Well, this month's list isn’t off to an auspicious start, is it? First Twilight and now another moment from Voyager?
I talked about the incredibly hit-or-miss nature of Voyager last month when a moment with neglected characters Tom and B'Elanna made my list of favorite fictional romantic gestures, but this month's moment of Voyager seriously hitting the mark can be attributed quite heavily to the actress Kate Mulgrew in the not so neglected role of Captain Kathryn Janeway.
This problem gets particularly distracting with her, because, well, she's the captain, and it'd be really nice to be able to trust her.
The premise of Voyager is that the starship Voyager, its crew, and the Maquis (rogue anti-Cardassian extremist) crew they are forced to ally with, are stranded in the Delta quadrant, 75 years from home at the ship's current top speed.
In this episode, they've managed to make contact with earth for the first time in two years and received letters from home, mostly family members thrilled to find out their lost loved ones are alive and well.
Janeway's letter is from her fiance, whom we met briefly in a phone call between them in the first episode, before Voyager's mission began.
We never see or hear any of the letter's exact contents beyond the unreadable shot at the top of this screen. All we see is the silent progression of Janeway's face as she reads it, from warm and fuzzy, to serious, to carefully restrained devastation, to I-sort-of-already-knew acceptance, all in small, subtle increments in the course of roughtly thirty seconds, and that's all it takes to establish exactly what it says.
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