A Plot: The Doctor (after learning to perform some opera) discovers that he is beginning to lose control of his faculties. This malfunction is a result of running the program for too long, which overloads his program with all the non-medical "irrelevancies" he has picked up over time. As his memory degrades, Kes and Torres work with a hologram of his creator, Lewis Zimmerman, to try to find a solution that won't mean a complete reset of the Doctor to his factory specs, without the memory and growth he had accrued in the last two years. The Zimmerman hologram makes a heroic sacrifice by attempting to blend his matrix with the Doctor's.
The Doctor's condition gives two metaphorical avenues for exploration. The first is that of the unsympathetic caregiver being turned into the patient. They've already touched on that in a B-plot before, and he's made progress with his bedside manner in episodes since then, so it is frustrating the way the writers make him regress in the beginning of the episode just to make this element "work." The other, more blunt use of this plot is as an Alzheimer's allegory. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have had the "what am I doing here and why can't I leave?" conversation with an Alzheimer's patient, so that certainly struck a chord. Additionally, Kes' heartbreak upon watching the Doctor lose the memories that made him the man who was her mentor is well-captured in that regard.
Early in the episode, The Doctor is completely resolute in his early decision to simply wipe his memory in order to stabilize his program, essentially citing "the good of the many" philosophy (though not directly). Instead, it is Kes who can't let go - the Doctor wouldn't have to live with his sacrifice, it'd be those that care about him that suffer the most - and that is true of Alzheimer's as well, in a way. The resolution is sneakily cathartic - the Doctor's memory appears to be wiped, until he begins to hum the operas from the beginning of the episode. This is a thread that deserves more screen time, with a gradual recovery, and it is a grave disappointment to me that it does not resurface in future episodes.
B Plot: Voyager encounters the territory of a reclusive, xenophobic group of aliens (again) that swarm intruders in a interlinked cloud of small ships, disabling and killing them. Janeway decides that the best course of action is to sneak through their territory instead of adding fifteen months to their journey by going around, even though, as Tuvok reminds her, those actions would be a violation of Federation protocol. Not surprisingly, they fail to sneak all the way through a territory so vast that it would take fifteen months at maximum warp to get around, and Voyager is beset upon by the swarm. At first, Voyager's weapons are useless, but then Janeway says some magic words and the weapons work great, and destroying one ship sends a chain reaction of destruction through the swarm. Voyager has successfully bullied its way through swarm space.
As you can probably tell from the tone of that recap, I was considerably frustrated by this part of the show. Janeway's stated rationale for sneaking? "We're a long way from Federation space." Really? Not only is that incredibly inconsistent with the most established parts of her character so far, but as justifications go, that one is very insubstantial. It isn't a "we're going to die if we don't do this" - and last time she used that one, we were treated to her saying "I told ya so" at length afterwards. I'm not even saying that sneaking through is necessarily the wrong choice: space is fraught with peril, there's no guarantee that going around would be any less dangerous - but her complete 180 on this issue is entirely out of the blue, and I need a better explanation. She's operating on the "it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission" principle here, and one of my favorite things about the Federation is that they give even their enemies the chance to be the bigger people. It is perhaps a naive faith in others that drives that approach, but I find it to be quintessentially Roddenberrian. If they'd have tried to go through without sneaking, and maybe even trying to solve the language barrier, they'd still probably have had a fight on their hands, but at least I could feel good about them as the representatives of the Federation in a foreign land.
Gripe number two comes from the solution. It is a common condemnation of Trek that "They just solve problems with technobabble. But in my favorite show, [diaries of teenage angst: the sequel], problems are solved by people." Now, first of all, that's really rarely true. I mean, just look at the A-plot for this episode: technobabble is used in the solution, but that jargon just allows for the heroic sacrifice of the Zimmerman hologram in order to save another being who was made by the same creator. But honestly? I'm okay with science solving problems. Because science solves problems. The thing is, there's just no science here. Janeway just says something like "remodulate the polarity" and everything is fine. Very unsatisfying, and it gives ammunition to people who don't like Trek.
Watchability: 3/5 (A Plot: 4/5, B Plot: 1/5)
Bottom Line: Voyager is starting to deserve the bad reputation that the Kazon have been giving them. The Doctor plot is compelling, but it is most unfortunate that it is never used again (though not the fault of this episode).
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