Heroes and Demons (VOY)

            It’s actually incredibly cool that immediately on the heels of TNG’s first foray into the “Holodeck episode” we get to see what Voyager has learned from seven years of trial and error. “Heroes and Demons” isn’t a great episode, but it’s more than watchable – great humor and character acting from Robert Picardo help sell one of our cheesiest plots to date. It helps that the Doctor actually learns something about himself from his time on the holodeck.

            The plot, in brief – B’Elanna and Janeway take a sample of some weird “photonic matter” from a nebula, because apparently it will “boost power converter efficiency.” Captain Janeway wants Harry to help B’Elanna harvest the stuff, but he’s in the holodeck, and won’t answer his calls. Then it turns out he’s not on the ship. And the Holodeck won’t turn off. So Chakotay and Tuvok go to investigate, and soon find themselves also vanished. Not wanting to risk any more crew members, Janeway sends the Doctor, who should be immune to being converted into energy since he’s already mostly energy, on his first away mission.

            Our destination this week is a holonovel based on the epic poem “Beowulf.” Unlike Dixon Hill, this is a real (if conveniently public domain) story, and the writers have some fun with that in the script. Unferth, for example, who in the original story challenges Beowulf to a duel to prove he is man enough to face Grendel, does the same to our heroes. The script also plays with the idea of the Holonovel as an interactive story that would actually be programmed, able to improvise but with obvious limitations. The characters greet each new “player” in much the same way, as if anyone entering the holodeck is essentially Beowulf. It feels much more like an interactive character screen in a video game, where it says “What is your name?” and the default is Beowulf, but you can enter something else if you want to.

            The cheesy fantasy-movie costumes and speech patterns, as well as the shoe-horned-in romance, all add to the feeling that we’re getting the 24^th-century Hollywood version of Beowulf. If all this episode was was Tuvok and Chakotay or Janeway wandering through this low budget sword-and-sorcery flick trying to find Harry, it would be a funny, if unmemorable episode. But adding in the photonic alien as the source of the malfunction (as opposed to “The Big Goodbye” and its totally unexplained malfunction) helps a lot. And what helps even more is that this plotline is used to force the doctor to recognize how far he has evolved beyond a simple program.

            The thing is, it’s not just his indestructibility that makes the Doctor ideally suited for this mission. While Chakotay and Tuvok talk past the Holodeck characters and treat them like they’re not real, the Doctor, himself a hologram, interacts with them as people and treats them with respect. This draws into focus how many of the crew still treat the Doctor, as a tool rather than a comrade. And ultimately, the Doctor rescues Kim, Chakotay, and Tuvok not by slaying “Grendel” but by communicating with him, which helps tie everything together thematically.

            “The crew accidentally captures a lifeform” isn’t an original plot, but it works well enough as a macguffin to drive the rest of the episode. I really admire the writing staff’s ability so far to know when something needs to be an ensemble piece and when it can put all the heavy-lifting on one actor, and while this is really The Doctor’s show, almost everyone is used effectively. Janeway, B’Elanna and Tom work well as his mission control team, and Kes, as always, is his moral support. Chakotay and Tuvok, in the one scene before they get captured, continue to have a really nice, developing relationship. Neelix doesn’t show up, which is fine as he’s really not needed.

Random Observations:

Vulcans apparently have no monsters or demons in their mythology. I find this hard to believe.

Janeway’s version of how holodecks work conflicts with Wesley’s brief explanation in “Encounter at Farpoint”, but I think its more consistent with Deep Space Nine and later TNG, especially “Ship in a Bottle.”

Again we see the effect of Janeway having moved into command from Engineering. She knows her ship better than Jean-Luc knows his, at least from a tech standpoint.

I’ll say it once more, Holodeck safeties should really be hardwired.

The effects in the Grendel scenes look really spectacular, and not cheesy at all. Well, aside from the Doc’s arm getting vaporized.

The Doctor chooses a name (Albert Schweitzer), but then decides it’s not for him.

Harry Kim Death Count: 2

Eye of the Needle (VOY)

            Like “The Cloud”, “Eye of the Needle” seems interested in telling both an internal and an external story, and it doesn’t do the work to knit them together very well. This doesn’t exactly bother me yet, but I think these A-plot/ B-plot structures work better when there’s some thematic connection between them, and in this episode I found that lacking. Still, the A-plot of “Eye of the Needle” has a lot more substance than the storyline of “The Cloud”, and both plots lay a lot of groundwork for future episodes.

           

            The A-plot is admirably full of twists and turns, but it never really puts Voyager in any danger. There’s still plenty of tension, but it’s driven by hope, rather than fear. For the first time since “Caretaker”, our heroes see a possible way to get home. They will have their hopes raised many more times before this is over, but the first time offers unique opportunities to explore some of the relationships in the ensemble – not everyone wants this to the same extent, and some are more willing to make sacrifices than others.

           

Teeny Tiny Wormhole.

            The whole episode is a big game of good news/ bad news – “Good News - We found a wormhole to the Alpha Quadrant!” “Bad news – it’s too small to fit Voyager through.” “Good News – There’s someone on the other side we can talk to.” “Bad News – he’s a paranoid Romulan.” “Good News – we can beam through the wormhole and go home.” “Bad news – we’d end up 20 years in the past.”

           

            Ultimately, of course, the potential damage to the timeline is non-negotiable, despite Harry Kim’s protests. They do leave messages with the Romulan, but have no way of knowing if they were ever sent. For now Voyager is still alone, the isolation felt all the more acutely for being so close to home.

            The B-plot continues what I think is the most promising sub-plot, the Doctor’s self-actualization. Fittingly, it is Kes who confronts the Captain about how the crew treats him, and Janeway reacts as if someone had just told her that the toaster was feeling left out since you started making waffles all the time. This response is fascinating to me. It may be because I just watched “The Measure of a Man,” where Picard talks about humanity being judged on how it treats its technological creations, and now I feel as I’m watching his prophecy unfold. The Doctor is just as human as Data, more human in many ways, but while Data was always embraced as a member of the Enterprise crew, everyone on Voyager still views the Doc as a glorified tricorder.

This includes the Doctor himself, who has no thoughts about agitating for his rights – when Janeway asks him if there’s anything she can do for him, all he asks is for the ability to turn himself off or back on. He doesn’t see any reason to think of himself as anything other than a machine designed to perform a specific task, yet he clearly has emotional needs that could be met.

Here’s where it gets creepy. We know, from Deep Space Nine, that plenty of people use holograms for sexual fantasies, and from every show that people use holodecks to play out violent fantasies. The Doctor is not the first Hologram to achieve sentience, and he won’t be the last. Now while most likely Tom Paris’s holo-bimbos from the French pool-hall simulation don’t have complex enough programs to be considered people, where the heck do you draw that line? It’ incredibly difficult to pick a point where you can say “These holoprograms are sentient and should have rights” and “These holoprogams can be used as our playthings.”

We’re going to get into these ethical issues eventually. I hope sooner rather than later, because the way the crew treats the Doctor makes me not like the crew much at all.

Random Observations:

No Neelix this episode (or very little at least.)

Kes has an eidetic memory, which makes sense given the Ocampa lifespan. This is how they can master enough skills in such a short time and have a functioning society.

We learn that B’Elanna is estranged from her parents and hasn’t seen her human dad since she was five. I guess if you walk out on a Klingon coming back would be pretty scary.

This episode definitely puts Harry at the forefront, but we don’t really learn much about him except that he really wants to get home.

B’Elanna still calls Harry Starfleet, and the writers still haven’t caught on to their relative lack of chemistry.

Janeway answers Telek Remor's (audio only) communique in her pink slip with her hair down.  It's not super sexualized, but its a little off-putting.

Telek Remor might actually be a cargo ship captain, but given what we know about the Romulans circa 2151, it’s equally likely he’s a Tal Shiar operative. Either way, the Romulans were a good choice for this episode – their distrustfulness helps racket up the tension even more.

The scene where the Doctor worries about being left on after everyone has abandoned ship is actually a little heart-breaking.

The Phage (VOY)

            Voyager is an adventure show. It toys with the more cerebral preoccupations of TNG, but ultimately, it’s about swashbuckling and having a good time, and not caring if your villains come off a bit cheesy. In this way, I think it’s telling that they chose the fourth episode to introduce the Vidians, a villain whose major preoccupation is stealing people’s internal organs.

            Note that Spock’s Brain is often considered the worst episode of the Original Star Trek, so internal-organ-snatching shenanigans are not something with proven popularity. But “The Phage” manages to be quite an enjoyable hour of television, balancing character development and tension, even if at times some of the plot details come across a bit contrived.

Neelix learns the hard way why you don't split the party.

            We open with the Voyager experiencing the first of many resource shortages – in this case, dilithium reserves are extremely low. With Neelix’s help, though, the crew has found an asteroid rich in the mineral. Determined to prove his usefulness to the Captain, the Talaxian Jack-of-All-Trades beams down with the survey team, and is promptly shot when he wonders off on his own.

            It turns out whoever shot him beamed his lungs out of his body. To make matters worse, the asteroid has no dilithium at all, it was all a ruse by the organ snatchers, who escape on their own ship with Voyager in hot pursuit. The Doctor manages to rig up some holographic lungs for Neelix, but the means he can’t leave sickbay or move from his bed at all.

            The rest of the episode is split between a kind of silly sci-fi chase where Voyager follows the ship into a giant asteroid filled with fun-house mirrors (not the most effective tension—building device) and scenes in sickbay, where both Neelix and the Doctor try to adapt to their new situations. Neelix has to confront the possibility of never leaving the biobed, and the Doctor has to confront the reality that he is not just a short term replacement anymore, and Kes is trying to help both of them come to terms with these facts. These scenes are well-written and show a lot of promise for the characters.

They get so much creepier once they start stealing faces.

            Janeways plot stays pretty cheesy and silly until she finally captures the two aliens, called Vidians, and tries to get Neelix’s lungs back. Unfortunately, the lungs were urgently needed and have already been implanted in one of the aliens. It turns out the Vidian race has struggled for thousands of years with an untreatable illness called The Phage, which causes systematic organ failure. To survive, they take organs from other species.

            Ultimately, the Vidians agree to use their superior biotech to give Neelix one of Kes’s lungs, since they’re used to modifying organs for safer transplant. Janeway warns them that if any of their people try to take organs from Voyager again, there will be hell to pay, but oddly enough lets them go on their way. As she points out, though, she hardly has a choice –  there are no authorities to turn them over to, and they can’t sit in Voyager’s brig indefinitely, so it’s ether kill them or let them go, and she’s not about to go around executing people. But this is a dilemma that isn’t going to go away.

Random Observations:

Kes is the first member of the crew to see the Doctor as a person with needs, and that includes the Doctor. Kes’s naiveté is a flaw, but it also seems to lead to her seeing things everyone else overlooks. And through her patronage, the Doc is starting to question his own identity.

There is a Neelix/Paris/Kes love triangle, and as these things go I think it’s kind of fun.

Voyager being much smaller than the Enterprise opens up new opportunities for action sequences, as the asteroid chase demonstrates.

This is the first we see of Neelix’s culinary obsession (though we hear about it before.)

The Vidian make-up is wonderfully ugly. Visually, it does a lot towards making their rather stretched premise believable.

On that note, wouldn’t a culture as advanced as the Vidians have figured out how to grow replacement organs by now? We’re almost there now.

I find it a little hard to swallow that this early in the series Janeway is already risking the whole ship for Neelix. He’s just joined their crew, and hasn’t even proven himself particularly useful yet. Tuvok might have something to say about the needs of the many…

The Vidian facility is obviously the same corridor as the Power Plant in “Time and Again”. It’s too distinctive to keep reusing.

Vidian: According to my readings, you are not here.

Doctor: Believe me, I wish I weren’t.

Minor Character Watch: Seska is now in Engineering Yellow, as she will be from now on.

Shuttles lost: 0

Fatalities: 0