Janeway is called out again to tend to her captainly duties, which includes preparing for meeting a reclusive, border-protecting faction and negotiating for passage through their territory. After speaking with them from long range, and being told that Voyager is to be evaluated in person, Janeway starts hallucinating about things from her holodeck program appearing in her real life. She slowly becomes a quivering wreck in sickbay, where Kes discovers that she can see and, in a limited way, interact with these hallucinations.
The aliens make second contact with the ship, and that's where things get interesting. Janeway seems to have temporarily broken her spell, but now other crew members are being affected all at once. One by one, each crew experiences a personal illusion, which absorbs them and puts them in a trance. Kim sees his girlfriend (thankfully we don't have to), Tuvok sees his wife and is transported back to Vulcan, Paris is berated by his stern admiral father. Some crew members takes longer than others, and it gets quite eerie as we see Torres and Janeway making their way past person after person who is just standing or sitting there, staring blankly. Eventually Torres succumbs to a fantasy where she is seduced by Chakotay. It is a little awkward, but I don't get the impression that she really pines for him, just that she sees him has a comforting figure who is also attractive. It works. Finally, Janeway is overcome by an illusion of her husband who is angry at her for cheating on him with the holodeck.
The Doctor, however, is immune (and back to normal size in sickbay). Going through person by person, you lose track of who is affected and who isn't, so when the attention finally turns to him, who hasn't been in the show since his scene in the beginning, it is a welcome break in the tension. Kes, too, is unaffected; even though she can see other people's hallucinations, hers don't affect her as much. The Doctor sends her down to sickbay, to finish setting up the disruption the rest of the crew is working on, and she experiences two hallucinations directed at her. The first is of Paris, wounded and in need of aid, but she reasons her way out and makes it to engineering. The second is Neelix, overbearing and protective, trying to "rescue" her from the ship. That doesn't work either, and he (well, the alien pretending to be him) tries a violent telepathic attack on her. She digs deep, with the Doctor's encouragement, and uses her latent telepathic powers to fend him off and save the crew.
The alien pulls a houdini and escapes. He seems to not be a member of the species that they had come out to meet, so we never find out what happens. Much like Conundrum (TNG), it is pretty unsettling that this guy was almost able to completely incapacitate the crew that easily; it makes you wonder why he doesn't control half the quadrant already. But also like Conundrum, this episode gives some great glances at what's going on in the character's heads (I would have loved to see what Chakotay was thinking of) that doesn't make it into dialogue. It would have been nice if maybe Chakotay's spiritualism could somehow save him, or if Vulcan mental dsicpline would have at least helped Tuvok last longer, but it still works.
Watchability: 4/5
Bottom Line: A moody and atmospheric episode, well done in many ways. Like many episodes I've watched so far, it was a slow-starter, but once it got going I had a great time.
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