Star Trek Voyager Reviews Written by Someone Who Actually LIKES the Show! -- Scientific Method

Hi there, and welcome to the latest of my Star Trek Voyager reviews, this one for "Scientific Method," a fun episode with creepy aliens, nice romantic scenes, some great character interaction, and nicely suspenseful climax. What more does a Trekker want? I mean, I got spoilers, I got opinions, I got quotes and music and links, and all the for the low price of $00.00! However, if this doesn't sound like a bargain to you, perhaps you'd rather go to Jennicam.

No? Still here? Happy happy joy joy!

INITIAL VIEWER RESPONSE
Uh, B'Elanna, do you have any idea how you sound? Oh, you do...Well, now the P/Ters can relax...Ew! I didn't wanna see that much of them!...Poor Chakotay...poor Neelix...poor whatever that woman's name is...Ooooooh, that looks funky...Janeway -- You GO, girl!

PLOT
Seven is working in a Jefferies tube when Torres comes along, more than a little irritated. It seems Seven's unauthorized repairs (a la Dalby in "Learning Curve") has been interfering with a warp core diagnostic Engineering has been working on for hours. Seven backs off, but doesn't do so apologetically enough for Torres, who starts to dress her down in fine style.

Then Torres realizes this sounds very familiar, because she was given such a speech once by Janeway. "If I could adjust to Starfleet life," she tells Seven, "so can you."

"Of course," Seven says back, looking gratified. She even apologizes.

Paris gives the Doctor some lame excuse about a conn report and gets out of Sickbay duty for a while. Instead of a conn report, however, he works with the site-to-site transporter and replicator.

Flowers first, he beams into the crawlspace where Torres is working. They flirt a bit and start kissing.

Suddenly they are scanned and appear as skeletons, still kissing, but not showing any skin. Alien data read-outs frame them. This ends, and Torres breaks the kiss, saying she feels that someone is watching them. Bright lipstick on his lips, Paris chalks it up to their illicit smooching, which then continues.

Janeway lies face-down in her quarters getting an extremely vigorous message she's not enjoying from the Doctor. He complains about her work hours and self-neglecting behavior. She describes the headaches she's been having lately: "They're like hot needles driving into my skull."

The Doctor sniffs. "These symptoms are hardly surprising, Captain. You work absurdly long hours under constant stress, eating on the run, without sufficient exercise or rest. Your body is crying out for mercy."

"It certainly is right now," Janeway says, wincing as the Doctor digs into her back with an elbow.

Chakotay calls in with a report that they've reached the source of energy readings Janeway was interested in. The captain leaps off the table and heads for the bridge...then heads back inside when the Doctor points out that she's wearing only a towel.

Later, Chakotay finds the Doctor and calls him every dirty name in the book.

On the bridge, Chakotay shows Janeway a binary pulsar. He talks about what they need to do to collect data, but Janeway -- whose hair is looking frazzled -- isn't really concentrating. Her head hurts -- something you can both from her pained expression and by her messy hair (on Trek, women show distress by having messy hair) -- and she eventually just asks Chakotay to deal with it.

An expectant look on his face, Paris strolls into Engineering, and Torres gets him to follow her to the upper deck, where they start going at it like they're in a drive-in or something. Tuvok comes along with a report for Torres, and Paris chases after him, wanting to know if the security chief will feel obligated to report this "incident." Tuvok is non-committal.

In the turbo-lift, on the way to a command staff meeting, Paris and Torres try to figure out what Tuvok will do and how they can continue to keep their relationship from becoming common knowledge. They agree to be circumspect, and in the middle of their strained, I-am-only-going-to-admit-to-what-you're-admitting-to conversation, Torres sees an opening and goes for it:

"Sounds like you see a future in this."

Paris counters, "I would never be so presumptuous."

"Smooth recovery, Lieutenant."

"I thought so," Paris says.

At the meeting, everyone settles how they'll study the binary pulsar. Torres and Paris can't stop staring at each other. When the meeting is over, in private, a rather pissy Janeway reveals that while Tuvok has said nothing, half the ship knows about their relationship. She snarls, "I expect you to maintain the standard for the rest of the crew, but this adolescent behavior makes me question my faith in you both."

Paris and Torres start to wilt. She tells them to behave. They nod and leave like chastised children.

Alone in his quarters, Chakotay gets some coffee. While he's drinking, that x-ray scan comes back, but this time it has a profound effect. Chakotay drops his coffee cup, and his extended hands shake. He goes to the sink, then looks at himself in the mirror. He draws a hand over his hair...and it comes off.

The Doctor reports to Janeway that Chakotay seems to have aged greatly in only a few hours, suffering everything from bone decalcification to decreased visual acuity. A DNA scan has revealed that his metabolism has been hyper-stimulated, but he has no idea how.

Bald but not beautiful, Chakotay wants to help, but the Doctor confines him to Sickbay and Janeway agrees. Meanwhile, the Doc wants to set up an electron resonance scanner in the science lab to get a closer look. Janeway agrees and starts to go, but when the Doctor asks about her headaches, she snarls at him. Cowed, he looks at her with concern.

In the messhall, Kim gives Paris a combination of admonishment and sympathy when Paris tells him about Janeway's orders to behave better.

Neelix shows up with an offer of scrambled eggs, but Kim would rather have some of that leftover pleeka rind casserole from last night. It would seem his stomach is getting used to interesting times. Neelix, pleased, goes off to find some, then promptly collapses from the shock that someone likes his food.

In Sickbay, Neelix looks like a speckled lizard with a mohawk, and the Doctor realizes some of his Mylean DNA has been hyper-stimulated, just like Chakotay's aging process. The Doctor leaves Paris in charge of Sickbay and heads to the lab for that resonance scan. Paris throws a big party and offers all the women free breast enlargement surgery. Janeway bursts in, snarling and wielding a compression phaser rifle, and tells the reviewer to behave.

Yes, ma'am.

Limping and tensed up, Neelix the Lizard Man and Chakotay the Old Man trade complaints about their ailments. A woman who looks even worse comes in, and Paris gets ready for a crowded Sickbay.

Torres and the Doctor run that scan on Chakotay's DNA and find a sort of tag which is emitting some sort of signal that's too weak to travel far. Torres is about to retune the internal sensors to a phase variance of .15, when the Doctor starts to loose cohesion. Torres sees that someone is trying to delete him, but before she can do much about it, she falls in pain to the floor. Doc alerts the Bridge, then taps in a few commands to the console in front of him before phasing out.

Paris shows Janeway, Kim, and Seven the many patients in Sickbay, including Torres, whose alveoli in her lungs have stopped processing oxygen. Kim reports that the Doctor was trying to transfer himself to Sickbay when "something must have gone wrong."

Suddenly, Seven hears the Doctor's voice. He's tapped into her audio implants so only she can hear him, and needs her to keep from revealing his communication to anyone. He's hiding in the da Vinci simulation in Holodeck Two and needs her to join him. Seven makes an excuse and gets down there.

All dressed up like Mr. Renaissance Painter, the Doctor tells Seven that the tags in the crew's DNA must be causing the mutations. He also tells her that when he and Torres were starting to figure out what was going on, suddenly they were both knocked out of the equation. He thinks they're being watched, so he wants to adjust Seven's Borg sensory nodes to a phase variance of .15. He does, and Seven looks around the holodeck, seeing a lot of glowing green auras, sort of the LSD version of Borg vision, but nothing unusual.

"That's one room down," the Doctor says, "256 to go."

ATTENTION TRIVIA BUFFS! That's 257 rooms on Voyager.

The Doctor tells Seven the frequency he's set aside for them to chat on in private, then sends her out to scan the ship. Seven walks around and sees that many in the crew have stage devices on their bodies. Also, brown-robed aliens are walking around. Seven gets into a turbo-lift and is joined by one such alien, who sticks some sort of probe into her body -- very creepy. She keeps from betraying that she can see anything unusual, and goes into the messhall, where many more aliens are looking over the device-laden crew.

She contacts the Doctor, who sends her to the captain.

Janeway is still having that bad hair day, and stands in a rage before her ready room window. Tuvok enters with a no-news-yet report about the mutations and the doctor, and is about to leave when Janeway starts snarling about how the crew isn't acting properly. They're spending too much time in the holodeck and the messhall. She wants him to "straighten them out."

Tuvok considers this a moment. "Shall I flog them as well?"

Janeway sags and considers that the Doctor may be right. Perhaps she needs a vacation.

Tuvok agrees: "You do seem unsettled."

"Crazed is more like it," she says.

Seven comes in, reporting urgently that she needs to talk with the captain. But then she sees that Janeway is surrounded by those aliens, and has long spikes being driven into her head. She pretends she's only there to get help with the resonance scanner and beats a hasty exit.

Alone with Tuvok, Janeway sits on the sofa, and now, though they are not in the frame, we can "see" the invisible aliens by her side, prodding her with their cruel spikes, "When this mutation crisis is over," she says quietly, "I think I'll spend a few days in Renaissance Tuscany. There's a little inn
outside Sienna I've been wanting to try."

"I will join you," says Tuvok, "for a glass of wine."

Janeway looks very touched, and puts her hand on his before rubbing her abused forehead once again.

Seven tells the Doctor she's seen fifty-six aliens on the ship, and there may be more. She wants to use a phaser on the aliens to make them visible, but the Doctor wants something that won't give the aliens a chance to retaliate. He wants her to knock out the genetic tags with a neuroleptic shock which, while painful, would not be disabling.

Seven goes to Engineering and begins the process for creating the shockwave, but Tuvok sees what she's up to and wants her to stop. When she doesn't comply with his orders over the conn to stop, he shows up in person. The aliens are crowding around Tuvok as he wishes to know why she is trying to create this harmful energy discharge, and Seven's fearful eyes give her away. Finally, she grabs Tuvok's phaser and fires at one of the aliens, bring the alien into phase. Seven grabs the alien woman and takes her to the captain.

Janeway goes down to the brig and talks...well, snarls some more, actually, at the alien woman while Seven and Tuvok work on making the aliens visible and/or disabling the genetic tags.

"Who are you?" Janeway asks the alien woman. "And what the hell are you doing to my crew"

The alien woman is very calm, and explains that she and her team are scientists who have been conducting experiments on the crew for several weeks. She claims not to like making people suffer, but "sometimes it's a necessary part of [her] work." One day what she learns on the ship may help cure some physical or mental disease.

Janeway is more than a little appalled at all this, but the alien woman says calmly that she and Janeway are very much alike, and Janeway would be sympathetic to her position, were she in her shoes.

Turning off the forcefield to get a little closer, Janeway sneers at this argument, pointing out (or panting out, if you prefer, she really isn't doing too well at this point) that her people don't use other people as subjects in experiments. "What you're doing isn't self-defense," she growls. "It's the exploitation of another species for your own benefit."

The alien woman responds with cool smugness, describing how impressed she and her fellow scientists are with Janeway's self-control. "We've been increasing your dopamine levels, stimulating various aggressive impulses to test your behavioral restraints. There's been a great difference of opinion about how much more strain you can bear."

"Not much," Janeway warns, then launches herself at her ship's tormentor. She reigns herself in, dangit, and tells this most unwelcome guest that "These lab rats are fighting back."

The alien woman says that won't work, as she has control of the situation. She assures Janeway "that the fatality rate will be minimal, though there may be some deformities."

"Oh," Janeway says. "Well, okay then."

Well, actually, she says that's not acceptable, and the alien woman says that if she doesn't cooperate, "Then the entire experiment and its subjects will be terminated."

Janeway and company are trying to figure out how to disable the DNA tags, or get the aliens on their sensors or something, when the Doctor (currently watching Janeway in great concern while her head seems to throb in pain) gets an emergency call to the bridge.

The blonde woman on the floor is wearing gold, but she gets the old "red shirt" fate, while her system completely collapses from whatever the aliens have done to her. Janeway tries CPR, but the Doctor explains she's brain dead (the woman, not Janeway).

Now Janeway is mad.

Very, very mad.

She relives the pilot (not Paris, I guess he's down in Sickbay) and takes the helm herself, flying the ship directly into those double pulsars. Seven announces that one of the aliens has entered the bridge. Janeway seems pleased.

Tuvok warns that they're going to get caught in the pulsars' gravity. When Janeway wants to continue, he comments, "This is a far more reckless course of action than I've come to expect from you, Captain."

Janeway replies, "It certainly is."

Kim works on the structural integrity field, but the ship is in danger of collapsing.

The alien on the bridge becomes visible and sneers at Janeway's attempt to play chicken with them. Janeway makes it quite clear she's not playing, and that the course has been locked in. When the alien woman complains that this is irrational, Janeway counters that increasing her dopamine levels and keeping her from sleeping while she suffered from a monster headache hasn't exactly encouraged her to act in a rational fashion.

The alien woman tries to bluster through this, but she's no match for Janeway on a self-destruct course, and soon retreats. Two leech-like alien ships disengage from Voyager's hull. One is destroyed by the stress (hooray!). Janeway takes it full-throttle, and Voyager goes through the binary pulsar system and out the other side.

While everyone sighs in relief, Janeway comments, "I never realized you thought of me as 'reckless,' Tuvok."

"A poor choice of words," Tuvok says calmly. "It was clearly an understatement."

All goes back to normal, and Torres and Paris are enjoying salads and wine in his quarters. She tells Engineering not to bother her with a problem in the plasma manifold (which turns out to have unfortunate consequences which involve a series of explosions and the deaths of eighteen crewmembers, but that's love for you). Paris in turn shoos away Harry Kim.

It occurs to them that their recent spate of hormonal overdrive might have something to do with the aliens. Maybe their entire relationship is nothing more than a by-product of the experiment.

Sure.

Discussing all these possibilities with lust shining in their eyes, they kiss a lot.