A trio of con artists are working through the sector, trading on the starship Voyager's good name to swindle people out of valuable resources. When the actual Voyager comes across a planet that's been wronged by the imposters, Captain Janeway resolves to capture the culprits and reclaim her crew's reputation.
I think it would have been harder to tell this story on, say, The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine, where the identities of our heroes could be easily verified from some secondary source. Here, only Voyager is around to vouch for themselves. The stakes are higher too; if some random Alpha Quadrant planet decides they've been wronged by "Picard" and the "Enterprise," it simply doesn't matter as much as it does to Voyager, always scraping to get by and needing any allies it can make.
Not that this episode is as serious as all that... and that's fine, because it leans into the fun. The alien con artists are an entertaining group of characters. Their leader Dala is actually conning people out of money to help "poor orphans," so on the nose it brings a smile to your face. Her partner Mobar is even funnier, a "method actor" who is devoted to remaining in character at all times. Their oversized communicator badges and rank pips call to mind the licensed Next Gen toys of the 1980s, cheesy knock-offs that look nothing like the real thing, that any convention cos-player would be too embarrassed to be seen in.
This approach of playing for comedy also serves the major subplot: Neelix and Paris are reckoning with how they, of all people, could have been swindled themselves by Dala and her team. Though I think if any scam would entrap a Starfleet officer (or Starfleet type), you'd have to imagine it would be someone posing as a cleric; Starfleet is conditioned to give such a wide berth to cultural quirks that they're reflexively going to accept religious beliefs at face value. Plus, if you wanted to, you might dig into whether Starfleet ideals themselves are approaching the dogmatic level of a religion; the fact that Dala's crew slips so easily from posing as clerics to posing as Starfleet officers suggests little distance between the two. But, again, we're rightly keeping it light here -- and so the Neelix/Paris subplot features them trying to scam the Doctor, being mocked by Tuvok, and ultimately working to con the con artists in the end.
All that said, I think the real charms of the episode weren't necessarily there on the script page. I don't really buy that Neelix ever thought of himself as a scammer. (A drifter or freeloader? Sure!) It's even harder to believe that Voyager's counter-con actually works on Dala, who seems far too smart for such a thing. But fortunately, the episode benefits from other elements beyond the page: fun directing by LeVar Burton, and an especially good performance by guest star Kaitlin Hopkins as Dala. This episode calls for her to play her character, that same character posing as a cleric, and posing as Captain Janeway... and then to play The Doctor pretending to be her character. She handles all that ably, and has great bickering chemistry with Gregg Daniel as Mobar.
Other observations:
- Early on, there's talk of Tom Paris and Harry Kim pranking Tuvok by hacking and altering his holodeck program. I'm with Tuvok -- that doesn't sound funny.
- Paris mentions a sedative called ambizine -- which sounds a lot like "Ambien." (Deliberately, I assume; as the drug existed years before this episode was made.)
- If you're keeping track, Voyager is now said to be 30,000 light years from home in this episode. (More than halfway there!)
I do think this episode is fun... though also not the sort of "laugh out loud" fun that would earn a truly high mark from me. I give "Live Fast and Prosper" a B.
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