155 – Flesh and Blood

Grade: B-

Summary

The Doctor wants to be allowed to attend a symposium on strange Alpha Quadrant diseases. Of course he’s not allowed to do that because it’s two weeks behind them, and they don’t want to be left without their Doctor for that long. Suddenly, Voyager receives a distress signal from a Hirogen ship that is under attack. It turns out that the holographic technology that Janeway has given them is now running completely out of control.

Commentary

OK, so the Hirogen are back. I was hoping we’d be done with them for good, way back in season 4. Your guess is as good as mine as to how they’re even close enough to the Hirogen who are at least 15,000 LY away, and why Voyager would even come to their rescue. Once they found out this was caused by improper use of the Holodeck, they should have just said, “sorry, your product is no longer under warranty” and just left them alone.

Now Voyager has managed to combine the Hirogen with everyone’s favorite cliché – the Holodeck. It doesn’t give this episode a terribly promising outlook. However, it redeems itself a little bit. What’s best about this episode is that it has some excellent character moments – and some very good arguments between Janeway and the Doctor. I thought the leader of the Holodeck beings was a very good character. But since the Hirogen are my least favorite aliens and the Holodeck is the most over-used cliché in this series, I didn’t really like this one too much.

Of Note

In this episode, Janeway mentions having shared replicators with other species along the way. Nevermind that we have never seen this happen during any episode we’ve seen in this series. But I do remember that one of the fights Janeway had with a Kazon faction was that she wouldn’t share replicator technology with them. Well, Voyager has never been about consistency.