3x12 Macrocosm

[6.1/10] The strange thing about “Macrocosm” is that it’s half one of the coolest things Voyager has done to date, and half a sleep-inducing dose of the usual, dull routine. It feels like the two halves were produced by two entirely different teams, and if we could keep one and jettison the other, we might have something to write home about.

Instead, on the one hand we get Captain Katherine Janeway: Space Marine, and on the other we get “extended flashback recounting of things the audience already knows or probably can guess.” The former is occasionally cheesy, but often extraordinary, and certainly breaking from the norm. The latter is an unfortunate paint-by-numbers interstitial from where the real action is.

In a forerunner to Strange New Worlds, much of “Macrocosm” is basically Star Trek doing Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens here, and that’s when the episode is at its best. When Janeway and Neelix return to the ship after a diplomatic mission, they find it in bad shape and without the crew present and accounted for. What follows is an (almost) lone wolf mission from the captain to figure out what went wrong and set it all right again, in true badass style.

Look, I love contemplative, thought-provoking Star Trek more than most. But I cannot deny the visceral charms of seeing Janeway dress down like she’s John McClane, load up with combat gear, and brandish a big honking phaser rifle so that she can eradicate the giant bugs on her ship. As the closing scene with the captain enjoying light jazz and painting, we so rarely get to see Janeway be a stone cold badass, and it is quite a thrill.

It’s also worthwhile if only for the format bender. Star Trek has long been a talky franchise, with its messages conveyed in boardroom debates, orders on the bridge, and monologues spoken through personal logs. So there is something cool and strikingly different about how, for good chunks of this one, Janeway is on her own, and the sequences of her skulking through the ship are almost wordless.

It puts a great deal of pressure on Kate Mulgrew, who more than rises to the challenge here. She has to convey the urgency of the situation, the captain’s determination, and the steady undercurrent of fear and desperation without being able to vocalize it. Getting a stretch of the show that’s more about performance and atmosphere than about explicating it all for the audience is a real treat.

Likewise, it means veteran Star Trek director Alexander Singer has to get more creative to keep things lively. We get shots from the buggers’ perspective that zoom through the corridors in ominous first person views. We get unusual angles as Janeway makes her way through the practically vacant ship. There is a different energy, a different means of shooting the action here, that immediately marks this as a distinctive and cool experiment.

The problem is that, about halfway through the episode, “Macrocosm” effectively throws all that exciting experimentation away in favor of the same old same old.

Once Janeway makes contact with The Doctor, suddenly, the episode is all in on a flashback that doesn’t tell the audience much it can’t already surmise. In Voyager’s defense, maybe I’m just jaded. There’s scads of other Star Trek episodes where crewmembers come back to an empty ship where something has gone spookily wrong, or hit some locale where there’s an epidemic afoot. So especially with some proboscis-packing creatures around, it’s not hard to guess what happened.

Nonetheless, “Macrocosm” has to walk us through, in painstaking detail, how it all went down. The visit to an alien race, the titular macro virus that Doc inadvertently brought back, the steady infection of the crew, are all things that could have been delivered in a three minute monologue rather than taking us through it step by step.

I am normally in favor of “show don’t tell” as a concept, but there’s nothing especially interesting about the infection. Doc’s a little bit adorable with his enthusiasm for his first away mission. B’Elanna and Tom have some Hepburn-Tracy chemistry at the replicator. But otherwise, the whole thing goes down about how you’d expect, without any interesting wrinkles to justify spelling this all out for the audience.

Plus, the solution to the problem isn’t especially interesting. The idea that the Doctor manufactured an antidote is a quick fix. The show throws in some appropriate hurdles with the fact that the environmental controls are down, so they can't just release it through the vents. But still, if you’ve seen this type of movie before, you know the method of defeat is inevitable.

There’s something mildly clever about Janeway trying to lure all the remaining buggers on board to the holodeck via the usual beach party program. The show does nicely setup that the macro virus agents are attracted to heat sources, and try to prick the Doctor, so there’s good precedent for Janeway trying to corner them via holographic humanoids But it does seem a little too easy to corral them all in one spot that way.

More to the point, the whole thing’s a little stupid. It’s churlish to complain about plausibility in Star Trek, but the “What if a virus, but really big!” premise is pretty dumb, only a few steps ahead of The Original Series’ evil flying space pancakes. Weird evolutionary things is one of writer Brannon Braga’s favorite hobby horses, and as a friend put it, he just never gets it right.

Likewise, I don’t like to slate Voyager for having bad CGI. The show did well for itself by the standards of a T.V. show in 1996. But to modern eyes, it’s hard to take pixelated, appendage-covered, floating bean bags too seriously. The creative team tries to make up for that by observing JAWS rules -- create suspense by only showing your monster in dribs and drabs. But by the time Janeway’s actively fighting one, the look of the thing renders the whole dust-up pretty silly.

I wouldn’t recommend “Macrocosm” to a casual viewer. Seeing Doc’s first away mission is neat, and there’s the seeds of some interpersonal business that matters down the line. But a good chunk of this episode is some combination of goofy and forgettable.

And yet, the part that isn’t turns out to be pure gold. I wish we could excise the flashback and just get Katherine Janeway: Badass Space Marine, with all the creative chances the show takes, for the whole runtime. Even so, those thrilling interludes alone are worth the price of admission.