Infinite Regress

When this episode started I was skeptical; but as it progressed, I found it interesting. I was only familiar with Jeri Ryan from Leverage, and I didn't like her. Not sure why; I just found her annoying, so maybe it was just the character she played. Watching her on Voyager, I decided she wasn't so bad and I was particularly impressed with her acting in this episode. She was a great Klingon, and I loved her Ferengi impression, it was perfect. The other characters were also well done; each one was well defined from the others. The technical parts of the story were as usual, hard to follow and somewhat non-sensical, but overall it was a much better episode than most.

Jerry Ryan is a talented actress but was only given limited breadth in the Voyager series. In this ep though we get to see her talents and she delivers. Otherwise the ep fits in the lines of the typical series ep.

When Voyager nears some debris from a Borg vessel, Seven of Nine begins acting very strangely. Suddenly, she begins switching from one personality to another. In between she's normal (or as normal as Seven can be) but it sure is becoming annoying! What's causing this mental breakdown and what can fix it? The Doctor thinks it's caused by a bad case of the Ankaran Flu. However, the know-it-all Doctor soon seems incapable of curing Seven so he calls in a specialist, 'Dr.' Tuvok.

Whether this is a good or bad episode, it must have been a challenge and rather fun for Jeri Ryan to act in this show. Her Seven of Nine is a wild emotional roller-coaster and she sure gets a chance to emote and show her stuff!

This show is okay and worth seeing. The Captain's behavior through the show, however, is odd (as often is the case) and seems to make little sense in light of the power and evil of the Borg. I cannot imagine any real person doing anything to disrupt the aliens from their plan. Yet another case where she acts more like a person reading a script than someone you can believe will exist in the 24th century. Her character is the weak link in this particular show-- everyone else is just fine and Ryan did a fine job in acting nutty!

Until this episode I was always a little doubtful about Jeri Ryan's acting ability, wondering if she could only do one note: Imperial bitchiness. Not that I don't like her Borgian disdain for non-scientific and imperfect humans. Or that high-minded carriage of her cat-suited Barbie-doll body. But in this episode, as her Borg implant fractures her into multiple personalities, she gets a huge range of characterizations to perform, and she handles them well. And this script has a handful of clever complications en route to her healing that make it an enjoyable installment. It ends kind of quickly, but it is one of the better episodes, IMHO.

I haven't had much occasion to watch any of the "Voyager" episodes---my preference has always been the original series---but this one grabbed my attention. It was a beautifully written story,centering on the trials and tribulations of Seven of Nine as she grappled with an invasion of multiple personalities that threatened to actually destroy her, and Jeri Ryan turned in a real tour de force of a performance. And when that doctor, who has a tendency to shoot off his mouth too much, was unsuccessful in his attempts to remedy the situation he had to step back and let the Vulcan, Tuvok, have a go at it---and Tuvok performed a dramatic Vulcan mind-fusion (very much like the one Spock used in "The Paradise Syndrome", by the way) as he joined Seven in successfully driving off the invaders. Electrifying, to say the least---but then I have always thoroughly enjoyed any and all mind-meld sequences in Trek. An additional comment: Someone once asked why Tuvok needed two hours to prepare. Answer: he needed that extra time because he knew what he was going up against, what he had to do if he were going to rescue Seven of Nine from the life-threatening predicament she was in. He was going all-out with the most powerful and most stressful of all the mind-melds---the Vulcan mind-fusion. He knew it was going to be a very rough ride, and indeed it was---but he had help from B'Elanna Torres in engineering who worked to destroy that Borg machine. Once it was gone, he was able to join his mind with Seven's in a full meld and pull her out of that mess. And after a wnek or so of recuperation in her regeneration chamber she was herself again.