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| The Doctor prepares to make contact with the Alpha Quadrant! |
Seven of Nine's work in the astrometrics lab yields an exciting result: a chance at contact with a Starfleet vessel! She has tapped into an alien relay network, property of a race known as the Hirogen, whose reach extends to the edge of the Alpha Quadrant, and believes that she can use that relay to get a message through to the Starfleet vessel. When the message proves too weak to get through, a desperate Janeway authorizes stronger methods: Transmitting the Doctor through the network to directly communicate!
The transmission is a success, and the Doctor finds himself on the USS Prometheus. But all is not well. This ship is a prototype, designed for use in deep space tactical missions against the Dominion ("The who?" the Doctor wonders). Given its advanced capabilities, it has become a target - boarded by the Romulans, who have killed the entire Starfleet crew and intend to take the ship back to Romulan space.
Now the Doctor must find a way to retake the ship, both so that he can complete his mission to deliver word of Voyager's situation to Starfleet and so that he can rejoin his own crew. He has only one ally: The Prometheus' Emergency Medical Hologram (Andy Dick) - but this EMH is as experimental as the ship he serves on, and his behavior is erratic and often cowardly!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Knows that she and the crew should not get their hopes up too much. As she observes, the crew has been through this before. Even so, she admits to Chakotay that she couldn't help herself from dusting off her letters to her loved ones and bringing them up-to-date. When the Doctor returns, having successfully made contact with Starfleet, she is moved to declare that the enormous distance between them and home seems less vast now that contact has been made.
Doctor: Robert Picardo takes the lead, and is splendid as usual. Paired with the supposedly more advanced Emergency Medical Hologram Mark 2, the Doctor moves from jealousy at his model being superseded to exasperation at the younger hologram's cowardice. He acts as the voice of experience, from pushing the Mark 2 to move beyond the boundaries of his program to irritably guiding the hologram through something as simple as crawling into a Jeffries tube. The interplay between Picardo and Dick is very funny, and greatly elevates this episode.
Torres/Seven: The episode's "B" plot sees Torres annoyed about Seven's rudeness, until she finally confronts Seven about it. This is very expendable material, which covers a lot of the same ground that seemed already dealt with in Scientific Method, when Torres gave her speech to Seven about how if she could learn to become a Starfleet officer, then she was sure Seven could as well. Still, it's well-performed by the two actresses, and gets a nice payoff when Torres voices her approval of Seven's "diplomacy" at the end.
Tom/Harry: The episode also dredges up a "C" plot, presumably to fill air time, with Tom and Harry attempting to create a new medical hologram. Which feels thin to begin with, given that the Doctor is only away for a matter of hours when Tom becomes desperate enough to propose it. I'd say this was meant to be comedy relief, but since the main plot is played so lightly in any case, it feels unnecessary... and, unlike the Robert Picardo/Andy Dick interplay in the "A" plot, it's also unfunny. Much better had those 5 - 6 minutes gone to, say, actually showing the Doctor making contact with someone from Starfleet instead of just telling Janeway about it afterward.
THOUGHTS
I'm torn in reviewing Message in a Bottle. On its own merits, it is an entertaining episode, certainly one of the better installments penned by the erratic Lisa Klink. It moves at a snappy pace and has plenty of humor, much of which works. Its pace lags a bit every time we (needlessly) cut back to Voyager, and the Tom/Harry scenes feel like desperate padding, but the "A" plot is consistently enjoyable. As a light adventure story, it is quite decent.
My problem is that this should be a significant episode: Voyager finally makes contact with the Alpha Quadrant, and the crew members' families and Starfleet finally know that they are alive. It's the first real progress the crew has made in contacting home. It's a big moment... Yet it comes in an episode that plays out as a standard runaround, with the significant events occurring entirely offscreen.
I'd have much preferred a straight drama rather than a light adventure. Drop the Romulans, and have the Doctor make contact with the crew and be taken to some Starfleet admirals and bureaucrats and scientists (maybe Dr. Zimmerman himself?) for debriefing and for study as to how he has so altered from his programming. Tension could come from whether or not he will be allowed to return to Voyager; or whether he might be deactivated, his holo-emitter taken away for study and potential use in the Dominion War. At the end, the Doctor's message, and the reply he brings back, could occur onscreen, in an episode actually focused on that - rather than the message being grafted onto a typical "ship held hostage" episode.
But that's me creating a bit of mental fanfiction out of what I'd have liked this episode to have been... Which is to say, an episode along the lines of a good Deep Space 9. Taken as another light adventure episode, much along the same lines as Waking Moments or Displaced, I'll acknowledge that what is there is reasonably good and often a lot of fun to watch. I was entertained (well, except for the Tom/Harry scenes), and Robert Picardo is terrific as always.
In short: Taken as what it is, Message in a Bottle works pretty well, and that's what my overall score reflects. I just wish this particular script had gone in a different direction and had tried to do more.
Overall Rating: 6/10.
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I don't think the Tom/Harry subplot was there to fill up airtime; I think every member of the ensemble has to be given something to do, even when the episode has its main focus on a single character. Was that subplot way less interesting than the rest of it? Yes, it was. But they couldn't let Robert Duncan McNeill and Garrett Wang twiddle their thumbs for a week; they had to have some lines.
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