[6.9/10] This another one of those Voyager episodes that I just don’t know what to do with. Half of “Virtuoso” is a farce. It’s a sitcom-y riff on fame with silly aliens, with ample, broad gags about how a little adulation gives a hologram who already thought highly of himself an even bigger head. But the other half is a meaningful reflection on the Doctor’s growth as an individual with his own wants and wishes beyond his programming, and the makeshift family that loves him. There’s some merit in each half (more so the latter one), but as with “Tsunkatse” a few episodes later, they don’t really fit together, in ways that weaken both parts.
I started out assuming this would be a pure comedy episode, a la some of the goofier Ferengi outings in Deep Space Nine. Suffice it to say, the comedy quotient here isn’t any better than it is there. Gags about nerdy aliens demanding to hear the Doctor sing, or sultry groupies finding any chance they can get to sidle up to the EMH, or Doc himself basking in the fame like the cock of the walk he’s always wanted to be have all the subtlety of a Klingon belting a high note.
The Qomar, our usual aliens of the week, are pretty dopey. They all speak in a halting cadence and spout an obsession with math and do weird gestures to the usual players. They feel like cartoon characters out of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s; all bumbling and tics. There’s no real depth to them, which is partly the point, but it makes their presence and their obsession with the Doctor a source of cornball silliness rather than anything you can build a genuine story around.
Part of me admires the show for going that direction, at least a little. Most of the aliens our heroes encounter are basically human in their disposition, even if their costumes or cultures are different enough to signify otherness. But despite being a forehead appliance and a height differential away from any standard crewmember, the Qomar do seem genuinely alien in their civilization and interests and manner of interaction with others. If anything, it makes me understand why Star Trek doesn’t go this route more often, even if it’d be more realistic, because the presentation of the Qomar almost exclusively comes off goofy as hell. (Shades of Chakotay’s escapades in “Nemesis”.)
True to the presence of guest star Paul Williams, there is also a vaguely Phantom of the Paradise-esque attempt to satirize the fleeting emptiness of fame in all of this. Here, as in that cult classic film, the treatment of it is often too exaggerated and cliched to have real weight. The tone of the Doctor’s ascendance among his Qomari fans could just as easily fit, say, Steve Urkel becoming famous in an episode of Family Matters as it could the more serious tone Voyager usually adopts. There’s no meat there, just ridiculous, musical fame-adjacent fluff.
And yet, halfway through the episode, suddenly “Virtuoso” gets substantive. The Doctor tries to resign his commission and gets into a debate with Janeway over whether he has the right to, and god help me, it’s good. Janeway is kind of a jerk throughout most of this episode, treating the EMH without her usual humaneness and understanding. But there’s an interesting tug of war here, between the Captain’s argument that this ship needs its physician and she can't in good conscience let Doc leave, and the Doctor’s argument that if he’s really an individual, he should have the right to choose his path, something every other crew member aboard Voyager got to do except him.
(As an aside, when Doc tells Janeway that she wouldn’t stand in Harry Kim’s way if he fell in love on an away mission and wanted to stay behind, I feel like the appropriate response from the Captain is, “Yes I would! I did just that “The Disease”!)
Even if the Doctor’s alleged departure is an obvious fake out, there’s a weight to seeing him say goodbye and see the reaction of the crew. I don’t know that I buy Tom's wistfulness about the whole deal, but it’s at least sweet, in principle, that his approach is one of “I kid ‘cause I love.” And Seven has an appropriately hurt and petulant response to the whole thing, with a real “six year old who’s upset that her big brother is going off to college” energy, which is unassumingly sweet in its way.
You understand why she’s hurt, why she feels like she’s losing a friend and a guide when the two of them have been growing together as individuals, and sticking up for one another, over the past couple seasons. But you also understand the Doctor’s motivation here . He feels he’s hit his ceiling aboard Voyager and wants new challenges and new opportunities. He wants to strive for something that he choose, rather than just what he’s programmed to do. Hell, when Seven presses him on his vanity over his fans, he admits that he wants to be admired and appreciated, rather than be a receptacle for mild derision, an issue that surfaced not that long ago in “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy”.
That is sympathetic. It’s relatable for me personally in some ways. I don’t pay the bills with these write-ups, but I find them artistically fulfilling in a way my day-to-day work just isn’t built for. I’d still pen my reviews if nobody read them, because it’s a labor of love, but I won’t deny that it’s invigorating when some piece I’ve written catches fire online, and that if someone leaves a nice comment, I’m riding high all day. We all have our passions beyond our daily routines. Few of us achieve adoration or exaltation. You can understand the Doctor discovering somewhere where his talents seem to be not only accepted but championed, and wanting to nourish that unfed part of soul.
There’s just one big problem with all of this -- it’s founded on buffoonery. If you want to do a story where The Doctor has to choose between the life he’s built on Voyager where he feels stifled and unappreciated, and taking a chance on an alien race that seems to venerate and even love him in a way Janeway and company rarely show, you need to make those aliens seem like, well, people rather than clowns.
The Qomar’s absurd speech patterns, their caricatured love of math, and their generally goofiness mean this never feels like a fair fight. The Doctor’s picking cardboard goofballs over his comparatively well-developed friends. Despite the legitimate issues at play, that Doc would even consider hanging around these over-the-top ninnies forever seems ridiculous, and robs the dilemma of its full impact. The fact that this grave, personal reckoning is built on twenty minutes of farce that precedes it doesn’t help either.
And yet, there’s some moving poetic irony in all of this. As much as the Doctor thinks the Qomar get him and appreciate him in a way his crewmates don’t, ultimately they’re the ones who see him as simply an appliance. They’re impressed with his skill, but even Tincoo, the woman who’s admiration he mistakes as love, views him as something that can simply be replicated and improved upon. In essence, Doc’s singing is a party trick to these aliens, a piece of technical showmanship, and as soon as they find a better replacement in the vocal department, they no longer care about who he is or his life away from the stage.
There is a powerful statement about fame in all of that. Like Seven, I try not to devolve into hero worship, but on the other side, it’s important not to mistake fandom for caring about the person. Knowing a human being is different than knowing the character they play. And as much as there’s reason to warn against the hollowness of parasocial relationships among Trekkies and fans writ large, there’s also something to be said on the opposite side of the equation. Fans’ appreciation is not the same as real love.
Still, for all the Doctor’s hangups, he’s on a ship full of people who may bristle at him now and then, but who appreciate him for who he is, not just his abilities as a physician. For all that Doc blanches at Janeway potentially viewing him as just another computer system on Voyager, she’s the only one in the crowd at his final Qomar performance who tears up. For all he jaws with B’Elanna over the utility of his musical pursuits, she’s the one who’s reluctant to erase parts of his program that would change who he is, just to make him better at singing.
Most of all, despite her ignorance and frustration at the onslaught of the Doctor’s fanmail, eventually Seven writes him a letter of her own. Rather than the standard fanatical pablum that is the stuff of most fan letters who only know the performer as an abstraction, Seven’s is one that comes from a place of sincerity and understanding. She appreciates the Doctor as an individual, not just as a walking talking jukebox.
The idea that what the EMH has been looking for has been here all along is a moving one. I can't deny that, and I dream of an episode whose first half delivers on the promise and potential of the second. I just wish “Virtuoso” wasn’t built on a mixture of loony characters and cheap farce, if it always meant to sing this sort of tune.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-08-15T04:12:47Z
[6.9/10] This another one of those Voyager episodes that I just don’t know what to do with. Half of “Virtuoso” is a farce. It’s a sitcom-y riff on fame with silly aliens, with ample, broad gags about how a little adulation gives a hologram who already thought highly of himself an even bigger head. But the other half is a meaningful reflection on the Doctor’s growth as an individual with his own wants and wishes beyond his programming, and the makeshift family that loves him. There’s some merit in each half (more so the latter one), but as with “Tsunkatse” a few episodes later, they don’t really fit together, in ways that weaken both parts.
I started out assuming this would be a pure comedy episode, a la some of the goofier Ferengi outings in Deep Space Nine. Suffice it to say, the comedy quotient here isn’t any better than it is there. Gags about nerdy aliens demanding to hear the Doctor sing, or sultry groupies finding any chance they can get to sidle up to the EMH, or Doc himself basking in the fame like the cock of the walk he’s always wanted to be have all the subtlety of a Klingon belting a high note.
The Qomar, our usual aliens of the week, are pretty dopey. They all speak in a halting cadence and spout an obsession with math and do weird gestures to the usual players. They feel like cartoon characters out of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s; all bumbling and tics. There’s no real depth to them, which is partly the point, but it makes their presence and their obsession with the Doctor a source of cornball silliness rather than anything you can build a genuine story around.
Part of me admires the show for going that direction, at least a little. Most of the aliens our heroes encounter are basically human in their disposition, even if their costumes or cultures are different enough to signify otherness. But despite being a forehead appliance and a height differential away from any standard crewmember, the Qomar do seem genuinely alien in their civilization and interests and manner of interaction with others. If anything, it makes me understand why Star Trek doesn’t go this route more often, even if it’d be more realistic, because the presentation of the Qomar almost exclusively comes off goofy as hell. (Shades of Chakotay’s escapades in “Nemesis”.)
True to the presence of guest star Paul Williams, there is also a vaguely Phantom of the Paradise-esque attempt to satirize the fleeting emptiness of fame in all of this. Here, as in that cult classic film, the treatment of it is often too exaggerated and cliched to have real weight. The tone of the Doctor’s ascendance among his Qomari fans could just as easily fit, say, Steve Urkel becoming famous in an episode of Family Matters as it could the more serious tone Voyager usually adopts. There’s no meat there, just ridiculous, musical fame-adjacent fluff.
And yet, halfway through the episode, suddenly “Virtuoso” gets substantive. The Doctor tries to resign his commission and gets into a debate with Janeway over whether he has the right to, and god help me, it’s good. Janeway is kind of a jerk throughout most of this episode, treating the EMH without her usual humaneness and understanding. But there’s an interesting tug of war here, between the Captain’s argument that this ship needs its physician and she can't in good conscience let Doc leave, and the Doctor’s argument that if he’s really an individual, he should have the right to choose his path, something every other crew member aboard Voyager got to do except him.
(As an aside, when Doc tells Janeway that she wouldn’t stand in Harry Kim’s way if he fell in love on an away mission and wanted to stay behind, I feel like the appropriate response from the Captain is, “Yes I would! I did just that “The Disease”!)
Even if the Doctor’s alleged departure is an obvious fake out, there’s a weight to seeing him say goodbye and see the reaction of the crew. I don’t know that I buy Tom's wistfulness about the whole deal, but it’s at least sweet, in principle, that his approach is one of “I kid ‘cause I love.” And Seven has an appropriately hurt and petulant response to the whole thing, with a real “six year old who’s upset that her big brother is going off to college” energy, which is unassumingly sweet in its way.
You understand why she’s hurt, why she feels like she’s losing a friend and a guide when the two of them have been growing together as individuals, and sticking up for one another, over the past couple seasons. But you also understand the Doctor’s motivation here . He feels he’s hit his ceiling aboard Voyager and wants new challenges and new opportunities. He wants to strive for something that he choose, rather than just what he’s programmed to do. Hell, when Seven presses him on his vanity over his fans, he admits that he wants to be admired and appreciated, rather than be a receptacle for mild derision, an issue that surfaced not that long ago in “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy”.
That is sympathetic. It’s relatable for me personally in some ways. I don’t pay the bills with these write-ups, but I find them artistically fulfilling in a way my day-to-day work just isn’t built for. I’d still pen my reviews if nobody read them, because it’s a labor of love, but I won’t deny that it’s invigorating when some piece I’ve written catches fire online, and that if someone leaves a nice comment, I’m riding high all day. We all have our passions beyond our daily routines. Few of us achieve adoration or exaltation. You can understand the Doctor discovering somewhere where his talents seem to be not only accepted but championed, and wanting to nourish that unfed part of soul.
There’s just one big problem with all of this -- it’s founded on buffoonery. If you want to do a story where The Doctor has to choose between the life he’s built on Voyager where he feels stifled and unappreciated, and taking a chance on an alien race that seems to venerate and even love him in a way Janeway and company rarely show, you need to make those aliens seem like, well, people rather than clowns.
The Qomar’s absurd speech patterns, their caricatured love of math, and their generally goofiness mean this never feels like a fair fight. The Doctor’s picking cardboard goofballs over his comparatively well-developed friends. Despite the legitimate issues at play, that Doc would even consider hanging around these over-the-top ninnies forever seems ridiculous, and robs the dilemma of its full impact. The fact that this grave, personal reckoning is built on twenty minutes of farce that precedes it doesn’t help either.
And yet, there’s some moving poetic irony in all of this. As much as the Doctor thinks the Qomar get him and appreciate him in a way his crewmates don’t, ultimately they’re the ones who see him as simply an appliance. They’re impressed with his skill, but even Tincoo, the woman who’s admiration he mistakes as love, views him as something that can simply be replicated and improved upon. In essence, Doc’s singing is a party trick to these aliens, a piece of technical showmanship, and as soon as they find a better replacement in the vocal department, they no longer care about who he is or his life away from the stage.
There is a powerful statement about fame in all of that. Like Seven, I try not to devolve into hero worship, but on the other side, it’s important not to mistake fandom for caring about the person. Knowing a human being is different than knowing the character they play. And as much as there’s reason to warn against the hollowness of parasocial relationships among Trekkies and fans writ large, there’s also something to be said on the opposite side of the equation. Fans’ appreciation is not the same as real love.
Still, for all the Doctor’s hangups, he’s on a ship full of people who may bristle at him now and then, but who appreciate him for who he is, not just his abilities as a physician. For all that Doc blanches at Janeway potentially viewing him as just another computer system on Voyager, she’s the only one in the crowd at his final Qomar performance who tears up. For all he jaws with B’Elanna over the utility of his musical pursuits, she’s the one who’s reluctant to erase parts of his program that would change who he is, just to make him better at singing.
Most of all, despite her ignorance and frustration at the onslaught of the Doctor’s fanmail, eventually Seven writes him a letter of her own. Rather than the standard fanatical pablum that is the stuff of most fan letters who only know the performer as an abstraction, Seven’s is one that comes from a place of sincerity and understanding. She appreciates the Doctor as an individual, not just as a walking talking jukebox.
The idea that what the EMH has been looking for has been here all along is a moving one. I can't deny that, and I dream of an episode whose first half delivers on the promise and potential of the second. I just wish “Virtuoso” wasn’t built on a mixture of loony characters and cheap farce, if it always meant to sing this sort of tune.