Star Trek: Voyager Secretly Demotes Fan-Favorite Character?
In various Star Trek series, it’s always a big deal when a character gets demoted. It happens to Tom Paris in Voyager, for example, who gets busted down to ensign and spends 30 days in the brig for disobeying Captain Janeway’s orders. Because he goes from two and a half pips to two pips after disobeying orders in “Prime Factors,” many fans think that Tuvok also received an early demotion, but the reality is that he simply had an extra half pip in that episode due to a costuming mistake.
Breaking The Law
For this tale about Tuvok’s seeming demotion to make sense, we need to first recap this particular episode. “Prime Factors” takes place in Season 1, when Voyager’s plight–being stuck over 70,000 lightyears from home–was fresh on the crew’s minds. That’s why everyone gets excited to meet the Sikarians, aliens with exotic technology that lets them instantaneously transport themselves 40,000 lightyears away.
Needless to say, Janeway and the rest of the command crew are very interested in obtaining this technology and using it to get them closer to home. They quickly run into a problem, though: the planet’s laws forbid them from sharing their technology with outsiders. Janeway tries to negotiate a trade with the government, but someone on the planet offers a far less official exchange.
Getting His Hands Dirty
Where do Tuvok and his alleged demotion come into all this? After Voyager gets officially shooed away from the government, three officers (including Chief Engineer B’Elanna Torres and the secret Cardassian traitor, Seksa) get ready to beam down to the planet to make the secret exchange with the civilian. Security Chief Tuvok finds out about their scheme, but instead of shutting down their plan, he beams down to the planet and makes the illicit trade on his own.
An Assumed Demotion
As you might expect, the technology did not work as planned…Voyager tries to use the spatial interjector, but it turns out it only works for the Sikarians because their planet has a special crystalline mantle that serves as a much-needed amplifier. After narrowly avoiding a warp core breach, the ship resumed its course home, and Tuvok got a stern talking-to from Captain Janeway. In the subsequent episode, Tuvok is missing a half-pip, so many fans assumed that he received a demotion for going behind his captain’s back.
A Simple Error
However, looking back on these early episodes, it’s clear that Tuvok didn’t receive a deliberate demotion so much as an accidental promotion. He has two pips before and after this episode, and everyone verbally refers to him as “lieutenant,” so his having the pips of a lieutenant commander in “Prime Factors” was actually a mistake. The next episode corrects the mistake, but since that correction happened right after Tuvok’s betrayal of Janeway, fans always assumed an offscreen demotion had taken place.
Tuvok And Starfleet
Incidentally, Tuvok would receive an actual promotion to lieutenant commander in the fourth season and, unlike Tom Paris, never faces an official demotion. In fact, we later discover that he has had quite a meteoric Starfleet career: by the third season of Picard, he has risen to the rank of captain and serves as a kind of professional mentor and confidante to Seven of Nine after she returns to Starfleet.
They bond even after Seven breaks one rule after another, but this is only natural. After all, few Vulcans other than Tuvok in Starfleet history would know all about breaking the rules in the name of the greater good.
