3-4. The Swarm.

The Doctor frets over his deterioration.

THE PLOT

Voyager enters a new area of space, one which Neelix warns is the domain of fiercely territorial aliens who destroy anyone who dares to breach their borders. Starfleet regulations insist that no vessel can intrude on alien borders without permission... but just this once, Janeway decides that the immediate situation justified breaking orders, and she commands the crew to pilot the ship through the narrowest patch of the aliens' space there is.

Naturally, they attract the aliens' attention. Soon, a swarm of tiny ships are pursuing Voyager. They have no weapons - but when Voyager fires at them, the blast is reflected back at Voyager. They are able to disableVoyager's shields, in preparation for boarding!

Meanwhile, the Doctor's program begins to break down, as he finds himself unable to remember basic elements of medical procedures...


CHARACTERS

Capt. Janeway: After 2+ seasons invoking Starfleet regulations every time her crew so much as wish to go to the bathroom out of turn, she pulls a sudden about-face and disregards regs to avoid adding 15 months to the trip home. Not that I disagree with her decision, which seems a fairly simple calculation of risk vs. benefit, but it does fly in the face of her decision-making in previous episodes. 

The Doctor: Robert Picardo pulls double-duty as both the holographic doctor and as the EMH's creator, Dr. Lewis Zimmerman. He has particular fun as Zimmerman, doubling down on the doctor's normal belligerance to amusing effect. Meanwhile, he basically plays an Alzheimer's patient as the Doctor regresses to something like childhood, playing with the medical instruments in sickbay as if they were mere toys. 

Kes: I'm still finding it hard to wrap my head around the notion that in a show that features Harry Kim, Chakotay, and Neelix, Kes was the character chosen to get the boot after this season's end. Character and actress remain very strong when given anything to do, as this episode demonstrates. Kes' medical competence has grown to the point that she can successfully direct a complex surgery when the Doctor's memory fails. Her confidence has also grown. She is able to argue for diagnosing the Doctor's deterioration rather than just rebooting him, appealing to both emotion and reason to sway Janeway to her point of view. Her emotional pain as she watches her mentor deteriorate is effective, and her determination to help the Doctor at the end is genuinely stirring.


THOUGHTS

The Swarm is the first solo script written by Mike Sussman, who previously collaborated on Season Two's excellent Meld. Sussman would go on to co-write several Voyager episodes before becoming arguably the best writer on Enterprise, so it was with some pleasure that I saw his name come up on the credits.

I won't say that The Swarm really disappointed me. This isn't a bad episode by any means. It has some good scenes, some good effects, and even some good character work for Kes. It is, however, a flawed show, with many of its problems coming from Sussman's script. Specifically, from an area that would later be Sussman's greatest strength as a writer: The structure.

The "A" and "B" plots do not go together at all. There is no connection, either in plot or in theme, between the alien plot and the Doctor plot. As a result, the strands are unable to feed each other or build upon each other in any way. Each plot simply interrupts the other, blunting the emotion of the Doctor storyline and the momentum of the alien one.

The alien plot doesn't fail disastrously, but it doesn't work very well either. A big problem for me is that this strand is driven entirely by Technobabble. Harry and B'Elanna do some Technobabble to the shields to hideVoyager from the mysterious aliens. When they are discovered, more Technobabble makes the situation dire, before yet some more Technobabble allows Harry and Janeway to save the day. Not exactly stirring stuff.

The Doctor plot works better, thanks to the ever-reliable performances of Robert Picardo and Jennifer Lien and to the inherent emotion of what is effectively an Alzheimer's plot. Technobabble both solves and resolves the problem here, too, but here both the problem and solution are easy to follow. The Doctor's program was always intended to be temporary, and so a breakdown after being left to run for so long perfectly fits the internal logic of the show. In fact, it's welcome to see one of the inherent problems of Voyager's situation actually addressed instead of ignored!

Kes' solution seems to be based more on the workings of medicine than on those of computer programs, which makes sense given that her professional background is entirely medical. It's also refreshing to see Kes behaving as temporary chief medical officer during the doctor's illness, giving some rare development to an often overlooked character. The ending leaves the ultimate fate of the Doctor's memories in doubt, even as it restores his program... Though this being Voyager, I strongly suspect that will be forgotten by the next episode.


Overall Rating: 5/10.

Previous Episode: The Chute
Next Episode: False Profits 

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2-03. Projections.

Barclay (Dwight Schultz) urges the doctor to destroy Voyager!

THE PLOT

The holographic doctor is activated, only to find himself apparently alone on the ship. The computer informs him that the ship came under attack by the Kazon. With a warp core breach imminent, Capt. Janeway ordered a complete evacuation.

As the doctor prepares to shut down his program, convinced that with the ship abandoned there is no further need for him, B'Elanna comes into the sickbay. She tells him that the ship's sensors were damaged, which is why the computer isn't detecting any life signs. She, Janeway, and a handful of others remained on board to contain the warp core breach. Now Janeway is injured, and her only hope lies with some experimental technology that will allow the doctor to project himself to other parts of the ship.

The projection technology works. The doctor is able to help Janeway, then is able to project himself to the mess hall to save Neelix from a Kazon warrior. But then something strange happens. The doctor, a hologram... bleeds. And feels pain. Then a stranger appears in the sickbay. Reginald Barclay (Dwight Schultz), an engineer formerly attached to Picard's Enterprise, informs the doctor that he is not a hologram at all. He is actually Lewis Zimmerman, running an experiment on a space station's holodeck. Radiation has caused the program to go wrong, and scrambled the doctor's memories in the process. He must shut down the program in order to save his own life. And there's only one way to do that: Destroy Voyager!


CHARACTERS

Capt. Janeway: Present, but largely inconsequential. Still, Kate Mulgrew's facial and body language when the doctor orders the computer to "Delete Janeway" are hilarious.

The Doctor: Any episode centered around the holographic doctor gets an instant boost from Robert Picardo's effortlessly assured performance. Picardo is terrific, whether he's reacting with smug satisfaction to the newfound ability to deactivate certain annoying programs (Tom Paris, Harry Kim), or whether he's struggling with pain in his head to determine which of two possible realities is the real one. Thankfully, Brannon Braga's script is at least sensible enough to make the doctor very skeptical of Barclay's claims, with it taking a lot of genuinely persuasive evidence for him to even begin to believe in it.

Kes: It's revealing that in the doctor's hallucination, Kes is his wife - the hallucination's last temptation for him, and its strongest. After all, Kes was the first person on Voyager to actually treat him with respect and friendship. He mentions within the hallucination that he has always found Kes very beautiful, though he does not repeat that to the real Kes. In the tag, Kes seems both amused and flattered at her role in the hallucination... though she asks the doctor not to mention it to Neelix, lest it trigger jealousy.

Neelix: Though only in the episode briefly, he still manages to annoy. When he duels with a Kazon, he dodges a gun-blast and then smirks, "Missed me." I really wanted a follow-up blast to literally wipe the smirk off his face, before wiping away his face for good. Kes' concern about Neelix's jealousy recalls what we saw in Phage, when he became paranoid about Tom Paris. It would seem that Neelix can add "possessive jealousy" to his long list of bad qualities. In fairness, he's probably self-aware enough to realize that Kes is far, far, far, far, far too good for him. A hologram would frankly be an enormous step up for Kes from her current boyfriend.

Barclay: Dwight Schultz reprises his TNG role as engineer Reg Barclay. His performance gives the episode a considerable boost. Not only does he have terrific screen chemistry with Robert Picardo, he is an actor who has the ability to go from funny to threatening very quickly, with little apparent change in behavior on screen. For most of the episode, Schultz and Picardo essentially make a comedy duo, with re-enactments of some bits from Caretaker particularly amusing. But when Barclay gets serious about convincing the doctor that he must either destroy the ship or die, Schultz is really quite sinister, particularly when he grills the doctor on who he would rather be - Dr. Zimmerman, a real person with a real career and a beautiful wife who loves him; or a hologram confined to sickbay and the holodeck, and nothing more?


THOUGHTS

Coming off the tedious mess that was the last episode, Projections is a bit of a relief. It's not a great episode, or even as good an episode as it honestly should be. But it's solid and enjoyable, with a workmanlike script and typically confident direction from Jonathan Frakes.

It's obvious fairly early on that none of what we're seeing is real, and the script tips its hand too quickly by having the medical tricorder unable to detect B'Elanna's life signs. But as a look into the doctor's character, with his fondest wish to be a real person with a family and a career to call his own, it has merit. Plus, a lot of it is fun to watch, particularly when the episode starts replaying bits from Caretaker, with the doctor and Barclay effectively providing color commentary ("Was Mr. Paris always this annoying?" "This is the work of an entity you will come to know as the Caretaker - or Banjo Man").

It isn't all it could be, however, simply because the episode never makes it seems as though there is any other possible outcome. An obvious comparison would be with Buffy the Vampire Slayer's episode, Normal Again. That saw a similar scenario, with the main character being made to think that her life within the television series was a delusion... but it did it in such a way that the "delusion" had credibility, to the point that it was hotly debated within fandom. Here, there's never any question what the truth is, nor is there anything within the episode to give us even a tug of doubt. Nor are there any real layers to the delusion, an attempted "sting" ending aside. As such, Projections plays well on its surface level, and that's fine. But it doesn't do anything more, leaving it an entertaining but shallow piece.


Overall Rating: 6/10.

Previous Episode: Initiations
Next Episode: Elogium

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