“Macrocosm”
Written by Brannon Braga
Directed by Alexander Singer
Season 3, Episode 12
Production episode 154
Original air date: December 11, 1996
Stardate: 50425.1
Captain’s log. Neelix and Janeway are concluding a trading mission with the Tak Tak, who speak in very ritualistic manners that include not just words but gestures and body language. (Janeway greatly insults them by putting her hands on her hips, and Neelix has to go through a lengthy apology to fix it.)
They return to Voyager on their shuttlecraft only to find it out of position and not responding to hails, with life signs impossible to detect. They board to find nobody around, the computer down, and no sign of anybody. They find work on a control panel abandoned in midstream, with the toolbox open. Janeway detects a signal from the Wildman quarters, but it turns out to be Neelix’s talk show on her com terminal. There’s no sign of Wildman or her daughter.
They follow a buzzing sound in the corridor to a transporter room, where they find a hole punched in the transporter pad and some slime around it. Then main power goes down.
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They try to take a turbolift to the bridge, but find the way blocked by something that bursts through the bulkhead and hits Neelix. When Janeway goes for an emergency medikit, Neelix screams, and when she goes back, he’s gone.
She goes to engineering to raid a weapons locker. (The ship doesn’t have an armory? They store weapons in a locker next to the warp core?) Armed with a bunch of stuff, including a knife and a phaser rifle—and also stripping down to a tank top due to the extreme heat, as main power being down means the heat from the warp engines isn’t venting—she heads to the bridge. She manages to get a distress call out, but unbeknownst to her, something hits her arm.
She gets enough of internal sensors online to find life signs in the mess hall. Heading there, she finds several crew members unconscious, including Kim and Chakotay. She also notices a growth on their necks, and a small organism exits from the wound as Janeway watches. Then a large creature attacks Janeway, which she manages to kill, but it also wounds her. She’s also starting to experience the same symptoms Neelix showed.
Stumbling to sickbay, she meets the EMH, who greets her with a phaser before realizing who she is.
He fills her in on what happened while he mends her wounds from the creature’s attack. Voyager received a distress call from a mining colony that was suffering from a virus. The EMH beams down to investigate, since he’s immune to viruses and can do that now with his mobile emitter. The virus appears to be literally growing so that it exists macroscopically, not just microscopically like most viruses. At this point, he needs his lab to synthesize a cure.
Chakotay refuses to allow him to beam a sample of the virus back, he’ll just have to settle for the data on his tricorder. He beams back, and the biofilter detects some of the virus and purges it. However, some of the virus got into the ship’s systems before the purge happened. It infects one of the bioneural gelpacks in the mess hall. When Torres goes to fix it, the gelpack explodes and she’s hit with slime—the same stuff Janeway and Neelix found on the transporter pad—and gets sick. The EMH quarantines the mess hall and takes a specimen back to sickbay. However, it grows before their eyes, and breaks out of the force field Kes put on it. But the EMH hits it with the antigen he’s synthesized and it kills it.
The problem is, the virus has spread all around the ship. They can detect the EMH’s holomatrix, so every time he tries to spread the antigen, he’s attacked by the big-ass version of the virus, the same way Janeway was. The viruses themselves are herding all the crew (who are all unconscious) into either the mess hall or one of the cargo bays.
The good news is, the EMH tests the antigen on Janeway, and it cures her, so it does work. They have to figure out how to get it to the rest of the crew. They each take a sample with them and head toward environmental control on deck twelve. If the EMH makes it first, she’ll talk him through how to send it through the vents; if she makes it first, she’ll do it.
The EMH is ambushed by the macrovirus en route, and has to take refuge in a shuttlecraft. And while on the way there, the ship is attacked. The Tak Tak heard Janeway’s distress signal, but they’re familiar with the virus and they have no cure, so they’re “purifying” Voyager by destroying it. Janeway urges them to stop firing as they do have a cure, and will share it. The Tak Tak gives her an hour.
Unfortunately, the attack trashed environmental control. So Janeway instead constructs an antigen bomb and then activates Holodeck 2 with the Paxau Resort program. Since the virus is attracted to holomatrices, they all head there. The EMH now has a clear path to the mess hall and cargo bays to administer the cure. Janeway heads to Holodeck 2 with the antigen bomb and—after being forced to kill one macrovirus with her knife—tosses it in and kills all the viruses.
The Tak Tak gratefully accept the cure, and Voyager is on its way, making repairs. Janeway authorizes R&R for the crew; Chakotay invites her to go skiing on the holodeck, but she prefers to stay in her ready room and work on a painting, having had enough physical activity for a while.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway gets to roam the corridors of Voyager while carrying a massive gun and basically play action hero for an hour. It’s actually kinda cool.
Her habit of standing with her hands on her hips also gets her in trouble with the Tak Tak. After her last talk with them, she pointedly waits until the channel is closed before she puts her hands on her hips again.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. After Neelix gets her out of hot water with the Tak Tak, Janeway talks about the possibility of making him an ambassador. It’s not clear if she’s kidding or not, but Neelix certainly takes the notion seriously.
Half and half. Torres is patient zero for the virus’s infection of Voyager, and the sickness that results from it is enough to make her queasy—no mean feat for someone of Klingon heritage like her who has two stomachs, and she’s nauseous in both…
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is the one responsible for bringing the virus on board, but he’s also the only one immune to it and the one who cures it, so there’s that.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Janeway uses the holodeck to gather all the viruses in one place and then wipe them out. It’s Holodeck 2, which means there’s at least one more holodeck on board, which means this doesn’t destroy the holodeck forever, sadly. (They probably fixed #2, too…)
Do it.
“How do I get there from here?”
“Jefferies Tube 11, take a left to Section 31 and straight down past the tractor-beam emitter until you hit Deck 10. Get out at Section 3 and follow the corridor all the way around until—”
“—until I hit the shuttlebay. Then I crawl through Access Port 9, go past three airlocks, and then two decks down. Environmental Control is at the end of the hall. Now I remember! Who designed this ship anyway?”
–The EMH asking Janeway for directions
Welcome aboard. Albie Selznick, who is also a movement coach and choreographer, plays the Tak Tak representative. He previously appeared in TNG‘s “Cost of Living” as the juggler, and he’ll return on “The Voyager Conspiracy” as Tash. His choreography will also be used in “Natural Law.”
Michael Fiske plays the sick miner.
Trivial matters: Brannon Braga’s original concept was to do an episode that was very low on dialogue, with Janeway bad-ass-ing her way through the ship with a phaser rifle and fighting the virus, but the need to explain what was going on meant there had to be scenes with extensive dialogue, to his disappointment.
The macrovirus creatures were created entirely using CGI, still a very new technology at the time. The success of these creatures would lead to the introduction of the more ambitious all-CG Species 8472 in the season-ending “Scorpion.”
When Janeway says there’s fluid in Neelix’s lungs, he corrects her to “lung,” as Neelix only has the one, it a transplant from Kes, which happened in “Phage” when the Vidiians stole Neelix’s original lungs.
Samantha Wildman doesn’t appear, but is mentioned, as is her daughter, and we get to see her playmat with toys in the Wildman quarters.
Neelix’s talk show from “Investigations” has apparently been renamed Good Morning, Voyager and Wildman is an avid viewer. Ensign Kaplan was a guest on the episode that aired the day Neelix and Janeway returned.
The Tak Tak being insulted by the gesture of someone putting their hands on their hips was a good-natured dig at Kate Mulgrew’s habit of standing in that particular pose.
Set a course for home. “I may never put my hands on my hips again.” It only took another ten years, but Star Trek finally got their Vasquez.
Okay, so the original conception of the character that eventually became Tasha Yar was a character named Macha Hernandez, who was patterned after Jenette Goldstein’s badass character in Aliens. But then they cast the incredibly blonde Denise Crosby, and changed the character’s name.
However, a decade later, we get Captain Janeway in a tank top and carrying a big-ass phaser rifle looking for all the world like Vasquez, and it’s pretty fabulous.
I want to like this episode more than I do, mainly because the opening is so promising. This is what I was hoping for in “Projections” when the EMH thought he was stranded alone on the ship, and it goes along beautifully for quite a while. It’s a nice action mystery, where Janeway is trying to figure out what happened.
But then we do find out what happened, and it all becomes significantly less interesting—and, more to the point, less sensible.
Okay, when Janeway and Neelix arrive, the computer’s down, environmental control is shot, internal sensors are out, communications are down—all this points to some very sophisticated sabotage.
Except then we find out that it’s just a very very big virus. One that is obviously not sentient, but acts only on instinct to propagate. That part explains why the crew is all gathered in the mess hall or the cargo bays, since new spores of the virus are created in infected people, and it makes sense to gather them all in groups to make things easier.
But how the hell did the macroviruses trash the computer? Or the sensors? Or environmental control? Or communications? It makes no sense that they would trash just those systems that would keep Janeway and Neelix from finding out what’s happening. Plus the virus isn’t instantaneous, so why was Wildman’s com terminal and the work in the corridor abandoned midstream like that? It’s a cheap, stupid way to create artificial suspense.
On top of that, the Tak Tak then attack—which is fine, in and of itself, but their weapons fire just happens to fry the exact system they need to spread the antigen. It wouldn’t be so bad except every other bit of damage in the episode is exactly what’s needed to drag the plot out. It’s never good when you can see the strings the writer is pulling.
It’s too bad, because the episode is still tremendous fun, mostly because the vast majority of the screen time is either Janeway being a badass or the EMH being awesome and taking his mobile emitter out for a stroll. It just suffers from way too many stupid writer tricks.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido can be seen talking about his upcoming work for eSpec Books on one of the “Hot Off the Press” panels from Con-Tinual: The Con that Never Ends on Facebook, alongside Danielle Ackley-McPhail, James Chambers, Megan Mackie, and Robert E. Waters. He was also interviewed at Pensacon in February for “Got a Minute.”
They store weapons in a locker next to the warp core?
When someone can board you with transporters, at almost any moment or any location, it kind of makes sense to have weapons lockers spread out through the ship.
Captain Ripley? I like it! Mulgrew did look pretty badass. I have a love/hate relationship with this episode. On one hand, it’s one of the most fun episodes of Voyager, but on the other hand they kind of blow it. If it was just a survival episode featuring Mulgrew doing an Alien impression, that would have been awesome. But halfway through, they have to explain what happened and the episode just loses all momentum. It’s a shame.
I hate this one profoundly. I don’t watch Star Trek to see big dumb action-movie scenes.This was a mindless, pointless exercise in gratuitous violence and noise, with no substance or message or point.
And this episode convinced me that Braga didn’t know how to write Janeway as a genuinely strong female character, just reverting to the sexist assumption that the way to make a woman strong was to make her as stereotypically macho and aggressive as possible, to give her a huge gun while also stripping her down to a tank top to reassure male viewers that she’s still an object for their gaze. What I liked about the writing of Janeway in the first two seasons is that she was allowed to be strong in a genuinely feminine (or at least not stereotypically macho) way, one defined by caring and nurturing as much as toughness and courage. I felt this episode threw that away in favor of a shallow, ignorant male notion of what a “strong female character” is. It foreshadows how much the writing of Janeway would suffer later on when Jeri Taylor left and Braga moved into the showrunner role.
Also, the growing viruses were dumb as hell. I hate stories that don’t understand something as simple as how organisms grow. They can’t just magically gain mass without taking it in from somewhere. The viruses couldn’t grow to giant size before our eyes unless they were feeding on something. If there were, say, one ounce of culture medium in the petri dish, then the largest the virus could possibly get is one ounce. Anything bigger is nonsensical. Okay, maybe it could take in oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor, and dust motes from the air and convert them into biomass, but only a very tiny amount.
The one thing I like is that it makes good use of Neelix, letting him do what was supposed to be his job all along — the indigenous guide who knows the local cultures and can thus be an intermediary in trade and diplomacy with them. The ambassador role was a genuinely good idea, and one that would be developed further over time.
Braga is obviously a fan of the Alien franchise. In the ST Generations DVD commentary, both him and Ron Moore take the time to notice and mention Goldstein’s cameo during the Enterprise-B prologue, referencing Vasquez and the classic 1986 sequel.
For the most part, Macrocosm pulls off the homage pretty well. Action and plot-oriented, with quite a few non-verbal sequences that are very welcome (which also reminded me of Picard and Worf leading teams in search of the Borg on First Contact). Singer’s atmospheric direction would also inspire Livingston’s work on the Scorpion finale.
My only complaint is that they choose to make the threat a virus. It’s almost as if someone in the staff (likely Rick Berman) objected to the idea of Janeway shooting actual living breathing aliens with a gun, which would obviously go against some of Roddenberry’s Trekkian philosophies (not unlike the argument they had on TNG over using space pirates on Gambit). Therefore, using viruses instead of actual aliens seem like a writer’s solution to not make these perfect Starfleet heroes come out as bloodthirsty assassins. But to me it creates a whole new set of problems, in terms of scientific credibility and also makes the threat seem a little less interesting.
@3/Christopher: I’m not so sure that Braga’s depiction of Janeway in this episode is necessarily a sexist assumption of what constitutes a strong female character. Visually, she may resemble Vasquez, but the characterization is closer to Ellen Ripley. Of all the Alien films, Aliens is particularly concerned with making Ripley into a mother figure. And part of that process is challenging the limits of motherhood, including threatening her offspring (Newt), which in turns triggers a very violent, very protective reaction from her. And Janeway has been defined both as a mother and as a captain to her crew. Is it in the realm of dumb movie clichés? Possibly. But I don’t really see it as a betrayal of Janeway’s character.
I kept being reminded of a line from Krad reviewing one of TNG’s action episodes: Die Hard on a spaceship. Sure, there aren’t thieves or terrorists but it’s still the captain running around a mostly empty ship with a phaser. Too bad so little about the virus makes sense.
This also the ridiculous idea of calling these creatures a virus. Viruses are notable for being such bare bones organisms that they do not possess some of the normal criteria for classification as a life form. Especially being able to ingest and process food on their own and organelle structures for independent movement. A virus reproduces by hijacking a cell and making it produce more viruses. They do not actually do anything else. Making them fly and be large enough to be visible and be grasped in one’s hand is making them something very different from a virus.
@4/Eduardo: That comes across for Ripley in Aliens because the story takes the time to sell it. This episode doesn’t succeed at conveying that, not for me. If the only way to salvage a story is to reference what happened in earlier stories, to expect the audience to fill in the gaps, then the story is a failure on its own.
And I never said it was a betrayal of her character. I said it was a dumbing down and a shallow, cluelessly masculine approach to how to write a strong female character, to what aspects of her were worth focusing on. A lot of productions in the ’80s assumed that they needed to turn a woman into Rambo in order for her to have strength, which was itself sexist because it assumed that the traditionally masculine way of behaving was intrinsically stronger and better. By the ’90s, TV had finally grown beyond that, and Janeway was one of a number of female characters given strength in a more nuanced and balanced way, one that found strength in their femininity rather than assuming they had to be masculinized. And “Macrocosm” felt to me like a regression to that cruder ’80s stereotype that Janeway had transcended until now.
Besides, Aliens worked because it wasn’t just about shooting the monsters. It was about corporate greed and corruption leading to human lives being treated as expendable. Ripley wasn’t just a badass woman with a gun, she was a working-class survivor of the atrocities inflicted by the rich and powerful, trying to save others from getting screwed over the same way she and the Nostromo crew were the first time around. There was a substance to it beyond the surface violence. That was not the case here.
I thought this one was dumb, mindless fun. This was basically Star Trek’s take on Aliens meets Outbreak. Not necessarily something I need to rewatch again in a long time though.
I also see Janeway here as more like Ellen Ripley from Aliens rather than Vasquez. And I don’t see it as reducing Janeway to a lame stereotype of what a strong woman is supposed to look like, but just letting her literally get to flex her muscles and play action hero for a change. This was the same for Picard in “Starship Mine” on TNG. It just makes for a change up from the normally more intellectual, non-physical captain of either series.
As someone who is grossed out by body horror, I found the growths on the necks of infected people that opened up to let out those “flies” to be viscerally effective. However, although it was cutting-edge CGI for the time, the large macro virus effect still looked very fake to me and so I couldn’t really suspend my disbelief.
Also, the Tak Tak representative is a big ‘ol a-hole. After he’s already fired on her ship and given her the ultimatum of finding the cure in an hour or else he’d “purge” her ship, Janeway showed remarkable restraint after he closed the com channel by not screaming “F*ck you, you miserable sh*t!!!” :op
@8/garreth: “Hard Time” was the DS9 episode where Chief O’Brien had 20 years of hellish prison memories downloaded into his brain in minutes and had to cope with the PTSD. If you’re talking about TNG’s “Die Hard” episode “Starship Mine,” I hated that one too. I don’t think the attitudes and values of violent action movies are a good fit for Star Trek.
@8
Oh, I love the Die Hard Picard episode.
I’m not sure I’ve seen “Macrocosm,” but this review has definitely piqued my interest. As always, thanks, Krad!
@9/CLB: Thanks, fixed! And I got the name of the episode wrong even after I had found the actual name of it on Wikipedia. It’s just the wonders of my particular brain that was confusing “Starship Mine” with “Hard Time” with Die Hard.
Lol
@6, Yeah, a virus is basically a rogue strand of DNA located within a protein coat. Different types of virus have coats that have been adapted to attach themselves to the cell membranes of certain types of cells which are then flooded with the rogue DNA and hijacked for reproduction of the DNA until the cell bursts resulting in a new generation of the virus. Viruses have no metabolism, the don’t eat, they don’t grow, they are not capable of locomotion, they simply float around until they randomly encounter a compatible cell they can “hijack” to reproduce. A giant virus makes as much sense as that old Soviet joke about them having produced the worlds largest microchip.
@7:”Besides, Aliens worked because it wasn’t just about shooting the monsters. It was about corporate greed and corruption leading to human lives being treated as expendable. Ripley wasn’t just a badass woman with a gun, she was a working-class survivor of the atrocities inflicted by the rich and powerful, trying to save others from getting screwed over the same way she and the Nostromo crew were the first time around. There was a substance to it beyond the surface violence. That was not the case here.”
Wasn’t the “working class Ripley” an example of Cameron revising the character? As I recall, Ridley Scott was interested in the class dynamics of the NOSTROMO, with Ripley and Dallas being the upper class and Brett and Parker the proletariat.Of course, one could connect the dots and say that Ripley, going from an officer in ALIEN to a loader in ALIENS has experienced a severe fall in social class.
Jane: that’s not my read on Alien at all. That was a ship full of working class people. These were all truckers and longshoremen, rather than the spit and polish military and science crews we usually get in SF.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
KRAD @14:” that’s not my read on Alien at all. That was a ship full of working class people. These were all truckers and longshoremen, rather than the spit and polish military and science crews we usually get in SF. “
Ridley Scott seems to feel that there was a difference in class between Weaver’s officer Ripley and Brett and Parker. Here’s Ridley Scott (RS) commenting on the dynamic at work on the ship:
“FS: And I mean the other thing, I suppose, about Alien was the fact that the whole film of the Nostromo, of the ship and the crew being kind of—they were workers, they weren’t sort of space elite were they? And all of that was all completely fresh and new.
RS: Yeah, well if you can classify Sigourney as a worker. Yes, in fact we decided to go with a counterpoint to Star Wars, which I thought—Lucas’ first Star Wars was absolutely seminal, blew me away, but in a funny kind of way he had done a great kind of space fairy story with the darkness of Darth Vader—it was a great thing to do, and the princess and the prince and all that stuff and the wild man who’s Harrison Ford. We were truck drivers in space, fundamentally, and off that you had Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton, a sort of double act below decks. And they give it that working class problem. I thought they were pretty funny, yeah.”
No matter their social class, the characters in Alien/s were all being screwed over by Weyland-Yutani’s greed. That was my actual point.
@3/Christopher: At least Nickelodeon did not give Didi Pickles, Betty DeVille, and Charlotte Pickles gave them both huge guns and baring their tank-tops to watch over their kids in “Rugrats”.
@16:”No matter their social class, the characters in Alien/s were all being screwed over by Weyland-Yutani’s greed. That was my actual point.”
Indeed.To Weyland-Yutani, , everyone was ultimately expendable; profit was the only god.
I enjoyed this episode, although I recall reading that Mulgrew is not a fan of it for many of the reasons mentioned above. I don’t mind a purely action-oriented episode every now and then. I also found my interest waning when we got the flashback showing us what happened. It really slowed the flow of the episode.
Oh, and you mention that Naomi and her daughter aren’t seen, but mentioned. Naomi is the baby. Samantha is the mother. FYI.
Bobby
Bobby: Thanks for that correction regarding the Wildmans. ‘Tis fixed.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, slave to the edit function
Best Voyager episode, sorry @krad but your series is all downhill from here.
Yes it’s stupid, ridiculous, unscientific, but damn if it isn’t better than anything else they produced in seven years.
@21 must be joking.
This episode is better in theory than in practice, because as krad rightfully points out the action is so plodding. But a Starfleet captain has to be comfortable with every possible mission. Sometimes the mission will be first contact. Sometimes it will be exploration. Sometimes it will diplomacy. And sometimes there’s an enemy that can’t be reasoned with and the mission is to neutralize the enemy as efficiently as possible. A Starfleet captain who can’t switch to that gear when the situation calls for it is only marginally less dangerous than one who always goes in with phasers blazing.
This is the first time we really see Janeway in that mode, and they make it abundantly clear it’s not her first choice– they show her as a diplomat in this very episode, twice, and they make “the enemy” a virus that can’t be reasoned with, in theory a rather fitting foil for someone who was on the science officer track.
Yeah, sure, it wouldn’t fit Star Trek if every week was a “kill the enemy” episode. But a universe where there’s always a way not to kill, or it ALWAYS turns out the threat of the week is actually misunderstood/peaceful is just as absurd and one dimensional as one where violence is always the answer. She’s the captain of a starship, she’s not going to get her crew home without getting her hands dirty sometimes.
@21/TheNewNo2: Different strokes for different folks. It’s cool you thought so highly of this episode, this coming from someone (me) who loves TNG’s The Royale, haha! I disagree with Voyager going downhill, however. Voyager is probably my least favorite Trek, but one thing I can praise it for is being consistantly not bad for all 7 seasons.
As for Janeway as Ripley or Vasquez or a combination of both: It didn’t work for me because it felt like it was changing her into something she isn’t. And dammit, there’s only one Ellen Ripley (not including her clone in Alien Resurrection) and one Corporal Vasquez! *slams fist on table with finality*
@23/Rick: I don’t disagree with any of that. My problem is not about Janeway, it’s about Brannon Braga’s choice of how to write her. As I said, this episode was just a harbinger for how I felt Janeway’s characterization suffered once Braga replaced Taylor, and I feel the difference in gendered assumptions and values was probably a factor. This episode, for me, represented how a male writer’s perception of what “strong woman” meant could be superficial and simplistic compared to how a female writer would approach it. Not to mention male-gazey, something that would be a persistent issue with Braga’s work as a Trek producer. (I mean, was there really any story reason for having the ship be so hot, other than an excuse to strip Janeway down to a tank top?)
@24/Thierafhal: “It didn’t work for me because it felt like it was changing her into something she isn’t.”
Yes — that’s also a good way of putting it. It just didn’t feel right for her. Maybe it would’ve worked better with B’Elanna as the action heroine — although I still would probably have found it pretty bad, dumb, and pointless.
I’m with @23 on this one. Yes, it’s fantastic that Janeway is often allowed to be a different, and better, kind of captain. But in this situation, the rest of the crew is incapacitated, and the antagonist is not susceptible to reason – and they blew a lot of sciencey details, but that scenario broadly isn’t overly contrived. In that case, the two things to try are technical cures – which she _does_ pursue also – and grabbing a big gun and kicking butt. It’s to Janeway’s credit, rather than detracting from her character, that this isn’t her first instinct, but she’s capable of adapting her approach when the sitiuation calls for it.
S
@26/Silvertip: It never makes sense to use the situation in the story to defend the writer’s choices, because it’s the other way around — the writer chose to define the situation that way in the first place. My issue is with the choice to tell this particular story at all, this really dumb concept forcing the show and characters into a genre that I consider a poor fit for them.
Oh, I remembered that I found the Tak Tak alien’s makeup design annoying and impractical with that “handle” that goes vertically over its mouth. Doesn’t really make sense for practically eating solid food, does it? I remember the bad guy alien on DS9 in the episode “Melora” also had that dumb handle over its mouth. I know it makes for an unusual alien design but it’s still silly!
@28/garreth: Maybe it’s vestigial and the Tak Tak used to have two mouths!
All joking aside, I remember Quark giving the DS9 handle-mouthed alien a bowl of soup as a bribe… Yeah, that’s the ticket! Needless to say, the soup got poured on the floor Klingon style.
@29/Thierafhal: Haha! Well a free bowl of soup is a pretty poor bribe to convince a hardened criminal not to kill you!
“One down. Ten billion to go.”
This one starts out as a creepy quasi-horror story before morphing into an action movie. To be honest, I enjoyed the latter more than the former: There’s only so many scenes of Janeway creeping down darkened corridors I can take. It does feel as though the episode is just copying genres without giving them a decent twist: We have Janeway wearing a vest and lugging a big gun, and even taking out a mook with a knife, just because that’s the sort of thing that happens in that sort of movie. On the other hand, it is unsettling to be presented with the rather un-Star Trek idea of an adversary that’s completely beyond reason.
Similar to “The Thaw”, the episode starts off with Neelix in a major role only to write him out in favour of the Doctor a third of the way through. The Tak Tak are an interesting concept with their genuinely alien body language, but the fact that they kill all the miners Voyager tried to help off screen is a rather nasty detail that’s treated in an incredibly throwaway manner.
Paris fills in as chef in Neelix’s absence: Is there no end to his talents? His and Torres’ bickering could get very old if it doesn’t move along soon. Ensign Wildman is mentioned but not seen, and her baby still doesn’t get a name.
You know I like a lot of the parts of this episode better than the episode as a whole. Janeway going Full Badass didn’t happen often enough, at least up until this point, loved the Doctor’s role but I think the most intriguing thing at least to me was the idea of an alien species and a gestural language. I wish we had seen more of the Tak Tak, maybe even like a rescued member of the species as a part of the crew. It could have been very reminiscent of “Darmok.” Digressing but languages and how they evolve have always fascinated me
The science behind the macro virus is quite shaky but my head canon says the virus becomes sentient after a certain point in their evolution and that’s the reason for the specific sabotage. And maybe “virus” isn’t even exactly what they are but filtered through Federation science understanding this is what they were called by the crew?
Regarding the inept procedure that allowed the macro virus to spread aboard the ship in the first place, a crew member shouldn’t have to press a button at the transporter station to purge the bio-filters of contaminants, the computer should do that automatically upon the immediate detection of said contaminants. Of course then we’d have no episode and no huge crazy killer macro virus!
@30/garreth: Well that was just the appetizer. If I recall, Quark offered him a real meal beyond that and a couple of Dabo Girls as well. Still, it was a pretty pathetic bribe to give to someone determined to kill you!
However, my real point was that soup is a silly thing to offer someone with a pylon in front of their mouth! Although I’m sure that was the intended joke from the writer(s).
I loved this episode, especially Janeway in this episode, for all the reasons CLB doesn’t. That is all.
So far nobody has mentioned the pure comedy gold that is the ridiculousness of the Tak Tak poses?
@34/Thierafhal: Thinking about it, that was a missed opportunity for pure comedy gold: seeing the alien criminal trying to eat the soup with a spoon but failing and/or pulling a straw out of his pocket to slurp up the soup. Lol
@36/Austin: I found the Tak Tak alien’s “language” of poses to be more overly broad silliness on the writer’s part than laugh out load comedy genius but that’s just me.
“Jefferies Tube 11, take a left to Section 31…”
Oh no, Section 31 has agents on Voyager! And they’re hiding in the Jefferies Tube even!
@37/garreth: Haha, producing a straw out of his pocket would have been epic!
“—and also stripping down to a tank top due to the extreme heat, as main power being down means the heat from the warp engines isn’t venting—”
One little problem with this concept–the last time I checked, the warp engines ARE “main power.” A Federation starship’s primary source of energy is the matter-antimatter reactor that powers the warp drive–they bleed plasma off of that to run ship’s systems. The heat generated by the warp engines comes from that same plasma. If main power is down, how exactly are the engines generating heat???
Hmm, this episode aired a couple of weeks after Star Trek: First Contact opened in theaters. I wonder, could they have been timing this to coincide with the bigger action Trek with its own action captain? Janeway and Picard even wear the same style of Starfleet issued vest to show off their guns. (From the Yippee-Ki-Yay line of action wear, available in select stores).
@40/DonRudolphII: “The heat generated by the warp engines comes from that same plasma. If main power is down, how exactly are the engines generating heat???”
I don’t think they’re generating new heat — it’s just that they’re already very, very hot to begin with and would take a long time to cool down from that temperature after shutting down (since vacuum is an insulator, contrary to popular belief). With the cooling systems down, there’s nothing to insulate the crew from that residual heat, so they’d be cooked by it long before it would all bleed off into space.
@25 CLB: was there really any story reason for having the ship be so hot, other than an excuse to strip Janeway down to a tank top?
Well, wouldn’t it be logical for a ship infected by a macrovirus to have a fever? *runs and hides*
The issue with the “virus” stems from writers without an adequate understanding of science trying to write science fiction. This episode occurred during the period when my reading habits were in transition from science fiction to fantasy – I recall finding magic systems more internally consistent than the hand-wavium science in several books I had read.
I think this would have worked better if we had no explanation of how the lifeforms got on board.
As far as the creatures’ growth rate, the episode really needed to incur some crew casualties to produce the requisite biomass.
@43 – if you recall, they had to induce a fever to save the biogel packs that form Voyager’s organic computer in season 1.
@8 Putting her hands on her hips would have sent a stronger message had she been on visual comms.
@44/lerris: “The issue with the “virus” stems from writers without an adequate understanding of science trying to write science fiction.”
Not really, because writers don’t work in a vacuum. If we don’t know something, we can ask someone who does. Star Trek had paid scientific consultants on staff — for Voyager it was mainly Andre Bormanis, with Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda serving as technical consultants as well as scenic artists. Denise Okuda was the main medical consultant, I think.
But here’s the thing: It’s fiction, not a doctoral paper, so the writers don’t have to follow the scientific advice if it gets in the way of the story they want to tell. The main thing that matters is the adventure, the drama, etc. Scientific detail can help make it sound more convincing, but it’s secondary, there to serve the narrative rather than veto it. Some science fiction, like mine, follows the science as closely as possible; other SF only uses science to justify the story it wants to tell, and if real science can’t justify it, you just fake the rest. That’s a stylistic choice. It’s not about ignorance, because a writer can be fully informed on how real science works and still decide to do something different in the story, since it’s make-believe, after all.
@45 – point taken.
However, art is a dialogue between ( in this case ) the writer and the viewer. And there may be a very large difference between how the audience viewed a virus in the 90s versus how we view a virus in the midst of a global pandemic. In this case, the inaccuracy, to this viewer, gets in the way of the story they’re trying to tell, and is a poor stylistic choice, IMO. As I mentioned, I am the type of reader who gets frustrated by bad science.
@46/lerris: “As I mentioned, I am the type of reader who gets frustrated by bad science.”
So am I, but I accept that we’re not the only audience for fiction. And when I was growing up, Star Trek for all its implausibility was the one SFTV/film franchise that even bothered to try acknowledging real science every now and then, so I appreciated the few scraps to ease my starvation. At least the Trek advisors were sometimes able to dial back the absurdities the writers envisioned, or to paper them over with some semblance of plausible-sounding technobabble, though they were less successful at it on Voyager than on TNG or DS9.
@47/CLB:
I wholeheartedly agree. I like to think that I had a basic understanding of how much of the technology from TNG worked but Voyager was all over the place. It seemed the writers would stop at nothing to make a story work, even if it meant making something up for an episode we’d never hear about ever again. TNG certainly did that on occasion, but not as wildly out of control as Voyager.
I used to be like: “whatever, it’s fiction, who cares if it holds any water”, but since I’ve been been commenting on this site, I’ve developed a much greater appreciation for plausible science.
45/Christopher: Wasn’t that Rick Sternbach?
@49/Eduardo: Oops. Fixed.
I decided to start a Voyager rewatch last week. I really didn’t need an episode about a rapidly spreading virus.
I remember this as a pretty unappealing episode. Also, as I always say when Macha Hernandez comes up, I am very glad the name “Macha” was never used. It’s ridiculous as hell.
@25 – Chris: But B’elanna isn’t an action hero either. Yes, she’s a Maquis, but she’s an engineer, not a fighter. I don’t think it would have made more sense. If anything, it would have been playing towards the “Klingon warrior” stereotype, something she doesn’t really like.
@52/MaGnUs: “If anything, it would have been playing towards the “Klingon warrior” stereotype, something she doesn’t really like.”
That just makes it more interesting, if you explore that discomfort with being forced into the role, and with how naturally it comes to her to be aggressive.
Everyone was way to chill about the “purified” colony.
The CGI really suffers Looking back from 2020… not looking forward to revisiting 8472 after seeing this. Also looking from 2020 anything about a virus sets my teeth on edge… i just want to fast forward it to be honest.
chadefallstar: I dunno, the CGI looked fine to me. No worse than, say, the cheesy aliens on old-school Doctor Who, and I still enjoy those.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This is actually my favorite Voyager episode, which is admittedly ironic given my distaste for the mindless ‘splosions the franchise focuses on these days. Then again, the rest of Voyager is so forgettable that anything memorable naturally stands out…
I was a kid when this came out and hadn’t gotten to biology yet. I found it pretty terrifying, and it scared the crap out of me. I still find it creepy, bad CGI notwithstanding.
Krad, did you mean Denise Crosby is incredibly blonde or incredibly bland? I also think Macrocosm suffers from way too much exposition.
3: Would you have liked Macrocosm more if it were Jeri Ryan stripped to a tank top? And was it Braga’s idea to sexualise ST? Is that why we get the resort program, as well as Ryan’s catsuits and Jennifer Lien’s sexier outfits later in the season? Apparently the macrovirus increases in size and dimension by absorbing some of its victim’s growth hormones into its protein structure.
5: That would be Starship Mine from TNG’s sixth season. 6: Imagine if the Coronavirus did the same! Then no-one would be safe! 7: Wasn’t there a female character like that in Rambo II: First Blood (written by James Cameron, no less!)? 8: The word used by the Tak Tak was “purified”. You’re thinking of Species 8472.
13: The Company prefer to dismiss Ripley as a crazy rather than risk her expose their dirty little secret about protecting the Alien. And because she lost her rank as a flight officer, Ripley had to take the work she could get. 18: And yet characters like Kane and Ash were more middle-class than the blue-collar Parker and Brett.
31: Neelix wasn’t a major character in The Thaw. Paris and Torres continue to bicker even when they become a couple. It’s not as annoying here as it will be later on. 32: It’s nice that ST takes something like that into account with the Tak Tak as well as similar species with language barriers like the Tamarians, the Swarm and the Skreea.
34: It did look like one of DS9’s upper/lower pylons! 38: I’m surprised they weren’t named Section 47 because that’s ST’s lucky number. 43: In Aliens, the xenomorphs assemble they’re host population under the colony’s primary heat exchangers – we assume because if someone launched an assault, they risk the colony’s reactor going nuclear (which it does). Perhaps that explains why Ripley strips to her vest at the climax?
45: ST makes a token attempt at science but as soon as it runs out of the real stuff, they just make it up. 53: Torres has to embrace the fighter within that she’s tried so hard to deny – a great arc. 57: I think the CGI Species 8472 were way more inconsistent and maybe that’s why they vanished after In the Flesh, at least until the technology had caught up with the idea.
@58/David Sim: “3: Would you have liked Macrocosm more if it were Jeri Ryan stripped to a tank top?”
I would certainly enjoy the view, but it would not improve my opinion of the story. I can distinguish the two.
“Apparently the macrovirus increases in size and dimension by absorbing some of its victim’s growth hormones into its protein structure.”
Growth hormones aren’t magic. They promote the process of growth, but they can’t create matter out of nothing. You can’t build a house just by hiring the contractors; you need to ship in the actual wood and bricks and stuff for them to build it out of. And living things need to take in food and water to build cells out of. A body can’t grow unless it eats.
58: “Neelix wasn’t a major character in The Thaw.”
I know he wasn’t. I was referring to the fact that the episode starts off with Torres partnering Kim, only to reduce her to a supporting role and replace her with the Doctor.
When Janeway and Neelix returned to a seemingly abandoned ship, I half expected them to find a still-playing video from Seska telling Chakotay “blah blah blah come save your kid!”
Also, why could the macro virus fly?
Did I miss something, or was there no explanation as to how Kes caught the virus? The last we saw of her in the flashback, she was with the Doctor in Sickbay; are we expected to believe she was stupid enough to venture out of there?
Also, how did the viruses get everyone into the Mess Hall? There was no sign of the infection involving any sort of mental control, and I really can’t see how they/it could have herded them, or carried them using those stupid little proto-arms.
One point I half expected you to critique: this is a very transparent rehash of TNG’s “Genesis”. Duo comes back from away mission, ship is adrift and thrashed, crew missing and changed, the returning crew are infected, an artificial being saves the day.
But spider!Barclay and predator!Worf have aged much better, VFX-wise, than these viruses. That’s the problem with all cutting edge CGI use: what looks groundbreaking in one year looks dated twenty later.