Voyager Flashback: The Disease

Episodic television has a built-in shortcoming when presenting a romantic story line for a main character: that character will have to be single again by the end of the episode. Some good stories can still be told within that constraint... but sometimes the artificiality shows, as it did in Star Trek: Voyager's "The Disease."

When Harry Kim pursues a clandestine relationship with an alien woman named Derran Tal, he contracts a disease that exposes the truth. But Derran is hiding a secret too, that strikes at the heart of her xenophobic, nomadic society.

The big "wait, what?" at the heart of this episode is that suddenly, after over 500 episodes of Star Trek across multiple franchises, we're now learning that hooking up with an alien hottie (without the captain's permission) is against Starfleet regulations? That's just the most laughable, contradictory notion. And it seems to me like a sign of the writers losing their nerve. There are already stakes here: Harry Kim's relationship has given him a sexually-transmitted disease, which in this science-fiction setting could have presented extreme risk. Instead, the effects seem largely cosmetic and benign, and the "lingering heartache" is really only an issue for the final scene (and not something that the audience will ever really see Kim grapple with).

The whole episode really operates this way, occasionally presenting good scenes or interesting avenues for story development before immediately doing something to undermine it. Paris is a friend to Kim by helping him initially hide the relationship... but he isn't caught and doesn't face consequences for doing so. There's sort of "Romeo and Juliet" potential in both ship captains forbidding the relationship... but no consequences at large attributable to the forbidden love itself (as opposed to the alien dissident movement; and there are no consequences at all for Voyager). The story is ultimately revealed to be about an oppressed minority within the alien society... but we really aren't shown how they're oppressed beyond a vague "I don't want the same things my square parents want, man."

It seems that at the beginning of their relationship, Darren really was just using Kim to facilitate some terrorism. Then they actually fell in love -- which I can more or less believe, as Garrett Wang and guest star Musetta Vander do have reasonably good chemistry together. But if the characters really loved each other -- so much that they've been breaking all these rules throughout the episode -- then nothing is stopping them from being together in the end! She could come to Voyager and be with him; he could leave Voyager to be with her. Instead, they just sort of break up for absolutely no reason. (Kim doesn't even voice a perfectly reasonable reason why: "you've been lying to me this whole time.")

Even the "ornaments" on the story work against each other in this way. It's quite interesting to have Voyager encounter another species that's surviving on a spaceship like they are. But the fact that they're also mistrustful of aliens doesn't feel like it adds much; Janeway has already broken down diplomatic barriers (after two weeks of effort) as the episode begins. Good moments (like Chakotay lobbying Janeway for leniency with Harry; Seven of Nine's dry "you're glowing" comment that's misread by Kim) live right along side bad ones (Seven's late decision that "love is not a disease" feels forced; I'm tired of Paris giving Kim shit about his love life; a momentary jeopardy that Voyager won't be able to detach from the "exploding" alien ship is nothing more than a tease before a commercial).

And another quiet friction within the story is how much Janeway essentially infantilizes Harry Kim. This conflict is at least represented in the dialogue -- Janeway says that she expects better from him and that she's protective of him, while Kim says he's not that fresh-faced newbie of five years ago. This really feels like the moment where Janeway, having heard from Chakotay and now from Kim himself, should realize Kim isn't that person anymore, and give him a promotion. But it doesn't seem like the writers much care about the character.

Other observations:

• The alien spaceship is just comically, Spaceball One long.

• And speaking of comedy, it's quite weird to me to see guest star Charles Rocket taking on a serious role.

• Seriously, if any character in Star Trek was going to get an STD from hooking up with an alien, we all know it's James T. Kirk, right? (Oh, who am I kidding? He's the one giving STDs all throughout the galaxy.)

• There's an impressive take in the middle of this episode that takes an argument from the conference room, across the bridge, and into Janeway's ready room all without a cut.

Garrett Wang does his best with a rare episode written for Harry Kim. But ultimately, this episode just feel underdeveloped: the alien dissident movement is vague, the romance runs inexplicably hot-then-cold, and the conflicts simply aren't that compelling. I give "The Disease" a C+.