3x22 Real Life

[6.2/10] The thesis of “Real Life” is strong. The Doctor concocts a holographic family for him so he can relate to his patients better. But he assembles a household of perfect “lollipops,” as B’Elanna puts it, whose chipper flawlessness denies him the very experience that he’s after with this whole exercise.

With a few adjustments, she constructs something far more accurate for him, but with accuracy comes hardship. With hardship comes pain and even loss. But weathering pain and loss together are also what helps forge families, in the bonds of shared experiences and mutual support. By facing that, rather than turning away from it, The Doctor is, unexpectedly, able to achieve his original goal and understand both the heaven and hell of what it is to be a husband and father.

There’s just one major problem -- whether they’re the Cleavers or the Conners, the Doctor’s holographic family never feels real. Honestly, I kind of like them better in their Stepford-esque forms, not because they come across like a genuine wife and 2.3 kids, but because the 1950s Father Knows Best-style presentation almost becomes a satire in how picture perfect everything is depicted and how oblivious Doc is to the fantasy land he’s living in.

The point of such an idealized view of family life is not just to amuse, but to provide for a marked contrast when B’Elanna redesigns the program to be more realistic, and Doc is in for a rude awakening. There’s something compelling about the idea. Given that The Simpsons is practically a religion for me, I know there’s room for great humor but also great poignance in taking a sitcom setup by injecting real life problems into the form.

The catch is that the “real life” problems Doc encounters once the changes take hold are every bit as cliched and hokey as the Brady Bunch domestic life the Doc was living before. His wife, Charlene, griping about being late to her lecture and Doc agreeing to make dinner is a cheesy sitcom conflict. His son, Jeffrey, being a rebellious teenager who wants to hang out with his bad influence friends is a stock standard teen kid issue, even with the mildly-clever wrinkle of his friends being Klingons. And his daughter, Belle, gives the best performance and has the best moments, but still gets reduced to cheap beats and corny “You don’t love me as much as mommy does!” protests before things turn tear-jerking.

The irony of the episode is that in promoting the emotional value and learning experience of a realistic family situation, it fails to deliver one. Everything in Doc’s holographic life seems pulled from an After School Special, or at best, a T.G.I.F. sitcom. I watched and liked Voyager as a kid, so I don’t want to knock the approach, but it feels like more episodes like this are aimed at a less mature audience, with heavily signposted points and simplified depictions of many things that fall below both Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation.

More than that, there’s simply very little truth in Doc’s interactions with his family. They are too caricatured, their disagreements too corny, to have the impact “Real Life” needs them to in order for the story to work.

Maybe things would turn out better if there wasn’t a tacked on B-story. While The Doctor’s having his Norman Lear-inspired exploits, Voyager runs into some strange “astral eddies” that create the usual grave danger but also spit out some plasma that might power the ship enough to spare the crew from Neelix’s casseroles.

There’s nothing much to this one. The technobabble speculation and solution abounds. Tom goes out in a shuttle and gets trapped in one of the eddies until he makes the usual daring escape. Everything about these escapades are fine, but the whole thing feels vanilla and mechanical. Maybe the point was to show off some mid-1990s CGI that doesn’t quite wow in the same way decades later?

(Question for folks who’ve seen the whole show before: Is Tom’s journey inside the astral eddies supposed to be our first glimpse of fluidic space?)

There’s only two purposes the subplot serves. For one, it shows, with some respectable subtlety, that despite the walls she puts up, B’Elanna cares for Tom. Her worry about him going on the mission and reaction to him in danger demonstrate that as much as her reading Klingon romance novels and sporting a hip new red-streaked hair braid. (That I think we never see again?)

For the other, it puts Tom through a risky experience that allows The Doctor to lecture him about recklessness in a way that reveals he’s preoccupied with his own holographic doctor’s terrible accident in a game of Parrises squares. I like that moment a lot! It shows that The Doctor is learning something, both in being able to “diagnose” Tom’s more reckless behavior because he’s witnessed it in his own child, and because it shows him developing more of a sense of empathy, knowing what it’s like to lose someone you care about and so being able to project that into his bedside manner. It’s a nice way to dramatize the notion that as hard as the “realistic” family is for Doc, it’s paying dividends for his growth as a sapient being.

I also like Tom’s response to the revelation that The Doctor refused to keep going with the family program when it got too hard. Tom’s speech about hardship bringing people together is itself a bit cheesy, but it’s buoyed by his citing Voyager itself as a group that’s become one of television’s inevitable but lovable found families after what they’ve been together.

And the message that it’s the hard times families go through that strengthen their bonds for the good times, that make everyone in the family better people, is a little aspirational. There’s legitimate traumas and tragedies that befall families that you can’t come back from. (Hello Manchester by the Sea fans!) But you know what? I don’t mind my Star Trek being aspirational. And I admire writer Jeri Taylor, and The Doctor, for the choice to face the loss of his daughter despite the pain he knows it will cause him.

Once again, the problem is that the actual scene of Belle’s death after the accident plays more like something out of a Hallmark movie than a lived-in kitchen sink drama. The music swells to almost oppressive levels. The family hugs and offers bland platitudes about the situation. None of it feels earned or piercing, just a calculated tragic ending designed in a lab to tug on your heartstrings, which is, ironically, what stops it from doing so.

There are quieter moments here -- Belle telling Doc she loves him, Doc telling his daughter she won’t get better -- that rate a reaction. They’re an oasis of real feeling in a set of scenes that play more like melodrama than lived-in family experiences. But in large part, the big emotional moments meant to move The Doctor, and the audience, are maudlin rather than moving.

And yet, this another Voyager episode that I want to like, because I appreciate what it’s trying to do even as the execution falters. It’s not exactly the same, but I can relate to the Doctor. Part of the power of stories is that they are, as Robert Ebert once called them, empathy machines. As an awkward kid growing up, uncertain of what the future held, watching stories of families in films and on television was a way of understanding things that were beyond my own personal experience. I’d like to think that it made me a better, more empathetic person.

The Doctor’s doing kind of the same thing, HIs is interactive, more immersive, more personal, but the principle is the same. Using those chances to process something real -- both positive and negative -- in the art we consume can, I believe, make us better people. Star Trek, at its best, is a bastion of that, giving us fantastical stories that end in triumph or tragedy but which, when done right, speak to the human condition in a way that broadens viewers’ perspective. I admire “Real Life” for aiming at that same target, even if it never quite feels real enough to earn the emotional impact it’s striving so hard for.