Voyager receives a hologram of Reginald Barclay in place of their monthly data stream from Starfleet, and he brings exciting news: he has a plan to return them home! But back in the Alpha Quadrant, the real Reginald Barclay is dismayed that his attempt to send a hologram to Voyager has apparently failed. And with the help of Counselor Troi, he soon learns that someone has hijacked his program and modified it for nefarious purposes.
When Star Trek: Voyager served up its first Barclay/Troi episode, I commented that as much as I enjoyed seeing the characters again (especially Troi), it didn't exactly feel like a Star Trek: Voyager episode with it featuring the main cast so little. "Inside Man" is balanced a little better in this regard, with scenes split between the Alpha and Delta Quadrants. Yet it still falls flat for me as a Star Trek: Voyager episode in one key way. Our regular characters are made to look painfully, fatally stupid.
Voyager never actually has any direct communication with Starfleet at any point in this episode, and thus the characters never have any agency in the plot. They're all duped by holographic Barclay (despite initial skepticism that quickly goes away), and then come moments away from all being killed before they're saved by an outside intervention they're completely unaware of. Worse still, it's a group of particularly stupid Ferengi that manage to pull one over on the entire Voyager crew. It's a truly poor showing for them all.
If you can overlook that and see this more generally as a Star Trek episode, then at least it's rather fun. Barclay is always good for an "it's not paranoia if it's actually happening" story. (You'd think sooner or later, his boss would start believing him. I guess we're not seeing all the times he's wrong.) In particular, it's a good episode for Dwight Schultz, who gives two very different takes on his character between "Barclay actual" and the smooth-talking, supremely confident "Barclay hologram." Plus, Troi (and Marina Sirtis) gets some good moments too: actually counseling Barclay about his breakup, and applying pressure in an interrogation to extract useful information.
There's some great production value here. We get a return of the Pathfinder project lab, this time with a group of school children on a tour. We get the bridge of a Ferengi starship, with three different bantering characters. There's even a day of filming out on the beach, complete with background actors in alien makeup. (Every last bit of dialogue would have to have been dubbed later, due to the sound of the crashing waves. What a pain!)
Get past that concern I have with the story construction, and the writing actually seems pretty good throughout. I appreciate "hanging a lantern" on this being the umpteenth time Voyager might find a fast way home, as Paris specifically references past episodes where that happened. The talk of a just-off-screen Will Riker serves well enough to make you not miss Jonathan Frakes too badly. And the Ferengi characters, along with Leosa the scamming dabo girl, all feel consistent with everything we've seen on Deep Space Nine.
Other observations:
- The scene of the Barclay holo doing impersonations of Janeway and Tuvok for entertainment cleverly sets up the later moment when he'll impersonate Seven of Nine's voice as part of his scheme.
- I love the ridiculousness of Barclay's improv about "Vidiian Phage torpedoes." (But also... remember that the people who were fooled by that are the same people who fooled the entire Voyager crew here. Yeah, just not a good day for Our Heroes.)
I'm jumping ahead here to a review I suppose I'll end up writing years from now, when I point out that the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise was widely criticized for featuring characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation more prominently than those of that show itself. In many ways, I feel like this episode laid a crucial bit of track getting to that later point. But this is at least is the better, more fun version of that. I give "Inside Man" a B.
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