star trek voyager marayna

Alter Ego (episode)

• 1.2 Act One
• 1.3 Act Two
• 1.4 Act Three
• 1.5 Act Four
• 1.6 Act Five
• 2 Log entries
• 3 Memorable quotes
• 4.1 Story and script
• 4.2 Cast and characters
• 4.3 Production
• 4.4 Continuity
• 4.5 Reception
• 4.6 Video and DVD releases
• 5.1 Starring
• 5.2 Also starring
• 5.3 Guest stars
• 5.4 Co-stars
• 5.5 Uncredited co-stars
• 5.6 Stunt double
• 5.7 Stand-in
• 5.8.1 Unreferenced material
• 5.9 External links

Summary [ ]

The USS Voyager arrives at an inversion nebula , and stops to investigate. While inversion nebulae normally burn out after a few years, this one appears to have been around for centuries. While studying the nebula , Neelix organizes a luau to raise the crew 's spirits. A solemn Ensign Harry Kim goes to Lieutenant Tuvok while he is playing a solitary game of kal-toh in his quarters and explains he wants to learn how to suppress his emotions. Tuvok points out that learning this requires a long personal journey, and inquires into his motives for asking.

Harry watches Tuvok play Kal-toh

Kim admits to Tuvok he has fallen in love with a holodeck character named Marayna . " You're in love with a computer subroutine? ", Tuvok asks skeptically. Kim explains that he's become emotionally attracted to her and seeks Tuvok's guidance in suppressing these feelings.

Act One [ ]

Tuvok agrees to meet her and goes to the holodeck with him. There, they see her walk up to them with Kes after she gives her a hydrosailing lesson. Tuvok watches as she subtly flirts with Kim until they are called to the bridge. On the way there, Tuvok explains and deconstructs the role each part of their conversation with her played in her attempts at seduction, and points out that logically, such interaction can end in only one of two ways: a relationship, or a tragic parting. Since the former is illogical, his only option is retreat to minimize tragedy.

As Voyager continues its scans, a plasma strand begins to ignite which would normally cause the entire nebula to burn up along with it.

Act Two [ ]

However, the energy is suddenly reduced by dampening fields of unknown origin. The crew decide to move in closer to investigate, knowing that if they could replicate the process they could contain warp core breaches or other normally catastrophic plasma reactions. The captain also recommends that all personnel go to the upcoming luau, which Tuvok misinterprets to be an order.

Paris getting ready with his Big Daddy-O Surf Special

Later, B'Elanna Torres exits a turbolift wearing a tropical dress. Tom Paris happens to be standing outside the doors and remarks that the chief engineer looks " smashing ". He notes that nothing can measure up to his 1962 Big Daddy-O Surf Special Hawaiian shirt , an " American classic ", as he puts it. She tells Paris to accompany her to get Vorik , knowing how "Vulcan" he gets when anybody is late. Paris tells her that he thought they were going to get Kim. However, Torres informs the helmsman that the operations officer will not be joining them at the luau this evening. Paris tells her that he and Kim will be joining her and Vorik at the luau. Torres tells Paris that he seems to be very confident in his powers of persuasion and he replies in the affirmative.

Paris arrives at Kim's quarters and observes the drab clothing he is dressed in, telling the ensign that he looks like he is ready to go to a funeral , not a luau. Kim tells Paris that he is practicing Vulcan meditation to suppress his emotions. Paris is incredulous. He tells a shocked Kim that he knows about his attraction to the holodeck character, since he has not been able to hide it well. He assures him that this happens to everyone once in a while and he should not be hiding out in his quarters. Kim denies it and Paris decides to leave him alone. Just before Paris leaves, Kim changes his mind and decides to go. Paris replicates him a Hawaiian shirt with a pineapple motif.

Paris and Kim enjoying the Luau

Despite of Tuvok's lack of interest, he encounters Marayna again as she is playing kal-toh alone, fascinating him. He moves over to her and finds himself strangely interested in her. Her analysis of the ways he isolates himself from the crew is intriguing to him, and they play kal-toh together.

Act Three [ ]

When Kim arrives and discovers Tuvok's interest in the hologram , he is beside himself with anger and jealousy, and begins to suspect Tuvok's motives for advising retreat were merely a ruse so that he could have Marayna all to himself.

After investigation, the crew finds that the dampening field that stops the inversion nebula from burning up only comes into force once a plasma strand starts to ignite; in essence, the fire seemingly puts itself out. Having learned everything they can from scans, the crew decide to continue their course home to the Alpha Quadrant . However, Paris reports that the helm has stopped responding. It's confirmed that the engines are still fully functional however the commands towards it are being blocked. When Harry Kim returns to the holodeck to find Tuvok playing kal-toh with Marayna, this leads to a confrontation in which Tuvok ultimately orders the computer to erase the startled Marayna. Harry Kim angrily insists that this does not truly solve the problem, however. Meanwhile despite investigation the crew still cannot get the warp or impulse engines to respond to commands, but they are able to get the thrusters working allowing Voyager to slowly move away from the nebula.

In his quarters, Marayna appears to Tuvok again using The Doctor 's mobile emitter and wearing a Starfleet uniform , sitting down and playing kal-toh .

Act Four [ ]

She tells him that she's lonely and indicates her desire to continue her relationship with him, but he contacts the bridge and declares an intruder alert , summoning security to his quarters. To his surprise, although the security guards do arrive, she is able to cancel the alert shortly before vanishing. In conference with Janeway and the other senior officers, he and they discuss the possibility that a hologram has become sentient and taken over the ship. Chakotay reports that this is not the first time this has happened. According to Starfleet records, this had previously happened to the USS Enterprise -D under Captain Picard when a sentient hologram took over the ship.

After further investigation, Tuvok, Tom Paris, and Lieutenant Torres discover that Marayna is actually a projection of someone from outside of the ship. Tracing the uplink through the holodeck, they discover a small cloaked station. Unfortunately, the holodeck characters suddenly become hostile. One of the hula girls attacks Torres with a lei used as a garrotte, One of the fire dancers attacks Tuvok, and one of the waiters attacks Paris with a plate of food. Tuvok and Paris attempt to come to Torres' aid, when a force field is erected, blocking the two. Tuvok orders Paris to shoot the holodeck control panel, causing the holodeck characters to vanish, saving Torres from being choked. As they attempt to escape the holodeck, an explosion rocks the ship. The plasma strands from the nebula are burning up around Voyager .

On the bridge, Marayna gives an ultimatum to Janeway through Voyager 's intercom . She wants to see Tuvok alone in the holodeck, or she'll destroy the ship.

Act Five [ ]

Tuvok returns to the holodeck to meet her alone, and then beams over to confront the real Marayna. Marayna disables Tuvok's communication with Voyager and tells Tuvok her story. In reality, it is she who holds the nebula together with the dampening fields for the benefit of her people, who often visit to observe the beauty of the inversion nebula. However, she's become lonely and she frequently taps into nearby ships' computers to find out more about their visitors.

The real Marayna

Marayna reveals that she had never encountered anything like the holodeck and tapped herself into it so she could interact with the crew of Voyager . This, in turn, allowed her to meet Tuvok who was much like her – interested in being separate from those around him – whereupon she developed feelings for him. After some discussion, Tuvok convinces Marayna to allow him to return to Voyager . Before he goes, however, Tuvok encourages Marayna to contact her people and have them find a replacement for her in this lonely assignment so she can seek company among her own kind again. She tells Tuvok she will consider this. Before the Vulcan dematerializes, Marayna asks him if he too will always be alone. Tuvok looks at her but does not answer her question before he is beamed away.

After his return to the ship, Tuvok is again playing kal-toh alone in his quarters. He then pauses and deactivates the game. He goes to the holodeck and, finding Harry Kim there, he apologizes for failing to consider or respect his feelings. Harry accepts the apology, and Tuvok offers to teach him kal-toh which he accepts, stating that he was under the impression it took years to learn kal-toh , which Tuvok confirms. A holo-woman comes up and offers to join them and they simultaneously refuse her company, but Tuvok then (somewhat uncharacteristically) thanks her for the offer. Kim smiles at the tactical officer and they begin to play the game as Voyager continues on home.

Log entries [ ]

• " Captain's log , Stardate 50460.3. We've been investigating an inversion nebula for several days. This phenomenon has never been seen in the Alpha Quadrant and is proving something of a mystery to us, here. "
• " Captain's log, supplemental. We've completed sensor scans and confirmed our discovery of an unusual dampening field responsible for keeping this unstable nebula from going up in flames. The field's origin is still a mystery. "
• " Security Chief's log, stardate 50471.3. The remaining damage to the ship was easily repaired, and we soon left Marayna's nebula behind. Voyager is back on course, and I have resumed my normal routine. "

Memorable quotes [ ]

" You're in love with a computer sub-routine? " " That's the problem. "

" Kal-toh is to chess as chess is to tic-tac-toe. "

" Vulcans do not hydrosail. "

" Are you two friends? " " Yes. " " No. "

" I tried a reverse curl this morning… I think I pulled a tendon. Feel that. " " It's like a knot! " " I'm sure it is. "

" I have already taken the liberty of reserving a table, Lieutenant, with a view of the lakeside. You did express a fondness for that particular vista. " " I did? " " Five days ago, in a conversation we had in Engineering regarding holodeck programs. " " I guess, maybe I did. "

" Forget about her. " " What did Tom say to you? " " Not a single word. I saw the way you were looking at Marayna yesterday. " " Hi, my name's Harry Read Me Like A Book Kim. " " It's not that bad. " " Apparently, it is. "

" Mr. Kim, I value our working relationship. I would not allow a holodeck character to disrupt that. "

" Make it stop!" (The intruder alert klaxon is silenced.) " You have access to the ship's control systems?" " And I'll use them all if I have to. You can't just delete me! "

Background information [ ]

Story and script [ ].

• This episode was originally to primarily feature the characters of Tom Paris and Harry Kim, before its focus was changed to Tuvok and Kim. ( Delta Quadrant , p. 162; Beyond the Final Frontier , p. 302)
• Prior to this episode being written, Tuvok actor Tim Russ expressed concerns to writer Joe Menosky about the nature of Tuvok's attraction to Marayna. Russ told Menosky, " It has to be right on the line of not looking as though he is romantically attracted to this woman, but that he is interested in her intellectually. He wouldn't be involved with anybody at all. He sticks to his wife. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 100)
• Joe Menosky considered this installment to be an opportunity to explore the way in which Vulcans suppress their emotions. " The actual mental details of it are not really that specified, " Menosky related. " Instead of imagining that Vulcans sort of bludgeon emotion, there is something a little more sophisticated going on. They understand the patterns and see them in a profound intellectual sense, that in some way robs them of their power, before they even add the will to suppress. It's an opportunity to add a layer of texture to how Vulcans work. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, pp. 103-104)
• The first draft script of this installment was delivered on 19 September 1996 . The episode's final script draft was submitted on 27 September 1996. [1]
• This episode has repeatedly been likened to the film Fatal Attraction . Tim Russ declared, " 'Alter Ego' was our Fatal Attraction episode. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 17 ) He also described the relationship between Tuvok and Marayna as "a Fatal Attraction kind of thing" and said that the episode "involved a sort of Fatal Attraction towards me". ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 33 , p. 30) Director Robert Picardo likewise referred to the installment as "the Mr Tuvok Fatal Attraction story". ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 15)

Cast and characters [ ]

• During production on the earlier third season installment " Macrocosm ", Tim Russ felt that, while his character does not heavily feature in "Macrocosm" or the even-earlier third season episode " The Q and the Grey " (both of which were consecutively produced straight before this installment), he had to concentrate more on this episode, due to its intense focus on Tuvok. While working on "Macrocosm", Russ noted, " Really, I have to take the time to prepare for the next one, which I will be heavy in! " Russ was eager to work on this episode, as he was interested in its plot, particularly the devoutly logical Tuvok's encounter with a woman who is not only attracted to him but is also a potential danger to the vessel on which he serves. " [It] is a very interesting situation to be in, so I'm looking forward to doing that story because we haven't done one like that yet, " he said. " It ought to be an interesting insight into Tuvok's character. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , pp. 11 & 12) Tim Russ later listed this episode, midway through the fourth season, as one of five episodes that he characterized as "the defining moments for Tuvok". Later in the same interview, he said of this installment, " It was a very interesting episode, and I liked the scenes between Kim and Tuvok. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 17 ) Russ also approved of the form of relationship that Tuvok has with Marayna, including the fact that his interest in her develops when he teaches her kal-toh . " All of a sudden there's someone to play with as opposed to a machine, which makes it much more interesting, " Russ commented. " Engaging in conversation and ideas and thoughts, that's something he's into very heavy duty, until she's perceived as a threat and it switches. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 100)
• Robert Picardo was pleased that this episode so heavily featured Tim Russ. " I was delighted that Tim Russ, Mr. Tuvok, was my principal character in the show, " Picardo remembered. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 92)
• In common with Tim Russ, Kim actor Garrett Wang enjoyed this episode in general and a particular highlight for him was the episode's focus on the characters of Tuvok and Kim. Wang enthused, " We saw a little bit more Harry and Tuvok, which I was happy to see […] Overall […], I thought 'Alter Ego' was a good show. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 17 )
• According to Robert Picardo, however, Garrett Wang was suffering from flu while this episode was produced. Picardo noted, " I had to whip him into a frenzy of energy before every take, because he was so under the weather! " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 15) In certain scenes (particularly the Vulcan meditation scene in Kim's quarters before the Lu'au), Wang is quite clearly struggling to deliver his lines through his nasal congestion.
• Nonetheless, Robert Picardo was delighted by Garrett Wang's work on this episode. The director remarked, " Garrett Wang […] had a very significant role in the story and is terrific in the show – it's the funniest I've ever seen his character […] He did a great job and I think his performance is very funny and charming in the show. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 15)
• In fact, both Robert Picardo and Joe Menosky were highly satisfied with the performances that Garrett Wang and Tim Russ delivered for this episode. " Tim and Garrett did very good work in the show, " Picardo remarked. ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 18 ) Menosky likewise raved, " I loved the scenes between Tim and Garrett, and I think they were really, really funny. Part of it was Tim's delivery, this dry, almost straight-man delivery. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 104)
• Appreciative of the casting of this episode, Robert Picardo found Sandra Nelson physically attractive, as well as two actresses who appeared as a pair of holographic, Polynesian women who kiss The Doctor. Picardo once referred to Nelson as "our beautiful female guest star" and to the pair of kissers as "beautiful". ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 15)

Production [ ]

Robert Picardo directs Tim Russ in a scene from this episode

• This was the second Star Trek: Voyager episode to be directed by a main cast member of the series. Regarding the experience of being directed by such a co-star, Tim Russ noted, " I've already had that experience in that Robert McNeill was directing an episode earlier [namely, " Sacred Ground "]. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , p. 11) In this case, the episode was directed by the performer of The Doctor, Robert Picardo. Shortly before production on Voyager 's third season officially began, Picardo remarked, " I would like to think I will definitely be directing this year […] I am confident it will happen. I don't know whether it will be the first half or the second half of [this] season. I hope it's a good one. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 28, No. 4/5, p. 98) In another interview conducted before Picardo directed this installment (at a time when he knew the episode's position in the third season but not yet its story), he commented, " I'm sure there will be a lot of challenges to doing it, but I'm really quite excited about it. There's not too much more I can say about it now, other than to tell you that I'm completely committed to doing the best job I can. I hope my first effort as a director is a respectable one. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 10 )
• Robert Picardo discovered the episode's production to be challenging though rewarding. He later said, " I certainly enjoyed it […] When you finally [direct for the first time] yourself, there's many sink-or-swim moments. I did as much homework as I could. I was well prepared. I stayed on schedule and on budget which are all important things to the front office, but it took me, five-fold the time to plan something that it would have taken an experienced director. I had to put in a lot of extra hours of homework and coming in on the weekend, rolling with the punches as those rewrite pages came flooding in as I was shooting […] At the end of the first day I said 'I never want to do this again.' By the middle of the third day, I was going, 'Well, maybe.' And by the fifth day I definitely wanted to do it again. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, pp. 91-92) Picardo also enthused, " It was a great experience. I really enjoyed it […] I certainly had a good time. After the first day's anxiety, I relaxed a bit, and I enjoyed it. " Additionally, Picardo expressed that he "didn't have any bad luck" with directing the episode, apart from the fact that Garrett Wang was ill with flu. ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 15)
• Robert Picardo encountered a problem of another sort, however. " [Sandra Nelson] appeared in a bathing suit, and the set was too cold, " Picardo recalled, " so we had to line the inside of her bathing suit. I don't know if you know this, but in television the networks [in this case, UPN ] issue what we call 'nipple memos' […] Too many nipples in 43 minutes of television and you get a memo. Anyway, we were afraid of getting a nipple memo so we closed down for 40 minutes waiting for the lining to be sewn in. That was the most interesting delay I had. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 15)
• During production, Robert Picardo devised a short moment involving his character of The Doctor, an event that Picardo enjoyed filming. " I wanted to have one vignette for my own character in this big luau which all the cast members were in on this set. So I got to pick my own vignette and suggest it to the writers, " Picardo remembered. " There are these two […] Polynesian women who are recreational holograms. I'm musing over the difference between being a working hologram and a recreational hologram, and they both kiss me. So that's one of the advantages of directing. I got to shoot as many takes of that as I wanted. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 15) Picardo also joked, " Since I started directing, I've had the chance to use myself the way I prefer to be used, which is strictly as a sex object. I'm hoping some of the other directors will take note! " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 26 , p. 13)
• The original edit of this episode was not long enough, so the scene wherein Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres meet in a corridor, comment on each other's clothing and then make last-minute preparations for attending the luau was added during post-production. While Torres actress Roxann Dawson 's typical make-up was being applied shortly before the scene was filmed, she explained to Star Trek Magazine , " I'm actually here at the studio today because we're tacking an extra scene onto 'Alter Ego.' When they put the show together (in the editing room), they realized it came in about a minute short. So Robbie and I and Bob (Picardo) are back here shooting a short scene in which Paris sort of compliments B'Elanna as they're walking down a corridor. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , p. 22)
• Robert Picardo ultimately thought his directing of this episode went well, as did other members of Voyager 's cast and crew. Executive producer Jeri Taylor commented, " [He] did a very nice job. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 14) Roxann Dawson said, " Bob was great on his [first] show. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 12 ) Garrett Wang agreed, " Bob Picardo did a nice job directing it. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 17 ) Picardo himself noted, " I thought it turned out well. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 18 ) He also said, " Directing ['Alter Ego'] was a wonderful whetting of the appetite, " and, " I believe I did well enough that they will offer me another opportunity [to direct]. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 30 , p. 20; Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 15) Picardo would indeed go on to direct another installment of Star Trek: Voyager – specifically, the sixth season episode " One Small Step ".

Continuity [ ]

• This is one of seventeen Star Trek episodes with titles derived from Latin .
• Voyager 's transporters are used while the shields are rapidly disengaged and reengaged; a common Starfleet technique. The editing makes this confusing however, as after Tuvok dematerializes, a plasma stream detonates near the ship and Chakotay reports "Shields are down to 47%;" Tuvok then rematerializes on the space station.
• This episode is the first to feature the Vulcan game kal-toh . Tim Russ noted, " The producers sort of made up the game and how to play it. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 33 , p. 30)
• This was the first produced episode to include the character of Ensign Vorik . He also appears in " Fair Trade ", which was produced straight after this episode but aired immediately before it.
• Vorik's interest in B'Elanna Torres is revealed in this episode. It becomes a major plot point two episodes later, in " Blood Fever ".
• The corridor scene between Tom and B'Elanna also somewhat presages "Blood Fever". In the makeup chair shortly before this scene was shot, Roxann Dawson said of the scene, " It will help set the stage for what happens in 'Blood Fever.' " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , p. 22)
• This episode makes a reference to the holographic depiction of James Moriarty and his role in the events of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes " Elementary, Dear Data " and " Ship In A Bottle ". The holographic Moriarty inspired the creation – early in the development process of Star Trek: Voyager – of the character of The Doctor. ( A Vision of the Future - Star Trek: Voyager )
• The mobile emitter is used by a hologram other than The Doctor for the first time, in this episode.
• In this episode, a humanoid uses a hologram as an avatar. This has occurred on Voyager once before, when The Doctor enabled Danara Pel to operate a holographic avatar while her unresponsive body was in Sickbay, as seen in " Lifesigns ".
• The story of a lonely alien seeking a companion was explored previously in the Star Trek: The Next Generation third season episode " Future Imperfect ", and would be explored again in the Star Trek: Enterprise season three episode " Exile ", which was directed by Voyager cast member Roxann Dawson .

Reception [ ]

• Jeri Taylor was highly satisfied with this episode in general, describing the installment as "a delightful kind of a romp" as well as "a very intriguing and unusual sort of story for Tuvok." ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 24 , p. 14)
• This episode achieved a Nielsen rating of 4.8 million homes, and a 7% share. [2] (X)
• Cinefantastique rated this episode 2 and a half out of 4 stars. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 103)
• Star Trek Magazine scored this episode 2 out of 5 stars, defined as "Impulse Power only". ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 28 , p. 57)
• The unauthorized reference book Delta Quadrant (p. 163) gives this installment a rating of 3 out of 10.
• One of the costumes worn by Sandra Nelson in this episode was re-used by background actress Fedra Thompson in the fourth season episode " Concerning Flight " and later sold off on the It's A Wrap! sale and auction on eBay. [3]

Video and DVD releases [ ]

• UK VHS release (two-episode tapes, CIC Video ): Volume 3.7, 2 June 1997
• As part of the VOY Season 3 DVD collection

Links and references [ ]

Starring [ ].

• Kate Mulgrew as Captain Kathryn Janeway

Also starring [ ]

• Robert Beltran as Commander Chakotay
• Roxann Dawson as Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres
• Jennifer Lien as Kes
• Robert Duncan McNeill as Lieutenant Tom Paris
• Ethan Phillips as Neelix
• Robert Picardo as The Doctor
• Tim Russ as Lieutenant Tuvok
• Garrett Wang as Ensign Harry Kim

Guest stars [ ]

• Sandra Nelson as Marayna
• Alexander Enberg as Vorik

Co-stars [ ]

• Shay Todd as Holowoman
• Majel Barrett as Computer Voice

Uncredited co-stars [ ]

• Lily Acain as Hawaiian woman
• Antony Acker as alien waiter
• Bobby Apisa as Hawaiian waiter
• Simone Boisseree as Hawaiian woman
• Debbie David as Russell
• Jeff Cadiente as torch holder
• Cid Castillo as torch holder
• Damaris Cordelia as Foster
• Adriana del Pomar as Resort woman
• Patrick Emery as command officer
• Tarik Ergin as Ayala
• John Faruzzi as Hawaiian waiter
• Caroline Gibson as operations officer
• Sue Henley as Brooks
• Lana Joy as Hawaiian woman
• Susan Lewis as operations officer
• Linda Li as lei strangler
• Angela Lloyd as Resort woman
• S. Senda as fire handler
• Martin Squires as Resort man
• Simon Stotler as operations ensign

Stunt double [ ]

• Ed Anders as stunt double for Robert Duncan McNeill

Stand-in [ ]

• Susan Lewis – stand-in for Shay Todd

References [ ]

1962 ; 2269 ; ability ; algorithm ; alien ; Alpha Quadrant ; amusement ; astrotheorist ; astrotheory ; Big Daddy-O Surf Special ; blonde ; centerpiece ; chess ; complex ; computer ; computer pathway ; course ; dampening field ; dampening field generator ; Delta Quadrant ; Enterprise -D, USS ; entertainment director ; Eros ; facial expression ; Federation ; Hawaiian shirt ; holodeck ; holodeck character ; hula ; hydrosailing ; illumination ; illusion ; image ; imagination ; inertial damper ; intimacy ; Intrepid class decks ; intruder alert ; inversion nebula ; k'oh-nar ; kal-toh ; Kelvin ; kilometer ; knot ; lake ; lei ; love at first sight ; luau ; Marayna's homeworld ; Marayna's space station ; Marayna subroutine ; Mister Vulcan ; mobile emitter ; Moriarty, James ; non-sentient ; parameter adjustment file ; Paxau Resort ; phenomenon ; Picard, Jean-Luc ; pineapple ; Polynesian ; plasma strand ; puppet ; race ; retreat ; RSVP ; shon-ha'lock ; short range sensor scan ; soo-lak ; spouse ; Starfleet Academy ; stereotype ; subatomic cascade reaction ; T'Pel ; t'san s'at ; table ; temperature ; tendon ; tic-tac-toe ; Tiki torch ; turbolift ; vessel ; volleyball ; Vulcans ; Vulcan (planet) ; Vulcan master ; warp core breach

Unreferenced material [ ]

Zito, Rebecca

External links [ ]

• " Alter Ego " at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• " Alter Ego " at Wikipedia
• " Alter Ego " at MissionLogPodcast.com , a Roddenberry Star Trek podcast
• " Alter Ego " at the Internet Movie Database
• 1 Daniels (Crewman)

Sandra Nelson

Series: DS9, Voyager

Characters: Tavana, Marayna

Sandra Nelson is the actress who played Marayna in the Star Trek: Voyager third season episode “Alter Ego” and Tavana in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fifth season episode “Soldiers of the Empire”.

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Star Trek: Voyager – Alter Ego (Review)

Following on from the aborted promise of a new beginning in Fair Trade , things get back to normal.

Alter Ego is another episode of Star Trek: Voyager that feels like it might have been wholly repurposed from an earlier Star Trek show. On the surface, it is a fairly standard “holodeck run amok” story in the style of earlier episodes like Heroes and Demons or Projections . However the contours of the plot recall a very specific (and very good) episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation . As Alter Ego seems to suggest that a holographic character has achieved sentience and threatens to destroy the ship, it recalls the far superior Ship in a Bottle .

Forced attraction.

There are differences, of course. Ship in a Bottle is a far stronger episode, one of the best holodeck stories ever produced. More than that, the climax of Alter Ego reveals that the holodeck programme has not become sentient but is instead being used as the avatar of an outside force. Still, this twist is confined to the last act of the episode, and so it feels more like an embellishment than a revision. For the bulk of its runtime, Alter Ego plays as a pale imitation of a much stronger piece of television.

It does not help matter that Alter Ego ‘s novel twist on that central premise is to paint its central guest star as a psychotic stalker with a crush.

A whole ball of crazy.

Fair Trade teased viewers with the promise of something new and exciting. As Voyager ventured into the Nekrit Expanse, audiences were primed to expect something new and unusual. If Fair Trade were to be believed, the past two-and-a-half seasons were ultimately little more than an extended prologue for what was to come. Neelix no longer knew what was coming. Voyager was finally ready to put the Kazon and the Vidiians and the Ocampans and the Talaxians behind it, to move into uncharted territory as part of a new chapter of its journey.

So there is something jarring about Alter Ego . Even in basic production terms, the episode features Voyager flying through an inversion nebula that it encounters in deep space. It is a very strange visual, given that the closing shot of Fair Trade found the ship flying into the wild purple yonder. Has Voyager already finished its trip through the Nekrit Expanse? Was the journey so uneventful that it came out the other side without anybody passing comment? Given all the fuss about the Nekrit Expanse in Fair Trade , this seems rather jarring.

Not a cloud of solar dust in the sky.

Of course, there are practical reasons for this. Alter Ego went into production before Fair Trade . Although there is no stardate given for the events of Fair Trade , the opening log Alter Ego has a stardate that places it considerably before the events of Blood Fever . It seems fair to suggest that the events of Alter Ego take place before the events of Fair Trade . The two episodes were simply swapped around in broadcast order, and the production team made no effort to ensure a sense of coherence upon broadcast.

It is worth comparing this to the way that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine approaches such challenges. When the episode Through the Looking Glass was slotted between Improbable Cause and The Die is Cast , the production team made sure it made sense when broadcast after the two-parter. Odo ends Improbable Cause in the custody of the Romulan-Cardassian alliance, and that is where The Die is Cast finds him. However, Through the Looking Glass features an opening scene with Odo on the station, which makes no sense if watched in production order.

Clear skies ahead.

There is a sloppiness to this scheduling that betrays some of the core issues with storytelling on Voyager . The entire point of Fair Trade was that Voyager was crossing a threshold and leaving the past behind it. Following that with the broadcast of an episode from earlier in the production cycle, with no effort to update or revise it to acknowledge that transition, completely undercuts the central premise of Fair Trade . After all, Fair Trade had promised that things would never be the same again and then offered an episode that clearly belongs to that earlier block.

Even in terms of plotting and construction, Alter Ego feels uncomfortably backwards. This is the story about a holodeck programme that runs amok, which is one of the most basic Star Trek storytelling templates along with “transporter accident” and “anomaly of the week.” In fact, there are even shades of the latter in the crew’s fascination with the “inversion nebula” that defies their understanding of the logical universe. The crazy holodeck story dates back to The Big Goodbye in the first season of The Next Generation . It is a Star Trek standard.

Masking his concern.

This is the point at which Voyager should be pushing itself. However, it refuses to do so. It settles into a pattern of comfort and ease, following the path of least resistance. It becomes something akin to a Star Trek tribute or cover band, less interested in honing its own sound than it is in approximating familiar hits.  Warlord is just The Assignment . The Q and the Grey is just Q Pid . Macrocosm is just Genesis . Alter Ego is just Ship in a Bottle . Rise is just The Ascent . This is to say nothing of the familiar comforts lurking just inside the Nekrit Expanse.

To be fair, some of these cover versions work quite well.  Voyager offers up its fair share of enjoyable  “holodeck malfunction” episodes. Projections was a first or second season highlight, depending on whether one is breaking the seasons down by broadcast or production order. Even later in the season, Worst Case Scenario takes a similar idea and has fun with it. Later in the run,  The Killing Game, Part I ,  The Killing Game, Part II and Bride of Chaotica! all find entertaining ways to play with the franchise’s second most error-prone technology.

Off the grid.

However, the problem is that many of these cover versions feel lifeless and unsatisfying. Alter Ego is one such example, a trainwreck of a script that builds towards a problematic idea and pivots off into a half-interesting idea that it never quite develops. It might not be a disaster of an episode on the level of Tattoo or Alliances or False Profits , but it does not work in any real sense while playing to the very worst attributes of Voyager as a television series.

At this point, it seems like the writers’ room on Voyager has forgotten how to break an episode of television, how to structure and pace a forty-five minute script. This is obvious just at looking at scripts like  Warlord and  Fair Trade , which do not seem to understand the concept of a teaser.  Star Trek has been on the air for a decade since the launch of  The Next Generation . Breaking and pacing a story for the franchise should be child’s play for the writing staff, particularly given the show’s aversion to experimentation or innovation.

It is worth breaking out the plot of Alter Ego , from one plot point to the next. Harry Kim falls in love with a hologram, so he contacts Tuvok to help him deal with his emotions. Tuvok investigates the hologram, and the hologram falls in love with Tuvok. Harry gets mad at Tuvok. The hologram hijacks the ship and demands that Tuvok surrender himself. Tuvok discovers that the hologram is actually a puppet being manipulated by an alien observer. He convinces her that she needs to be among people. The episode ends with Harry and Tuvok playing kal-toh .

So, reading that summary… what is the episode about? What is the central point of the episode? What is the central thread that pulls it all together? On paper, it seems like Alter Ego might work best as an exploration of isolation and loneliness. Harry is so far from home that he seeks comfort in the arms of a woman constructed from photons. A hologram becomes aware of her existence and is drawn to a character who is himself an outsider. Later, it is revealed that the hologram is actually being manipulated by a lonely woman sitting at the heart of a nebula.

“Marayna, you’re trying to seduce me.”

This is not a bad idea. After all, Voyager is very much a story about loneliness and isolation. It is the story of a ship thrown half-way across the galaxy making a seventy-year journey home. The ship cannot form friendships along the way, because it must keep moving. The crew cannot find a place to lay down their burdens, because home is calling across the cosmos. Voyager should be a ship full of lonely people wrestling with that fact that they are on a solitary spec of light cruising through a vast unknown quadrant.

However, the third season of Voyager has completely rejected this idea. The production team have talked at length about how they don’t want the crew to feel anxious about their journey, or depressed by their isolation. There is no sense that the characters are working through their own issues with this isolation. So Alter Ego avoids this potential thematic avenue. Harry’s holodeck romance is never framed in terms of the fact that he hasn’t seen Libby since Non Sequitur , and even then it was a double. Tuvok’s wife on Vulcan is never even mentioned.

A convincing (in)version of events.

As a result, Alter Ego is robbed of any thematic depth or nuance. However, it could still be an interesting character study. But who is the focal character in Alter Ego ? Who is Alter Ego about? In an interview with The Star Trek: Voyager Magazine , Tim Russ pointed to Alter Ego as a formative Tuvok episode:

I think the defining moments for Tuvok have been in Meld, Random Thoughts and Alter Ego. I would also add Innocence to that list and, I guess, The Gift. Meld and Random Thoughts both explored suppressed and deep, violent thoughts and the problems those things created for Tuvok. We also saw how Tuvok worked with others in Random Thoughts.

That episodes like The Gift and Random Thoughts are counted alongside Alter Ego as definitive Tuvok episodes speaks to how poorly Voyager has served the character. Tuvok is the first full-blooded Vulcan regular to appear on a Star Trek show, so there should be more interesting material to give him.

“Why Hawaii?”

Indeed, Alter Ego does not even belong to Tuvok alone. The narrative starts with a focus on Harry, who brings his problem to Tuvok at the end of the teaser. At this point, it would make sense for the narrative to shift its focus to Tuvok. After all, the plot will be driven by Tuvok’s investigation into Marayna and her flirtation with him. That is where the mystery and drama lies. However, the story keeps cutting back to Harry, focusing on his intense infatuation with Marayna even as the narrative thrust of the show has been given over to Tuvok.

This leads to a number of embarrassing sequences, such as when Harry becomes jealous of Tuvok. “Now I know why you told me to keep off the holodeck,” he insists on walking in on Tuvok and Marayna together. “I respected you. I trusted you. And you did this right behind my back.” It is a ridiculous scene on multiple levels. Most obviously, Harry and Tuvok are supposed to be professionals, not thirteen-year-old boys. On a more technical level, what is to stop Harry from simply duplicating Marayna’ programme, as far as he knows. (Now there’s an interesting idea.)

Well, at least Neelix isn’t concerned about his redundancy any longer.

However, even the sections of the episode focusing on Tuvok has little interest in his character or motivations. According to an interview with Cinefantastique , Russ had to remind writer Joe Menosky that Tuvok was married:

When Tuvok encounters an alien femme fatale in Alter Ego, Russ made sure that Tuvok behaved in a properly Vulcan way, and was not romantically involved with Marayna (Sandra Nelson), the alien woman. He talked to writer Menosky before the story was written. Russ told Menosky, “It has to be right on the line of not looking as though he is romantically attracted to this woman, but that he is interested in her intellectually. He wouldn’t be involved with anybody at all. He sticks to his wife.”

The complication never comes up in the episode, which feels like something of a lost opportunity. After all, Tuvok is the only member of the primary cast with a wife and children waiting at home.

Flower power.

In many ways, this all speaks to the recurring sense that Voyager is far more interested in plot beats than character development. Indeed, the flow of Alter Ego is essentially a collection of narrative pivot points that break up the acts and serve to keep things moving at a reasonable pace. In fact, most of the character actions in Alter Ego seem reverse engineered in order to hit those narrative beats. For example, Kim’s unprofessional outburst serves to motivate Tuvok to delete Marayna, which then escalates the situation further.

This is unfortunately how the Voyager writing staff tend to approach the subject of characterisation, resulting in a primary cast that feels hazy and undefined. Janeway is a notoriously unpredictable character, because of this approach to the cast. The writers on Voyager are not interesting in actions that flow from character, instead leaving character as something to be reversed engineered from the actions dictated by a given plot. It is very disheartening, particularly when the plot is itself so underwhelming.

“The continued use of the holodeck seems to suggest that they don’t have technology recalls in the future.”

The plot is very much a riff on Ship in a Bottle , the episode in which Moriarty holds the Enterprise to ransom. When Marayna takes control of Voyager towards the climax of Alter Ego , the characters even explicitly confirm that reference. “Most likely a sentient computer programme,” Chakotay observes. “I checked the Starfleet database. This kind of thing has happened before. The Enterprise-D under Picard was once taken over by a holocharacter.” Harry adds, “We studied that case at the Academy. It gained control of the ship from inside the holodeck.”

There are certainly worse episodes to reference. Ship in a Bottle is an underrated Next Generation classic that plays with ideas that were still working their way into the popular consciousness when it was broadcast. However, the problems with Alter Ego come in the way that it chose to depart from that template. In Ship in a Bottle , Moriarty is motivated by his desire to break free from the holographic prison in which he finds himself. In Alter Ego , Marayna is ultimately presented as little more than the psychopathic female stalker.

Lighten up.

The production team readily acknowledge as much. In an interview with Star Trek: Monthly , Tim Russ likened the episode to the plot of Fatal Attraction :

“That particular episode,” Russ recalls of Alter Ego, “involved a sort of Fatal Attraction towards me, and my character sort of learned how to not live quite so isolated. He is generally isolated. He spends time by himself. He meditates by himself and plays the game [kal-toh] by himself. In that episode he actually offers to play this game or teach the game, and in that sense he actually learns from this alien woman about sharing activities with other people.”

Fatal Attraction is of course the Oscar-nominated thriller about a man whose one-night stand turns out to be a psychopath who turns his life into a living hell.

Carrying a torch.

As Alter Ego develops, it transforms from the story of a potentially unhealthy interest in a holographic character from two members of the crew into something a lot more predicable and generic. Harry’s emotional attachment to Marayna is never truly explored, instead seguing into a plot about Marayna’s unhealthy fixation with Tuvok. Marayna is apparently so infatuated with a man that she only just met that she is willing to destroy a ship full of innocent people if she cannot have him.

At one point, Marayna hijacks the EMH’s mobile emitter and allows herself into Tuvok’s quarters. “Given your actions, I have no choice but to consider you a potential threat to myself and to Voyager,” he advises her. “But you’re wrong,” she insists. “I would never do anything to harm you.” Naturally, she immediately undermines that argument. “You have access to the ship’s control systems?” Tuvok asks. Marayna vows, “And I’ll use them all if I have to. You can’t just delete me!”

Putting the pieces together…

This is a very crass, very broadly drawn stereotype of the obsessive woman terrorising an innocent man. Nevermind that women are far more likely to be brutalised and murdered by their male partners than vice versa , this is one of the most hackneyed clichés in popular culture. As Elayna Rappinng argues in Media-tions , Fatal Attraction became popular shorthand for the way that the media talked about certain types of women:

So much has already been written about Fatal Attraction that it hardly seems necessary to point out that the film escalates the pre-family/traditional woman, anti-independent, sexy woman propaganda to outrageous heights. Glenn Close is just too smart, sex, and aggressive to be anything but nuts, at least by 1980s standards.

Indeed, the portrayal of Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction is still part of the cultural discourse and still finds its way into conversations about how we talk about ambitious and independent women . In the context of Alter Ego , Marayna’s obsessive behaviour is contrasted by two men. Harry also feels a strong and unreturned attraction, but does not attempt to murder over a hundred people. Tuvok also lives in isolation, but does not crack up.

Alter Ego does not exist in isolation. The third season of Voyager seems to have a very regressive political perspective on such issues. The depiction of family life in Real Life is one such example, but there are plenty of other more overt examples of the show’s worrying attitudes towards traditional gender roles. The Q and the Grey might just be the best example, suggesting that Q’s ultimate ambition upon meeting a female captain should be to sleep with her and that the first female member of the Continuum should be stuck-up and jealous, with minimal agency.

Marayna feels like a horrible miscalculation, a character who would have seemed dated had she appeared on the original Star Trek . Marayna is obviously very intelligent and insightful, but the episode seems to suggest that she is less capable of dealing with social isolation than Harry or Tuvok. The episode caps all this off with a cringy creepy joke in which both Harry and Tuvok reflexively reject a woman’s attempt to join their game of kal-toh . It makes the jokes about Kate Mulgrew putting her hands on her hips in Macrocosm seem particularly mean-spirited.

“You know, you’d think we’d be a lot less hung up in the twenty-fourth century about the idea I’d want to hook up with a hologram, but no.”

To be fair, there some half-formed interesting ideas in Alter Ego . The sequence in which Marayna has weaponised the resort programme against the Voyager crew is delightfully unnerving, evoking the dreamscape of The Thaw . The imagery of smiling waitresses garotting guests with their leis is particularly clever, although it is also fun to see the guys carrying the torches employing them as weapons. It is a delightful piece of surrealism, and there is something to be said for a Star Trek story willing to push “the holodeck tries to kill the crew” to its logical conclusion.

There is also a clever final twist in the idea that Marayna is actually a construct being manipulated from outside the ship, with the holographic character used as a puppet by somebody spying on the workings of the ship. It is great idea, and one that feels ahead of the curve. Marayna is ultimately an avatar, an online persona that mirrors those employed by people posting on message boards and playing multiplayer games. Of course, this is all very obvious in the context of the twenty-first century, but it was a novel idea in the mid- to late-nineties.

“Don’t worry. Some day soon, James Cameron will create a blockbuster movie about people hopping into other bodies to make out with hot aliens.”

Indeed, there might be a more interesting story to be told about the relationship between the holographic Marayna and the alien who is pulling the strings. Is this holographic reaction an accurate representation of who she is? More than that, she only interacts with Harry and Tuvok on the holodeck, so how is her perception of them shaped by those encounters? After all, peering into a ship through the holodeck is almost like walking into somebody’s fantasies. It is a window to the collective subconscious.

To be fair, later episodes of Voyager would build on this clever final twist, to varying degrees of success. Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy would introduce the Heirarchy, a bureaucratic alien species that would peer into Voyager through the eyes of the EMH. Inside Man would find the Ferengi manipulating a holographic programme to serve as their spy on Voyager. Many of the later episodes centring on the EMH, like Body and Soul or Renaissance Man , would play with this idea of holographic identity.

Let it lei.

Indeed, Alter Ego could be seen as the point at which a recurring theme begins to solidify within Voyager . Over the course of the show, Voyager repeatedly focuses on the lives touched by the crew as they journey towards the Alpha Quadrant, the footprints that they leave in the sand. To be fair, this is standard practice for a television show, given that stories tend to involve the crew meeting various aliens. However, Voyager increasingly engages with the idea of the ship and crew as something approaching a Delta Quadrant myth seen through the eyes of other species.

Alter Ego is the first episode to really touch upon the idea of Voyager as seen by an alien visitor. It is not explored in the context of the episode, by Marayna’s efforts to insert herself into the life of the crew foreshadows later stories. In Distant Origin , Professor Forra Gegen chases Voyager across the Delta Quadrant as validation of his own theories. In Living Witness , Voyager is presented as a mythic force. In Muse , the crew’s stories become legend. In Blink of an Eye , Voyager becomes an object of worship to an alien species looking to the sky.

It does not come together.

A lot of this is down to writer Joe Menosky, who also suggested mythologising Voyager in False Profits . Voyager’s journey home is constrasted with the static nature of Marayna’s assignment. Voyager passes by the inversion nebula as it journeys home, but Marayna will always remain there. (Or on her home planet nearby.) There is something quite appealing about the idea of Voyager as a mythic force that brushes against more static objects on its journey back to the Alpha Quadrant, and in the show’s willingness to look from the outside in.

Still, these are ideas that find better expression elsewhere.

You might be interested in our other reviews from the third season of Star Trek: Voyager :

• Basics, Part II
• False Profits
• Sacred Ground
• Future’s End, Part I
• Future’s End, Part II
• The Q and the Grey
• Blood Fever
• Favourite Son
• Before and After
• Distant Origin
• Worst Case Scenario
• Scorpion, Part I

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: alter ego , fatal attraction , Holodeck , Joe Menosky , star trek: voyager , tuvok , voyager |

9 Responses

This is one of the most forgettable episodes of Voyager, as I had no idea what episode this was until I read your review. Even then, I confess to having little memory of watching the episode. Normally, this wouldn’t surprise me, as this was the beginning of Voyager churning out a lot of generic forgettable episodes. Therefore, it was a real surprise came when I saw this episode was written by Joe Menosky who is usually one of the most creative Star Trek writers. Furthermore, even when he misses, he usually misses in memorable fashion, such as “Masks” or “Distant Voices.”

Yep. This just… kinda is, isn’t it?

Reading this, I thought of yet another little thread that could have been interesting. Voyager is a lifetime away from home… for humans. While much of the crew would theoretically die out before they saw home, what about Tuvok? We don’t know exactly how old he is, maybe he’d easily live to see his family again, how about other Vulcans and long lived races?

I know it’d be yet another time travel episode, but how about a glimpse into a future where the older members of the crew have become entrenched and lost their way? Or if there weren’t enough children born so they were the only crew left?

There could have been threads, making long term contingencies involving those species, resentment that they’d have lives to go back to in some form etc. It could have been a pretty good source of stories with a little thought.

It definitely would have been cool to do something like Before and After that treated Tuvok as a constant on an evolving and changing Voyager. Unfortunately, the production team made it clear that Voyager wasn’t going to evolve, so that story probably wouldn’t have worked. But it would have been fun to try, and I’m surprised that we only ended up with glimpses in episodes like Before and After or Shattered.

Is this the first Voyager example of a crewmember falling in love with a Holodeck character after TNG examples like 11001001 and Galaxy’s Child? Except I don’t consider Marayna as memorable as Minuet or Dr Brahms (Sandra Nelson would make a far better impression as Klingon Tavannah in the DS9 episode Soldiers of the Empire later in the year). One wonders what it is about her that has not one but two men so interested in her?

Alter Ego is the first of what will become an unfortunate trend over the following seasons for Harry Kim’s character – doomed romances. Marayna, Seven of Nine, the wrong Delaney sister, Derran Tal, Lyndsey Ballard, etc. It’s annoying Tom keeps score so we can’t ever forget but even more annoying is all these episodes do is bring out Garrett Wang’s immaturity to the fore, whether it’s acting as a lovesick puppy or in Alter Ego, like a jealous schoolboy.

Alter Ego is another example of VGR being a pale imitation of DS9 this year. This time I was reminded of DS9’s Looking For Par’Mach in All the Wrong Places (just substitute Par’Mach for Tuvok’s Vulcan word Shan’Halok). It’s depressing to see Voyager’s lack of imagination after just two and a half years on the air.

I wonder if Alter Ego should have been a Doctor episode but would that have been too similar to Lifesigns? Still, the Doctor falling for a sentient Holodeck character seems so obvious it’s surprising that idea was never explored. And it’s disappointing that Robert Picardo’s directing debut had to be in such an inauspicious episode. We would have to wait until S6’s One Small Step before he got another shot at directing.

Worst Case Scenario is a S3 episode Darren, I’m glad you picked up on The Graduate reference, I think Tuvok does mention T’Pel to Marayna on the station at the end. Under the picture of Tom in his shirt, my idea for a caption is Hawaii Daddy-0. They could have called this episode Play Kal-toh For Me. Marayna also met Kes Darren when she gave her a hydro-sailing lesson, it was Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy, and there are quite a few pictures of people playing kal-toh, aren’t there?

There are a lot of shots of people playing kal-toh indeed.

It’s always an issue to get enough screencaps from visually boring episodes like this. Kal-toh might just be the best thing in it.

Sigh! You don’t fucking understand this episode, do you? And it’s so easy to understand. I really am beginning to loathe a lot of Trek fans.

Would you care to share your interpretation of the episode?

I was actually most frustrated by the very intriguing idea of a human crewman committing to Vulcan epistemology, similar to a religious conversion. I imagine Kim growing his hair out, becoming Tuvok’s student, slowly becoming more and more emotionally dead as each season goes by. It would have been a very interesting character arc, and would have caused fantastic conflict with Paris and unsettled many of the crew who tend to rip on Tuvok non-stop.

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Star Trek: Voyager

“Alter Ego”

Air date: 1/15/1997 Written by Joe Menosky Directed by Robert Picardo

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan

"Hi, my name's Harry read-me-like-a-book Kim."

Review Text

Nutshell: Nothing earth-shaking, but a pleasant outing, and with a good ending.

There's nothing particularly special about "Alter Ego." It's a routine episode with a routine plot. Just about everything done here has been done before on The Next Generation in a similar fashion. Still, "Alter Ego" manages to work for me anyway, because it's quiet about what it does, makes good use of the characters, has a high amiable factor, and, best of all, ends on a good note that is 100% Star Trek in its character outlook.

"Lightweight" would be a good word for this installment, but that should be taken as a compliment—if it had tried to punch more buttons of intensity it probably wouldn't have been successful, because the routine nature of its storyline suits it much better to characterization than to plot. Coming from scripter Joe Menosky—often renowned for his weird concepts on this series as well as TNG and DS9 —"Alter Ego" is a surprisingly restrained outing.

As the episode opens, we learn that Harry is having a problem controlling one of his emotions. Specifically, he has fallen in love at first sight with a holodeck character named Marayna (Geordi LaForge syndrome perhaps?), and now he needs Tuvok to help him overcome his distraction—the Vulcan way. (Speaking of Vulcan ways, or, perhaps more specifically, Tuvokian ways: An example of Vulcan pride appears in an absolutely hilarious line from Tuvok, which harbors a touch—make that a ton—of superior attitude. When Kim calls Tuvok's game of caltoe the "Vulcan chess," Tuvok dryly replies, "Caltoe is to chess as chess is to tic-tac-toe." Ouch. I was laughing hard on that one.)

For Harry's benefit, Tuvok prescribes an immediate termination of all holodeck activity involving Marayna, heavy concentration via isolation, and plenty of serious meditation. Harry goes along with it as long as possible (fifteen minutes). By coincidence, that same evening there is a shipwide gathering on the Neelix resort holodeck program that everyone is planning to attend. (My question: who's left running the ship?) When Harry doesn't show up, Paris goes looking for him and tells him that there are easier ways of forgetting about holodeck women than sitting in the dark in Vulcan meditation.

Sound lightweight? Almost trivial? Perhaps, but it proves surprisingly entertaining. What makes these scenes interesting is in the way they're performed. Every episode of Voyager features some sort of problem that the crew has to figure out or overcome, and in the process of working these problems the personalities can sometimes get lost in the shuffle. Well, the beauty of "Alter Ego" is the way it allows the characters to work their own personal problems rather than simply the mechanics of alien threats or spatial anomalies. I'm not saying that Voyager should do "Alter Ego" every week, but every once in a while is certainly nice. I enjoyed watching Harry and Tom break out of their bridge personalities in favor of something more fun.

That, of course, isn't to say there's no plot here, because there is—although it's a mostly a story combined from parts of old TNG stories. Specifically, Marayna (played with amiable although not quite compelling charisma by Sandra Nelson) becomes intrigued and interested in Tuvok after she meets him at the party. It takes very little time before it's obvious that there's more here than meets the eye. She wants Tuvok's affections, but Tuvok is unwilling and unable to give her the emotional ties she wants.

A series of plot twists ensues, in which Marayna is revealed to be sentient and cleverly escapes the holodeck by making use of Doc's portable emitter and surprising Tuvok by waiting for him in his quarters. Tuvok is not receptive. Disappointed and angry, Marayna threatens Voyager by seizing control of the ship's computer and disabling the engines, which could spell trouble as Voyager is in the middle of investigating a nebula.

Haven't we seen this story before? Of course: way back in TNG 's " Elementary, Dear Data " and its follow-up, "Ship in a Bottle." Plotwise, this story can't hold a candle to those classics, especially the latter, and it seems pretty blatant the way Joe Menosky recycles the initial idea for the concept. That's not a terrible thing—"Alter Ego" does take the fresh perspective of focusing on the human angles rather than the "nature of existence" arguments revisited. And at the same time it's also gracious enough to acknowledge its predecessor in a briefing scene when Chakotay casually mentions that a similar occurrence happened under Picard on the Enterprise -D. And last, and most importantly, the ending takes a twist that makes the episode much more emotionally engaging, effective, and somewhat more original. (More on this later.)

Let's begin with the characterizations. In "Alter Ego" the important thing to keep in mind is how the issue of romance is based on a mental connection rather than just a physical one. After DS9 's amusing but superficial " Looking for Par'mach in All the Wrong Places " and its horrendously awful follow-up " Let He Who Is Without Sin... " it seemed that the only romances present in the Star Trek universe were comprised of hollow collections of clichés and sophomoric jokes. But "Alter Ego" has a mind and heart, and shows that Trek can do romance stories with deeper meaning. Marayna's attraction to Tuvok is based on how mentally interesting she finds him. She enjoys talking with him because he can think, and because he has such wonderfully logical insights about the world. And as a loner herself, she finds his attempts to isolate himself to be of common interest.

To say Tuvok is completely unreceptive would be wrong. True, he doesn't see romance on the emotional level that Marayna does, or as a human like Harry would, but he can and does appreciate the fascinating time spent with an intelligent companion that proves surprisingly intriguing to him. Tim Russ, as usual, is the perfect Vulcan personality, but I think he deserves some extra recognition here, because many of the sequences in "Alter Ego" are more complex than they initially appear, because Tuvok is not as simple as he seems. His fascination with Marayna's presence of mind is beyond the usual Tuvokian qualities the series typically utilizes. But, at the same time, it's perfectly logical and in character and never once overstated in performance, because Russ hits the notes perfectly.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Harry's situation. Once Harry finds out Tuvok has been spending time with Marayna, he's angry and jealous—which is somewhat understandable given the story's setup. The episode overplays this aspect, however, and Harry comes off looking overly emotional and wrong-headed in an arising conflict that's just too forced to be believable. (Tuvok on the other hand, remains perfectly in character, trying to calm Harry with a tone of voice that almost reaches into desperation, but just far enough and without overstepping the bounds. Kudos.) The plot doesn't need this element to work. The distracted Harry who wanted to get over Marayna fit the show well (especially given that it provides the priceless line, "Hi, my name's Harry read-me-like-a-book Kim"). But presenting this jealously angle only pulls the show that much closer to cliché territory. The scenes between Tuvok and Marayna are the true selling point; Harry's problem ultimately becomes a distraction. Fortunately there isn't too much screen time devoted to it.

Turning to the ending, some of the gags used to get there are less than stellar, but the show's quick pacing allows us to forgive some of the hokiness. I could've done without the silly "action" fight on the holodeck once the crew realizes that Marayna's holodeck image is simply being used like a puppet from an alien in a nearby space station (a twist that makes the recycled premise feel a little less recycled). The subsequent Voyager -in-jeopardy idea is nothing at all new (although the special effects are decent). But when the show ends, ask yourself, would Marayna really be so ruthless as to strangle B'Elanna and destroy Voyager if Tuvok denies her?

No she wouldn't, and no she doesn't, because the ending paints Marayna, this isolated alien, as simply a lonely person who got caught up in something so diverting as the Voyager holodeck after her curiosity led her to hack into the Voyager computer. The best part about the ending is its sense of quiet, rational behavior. (That's why, in retrospect, Marayna's needless, violent posturing doesn't really fit the character—unless she's pulling the bluff of all bluffs, which doesn't really fit the character either.) Marayna is not some evil entity out to capture a starship. She's just a regular, lonely person with a situation that can be understood—that of someone who has fallen in love with another who cannot, because of his own complex situation, return her feelings. The final dialog between Tuvok and Marayna is simple, sensible, humanistic, and involving. Works for me.

Whether you enjoy this episode or not may very well depend on your mood. If you want something fresh, exciting, and important to the development of the series, you aren't going to find it. But if you sit back, relax, and just watch the characters do their thing, and allow yourself to get caught up in Marayna's plight, you'll probably find it much more enjoyable.

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Comment Section

46 comments on this post, jordi bosveld.

This episode made me laugh on several occasions. The subtle ending scene "may I join you?" "(together) No!" -whereas Tuvok and Kim had said yes/no simultaneously twice earlier in the episode- was the kind of touch I seem to appreciate more than most people. Not stellar, but quite enjoyable.

For me, this episode's biggest flaw was Tim Russ's uncharacteristic portrayal of Tuvok. He seemed more animated, with much less of a Vulcan flat affect. Normally one would blame this on the direction, but the director was Picardo, who certainly knows the characters well. "The final dialog between Tuvok and Marayna is simple, sensible, humanistic, and involving. Works for me." Well, that's kinda interesting, given that neither one of them is human.

Jeffrey Bedard

I watched this episode last night. I'd seen a couple times before from my DVD set. But this time I really didn't care for it. Tuvok was not acting like himself. The way he was carrying on when Kim caught him playing caltoe with the hologram was too much like "But baby, we were just playing Vulcan chess!" I guess that is what Menosky was going for, but it Tuvok was a terrible choice to add in to that mix. As for Harry Kim, again, his characterization in this episode is just terrible. Madly in love with a hologram and then he wants to learn how to purge all emotion?! How is that a reasonable response to his problem? Not to mention he goes through the whole episode acting like he's never been in love before or been attracted to anyone before. Very disappointing. And I never thought this before, but last night as I'm watching the party sequence my thoughts went to the starship Equinox, also in the Delta Quandrant getting the snot beaten out of ship and crew where as Voyager is having a luau. And finally, Janeway can say she merely invited Tuvok to the party, but it sure sounded like an order to me.

I liked Russ's performance in this. I saw the intellectual attraction --not the same as physical attraction. And the characterization of Harry also fit, because he just seems darker, more troubled after The Chute.

This is the most I have laughed during a Voyager episode. I love when Harry feels Marayna's tendon, looks at Tuvok, and says "It's like a knot." Too funny.

If the closed captions on the DVDs (and MemoryAlpha.org) are to be believed, it's not "caltoe"; it's "Kal-toh."

I was very pleasantly surprised by the twist at the end. What I assumed would be yet another "holodeck character is now sentient due to the effects of some anomaly and wants to take over the ship; what do we do" plot turned out to be much more interesting. Kudos to the writers; I didn't see it coming and it worked very well.

I enjoyed Tuvok's Vulcan description of the different phases of falling in love... very Vulcan.

Nice to see an episode of catfish back in 1997.

This episode seemed clearly inspired by Fatal Attraction. There's a line in here where Marayna yells something very much like "I'm not going to be ignored, Dan!" She's clearly maladjusted. Perhaps it was from spending all that time alone. Perhaps because the interacted via a simulation it didn't seem real, thus her actions didn't seem as wrong. Or perhaps she chose solitude because she already was maladjusted. A holodeck simulation can give you anything you want exactly the way you want it. Getting used to that could hamper people's relationships with real people. With a holodeck character, everything goes as you want it, but a relationship with a real person takes some work and compromise. Your holodeck lover won't mind if you're out every night at the bar with your friends, the holodeck lover is available for what you want 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on your schedule. It would be surprising if more people didn't fall for holodeck characters. Perhaps by the 24th century, they have become more sophisticated about relationships.

For me this is a medium calibre episode; 2.5 stars. I liked the intellectual aspect of the Marayna-Tuvok relationship. I thought Harry's jealousy was a not very plausible over reaction. The ending didn't do much for me.

Surprisingly pleasant outing with an ending that was pure Star Trek at its heart. The fact that it's a spiritual successor of sorts to the two mentioned TNG episodes (albeit with a twist) was a nice touch. The scene with Kim's jealous outburst bordered on juvenile and out of place as well as the scene with the aliens momentary overt-aggressiveness didn't hold much water. Otherwise it was lighthearted, affecting, and, when all was said and done, rather touching. The close up shots of Voyager inside the inverse nebula was absolutely gorgeous, too. Kudos to the SFX department. 3 stars.

John C. Worsley

"Well, that's kinda interesting, given that neither one of them is human." Captain James T. Kirk: "Spock, you want to know something? Everybody's human."

This one ended up being better than I predicted when I heard Harry claim he fell in love with a hologram and his reaction was to "purge all emotion" .. (slaps forehead) I thought Tim Russ was outstanding. I thought Kes looked unhealthy and uncomfortable in her bathing suit. I thought B'Elanna looked more than healthy in hers :-) I liked the Moriarty discussion and I liked it even more that this episode ended up not being a copy of TNG's 'Ship in a Bottle'. The ending was awesome. Solid Trek here. 3 stars.

No mention of Libby then? The fiance that Harry apparently loves so much back on Earth. Although I suppose him prefering to get stranded on the other side of the galaxy with an ex-con rather than spend the rest of his life with her would kinda put a downer on the relationship. If she is still waiting for him when they get back (and we don't hear about her again either way) I'd love to see him explain that the fell in love with a hologram. And a Borg. And the wrong twin. And an alien girl that makes your skin glow... He must love Libby so much...

Diamond Dave

Possibly the very model of the middle of the road episode. It does nothing badly, does nothing spectacularly well, contains a bit of an unexpected twist, a bunch of good character moments, continues to put female crew members in swimsuits and has someone being strangled with a lei. "Vulcans do not hydrosail" indeed. 2.5 stars.

Having just watched this again, why didn't Kim just order up another Marayna? A twin sister. He's used to twins...

Hey look. A seemingly innocuous space phenomenon. Let's get up close because nothing ever happens to us when we get close to seemingly innocuous space phenomena. I thought it was a holodeck episode. Turns out it's just a repressed alien. (**)

I'm not seeing what others seem to enjoy about this episode. It just comes off as more character assasination of Kim. And the rest is just rediculous.

@Akkadian Not much there to assasinate, really. Personally, I would prefer if they didn't add the twist with the alien and just ahd the episode be a characer drama with Tuvok and Kim. No need to add baddie of the week and "female stalkers are jsut misunderstood" trope.

Good episode - of course plenty borrowed from other Trek episodes but it has its originality with the ending and how the phenomenon of sentience in the holodeck comes about - thought that was creative enough. This is what sci-fi is all about. This episode actually reminded me of one of my favorite TOS episodes "Metamorphosis". The ending is well done in both episodes. Both are exemplary of Star Trek in many ways (unlike say TNG's "Conspiracy"). Both are well-done Trek romance stories - intelligent and not cheap/physical nonsense. My criticism would be of Wang's portrayal of Harry Kim - very wooden. But I thought Russ's performance of Tuvok had a great deal of integrity to being a Vulcan. He continues to impress as a Vulcan - much more so than say Blalock as T'Pol from ENT. This is a good character episode and it tied the nebula phenomenon with the lonely alien story reasonably well. Agree with Jammer that there's nothing earth-shaking here but it's a solid story with a nice ending and. Rates 3 stars for me.

While not starting with the most thrilling set-up, this episode almost worked for me. Unlike many above, I don't think Harry's over-the-top reaction of wanting to purge all emotion because he had a crush is wholly ridiculous in context. And nor do I think his reaction to Tuvok playing kal-toh with Marayna is that extreme, either, because it seems at least partly clear that he was right about Tuvok -- just that Tuvok was unwilling to admit that he was intrigued by the holodeck character enough to feel mildly ashamed and to want to hide it. The key is that they do think she's a holodeck character, and that makes the difference. Admittedly this episode drafts a little off 11001001, but I think it's important that people have certain expectations for holodeck programs, and are a little floored and taken aback when the holograms seem real enough to fall for. (See how Minuet deeply surprises both Riker and Picard.) With Geordi/Leah, we saw something a bit different, in that Leah was a constructed image where Geordi easily transferred his infatuation from the program to the actual person. What Harry goes through here is a shock that he *should not have fallen in love with a hologram, because she's not a person*, and while we don't see the specifics of what Harry and Marayna's interactions were like, I think it's implied that Harry is partly questioning his sanity. Surely a hastily-programmed extra in a resort couldn't be the charming, intelligent woman he sees when he looks at her, and so his emotions must be completely out of whack. I think that's also why Marayna is able to get past Tuvok's defenses early on. If some crew member started psychoanalyzing Tuvok, I think he'd be prepared for it; Marayna manages to find a way to pierce his mental protective shell, so to speak, by showing dazzling insight that she shouldn't have. And yet she doesn't do anything that is impossible for a computer to do -- just unexpected -- and he finds himself intrigued, particularly by the "riding the waves of emotion, believing oneself in control but it being illusion" bit. There's a tension here between what is, I think, a real attraction -- not just to Marayna but to the very idea of actually confronting the limitations of his emotional control -- and the conscious knowledge that she is only a hologram, and thus nothing he experiences can be real. And so through Tuvok's insistence that he's totally under control to Harry and the way he violates the rules he sets up for Harry himself, we get the impression that Tuvok is both less fully controlled and also more driven by fears (fear of exposure?) than he seems. He's also lonelier, and he deals with that loneliness by isolating himself and attributing it to Vulcan discipline. The episode even uses Vorik, who not only seems very willing to participate in the program, but also seems to be ramping up to hit on B'Elanna more explicitly, to show that what Tuvok suggests is purely a matter of Vulcan philosophy is maybe more complicated and more about Tuvok himself. Harry's role in the episode is mostly to set Tuvok up, admittedly, but I think the way in which Tuvok treats Harry's problems (and his suspicion that he's losing his mind at how real he finds Marayna) tells us about how Tuvok chooses to believe in his own superiority as a way of avoiding genuinely dealing with his loneliness and alone-ness. I also think that Tuvok's going to meet Marayna again, to play kal-toh, *is* a sign that he's started to let his feelings for her develop, but that he can rationalize it as being purely above-board and not at all a betrayal of his wife, himself, or of Harry. And of course Tuvok is correct that he did nothing wrong, but it's sort of a sign of his logic failing him that he would be willing to go and play the "is to chess what chess is to tic-tac-toe" game with what is *supposed* to be a holodeck program, who should have already raised alarms by being more observant than one would expect. (Who programmed her?) And then the episode goes Fatal Attraction. It's not convincing here because we only got one real moment between Tuvok and Marayna -- the big conversation the luau night -- along with the brief introduction scene and then a small moment the next day when Harry walks in on them kal-tohing. It's a bit of a nightmare for Tuvok -- he lets his guard down just a touch, and then the woman comes at him and insists they have a real connection, and there's just enough truth in it to make it difficult. But she goes too far, too fast, and she just clearly makes herself seem delusional. If the episode had built it more slowly, and had allowed Tuvok a slightly greater indiscretion, something she could point to with more confidence.... Really the whole ship-in-jeopardy plot could have been excised and the episode would have been superior; I'd prefer it even if Marayna, say, stalled the ship to keep Tuvok nearby for longer. But yes, the final moments between Tuvok and Marayna were lovely. I like the way Tuvok leaves implicit that her actions seemed delusional and dangerous, and then reasons from that not that there's something fundamentally wrong with Marayna as a person but that she has had her perspective warped and broken by loneliness. And her response to Tuvok was also lovely. Tuvok reaching out to Harry at the end is a moment I'm very fond of, too. The way kal-toh works in this episode is interesting; Tuvok plays it alone because he believes that no one else is his peer (he doesn't even bother tying to ask Vorik), but he does end up jumping at the chance to play it with a holoprogram, as long as he can be assured she isn't real, and thus cannot be any threat to his carefully cultivated sense of solitude, which he uses to protect himself from feeling the full weight of the absence of his family. There is an element of attraction to Marayna which is, we can be sure, not present with Harry, but the fact that he wanted that connection is something he could only find out by finding he wanted it with someone he believed he would be able to delete from his life at a moment's notice. The show didn't often do right by Harry, but I appreciate that Tuvok recognized that his almost mechanistic response to Harry's problem (and his dismissiveness at the idea that Harry could have fallen for a holoprogram), as well as his smug dismissal of Harry being anything like his friend. 2.5 stars -- interesting except for the Fatal Attraction middle bit. A good episode for Tuvok.

I also found it a bit strange that neither Kim nor Tuvok noticed that Marayna wasn't a normal holodeck character after just a few minutes. I certainly did. Why do the aliens need to have someone sitting in the middle of this nebula all by themselves to preserve it? That was wierd. And why would a nebula controlling machine be able to tap into an alien computer and completely take over the holodeck and all of Voyager's systems? Also I'm getting sick of the inertial dampers failing, since that is supposedly what keeps them from dying every time they move the ship basically, but apparently they don't need them at all, because nothing every happens when they fail anyway. I didn't like Kim's part in the whole thing, I think that was completely unnecessary. It could just as easily have been only about Tuvok, which would have made it a better episode, I think. 2 1/2 stars.

Startrekwatcher

2 stars. An episode featuring the dumb holoresort, a lovesick Harry Kim and Tuvok falling for a ” hologram”. That’s a recipe for a boring hour

SouthofNorth

If Neelix is Voyager's Jar-Jar Binks, then Harry is Voyager's Wesley Crusher. The 3/4ths of this episode was darn-near unwatchable. Do the writers understand nothing about these characters? We've already seen that Kim has a hot girlfriend back on Earth that he's living with, so why is he acting like a 14-year boy who just fell in love for the first time? It was all sophomoric and completely insulting. The last five minutes of the episode were very nice and almost redeemed the nonsense the preceded it. Rating: 2 stars Fast Forward Rating: Fast foward through the first 40 minutes and then enjoy the last five.

I was just watching this episode and it got tot he scene where Kim and Tuvok were in the turbolift. Tuvok was saying that there were 2 outcomes for the feelings Kim had. Either the feelings balanced out and forged a longterm relationship, or things end badly. He advised retreating. Once that scene concluded all I could think was "Just delete the girl from the holo-program... problem solved" The sheer irrelevance of the Kim story, combined with the fact that it already done better on TNG, made this episode really frustrating.

Sean Hagins

The only thing I remembered about this episode from when I watched it all those years ago was a Hawaiian girl strangling B'lanna without ever losing her friendly smile! It was so creepy it stuck with me! Star Trek was always good for giving me those horror movie chills (Star Trek is about the scariest thing I watch)

Looking back on the episode, I can't help but notice how similar the actual Maryana looks to the Hirogen. Her species was never identified in the episode, but the resemblance is striking (plus we never saw a female Hirogen). Given the fact they're a nomadic species used to living in isolation, it would be a neat little retcon... even though it makes little sense for them to maintain the nebula. Why would a hunter race care about what comes down to a tourist attraction?

This was a Tuvoc-centric episode and it highlighted a weakness in how Tim portrayed a vulcan. Tim's interpretation of a vulcan is an emotionless robots who delivers flat deliveries. Often he stares blankly at the person he talks to while not moving his body, not changing his vocal inflections or varying his rate of speech with natural gaps. This is VERY different from Spock. The secret to why Spock (and Data) worked was NOT because they had no emotions, but because they had little to no egos. Emotions did overlap some...but the ego was the key to why these characters work or don't. Tim never figured this out. He was constantly "protecting himself" and his ego with his deliveries which was in stark contrast to Spock/Data who content to be oblivious to attacks on their identity. Characters without egos are a rare delight in science fiction and they make a scene uplifting. We needed more of them in Voyager. The best we would get would be 7 of 9 who would appear later in the show.

Sarjenka's Brother

Mildly surprised and mildly delighted that I liked this as much as I did. Mind you, I went in with low expectations. I'm amazed at the number of Voyager episodes I never saw or just plain forgot. The guest actress was Phyllis No. 2 on the Young & the Restless. I liked her. Best scene: the Hawaiians attacking the crew.

Steve McCullagh

Harry Kim may be the most beige character in the history of Star Trek, and this episode was just plain dull.

A solid, enjoyable * * * episode. I'm not sure how I've missed this episode all these years? But like @Sarjenka's Brother, I have absolutely no memory of every watching it. Which made watching "Alter Ego" this evening - for the very first time, a real treat! Like @Lt. Yarko, this is easily the most I have ever laughed with a Voyager episode. On the level of sheer fun, I'd put this one up there with "Future's End Part I". One new thing that re-watching Voyager after all these years has given me, is an appreciation for just how well the show sets up the Paris/B'Elanna coupling over the years. There are small flirtations a few times here and there. Then, I think it was at the start of Season 3, with "The Swarm" when we get some real honest-to-goodness (and fun) flirting. So to see the Lower Decks vulcan (Vorik) cock-block Paris at the luau was absolutely hilarious. Watching this episode for the first time now - after movies like Joaquin Phoenix's Her (https://youtu.be/6QRvTv_tpw0) have been made, also makes Harry's reaction to crushing on a holodeck character more understandable. Harry had studied the TNG Moriarity situation at the Academy. Maybe, @William B, Harry also knew about the Minuet gambit the Binars pulled on Riker? Maybe Harry's reaction to falling for a holographic woman was actually prudent? Finally, let me echo what @Jordi Bosveld said at the top. When both Tuvok and Harry say "no" to that lovely hololady who wants to join them at the end of the show, I for one burst out laughing :-)

If nothing else, this episode has the comedy gold of a jilted Harry Kim catching his holo-crush in the act* with Tuvok. *of playing a board game

I liked how Harry wears his heart on his sleeve in this episode, and how everybody is so mundane about his holo-crush. I can imagine how in a future with this sort of entertainment system, it happens a LOT. And the way Kim shares this "embarrassing" emotions so openly with his crew mates, really goes a long way as a message advocating for positive masculinity.

Teaser : ***, 5%  The Voyager has encountered another unique space phenomenon. Immediately, the difference in tone between the way Janeway and co. approach this “inversion nebula” and the super novae from “The Q and the Grey” is stark. Where one was gratingly boisterous and syrupy, the other is invitingly sober. This scene seems to strike the right balance between genuine, optimistic scientific curiosity and emotional restraint that personifies the Star Trek ethos regarding space exploration. It may seem like a triviality, but to me it makes a tremendous difference in the episode’s tonal appeal. Speaking of emotional restraint, Harry is uncharacteristically distracted at his post when Janeway orders him to tech the tech. They continue the thematic place-setting: “JANEWAY: Astro-theory never predicted this would be so lovely. Beauty and mystery, a tantalising combination. PARIS: No argument here. Right, Tuvok? TUVOK: I am fully capable of appreciating this phenomenon without the extraneous sentimentality humans find so necessary. CHAKOTAY: Being moved by an emotion isn't always extraneous. Sometimes it's the whole point. I wonder where this is going...well for now, our next stop is Tuvok’s quarters. Ensign Distracted Face visits the unsentimental Vulcan while he plays with a ball of paper clips. He explains to Kim that these paper clips are actually a Very Smart Vulcan version of chess and Kim reveals something actually kind of startling; he wants Tuvok to teach him to purge his emotions. KIM: I also know that Vulcans use certain techniques... TUVOK: The t'san s'at, the intellectual deconstruction of emotional patterns. KIM: I'm willing to learn. It turns out Harry is in love with a hologram called Marayna. Hoo boy. There’s a lot to talk about here. First, let’s discuss Harry. His few featured scenes in Season 2 did manage to contextualise his social awkwardness and reveal that he tends to gravitate towards relationships with damaged people, like Paris and Torres. His ersatz romance with Libby in “Non Sequitur” was so tepid compared to the infinitely more compelling hurt-comfort homo-eroticism in “The Chute,” that these seem almost comical in juxtaposition. And of course, there’s his fear of infantilisation memorably portrayed in “The Thaw.” While the idea of purging all emotion because you’re in love with a hologram may seem like an extreme response, there’s something familiar in Harry’s desire to re-invent himself like this. As far as he knows, falling “in love with a computer subroutine,” as Tuvok bluntly puts it, is another symptom of his own immaturity, that thing that he’s so afraid makes the captain and the rest of the crew baby him. So he takes this as a sign that his own emotional problems run deeper than developing a misplaced crush. His desire to try on Vulcan spiritual philosophy is quite a bit like folks trying out fad religions like Kabbalah, or western Buddhism, or even Scientology. It’s a quick fix for a profound spiritual crisis. On the other hand, the word choices around Tuvok’s description of Vulcan philosophy hearkens back to the more interesting parts of “Innocence.” Whether it’s fear of the Morrock or desire for holo-love, Vulcans learn to objectify their emotions and thus prevent them from affecting their decision-making or general sense of well-being. This is a double-edged sword, as we saw in the first scene. Any degree of emotional control means limiting your own potential to enjoy life in particular moments. Pure Dionysiac excess is a like the inversion nebula, quick to burn itself out. And Vulcan emotion is similarly potent stuff; so Tuvok’s choice to live so far down the spectrum of emotional control may be excessive by our standards, but it still relevant to us. The Vulcan version of humanity (remember, all races in Star Trek are aspects of the human condition) is a useful tool to have in the box, assuming we aren’t ready to flame out entirely. And we have to mention that the “character falls for a hologram” thread is something that takes us all the way back to “11001001.” Riker, per his idiom, wasn’t going to let any social stigma around fucking a subroutine get in the way of Number One, but he ended up being let off the hook by the revelation that Minuet’s remarkable personality stemmed from the Binars’ interference. Still, although her programme was more advanced than what the Federation should have been able to conjure, she wasn’t any less an artificial being who stole Riker’s heart. But as the years went on, we saw the Enterprise create Moriarty, a remarkable facsimile of Leah Brahms, and eventually a new emergent species of artificial life in, um, “Emergence.” It was the Doctor’s feelings that were given attention in “Lifesigns;” Pel’s were addressed by Kes, but as an especially compassionate and open-minded alien, her perspective can’t be taken as typical. Our best gauge for contemporary social standards regarding developing feelings for holograms is probably the problematic story between Geordi and Brahms in “Booby Trap” and “Galaxy’s Child.” The only thing which seems to justify Geordi’s feelings is the conceit that holo-Brahms’ personality is based on a “real” person. I think it’s pretty fair to assume that the nonplussed look Picard gives him when he interrupts the brainstorming session in the holodeck is a typical response one could expect. Given that, Tuvok’s incredulity and Kim’s embarrassment seem to fit right in here. Act 1 : ***, 17% Tuvok begins by cataloguing Harry’s feelings, objectifying each emotional facet of Harry’s response to Marayna. The poetic nuances of attraction and romance are to Vulcans like the life-cycle of a fruit fly: small, simplistic, and readily comprehensible. TUVOK: Does your daily routine seem somehow empty, perhaps even ludicrous? KIM: Yes! TUVOK: You are experiencing shon-ha'lock, the engulfment. It is the most intense and psychologically perilous form of eros. I believe humans call it love at first sight. Interesting, amusing and insightful all at once. When Tuvok is given this kind of sharp dialogue, it really shows off the appeal of the character. The pair enter the holodeck, where of course the resort programme is already running, with Neelix doing his thing. I don’t know if it’s Picardo’s direction (this is likely given the tone established in the teaser) or a reflection of the character’s new-found security within the Voyager family after “Fair Trade,” but his effusiveness doesn’t have nearly the same grating insistence that is typical for him. He’s still exuberant and all that, but there’s something more human and less performative about Phillips’ delivery. I’ll take it. It turns he’s planning a “Polynesian style” lu’au for this evening. Uh huh. I don’t know why they couldn’t just go with “Hawaiian”--it seems like in their attempts to be more inclusive with this stuff, the writers just trip over their own low-key racist dicks. Anyway, Marayna finally appears, returning from giving Kes a hydrosailing lesson. Hydrosailing is one of those realworld things that sounds like a Trek writer trying to make a normal activity sound more futuristic than it is. Tuvok declines her offer to join a volleyball game and instead invites the hologram to join them for a chat. Marayna demonstrates that she can manipulate Harry’s hormones and feelings with nary any effort as a single feel of her knotted leg muscle is enough for Harry to give Tuvok a pleading look to rescue him from his own erection. The dialogue continues to be amusing, with an almost Laurel and Hardy charm. MARAYNA: So Vulcans don't hydrosail, and they don't have friends? TUVOK: We have fellowships and associations, but without the emotional dimension humans experience. They’re called away to the bridge and on the way, Tuvok tells Harry that his emotions are “as formulaic as a mathematical equation.” Harsh, but fair. KIM: It's all so predictable. TUVOK: That's just what I've been trying to get you to perceive. To the trained Vulcan intellect, intense romantic love is nothing more than a set of stereotypical behaviours. Not having our discipline, typically, humans are swept along by the process until it ends. It’s hard to argue with this. You don’t have to have a strict Darwinian take on sociology to appreciate the fact our experiences have a cyclical, patterned, almost inevitable quality to them. That’s why we can be moved by the lives of strangers or fictional characters. Reconciling this truth with what Chakotay said earlier, how the emotional responses to stimuli, no matter how formulaic, are entirely the point, we can really appreciate the value of the Tuvok character in this series. TOS had Spock of course, but Spock’s story was about the struggle between his Vulcan and Human selves. Data on TNG aspired to experience the emotions Vulcans deny themselves on purpose; another tortured soul of sorts. Tuvok by contrast seems perfectly content with himself. Tuvok is aspirational, in much the way Picard was (c.f. Data’s and Spock’s conversation in “Unification’). His discipline and stoicism afford him peace and purpose. We by contrast subject ourselves to these repeating patterns of behaviour. Some days, this can be a Kafkaesque nightmare of pure nihilism. Other days, it’s like reliving treasured memories. We can’t become Vulcans, but we can certainly emulate them. The pair walk onto the bridge and enter the related B-plot. Janeway has pulled the Voyager close to the inversion nebula to see whatever special process keeps it from burning itself out first hand. Act 2 : ***.5, 17% Seeing the phenomenon up close convinces Janeway that it’s worth a more thorough investigation. If they’re very lucky they may discover how to design their consoles not to explode when their shields graze a meteorite. In the meantime she passively suggests to Tuvok that she expects him to attend Neelix’ culturally-disrespectful lu’au this evening. We get an interlude where Tom and B’Elanna run into each other on the way to said lu’au, initiating their “I’m a big white nerd” and “I’m too hot for you, gringo, but I’ll probably settle anyway” flavour of flirtation. It turns out Harry has decided to skip the occasion, so their chaperone is going to be Vorik instead. Tom won’t be kept from his true love, however, so he bids Torres farewell with a knowing wink (after sizing up her bathing suit) and leaves her to fetch him. Harry is in his quarters keeping himself distracted with Vulcan meditations. So, I think the Bashir/O’Brien relationship is well-utilised most of the time and I enjoy their friendship. But I often have to roll my eyes with their dated and toxic inability to express unveiled affection for each other (“Hard Time” excepted). While Paris has a little snicker at Kim’s odd behaviour here, his next instinct is to ask his friend about his feelings, diagnosing immediately that Harry is in pain and wanting to help him through it. Tom also knows Harry so well that he’s already determined the cause of Harry’s problem. And he’s a little hurt that Harry chose to seek Tuvok’s counsel instead of his best friend’s. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but the only other regular male-male relationship that demonstrates this level of open intimacy I can think of is Data’s and Geordi’s friendship. I don’t discount that, but Data’s android nature gives the writers a bit of a pass; his anatomical gender is a product of his creator’s ego more than anything endemic to himself. Harry and Tom seem to be able to be open and caring about each other’s feeling without any gay panic. I know I make jokes about it because, damn it, Star Trek needed a gay couple before it became fashionable, but I do think the dynamic that exists is under-appreciated. Anyway, Tom has a more human solution to Harry’s dilemma. PARIS: We have all fallen for a holodeck character. It happens. You deal with it by staying with your normal routine, not by hiding out in your quarters. Personally, I think a little of column a and column b is in order, but Harry is frustrated with his lack of progress and would rather spend some time with his friends and so agrees to replicate himself his own hideous Hawaiian shirt and attend the lu’au. At Disney’s Moana Experience or whatever, we find most of our regulars enjoying themselves--the EMH is kissing holo-ladies (thank you Mr Director), Janeway is on Chakotay’s arm--while Tuvok meanders about unimpressed. He refuses Neelix’ offer to wear a lei. Again, Neelix is himself, but he isn’t pushy or self-important about it. He respects Tuvok’s refusal, even though it disappoints him, and then moves on to something else. Tuvok prepares himself for an evening of testing his Vulcan patience but is surprised to see Marayna in a corner playing with the Vulcan paper clips. Hmm. He approaches her and Vulcan-splains her error in trying to play the game like a human. TUVOK: Kal-toh is not about striving for balance. It is about finding the seeds of order, even in the midst of profound chaos. She decided to teach herself to play specifically to provide Tuvok an opponent. This is “perceptive” as Tuvok admits, but not outside the bounds of a well-programmed hologram designed to entertain guests of the resort, is it? But her perceptiveness cuts much deeper. MARAYNA: I think you're tying to isolate yourself and make a public protest at the same time...You didn't want to be here in the first place. Being the only one without a lei sets you apart from the others, allowing you to symbolically maintain your solitude. And since everybody can see that you're the only one without a lei, you're letting them know that you'd rather be somewhere else. TUVOK: Your logic is impeccable. ...which is Vulcan for “dat ass.” Marayna then removes her lei, a symbol her of solidarity. She too would rather be somewhere else, it seems. Meanwhile, Vorik has taken the liberty of booking a table for himself and Torres, to both her and Paris’ surprise. I’m sure this is a love triangle we will never revisit. Anyway, this leaves Tom free to dine with Harry, but the latter is too distracted by the sight of Marayna to enjoy himself and, sensing he’s hit the line, Tom backs off and lets him retreat back to his quarters. After the party, Tuvok and Marayna are still deep in conversation on the holodeck. She demonstrates a keen insight on the foundational principles of Vulcan emotional suppression, citing the “illusion of control” over such phenomena as the tides and the currents of the sea. It’s simultaneously intellectual, probing, and poetic, a classically Vulcan combination of attributes while still delivered with a certain degree of personality that allows Marayna to be her own unique character outside of the Vulcan paradigm. The episode quite efficiently shows us why both Harry and Tuvok would be attracted to this person. Marayna escalates to the point where she’s pawing at Tuvok in a way we would expect to end with a passionate kiss. Tuvok returns this gesture with a promise to “perhaps” return the next day. For a Vulcan, this downright sensual behaviour. Act 3 : ***, 17%  The Voyager’s investigations have confirmed the existence of a dampening field of some sort keeping the nebula from blowing itself up. It seems as though there’s a “feedback loop” by which the chain reactions trigger the creation of the dampening effect, finding, you might say, “the seeds of order, even in the midst of profound chaos.” A still-distracted Harry is assigned to work out and replicate the mechanics of this phenomenon with the deflector dish which, remember, can do anything. Having acquired the necessary data, Janeway orders Tom to resume their course home, but he encounters a problem. Assuming the nebula is affecting their systems somehow (genre-savvy, aren’t they?), the la’au gang work to track down the issue in Engineering. Harry demonstrates feminism by repeating back Torres’ diagnosis to her as though he hasn’t heard a word she said, which, he hasn’t. Under Picardo’s restrained direction, Dawson really excels at channelling Torres’ acerbic nature into an EMH-esque dry humour that helps carry the scene. We feel sorry for Harry, but avoid an emotional pile-on because Torres isn’t angry or disappointed with him, she teases him because she cares about him, echoing the Harry/Tom scene from before. It’s a subtle bit of characterisation, but this whole script is about those subtle moments. KIM: What did Tom say to you? TORRES: Not a single word. I saw the way you were looking at Marayna yesterday. KIM: Hi. My name's Harry read-me-like-a-book Kim. She tells him to sort himself out before he accidentally ejects the warp core. He decides the best place to start is to confront Marayna on the holodeck. When he arrives, he discovers that she’s already running and mid-paper clips with Tuvok, who has apparently made good on his promise from the previous evening. Upon discovering the two of them together, Harry is incensed bordering on enraged that Tuvok would betray his trust like this. What I like about this is that it hearkens back to Janeway’s infamous line from “Prime Factors”; “You can use logic to justify almost anything.” In a rules-lawyer-y way, Tuvok is *justified* here; Marayna isn’t a real person; Vulcans don’t engage in sexual relationships with real people the way humans do anyway; the only thing Tuvok has done with this non-person is play some paper clips and chat; ergo, Tuvok has done nothing wrong. However, Tuvok has shown that he understands human emotions to the extent that he’s able to catalogue them like species of insects. Maybe he shouldn’t *have* to care about Harry’s feelings here, but to assume he wouldn’t have expected them is dishonest. No, Tuvok has put his own interests ahead of Harry’s emotional needs. And that is by no means a crime, but it is, to a degree, selfish. But Harry and Tuvok aren’t really friends, are they? So it’s okay not to consider the feelings of a non-friend? Well apparently not, as Tuvok is so desperate to salvage their relationship that he deletes Marayna without a second’s pause to prove just how much he doesn’t care about her to Harry. This fails to appease Harry for now, but it excellently unfolds the complexity of this situation. We are able to see the layers of Tuvok’s character, the loneliness William B expounded upon in his comment and the fragility of his ego, without violating the Vulcan-ness of his characterisation the way, say, “Meld” did. In most Vulcan stories, we have to un-Vulcan our character(s) in order to get a the juicy bits underneath (“Amok Time,” “Sarek,” “Meld,” etc.). The fact that we don’t go there in this story is a testament to Joe Menosky’s skill as a writer. Very often the spectacle in his stories overshadows the subtlety of his characterisations. I’m glad he’s given a chance to shine here. Meanwhile, the Voyager is still stuck inside the magic nebula and Torres is more convinced than ever that a computer malfunction is to blame. She’s able to get the aft thrusters working well enough to push the ship clear by tomorrow, which appeases Janeway. It turns out this computer malfunction has a name as Tuvok returns to his quarters to discover Marayna playing paper clips. She has avoided deletion, downloaded herself into the Doctor’s mobile emitter, and cheerfully parked herself here. Well that’s a bit of a yikes. Act 4 : **.5, 17%  TUVOK: I deleted you from the holodeck. MARAYNA: But you only did that for Harry's benefit. I know you wanted to keep seeing me. I like Harry, but you're different. You're not like anyone else...You're like a new world to me, Tuvok. I want to know everything about you. I didn't realise how lonely my existence was, and I can't go back to the way things were, not without you. Again, the script clings tightly to its characterisation. Tuvok is intrigued by Marayna, and by her apparent sentience, but doesn’t hesitate to call for security at this violation of the established order. The chaos has been exposed and, however tempting it may be to ride the wave, it’s time to close this particular door. Marayna, however, becomes a bit unhinged at this betrayal and shuts off the intruder alert by an apparent act of will, revealing a troubling degree of autonomy for this sentient hologram. Marayna’s schizophrenia is a disappointing and rushed element to this otherwise subtle story. It’s not exactly out of bounds, but it is out of step with what we saw of her and Tuvok on the holodeck. Then again, all we’ve seen of her so far is getting exactly what she wanted, first from Harry and then from Tuvok; all the attention she desired was pretty much immediately rewarded. So, yes I find it too broad for my tastes, but it by no means breaks the story either. In the conference room, the crew discuss this issue. Chakotay brings up Moriarty and Harry admits that this now eight-year-old event from “Elementary, Dear Data” is something they teach at the academy. Tuvok admits to the crew that her motivation is likely her feelings for himself, while the crew respond, Harry buries his head in his hands and Janeway sizes her old friend up, somewhat amazed at this news. Again, it’s all about the subtlety, this time in the direction. Harry’s story hasn’t been forgotten and neither has Janeway’s and Tuvok’s friendship, it’s just not being delivered to the audience on a silver platter. Anyway, their working theory is that instead of Marayna having been conjured by a slip of the tongue from an overzealous chief Engineer, the (presumably now-corrected) holodeck has given rise to a new intelligence by virtue of some mysterious property of the magic nebula. Janeway looks Tuvok straight in the eye and tells him to resolve this situation “one way or another.” In other words, she lets her friend know that he has shown her his cards; if this issue is being perpetuated by a, shall we say, untoward relationship between himself and this person, then he had better handle it better than he has handled his non-friendship with Harry. The gang goes to the holodeck to confront her and are met by the gentle Hawaiian music of the resort programme. As they mill about the flowers and ocean air with phasers out, the discontinuity of the tone creates a creepy atmosphere, as Paris directly points out. Torres accesses a control panel and discovers that the holodeck is actually being tapped by a signal from outside the ship. Immediately upon making this discovery, one of the hula girls begins strangling her with a lei, all while wearing her Disney Resort smile. The other holodeck characters keep Paris and Tuvok busy, too, creating a macabre tone that reminds me of the horrific heights of “The Thaw.” Eventually, they’re able to break free of the holodeck, but the nebula scornfully responds by lighting up around the Voyager, causing damage. Marayna makes contact with the bridge and demands that Tuvok return to the holodeck she’ll, you know, destroy the Voyager. This is...too much. Too TV trope-y for what had been such a nuanced character story. Act 5 : ***.5, 17% Tuvok enters the resort and examines a discarded mask. Does this mean anything? Nah. Marayna greets him, convinced that, having removed any prying eyes and outside expectations of behaviour, the two of them can consummate their relationship and discard the masks, if you will. While they chat, the crew is able to relay a transporter beam along the alien signal and beam Tuvok to her location. In response, the plasma streams start to really burn up, lady-rage metaphors that they are. Chakotay notes that the shields are down to 47 [duh] per cent. Thank you, sir. Tuvok materialises aboard an space station and discovers the real Marayna, a heavily prosthetic-ed alien about to destroy the Voyager from her control panel. She has begun an ignition sequence, her passions having boiled over into a homicidal fit of pique. Tuvok is forced to rely on his understanding of their relationship and her emotions (which he failed to do with Harry) to try and talk her down. We learn that, for some insane reason, Marayna’s people have allowed her to live alone in this station for who knows how long, containing the inversion nebula so that they can enjoy its beauty. While this is a little contrived from a , world-building perspective, it does make for a nifty metaphor about emotional labour, the hidden cost of seemingly effortless beauty. And this ties in nicely with the earlier discussion about loneliness and emotional control, that is an illusion, but a compelling, thrilling, beautiful, purpose-defining illusion nonetheless. We learn that part of what made Marayna so perceptive about Tuvok’s unspoken motivations for self-isolation at the lu’au was recognising a similar motivation in herself. MARAYNA: I watch the ships when they pass by. They don't even know I'm here...I prefer to be here, alone...I never expected to find something as diverting as your holodeck. I never expected to find you. You are like nothing else I've ever encountered. She is, in essence, letting us in on part of what’s going on under the surface with Tuvok; he watches the crew evolve, things like Tom’s and B’Ellana’s flirtation or Harry’s infatuation and makes a point of letting everyone around him know how much he doesn’t give a fuck. But when something “diverting” comes along, such as an insightful hologram who sees through his defences, those deep currents of Vulcan emotion are nigh impossible to contain. In retrospect, Tuvok’s seemingly innocent interactions with Marayna on the holodeck reveal a well of pain. For a Vulcan to engage in any behaviour due to something like loneliness is actually remarkable. Again in retrospect, if we examine Marayna’s change of tone in Act 4 from the perspective of someone who’s been living in complete solitude for god knows how long, it’s far more understandable. Marayna casually admits to examining all the little details of the lives of passing aliens. That’s...creepy, but it’s not too dissimilar from Tuvok’s taxonomical evaluation of Harry’s feelings. Much like how the Ferengi have dozens of words for “rain” because their world is inundated by it, Vulcans have all these detailed words describing emotional experiences because they are inundated by emotions. You might call them neurotic by necessity. More immediately, what Marayna expresses here when she tells Tuvok that she can’t be without him is, to me at least, a very special feeling of having found a person who truly understands you. When I think back on all the one-off Trek romances we’ve seen, this is believable for that reason. It’s not unlike Commander Darren and Picard from “Lessons.” When someone “gets” you, it’s difficult let it go. TUVOK: I must admit, I have found our conversations stimulating. Your insight and intelligence, fresh and unexpected. In other circumstances, I would be willing to spend time in your company, to continue to share knowledge and ideas...I do not have a complete understanding of emotions, but I believe that if you truly care for me, you will not pursue this course of action. And so let him go she does, but not before a final reckoning. As he beams away, she asks, “will you always be alone?” And all he can do is scrutinise her wordlessly as he dematerialises. The brief epilogue sees Tuvok begin to answer this question. He decides to reconcile with Harry, promising to teach him how to play paper clips. Much like how the game itself is described, this strikes an unexpected balance in the story’s approach to emotions and relationships. Instead of dismissing Harry’s distress as pathetic, Tuvok is willing to be a little vulnerable with him and invite him into his frame of mind more intimately. Maybe there’s still some room for Harry to adopt Vulcan objectivity, but there’s also room for Tuvok to develop meaningful relationships outside of the isolation he’s restricted himself to thus far. Episode as Functionary : ***.25, 10% The fourth act was a bit disappointing as I watched as it seemed like the subtlety in characterisation had been chucked for broader strokes. The ship-in-danger angle still is less than stellar to be certain, but the final conversations recontextualise those moments in such a way as to make some of the contrivance more understandable. It’s tough from a rating perspective because I can’t un-feel my irritation with those scenes just because I understand them better, hence the odd score. As a Tuvok story and as a Vulcan story, this is top shelf. We get a pretty thorough insight into an often inscrutable character without introducing a gimmick into the plot. The B story is of course a metaphor for issue under examination within the A story, which keys us in to how to read between the lines. I like how the crew assumes the nebula is naturally keeping itself from burning out, but in reality, that process is intentional and artificial, just like Vulcan discipline. Tuvok is somehow able to be a dynamic character without at any point violating his Vulcan nature, and Russ delivers as usual. There’s only one scene in the whole show that can be seen as superfluous, the brief interaction between Tom and Torres in the corridor. But this conversation is useful to the series at large, serves as a contrast for the way more conventionally emotional people interact regarding a budding romance, and segues effectively into the following scene with Harry. The test is going to be whether Tuvok is truly impelled to develop meaningful relationships with the rest of the crew. What is to become of his loneliness? His invitation to Kim at the episode’s close suggests the beginnings of something here. We shall see. Final Score : ***

Solid 3 stars for me. Nice character work...and let's face it, Harry is likable but emotionally immature and his reaction was spot-on. The smiling hula girls viciously fighting and strangling Torres with a lei had me laughing out loud.

Elliott mounts a good defense of this episode (hurry up and review the later seasons, Elliott). It's probably the only deep-dive of this episode on the internet. What struck me most about this episode is that it's that rare thing: a good Kim episode. I could have done without the "action climax" and "villain of the week" - too often Trek finds the need to insert "action" into a plot that would play better as straight drama - but other than this, Kim and Tuvok's quiet scenes together were often special. I also loved scenes in which the gang gather for a holodeck party. There was a real sense of camaraderie in these early scenes.

Wishiwasagrek

Wish Elliot could/would link to jammer reviews of the episode they reference - much easier for those playing along who don't have encyclopedic star trek knowledge...still it's a quick flick between browsers.

Can't believe so many people liked this episode. Outside of some funny one liners I didn't see anything to love. A 1 star for me.

I thought this was a great episode because it was an excellent exploration and commentary into the human condition. 4 stars just for that.

Awesome episode! Loved it, super entertaining! Poor old Harry lol.

The standout in this ok episode (apart from the eye candy in the "resort program") is Sandra Nelson -- the actress for Maryana. Sandra worked steadily from 1990 to 2016 and has 44 credits as an actress on IMDB. As someone above noted, she appeared in 116 episodes of "The Young and The Restless" from 1986 to 1999. Ms. Nelson is just another of those journeyman ("journeyperson"?) actors of which the Trek franchise has made good use. She showed up in a minor role ("Tavana") in DS9's "Soliders of the Empire." I liked her performance here. I also think her appearance bears a resemblance to Elizabeth Montgomery (a/k/a Samantha of TVs hall-of-fame entry "Bewitched").

Star Trek, like all sci-fi, has a lot of what amounts to space magic. I’m generally ok with this. Universal translator? Sure. Warp travel? Yeah, ok. Replicator tech? Hey, why not? Transporter tech? When in Rome. Holodeck? Ummmm… A piece of equipment that constantly breaks down and endangers the ship/station and its crew seems like a liability. I mean, in this episode it’s high jacked by an outside power and used to threaten the ship! The downside to this thing FAR out ways the benefits of neelix having a luau. I would have imagined that after the enterprise produced a sentient moriarty, a memo would have gone out federation wide to shut those freaking things down!

Further to ldh2023’s point above, this episode reminded me of something I may have read somewhere to the effect that the first thing a real-life Star Fleet captain or admiral should do is shut down all the holodecks, as they inevitably lead to problems. (Also after eating a big meal on the holodeck, how does the program convince you that you feel full, as there’s nothing in your stomach, right?) Still, I liked this episode. Tuvok gets the girl that Harry pines for is a great premise.

I like the nod to "The Graduate" in the Yes/No - scene. It would have been great if Tuvok said "Marayana, you are trying to seduce me" over the course of the episode.

This is DEFINITELY a favourite of mine. Tuvok has always been an upstanding, moral character. In this episode, he not only rejects overtures from a woman not his wife, but does so in a tactful manner. I also remember this one because of the smiling Hawaiian girl choking B'lana! I always found that image very spooky. I like how this show in the last couple episodes could be scary without going overboard. I feel sorry for Harry Kim's crush, and even for the obsessive alien girl's obsession, but her change of heart, and Harry's softening made a nice ending

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Star Trek: Voyager - Full Cast & Crew

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A starship is stranded in the uncharted Delta Quadrant in this fourth 'Star Trek' series, the first to feature a female captain. Here, the crew grudgingly teams with Maquis rebels to try to return to Earth after Voyager is hurtled 70,000 light-years from Federation space.

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Star Trek Voyager S 3 E 13 "Alter Ego" » Recap

This episode has the following tropes:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot : What the crew originally think they're dealing with, given the past history of Holodeck Malfunctions in the Trekverse.
• Alone in a Crowd : Marayna points out this quality in Tuvok. You gotta be pretty perceptive to impress a Vulcan. Marayna: You're the only one here not wearing a garland. Tuvok: Given the decor, it seems somehow excessive. Marayna: I don't believe you. Tuvok: I beg your pardon? Marayna: I think you're trying to isolate yourself and make a public protest at the same time. Tuvok: Explain. Marayna: You didn't want to be here in the first place. Being the only one without a lei sets you apart from the others, allowing you to symbolically maintain your solitude. And since everybody can see that you're the only one without a lei, you're letting them know that you'd rather be somewhere else. Tuvok (taken aback): Your logic is impeccable.
• Armor-Piercing Question : As Tuvok beams back to Voyager , Marayna asks if he too will always be alone. Tuvok then seeks out Harry and apologises to him for taking his feelings for Marayna lightly, and the episode ends on him teaching Harry how to play kal-toh .
• Birds of a Feather : Why Marayna thinks she and Tuvok are meant for each other, due to their self-enforced isolation.
• Brick Joke : During the first scene with Marayna, she asks if Tuvok and Harry are friends, then if they're both coming to the luau; each question prompts a "Yes" from Harry and a simultaneous "No" from Tuvok. ("You've got to stop doing that!") At the end, when another female holocharacter offers to join the two at their table, they both simultaneously reply " No. "
• Butter Face : The real Marayna is an alien who is quite less attractive (by human standards) than her holodeck incarnation.
• Buxom Beauty Standard : The moment Marayna appears in a swimsuit, we realize why Harry has fallen for her.
• Casanova Wannabe : Tom is cock-blocked by a Vulcan. In a Hawaiian shirt!
• Catchphrase : "Vulcans do not (etc.)"
• Continuity Nod : Chakotay mentions an incident in which a holodeck character took over the Enterprise-D, a reference to the Professor Moriarty program in the ST:TNG episodes "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle" . Tom also tells Harry that falling for a holo-character is not that uncommon. We've seen it happen before.
• Conversational Troping : Tuvok discusses Love Tropes with Harry in order to identify them and thereby reduce their power, specifically Love at First Sight and Everyone Can See It .
• Date My Avatar : The holodeck character Marayna is actually being remote-operated by a female alien in a cloaked ship, who hacks the computers of passing ships to amuse herself. The holodeck enables her to interact with a ship's crew a lot more than usual - and it proves to be a tremendous danger to the ship and everyone on it.
• A Day in the Limelight : Played with. It's set up to be a Harry episode, and becomes more of a Tuvok episode.
• Death Glare : After their argument on the holodeck, Tuvok glances at Harry on the bridge, and, uh... yeah, Harry's still angry.
• Dissonant Serenity : The Polynesian holo-babe smiling while choking B'Elanna with a lei.
• Does This Remind You of Anything? : Internet dating.
• Everyone Can See It : The k'oh-nar , the feeling of being completely exposed. B'elanna confirms this trope to an embarrassed Harry. B'Elanna: Forget about her. Harry: What did Tom say to you? B'Elanna: Not a single word! I saw the way you were looking at Marayna yesterday! Harry: Hi. My name's Harry Read-Me-Like-A-Book Kim.
• Fanservice : It's a Polynesian resort. Bikinis and bare chests everywhere.
• Fatal Attractor : Described as Tuvok's Fatal Attraction episode. Also the start of a Running Gag in which Harry falls for women who are either not interested in him, or are planning mischief.
• Vorik's implied romantic interest in B'Elanna is confirmed in "Blood Fever".
• Why Tuvok knows how to cope with the emotions of unrequited love is shown in "Gravity".
• Marayna points out Tuvok being Alone in a Crowd as listed above. By the end, we see why Marayna knows a thing or two about being isolated.
• Green-Eyed Monster : Harry is furious when he sees Tuvok playing kal-toh with Marayna.
• Go Mad from the Isolation : The real Marayna is headed down this road - she's been alone in the nebula for so long that she's desperate for companionship, and when she develops a crush on Tuvok, she'll do anything - anything - to have him.
• Hands-On Approach : Marayna invites Harry to feel her cramped leg muscle.
• Hawaiian-Shirted Tourist : Tom Paris proudly shows off his 1962 Big Daddy-O Surf Special shirt. He replicates another in pineapple for Harry. Even Vorik wears one, which he has buttoned all the way up , as you might expect a Vulcan to do.
• Hikikomori : Alien!Marayna works alone in a cloaked ship, keeping the inversion nebula stable for tourists. Staying there, she created an avatar that looks like a human to use on Voyager's holodeck. Her exile is self-imposed as she's never gotten along with others.
• Kim tries to become this in order to suppress his emotions about Marayna. It doesn't work.
• Tuvok manages to be one in the short time he's in the luau, wearing his uniform and rejecting a lei, in comparison to Vorik, another Vulcan, who seems to be enjoying the party. Marayna, however, finds Tuvok's personality refreshing.
• Inertial Dampening : Janeway nearly goes flying over a bridge railing when the inertial dampeners go offline.
• Interrupted Catchphrase : Chakotay tells Tuvok to stop being a stuffed Hawaiian shirt and mingle. Tuvok is about to say that "Vulcans do not mingle" when he catches sight of Marayna playing kal-toh and decides to mingle with her.
• I Just Want to Be Loved : Due to being alone on a space station for a long time, Marayna has pined for companionship. She has interacted with other ships in the past, but Tuvok is the only one (so far) that has sparked romantic feelings in her.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy : Tuvok uses this to persuade Marayna to relent, saying if she truly had feelings for him, she wouldn't want to keep him against his will or harm his friends.
• Just Following Orders : Tuvok's reason for turning up at the holodeck party. Janeway claims she was only making a suggestion, even though a 'suggestion' from The Captain is not something that Tuvok is going to ignore.
• Kiss Me, I'm Virtual : Or else she'll blow holes in the ship's hull.
• Love at First Sight : What the Vulcans call shon-ha'lock , the Engulfment.
• Love Triangle : Harry/Marayna/Tuvok and an implied Tom/B'Elanna/Vorik.
• Meaningful Echo : Marayna uses the metaphor of a boat on a turbulent ocean to describe a Vulcan's mental control. T'Pol will use the same metaphor when teaching emotional control to Hoshi Sato in Star Trek: Enterprise .
• Mood Dissonance : B'Elanna is throttled by a lei held by a laughing holodeck babe.
• Negative Space Wedgie : The inversion nebula. A rare example of one that's being artificially maintained.
• Nipple and Dimed : Apparently it was cold on set during the holodeck scenes, so all the women had to wait while extra lining was added to the bathing suit tops.
• Not What It Looks Like : Harry somewhat misconstrues the situation when he finds Tuvok and Marayna playing kal-toh on the holodeck, but regardless, he is pissed.
• Please, Don't Leave Me : Marayna's threat against the ship is really just a desperate attempt to keep Tuvok there. Marayna: I have done it before. Tapped into the computer of a passing alien vessel, examined all the little details of their lives. But I never expected to find something as diverting as your holodeck. I never expected to find you. You are like nothing else I've ever encountered. And I can't be without you. Stay here with me, and I will let your ship resume course.
• Reset Button : "Security Chief's Log, Stardate 50471.3. The remaining damage to the ship was easily repaired..."
• Rule of Symbolism : Tuvok studies a Polynesian mask when he goes to meet Marayna, having discovered she's an avatar.
• Rule of Threes : Harry and Tuvok's responses to a question are a simultaneous "Yes"/"No", "No"/"Yes", and finally "No"/"No" at the end of the episode.
• Seduction-Proof Marriage : Tuvok's marriage, in fact. Marayna certainly has a funny way of going about "seduction," but it's not like Tuvok ever considered Marayna more than a friend to begin with. If you watch their climactic encounter, Marayna gently reaches a hand up to Tuvok while he's talking, and as soon as he points out that he's Happily Married , her hand, and face, lowers, and she looks defeated.
• Sherlock Scan : Marayna first gains Tuvok's interest when she deduces that he's wearing his uniform at the party as an unspoken protest at being ordered to attend.
• Ship Tease : J/C arm in arm on the holodeck, and P/T vs. V/T.
• Some Kind Of Forcefield : Used to stop Tuvok saving B'Elanna when she's attacked. He orders Tom to shoot the control panel instead .
• Space Clouds : The inversion nebula.
• Stalker with a Crush : Tuvok first realises something is wrong when Marayna appears in his quarters by using the Doctor's mobile emitter.
• Take Me Instead : Tuvok invokes this in his confrontation with the real Marayna. She brushes it off immediately. Tuvok: If it is the only option, I would willingly sacrifice myself to save my crewmates. Marayna: No, that's not enough! You have to want to be with me!
• Tragic Villain : On the milder end of the scale, but nonetheless, the real Marayna only does all this manipulation because she's been alone in the nebula for way too long. She's heartbroken that Tuvok can't be with her, and Tuvok is obviously sympathetic to her plight.
• Variant Chess : Harry identifies the kal-toh puzzle Tuvok is playing as "Vulcan chess". Tuvok replies that " Kal-toh is to chess as chess is to Tic-Tac-Toe ."
• Wham Shot : Tuvok idly walking into his real-life, non-holographic quarters, and seeing Marayna waiting for him. That ain't right.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human? : Tuvok deletes Marayna to demonstrate to Harry he has no romantic interest in her. Harry isn't impressed, as he's missing the point .
• Yandere : Marayna threatens to ignite the plasma streams in the inversion nebula if she doesn't get Tuvok.
• Star Trek Voyager S 3 E 12 "Fair Trade"
• Recap/Star Trek: Voyager
• Star Trek Voyager S3E14 "Coda"

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What Happened to Kathryn Janeway After Star Trek: Voyager?

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The erased future of admiral janeway saved voyager and decimated the borg, kathryn janeway earned a promotion to admiral and invested in starfleet's future, the search for the protostar and commanding the uss dauntless, admiral janeway's adventures continue in star trek: prodigy and picard.

When Star Trek: Voyager debuted as the flagship series on the United Paramount Network (UPN), it was a return to the ship-based storytelling Gene Roddenberry's universe was known for. The series also made history from its inception because it was the first show led by a female Starfleet captain, Kathryn Janeway. When the USS Voyager was sent to the Delta Quadrant of the galaxy, its crew had only one mission: get home.

Over seven seasons, Captain Janeway never let the crew forget they were also serving the larger mission of Starfleet: seek out strange new worlds where no one had gone before. They would routinely divert from their course home for scientific exploration or to help species in need. The ship also frequently engaged the Borg, and even the god-like Q turned his attention from Jean-Luc Picard to Janeway. Getting the ship back to Earth would be career enough for any officer, but Janeway's story didn't end with Voyager 's finale. In fact, she had two distinct and different futures ahead of her.

10 Best Star Trek: Voyager Episodes, Ranked

Star Trek: Voyager may have been a controversial series on its debut, but it's now a certified classic as these top-ranked episodes prove.

Nearly two decades before the Avengers, "Endgame" was the title of Star Trek: Voyager 's series finale, which opened with a shot of the ship arriving on Earth . When first stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the USS Voyager was 75 years away from Earth at maximum speeds. The first time around, Captain Janeway beat that time by 52 years . She also lost, in one way or another, a number of crew including Seven of Nine, Chakotay and Tuvok, suffering from a Vulcan cognitive illness. She is eventually promoted to Vice Admiral, teaches at Starfleet Academy, and is the foremost expert on the Borg .

Not content with this future, Janeway meets with a Klingon named Korath, with Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres's daughter Miral acting as a go-between. She steals a device that allows her to travel back in time, and Korath sends his warships after her. Starfleet sends Captain Harry Kim of the USS Rhode Island to stop her from violating the Temporal Prime Directive , but Kim's loyalty to Janeway outweighs those orders. She successfully travels back in time and finds the USS Voyager and her younger self in the Delta Quadrant. The two Janeways butt heads, but the elder Kathryn convinces her younger self to follow her plan.

Admiral Janeway takes the ship to the Borg Unicomplex, arming USS Voyager with technology from the future so that it can survive the journey. The plan is to hijack the Borg's transwarp network and get the Voyager crew home in an instant. However, ablative armor and transphasic torpedoes aren't the only technology the elder Janeway brought back. She infects herself with a technovirus and allows the Borg Queen to assimilate her. While it takes the life of the elder Janeway, it deals a deathblow to Starfleet's most dangerous adversary . It also gives the younger Janeway a new lease on her future .

How Did Star Trek: Voyager Become a TV Series?

Star Trek: Voyager debuted after The Next Generation ended its historic run, but Captain Janeway's series was in development long before then.

After the USS Voyager returned to Earth, Captain Kathryn Janeway was promoted to Vice Admiral . She's also one of Starfleet's most decorated officers , in large part because of her ability to keep her crew together and get them home. This is no small task, after all. In Voyager Season 5, Episode 25, Janeway encounters the USS Equinox also stranded in the Delta Quadrant. While their captain, Rudolph Ransom, kept the crew together, he did so by violating every ideal Starfleet stands for. In Star Trek: Nemesis , Vice Admiral Janeway calls Picard from Starfleet Command to send him on the USS Enterprise's ill-fated mission to Romulus .

Because of her accomplishments as the captain of the USS Voyager, Janeway is well known throughout the galaxy. In Star Trek: Lower Decks , the dim-witted Pakleds believed any human woman in command of a Starfleet vessel was the illustrious Janeway. Still, after her experiences in the Delta Quadrant, Janeway was reticent to return to any deep space mission. Yet, she still believed in Starfleet's core goal of exploring the galaxy, welcoming new species into the Federation or, at least, establishing positive diplomatic relationships with them.

To that end, Janeway was part of the group that created the USS Protostar , a vessel with a faster-than-warp propulsion system . Her former first officer, Chakotay, was named the captain of the vessel and sent on a mission to the Delta Quadrant. As far as Star Trek fans know, he never returned. Also, when Seven of Nine tried to officially join Starfleet after Voyager's return, she was denied entry because she was Borg. Janeway stood by her and even threatened to resign. Seven didn't allow that, instead joining the Fenris Rangers and helping those who were outside of Starfleet's jurisdiction.

Star Trek: Prodigy Is the Last Hope for Janeway and Chakotay Shippers

Star Trek: Prodigy brought Voyager characters Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay back into their story and there is a chance for the romance fans never got.

When Dal R'El and the other Star Trek: Prodigy characters found the USS Protostar, they discovered that Janeway was the model for the holographic training assistant on the ship. Meanwhile, the real Janeway was back at Starfleet Command hoping for any sign of the ship or Chakotay. The makeshift crew of the Protostar wanted to turn the ship over to Starfleet, but an advanced weapon created by the Vau N'akat would infect any Starfleet vessels and make them destroy each other. Thus, the crew ended up being hunted by Vice Admiral Janeway, who returned to deep space in command of the USS Dauntless .

While on the hunt for the Protostar, Janeway consulted with other Starfleet admirals, such as former USS Enterprise-D captain Edward Jellico . Despite the respect she commanded among Starfleet officers, her First Officer Commander Tysess refused her order to pursue the ship into the Romulan Neutral Zone. Later, Janeway and her crew found the Diviner, a Vau N'akat operative who'd lost his memory. Finding him caused another operative, called the Vindicator, to break her cover as a Trill Starfleet ensign named Ascencia.

Eventually, a sci-fi mishap caused Janeway and Dal to swap minds Freaky Friday -style . While trying to pose as Vice Admiral Janeway, Dal ended up getting her removed from command and locked up. Once the real Janeway was back in her body, however, a Starfleet officer she saved as a child while commanding Voyager freed her. Once the Protostar crew destroyed the ship and the weapon hidden on it, Janeway advocated for them to be allowed into Starfleet Academy . Unlike with Seven of Nine, Starfleet Command allowed them in.

Star Trek: Prodigy's Connection to Voyager, Explained

Star Trek: Prodigy is a new series with new characters in the universe, but the series is directly connected to Voyager through characters and ships.

Star Trek: Prodigy's second season will debut on Netflix in July 2024, and it will cover Admiral Janeway's search for Chakotay . The new cadets who crewed the Protostar will join her on the USS Voyager-A, a new ship bearing the name of her storied vessel. Season 1 revealed that Chakotay wasn't just lost in the Delta Quadrant, but also lost in time. It's possible that Janeway will again have to violate the Temporal Prime Directive in order to rescue her former First Officer. While her adventures with the Prodigy crew are as yet unknown, thanks to Star Trek: Picard , fans know she at least survives.

Seven of Nine eventually joined Starfleet , serving aboard the USS Titan-A, and during her tenure, had conversations with Admiral Janeway. In fact, according to the Star Trek: Picard commentaries, producers wanted Janeway actor Kate Mulgrew to appear in an episode or two. However, time and money prevented that. Still, through conversations with Seven, Picard and Tuvok, Janeway was a high-ranking Admiral in Starfleet Command at the turn of the 25th Century. While her ultimate fate is unknown, Janeway had many adventures after she left the USS Voyager behind .

Star Trek: Voyager is currently streaming on Paramount+, while Star Trek: Prodigy is streaming on Netflix.

Star Trek Voyager

Pulled to the far side of the galaxy, where the Federation is seventy-five years away at maximum warp speed, a Starfleet ship must cooperate with Maquis rebels to find a way home.

Star Trek: Voyager (TV Series)

Alter ego (1997), tim russ: lt. tuvok.

• Quotes (12)

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Quotes 

Marayna : Are you two friends?

Lieutenant Tuvok : [simultaneously]  No.

Ensign Harry Kim : [simultaneously]  Yes.

[at the luau] 

Marayna : You're the only one here not wearing a garland.

Lieutenant Tuvok : Given the decor, it seems somehow excessive.

Marayna : I don't believe you.

Lieutenant Tuvok : I beg your pardon?

Marayna : I think you're trying to isolate yourself and make a public protest at the same time.

Lieutenant Tuvok : Explain.

Marayna : You didn't want to be here in the first place. Being the only one without a lei sets you apart from the others, allowing you to symbolically maintain your solitude; and, since everybody can see that you're the only one without a lei, you're letting them know that you'd rather be somewhere else.

Lieutenant Tuvok : [impressed]  Your logic is impeccable.

Marayna : There's a luau tonight. You're coming, aren't you? Both of you?

Lieutenant Tuvok : No.

Ensign Harry Kim : Yes.

Marayna : You've got to stop doing that.

Ensign Harry Kim : That's kal-toh, isn't it? Vulcan chess?

Lieutenant Tuvok : Kal-toh is to chess as chess is to tic-tac-toe.

Marayna : Imagine this: that you - with your logic and your reason - are skimming atop endless waves of emotion. You believe you're in control, but you know that control is an illusion. You believe that you understand the depths beneath you, but that, too, is an illusion.

Lieutenant Tuvok : I can see why Ensign Kim finds you... compelling.

[Kim has fallen in love with a holodeck character] 

Lieutenant Tuvok : You are experiencing shon-ha'lock, the engulfment. It is the most intense and psychologically perilous form of eros. I believe humans call it "love at first sight."

Lieutenant Tuvok : I am fully capable of appreciating this phenomenon without the extraneous sentimentality humans find so necessary.

Commander Chakotay : Being moved by an emotion isn't always extraneous. Sometimes it's the whole point.

Lieutenant Tuvok : Kal-toh is not about striving for balance. It is about finding the seeds of order, even in the midst of profound chaos.

Lieutenant Tuvok : To the trained Vulcan intellect, intense romantic love is nothing more than a set of stereotypical behaviors. Not having our discipline, typically humans are swept along by the process until it ends.

Ensign Harry Kim : How does it end?

Lieutenant Tuvok : Either in conversion to a more balanced, stable relationship, or in tragic circumstances.

[last lines] 

[Tuvok and Kim are playing kal-toh on the holodeck] 

Holodeck Woman : May I join you?

Ensign Harry Kim : No.

Lieutenant Tuvok : But... thank you.

Lieutenant Tuvok : To see through an emotional complex is to rob it of its power. The first step is to identify the complex in which you have been caught.

Ensign Harry Kim : I told you, I'm in love.

Lieutenant Tuvok : There are many different kinds of love, Ensign. You must learn to differentiate. For example, you told me that you met this individual only days ago, yet you feel overwhelmed.

Ensign Harry Kim : I can't get her out of my mind, not for a second.

Lieutenant Tuvok : Have you been able to sleep?

Lieutenant Tuvok : Have you eaten?

Lieutenant Tuvok : Does your daily routine seem somehow empty? Perhaps even ludicrous?

Ensign Harry Kim : Yes!

Lieutenant Tuvok : You are experiencing shon-ha'lock, the engulfment. It is the most intense and psychologically perilous form of Eros. I believe humans call it "love at first sight."

Ensign Harry Kim : But we're talking about a holodeck character.

Lieutenant Tuvok : Irrelevant. The emotional complex in which you are trapped is the same - and so is the cure: Logical deconstruction followed by a regimen of meditative suppression, as I shall demonstrate.

Marayna : Ready to get your ears wet?

Lieutenant Tuvok : Vulcans do not hydro-sail.

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Star Trek's Kate Mulgrew Reveals The Janeway Story She Wished Voyager Would've Explored, And I Totally Agree

The star made a great point.

With the current lull in Star Trek programming, it's a great time to look back and reflect on all the shows released thus far. While some might choose to do so by watching past series with a Paramount+ subscription , others were psyched to visit Fan Expo Boston to watch Kate Mulgrew speak about her time on Voyager . Among other things, the star who played Captain Janeway revealed the storyline she wished the series would've dove deeper into, and I agree with her.

Star Trek: Voyager has some WTF moments , but it also contains some of the best story and character ideas the franchise has ever delivered. I love the series and think it's great, but I can't help but think it would be that much better had the writers had the same thought Kate Mulgrew talked about during her fan Q&A. In a video uploaded by Craig Semon , Mulgrew talked about the one episode she felt should've been stretched across the series, saying:

They did one episode on the Captain's loneliness. It didn't seem to have much traction, but I thought they should've explored that throughout the run. I gave up my life as a young woman. I gave up the chance to have children. I had to break up with my fiancé, who quickly remarried. I had to say goodbye to my dog. As Captain, I could love, but only to a certain extent. And Janeway chose not to have a lover. I chose–Kate Mulgrew chose not to do that. So, the loneliness was harrowing. And I think it should've been a bit better revealed that just under the surface of her absolute devotion to this crew and her passion for science and exploration. But, you have to show the person, you know?

I agree with Kate Mulgrew, and I wouldn't be surprised if her take was somewhat influenced by the way current and upcoming Trek shows emphasize character-driven storytelling. It almost sounds like she wishes Captain Janeway could've been explored in the same way that Michael Burnham was in Discovery , and as someone who thinks Burnham is one of the best Trek characters specifically because we see so much of the captain's growth, I can't blame Mulgrew for wishing she had that same experience as Janeway.

Of course, Star Trek: Voyager had an entire ensemble cast to worry about, and not every adventure was Janeway-centric. Even so, Kate Mulgrew feels there was another reason the writers didn't harp on the Captain's loneliness too much, but why she still feels like it was a missed opportunity:

I suppose they were a little afraid that would be feminine or something, but I think it's crucial. Women doing brave things, and bold things, and unprecedented things are often lonely. Anyway we are lonely in life. The only thing we can do is be the best we can be under the circumstances. So I gave Janeway everything I had.

I think many Star Trek fans would agree Kate Mulgrew gave one of her best performances as Captain Janeway, and she's even continued to do so as Admiral Janeway in Prodigy . With Season 2 on its way to those with a Netflix subscription in July, maybe the writers gave her the wish of diving deeper into exploring the lonely side of Janeway.

Let's make this happen.

And if not, Kate Mulgrew can take solace that Captain Janeway was never neglected as a character on Star Trek: Voyager . Lest we forget there are characters like Harry Kim who really got screwed over on the series, it could always be worse.

Kate Mulgrew expressed an interest to reprise her character in live-action in the modern era of Star Trek , but we haven't seen it happen yet. Top brass Alex Kurtzman told CinemaBlend "surprises" are on the way after Discovery 's end, so maybe there is something we don't know about yet in the works. Cross those fingers if you'd like to see it happen, because we're not that far off from San Diego Comic-Con, so there could be some big announcements for the franchise there. I'd hate to be so bold to ask for a Voyager movie , but c'mon, isn't that way overdue at this point?

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While we wait for updates on that front, many other Star Trek fans and I will be watching Season 2 of Prodigy when it arrives on Netflix on July 1st. Hopefully, the latest season will be just as good as the first, and enough fans will watch to encourage Netflix to greenlight more seasons.

Mick Joest is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend with his hand in an eclectic mix of television goodness. Star Trek is his main jam, but he also regularly reports on happenings in the world of Star Trek, WWE, Doctor Who, 90 Day Fiancé, Quantum Leap, and Big Brother. He graduated from the University of Southern Indiana with a degree in Journalism and a minor in Radio and Television. He's great at hosting panels and appearing on podcasts if given the chance as well.

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Star Trek: Voyager's Original Plan Would Have Delayed Seven of Nine's Introduction

• Star Trek: Voyager almost ended season 3 with "Year of Hell," delaying Seven of Nine's debut.
• The creative team also considered a doppelgnger storyline for the season 3 finale, which later became the episodes "Demon" and "Course: Oblivion."
• Seven of Nine's introduction in "Scorpion" was crucial, so delaying "Year of Hell" and the doppelgngers made more sense.

The original plan for Star Trek: Voyager 's season 3 ending would have delayed Seven of Nine's (Jeri Ryan) introduction. Voyager 's season 3 finale/season 4 premiere, "Scorpion, Parts 1 and 2," was a huge episode for the show. Although they had been introduced earlier in season 3, "Scorpion" officially cemented the Borg as the main villain for Voyager 's cast of characters , and kicked off a Borg storyline that would continue for the next four seasons . The Borg became extremely important on Voyager starting in "Scorpion" thanks to the debut of one of the show's more beloved characters: Seven of Nine.

Seven was created to replace Kes (Jennifer Lein), who bowed out of her role in the Star Trek timeline at the start of season 4. Although she was initially brought on for sex appeal, Seven's journey to rediscovering her humanity and coping with the trauma of her time as a Borg turned her into a complex character that became much more than her initial premise . Seven was one of Voyager 's best characters and remains important in the franchise thanks to her time on Star Trek: Picard . However, Seven's first appearance almost didn't happen at the start of season 4.

Every Voyager Character Who Has Returned In Star Trek (& How)

Star Trek: Voyager's beloved characters have returned in Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, and especially Star Trek: Prodigy.

Star Trek: Voyager's Original Season 3 Finale Plan Almost Delayed Seven of Nine's Introduction

Voyager's season 3 finale was almost a different episode.

Voyager originally intended another two-parter, "Year of Hell," to end season 3 and begin season 4, and the change would have seriously delayed Seven's debut. "Yeah of Hell" is considered the best of Voyager 's two-part episodes , focusing on Voyager 's crew in a brutal year-long fight against Annorax (Kurtwood Smith) of the Kremin Imperium. The episode aired in season 4, but was teased as early as season 3, episode 21, "Before and After." Given that the creative team had already conceived of and foreshadowed "Year of Hell," it would have made some sense to use the storyline as season 3's ending .

The storyline in "Scorpion" was necessary to tell before "Year of Hell" could make its entry.

However, the fact that the cast was being shaken up at the start of Voyager season 4 seemingly took precedence over including "Year of Hell" earlier in the series. Voyager 's writers needed to find a way to introduce Seven at the beginning of season 4 so that Kes could depart the show , and ultimately, "Scorpion" was the right way to do this. Although it delayed "Year of Hell," the episode made more sense where it ended up midway through season 4. The storyline in "Scorpion" was necessary to tell before "Year of Hell" could make its entry.

Another Voyager Episode Also Almost Led To Seven of Nine's Intro Being Delayed

Voyager's creative team had a lot of ideas for the season 3 finale.

Interestingly, "Year of Hell" wasn't the only future Voyager episode that almost delayed Seven's introduction. Another initial idea for the season 3 finale was a storyline involving a set of Star Trek: Voyager character doppelgängers reaching Earth before the actual ship and causing chaos when it was discovered that they weren't Voyager 's real crew. The idea was put aside when it became clear that "Scorpion" would be necessary, but with a few tweaks, it was brought back and became the episodes "Demon" and "Course: Oblivion" in seasons 4 and 5.

It's a good thing that both "Year of Hell" and the crew's doppelgänger storylines still got their day in the sun. Both plots were great additions to Voyager 's later seasons and fleshed out the show in a lot of interesting ways. However, "Scorpion" and Seven's first appearance had to happen at the start of season 4. If Star Trek: Voyager had pushed Seven any later in the series, it would have risked her inclusion feeling rushed and less important than the other main characters , which in turn would have hurt the status she has since gained as a franchise icon.

Source: Star Trek Monthly , issue 34, Cinefantastique , Vol. 31

Star Trek: Voyager

Cast Jennifer Lien, Garrett Wang, Tim Russ, Robert Duncan McNeill, Roxann Dawson, Robert Beltran, Kate Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, Ethan Phillips, Robert Picardo

Release Date May 23, 1995

Genres Sci-Fi, Adventure

Network UPN

Streaming Service(s) Paramount+

Franchise(s) Star Trek

Writers Kenneth Biller, Jeri Taylor, Michael Piller, Brannon Braga

Showrunner Kenneth Biller, Jeri Taylor, Michael Piller, Brannon Braga

Rating TV-PG

Where To Watch Paramount+