“The Swarm”
Written by Mike Sussman
Directed by Alexander Singer
Season 3, Episode 4
Production episode 149
Original air date: September 25, 1996
Stardate: 50252.3
Captain’s log. While Voyager is getting supplies, Paris and Torres take a shuttle to investigate some odd sensor readings. They don’t find anything for several hours, but eventually they do track something—and then they come under attack by an alien ship that beams two people aboard and shoots them both, speaking in a language the universal translator can’t handle.
The EMH is on the holodeck, attempting to perform opera. He’s doing a duet of “O, Soave Faniculla” from Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème with a 22nd-century soprano named Giuseppina Pentageli. However, the holodeck has also re-created Pentageli’s rather difficult personality, and then on top of everything, the EMH forgets the words at one point.
Before he can pursue this unexplained memory loss, he’s summoned to sickbay. Voyager has found the shuttle, and Paris and Torres are badly hurt. Torres is recovering nicely, but Paris needs surgery. It quickly becomes apparent that the EMH’s memory loss is more far-reaching than just one song—he forgets to tell Torres she’s well enough to be discharged, and he no longer remembers the surgical procedure that Paris needs. He still has his surgical skills, however, so Kes basically reads him the procedure to walk him through it and save Paris.
Neelix has heard of these aliens that Torres has described, and while he doesn’t know their names, he does know that they’re to be avoided at all costs. The sensor readings that Paris and Torres were investigating in the first place was a sensor net that the aliens use to detect intruders. They’ve scanned more thoroughly and mapped out their border based on that net, and going around their territory will add fifteen months to their journey home. Janeway finds this totally unacceptable. She tasks the crew with figuring a safe way through without going around.
After saving Paris, the EMH reports his memory issues to Torres. The EMH has been in far greater use than expected, and the extra memory buffers Torres put in to help him cope are breaking down. At this point, her best option is to reinitialize him—the problem is that he’ll then lose all his knowledge and experience gained over the past two years. He will be as he was when they first activated him. (Nobody mentions that he’d also lose all the experience he’s gained from various Delta Quadrant species they’ve encountered, most especially Talaxians, Ocampa, Kazon, and Vidiians.)
Kes very passionately argues against that option. The EMH isn’t just a program, he’s a person, and they should make every effort to heal him rather than reset him. Janeway agrees, and tasks Torres with finding another option.
Chakotay and Kim have a plan to get through the aliens’ territory: modifying the shields to refract the sensors in the net and then flying through the “skinniest” part of their space and hope they don’t get noticed.
Torres tries several things in sickbay, but still can’t fix the problem, not aided by the EMH kibitzing. She then goes to the holodeck and runs the EMH diagnostic program, which is a re-creation of the Jupiter Station lab where Dr. Lewis Zimmerman created the EMH, complete with an avatar of Zimmerman himself.
Zimmerman quickly diagnoses the problem: The EMH has run significantly longer than it was designed to, and is filled with a crapton of excess memories and experiences that are utterly irrelevant to its function. Torres knows all this already, but they have to keep him running due to being 70,000 light-years from home with no medical staff.
Torres is needed to help Voyager get through alien territory, so she leaves Zimmerman to work. Kes goes to the holodeck to see how the EMH is doing—and also advocate for him.
Voyager makes it through the sensor net seemingly undetected. They find a swarm of alien ships, but they’re inactive. They zip across the alien territory, but Paris says there’s a drag on the engines.
Then they detect a ship that is different from all the others. There’s only one life sign. They beam the survivor aboard. He’s a Mislen named Chardis. Chardis’s wounds are too great for Kes (with minimal assistance from a deteriorating EMH, who’s barely able to follow Kes’s simple instructions) to treat, and he dies, but not until he tells what happened: The aliens attached their ships to the Mislen vessel’s hull and drained it of all its energy before trying to crush them.
One of the ships attached to the Mislen ship detaches and latches onto Voyager‘s hull. It emits a polaron pulse that negates Voyager‘s shield trick, and now the swarm of alien ships can detect them, and they’re off to the races. The alien ships soon catch up to Voyager and latch onto the hull and start draining their energy.
Kes suggests using the Zimmerman hologram as a graft, adding it to the EMH’s memory to expand it enough to stop degrading. Zimmerman points out that they’ll lose the diagnostic program if they do that, and it still may not work, but Kes thinks it’s worth the risk.
Janeway suggests destroying one ship to break the lattice. Three aliens beam on board, and wound one bridge crew member, but Tuvok, Janeway, and Chakotay are able to fight them off. For some reason, they stop beaming people aboard then, giving Kim a chance to destroy one ship, which destroys the lattice, er, somehow. The swarm breaks off and Voyager continues through.
The procedure on the EMH is successful, but the doctor now acts as if he’s just been activated, with no apparent memory of anything that has happened since Voyager fell down the Caretaker’s rabbit hole. However, as he prepares an analgesic for Torres’s headache, he starts to sing “O, Soave Faniculla.”
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The EMH’s experiences over the first two seasons-and-a-bit have added fifteen thousand gigaquads to his memory, which is more than the matrix can handle, apparently.
There’s coffee in that nebula! After going out of her way to follow Starfleet regulations to the letter in, more or less, every other episode, Janeway decides to say “fuck it” and barrel through the sovereign territory of an alien species just because she doesn’t want to be inconvenienced by an extra fifteen months of travel on her seventy-year journey. (Said journey being so urgent that she was willing to let Torres and Paris arse about looking for sensor readings for hours on end.)
Half and half. Torres has to find an errant sensor reading, modify the shields, and try to fix the EMH. She is successful in all three to a degree, though at one point Kes asks for her help with the EMH and Janeway says no because she’s busy with other stuff and, well, what about the entire rest of the engineering staff?
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix tells everyone that the aliens are bad news. The rest of the episode proves him right.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Apparently Zimmerman didn’t program the EMH with the capacity to expand its memory very far, which is a problem if the program needs to learn new medical techniques for, say, newly encountered species—y’know, that thing that’s Starfleet’s mission statement? Also neither the EMH nor the diagnostic program can be copied or backed up, making them both unique among computer programs. (No, seriously, shouldn’t there be regular backups of the EMH made? And why would grafting the Zimmerman hologram make it disappear? That’s not how computer programs work. This is especially glaring given that “Living Witness” will later establish that there is a backup EMH…)
Forever an ensign. Kim comes up with a way to get through the aliens’ sensor net because he’s just that awesome.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. The EMH’s diagnostic program is a holodeck re-creation of where he was programmed, Jupiter Station.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Paris and Torres are alone on a shuttlecraft for several hours, with Paris teasing Torres about the crush Freddy Bristow has on her. Given the future relationship between the two, this scene is especially hilarious.
When the holographic Zimmerman realizes that the EMH has had relationships with women, he shoots the doctor a look and asks, “Did they find you attractive?”
Do it. “All the sopranos seem to have the most irritating personalities. These women are arrogant, superior, condescending—I can’t imagine anyone behaving that way.”
The EMH showing a spectacular lack of self-awareness.
Welcome aboard. Carole Davis is delightfully snotty as the holographic opera diva. Steven Houska is completely expository as Chardis. And Robert Picardo does double duty, playing both the EMH and the holographic Zimmerman.
Trivial matters: This is the first time Robert Picardo has played an actual version of Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, though it’s still a holographic representation, as it was (kind of) in “Projections.” The real Zimmerman will be seen in the sixth season’s “Life Line,” and also in DS9‘s “Doctor Bashir, I Presume?”
While Michael Sussman got sole credit for writing the episode, Jeri Taylor did an uncredited rewrite of the teleplay.
The EMH plot was partly inspired by a notion put forth by Picardo whereby the EMH would interact with Zimmerman. In addition, Picardo had suggested the EMH getting an interest in opera during the second season, and was rather surprised that the producers took it seriously. Picardo did his own singing in the holodeck opera scene.
The aliens in the swarm are the first Voyager has encountered native to the Delta Quadrant to have transporter technology.
When Kes and the EMH are discussing his life on board, they talk about the events of “Caretaker” when he was first activated, the EMH remembers rubbing Kes’s feet in “Elogium,” and he gets angry when he realizes he doesn’t have a name, which has been a running theme since the first season.
Set a course for home. “It’s like singing with a computer!” When I wrote the second-season overview I pointed out that Voyager was at its best when it colored within the lines, as it were. When they did stories that needed to have scope beyond the 42 minutes of the episode itself, it didn’t work, and often was a colossal failure.
“The Swarm” is a colossal failure.
Let’s start with the worst part of the plot, which is Voyager plowing through sovereign territory to save themselves fifteen months in a seventy-year journey. The same Kathryn Janeway who insists on following Starfleet principles, who makes the Maquis crew wear Starfleet uniforms and follow Starfleet regulations, who refused to steal the Sikarians’ technology, who refused to share any technology with the Kazon, who refused to get into it with the Sky Spirits over polyferranide, and so on, suddenly decides that it’s totally okay to invade a foreign power’s space in order to make the journey go 11% faster. Never mind that they’ve already made tons of extra stops to stare at nebulae or futz about with supply issues that should be irrelevant to a ship with replicators or divert for whatever crazy-ass reason, the cumulative effect of which is likely to have added at least fifteen months to the journey anyhow…
This journey comes with considerable risk, as the Mislen ship demonstrates. (I’m giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming that the crewmember shot on the bridge survived, but if he died, it’s even worse.)
And the only response is one brief objection plus eyebrow-raise from Tuvok, and that’s it. This is a complete 180 from Janeway’s prior actions and it’s barely even acknowledged or dealt with.
Plus everything that happens with the aliens is so perfunctory and unexplained. And in the end, they technobabble their way out of it in a manner that’s incomprehensible even by the high standards of 1990s Trek technobabble.
At least the EMH plot is fun for a while, because Robert Picardo is always awesome, so two Robert Picardos is twice the awesome! From singing opera while wearing a ridiculous wig to his heartbreaking loss of memory to the even snottier Zimmerman, Picardo is superb throughout. On top of that, Jennifer Lien puts in a fantastic performance, as Kes argues vehemently and passionately for the EMH’s rights as a person. She was the first one on board to treat the doctor as a person rather than a computer program, and she values his friendship too much to just let him be reset without a fight.
But then the ending fucks it all up. It should be dramatic. It should be tragic. For all intents and purposes, the EMH is dead and has been replaced with a duplicate. But then they hedge their bets with the opera singing at the end—in much the same way Star Trek Nemesis would hedge Data’s death by having B4 sing “Blue Sky”—which already takes some of the zing out of it. Plus, this is a rewatch, not a watch, so I already know that (one line of dialogue in “Future’s End” excepted), this will never even be acknowledged again. Every subsequent episode of the show will portray the EMH the exact same way he was portrayed before, so the tragedy is completely flushed down the toilet.
This should’ve been a strong episode that showed Janeway agonizing over the decision to finally sacrifice some of her principles. This should’ve been a tragedy about how the EMH is paying the price for exceeding his programming. It wound up being an inconsequential technobabble episode that is only rated as high as it is because it’s got Robert Picardo in it twice.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido has been doing readings of his short fiction since the pandemic started. Check out his “KRAD COVID readings” YouTube channel which includes, among other things, his readings of his Star Trek short stories “Letting Go” (from the Voyager anthology Distant Shores), “Broken Oaths” (from the Deep Space Nine anthology Prophecy and Change), and “loDnI’pu’ vavpu’ je” (from the Tales from the Captain’s Table anthology), as well as an excerpt from the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novella Here There Be Monsters. There’s a new reading every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
On paper, I feel like I should love this episode. A subplot about them actually acting like they want to get home! Double the fun of Robert Picardo! And I love how determined they are to save not only his “physical” self, but everything he has learned along the way. The EMH is a person to them already, and they treat him like one- taking risks to ensure he stays “him.” There is a good episode in here, and it is all entirally focused on the EMH, Zimmerman, and the crew’s desire to fix him, not just for their own sake, but for his as well.
But the B- plot is the usual technobabble, made all the worse for all the reasons KRAD mentioned. The EMH doesn’t have back-ups? Not only is that foolish, but then what is the “second” EMH in “Living Witness”? Suddenly it is urgent that they get home?! Since when? They’ve wasted months poking around at every nebulae and negative space wedgie they can find, but suddenly 15 months is a bridge too far? Whats the sudden urgency? None of this would bother me if it led to or resulted from any actual character development (like the crew starting to realize, as Sisko put it, that they are no longer in Paradise, and being a saint isn’t always an option, and started to act a little more pragmatically), but these people will spend the next 5 years perfectly content to meander their way across the quadrant. It’s stuff like this that makes Janeway’s comments in “Equinox” so much more grating. It’s fine when she breaks the rules, for seemingly no reason other than it tickling her fancy, but when someone else does it? Feed them to the angry spirits! Demote them! It’s what they deserve!
Ah, the opera- this will show up a couple times again (special mention to “Tinker, Tailor, Doctor, Spy,”) and I’ve always assumed it was only included to let Robert Picardo show off his vocal chops. Interesting that he floated it without much expectation of it being picked up on. Do we ever see him doing Gilbert and Sullivan? I seem to recall TNG had an occasional fondness for them.
I rate this episode much more highly, because as far as I’m concerned, the Swarm plot is a completely forgettable time-filler and the only part that actually matters is the superb storyline about the Doctor’s memory loss. It’s one of the rare cases in Trek (DS9’s “The Muse” being the other) where an episode is named after its less important subplot.
I agree, though, that as with “Tuvix,” they totally dropped the ball by failing to have any followup and leaving it unclear whether the Doctor had really recovered his memory or not. Great routine, but they lost points on the dismount.
One of the pitches I developed for Voyager (though I don’t recall if it’s one I actually pitched) was a story called “Forget Me Not” in which Danara Pel returned and was devastated to discover that “Shmullus” had no memory of her. I think that would’ve been a natural followup. I managed to work one scene along those lines into Places of Exile in Myriad Universes, but due to length constraints, I was unable to tell the full story I’d envisioned.
Incidentally, the idea of an AI program not having backups is plausible if it’s a quantum computer. Quantum information can’t be copied like regular digital data; the act of measuring it alters it, so if you transfer quantum information from one ensemble of particles to a different one, the information is erased from the original ensemble.
Also, a conscious mind, AI or otherwise, is a very different thing from an ordinary computer program, because it’s not just a fixed set of data, it’s an active, dynamic process. It’s something that emerges from a set of initial conditions when you run them. If you restart the same set of initial conditions, chaos theory means the result you get won’t be exactly the same. It’s like one of those peg board things that you pour marbles through. The pegs and the marbles are the same, but each time you run it, the outcome will be different, even if it tends toward a similar overall pattern. So a copy of a sentient AI wouldn’t be the exact same consciousness — more a sort of offspring. (My novelette “Murder on the Cislunar Railroad,” available in my collection Among the Wild Cybers, is built around this idea.)
“Message in a Bottle” will also assert that the EMH has no backup, so yes, “Living Witness” is inconsistent. I assume they managed to create a backup somehow between those episodes, though by what I said earlier, I question whether that should really be feasible.
The premise of the EMH suffering a complete degradation of his neural pathways is a fascinating, truly dramatic concept, ripe with possibilities. For the most part, I don’t think the episode quite lives up to his premise. This situation should be front and center, and the stakes theoretically should be much higher. This is a living being’s entire existence at stake.
Pairing it up with an inconsequential dull B plot (charged with level 5 technobabble) took a lot away from the EMH’s plight. This story should have been the entire episode.
To me, season 3 is where Picardo finally becomes the Doctor we all know and love. He was great in the first two seasons, but Picardo was still getting warmed up, finding his footing and discovering the character. The Swarm is the first real test of the EMH becoming the show’s breakout Data-esque character. It’s too bad the ending is so muted. The Doctor resetting to factory default settings should have been played in a far more tragic manner than the way Alex Singer depicts it. And not recognizing the EMH’s memory loss in subsequent episodes was a misfire. Once again, embracing at least some character serialization would have helped.
But alien swarm B plot aside, I don’t have much of an issue with the episode as it is. The EMH’s story mostly works. It’s great that Kes was still around at this point to serve as a voice of reason and defense of the EMH’s rights. And Picardo is at his best.
I also get the impression it’s The Swarm that would also partly inspire one of the franchise’s all-time best episodes in a couple of years: season 5’s Latent Image. It seems to me that Braga and Menosky took the EMH’s mental degradation premise from this episode and gave it that tragic twist for that particular masterpiece of a show.
Christopher: Fair point regarding backing up the EMH, but that doesn’t explain why “grafting” the Zimmerman hologram onto the EMH would make it disappear. That’s just a diagnostic program gussied up to look and act like an existing person. I can’t imagine that’s a quantum program, especially given that it’s something that would be regularly referred to and expected to act the same each time…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It’s funny, I hardly remember most of the episodes up to now, making me think I quit much earlier than I realized, but boy oh boy do I remember this one and rage quitting after seeing it! I just can’t get past the fact that Janeway chose to enter a hostile situation while the ship’s only Dr was literally breaking down. What if they ended up in a huge fight with lots of injuries? Who would have taken care of the crew??? It makes zero sense to me that they didn’t park the ship somewhere while they fixed the Dr, but I guess that wouldn’t have been ‘exciting’ or whatever…
Excellent review as always, Keith.
Since when? They’ve wasted months poking around at every nebulae and negative space wedgie they can find, but suddenly 15 months is a bridge too far? Whats the sudden urgency?
What gets me about this is the finale makes this even worse and destroys what little stakes there were in a bunch of “shortcut/avoiding a delay home” episodes. Suppose that they had just bitten the bullet and added 15 months to their journey. Who cares? Admiral Janeway is going to make sure their voyage is exactly 7 years anyway. I guess in theory she got home the “first” time 15 months sooner, but she’s going to erase that timeline anyway. So this episode suffers in the rewatch because the stakes in both plots are ultimately moot and irrelevant, less the line in Future’s End you referenced.
Also: There’s no urgency to either problem. They could, in principle, study the Swarm problem while they fix the Doctor, then try to break through once that’s resolved. Alternatively, the Doctor could simply be shut off until they’re on the other side and they could work on him then– there’s no indication he’ll get worse while deactivated. But the crew stubbornly does both at the same time so we can have the thematic unity of two plots solved with arbitrary technobabble solutions or something. What a mess.
I had completely forgotten the Doctor lost his memories of season 1-2 because, as Keith points out, it’s never mentioned again, not causes any problems when he can’t remember a patient’s medical history. Shouldn’t he not know the Maquis members of the crew?
Also, shouldn’t this be a problem every 2-3 years going forward? Or are we to assume that whatever magic was worked with the Zimmerman program was a long-term fix?
Shouldn’t there be a backup of the Zimmerman program somewhere? The Doctor has 2 years of memories, and has developed sentience, or so we are led to believe. But the Zimmerman diagnostic was fresh “out of the box”. Shouldn’t there be a way to grab a fresh copy from storage?
Having Janeway decide now that she’s comfortable abrogating Federation principles in the interest of getting home sooner does also feel odd given the pitch guidelines ChristoperLBennet shared in the comments of the last review, although the thinking behind those guidelines (specifically the ‘We’ve probably had enough moral dilemmas to last several lifetimes.’) might explain why it isn’t a matter of debate among the crew.
A series where Voyager had to negotiate for passage through the territories of various factions might have been interesting, and provided reasons for ongoing storylines with recurring races/characters, but insofar as they weren’t interested in telling those stories, it feels odd to bring it up as an issue in the first place. Some of the problem might have been averted by using a naturally occurring Negative Space Wedgie instead of a standoffish alien species, although the risk reward still seems off when we’re talking about fifteen months on a seventy-year trip.
@10/Benjamin: You’re right. I said last time that “False Profits” was the only “quest for home” episode this season prior to “Scorpion,” but this qualifies too. I guess I was thinking of episodes about attempts to get home right away or greatly accelerate the journey, whereas this is more just about not slowing down. But it’s ultimately the same principle, and Janeway’s willingness here to put her crew in extreme risk by invading a ruthless enemy’s territory in hopes of continuing her obsessive quest for home was a foreshadowing of her choices in “Scorpion.”
Maybe I forgot because I find the whole Swarm plot to be completely forgettable and only bother to remember the Doctor part of the episode.
Anyway, it’s still an early episode, so it could be that it was a leftover premise from season 2.
In Janeway’s defense, 15 months is an awfully long detour. I mean, just picture that passage of time in your head. That would have to be a big blow to crew morale.
What a crappy ending. It actually really pisses me off. What a way to wiffle on that.
@12/Austin: But 15 months is nothing next to 70 years. It’s 1.8 percent — that’s less than a rounding error. To put it in perspective, it’s the difference between 840 months and 855 months. Doesn’t seem as big a deal that way, does it? Is there some pressing reason they have to get home by, say, 2441 instead of 2442? Did Janeway leave the stove on???
It’s really the math that wasn’t thought out. An extra 15 months is close to nothing in this generation-long journey. Now, if going around the expanse had required an extra 15 years, Janeway’s decision to plow through their area would certainly seem more understandable. Nothing that couldn’t have been fixed with a minor dialogue rewrite.
@14/Eduardo: What might have been better would be if Janeway had decided to go around their territory and take the extra 15 months to keep her crew safe, but the Swarm had pursued and attacked them anyway.
Although what would really have been better would be if, as you’d said, they left out the whole tedious Swarm subplot altogether and just made the whole episode about the Doctor. (I wonder what the title would’ve been then. My “Forget Me Not” title could’ve worked.)
Indeed, it’s funny that I can’t remember the swarm part of The Swarm at all. The Doctor plot on the other hand was nicely done. “More Picardo” needs to be written on the wall of every casting director.
Seems like this is kind of a reset of the show. Effectively this highly antagonistic sector of space prohibits/ explains no further contact with factions previously interacted with. The doctor is somewhat reset. Whether or not they followed through with that going forward it seems like it was their intention
The swarm part certainly was forgettable. Thing is I find the idea interesting. I would have been interested in a show about a species that operates in swarms of little ships. But I’ve watched this episode several times, even recently and I still can’t remember what happened in it. I didn’t really care for the doctor plot so much, it just seemed like a slightly better done clip show concept, where they talk all about what a character has done in previous episodes rather than bother to write a new show. Being all about the doctor doesn’t make it better for me, its still a rehashing.
The crazy thing about this episode to me is that in my memory, it is 100% two episodes. I always remembered an episode where they got swarmed by bug ships, and an episode where the doctor hits his maximum memory and they have to save him. The Swarm episode is wholly forgotten otherwise aside from the visual, while in my head the Doctor having a near complete systems collapse and them having to reset him and instead fusing him with the diagnostic program was a whole episode.
Star Trek Beyond ended up doing something kind of interesting with a swarm of ships. At least visually.
On the Doctor resetting, I always assumed that his singing at the end indicated his memories were returning. By the next episode, he would have recovered his full personality and everything could continue as normal. If so, that makes the Doctor ending much more palatable.
@21/mrpalmtree19: The Doctor’s line in the upcoming “Future’s End” is “I’m still in the process of retrieving my memory files,” which seems to mean that his memories were at least somewhat retrievable and it just took time. Although it’s possible they might not have been fully retrievable, that he’d regain much but not all of his memory (which would pretty much put him in the same boat as a human). The show could’ve stood to be clearer about how much he did or didn’t recover.
(In my “Forget Me Not” pitch, the Doctor did eventually recover memory of his feelings for Danara once she was endangered, even if his episodic memory of their time together was gone.)
Carole Davis (not Douglas)
I liked this one for the parts were better than the whole. Picardo was masterful here, in both roles. It was nice to finally see the character of Dr. Zimmerman even if it was just a holographic version, because it felt momentous and he’s uniquely different in personality from the EMH. It was wonderful to hear Picardo sing opera and this is the episode where that originates. Kes does an excellent job of being a a great friend to the EMH and being his advocate as well as coming up with the grafting idea. I also thought the ending was quite powerful if you look at this episode as self-contained and don’t consider the episodes that come after it. Yes, it completely sucks that there really is no continuity from the events of this conclusion but I don’t think you can fault this episode itself for that. The actual swarm stuff was filler but I still appreciated that this alien race for once felt truly alien because the universal translator didn’t work on them (I.E. they don’t speak English), the swarm of little ships that caused havoc was unusual and a cool visual, and the aliens were intimidating. I think this was also the first real origin of where you can at least see a hint of the Paris/Torres relationship brewing. That Janeway decides to suddenly break with her principles to violate sovereign space is a momentous decision though that should have carried much more weight on debate amongst the senior officers.
A curious quirk of fate meant I saw this episode at a convention a matter of weeks, if that, after seeing “Phage” on BBC. In the earlier episode, when Tuvok predicts she’s going to take Voyager into the asteroid after the Vidiians, Janeway remarks “One of these days I’m going to surprise you, Tuvok. But not today.” Here, when Janeway chooses to sneak through the Swarm’s territory against regulations, Tuvok remarks “Captain, you have managed to surprise me.” I’m never sure if that callback was deliberate or not, but it’s a nice touch either way.
And it continues the theme of the last episode of Janeway beginning to realise that maybe the rules don’t apply here. Last season she was vehement at sticking to Starfleet regulations at all costs but with no back-up or authority, it seems sometimes things need to be bent. It’s a shame that Tuvok’s disapproval doesn’t really lead to anything and it turns into a battle with some generic xenophobic aliens. Still, nice to see Voyager being effective in combat for once. I had completely forgotten that the Swarm troopers boarded Voyager so that was a tense moment.
But there’s no way that plotline’s going to get our attention when we’ve got the apparent B-plot of the Doctor losing his memory, with the tour de force performances of Robert Picardo, Robert Picardo and Jennifer Lien. The Doctor is on the receiving end of Zimmerman’s condensation, not for the last time. And Kes is utterly awesome. She slips back into the role of the Doctor’s advocate when Janeway and Torres consider a systems wipe. She basically ends up as the ship’s doctor, with the EMH as her assistant. There’s pain etched on her face as the Doctor loses more and more of his faculties and fails to remember her. And then she takes it upon herself to inspire the Zimmerman hologram in the same way she inspired the Doctor and even comes up with the plan herself: By the end, he seems more like the Doctor has become.
That ending’s maddening though because I’m not sure what it’s meant to mean. Did the Doctor remember everything and he was just pulling their legs? Is his memory slowly coming back? Is his memory gone but some subconscious trace of his old self remains? Next episode he seems to be back to his old self (although I don’t think he appears much) and this is never referenced again except, as has been mentioned, in “Future’s End” when he casually notes he hasn’t fully recovered all his memories. (So…option two then?)
Whilst we’re still a season off them being a couple, the pre-credits sequence of Paris basically asking Torres out seems to be a clear sign that their “thing” has started, after the early hints in “Faces” and “Threshold”. The beginning of the Doctor’s interest in singing, which will literally end up having a whole episode built around it. As also mentioned, the real Zimmerman, distinct from the hologram we see here, will turn up in Deep Space Nine later that season and turn up in Voyager in Season 6. I always get the impression he was in more episodes than that but maybe there was a limit to how often Bob Picardo could do a double shift.
Entering other species space without permission is sort of a thing that Starfleet does on a regular basis. See The Corbomite Maneuver, A Taste of Armageddon and The Spectre of the Gun among others.
@15/Christopher: Leaving it out entirely would probably have been for the best. It’s really a situation where the A plot and B plot don’t really blend together at all. There’s no synergy or parallel themes. The swarm plot is purely designed to give random casualties for the EMH to treat. There’s nothing involving the alien race that complements or enhances the A story, and it doesn’t enrichen the Delta Quadrant as a place either. A real case of mismatched A/B plots.
It’s also a recurring theme in Berman-era Trek shows that episodes focused on pure character stories always find themselves paired up with some sort of jeopardy/science mystery B-plot, even if the episode can sustain itself without it. It’s almost as if the writers are afraid they’ll lose viewers if the episode doesn’t have some sort of action or mystery hook. There was even once a writers debate to insert a B science plot on TNG’s Family, of all episodes – which thankfully was aborted.
A more seasoned writer might have been able to make this melding of two different plots work more effectively. I’m not sure. But to be fair, this was Mike Sussman’s first ever teleplay assignment. The Swarm is by no means indicative of what his later work would end up being. This is the same writer who would eventually pen top tier Enterprise episodes such as Regeneration, Twilight, Stratagem and In a Mirror Darkly.
It has been a while but… Federation ethics and prudence exclude sharing technology and other influences with non-member civilisations, but just zipping through a culture’s region of space shouldn’t be interfering, especially being cloaked. There are other “not going the long way around” episodes in the series, though are those later? There currently are U.S. and Russian and Chinese warships steaming here and there on this planet just to assert that they can. That’s a thing. And not as childish as it sounds, I suppose. “International waters” supposedly are basically free passage.
As for the Doctor… it is problematic to create jeopardy if he’s “just” a computer program that you can copy or restore from a previous backup, even if he also has a personality. You could either spread more technobabble about what a “hologram” actually is (a swarm of nanites? a gas?), or just ignore it: he’s breaking down, and restoring an old copy isn’t an option – except for the complete reset to episode one version, which is a sort of electronic murder. Or cannibalizing the Lewis Zimmerman hologram, which they do…it’s not quite clear why that isn’t murder, but holo-LZ is basically a debugging routine with an attitude. In his own opinion.
My reading of the Doctor at the end is quite different to yours; the corrective action does return him to standard medical functions… but his memories of the story so far do still exist and are being integrated into the corrected system. So he’s back!
I have some experience of computer programs that can deal with data up to a certain limit but break down hard if that’s exceeded, usually some way beyond the designed and tested specification. That can’t be fixed or even fully understood because they’re just too complicated. You just have to live with what you’ve got. I’ve had to rewrite colleagues’ programs, carefully not fundamentally changing them, just to be able to read them.
Later we’re shown that the first EMH, which does exist as many copies, was meant to be “updated” with new techniques simply by being replaced with a new model, with all the originals assigned to sci-fi sewage treatment or something. But I presume that the Voyager Doctor recorded his own acquired knowledge outside his own program in some way, so if he did forget then he could just read his notes… probably at hyper speed like Data does. He wasn’t even supposed to be used: there was a flesh and blood doctor originally, who would have been doing that.
Robert Carnegie: This isn’t going through international waters — the equivalent of that is when Voyager is going through interstellar unclaimed space. What they did in this case was invade a sovereign nation. It isn’t the equivalent of U.S. ships sailing in the Indian Ocean, it’s the equivalent of a U.S. troop convoy crossing through the Ural Mountains in Russia.
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido
@9: Worse than that, I didn’t even get the impression that the Doctor lost is Season 1/2 memories. B’Elanna’s magic fix with the matrix from the diagnostic program cured the Doctor’s issue and restored his “missing” memories, it seems.
I’ve been listening to ‘The Delta Flyers’ and one interesting thing that Robbie and Garret have talked about is how the Doctor was not really intended to be a main character early on, and that the character’s growth stemmed in some part from Robert Picardo taking the little he was given and making the most of it. I wonder if the B (A?) plot in this episode was meant as something of a metaphorical reset for the character. It seems strange that for a character whose popularity stemmed entirely from its growth, that the show would tease a hard reset on that growth.
@31: I don’t think it’s strange at all “that the show would tease a hard reset on” the growth of the EMH. If anything, because he is such a popular character, the stakes are upped and it’s even more dramatic if he does in fact lose his memories. It keeps the audience riveted until the end to see what will happen.
@30: In between star systems, it’s just space. It’s not like they are wearing it out.
(Except for that Next Gen episode where apparently they are wearing it out, and the other Voyager stories about the irresponsible culture that dumps its industrial waste in space and dirties it up.)
Ladies, Gentlemen and Significant Others, all this very sensible and insightful commentary has still managed to completely miss the most shocking, dramatic and unprecedented twist of this entire episode – it actually allows krad to find Mr Neelix wholly agreeable!
^^ Well, at any rate he agrees with the character entirely, but that still qualifies as a stunning development! (-; ^^
The best uses of Neelix have been the ones that take advantage of his being native to this region, like “Jetrel” and “Resistance.” This is another example. It’s when they try to make him comic relief or a jealous boyfriend that the character fails and you wish Tuvok really strangled him in “Meld.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@35
I need to get my eyes checked. I first read that as “The best uses of Netflix have been…”
:-D
@29 – Let the Russians or Chinese try to sail their warships all around the islands of Hawaii and see what happens. There’s the concept of international waters and then there’s territorial waters. And Voyager isn’t dealing with someone that they have diplomatic relations with. They were told to keep out and Janeway was basically “Meh, I’m Starfleet and I can do what I want because (to steal a phrase from KRAD) I’m just that awesome”. The Federation at least has some sort of contact with the Borg and knows what to expect. And, as we’ve seen in prior episodes, Voyager doesn’t exactly have the best reputation is this part of the galaxy.
@33 – As to being cloaked, how do you think the US Air Force would react if they suddenly discovered a Russian stealth bomber flying over Kansas? It’s just air. It’s not as if they’re wearing it out.
What about all the retired EMH units now stuck drudging away at manual labor? We get a glimpse of them at least once, and they are also sentient. I doubt anyone is even bothering to use enough data space on them to save their original extensive medical knowledge and skills, much less to save their long-term experiences and sentience.
@38/Lisa: I don’t buy that those other EMHs are sentient, no matter what the episode implied. The Doctor only became sentient because of the unusual conditions he operated under — kept on continuously, subjected to unprecedented challenges that required innovation, encouraged by Kes to develop as an individual. I doubt menial labor in a mine would provide the necessary mental stimulation to generate sentience.
Not to mention how utterly stupid it is to have holograms mine an asteroid like manual labor in the 19th century. Don’t they have robots? Mining phasers? Heck, by now all the mining in the Federation should be done by Hortas. So I tend to consider that “mining EMHs” scene apocryphal. It’s just too stupid to be real.
Why not go around? You’ve already almost lost two crewmen and your medic is having issues. Much safer to go around. And you won’t piss off another alien species. Doesn’t Voyager have enough enemies?
@@@@@39 – Federation scientists have had 20 years to figure out what exactly led the EMH to sentience. Even if it was as simple as leaving them on for a few years, they’ve had plenty of time to do that.
Stupid to have the doing the work, sure. But there’s nothing to say that it’s not possible. Star Trek has had lots of things done in a stupid way that would be easier done by almost any other method.
@@@@@ 40 – Apparently not. Got to show how upstanding and moral the Federation is by ignoring the big “Keep Out” signs.
@40: “Going around” presumably means encountering all of the Hostilians’ neighbors as you go, and they’re likely to be equally anti-social. You know how folks get in those situations. Unless the plan is to go around those as well. I would do that. But I’m not in a hurry.
@42/Robert: That doesn’t follow. After all, they were coming to Swarm space from a neighboring region and met no equally hostile territorial powers there. This part of the Delta Quadrant has been relatively empty overall, with the only widespread powers we’ve seen being the Kazon, a species of nomads with no homeworld and no larger political organization, and the Vidiians, who presumably roam far afield looking for organ “donors” and thus whose territory size cannot be extrapolated. Voyager traveled through the space those cultures occupied for nearly two years having only intermittent encounters with them. So the Swarm is the first power encountered in the region that appears to have strict control over a wide expanse of space. It’s therefore incongruous to assume there are suddenly multiple other powers with the same kind of strictly delineated territory. There’s no basis for that presumption.
Besides, other starfaring species in the region have probably learned to keep a safe distance from Swarm space, if they haven’t already been blasted back to the Stone Age by Swarm attacks. So there’s probably a fairly empty buffer zone around their territory.
Don’t you think the Swarmers would expand their territory until they bumped into someone who can stand up to them? That’s my interpretation, that anywhere they aren’t surrounded by equally tough neighbors, they take that space over for themselves. However, a buffer zone is possible… there’s probably an Academy course on astropolitics “where no one has gone before”.
@44/Robert: Maybe the Swarm are expanding their territory but, since this section of the DQ is relatively lacking in large interstellar powers, they haven’t yet reached the point of bumping into any other major power. At least, there’s no reason to assume their every border, even in 3-dimensional space, runs up directly against another territorial power. The presumption that the region is that crowded is inconsistent with the evidence of the past two-plus seasons.
@14/Eduardo Jencarelli:
That simple fix to this episode would have made Janeway’s “to hell with it” plan more believable within the context of her past choices. Considering Kazon territory was ridiculously huge, albeit as a contrivance, why couldn’t The Swarm’s territory be ridiculously huge? If the journey around would have taken 7 years longer than going through, Janeway could have had her cake and eaten it too. It wouldn’t have solved the A-story’s hypocrisy entirely, but it would make her choice more understandable.
But as we all know, the cake is a lie anyway!
@46/Thierafhal: As I’ve said before, there’s nothing ridiculous about a nomadic people being spread over a far wider territory than a sedentary people; on the contrary, it’s precisely what you’d expect, a smaller population spread out across a much larger volume (like a gas as opposed to a liquid or solid). And we’ll see it on a far vaster scale with the Hirogen later in the series. The only contrivance is that they kept encountering the same individuals, Culluh and Seska and the Nistrim, over the span of a year or more. If it had been different Kazon sects, it would’ve made more sense.
@47/CLB: I see your point. I guess I didn’t even need to reference the Kazon to support the argument, haha.
Although upon further thought, the flip side of the coin makes me realize that perhaps it would have not made sense for The Swarm to have so expansive a territory considering their swarm mentality. It’s far easier to overwhelm and devastate when point A, B, C and D (various Swarm fleets) is not so far away from point E (a potential target).
1. Does anybody get a South Sentinel Island vibe from these aliens? I am wondering if that’s where the inspiration came from.
2. Relationships cannot be replicated, but knowledge learned about alien species can be picked up from logs of the prior interactions, so I wouldn’t be as worried about that part if he did start from scratch.
I have no issue with the EMH not having enough memory to expand, as it’s that, an emergency program. I don’t like how afterwards they completely ignore the tragedy of him being reset. As for “that’s not how computer programs work”, I can believe that semi-autonomous, self-aware programs can’t just be copied the same way as Excel or Winamp (ah, Chris said it better)
I’ve always found it strange that other than Kes (and to a lesser extent Paris), the Doctor made no attempt to field train any of the crew as medics, in case of emergencies like this one. Do the Swarm try to crush they’re enemies? The lone Swarm ship doesn’t attach itself to Voyager. It “high-tails” it once it’s warned the other Swarm of Voyager’s presence.
The episode is admittedly vague on this point about how destroying one Swarm ship could also destroy a whole cluster of them, even if they are connected by lattice. Is it 70 or 75 years to reach the Federation? The MK1-EMH was really a prototype until Zimmerman could establish a more long-lasting one.
The Swarm are emphatically not the first DQ species to have transporter technology – what about the Vidiians or the Sikarians? No Mr. Vulcan, Krad? He has a lot to say about Janeway’s reckless plan (he even seems to agree with Neelix!). Voyager can’t keep those replicators running indefinitely so they’ll have to make do with other foodstuffs.
I think Starfleet captains make or break the rules whenever they feel like it. That officer on the bridge probably died because there was no EMH to help him. I wish The Swarm hadn’t tried to straddle two separate plots because by trying to do both, it achieves neither one.
1: Starfleet captains, and Janeway in particular, have a very inconsistent attitude towards following their own rules. 2: It’s Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy. 3: I think the Doctor did eventually recover all of his lost memories.
8: Zimmerman believes the EMH will continue to degrade, even when deactivated. 13: It’s 2373. 15: I would have liked it if the title were a double-edged sword – if I can think of any, I’ll post them.
26: Swarm troopers
And I think you meant condescension, unless this review is getting you all misty-eyed? 28: Yep, The Swarm reminds me of Real Life, another S3 episode where the writers feel the need to do a Doctor episode by forcing an extraneous subplot onto it.
Gene Roddenberry was against Family because he failed to see how this purely character-based episode could work without a SF B-plot. 31: Kes cured the Doctor, not Torres. 36: It’s easy to get them confused.
Was the Doctor lagging behind the diva already a symptom of his failing faculties, or was she really rushing the tempo, like he believed?
Yes, yes, and yes.
Thus begins the frustrating wishy-washiness of Janeway’s principles. (One of many elements in VOY that work better if you imagine a bigger picture that the episodes only offer glimpses of. Like what’s happening to morale in the tedium and danger between episodes that would cause Captain Prime Directive to all of a sudden decide it’s time to break Starfleet protocols and prioritize getting home?)
Thus continues the lack of follow-through to big events.
And Picardo is awesome.
But even just a simple follow-up in a pre-title sequence in a subsequent episode would have been something. Like, “I’ve reviewed logs and sensor records of the time since my initial activation and while I’m not quite that man anymore (please don’t call me Shmullus), you can think of me as his even more exceptional twin. And rest assured that while some of his personal memories have been lost, my medical database remains intact.” Or something.
@51 “the Doctor made no attempt to field train any of the crew as medics, in case of emergencies”
This always felt to me like a symptom of VOY’s aversion to having an large recurring cast like DS9. I can sort of understand that decision, especially for budgetary reasons, but on a small, close-knit ship where crew turnover is impossible I feel like it would have benefited the show a lot to have more non-command staff in regular recurring roles for things like this, or even just the familiarity of more familiar faces in the corridors and the mess, and for it to feel more devastating each time a crew member is lost.
@53/mastadge: As mentioned above, there was a bit of followup in “Future’s End” where the Doctor said he was still retrieving his memory files. But I agree there should’ve been more.