Infinite Regress

This is one of those good ole fashioned somewhat cheesy episodes. But oh if cheese isn't one of my favourite foods! This is classic Trek. I have to say that Ryan did a great job in her performance. It's a bit of a ridiculous role to play, someone constantly experiencing different personalities, but I love it. Put a big smile on my face. I wish modern Trek were this good!

Seven of Nine starts to hear voices and display varying personalities.

This is a reasonably good episode with a memorable turn from Jeri Ryan. The writers give her the opportunity showcase great range with an episode that further humanises her character during the journey back to individuality.

The best scenes involve Seven either in multiple-personality mode or exchanging dialogue with the character Naomi Wildman. I also enjoyed the pivotal mind-meld sequence which is very well made by the film crew and conveys what is happening with visual storytelling.

I was not particularly intrigued by the scenes involving the main antagonists, the vinculam and associated technobabble, but the main focus is on Seven.

Ryan is on top form along with Robert Picardo. A young Scarlett Pomers also makes a good contribution.

The fun of these sorts of episodes, where one character is the primary focus of the plot and is given a chance to flex his/her acting muscles, is seeing how well the writers create opportunities with good writing, and how well the actor is up to the challenge of either doing justice to a good script or lifting a mediocre (or bad) script up. In this episode, the script was pretty decent, but not earth-shattering (see episode immediately preceding this one for an example of a great script that gave an actor a chance to match, and the actor pulled it off.) However, Jeri Ryan gave an almost-great performance. I say "almost" because her acting chops were never in question in this episode but, sadly, she doesn't really do voices. Which isn't a slam on her -- some people can do voices with amazing facility, others just aren't gifted at that particular skill, and there's only so much teaching can do to compensate for not being naturally adept at it.

In any event, Jeri Ryan absolutely does a fine job with the mannerisms and tics and behaviors of each individual personality/race. She may be eye candy, but she has the acting chops to rise above that, and the script was perfectly designed to let her show range and adaptability.

I do have a couple reservations about the script. First, once the Doctor identified the cause of the cube's destruction as a synthetic virus, every half-way awake viewer probably immediately knew that it was almost-certainly a deliberate infection designed as a weapon against the Borg, especially after hearing the history of the race involved and the nature of how the virus got aboard the ship. Yet it literally doesn't seem to even occur to any of Voyager's staff that this might be the case despite the fact that they literally helped take out Species 8472 with a similar plan, something that was referenced not 3 episodes back (presumably only weeks or possibly months ago in Voyager time) My other issues were: 1) Why did "blow that sucker up with photon torpedoes rather than beam it aboard" never seem to occur to them. It was obviously not well-shielded because they could beam it aboard, and this was prior to the Doctor declaring that it was too late to destroy it without harming 7; 2) That "can't escape because subspace" was ludicrous. If it could disseminate the virus so easily and unavoidably, it wouldn't even be necessary as a trap -- it could just go after all Borg vessels in subspace range, which meant that it wasn't so much a Trojan Horse as a continuous bomb.

Overall, it was a fun episode to watch, mainly for the chance to see an actor really put on a performance.

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.

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.