Post by Prole Hole on Aug 4, 2016 7:38:34 GMT -5
Season Seven, Episode 19 - "Q2"
All In The Family
By some distance, "Q2" is the weakest of the three Voyager Q episodes. We haven't even seen Q since Season Three so it feels a bit odd to have him turn up here, full of the usual innuendos and smarm, as if we're revisiting a part of Voyager that the show divested itself of some time back. And while this does, technically, follow up on the events of "The Q And The Grey" it does so in the least interesting way possible, by focusing on Q's brattish son rather than, say, the genuinely interesting philosophical war that was raging at the heart of the Continuum. That's not especially surprising, I suppose – the idea of Q having a child was always something that was going to be returned to, so here we have it. What a shame that, as per his reason for existing in the first place, Q Junior isn't used to elucidate something about the nature of the Q but instead gets put through a predictable "teenager has to learn the value of respect" story. The script goes out of its way to paint this as Q Junior learning the value of the nebulous concept of "Q-ness" but from what we get on screen that doesn't seem to be any different than the trials Charlie X went through back in the first season of TOS and it's not something which comes to any different conclusion, which is basically that one should consider the consequences of one's actions and behave responsibly. Riveting. But anyway, since this is the last appearance of Q, I think this will also be the last of my Any Other Business reviews, because, while this really wasn't as bad as I was expecting it's also a fairly straightforward episode that's easy to tick off. Thusly...
Any Other Business:
• The opening scene, with Icheb delivering his speech on Kirk's five-year mission, is quite pleasing in the sense that it contextualizes Kirk as part of Starfleet history, and a significant one at that. It's hardly new or vital information, but it's good to see nonetheless.
• So Q Junior turns out to be a bit of a brat. Whoever would have guessed? He's played by John de Lancie's real-life son, Keegan, so when Q asks Janeway if she can see the family resemblance the answer really ought to be a resounding yes.
• Unfortunately the junior de Lancie doesn't quite have the same verve as the original. He's not bad, really, but he can't carry off the arrogant self-certainty in the way his father can, so when he's basically telling Neelix to piss off in astrometrics, or nagging Janeway about being bored, it doesn't really work as well as it would if the senior model had been delivering the same dialogue. Having our Q around for a bit longer than is necessary, not really doing much of anything, only really throws that into sharper relief.
• Still, he is good at referring to Janeway as Aunt Kathy, and Mulgrew gets a whole episode to cycle through her entire range of annoyed facial expressions (and that's quite lot, as it turns out). Obviously she's terrific at it.
• Q Junior's attempts to provoke the crew are mildly amusing, but the one with Seven, where she refuses to be embarrassed about being naked, is great, and it's not at all shot in a prurient or titillating way – Seven is matter-of-fact about what happens to her, refuses to give in to his childish prank, and Q Junior eventually leaves. Seven is never reduced to being an object despite his efforts, and keeps her autonomy. That's surprisingly well handled and could have gone badly wrong.
• Though saying that, Q Junior turning Engineering into a sort of ghastly, tacky disco is, well, ghastly. And as ever, lots of dancing girls, but not a go-go boy to be seen.
• One thing the episode does get right is finding a use for Icheb which feels appropriate to his character rather than just shoehorning him in. It makes sense he'd want to reach out to someone who is, at least superficially, the same age as him, and though not enough time is spent on it their burgeoning friendship works reasonably well, even down to them giving each other silly nicknames.
• Janeway being told to "make it yourself" by the replicator when she asks for a coffee at least manages to raise a smile, not least because of the way Majel Barrett manages to make the computer sound genuinely annoyed at being asked to make the coffee.
• Q visiting Janeway in her bath is everything you might expect...
• The pacing of the episode is a bit uneven here - we're halfway through the second act before we get to the punchline of Q Junior having his powers removed. While it is necessary to establish what a pain in the arse he is prior to that event, it still takes too long to get there.
• Though all the business with him being turned into a single-celled amoeba is quite amusing, mostly thanks to John de Lancie's delivery of the material.
• Neelix's over-effusive greeting of everyone in the mess hall in response to the earlier incident of Q Junior removing his vocal cords and fusing his jaw together also manages to raise a little smile too.
• That's kind of the issue here though – lots of little smiles and not much of anything that adds up to anything of real consequence.
• And Q Junior is simply too annoying to care about – obviously for a lot of the story he's meant to be annoying so his act of contrition carries some weight but it's just too successful in making him annoying, so when the time for redemption comes it just feels plodding and obvious. After all, our Q is also meant to be annoying but he has a certain charm and joie de vivre that overcomes that. Q Junior does not.
• Janeway's "we may be common bipeds but we're not stupid" speech is delivered with dripping contempt and it's really rather wonderful, one of the highlights of the episode.
• So why does Q Junior suddenly decide to go rogue and steal the Delta Flyer? He's doing well in his lessons, he's making progress, he's got a friend... then he suddenly does a stupid thing for largely plot rather than character reasons. It's passed off as him thinking he can never live up to what's expected of him, but that doesn't jibe with what we get on screen, where he's been doing just fine until his (entirely predictable) act of rebellion. His "explanations" just don’t work for the story or the character.
• And the actual act of rebellion – running away – is about as obvious as it's possible to imagine. And then it all goes wrong with entirely foreseeable results, ones destined to re-enforce what the episode has already told us the point will be. This is not "Q2"'s finest moment.
• Small redeeming factor: it doesn't work, with the Q judges quite rightly pointing out that an act of contrition after the event doesn't exactly make up for being the one who put Icheb's life in danger in the first place. That's something.
• Though it's kind of washed away by the fact that Q is able to plead with them and get Q Junior his powers back after all. Huh.
• Still, the best moment Keegan de Lancie has in the episode is where he asks Janeway to continue his training even though he has nothing left to prove. He's much better at quiet despair than over-the-top arrogance.
• I do like the scene between Q and Janeway when he claims the continuum crumbled like "Gelbian sandsculptures" and they both laugh and more or less admit he's talking bullshit. That, and indeed the entire final scene, is very well played by Mulgrew and de Lancie, and it does feel like the adults have finally gotten the chance to have a proper conversation. A bit late in the day...
So there we have it. Yes, this is Q's last appearance in Star Trek, and it's a shame this isn't as strong as either "Death Wish" or "The Q And The Grey", though it's not quite a complete wash-out either. The discussion of rights and responsibilities really ought to feel like it connects more with the over-arching themes of this season, and the fact that it doesn't tells you all you need to know, because those themes are certainly present here, but in very abstracted form. This is, clearly, meant to be a romp, but it's just too annoying to really succeed in those terms, like the contractual-obligation Q episodes from TNG, where the hope seems to be that if Q's around then that's enough to make up for any other shortfalls. It's not, and what this episode demonstrates (especially in comparison to the two other Voyager Q episodes) is that the Q works best when the underlying concepts are taken seriously even while the surface is full of sarcasm and innuendo. "Q2"'s mistake is failing to realize that and just giving us the surface. And it's not enough.
Season 7, Episode 20 - "Author, Author"
Shot Through The Heart And You're To Blame
Next to "Q2", "Author, Author" feels like it's doing everything right that the preceding episode got wrong, and that's largely because it does. Here we have the most explicit stating of the themes that have been playing out over the season, filtered directly though the Doctor and his status, or more accurately the lack of clarity around his status. The underlying theme – what rights an individual has balanced against the state and a private corporation – are deadly serious and important, but much of the surface here is light-hearted (and occasionally awkward), the comedic elements helping to make the more serious underpinnings go down easier. This is the exact balance that "Q2" fell short of, and the deftness of "Author, Author" is largely in being able to thread these two disparate elements together. This acts as a summary of the issues raised in the season so far, a drawing together of the points that have been made.
But it takes a bit of time to get there. Unlike the court-room drama of TNG's "The Measure Of A Man" (an obvious antecedent), this episode doesn't start, run through, and finish with the arguments around whether the artificial life-form in question qualifies as a person, but rather builds up to it's discussion of rights. This matters in the episode (apart from making it seem considerably less derivative) because it takes all the familiar traits we associate with the Doctor – his desire to be taken seriously, his artistic expression, his large-but-easily-dented ego – and allows them to organically suggest why these should be used as defining factors in the Doctor's sentience, rather than beginning with the fact of it being self-evident and then trying to defend that position. This isn't an episode which gives the Doctor character progression in the traditional sense, it's one that knows the Doctor has had character progression up to this point and that it's the understanding of this which now needs to be progressed. It's a smart move – the smartest one in a generally very smart episode in fact – and makes it clear just how far the Doctor has come over the course of the show. In this, the most important comment of his defence is the one made by Janeway when she states he directly disobeyed her orders, and that he made a mistake in doing so, because people – all people – are capable of making mistakes. This means that the defence of the Doctor doesn't rely on a big high-principled speech or a well-meaning quotation from another source, but instead brings things away from the level of abstraction and down to a different level – a human one. It's also extremely important that the Doctor does not, in fact, win his argument, despite the fact that to us he clearly is an emergent intelligence and one worthy of recognition under the law. Oh he manages to gain control of his work, but it's only a partial victory – he doesn’t get declared legally a person. This too is a smart move on behalf of the episode, because it stops short of becoming polemic in the arguments its presenting, but instead understands that these things do not exist on a binary yes/no scale and so have subtleties and intricacies that take more than a few eleven-minute comm sessions and a forty-five minute episode to resolve. The Doctor doesn't win or lose here, but rather this is presented as part of an ongoing debate – which is of course exactly how this functions in real life. It's a fantastically intelligent approach that elevates this episode tremendously.
But that's all at the end of the episode, and there's a fair amount of time to be spent in the Doctor's holonovel itself before we get there. This becomes interesting because it's a much more direct look inside his psyche than we're normally afforded. "Projections" was probably the last time we really got inside his head, but here we really get to see what's been going on in there, and a lot of the details are fascinating. Of course seeing him in a quilted dressing gown, writing with a feather quill, is going to be funny and a familiar expression of the Doctor's pretentiousness and ego, but this is basically a red herring, using this setting as something we're familiar with before subverting it. The idea of the mobile emitter being a burden, for example, made literal in the program by its physical size and weight, simply isn’t something which has been addressed before,. The Doctor's little speech about how the crewmembers might feel if they had to carry something like that with them everywhere they go gives new insight into a piece of technology which is now entirely taken for granted, but more importantly it gives insight into how the Doctor as an actual character interacts with it. Of course it gives him freedom, but in another sense it also marks out what's different about him, and the fact that something like the mobile emitter can be re-interpreted though another lens is more strong writing, whilst remaining in line with the recontextualization which has been going on throughout this season. There's lots of little glimpses like this in the holo-novel, and though they become increasingly ridiculous (having "Captain Jenkins" shoot a patient in sick-bay, for example) it's that very ridiculousness that allows the point the Doctor wants to be made come across. The situations might be extreme, but the underlying points he's trying to make aren't, and this is how he chooses to demonstrate them. In taking the Doctor's impulse for self-expression and channelling it through his desire for recognition the Doctor is treated more like a full character than probably any other point in the series (as a side note, this is also a much more successful use of his creative outlets than his turns at opera, because this actually involved him being creative, rather than reciting a work which is already in existence).
Legal arguments, the rights of the individal, the state of the law... it doesn't sound like a traditional recipe for fun, yet that's the other way that "Author, Author" manages to score, because it really is hugely enjoyable. Large chucks of the Doctor's holo-novel are hilarious, everyone gets to do a bit of "evil version" acting, Tom's subversion of the novel (with the Doctor sleazily hitting on patients, complete with terrible comb-over) is laugh-out-loud funny, and there's a verve and pep to the production that works greatly in the episode's favour. Yet even among all this there's time for little character moments which allow others to shine, even if only briefly. Seven being slowly exposed to the hopes and lives of the crew by watching their communications back home, until she's ready to accept she has family she wants to talk, to is a lovely moment, and there's something genuinely moving about the way her aunt calls her Annika in the same way everyone else calls her Seven. Because of course she does. It's a small moment, just as Kim talking to his mother (at last!) is, but it helps to humanize these characters, and in an episode which is about humanization and what that means this connects extremely well to the thematic structure of the episode. And the details feel right here - B'Elanna's father wants to try and reconnect, which gives just a little nod to a story which has been running all season but which doesn't get in the way of anything. The sense in which Voyager itself seems to be getting closer and closer to getting home also continues to grow – this is something which has been slowly, subtly layered throughout the series ever since "Pathfinder" and the threads that link back to Earth continue to get stronger, with face-to-face two-way communication being established here for the first time (and finding relevance next episode out). Yet even more important that this is the live shot of Earth that the crew get to see – a goal which seems even more tangible and achievable now. These details give a feeling of momentum to the episode and the season, which feels appropriate for an episode which is about moving forward. There's real ambition and scope to what's being tried here and what's so pleasing about all of this is how successful everything is. So close to the end we still have episodes like this which are both challenging and entertaining, and which are looking forward, not bad. During the review of "Critical Care" I said that episode was the best use of the Doctor in a long time, which was true, but this ups the game into a whole new level. By taking the time to understand the Doctor, and re-examine who and what he is in a considered, intelligent manner, "Author, Author" manages to be the single best episode about the Doctor in the entirety of Voyager.
Any Other Business:
• Yup, a really terrific episode, and though it covers similar thematic ground to "The Measure Of A Man" the difference in approach and conclusion really stops this from being a pale re-tread. In fact, I think this might be better.
• The almost-but-not-quite names for the characters in the Doctor's holo-novel are all quite funny, but top marks for Lieutenant Marseilles. That's up there with "The Killing Game"'s Mademoiselle de Neuf.
• Nice to see Roxann Dawson shorn of her make-up as well.
• Photons Be Free is an unbelievably cheesy name for the Doctor's holo-novel, and absolutely perfectly in keeping with the sort of choice the Doctor would make – meaningful, but just ever-so-slightly misjudged.
• It's a nice little use of established history that the Doctor acknowledges the fact that Tom has written a few holo-programs and might be able to help him with re-writes, even if Tom uses the chance to do so as his way of getting the point about how hurt the crew are across.
• Though what's weird is Tom asking the Doctor if he might help get the Captain Proton series published. This is the only time it's implied these were actually written by Tom, rather than them being a program he found and started running (as distinct from Sandrines, for example, which he definitely created).
• I'm not quite sure about the final scene – it's obviously meant to suggest that everyone should have the opportunity to better themselves and be given fair treatment regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in, which is in keeping with the point this episode is trying to make, and more broadly in line with Star Trek's philosophy. Where is struggles a bit is that it's clear the experiences of the Doctor (in "Projections", "The Swarm" and "Latent Imagine" specifically) are what have made him an emergent intelligence, and the holograms working in the dilithium mines don't have that. So it's thematically relevant, at least, even if it doesn't necessarily make literal sense.
• It's also set three months into the future, which actually sets this scene after the events of "Endgame", making it the furthest we go into Star Trek's future that doesn't involve time travel, reality warping, or some other form of time-shift (like the Doctor's program being stored as a back-up for three hundred years in "Living Witness").
All In The Family
By some distance, "Q2" is the weakest of the three Voyager Q episodes. We haven't even seen Q since Season Three so it feels a bit odd to have him turn up here, full of the usual innuendos and smarm, as if we're revisiting a part of Voyager that the show divested itself of some time back. And while this does, technically, follow up on the events of "The Q And The Grey" it does so in the least interesting way possible, by focusing on Q's brattish son rather than, say, the genuinely interesting philosophical war that was raging at the heart of the Continuum. That's not especially surprising, I suppose – the idea of Q having a child was always something that was going to be returned to, so here we have it. What a shame that, as per his reason for existing in the first place, Q Junior isn't used to elucidate something about the nature of the Q but instead gets put through a predictable "teenager has to learn the value of respect" story. The script goes out of its way to paint this as Q Junior learning the value of the nebulous concept of "Q-ness" but from what we get on screen that doesn't seem to be any different than the trials Charlie X went through back in the first season of TOS and it's not something which comes to any different conclusion, which is basically that one should consider the consequences of one's actions and behave responsibly. Riveting. But anyway, since this is the last appearance of Q, I think this will also be the last of my Any Other Business reviews, because, while this really wasn't as bad as I was expecting it's also a fairly straightforward episode that's easy to tick off. Thusly...
Any Other Business:
• The opening scene, with Icheb delivering his speech on Kirk's five-year mission, is quite pleasing in the sense that it contextualizes Kirk as part of Starfleet history, and a significant one at that. It's hardly new or vital information, but it's good to see nonetheless.
• So Q Junior turns out to be a bit of a brat. Whoever would have guessed? He's played by John de Lancie's real-life son, Keegan, so when Q asks Janeway if she can see the family resemblance the answer really ought to be a resounding yes.
• Unfortunately the junior de Lancie doesn't quite have the same verve as the original. He's not bad, really, but he can't carry off the arrogant self-certainty in the way his father can, so when he's basically telling Neelix to piss off in astrometrics, or nagging Janeway about being bored, it doesn't really work as well as it would if the senior model had been delivering the same dialogue. Having our Q around for a bit longer than is necessary, not really doing much of anything, only really throws that into sharper relief.
• Still, he is good at referring to Janeway as Aunt Kathy, and Mulgrew gets a whole episode to cycle through her entire range of annoyed facial expressions (and that's quite lot, as it turns out). Obviously she's terrific at it.
• Q Junior's attempts to provoke the crew are mildly amusing, but the one with Seven, where she refuses to be embarrassed about being naked, is great, and it's not at all shot in a prurient or titillating way – Seven is matter-of-fact about what happens to her, refuses to give in to his childish prank, and Q Junior eventually leaves. Seven is never reduced to being an object despite his efforts, and keeps her autonomy. That's surprisingly well handled and could have gone badly wrong.
• Though saying that, Q Junior turning Engineering into a sort of ghastly, tacky disco is, well, ghastly. And as ever, lots of dancing girls, but not a go-go boy to be seen.
• One thing the episode does get right is finding a use for Icheb which feels appropriate to his character rather than just shoehorning him in. It makes sense he'd want to reach out to someone who is, at least superficially, the same age as him, and though not enough time is spent on it their burgeoning friendship works reasonably well, even down to them giving each other silly nicknames.
• Janeway being told to "make it yourself" by the replicator when she asks for a coffee at least manages to raise a smile, not least because of the way Majel Barrett manages to make the computer sound genuinely annoyed at being asked to make the coffee.
• Q visiting Janeway in her bath is everything you might expect...
• The pacing of the episode is a bit uneven here - we're halfway through the second act before we get to the punchline of Q Junior having his powers removed. While it is necessary to establish what a pain in the arse he is prior to that event, it still takes too long to get there.
• Though all the business with him being turned into a single-celled amoeba is quite amusing, mostly thanks to John de Lancie's delivery of the material.
• Neelix's over-effusive greeting of everyone in the mess hall in response to the earlier incident of Q Junior removing his vocal cords and fusing his jaw together also manages to raise a little smile too.
• That's kind of the issue here though – lots of little smiles and not much of anything that adds up to anything of real consequence.
• And Q Junior is simply too annoying to care about – obviously for a lot of the story he's meant to be annoying so his act of contrition carries some weight but it's just too successful in making him annoying, so when the time for redemption comes it just feels plodding and obvious. After all, our Q is also meant to be annoying but he has a certain charm and joie de vivre that overcomes that. Q Junior does not.
• Janeway's "we may be common bipeds but we're not stupid" speech is delivered with dripping contempt and it's really rather wonderful, one of the highlights of the episode.
• So why does Q Junior suddenly decide to go rogue and steal the Delta Flyer? He's doing well in his lessons, he's making progress, he's got a friend... then he suddenly does a stupid thing for largely plot rather than character reasons. It's passed off as him thinking he can never live up to what's expected of him, but that doesn't jibe with what we get on screen, where he's been doing just fine until his (entirely predictable) act of rebellion. His "explanations" just don’t work for the story or the character.
• And the actual act of rebellion – running away – is about as obvious as it's possible to imagine. And then it all goes wrong with entirely foreseeable results, ones destined to re-enforce what the episode has already told us the point will be. This is not "Q2"'s finest moment.
• Small redeeming factor: it doesn't work, with the Q judges quite rightly pointing out that an act of contrition after the event doesn't exactly make up for being the one who put Icheb's life in danger in the first place. That's something.
• Though it's kind of washed away by the fact that Q is able to plead with them and get Q Junior his powers back after all. Huh.
• Still, the best moment Keegan de Lancie has in the episode is where he asks Janeway to continue his training even though he has nothing left to prove. He's much better at quiet despair than over-the-top arrogance.
• I do like the scene between Q and Janeway when he claims the continuum crumbled like "Gelbian sandsculptures" and they both laugh and more or less admit he's talking bullshit. That, and indeed the entire final scene, is very well played by Mulgrew and de Lancie, and it does feel like the adults have finally gotten the chance to have a proper conversation. A bit late in the day...
So there we have it. Yes, this is Q's last appearance in Star Trek, and it's a shame this isn't as strong as either "Death Wish" or "The Q And The Grey", though it's not quite a complete wash-out either. The discussion of rights and responsibilities really ought to feel like it connects more with the over-arching themes of this season, and the fact that it doesn't tells you all you need to know, because those themes are certainly present here, but in very abstracted form. This is, clearly, meant to be a romp, but it's just too annoying to really succeed in those terms, like the contractual-obligation Q episodes from TNG, where the hope seems to be that if Q's around then that's enough to make up for any other shortfalls. It's not, and what this episode demonstrates (especially in comparison to the two other Voyager Q episodes) is that the Q works best when the underlying concepts are taken seriously even while the surface is full of sarcasm and innuendo. "Q2"'s mistake is failing to realize that and just giving us the surface. And it's not enough.
Season 7, Episode 20 - "Author, Author"
Shot Through The Heart And You're To Blame
Next to "Q2", "Author, Author" feels like it's doing everything right that the preceding episode got wrong, and that's largely because it does. Here we have the most explicit stating of the themes that have been playing out over the season, filtered directly though the Doctor and his status, or more accurately the lack of clarity around his status. The underlying theme – what rights an individual has balanced against the state and a private corporation – are deadly serious and important, but much of the surface here is light-hearted (and occasionally awkward), the comedic elements helping to make the more serious underpinnings go down easier. This is the exact balance that "Q2" fell short of, and the deftness of "Author, Author" is largely in being able to thread these two disparate elements together. This acts as a summary of the issues raised in the season so far, a drawing together of the points that have been made.
But it takes a bit of time to get there. Unlike the court-room drama of TNG's "The Measure Of A Man" (an obvious antecedent), this episode doesn't start, run through, and finish with the arguments around whether the artificial life-form in question qualifies as a person, but rather builds up to it's discussion of rights. This matters in the episode (apart from making it seem considerably less derivative) because it takes all the familiar traits we associate with the Doctor – his desire to be taken seriously, his artistic expression, his large-but-easily-dented ego – and allows them to organically suggest why these should be used as defining factors in the Doctor's sentience, rather than beginning with the fact of it being self-evident and then trying to defend that position. This isn't an episode which gives the Doctor character progression in the traditional sense, it's one that knows the Doctor has had character progression up to this point and that it's the understanding of this which now needs to be progressed. It's a smart move – the smartest one in a generally very smart episode in fact – and makes it clear just how far the Doctor has come over the course of the show. In this, the most important comment of his defence is the one made by Janeway when she states he directly disobeyed her orders, and that he made a mistake in doing so, because people – all people – are capable of making mistakes. This means that the defence of the Doctor doesn't rely on a big high-principled speech or a well-meaning quotation from another source, but instead brings things away from the level of abstraction and down to a different level – a human one. It's also extremely important that the Doctor does not, in fact, win his argument, despite the fact that to us he clearly is an emergent intelligence and one worthy of recognition under the law. Oh he manages to gain control of his work, but it's only a partial victory – he doesn’t get declared legally a person. This too is a smart move on behalf of the episode, because it stops short of becoming polemic in the arguments its presenting, but instead understands that these things do not exist on a binary yes/no scale and so have subtleties and intricacies that take more than a few eleven-minute comm sessions and a forty-five minute episode to resolve. The Doctor doesn't win or lose here, but rather this is presented as part of an ongoing debate – which is of course exactly how this functions in real life. It's a fantastically intelligent approach that elevates this episode tremendously.
But that's all at the end of the episode, and there's a fair amount of time to be spent in the Doctor's holonovel itself before we get there. This becomes interesting because it's a much more direct look inside his psyche than we're normally afforded. "Projections" was probably the last time we really got inside his head, but here we really get to see what's been going on in there, and a lot of the details are fascinating. Of course seeing him in a quilted dressing gown, writing with a feather quill, is going to be funny and a familiar expression of the Doctor's pretentiousness and ego, but this is basically a red herring, using this setting as something we're familiar with before subverting it. The idea of the mobile emitter being a burden, for example, made literal in the program by its physical size and weight, simply isn’t something which has been addressed before,. The Doctor's little speech about how the crewmembers might feel if they had to carry something like that with them everywhere they go gives new insight into a piece of technology which is now entirely taken for granted, but more importantly it gives insight into how the Doctor as an actual character interacts with it. Of course it gives him freedom, but in another sense it also marks out what's different about him, and the fact that something like the mobile emitter can be re-interpreted though another lens is more strong writing, whilst remaining in line with the recontextualization which has been going on throughout this season. There's lots of little glimpses like this in the holo-novel, and though they become increasingly ridiculous (having "Captain Jenkins" shoot a patient in sick-bay, for example) it's that very ridiculousness that allows the point the Doctor wants to be made come across. The situations might be extreme, but the underlying points he's trying to make aren't, and this is how he chooses to demonstrate them. In taking the Doctor's impulse for self-expression and channelling it through his desire for recognition the Doctor is treated more like a full character than probably any other point in the series (as a side note, this is also a much more successful use of his creative outlets than his turns at opera, because this actually involved him being creative, rather than reciting a work which is already in existence).
Legal arguments, the rights of the individal, the state of the law... it doesn't sound like a traditional recipe for fun, yet that's the other way that "Author, Author" manages to score, because it really is hugely enjoyable. Large chucks of the Doctor's holo-novel are hilarious, everyone gets to do a bit of "evil version" acting, Tom's subversion of the novel (with the Doctor sleazily hitting on patients, complete with terrible comb-over) is laugh-out-loud funny, and there's a verve and pep to the production that works greatly in the episode's favour. Yet even among all this there's time for little character moments which allow others to shine, even if only briefly. Seven being slowly exposed to the hopes and lives of the crew by watching their communications back home, until she's ready to accept she has family she wants to talk, to is a lovely moment, and there's something genuinely moving about the way her aunt calls her Annika in the same way everyone else calls her Seven. Because of course she does. It's a small moment, just as Kim talking to his mother (at last!) is, but it helps to humanize these characters, and in an episode which is about humanization and what that means this connects extremely well to the thematic structure of the episode. And the details feel right here - B'Elanna's father wants to try and reconnect, which gives just a little nod to a story which has been running all season but which doesn't get in the way of anything. The sense in which Voyager itself seems to be getting closer and closer to getting home also continues to grow – this is something which has been slowly, subtly layered throughout the series ever since "Pathfinder" and the threads that link back to Earth continue to get stronger, with face-to-face two-way communication being established here for the first time (and finding relevance next episode out). Yet even more important that this is the live shot of Earth that the crew get to see – a goal which seems even more tangible and achievable now. These details give a feeling of momentum to the episode and the season, which feels appropriate for an episode which is about moving forward. There's real ambition and scope to what's being tried here and what's so pleasing about all of this is how successful everything is. So close to the end we still have episodes like this which are both challenging and entertaining, and which are looking forward, not bad. During the review of "Critical Care" I said that episode was the best use of the Doctor in a long time, which was true, but this ups the game into a whole new level. By taking the time to understand the Doctor, and re-examine who and what he is in a considered, intelligent manner, "Author, Author" manages to be the single best episode about the Doctor in the entirety of Voyager.
Any Other Business:
• Yup, a really terrific episode, and though it covers similar thematic ground to "The Measure Of A Man" the difference in approach and conclusion really stops this from being a pale re-tread. In fact, I think this might be better.
• The almost-but-not-quite names for the characters in the Doctor's holo-novel are all quite funny, but top marks for Lieutenant Marseilles. That's up there with "The Killing Game"'s Mademoiselle de Neuf.
• Nice to see Roxann Dawson shorn of her make-up as well.
• Photons Be Free is an unbelievably cheesy name for the Doctor's holo-novel, and absolutely perfectly in keeping with the sort of choice the Doctor would make – meaningful, but just ever-so-slightly misjudged.
• It's a nice little use of established history that the Doctor acknowledges the fact that Tom has written a few holo-programs and might be able to help him with re-writes, even if Tom uses the chance to do so as his way of getting the point about how hurt the crew are across.
• Though what's weird is Tom asking the Doctor if he might help get the Captain Proton series published. This is the only time it's implied these were actually written by Tom, rather than them being a program he found and started running (as distinct from Sandrines, for example, which he definitely created).
• I'm not quite sure about the final scene – it's obviously meant to suggest that everyone should have the opportunity to better themselves and be given fair treatment regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in, which is in keeping with the point this episode is trying to make, and more broadly in line with Star Trek's philosophy. Where is struggles a bit is that it's clear the experiences of the Doctor (in "Projections", "The Swarm" and "Latent Imagine" specifically) are what have made him an emergent intelligence, and the holograms working in the dilithium mines don't have that. So it's thematically relevant, at least, even if it doesn't necessarily make literal sense.
• It's also set three months into the future, which actually sets this scene after the events of "Endgame", making it the furthest we go into Star Trek's future that doesn't involve time travel, reality warping, or some other form of time-shift (like the Doctor's program being stored as a back-up for three hundred years in "Living Witness").