Janeway's doing her holonovel thing again. It is irrelevant and a bit painful to watch. Oh well, it's over soon enough. I'm just hoping it doesn't become the focus of an entire episode.
There's a problem with the bio-neural gel packs that the ship uses (to do everything it seems) - and a Maquis crewmember decides to just up and fix it! How could he?? Doesn't he know there are appropriate channels for that sort of thing? I just... the Maquis. It feels like an odd choice. The writers seems almost inconvenienced by them most of the time. Every now and then (this episode makes number four out of fifteen) they decided that the Maquis should be a major plot point, and the rest of the time every just acts like they've been starfleet all along (Chakotay is particularly guilty of this). The degree to which everyone has integrated just doesn't feel natural to me.
And it doesn't feel natural to some of the Maquis either. For some reason, Tuvok is tasked with whipping four of the less well integrated ones into shape, perhaps because Janeway wants him to fail. Seriously, giving that job to the least flexible guy on the ship is like saying "just fail them for me so we can give up on them and kick them off the ship." Even Neelix can tell it is a bad idea. But because of that, we get our first real Neelix/Tuvok scene since the premiere, and they work well together again. It could have been a painful "emotion is better than logic, silly Vulcan" moment, the kind that TOS loved to have, but it wasn't.
Back to the B-plot, the bio-neural gel packs, which have been name-dropped but not really explored yet, seem to have an infection. Torres brings one to the Doctor to cure, and he teases her by trying out his improved bedside manner with them. Excellent. The bacteria/virus (they don't seem to make up their minds on that) is resistant to medications, so the solution they pick is to simulate a fever to kill the bug. Fun idea, but that theory of why people have a fever isn't likely to be correct. If the body were to really heat up enough to kill bugs, it would be hot enough to denature the proteins in the good cells too. Nice thought though.
Meanwhile, Tuvok and the Maquis both learn important lessons about flexibility and responsibility and they all integrate beautifully. Just very unsatisfying for me.
Watchability: 2/5
Bottom Line: I can understand the desire for the last episode of the season to have some continuity, but this was no season finale. I would have much rather they had wrapped up the season with Jetrel.
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