Entry tags:
It's good to know how the world works
I can't not be interested in popular receptions of J. Robert Oppenheimer; I've written one myself. Considering how many historical allusions and allegories the franchise has employed over the decades, I should not have been shocked that Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001) indulged a similar impulse in its first season, but I reserve the right to be pleasantly surprised that it turned out intelligent, ambivalent, and much less anvillicious than any translation of the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into an interplanetary conflict of the twenty-fourth century had any right to be.
The premise of "Jetrel" is not quite space Oppenheimer meets space hibakusha, but it's close enough for top-secret government work. Instead of the father of the A-bomb, we have Dr. Ma'Bor Jetrel (James Sloyan), the leading scientist of the Haakonian Order whose research efforts ended nearly a decade of war in a single sky-blinding flash; standing in for the survivors, we get Voyager's chief cook and bottle washer Neelix (Ethan Phillips), whose home moon of Rinax was ground zero of that flash, an atom-unraveling weapon of mass destruction known, with a simplicity that borders on euphemism, as the "metreon cascade." The parallels are not subtle. The teleplay mostly by Kenneth Biller leans on them until they can't be missed, right down to dialogue remixed from the historical record and strategic details like a planned invasion forestalled by an unconditional surrender. The cascade vaporized a quarter of a million civilians on impact, left thousands more to die burnt and disfigured, explicitly of radiation poisoning. The second-order complication of metremia—a fatal blood disorder which reproduces in slow motion the sub-molecular disintegration of the cascade's victims—echoes the leukemia from which so many of the hibakusha died. Neelix who escaped the cascade only because he was planetside at the time describes his fruitless search for his family among the seared and flattened ruins, finding instead a ten-year-old girl whom he brought home to die like Sadako without paper cranes; his insistence that the weapon should have been demonstrated on a purely military target or even some uninhabited satellite of the Talaxian system resurrects the arguments of like-minded scientists at Los Alamos whose petition in favor of the nuclear equivalent of a warning shot was overruled by the recommendations of the Target Committee and overtaken by the signature of President Truman. Even the late-breaking revelation that Jetrel was disgraced as a "Talaxian sympathizer" and exiled from the Order for trying to turn his postwar research toward repairing the destruction of the cascade recalls the stripping of Oppenheimer's security clearance during the Red Scare, the President's disgust with the "cry-baby scientist" who couldn't deal with having "blood on his hands." I am sure there are other quotations I am not equipped to catch. We have passed well beyond the point of Easter eggs when one of Jetrel's key lines interweaves the two verses from the Bhagavad Gita that are supposed to have come to Oppenheimer's mind (If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds) on the success of the Trinity test of July 16, 1945: "The day when we tested the cascade, when I saw that blinding light, brighter than a thousand suns, I knew at that moment exactly what I had become."
It is probably inevitable that along with these transpositions of fact, the episode should also perpetuate some of the myths surrounding the A-bomb, such as the notion that there was ever a question of deciding to use it or even that its use ended World War II, when it was understood from the start of the Manhattan Project that if a bomb could be successfully developed, it would be lethally dropped, and the impetus for the surrender of Imperial Japan remain to this day much less clear-cut than even the encore horror of the bombing of Nagasaki. There's no Talaxian Nagasaki—the one world destroyed was enough. But then neither is Jetrel an exact transfer of his twentieth-century model, which means I am almost more interested by the ways in which he diverges: for starters, he's a far more sympathetic presentation of the scientist as monster than Oppie himself. Whether he thought of himself as Shiva or, in the words of Trinity test director Kenneth Bainbridge, a son of a bitch, it is documented that when the white sands flashed to green glass at Alamogordo, Oppenheimer was not horrorstricken but exhilarated, triumphant to such a disconcerting degree that his old friend Isidor Isaac Rabi compared him to a gunslinger at high noon. Isn't that an American image? So's the report of Oppenheimer's first public appearance post-Hiroshima, shaking his clasped hands above his head like a prizefighter who'd just won the world championship. He was proud of the bomb. He was sorry it hadn't come online in time to be used against the Nazis. Any number of his colleagues felt sickened, betrayed, guilt-ridden at once, but it took the additional destruction of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 to change Oppenheimer's tune. By the end of the month, he was all out against nuclear proliferation; by the end of the year, he was expressing blunt regret that the whole history of physics as a discipline had culminated in mass murder. His about-face was as real as it was remarkable and if it made him enemies he couldn't afford when the time came for his loyalty to his country to be challenged, he had been proving for years that, sometimes silver-tongued, sometimes shockingly gauche, he could sabotage himself without any assistance from the A-bomb. He died of a chain-smoker's throat cancer, not of the radioactive irony of his own creation: that fate was saved for Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, tickling the dragon's tail of the demon core. Certainly he did not spend the years between the war's end and his own working to improve or save the lives of the survivors of the cities he had enabled to be bombed. He wished there to be no more like them, but I have never read that he met with any of those who had no choice but to live as they already were.
Fortunately, we have fiction instead of biography for a reason, and the differences between Oppenheimer and Jetrel—and between their weapons and their wars—are part of the reason the episode makes such a riveting near two-hander between the Haakonian scientist and the Talaxian survivor, with the rest of the cast serving as divers plot hands and sounding boards more than decisive players. It's such a good character piece, I forgive it even the technobabble that inevitably enters the plot. For most of its runtime, it is instead a chain of arguments over the ethics of science and the stresses of war and the consequences of atrocity, played out between two intelligent, articulate, revealingly damaged people who in some ways aren't talking to one another at all. Judgments, accusations, contempt disguised as curiosity or served raw as a slap in the face, Jetrel must have heard it all in his years of studying metremia among those Talaxians who were exposed, like Neelix, to the aftereffects of the cascade; he dismisses a piece of particularly deliberate rudeness on his intended patient's part with an even-voiced "I'm used to it." He says such things with neither self-pity nor self-flagellation, almost irrelevantly. He doesn't defend himself. He defends science: the imperative to understand the universe, the sharing of knowledge and its applications, the necessity of not shying away from the implications of power. His claim that the metreon cascade would have been discovered with or without his research sounds like passing the buck until the audience remembers that nuclear fission was the scientific question of the first half of the twentieth century. His claim that its use was always out of his hands is very definitely letting history off the hook, but whether it signifies naïveté or sophistry, Neelix calls him mercilessly on it: "That must be a very convenient distinction for you. Does it help you sleep at night?" Quietly and seriously, Jetrel replies, "I slept no worse last night than I have any other night for the past fifteen years." He seems to have accepted the mantle of monster without protest, though not without pain. Even his own wife saw nothing else in him when he returned from the devastation of Rinax—a touch borrowed not from Oppenheimer but from his predecessor in mass destruction Fritz Haber, the pioneer of chemical warfare whose wife shot herself after he personally oversaw the first successful deployment of poison gas during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. It is clever to present the Haakonian as such a weary, unflamboyant figure, with a deep rough brush of a voice and a dry, crenellated face in which the bright eyes seem the only remnant of the man whose heart could once beat faster for more things than science. Neither conspicuously anguished nor tethered to his planet's party line, he answers a prod at his conscience with the patient, practiced "I did what had to be done," but his rationalizations find no purchase on the uncompromising hatred of the Talaxian who won't give him a Planck length of absolution, this funny-looking little ginger-ruffed man with nothing funny at all in his razor-light voice as he describes the experience of watching all the lights of Rinax wink out in the wake of the blast or pronounces the name of a child fifteen years dead to make the man who killed her remember it. "Peace of mind is a relative thing, Captain." From the moment he recognizes the shuttle on the viewscreen as Haakonian and hears its pilot identify himself as Dr. Jetrel, Neelix is reverberating with memory and all the raw nerves that come with it, grief, helplessness, fury, guilt, all burning-glassed on one plainspoken yet maddeningly elusive scientist who puts a face on everything he ever lost in his life. Their fights are not straw men on either side. It's just that the answers to their problems, if there are answers, are really messy.
Having seen maybe half a dozen episodes of Voyager prior to this one, I had barely a nodding, annoyed acquaintance with Neelix and am still impressed with the serious recontextualization of his character which "Jetrel" achieves. As far back as Lloyd Alexander and Diana Wynne Jones, I have liked it when comedy turns out not to preclude reality and the reality of Neelix is poignantly fucked up. Except for the camaraderie of the pool game in the cold open, it's quickly clear that any time he uses humor in this episode, it's as some kind of defense, so reflexive that it's all the more effective and affecting when he just drops it, relating his memories of Rinax or confessing the truth of his war record to Kes (Jennifer Lien); the same begins to feel true of his default cheerful bustle, especially when we hear the same register sharpened to needle his enemy or unraveling into a sudden furious snarl. He has a marvelous voice, actually, as convincing in its unexpected strength as in the thready, breaking whisper of shame he's never shared before. It helps to underscore what an amazing liar he is. He doesn't look it. He looks easy to catch out and embarrass, his flexible clown's face wincing, muttering with a nervous little chuckle, "All right, then, I surrender." But the first time we hear him refer to the Battle of the Pyrithian Gorge, all we imagine is that he's playing up his heroism to comfort and distract his lover, embroidering some less sterling war story with endearingly transparent flair: we don't question that he was there at all. He explained his survival to Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) with three truths and one lie and nothing in his shaken, bitter delivery gave away which was which. I still can't tell whether his cautionary tale about the talchok trap is sincere or invented off the cuff with its ingenuously on-the-nose moral of becoming so enamored of the cleverness of his invention that he forgot the harm it would do to the animal it caught. But he can't carry one particular lie any further, not in the orbit of a dead moon still occluded by the ionized purple swirl of the metreon cloud, and the scene with Kes in the darkened mess hall in which he tells the truth for the first time in fifteen years is devastating. If he couldn't die with his family on Rinax, he could at least have tried to stand against the regime that killed them. No wonder he dreams a nightmare re-run of the pool hall, where the shape of Jetrel taunts him in his own voice for always calling a safety and the Voyager crew speak for his dead family, "Why weren't you here to help us?" The dialogue clunks more than a little, but the emotional point is sound: if Neelix wants to get past hating Jetrel, he'll have to find a way first to stop hating himself.
It's well done. "Forgive me," Jetrel introduced himself, but he had to know it was only a form of words; there was much more realism in his awareness, "There is no way I can ever apologize to you, Mr. Neelix. That's why I have not tried." When Neelix enters the sickbay in the episode's final scene, he doesn't look as though he's come for one last dig at the dying scientist, but neither does he look as though he has forgiveness on his mind, and yet when faced with Jetrel whose own body is undoing itself from metremia, it's what gets out of his mouth. It's a beautifully jarring, complex moment. I don't think he could have said it if it wasn't the truth, but we don't know quite what kind of truth it is. Can he forgive Dr. Jetrel for the death of his entire family, the destruction of his home, the conquest of his world? What does it even mean if he can? I know the writers did their homework on Oppenheimer, but I want to know if any of them read Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (1969) or even just a machzor, because I thought instantly of the reason that murder is unforgivable in Judaism: it is not possible to be forgiven by the dead. They're dead, schmendrick. You can't apologize to them, you can't change your behavior toward them, they cannot choose to refuse or accept your amends. You can do nothing for them anymore. But Jetrel was trying to restore the dead of Rinax, to undo the holocaust of his invention through the fingernail chance of a technological miracle; perhaps that's what Neelix gives him, the recognition of the effort to atone. Perhaps it's the sympathy for someone else's pain—someone else's failure—that he had closed himself off from before. It has to be the follow-through of beginning to forgive himself. Whatever it is, it's the last thing Jetrel hears, and he dies before he can respond to it. It's so fragile, I hesitate to call it closure. It feels like the right, unfinished gesture to end this ambiguous story on.
I am aware that Star Trek was capable of dealing in nuance when it felt like it, but "Jetrel" still feels rewardingly risky in the indeterminacies it offers its audience, which could be mistaken for plot holes when they are merely the difficulty of the world. We never learn how the war started, only how it ended. We are primed to think of the Talaxians as the wronged side because they were nuked and occupied by the Haakonians, but Neelix's explanation of his failure to report for duty suggests that his planet may not have been blameless: "I thought the war was unjust—that Talax was fighting for reasons that weren't worth killing for—" It wasn't the Axis who dropped the bomb, remember. (This parenthesis is your semi-annual reminder that the development of the A-bomb was not an arms race between the U.S. and Germany, it was a no-contest between the Manhattan Project and Werner Heisenberg with a side of heavy water because the Nazis had kneecapped themselves in nuclear science with their anti-Semitism. If you marginalize theoretical physics as a Jewish science and then cause the majority of your physicists to flee the country on pain of genocide, you do not achieve criticality anywhere except in failure. Only in fiction does this irony rebound directly on Germany instead of Japan.) We might conjecture it was something like the Vietnam of the Delta Quadrant, but we're never given a hint of heroes or villains, just as it is never clarified for us whether Neelix dodged the draft out of conscience or cowardice. Because of his comments about the war and because Kes has a point that he was risking his life just as much by refusing to fight for a government that executed conscientious objectors, I am inclined to interpret it as a genuine stand of principle that in the aftermath of the cascade felt like an unforgivable dereliction of duty, but his motives could have been mixed at the time—most people's are—and the survivor guilt doesn't care either way. We never even find out whether Jetrel's long-cherished dream of "regenerative fusion" failed because the theory was bananapants to begin with or simply because Voyager's transporter couldn't draw enough power to overcome the degree of fragmentation inherent in the turbulent biomatter of the metreon cloud. It's not a repeatable experiment, not for a long time or perhaps ever. What's left mattering is how much the scientist wanted it to work. What's left mattering is what Neelix was able to say. There's nothing else to do but go on living with what you've done and what's been done to you. I don't think of that as a very Trek-y moral, but I do think it's true.
"Jetrel" aired in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; I don't know if it was part of the official commemorations, but I can't imagine how it could have been viewed separately from them, either. I am indebted to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants for tipping me off that it existed at all. It has left me with renewed feelings about Oppenheimer, who met a much more muted end than the fictional scientist he inspired, and a deep and inconvenient attachment to Neelix, whom I gather the writers remembered was a real person even less often than happened with the Ferengi. In the alternate timeline where I could be bothered to learn to vid, I'd be using the music of Oppenheimer Analysis, particularly "You Won't Forget Me." I know that Oppenheimer after 1945 never really lived out of the shadow of those shadow-etched stones he never visited in real life; I understand the narrative desire to bring him even closer. I made him talk to a golem. This safety brought to you by my radiant backers at Patreon.
The premise of "Jetrel" is not quite space Oppenheimer meets space hibakusha, but it's close enough for top-secret government work. Instead of the father of the A-bomb, we have Dr. Ma'Bor Jetrel (James Sloyan), the leading scientist of the Haakonian Order whose research efforts ended nearly a decade of war in a single sky-blinding flash; standing in for the survivors, we get Voyager's chief cook and bottle washer Neelix (Ethan Phillips), whose home moon of Rinax was ground zero of that flash, an atom-unraveling weapon of mass destruction known, with a simplicity that borders on euphemism, as the "metreon cascade." The parallels are not subtle. The teleplay mostly by Kenneth Biller leans on them until they can't be missed, right down to dialogue remixed from the historical record and strategic details like a planned invasion forestalled by an unconditional surrender. The cascade vaporized a quarter of a million civilians on impact, left thousands more to die burnt and disfigured, explicitly of radiation poisoning. The second-order complication of metremia—a fatal blood disorder which reproduces in slow motion the sub-molecular disintegration of the cascade's victims—echoes the leukemia from which so many of the hibakusha died. Neelix who escaped the cascade only because he was planetside at the time describes his fruitless search for his family among the seared and flattened ruins, finding instead a ten-year-old girl whom he brought home to die like Sadako without paper cranes; his insistence that the weapon should have been demonstrated on a purely military target or even some uninhabited satellite of the Talaxian system resurrects the arguments of like-minded scientists at Los Alamos whose petition in favor of the nuclear equivalent of a warning shot was overruled by the recommendations of the Target Committee and overtaken by the signature of President Truman. Even the late-breaking revelation that Jetrel was disgraced as a "Talaxian sympathizer" and exiled from the Order for trying to turn his postwar research toward repairing the destruction of the cascade recalls the stripping of Oppenheimer's security clearance during the Red Scare, the President's disgust with the "cry-baby scientist" who couldn't deal with having "blood on his hands." I am sure there are other quotations I am not equipped to catch. We have passed well beyond the point of Easter eggs when one of Jetrel's key lines interweaves the two verses from the Bhagavad Gita that are supposed to have come to Oppenheimer's mind (If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds) on the success of the Trinity test of July 16, 1945: "The day when we tested the cascade, when I saw that blinding light, brighter than a thousand suns, I knew at that moment exactly what I had become."
It is probably inevitable that along with these transpositions of fact, the episode should also perpetuate some of the myths surrounding the A-bomb, such as the notion that there was ever a question of deciding to use it or even that its use ended World War II, when it was understood from the start of the Manhattan Project that if a bomb could be successfully developed, it would be lethally dropped, and the impetus for the surrender of Imperial Japan remain to this day much less clear-cut than even the encore horror of the bombing of Nagasaki. There's no Talaxian Nagasaki—the one world destroyed was enough. But then neither is Jetrel an exact transfer of his twentieth-century model, which means I am almost more interested by the ways in which he diverges: for starters, he's a far more sympathetic presentation of the scientist as monster than Oppie himself. Whether he thought of himself as Shiva or, in the words of Trinity test director Kenneth Bainbridge, a son of a bitch, it is documented that when the white sands flashed to green glass at Alamogordo, Oppenheimer was not horrorstricken but exhilarated, triumphant to such a disconcerting degree that his old friend Isidor Isaac Rabi compared him to a gunslinger at high noon. Isn't that an American image? So's the report of Oppenheimer's first public appearance post-Hiroshima, shaking his clasped hands above his head like a prizefighter who'd just won the world championship. He was proud of the bomb. He was sorry it hadn't come online in time to be used against the Nazis. Any number of his colleagues felt sickened, betrayed, guilt-ridden at once, but it took the additional destruction of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 to change Oppenheimer's tune. By the end of the month, he was all out against nuclear proliferation; by the end of the year, he was expressing blunt regret that the whole history of physics as a discipline had culminated in mass murder. His about-face was as real as it was remarkable and if it made him enemies he couldn't afford when the time came for his loyalty to his country to be challenged, he had been proving for years that, sometimes silver-tongued, sometimes shockingly gauche, he could sabotage himself without any assistance from the A-bomb. He died of a chain-smoker's throat cancer, not of the radioactive irony of his own creation: that fate was saved for Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, tickling the dragon's tail of the demon core. Certainly he did not spend the years between the war's end and his own working to improve or save the lives of the survivors of the cities he had enabled to be bombed. He wished there to be no more like them, but I have never read that he met with any of those who had no choice but to live as they already were.
Fortunately, we have fiction instead of biography for a reason, and the differences between Oppenheimer and Jetrel—and between their weapons and their wars—are part of the reason the episode makes such a riveting near two-hander between the Haakonian scientist and the Talaxian survivor, with the rest of the cast serving as divers plot hands and sounding boards more than decisive players. It's such a good character piece, I forgive it even the technobabble that inevitably enters the plot. For most of its runtime, it is instead a chain of arguments over the ethics of science and the stresses of war and the consequences of atrocity, played out between two intelligent, articulate, revealingly damaged people who in some ways aren't talking to one another at all. Judgments, accusations, contempt disguised as curiosity or served raw as a slap in the face, Jetrel must have heard it all in his years of studying metremia among those Talaxians who were exposed, like Neelix, to the aftereffects of the cascade; he dismisses a piece of particularly deliberate rudeness on his intended patient's part with an even-voiced "I'm used to it." He says such things with neither self-pity nor self-flagellation, almost irrelevantly. He doesn't defend himself. He defends science: the imperative to understand the universe, the sharing of knowledge and its applications, the necessity of not shying away from the implications of power. His claim that the metreon cascade would have been discovered with or without his research sounds like passing the buck until the audience remembers that nuclear fission was the scientific question of the first half of the twentieth century. His claim that its use was always out of his hands is very definitely letting history off the hook, but whether it signifies naïveté or sophistry, Neelix calls him mercilessly on it: "That must be a very convenient distinction for you. Does it help you sleep at night?" Quietly and seriously, Jetrel replies, "I slept no worse last night than I have any other night for the past fifteen years." He seems to have accepted the mantle of monster without protest, though not without pain. Even his own wife saw nothing else in him when he returned from the devastation of Rinax—a touch borrowed not from Oppenheimer but from his predecessor in mass destruction Fritz Haber, the pioneer of chemical warfare whose wife shot herself after he personally oversaw the first successful deployment of poison gas during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. It is clever to present the Haakonian as such a weary, unflamboyant figure, with a deep rough brush of a voice and a dry, crenellated face in which the bright eyes seem the only remnant of the man whose heart could once beat faster for more things than science. Neither conspicuously anguished nor tethered to his planet's party line, he answers a prod at his conscience with the patient, practiced "I did what had to be done," but his rationalizations find no purchase on the uncompromising hatred of the Talaxian who won't give him a Planck length of absolution, this funny-looking little ginger-ruffed man with nothing funny at all in his razor-light voice as he describes the experience of watching all the lights of Rinax wink out in the wake of the blast or pronounces the name of a child fifteen years dead to make the man who killed her remember it. "Peace of mind is a relative thing, Captain." From the moment he recognizes the shuttle on the viewscreen as Haakonian and hears its pilot identify himself as Dr. Jetrel, Neelix is reverberating with memory and all the raw nerves that come with it, grief, helplessness, fury, guilt, all burning-glassed on one plainspoken yet maddeningly elusive scientist who puts a face on everything he ever lost in his life. Their fights are not straw men on either side. It's just that the answers to their problems, if there are answers, are really messy.
Having seen maybe half a dozen episodes of Voyager prior to this one, I had barely a nodding, annoyed acquaintance with Neelix and am still impressed with the serious recontextualization of his character which "Jetrel" achieves. As far back as Lloyd Alexander and Diana Wynne Jones, I have liked it when comedy turns out not to preclude reality and the reality of Neelix is poignantly fucked up. Except for the camaraderie of the pool game in the cold open, it's quickly clear that any time he uses humor in this episode, it's as some kind of defense, so reflexive that it's all the more effective and affecting when he just drops it, relating his memories of Rinax or confessing the truth of his war record to Kes (Jennifer Lien); the same begins to feel true of his default cheerful bustle, especially when we hear the same register sharpened to needle his enemy or unraveling into a sudden furious snarl. He has a marvelous voice, actually, as convincing in its unexpected strength as in the thready, breaking whisper of shame he's never shared before. It helps to underscore what an amazing liar he is. He doesn't look it. He looks easy to catch out and embarrass, his flexible clown's face wincing, muttering with a nervous little chuckle, "All right, then, I surrender." But the first time we hear him refer to the Battle of the Pyrithian Gorge, all we imagine is that he's playing up his heroism to comfort and distract his lover, embroidering some less sterling war story with endearingly transparent flair: we don't question that he was there at all. He explained his survival to Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) with three truths and one lie and nothing in his shaken, bitter delivery gave away which was which. I still can't tell whether his cautionary tale about the talchok trap is sincere or invented off the cuff with its ingenuously on-the-nose moral of becoming so enamored of the cleverness of his invention that he forgot the harm it would do to the animal it caught. But he can't carry one particular lie any further, not in the orbit of a dead moon still occluded by the ionized purple swirl of the metreon cloud, and the scene with Kes in the darkened mess hall in which he tells the truth for the first time in fifteen years is devastating. If he couldn't die with his family on Rinax, he could at least have tried to stand against the regime that killed them. No wonder he dreams a nightmare re-run of the pool hall, where the shape of Jetrel taunts him in his own voice for always calling a safety and the Voyager crew speak for his dead family, "Why weren't you here to help us?" The dialogue clunks more than a little, but the emotional point is sound: if Neelix wants to get past hating Jetrel, he'll have to find a way first to stop hating himself.
It's well done. "Forgive me," Jetrel introduced himself, but he had to know it was only a form of words; there was much more realism in his awareness, "There is no way I can ever apologize to you, Mr. Neelix. That's why I have not tried." When Neelix enters the sickbay in the episode's final scene, he doesn't look as though he's come for one last dig at the dying scientist, but neither does he look as though he has forgiveness on his mind, and yet when faced with Jetrel whose own body is undoing itself from metremia, it's what gets out of his mouth. It's a beautifully jarring, complex moment. I don't think he could have said it if it wasn't the truth, but we don't know quite what kind of truth it is. Can he forgive Dr. Jetrel for the death of his entire family, the destruction of his home, the conquest of his world? What does it even mean if he can? I know the writers did their homework on Oppenheimer, but I want to know if any of them read Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (1969) or even just a machzor, because I thought instantly of the reason that murder is unforgivable in Judaism: it is not possible to be forgiven by the dead. They're dead, schmendrick. You can't apologize to them, you can't change your behavior toward them, they cannot choose to refuse or accept your amends. You can do nothing for them anymore. But Jetrel was trying to restore the dead of Rinax, to undo the holocaust of his invention through the fingernail chance of a technological miracle; perhaps that's what Neelix gives him, the recognition of the effort to atone. Perhaps it's the sympathy for someone else's pain—someone else's failure—that he had closed himself off from before. It has to be the follow-through of beginning to forgive himself. Whatever it is, it's the last thing Jetrel hears, and he dies before he can respond to it. It's so fragile, I hesitate to call it closure. It feels like the right, unfinished gesture to end this ambiguous story on.
I am aware that Star Trek was capable of dealing in nuance when it felt like it, but "Jetrel" still feels rewardingly risky in the indeterminacies it offers its audience, which could be mistaken for plot holes when they are merely the difficulty of the world. We never learn how the war started, only how it ended. We are primed to think of the Talaxians as the wronged side because they were nuked and occupied by the Haakonians, but Neelix's explanation of his failure to report for duty suggests that his planet may not have been blameless: "I thought the war was unjust—that Talax was fighting for reasons that weren't worth killing for—" It wasn't the Axis who dropped the bomb, remember. (This parenthesis is your semi-annual reminder that the development of the A-bomb was not an arms race between the U.S. and Germany, it was a no-contest between the Manhattan Project and Werner Heisenberg with a side of heavy water because the Nazis had kneecapped themselves in nuclear science with their anti-Semitism. If you marginalize theoretical physics as a Jewish science and then cause the majority of your physicists to flee the country on pain of genocide, you do not achieve criticality anywhere except in failure. Only in fiction does this irony rebound directly on Germany instead of Japan.) We might conjecture it was something like the Vietnam of the Delta Quadrant, but we're never given a hint of heroes or villains, just as it is never clarified for us whether Neelix dodged the draft out of conscience or cowardice. Because of his comments about the war and because Kes has a point that he was risking his life just as much by refusing to fight for a government that executed conscientious objectors, I am inclined to interpret it as a genuine stand of principle that in the aftermath of the cascade felt like an unforgivable dereliction of duty, but his motives could have been mixed at the time—most people's are—and the survivor guilt doesn't care either way. We never even find out whether Jetrel's long-cherished dream of "regenerative fusion" failed because the theory was bananapants to begin with or simply because Voyager's transporter couldn't draw enough power to overcome the degree of fragmentation inherent in the turbulent biomatter of the metreon cloud. It's not a repeatable experiment, not for a long time or perhaps ever. What's left mattering is how much the scientist wanted it to work. What's left mattering is what Neelix was able to say. There's nothing else to do but go on living with what you've done and what's been done to you. I don't think of that as a very Trek-y moral, but I do think it's true.
"Jetrel" aired in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; I don't know if it was part of the official commemorations, but I can't imagine how it could have been viewed separately from them, either. I am indebted to
skygiants for tipping me off that it existed at all. It has left me with renewed feelings about Oppenheimer, who met a much more muted end than the fictional scientist he inspired, and a deep and inconvenient attachment to Neelix, whom I gather the writers remembered was a real person even less often than happened with the Ferengi. In the alternate timeline where I could be bothered to learn to vid, I'd be using the music of Oppenheimer Analysis, particularly "You Won't Forget Me." I know that Oppenheimer after 1945 never really lived out of the shadow of those shadow-etched stones he never visited in real life; I understand the narrative desire to bring him even closer. I made him talk to a golem. This safety brought to you by my radiant backers at Patreon.