In the third episode of the second season of Voyager, THIS IS ALSO COOL AS HELL. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Trigger Warning: For unreality/manipulations of reality.
There’s a point towards the final act of “Projections†where the tension fizzles out a bit. That’s understandable; the premise for this episode is so ambitious and lofty that any possible conclusion was going to be challenging to pull off. And given the episodic nature of the show, there was another restriction placed on the story: somehow, The Doctor had to be okay.
Which is fair! I’m glad that the Doctor is not removed from the show, HE IS GREAT, MORE OF THE DOCTOR. Yet the experience provided to us by Voyager is an existential crisis, one that seems very real. And there was a definite point where I wondered if Barclay was telling the truth and this entire episode took place on the Jupiter Station, and WHAT A SATISFYING TWIST THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN. Of course, that’s the kind of doubt that the Brannon Braga’s script relies on. Is this all possible? And every time I felt certain about a specific direction the story was headed, doubt would crop back up again, and the tension would get to me.
In hindsight, this really is a bold episode. The first five minutes of it makes it seem like it’s something else, y’all! I went into this thinking that it was going to be a story about a disaster scenario. How would B’Elanna, Janeway, Neelix and the Doctor save the ship and get back all their kidnapped crew? WHO CARES, BECAUSE THE DOCTOR IS BLEEDING. Once that scene hits, “Projections†stops being a rescue mission, and it morphs into a complex and unnerving examination of the Doctor’s identity. If the Doctor is suddenly human, what does that mean? Does it change his purpose or his mission? Does he act differently himself? Yet even those questions are eclipsed by an even weirder phenomenon: the computer insists that the Doctor was never a hologram, that no hologram ever existed on Voyager, and that he is actually Louis Zimmerman, the scientist who created the Doctor.
Of course, that’s not something that I was ready to believe right off the bat. And neither was the Doctor! He has memories! He is a hologram on the Voyager starship! This can’t all have been part of a holographic simulation. And as I mentioned before, the nature of how stories work on Star Trek meant that I wasn’t ready to accept this hypothesis either. The show had to prove it to me that the Doctor was actually Louis before I’d believe it.
SO THEN THEY DID. Through the use of Barclay (!!!!! I NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS EXPECTED TO SEE HIM ON VOYAGER), we are shown definitively that the Doctor is not the Doctor, nor is he a holograph. He’s a scientist who has been stuck inside a simulation due to radiation poisoning. And while every cell in my body was telling me that this was impossible, how could I deny what I was seeing? Even further, the choice to use Barclay was brilliant. See, I kept wondering if some alien force had invaded Voyager and was trying to trick the Doctor into destroying the ship through this illusion. But why on Earth would they appear as Barclay, a character that none of the Voyager characters had ever met? Thus, something else had to be the cause of all of this.
This is the point where “Projections†begins to feel a bit too tiresome, unfortunately. The double ending, coupled with a whole lot of info-dumping to help the audience understand the complicated situation, makes the story drag. Like, I get that the show has to communicate to us how the Doctor is able to experience this entire thing, but a ton of information is thrust our way in a very short span of time. It made the story feel suddenly less emotional and more technical, which is a misstep for me. The Doctor’s existential crisis was so personal, and the technobabble pulled me right out of it.
But it certainly doesn’t ruin the episode for me at all. This was an EXTREMELY fun thing to watch, and I’m rather pleased with how season two has started.
The video for “Projections†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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