star trek voyager darkling

Darkling (episode)

View history
1.2 Act One
1.3 Act Two
1.4 Act Three
1.5 Act Four
1.6 Act Five
2 Memorable quotes
3.1 Title, story, and script
3.2 Cast and characters
3.3 Production and effects
3.4 Continuity and trivia
3.5 Reception
3.6 Video and DVD releases
4.1 Starring
4.2 Also starring
4.3 Guest Stars
4.4 Co-Stars
4.5 Uncredited Co-Stars
4.6 Stunt doubles
4.7 Stand-ins
4.8 References
4.9 External links

Summary [ ]

Captain Kathryn Janeway talks with a Mikhal Traveler , who is later revealed to be called Nakahn . They're in his lodge at the Mikhal outpost and he's animatedly telling the captain the incredible story of one of his travels, involving a monstrous, living asteroid . Kes comes in with Zahir , the Mikhal pilot with whom she's been working on the transfer of medical supplies to the outpost. Zahir picks up the last part of Nakahn's story and it's immediately obvious that he's skeptical of it. When he makes that clear, tempers flare and there's a short argument between the two Mikhal but eventually, Kes, Zahir and the captain are left alone. Zahir explains to the captain that there is no such thing as a living asteroid in the space ahead of the USS Voyager but points out that the asteroid in question is rich in vorilium , whereupon the captain decides that might be worth a detour.

Later, The Doctor is in the holodeck , discussing passion with Neelix and the holographic simulations of two historical figures: Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Byron . He's taking note of their arguments on a PADD . When Kes comes in and asks him what's going on, he explains to her that he's working on a "personality improvement project." He's been interviewing all the holographic versions of important historical figures in the database , including Socrates , Mahatma Gandhi and T'Pau , in order to select the character traits he finds admirable and merge them into his program. In this manner, he hopes to accomplish, among other things, an improved bedside manner, a fresh perspective on diagnosis , more patience, etc. He adds that he could have used her assistance on his project if she hadn't been "otherwise engaged" on the planet , making it clear that he's not happy with this "infatuation" of hers with the Mikhal Travelers, whom he considers to be " risk-taking thrill seekers with no responsibility to the ideals of exploration ." Kes counters that she finds them intriguing, especially Zahir , but The Doctor warns her that how she feels about him now may just be a reaction after recently ending her relationship with Neelix . He then tells her that Gandhi would likely advise her to " take a cold bath " and walks away.

Act One [ ]

Kes and Zahir kiss while being watched by The Doctor

The Doctor is in sickbay with Lieutenant jg B'Elanna Torres who is complaining of nausea , after having eaten a small salad on the planet, despite The Doctor's prior warning that Klingon physiology lacks the enzymes to digest the vegetation of that planet. The Doctor reacts to this in a rather uncharacteristic way, coming awfully close to her and when Torres tells him to back off, he instructs the computer to isolate the recent additions to the EMH program and hold them for review. He then explains to Torres the project he's been working on, whereupon she tells him to be careful with adding behavioral subroutines to his program, as they have a tendency to interact with each other in unpredictable ways. She promises him to take a look at his program after her shift in engineering and as she leaves sickbay, The Doctor deactivates himself.

Meanwhile, Kes is with Zahir on the planet. They're walking an old path in a wooded area, left behind by other spacefarers like Zahir in long forgotten times. When they reach the end of the path, Kes discovers a strange kind of inscription in a rock. According to Zahir, it says " My course is as elusive as a shadow across the sky. " Kes thanks Zahir for the evening and they kiss, while a cloaked figure appears in the background watching them intently.

Act Two [ ]

Back on Voyager , a dreamy look in her eyes, Kes bumps into Lt. Tuvok in the corridor, who reminds her that it's 0300 and that she has an away team report due at 0800. Kes assures him she hasn't forgotten and leaves. A few moments later, Kes enters sickbay, where The Doctor, who's working on a report Kes should have done but forgot, gives her a lecture about becoming increasingly unpredictable. She lashes out that everyone's treating her like a child and that she's not a child anymore, then assures The Doctor that she knows he cares about her and that she won't forget that. Then she goes to finish the report.

The next morning, Kes enters the captain's ready room , looking very tired and after having handed her the report, asks to have a word with Janeway. She then proceeds to tell the captain that she wants to spend more time with Zahir and asks to be granted permission to temporarily leave the ship. The captain tells her to think about it for a few more days and Kes leaves.

That evening, Zahir and Tuvok are discussing which route Voyager should take to avoid the Tarkan sentries. Kes interrupts them and tells Zahir that she wants to spend time with him but must catch up on her sleep. Later Zahir walks the same path where he was with Kes the day before. Suddenly, he hears something and pulls out his weapon. He appears to have discovered something horrible on the ground before him but he is knocked off a cliff by the same cloaked figure that was there the day before. A few moments later, the cloaked figure enters Nakahn's lodge and pulls his cape off his head, revealing that he is The Doctor, with a curious expression in his eyes. He drags Nakahn's hands into the fire, then demands a ship and safe passage off the planet.

Act Three [ ]

The Doctor convinces Nakahn to offer him safe passage off the planet

The Doctor seeks safe passage

Kes enters sickbay the next morning and activates the EMH . The Doctor appears to be back to his normal self. When Kes tells him Zahir has been found unconscious and that he needs medical attention, nothing in his behavior suggests he knows anything about it and he's immediately prepared to help. However, as they reach the transporter room , Torres stops them, telling The Doctor she needs to run a full diagnostic on his Holomatrix , because something is wrong. While running the diagnostic, she explains to him that, while all the historical personalities he's chosen to incorporate into his program had some very admirable traits indeed, they also had less desirable attributes and all those, combined within The Doctor's personality, have caused his program to destabilize. She then asks him to deactivate himself so that she can purge his matrix of the added elements but when he attempts to do so, it doesn't work. He merely shimmers a bit.

Meanwhile, by the turbolift , Tuvok is explaining to Janeway that the one who attacked Zahir has curiously left no tangible evidence of his crime at all on his victim. Also, Zahir cannot recall anything. Tuvok and Janeway make their way to sickbay and when they enter it, they find Torres unconscious on the floor. Tuvok activates the EMH and although he's a little irritated, he seems to be his normal self. He diagnoses Torres with delayed anaphylactic shock from the salad she ate the day before and puts her on a biobed for a few hours of observation.

After Tuvok and Janeway leave however, The Doctor starts to shimmer again. When he reappears, he's got the strange look in his eyes once more. He grabs a few hyposprays and goes over to Torres.

Act Four [ ]

The Doctor being replaced by his alter ego.

Socrates hologram malfunctioning

After waking her with one of them The Doctor tells her he simulated the anaphylactic shock using a drug and as she discovers that he has paralyzed her from the waist down to get her cooperation, she quickly realizes he has a new personality, created from the new subroutines. He tells her she is correct and that he wants to know from her how to delete The Doctor from his matrix, threatening to torture her if she doesn't. When Torres still refuses to help him, and his subroutines visibly begin to destabilize, he turns to the historical figures in the holodeck for help.

Meanwhile, Tuvok is interrogating Nakahn before going back to the scene of the crime and it's clear that he suspects him.

A few minutes later, Kes finds The Doctor in the holodeck, surrounded by all kinds of malfunctioning holograms. He explains to her that he's the new master of the EMH and the old Doctor is locked up inside him. He then takes her hostage and transports off the ship, after having created a dispersion pattern so that Voyager won't know where to look for them.

Act Five [ ]

On the bridge Ensign Harry Kim reports an unscheduled transport. At the same time, Tuvok reports to the captain that he has found residual holographic signatures at the scene of the crime.

The Doctor and Kes being transported after he pulls them both over a cliff

The Doctor and Kes falling from a cliff.

Meanwhile, The Doctor and Kes are in the lodge, waiting for Nakahn and the scout ship. The Doctor is attempting to remove the EMH from his program and Kes talks to him and for a moment. She explains to him that both should survive. It almost seems as if she's going to manage to convince him that a place can be found for both him and the original Doctor, until Nakahn enters and tells him he won't be able to escape, because Janeway and her crew have cordoned off the entire area. The Doctor flees, planning on taking the ship onto another continent but Janeway manages to disable the dispersion field long enough to get a lock on Kes' and The Doctor's location and transfers the coordinates to the away team on the planet.

Not long thereafter, the away team finds Kes and The Doctor and Tuvok blocks their path using a phaser to shoot some rocks down. The Doctor then threatens to jump off a cliff with Kes, eventually doing so; right at that moment, they are beamed up to the ship. He is also apparently his normal self once again. Back in sick bay, Torres informs The Doctor that she has rid him of all the extra subroutines. Kes enters and The Doctor explains his gratitude that Kes has decided to remain on board Voyager with those that know her and care for her. The Doctor tells Kes that she’d have been missed, had she departed; realizing what he is trying to say, Kes responds that she’d have missed him too, and leaves sickbay. The Doctor considers what recently happened and recites to himself the Hippocratic Oath pledging that he will "do no harm".

Memorable quotes [ ]

" Men and women should refrain from enjoying each other. By that I mean to say, even their mutual glances must be free of all suggestion of carnality. " " Free of passion? One might as well be free of Humanity. "

" It is said the angels themselves take pleasure in their bodies of light. " " And you should take a cold bath. In such cases, it is the finest preventative. " " I'll keep that in mind. "

" In my opinion, you've become far too infatuated with these Travelers. From the away team reports, they seem afflicted with terminal wanderlust, risk-taking thrill-seekers, with no responsibility to the ideals of exploration. In short, bad news. "

" I think I am detecting a reaction to your recent break-up with Mr. Neelix. The Mahatma would recommend a cold bath. Simplistic and no doubt effective. "

" But everyone seems to be treating me like I'm still a child. I'm three years old now. "

" Any sharp pains? Heartburn? There's nothing like a heart that burns. Your pulse is – lovely. Ah-hah. Mmm, does that feel … good? " " Doctor, unless you want me to knock you into the middle of the next millennium, you'd better back off! "

" The fine art of putting off an important task to the very last minute… then rushing through it. In my Academy days, I was the acknowledged master. "

" The flesh is weak, Kes. Never forget that. "

" What am I doing here, and why am I wearing these ridiculous clothes? "

" Put those phasers away, before you hurt someone and I have to clean up the mess! "

" I swear this oath by Apollo Physician , by Asclepius , by Health and by all the gods and goddesses : In whatsoever place that I enter I will enter to help the sick and heal the injured, and I will do no harm. "

Background information [ ]

Title, story, and script [ ].

Shortly after working on this episode, Robert Picardo supposed the probability that the installment's title is a reference to The Doctor's "purely evil alter ego." ( Star Trek Monthly issue 26 , p. 11)
Robert Picardo reckoned that Brannon Braga co-wrote this episode after finding out that Picardo had played Eddie Quist, a psychopath/ werewolf , in the 1981 movie The Howling . The actor commented, " My pet theory is that when Brannon Braga found out I played Eddie Quist in The Howling , he decided to write a scary doctor episode, because The Howling is one of his favorite movies. He didn't know that I played that role. So when he found that out, he decided to do sort of a return of Eddie Quist in the context of Voyager . That's just a theory. " In reality, Braga had enjoyed Picardo as Eddie Quist but that performance was unrelated to the genesis of this episode. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 91)
The episode actually began with an uncredited premise that Star Trek: Voyager 's writing team bought. Brannon Braga remembered, " The idea [for the episode] actually came from a pitch, and we bought the premise for it. Jekyll and Hyde was all there was. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 106) Indeed, the episode is obviously similar to the story Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . Both Robert Picardo and Roxann Dawson have referred to this installment in such a way, with Picardo calling the episode "pretty much a classic 'Jekyll and Hyde' story" and Dawson saying, " That was our Jekyll and Hyde episode, with The Doctor turning a little evil. " ( Star Trek Monthly issue 26 , p. 11; The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine issue 12 )
The first draft of this episode's script was submitted on 18 November 1996 .
The Doctor's malevolent alter ego was initially scripted as being more perverse than he is in the episode's final version. Joe Menosky remembered, " We originally made The Doctor perversely sexual and sadistic. There was a sense that his attachment to Kes was weirdly kind of psychosexual, and we took it to its limit. In the screenplay first draft that I wrote, I had a scene when Kes walks into the holodeck and sees The Doctor doing an experiment. There are Keses everywhere, and he's got one of them on the operating table, and he has some flip line about, 'Just trying to get to know you better.' It's very perverse. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 94) Presumably, this scene ultimately became the one in which Kes finds The Doctor sabotaging the historical holograms on the holodeck.
The perversity of The Doctor's evil second self was lessened on behalf of story consultant Michael Piller , much to the disappointment of Robert Picardo. " Michael Piller […] wrote a strong memo. He basically said, 'If you guys shoot it like this, I'm going to take my name off this episode,' " Joe Menosky recounted. " It made us reconsider doubts that we'd had. Michael's argument was that you got a sense, after the episode was done and The Doctor was back to normal, that somewhere in The Doctor was this horrible, dirty old man who was just waiting to get his hands on Kes. There was almost no way to erase that. That's probably why Picardo was so disappointed when we ended up not going that route, because he really loved the 'S and M Doctor,' as he liked to call it. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 94)
Ultimately, however, Robert Picardo was not only excited but also surprised by the conclusion of this episode's final version. He opined, " It has quite an exciting ending […] It's very unexpected with regard to what I do with Kes and what risks I'm willing to put her in. " ( Star Trek Monthly issue 26 , p. 11)
The episode's final draft script was submitted, under the slightly different title "The Darkling", on 3 December 1996 . [1] The shooting script noted when The Doctor was in "evil" mode by surrounding the character's designation in quotation marks (i.e., "Doctor"). ( Star Trek: Voyager Companion , p. ? )

Cast and characters [ ]

Robert Picardo was thrilled that this episode allowed him to act outside of his usual confines of performance on the series. " I got to really be evil. I got to do Jekyll and Hyde, " he excitedly recalled. " It was fun! " ( Star Trek Monthly issue 26 , p. 11) He also said, " I got to be very crazy […] It's a fine line to draw, between pulling this off and […] what[ever] happens if the audience doesn't take it seriously. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 91) In addition, Picardo remembered, " 'Darkling' was fun and challenging for me because it was so different from anything else I have done on Star Trek: Voyager thus far. I had the freedom to create a completely different personality for The Doctor – one that had a very evil streak. So it was incumbent on me to be frightening to the other cast members and hopefully to the audience, and to really take it as far as I could go. The episode reminded me of my experience doing horror movies such as The Howling . It was challenging. " However, Picardo simultaneously felt that he didn't enjoy playing The Doctor's evil doppelganger as much as he probably would have, had he been considerably younger. He admitted, " To be frank, it wasn't fun to do. I don't enjoy playing creepy characters the way I used to as a young man. I don't know if that's a response to being a father now. " ( Star Trek Monthly issue 30 , p. 18)
Roxann Dawson enjoyed acting with Robert Picardo in the scenes wherein the evil Doctor persona menaces B'Elanna Torres. Dawson recalled, " Bob Picardo and I had some fun together when we were doing the scenes when he was in his Mr. Hyde mode […] It was so disgusting, but I think it came across as very funny. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine issue 12 ) Remembering such sequences, Robert Picardo laughed, " I was teasing poor Roxann about how sorry I was for behaving this way, but how they made me do it, and were paying me. " ( Star Trek Monthly issue 26 , p. 11)
Robert Picardo liked how the episode presented him with an enjoyable opportunity to act wickedly to the episode's female performers in general. Not long after he performed in this episode, Picardo mused, " Last year I was paid to kiss all the female guest stars. This year I'm paid for sexually harassing all the women in the cast, which has been fun! […] I abuse women, which is certainly not an image I'm promoting. But they straighten me out in the last couple of minutes. " ( Star Trek Monthly issue 26 , p. 11)
According to the costume tag of a sold costume on the It's A Wrap! sale and auction on eBay, actor Steve Ozuna appeared as an extra in this episode. (The costume actually was not found on screen, so this has yet to be verified.) [2]

Production and effects [ ]

Robert Picardo used contact lenses and prosthetic teeth for the evil version of The Doctor. " There were very subtle changes in my appearance, subtle make-up changes, " he observed. " I wore some interesting contact lenses that were my idea, to reduce the size of my cornea so that my eyes appear just slightly beadier. And I also wore a dental appliance on my lower teeth that I had not worn since The Howling . I save all of my prosthetics in a drawer, so I pulled out the teeth and wore them to give me a more Neanderthal, animalistic appearance. " ( Star Trek Monthly issue 26 , p. 11) Picardo also remarked, " I've saved my Eddie Quist teeth for I don't know, 12 or 14 years. It's nice to take them out of the drawer. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 91)
The individuals on whom Robert Picardo tried out his subtle make-up changes included Joe Menosky. " He walked into our offices when we were working, looking mean and basically being mean, and he said, 'What do you think?' in his Hyde voice, and stayed in character the whole time, " Menosky remembered. " It wasn't until the end of his little psychodrama that we realized that makeup had put in contacts that made his eyes beadier, and also he had put on his bottom teeth, a couple of real tiny kind of overlays. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 91)
An early indication gave Robert Picardo a good impression of the makeup. " It's pretty cool, " he said. " I've seen the footage in rough cut, and it's good. I'm kind of excited about it. " ( Star Trek Monthly issue 26 , p. 11)
Joe Menosky thought the makeup, in the end, was very successful. " If you're aware of it when you watch the episode you realize that his bottom lip is pushed out just a little bit. He changed his voice around this thing that he'd done to his teeth, " Menosky noted. " He did look mean, totally different. He looked scary as hell. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 91)
Metal structures (showing Kazon designs) seen in Nakahn 's bar on the planet here were reused from the second season episode " Alliances ", wherein they appear on the planet Sobras .
This episode includes five matte paintings that were created by digital matte artist Eric Chauvin . The first that appears in the episode provided the background for, in the words of visual effects supervisor Mitch Suskin , "the shot with the three moons and Kes and Zahir standing in front of the mountains." The second that is shown was of the distressed holographic Socrates, having been halved by the nefarious personality that takes control of The Doctor. Of this matte painting, Suskin recalled, " There was an actor lying on the floor. Mr. Berman wanted to see that these particular holograms were just hollow shells, so Eric did the painting of Socrates in half. " The other three mattes that Chauvin contributed for the episode are shown towards the end of the installment, with the first to appear being the wide shot of "The Doctor and Kes running along the edge of the cliff where we see the cliff face in the foreground." The penultimate matte to appear is the establishing shot of the forest below the cliff. The sequence in which The Doctor and Kes fall from the cliff involves not only the last matte to be shown but also blue screen footage of Robert Picardo and Kes actress Jennifer Lien hanging on wires. Chauvin composited the matte together with the wirework footage, and the shot was completed with the transporter effect, as done by Digital Magic . ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 105)

Continuity and trivia [ ]

This episode establishes that the relationship of Neelix and Kes has ended. In " Warlord ", Kes (possessed by Tieran ) told Neelix her decision to break up. No such decision is shown on-screen by the actual Kes, but the separation must have occurred between Warlord and this episode.
Since Voyager is shown to be traveling through normal space again, the crew's journey through the Nekrit Expanse must have come to an end sometime prior to this episode.
A similar technique of transporting a person but not the weapons in his possession was used in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode " To the Death ".
The act of transporting individuals while falling is also successfully attempted in 2009 's Star Trek .
Structures that can be seen on the surface of the Mikhal Traveler's outpost here were evidently later reused in the sixth season episode " Blink of an Eye ", on the surface of Kelemane's planet at its most advanced stage.
Similarly, the metal structures in Nakahn's bar later appear again in Doctor Chaotica 's lair.
T'Pau , an important Vulcan figure who appeared in Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: The Original Series , is mentioned as being one of The Doctor's added subroutines.
Chakotay later led a Voyager away team and found vorilium on the planet. During this mission, Harry Kim was separated from the group for a time and became infected with a Taresian retrovirus . ( VOY : " Favorite Son ")

Reception [ ]

Joe Menosky was reasonably satisfied with Robert Picardo's performance here. " He chewed the scenery as only Bob can chew, " Menosky noted of Picardo, " and I think it worked pretty well. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 91)
This episode is the first in what is known to some fans as the "trilogy of terror" – three consecutive episodes that are often considered to be remarkably bad (the other two episodes being " Rise " and " Favorite Son "). ( Beyond the Final Frontier , p. 304)
This episode achieved a Nielsen rating of 4.3 million homes, and a 7% share. [3] (X)
Cinefantastique rated this episode 3 out of 4 stars. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 106)
Star Trek Magazine scored this episode 4 out of 5 stars, defined as " Trill -powered viewing". ( Star Trek Monthly issue 29 , p. 58)
The unauthorized reference book Delta Quadrant (p. 173) gives this installment a rating of 5 out of 10.
Janeway actress Kate Mulgrew expected that this episode's quality would be recognized over time. Speaking at the end of Voyager 's third season, she remarked, " I think The Doctor's (Robert Picardo's) work this year was pretty exceptional. I think that 'Darkling' will probably go down as one of the better shows. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 84)
The items that were used for this episode's production but were later sold off on the It's A Wrap! sale and auction include a jacket worn by Stephen Davies (as Nakahn ) [4] and a coat worn by Tom Morga (serving, in this case, as stunt double for David Lee Smith , in the role of Zahir ). [5]
As of October 2021, Amazon.com 's Prime streaming service has this episode listed under its working title : "The Darkling".

Video and DVD releases [ ]

UK VHS release (two-episode tapes, CIC Video ): Volume 3.9, 21 July 1997
As part of the VOY Season 3 DVD collection

Links and references [ ]

Starring [ ].

Kate Mulgrew as Captain Kathryn Janeway

Also starring [ ]

Robert Beltran as Commander Chakotay
Roxann Dawson as Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres
Jennifer Lien as Kes
Robert Duncan McNeill as Lieutenant Tom Paris
Ethan Phillips as Neelix
Robert Picardo as The Doctor
Tim Russ as Lieutenant Tuvok
Garrett Wang as Ensign Harry Kim

Guest Stars [ ]

David Lee Smith as Zahir
Stephen Davies as Nakahn

Co-Stars [ ]

Noél De Souza as Gandhi
Christopher Clarke as Lord Byron
Sue Henley as Ensign
Majel Barrett as Computer Voice

Stunt doubles [ ]

Tom Morga as stunt double for David Lee Smith
John Nowak as stunt double for Robert Picardo

Stand-ins [ ]

Tarik Ergin – stand-in for Christopher Clarke
Ken Gruz – stand-in for Noél De Souza

References [ ]

10,000 years ago ; 19th century ; 2369 ; Aesculapius ; alizine ; Algorithm ; all-nighter ; Alpha Quadrant ; alter ego ; anaphylactic shock ; angel ; Apollo ; asteroid ; automaton ; away team member ; away team report ; bath ; bedside manner ; behavioral subroutine ; cateline ; ccs ; cell ; character trait ; child ; " clean bill of health "; closing time ; command sequence ; Curie, Marie ; da Vinci, Leonardo ; dermal regenerator ; dispersion signal ; divine intention ; DNA ; dozen ; EMH program 4C ; enzyme ; emergency outpost facility ; empathy ; explorer ; forensic investigation ; heart ; heartburn ; high warp ; Hippocratic Oath ( Hippocrates ); historical figure ; holodeck ; holographic technology ; H'ohk ; ice pack ; infrared ; intraspinal inhibitor ; Intrepid class decks ; kilometer ; Klingon Physiology ; lodge ; logic ; logical ability ; low-altitude ship ; Mahatma ; mannequin ; medkit ; mentor ; meter ; Mikhal outpost ; Mikhal outpost planet ; Mikhal outpost planet moons ; Mikhal visited system moons ; Mikhal Travelers ; molecule ; moonquake ; Nakahn's navigator ; Nakahn's ship ; navigator ; osteo-regenerator ; path ; personality ; Personality improvement project ; philosopher ; pilot ; plasma belt ; poet ; preventative ; preparatory report ; preparatory report ignorers ; procreation ; progenitor ; protein ; ravine ; romanticism ; saga ; saint ; salad ; sentry ; scattering field ; scientist ; scout ship ; sex ; simulacra ; skin ; spacefarer ; speech center ; Starfleet Academy ; subspace wave guide ; Sylleran Rift ; Tarkan ; tricorder ; tongue ; Tropical Resort Simulation 3 ; transporter ; transporter operator ; Transporter Room 3 ; trophy ; turbolift ; vorilium ; Vulcan ; Vulcan (planet) ; waist ; wanderlust ; year ; Zahir's ship

External links [ ]

" Darkling " at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
" Darkling " at Wikipedia
" Darkling " at MissionLogPodcast.com , a Roddenberry Star Trek podcast
" Darkling " at the Internet Movie Database
1 Daniels (Crewman)
3 Calypso (episode)

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Star Trek: Voyager – Darkling (Review)

There is something to be said for the pulpier side of Star Trek: Voyager , the aspect of the show that plays like a cheesy sci-fi b-movie.

Brannon Braga is very much the driving force behind this aspect of the show, as evidenced by his scripts for the belated Cold War body-swapping horror of Cathexis or the psychological nightmare of Projections or the trashy psychedelic terror of Cold Fire or even the weird evolutionary anxieties of Threshold and Macrocosm . These sorts of episodes often feel like they belong in a late night movie slot reserved for forgotten horror flicks from the fifties and sixties. Of course, Braga is not alone in this; episodes like Meld and The Thaw also fit the pattern.

Blurred lines.

Of course, these episodes do not always hit the mark. Charitably, it could be argued that they land about half the time and misfire spectacularly about one third of the time. However, there is something strangely compelling about these episode. They feel distinct from what audiences expect from Star Trek . Even if they are arguably just an extension of late Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes like Sub Rosa or Genesis or Eye of the Beholder , they feel like something different from the show’s more conventional “let’s do archetypal Star Trek” plotting.

Darkling is an episode that doesn’t quite work, but which is oddly endearing in its dysfunction. It is a ridiculous central premise executed in a deeply flawed (and occasionally uncomfortable) manner. However, there is something weirdly compelling about wedding the show’s science-fiction premise to gothic horror through the fractured psyche of a computer program.

Darkling is a surprisingly gothic episode, even considering the obvious influence of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde on the script. A lot of that is down to the choice of setting. Voyager visits a trading outpost on a remote world, a planet that seems to consist entirely of mountains and forests populated by an entire species of wanderers. The episode opens on Janeway sitting inside an old-style tavern, with a fireplace burning brightly behind her. She is being regaled with stories of mystery and wonder by the local innkeeper.

“The hours past, the air grew cold, and with our weapons we started a fire to keep warm,” narrates Nakahn. “Later, in the night, we awoke with a shudder. The ground was shaking.” Janeway is clearly caught up in the narrative, as ridiculous as it might seem. His tale recalls the narratives crafted by sailors, a myth that treats the cosmos as place of infinite wonder beholden more to magic than rational science. It certainly does an effective job establishing a tone for the rest of Darkling .

Fuel for the fire.

Of course, there is something faintly frustrating in all of this. As ever, Voyager consciously retreats from the bolder promise of earlier episodes. Much like Voyager pulled back the mystery and intrigue teased by the new frontier in Fair Trade , the show recoils from the tease of the Borg buried in the final few moments of Blood Fever and the threat posed in Unity . The very premise of Darkling insists upon “business as usual” , Voyager visiting a strange new world like they would on any other week.

“Our guests are offering us supplies we need,” Zahir advises Nakahn. “In exchange we Travellers are giving them a look at what lies ahead of them. We should keep that view as clear as possible.” In theory, Janeway should already knows what lies ahead. The Borg Collective loom in the distance, the single largest threat in the Star Trek canon. As such, it is quite disheartening to see Voyager back to bumping into random aliens again. Surely the Borg have pillaged and destroyed any civilisations living this close to their territory?

Travellers’ tavern.

The subject of the Borg never comes up. Instead, Zahir offers generic advice about the other alien species living in the region. “You should navigate here, away from this plasma belt, you’ll avoid the Tarkan sentries altogether,” Zahir explains to Tuvok. Tuvok responds, “It would also take Voyager off a direct course to the Alpha Quadrant.” The crew really should have bigger things to worry about. After all, the looming threat of the Borg should probably feel like the pending threat of the Dominion War on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .

Allowing for this issue, which plagues the rest of the show’s third season, Darkling does a great job of establishing mood. Zahir takes Kes on a magical evening walk through a forest following a mountain path. The characters all dress in old-fashioned robes, while the killer conceals his identity with a ridiculous hood. Beaming back to the ship, the EMH draws attention to the absurdity of the costuming. “Why I’m wearing these ridiculous clothes?” he demands of the ominous gown that his doppelganger had chosen.

All good in the hood.

Even the Mikhal Travellers themselves feel like they were lifted from a nineteenth century gothic horror story. The name sounds suitably Eastern European, recalling the landscape of tales like Dracula . The nomadic lifestyle of the Mikhal recalls that of the Roma community, the gypsies who seem to populate classic horror narratives. Indeed, even the makeup design cements this idea by reference to the larger Star Trek canon. The Mikhal are distinguished by nose ridges; this recalls the Bajorans, franchise’s most high profile displaced species.

The plotting of Darkling is also something of a throwback. The episode builds to a climactic confrontation on the edge of a cliff, a literal cliffhanger. This is a touch that harks back to old pulpy adventures, evoking everything from Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty throwing themselves over the cliff in The Final Problem to the deaths of Disney villains like Gaston in Beauty and the Beast or the Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . It is such a classic trope that it seems almost quaint in the context of Star Trek .

That falling feeling.

As the special effects used to realise the giant viral monsters in Macrocosm , the computer-generated imagery in Darkling has not aged particularly well. The climactic scenes look more than a little ridiculous, particularly the wide shots of the evil! EMH forcing Kes across the narrow edge and the shots of the pair falling to their potential doom. These sequences feel almost stylised, looking quite animated. The result is something that looks like it belongs in a much older piece of entertainment, perhaps even a black-and-white film.

Even the premise of the episode feels very much like an homage to a very retro school of horror. The EMH decides to upgrade his programming by copying subroutines drawn from a variety of historical figures, from Mahatma Gandhi to Lord George Byron to T’Pau of Vulcan. Inevitably, it all goes spectacularly wrong. It creates a monstrous alter ego for the EMH, a monster denoted by his slumped posture and his unkempt hair. It is a classic horror movie transformation, one that recalls the werewolf or Mister Hyde.

Cliffhanger.

As with so many of these classic horror movie villains, there is something decidedly creepier lurking just beneath the surface of the literal transformation. Many of those nineteenth century horror classics, from Frankenstein to The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde to Dracula , layer their monstrous characters with suggestions of something more carnal and unsettling. Reproductive and sexual horror tends to ripple just beneath the surface of these tales, with horror providing a metaphor through which these ideas might be explored.

The original novels were informed by the cultural mores of nineteenth-century Britain, where topics of sex and sexuality were certainly never openly discussed. When these novels were originally adapted for the silver screen in the twentieth century, there were similar forces at work. The Hayes Code prevented films from directly engaging with ideas of sexual expression and deviance. So that simmered underneath polished exteriors, with directors like James Whale burying queer themes in films like The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein .

“Somebody needs a Doctor!”

There is certainly an element of that to Darkling , which seems appropriate. It is written by Joe Menosky from a story that he drafted with writer Brannon Braga. Both writers have a long interest in themes of psychology and identity; Braga in stories like Frame of Mind and Flashback , Menosky in Masks and The Thaw , together in Remember , The Killing Game, Part I and The Killing Game, Part II . It makes sense that the writers would be drawn to the grotesque and stylised psychodrama suggested by Darkling .

Indeed, over the course of Voyager , Braga seems particularly interested in the idea of the EMH as a character with a very transparent and literal subconscious as reflected by the fact that he is comprised entirely of computer algorithms. Unlike human characters, it is quite easy to get inside the head of the EMH. Unraveling the EMH’s frame of mind is as simple as debugging lines of code. Braga plays with this idea in scripts like Projections and in his manipulation of the EMH’s psychology in scripts like Latent Image or Equinox, Part II .

Empty philosophy.

To be fair, the EMH is not the only computer-based individual subject to such psychological exploration. The seventh season of The Next Generation ventured into the subconscious of Data in Phantasms and of the Enterprise itself in Emergence , both episodes that could be seen to foreshadow Voyager ‘s treatment of the EMH. Seven of Nine undergoes similar technology-related breakdowns in episodes like Retrospect , One , Infinite Regress , The Voyager Conspiracy and Human Error .

However, it does seem that holographic characters on Voyager are particularly subject to such breakdowns. The EMH already had a complete mental breakdown in The Swarm , but will also encounter other holographic lifeforms afflicted by severe psychological conditions. In Revulsion , Dejaren demonstrates severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and murders his organic crew members. In Flesh and Blood, Part I and Flesh and Blood, Part II , Iden develops a messiah complex and suggests that his fellow holograms should worship him.

“I’d love to have you my table.”

Unsurprisingly, given the interests of Braga and Menosky, early drafts of Darkling were loaded with psycho-sexual subtext. As Menosky explained to Cinefantastique :

We originally made The Doctor perversely sexual and sadistic. There was a sense that his attachment to Kes was weirdly kind of psycho-sexual, and we took it to its limit. In the screenplay first draft that I wrote, I had a scene when Kes walks into the holodeck and sees The Doctor doing an experiment. There are Keses everywhere, and he’s got one of them on the operating table, and he has some flip line about, ‘Just trying to get to know you better.’ It’s very perverse.

There are certainly elements of that bleeding through into the final cut of the episode, with a decidedly sexual subtext to the evil! EMH. He is undoubtedly more violent and aggressive than his alter ego, but he also seems more perverse than his relatively innocent counterpart.

“Gandhi’s not in favour of having a gander.”

After all, the introduction to the EMH’s attempts at enhancing his personality finds Gandhi lecturing about the importance of sexual restraint and repression. “Men and women should refrain from enjoying each other,” Gandhi insists. “By that I mean to say, even their mutual glances must be free of all suggestion of carnality.” Gandhi seems to urge a sexless world, perhaps one that resembles the relatively sterile twenty-fourth century as portrayed on the Berman-era Star Trek shows.

It is suggested that the evil! EMH is in someway a product of all that repression. “I was born of the hidden, the suppressed,” he insists, a rather poetic piece of dialogue. Then again, most monsters are born of those things; it is easier to process that which makes us uncomfortable when filtered through the fantastical. In some ways, Darkling seems to be touching up the themes left half-developed in Blood Fever . The evil! EMH is the ultimate expression of pent-up sexual frustration, a raging id motivated my carnal desire.

Somehow, the fact that Starfleet never bothered to programme workplace harassment guidelines into the EMH is not surprising.

Even before the malfunctions become clear, it is suggested that the EMH is undergoing some sort of sexual awakening. When Torres reports to Sickbay suffering from heartburn, the EMH engages in some casual workplace harassment. “In my preparatory report to the away team, I recall mentioning to you that Klingons lacked an enzyme for metabolising this planet’s vegetation,” he reflects. He leans in close, almost whispering, “Have you been naughty?” This is before his transformation.

This creepy subtext only grows stronger once the EMH actually begins to transform into the evil! EMH. There is something decidedly creepy in the way that the evil! EMH chooses to torture Torres as she lies paralysed on his bio-bed. “I’ve paralysed you from the waist down,” he suggests. “You’re now in my capable hands.” He creepily runs his finger up her thigh, framing the threat in sexual terms. Later on, the evil! EMH stalks an anonymous female Ensign and plots to kidnap Kes.

“The thighs have it.”

To be fair, sex and sexuality have long been an interest of Brannon Braga. After all, the writer was responsible for the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact and the creation of Seven of Nine, both female characters who could be defined as “cybernetic dominatrices.” Indeed, the writer has a long-stated interest in exploring the kinky side of Star Trek :

Braga has been at Paramount for five years and has worked on more than 150 episodes, seeing his ideas shot down and reworked by half a dozen people. If he could write one show entirely on his own – total freedom, no one else involved – what would he do? “That’s easy.” Braga grins, and slides the hefty tome into his satchel. “I’ve always wondered what people really do on the Holodeck.”

In some ways, Darkling could be seen as a slight variation on that original pitch; it is a story about what really goes on inside the mind of a hologram. During the show’s original run, Braga had an acknowledged fondness for collecting pornography and “raunchy art.” As such, it makes sense that some of that would bleed into his work on the show.

Falling for Kes.

There is something to be said for being willing to talk candidly about sex and sexuality, as Blood Fever halfheartedly argued. Darkling touches on the idea of sexual awakening, hinting at the sexual development of Kes through her flirtations with Zahir. Late at night, she walks through an empty forest with him. It is like a scene from a fairy tale. The episode is reasonably explicit about what is happening. “How about an understanding?” she teases. “A meeting of the minds?” Zahir responds, “Only minds?”

Repeatedly over the course of Darkling , male characters are forced to confront the fact that Kes is growing up. Tuvok makes note of Kes arriving back on the ship at a late hour. “It is three o’clock in the morning, Kes,” he states. “You have an away team report due at oh eight hundred hours.” Similarly, the EMH complains, “Gallivanting around after hours is beside the point. The fact is, you’re becoming increasingly unpredictable, given to swings of mood and emotion.”

Kes from a rose.

The recurring suggestion is that Kes has found herself at the cusp of womanhood, between being a girl and being a woman. The male characters struggle to adapt to that. Tuvok is protective; when Kes suggests traveling with Zahir, Tuvok seems wary. After Zahir warns of the dangers lurking in a particular region, Tuvok inquires, “You aren’t planning on taking Kes anywhere near this part of space?” Kes is shown to be going through something approaching her late teenage years; staying out late with boys, considering leaving home.

Kes explicitly acknowledges this in her conversations with the EMH. “Doctor, I know that you care about me and that you have my best interests at heart, but everyone seems to be treating me like I’m still a child,” she warns him. “I’m three years old now. If I’m attracted to someone it’s my business, not the whole ship’s.” It is definitely worthwhile to acknowledge sex and sexuality as part of growing up, particularly for female characters. On American television, there is a tendency to downplay the sexual lives of prominent female characters.

Disarming conversation.

Pop culture tends to deal awkwardly with female sexuality, insisting on uncomfortable dichotomies that play into sexist stereotypes, the insistence that a woman cannot have and enjoy sex without that becoming defining trait. There are any number of examples from nineties television. Whereas Kirk, Picard, Sisko and Archer all had romances within their first two seasons, Janeway has to wait until the fifth season’s Counterpoint to get a romance episode. On The X-Files , Gillian Anderson and Glen Morgan fought with Chris Carter over the production of Never Again .

To be fair, Voyager makes a point to have Janeway celebrate Kes’ growth. Janeway actively encourages Kes to embrace new experiences with Zahir. There is a very clear (if unspoken) implication there that Janeway is encouraging Kes to embrace the possibilities of adult life. When Kes suggests taking a trip with Zahir, Janeway does not respond with concern but with understanding. “That would certainly give you a chance to get to know him better,” she reflects, insisting Kes has the right to make her own choices.

It’s Janeway or the highway.

The short scene between Janeway and Kes is very sweet. Janeway’s empathy and understanding for Kes’ situation stands in marked contrast to the patronising concern expressed by Tuvok and the EMH. It seems as though Darkling is trying to make a point about the double-standards applied to women who do want to explore their options and their sexual identity. Despite being a surrogate parent figure for Kes, Janeway is sympathetic and encouraging. The varied reactions to Kes’ awakening ar insightful, in their own ways.

However, there are several problems with trying to explore this idea through Kes. Most obviously, there is something deeply creepy about the decision to portray Kes as an alien who will only live nine years. In theory, it is a very clever science-fiction metaphor. Imagine watching Kes grow over the seven seasons of Voyager , living a full and meaningful life over one-hundred-and-seventy episodes. Of course, Voyager was never going to tell that story because it would require serialisation and long-form storytelling, which are simply not what Voyager does.

No man’s sky.

As a result, Kes is not really a character arc, but a character with a sole defining attribute. That attribute is not that she will live out most of her life over the course of the seven years of the show, because Voyager is disinterested in this concept even before The Gift writes her out of the series. That attribute is the fact that Kes is between one and three years old during her time on Voyager . This is not a story about a young woman living her life in a short amount of time, it is about a woman who looks much older than she actually is.

This is an issue against which Voyager brushed when it waded into the toxic swamp that was the romance between Neelix and Kes. After all, regardless of the fact that Kes was played by a twenty-one-year-old actor, the show was constantly insisting that she was only two years old. Regardless of basic biology, that creates all sorts of questions about experience and power imbalances within the relationship. It is hard to believe that three years (even three Ocampan years) are enough time to fully forge an identity, let alone a sexual identity.

Oh, I wish it could be Christmas every day.

As a result, attempts to sexualise Kes often felt deeply creepy. The writing staff on Voyager realised this, with Warlord effectively hinging on little more than “isn’t it super creepy to watch a hypersexualised Kes?” This creates an interesting challenge in writing stories about Kes’ sexuality, because it makes any male character expressing an interest in her seem almost predatory, as there is simply no way that Kes could ever hope to have equivalent or comparable life experience to a prospective romantic partner.

This is reflected in both Warlord and Darkling , episodes that suggest Tuvok and the EMH harbour a deep-seated sexual attraction to Kes. There is something distinctly uncomfortable in this suggestion, given that both Tuvok and the EMH are effectively surrogate father figures for Kes. Voyager seems to suggest that it is impossible for any relationship between a man and woman to remain divorced from sexual desire, at least on the part of the man. It is a rather unfortunate stereotype, and one into which Voyager repeatedly played.

“The truth is, Kes is not old enough to be in here.”

Indeed, the psycho-sexual subtext of Darkling generated no shortage of controversy among the production team. As Joe Menosky related to Cinefantastique , the theme was toned down at the behest of a figure no longer involved in the day-to-day running of the show:

Michael Piller […] wrote a strong memo. He basically said, ‘If you guys shoot it like this, I’m going to take my name off this episode.’ It made us reconsider doubts that we’d had. Michael’s argument was that you got a sense, after the episode was done and The Doctor was back to normal, that somewhere in The Doctor was this horrible, dirty old man who was just waiting to get his hands on Kes. There was almost no way to erase that. That’s probably why Picardo was so disappointed when we ended up not going that route, because he really loved the ‘S and M Doctor,’ as he liked to call it.

To be fair, Piller has a point. After all, Voyager had hardly acquitted itself well with the sexual politics of Blood Fever . More than that, when even the writer of Tattoo worries that a script is tasteless, it is probably a good idea to listen.

I have you now, my pretty.

As a result, a lot of the sexual subtext of Darkling is toned down and muted in the finished episode. However, just enough remains haunting the edges of the narrative. The evil! EMH might claim that he is abducting Kes to protect her from herself, but his behaviour towards other female crew members suggests a much darker intention. (Which serves to render Kes’ appeal to his better nature towards the climax feel somewhat tone deaf.) There is very definitely a coded sexual threat.

The sexual subtext is not removed, it is just buried right beneath the surface. No viewer could be mistaken about the impulses driving the evil! EMH, despite his pseudo-philosophical rhetoric. The episode still revels in a sequence of evil! EMH stalking a female ensign, with only the late arrival of Tom Paris seeming to avert some horrific incident. Torres still finds herself paralysed on a bed, subject to the mercies of the evil! EMH. Darkling retains the psycho-sexual elements, but simply opts not to explore them or deal with them.

The result is deeply unsatisfying, particularly in the context of the third season as a whole. As Michelle Erica Green reflects of the third season’s big-ticket episodes :

If it was a goal of Voyager’s writers to demonstrate that men can’t control themselves on long space missions and should be left at home, then the series succeeded triumphantly during the sweeps month that included Blood Fever, Unity, and Darkling. In the latter, for the second time in three consecutive episodes, we see a woman on the crew assaulted by a man with the excuse that his out-of-control body made him do it, and the man ultimately suffers no negative consequences while the woman is offered no protection, no counseling, not even the validation of having others acknowledge that the experience might have been traumatic.

Green makes a great point, but it almost feels like she gives Voyager too much credit. Torres has been assaulted by a male colleague three times in three episodes, each given the excuse of not being themselves. Vorik in Blood Fever , Chakotay in Unity , the EMH in Darkling .

Let Byron be Byron.

This all contributes to a rather toxic tone seeping through the third season as a whole. Voyager should be a feminist piece of television, by any measure. It is the first Star Trek show to be headlined by a female character. It is the first Star Trek show to feature a single female showrunner. It is the only Star Trek show to feature four credited female leads, with never less than three credited female leads across each of its three seasons. In theory, Voyager should literally and figuratively bring Star Trek into the twenty-first century.

However, the show repeatedly falls short. Voyager feels downright reactionary on issues of race and gender. The Kazon felt like a racial caricature, but the gender politics were not much better. Janeway lacks consistent characterisation. Kes spends the bulk of her time on the show trapped in an abusive relationship normalised by the narrative. Kes will be dropped from the show at the start of the fourth season for a character in a catsuit so tight that it took ten minutes to go to the bathroom .

If the show’s questionable racial politics bubbled to the surface over the second season in episodes like Initiations and Alliances , then the show’s problems with gender shone through the third season. In The Q and the Grey , it was decided that Q’s reaction to the franchise’s first female captain should be to try to sleep with her in an episode that introduced his nagging “ball and chain.” In Alter Ego , Tuvok gets to live through his own version of Fatal Attraction . Blood Fever opens with a sexual assault that the rest of the hour trivialises.

Darkling feels very much like a part of that. To be fair, stripping out the psycho-sexual elements was probably the right call. The writing staff on Voyager have struggled with concepts as simple as basic television structuring, and Blood Fever makes it clear that they cannot be trusted to deal with issues related to sex in a particularly candid manner. However, stripping those elements out leaves Darkling with nothing but a lot of (explicit and implied) sexual violence directed at the female cast members.

No more mister Nietzsche guy.

Darkling also suffers because it has nothing interesting to replace that psycho-sexual tension. As a result, the evil! EMH becomes a collection of vague clichés and half-considered nihilism. Abducting Kes, the evil! EMH rants like a supervillain about the raw and undiluted power of evil. To his captive audience, he preaches a truth “that darkness is more fundamental than light. Cruelty before kindness. Evil more primary than good, more deserving of existence.” It is all nonsense, and any fan of pulpy media has heard it all before.

The evil! EMH positions himself as a holographic Nietzschean übermensch. “I am beyond considerations of wrong and right,” he insists. “Behavioral categories are for the weak, for those of you without the will to define your existence, to do what they must, no matter who might get harmed along the way.” This is all cliché stuff, the ramblings of an angry teenager raging at the world. The most interesting thing about it is that it reflects Star Trek ‘s deep-seated fears about “unnatural” life-forms like holograms, androids and the genetically engineered.

“You know, this really happens to B’Elanna far too often.”

This thread allows for some stock Star Trek optimism, with Kes affirming the core values of the franchise by insisting that the evil! EMH’s worldview is fundamentally wrong. She insists that goodwill and decency are the ordering principles of the universe. “Then you know what I’m saying is true. The very organs and cells of the body cooperate with each other, otherwise they wouldn’t function.” She expands, “Families, societies, cultures, wouldn’t have evolved without compassion and tolerance.”

This is all very Star Trek 101 , a humanist philosophy couched in optimistic vagaries that insist upon a compassionate universe. It is an argument that the franchise has made countless times before, and with a great deal more nuance. While it provides the slightest hint of substance to the whole evil! EMH plot, it also feels very shallow. It is a theme that has clearly been shoehorned into the script at the last minute when another was taken out, with Voyager falling back on classic Star Trek clichés for security and comfort.

We was robed.

And yet, in spite of all this, there is a certain pulpy charm to Darkling . It is a ridiculous and deeply flawed episode, but it also has an endearing energy that is sorely lacking from many of the surrounding stories. A large part of that comes from the performance of Robert Picardo, who cites the episode as one of his favourites :

One of my favorite Voyager episodes was called The Darkling where my – it was a Jekyll and Hyde episode for my character and I got to play the sort of pure evil version of my regular program. That’s always a lot of fun for an actor to do.

Picardo’s performance as the evil! EMH is ridiculous and exaggerated, but that is part of the charm. With only a few small changes to his hair and make-up, Picardo adjusts the character’s posture and demeanour to construct something monstrous. The evil! EMH almost wanders into the uncanny valley, something that looks close to human but also somehow inherently wrong.

(Holo)graphic terror.

Picardo is possibly the strongest actor in Voyager ‘s cast, as demonstrated by the way that the EMH became the series’ breakout character through a series of small character moments scattered across the first season like breadcrumbs. Picardo is also a veteran of exactly the sort of cheesy b-movies towards which Darkling pitches itself; he has appeared in films like The Howling , Legend , Amazon Women on the Moon , Innerspace and Gremlins 2 . Picardo understands how best to pitch his performance; it recalls Jack Nicholson’s Joker or Danny DeVito’s Penguin.

The evil! EMH feels like a creature from some forgotten horror film. He seems to stagger and stumble more than he walks, as if feeling uncomfortable in his own holographic body. His lower jaw protrudes. His movements are clumsy, struggling to properly load a hypospray. Sadly, the mechanics of the evil! EMH prevent Picardo from playing a true “transformation” scene in the style of a classic werewolf movie, but the homage is clear. Picardo understands what Darkling is attempting to accomplish, and his performance is very effective in that context.

“I’m not bad, I’m just mat(rixed) that way.”

Darkling is a messy and deeply flawed episode, one that arguably suffers more in the context of the episodes around it than it does on its own merits. At the same time, the episode has a weird energy that taps into the darker and weirder side of Voyager . It is almost refreshing to see Voyager swinging so wildly, even if the result is far from perfect. Darkling is an episode that is unsatisfying, but intriguing. Given where Voyager is at this moment in time, that may not be the worst thing.

You might be interested in our other reviews from the third season of Star Trek: Voyager :

Basics, Part II
False Profits
Sacred Ground
Future’s End, Part I
Future’s End, Part II
The Q and the Grey
Blood Fever
Favourite Son
Before and After
Distant Origin
Worst Case Scenario
Scorpion, Part I

13 Responses

What’s so puzzling to me about the misogyny in this season to me is that this was one of the only times in Star Trek’s history with multiple female writers, and the only time, along with the fourth season, that there was a female show runner. Then again, Lisa Klink’s episodes are often quite sexist, such as Blood Fever and Favorite Son. Still, one has to wonder why Jeri Taylor would not push for the episodes under her watch to be more progressive. I can’t help but wonder if Rick Berman is to blame. I read Terry Farrel’s account about how Rick Berman was constantly fussing about her breast size, so he would seem like the most likely culprit.

Let’s not forget Katharyn Powers, writer of the feminist nightmare TNG: Code of Honor. When it was clear that episode was a complete disaster, she doubled down with SG1: Emancipation, which someone ends up being more racist and sexist than Code of Honor. And that was only the 4th episode of Stargate SG-1.

(You might want to take a look at that nightmare episode one day Darren). Who knows what drove these women to write such scripts…

I remember Emancipation being terrible. But picking between Code of Honour and Emancipation is like playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded handgun. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose.

Code of Honour also came at a very early stage for TNG, so it’s many mistakes and poor judgment were a lot more forgivable than VGR’s which you would think by its third season would be a lot more sure-footed by now. TNG certainly was.

There’s a great quote from Spiner on Code of Honour, where he’s basically like, “Well, at least we got that out of the way early…”

I don’t think Code of Honor could or should be forgiven. Ever. Neither should SG1: Emancipation. SG1 started off as a fantastic show, but it still made a Code of Honor spinoff in it’s first season as well. TNG season 1 must bare the blame for it.

I mean, Jeri Taylor is a very old-school Hollywood television writer. She worked on Little House on the Prairie and The Incredible Hulk. I don’t imagine Taylor as a particularly strong second or third wave feminist, although I may well be wrong on that count.

Given her experience and her history, and the general tone of her output, I suspect that getting the show out on time and to a reasonable professional standard was a higher priority for Taylor than worrying about the feminist subtext of the work.

“This creates an interesting challenge in writing stories about Kes’ sexuality, because it makes any male character expressing an interest in her seem almost predatory, as there is simply no way that Kes could ever hope to have equivalent or comparable life experience to a prospective romantic partner.”

Except of course for the EMH himself, who has even less life experience than Kes and is arguably even more of an innocent – though obviously his appearance and manner inspire fewer protective feelings!

Fair point. Although, to be fair, the character does found (and then apparently completely abandon) a nuclear family before the season is out.

How many times do you say “to be fair” or “that’s a fair point” Darren? You could make a drinking game of it!

Ha! Right up there with every time I type “the end of history” or “on the nose.” I do like my critical clichés, even when writing short form and quickly, as I do replying to comments.

Brannon Braga was said to have been inspired by Robert Picardo’s performance as Eddie Quist in The Howling when devising the plot of Darkling. But I found his Mr Hyde persona far too much of a cliche. There seems no good reason why the evil EMH should be a beady-eyed, staggering hunchback. Picardo would give better performances in Warhead or Equinox that called for a subtle touch lacking from Darkling.

This appears to be the point where the writers try to sexualise Kes by putting her in catsuits similar to Jeri Ryan’s, but yeah it still brings up a lot of unsavoury connotations no matter how old Jennifer Lien is in real life. Lien delivers that line “Everyone seems to be treating me like I’m still a child. I’m three years old now” with a remarkably straight face.

But it does illustrate the underlying sexism that permeates all of Trek. From the female uniforms of TOS to Deanna Troi’s rather unprofessional outfits (until Captain Jellico put a stop to that) to Kira’s sexier uniform as well as Seven of Nine’s catsuits and corsets and T’Pol baring all, the sexual revolution never really caught up with Trek. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get misogynistic aliens like the Kazon and the Ferengi.

Why do the Mikhal have Bajoran noses and the eyes of a Vorta? Is it another example of VGR falling back on pre-existing Star Trek races rather than come up with some intriguing new ones of its own? Janeway is a surrogate mother figure to quite a few members of the crew, including Kes. But I’ll leave you Darren to guess which ones. Braga collects porn! That’s a staggering revelation but it would explain so much, especially with the Doctor becoming the S&MH. “Janeway of the highway”. How about It’s the Janeway, or the highway?

Good catch there. Corrected.

Yeah, Braga’s porn collection (and other allegations/insinuations/suggestions) are interesting in terms of interrogating his work on the franchise. On the one hand, they are very trashy and gossipy. On the other hand, they explain an awful lot about how and why he writes. So I tend not to delve into them too heavily, but they are important in evaluating his work.

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Star Trek: Voyager – Season 3, Episode 18

The darkling, where to watch, star trek: voyager — season 3, episode 18.

Watch Star Trek: Voyager — Season 3, Episode 18 with a subscription on Paramount+, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

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Kate Mulgrew

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Episode Info

The Doctor alters his personality subroutines while Kes contemplates leaving Voyager for a man.

In this episode of the podcast, Wes and Clay discuss “Darkling” and the disappointment of Kes. Plus! The guys chat about historical figures, Voyager getting dark, and badly setting up the Borg.

Post author By Wes
Post date 08/15/2023

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

Hello, Star Trek fans! Immerse yourself in the “The Pensky Podcast” universe. I’m Wes, and together with my co-host Clay, we delve into Star Trek’s rich tapestry, one episode at a time. Today, our lens focuses on the Star Trek: Voyager episode, “Darkling.” Whether you’re a die-hard Trekkie or new to the Starfleet universe, our discussions are designed to engage and enlighten.

“Darkling” is a notable episode from Voyager’s third season . Premiering on February 19, 1997, the plot unfolds around the Doctor and his quest for self-improvement. Driven to enhance his personality, the Doctor integrates the characteristics of several historical figures into his program. But things don’t go as planned. Instead of an improved persona, the Doctor becomes erratic and even dangerous, leading to a tension-filled narrative as the crew deals with the unpredictable shifts in his behavior.

Diving into our podcast, Clay and I first touch upon the striking parallels between “Darkling” and the film “ Virtuosity ,” especially highlighting Russell Crowe’s brilliant performance . We then shift our focus to Kes. We discuss Voyager’s challenges in developing her character in an episodic format, which often sidelines nuanced character growth for standalone plots . Our conversation also dives into the episode’s darker, more mature themes. We reflect on the potential directions “Darkling” could have entered, especially touching on the mature and sometimes even sexual undertones hinted at in the storyline.

Furthermore, we address some lingering issues from our previous podcast episode . Our conversation got held up because we were unaware of future Borg appearances. We revisit that topic, dissecting the narrative choices and potential issues that the Borg’s presence might have introduced.

In summary, “ The Pensky Podcast ” offers a balanced blend of entertainment and insightful critique. We rigorously dissect episodes like “Darkling,” interweaving our unique perspectives and informed analysis. So, whether you’re a seasoned Starfleet officer or a newbie ensign, our discussions promise to engage. And if you’re keen to delve even deeper and support our voyage, our Patreon page is the gateway to even more content. Join us!

Star Trek: Voyager

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David Lee Smith

Stephen Davies

Noel De Souza

Mahatma Ghandi

Christopher Clarke

Ensign Brooks

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Retro Review: Darkling

Star Trek: VOY

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The Doctor creates an evil doppelganger when he modifies his program with personality traits from historical figures.

Plot Summary: While Janeway and several other crewmembers visit an outpost to trade materials for maps and information about the region of space ahead, the Doctor modifies his personality to incorporate elements from celebrated historical and literary figures. Torres warns him that the subroutines will interact and may become unstable. Kes has begun to fall in love with an alien pilot and is considering leaving Voyager for a wider range of life experiences, though the Doctor suggests that she’s far too infatuated with travelers suffering from wanderlust and believes it to be a consequence of her breakup with Neelix. When Kes’s new romantic interest Zahir is shoved off a cliff by an unknown assailant, suspicion falls on the jealous Nakahn, who runs a local lodge. But it soon becomes obvious that the Doctor’s program has been severely compromised by his experiment and that a vicious new personality is responsible for attacking Torres when she wants to run tests on the EMH. Tuvok and Chakotay warn Janeway of newly discovered evidence that a hologram injured Zahir and try to find Kes, who has been taken from the ship by the Doctor. Kes tries to persuade him that empathy and kindness are fundamental to all forms of life, but the Doctor flings himself and Kes off the side of a cliff rather than surrender to Chakotay and Tuvok. Voyager beams them up mid-fall. Torres is able to delete all the damaging subroutines before reactivating the Doctor, who has no memory of his evil personality and promises that next time he wants excitement, he’ll read a good book. Much to the Doctor’s relief, Kes decides to remain on Voyager. Left alone to ponder his recent behavior, he recites the Hippocratic Oath, pledging to do no harm.

Analysis: Nearly twenty years of interviews and convention appearances have revealed that the cast and crew of Voyager loved “Darkling” – which is a good argument for not reading interviews or going to conventions, because rather than improving my opinion of the episode, they’ve lessened my respect for the people praising it. I understand that Robert Picardo must have been excited to have something different to do so that after Voyager stopped production, he’d have a recent clip demonstrating his ability to perform in horror movies, but the fact that he’s expressed disappointment that he didn’t get to take his torture of Torres and Kes further makes me think he cares more about his resume than consistent storytelling or characterization. It may be fine for the Doctor, who gets to have his fun and hit a reset button, but we’re supposed to believe that two women he’s tried to murder get over it just as quickly – particularly Torres, whose attempted rape by Vorick he dismissed as well? If it was a goal of Voyager ‘s writers to demonstrate that men can’t control themselves on long space missions and should be left at home, then the series succeeded triumphantly during the sweeps month that included “Blood Fever,” “Unity,” and “Darkling.” In the latter, for the second time in three consecutive episodes, we see a woman on the crew assaulted by a man with the excuse that his out-of-control body made him do it, and the man ultimately suffers no negative consequences while the woman is offered no protection, no counseling, not even the validation of having others acknowledge that the experience might have been traumatic.

We hear more characters express resentment of Riley Frazier for seducing a willing Chakotay with her sexy Borg neural interface than we hear condemnations of either Vorick or the Doctor for their life-threatening assaults on Torres and Kes. This is sensationalistic, cheap-porn material, and the passage of time has only made it seem worse. Sure, the original series did a version of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Kirk behaving pretty badly toward Janice Rand, but that was decades earlier, and The Next Generation did a couple of episodes where crewmembers didn’t realize they’d been compromised by evil aliens, but they don’t contain anything like the scenes where the Doctor paralyzes and threatens Torres, brutally murders fellow holograms, and tries to kill a captive Kes – a scene often described as a planned murder-suicide, though we have no evidence that anything terrible will happen to a hologram wearing a mobile emitter as long as the 29th century emitter itself survives the fall. If it’s ridiculous to let Vulcans in pon farr walk around unsupervised, it’s twice as ridiculous to let a self-aware hologram make changes to his own program because he wants a little more excitement in his life, “excitement” in this case meaning a change from his usual tasks of caring and nurturing, thus introducing their exact opposites. Even the usually reliable Picardo can’t save this script, since the Doctor’s trademark wry humor is traded for sadism and his barking sounds completely over-the-top, particularly in a scene in a turbolift where Paris interrupts what might be the attempted rape or the attempted murder of Ensign Brooks, which causes the Doctor to sulk and seethe. I’d love to know what Janeway would have done had the Doctor succeeded in murdering Torres, Kes, or Brooks…given him a very stern lecture about not playing around with his programming? Insisted on creating a holographic nurse to babysit him?

For the most part, “Darkling” is a good Janeway episode, first as she tries to be polite while negotiating with an alien who’s lying to impress her, then at her most empathetic while Kes admits that, after having lived a third of an Ocampan lifespan aboard Voyager, there might be other avenues to explore. Since both Tuvok and the Doctor have just given Kes paternalistic lectures about how she needs to be a good girl and focus on her homework instead of enjoying her time with Zahir, it’s such a breath of fresh air to see Janeway treat Kes with understanding and kindness. Knowing that the crew will soon lose Kes anyway, it’s also poignant to see Janeway facing the departure of a confidant. My only complaint where the captain is concerned is that we don’t get to see her giving the Doctor the kind of dressing down that she gave Neelix for what seem like petty offenses compared to trying to murder a crewmember. I know I’ve complained in the past that Neelix has been too proprietary toward Kes, but clearly he was never the one we needed to worry about, since he apparently has let her go without a word and is now removed from her sphere of influence. It’s the possessive, patronizing Doctor who represents the real threat to her maturity and independence, and that’s not even when his evil twin has taken over. Why does the holographic Doctor have free time to create an evil twin if Kes can’t even go on a few dates without getting judged by the men she most respects? What a disappointment that, in the end, Kes goes back to trying to be a good girl and please the Doctor instead of telling him how damaging his behavior has been, not just to his own program but to her. And what a shame that Torres doesn’t come back to punch the Doctor in the face as she did Vorick. The old B’Elanna might have had her revenge while reprogramming him, so I’m going to assume that she didn’t merely reset the EMH but also shrunk him by several centimeters.

About The Author

Michelle Erica Green

Writer, mother, reader, traveler, teacher, partner, photographer, activist, friend, fangirl, student, critic, citizen, environmentalist, feminist, vegetarian, enthusiast. TrekToday staffer for many years, former news reporter, current retro reviewer.

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Star Trek: Voyager

“Darkling”

Air date: 2/19/1997 Teleplay by Joe Menosky Story by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky Directed by Alex Singer

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan

"Everyone seems to be treating me like I'm still a child. I'm three years old now. If I'm attracted to someone it's my business, not the whole ship's." — Kes

Review Text

Nutshell: Sparsely amusing but mostly just rambling and pointless. Near-zero substance.

"Darkling" is about as superficial as they come, but unlike the also-shallow " Blood Fever ," there's no reason for any of the events here to happen, nor the possibility of consequences to emerge from any of the characters' actions. Things simply happen because the writers apparently thought they would be "fun." Whether that's intended fun for them, for us, or for the actors I'm not really sure, but I am sure about one thing: You can't base an entire episode on one silly (and I do mean silly) concept lacking all dramatic relevance and expect it to sustain an hour.

There's not really a story here—it's simply a premise that can be explained in a single sentence, which is then used for wackily glib characterization: Doc tries to expand his personality by using data from holodeck characters, but when his program malfunctions, an "evil" personality emerges and terrorizes Kes.

Mired in here is a theme about Kes reaching a "crossroads" in her life (she has fallen in love with this week's friendly, all-too-human alien and considers leaving the ship to pursue a relationship)—a storyline that doesn't have nearly the genuine emotional sense or time devoted to it that it demands. There's also a "mystery investigation" plot angle when Kes' new boyfriend (Lee Smith) is injured after being pushed off a cliff by a shady character in a hood.

Well, no points for guessing that it was Evil Doc that assaulted him—if, for no other reason, because the previews gave away that Doc was going to be a bad guy this week. (Although, more amusing is the hypothetical situation that this hooded character is really a jealous Neelix stalking his ex-girlfriend.)

Speaking of Neelix and Kes, "Darkling" finally confirms that the confusing "breakup" in " Warlord " was actually not a side effect of the alien possession of Kes' body. In retrospect, the handling of the whole idea is poor; then again, I really don't care, because it also means I don't have to sit through any more silly scenes between the two characters.

The episode follows by-the-numbers plotting as Doc switches between Jekyll and Hyde while his program malfunctions for reasons Torres can naturally explain with her technical prowess. (The Hyde, if I may say so, is Doctor Hyde—quite handy with the hypo-spray, to which Torres can later attest.) There are some surprisingly amusing, mildly macabre moments within the confines of the script's banality, as Evil Doc cripples Torres with some creative uses of sickbay drugs. And the episode's best scene features Evil Doc's trek from the sickbay to the holodeck—simply allowing us to watch his quiet, repressed insanity in the everyday situations of walking down the corridor and riding in the turbolift. Paul Baillargeon's ominous score sets the mood wonderfully.

Unfortunately, this idea doesn't have far to go. It doesn't take long before the mild amusement of Evil Doc's unstable mindset begins to run out of steam, and we're then treated to the standard plot device of his kidnapping Kes. Evil Doc beams himself and Kes down to the planet surface to await transport off the world for motives that are never clear. There are indications that Evil Doc feels compelled to "protect" Kes from something, but Menosky's script never bothers to explain why.

I don't have as much problem with the pedestrian plot as I do with the fact that every idea within it contains virtually zero substance. Just about everything Evil Doc does and says is meaningless. None of the dialog reveals any relevant character insight or theme. And don't even try to label the scene in Byron's bar where Kes and the Doctor discuss the benefits of "good" as decent writing or character depth. It's not. It's a pretentious smattering of false positive emphasis, as if a pile of "Roddenberry values" were stacked next to a barrel of TNT and left to explode onto the television screen. (One of my friends sarcastically commented that, by coincidence, his next psychology paper was concentrating on the exact topics Kes was discussing. I wished him good luck.)

Likewise, if we're supposed to take Kes' character arc seriously, then there needs to be a point to it. We all know she won't leave the ship anyway, so unless the writers devote some time to analyzing what Kes' options are and the relevant benefits and regrets each would bring, there's really no reason to bring it up. Unfortunately, this story is ultimately not about Kes. Once the writers introduce the topic of her dilemma, it's quickly abandoned in favor of the "crew member behaves erratically" paradigm. Kes' problem is short-changed to the point we don't care; all that remains are its uses in the plot machinations and a standard tack-on in the episode's coda explaining "why" she has decided to remain on board Voyager . Not good, folks.

The ending contains a nifty special effect: when Doc throws himself and Kes off a cliff, Voyager beams them up as they're falling to their doom. Unfortunately, this fresh visual hardly justifies the rest of the hour. The implications of Evil Doc's final actions sums up just how unfocused the entire show is. It tries to be "fun," yet it contradicts any possible theme of Evil Doc trying to "protect" Kes.

Menosky seems to enjoy episodes where characters act outside the normal range of reality ( TNG 's " Masks " and DS9 's " Dramatis Personae " come to mind). But with "Darkling," Braga and Menosky have nothing substantial upon which to form any fresh ideas. Menosky's use of "evil" as a theme is merely perfunctory. The result is a story that rambles with no discernible direction. Doc's interactions with the crew are limited, missing opportunities that could've been interesting. And the few times his personality does switch between Jekyll and Hyde aren't used for any dramatic effect but simply for the convenience of the plot.

The overall product seems to be little more than an excuse to give Picardo some varied "acting" scenes, some of which work nicely, others which fall flat. Sure, Picardo may have had fun, but that's not much of a rationale for an episode.

"Darkling" is watchable, but nothing more.

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Comment Section

80 comments on this post.

The Mikal race or whatever they're named look exactly like Bajorans, did they run out of ridged foreheads and had to reuse ridged noses? Also it's too bad they didn't film Neelix getting heartbroken or something with Kes breaking up.

Another holographic malfunction? Aye...carumba... Brannon Braga is the Adam Dunn of Trek - he either hits a home run or strikes out looking.

"We all know she won't leave the ship anyway, " Uhuh. I think you're underestimating this one, Jammer. I see very clearly here the continuing development of Kes into a character who has to leave the ship in "The Gift." She is no longer the child that Doc or the rest of the crew want to see her as--in Ocampa terms, she has aged almost 30 years since "Caretaker"--that's a lot of growth to portray, and Lien does it wonderfully. You're going out of your way to take every little detail of the scripts and blow them out of proportion as to make them into clichés--Kes doesn't "fall in love with" the traveller character--she's just attracted to him--it's reasonable and understated--as is her overly defensive attitude--she is establishing her adult identity against her mentors as much as she is being swept away with emotional intrigue. Voyager's multi-episode/season arcs are confined almost exclusively to characterisation. Because of that fact, you've lost, it seems, all faith in the series developing over time. Will we see these aliens again? Nope. Do I care? Nope. The character ramifications will extend through until "Fury" however, 3 years later. The Doc side of the script was hardly deep, but it was relevant to his ongoing self-improvement and very, very entertaining given Picardo's delivery--the early scene with Torres in the sickbay where he's suggestively asking if she feels "good" is a scream. Regarding the so-called TNT/"good" debate at which you scoff: you label it "pretentious" without explaining why. Your criticism smacks of classic 20-something hip pessimism which demands one role one's eyes at the very notion of altruism or social evolution. Grit and evil seem to automatically provide one with more compelling characterisations. This is an assumption you frequently take at face value in your reviews without bother to explain why. It's lazy and I don't accept it. I'm not saying that the conversation was extraordinary, but your dismissal seems rooted in personal beliefs about right and wrong rather than an objective review of the dialogue.

Yeah, what Elliott said. This wasn't a classic but 1.5 stars? It's 2 or 2.5 anyway, just for Picardo diving into the evil doctor persona.

Love Picardo's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" performance!

I almost completely agree with this review. This is an awful episode. The Kes story is boring and the "Evil Doc" story is preposterous. The only thing that makes it watchable is Picardo's performance. That, however, is not reason enough to watch. This is one to avoid. Voyager's worst since "Threshold." @Elliot, virtually all of your posts smack of pedantry, egoism and yes, pretentiousnes. Stop trying to impress everyone with your Trekkier-than-thou analyses.

@ Justin : This is at least the 4th time you've accused me of being pedantic on this site. I think that you mean to imply I only respect an episode of Trek if it glorifies so-called Roddenberrian ideals. Well, this is untrue; if I complain about the subject it's usually because something in the episode challenges those ideals in a stupid and unconvincing way AND is either ignored or praised by the review. I do not think very much of this episode, but it's not as bad as Jammer makes it out to be. A portion the review concerns itself with a feeling of pessimism and peevishness against admittedly, half-assed arguments about altruism. The alliteration was unintentional.

No Elliott, I mean that you are pedantic in almost every sense of the word. Let's examine it, shall we? A "pedant" as described by Dictionary.com: 1. a person who makes an excessive or inappropriate display of learning. 2. a person who overemphasizes rules or minor details. 3. a person who adheres rigidly to book knowledge without regard to common sense. OK, so we're both clearly guilty of #1, but in regards to #'s 2 and 3: *You show varying degrees of contempt for any episode of DS9 that even slightly strays from your view of the "Roddenberrian Ideal" (and some that probably don't). *You counter criticism of VOY when it clearly deserves it. See your above comments. *You insist on the correct usage of the word, "premise" and refuse to accept popular usage. *You use umlauts in words that have two vowels in a row like "coöperate" and "coëxist" Now all that may make it seem like I think you're a total jackass. Not at all. I think you're a good guy, but like Dr. Noonien Soong you are often wrong.

I show contempt, even hostile contempt for stupidity. Voyager has lots of stupidity as do all the incarnations of Trek. Strangely enough DS9 rarely show as much ineptitude except when it comes to arguing those Roddenberrian ideals and religion, two of the three aspects of the show which set it apart (the other being the serialisation, at which it excelled). That is why my hostile DS9 comments tend to focus on those points. Truly. I think BSG was a wonderfully crafted show which did everything well DS9 attempted including arguing those ideals well. Though the ending was surprisingly utopic... Let me repeat; this was not a good episode, but some of the criticism in the review I think are unwarranted. I don't think that's "overemphasising minor details". Just the opposite in fact. Here's some pedantry for you: they are called umlauts in German (voiced around) but in English, they are called diereses. By the time (as a teen) I learned that this was an old fashioned means of writing prefixes to words beginning with vowels, it was a habit I didn't care to break. I'm certain I'm wrong more often than not, which is a fun little paradox, but I try hopefully more often still not to talk out of my ass. For the record, I'm sure you're a nice guy too and should we ever meet in person I bet we'd enjoy overanalysing an episode of trek together.

A habit you didn't care to break? Sorry, but I have to call bullshit. First, let's get it out of the way that "umlaut" *is* in the English dictionary. It's also more commonly used than "diereses," and a far sight less silly sounding. Don't even get me started on "diphthong." Now, I could see your point in regards to your own handwriting, but to create an umlaut over a vowel you have to use an Alt-Code in Windows or an Accent Code in Mac (or HTML where appropriate). In other words, a lot of extraneous typing. Therefore, in order to type "coëxist" on a Windows keyboard you'd have to type the following characters (sans dashes): c-o-Alt0235-x-i-s-t That seems more like a habit you STUBBORNLY REFUSE to break...

@ Justin : I use a mac, meaning creating diereses requires hitting 2 buttons, command + u. And because I'm sure this is a point worth belabouring, an umlaut in german is about the simultaneous creation of two vowel sounds (open e plus the written letter, also open), diereses in english (and spanish, by the way) are used to denote the separation of vowel sounds (yes, the removal of the diphthong), like in the name Chloë (pronounced CLO - EE, not CLO).

Very entertaining. I've taught English for 35 years, but I have never heard such an impassioned discussion of diction and punctuation. And to think I found it on a Star Trek fan site. I thought Jammer got it about right. I laughed several times, but not in a good way.

This episode isn't bad. Don't see why you all keep harping on it. Also why oh why is there a big debate of punctuation? Isn't language relative and constantly changing? Why does it matter? There's really no "right" answer when it comes to language, just arbitrary rules of the time and place you're in.

Another wonderfully smarmy a**hole seduces a woman in the Trek universe. Seriously, how is it that so many Trek writers can think that these characters aren't just disgustingly gross? Let's review. There's the smarmy administrator dude that Deanna Troi falls for in the genetically engineered society. And the massively smarmy secretly telepathic negotiator who rubs her feet. Ewww. Then there's the smarmy Trill body-jumper that Doctor Crusher--or should I say Doctor Beverly--falls for. So reliant on smarminess is she, in fact, that she can't stay in love with him when he's in the body of a decent-seeming lady. There's the super-smarmy Vedic dude, who Kira falls in love with. And a second, slightly less smarmy resistance fighter dude she falls in love with after the smarmy Vedic dies. (Who, remarkably, is the same actor who played ANOTHER smarmy dude that Doctor Crusher fell for. But she was under a sort of cosmic spell, so we won't count that one.) On Voyager, we see Captain Janeway fall for that smarmy holodeck dude whose children she's governess to. And she even seems to almost fall for the smarmy slicked-back hair dude that won't help Voyager blip themselves home on the we're-just-after-a-good-time planet. Then there's Riker...who's just smarmy every time he's around a woman. I love the man, I do. But introduce him to a female character, and he's like a walking ad for Drakkar Noir. Can the writers not imagine that a woman can fall head over heels in love with emotionally normal men? Do they all have to seem like bad romance novel heroes?!

Jo Jo Meastro

I've been quite enjoying season 3 so far and under the surface I see developments which I find very promising, like the hints at meeting the Borg and just in general enjoying the show even if its nothing especailly deep or ground breaking. However, when I came to this trilogy of such low rated episodes I feared my enjoyment of the show will come screeching to a halt for a while. I've endured it and thankfully it seems I'll now be rewarded with an above average episode as the light at the end of the tunnel. On this particular episode, it was a bit flat and revolved around a gimmicky one-note premise which only had a handful of note-worthy moments. I think Picardo made much of the material better than it really should be. I can't say I hate the episode, but most of it is forgettable and stretches its already thin premise to the point of collapse. Thanks to the before mentioned handful of note-worthy moments and Picardos' touches of humour and charm given meritt to a at-best routine routine story...I'd give it a 2/4.

By Jove, another instance of the comments being far more entertaining than both the episode and Jammer's review (sorry, Jammer!). @Elliott: The dieresis is used in French, not Spanish.

@Michael: in English, the diæresis, in French, la tréma, in Spanish, diéresis. All are functionally and orthographically identical. Sp: vergüenza, güiro, etc.

Haha Kristen! Although I think Vedik Bareil doesn't deserve to be on that sorry list of supposedly irresistible Star Trek love interests. In this one I did enjoy evil Doc. Perhaps Hyde would be a good name for him? (And Jekyll for his saner counterpart)

Plus I thought the facial and physical expressions of evil doc were excellently done.

Finally, I agree with Elliott... I think the so-called pointless Kes plot has to be revised in the light of future episodes. I believe that in fact VOY is perhaps better than any other incarnation of Trek (at least as good as DS9) as far as character growth over the very long term. It seems that VOY gets judged before its arcs are over... it receives a sarcastic remark in the middle of its arc, whereas the other series (especially one in particular) would at least receive the benefit of the doubt, or credit or praise, or at least judgement would be reserved until the arc was over.

This was a bad episode. Picardo's portrayal of the evil Doc was actually quite chilling, but the script just wasn't there to bring it home. This could have been one of Trek's better forays into horror, but the writers just phoned this one in.

I think Jammer is quite fair in this review. This episode is really bad from the beginning to the end. I only think that Jammer put too few attention to the ridiculous Kes and Neelix break up. Ok, I understand that Jammer (and many of us) does not care about this couple, and about Neelix in general. I myself have always found the couple to be really strange and unfitting. However, one thing is to like or dislike characters. Another is to not address importante issues from an episode or a season/show arc. The confirmation that Kes and Neelix broke up in this very odd and poorly handled way a few episodes ago was really surprising. It does not make sense, and desserves a lot more criticism, to have a couple of characters be developed across episodes, to have their love relationship developed and even become central for their characters portrayal, and then have everything changed and relationship abandoned without more dramatic consideration on screen. Not a dialog? Not a tiny moment when we see Neelix's side on this? Breaking up in a scene out of nowhere, in an episode that makes it looks like Kes was just being controled by an alien? My gosh, this is what I call handling a show really poorly. It does not matter how much I like or dislike Neelix and Kes. It was so poorly done that when Kes started to show atraction for another guy in this episode, I was thinking for a few minutes whether I have missed something, or changed episodes' order. My mind just couldn't recall that scene from "Warlord" to be something serious. Bad horrible, with the final point to a horribly handled situation. One and a hald stars is more than enough.

I think this episode instantly encapsulates EVERYTHING that is wrong with Voyager. 1. Continuity kicked to the curb by allowing the Warlord break-up to stick. Check. It would have been more interesting if they broke up in THIS episode because she was attracted to someone else. 2. Phoned In Script - Crew members goes crazy is about as pedestrian as it comes. 3. Reset Button - Kes' dilemma and the Doc's actions are swept away at the episode's end. Nothing really happened. @T'Paul & Elliott - Kes maturing at light speed and starting to look beyond the bough of her ship, the Doctor maturing (and putting in a good performance)... these are all things that happen in spite of the crappy writing! The Kes grows up arc IS good (although it crashes and burns in Fury), but it's Jennifer Lien that gives it weight... the writers deserve no credit. Kes' growth is ALWAYS sidelined in favor of what the writer's deem a more interesting story. She's possessed in Warlord (huh, that was another crew member goes nuts episode... how long ago was that?), in this one sidelined for the doc acting crazy, in the one where she time travels it's all showing a future that will never happen (that is more interesting than the one we actually get), and in "The Gift" she's sidelined for Seven. The little glimpses into Kes maturing are things Lien adds to her very limited showing. It's not the writer's developing a fascinating arc for her, it's her doing what she can with crap.

For a while, when it was on, I actually liked VOY better than anything else. I LOVE the characters/performers. We just tend to have them learn the same lessons over and over, or have to watch the writer's prefer to deal with alternate versions of them, some of them got seriously sidelined (Kim/Chakotay) and others feel like they were possessed and nobody noticed (Janeway). Maybe Tieran possessed Janeway at the end of Warlord and nobody noticed. It'd certainly explain a lot of the later seasons.

Eh, I don't know, Robert. For me, watching Star Trek is like watching opera; half the plots make no sense and storytelling is more a means to an than and end unto itself. With the exception of DS9, stories tended to be vehicles for other artistic enterprises to manifest onscreen. That's one of the reasons Star Trek is so unique in the genre of Sci-Fi. I watch Trek for deep psychological truths, political allegories and myth-building through performances and visual composition. Hence, your complaint about the writers v. the actors is, in my view, somewhat overstated. If actors can carry a show and convey something meaningful, that means the script enabled them to do so--or at least did not prevent them from doing so. The scrip on its own may not deserve much praise, but as a vehicle for something else, it does its job. As an opera allegory, this is like the libretto. One would never wish to see an opera performed as a straight play. The whole point of the story is to deliver the music, which can be purely entertaining (as in a Rossini opera) or deeply psychological (like a Britten opera) or profoundly mythical (like a Wagner opera) or a combination of the three (like the best Mozart operas). In every case, the libretto (the words, the story) would be judged an inferior piece of drama if not for its musical marriage. I think the Voyager ethos was in tune (pardon the pun) with this idea. It is possible for me to note all the scripting flaws you and others point out and be no less moved by the content of the series, just as I can be aware of the writing cleverness and cohesion in DS9 and be utterly numb to it artistically.

You're comparing Voyager to Wagner or Mozart operas? For Wagner, opera was the highest expression of performance and drama - the story, performances, and production at least as important as the music. He wrote the libretto himself for each and every one of his operas. I'm not really sure what you're trying to say, in any case - Voyager (and, for the most part, no Trek series) is very much a product of mid-90s television, which implies a visual look and production design that isn't especially sophisticated or "artistic". Breaking Bad or True Detective it is not. Anyway. Voyager isn't Tristan or Götterdämmerung or Parsifal.

@Elliott - As someone who watched all of Voyager I clearly agree with you that I can be aware of these flaws and still enjoy the series (I probably would say that about 80%-85% of episodes did not end with me "wanting my hour back" so to speak). Still, my issues with the script is just that... would you rather watch Patrick Stewart do "Lonely Among Us" or "Inner Light". He's still Patrick-freaking-Stewart and he'd be captivating reading the yellow pages in a closet on a stool... but I'd still rather watch the "Inner Light". Take an AMAZING Voyager script, like "Life Line". Sure the Doctor was captivating in "Darkling" but in "Life Line" he got to be captivating AND have a kick ass script.

@Josh : Please don't assume to lecture me on Wagner. His libretti are often criticised for their lack of poetic cohesion, but he knew exactly the kind of words he needed to write the music which conveyed his ideas. Voyager certainly isn't anywhere near the artistic potency of a Wagner opera (I don't know any television programme which comes remotely close), but the priorities are similar. I would also ask that you not conflate the stylised format of some modern shows or films with artistic content. @ Robert : My original point was that if Lien's performance conveys the arc of her character, or Picardo's performance conveys an engrossing idea of a dark persona, the fact that the script has big holes where literary explanations for these things "ought" to be is not relevant. Of course there are better episodes than this! And a better script provides the opportunity for better performances and emotional resonances. You said the positive things in episodes like this one happen "in spite of the crappy writing," and I'm saying that if the actors made it happen, the scripts allowed them to do so. The writing certainly can sabotage this endeavour by overloading with technobabble explanations or unnatural dialogue.

@Elliott "You said the positive things in episodes like this one happen "in spite of the crappy writing," and I'm saying that if the actors made it happen, the scripts allowed them to do so." Are you so sure actors can only do things that scripts let them do? The writer's didn't figure out Odo was in love with Kira until they saw Odo react to Kira being in love with Bareil. Rene did that, and there was nothing in t he script that "let him". Actors can accomplish so much with the right look or movement that just isn't in the script. I guess I feel like Lien's acting HELPED her arc and the script hurt it (mostly). Her acting sells a longing for more and a sense that Kes has grown up. And then the script SLAMS a brick wall in her way so that this can promptly go nowhere. I will give the script credit in one place. I LOVED the scene where she and Janeway discussed how an explorer (which Kes has always been at heart) might not want to spend all 9 years of her life on one ship. It's a weighty idea, and it's an AMAZING plot point to go with the premise of a character that lives 9 years. But the script doesn't pay it off. We get EMH: I'm glad to hear it. I'm also pleased you've decided to remain on board. I would have had my hands full in sickbay without you. KES: The Captain suggested I consider all the consequences. If I am going through changes in my life, things that are unpredictable, this is the best place for me. It's a miserable resolution. The fact that Lien manages to sell this episode is a credit to her, not the episode. And canonizing a possession based breakup with Neelix... this script does more wrong by her arc than it does right.

Check out Lien's performance at the end of Warlord when she's reunited with Neelix. There's no tearful hug, rather she looks at him with something like disgust. Then Tuvok tells Kes that her experiences will change her. In this episode, it is confirmed that this led to a confirmation of the break-up. Did we really need it spelled out more deliberately? Regarding Odo & Kira--the script absolutely left room for a budding romance as Odo was always painted with a deep loneliness. The fact that the writers did not specifically intend it is not the point: Odo's characterisation informed Auberjonois' performance which in turn informed future writing choices.

"Check out Lien's performance at the end of Warlord when she's reunited with Neelix. There's no tearful hug, rather she looks at him with something like disgust. Then Tuvok tells Kes that her experiences will change her. In this episode, it is confirmed that this led to a confirmation of the break-up. Did we really need it spelled out more deliberately?" A two and a half year long relationship ends... ya, I needed to see it happen on screen. I also needed to see Odo and Kira have their heart to heart in "You Are Cordially Invited". This script, to me, dropped the ball on Kes twice. Once to break her up with Neelix and once to have Kes abandon her plans to leave Voyager and to do them BOTH off screen. All you have are brief moments from Lien to sell these things as things that actually happened. And she does the best she can, but the script short changes her. If you want to agree to disagree, we can. Lien hits the notes for these things to the point where we can believe them enough... she does well for what she has, but she doesn't have much. The script shortchanged her for a massive personality facelift on the Doctor that was fun to watch but reset buttoned. A LOT of important things happened to Kes and she was the B plot. What did we learn from the Doc? That he cares enough to improve his bedside manner. Good stuff there, and evil Doc was fun to watch. This wasn't a bad episode to spend an hour with per say, but it short changes Lien BADLY in an episode that should be about her. If you didn't need to see her to decide to stay or break up with Neelix there's nothing left to say. I mean, it's ok if you liked that they glossed over what you considered unnecessary. I was in 10th grade when this episode aired (back when some sadistic person decided to air DS9 and VOY at the same time slot, anyone remember that?!) and I SWEAR I thought I had missed an episode because my brain wanted to know when Neelix and Kes broke up!

I threw in the bit about Kira/Odo to level the playing field about this kind of conversation. I know you like VOY and I like DS9, but I hate when important character developments occur off screen. It would have been more interesting coming off Warlord where Kes feels differently about Neelix for them to breakup in this episode after she kisses Zahir and it finalizes her realization that there's more to life than Neelix has to offer.

I liked this episode simply because of Picardo's performance, but like most Voyager episodes, they didn't know how to write an ending. Doc attempts to murder a member of a new species they just met and burns another in a fireplace, he more or less tortures B'Elanna and holds her captive, he abducts Kes and then attempts to murder her. And despite all this, at the end everyone's just sort of "Welp, glad that's over with" and everyone moves on. What?

Much like this season's "Warlord", the energetic performance that makes things more interesting is hit or miss. The difference here is the Doctor's performance started fantastic and slowly devolved into a bad Batman impression whereas Kes's performance ("Warlords") was random. Another interesting aspect of this episode is the Doctor utilizing computer subroutines of known legendary figures in history in an attempt to better himself. Inadvertently it causes their inherent dark tendencies to overwhelm the Doctor to the point where he nearly completely loses himself in the process. I for one am intrigued at the notion that he would bring it upon himself to even think of delving into such a project. The fact that he does shows some growth as a character; especially seeing as he's programmed as a physician-of-all-related-trades and not as an engineer or programmer. It seems to make sense that their would be some unforeseen consequences on his part. As for the rest of the plot, it's nothing to write home about. I like the fact that the crew are finding more friends rather than anomalies and cardboard villains. I also liked the Kes part of this story to an extent, although, having a sound byte several episodes ago and a sound byte in this one does NOT equate to good character growth. The Kes/Neelix breakup deserves more and so do the people that are supposed to care about these characters. Otherwise, there was some nicely realized dialogue between Janeway/Kes and a few genuinely creepy scenes to boot. Except for a couple of isolated moments, however, the last couple of acts slowly flushed away some of the good will it had built up. Which is rather unfortunate. I believe this could have been a much better episode with some substantial reworking. As it is, I'd say it's got some good ideas but failed execution-wise. Par for the course once again. I'd prefer this over "Warlord". 2.5 stars.

You know, this "Kes dumps Neelix" thing kind of ticks me off. I never have liked this relationship. As I've stated it makes me feel kind of dirty... but Neelix has done NOTHING but love this gal with every fiber of his being... you'd think the writers would dedicated a couple lines, a moment between Kes and Neelix after Warlord to make the split a little more formal and final. Neelix deserves that. We deserve that too. What are we talking here? ... a 2 minute conversation? Come on. Jammer, you're right on the money here. As much as I enjoyed the "evil doc", nothing of any substance was derived from the experience. The Picardo factor and a good performance by Jennifer and Roxann gets 2 stars from me.

@Yanks - Watching the series the first time I was POSITIVE they were still together when Darkling aired. And then she's off with someone else and I'm left wondering if I missed an episode. People jab VOY for continuity and whatnot, but I'll shuttle counts, photon torpedo inconsistencies and fluctuating crew manifests are fun to joke about in a nitpicking circle. The majority of us are not ACTUALLY upset about those things. But being sure you missed an episode because a major storyline had changes to it without notifying the viewer is horrifying.

Yup... don't know how they (what, 3 writers) could have missed this.

Interestingly enough I found Picardo's performace as the evil doctor completely devoid of any humor. It was his darkest performance in the series. The title certainly fits. But Picardo's talents weren't exactly a secret to anyone. The main premise of the story Jammer pretty much summed up. He wanted to expand his personality subroutines and wound up creating a darker side of himself. Entertaining to say the least! The rest of the episode doesn't really stick in my mind as much regarding this particular race they came across. I guess I didn't find them all that compelling. Not horrible but this is one race I didn't mind not seeing again since I barely remembered them. I liked Jennifer Lien. I felt she was a gentle soul that Voyager lost when they axed her character. Honestly she showed more potential and interest for me than Ensign "can't-get-a-lock" Kim. (not sure who coined that phrase but it sure fits.) They could have gotten rid of chuckles as well, even more annoying. Kes clearly was showing development. And she turned out to be a more versatile actress as well. Warlord showed us that. First they get rid of Martha Hackett (still can't believe they didn't know how to integrate Seska, as charismatic as she was). Then Jennifer Lien. Yeah they did bring in Jeri Ryan, who was sexy yet as cold as a borg drone could be. Geez. These writers hate their mothers or something? Anyways Darkling was bogged down with a lot of things that I was nonplussed by. So it's difficult to give it a high rating. But Picardo really bought it home this episode as the evil doctor. I sure can't give it an epic fail. Not like Threshold or Natural Law. 2 to a weak 2.5 stars is the range I'll settle for.

Kristen, any chance you can elaborate on this, since your comment seems to me to be both unintelligible and man-hating at the same time. You write: "Another wonderfully smarmy a**hole seduces a woman in the Trek universe." Why was he an asshole? He was nothing but kind to Kes. What was wrong with him? "Seriously, how is it that so many Trek writers can think that these characters aren't just disgustingly gross?" How was he gross? "Let's review. There's the smarmy administrator dude that Deanna Troi falls for in the genetically engineered society." What was your problem with him? He was nothing but kind and decent to Troi. "And the massively smarmy secretly telepathic negotiator who rubs her feet. Ewww." Okay, yes, he was a con man. That's one point for you. "Then there's the smarmy Trill body-jumper that Doctor Crusher--or should I say Doctor Beverly--falls for." What was your problem with him? He was nothing but kind and decent to Crusher. "So reliant on smarminess is she, in fact, that she can't stay in love with him when he's in the body of a decent-seeming lady." Um, you....do know that Dr. Crusher isn't a lesbian, right? You do know that your sexual orientation is something you are born with, right? Do I detect a hint of lesbian resentment here? Just asking. "There's the super-smarmy Vedic dude, who Kira falls in love with." What is your problem with him? He was nothing but kind and decent to Kira. "And a second, slightly less smarmy resistance fighter dude she falls in love with after the smarmy Vedic dies." What was your problem with him? He was nothing but kind and decent to Kira as well. "(Who, remarkably, is the same actor who played ANOTHER smarmy dude that Doctor Crusher fell for. But she was under a sort of cosmic spell, so we won't count that one.)" Yeah, Crusher's ghost rapist was pretty "smarmy." That's a second point in your favor. "On Voyager, we see Captain Janeway fall for that smarmy holodeck dude whose children she's governess to." What? No we don't. He kisses her and she stops him. Janeway never fell for him in any way. But yeah, he kept his wife locked in the third floor. Not good. Another point for you. "And she even seems to almost fall for the smarmy slicked-back hair dude that won't help Voyager blip themselves home on the we're-just-after-a-good-time planet." Okay, yeah, that was another con man. Four points for you. "Then there's Riker...who's just smarmy every time he's around a woman. I love the man, I do. But introduce him to a female character, and he's like a walking ad for Drakkar Noir." What the hell are you talking about? Is there even one female whom Riker ever mistreated in any way? "Can the writers not imagine that a woman can fall head over heels in love with emotionally normal men? Do they all have to seem like bad romance novel heroes?!" With four exceptions, all the men you listed above are decent men who treated the women in their lives fairly and justly. I have no idea what you're talking about at all. You seem to have some issues with men in general and some resentment towards Dr. Crusher for not being bisexual. I suggest you work on these issues and come out a better person. P.S. Is "smarmy" like your favorite word of all time?

Episodes like Darkling really cheated Voyagers good actors out of good story lines

Diamond Dave

Well colour me the contrarian but I loved this. For the first half it seemed we were getting what I thought was actually quite an interesting exploration of Kes' character. Yes, we could have done with an on screen resolution of the relationship with Neelix but by setting up the prospect of her taking a voyage and reuniting with Voyager later there actually was a realistic prospect of her leaving (at least for a while) so that was something new. It then jumped off into left field with the Jekyll and Hyde doctor, and Picardo plays this with such verve and malice that I found it difficult to nitpick even when the plot entered some corny territory. Good conclusion with the beam out too. "It's about to get interesting" indeed. 3.5 stars.

Great episode. 4 stars. Sorry Jammer, your constant negative reviews of this show are disgusting. Please do not review any future Star Trek content. Thanks.

I like Jammers reviews and agree with him most times. As for Kes, why not make her wear a Starfleet uniform where she would feel more part of the crew rather than her present outfit which I find makes her look goofy and unflattering.

this made no sense. The holodeck computer took over the holographic doctor and made him evil. really?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Londonboy73

Trek Fan - Great episode. 4 stars. Sorry Jammer, your constant negative reviews of this show are disgusting. Please do not review any future Star Trek content. Thanks. Yea Jammer, go back in time 15 years and don't review all future episodes. Also don't create and maintain this website which contains reviews that I have read in order for me to ask you not to review any Star Trek. Now you may have been Trolling and I have fallen for it, but I have a feeling Trek Fan, that you are simply an idiot.

dave johnson

@Kristen from way back in 2013 re: trek females always going for the slimy guys... I would suspect the writers are guys who didn't get a lot of women throughout their life. Guys like that usually do the "Im nice and girls don't like me, they always go for the douchebags".... while there sometimes is truth in that, generally speaking it is a complete cop-out and lack of responsibility for how one interacts with the gender they want to court. This seems to come out in the Trek writing especially into DS9 and Voyager... "hot women love lying womanzing guys"....... I can speak this because when i was younger I did that whole whiney "I am a nice guy and girls don't pick me". It took me a while, until I realized the kicker was just to be a guy who was confident talking to women, open, and most of all bold enough to approach and not fear rejection. The slimey guys approach women after women, getting rejected the majority of th time.. however, when they make a connection the illusion is created that they always do. Anyways, I digress... however, I suspect the writers come from a certain scope and that is why they write their shows where "nice men don't get the girls" They did write Rom to get the girl, although they still made it like a bumbling accident.

It is a confidence issue for sure. Jerks tend to be among the most confident people and confidence is sexy. Jerkiness is not sexy, but that's not the bit that is attractive. I learned this because I never got hit on until after I was taken. Took me a little while to figure out what changed. It was me.

I guess the viewers were the only ones supposed to notice that the Doc's hair was a little messy and his face was looking unhealthy when he was "evil". You would think the crew should have noticed that. And, this evil persona.. why would he bother to change his appearance (which would require changes to the program) just to "look evil" i found that funny

This show highlights my love hate relationship with holograms on Star Trek. It is pretty clear that holograms can easily become sentient. Literally all you have to do is add some additional sub routines and boost some of their mental attributes. This is shown in Prof Moroarty, the doctor, the holograms that the Hirogen enhance. And yet they ALL very easily turn evil. As a side note it does beg the question: during the dominion war Or borg battles why doesn't the Federation create a fleet of hologram ships?

There is an understanding in the Trek universe that characters aren't responsible for their actions when under alien control or other circumstances. The characters still typically feel guilt or remorse afterwards. In this episode, the Doctor seems completely uncaring about everything that happened. But in this case, it was HIS FAULT. He went messing around with something he didn't understand and it had almost deadly consequences. Why didn't Janeway give him a huge lecture at the end? Or set up some sort of holographic confinement/restrictions for a while?

RandomThoughts

Hello Everyone! One of the things I noticed was, and maybe it was just me, Kes was talking in a somewhat lower, huskier tone in this episode. Not quite to the level of when she was possessed, but lower than the higher-pitched voice she normally used. I thought she must have done that on purpose. She was with Neelix for 2 1/2 years. For her, that's 25% of her normal lifespan. I believe she had a bit of a mid-life crisis. Also, the writers were hopefully trying to (finally) get her to grow. Kes wasn't wearing the little dress thingy she wore for most of the first 2 1/2 years. Actually, I didn't understand why she wore the same thing all the time anyway. But, while I didn't really notice until a bit later, she seemed to wear at least two different sets of clothes in this one. I was astonished! Just some musings and have a great day... RT

grumpy_otter

@Robert You noted: "He's still Patrick-freaking-Stewart and he'd be captivating reading the yellow pages in a closet on a stool" Interestingly, I have the whole Narnia series audiobooks read by different British actors like Kenneth Branagh, Lynn Redgrave, Derk Jacobi, and Patrick Stewart, who reads "The Last Battle." And it's horrible. It sort of reminds me of how Sisko says his lines with deep gravitas for every one. It makes the story really plod, while others' versions soar. I agree he's a great actor--but not so much for the reading.

52 comments in and no-one has mentioned the hilarious false teeth and contact lenses Picardo had in to play the "evil" Doc. This for me is one of those eps that I thought was fine as a kid but now just doesn't stand up. The whole Kes side of the plot is handled clumsily and the ep is schlocky af, not in a good way. I reluctantly have to agree with 1.5 stars.

So, I read Jammer's review and many of the comments, in particular Elliott's; while his take on Voyager is sometimes controversial, it is usually illuminating. So I sort of agree with Elliott's points about Kes here. I also went back and rewatched the end of Warlord to see that, yes, indeed Kes looks at Neelix with something like disgust. I feel like I got the gist of Warlord as an episode to force Kes to question her assumptions about herself (especially knowing where her story was going) but I was unconvinced by the ending, but I might have to revisit that. Anyway, I feel sort of similarly here. I agree that Kes' having some wanderlust and wanting to get off the ship makes a lot of sense, and the crew's protectiveness toward her -- refusing to let her change, partly because she is (by pure biology) predisposed to change much faster than they are -- also does. Lien does play Kes as significantly older and a little more jaded, and she seems in the early scenes not to be "in love with" that guy (though he at least claims to be in love with her) as seriously considering if Voyager is all that she wants out of the whole rest of her life. So we know SPOILER that she's leaving soon, and so the ending where Kes decides to stay in some ways doesn't even "have to" lead to Kes providing a fully convincing argument. There's a sense in which it's sort of a patch -- a band-aid placed on an open wound, but which really can't be cured until Kes actually lives her own life. Her relative lack of concern about the guy she was going to run off with (I'm not saying she doesn't care about him, but she's not that broken up) tends to show that he was mostly a means to an end, to try to start actually living separately. And in that sense, I get the sense that Kes is almost humouring the Doctor at the end. Maybe she does believe that the Doctor is concerned about her, and that others' concerns about her are justified. But the Doctor also basically went berserk over the possibility of her leaving. I can't decide whether it's a deliberate omission or not that no one mentions the most likely explanation for the Alternate Evil Doc to insist on kidnapping Kes to prevent her from leaving: he cares about her, she's the best friend he has, and he doesn't want to lose her. The Doctor imagined Kes as his wife in Projections, after all. And I think *maybe* Kes intuits that on some level (I don't mean using psychic powers, but ordinary psychology) and recognizes that she's needed, and, like the nurse she's trained to be, does triage: the Doc goes mad at her leaving, so she stays, and even finds ways to describe it in terms of satisfying her needs, rather than the Doctor's (and, indirectly, the crew's). But it can't last forever. That read is consistent with the episode but isn't really what I'd call "put forward" by it, so I'm left sort of on the fence about what we actually see. The goofiness of the Hyde persona is pretty heavy and there are lots of ridiculous elements pretty much throughout. The Doc plot reminds me a bit of some of those Data stories on TNG where Data upgrades himself and then some unexpected impact happens (A Fistful of Datas; Phantasms, though admittedly there the "upgrade" was more natural) and it hits some of the same notes; there is something good but also something dangerous about a person who constructs their whole identity from the ground up. And I do like the idea of showing that there is a kind of balance in many "great figures," and that in trying to become a Great Man the Doc starts to both take on their dark sides and also to develop a kind of Nietzschean Ubermensch complex. It's kind of neat, too, that after all the "great men had dark sides" stuff, Kes manages to find evidence of good within the Hyde persona (it's a sort of yin-yang thing, a part of good in evil and a part of evil in good), though it doesn't really work and they have to get beamed up from the cliff. Anyway, I agree with Jammer about what the episode seems to be doing and maybe with Elliott in what the episode is maybe suggesting for moving the characters around -- and I can't quite decide how to evaluate it. The larger discussion of how much credit to give to the script versus performances is the type of thing I think about, and it's particularly noticeable with Voyager where there often seems to be "text" and "subtext" at odds and it's very hard to tell how aware the various writers were. Anyway. This isn't a good episode but I guess I like it a bit better than Jammer -- 2 stars.

Oh yeah, on that "is evil more fundamental than good? is good more fundamental than evil?" discussion -- I think I just forgot it even happened, because it kind of seems to be unrelated to the things the episode does (kind of) well. This episode isn't very good generally but it maybe would have been improved by splitting the different plots into different episodes or providing more focus. I don't want to armchair teleplay write too much, but I think dropping the whole "historical figures" thing and having the Doctor just do some other upgrades to his program that leads to him attempting to murder the person trying to take Kes away, and realizing that this means that he wants her to stay, might have made the emotional content that kinda-sorta works to shine through in an actually believable package. We could even see the Doctor attempting to make the modifications as a displacement exercise because he wants Kes to stay -- and so imagines that if he can change as fast as she does, she won't get bored being his student. I guess the good-evil stuff works a bit with the overall question of selfish/selfless -- Kes and the Doctor both have to weigh their own needs with the ones of those they care about in the episode -- but most of the Great Figures Of History or good/evil stuff are way too far from being related.

Konstantinos

Overall I found this a very good episode. Kess had always a special relationship with the Doctor so it is interesting to see what happens when he injects some human vices into his personality. It changes the balances between them and also gives Picardo the chance to have some fun (That elevator scene was funny as well) I like the way that this episodes tries to define humanity as a source of both good and malice. All these historical figures clearly had a dark side we sometimes pretend to ignore. Still their contribution to society transcends their personal limitations. So it leads to the point of people being essentially good despite their shortcomings. Which is something to appreciate on any ST show Also after 60 or something episodes it is obvious that they will resolve everything in 40 minutes especially concerning a basic episode. Which makes everything funny because the reviewer is currently against keeping things "muddled" in discovery, while is also against "keeping everything tidy" here.

Diereses and umlauts and opera for god's sake...wtf The Doc takes certain character traits from various historical figures, and they somehow all blend together and what comes out? An insane serial killer of course. And at the very beginning of the episode after he molests Torres, he tells the computer to isolate the subroutines and not use them anymore, so why does he still go all mental? And why does he keep switching from good to evil? It would seem if his program was corrupted it would stay that way, not go from being normal to being messed up to being normal again. How does the Doc keep transporting back and forth from Voyager to the planet over and over with no one noticing? He beamed down to spy on Kes, then back up, then back down, to push that guy off a cliff, then back up. And where does this cloak come from? He has it hidden away on the planet and puts it on whenever he beams down I guess. And like "N" mentioned above, what's up with the eyes and teeth? And the messy hair and 5 o'clock shadow? Why would he look different? He would have to alter his program, and if he did, why would he make himself look like a dimwitted crazy person? Tuvok interviews Nakahn about the attack on Zahir, accusing him of being involved, and Nakahn doesn't mention the crazy guy that showed up that night and stuck his hand in a fire? KES: Empathy and kindness are basic to all forms of life. I dispute that. :D The Doc keeps glitching out because his subroutines are degrading (sigh) and then he flings himself and Kes off the ledge and they are beamed up to Voyager, and he's totally fine. Good thing his subroutines quit affecting him during that precise second it took to transport them or else he may have started shooting people when he got back. Lucky, huh!?! And I agree with most of the other posters that they totally glossed over Kes' story which is what was actually important in this episode, instead focusing on what was happening to the Doc which was totally meaningless. The Doc was totally irresponsible, messing with his own systems, and nearly causing the death of several people, but no one cares. At least take his mobile emitter away for awhile as punishment or something. Another case of someone on Voyager endangering lots of people for no good reason, with absolutely no repercussions whatsoever. I do not like this one. 1/2 star.

Phallic Metaphor

For me this is one of the worst episodes of the first 3 seasons. It just reads as cartoony. We know the doctor is never going to do anything irredeemable and the his alter ego "I am the hidden dark nature people have been to afraid to embrace" is cringe worthy bad. It is what I would write if I was doing a lazy satire. I think Robert Picardo did a good job with what he was given but the premise is laughibly bad.

This one descends to the depths of "False Profits" from earlier in the season. Totally pointless, ridiculous and without focus. Until Evil Doc pushes Kes's love interest off a cliff, this episode really seemed to be about Kes and her potential transition. A potentially decent romance started to build up and she has a good conversation about it with Janeway, but then it all goes south quickly. When you get used to Picardo acting a certain way for Doc, it gets difficult to tolerate him trying to do something completely different. (This is the case with "Warhead" in S5 as well.) Maybe this is a weakness with Picardo as an actor. I think he's one of the better actors on VOY and Doc is one of the series best characters. So there's something about all these historical figures having a dark side and it showing up in Evil Doc. But what his purpose is -- not clear. He has some kind of feelings for Kes, keeping her as a hostage, but this doesn't really get expressed clearly. Basically, we don't get anything concrete about Doc's character other than some resentment feelings about being on call or something unimportant. While the plot is razor thin, the ending resolution leaves a ton to be desired: So Evil Doc/Kes get transported as they're falling and then Doc is back to normal! How?? And then Kes just decides to stay with Voyager -- doesn't the episode at least deserve a final scene between her and new boyfriend after the investment made earlier in the episode? Barely 1.5 stars for "Darkling" -- poorly conceived and executed. I wasn't a fan of the Evil Doc character whose purpose was unclear. Thought Kes was good in this one, but her story wasn't going to be fleshed out here due to a lot of Doc silliness. The good/evil personas has been done far more effectively in Trek. This episode didn't try to make any kind of reasonable statement.

Good performance by Picardo, though the ep was a bit boring. Disagree that Doc's journey was pointless. He learned a lot about the duality of human nature. It was interesting that he merrily incorporated parts of others into his own personality without realizing it wasn't that simple. This was not coincidentally placed in a ep that was also about Kes's growth as an individual - away from Neelix, away from Doc, away from Tuvok, and ultimately, away from her new found lover. When we grow, we learn from those around us, we incorporate modes of thought and behavior from others, we sometimes directly imitate them, but we must ultimately become ourselves, unique. So that parallel is being drawn here. Voyager doesn't get nearly the credit it deserves in general, IMO. A solid ep, if a bit plodding.

Sean Hagins

I for one loved this episode! It was fun seeing Robert Picardo play the villian. No one mentioned this, but I think the Doctor has some feelings for Kes, and with that pyscho Lord Byron added to the mix, he became posessive. I don't understand why so many people didn't like Kes' relationship with Neelix. I hoped they would get married in the show. I really don't like the way they changed Kes' character as time went on

Lord Byron was "crazy"? You are literally the first person I've ever heard say that.

Excuse me, I do not know this show well. I'm a physics student and an American friend showed it to me thinking that I would like it, but I found this one episode so infuriating that I had to find somewhere to speak about it. At the beginning, the alien man spoke about something "so large" that it generated it's own gravity, with the implication that only something very large exerts gravitational force, but any massive thing has gravity, from an atom to an elephant to a planet! Gravity can be calculated between two objects with Newton's law of universal gravitation in most circumstances inside of a solar system, F = G m1m2/r^2, with G being Newton's constant, m being the masses of either object and r being the distance between them. Try it for yourself and the Earth, the moon or even Mars and you will find that you exert gravity on these objects even though you are small. Newton's law is not strictly correct, it is an approximation for when space time is only lightly curved, that is situations when objects are extremely massive (or energetic, they are equivalent) or things are moving at relativistic speed. For this you can use the Einstein Field Equation. What a silly program, children should not watch it, I will never do so either!

OmicronThetaDeltaPhi

A rugged pilot is sitting in a bar, telling tall tales about a monster of planetary size, and you find the fact that his story doesn't conform to Newton's laws infuriating? I'll be the first to admit that Star Trek occasionally makes scientific errors (just like any other sci fi series) but the example you've chosen to complain about is a complete non-issue.

That was the first time I read all of the comments section. And after umlauts, opera and Newton, all I have to say is: GOOD GOD GIRL GET A GRIP

Some of the discussion earlier in the comments, particularly from Elliott, has helped me realize why I'm enjoying Voyager more on my current re-watch than I have in the past. It's because I appreciate the characters more this time around, and even when we get a weak plot, if a character has a good outing, it makes up for a lot. Darkling is not a particularly original episode. It's another "main character turns evil" variation. We had "evil Tuvok" back in "Meld", "evil Kes" in "Warlord" and now "evil Doctor" in Darkling. Picardo really goes for it as evil Doc, changing his whole physical performance as well as his voice and persona, and it's a fun performance, if admittedly uncomfortable to watch given that his victims are mainly female members of the crew. But it's Kes who benefits the most from this episode. She's definitely being allowed to grow up a bit here, both in how she dresses (I feel like Seven of Nine would raid her closet for those form fitting outfits!) and in the way she considers other options beyond Voyager for her life. He friends, her almost parental figures, all offer advice and look out for her (I particularly enjoy the scene where Tuvok questions her love interest about his intentions) but in the end have to admit that the decision is hers. She seems to be about the equivalent of someone college age here, rapidly growing up and looking at the real world and trying to decide how to proceed. It's a good episode for the character, better than I realized, and given that we know she would leave the series soon, it's good to see that Lien got a few strong episodes for Kes before she was gone.

Sarjenka's Brother

I found myself squarely in the middle on this one. I enjoyed it better than the detractors. But I can't say I loved it either. I'm still trying to figure out Gandhi's "dark" side, though.

Far out of my area of knowledge but has been a case made that Gandhi's legend has far outstripped his reality. Here's a Christopher Hitchens piece on the topic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-real-mahatma-gandhi/308550/

Very educational article - not so much with respect to Gandhi (who I knew was no saint) but in helping me understand why Hitchens is now a poster child of the far right. Using anything remotely un-Western about his culture against him, calling Gandhi a 'fakir' as if all eastern religions were the same, total rejection and ignorance of any form of spirituality as opposed to established (Western) religion, and throwing in surprisingly unsubtle praise of materialism and colonialism wherever possible. If I hadn't known it was written in 2011 I would not have been surprised to be told it was a 1950s piece.

The don't look exactly like Bajorans.... They have silver spray paint on the tops of their lil nose ridges.

I too found this episode inconsequential, but I didn't find it horrible as a stand-alone. It makes no sense that the doctor would wreak this much havoc to an alien species but there were no consequences discussed. No one even raised the notion that he should be blocked from modifying his own program in the future, just that he "shouldn't do it". Torres warns him briskly in the beginning after he is violating her medical boundaries, but he doesn't heed the warning, and there's no further investigation. If a flesh and blood crew member did all that, there would be hell to pay. Like all of VOY, the writers don't go deep enough into the realities they are creating. Actors are supposed to be embody character roles, which gives them an insider view of that character like a living, breathing being. The writers never seemed to do this. The characters were more about the selfish projections of the writers than any attempt to breathe deep life into them. That said, this episode wasn't THAT bad. Picardo did a good job as the two-sided doctor. The alien species were interesting in concept. Too bad that, for such a far flung race, we'll never encounter them again in the series. We also never find out exactly just what information they give the Voyager crew. At least with 7of9 and astrometrics, we see illustrations of course plots. This series had so much potential and episodes like this make me remember why I was ultimately disappointed by it all. They really should've made Ronald Moore the chief producer.

ugghhhhhh this show Picardo is wasted on this show. Wish he had been able to be on some TNG. At least he got a DS9 cameo. Once again its a mess of a show with too many random ideas that only gives surface level attention to all of them

There's a whole subgenre of old science fiction novels in which travellers journey across rustic alien planets, with their Medieval-like taverns, and glittering moons, and romantic, wind-swept fields, and strange beasts with strange names, and homey bars where locals mingle with space pilots, smugglers and star merchants. Usually the lead character is some woman with burgeoning powers. Usually there's some sexy hunk with his unbuttoned shirt displaying his mighty chest. Usually on the book's cover is some kind of space horse, and a scantily clad, bosomy woman holding its reigns while spaceships in formation zoom overhead. This episode is crap, but it reminds me of those novels. It's at its best when its just basking in the vibe of its alien planet, and its alien canteens. Best scene? Janeway sitting in a bar, chilled out, listening to a space stud woo a smitten Kes. Felt like old-school space opera; the kind of water-stained, dog-eared books you'd find in the clearing-out garage sale of your dead neighbor.

I read some of the reviews, and expected to find the episode to be utter garbage. And was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t. It is undistinguished, perhaps, but not garbage, by any means. Though I was a bit disappointed, after the old trope of the gigantic-seabeast- mistaken- for-land was used, that the beast sank without trace. An episode about its space equivalent might have been a good one. Robert Picardo was the best element in the episode.

I don't think anyone mentioned that while the Dr was holding Kes on the cliff, each time he would start blinking out, he had to let go of her, and instead of running away towards Tuvok and Chakotay, she'd just look at the Doc, like "Ok, I'm here waiting, come on and grab my arm again!"

Just_some_guy

After re-watching this on N yesterday and reading the comments here... as well as searching the internet for VOY-casualties: What happened to the gay manning the transporter room when Doc wanted to beam to the surface with Kes? The phaser was set to kill? Or maybe I have missed this?

Sorry, "guy". "What happened to the guy manning the transporter room..."

Alex (in the UK)

Rewatching the series with my girlfriend currently. We watched it some years ago but she wasn't very into Star Trek at the time so we just rattled through the big episodes like Caretaker, Scorpion, etc. Now we're rewatching the whole series (her idea) and I am rewatching some of these episodes for the first time in 20 years or more. Anyway first thing she said in this episode was "What about Neelix?" when Kes was developing a relationship with the guy on the planet. She definitely assumed that the breakup in Warlord was undone after the revelation that Kes was possessed by the titular warlord. Just an observation that for many viewers the way the Kes and Neelix breakup was handled was confusing.

This is a poor episode with not much to take away from it. It just doesn't feel like Star Trek - especially with its music. It could have been better if it was executed differently even with the same script. Even the the story is poor compared to what Menosky and Braga can normally produce.

O dear, I am not sure that the doctor's sub-routines was the greatest problem. Somwhere in VOY Picardo's sub-routines started to get to much. Did it start here? He can act, and he definetly can be funny but I very much got the impression that his ego developed in the same way as the doctor. The idea of exploring AI was fine, but they could not repeat Data. I also understand why they wanted to develop his character. Contrary to many others I have no beg problem with that some of the main characters sits more in the back seat. Kim, Chakoty, Tuvok mainly. Paris and espesially Belana get mor place. To me the problem with the development of the docktor was his (or perhaps Picardos's) ego. To me it got to much. This episode was overplayed from his side. Perhaps thet was neccesary. I liked Jennifer Lien's acting again. Her dialogue with the doctor was theatrical but very consistent.

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Star Trek Voyager: Darkling

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Star Trek: Voyager/Darkling

Darkling is the eighteenth episode of the third season of Star Trek: Voyager , and the sixtieth episode overall.

Starring : Kate Mulgrew ( Captain Kathryn Janeway )

Also Starring : Robert Beltran ( Commander Chakotay ), Roxann Dawson ( Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres ), Jennifer Lien ( Kes ), Robert Duncan McNeill ( Lieutenant Tom Paris ), Ethan Phillips ( Neelix ), Robert Picardo ( The Doctor ), Tim Russ ( Lieutenant Tuvok ), Garrett Wang ( Ensign Harry Kim )

Guest Stars : David Lee Smith (Zahir), Stephen Davies (Nakahn)

Co-Stars : Noél De Souza (Ghandi), Christopher Clarke (Lord Byron), Sue Henley (Ensign), Majel Barrett (Computer Voice)

Plot Overview

The Doctor adopts some impressive character traits from historical figures into his Starfleet database, but inadvertently adopts several abnormal traits as well.

Arc Advancement

Behind the scenes, allusions and references, memorable moments.

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Star Trek: Voyager/Episodes

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Voyager, Season 3: Darkling

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Recap / Star Trek Voyager S 3 E 17 "Darkling"

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I was born of the hidden, the suppressed. I am the dark threads from many personalities.

Contains examples of:

Above Good and Evil : The amalgamated subroutines in The Doctor's form believe themselves to be this.
Absence of Evidence : Tuvok finds no skin fragments from Zahir's attacker.
A.I. Is a Crapshoot : The Doctor's personality improvement program looks good at a glance, but he didn't consider the negative aspects of all those characters he incorporated.
Always a Bigger Fish : Zahir warns Voyager against trespassing through Tarken territory. "They'll remove your entire crew, settle you on a moon somewhere, and your ship will become their latest trophy."
Badass Boast : When Nakahn draws a pistol, Zahir faces him down by coldly stating; "I've journeyed to the corners of known space and beyond . I've earned the right to come and go as I please, where and when and how I please. Do you challenge that right?"
Badass Creed : The Hippocratic Oath by its very nature, required by every doctor to make the core of his being; the Doctor reaffirms it at the end.
Bait-and-Switch Comment B'Elanna: Research is one thing, putting it into practice is something else. Behavioural subroutines have a way of interacting with each other which isn't always predictable. You've got to be careful... ( Badass Armfold ) Or someone might hurt you. ( Reveal Shot of the Doctor's hand fondling B'Elanna's knee. He quickly removes it.)
Berserk Button : For the duration of this episode, turning the Doctor off is enough to turn his unstable amalgam of subroutines on, until they start up on their own ...
Birds of a Feather : Kes and Janeway share similar feelings of confusion and dissatisfaction with simply staying in one spot.
But Now I Must Go : The first manifestation of Kes' wanderlust, jump-started by the appearance of Zahir. Too bad she's not traveling in any way she'll appreciate... Thankfully, this is subverted, for now.
Call-Back : After being injected with a hypospray that paralyses her, B'Elanna sounds a lot like her Klingon self in "Faces", another episode where she was at the mercy of a Mad Doctor .
Card-Carrying Villain : The amalgamated subroutines say as much in their Motive Rant after kidnapping Kes.
Character Development : The Doctor tries to force this by implementing subroutines based on many people throughout history. Hilarity Ensues (and almost a Megaton Punch from a very freaked-out half-Klingon engineer), but what happens next is anything but funny .
Chewing the Scenery : Because Evil Is Hammy .
Continuity Nod : T'Pau and Socrates play kal-toh .
Creepy Physical : The Doctor and B'Elanna. Played for Laughs at first, then Played for Drama with Evil Doc.
Cut Phone Lines : Evil Doc removes Kes and B'Elanna's commbadges.
Do Not Call Me "Paul" : The amalgamated subroutines don't like it when Kes calls them 'Doctor'.
Evil Is Hammy : And has a Hair-Trigger Temper !
Evil Sounds Deep : The amalgamated subroutines distort the Doctor's voice.
Evil Twin : A different character does seem to be implied, but it's really a Jekyll & Hyde situation, with the Doctor unaware of anything the amalgamated subroutines get up to.
False Reassurance : Evil Doc says he just wants a place by the fire. He then drags Nakahn over to the fire and burns his hand in it, as first step in some Aggressive Negotiations .
Fanservice : Kes dons a snug catsuit very reminiscent of what Seven of Nine will wear once she joins the crew.
The Doctor notes that Kes is becoming "increasingly unpredictable, given to swings of mood and emotion." Surgeon, heal thyself first.
Maybe — Kes appreciates that the Doctor cares for her, and she won't forget it... How could she be in a position wherein she'd forget it?
Funny Background Event : Gandhi chatting up a holodeck babe, after telling off Lord Byron for being Distracted by the Sexy .
A Glitch in the Matrix : When the amalgamated subroutines degrade, the Doctor flickers. Brought up to eleven with Body Horror when the subroutines perform horrific experiments on the characters from which they're derived to find how to kill the Doctor.
Historical Domain Character : Including Mahatma Gandhi , Lord Byron and T'Pau of Vulcan .
Due to the new personality created from combining the traits from the holographic representations of historical characters not being compatible with his base program, the Doctor glitches out in a manner resembling vertical static whenever the other personality surfaces.
This also applies to the holograms of the historical characters when the other personality hacks their programming in a desperate attempt to figure out a way to make himself more stable: the Gandhi hologram is standing still and undergoing a Demonic Head Shake , the Socrates hologram is lying on the ground with his lower half missing and empty insides visible while looking around in confusion, the T'Pau hologram is stuck repeating a kal-toh move and reseting back to her original position and the Lord Byron hologram is lying on a table with his head swelling and bulging unnaturally.
I'll Kill You! : Nakahn reveals that Voyager is preventing all ships from taking off until Kes is returned, but insists on being paid anyway. Evil EMH: (striking him) I'll kill you! Nakahn: If someone's going to die today, it won't be me.
In the Hood : Until Evil Doc throws off his cloak for a Dramatic Unmask .
Jekyll & Hyde : Complete with animalistic traits in the amalgamated subroutines: cold stare, hunched walk and slightly pooched lower lip.
Just a Kid : Kes says without any irony that the Doctor should stop treating her like a child because she's three years old now (a third of the Ocampan lifespan).
Make It Look Like an Accident : Evil Doc makes it look like B'Elanna has collapsed from anaphylactic shock over a meal she ate earlier.
B'Elanna warns the Doctor against fiddling with his program because "someone might hurt you". She then pointedly looks down at the Doctor's hand on her thigh. Doc promptly erases his Lord Byron subroutine .
The female transporter ensign gives a knowing smile when Kes beams back to Voyager .
Milking the Giant Cow : Albeit with a phaser in one hand.
Not Big Enough for the Two of Us Kes: The mobile emitter contains both your programs. If you damage it you could both be destroyed. Evil EMH: There's not enough room inside for both of us. One must die. I deserve to exist more than your Doctor does.
Not Himself : The Doctor uses a phaser on the transporter operator.
Other Me Annoys Me : Evil Doc rants about his good self. "He's as weak as the rest of you. He fails to understand the power of his own holographic nature. He is detestable." He wants B'Elanna to help him destroy the Doctor part of himself.
O.O.C. Is Serious Business : Holy crap, Doctor!
Patrick Stewart Speech : Kes points out to Evil Doc the benefits of cooperation.
Pet the Dog : In-Universe ; Kes points out to Evil Doc that his actions are motivated by concern for her, no matter what he might claim .
Pun : The Doctor says his improvement program will help him develop "more patience with my patients".
Punctuated! For! Emphasis! Kes: What you're doing is wrong. Evil EMH: (adjusting tricorder) Not at all. It's working perfectly. Kes: That's not what I meant. Evil EMH: (slamming Kes against the bulkhead) I know ...what you meant .
Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil : Evil Doc follows a female ensign into a turbolift, eyeing her with a suggestive leer. Fortunately Tom Paris enters the turbolift before anything happens.
Reaction Shot : The Doctor's first on-screen change into his evil self is shown only by B'Elanna's horrified expression.
Replacement Goldfish : The Doctor thinks that Kes is rushing into her relationship with Zahir because of her recent breakup with Neelix.
Sexy Discretion Shot : After snogging Zahir, Kes is shown beaming up to Voyager at three in the morning, with her hair tousled and a sore back, grinning like she just got laid .
Shadow Archetype : The alternate EMH even goes into describing himself in such terms.
Sinister Surveillance : While Kes and Zahir snog, a hooded figure watches them from the shadows.
Slow-Motion Fall / Slow "NO!" : ZAHIR!!!
Species of Hats : The Mikhal Travelers are a race of loosely-governed Bold Explorers .
Split-Personality Makeover : Evil Doc's appearance is subtly different to his good counterpart; his eyes are beadier and his teeth are somewhat crooked, giving him a more animalistic look. note Robert Picardo actually wore the same dental prosthetic he wore as evil werewolf Eddie Quist in The Howling ; he apparently keeps old prosthetics as souvenirs.
Strapped to an Operating Table : Done with drugs that paralyse B'Elanna.
Teleportation Rescue : When Evil Doc grabs Kes and jumps off the cliff , they're transported in mid-fall.
Tempting Fate : Kes says she wants complication in her life.
That's No Moon : Nakahn talks about a forest-covered planetoid he claimed to have once discovered: during an "earthquake", it turned out to really be a gigantic alien creature with its own ecosystem growing on it. Of course, the whole story turns out to be a Tall Tale .
Twerp Sweating : Tuvok grills Zahir on whether he is responsible enough to be trusted with Kes. He reassures him as to his genuine concern for her.
Uncomfortable Elevator Moment : The nameless ensign has no idea how uncomfortable it could've been.
What You Are in the Dark : The dark sides of all the characters the Doctor studies for his improvement bite him hard when he develops a homicidal, possessive personality in reaction to Kes' considering leaving the ship, though the malevolent personality denies this, claiming that he simply wants to live.
Yandere : The Doctor, of all people, caused by his forced Character Development .
You Wouldn't Shoot Me : Evil Doc tells Kes his phaser is set to kill. Kes: You won't fire. Evil EMH: ( Psychotic Smirk ) Are you so certain?
Star Trek Voyager S 3 E 16 "Unity"
Recap/Star Trek: Voyager
Star Trek Voyager S 3 E 18 "Rise"

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To improve his performance as the ship's physician doctor modifies his program to include the subroutine of poet Lord Byron a skilled Vulcan diplomat and other famous personages from the ships holodeck. But his effort soon becomes a case of good intentions gone mad.

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Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.32 x 4.19 x 1.12 inches; 6.13 ounces
Director ‏ : ‎ Beaumont, Gabrielle, Biller, Kenneth, Bole, Cliff, Bruno, John, Burton, LeVar
Release date ‏ : ‎ September 3, 2002
Date First Available ‏ : ‎ October 25, 2006
Actors ‏ : ‎ Dawson, Roxann, Russ, Tim
Studio ‏ : ‎ Paramount
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000003KB1

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8 Alpha Quadrant Things Star Trek: Voyager Found In Delta Quadrant

Star Trek: Voyager finds familiar things from the Alpha Quadrant in the Delta Quadrant, sparking important questions and connections.
Encounter with Ferengi negotiators leads Voyager crew to stop their interference in a pre-warp civilization for profits.
Janeway and crew discover humans abducted by aliens in the 1930s living in the Delta Quadrant, including Amelia Earhart.

For a show with the conceit of being so far from home, Star Trek: Voyager found a surprising number of things in the Delta Quadrant that originated in the Alpha Quadrant, including several from Earth itself. The USS Voyager, commanded by Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), and Commander Chakotay's (Robert Beltran) Maquis raider Val Jean were both brought to the Delta Quadrant in 2371 by the Caretaker (Basil Langton). After Janeway destroyed the Caretaker's array to save the Ocampa , Voyager and the Val Jean were left without a ticket back to the Alpha Quadrant, and banded together to make the long journey.

Finding something familiar in an otherwise totally alien corner of the galaxy brought a sense of familiarity to the USS Voyager crew and viewers at home alike, but the presence of something from the Alpha Quadrant in the Delta Quadrant inevitably raised important questions , like how familiar people and objects traveled 70,000 light years from home in the first place, and whether the find could lead Captain Kathryn Janeway towards a quicker path home to Earth.

Star Trek: Voyagers 20 Best Episodes Ranked

A pair of ferengi negotiators, arridor and kol, star trek: voyager season 3, episode 5 "false profits".

The USS Voyager encounters a pair of Ferengi negotiators, Arridor (Dan Shor) and Kol (Leslie Jordan), who claim to be the prophesied Great Sages of the Takarians, a society with Bronze Age level technology. The Ferengi have no Prime Directive to deter them from interfering with the Takarians' development , so they're performing "miracles" with a standard replicator to reap the monetary benefits of the Takarians' worship. Voyager's crew know the Ferengi reputation well enough to know they're no Sages, so they must figure out how to put a stop to Arridor and Kol's grift.

"False Profits" serves as a Star Trek sequel episode to Star Trek: The Next Generation season 3, episode 8 "The Price", as Voyager catches up with Arridor and Kol (formerly played by J. R. Quinonez) seven years after their Delta Quadrant arrival. The Ferengi took a test flight through the supposedly stable wormhole near Barzan II, which was supposed to emerge in the Gamma Quadrant, but instead stranded the Ferengi in the Delta Quadrant, where they made the best of their situation as only Ferengi can.

Star Trek: Voyager Season 3, Episode 23 "Distant Origin"

"Distant Origin" opens on Forra Gegen (Henry Woronicz), a scientist who discovers that his people, the Voth, share certain genetic similarities with the humans aboard the USS Voyager. While this confirms Gegen's theory that the Voth are the descendants of a species brought to their homeworld millions of years ago , religious leader Minister Odala (Concetta Tomei) refuses to accept the truth. Even with Commander Chakotay present as a living specimen of humanity, Odala pushes Gegen to recant, because Gegen's theory goes against the Voth Doctrine that keeps Odala in power.

After meeting Gegen's assistant, Tova Veer (Christopher Liam Moore), Janeway and the Doctor use the holodeck as a research guide to extrapolate how hadrosaurs might look in the 24th century if they'd been able to evolve into a humanoid form with comparable intelligence. The result resembles Veer, so Janeway and the Doctor conclude, like Gegen, that the Voth evolved from hadrosaurs into a highly advanced species on Earth , then fled to the Delta Quadrant in spacefaring vessels instead of being wiped out with the other dinosaurs.

The Friendship One Probe

Star trek: voyager season 7, episode 21 "friendship one".

By Star Trek: Voyager season 7 , the USS Voyager is in regular contact with Starfleet Command, and Starfleet gives Voyager a mission to retrieve a 21st-century Earth probe, Friendship One . The probe proves difficult to find, but once discovered on an alien planet suffering devastating climate collapse, the implications of Friendship One's launch become clear. Besides the irreversible damage to the planet's climate, the inhabitants are all suffering from radiation sickness, and bear understandable hostility towards Earth, because the aliens believe humans orchestrated their destruction with the Friendship One probe.

The United Earth Space Probe Agency was one of the early names for the organization the USS Enterprise belongs to in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode, "Charlie X".

Friendship One was launched in 2067 by the United Earth Space Probe Agency with the intention of making friends with whomever found it, as the name implies. Although Friendship One, the 400-year-old Earth probe, traveled for centuries carrying messages of peace, musical recordings, and ways to translate languages, the people who discovered Friendship One in the Delta Quadrant took a greater interest in the antimatter it used to travel across space. Without the proper knowledge of its use, antimatter proved devastating to the planet and its people, resulting in death and disease for generations.

Dreadnought, a Cardassian Missile

Star trek: voyager season 2, episode 17 "dreadnought".

The USS Voyager discovers a dangerously powerful, self-guided Cardassian missile in the Delta Quadrant, which Lt. B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) recognizes as one nicknamed "Dreadnought" . When B'Elanna was with the Maquis, Torres had actually reprogrammed the missile herself, with the intention of turning the Cardassians' own weapon against them. Without a Cardassian target in sight, the artificially intelligent Cardassian Dreadnought targets a heavily-populated Class-M planet , Rakosa V. B'Elanna determines she must be the one to keep Dreadnought from hurting anyone else, and boards the missile to convince it to stand down.

While no concrete reason is given for exactly how the Dreadnought wound up in the Delta Quadrant, its last known location in the Alpha Quadrant was the Badlands, the same rough patch of space where Voyager and the Val Jean, Chakotay's Maquis raider, fatefully met. Because of this, Torres theorizes that Dreadnought arrived in the Delta Quadrant the same way that Voyager and the Val Jean did , courtesy of the Caretaker.

Star Trek: Voyagers BElanna Is More Klingon Than TNGs Worf Ever Was

A klingon d-7 class cruiser, complete with klingons, star trek: voyager, season 7, episode 14 "prophecy".

The USS Voyager certainly never expected to find a Klingon ship in the Delta Quadrant, but more surprising is the fact that the crew of the Klingon D-7 Class Cruiser believes their savior, the prophesied kuvah'magh, is aboard Voyager . Janeway assures the Klingon captain, Kohlar (Wren T. Brown), that the Federation and Klingon Empire have been allies for the past 80 years, and offers Voyager's own half-Klingon, Lt. B'Elanna Torres, as proof their societies are working together now. The kuvah'magh is Torres' unborn daughter, who does save the Klingons, but not the way they expected.

Centuries ago, Kohlar's great-grandfather set off on a quest to find the kuvah'magh, and the Klingon D-7 Cruiser became a generation ship that is now crewed by the descendants of its original crew . The quest begun by Kohlar's great-grandfather brought Kohlar and his crew to the Delta Quadrant after four generations of searching. Whether B'Elanna's child is actually the kuvah'magh or not, Kohlar desperately wants the baby to be their savior, so that his people may finally rest.

Amelia Earhart

Star trek: voyager season 2, episode 1 "the 37s".

The discovery of a 1936 Ford truck, seemingly disconnected from any parent vehicle, leads the USS Voyager to a nearby Class-L planet, where they find eight humans who have been in cryo-stasis since they were abducted by aliens in the 1930s. Among them are one of Janeway's personal heroes, legendary American aviator Amelia Earhart (Sharon Lawrence) , who disappeared without a trace while attempting to fly around the world, and Earhart's navigator, Fred Noonan (David Graf). Earhart and the other preserved humans are known by the planet's inhabitants as "The 37s", and revered as sacred.

Originally thought to be aliens, the natives of the unnamed planet are the descendants of humans. A species called the Briori abducted the natives' ancestors, along with Earhart and the other 37s, from Earth centuries earlier , and took them to the Delta Quadrant. Once held as slaves, the humans who weren't in stasis revolted to free themselves from the Briori, and developed a thriving, Earth-like civilization in the Delta Quadrant. Voyager's crew consider staying with the humans in their little slice of home, while Janeway also offers a ride back to Earth to anyone who wants it, including Amelia Earhart.

The USS Equinox

Star trek: voyager season 5, episode 26 & season 6, episode 1 "equinox".

The crew of the USS Voyager believe they're the only Starfleet vessel in the Delta Quadrant until they find the USS Equinox, five years into their journey home. Captain Rudolph Ransom (John Savage) and the Equinox crew have had a harder time in the Delta Quadrant than Voyager, with more damage, fewer starting resources, and fewer opportunities to make friends along the way. Ransom's survival tactics include sacrificing innocent nucleogenic life forms for a more efficient form of fuel, which Janeway finds hard to stomach, and decides that Ransom needs to be held accountable for defying Federation ideals, regardless of how badly the Equinox is damaged.

Although Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) suggests that the Equinox might be in the Delta Quadrant on a rescue mission to find Voyager, the USS Equinox's specs don't fit the profile of a starship that would be assigned to a long-range mission. The explanation of how the Equinox arrived in the Delta Quadrant in the first place seems fairly simple, because Captain Ransom tells Janeway that the Equinox was also abducted by the Caretaker , just like Voyager, but the Equinox has only been in the Delta Quadrant for 2 years, and Janeway destroyed the Caretaker's array 5 years earlier.

Seven of Nine

Debuts in star trek: voyager season 4, episode 1 "scorpion, part 2".

When Captain Kathryn Janeway allies with the Borg in order to secure safe passage across Borg space, Janeway refuses the cursory assimilation that the Borg want to use to communicate with Janeway and Voyager's crew, and instead requests a speaker for the Borg, citing the existence of Locutus (Patrick Stewart) as precedent. Seven of Nine , Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01, is selected as the Borg drone to act as liaison between the Collective and Voyager, likely because Seven of Nine had once been a member of Species 5168, like most of Voyager's crew -- in other words, human.

Voyager season 5, episodes 15 & 16, "Dark Frontier" provides even more detail of the Hansens' fateful journey.

After Seven's link with the Collective is severed, more information about Seven's human origin comes to light. In Voyager season 4, episode 6 "The Raven", when Voyager nears the Hansens' ship, the USS Raven, memories of Seven's early life surface, revealing that Seven had been six-year-old human Annika Hansen , the daughter of Magnus Hansen (Kirk Baily) and Erin Hansen (Laura Stepp), Federation scientists who were studying the Borg when they were assimilated. Voyager season 5, episodes 15 & 16, "Dark Frontier" provides even more detail of the Hansens' fateful journey, showing the Raven arriving in the Delta Quadrant by following a Borg Cube through a transwarp conduit.

10 Ways USS Voyager Changed In Star Treks Delta Quadrant

Star Trek: Voyager links back to the greater Star Trek universe with people and starships from the Alpha Quadrant. Connections to the familiar were especially important early on, because Voyager 's place in the Star Trek franchise was established and aided by the legitimacy these finds offered. Later, when the USS Voyager used the Hirogen communications array to communicate with Starfleet Command, links back to the Alpha Quadrant were plentiful again, not only to prove that the USS Voyager was closer to home, but to help Star Trek: Voyager maintain connections to Star Trek and carry the franchise in its final years.

Star Trek: Voyager is available to stream on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Voyager

Cast Jennifer Lien, Garrett Wang, Tim Russ, Robert Duncan McNeill, Roxann Dawson, Robert Beltran, Kate Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, Ethan Phillips, Robert Picardo

Release Date May 23, 1995

Genres Sci-Fi, Adventure

Network UPN

Streaming Service(s) Paramount+

Franchise(s) Star Trek

Writers Michael Piller, Rick Berman

Showrunner Kenneth Biller, Jeri Taylor, Michael Piller, Brannon Braga

Rating TV-PG

8 Alpha Quadrant Things Star Trek: Voyager Found In Delta Quadrant

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Published May 29, 2024

The Darkest Treks: Star Trek's Closest Calls with Black Holes

From lost probes to ancient treasure, Starfleet's encounters with black holes require science know-how and faith of the heart.

This article contains story details and plot points for Star Trek: Discovery's "Lagrange Point."

Graphic illustration of a starship flying above a the gravitational pull of a black hole

StarTrek.com

As the journey of Star Trek: Discovery comes close to reaching its endpoint, the eponymous starship and crew have found themselves at the end of a very long road. In the search for the technology left behind by the mysterious Progenitors , we learn that the technology itself has been hidden at a specific spot, right in a tricky place, between two black holes. In scientific terms, this is called a " Lagrange Point ," which is where the episode gets its name and refers to a location in space between two bodies in which gravitational attraction and repulsion are enhanced, creating what NASA calls "parking spots," in space.

In this case, the two bodies that have created a small parking spot are two black holes, rendered in all their glory, resembling what physicist Kip Thorne posits black holes would really look like if observed from a spaceship. But, Star Trek has been thinking about black holes, long before current science was really sure what they might look like, and, as such, Starfleet's history with this phenomenon goes deep. So deep, you might say, that light can't even escape!

Here's a brief history of Star Trek 's best black hole adventures, and how these wonderfully mysterious phenomena continue to pull us in.

Voyager 6 … I Presume?

Beyond the iris-like petals, the center of the enormous vessel contained the oldest part of V'ger – Voyager 6, an unmanned deep space probe launched by NASA in the late 20th century — in Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

In Star Trek: The Motion Picture , the crew of the Enterprise learn that a giant machine intelligence known as V'Ger is really a mash-up of an ancient alien lifeform and an old Earth space probe called Voyager 6 . Decker tells us that the probe "disappeared into what they used to call a black hole." In 1979, the same year as the Disney sci-fi romp titled The Black Hole , the actual term "black hole" was still relatively new, at least in the popular consciousness. Although the etymology of "black hole," can be traced to the early 1960s, it was not until 1967 — smack-dab in the middle of the first run of The Original Series — that the scientific term became more widely used. Before the 1960s, referring to a collapsed star with an unbeatable gravitational pull wasn't standardized, and as far back as the 1700s, the term "dark star" was often used instead.

"Beyond the Farthest Star"

This is why Decker says people used to call various gravitational phenomena black holes. At the time, the coinage was still fairly new! In The Animated Series debut episode, "Beyond the Farthest Star," the Enterprise gets into the orbit of a "dead star," which is an imprecise astronomical term, because again, at the time, black holes had just recently become fully codified as black holes.The 1967 TOS episode " Tomorrow is Yesterday ," also mentions that the Enterprise uses a "black star" to create a slingshot effect and travel back in time. In theoretical physics, a "black star" is a kind of alternative theory to a black hole, but, it's also possible that in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," Starfleet merely called it a black star, and it was really a black hole.

In real life, NASA has not lost any probes to black holes, at least not that we know. But, on Voyager I and Voyager II , there is a golden record, containing various pieces of information about Earth, including an audio recording of Nick Sagan saying, "Hello from the children of planet Earth." Sagan is the son of Carl Sagan and was a writer for The Next Generation and Voyager .

Singularity Headaches from Voyager to Enterprise

A Voyager shuttle with B'Elanna Torres and Janeway charge a dekyon beam at the site of a quantum singularity in hopes of expanding the hole in 'Parallax'

"Parallax"

Speaking of spacecraft called " Voyager ," the wayward crew in Star Trek: Voyager dealt with more than their fair share of black hole conundrums. In the second regular episode of Voyager , ever, " Parallax ," they encounter an event horizon of a "quantum singularity." In physics, the center of a black hole is called a singularity, the place of infinite density. In "Parallax," the proximity to this singularity the Voyager crew believed there was another ship trapped in the same area of space, but, in reality, it was a time-delayed echo of Voyager itself.

In the episode " Hunters ," the Voyager crew was able to transform a microsingularity into a full-blown black hole, and thus, destroy an attacking Hirogen ship. A few years later in Earth time — but roughly 200 years prior in Star Trek time — the Enterprise episode " Singularity " found the crew of the NX-01 skirting the edge of a black hole, resulting in everyone becoming obsessed with irritating minutiae. You could say, the proximity to the singularity of a black hole made the crew single-minded .

Real Black Holes Come To Star Trek

"If Memory Serves"

As NASA has pointed out over the years, black holes are not fully understood by contemporary science, an evolving truth that is reflected over the years throughout all of Star Trek , too. This is why, it wasn't until the 2019 Discovery episode " If Memory Serves " that we got our first Star Trek glimpse of what current science thinks a black hole might really look like. When siblings Spock and Burnham take an unauthorized road trip to Talos IV, the Talosians create an illusionary black hole around their planet to ward off the visitors. From this point, all versions of Star Trek have begun using this conception of black holes on-screen. While the red-matter-generated black hole Spock created in the 2009 Star Trek film looks incredible, the version first depicted in Discovery Season 2 is more scientifically up-to-date.

This contemporary version of a black hole also appeared in the Strange New Worlds episode " Memento Mori ," in which the Enterprise crew uses the gravity of a brown dwarf star — tethered to a black hole — to escape attacks from the Gorn. A black star of this nature also appears in the opening credits of every single episode of Lower Decks , in which it appears the U.S.S. Cerritos almost gets sucked into a black hole, but, thankfully, narrowly escapes.

At her station on the Discovery bridge, Tilly looks down at the screen which reveals they're at the location of binary black holes in 'Lagrange Point'

"Lagrange Point"

Because Discovery pioneered this newer look for black holes, it's fitting that two black holes appear in the penultimate episode of the entire series. From navigating the multiverse to the mycelial network, Discovery has had more than its fair share of encounters with the stormy weather of outer space. But, with the double black holes of "Lagrange Point," Discovery proves that when it comes to space obstacles, sometimes, the classics work best.

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Ryan Britt is the author of the nonfiction books Phasers on Stun! How the Making and Remaking of Star Trek Changed the World (2022), The Spice Must Flow: The Journey of Dune from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies (2023), and the essay collection Luke Skywalker Can’t Read (2015). He is a longtime contributor to Star Trek.com and his writing regularly appears with Inverse, Den of Geek!, Esquire and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Maine with his family.

Star Trek: Discovery Seasons 1-4 are streaming exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., the UK, Canada, Switzerland, South Korea, Latin America, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and Austria. Seasons 2 and 3 also are available on the Pluto TV “Star Trek” channel in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The series streams on Super Drama in Japan, TVNZ in New Zealand, and SkyShowtime in Spain, Portugal, Poland, The Nordics, The Netherlands, and Central and Eastern Europe and also airs on Cosmote TV in Greece. The series is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

Collage of Hy'Rell, Linus, Rayner, and other species featured in Star Trek: Discovery

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Star Trek needs less logic and more crying

Thankfully, Star Trek: Discovery is doing just that

Michael from Star Trek: Discovery sitting in the captain’s chair

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“Who do we want to be?”

Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) poses that question to the United Federation of Planets council at the climax of “… But to Connect,” the seventh episode of Star Trek: Discovery ’s fourth season. The council has convened to address the presence of a new species whose arrival in the galaxy has planet-destroying consequences, perhaps intentionally. Some council members consider an aggressive response, but Burnham urges diplomacy, recognizing a unique first contact opportunity.

Disagreements such as these are hardly new to Star Trek. In fact, the paradigmatic Star Trek scene involves a group of people peacefully debating possible complicated issues. But Discovery takes a decidedly unique approach to this trope. The camera glides around Burnham as she speaks, capturing every creased brow and pleading smile, underscoring her feelings even more than her words. Martin-Green pours herself into the moment, lowering her voice to a whisper when being sincere and raising it an octave when marshaling hope. She finishes the speech a near wreck, barely fighting back tears.

For its detractors, scenes like this are everything wrong with the series. Over its 3 ½ seasons, Discovery has established itself as the most openly emotional Star Trek series, in which characters talk about their trauma, give each other meaningful hugs, and shed tears in nearly every episode. Discovery explores pathos more thoroughly than any other series in the franchise. In doing so, it underscores an important aspect of humanity, one too often downplayed by the franchise.

Some of the crew of the Discovery in a still from Star Trek: Discovery

Michael Burnham is hardly the first Trek character to shed tears on the final frontier. After all, who can forget William Shatner stifling a cry during Captain Kirk’s eulogy for Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ?

Right from the start of Star Trek, Doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley) was there at Kirk’s side, countering Spock’s cold logic with a passionate outburst. Many of the all-time best Star Trek episodes mine the emotional core of their characters, letting them be messy and human instead of demanding that they adhere to logic in every moment. The Deep Space Nine episode “ The Visitor ” captures the longing and joy Jake Sisko feels as he grows to an adult, only seeing his time-displaced father in short intervals every few years, while the bittersweet final moments in the life of George Kirk reverberate not only throughout 2009’s Star Trek , but all three reboot films.

But as powerful as these moments may be, Trek usually treats empathy as a challenge, a problem to overcome for the greater good. Take the classic episode “ The City on the Edge of Forever ”, in which a delusional McCoy disrupts the timestream, inadvertently preventing the death of social worker Edith Keeler, thus allowing her to found a humanitarian movement. But her work has the unintended consequence of delaying the U.S. entry into World War II, which allows the Nazis to kill far more people than they otherwise would have. As Spock describes it in his characteristically blunt manner, “Edith Keeler must die.”

To be sure, the death scene honors the pain and sorrow Kirk feels as he prevents McCoy from saving Keeler. But the message is clear: Because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, Kirk’s emotions take a back seat to demands of logic.

Edith Keeler dying in the street in a still from The Original Series of Star Trek

Similar plots reoccur throughout the franchise, a fact that can be traced back to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry imagined an ideal future for humanity , which had evolved past issues such as capitalism or racism and sexism. While Roddenberry didn’t explicitly outlaw emotion, he did reject plots that dealt with emotional issues, including interpersonal conflict, irrational responses to trauma, and grieving death. In a world where everyone could heal themselves and survive without struggle, he thought, logic would — and should — always win out.

Even when Trek series attend to the feelings, they either mishandle it or lose interest. As an empath and ship counselor, Deanna Troi seemed primed to fill the McCoy role on The Next Generation ( TNG ) , but the writers too often relegated her to describing other characters’ obvious feelings. By the time Voyager ’s Neelix matured from a manipulative coward into an empathetic morale officer, the show had turned its attention to hologram The Doctor and ex-Borg Seven of Nine. The same problem plagues Enterprise ’s genial Captain Archer, who was often overshadowed by the Vulcan T’Pol.

After Roddenberry died, the Star Trek shows were able to let emotions build up more throughout their shows. Deep Space Nine let its protagonists carry traumas and have romances. It even takes a nuanced look at the feelings associated with 20th-century racism (“ Far Beyond the Stars ”) and PTSD (“ It’s Only a Paper Moon ”).

The other three current ongoing Trek series each embrace emotion more consistently than their predecessors. Picard uses audience nostalgia for the title character as a contrast to Starfleet’s callous bureaucracy, while the young Delta Quadrant outcasts in Prodigy bubble over with childlike wonder as they become the crew of the abandoned USS Protostar. Lower Decks finds comedy not just in references to the goofier parts of Trek lore, but also in the foibles of its neurotic ensigns.

Two characters from Star Trek: Prodigy staring each other in the eyes

In each case, these series work precisely because it counters the franchise’s usual focus on logic over emotion. Picard becomes the principled leader that we know from TNG when he defies the Federation pragmatism to help synthetics by assembling a new crew. As much as Holographic Janeway tries to get the Prodigy kids in shape, the pleasure of the series comes from watching them learn how to make Starfleet regulations meaningful for themselves. Lower Deck s is funny precisely because its characters undercut the standard image of the constantly professional Starfleet officer. But because these series go in a new direction with its characters, they end up being exceptions that prove the rule. Picard’s rag-tag crew, the kids on the USS Protostar, and the Lower Decks goofballs indulge their feelings; members of the real, proper Starfleet do not.

Of the current ongoing Star Trek series, these “real, proper” Starfleet personnel can only be found on Discovery . And in many ways, the actions of Captain Burnham and her crew carry more weight than those of even Enterprise Captains Kirk or Picard, as the USS Discovery-A plays a central role in rebuilding the United Federation of Planets in the 32nd century. It’s a flagship vessel, both for the show and the greater series. Viewers have to take notice when Discovery breaks from the standard Star Trek portrayal of human emotion.

One of the clearest examples of the difference in Trek’s approach to emotional issues can be found in the season 2 TNG episode “ The Measure of a Man .” Taking the form of a courtroom drama, the episode centers around a debate about Commander Data’s personhood status, prompted when Starfleet defines him as mere property. Captain Picard argues for Data’s sentience, while Commander Riker has been ordered by Judge Advocate General Phillipa Louvois to contend that Data is property, fit for experimentation by Commander Bruce Maddox.

Unruly feelings abound: Riker feels guilty for prosecuting his crewmate, Picard and Phillipa Louvois have complicated feelings from a past romance, and Maddox has aspirations for his experiments. During the trial, Picard passionately states his case, with Patrick Stewart bringing Shakespearean gravitas to the speeches he delivers. “Starfleet was founded to seek out new life,” he declares in his booming baritone, pointing at Data; “ Well, there it sits! ”

But while Picard states his case lovingly and movingly, it’s a fundamentally logical argument that he wins with. If Starfleet defines life according to forms it knows and if Starfleet exists to seek out new forms of life, then it must alter its definition according to those new forms. Moreover, everyone involved must overcome their own emotions to accept Picard’s claim. Arguably the first great episode of TNG , “The Measure of a Man” chrystialized the focus on logic found in TOS and the early movies. From that episode forward, Trek would make explicit what was often implied: evolved humans do not use feelings to solve their problems.

The Discovery episode “ …But to Connect ” has clear parallels to “The Measure of a Man,” but the more recent episode emphasizes feelings over reason. Once again, the characters debate the distinction between personhood and property when Discovery’s computer Zora gains sentience, and Adira even echoes Picard when they call Zora an “entirely new lifeform.” But while there is certainly a logical structure to the various positions, director Lee Rose focuses on emotions. Arguing they should follow Starfleet protocol and put Zora into a new form, Stamets recounts the fear and mistrust he feels when she refuses a direct order from Captain Burnham to protect the crew. Contending that Zora should stay in Discovery, Adira and Gray relate their own feelings of rejection and acceptance for failing to fit social standards. Even Zora describes her affinity toward the crew and her worries for their safety.

Two people intensely debating on Star Trek: Discovery

In fact, Zora and her supporters win the debate not with a steel-tight syllogism, but with an ethos appeal. While investigating Zora’s memory structure, Adira finds a new section, which they identify as Zora’s subconscious. Within this field are images of Discovery ’s crew, connecting with and caring for one another. In part, this fact wins over Stamets and Kovich because the existence of a subconscious means that Zora cannot be considered artificial intelligence. But as the music and camera movements make clear, empathy for Zora drives Stamets’ decision.

For some of Discovery ’s critics, this plot resolves too easily, the equivalent of “hugging it out” instead of facing the issue (if they apply the same level of rigor to the fallacies in “The Measure of a Man”, I cannot say). But that reading misplaces the focus of the Zora debate. The goal of the debate isn’t to comb through legal proceedings, but to allow the participants to have their feelings recognized and validated. “It feels marvelous … Being seen,” Zora says after her official status is changed.

In these scenes, Discovery revises the utopian future that has always been at the heart of Star Trek. The humans of the future reach their best selves not by overcoming their emotions, but by recognizing them and caring for them, in themselves and others. Discovery insists that empathy is an effective way to seek out new life and new civilizations.

Michael Burnham asks the Federation council “Who do we want to be?” Discovery answers, boldly, firmly — and, yes, tearfully — “Fully human, both logical and emotional.”

Star Trek: Discovery tore itself apart for the good of Star Trek’s future

Star trek: discovery boldly goes where no trek has gone before by saying religion is... ok, actually, star trek: discovery is cracking open a box next gen closed on purpose.

COMMENTS

"Star Trek: Voyager" Darkling (TV Episode 1997)
Darkling: Directed by Alexander Singer. With Kate Mulgrew, Robert Beltran, Roxann Dawson, Jennifer Lien. As Kes develops a relationship with a Mikhal Traveler, a member of Voyager's crew develops a dangerously ruthless split personality with a fixation on Kes.
Darkling (episode)
The Doctor alters his personality subroutines while Kes contemplates leaving Voyager for a man. "Captain's log, stardate 50693.2. We've been in orbit above an outpost of the Mikhal Travelers. This loosely governed race of explorers has extensive knowledge of the territory ahead of us, which they are willing to share." Captain Kathryn Janeway talks with a Mikhal Traveler, who is later revealed ...
Darkling (Star Trek: Voyager)
Star Trek: Voyager. ) " Darkling " is the 60th episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the 18th episode of the third season. This episode focuses mostly on the events which result when the holographic Doctor (a self-aware computer program) aboard the starship USS Voyager tries to enhance himself by adding personality traits from other people into his ...
"Star Trek: Voyager" Darkling (TV Episode 1997)
"Star Trek: Voyager" Darkling (TV Episode 1997) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. Menu. Movies. ... STAR TREK VOYAGER SEASON 3 (1996) (8.5/10) a list of 26 titles created 12 Aug 2012 Movies to collect. Watch nearly immediately.
Star Trek: Voyager
Darkling is a surprisingly gothic episode, even considering the obvious influence of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde on the script. A lot of that is down to the choice of setting. Voyager visits a trading outpost on a remote world, a planet that seems to consist entirely of mountains and forests populated by an entire species of wanderers.
"Star Trek: Voyager" Darkling (TV Episode 1997)
As Kes develops a relationship with a Mikhal Traveler, a member of Voyager's crew develops a dangerously ruthless split personality with a fixation on Kes. Kes falls in love on an away mission. The Doctor, seeking to expand his programming, incorporates the personalities of several historical figures. B'Elanna Torres chastises The Doctor ...
Star Trek: Voyager: Season 3, Episode 18
Watch Star Trek: Voyager — Season 3, Episode 18 with a subscription on Paramount+, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video. The Doctor adopts some impressive character traits from historical ...
Watch Star Trek: Voyager Season 3 Episode 18: Star Trek: Voyager
S3 E18: Darkling. Sign up for Paramount+ to stream. TRY IT FREE. 45M FEB 19, 1997 TV-PG. ... Star Trek: Voyager . Kathryn Janeway is the captain of a starship that is lost in space and must travel across an unexplored region of the galaxy to find its way back home. On its way, the crew encounters different species they must deal with, but find ...
Darkling
The Doctor becomes a "Darkling" creation when he decides to upgrade his programming with the darker traits of history's finest minds.
Darkling
The Doctor tries to improve his programming by incorporating traits from famous and historical people, but is soon overwhelmed by the dark sides of th…
Retro Review: Darkling
An archive of Star Trek News. ... Darkling 6 min read. 8 years ... Kes has begun to fall in love with an alien pilot and is considering leaving Voyager for a wider range of life experiences ...
Star Trek: Voyager season 3 Darkling
Star Trek: Voyager follows the adventures of the Federation starship Voyager, which is under the command of Captain Kathryn Janeway.Voyager is in pursuit of a rebel Maquis ship in a dangerous part of the Alpha Quadrant when it is suddenly thrown 70,000 light years away to the Delta Quadrant. With much of her crew dead, Captain Janeway is forced to join forces with the Maquis to find a way back ...
"Darkling"
Star Trek: Voyager "Darkling" Air date: 2/19/1997 Teleplay by Joe Menosky Story by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky Directed by Alex Singer. Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan "Everyone seems to be treating me like I'm still a child. I'm three years old now. If I'm attracted to someone it's my business, not the whole ship's." — Kes
Star Trek Voyager: Darkling
The Voyager creative team loved to play with horror tropes, something that's come up over and over again across seasons two and three ('The Thaw' is probably the most terrifying episode of all). It's perhaps no surprise, then, that they decided to do a complete horror homage, as this episode offers Star Trek's take on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The ...
Star Trek: Voyager/Darkling
Darkling is the eighteenth episode of the third season of Star Trek: Voyager, and the sixtieth episode overall. Starring: Kate Mulgrew ( Captain Kathryn Janeway ) Also Starring: Robert Beltran ( Commander Chakotay ), Roxann Dawson ( Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres ), Jennifer Lien ( Kes ), Robert Duncan McNeill ( Lieutenant Tom Paris ), Ethan ...
Treknobabble: Voyager, Season 3: Darkling
Voyager, Season 3: Darkling. Voyager, Season 3. "Darkling". Airdate: February 19, 1997. 60 of 168 produced. 59 of 168 aired. Introduction. The Doctor is experimenting with augmenting his personality with some of history's greatest figures. Meanwhile, Kes falls for the charms of a wandering explorer, and considers leaving Voyager to follow him.
Star Trek: Voyagers Jekyll & Hyde Doctor Episode Was Originally ...
The Doctor's original dark persona in Star Trek: Voyager's season 3 episode "Darkling" was intended to be more sadistic and perverse. Michael Piller stopped "Darkling" from showing the Doctor's ...
Star Trek Voyager
First aired: 19 February 1997The Doctor alters his personality subroutines while Kes contemplates leaving Voyager for a man.
"Star Trek: Voyager" Darkling (TV Episode 1997)
Star Trek: Voyager (TV Series) Darkling (1997) User Reviews Review this title 11 Reviews. Hide Spoilers. Sort by: Filter by Rating: 7 /10. The Doctor and Mr. Hyde Tweekums 26 August 2010. Warning: Spoilers. While gathering information about the space ahead of them from a race of space travellers Kes becomes interested in one of them in ...
Star Trek Voyager S 3 E 17 "Darkling" / Recap
Star Trek Voyager S 3 E 17 "Darkling". I was born of the hidden, the suppressed. I am the dark threads from many personalities. Kes, rebounding fairly hard from her recent breakup with Neelix, finds a "friend" in Mikhal Traveler Zahir, a Lovable Rogue whose love of adventure and bravery enthralls her. But the rapidity of her relationship with ...
Darkling
The Delta Flyers is a weekly Star Trek: Voyager rewatch and recap podcast hosted by Garrett Wang and Robert Duncan McNeill. Each week Garrett and Robert will rewatch an episode of Voyager starting at the very beginning. This week's episode is Darkling. Garrett and Robbie recap and discuss the episode, and share their insight as series regulars.
Star Trek
Amazon.com: Star Trek - Voyager, Episode 61: Darkling [VHS] : Dawson, Roxann, Russ, Tim, Beaumont, Gabrielle, Biller, Kenneth, Bole, Cliff, Bruno, John, Burton, LeVar ...
8 Alpha Quadrant Things Star Trek: Voyager Found In Delta Quadrant
"False Profits" serves as a Star Trek sequel episode to Star Trek: The Next Generation season 3, episode 8 "The Price", as Voyager catches up with Arridor and Kol (formerly played by J. R ...
The Darkest Treks: Star Trek's Closest Calls with Black Holes
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the crew of the Enterprise learn that a giant machine intelligence known as V'Ger is really a mash-up of an ancient alien lifeform and an old Earth space probe called Voyager 6.Decker tells us that the probe "disappeared into what they used to call a black hole." In 1979, the same year as the Disney sci-fi romp titled The Black Hole, the actual term "black ...
"Star Trek: Voyager" Darkling (TV Episode 1997)
He fails to understand the power of his own holographic nature. He is detestable. The Doctor-Darkling : I am beyond considerations of wrong and right. Behavioral categories are for the weak, for those of you without the will to define your existence, to do what they must, no matter who might get harmed along the way.
Star Trek needs less logic and more crying
The Paramount Plus series Star Trek: Discovery season 4 joins Prodigy and other new Star Trek TV shows as being more emotional and less logical, particularly with Zora. That's a good thing.

Darkling (episode)

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