IN BRIEF

A watchable but ultimately unfulfilling take on the "Voyager crew as saps" pattern.

(originally aired November 8, 2000)

Written by Robert Doherty
Directed by Allan Kroeker

A Quality Lie

HARRY KIM: I'm not THAT gullible.

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GUEST CAST

Dwight Schultz -- Barclay
Marina Sirtis -- Troi
Richard Herd -- Admiral Paris
Richard McGonagle -- Commander Pete Harkins
Frank Corsentino -- Gegis
Christopher Neiman -- Yeggie
Michael William Rivkin -- Nunk
Sharisse Baker-Bernard -- Leosa

RATING (OUT OF 4)

**

ANALYSIS

Warning: This review contains significant spoilers for Voyager's "Inside Man". If you haven't seen the episode yet, beware.

"Inside Man" has a few things going for it, but one of those things, unfortunately, is not the bigger picture. That is to say, when you have at your disposal the entire Alpha Quadrant guest cast that made "Pathfinder" such a winner last year, why waste it on a silly caper plot that doesn't advance Voyager along the lines of the continuing saga of its search for a way home?

Even worse, why waste it on yet another example of the crew being manipulated like sorry saps into believing that a shortcut home is actually going to work when in fact it would get them all killed, a la the deception in "Hope and Fear"? "Inside Man" is a collection of isolated bright ideas undercut by standard plotting and character stupidity.

And a show of hands: Do we really want to see the Ferengi again?

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

~

The underlying premise -- Reg Barclay would transmit a hologram of himself to Voyager as an interactive program to assist in future coordination between Voyager and the Alpha Quadrant -- is actually very reasonable.

Unfortunately, the problem with "Inside Man" is that it's heavy on gimmicks and alarmingly light on story. One admirable aspect of "Pathfinder" and "Life Line", also from last season -- both which featured Barclay and Troi and other characters from the Alpha Quadrant -- is that they were real stories with true appeal and meaning. They were not stunt episodes. "Inside Man," on the other hand, is just that -- a stunt episode that doesn't mean anything to any of its characters . . . not the Voyager crew members in the Delta Quadrant nor Barclay back home in the Alpha Quadrant.

The plot can basically be summarized in one sentence: Some scheming Ferengi intercept the transmission of Barclay's hologram and reprogram it to lure Voyager through a manufactured tech anomaly so they can get their hands on Seven of Nine's nanoprobes and sell them for huge profit. (No one onboard Voyager, by the way, will survive the radiation when traveling through this anomaly, which makes me wonder if even Ferengi would resort to murdering 150 people to score a quick buck.)

Aside from following this premise through to its inevitable conclusion, the rest of the episode is either (a) filler or (b) rehashes of Barclay's character already covered in the far-superior "Pathfinder".

Some of this is admittedly entertaining. For example, the most truthful and appropriate idea in the episode is the notion that the Reg hologram has such a confident swagger. Assuming that its outgoing nature wasn't programmed by the Ferengi, this makes sense -- this is exactly the alter ego Reg would code for himself.

And even if most of this is rehash, I still have to confess to enjoying Dwight Schultz as Barclay. Here he gives two very different riffs on the character -- as the real Barclay, and also as the holographic version he wishes he could be. The real Barclay is the same guy we knew from "Pathfinder" -- always sure his ideas will work but unable to convince his boss Harkins that he's on the right track.

~

But even though this may be fun, we've been here and done this. When you have a rare opportunity to use these characters, why waste time doing everything over again?

Sure, holo-Barclay is a personable fellow. But I still had to ask myself if having him do impressions in the Voyager mess hall was really necessary to the story.

And take, for example, the extended scene between Barclay and Troi on the beach. It may be the longest dialogue scene in the episode, and it doesn't need to be. The information we get here is secondary to the setting, as if the scene had to be drawn out unnecessarily in order to justify the expense of shooting on location rather than on soundstages. (When I think of things like that, it's an indication the dialogue isn't grabbing enough of my attention.) And Barclay comes close at times to being reduced to a cartoon character, decked out in a hat and sunglasses designed to make him look awkward. The character analysis in "Pathfinder" was far less forced, and more truthful.

The main drive of the plot hinges on some contrived facts that annoyed me.

One is the idea that the Voyager crew would follow holo-Barclay so blindly, like brainless lemmings. This episode's proposed Instant Way Home [TM] is not only mired in the typical invented technobabble, but would be very dangerous for our gallant Voyager crew. Radiation levels would be lethal. Even so, the deceptive holo-Barclay explains away the danger as no longer a problem thanks to shield modifications and Doc's inoculations.

Far too simple, and yet suddenly the Voyager crew prepares to follow Barclay straight to their doom. Meanwhile, we get the usual discussions about being excited about possibly getting home while also trying to keep optimism in check.

~

Back in the Alpha Quadrant, we learn that the Ferengi gained access to Barclay's hologram thanks to Barclay's ex-girlfriend Leosa, who had played Barclay for a fool specifically for this purpose. Since he's a victim of his own trusting nature, I would say "poor Reg" here, but -- unlike "Pathfinder" -- the writers don't seem to be sympathizing with him nearly as much as they seem to be laughing at him behind his back.

The conclusion is one of those races against the clock where Barclay must use his technical ingenuity to foil the Ferengi before the Voyager crew is lured through the anomaly and killed. Par for course, but I wanted a different course.

And, no, I didn't really need to see the Ferengi again. As portrayed here, does a single one of them look like he has the intelligence to come up with a plan as brilliant as this one? If not, the explanation may be that the plan isn't brilliant so much as the victims of the plan -- in both the Alpha and Delta quadrants -- are gullible fools. At the very least, I'll give Barclay and his team, including Admiral Paris, credit for figuring out the Ferengi plot without too much slow-wittedness.

But that's not enough, because the bottom line is that "Inside Man" starts out as a promising idea that is quickly tossed aside in favor of something trivial and mundane. "Pathfinder" and "Life Line" showed true promise in telling a story arc that connected Voyager with the Alpha Quadrant, using Barclay as the common thread to hold it all together. "Inside Man" seems convinced that Barclay and Troi are enough on their own to keep us interested (they're not), and so doesn't bother to be a story that we should care about.

As far as the Voyager-characters-as-saps paradigm goes, the last scene, in which Tom and B'Elanna pull Harry's leg with a far-fetched premise that promises another way home, is perhaps the episode's most telling. There he is, Harry Kim, after all these years and this episode in particular, still playing the part of the hapless chump -- just as gullible and naive as he was when the series premiered nearly six years ago.

Is this supposed to be a funny joke on the character? If we buy into it, I'm thinking the joke is on us.

JUNIOR HIGH QUESTION OF THE WEEK

Why does a transwarp conduit (as depicted in animation in this episode) look exactly like a condom?

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK

"Being John Malkovich" -- Voyager style! (In other words, "Being Seven of Nine" or, as the official title has it, "Body and Soul".

Copyright 2000 Jamahl Epsicokhan. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this article is prohibited.