3x18 Darkling

[3.0/10] Most of the Star Trek episodes I rate this low have something seriously wrong with them. Maybe it’s some type of assault or abuse that’s ignored or even praised. Maybe it’s themes or takeaways that seem antithetical to the values of Star Trek. Maybe it’s just something that seems too backwards or abhorrent to pass muster.

“Darkling” isn’t like that. There’s nothing really offensive about it. The themes at play are trite, but well in-line with Star Trek ideals. Beyond some generic serial killer shtick, there’s nothing here that will make you recoil.

The episode is just, well, bad. Run-of-the-mill bad. Uninterestingly bad. Nothing in “Darkling” makes you feel like someone on the creative team doesn’t get Star Trek. But it does make you feel like someone shepherding all this was phoning it in, or at best, asleep at the switch.

There’s two main storylines at play here, and both of them are pretty rough. One sees Kes meet a dashing alien beau and consider leaving Voyager to go gallivanting about with him. The other sees The Doctor toying around with his personality subroutines and inadvertently unleashing a malevolent alternate personality. Both are, more or less, the pits.

Kes’ story is a paper thin metaphor for adolescence. I don’t necessarily mind the concept. The notion of Kes starting to imagine a bigger world for herself, and considering what life might be like outside of Voyager is a compelling one. But having her various parental figures, from The Doctor, to Janeway, to Tuvok, all saying, in one form or another, “I have questions about your behavior, little missy” is tepid and tiresome. Plus, the fact that what spurs this whole thing is some barely-developed, wet rag of a boyfriend is, while arguably true to life, not very interesting as a story for television.

(As an aside, it’s a little odd that Kes broke up with Neelix while she was possessed by a malevolent warlord, and the show never really revisited the relationship since then? I’m on record as hating the Kes/Neelix pairing, but by god, it was something important to the show as originally constructed. You need more than, “I said I wanted to see other people while I was mentally controlled by a bad guy” to resolve it.)

The Doctor’s story isn’t much better. On the surface, there’s something to the idea of the EMH playing around too much in his own subroutines and unwittingly unleashing something evil. In line with Data on The Next Generation, there’s juice in the notion of a unique being getting to show what a threat they’d be if they used their abilities for evil, and to let the performer show some range.

And look, Robert Picardo is in contention with Kate Mulgrew for the best performer on the show. He’s more than capable of delivering an outstanding bit of acting. True to form, the initial moments when we see him doing a Hannibal Lecter routine are legitimately chilling. But the show leans into it way too hard, until Picardo’s scene-chewing bad guy shtick becomes exhausting and overdone by the end of the episode.

The plotting is feeble as all get out. I’ve occasionally grown frustrated with Star Trek for drawing out obvious mysteries beyond the point where the reveal is practically staring the audience in the face. “Darkling” makes me rethink my stance a little. To its credit, Voyager doesn’t belabor the evident twist that The Doctor is the one committing the disturbing crimes against the crew’s new alien allies, making the reveal about a third of the way through.

The other side of the coin is that while the viewer knows what’s up, Tuvok and company don’t, and the show can’t salvage much in the way of dramatic irony there. The characters catching up to the audience’s knowledge on that front is tedious, rather than engaging or dramatic. And it just means we get more scene-chewing from the evil doctor that doesn’t really go anywhere.

That’s not helped by the fact that the dialogue in “Darkling” is truly awful. My god, the debate between The Doctor and Kes about good versus evil is facile. This isn’t Star Wars, for chrissake. Characters arguing over whether pure malevolent will or empathy and kindness should rule the day, without more nuance and complexity, makes this come off too blunt and shallow. And the florid prose Star Trek vets Joe Menosky and Brannon Braga come up with doesn’t help matters.

At my most generous, I can sort of see what Voyager is going for here. In a way, you can see both Kes and The Doctor going through going pains as each tries to move a bit beyond their basic personalities and limitations. The idea that their paths collide in that effort, and that they struggle to reconcile their newfound efforts at freedom with their connections to one another, has some merit.

The execution is just so so poor. The Doctor’s evil persona has all the subtlety of a Snidely Whiplash outing. I’m not one to slate Star Trek in the plausibility department, but the idea that The Doctor develops his “Mr. Hyde” persona from absorbing the dark sides of various figures from history he’s trying to embrace is downright silly. The same goes from him doing corny experiments on holographic historical icons in the resort simulation.

And while The Doctor ultimately expressing his roundabout affection for Kes, and her deciding to stay on the ship has some juice given the parent-child relationship they’ve developed over the course of the show, it seems like it happens by fiat at the end, rather than something the episode earns. Yeah, it’s nice that even in his evil form, The Doctor has bonded with Kes too much not to care about her, but the rendition here is too cartoony for that to really land.

Nothing here passes the smell test. None of it feels real. Everything comes off as campy, and unintentionally so.

“Darkling” isn’t bad in a way that reveals some truth about Voyager’s flaws, or the struggles to tell a story about the unique maturation processes of a three-year-old Ocampa or a two-year-old hologram. It’s just a mediocre-at-best story, delivered in a cornball and over-the-top fashion, with weak performances, dialogue, and writing writ large that all but sink the episode from the jump. This is assuredly one of Voyager’s worst episodes, but not in a way that makes it an entertaining car crash, just an unfortunate but uninteresting failure.