S6 E13: Virtuoso

Voyager is playing host to the survivors of a damaged ship, and their smug superiority frustrates the Doctor's smug superiority to no end. However, he starts humming a tune, and they are entranced; they've never even heard of music before. The doctor's singing to so amazing to them that he becomes a cultural icon for them, and before long, he is contemplating staying on their planet when Voyager leaves. His departure plans depress the crew, but when one of his devoted fans makes an enhanced version of him, his adoring public moves on, and he sullenly decides to keep traveling with Voyager.

I get it, Picardo can sing. He's quite talented at it. But while the campy atmosphere and dialogue is evocative of TOS, it is also intensely uncomfortable. Homage is paid to the mathematical nature of music, but that just opens up opportunities for characters to wax poetic about music being more than just equations. This episode had an opportunity to get really nerdy about the foundations of music, about the math behind it - certainly, there is something very resonant with the human mind about the structure of musical scales and sound wavelengths and the way octaves work frequency-wise, and maybe they could have done something really creative with the aliens and how they perceive the music. However, instead of a music theory lesson, we get boring, stilted dialogue, with nothing deeper than what we'd learned in second grade playing the recorder.

A couple scenes in particular really sunk this episode, and unfortunately they were one after the other. The first is the one between the Doctor and his biggest fan, the one who leads him to believe that she's in love with him. The complaint about characters dismissing the math of music as missing the point stems primarily from this scene - but it got much worse. When the Doctor talks dismissively of equations, and his fan is trying to get him to stay, she drops this bomb: "What about the equation one plus one?" Voyager writers, you can't be serious. Really? Then there's the scene between the Doctor and Janeway, where she engages in some mental acrobatics bouncing around treating him like property, then making nonsensical statements about him treating himself like a piece of property, then calling herself his friend.

The idea for this episode, as long as the writers aren't going to do any music theory research, could have worked a lot better as a B-plot. There just isn't much substance to it, and it is stretched over the full hour. I recently added character tags to the reviews in the archive, and noticed that Voyager hasn't been using the A-plot/B-plot formula as much. While I've liked the later seasons better, I don't think that shift is responsible; I feel like a good B-plot can really keep a floundering episode afloat, or at least give me something to hold on to when I don't like the A-plot. Using that format more often could have evened out the bumpier spots of seasons four, five, and six.

Watchability: 1/5

Bottom Line: This episode's failure is no fault of Picardo, or really even his character. It's just too flimsy for him to do anything with it.