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

Hello there, and welcome to my latest review, this one on Star Trek Voyager's "Real Life." This is going to be full of spoilers and focused solely on the show I like so much, so if learning about a little Klingon romance and a lot of holographic heartache is just not your thing, may I suggest that you should click your mouse over to something else all together?

How about a naked Star Wars convertion?

No? Okay then, let's get to it!

PLOT
A perfectly groomed, laughing gas-addicted family stops sucking on their happy pipes long enough to present themselves to the husband/father who's going off to work. The super-perfect kids and fresh-dressed wife stand at the door, waiting eagerly for the chance to wish him a happy day (and perhaps sell him some commercial product that represents down-home American values). As the audience begins to feel more nauseated than they would eating ten pounds of M&M's during a marathon of Leave it to Beaver, who should trip lightly down the stairs, beaming and sipping on a cup of freshly brewed coffee?

The Doctor!

Doc says goodbye to the radiant family and phases back into Sickbay. Kes asks after his holofamily, and he says, "They're everything I could have hoped for."

But, don't worry. This is Star Trek, and a happy family is just a ticking time bomb waiting for a disaster! He he he he.

After the credits, we get to watch Voyager tooling through the galaxy and hear Janeway's voice telling us that they are trying to contact a "seemingly friendly" race, the Vostigi. They try to rendezvous with a Vostigi space station, but it's been recently destroyed. This really gets Janeway's dander up (quite the scary sight!) and she orders up some scans.

Turns out, though, that the space station was not destroyed by a weapon they can recognize. Instead, they find signs of a subspace wake and plasma particles. They follow the wake.

Torres finishes giving the Doctor another tune-up and pronounces him healthy. They have some fun dialogue about who doctors whom, and he ends up inviting her and Kes to dinner with his holofamily. There, in the perfect livingroom with the Stepford wife and one third of the Brady kids, the Doctor, or "Kenneth" eats his meal happily as everyone gushes over him.

Torres finally can't stand it and freezes the program before her "blood sugar levels overload." She explains to the bewildered Doctor that this perfect family is teaching him nothing about family life and will not help him, as he's hoping, to become a better doctor. However, if he'll let her, she could tweak his program [insert junior high school sex joke here] and get it to act more like Real Life [Hence the title!].

Voyager finds that the particle wake has dissipated, but before this can evolve into a gap in the plot, a subspace disruption occurs. Voyager is thrown around and the screen shakes a lot as the ship loses propulsion and helm control. Janeway prepares to disperse the disruption with a phaser blast, but then it dissipates on its own. There's little damage to the ship, and Janeway starts drooling with scientific curiosity.

Like waving a red flag in front of a bull, Chakotay talks about what a freakin' phenomenon that was, and the captain decides to hang around and investigate.

Kim (who spends yet another show doing nothing but talking from his station at ops) says that the disruption is some sort of eddy formed between space and subspace. Chakotay suggests harvesting some of the plasma caused by this disruption, if they can just figure out how.

The Doctor, still confident and glowing about his prowess as husband and father, returns to the holodeck to meet his new and improved family. The house, now messy and full of teenager music Star Trek-style, greets him like a slap in the face with a damp rag. His wife now sports a more professional and haggard appearance as she shifts through the mess on her way to lecture at the Bolian embassy. Perhaps it's on the digestive system, but we don't get to find out for sure.

Reminding "Kenneth" that it's his night to cook, the wife leaves, and the Doctor is confronted by Belle, his daughter, who is demanding that he help her find her mallet for Peresies Squares. He lectures her with the usual "If you put things back where you should..." garbage that I must admit my parents said to me.

A signal at the door announces the arrival of son Jeffery's new Klingon friends. They are not drug dealers, but they do seem to be members of some Klingon street gang, and Jeffery's appearance has been altered to show that he considers himself One Of Them. He smarts off at his father and refuses to keep his music turned down and in general acts like teenagers are supposed to just before parents find weird cigarettes in their sock drawers.

As Belle screams in her tantrum, the Doctor stands there looking frightened and confused.

Welcome to family life, Doc!

Paris gets a casserole from Neelix that the cook has been serving up for the last four days. Hmm, something seems to be going on with our little Talaxian friend.

But Paris is more interested in Torres, who's sitting at one of the tables with a padd in her hand. He sits down with a smoothly uncertain, "A beautiful woman should never have to eat alone," then grabs the padd from her and starts reading:

"Rorg turned his fierce eyes upon her and Menaya felt her heart begin to quicken even as her hand reached for her dagger. She had intended to plunge it into his throat, but something about him made her hesitate."

Looking amused and a little turned on, he asks her if this is the Klingon version of a Harlequin Romance, and she shrugs it off, calling it "escapist reading." Paris decides he'll read the story, hopefully to find out how to make Torres' heart quicken.

"It's not a technical manual, Tom," she says.

"Depends on what you mean by technical."

And, well, the double entendres go on until Torres calls an end to it by mentioning the Doctor's new and improved family. She admires the Doc for sticking with the program.

Meanwhile, a new subspace disruption forms outside the ship and everyone who's allowed to hustles to the bridge.

[Do you think it makes the non-bridge-people feel left out when they don't get to see what's going on? I bet if I were on Voyager I'd get the job of emptying the trashcans or something, and there I'd be holding the trashcan and looking at the important people go by and having nothing to do.

Except stick out my foot and trip them! HAHAHAHA!

Ahem. Sorry about that.]

On the bridge, the important people watch as another subspace disruption has formed. Paris rides the graviton waves so that Voyager can send out a probe. The disruption has a calm eye in the center where it seems to create that space-subspace link. The disruption disappears, taking the probe with it, but the probe continues to transmit. They realize they could collect some of the plasma (and go off replicator rations for awhile) with the bussard collectors of a shuttle. Paris, of course, volunteers immediately.

In Sickbay, he gets some radiation-prevention medicine to help him with the mission and a little sniping from the Doctor about how Paris must have been a torment to his parents as a child with his reckless ways. Obviously, the Doctor is comparing Paris in his mind to Belle's recklessness at playing Paresies Squares.

Paris asks after the holofamily, and the Doctor admits things are a little difficult. However, he's come up with a solution, and soon things will be just fine and dandy. Paris warns him that having a family isn't like curing an illness, but the Doctor exudes confidence and sends the lieutenant on his way.

The Doctor's solution, it turns out, is to hold a family meeting. Jeffery arrives last, sleepy and petulant. Doc hands out little padds to everyone, telling his wife to change her lecture night, Belle to switch to the younger PS team, and Jeffery to find some nice Vulcan friends. No one cares much for this, and his wife in particular doesn't enjoy being ordered around. Soon the meeting is a bust and Doc is left with Belle, who tells him gently that he's made a mess of things.

However, she also gives him a hug and says she loves him even though he's made a mess of things, and that she'll sign on to the lower-ranked team. Doc looks at her, surprised at how much nicer it is to have someone chose to love you when their programming actually makes it possible for them to dislike you instead.

Paris rides his shuttle into the disruption eddy just as it dissipates and starts collecting plasma, but then another eddy forms and drags his shuttle out of normal space, to the great dismay of all his friends on the bridge.

Kim and Janeway manage to keep in contact with the disappeared shuttle, and the captain asks Paris where he is. We see the shuttle passing through a strange area, and Paris says he doesn't know where he is.

A distracted Doctor returns early to his holofamily and finds Jeffery in the midst of a heavy meeting with his Klingon homies. Turns out they're planning for Jeffery to go through a Klingon ritual where he uses a special knife to perform an act of violence on an unsuspecting victim -- probably some poor joker holding a trashcan -- in preparation for becoming a full-blown warrior. Doc kicks the Klingon Bad Influences out of his house and tells Jeffery he won't stand for this sort of thing while Jeffery is living under his roof. Jeffery, of course, responds that he won't keep living there.

The argument is interrupted by news from Doc's wife that Belle has been injured.

Doc stands at Belle's biobed, explaining to his wife that three hours of surgery was not enough to correct all the damage done to Belle's brain when she hit her head on the side of the PS court. The wife refuses to accept that her daughter will die and goes to consult another doctor.

Alone with his unconscious daughter, the Doctor says her name in despair, and she answers him, explaining in a small voice that she can't feel her legs and everything seems dark. Is she going to die? she wants to know.

Well, the Doctor has now had all the virtual reality suffering he can stand and ends the program.

Back in Sickbay, Doc plasters on a smile for Kes and says that the family program was enjoyable, but he's had enough of it for now. She seems puzzled but doesn't press it.

Paris tells Janeway he believes he's in that interfold layer between space and subspace. The only way he can figure to get out is to ride one of the disruptions back into normal space. He tries it, but the eddy he picks is quite a doozy. He signals for Voyager to get out of the area, but Janeway, of course, refuses to leave him there. Chakotay takes the helm and keeps the ship right ahead of the wake so that they can stay within transporter range.

The guy at the helm that Paris and Chakotay always push out of the way when the going gets tough leaves the bridge and empties some trashcans.

The screen shakes like mad now as Paris flies through the eddy. Finally my television falls off its perch and Paris goes flying across the shuttle to hit his head on the bulkhead. He seems woozy, but gets back to the controls, where he can watch debris fly at his weakening shields. His hull is starting to buckle.

Kim manages to get the shuttle beamed aboard and Chakotay gets the ship out of there.

An extremely pissy Doc tells Paris that his hard head has saved him again, then starts fussing big-time about people who take risks. Paris goes from amused to concerned and asks what's wrong. Doc explains that Belle is dying, but that he's ended the program and fortunately won't be returning.

Paris advises him to rethink. If the Doctor doesn't go back to say goodbye, he won't see what a family is really all about: coming together in a crisis. Voyager's crew is like such a family, drawn close by good and bad times.

Doc returns to Belle's biobedside and says goodbye to her with his wife and a repentant (but not overly so) Jeffery at his side. Belle dies and Doc hugs his remaining family.