Starfleet manages to contact Voyager and deliver messages to the crew. Discovering his creator, Dr Zimmerman, is dying, the Doctor is transmitted back home in an attempt to cure him.
It’s a bit of a desperate ploy to shift the action back to the Alpha Quadrant, but for some reason it works, even thought the story is awfully one-note. Yes, it’s an episode I quite enjoyed, which after all these weeks is long overdue.
The reason it works is due to Robert Picardo’s sterling work playing both the Doctor and Zimmerman, many of whose scenes are with each other. The amount of hours he must have put into the episode is astonishing. With two forceful personalities, one based on the other, going at each other, it’s no wonder that the end result is some of the most wonderful bickering seen in Trek since Spock and McCoy. The fact that both play all manner of tricks on each other to get what they want is particularly funny.
Barclay sadly remains rather superfluous to the story, and Counselor Troi is dragged in in a particularly desperate manner, but it’s good to see both again, even if I’d rather be watching the latest mission of Captain Picard that Troi mentions. The regular revelation that someone or something is a hologram gets a bit wearing after a while too, but I quite like the concept of a holo-fly that you can use for spying.
What puzzles me is what’s happening on Voyager, which is essentially very little. One scene sees Janeway wondering how to explain what’s happened to the Maquis to Starfleet, but in the end nothing is made of it at all. It’s as if the episode was running a few minutes short and the scene was tacked on at the last minute.
The final outcome is pretty clear, but at least it’s an enjoyable route to it, which is more than can be said for almost every other episode this season. Shame next week’s looks truly awful…
****
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