Voyager Flashback: Scientific Method

Star Trek: The Next Generation had done an episode about aliens experimenting on the crew. But where "Schisms" tried mostly for a horror tone (and fell a bit short), Voyager's take on the same concept -- "Scientific Method" -- put a face on the aliens and focused more on how the characters were pushed to different limits.

When Chakotay undergoes rapid aging, it's just the most overtly threatening of many oddities among the crew. Janeway is suffering from debilitating headaches. Neelix is breaking out in spots. And all of it seems to be caused by alien tampering with the crew's DNA. They've all become part of a series of twisted experiments, and must find an escape before people die in these bizarre tests.

In the plus column, this episode has plenty of story to go around for many different characters. Janeway "plays through the pain" and does some of her most forceful captaining. Tuvok trades some especially wry banter with her in a scene underscoring their friendship. Seven must act with subterfuge, rising above her nature and experience. The Doctor is played for comedy, giving Janeway the worst looking massage imaginable. Chakotay and Neelix compare their "war wounds" in an entertaining scene.

But in the minus column, some story threads get short shrift -- if they make sense at all. There's true horror in the concept that Seven can see the aliens experimenting on her even as she must not react and give herself away; the episode really doesn't tap into the tension of the situation. B'Elanna and Tom continue to hide their romance (badly) for inexplicably juvenile reasons. (At least this time, alien interference is a possible justification.) And an attempt at encoding a "message" in all these sci-fi shenanigans feels half-hearted at best; this is a cautionary tale about the evils of scientific testing on animals? Maybe?

There are a lot of surprisingly good visual effects throughout. The CG exposing interior anatomy look pretty credible (and showing the skeleton/musculature of a couple while they kiss certainly carries a high degree of difficulty). The "binary pulsars" look great. Even good old practical effects are solid. The various torture devices we see on the crew are truly unsettling, and the moment when Chakotay pulls out a clump of his hair is a legitimately horrifying beat in the episode.

Other observations:

• The ongoing story about the construction of the Astrometrics Lab continues.

• They still can't quite nail down Seven of Nine's look the way they want. After discarding the structured silver catsuit in favor of less-painful-to-wear brown version, they've now put the high collar from the silver suit onto the new brown suit.
  

• Decades before the eggplant would be widely recognized (as an emoji stand-in for something else), it appears here on Neelix's kitchen counter as a "food so weird looking that it will pass for alien."

• Actress Annette Helde makes an appearance. I call her out among the many other recurring Star Trek actors in minor roles because she was part of the Denver Center Theater Company throughout the 90s, and I saw her perform live many times.

• When Harry Kim interrupts Tom and B'Elanna's dinner at the end of the episode, he remarks that it "smells good." They're eating salad. Harry can smell salad.

"Scientific Method" continues an emerging trend of season four, of episodes that are fine if not particularly great or memorable. I give it a B.