Star Trek Voyager Reviews Written by Someone Who Actually LIKES the Show! -- Darkling

Okay, this is a review of the Star Trek Voyager episode "Darkling." It is written expressly for the enjoyment and psychological enlightenment of those who like Star Trek and really cool versions of Hans Christian Anderson tales. This review contains many spoilers, so those of you who haven't seen the show or don't care to "hang" with someone who quotes Kirk dialogue at the drop...of...a...hat!...please take yourselves elsewhere.

How about The Tale of the Tree Sweater ?

No? Then lay down on the couch (if you can see the computer from there) and I'll tell you all about it...

INITIAL VIEWER EXPERIENCE
Whiplash!! What the heck happened to Kes?? She and Neelix WHAT? Thanks for giving us all the details, dudes...Oh, the Doctor runs amok...this is pointless and I'm still mad about Kes...No, wait...I get it! This is all symbolic! My eyes are opened, and this is pretty interesting...Perfect ending, including the oath.

PLOT
No longer getting valuable directions from Neelix, the Voyager stops by the Nical gas station to buy a map and ask for directions. The Nical travelers are somewhat famed in these parts for zipping around in two-seater ships and looking at everything. The Voyager crew, especially Kes, see themselves in the Nical travelers, but only to a point. They are more loners than part of a merry band.

Janeway listens with interest to a story from the owner of a local tavern -- whom I'll have to call the Host, since I tried but couldn't catch his name. He tells of going to a moon and discovering that it was actually a giant creature. Janeway keeps her polite face on.

Enter Kes and her new squeeze, Zahir, who scoffs at the Host's story. The Host gets pissy and pulls out a weapon, but Zahir proves that his is bigger and the tense moment passes with bad grace. Zahir talks to the captain about this dangerous section of space while the new and improved Sexy Kes watches. Her hair is fluffier, her blusher is blushier, and her outfit...hmmm, how would one describe it with kids in the room? What? You say there are no kids here? Then let's just say it's tres risqué. Sexy Kes seems to like Zahir. Something about those weird eyes and yet another puckered prosthetic on the bridge of his nose just speaks to her.

Back on the ship, the Doctor has gathered Lord Byron, Ghandi, Socrates, T'Pau of Vulcan, and assorted other great figures of history in Holodeck Club Med. [Now, add a few kegs and some tunes by The Wallflowers into the mix, and you're talking my idea of the PERFECT PARTY!!] Byron and Ghandi talk for some time on the merits of sensuality versus a cold bath, and Kes enters to ask what is going on. The Doctor explains this is all part of his new Personality Improvement Project, which will soon be awarded the Voyager Bad Idea of the Week once someone remembers where they put the statuette. Anyway, his brainstorm involves taking the best of all these historically awesome personalities and putting it into his own program to improve his bedside manner.

Kes is only vaguely interested in the Doctor's doings, as she only has eyes for Zahir, who's so "unique." The Doctor sniffs, "I think I'm detecting a reaction to your recent breakup with Mr. Neelix." [And that, my friends, is ALL we get on that!]

In Sickbay, the Doctor tends Torres, who's gotten heartburn from eating a Nical salad. The Doctor reminds her that he warned her about eating the plants, and asks in a nicely over-deep voice, "Have you been...naughty?"

"Doctor," Torres asks, "have you been messing around with your program?" He explains his self-improvement project, and she explains -- duh! -- that behavioral sub-routines have a way of interacting unexpectedly. She says she'll try to fix him up after work, and he stops rubbing her leg long enough to turn himself off.

Kes takes a walk with Zahir, who admires the Voyager crew's closeness. In fact, he's pretty much into closeness of all kinds. As Kes and Zahir exchange knowledge of each other's dentistry, a red-robed figure lurks in the bushes, watching them.

Kes beams back up to Voyager at three in the morning with a rosy glow to her cheeks. She has an away team report due in only a few hours, as a passing Tuvok reminds her. Irritated that everyone can tell what she's been doing just by looking at her, she goes into Sickbay, and finds the Doctor working on yet another report she hasn't finished. The Doctor expresses concern for her recent unpredictable behavior, and she points out that she's three years old now, which is the Ocampa version of old enough to vote. The Doctor looks a little jealous...yeah, and Kes' outfit looks a LITTLE tight.

The next morning, Kes turns in the away team report to Janeway on time. Janeway spots the signs of an all-nighter, and the two of them have a little talk. Kes is thinking seriously of leaving Voyager, at least for a time, and traveling with Zahir. She could hook back up with Voyager later...maybe. Her life, she reminds us again, is a third over now. She wants, she says, "a little complication" in her life.

Down on the planet, Zahir shows Tuvok his AAA map and tries to sell him some tacky silver jewelry...no, he warns him that Voyager must steer clear of the Tarken sector of space. Tuvok fusses a little about Kes, and Zahir assures him he wants to take care of her.

Kes can't play with Zahir tonight, though, and he walks alone under the stars. Something sounds from behind him, he turns, and the red-robed figure pushes him into a ravine. The red-robed figure then walks into the tavern and reveals himself to the Host. It's the Doctor, in need of a shave and looking very strange, particularly around the eyes. Evil Doc burns the Host's hand and demands a ship and passage off the planet.

Back in Sickbay, Kes activates the good Doctor and tells him Zahir is hurt. The Doctor gets ready to go, but at the transporter Torres stops him with the news that there is definitely something wrong with his program. Kes takes the medkit to Zahir while Torres and the Doc return yet again to Sickbay. There, Torres tells him the sub-routines aren't working right. Basic psychological theory tells us that these great figures he's plundered all have dark threads running through their personalities, and the Doctor has added those dark threads along with everything else.

"And now those dark threads are in me," the Doctor asks, "running through my program? Well, get them out, Lieutenant!"

But when the Doctor goes to turn himself off so she can fix him, something goes wrong.

Tuvok and Janeway are talking about the strange lack of evidence as to who hurt Zahir when they walk into Sickbay and find Torres on the floor. Janeway calls up the good Doctor, who says it's anaphylactic shock from the salad. Once Janeway and Tuvok leave, though, the Doctor goes fuzzy and then transforms before our eyes into Evil Doc.

Evil Doc, in a move not usually seen on Star Trek, demands his own right to existence and threatens Torres with torture (in a really creepy way) if she won't tell him how to fix the destabilizing sub-routines from whence he came. As for the Good Doctor, he can take a hike. She refuses and he zaps her with the hypospray. He decides instead to go to those original holocharacters, his progenitors, to find his answers.

He rides down to the holodeck in the turbo lift with a pretty ensign and Paris, who says something I'll talk about in STAR TREK ELEMENTS WE LOVE. From the lift, the Doctor swagger/staggers to the holodeck.

Tuvok thinks the Host may be their prime suspect, and he, Chakotay, and an injured Zahir go to visit the actual scene of the crime.

Kes finds Torres, but is confused instead of alarmed. She goes looking for the Doctor in the holodeck and finds Byran, Ghandi, and company in broken holo-pieces. Evil Doc reveals himself to her, grabs her combadge, and drags her out with him. In the transporter room, he stuns [hopefully!] the chief and sets up a scattering field with his tricorder so they can beam down to the planet without Janeway's interference. He and Kes get on the transporter pad. "Stay close," he leers at her. "It's about to get interesting."

Kim detects the transport, but can't trace it. Janeway signals Chakotay and Tuvok that the Doctor and Kes have beamed off the ship, and Tuvok says they've got evidence it was the Doctor who hurt Zahir. In good captain fashion, Janeway remembers to send help to Torres while she starts working on getting through that scattering field.

Waiting in the tavern and fooling around with his portable emitter, Evil Doc justifies his existence to Kes. He is made of dark threads, and "darkness is more fundamental than light." Kes responds that kindness is just as fundamental, inadvertently revealing that she's never ridden on a subway.

The Host comes in with news of the ship, but warns Evil Doc that Janeway won't let him leave the planet. Though he fuzzes a bit as his sub-routines fade further, Evil Doc punches the Host in the stomach, and he runs away like a girly-man.

Dragging Kes along with him, because she is "too naive" and makes "the wrong decisions," Evil Doc tries to get to the ship. Tuvok, Zahir, and Chakotay find him and block his way just as Evil Doc drags Kes to the edge of a cliff. He'll jump with her, he threatens, if they don't back off. Chakotay talks about getting Evil Doc his own space at the holodeck, with cable and central air, but Evil Doc isn't buying it. He tells Kes he's going to jump.

No, she says, I don't think you will. She points out that he's been trying to protect her by beating up her new boyfriend and calling her "naive." [Neelix has given her some really strange notions of what constitutes a relationship.] You want to help me, she says. "You can't deny it."

"Watch me," says Evil Doc, and jumps with her over the cliff. Fortunately, Janeway's made it through the scattering field and scoops them both up with the transporter. Back on the ship and returned to normal, the Doctor fusses about his silly clothes [and we never do find out where that red robe came from] while Kes looks relieved.

In Sickbay once again, Torres announces to the Doctor, who can barely make eye contact with her, that he is cured. He says the same about her. A moment of understanding and forgiveness passes between them.

She exits, Kes enters, and the Doctor says he's glad she's staying on the ship. Janeway, she says, advised her to stay on the ship with people who care about her while she goes through these changes in her life and personality.

Alone, the Doctor runs through the line of the Hippocratic Oath that ends, "and I will do no harm."

CHARACTER
The temptation is to complain that this is another possession story, and all the stuff about the doctor is meaningless because it isn't really him, just a bunch of sub-routines that aren't even a part of his subconscious. This is true in its way, but it's not the point.

This episode is about Kes, all the way through. That's what I was getting at when I mentioned symbolism.

Hans Christian Anderson's best story (in my opinion) is "The Shadow." In it, a learned but timid man stands on his balcony and stares across the street at the flower-strewn balcony of a beautiful woman. As he watches, his shadow stretches across the street and touches this balcony. He jokingly tells his shadow to go through the woman's window, and the shadow does just that. Detached from the man, the shadow lives a much better life than the man does. In time, the shadow returns to the man and tells of his wonderful life, while the man himself has wasted away in poverty. Finally, the shadow hires the man to pretend to be his shadow, while his shadow lives the life he never acknowledged he wanted to live, or knew he could find the courage to live. Finally, the man can't take it any more and tries to explain who the real shadow is. The man is then executed for telling lies while the shadow marries a princess.

The moral, of course, is that we all have shadows, the darker versions of ourselves that want to take chances and experience fun things in life. These shadows must be recognized, appeased, dealt with, even embraced, or they will take over our lives.

Now, ever since Kes ran into Tanis in "Cold Fire" and really enjoyed sucking the life out of all those plants, she's been aware of her own dark side, but she's done little to come to terms with it. Perhaps she thinks she's too cute to be really dangerous inside, and that's dangerous thinking indeed.

Since Warlord we've known that she's had unexpected and dark changes in her personality. Now here she is thinking about leaving the ship and hanging around with an attractive -- if you're into weird eyes -- and potentially dangerous man. Much is made of the Nical travelers' perilous lifestyle. Kes shrugs this all off, and Evil Doc is right to call her "naive." Considering what happens to the careers of most Star Trek cast members, I too would call leaving the ship a "wrong decision."

It's quite appropriate, then, that when the Doctor gets "possessed" in his own way, he stands in for Kes' own dark side. He even throws her dialogue back at her to make sure we all get it. She asks for "complications," and he's gonna give 'em to her. When Kes asks, "What do you want?" he responds, "What everyone wants, just a little...excitement." When they're about to beam off the ship, he tells her, "You said you wanted to leave the ship for a while, go on an adventure." This is where such wishes can lead.

At three years old, Kes may be a third of the way through her life, but she's still three. She needs to realize that our darker natures really aren't neatly compartmentalized into a "side," but run all through us. Evil Doc's "dark threads" are like anyone's. He wants to protect her, as our dark threads do in their own way, and he wants to destroy her, as ours do as well. Evil Doc's directive to "stay close" is like the shadow inside telling us we can't escape, nor, perhaps, should we wish to, any more than Anderson's poor hero should wish to. These dark threads helped to make Byron and Ghandi and the others great, after all. Running amok in a computer sub-routine, darkness is simply dangerous, but inside us, it gives us strength and determination, and all that stuff.

Now, I must mention that we've seen this psychological theme on Star Trek before, and more than once. But that just adds to the richness of the argument, if you ask me, as long as the stories themselves are different. The earliest version I can think of is TOS "The Enemy Within" where Kirk is split in two and he has to embrace the "dark" half of him that swilled brandy and hit on Janice Rand. In that episode, Spock uses Kirk as a reference to himself, his half-Vulcan/half-Human nature, and urges the captain to learn from his own conflict. The Evil Doc urges this on Kes in a different way, and not just on Kes.

Evil Doc comments on the Good Doctor's own ignorance of his strength, sneering that his counterpart has no idea of the possibilities of his own holographic existence. I hope this all means the Doctor will explore these aspects of himself in future episodes. But I digress...

So Evil Doc does jump off the cliff. Destruction before surrender. And, just as it should be, Kes is saved not by her sweet but misguided belief that Evil Doc will suddenly turn good and let her go, but by Janeway and the rest of her friends. That is, after all, what we need our friends and families for as we go through changes at all stages of our lives. They help us from going too far off track, and they catch us when we fall (though usually without the transporter, I admit).

It's quite right, therefore, and not just a plot device, that after all this Kes decides to stay with the ship. She has learned her lesson after all, which one would expect in someone with a photographic memory. She knows she's vulnerable to herself as much as to anything else, and so needs the same people that her restlessness (or shadow) is telling her to leave for fun and dangerous freedom.

The Doctor's reciting of his oath reveals his concern that he has, after all, done harm. But he needn't worry. He hasn't.

More on the Doctor's character. It's not just convenient, but correct that he return to his personality after the transport. Evil Doc jumps off the cliff, after all, to commit suicide before his sub-routines completely disintegrate. In a sense, he succeeds, and the good Doctor is left alone.

The one thing about CHARACTER I am going to complain about, however, is the glib toss-off about the Kes/Neelix breakup. I don't care if we saw it coming or not, and I suppose a whole episode devoted to their breakup would be a bore, but couldn't we at least have a scene where they talk about it? Yeesh. Did he find he didn't love the new and improved Kes? Did she tell him to take a hike and break his Talaxian heart?

And whether or not the writers ran out of story lines for an involved Kes, I'd like to point out that their breakup is more than a little contradictory. We were told that Ocampans mate for life. She always made such an issue out of not understanding jealousy. She gave him a lung! I really feel they made the whole breakup thing too casual.

However, once I recovered from the shock, I agreed that the abruptness of Kes' own changes are quite right. She is only going to live for a decade or so. Cramming all that living into that sort of space means she will jump from sophomore platitudes to rebellious teen to God knows where. Handled right, it could make her one of Trek's most interesting characters.

But I'd like to know, is Paris going to come after her now or is he too distracted by pleasant memories of Torres in the cave? Hmmm, are we headed for a Kes-Torres cat fight? Have you ever seen the movie, Godzilla vs Bambi?

Let's take a second to note the extremely subtle relationship they've kept going between the Doctor and Torres. She's always seemed a little uncertain of him. He irritates her, but since way back in "The Cloud," when he complimented her ideas, we've seen her give him that "I don't know how to take you" look. The discomfort between the two of them at the end of "Darkling" is wonderfully played. It'll be really interesting to see where this goes.

Is Kim going to do anything anytime soon?

THOUGHT
This section got pretty thoroughly gutted by what I said under "character."

Could Byron and Ghandi really have a conversation without simply giving up in mutual disgust? Seems to me Byron might be more interested in talking to T'Pau.

I notice they're getting better and better on the show in remembering details. Janeway's call to security to check on Torres in Sickbay was great.

SPECTACLE
Picardo does a super job as Evil Doc. I've seen some criticizing the performance as being too hammy, but we should remember that Doc is a hologram, after all. A hologram programmed with dark threads of other holograms is not going to be subtle in his evil. Evil Doc looks just like a cartoonish, unfettered version of evil, and quite frankly he gives me the willies.

The contact lenses I thought at first were a bit much, but they were part of the willies-making process in the end. Besides, they do create a slight link between Evil Doc and Z'heer...and to Neelix, come to think of it.

Do you suppose they keep all those rocks in a warehouse somewhere and just drag out the day's allotment to scatter around? How about some differently colored rocks in an episode? A nice assortment of red and blue rocks, maybe? They could still glitter.

DICTION
Some good lines in this one already noted. Others include:

"A melding of the minds." "Only minds?" -- Kes and Mr. Suave.

"So I made a mess of things?" Doctor being nicely direct to Torres.

"'State the nature of the medical emergency' -- what a hollow excuse for a life." -- Evil Doc making a pun that works because it passes by quickly.

"Behavioral categories are for the weak." -- Evil Doc.

"Put those down before someone gets hurt and I have to clean up the mess." -- the restored Doctor to security, who make a once-only appearance WITHOUT getting killed.


SONG
Score great as always, guys.

And now for the baggage...

STAR TREK ELEMENTS WE (OR I, ANYWAY) LOVE
In the turbolift, Paris points out to the Doctor, "I guess that mobile emitter turned out to be something of a mixed blessing."

I'm happy to see that this aspect of the emitter gets some notice. I really want to see the Doctor consider his life as a hologram instead of an almost-human, striking some medium between Data's Pinochio complex and Odo's disdain of solids. It's also nice that Paris is the one to say it. Don't know why, just is.

STAR TREK ELEMENTS WE (OR I, ANYWAY) HATE
Much as I don't want some sort of Troi clone on Voyager, I wish we could have someone who gets acknowledged as the resident psychological expert. I thought it was going to be Kes, but she seems to be getting less wise as she gets older. I thought it was going to be the Doctor, but if he's that misguided about how sub-routines work, I wouldn't let him touch my neurosis with a ten-foot pole. Janeway's too busy, Tuvok's too Vulcan, Torres would just take a poke at you, and Chakotay's spirit guide has disappeared down a black hole. Maybe Kim could...no.

People are talking a lot about getting tired of possession stories, but this one really works for me. The possession is certainly plausible and presented without a lot of gobbledigook. It makes sense that the Doctor, in trying to better himself, actually invites the evil inside him. His possession story also helps recall "Warlord," making clearer the commentary his actions make upon Kes.

Did I mention that Kes and Neelix's breakup seems a little abrupt?

Well, that's the end of this review. Hope you liked it.

Star Trek Voyager Reviews

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