This Week's Episode: "Virtuoso"
Mission Image Archive for 'Virtuoso'
Summary: Voyager rescues a small vessel belonging to the technologically advanced species, the Qomar. The Qomar regard Voyager's crew as unadvanced and somewhat primitive, until they hear the Doctor singing. The Qomar people have spent so much time on the mathematics, that their culture never developed music. Before long, the Doctor becomes a superstar on the Qomar homeplanet: he begins to receive massive amounts of fan mail, and even provides small holographic projections of himself. When the Doctor begins to enjoy the attention and admiration he receives, he decides to leave Voyager and live on the Qomar homeworld.
Rating: 2
Best Scene: Seven's "fan mail" to the Doctor was nice.
Worst Scene: The other fourty five minutes of the show.
Best acting award goes to: The Doctor's love interest. Just kidding! She was awful...and so was everyone this week. No award for anyone!
Best Line: "I'll always consider myself your loyal fan." -- Seven of Nine.
Impressions: One word: corny. And how about another: crummy. And one more for good luck: terrible. Geez, this episode was the absolute pits. Xena: Warrior Princess can do better than this.
I'm usually a big fan of Doctor episodes, but this episode was embarrassing. I can see that the writers were really trying to capitalize off the comedic success of 'Tinker, Tenor', but this one just wasn't funny. The whole plot seemed contrived and predictable, and the poor acting couldn't have helped any. I have to say, each of the guest stars playing the Qomar was terrible, especially the Doctor's love interest. Whenever she opened her mouth, I cringed at how bad she was. I wonder where the casting department found them? Or, maybe they are relatives to people in the cast, like Alexander Enberg who played Vorik so well. (He's Jeri Taylor's son by the way). Or maybe, the casting department hit up the infomercial circle to find the most terrible and transparent actors they could find. Hard to say.
The episode lacked so much originality, that even if you hadn't read the spoilers for the episode, you would have known the entire episode. It's the typical "I'm leaving the ship to join people who appreciate me more than you do.", which always ends up with the person crawling back on their hands and knees looking for re-acceptance. You see these plots all the time in teen dramas and after school specials. You know, the ones where one kid joins the "cool kids", only to be rejected, and then has to go back to his/her "not so cool friends". Yikes, you'd think the writers of Voyager would borrow their ideas from shows with a little more substance.
Even Robert Picardo was not his normal self in this episode. Maybe because he knew he was making such a terrible hour of television. And Jeri Ryan, let's not get started. I do like her, but it does seem that she has only two acting modes: bitter Seven of Nine ("One Small Step", "The Gift", and countless others), like in the scene in the Cargo Bay. The other mode would be superior Seven, which we see in pretty much every episode. However, I did enjoy the last scene as she reads her "fan mail" to the Doctor.
I can't help but think that this episode is a dig at Star Trek fans. The whole dialogue between Seven of Nine and Janeway about fanaticism, etc..., could refer to Trekker devotion to the show. This could be the case as many of the people involved with show have said that Trekkers are a little too devoted...remember Will Shatner's comedic short "Get a life!", when referring to Star Trek fans?
This episode certainly is up there on the stink-o-meter with shows like "Threshold", "The Disease", "Favourite Son" and "Rise". I think that the writers should have realized how bad this episode was before they started to make it. Yikes, can't they catch these things?? This review is certainly short, but I think I've said the same sentence too many times (IE: "how bad this episode was"), and I'm fearing that I'm becoming too repetative. So, I'll end it here. The episode gets a two out of ten, simply for some interesting special effects of the Qomar planet, and for the final scene. The entire episode was drivel, and an embarassement to the Star Trek franchise.
