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| The Doctor and his holographic family. |
Voyager is en route to a science station run by the Vostigye, an apparently friendly race eager to rendezvous with them. When Voyager arrives at the coordinates, however, there is no space station - only debris. The station has been destroyed.
It doesn't take long to discover that this was no attack, but rather a recurring spatial anomaly. Analysis shows that the event leaves behind plasma that could be mined to fuel the ship's systems. Tom goes out to begin extracting it - only for the anomaly to come back midway, sucking him right into the eye of the storm!
Meanwhile, the Doctor has decided to create a holographic family for himself, to allow him to experience family life. When he invites Kes and B'Elanna to meet them, both are left uncomfortable by how artificial and "perfect" this family is. Torres asks for permission to introduce a randomizer into the program to make the family more realistic and less ideal. The Doctor assents - only to find himself confronted with children he cannot control and, ultimately, with a tragedy he cannot bear to face!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Finding the anomaly sparks her enthusiasm. Her response for calls to get away before it recurs is to wonder if they really should: "We've just witnessed a phenomenon none of us has ever heard of before, much less experienced... I think we owe it to ourselves to investigate." Once Tom is sucked in, though, her priority is clearly getting him out safely, with other considerations forgotten.
Doctor: Despite things going wrong with his last attempt to improve himself, the Doctor has continued to try to make himself relate better to the people on the ship. His holo-family is his latest experiment. He enjoys the first version, drinking in the adulation of his ideal Stepford family, and he is clearly shaken by what he finds after Torres changes the simulation. Still, he sticks with it and it's clear that he is more emotionally engaged with the more troubled variant he is left with. The Doctor tries to control his family the way he does his sickbay, which has predictably poor results - But the way he keeps thinking about the problems when "at work" shows that his failures are having more impact on him than the easy fantasy life he initially created.
Torres: Ever since the Doctor's Jekyll & Hyde incident, she has insisted on checking his program regularly - a sensible precaution. When she and Kes visit the Doctor's holo-family, Kes diplomatically says that they're a little too perfect. Torres is much blunter, laying into the Doctor's Stepford wife and kids as being completely unrepresentative of a real family. "This is a fantasy!" she all but shouts, amusingly dismissing the group as "lollipops." She calms down quickly, however, then volunteers to make the program more lifelike.
Tom Paris: Is quick to volunteer to take a shuttle to mine the plasma left by the anomaly. Even after he gets sucked into the anomaly, he is happy to have seen something so unique and describes it as "worth it... one wild ride!" When his risk-taking tendencies attract the ire of the newly-paternal Doctor, he pushes the Doctor to reveal what's wrong. When the Doctor tells him that he intends to never restart the program so that he won't have to deal with a family tragedy, Tom urges him to reconsider, telling him, "In the long run, you'll miss the whole point of what it means to have a family."
THOUGHTS
Thank God that Before & After came between "The Trilogy of Terror" and this. Without that reminder of how good this show can be, so many weak entries clustered together might have been enough to make me quit this show.
There are a lot of reasons why this episode doesn't work for me, but the biggest one is how absolutely it represents one of Voyager's biggest faults: Jeri Taylor's script is easy. It's attempts at comedy and drama alike are obvious. Its attempts to evoke emotion are the grist of signposted, surface-level, Lifetime drama. The result: Comedy moments that I don't find particularly funny, and drama that I don't find at all moving. All further bogged down by a subplot in which the ship encounters yet another spatial anomaly - because we certainly haven't had enough of those yet, have we?
In reviewing Real Life, I'll parrot one of B'Elanna's criticisms of the Doctor's initial family: [I]"There is nothing wrong with your premise... It just needs a little tweaking to bring it closer to real life."[/I] The idea of giving the holographic Doctor a holographic family? That could be used to develop his character. But it shouldn't be one episode unto itself. This family should have been introduced earlier in the season, seen in "B" plots and throwaway scenes across several episodes before this. Then, when it came time for that family to get its own episode ending in tragedy, the emotions would have real weight.
By cramming all of this into a single episode, the family dynamic has to be introduced and developed within half an episode. Then, around the subplot, there's only about 10 - 15 minutes left for the Doctor to deal with the tragedy. Is it any surprise that Jeri Taylor resorts to surface-level tearjerker tactics? We don't know this family or see them as "real" people - There just hasn't been time - and so all she can do is use heavy-handed manipulation to try to evoke a response. For some viewers, I'm sure it worked well enough, and that's good for them because they got to enjoy an episode I didn't. Because for me, I was too conscious of the puppeteer and her strings to feel a thing.
It should be said that Robert Picardo throws himself into this with his usual dedication, his performance possessing a subtety and credibility that the script itself lacks. The scene in which he confronts his son's Klingon friends about the true nature of the knife they are carrying is a strong "hero moment" for him, and he plays the episode's two hospital scenes with the right mix of emotion and suppression to get a lot more out of the material than it deserves.
Unfortunately, just as the Doctor's holo-family never existed before this episode, I'm certain it will never again exist after. The events of this episode will be irrelevant to his character, and the episode itself will remain a pointless and not-very-entertaining one-off.
Not the worst Voyager I've seen, not even the worst I've seen lately, Real Life is nevertheless another sign of a show that has no clear ideas about what to do with itself from one episode to the next. Another exercise in heavy-handed sludge, from a series that's indulged in that far too often for my tastes.
Overall Rating: 4/10.
Previous Episode: Before & After
Next Episode: Distant Origin
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