Star Trek 484: Persistence of Vision

484. Persistence of Vision

FORMULA: Sub Rosa + Night Terrors + Where No One Has Gone Before

WHY WE LIKE IT: The shot of Vulcan.

WHY WE DON'T: The gross horror make-up. The ending.

REVIEW: One of the things I found distasteful about Voyager when it originally aired (and still do) is how they tried to make it more edgy by using gratuitous sex and gore. This episode has a touch of sex (we'll come back to that), but it's the gross, foaming make-up effects that are really disgusting. Horror is always scarier when it's in your imagination, and moving from the gothic horror tropes of this episode's early scenes to the Fangoria stuff at the end is definitely a tonal mistake.

The story uses (I think for the last time) Janeway's holonovel. It's clear her nerves are frayed (though she habitually snaps at and ignores Neelix and the Doctor, so that's not really a clue) and for a minute, you might actually believe she's hallucinating due to stress. Except it's Star Trek, so you know there's an alien influence at work. The explanation about malfunctioning holo-emitters sending parts of her program all over the ship might have been more original, I don't know (in the fight between alternate reality and holodeck malfunction, there is no clear winner).

The Bothan xenophobe(s) eventually get(s) to everyone except the Doctor, and in a sense, it makes this episode Voyager's Naked Time/Now. Not quite as entertaining a way to do it, but it still gives us tidbits about the characters' inner lives, what matters to them. Unfortunately, there's a lot of self-evident things in here, such as Paris' oft-mentioned father, Janeway's boyfriend, and Libby. The only revelation is B'Elanna's crush on Chakotay, which comes out of the blue a little bit, and IS NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN! What a waste.

And then there's that ending. I'm fine with Kes surviving to the end, what with her mental powers and all, but I'm just not sure how to interpret what comes next. The alien, who may or may not have been working alone, gets defeated, but then isn't really there. Then how was he pushing buttons while Kes was incapacitated? It's played as a ghost story to the end, with thoroughly unsatisfying results.

LESSON: The love that dare not speak its name is between a half-Klingon and an Native American.

REWATCHABILITY - Low: Maddening unanswered questions, and the only scene of note gets ignored for the rest of the series. Might as well think of this one as another episode that didn't happen.