victims of this cruel government and removed the implants being used to torture them, but instead she leaves them - the message seems to be that only her crew have rights as sentient life forms, and she will only interfere to the point that is necessary to rescue her own crew members - if someone else is being victimised, even if they ask her for help, it's Not Her Problem. It really paints her - and Starfleet - negatively.

I'm giving this episode 3 stars for the potential it had. In light of the negative message it ends up sending, I'm probably being overly generous.

Very off dialogue that seemed to strip any character from the actors, still they did do a good job with what they had. Whoever the cinematographer was did a good job. There was this one cool shot where it framed Kim's new ally as JESUS, and there was a whole load of good blocking done throughout the episode. Which is a shame, because I think the aesthetic is all that this episode has going for it. A lot of the ideas that were trying to get out in the script ended up not being fully realised. I found the idea of somebody writing a manifesto on how the prison is made to pit people against each other fascinating. This should have been the core of the episode. Imagine if the way Kim and Paris got out was through training their mind to work alongside their implants, and where the main conflict was trying to convince the other prisoners to join their cause and escape. This would have led to some actual character and relationship development between both Paris and Kim, but instead They just go crazy against one another and were then saved by the bell. Overall, the ideas are cool, the cinematography and blocking is surprisingly intuitive for Star Trek, But the script and dialogue is a god awful stilted mess.