Plot – One the oddest and most pantomimic openings to an episode of Star Trek ever, Neelix is covering up for a first contact blunder that Janeway made insulting a species who communicate by gesturing empathically by putting her hands on her hips. I’m not sure that it is either funny or clever but it certainly gets things off on a memorable note. The Tak Tak turning up at the climax to add an extra layer of excitement is undermined by the alien’s bizarre spirit fingers whilst threatening the ship.
Essentially by the time Janeway comes back on board the Doctor has already developed a cure to the macro virus and so the episode merely filling in the blanks before the solution can be put in place. It all comes down to Janeway as Ripley with her antigen bomb. Yes, the script boils down to that level of simplicity.
What the hell happened to Neelix anyway?
Character – Ambassador Neelix? Can you imagine promoting this guy to such an exalted position? First contact with a new species and this over ripe and excitable hedgehog shows up to shove your own culture down your throat.
Performance – Interestingly the chemistry between Mulgrew and Phillips works very well in the first scene where they are just sitting around and chatting but later when they are playing action heroes it lacks any spark. But then Neelix, having been vomited on by the macrovirus, is essentially a dead weight. Mulgrew is phenomenal throughout but she is essentially lifting this episode (which is a dead weight) as high as she can through her sheer talent. She manages to get it to about her knees.
Production – Alexander Singer seems to be the go-to director for ship-based action stories (Gambit, The Adversary, Starship Down) because he seems to understand where to position the camera in any given room to suggest a sense of scale and dynamism to the action. He gets to show off so much of the Voyager sets here as Janeway dashes from one area to another to fight the alien menace and Singer gets the most out of the multitude of sets he has to work with. In an episode this thinly written, the director sure has to pick up the slack.
There is one moment where Neelix is lit from below and is clearly the most terrifying thing in the whole episode.
Best moment – The flashback to how the macrovirus came aboard turns out to be far more interesting than exploring the after effects. Perhaps this should have been a more linear script, with half detailing the flashback in more detail and the second half seeing Janeway return to the deserted ship.
Worst moment – What is it with Voyager and it’s CGI monsters? Species 8472 and the Slimers from Equinox were similarly unconvincing. Singer does a wonderful job in convincing you there is something nasty roaming the ship with the skin crawling sound effect of flies buzzing nearby. Just that and some shadows would have been enough to create some real tension. Or maybe just showing the scenes from the creatures POV would have been more effective. Instead we get to see the macrovirus in full cartoon glory and it just pops the balloon of tension immediately. It’s unbelievably fake looking, especially when Janeway has to grapple with one.
Who thought that setting the macrovirus on the Hawaii holodeck programme was a good idea? It’s another example of attempted humour that bombs spectacularly. It often feels like Voyager is trying very hard to be funny…when the best shows (TNG is particularly good at this) are just naturally amusing. It often comes down to the cast involved.
I wish they hadn’t done that – Let’s get this out of the way straight away so I can get on with talking about something less obvious and more interesting – a lot of Voyager episodes are pale imitations of stronger TNG ones and Macrocosm is probably the ultimate example. As this is a ship bound show there are bound to be similarities but by having the same writers that brought TNG to life transferring to Voyager (can you imagine if Ron Moore had transferred to this show from the off…it would be a very different Voyager) they took the same ideas along with them. This is part Starship Mine (in which Picard strips down and protects the ship with a big gun as Janeway does here) and part Genesis (in which Picard and Data return to the Enterprise to find it deserted and horrors roaming the ship just as Janeway and Neelix do here with the bugs). It is a shame when there is the potential to do anything at all in a region of space that we know nothing about that the writers should fall back on familiar plots and old tropes.
At the end of the episode Voyager sails on its merry way with jazz music playing in the background…almost as if to highlight how insignificant this whole exercise has been.
A reason to watch this episode again – Essentially a horror story which is lacking a formidable foe, Macrocosm is one of the thinnest episodes of Voyager because it can essentially be summed up as ‘Janeway and her gun.’ Jeri Taylor was actually quoted as saying ‘The story is basically Janeway as Rambo.’ If you enjoy watching Kate Mulgrew stalking about the ship in a vest then this might just be the episode for you. Me? I prefer something a little more significant. The CGI bugs are a huge let-down after all the reasonable build of atmosphere, especially when horror movies over time have shown so many techniques for creating effective spooks and monsters. Alexander Singer should have looked to Alfred Hitchcock for inspiration. The script leans on clichés more often than not and Mulgrew is in the thankless position of trying to make them feel fresh and exciting. Macrocosm works to a point but after the kind-of exciting flashback to what happened on Voyager you are basically watching a lot of wandering and shooting and not much else. Brannon Braga’s original intention was to do a cinematic episode entirely without dialogue and purely with action and I can only imagine how much better that would have been.
**1/2 out of *****
Clue for tomorrow's episode:
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