2x03 Projections

[7.5/10] One of my favorite installments of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a 2022 episode called “Normal Again”. It is, much like Voyager’s “Projections” from seven years earlier, a story that asks the question, “What if the entire show has been a delusion?” And both episodes ask their protagonist to basically burn the series down to get back to reality.

There’s something intuitively appealing about that setup. From the popularity of The Matrix to real life public figures wondering if (or asserting that) we’re in a simulation, the jolt of trepidation and excitement at the idea that our everyday lives are a paper mache mock-up hiding the “real world” is a possibility both alluring and scary, which gives it a certain power.

The Doctor makes for a particularly compelling focal point since it ties directly into questions about the nature of his identity. As hints start to arise that he may be a flesh and blood person, and it’s everything else that's a hologram, it flips his (and our) expectations and understanding of the world of Voyager on its ear. Savvy viewers can probably guess that the series wasn’t going to reveal the sci-fi equivalent of “It was all a dream” a few episodes into the show’s second season. But the simple thought experiment -- how would you respond if someone told you everything you thought you knew about your life was wrong? -- remains potent.

I suspect it’s no coincidence that The Doctor’s predicament takes on a certain Descartes-esque quality. The philosopher who famously declared, “I think, therefore I am” framed his quest to establish his own existence as a series of questions or tests, meant to test how we can be sure that what we experience with our senses is right and accurate. They ask the 1600s equivalent of how we could truly know that we’re not in a simulation, and even wonder how we can be sure our deepest truths about the universe are not the product of an evil, deceiving demon.

Here, that demon comes in the form of none other than Reginald Barclay. It’s a trip to have ol’ Broccoli back in the fold on another Star Trek show. Especially given his own dabbles in self-aware holograms and reality-questioning installments via Moriarty, having him as the ostensible “voice of reason” when The Doctor is going through his crisis makes a strange amount of sense.

Barclay’s presence and history lends plausibility to the idea that he’s working with Starfleet to rescue the flesh and blood Louis Zimmerman, the holo-engineer who designed the EMH, from a malfunctioning simulation and case of holoprogram-induced dementia. And it also lends credence to Chakotay’s claim that his is all the result of a strange feedback loop in The Doctor’s, and Barclay is merely an officer who helped build Voyager and, most plausibly of all, trained EMH on his social skills.

The best thing you can say for the plot of “Projections” is that it keeps you guessing. The chances of the show’s whole first season all being part of a simulation is pretty slim. Moreover, Barclay’s “destroy the ship to end the simulation plan” is especially suspicious. But Barclay’s arrival and unique affect is something that's hard to explain away, so figuring out what’s really going on, alongside various fakeouts and compelling arguments and bits of evidence on both sides of the equation, is legitimately challenging.

The worst thing you can say for the plot is that it more or less has one trick that it goes back to over and over again. Is this real or fake? We’re going to swerve you and then swerve you again and then swerve you back and then swerve you on more time for good measure. Narratively, “Projections” is an empty puzzle box, merely containing twist after twist in the same general mode. It does get tiresome in points.

But I still appreciate it for two big reasons. The first is because it situates the audience nicely in The Doctor’s shoes. The constant changes are disorienting. The shift in the expected like the EMM bleeding, or his request to end all holographic programs getting rid of the Voyager crew rather than himself, does a good job of forcing the audience to wonder, “What the hell is going on?” in the same way The Doctor is.

Likewise, he asks all the right questions. Frankly, sometimes main characters in Star Trek seem to go along with the weird phenomenon of the week without asking the basics of why trust this thing/why believe the latest alien invader, without fully interrogating it, because the plot requires it. Here, however, the questioning is the plot. The whole point is for the EMH to uncover what’s real, so when he tries to test his hypothesis, double-check Barclay’s claims, there’s something that feels true to life in an otherwise unreal situation.

And in the same vein, there’s an almost meta quality to the episode that helps carry the day. As the EMH is questioning his surroundings, he’s also questioning the premise of the show to a degree. Watching him beam back into the pilot and show a genre savvy reaction to the events of “Caretaker” makes for some great madcap fun. (If only he could have deleted Paris and Kim permanently.) Much of “Projections” plays the dream logic conceit for disorienting terror, but sometimes it plays it for loony fun as well.

Granted, in places the episode goes overboard. Did we really need to resort to the cliche of a fish-eye lens to convey that something funky is going on? And the explanation for why the Doc had the delusion -- that the ship hit some weird radiation while the EMH was in the holodeck and his program got caught in a feedback loop -- is a rote technobabble handwave. For all the intriguing pretzel logic at play, it all boils down to something fairly mundane by Star Trek standards, without much of a punchline to the delusion.

Except that's the second big thing that really boosts this episode for me. No one ever makes it explicit, but The Doctor asks the big question at the end -- why is this the delusion his program resorted to when stuck in this peculiar feedback loop? It is, in essence, the same question we flesh and blood humans ask about our dreams. Why did my brain fixate on this thing? I think the comparison is deliberate and telling.

The answer, to my mind at least, is that even in these early days, The Doctor is evolving and maturing. He’s grown beyond being a mere talking sick bay appliance and has started to become a full-fledged person, with thoughts and feelings, hopes and (yes) dreams. This delusion is a sentient being taking its first steps and working through those same existential questions that Descartes once wrestled with, as the EMH starts to stake out the metes and bounds of his own life and what it means to be alive in photons and projections rather than bone and flesh.

It’s a thematic undercurrent Voyager would explore from beginning to end. “Projections” is far from perfect. But it’s wild and elliptical in the way that some of the most ambitious Star Trek episodes are. And it roots all this twisty nonsense in the journey of a buddingly sentient lifeform reckoning with what it is to experience the world, and how he, or anyone, can be sure that it, and he, are “real”. Whatever that means.