[3.8/10] Trying to display “true love” in a single episode of Star Trek is a big gamble. As common as it is in fiction, a genuine, soul-shaking connection between two people is a decpetivley tricky thing to convey. It has to look and feel just right. And even if, by some miracle, you cannot only write that profound connection in a way that lands within a forty-five minute time slot, you still have to hope and pray that the actors have enough on screen chemistry to make the relationship sing on the screen.
It can work! I bought it with Janeway and Kashyk just a few episodes ago! I bought it with Picard and Nella Darren! Hell, I bought it with Zefram Cochrane and a frickin’ energy blob! It’s not impossible, but it’s very challenging.
Suffice it to say, the romantic trials and travails of Harry Kim are not up to the challenge.
I’ll be frank. I don’t know what the show’s doing with Harry at this point. The entire episode seems to be about him having character development over the course of the show, but I don’t know that we’ve ever really seen that. He’s pretty much the same green but resourceful ensign he was when the show started. You can declare that he’s become “a man”, but telling rather than showing doesn’t make it so, and neither does trying to prove it with the world’s drippiest romance.
Hoo boy. Instalove is dicey to begin with, and the relationship between Harry and Tal, an engineer on a generational ship Voyager is partnering with for the episode, is pretty much the pits. The two of them have one of those generic, dopey teenage romances that 1990s television liked to dramatize . And it’s not my cup of tea, but you know, under other circumstances, it could be fine.
I can't pretend I’m over the moon at having to watch scene after scene of Harry trying to awkwardly pitch woo. The interactions between him and Tal are tin-eared and styrofoam enough to make you wonder if the writers have ever been in an actual relationship. But you know what? Dopey teenage romances do happen, and they’re often inane, so there could be something true to life about Harry’s amusingly petulant, “But mom, I love her!” routine about all this.
Except the show wants us to take it seriously! It wants to treat this frozen dinner of a romance like it’s some kind of profound connection between Harry and this alien lady he barely knows! More than that, it means for this to be some kind of tribute to the very idea of love and the way that it can make us do crazy things, but in a way that can be beautiful and speak to the unique worthiness of this particular “disease”.
There’s something to that idea. Love can be grand, intoxicating, and a little dangerous all at once. (Hell, we just covered that idea a few episodes back in “Gravity”, with a much better rendition of it.) But you need a romance that actually delivers on that point rather than a warmed over dose of feeble puppy love between two performers who have no more chemistry than a second grade science class.
What kills me is that all the focus on Harry’s muted character development and abortive romantic life occludes the actual interesting stuff in “The Disease”. Voyager finding a generational ship that reflects a glimpse at our heroes’ possible future is fascinating! Different groups aboard that ship wanting to break away and have more freedom and self-determination is compelling! The prospect that decades in the Delta Quadrant has made the ship’s leaders (including SNL’s Charles Rocket, in an odd but solid bit of casting) suspicious and arguably xenophobic is especially intriguing given the changes we’ve seen in Janeway over the course of the show.
But there’s barely any time to explore any of this because Harry Kim has the big fee-fees. Sigh.
What’s particularly strange is how they frame this in terms of the relationship between Janeway and Harry. For one thing, the Captain is a total prude about the whole thing in a way that doesn’t track with what we’ve seen in the past from the franchise or Janeway herself. You can only have seen Kirk and Riker romance so many aliens before the idea that there’s this strict protocol to the whole thing becomes ludicrous as a plot point here. Hell, while there’s never been anything explicit Janeway herself has gotten close to more than one alien suitor. So the whole, “I’m very disappointed in you for canoodling with an alien ingénue and getting some kind of romantic space herpes” routine comes off very strange.
What’s particularly odd is that there’s a much more natural, ready-made excuse for Janeway to be upset with Harry. She could just as easily say, “I have no problem with your relationship in principle, but this society is virulently against outsiders and we’re on thin ice with them as it is. This isn’t about violating protocol, it’s about jeopardizing an alliance with one of the few friendly peoples we’ve encountered out here.” You could still do the same generic “love vs. duty” routine, but it would come from a place of pragmatism and priorities rather than a strange personally judgmental side of Janeway we’ve never seen before.
The show tries to put a fig leaf on that, with the idea that the Captain has a special quasi-maternal relationship with Harry, to where she can't stand to see him as anything but the pure-hearted innocent ensign he was when he stepped on board Voyager. I could buy that...if I hadn't watched the last five and a half seasons of Voyager.
Harry and Janeway have never seemed terribly close. Sure, they have a few scattered moments here and there, but no more than any of the rest of the crew. In terms of being a surrogate parent, the show brought that to bear with Kes and with Seven, but rarely, if ever, with Harry. She has a deep friendship with Tuvok, a courtly romance with Chakotay, and even a regular beleaguered boss routine with Neelix. But Harry barely factors in. Hell, I’d argue she shows more mentorship with Tom and B’Elanna than she does with Harry (even if that's more of an early season Voyager thing).
So you have an episode founded on: Janeway’s special relationship with Harry, on Harry evolving into A Man:tm:, and Harry falling in love. That's all well and good except for the fact that none of those things work on their own terms within the episode, and the first two have little to no basis in the show or the characters as we’ve known them to this point.
Honestly, I might be able to forgive the first two if the romance worked, and I don’t entirely blame the creative team on this. Love is hard! It’s easy to throw two attractive people on screen and hope it suffices, but ninety percent of the time it’s much much more difficult than that. Conveying real affection in fiction typically takes time for the romance to develop, for us to see the people getting to know one another, becoming comfortable with one another, finding solace in one another. The writers and producers and director (who invokes some noteworthy creative cinematography here) are not worthy of scorn for being unable to meet that lofty standard in less than an hour.
But they did choose to produce this episode. They did choose to center it on Harry’s love life when the character’s shown all the romantic range of a constipated puppy. They chose to cast a love interest who doesn’t click with him, seems to slip in and out of her accent, and isn’t any better in the performance department. They did choose to not only center this story on a romance that absolutely doesn’t work but to frame it as some bittersweet paean to love.
Sometimes, storytelling gambles pay off. Bringing a producer-described “Borg Babe” onto Voyager show could have been disastrous; instead it was a shot in the arm for the series. Doing an episode when your bumbling clown character contemplates suicide could have been ridiculous; instead it was a creative highlight. It’s good when shows try challenging things, to tell the stories they think they can tell.
But sometimes you roll the dice and you fail miserably. This episode has a solid idea about love as a motivator, and its hardships as much an indicator of strength as of human frailty. But the way it tries to realize that idea lacks the human element, and the character background, to even come close to that heady notion, in a way that makes me wish they had left this one on the cutting room floor. At the risk of prose that rivals this script for painfully on-the-nose writing, no cure could be worse than “The Disease”.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-06-26T23:02:09Z
[3.8/10] Trying to display “true love” in a single episode of Star Trek is a big gamble. As common as it is in fiction, a genuine, soul-shaking connection between two people is a decpetivley tricky thing to convey. It has to look and feel just right. And even if, by some miracle, you cannot only write that profound connection in a way that lands within a forty-five minute time slot, you still have to hope and pray that the actors have enough on screen chemistry to make the relationship sing on the screen.
It can work! I bought it with Janeway and Kashyk just a few episodes ago! I bought it with Picard and Nella Darren! Hell, I bought it with Zefram Cochrane and a frickin’ energy blob! It’s not impossible, but it’s very challenging.
Suffice it to say, the romantic trials and travails of Harry Kim are not up to the challenge.
I’ll be frank. I don’t know what the show’s doing with Harry at this point. The entire episode seems to be about him having character development over the course of the show, but I don’t know that we’ve ever really seen that. He’s pretty much the same green but resourceful ensign he was when the show started. You can declare that he’s become “a man”, but telling rather than showing doesn’t make it so, and neither does trying to prove it with the world’s drippiest romance.
Hoo boy. Instalove is dicey to begin with, and the relationship between Harry and Tal, an engineer on a generational ship Voyager is partnering with for the episode, is pretty much the pits. The two of them have one of those generic, dopey teenage romances that 1990s television liked to dramatize . And it’s not my cup of tea, but you know, under other circumstances, it could be fine.
I can't pretend I’m over the moon at having to watch scene after scene of Harry trying to awkwardly pitch woo. The interactions between him and Tal are tin-eared and styrofoam enough to make you wonder if the writers have ever been in an actual relationship. But you know what? Dopey teenage romances do happen, and they’re often inane, so there could be something true to life about Harry’s amusingly petulant, “But mom, I love her!” routine about all this.
Except the show wants us to take it seriously! It wants to treat this frozen dinner of a romance like it’s some kind of profound connection between Harry and this alien lady he barely knows! More than that, it means for this to be some kind of tribute to the very idea of love and the way that it can make us do crazy things, but in a way that can be beautiful and speak to the unique worthiness of this particular “disease”.
There’s something to that idea. Love can be grand, intoxicating, and a little dangerous all at once. (Hell, we just covered that idea a few episodes back in “Gravity”, with a much better rendition of it.) But you need a romance that actually delivers on that point rather than a warmed over dose of feeble puppy love between two performers who have no more chemistry than a second grade science class.
What kills me is that all the focus on Harry’s muted character development and abortive romantic life occludes the actual interesting stuff in “The Disease”. Voyager finding a generational ship that reflects a glimpse at our heroes’ possible future is fascinating! Different groups aboard that ship wanting to break away and have more freedom and self-determination is compelling! The prospect that decades in the Delta Quadrant has made the ship’s leaders (including SNL’s Charles Rocket, in an odd but solid bit of casting) suspicious and arguably xenophobic is especially intriguing given the changes we’ve seen in Janeway over the course of the show.
But there’s barely any time to explore any of this because Harry Kim has the big fee-fees. Sigh.
What’s particularly strange is how they frame this in terms of the relationship between Janeway and Harry. For one thing, the Captain is a total prude about the whole thing in a way that doesn’t track with what we’ve seen in the past from the franchise or Janeway herself. You can only have seen Kirk and Riker romance so many aliens before the idea that there’s this strict protocol to the whole thing becomes ludicrous as a plot point here. Hell, while there’s never been anything explicit Janeway herself has gotten close to more than one alien suitor. So the whole, “I’m very disappointed in you for canoodling with an alien ingénue and getting some kind of romantic space herpes” routine comes off very strange.
What’s particularly odd is that there’s a much more natural, ready-made excuse for Janeway to be upset with Harry. She could just as easily say, “I have no problem with your relationship in principle, but this society is virulently against outsiders and we’re on thin ice with them as it is. This isn’t about violating protocol, it’s about jeopardizing an alliance with one of the few friendly peoples we’ve encountered out here.” You could still do the same generic “love vs. duty” routine, but it would come from a place of pragmatism and priorities rather than a strange personally judgmental side of Janeway we’ve never seen before.
The show tries to put a fig leaf on that, with the idea that the Captain has a special quasi-maternal relationship with Harry, to where she can't stand to see him as anything but the pure-hearted innocent ensign he was when he stepped on board Voyager. I could buy that...if I hadn't watched the last five and a half seasons of Voyager.
Harry and Janeway have never seemed terribly close. Sure, they have a few scattered moments here and there, but no more than any of the rest of the crew. In terms of being a surrogate parent, the show brought that to bear with Kes and with Seven, but rarely, if ever, with Harry. She has a deep friendship with Tuvok, a courtly romance with Chakotay, and even a regular beleaguered boss routine with Neelix. But Harry barely factors in. Hell, I’d argue she shows more mentorship with Tom and B’Elanna than she does with Harry (even if that's more of an early season Voyager thing).
So you have an episode founded on: Janeway’s special relationship with Harry, on Harry evolving into A Man:tm:, and Harry falling in love. That's all well and good except for the fact that none of those things work on their own terms within the episode, and the first two have little to no basis in the show or the characters as we’ve known them to this point.
Honestly, I might be able to forgive the first two if the romance worked, and I don’t entirely blame the creative team on this. Love is hard! It’s easy to throw two attractive people on screen and hope it suffices, but ninety percent of the time it’s much much more difficult than that. Conveying real affection in fiction typically takes time for the romance to develop, for us to see the people getting to know one another, becoming comfortable with one another, finding solace in one another. The writers and producers and director (who invokes some noteworthy creative cinematography here) are not worthy of scorn for being unable to meet that lofty standard in less than an hour.
But they did choose to produce this episode. They did choose to center it on Harry’s love life when the character’s shown all the romantic range of a constipated puppy. They chose to cast a love interest who doesn’t click with him, seems to slip in and out of her accent, and isn’t any better in the performance department. They did choose to not only center this story on a romance that absolutely doesn’t work but to frame it as some bittersweet paean to love.
Sometimes, storytelling gambles pay off. Bringing a producer-described “Borg Babe” onto Voyager show could have been disastrous; instead it was a shot in the arm for the series. Doing an episode when your bumbling clown character contemplates suicide could have been ridiculous; instead it was a creative highlight. It’s good when shows try challenging things, to tell the stories they think they can tell.
But sometimes you roll the dice and you fail miserably. This episode has a solid idea about love as a motivator, and its hardships as much an indicator of strength as of human frailty. But the way it tries to realize that idea lacks the human element, and the character background, to even come close to that heady notion, in a way that makes me wish they had left this one on the cutting room floor. At the risk of prose that rivals this script for painfully on-the-nose writing, no cure could be worse than “The Disease”.