“There is an old saying: he who studies evil is studied by evil,” Solbor (James Otis) says in one of the last episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It’s a quote that applies very subtly to an episode of Star Trek: Voyager titled “Nothing Human” that was rerun on the Heroes & Icons digital TV channel a few days ago.
Dr. Crell Moset (David Clennon) is an infamous Cardassian doctor who performed evil experiments on Bajorans and other sentient life forms, he’s the foremost exobiologist of the galaxy’s Alpha Quadrant. And apparently he’s the only one who can save Lt. B’Elanna Torres’s life when she’s struck by a strange life form. No one aboard Voyager knows anything about these creatures, not what they’re called, not even how to communicate with them.
Lt. B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Biggs-Dawson) incapacitated by a strange life form that has latched on to her. Background, left to right: Dr. Crell Moset (David Clennon), Voyager's holographic doctor (Robert Picardo) and Lt. Tom Paris (Robert Duncan-McNeill).
Voyager’s database has enough information about Moset and his research to construct a reasonable facsimile of him on the holodeck. The likeness is so convincing that Tabor (Jad Mager), a Bajoran crewmember, is horrified enough to complain to the captain.
The Cardassians occupied Bajor for fifty years, they ruled with an iron fist. It’s an important part of the background for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. During the Occupation of Bajor, the real Dr. Moset performed evil experiments on Tabor’s grandfather and brother. The real Dr. Moset also allegedly caused a viral outbreak in a Bajoran province, an incident he would likely brush off as being necessary to come up with a cure for the disease.
Ensign Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) is the first to express concern about making a hologram of a Cardassian doctor. But Ensign Kim has no personal connection to Dr. Moset like Tabor does, and so is easily convinced that the Dr. Moset hologram is necessary for Torres’s survival.
Voyager’s own doctor, the Emergency Medical Hologram (Robert Picardo), hereafter referred to as “the Doctor,” could theoretically just “download” Dr. Moset’s knowledge into his own memory. That’s a suggestion that is briefly considered and dismissed early on in the episode. It would have been a much less interesting episode otherwise.
I’m guessing this episode started out with this question in the writers’ room: How can we bring Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo) aboard Voyager? Obviously it would have to be as a hologram. But why would anyone on the Voyager crew make a hologram of Dukat? To practice punching him in the face? Not very compelling.
Maybe there’s a Cardassian with expertise that Voyager might need. So I think that’s how they came up with Dr. Crell Moset, a charming man, like Dukat, who casually commits cruelty that he later justifies as necessary, without any real remorse.
Even so, Dr. Moset is a very interesting character apart from Dukat, and Clennon embodies the character without copying Alaimo’s mannerisms. Moset seems to be the kind of agreeable, sympathetic professional colleague the Doctor has wished for all these years.
The episode starts out quite boring, to be honest. The Doctor is presenting a slideshow to a very bored audience, and no one has the guts to leave. The first few scenes of the episode could easily have been compressed or cut out altogether, but then the pacing of the later scenes might have suffered by being expanded to fill the episode’s allotted 46 minutes.
Voyager rescues a non-humanoid being from a damaged ship. The life form is “beamed” to sickbay and placed in a force field. But when Lt. Torres (Roxann Dawson) shows up in sickbay to talk to the captain, the life form jumps through the force field and latches on to Torres and knocks her down to the deck. Soon, the life form has compromised Torres’s heart and lungs, but the life form is also ill.
Wait, how many hearts do Klingons have? Torres is half-human, though. Regardless of that, the strange life form is a clear threat to Torres’s life, and shooting the creature with a phaser would probably also kill Torres. The only way to save Torres is by separating her from the creature. That’s where Dr. Moset comes in. Dr. Moset might be the only exobiologist who can make sense of the strange creature and save Torres’s life.
Dr. Moset quickly becomes dissatisfied by the medical instruments in Voyager’s sickbay, and expresses a longing for his own lab. The Doctor says they can recreate Moset’s lab in the holodeck if Moset gives a precise enough description. I am skeptical that the real Dr. Moset would find the holodeck recreation of his lab a credible facsimile, but at least it looks consistent with what Deep Space Nine has established about Cardassians.
It is quite reasonable to believe that Dr. Moset’s real lab has medical instruments which the Doctor considers crude in their design and barbaric in their use. Dr. Moset asks the Doctor to use a scalpel to make an incision on a holographic recreation of the creature that’s latched on to Torres. The scalpel looks like a knife of torture, and the Doctor starts to have serious second thoughts about bringing Dr. Moset on the case.
Dr. Moset thinks that the only way to save Torres’s life is to kill the creature, presumably with strategic scalpel incisions and cuts, but the Doctor urges Dr. Moset to think harder and come up with a solution that saves both lives.
The mandatory spoiler warning: although we’re talking about an episode that first aired in 1998 of a show that ended in 2001, I’m not assuming that everyone who wants to watch it has already done so, however safe an assumption that seems. We’re going to discuss pretty much the whole episode, including the ending. Who lives, who dies.
However, you need to know that every main character on Voyager dies multiple times and gets restored somehow each time (though there are a few cases we can quibble on). Also, each main character gets an episode in which he or she comes very close to dying — I’m 99% certain of this. The one main character whose actor wanted to exit the show gets sent away, not killed off.
So I don’t think it’s a much of a spoiler to tell you the following: Lt. Torres survives the ordeal of this episode we’re focusing on. So does the creature. The hologram of Dr. Moset does not. Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) tells the Doctor to decide whether or not Dr. Moset will be kept on as a medical consultant. The Doctor decides to delete Dr. Moset’s program. Dr. Moset uses his last words to remind the Doctor that Voyager has already benefited from Moset’s evil research.
Janeway visits Torres’s quarters. Torres is angry that Dr. Moset’s research was used to save her life. Torres is burning an incense with a smell that Janeway describes as “interesting.”
TORRES: It’s a combination of mental relaxant and expeller of demons. It’s an ancient Klingon remedy.
JANEWAY: Feeling any better?
TORRES: I’m alive.
JANEWAY: I hope you can understand why I went against your wishes, B’Elanna. Losing you was unacceptable. I know you’re angry, but we need to put this behind us. Understood?
TORRES: Is that an order?
JANEWAY: Yes.
TORRES: You can’t order someone to get rid of an emotion, captain.
JANEWAY: And what emotion is that?
TORRES: You had no right to make that decision for me!
JANEWAY: I’m the captain. You’re my crewman. I did what I thought best. I get the feeling there are still a few demons in the air. Let's hope this [incense] does the trick, huh?
And with that, Janeway leaves Torres’s quarters. This being Voyager, the events of this episode are neatly forgotten and never brought up again in any later episode. But it won’t be the last time Torres disagrees with Janeway in a matter of medical ethics.
And besides, there are some Klingons somewhere in the Delta Quadrant who would be disappointed if the future mother of the Kuvah’magh died before actually being impregnated with the prophesied savior. Don’t worry, neither of the later episodes I’m alluding to have any significant impact on the show’s series finale.
With these open threads I used to list every Star Trek episode H & I would be airing that night. But for tonight’s line-up, the only one that seems at least tangentially relevant to the open thread topic is the Deep Space Nine episode “Life Support,” in which “[Dr.] Bashir must use questionable methods in order to keep Vedek Bareil alive long enough to help bring about a Bajoran peace treaty with Cardassia.” Why the “methods” are “questionable” I don’t quite remember.
The open thread question: is it ever acceptable to use knowledge obtained by evil means for a good cause?