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| Janeway's Gothic holo-novel |
THE PLOT
Janeway is relaxing in the holodeck when she receives an urgent message from the bridge. Chakotay and Tuvok's shuttle is coming back, but there is no response to hails, and their life signs are very faint. Janeway orders them beamed directly to sickbay, only for the doctor to make a startling pronouncement. Tuvok will be fine, but Chakotay's mental energies have been drained. Commander Chakotay is brain dead!
When Tuvok regains consciousness, he tells them what happened. The ship was exploring a Dark Matter nebula when it came under attack from an unfamiliar ship using an unknown energy weapon. With the doctor confirming that the only hope of restoring Chakotay rests in knowing exactly what happened to him, Janeway orders Voyager back to the nebula. But every time they begin heading toward it, a crew member changes course - taken over by some strange alien presence. Something came back in the shuttle, Tuvok concludes, and is now hopping from host to host among Voyager's own crew!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Enjoys Gothic romances, judging from her choice of holodeck programs. When the nature of the alien becomes clear, she invests the doctor with the command codes as a guard against the alien taking possession of her. Hilariously, when she is possessed and starts to knock crew members around, the writers feel the need to have someone tell us that Janeway is possessed. What, we might otherwise think this normal behavior for her?
Chakotay: Chakotay is brain dead... and amazingly, the crew are actually able to tell the difference! Torres' loyalty to Chakotay shows itself when she erects the medicine wheel at his bedside, and this provides the perfect answer to Chakotay's query a few episodes ago about whether anyone on the Maquis ship was actually "working for (him)." Chakotay's own loyalty to Voyager is made clear when he attempts to keep the ship out of harm's way.
Tuvok: Investigates with the same persistence as always. His investigations combine with the doctor's medical readings to determine that something is taking over members of the crew and controlling their actions. When Kes informs him and Janeway that she has sensed a presence, Tuvok suggests using a mind-meld to better focus on what Kes sensed... which then makes them the focus of an attack. Tuvok freely admits that he may have been taken over by the alien during the attack, and suggests that the command codes are too important in this situation to all rest with just one person.
The Doctor: When Torres puts up Chakotay's medicine wheel at his bedside, I was all set for the doctor to start mocking the superstition. Instead, his annoyed facial expression is down to her misplacing the stones on the wheel, as he steps forward to correct her. He explains that his exhaustive medical programming includes alternative medicine, and though his tone doesn't indicate a lot of faith in such superstition, he does not actively object to it. We once again see his nervousness when asked to accept authority beyond his programming, in this case when he is given the command codes in order to act as a fail safe if key members of the bridge crew are taken over by the alien.
Kes: Her psychic abilities are manifesting again, this time in an episode that isn't completely reset at the end. Oddly, despite the fact that the previous episode in which she showed psychic abilities "never happened," the crew are still aware that Kes has these abilities. Sloppy continuity, though I suppose Neelix's offhand comment about what happened "last week" indicates that there have been offscreen manifestations. Kes continues to offer help any time there is a legitimate chance she might be of help, and her competence and intelligence are such that the command staff have learned to take her seriously.
THOUGHTS
Janeway's holodeck program strikes me as a very dull choice of recreation. I don't think I'd construct a holodeck program in which I get to be bullied by a Judith Anderson-like housekeeper - not my idea of fun, somehow. At least the holonovel has a bit of atmosphere to it, though, something most of the rest of the episode lacks.
Cathexis is fairly entertaining, as far as it goes. The problem is, it doesn't really go very far. Enterprise's similarly-themed The Crossing was far from one of that series' highlights, but it did offer some good character beats and strong atmosphere - Elements completely lacking in Cathexis. Tuvok is in "robo-Vulcan" mode throughout, while Janeway is only a hair less robotic than he is. Kes and the Doctor are good in their scenes, as always - but even there, given the friendship that's been developed between the two of them, you'd expect the Doctor to be a lot more concerned when she is injured.
The end twist is ridiculously easy to see coming (if you didn't guess who the "alien" was right after the medicine wheel scene, thwack yourself in the head one time, hard, to wake up the synapses). Of course, there's more technobabble, this time involving magneton scanners and multiphasic something-or-others. At least there's a nifty bit when Tuvok sets his phaser to simultaneously stun everyone on the bridge when the alien is hopping from host to host at one point. The nebula effects are also quite good, as has been standard for the effects on this series as a whole.
Passably diverting without being particularly interesting or memorable, in the end the only thing I can really say about Cathexis is that it passes the time painlessly enough. Clearly padded to fill the running time (what else can explain the completely irrelevant 5-minute holodeck scene at the start), highly predictable, and with characters who behave like robots whether they're possessed or not, it may say something about the series that this still isn't any worse than average for what we've seen so far.
Overall Rating: 4/10.
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