Season 5 Ep 7 / 8 "Infinite Regress" / "Nothing Human"
Dec 3, 2015 7:24:12 GMT -5
Jean-Luc Lemur likes this
Post by Prole Hole on Dec 3, 2015 7:24:12 GMT -5
5.07 5.08 Season Five, Episode 7 - "Infinite Regress"
Oh dear...
Well, this is just an excuse for Jeri Ryan to show off, isn't it? I mean, that has to be why this got written, doesn't it? Let's write, ohh about a dozen different personalities for Seven to experience then just let Jeri Ryan get on with the business of actually having to deliver them. Which she does, in spades. We're only just over a season into Ryan's run on Voyager and it's already becoming difficult to work out where her best performance has been because she just keeps delivering on the promise of Seven, and although "Infinite Regress" isn't the strongest script she's been faced with, it certainly gives her a chance to show off her chops and she doesn't waste the opportunity.
In fact, it's a shame the story here isn't just a fraction better, because the first half of "Infinite Regress" is really, really terrific, but the second half doesn't quite live up to it. That's because the journey inside Seven's mind, while entirely successful from a scripting perspective, doesn't quite come off on screen, which is a shame because seeing the voices inside Seven literalized in this way had the chance to really explore something deep in Seven's psyche. That's what I mean when I say the second half doesn't quite live up to the promise of the first. While there's nothing actually wrong with what we see on-screen, it's a bit... well, literal when it should have aimed for something a bit more lyrical, or at least a bit more peculiar. We saw, back in "One", Seven having that strange dream of her completely alone on an ice-field - it was a short shot, just a few seconds really, but it was striking and memorable for being just so unexpected, and this episode could have done with a bit of that, instead of Attack Of The Stock Alpha Quadrant Costumes. Again, it's not that it's badly done, but a little bit more imagination could have really stretched this into a more abstract direction which we don't often get to see Voyager take and would definitely have resulted in a stronger sequence.
Yet there's a reason I'm starting with what's really the only slightly sub-par bit of the episode, because everything else here is basically great. Seven's emerging personalities ought really to be a bit of a cliché, especially given the old Quantum Leap trick of having Seven's reflection be whatever character has emerged from within her, but that it all hangs together so convincingly is a real testament to Ryan's skill as an actor. This episode allows Seven to re-experience trauma, and while this season has de-emphasized that side of her character, that's at least in part because we've already spent a season working on it and you need to move on at some point. Yet here the trauma Seven suffers feels real and genuine - her shrieking in sick bay and her plaintive cries that she can't take much more of it are properly disturbing (again a tribute to Ryan's work here) - but in some ways this is a parallel opposite from the trauma she had being separated from the Collective. Instead of suffering the pain of separation here she suffers the pain of combination , with dozens of personalities flooding and eventually overwhelming her own.
Which brings us to Borg lore. Voyager interacts with the Borg more than any other branch of the franchise, so it's worth pausing to establish just why this is, and what the benefits or detriments of this approach are. Because there are definitely advantages to having a recurring enemy to square off against, and the gathering storm that they represented in the back half of Season Three had to break sometime. That break came with "Scorpion", of course, but in "Scorpion" we don't really get into an expansion of what it is that the Borg are - indeed their typical behaviour turns out to have been the trigger for the invasion of Species 8472 in the first place, their arrogant assumption that they could assimilate anything finally colliding with something that could properly fight back. Their presence looms over all of Season Four, but it's largely off stage - the few glimpses we do get, in "Hope And Fear" for example, just show them going about their business. So why use the Borg? I mean they're a galaxy-spanning species, so persistently running into them feels credible, even when, as happened in the last episode, Voyager manages to make great strides across space. But obviously as well as a physical threat, they represent an existential one as well - the Borg are literally the opposite of what the Federation is, a vast, interconnected series of planets with no individuality, freedom, or any of the rights that the Federation holds so dear. In this sense, the idea that the Borg are there, omnipresent but not always in direct sight, they can stand in as a physical manifestation of the philosophy that resides at the core of Star Trek. Because there are always people who will try to take away freedoms, and people who will do it with a smile because it will make you "safer", because it's easier, because, in Borg parlance, it will bring you closer to perfection. In the liberal, freedom-loving philosophy of Star Trek this is the tyranny that must always be fought, just as much as bad guys with phasers or photon torpedoes - you don't listen to the voices that whisper in your head, and you stand for the freedom that is intrinsic to a civilized society, however much making that stand might cost. We know the high cost of going up against the Borg, but in Star Trek that's always a price worth paying because a philosophy or belief that bends to convenience or ease is no real philosophy at all. This has always been what the Borg symbolize - the need to fight for what you believe in against those who would take it away in the name of protection.
So that’s their first value, as a physical manifestation of a philosophical point. But on a purely storytelling level they're a useful threat to have in the Delta Quadrant. After all, quite apart from the philosophical angle, they're just interesting bad guys, so it's natural to want to find out more about them. The first meaningful expansion of Borg lore we get in Voyager is in "The Omega Directive" when we actually discover the purpose of the Borg, what they actually exist for, which is their quest for perfection. This was mentioned in First Contact, of course, but that was mostly just the Borg Queen crowing so how much of what she said was actually accurate was open to interpretation. Seven's confirmation of the Borg's quest is the first "independent verification", if you will. But from both sources it's a somewhat unexpected angle - from everything we've seen of the Borg thus far they seem to be about as far from perfection as we could imagine, yet this is exactly why this becomes a successful conceit, because it shows us an properly different perspective on something we would automatically assume to be wrong or aberrant, yet is their entire modus operandi. This is the way to expand an understanding of a species without diminishing them or giving too much away. As I mentioned back in the review of "In The Flesh" at some point it becomes necessary to deliver more detail on a recurring bad guy because otherwise their return becomes repetitious without delivering any reason for their return (beyond fan service). Since the Borg are more widely used in Voyager, it therefore stands to reason that we're going to get a continued expansion of our knowledge and understanding of them, and this kind of expansion makes a compelling case for their continued use when what we learn about then expands our understanding but doesn't undercut them as a threat.
"Infinite Regress" adds to our knowledge of the Collective with the discovery of the Vinculum at the heart of the Borg cube. Yet, honestly, this is also where this episode falls down a little - we now know the Borg use this device to regulate and suppress the individuality of the drones who get assimilated. OK. That's nice. And...? The emphasis here is a little off - if this were treated as a quick throwaway to get us to Seven's personality crisis that would be fine, but there's just a little too much time spent on lingering over what it is and what it does instead of getting on with telling the real story of Seven's crisis. It doesn't really add anything to our understanding of the Collective at all, apart from something which is just a relatively functional piece of technology. That's a bit of a pity, but don't let it distract you too much from the rest of the episode, because even if everything surrounding the Vinculum was terrible (and it's absolutely not) it would be worth watching this episode for Ryan's performance alone. Yes the sequences in Seven's mind could have been a bit more expansive in their ambition, and yes the Vinculum could have given us a more perceptive insight into the Borg, but even putting these points aside this is still an excellent episode. But watch it for Jeri Ryan, not for the Borg, because that's really what this is all about.
Any Other Business:
• For those interested, the dictionary definition of "vinculum" is either a connective band of tissue, or something which implies unity - so the reason for the use of the word here for the Borg should be quite obvious.
• Yea this is a real tour de force for Ryan, and one of the stand-out performances in the whole of Voyager.
• I didn't mention it in the review, but her scenes here with Naomi are really very sweet, both as the real Seven and as the little-girl personality that takes her over when they play kadis-kot.
• The Quantum Leap mirror trick is, if a touch obvious, generally well used here, but the example where we see the little-girl personality reflect in the kadis-kot game board is beautifully subtle and not emphasised in the way that, say, the Klingon is in Engineering before Seven initiates the mating ritual.
• Both Robert Picardo and Kate Mulgrew appear a bit sleepy in the first half of this episode, though they sharpen up when the script calls for it in the second half.
• It's handy that the bulk of the personalities that manifest themselves are predominantly Alpha Quadrant, though it's nice that Janeway says at one point she spoke to a Krenom scientist about the finer points of temporal mechanics. Whether this is reflective of people that Seven has come into contact with either as a drone or individual, or a budget-saving measure is up for you to decide...
• The Borg Vinculum - green.
• One thing that might have made the scenes inside Seven's mind more effective is if they had stayed in her mind, rather than cutting back to sick bay all the time. While the exploration of her mind is just a funny camera lens and some stock Borg sets at least if we had stuck with it there would be a feeling of increasing disorientation, with the camera never settling and the screaming voices getting lounder and louder. But the constant returns to sick bay undercut this and it does drain a bit of the tension.
• I really like the fact that as soon as Seven is better Voyager doesn't even both finishing its space battle, it just beams the Vinculum off the ship and leaves, which is certainly an unusual conclusion to that kind of battle.
• Seven spends a week regenerating before being declared fit for duty - a nice acknowledgment that an event like this takes time to recover from and it's not all-back-to-normal-then-roll-credit within two minutes of the plot being over.
Season Five, Episode 8 - "Nothing Human"
This has not been a good week for alien design...
Contrivance is a normal, natural part of the writing process. In drama there are always contrivances, but the trick is to make everything look natural, as if one thing flows to another naturally, rather than because of a writerly conceit. The most obvious ongoing contrivance in a show like Star Trek, even before we start talking about transporters or warp drives, is, "how come every episode something exciting happens?" (well, not in "Parturition", but you know what I mean) The correct answer is, "because it's contrived that way" - or in other words, we don't want to watch an episode of Voyager not doing much of anything because that's very boring. You need something to actually happen, whether it's character conflict, or action, or whatever, because nobody wants to sit around watching B'Elanna carrying out warp diagnostics or Chakotay going through crew evaluations for forty-five minutes. It's possible for episodes to play with this - the first half of "Night", for example - but this is really hiding one contrivance behind another, which is the contrivance of the narrator (which is to say, the writer) commenting on the contrivance of something/nothing happening. This is fine if the writer can find a way to integrate this into the ongoing narrative.
Guess what I'm going to criticize "Nothing Human" for? There are two principal contrivances here, neither of which are remotely well integrated into the ongoing narrative. These are: the convenient, strangely well-informed records on Crell Moset, and the probability of This Week's Crewmember having some kind of connection to him. These are dropped into the episode with astonishing clumsiness, which is especially odd given that this is written by Jeri Taylor who, you know, isn't exactly a newcomer. Moset himself is an interesting enough character, and well played by David Clennon, but his inclusion here just makes no sense, so it ends up badly undermining the appearance. There is, frankly, no need to include Cardassians in Voyager - DS9 has more than enough Cardassian material to keep anyone interested in them going, and the sheer contrivance to get him into this story makes the writing look clunky. This isn't one thing naturally flowing into another, in other words, it's, "here's an idea, twist everything to try and get it to work." Well there's just too much twisting here for this to succeed. It could be forgiven, perhaps if this was in service of a better story, but it isn't so it's not. And that's because the second contrivance, having the never-before-seen Tabor have a personal connection to Moset just feels plonked in the middle of the episode as well, without a moment's thought given to how super-convenient this is for the story. As with David Clennon, Jad Mager does a good job with the role, and he's able to convincingly bring across the horror of the Melenge-alike setting that Moset's horrors were meant to have taken place in. But if his appearance and connection just seem episode-convenient it's also very undermining, and no matter how good the performance is (and it is good) there's just no way to compensate for that.
So we have two contrivances, Moset and Tabor. Was there a way to make these two function together in this episode and make it work? Well yes, but it would have to be an episode of Deep Space Nine because that's clearly what "Nothing Human" is shooting for. It's not like it would have been a difficult re-write - swap out the Doctor for Julian, any Bajoran-of-the-week for Tabor, and any cast regular (but let's say... oh, Dax maybe?) to be attacked by an unconvincing rubber alien, and off you go. There's literally no reason this needs to be an episode of Voyager. The ethical considerations that sit at the heart of "Nothing Human" certainly feel more of a piece with DS9 , though in fact these are badly muddled here as well, because the episode clearly wants to say something about ethics and morality but... what? There's something very unclear in what the episode is trying to say, beyond "experimenting on people is bad, mmmkay?". Moset developed a cure for a plague, which relied on unethical experiments on Bajorans. OK, fine. It's a suitably nasty bit of character background for a Cardassian doctor to have. But then... that's not what B'Elanna's suffering from, she's suffering from having a collection of poorly designed pink bladders strapped to her chest. So the cure than Moset and the Doctor come up with here isn't actually anything to do with the plague he developed a cure for. Yes it's upsetting for Tabor to see this walking representation of a criminal striding about sickbay like he owns the place but it doesn't materially affect anything. Indeed fairly soon after the Doctor starts pointing a finger at him Moset points out that it wasn't him that carried out the research the Doctor is so concerned about, and the problem with this argument is that he's correct. Everybody carries on as if this was the real Moset, but it isn't. It's just a hologram. Indeed, why not just change his appearance and have him look like... I don't know, whatever race has the cheapest make-up for this week's obviously low-budget instalment? He doesn't need to look Cardassian at all. The problem with this is not one that comes from picking holes in the logic of the episode so much as why didn't this occur to any of the actual characters in the show. It's incredibly obvious. Because... that's this week's contrivance. It makes everyone look stupid in the service of an ethical debate that has no core to it.
So is there anything remotely successful here? Well actually yes. This is a muddy mess of an episode but all the performances here are strong and the not-affecting-much subplot of Voyager trying to make contact with a species that can't be Universal Translator-ed is always welcome. We haven't seen this since "The Swarm", but it's another welcome acknowledgement that not every species is a member of the bumpy-head brigade and the fact that the creature that takes over B'Elanna is doing it out of self-preservation rather than antagonism gives a pleasingly different motivation. That the alien is quite so unconvincing also undercuts this a bit, but still at least some effort and thought have been put into it. And if the ethical part of the episode is confused then all praise to Robert Picardo and David Clennon for making it look like the exchange between them actually has bite and matters. They're interactions are actually the best bit of the episode by miles - both actors really seem to enjoy getting their teeth into the material and Clennon is genuinely excellent at playing a self-righteous, self-important Cardassian doctor who believes that there is never a price too high to pay in the service of science. It's not strikingly different from any number of unpleasant Cardassians we've met on DS9 but it's delivered with such relish it's hard not to just enjoy it. Really, it's these two that stop the episode becoming a straight-up failure, so we do again see what a difference good casting can make to an otherwise sub-standard episode. To be clear though, this is nothing like the shoddy disaster of "Once Upon A Time", and actually sitting down and watching it means that you get to spent a fairly low key but generally entertaining forty-five minutes in front of the telly. In terms of the way this season is thus far developing, "Nothing Human" also fits in well - all of the episodes, "Night" aside, have focussed on a single character or pair of characters, and given them an episode to do their thing, and this will continue up until "Bride Of Chaotica!", which will return to a more ensemble feel. This has largely been a successful format after the intense focus on Seven during Season Four, and if nothing else "Nothing Human" gives the Doctor and Robert Picardo a real chance to take the spotlight and that's always something that's welcome. At the end of the episode, the Doctor chooses to delete Moset from the database, with the question of whether this was the right thing to do hanging over the closing credits. If it means we don't have to sit through another muddled, clumsily written contrivance like this then, sadly, the answer must be yes.
Any Other Business:
• This is Jeri Taylor's final script for Voyager. She's such a pivotal, influential figure in the series and so important in bringing Voyager's feminist agenda to the fore, it's really sad that she didn't go out on a better episode than this.
• I don't mean to harp on about it, but the alien that attacks B'Elanna really is just awful. It would have looked cheap and unconvincing on TOS.
• There really is something very pleasing about Voyager's attempts to communicate with a properly alien species and the time spent on it, small as it is, also helps to prop this episode up with a genuinely interesting sub-plot.
• Poor Roxann Dawson really drew the short end of the stick this week.
• Those Cardassian sets are looking tired...
• Yea Tabor's inclusion here really is ridiculously contrived, though it's nice to see a Bajoran in the crew, as one of the ex-Maquis. It's a terrible shame they couldn’t have given him just a couple of scenes in an earlier episode just to make his appearance here markedly less convenient, as they did with Durst back in Season One, when he appeared briefly in "Cathexis" before getting killed off in "Faces". That's a much more successful example of how to handle this kind of character inclusion.
• Though saying that, Tabor's inclusion here might be an astonishing co-incidence, but he is at least seen again, in the Season Seven episode "Repression" so at least he doesn't just turn up then is never seen again. Just.
Oh dear...
Well, this is just an excuse for Jeri Ryan to show off, isn't it? I mean, that has to be why this got written, doesn't it? Let's write, ohh about a dozen different personalities for Seven to experience then just let Jeri Ryan get on with the business of actually having to deliver them. Which she does, in spades. We're only just over a season into Ryan's run on Voyager and it's already becoming difficult to work out where her best performance has been because she just keeps delivering on the promise of Seven, and although "Infinite Regress" isn't the strongest script she's been faced with, it certainly gives her a chance to show off her chops and she doesn't waste the opportunity.
In fact, it's a shame the story here isn't just a fraction better, because the first half of "Infinite Regress" is really, really terrific, but the second half doesn't quite live up to it. That's because the journey inside Seven's mind, while entirely successful from a scripting perspective, doesn't quite come off on screen, which is a shame because seeing the voices inside Seven literalized in this way had the chance to really explore something deep in Seven's psyche. That's what I mean when I say the second half doesn't quite live up to the promise of the first. While there's nothing actually wrong with what we see on-screen, it's a bit... well, literal when it should have aimed for something a bit more lyrical, or at least a bit more peculiar. We saw, back in "One", Seven having that strange dream of her completely alone on an ice-field - it was a short shot, just a few seconds really, but it was striking and memorable for being just so unexpected, and this episode could have done with a bit of that, instead of Attack Of The Stock Alpha Quadrant Costumes. Again, it's not that it's badly done, but a little bit more imagination could have really stretched this into a more abstract direction which we don't often get to see Voyager take and would definitely have resulted in a stronger sequence.
Yet there's a reason I'm starting with what's really the only slightly sub-par bit of the episode, because everything else here is basically great. Seven's emerging personalities ought really to be a bit of a cliché, especially given the old Quantum Leap trick of having Seven's reflection be whatever character has emerged from within her, but that it all hangs together so convincingly is a real testament to Ryan's skill as an actor. This episode allows Seven to re-experience trauma, and while this season has de-emphasized that side of her character, that's at least in part because we've already spent a season working on it and you need to move on at some point. Yet here the trauma Seven suffers feels real and genuine - her shrieking in sick bay and her plaintive cries that she can't take much more of it are properly disturbing (again a tribute to Ryan's work here) - but in some ways this is a parallel opposite from the trauma she had being separated from the Collective. Instead of suffering the pain of separation here she suffers the pain of combination , with dozens of personalities flooding and eventually overwhelming her own.
Which brings us to Borg lore. Voyager interacts with the Borg more than any other branch of the franchise, so it's worth pausing to establish just why this is, and what the benefits or detriments of this approach are. Because there are definitely advantages to having a recurring enemy to square off against, and the gathering storm that they represented in the back half of Season Three had to break sometime. That break came with "Scorpion", of course, but in "Scorpion" we don't really get into an expansion of what it is that the Borg are - indeed their typical behaviour turns out to have been the trigger for the invasion of Species 8472 in the first place, their arrogant assumption that they could assimilate anything finally colliding with something that could properly fight back. Their presence looms over all of Season Four, but it's largely off stage - the few glimpses we do get, in "Hope And Fear" for example, just show them going about their business. So why use the Borg? I mean they're a galaxy-spanning species, so persistently running into them feels credible, even when, as happened in the last episode, Voyager manages to make great strides across space. But obviously as well as a physical threat, they represent an existential one as well - the Borg are literally the opposite of what the Federation is, a vast, interconnected series of planets with no individuality, freedom, or any of the rights that the Federation holds so dear. In this sense, the idea that the Borg are there, omnipresent but not always in direct sight, they can stand in as a physical manifestation of the philosophy that resides at the core of Star Trek. Because there are always people who will try to take away freedoms, and people who will do it with a smile because it will make you "safer", because it's easier, because, in Borg parlance, it will bring you closer to perfection. In the liberal, freedom-loving philosophy of Star Trek this is the tyranny that must always be fought, just as much as bad guys with phasers or photon torpedoes - you don't listen to the voices that whisper in your head, and you stand for the freedom that is intrinsic to a civilized society, however much making that stand might cost. We know the high cost of going up against the Borg, but in Star Trek that's always a price worth paying because a philosophy or belief that bends to convenience or ease is no real philosophy at all. This has always been what the Borg symbolize - the need to fight for what you believe in against those who would take it away in the name of protection.
So that’s their first value, as a physical manifestation of a philosophical point. But on a purely storytelling level they're a useful threat to have in the Delta Quadrant. After all, quite apart from the philosophical angle, they're just interesting bad guys, so it's natural to want to find out more about them. The first meaningful expansion of Borg lore we get in Voyager is in "The Omega Directive" when we actually discover the purpose of the Borg, what they actually exist for, which is their quest for perfection. This was mentioned in First Contact, of course, but that was mostly just the Borg Queen crowing so how much of what she said was actually accurate was open to interpretation. Seven's confirmation of the Borg's quest is the first "independent verification", if you will. But from both sources it's a somewhat unexpected angle - from everything we've seen of the Borg thus far they seem to be about as far from perfection as we could imagine, yet this is exactly why this becomes a successful conceit, because it shows us an properly different perspective on something we would automatically assume to be wrong or aberrant, yet is their entire modus operandi. This is the way to expand an understanding of a species without diminishing them or giving too much away. As I mentioned back in the review of "In The Flesh" at some point it becomes necessary to deliver more detail on a recurring bad guy because otherwise their return becomes repetitious without delivering any reason for their return (beyond fan service). Since the Borg are more widely used in Voyager, it therefore stands to reason that we're going to get a continued expansion of our knowledge and understanding of them, and this kind of expansion makes a compelling case for their continued use when what we learn about then expands our understanding but doesn't undercut them as a threat.
"Infinite Regress" adds to our knowledge of the Collective with the discovery of the Vinculum at the heart of the Borg cube. Yet, honestly, this is also where this episode falls down a little - we now know the Borg use this device to regulate and suppress the individuality of the drones who get assimilated. OK. That's nice. And...? The emphasis here is a little off - if this were treated as a quick throwaway to get us to Seven's personality crisis that would be fine, but there's just a little too much time spent on lingering over what it is and what it does instead of getting on with telling the real story of Seven's crisis. It doesn't really add anything to our understanding of the Collective at all, apart from something which is just a relatively functional piece of technology. That's a bit of a pity, but don't let it distract you too much from the rest of the episode, because even if everything surrounding the Vinculum was terrible (and it's absolutely not) it would be worth watching this episode for Ryan's performance alone. Yes the sequences in Seven's mind could have been a bit more expansive in their ambition, and yes the Vinculum could have given us a more perceptive insight into the Borg, but even putting these points aside this is still an excellent episode. But watch it for Jeri Ryan, not for the Borg, because that's really what this is all about.
Any Other Business:
• For those interested, the dictionary definition of "vinculum" is either a connective band of tissue, or something which implies unity - so the reason for the use of the word here for the Borg should be quite obvious.
• Yea this is a real tour de force for Ryan, and one of the stand-out performances in the whole of Voyager.
• I didn't mention it in the review, but her scenes here with Naomi are really very sweet, both as the real Seven and as the little-girl personality that takes her over when they play kadis-kot.
• The Quantum Leap mirror trick is, if a touch obvious, generally well used here, but the example where we see the little-girl personality reflect in the kadis-kot game board is beautifully subtle and not emphasised in the way that, say, the Klingon is in Engineering before Seven initiates the mating ritual.
• Both Robert Picardo and Kate Mulgrew appear a bit sleepy in the first half of this episode, though they sharpen up when the script calls for it in the second half.
• It's handy that the bulk of the personalities that manifest themselves are predominantly Alpha Quadrant, though it's nice that Janeway says at one point she spoke to a Krenom scientist about the finer points of temporal mechanics. Whether this is reflective of people that Seven has come into contact with either as a drone or individual, or a budget-saving measure is up for you to decide...
• The Borg Vinculum - green.
• One thing that might have made the scenes inside Seven's mind more effective is if they had stayed in her mind, rather than cutting back to sick bay all the time. While the exploration of her mind is just a funny camera lens and some stock Borg sets at least if we had stuck with it there would be a feeling of increasing disorientation, with the camera never settling and the screaming voices getting lounder and louder. But the constant returns to sick bay undercut this and it does drain a bit of the tension.
• I really like the fact that as soon as Seven is better Voyager doesn't even both finishing its space battle, it just beams the Vinculum off the ship and leaves, which is certainly an unusual conclusion to that kind of battle.
• Seven spends a week regenerating before being declared fit for duty - a nice acknowledgment that an event like this takes time to recover from and it's not all-back-to-normal-then-roll-credit within two minutes of the plot being over.
Season Five, Episode 8 - "Nothing Human"
This has not been a good week for alien design...
Contrivance is a normal, natural part of the writing process. In drama there are always contrivances, but the trick is to make everything look natural, as if one thing flows to another naturally, rather than because of a writerly conceit. The most obvious ongoing contrivance in a show like Star Trek, even before we start talking about transporters or warp drives, is, "how come every episode something exciting happens?" (well, not in "Parturition", but you know what I mean) The correct answer is, "because it's contrived that way" - or in other words, we don't want to watch an episode of Voyager not doing much of anything because that's very boring. You need something to actually happen, whether it's character conflict, or action, or whatever, because nobody wants to sit around watching B'Elanna carrying out warp diagnostics or Chakotay going through crew evaluations for forty-five minutes. It's possible for episodes to play with this - the first half of "Night", for example - but this is really hiding one contrivance behind another, which is the contrivance of the narrator (which is to say, the writer) commenting on the contrivance of something/nothing happening. This is fine if the writer can find a way to integrate this into the ongoing narrative.
Guess what I'm going to criticize "Nothing Human" for? There are two principal contrivances here, neither of which are remotely well integrated into the ongoing narrative. These are: the convenient, strangely well-informed records on Crell Moset, and the probability of This Week's Crewmember having some kind of connection to him. These are dropped into the episode with astonishing clumsiness, which is especially odd given that this is written by Jeri Taylor who, you know, isn't exactly a newcomer. Moset himself is an interesting enough character, and well played by David Clennon, but his inclusion here just makes no sense, so it ends up badly undermining the appearance. There is, frankly, no need to include Cardassians in Voyager - DS9 has more than enough Cardassian material to keep anyone interested in them going, and the sheer contrivance to get him into this story makes the writing look clunky. This isn't one thing naturally flowing into another, in other words, it's, "here's an idea, twist everything to try and get it to work." Well there's just too much twisting here for this to succeed. It could be forgiven, perhaps if this was in service of a better story, but it isn't so it's not. And that's because the second contrivance, having the never-before-seen Tabor have a personal connection to Moset just feels plonked in the middle of the episode as well, without a moment's thought given to how super-convenient this is for the story. As with David Clennon, Jad Mager does a good job with the role, and he's able to convincingly bring across the horror of the Melenge-alike setting that Moset's horrors were meant to have taken place in. But if his appearance and connection just seem episode-convenient it's also very undermining, and no matter how good the performance is (and it is good) there's just no way to compensate for that.
So we have two contrivances, Moset and Tabor. Was there a way to make these two function together in this episode and make it work? Well yes, but it would have to be an episode of Deep Space Nine because that's clearly what "Nothing Human" is shooting for. It's not like it would have been a difficult re-write - swap out the Doctor for Julian, any Bajoran-of-the-week for Tabor, and any cast regular (but let's say... oh, Dax maybe?) to be attacked by an unconvincing rubber alien, and off you go. There's literally no reason this needs to be an episode of Voyager. The ethical considerations that sit at the heart of "Nothing Human" certainly feel more of a piece with DS9 , though in fact these are badly muddled here as well, because the episode clearly wants to say something about ethics and morality but... what? There's something very unclear in what the episode is trying to say, beyond "experimenting on people is bad, mmmkay?". Moset developed a cure for a plague, which relied on unethical experiments on Bajorans. OK, fine. It's a suitably nasty bit of character background for a Cardassian doctor to have. But then... that's not what B'Elanna's suffering from, she's suffering from having a collection of poorly designed pink bladders strapped to her chest. So the cure than Moset and the Doctor come up with here isn't actually anything to do with the plague he developed a cure for. Yes it's upsetting for Tabor to see this walking representation of a criminal striding about sickbay like he owns the place but it doesn't materially affect anything. Indeed fairly soon after the Doctor starts pointing a finger at him Moset points out that it wasn't him that carried out the research the Doctor is so concerned about, and the problem with this argument is that he's correct. Everybody carries on as if this was the real Moset, but it isn't. It's just a hologram. Indeed, why not just change his appearance and have him look like... I don't know, whatever race has the cheapest make-up for this week's obviously low-budget instalment? He doesn't need to look Cardassian at all. The problem with this is not one that comes from picking holes in the logic of the episode so much as why didn't this occur to any of the actual characters in the show. It's incredibly obvious. Because... that's this week's contrivance. It makes everyone look stupid in the service of an ethical debate that has no core to it.
So is there anything remotely successful here? Well actually yes. This is a muddy mess of an episode but all the performances here are strong and the not-affecting-much subplot of Voyager trying to make contact with a species that can't be Universal Translator-ed is always welcome. We haven't seen this since "The Swarm", but it's another welcome acknowledgement that not every species is a member of the bumpy-head brigade and the fact that the creature that takes over B'Elanna is doing it out of self-preservation rather than antagonism gives a pleasingly different motivation. That the alien is quite so unconvincing also undercuts this a bit, but still at least some effort and thought have been put into it. And if the ethical part of the episode is confused then all praise to Robert Picardo and David Clennon for making it look like the exchange between them actually has bite and matters. They're interactions are actually the best bit of the episode by miles - both actors really seem to enjoy getting their teeth into the material and Clennon is genuinely excellent at playing a self-righteous, self-important Cardassian doctor who believes that there is never a price too high to pay in the service of science. It's not strikingly different from any number of unpleasant Cardassians we've met on DS9 but it's delivered with such relish it's hard not to just enjoy it. Really, it's these two that stop the episode becoming a straight-up failure, so we do again see what a difference good casting can make to an otherwise sub-standard episode. To be clear though, this is nothing like the shoddy disaster of "Once Upon A Time", and actually sitting down and watching it means that you get to spent a fairly low key but generally entertaining forty-five minutes in front of the telly. In terms of the way this season is thus far developing, "Nothing Human" also fits in well - all of the episodes, "Night" aside, have focussed on a single character or pair of characters, and given them an episode to do their thing, and this will continue up until "Bride Of Chaotica!", which will return to a more ensemble feel. This has largely been a successful format after the intense focus on Seven during Season Four, and if nothing else "Nothing Human" gives the Doctor and Robert Picardo a real chance to take the spotlight and that's always something that's welcome. At the end of the episode, the Doctor chooses to delete Moset from the database, with the question of whether this was the right thing to do hanging over the closing credits. If it means we don't have to sit through another muddled, clumsily written contrivance like this then, sadly, the answer must be yes.
Any Other Business:
• This is Jeri Taylor's final script for Voyager. She's such a pivotal, influential figure in the series and so important in bringing Voyager's feminist agenda to the fore, it's really sad that she didn't go out on a better episode than this.
• I don't mean to harp on about it, but the alien that attacks B'Elanna really is just awful. It would have looked cheap and unconvincing on TOS.
• There really is something very pleasing about Voyager's attempts to communicate with a properly alien species and the time spent on it, small as it is, also helps to prop this episode up with a genuinely interesting sub-plot.
• Poor Roxann Dawson really drew the short end of the stick this week.
• Those Cardassian sets are looking tired...
• Yea Tabor's inclusion here really is ridiculously contrived, though it's nice to see a Bajoran in the crew, as one of the ex-Maquis. It's a terrible shame they couldn’t have given him just a couple of scenes in an earlier episode just to make his appearance here markedly less convenient, as they did with Durst back in Season One, when he appeared briefly in "Cathexis" before getting killed off in "Faces". That's a much more successful example of how to handle this kind of character inclusion.
• Though saying that, Tabor's inclusion here might be an astonishing co-incidence, but he is at least seen again, in the Season Seven episode "Repression" so at least he doesn't just turn up then is never seen again. Just.
