In the fourteenth episode of the third season of Voyager, Harry falls for a Holodeck character, and this episode turns out to be a billion times better than it should be. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Infatuation is a nightmare. It is such a smothering and physical phenomenon that it’s often hard to overcome it. I found the depiction of it in “Alter Ego†to be convincing and emotional, and I’m going to take that and run with it at the beginning here for a specific reason.
This is entirely unintended, but lord, as a gay man who was in the closet until post-high school, this is a brilliant depiction of what it’s like to fall for someone who is straight. Again, this is 100% unintended, I know that. But there’s an aspect of this specific story that reminded me of the experience: Harry knows 100% that he cannot be with Marayna. This is not simply an issue of him falling for a woman that is uninterested in him. This is a person who is literally unavailable to him in every scenario (aside from the holodeck), and there’s nothing he could ever conceivably do to change that.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that if a woman tells Harry no, there is still a 1% chance she might say yes because that’s not how consent works. What I’m referring to is something I went through a long, long time ago when I was struggling with my identity and after I was outed. There’s a pain that often comes with non-heterosexual people realizing that their choices are inherently limited, and this sort of anxiety is something that’s often hard to explain to others. But I remember realizing that if the myth that 1 in 10 men were not straight was true, then I was certainly doomed. How could I ever find love and companionship if my odds were so love? Obviously, this is a bit of an absurd thing to thing because LOVE AND AFFECTION IS NOT A CASINO GAME.
But when you’re not straight, you come to realize that an entire portion of the world is 100% unavailable to you, and in my case, I realized that as I fell for one straight guy after another. While you can, as Tuvok suggests, do specific things to move away from someone you develop an infatuation for, you can’t really control that initial attraction. Just like Harry here, sometimes, you just get sprung. And I get why that happens here, even though Harry knows she is just a hologram! That is precisely where the tragedy comes in: when you are overflowing with love, nothing seems to be more painful than to know it can never be reciprocated.
Which is why I am utterly obsessed with the transformation that “Alter Ego†goes under as it switches from a story about Harry to one about Tuvok. What I’ve described is an experience that lends itself to a person feeling completely lonely. That’s what I had to deal with for years, and it was complicated by a ton of other issues, which I won’t get into because they’re not really relevant to this story. (But just imagine being gay, coming from such a repressive background, and then discovering that the gay community only worships men who are white, muscular, not fat, and who fit their idea of who is attractive. That’s a conversation for ANOTHER DAY.) But loneliness is the central theme to what fuels Marayna actions. As she becomes more and more interested in Tuvok – and as the crew realizes this Holodeck character is behaving quite strangely – I worried that the writers were going to give us a story about a vengeful woman who lashes out because she can’t have the man she wants. That’s a little too on-the-nose of that trope, and it made me uncomfortable.
Yet while the script acknowledges the terrible nature of what she’s done, “Alter Ego†offers Marayna sympathy. It makes this episode so much better to understand why she did what she did. The prevailing motivation was loneliness, exacerbated by her infatuation with Tuvok, someone she could never truly have. It’s heartbreaking to learn that she’s been living inside the nebula, controlling the plasma fires for years without any interaction with any other beings. NO ONE FROM HER WORLD EVEN KNOWS SHE IS THERE. And yet, the Holodeck provided her the chance to genuinely interact with other people, which brought her to Tuvok, which activated this sensation inside her… whew, THE FEELINGS ARE TOO MUCH.
I think a strong case could be made that Marayna is demisexual because this is like… the very definition of demisexuality. She had no interest in romance or sex or anything until she made a close emotional bond with Tuvok through the Holodeck. Of course, I should acknowledge the fact that this representation is complicated because SHE NEARLY KILLED EVERYONE ON VOYAGER TO GET TO TUVOK. I actually had a moment of panic when Tuvok boarded Marayna’s ship. I kept wishing Marayna did not turn out to be a man because I was so worried that this would paint gay/queer men in a bad light. Again, Marayna ends up being portrayed in a sympathetic light, but STILL. It could have been a very sloppy thing.
Anyway, I really do adore this episode, which also has a great subplot concerning Tuvok’s relationship with Harry. The story comes full circle in the end as Tuvok does what he can to repair the damage he wrought by disrespecting Harry, and it’s a sweet resolution to a well-written story. Bravo, Voyager.
The video for “Alter Ego†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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