Recap / Star Trek Voyager S 5 E 8 Nothing Human

The Doctor meeting the hologram of Dr. Crell Moset.

When a bug-like alien latches onto B'Elanna, the Doctor consults a hologram of a Cardassian doctor allegedly involved in medical atrocities.

This episode provides examples of

• Affably Evil: Crell Moset. He's friendly and charming to the Doctor (seeing him as a colleague), and hiding a very dirty past.
• Always Save the Girl: Tom ust wants to save B'Elanna, full stop. When Janeway rules in favour of this, he whispers a quiet "thanks" to her as he passes.
• Birds of a Feather: Moset appears to be a kindred spirit to the Doctor at first, flattering his ego and showing an interest in opera, and empathizing with his need to improvise with what limited medical resources are available. His medical ethics, on the other hand (or lack thereof), reveal him to be the Doctor's Shadow Archetype.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The Universal Translator can't understand the cytoplasmic lifeform's language, the tricorder can't comprehend its biology, it controls a spaceship via biochemical secretions, it can leap through a forcefield in a single bound, and it uses B'Elanna as an emergency life-support system.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: Moset turns out to be pretty dark, no doubt about that. The Doctor, however, willingly works alongside him to save B'Elanna, although doing his best not to follow Moset's actions to the letter.
• Book Ends: The episode opens on the holodeck with the Doctor bragging before a larger-than-life photo of himself, and ends on the holodeck as the Doctor deletes Moset's programme and walks out the door.
• The Bore: The Doctor. For two hours. And with snapshots. The horror...
• Both Sides Have a Point: Janeway declares this during the argument in the conference room, but says her priority is to save B'Elanna's life.
• Continuity Nod: To the Doctor's boring subjects of discussion for A Briefing with Neelix, notably the wonders of internal organs ("Investigations").
• Contrived Coincidence: There are three Bajorans on Voyager, and it just so happens that one of them personally suffered at the hands of the real Crell Moset.
• Covered in Mud: The EMH shows everyone a holo-photograph of Tom after he fell into a mud pit during an away mission. Tom insists he was pushed, but his fellow crew members don't believe him.
• Distress Call: The alien ship creates a non-lethal Planar Shockwave that causes any other ship in the vicinity to come and investigate. After the crew's effort to translate the message into something legible fail, Voyager repeats the message in the same manner.
• Escape Call: Chakotay was supposed to go to Yellow Alert to rescue Janeway (and others) from the Doctor's self-aggrandizing photo montage after a half hour. Unfortunately for them, he decides that since he (and Harry) had to suffer through the whole thing, they should too. Afterwards, Tuvok and Janeway trade barbs about how Chakotay defied a direct order, and that this is grounds for court martial.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep":
  Moset: And you, good man. What's your name?
  EMH: Actually, I'm in-between names at the moment. I'm an Emergency Medical Hologram.
  Kim: But his friends call him Doc.
• Fantastic Racism: B'Elanna isn't happy to find out that Moset is Cardassian. "As far as I'm concerned, they're all cold-blooded killers."
• First-Name Basis: Moset insists the Doctor call him Crell.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: The whole debate over the morality of Moset's hologram kinda falls flat in light of TNG's "Booby Trap" where Geordi had to specifically request the computer to reconstruct Dr. Leah Brahms's personality rather than just her research or looks. Perhaps they could have avoided all the unpleasantness of actually interacting with Moset by just downloading his research into the Doctor, a hologram himself, but due to the Doctor's experiments with downloading information associated with distinct personages (Darkling), maybe they wanted to avoid any possible personality cross-contamination; that being said, they could have made Moset's hologram look like anyone they wanted once the racism aspect was discovered, removing B'Elanna's initial objections (but possibly delaying the morality discovery).
• Guest Star: Frank Welker as the voice for the cytoplasmic lifeform.
• Gut Feeling:
  • B'Elanna has a bad feeling about Moset as soon as she sees him. Granted, it's mostly fueled by Fantastic Racism, but she turns out to be right.
  • As the Universal Translator doesn't work, Captain Janeway has to go on guesswork as to what the aliens are saying. She ends up being right.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: The Doctor wisely leaves out the photo of B'Elanna in an embarrassing position from the essay where she's present. Not played for laughs at the end, when he tells the Captain that he almost had to sedate her, due to B'Elanna's violent reaction to finding out what happened.
• Hypocritical Humor: B'Elanna giggles at a picture of Tom Covered in Mud, but nearly erupts with rage when he suggests showing everyone an equally embarrassing picture of her.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Moset's justification for pretty much everything he's done. The Doctor starts using it as well.
• Idiot Ball: So Harry goes to repair the Cardassian hologram, and he brings a Bajoran engineer to help him? What did he think was gonna happen?
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Harry finds it a lot easier to create a holographic medical consultant with a full personality and the ability to conduct surgical operations, than he did recreating the EMH in "Message in a Bottle".
• Mad Scientist: If Tabor is to be believed, the real Crell Moset.
  Tabor: He blinded people so he could study how they adapted. Exposed them to polytrinic acid just to see how long it would take for their skin to heal.
  EMH: Ensign, the man you're accusing cured the Fostossa virus. He stopped an epidemic that killed thousands of Bajorans.
  Tabor: By infecting hundreds of people so that he could experiment with different treatments. Old, helpless people like my grandfather, because he considered their lives worthless.
• Monster of the Aesop: The Driving Question is whether it's ethical to use medical knowledge gained via unethical means. So we have not Moset, but a hologram that holds his combined knowledge.
• Morally Superior Copy: the Doctor needed to create a consultant to work with to solve a medical crisis that was going to kill B'lannna. He conjured up a holographic version of the best exobiologist known to the Federation, a Cardassian named Crell Moset. The hologram is kind, courteous, funny and extremely gifted in the field of medicine. His inspiration was also an immoral monster who mimicked Josef Mengele's crimes. The Doctor calls out the new Moset for this (even though he's only 3 days old at this point) and discovers that the holographic creation was based on what the Cardassians released to the Federation which left out most of the really negative stuff. As such, this part of Moset was never integrated into new Moset's program and he's genuinely shocked and disgusted by his inspiration's actions. Even though he was an innocent, the Doctor deletes his program anyway; there were still plenty of morally gray moments that appeared in Moset's program when he was working with the Doctor, enough to give everyone second thoughts about integrating the knowledge shared, and the Doctor did not want his ethical subroutines to get that murky.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Doctor raves about the beauty of the Vulcan reproductive organ in a crowd that includes Tuvok. That whole sex thing is rather embarrassing for Vulcans.
  • Crell is annoyed that some Starfleet medical officers thought he might be a spy, bringing to mind Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Some of Crell Moset's "experiments" sound horrifyingly similar to those conducted on Nazi concentration camp prisoners during WWII, particularly those performed by "Dr." Josef Mengele.
• Noodle Incident: The Doctor's photo-essay has Tom falling in a mudpool during an Away Mission, Doc retrieving a data module from a Death World, and B'Elanna getting her foot stuck in a plasma injector.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Crell tries to defend his work by pointing out that the Doctor was willing to use it when desperate enough. Unfortunately for him, the Doctor wasn't convinced.
  Moset: You can erase my program Doctor, but you can never change the fact that you've already used some of my research. Where was your conscience when B'Elanna was dying on that table? Ethics, Morality, conscience — funny how they all go out the airlock when we need something. Are you and I really so different?
  EMH: Computer, delete medical consultant program and all related files.
• Omniscient Database: Averted at first; the Doctor has to create the Moset hologram because he doesn't have the information on his own database. Played straight later on when the crew discover a requisition order Moset placed during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor for biochemical agents, including the strain of virus he was famous for curing.
• The Oner: Two, both in Sickbay:
  • The first is roughly 90 seconds in length, and follows the EMH, Janeway, and Paris from B'Elanna's bed into the EMH's office as Janeway suggests creating the holographic assistant, before finally settling back on B'Elanna's bed as seen through the office window.
  • The second, also about 90 seconds in length, moves from the EMH's office, to B'Elanna's bed, to the sickbay console, back to inside the EMH's office again as Crell and the EMH discuss B'Elanna's condition and the possibility of using the Holodeck to recreate Crell's office.
• Personal Space Invader: The moment B'Elanna comes near instead of the EMH, the alien leaps clear through a forcefield and latches onto her.
• Playing with Syringes: Moset's charity work with Bajoran civilians was just a cover for his medical experiments.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: B'Elanna to Janeway after it's all over. "You had-no RIGHT-to make that decision for me!"
• Quit Your Whining:
  Moset: A celebration is in order. How about listening to that opera you promised me? [sees Doc's expression] Oh...you're still wrestling with your 'ethical subroutines'. Take my advice. It's a waste of time. What's important is that we saved two lives today.
  • Janeway tells B'Elanna to just get over it. She does.
• Rubber-Forehead Alien: Lampshaded when Crell notices that B'Elanna's isn't as prominent as he'd expect.
  "She's Klingon... no, the cranial ridges are less pronounced. Klingon-human hybrid."
• Sarcasm Mode:
  Moset: I've already outlined a paper that you and I will one day present to the Federation Medical Academy. Total Systemic Invasion of a Klingon-Human Hybrid by a Cytoplasmic Pseudoparasite. Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
  EMH: Are we also going to tell them where you honed your surgical techniques? A footnote, perhaps. "For further details, see Cardassian death camps."
  Moset: Those techniques were crucial this morning. Where was your sarcasm then?
• Screen Shake: The first indication of the approaching energy wave.
  Paris: What did you put in the coffee, Neelix?
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!:
  Paris: Fine. Let's just deactivate the evil hologram and let B'Elanna die. At least we'd have our morals intact. And you, Chakotay. Since when do you care what Starfleet thinks?
  Chakotay: This isn't about rules and regulations. This is about doing what's right!
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The Doctor allowed the Crell Moset hologram to have his final say before just deleting him.
• Spikes of Doom: Moset's surgical instruments have sinister spikes on them, as opposed to the non-invasive Cow Tools used in Federation medical technology.
• Tempting Fate: The Doctor gets annoyed when it's pointed out that activating a Cardassian hologram might not be a good idea, saying: "I don't care if he's the nastiest man who ever lived!"
• Tested on Humans: Moset's discovery of the cure for the Fostossa virus involved infecting hundreds of unknowing Bajorans.
• That's an Order!:
  Janeway: 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.
• Universal Translator: For once this is ineffective, making it difficult to establish the aliens' intentions.
• Unwanted Healing: B'Elanna refuses to be saved with a medical procedure that was devised by a Cardassian equivalent of Doctor Mengele. She's furious when the Doctor does so anyway.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • Moset points out that human medicine was based on animal experimentation. The Doctor argues that animals aren't sentient so it doesn't count.
  • When the Doctor deletes Moset's program, he treats it with the gravitas of an execution, reading out the 'charge' first.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  Tuvok: If the Doctor uses knowledge that Moset gained through his experiments, we would be validating his methods, inviting further unethical research.
  Chakotay: We'd be setting a terrible precedent.
  Paris: We're in the middle of the Delta Quadrant! Who would know?
  Tuvok: We would know.
• You Killed My Father: When Moset is activated in front of him, Tabor is aghast and has to be restrained from attacking the hologram.
  Tabor: He killed my brother, my grandfather, hundreds of people. He's a mass murderer!