Revulsion
[Sorry, I've been real busy this semester, and thus late with all my reviews. A review of the whole DS9 War with the Dominion 6-episode arc is in the works...]
This is one odd little episode. The A and B stories are completely unrelated, but that's not the problem. And the B story works moderately well as a B story (more on that later). The A story, though, about the homicidal maniac hologram, is just a stumper. I have no idea what the heck the writers were thinking about setting the story up as they did.
As soon as the episode begins, we see that the hologram guy is a homicidal maniac, and has offed his living crew. The problem is, the rest of the episode is set up as a "suspenseful thriller", out of which all the suspense has been destroyed the second the show began. We know the guy's a nut; this renders pretty much all the rest of the scenes with him pointless. The rest of the scenes play as if we don't realize he's a psychopath; apart from almost braining Bellana and the Doc as soon as they board his ship, the killer does a good job of masking his insanity at first, gradually becoming more unglued and revealing more and more of his inner pathology as the show progresses. But who cares? We know he's a psycho, and all the scenes which him gradually revealing his psychosis are useless from a thriller point of view. All that's left for us to do is watch and wait for him to act like a psycho in front of Bellana or the Doc. What's the point?
Now, having said that, I should point out that the part of the psychotic hologram is, in fact, acted quite well, and this makes the scenes of him describing his loathing of creepy, unclean humanoid life moderately watchable. But still, what's the point? He's a malfunctioning computer program, he killed his crew, he's gonna get killed by Torres. We know all this as soon as the episode begins, and nothing interesting enough ever happens with this plot to make us care much about watching it. And, of course, the fashion of his final demise is likewise telegraphed about 10 minutes into the show. Perhaps the writers had recently watched "Scream", and decided to do a slasher show which slavishly conforms to the slasher formula, with the exception of giving the killer away in the first reel as some sort of post-modern, winking satire. Maybe they were just drunk. Or maybe they forgot what the point of a suspense episode is – suspense.
The B-story is more successful, if not actually satisfying. This story, of course, is about Harry's crush on Seven, and her reaction to it. Now, I've complained about this before, and I'll probably complain about it again, but when exactly was it that Harry decided to stop being faithful to his girlfriend back home? That was established early on as one of Harry's defining traits, his faithfulness to his girlfriend. At some point, he started chasing any female of any species that doesn't have a personal cloaking device. Now, that's not necessarily an unrealistic turn of events – at this point, he must be itching for female company, and surely his girlfriend has moved on. But as far as I can recall, we never saw any conscious transition – the writers simply stopped writing him one way and started writing him another way, with no transition at all or explanation to the viewer of why this is happening. That's sloppy.
But anyway, how does his infatuation with Seven play out? Fine, but not all that interesting. Sure, he's smitten. He's tongue-tied; he's goofy. That's fine, but, we've seen Harry act this way before, so it's not all that interesting. Seven is definitely the far more interesting one to watch here, as she is actually quite interesting, and it turns out Jeri Ryan can, in fact, act. And, of course, all the close-ups mean that it's actually possible to concentrate on her performance, and not her ridiculous costume. The centerpiece scene of all of Harry's pathetic gooniness is the scene in which Seven confronts him about being in lust with her, and proposes mating with him as a learning experience. This is a moderately amusing scene, even if Harry's hapless fumbling is a bit over-the-top. It's certainly reasonable from Seven's point of view, as she tries to amass data about her environment, as any good Borg would.
The chief problem here is that this scene is nothing new – this is territory already very well covered. The discussion of why humans care so much about sex, what's the point of kissing, etc. – this has been done already – 30 years ago. This conversation closely mirrors the one Kirk has with Kelinda in "By Any Other Name" – "why do you humans create such a mystique about a simple biological function?", "You find this pleasurable, this pressing of the lips?" (Or quotes pretty close to that). Also, in "The Gamesters of Triskelion", Kirk had to teach Shahna, the original silver-clad Trek space-babe about kissing. And, of course, in "The Apple," the Enterprise crew had to teach a whole alien race just what this strange lip-pressing behavior was (not to mention how babies are made – and what they are.) So, this scene with Seven and Harry just doesn't seem fresh at all – it's well-worn territory, and frankly, the kind of thing that lots of people tease TOS about in the first place. Why the Voyager writers want to steal those bits of TOS is beyond me.
Anyway, that's about it – this episode doesn't really deserve much more analysis. The A-story is profoundly uninteresting, due to the writers giving the whole thing away in the first seconds of the show. The B story is successful as a showcase for the emerging talents of Jeri Ryan, but beyond that, is a hackneyed, uninspired trifle.