465. PhageFORMULA: Ethics + Spock's Brain + Life Support
WHY WE LIKE IT: The Vidiians are interesting...
WHY WE DON'T: ...but I'm not sure we want to look at them.
REVIEW: The Vidiians make their first appearance as a race that has been struggling for millenia (why does every culture have to dwarf ours in age, anyway?) with a flesh-warping disease called the phage. At first, they're mysterious boogeymen, using holographic hiding places and false deuterium lures, as well as silly funhouse mirrors in the interior of an asteroid. But they are later revealed as sympathetic, desperate beings who count on one another to do unspeakable things.
The whole idea of organ harvest is as gruesome as the Vidiians are grotesque, but it's well handled here. They're not one-dimensional villains, and the crew is allowed to deal with one of their victims before it's all fixed. Of course, the EMH's science may be just as mad as the Vidiians'. They may be able to integrate any organ into their systems, but the Doctor's solution is to create holographic lungs for Neelix. That's pretty incredible. Still, they don't go too far with it, and it becomes the equivalent of spending the rest of your life in an iron lung.
Neelix, presented as the most lively of men, is essentially dead by his standards, and one can't help but empathize with his claustrophobia and powerlessless. The episode makes a good point of showing him as an ever active member of the crew. His kitchen makes its first appearance, and it's a crazy place full of colors and smells. So he didn't ask Janeway's permission, so what? What the galley does is remind us that the crew "roughing it", something too often forgotten by the show's creators. His relationship with Kes is obviously important to him, though we don't know how physical it is (or was), shown as jealousy over Paris here. There was a telling quick look in Parallax, but now it's full-blown and ugly.
The Doctor's ingenuity and Neelix's liveliness are the focus of the episode, but Janeway gets a good turn too as entirely empathetic to the Vidiians. I'm not sure when she turns into an unreasonable hardass - as my memory would have it - but I definitely like her as a compassionate, even motherly, captain. Kes is also sympathetic, not only because she gives up a lung for Neelix, but because she's already championning the Doctor's cause. To her, he's a person. It's something to explore. Some foreshadowing: "Are you programmed to sing?" Oh, and Seska's now wearing gold, building on B'Elanna's little team down in engineering.
LESSON: Beauty is only skin deep. Your organs are a bit deeper in however.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: A premise that's better than its genealogy would seem to allow, though the Doctor's science is probably as mad as the Vidiians'.
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