Season 7, Ep 6 / 7 "Inside Man" / "Body And Soul"

Season 7, Episode 6 - "Inside Man"


Oh do fuck off


Well, that all came to an abrupt stop. Dear Rassilon the Ferengi are crap. Really, actually properly crap, in a way that makes you wonder how Armin Shimerman was ever able to make one of their number even slightly interesting. The last time we were grudgingly forced to put up with them was back in the execrable "False Profits", but now we have contact with the Alpha Quadrant that means we have to put up with all the baggage from the Alpha Quadrant as well, so here they are, the Ferengi, back in action and stinking up the joint like nobody's business. They are awful here. Tedious, unfunny, dreary, crushingly obvious, and badly acted. Actually maybe that unfair, because it's hard to imagine a hybrid of Lawrence Olivier, Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando and William Shatner making these lines work as they should.

Are you invested in the loose series of episodes that chart the re-connection of Voyager with Earth? Because the string of contacts Voyager has, and the slowly increasing frequency with which they occur is, in abstract, A Good Idea. This is, as you can probably guess, the redemptive part of this review, because it really is a good idea. We've seen lots of Cold War and World War II parallels in Star Trek, quite a few of them fairly recently, and this one, which basically amounts to the idea of sending coded messages across hostile territory to communicate with home has worked in everything from Eye Of The Needle (the movie, not the Voyager episode) to 'Allo 'Allo (funny how we keep coming back to 'Allo 'Allo). That's fine, we know Star Trek can and does work in this context, and here the stolen plans for the nanoprobes have more than a whiff of Top Secret documents stolen under cover of darkness. The setup is even inverted here for a little bit of a spin on familiar material, as we have the bad guys stealing the Top Secret plans and trying to mount an escape from dire (emphasis on the dire, sadly) circumstances. Fine, that's all to the good, and this plan, at least, shows markedly more ambition than a lot of sub-standard Ferengi plans, and suggests some genuine intelligence. That helps give some scope to the episode even beyond the fact we're dealing with two different quadrants of space, and it's a proper motivation for the Ferengi. I mean, it's the same one they almost always have but still, it's consistent so it's not like they're acting out of character or anything.

However here endeth the redemptive part of this review, because there are just no other good things to say about them. As ever the Ferengi stand for the most lazy of capitalist critiques and the fault of this episode (well, not just this episode) is that they never rise about that. I mean, it's not that capitalism doesn’t deserve to be critiqued, but the Ferengi just aren't up to the task and their (ironically) toothless criticism simply has no bite to it. Added to which none of the Ferengi we meet here have anything approaching individual identities, they're just the same boring little money-grubbers they always are, trotting out the same clichéd lines they always do, for the same reasons they always have. They're completely interchangeable here (even the two Ferengi from "False Profits"/ "The Price" had distinct personalities), there to provide a plot function and absolutely nothing else. They aren't funny, they aren't interesting, and they aren't being discussed any further. Meanwhile, over at the other part of the plot, we have a rogue Barclay hologram on Voyager and the real Barclay trying to solve the mystery of what happened to said hologram back on Earth. It's... not compelling. Dwight Shultz does a good job of selling the Voyager hologram, lowering his voice a little and acting more confident, and he plays Reg the same old way, so they are at least clearly distinct and he deserves some credit for that at least, but it's all very small fry and never really feels compelling in anything other than the most abstract of ways. Similarly, Marina Sirtis slips back into her role as Troi with the usual ease, but it's equally clear that she's been brought back because, hey, we can have Troi in this, rather than because her character serves any real function. Certainly I'd rather spend time watching Sirtis than a handful of interchangeable Ferengi but still, that doesn't quite cut it as a justification for having her here in the first place.

The fact that there is no sense of threat here shouldn't exactly come as a surprise. Still, it should be pointed out that, for an episode where there is (in theory) the potential for the entire crew to be killed and Seven harvested for her nanoprobes, there is absolute no feeling of danger at any point during the episode. Yes, this is a light-hearted episode, but what the Ferengi are planning to do is genuinely horrific, and neither script nor characters come even close to making this seem like something that might actually happen, or for in any way following up on the implication of how nasty all of this is. This means that the episode has something of a tonal disconnect – the actual Ferengi plan is terrible but everyone treats this as if it's just a jolly old romp and that leads to a very weird overall feel to the epiosdes. It's logcial that there's a disconnect between the three distinct settings of the episode – the Troi and Reg show, the Ferengi ship, and what's happening on Voyager - but the tone of each section id equally off, so the Earth sections just toddle along doing little of anything, the Ferengi ship just has them hopping about as per usual, and the events on Voyager never seem remotely threatening. It's all very strange, and Allan Kroeker's direction isn't strong or distinctive enough to tie these three disparate settings and tones together.

So is the episode really a total write-off? Basically, yeah. There's a few moments of brightness – Leosa, Reg's "inside man" is an absolute delight and she flounces through her few scenes with a terrific sense of joy that enlivens the episode every time she's on screen. Indeed, in some ways her presence gives a hint of how this episode should have been played, with everything just dialled up to maximum comedy and silliness. Silliness shouldn't always be thought of as a pejorative, and lots of Star Trek episodes have benefitted from fully embracing silliness, and had "Inside Man" gone down that road it would likely have been a great deal more entertaining than what we have. Still, Sharisse Baker-Bernard deserves credit from bringing some real lightness of touch to a story that otherwise feels incredibly lumpen and inert. Sirtis does too, and their one scene together where Troi actually gets to do something that affects the plot, is absolutely terrific – Sirtis is great when she gets to do a little ass-kicking, and her manipulation of Leosa works for the character and makes sense in terms of the story, which makes a nice change. That gives things a little momentum at least, but it's very much the exception rather than the rule. Elsewhere things just plod along until eventually the Ferengi are defeated – it's probably not the most stupid way they could have been stopped, but I'm having a hard time thinking of another, and because there's no sense of threat leading up to their defeat there's no sense of joy or catharsis at them being stopped. They just are. It's hard to care about the defeat of the bad guys when you didn't care about anything else they did prior to their defeat and, ultimately, that's the biggest flaw of the episode. It's true that the comedy isn't funny. It's true that there was no compelling reason (or indeed any reason) to bring back the Ferengi. It's true that there's a vast disconnect between what we're told is meant to be threatening and what we actually get on screen. But ultimately the biggest flaw of this episode is that it's just not remotely interesting. There isn't a single new idea, there isn't a single new thing being done with familiar ingredients and, in the end, there isn't a single reason to care about any of this.


Any Other Business:

• There are so many weird miss-cues from a bunch of people who really ought to know better. I guess this was the Friday-afternoon-phone-it-in episode.

• Needless to say there isn't even the tiniest feeling that maybe Voyager will make it home this time.

• The beat of the Barclay hologram borrowing the Doctor's mobile emitter and the Doctor getting increasingly anxious about its return always feel like it was meant to go somewhere, and just never does. It completely peters out and contributes nothing, not even an amusing scene with Schultz and Picardo. Weird.

• Also weird, the number of continuity references shoehorned in here, including metaphasic shielding, the Iconians, Arcturus, the "telepathic pitcher plant"… There's even a peculiar reference to the Romulans always having an interest in Voyager, which is... a reference to "Eye Of The Needle" maybe? It feels very strange just having them all randomly thrown in anyway.

• The potential anxiety Seven might feel about returning to Earth is glossed over in the most surface way possible. I get that the Barclay hologram isn't actually interested and is only asking to keep her on side during his deception, but still, a lot more could be made of this.

• The scene between Reg and Troi on the beach is unbelievably stilted. Maybe it had to be re-dubbed because of bad sound or something but both Sirtis and Shultz are uncharacteristically clumsy, and it's not a character thing, it's definitely them.

• Troi is absolutely dead right when she tells Reg how inappropriate it is for him to follow his therapist on holiday. So why does she keep indulging him? That's an appalling breach of the patient/therapist relationship, yet it's treated as if him basically stalking her is just another jape from good ol' Reg! It's one more example of the tonal disconnect that haunts everything here.

• The Doctor's golfing outfit is, like all golfing outfits, utterly hideous.

• Harry is obviously genuinely upset at the end when it turns out they wont be getting back to Earth after all, so it's a bit cruel of his alleged "friends" to do the whole "Iconian gateway" bit.

• This is Sirtis's third and final appearance in Voyager. While I wish she'd been in stronger stories it's mostly been a delight to have her around and I'm glad she turned up.


Season 7, Episode 7 - "Body And Soul"


No caption required


Seven's recovery from trauma has been commented on enough now that it doesn't need to be reiterated, but there's a definite logic that, of all the things that are going to affect her, being re-possessed and losing control of her own body is one which is going to strike particularly close to home. That helps to explain her massive over-reaction to the Doctor enjoying a meal with their captor about a third of the way through the episode. Does the Doctor take things a bit too far? Certainly, although in a way that remains fairly characteristic of him, since we know his overconfidence or ego can often lead him down the wrong path. But a few glasses of wine or a few slices of cheesecake doesn't really justify Seven's fear-and-anger at what the Doctor has done, even if he's clearly over-stepped a particular line. The only thing that can explain it is what it reminds her of – the horror of being possessed by the Borg, of having her consciousness submerged (which is the term the Doctor uses for what happens to her while he's in the driving seat), even after this time has the power to genuinely shock her system in a way that nothing else does. As the pre-eminent experience of her life up until this point this makes sense. Later she finds further reasons to object to the Doctor's control of her body, and these enter trickier ethical waters, but that first (over) reaction she has is in line with both the Doctor and Seven and what we know of them.

It's this kind of attention that really makes the details in "Body And Soul" add up to something, but of course the main reason this episode exists is to show us what a great actor Jeri Ryan is, as if this were somehow something we were unaware of up until this point. Still, this is a challenge on a whole different level to anything she's faced before, tasked with impersonating the Doctor, bringing across Seven's disgust at what's happening to her, and then being able to sell the eventual forgiveness in the episode's closing scene. This episode also manages to be about two separate things which intertwine really rather neatly. The first is the beginning of some intriguing background details about local prejudices against photonics (i.e. holograms), and we're given some nice background details about how they were welcomed into people's homes but how they wanted more and rebelled (the parallels with racism and slavery here being perfectly obvious without being overstated). This is presented in "Body And Soul" as some background cultural shading, which is always welcome, but here it also has the feel of being just a little bit more than that, and not just because it's also the plot engine that's required to put the Doctor's existence in jeopardy. The second is the already-mentioned struggles Seven goes through to deal with the experience of her possession and the way it reflects on her past. This is already the second episode to have brought this up during Season Seven (well, third if you want to count "Unimatrix Zero" Pt 2, but let's not), and it will continue to be a dominant theme going forward so it's well worth paying attention to here. These come together in the final few minutes of the episode, with the Doctor exhorting his right to be who he is (and it's easy to read traces of LGBT coming out in this as well, as he finally admits who he is, what his true nature is, and asks to be accepted without apology), and Seven coming to an acceptance of what has happened to her. That the episode opens itself up to a number of readings – LGBT, racism, assertion of individuality, privacy – without allowing any to be either dominant or invalidated shows a real strength in the writing and means this episode is genuinely about something, even when the something it's about can be read in a number of different ways.

There is one thorny ethical question, though. The second time the Doctor emerges from Seven she again reacts angrily, and this time she has a point. The way she furiously spits out, "you became sexually aroused in my body!", the episode makes clear, is seen by Seven as being a violation. This isn't some ho-ho-the-Doctor's-had-too-much-to-drink shenanigans on the Detla Flyer while he tries to do his best Scarlett Pimpernel impression. This is brought across as a clear, direct violation of what Seven is prepared to put up with. The problem is that it's handled way too lightly, and we end this scene with the Doctor looking a bit bemused and it's all played like it was a bit of a prank. It's not. This is, as much as anything, a failure of the production rather than the script – it's an event that should have been leaned into, with the Doctor genuinely ashamed of his actions and desperate to try and make up for his huge breach of trust. Instead it's brushed off. It's a big miscalculation, and because it's never brought up again it rather trivializes this whole aspect of what's happened. As ever, Star Trek remains incredibly clumsy on all matter sexual and the awkwardness of the Doctor unsuccessfully flirting Jaryn while failing to remember he's in a female body, or with Ranek as he tries to use Seven's body to their advantage and escape, is not the episode's finest moments to put it mildly. Even the slightest hint that it would be possible for someone who looked like Seven to be attracted to a woman like Jaryn would go a long way to ameliorating this, but an open acknowledgement of potential gay feelings are not on the cards here, even as the episode allows itself to be read as a queer analogy.

And speaking of failed attempts to address sexual issues, we have a whole B-plot here regarding Tuvok's late-in-the-day Pon Farr. This brings up two questions immediately – one, why didn't the events of "Blood Fever" count as a way out of having to deal with this most uninteresting of continuity points and two, why bother addressing it at all? We're into the seventh season of Voyager now, it's not like anyone was expecting this to outlast TNG or DS9, and while its fair enough that nobody wants to be reminded of "Blood Fever" it does mean that, should this point of continuity get raised there's an answer ready and waiting. Even the holo-pimping we've seen before, though Tom handles it with a degree of sensitivity we wouldn't necessarily expect from him. This actually ends up being a nice character beat, showing him having grown as a person and choosing to help Tuvok rather than be childish about it, even if he does allow himself an occasional, good-natured rib-poke. And of course the theme of sexual repression does loosely tie in with what's going on in the rest of the story, but the important word here is "loosely", because it's just a little too loose to connect with anything, even as it's obviously playing around in the same wheelhouse. And, other than getting a minor piece of continuity out of the way for the continuity fetishists out there, there's really not much else to say about the B-plot.

But let's return to where we started, because, for all that there's a lot going on here, the thing that sticks in the mind – quite rightly – is Jeri Ryan's impression of Robert Picardo. Because she is brilliant at it. Her mannerisms, her tics, even the sidelong glances, all invoke the Doctor excellently, yet never quite feel like just a straightforward impression. It's more that the essence of him is in there, and it's that essence that really lets Ryan show off what she can do. In this, the cuts to her being Seven again only highlight just what a different performance she's given when being possessed by the Doctor, because she does it so naturally it becomes at times hard to remember that this isn't how she always plays the character. This story is clearly designed from the outset to give her the chance to deliver a bravura performance and that she absolutely does. It's a terrific role, a terrific performance and a real return to form for the season, even if there are a few stumbles along the way. But perhaps for an episode which is practically about awkwardness, that isn't too inappropriate at all.



Any Other Business:

• I didn't mention Wang or Harry during the review, which is a mite unfair, but you can't squeeze everything in. He's fine here, never gets reduced to being a peril monkey (surprisingly), and doesn't get in the way of anything.

• He does, however, apparently smell. Draw your own conclusions. Actually Wang manages to play Harry's obvious embarrassment surprisingly not-badly.

• There's a lovely shot of Tom and Tuvok looking out Tuvok's window, both of them bathed in purple, some nice directorial work from Robert Duncan McNeil, who’s back at the helm this week (because he's the ship's pilot you see... oh please yourselves). It's also the last episode of Voyager he directs.

• But yes, it's a great shame he (or possibly Picardo, to be fair) mishandled the sexual violation scene because that very nearly undoes all the good work the episode had managed up to that point.

• Why doesn't Tuvok want Janeway to know it's time for his Pon Farr? Even given this is meant to be a very private time for Vulcans, he must know she can work out what's going on (especially since she does just that anyway).

• No B'Elanna this week.

• The Doctor's "coming out" as a photonic is actually handled with some degree of skill. It's a shame that the skill deployed there wasn't so consistent throughout the rest of the episode.

• The "forgiveness" scene at the end is also mostly well handled. There's at least some admission that the Doctor violated a trust, but that their friendship is strong enough to survive it, and Seven's offer to allow the Doctor to vicariously enjoy a meal is sweet.

• And of course, this is also the episode that really starts to push Seven away from just being someone who, if you'll excuse the expression, just consumes nutritional supplements. As this will play out over the rest of Season Seven, the experiences she goes through here represent some genuine character progression for her, and is most welcome. Especially for a show now entering its twilight.