Mark Watches ‘Voyager’: S04E07 – Scientific Method

In the seventh episode of the fourth season of Voyager, this show found the one thing to terrify me the most and made a forty-five minute episode out of it. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek. 

Trigger Warning: For extensive talk of consent and non-consensual medical experimentation.

I’m still exhausted from this episode, but consider that a compliment. The more I think about “Scientific Method,” the more I’m utterly creeped out. This is easily one of the most terrifying Star Trek episodes to me, and I know it’s because it’s about the perversion of science. And exploitation. And monsters hiding in plain sight. And consent. And it’s all wrapped up in a story that gets under your skin because this represents everything the Federation is not.

And really, that’s such a brilliant idea. What if there was an advanced, “progressive” race that wanted to cure illness and disease? What if they had access to some of the most technologically superior medical instrumentation in all of existence? How would they go about the problem of death and disease? And how would that issue be addressed if they believed that the ends justified the means? The “means” are what Starfleet protocol is for. Indeed, even if you examine the burgeoning relationship between Tom and B’Elanna, Janeway’s concerns are rooted in protocol. She’s fine with them being in a relationship, and there’s nothing prohibiting it in Starfleet regulations. But how do they get to that point? How does their behavior affect the rest of the crew?

Granted, there’s more to B’Elanna’s and Tom’s story than that. It’s great to see these two get together this way, since it allows the writers to explore the complications and joys of love in this specific context. Yet I’m addressing the rest of the plot not to say that the romance is worthless (IT’S NOT, IT’S GREAT), but to have a chance to go in-depth into why the experiments here are so scary.

Now, this is not the first episode of Star Trek by any measure to contain a mysterious illness or affliction that spreads throughout the ship. This happens a lot. (So much so that I wonder if the immune systems of Starfleet members who travel through the universe are much stronger than those on Earth or their home planets.) Yet this episode so wildly branches from that trope that it feels utterly unlike anything we’ve seen, despite that medical experimentation from alien beings is also a story that’s appeared more than once. For me, it’s the way that the writers commit to the full horrors of this idea that hit me the hardest.

I’ll explain. As the weird DNA manipulations begin to disable the crew, this was weird, but it wasn’t refreshing or new. The discovery of the alien barcode was an interesting development, but as soon as the Doctor was deleted and Torres rendered unable to breathe that this episode felt way more sinister than it did before. This, of course, was the moment when the audience knew for certain that an outside force was doing all this to the crew and absolutely did not want them to find out. Still, a creepy idea can only go so far in an episodic story format, right?

Nope. The script for “Scientific Method” is part ethics and part pure horror. There are a number of story choices and filming techniques that reminded me of the horror genre, but I was most impressed with the camera effects used to put us inside Seven of Nine’s head so we could see things as she could. It is perhaps the single creepiest thing here because she is the only person who can witness what these unnamed aliens are doing to the crew. When you watch them move about, poking and prodding people without their consent, attaching devices to them, and viewing them all like lab rats, my soul wanted to evaporate out of my body. And because they were slightly out of phase with the Voyager crew, NO ONE COULD EVEN PHYSICALLY FIGHT BACK AGAINST THEM. That’s so frightening.

And it’s made even worse after Seven exposes one of the aliens. Look, Jeri Ryan is SUPER GREAT in this episode, but I want Kate Mulgrew to retroactively win fourteen Emmys for this performance if she did not get nominated for one. There is no one better in this episode than her, and I have a number of reasons for feeling this way. Upfront: she fights for the right of her crew to consent to experimentation done upon their bodies. And my god, does she ever argue her case here. Even though she stands face-to-face with a person who could kill her in an instant if they wanted to, Janeway still refuses to accept the heinous logic that the alien presents to her. Over the course of Star Trek, I’ve certainly had my issues with how the writers have often hand-waved issues with oppression in history by saying that Earth just “solved” everything without any exploration as to why. But you know what? I still deeply understood that the Federation absolutely would never do what these aliens did. It is a complete rejection of their laws and their philosophies. To experiment on people without their consent, to make them suffer without reason or explanation for weeks on end, to permanently disfigure them or kill them, all because some other people might survive, is monstrous.

And yet, these aliens refuse to see it this way. As I said before, the ends justify the means. But I also love what Janeway does in response to this for an entirely different reason: the show validates irrational anger as a response to trauma and torment. Janeway outright admits that it is irrational for her to order Voyager to fly between a binary star because it could easily kill everyone. If she’d just waited the experiment out, more people would probably survive! But the suffering that Janeway and her crew experienced is not worth it, so she turns that same experiment against these aliens. If they wanted to see what sleep deprivation, anxiety, and aggression were capable of, well, they damn well were going to get it.

I love this episode. SO MUCH.

The video for “Scientific Method” can be downloaded here for $0.99.

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