Voyager - Across the Unknown Explores Darker, Colder Space

Tom Paris will not die. 

For the last dozen or so hours in Voyager: Across the Unknown, I have been trying to kill him. When there's an away mission, I send him first. I make bad choices with him, things that the real Kathryn Janeway would never authorize, never approve, never even consider. I look at the numerical values presented, see where his faults lie, chart the impossibilities of his success and say "Make it so." These are decisions that Starfleet would have drilled out of the real Janeway if she wasn't the most Bloomington, Indiana tomboy to ever follow in her Vice Admiral Daddy's cop footsteps. No. These are the decisions of me, Dia Lacina. Not even a What If...? Mirrorverse Janeway would be this casually reckless. And yet, Tom Paris persists.

I've seen people roll bad in games before. Hell, I've listened to the first season of Friends at the Table. I've personally taken a fistful of d6 and whiffed every single one. I've lied to friends on the verge of falling apart and quitting about what that 2d10 came up as behind my screen. I've never seen someone roll like Thomas Eugene Paris in my entire life. This is what happens when you luck your way out of a New Zealand penal colony, onto an early model Intrepid-class, and somehow survive not only the seven year journey through the Delta Quadrant, but seven seasons on a new untested cable network. Tom Paris is the embodiment of mediocre Starfleet men who roll nothing but 20s—because 20 is the only number on their dice. 

The thing is I didn't realize how much I actually like Voyager, until I decided I needed to kill Tom Paris.

Voyager was a tough sell for me when it premiered. While the prospect of another non-Enterprise show and a woman at the helm was exciting, the "lost in space" angle didn't thrill me and I hated Kate Mulgrew's Pioneer Woman Updo. Also, at the time, the world didn't know if the Voyager and her crew would make it home from the Delta Quadrant. It was a new untested network. The innumerable articles freaking out in all directions about a [Ferengi voice] female captain. All around were the threats of cancellation that could see it ending abruptly with this crew as a perpetual Space Family Robinson. After Earth 2, Space: Above and Beyond, and the absolute betrayal that is SeaQuest 2032—I wasn't willing to trust again just yet.

Also, Neelix is a tough sell.

Besides, this was a franchise demanding I split my attention between the best years of The X-Files in its first half, and Farscape for its last 3 seasons. And by the time Voyager finished its seven-year run, I had stopped remembering to watch it entirely. I was in college and Bush was about to embroil us in a patchwork of foreign policy disasters that started well before I was born and will still be rippling after I'm gone. On May 23, 2001 when the show ran its truncated conclusion, I was definitely on the verge of blackout drunk in a college dive bar that didn't card with an older, busty classmate with a double Erl. It was a Wednesday night after my three-hour psych elective. We both preferred Charmed. 

I'm on my 9th run of Voyager: Across the Unknown now. And it’s finally settling in just how ambitious this game made by German studio Gamexcite is. By any metric. But especially from a studio who, according to their website, previously remastered one Asterix game for mobile, and made two other Asterix games themselves. It's safe to say this narrative survival adaptation of a major television property is quite the scope-up in terms of project size and complexity. Voyager: Across the Unknown is ambitious. It's not quite the ambition equivalent of launching a new network with a woman at the helm of a non-Enterprise Star Trek series in the mid-late 90s, but it comes close.

Halfway between yet another godforsaken Class D planet and godforsaken Class J, B’Elanna Torres decides she wants more reserve batteries. I don’t entirely disagree with her. We only have one, and we’re on our 7th dip into “Gray Mode” (reserve power, minimal systems, minimal life support) in this journey. I look up how many times Voyager actually went into Gray Mode in the television series — five episodes. I agree to make the batteries.

This is yet another way Across the Unknown chooses to ruin your life as the manager of Starfleet’s sleek, new starship. Introducing mechanical novelty and quick characterization by Starfleet rank or job into missions designed to drain resources, split your focus, and have both principal and walk-on characters offer terse praise or vituperative abuse. B’Elanna is in engineering, so she wants batteries. Neelix wants you to secure food and housing. Tuvok wants you to unfuck morale so he can stop breaking up fights. No one cares about what Janeway wants. That’s not how command works.