151 – Critical Care

Grade: C+

Summary

An alien named Gar steals the Doctor’s program and then sells it (him?) to a medical ship. There, medicine is dispensed to those who have the best chance to be productive in society, and not to those who most need it. This is obviously disturbing to the Doctor, who takes matters into his own hands and tries to single-handedly reform their medical system.

Commentary

There’s nothing subtle about this episode. This is clearly making a statement about the US health care system at the time it was made. At least we’re not as bad as these guys are.

Well, anyway. It’s not particularly deep, though it tries to become that way once the Doctor is back on Voyager. I was actually quite disappointed in how this played out. How is it possible that an alien who is completely unfamiliar with Voyager and its technology is able to so easily fool the entire ship and steal a piece of computer software? Not only that, but he actually had to replace the real Doctor with a fake, non-functioning one so that nobody would suspect him. How can this happen? Who is running this ship?

I hated it when Tuvok says “I take full responsibility,” as if that meant anything. Janeway won’t reprimand him, strip him of rank, require him to run extra shifts, take away some privileges or do anything else for that matter. I would have left that line out of the script entirely, because the show isn’t going to do anything about it at all. This is Voyager, after all, where nothing of any consequence ever happens.