muse

Muse (VOY 6.22) is an incredible episode when you read it as a response to ancient Greek drama specifically.

The story doesn’t reproduce or retell any particular drama,^[1] but it is absolutely steeped in the tradition. Kelis’ plays were, in my opinion, at least influenced by (if not outright based on) the style and form of Greek drama. Like, I straight up would not believe that that level of similarity (e.g. in production elements like the masks and stylistic elements like the particular use of the chorus) was coincidental.

For me, this makes B'Elanna’s role even more fun. After an entire story about the creation of a pseudo-Greek drama, B'Elanna pulls off the most technical of Greek dramatic spectacles in reverse: instead of a god appearing from the mechane^[2] to speak to the characters or the audience (the one thing which sometimes restores belief and order at the end of a particularly messy tragedy^[3]), an starship engineer uses her technnical prowess to disappear back up into the sky,^[4] inspiring belief and restoring some sort of order.

The only reason this ending happens, the keystone holding the narrative in place, the only reason B'Elanna is even around to play the god at this critical moment,^[5] is her belief in the power of narrative. Without that, the whole thing collapses under its own weight. It's a fabulously revealing moment for her character.

1. Though (and this is more speculative) I would be 0% surprised to find that whoever wrote that story had read and enjoyed the comedian Aristophanes in general and in particular his Frogs (which [Trekkie bonus!] is the source of Alexander’s song in the TOS episode “Plato’s Stepchildren”). Frogs is fundamentally a debate about what kind of poetry can inspire Actual Good, starting from the presumption that some form of poetry has that ability. It was written during the later years of the Peloponnesian War. it’s fundamentally kind of a pessimistic play: it posits that poetry can save us, but not all poetry, and those even arguably capable of producing the right sort are already dead. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that Aristophanes’ pessimism was justified: if there were a poem that could save Athens, it was certainly not a poem that anyone wrote.^{^}
2. This is where deus ex machina (“god out of the machine”) comes from. It’s a particularly fitting mechanic (pun intended) for B'Elanna to make use of.^{^}
3. This is, for example, one available interpretation of the ending of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. It’s also what happens in Euripides’ Orestes; as Anne Carson puts it in her intro to her translation of the play, “all the lines of the plot have been pushed to impasse and categories like good/evil, happy/unhappy, mortal/ immortal are sliding around so crazily that only a god can make things clear” (An Oresteia, 177).^{^}
4. Fun note: the character who comes to mind as famously leaving via mechane (and the only non-god to use the mechane in extant Greek tragedy) is Medea at the end of Euripides’ Medea. Having murdered her husband’s new wife and her own children, she leaves via a chariot pulled by dragons.^{^}
5. The dea in machinam, I guess.^{^}