Star Trek: VOY Reviews - From Start to Suicide!

If the only serious problem you had with Once Upon a Time was beaming out a whole shuttle, why only 3 stars?

I'm reading these reviews just for the humour. Very good.

Eh, maybe the flashbacks to seeing an aging Majel Barrett in a hot tub got to me.

Timeless reminds me:If there was one big improvement that TPTB seemed to learn from for VOY to carry over to ENT, it was the l;ack of the reset button. Considering the existence of the TCW and all that Suliban time travel bullshit, we should be damn lucky we only got that plot once.

IIRC, a major point was that their jury-rigged QSD used a rare element that was unstable. They had enough to make the trip home in one burst, but it would likely have decayed if they slowed the journey by making short hops and then recalibrating the drive.

Plus Future Harry's message probably put them off the idea.

Starfleet probably will develop the tech further now Voyager's back, though... possibly using it to make a big jump to a frontier area then exploring via conventional warp?

This is happening right now in the -- mostly rather good -- Pocket novels.

I recall outraging some people over at TBBS when suggesting Neelix may have been a paedophile. He was besotted with Kes, who was 2 years old, spent more time with Naomi than her own mother, "took care" of the Borg kids when Seven was not around, and left Voyager for a Talaxian boy. But he claimed he really fancied his mother and wanted to live among other Talaxians. Sure you did, Neelix.

Whatever happened to Naomi's mother anyway? They kept the kid and never asked the mother back after, what, two episodes? It was just disturbing that this little parentless kid was wandering around the ship.

In a way, she's an allegory for the entire Voyager series.

You should post this in the Voyager forum on TBBS.

EDIT: shit, I can't read this morning. You did post this.

Infinite Regress
I take it back. This is the high point in Jeri Ryan's career.

She's stomping around the ship like Robert Beltran realizing his career is over, and eventually storms into the mess hall. She starts grabbing up meat and tearing it apart with her teeth. When she glimpses her reflection, it is of a Klingon, not a blonde that Brannon Braga has put his penis inside of.

Voyager soon stumbles across a vast debris field, and analysis soon shows that it's the result of a Borg vessel colliding with an Anomaly of the Week. Janeway urges caution (don't worry, in a few episodes, she'll have switched back into crazy mode), but they start scavenging supplies.

Amongst the debris is a Borg Vinculum, which essentially routes the thoughts of the collective aboard a Borg vessel. Seemingly ignoring Janeway's directive to leave things the fuck alone, they bring it aboard to ostensibly deactivate it.

However, Seven's erratic behavior soon becomes more obvious, most notably when she attempts to initiate Klingon mating rituals with Torres in Engineering. No, Baba, put it away, they don't make out, Seven just bites her, spawning countless ill-advised fanfictions. After escaping, she goes to Naomi and plays a board game with her, all the while acting like a little girl. And finally, when they catch up to her, she's switched into full-on Ferengi, trying to buy almost all of the ship. After restraining her in sickbay, a Starfleet crew member takes over, and describes heading to Wolf 359.

They soon discover that the vinculum is routing thousands of repressed personalities through Seven, and with increasing frequency, they bubble to the surface. As Torres works to deactivate the vinculum, Tuvok mind-melds with Seven in an attempt to quiet the voices (which she is screaming about constantly - at least it isn't the guttural howl of Jennifer Lien). Tuvok follows Seven through a Cube in her mind, filled with countless thousands assimilated (amusingly, we even see an assimilated Voth, as if we needed a reminder of Distant Origin).

Just before the victims are about to throw her into an abyss, Tuvok saves her, and Torres shuts down the vinculum once and for all.

This episode presents an interesting quandary, because while it demonstrates that Jeri Ryan really isn't that bad of an actress, the entire thing was just embarrassing to watch. It was a directionless hodge-podge of shit, and it was probably the most obvious beginning of one of the worst problems of Voyager.

Remember how, on TNG, Data worked flawlessly almost all of the time, and if he didn't, it was serious business (well, until Insurrection, anyway, then it's just time for a Gilbert & Sullivan sing-along). Voyager, however, was apparently not content with one crew member for whom technology could go catastrophically awry. The Doctor functioned in a similar role in the early seasons of Voyager, albeit with slightly less finesse. Then they shoehorn in Seven of Nine, who also malfunctions, but unlike the Doctor, her malfunctions almost always result in an eye-rollingly bad episode (oh, just wait until The Voyager Conspiracy). Of course, the Doctor's malfunction episodes from here out aren't much better.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -13/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 10
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 10

Nothing Human
Back on Demon, I talked about how I came back to Star Trek. I had watched some of it as a kid, but my folks stopped watching near the end of TNG, IIRC, and so I didn't recall very much of it. Though, hell, I saw Star Trek IV in theatres - yes, my parents took me to a movie when I was a baby, much to UA's chagrin. Don't worry, they never did it again.

Anyway, the first episode of TNG I saw after losing the faith, so to speak, was TNG's Ethics. For those who don't remember from RTM's reviews, basically, Worf takes a cargo drum to the back like a bitch, and then a doctor with questionable morals assists Dr. Crusher at Captain Picard's behest. It's a pretty decent episode.

So, naturally, it wasn't safe from Voyager ripping it off and tossing it in a pan of DS9-flavored Shake-And-Bake before spitting it out again for our 'enjoyment.' Having baked any moisture and flavor out of it, it's a decent, but unremarkable episode.

So, basically, most of the senior staff are listening to a presentation the Doctor is giving about reproductive systems, and it's as groanworthy as that one Churchill Films sex ed video where the kid pops a boner during his class portrait because he's standing next to a girl he has a thing for, then pulls a Wesley Crusher and messes up his sheets that night after dreaming about this girl inexplicably giving birth - yeah, it's perfectly normal to get off on the miracle of birth.

I digress, but it's more interesting than this episode. Harry and Chuckles are on the bridge being dicks and refusing to issue a fake red alert to get the rest of the senior staff out of the Doctor's lecture. I will say this - it's probably one of the more genuine funny moments in the show. Anyway, they discover a derelict alien spacecraft with a single occupant, so they call everyone to the bridge, much to the Doctor's chagrin. Janeway decides to beam the lifeform to sickbay for treatment.

The Doctor soon makes the startling discovery that the thing that looks like a giant Ceti Alpha V eel is actually sentient. Torres reports in to take a look at the creature to try to get a better understanding of how it flew the vessel. Eventually, she determines that it accomplished this via chemical secretions. Eew.

The creature, however, is not content with the Doctor's photonic company. It leaps through the containment field and latches itself onto Torres in a rather permanent fashion, and starts pulling a Facehugger - attempts to remove it will kill Torres, and it's using her for sustenance and bodily functions while it heals.

Baffled by this creature, the Doctor decides to call in an expert. He and Harry come up with a supplementary hologram, based on a famous exobiologist. Harry expresses surprise when the doctor is actually a Cardassian, but thinks nothing more of it after the guy is relatively pleasant.

Of course, when Torres hears about her new doctor, she isn't thrilled, and says that she'd rather die than be treated by a Cardassian. And other Voyager crew aren't happy with his presence aboard. After all, he's Crell Mosset, the Josef Mengele of the Cardassian occupation. At least, that's what the Bajorans aboard claim, accusing him of performing some less-than-ethical treatments on unwilling patients, vivisection, etc., etc.

Weighing the ethical considerations, Janeway comes to a decision - they need a chief engineer more than they need to make a bunch of whiny Bajorans happy, so she orders the procedure that Crell develops to go ahead, against Torres' wishes. So yeah, back to crazy. Just wait until she tells Harry that he can't lose his space virginity!

While the procedure begins, however, the alien's compatriots arrive and begin attacking the ship, especially when Crell begins cutting into the creature. The Doctor realizes that he's specifically operating towards the fastest possible completion, rather than the one that'd cause the creature the least amount of pain - in fact, he realizes that the procedure will probably kill the alien. He and Crell have a reasonably good philosophical debate, and Crell points out that a great deal of the Doctor's program was based upon exactly the sort of research that Crell performed. The Doctor takes over the surgery, and successfully separates Torres and the creature.

Torres is unhappy, but she understands. Janeway, meanwhile, leaves Crell up to the Doctor, stating that it's his decision if the benefit of having a renowned exobiologist aboard outweighs his penchant for poisoning old men and filleting living beings. Crell makes a passionate argument for his continued existence, but the Doctor, wracked with guilt over even consulting with the man, despite his having saved Torres' life, deletes the Crell program.

I don't know if B&B thought they could just co-opt the Bajoran/Cardassian conflict since DS9 was basically now in the business of ejaculating space battles onto the screen one week and shitty holodeck episodes the next during this season, but they did a pretty shallow job of it. I even remember watching it and thinking, "They just ripped off that episode of TNG", and a middle schooler's tastes are not that discerning. On the whole, though, it wasn't a particularly bad episode - it just paled in comparison to what it tried to rip off.

Oh, and they teased us with Tom saying something like "We're in the Delta Quadrant, who would know?" regarding simply killing the creature - as if Voyager had the balls.

Rating: **
Torpedoes remaining: -13/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 10
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 10

^
I'd give it 3 stars. It made a solid effort to address a real world subject.

I bet that Voyager episode spent more time wrestling with its moral than the US science programs absorbing Nazi scientists.

How does that even make sense? Everything that hologram would have known would have to be in the ships computer so they could have just as easily created a copy of the EMH loaded with that specific medical knowledge.

Actually, how does it even make sense for an EMH to have medical knowledge that is in the computer banks omitted from its program?

It would have earned three stars if it wasn't a blatant rehash of Ethics with poorly applied Cardassian and Bajoran stickers stolen from DS9.

I believe that this was actually addressed in the episode as the Doctor replied to Tom Paris freaking out. Basically, the rationale was that there were certain fringe topics that the Doctor was only given a basic knowledge of, especially considering that it would be extremely unlikely for an EMH to ever be a primary physician on such a case. That way, the program would simply have less nominally-relevant information to sort through and discard when making diagnoses.

And I think there was some bullshit about the personality of the physician, but let's face it, the Holodeck is already magic when it comes to personality interpolation.

Nah.... Ethics was about assisted suicide and shady doctors pushing
questionably "cures" to advance their own careers.

This was about Nazis and stuff, and maybe the ethics of experimenting on animals, depending on how you feel about the Bajorans.

I believe that this was actually addressed in the episode as the Doctor replied to Tom Paris freaking out. Basically, the rationale was that there were certain fringe topics that the Doctor was only given a basic knowledge of, especially considering that it would be extremely unlikely for an EMH to ever be a primary physician on such a case. That way, the program would simply have less nominally-relevant information to sort through and discard when making diagnoses.

And I think there was some bullshit about the personality of the physician, but let's face it, the Holodeck is already magic when it comes to personality interpolation.[/quote]
Voyagers computer created a personality for holo-Moset the same way the Enterprise computer created one for holo-Leah Brahms.

I think it's also implied that the doctor is a completely independent system outside of the Voyager computer (well sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't). He couldn't interact with the computer with his own program, meaning uploading a med file into the computer core didn't make the doctor instantly know it. We seeing him doing research in his office a few times. It makes a fair amount of sense because we'd expect most emergency-use equipment to be independent systems.

I also sometimes got the impression his program had its own hardware in sickbay.

Nothing Human was complete garbage and I have reviewed it before.

http://wordforge.net/showthread.php?t=45982&highlight=voyager

For simplicity's sake, I'll repost my original post here, but that thread had some interesting discussion and is worth looking at again.

Yeah, didn't care much for this one.

As Kyle said, it was basically VOY trying and failing to tell a TNG/DS9 type story.

Nothing Human killed baby seals.

30 Days
Janeway demotes Tom and sends him off to the Brig for a month. This implies that, for once, someone's actions had consequences aboard the Good Ship Lollypop, and we're about to see that they're...well...Janeway does worse shit than this most of the time.

Voyager stumbles across a rogue planet that appears to be entirely covered in water. On closer examination, it isn't a planet at all, but just a ball of water floating in space, held together with a containment field. Tom's immediately interested, because fuck, if he's going to be a whore for 20th century pop culture, might as well make him a nautical buff too.

It turns out that the sphere is called The Waters (oh, original, Kenneth Biller), and is owned by the Moneans, who spend their entire lives in ships beneath the water's surface. The Moneans had previously been nomadic, but eventually found The Waters abandoned, and decided to set up shop.

But not all is well in paradise. The technology driving the containment field is beginning to degrade, and water is escaping into space. Tom enthusiastically volunteers Voyager's services, and Janeway gets pissed off about it - as if she was going to do anything fucking differently. She seemed to be more angry that he stole her thunder than anything else. What a bitch.

Eventually, some Monean scientists and Tom come up with a plan. The Monean ships can't descend deep enough to track down the generator. This is immediately a WTF, because they fucking live here. They've lived in The Waters for hundreds of years, and they never bothered figuring out how to take their ships down to the center of the thing? Lazy assholes. Anyway, Tom suggests that the Delta Flyer's enhanced shields could be quickly modified to convert it to a submersible.

Diving into the vast ocean, Tom, Seven, Harry, and one of the Monean scientists descend towards the center. Tom looks like a kid in a candy store the entire time. Voyager discovers, meanwhile, that the ocean is dissipating at a much faster rate than the Moneans expected - they have, at most, five years remaining, largely due to the stress their oxygen refineries have put on The Waters. And, of course, the Moneans don't want to do things differently, and want to keep killing the ocean. Way to send an environmental message, Voyager. Never mind that it doesn't make any goddamn sense because there is nothing replenishing the oxygen supply here. Either they're extracting new oxygen from the water, which would mean that The Waters would eventually dry up anyway, or they're pulling some Federation science nonsense and have systems that somehow convert CO2 to oxygen, in which case, they wouldn't need the refineries.

Upon approaching the center of the planet, the Flyer encounters a giant generator that is at least 100,000 years old. Sure, 100,000, why not - a good, mystical, awe-inspiring number. And then a giant eel attacks the ship. Seven hits it with phasers, but the eel has already sent an electric shock through the vessel, disabling many systems and springing a few leaks.

And then they recharge the generator with the Flyer's fuel cells and somehow this causes them to rise to the surface. Who knows what the fuck.

Anyway, after discovering the Moneans aren't planning to do anything to stop the Waters' destruction, Tom decides to take matters into his own hands after talking with Torres on the holodeck in the Captain Proton simulation (why the fuck was that necessary?). He contacts the Monean scientist he worked with and they quickly steal the Flyer, intent on using it to disable the oxygen refineries.

Janeway realizes what he's doing and contacts the Moneans to get them to evacuate the refineries. She orders phasers to stop the Flyer, but apparently, they'd fuck up the ocean or something, so Tuvok recommends a torpedo be used as a depth charge. Seven seemed to be able to use the phasers without fucking up the ocean, so, uh, what the fuck?

Voyager fires one torpedo, and the Flyer fires another (though one of the special Borg ones Seven made for the Flyer, so it won't count against them in the torpedo count), directly at the refineries. The two torpedoes collide, knocking the Flyer offline.

And that brings us back to the beginning of the episode, with Janeway demoting Tom and throwing him in the brig. Of course, interspersed throughout the episode was Tom writing a letter about all of this to his father, and different Voyager crew members basically taunting him with life outside of the cell. Also, the Delaney Sisters showed up in this one - they did not disappoint.

What this episode lacked in science or, occasionally, common sense, it made up for with a sense of scope. This is really one of the first episodes of modern Trek to really take advantage of CG to create a truly alien atmosphere, and the effects still stand up pretty well. Additionally, rather than simply having Tom get promoted back right away, they stuck with his demotion for a good long while - the episode actually had consequences.

And apparently there's a Federation Naval Patrol. Sounds totally fucking unnecessary if you ask me - glad to hear that Ted Stevens is still alive and kicking in the 24th century.

Rating: ***
Torpedoes remaining: -14/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 10
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 10

Counterpoint
Boy howdy, you know what we haven't had much of on Voyager? Yep, that's right, Janeway getting her panties moist over some hilariously inappropriate beau.

Voyager's traveling through Devore space, a massive region strictly policed by the exceptionally powerful race. Voyager is no match for their ships, but cannot realistically plot a course around, so they put up with inspection after inspection. And, because the Devore are bigoted towards telepaths, the Betazed and Vulcan crew members aboard are put in transporter suspension (a nice reference to Relics, at the very least) so that they won't be captured and sent off to be gassed with any Jews that the Devore might find aboard the ship as well .

This inspection, however, is lead by Kashyk, a somewhat flippant Devore intendant. Who is named after the fucking Wookie homeworld. Yes, I know, that's Kashyyyk, but they're pronounced practically the same way. Fucking hell. Anyway, he delights in tormenting Janeway, but it's clear they have something of an unsteady rapport. After being convinced yet again that there are no telepaths aboard, Kashyk and his men return to their ship and send Voyager back on its course.

Oh, and Voyager's shuttling a bunch of telepathic refugees through Devore space. Yeah, way to respect their laws and customs, Janeway. I could see it for your crew, but you should have taken these refugees and left them outside of Devore space. Anyway, the refugees contact a trader who can get them directions to a wormhole that will take them out of Devore space.

Soon, however, a small Devore ship shows up, piloted solely by Kashyk. He tells Janeway that he wants to defect, and desires asylum. She's initially suspicious, but after he demonstrates a number of potential traps on the route to the trader's hideout, she starts to soften towards him. Sensing that she hasn't been laid in a long time, he even rolls out a story about how he decided to defect after discovering a young telepathic girl he discovered during an inspection, and sending her off to the internment camp. Seeing that he was clearly wracked with guilt, Janeway, at this point, would probably let him do any number of degrading things to her, but she plays it cool.

The trader gives them directions to the wormhole, and Kashyk helps her sneak through a Devore sensor net as he tells her that he wants to stay on Voyager. Now, Janeway is practically imagining just how he'll be inverting her tachyon pulses, but Voyager is suddenly detected. Kashyk gets in his shuttle and offers to trick the Devore into thinking he's still working for them, and they kiss passionately before he leaves.

When he arrives with his boarding party, he again takes Janeway's ready room. While there, she tells him about the exact location of the wormhole, and that a specially crafted torpedo will help hold it open long enough for Voyager to get through.

And, of course, he thanks her and immediately tells his friends - he was playing her like a fiddle. He even takes delight in telling her that sending that little girl off to the camps was the right thing to do. However, he soon discovers that he, too, has been played - the location Janeway had given him wasn't a wormhole after all - it was stray warp emissions. From two shuttlecraft that the refugees had taken through the wormhole, firing two torpedos to keep the damn thing open. Bested, Kashyk lets Voyager go, with Janeway clearly emo that her inertial dampers remain inoperative.

Rating: *
Torpedoes remaining: -16/38 (and since when could normal shuttlecraft fire photon torpedoes?)
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 12 (well, Voyager ain't getting 'em back, at least)
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 10

Oh yeah, a couple more things...
The original plot for this episode was going to revolve around Seven, and have her take a shuttle full of refugees to neutral space after they were forced out of their hiding places in the ship's landing struts. Apparently we needed an awkward romance more than reasonable character development for Seven and another bitchin' landing sequence.

And I've got to say, this episode makes me seriously question the taste of our friends across the pond. For BBC's Star Trek Night a few years back, each of the then-four lead captains selected an episode as their favorite. Shatner picked The City on the Edge of Forever, Stewart inexplicably chose In Theory, Brooks went with Far Beyond The Stars, and because Kate Mulgrew apparently thought "You're So Vain" really was about her, she picked this episode. And the BBC viewers voted. And they picked this episode. YOU ARE WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.

That's great. Counterpoint is probably my favorite Voyager episode, and I was almost certain you'd give it four stars. Cheers

I think you're being unnecessarily harsh on Counterpoint. I thought it was pretty clear Janeway was playing him the whole time. I'd have given it a ***.

See, I could believe that of Picard. I could definitely believe that of Sisko. Kirk, fuck yeah, he pulled that shit all the time. But Janeway? The character is so poorly, inconsistently written that it's far too easy to see her as barely making it through this one by the skin of her teeth. At best, she was simply paranoid.

At least Mr. Wookie Homeworld isn't a projection of the cover of a dime store romance novel, though.

I'd be willing to kick it up to two stars, but I simply can't in good conscience claim that it was a good episode.

I remember the BBC vote evening in question (and thoroughly disagreed with the outcome, so don't blame all Brits!)... I think part of the problem if you look at the episodes presented are that three of them are very unconventional episodes... one is a hallucinated vision-quest type of thing on behalf of Sisko, which mandates that the casual viewer know all his backstory, another is a love story episode for Kirk where the main characters are trapped in the past and the third is Pinocchio attempting to be a real boy with a hot blonde. Apart from In Theory, there's very little "Star" in the "Trek", whereas Counterpoint is what folks expect from Trek these days - a starship crew bumping into aliens of the week, stuff happens.

Mulgrew's introduction to the ep made it clear that her take on it was that Janeway was indeed playing the guy throughout... BUT also hoping that he might be genuine in his reformation and hence disappointed at the end. Viewed through that lens, Janeway comes off as a much smarter (but still lonely) figure, so I can see why some might have enjoyed the episode.

Personally, I think they should have gone for Janeway/Chuckles. Apart from giving Beltran something to DO rather than toke on his peyote-tricorder, it would have been a departure from Trek convention - that the Captain never gets it on with a member of the senior staff (unless alien mindfuckery/alternate universes come into play).

Perhaps the writer was a fan of Polanski.

It's not really rape-rape if it's an alien. Right?

Latent Image
Apparently, the crew has been letting the Doctor indulge in dubious hobbies in the name of medicine again. I guess they didn't learn their lesson when he showed them porn of Species 8472 getting it on a few episodes ago. This time around, he's holographically imaging the crew's physiology using special filters on his camera. This way, he can strip them down to the bones, organs, musculature, and flesh (fucking perv) whenever he wants, ostensibly to aid in diagnoses, but I think he really just wants to see naked chicks.

Anyway, he does the procedure to Harry, and discovers scarring on the base of his skull - scarring that indicates that he performed the procedure. Harry doesn't remember it, and neither does the Doctor.

However, when he tries to get the attention of Janeway, Torres, or even Harry to take a look at his program to figure out why he can't remember it, it seems like nobody's got the time of day for him. I don't know what'd be more confusing, that they'd happily indulge him in trivialities, or that they'd ignore the important stuff.

However, he soon enlists Seven's help, and they discover that photos had been deleted off of the Doctor's holographic camera. They depict an away mission on a shuttlecraft, and an ensign neither Seven nor the Doctor recognizes. Seven has an excuse - the events were from before she was aboard. But the Doctor's lapse in memory is not so easily accounted for.

Seven soon discovers that his memory of the events of that period are still intact, but the program has been rewritten to simply skip over them. So she restores them, and the Doctor soon starts experiencing them out of order.

A birthday party, the away mission, all seeming to revolve around this Ensign. And the away mission soon goes terribly awry, as an alien boards the shuttlecraft and shoots both Harry and the ensign something going terribly wrong on a shuttlecraft (oh gee, surprise. And McCoy seriously thought this shit was safer than the transporter?).

The Doctor and Seven notify Janeway, who immediately orders Tuvok to begin looking for evidence of the events and perform security sweeps to see if this ensign is still aboard. But the Doctor is paranoid, and fearing the deletion of the memories again, he sets his holoimager to take a photo if anyone tried to modify his program. After deactivating himself, and reactivating himself, he finds a new image waiting for him. The person is slowly reconstructed - bone, organs, musculature, skin, command red, and that so-much-better-than-the-bun hairstyle of our favorite psychopath. Janeway modified his program. She's behind all of it.

So he goes to the bridge and accuses everyone of conspiring against him. Janeway takes him to her ready room and explains that he had to be denied the memories - they caused a conflict in his programming that could not be rectified. She informs him that she and Torres will be carrying out the procedure again, as a functioning Doctor aboard is necessary to Voyager's survival.

Upon hearing about the procedure, Seven demands to speak with Janeway, and accuses her of denying the Doctor the individuality that she granted to Seven. Janeway counters, saying that the Doctor is more like a replicator than a person, and that if a replicator goes berzerk (and I'm amazed that hasn't been a part of more storylines, let me tell you), it is repaired. Seven then mentions that she is part machine, and wonders if she too will someday receive such caring treatment. She wonders if Janeway is really an appropriate model for the concept of 'humanity.' And I've got to give credit where credit is due, this is actually a pretty damn good scene.

Relenting somewhat, Janeway offers to let the Doctor experience fully the events of that day. He agrees, and we get to be filled in. Essentially, the ensign was apparently a well-liked member of Voyager's crew (so much so that the Senior staff felt the need to throw her a fancy birthday party - the only real 'WTF?' moment of the episode). When she, the Doctor, and Harry went on an away mission, an alien beamed aboard, shot everyone, then beamed out again. The Doctor was fine, but Harry and the ensign were in critical condition, bleeding all over the upholstery. In Sickbay, both Harry and the ensign have equally bad chances of survival, so the Doctor makes a decision - he decides to focus on and stabilize only one patient. He picks Harry. The ensign dies.

The conflict in his program is now perfectly clear - his software cannot reconcile that his choice was based solely on friendship and no other legitimate criteria. We then see a memory of him flipping out in the Mess Hall as the ethical portions of his program clash with the reasoning sections - indeed, this would have never been a tested condition for the software, as the EMH was never expected to make friends.

Before beginning the procedure, Janeway talks to Seven once more, and asks her whether she regretted being separated from the Collective - she stated that she preferred her individuality. So Janeway decides to give the Doctor the same chance. The senior staff go through shifts just sitting and talking with him as he tries to work it out in the Holodeck, apparently leaving Tom in charge of Sickbay. After some self-serving existential nonsense, he realizes that Janeway, his watch for the moment, is sick - he recommends she get herself to sickbay, and that he'll be fine on his own. His program managed to reconcile itself after all.

In the previous misadventure with a malfunctioning Seven of Nine, I said that the Doctor's future malfunctions wouldn't be handled particularly well, but I've got to take it back on this one - this is actually a damn good episode, and it stands on its own (even though I vaguely recall something similar with Data from TNG). Robert Picardo and Jeri Ryan really make this episode.

Rating: ****
Torpedoes remaining: -16/38
Shuttlecraft destroyed: 12
Failed endings to the three-hour tour: 10

"that if a replicator goes berzerk (and I'm amazed that hasn't been a part of more storylines, let me tell you),"

Stargate would have sued.

Sickbay's internal sensors should have told the Doctor that Harry was lying about not remembering the procedure. Data could tell when people were most likely lying by a sudden increase in heart rate and pupil dilation.