75 – Scientific Method

Grade: B

Summary

Tom and B’Elanna are enjoying some private time together, but they are apparently being watched. While at first we only think the two lovebirds are out in the open, it’s actually a bunch of aliens who are studying them.

Commentary

It has been a while since we have seen an episode this good. So far, this is the second best episode of the 4th season. I liked the unraveling of the mystery of what was happening to the crew. I thought it was fairly original, though there are a couple of TNG episodes that have a few similarities with this one.

In Where Silence has Lease, the Enterprise has to deal with some powerful aliens who put Picard and crew to some odd tests. Personally, however, I think Scientific Method is a much better episode. It’s much better executed and far more interesting. And like another TNG episode (Phantasms), the threat is not visible to most of the crew except one person can detect them. In TNG, it was Data. In Voyager, it is Seven of Nine. In reality, I liked the Data version better, but this wasn’t that bad.

If there’s one thing that really could bring this episode down a bit, it’s the “fun with DNA” routine. Honestly, I didn’t care for that part very much, but it could have been worse. There is also a bit of a debate about animal rights and testing, and that gets a little tedious, but it really is part of the story, so it’s not terrible.

I did think Janeway was a little extreme in her method of getting rid of the aliens. She’d rather destroy her own ship than try to find another way to get rid of these guys? Can’t they come up with some kind of gas that would put the aliens to sleep? Still, if there’s one good thing with how the episode ended, it was that while Janeway seemed to expect the ship to be torn apart, it actually didn’t suffer too much damage.

Of Note

Brannon Braga was very pleased with how the opening teaser went. He liked how creepy it looked when Tom and B’Elanna’s kiss was shown in x-ray.