A shuttlecraft returns from exploring a nebula, carrying a comatose Chakotay. The other passenger, Tuvok, explains that they were attacked by an alien ship. But as Voyager goes for a closer look, a new concern presents itself: one of the aliens seems to be aboard the ship in non-corporeal form, hopping between crewmembers, possessing them, and performing sabotage. Paranoia rises as no one can be trusted.
I usually take it as a given in my flashback Trek reviews that 25-year-old spoilers aren't really spoilers anymore, but because the mystery here really is The Thing This Episode Offers, I'll sound an extra alarm before revealing... that this whole episode's twist sprang from a conversation between Star Trek writers Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky. They'd done the "alien among us" story before, but what if "the alien" was actually one of us?!
Thus, for the second episode in a row, the character who the episode is theoretically centered upon isn't really in the episode much. (Kim as Beowulf, felled by holoGrendel; Chakotay wandering the ship as a disembodied spirit.) The writers were ultimately somewhat disappointed in the results, feeling that they could not capture the sense of paranoia, the "And Then There Were None" with a body-hopping suspect, that they were really hoping for. And to be fair, they're right about that. The moments of most intense paranoia are actually played for comedy: Kim zones out for a moment in a meeting and gets a phaser leveled at him; the Doctor displays a twisted sense of humor when he turns Neelix's suspicious eye back on him.
But the writers did nevertheless build a pretty clever mystery here. (A much better one than the "who is the traitor?" mystery of a few episodes ago.) The idea that "anybody could be possessed" is introduced at just the right time to make it very hard to suspect that there's a second alien (the real alien) continually possessing Tuvok. You're thrown off the scent of there even being a solvable mystery here in a way that ultimately makes the Tuvok reveal land.
Along the way, there are a few nice bits of character building. B'Elanna tries to honor Chakotay's wishes with a medicine wheel ceremony, and when she thinks the Doctor is going to criticize the dogma, he instead corrects her sloppy performance of the ritual. Paris waxes nostalgic about a childhood doctor he liked. The Doctor is handed the command codes of the ship (in a moment that I wish had been given a little more weight). Ensign Kim has to be the first to take sides between Tuvok and Janeway in a mutiny situation.
But there are also plenty of moments that don't quite work. Tuvok's "wide beam stun" phaser setting seems so useful that there's no explaining why it isn't just used all the time. The idea of Chakotay's two-dimensional medicine wheel serving as a map through three-dimensional space makes no sense. And the hand-waving about "reintegrating Chakotay's consciousness" at the end of the episode approaches a "Spock's Brain" level of science fiction silliness.
Yet the biggest "this doesn't work" element of it all is the bizarre gothic holonovel Janeway plays at the opening of the episode. Star Trek: The Next Generation began its share of episodes with holodeck scenes... except that those scenes were always related thematically. Squint and tilt your head, and you can maybe see that "paranoia" is the theme of the holonovel, and also the theme of the episode? But the reality is, this holonovel scene was actually written and filmed for a completely different episode, "Eye of the Needle." It had no more resonance there, from what I can tell, but they spent a ton of money (for some reason) on building the set and were determined to re-use the scene somewhere. And so you get Janeway involved in a territorial squabble with a former Romulan commander -- amounting to nothing.
Other observations?
- Uh... nope, I think that covers it this time.
I'm really not sure that "Cathexis" is a strong episode. But it's essentially a mystery, and I find it a better one than "State of Flux," which I called a B-. So I'll say "Cathexis" merits a B.
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