2x19 Lifesigns

[7.7/10] The Doctor is part of a proud tradition of Star Trek characters who allow us to examine the human condition by existing outside of it. Spock, Data, Odo, and now Dr. Shmullus (the new name doesn’t stick, though) all come out human experiences from an outsider’s perspective. Their exploration of them allows us to look at those parts of ourselves in a new light, especially the things we take for granted because we’ve never known what it’s like to be apart from them. It’s like how learning a foreign language can help you better understand your native tongue by making language something you study rather than just intuitively learn.

What better idea to explore through that lens than love? The Doctor isn’t programmed for love. If anything, his bedside manner and ability to connect with others tends to be a bit lacking (give-or-take Kes). So he comes at it awkwardly, uneasily, unsure of how to approach these feelings that the “adaptive” side of his program has suddenly injected into his life. But the beauty of it is that his love is pure, uncalculating, and unwavering, with the fervor of a convert. His affections are easier for the audience to appreciate when it comes from that perspective.

Granted, the mechanics of the whole thing require a healthy dose of willing suspension of disbelief. Voyager beams aboard Pel, a lone Vidian physician who fell ill on a long journey back from a mission of mercy. Her body is dying, but she has a cortical implant that basically allows The Doctor to upload her brain into the computer and use her chromosomes to give her a holographic body in the meantime.

Okay, so once again, the holodeck is basically magic. This shouldn’t be possible, or at least comes too easily. But there’s precedent for it from Dr. Bashir’s 007 shenanigans, and the story is good enough that it’s easy to forgive the conceit.

Inevitably, The Doctor becomes sweet on Pel. She’s a fellow physician, one who’s attentive and affectionate toward The Doctor, and the two like spending time together. But what I appreciate about this episode is that it’s as much Pel’s story as it is our humble healer’s.

Pel is experiencing something transcendent here. After having been sick, scarred, and treated like a leper since she was a child, for the first time in her life she is unblemished and unencumbered. The holographic body, in essence, frees her from her illness for the first and only time in her life.

More to the point, sadly, it changes how people treat her, with a lifetime of revulsion and exclusion traded for kindness and affection. There’s so much to explore there, layers of how sickness and visible disabilities are both stigmatized. Pel experiencing what it means to be liberated from those unfair burdens is as important as her growing affections for The Doctor.

Her experience is a big part of what makes her romance with The Doctor work. Some of it simply comes down to the performers. Robert Picardo expertly plays the slightly socially stunted Romeo, sometimes blithely yet bluntly declaring his love in the middle of a medical procedure (which made me laugh out loud), sometimes gingerly spending time with his lady love whilst “parking.” Susan Diol convincingly plays someone who isn’t used to this sort of attention, who’s a little scared by it, but also pulled toward this person who treats her like a person, not a disease.

That's the rub, and the part of the script that makes this really sing. There’s a way in which both The Doctor and Damara Pel each truly see each other in a way no one else does. (Again, give or take Kes.) In truth, there’s a little Florence Nightingale syndrome here I’m not crazy about. But I think the more optimistic view of Pel’s care for the Doctor is that he sees her for who she is, not her condition or her exterior, and that helps her to open up and become close to him. Likewise, for the Doctor, Pel doesn’t see him as a collection of photons or energy, but as the person who made this wonderful gift possible. They treat one another as real, three-dimensional, worth of love and care, in a way that makes two veritable outcasts feel genuinely seen. It’s hard to imagine a better foundation for romance than that.

Hell, even the B-story is interesting. I owe Voyager a bit of an apology, since I hated on the seemingly pointless “Tom runs a betting pool” subplot from “Meld”. Well, it turns out it wasn’t pointless! It built up a growing conflict between Tom and Chakotay, that dovetails with Tom’s increasing propensity to shirk his duties, that's been threaded from that episode to now.

I like that this continues the conflict between Chakotay and Tom that was set up in the first episode of the show and has otherwise gone unaddressed until now. Paris feeling hemmed in by Starfleet protocols, with Chakotay perhaps being a little too doctrinaire provides a good motivation for the immediate conflict that ties into broader, “Why do we have to stick so tightly to protocols 70,000 lightyears away from home?” themes that have run through recent episodes.

Thematically, it's another spin on Worf’s lesson when joining DS9 (with some help from O’Brien) that subordinates need leeway to do their jobs in order to feel fulfilled. More than that, it ties into continuity and character dynamics, with Chakotay wanting to run any disciplining of Tom past Janeway, while she gives him the autonomy to handle crew discipline as is his purview, and backs him up when he tightens the screws on Tom. Plus, Paris going to the brig nicely sets up how his loyalties may be compromised if the ship gets into a tough situation.

And that situation seems to be coming. I appreciate Voyager dabbling in serialization here, with Hogan continuing to feed info to the Kazon. The fact that he simply wants to peddle information to Seska, while she wants him to actively sabotage the ship to give her squadron a leg up, makes for both an interesting tease and a compelling moral dilemma for Hogan.

But that’ll have to wait for another day. The meat of this episode is the sweet romance between The Doctor and Pel. Theirs is a bit of a bumpy ride. Both are relatable in people who are, in effect, embarking on their first crush and relationship, and neither of them quite knows what to do or how to process their feelings yet. The show walks the line between funny and sweet, with Tom and Kes coaching each of them through one of those essential experiences in life, however fumbling and awkward it may be for most, if not at all of us at first.

That fumbling quality makes their courtship extra sweet though. We sympathize with the Doctor when he struggles with the intense feelings of longing he didn’t ask for, and when he struggles with pain of rejection. We feel for Pel when she’s ambushed by The Doctor’s proclamation of love and when she’s reluctant about the positive attention she receives from erstwhile strangers. These are two people bumping into things while they figure these peculiar but universal feelings out, and there’s something inherently endearing about that.

But it’s not meant to be. My one big complaint about “Lifesigns” is the inevitable reversion to the status quo that Voyager all but demands. Pel inevitably has to leave the ship to go help her people, rather than follow her heart. I wish she could have stuck around, at least for a few more episodes, to delve more deeply into the two of them developing as a couple, and as people, together. It feels like this one ends just as it’s kicking into gear, and the endgame scans as a bit rushed.

It’s good though! Pel tries to kill her biological body because she doesn’t want to return to it. That life has been an incredibly difficult one, so it’s understandable why she’d be hesitant to return to it, even with the limitations that being holo emitter-bound might bring. Most of all, though, she’s worried that The Doctor wouldn’t love her if she returned to her phage-affected state, that he wouldn’t find her beautiful, wouldn’t want to touch her or be close to her.

Her willingness to poison her physical body puts the lie to her need to leave the ship. Presumably if she can stay as a hologram, she can stay as a flesh-blood individual. Setting that aside though, that too is an understandable anxiety. If folks have shunned you your whole life for your disease, it’s natural to fear that the person who fell in love with you without it might not feel the same way once you returned to your infected state.

And yet, The Doctor gives one of those incredible affirmations, that what he loves about her isn’t her appearance, but who she is deep down, and that this experience has been as meaningful and enriching for him as it was for her. Despite earlier protestations that it’s not in his programming, the final scene is bookended with the two dancing, with Pel returning to her skin-grafted form and The Doctor looking no less enamored with her, recognizing the deeper connection between them, regardless of the form they take yesterday or tomorrow.

It’s an unusual romance to be sure. But one that resonates from how it unpacks what makes those sorts of relationships so fulfilling. It’s not a pretty smile or kind eye. It is, instead, the wonder of someone seeing us, the core of who we are deep down, and loving that regardless of what package it comes in. Leave it to a couple of holograms to teach us meatbags what love truly means.