“Nothing Human” is episode eight of season five of Star Trek: Voyager.
The Doctor is doing a presentation, featuring himself, on the holodeck. Captain Janeway says everyone’s enjoyed his holoimages immensely. He isn’t finished. On the bridge, Harry tells Chakotay the time. Then does it again. Chakotay heard him the first time. Harry says they’ve been in there over an hour and the captain said to rescue them after 30 minutes. Chakotay reminds Harry that they enjoyed the Doctor’s presentation for two hours. It would not be fair to deny their friends the same unforgettable experience.
With the presentation over, B’Elanna asks what happened to yellow alert after half an hour. Tuvok states that Chakotay appears to have disobeyed a direct order. Grounds for a court martial according to the captain. B’Elanna and Tom head to the galley; it seems Neelix has already been a victim of the Doctor’s presentation. B’Elanna did find some pretty funny; Neelix agrees that the one where Tom slipped into the mud was. There was also one which showed the chief engineer with a foot stuck in a plasma injector. It seems the Doctor removed that image. Probably due to a death threat. Then the ship starts shaking and Harry reports an energy wave heading directly for them.
The energy wave hits, despite their attempt to avoid, but only does minor damage with no injuries. Something was downloaded to the ship, and it included an audio component. Incomprehensible screeching. The captain thinks this was deliberate and Tom says the ship left a residual ion trail. This leads to a badly damaged ship with one lifesign. That’s beamed directly to sickbay.
In sickbay, the Doctor can’t make anything out about the creature. It’s injured, but he has now idea how to treat it. B’Elanna is saying that the interfaces on the alien vessel are activated chemically; she guesses it interfaces directly with the ship’s systems. Then the creature leaps through the forcefield and lands on B’Elanna. Harry is unable to get a transporter lock on it.
The creature is now attached to B’Elanna and the Doctor can’t remove it surgically without doing irreparable damage to her internal organs. Beaming it off would take her cardio vascular system with it. The Doctor needs to brush up on his exobiology; he may be a walking encyclopaedia, but his matrix isn’t large enough to hold everything. The captain suggests creating a consultant, merging an interactive matrix with a hologram. Tom thinks Harry can do it.
Harry meets the Doctor in the holodeck. They are going to base the consultant on a real person. The Doctor has chosen Dr. Crell Moset. They start with his physical appearance. He’s a Cardassian. Harry thinks that might cause problems. The Doctor doesn’t care if he’s the nastiest person who ever lived, if he can help save B’Elanna. The first attempt doesn’t work; the second does.
The Doctor fills in Moset as to the situation, and their mutual holographic natures. Moset wants to see the patient, and both head back to sickbay. Moset says that the alien appears to be a cytoplasmic lifeform, and correctly deduces that B’Elanna is a human-Klingon hybrid. Moset isn’t surprised that the Doctor got nowhere with his Starfleet tricorder. He suggested an upgrade at a joint medical conference, but Starfleet thought he was a typical arrogant Cardassian attempting to prove his superiority. Or a spy.
Janeway and Chakotay are trying to decipher the signal. They ask Seven of Nine to download the ship’s databanks. A Bajoran engineer, Tabor, has a bit of a problem with taking her orders, because B’Elanna doesn’t like her. Seven is aware of that, but the captain has put her in charge. Feelings are irrelevant. However, the ship destabilises and explodes.
The Doctor and Moset are recapping what they know. They decide the alien has latched onto B’Elanna as a stop gap measure to keep itself alive. Moset wishes he had access to his lab. The Doctor says they can create a reasonable facsimile on the holodeck, if Moset can give an accurate description. He can. B’Elanna wakes and sees Moset. She is not happy. Is there no-one else? Tom tells her no.
Janeway and Chakotay are not really getting anywhere with the alien signal; the captain suggests retransmitting it to see if any others of the species respond. The Doctor and Moset are getting on very well. Things with Moset are going fine – until Harry brings Tabor to help with a problem with the program. A Bajoran was not the best choice to fix a Cardassian program at the best of times. Even less so when the Doctor’s comment about the nastiest person who ever lived turns out to have some truth in it; Starfleet did not have access to Moset’s complete records. Which creates a conundrum; the ethics of using research gained using appalling methods to save B’Elanna’s life.