Customer Reviews

Star Trek - Voyager, Episode 49: The Swarm [VHS]

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Voyager encounters an area of space that is inhabited by a race of aliens that are somewhat inhospitable to say the least. They warn voyager that crossing into their territory will mean their destruction. Since their territory would take years going around voyager must go through it. Meanwhile the doctor's neural pathways are deteriorating and he is losing all his capabilities. Kes doesn't want him to be reset his original programming so they seek the help of a fellow hologram modeled after the Doctor's creator and designed to help with his system. Can Kes save the Doctor's memory? As voyager encounters a damaged vessel adrift inside the territory the sole survivor says to leave as soon as possible before dying of injuries. Just then they are spotted and a fleet of a few thousand ships converges on voyager, can they escape in time?

A great episode that has two main storylines, the first is about the Doctor whose been operational for over two years non-stop something his programming was never designed to do, as such his personality and memory routines are degrading, at first slowly but eventually at a shocking rate. The Voyager crew face an uneasy decision, turn off the Doctor for now or re-boot the programme and thus lose all that WAS the Doctor.

In the meantime Voyager needs to cut through an area of space to save a lot of time, this space is surrounded by a detection grid and obviously belongs to a powerful alien race, the Swarm. The Swarm are a strange race who attack first then talk. They have thousands of tiny ships that 'swarm' around an enemy vessel and attach themselves to the hull, sucking the starships power direct from the engines. When the Swarm spots Voyager violating their territory the Federation starship becomes easy prey...

A really exciting episode, the Swarm are well spooky, it is quite touching to see the Doctor losing his memory...

"Star Trek: Voyager," Episode 49, "The Swarm" (Written by Michael Sussman, Aired September 25, 1996) finds the starship encountering yet another enemy in the Delta Quadrant. While on a shuttle mission Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) and B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) are attacked by aliens who materialize, fire weapons, and disappear. Both are wounded, Paris seriously, but Torres gets the shuttle back to "Voyager." We learn from Neelix (Ethan Phillips) that no one knows the name of these aliens, but their reputation is that the attack anyone who dares to enter their territory. Like angry insects, they swarm after their prey. The problem is that their territory is so large that Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) decides to just keep on course and not try to take the long way around. Meanwhile, the memory circuits on the EMH have seriously degraded and the Doctor (Robert Picardo) cannot remember how to complete an operation. Torres needs to reinitialize his program, but that will erase not only the Doctor's accumulated memories but his personality as well. Clearly, "Voyager" needs a functioning EMH, but no one likes the idea of pushing the reset button on the Doctor and having to start all over again (although that would certainly be an interesting idea; the original "Star Trek" had the opportunity to do that with Uhura when Nomad wiped her slate clean, but that was fixed in five minutes off-screen).

"The Swarm" is an atypical "Star Trek" episode in that the two plot lines really do not come together in any significant way; i.e, the swarm does not magically offer a solution to the Doctor's problems. Actually it is too bad they put these two plotlines together. An episode devoted to "Voyager" doing the silent running bit to escape the swarm would have been a nice tension filled episode and solving the Doctor's problem could have stood on its own as well. To try and find a solution Torres ends up transferring the Doctor's program to a holodeck recreation of Jupiter Station where his database was created. Who should pop up but a holographic version of Dr. Lewis Zimmerman (also played by Picardo), who created EMH. Needless to say, Dr. Zimmerman is less than pleased with the way his creation has been altered. Since the EMH was designed to run for only 1,500 hours it is not surprising that the system is now failing. Fortunately Kes (Jennifer Lien) is not willing to put up with either Zimmerman's corrosive personality or his insistence that nothing can be done. An above average "Voyager" episode, but an interesting combination of plotlines that would have been better served being out on their own.