Flesh And Blood Movie

[Merilyn Mardis]

Surprisinglyenough, it was in the process of staying faithful to my spiritual journey that I first began to face my profound ambivalence about life in a body. At the ripe old age of thirty, I could no longer ignore the fact that I was tired, lethargic and somewhat depressed. Thinking that my lethargy and lack of enthusiasm for life were psychological or spiritual in nature, I went to a psychologist who was also a spiritual director. To my surprise, some of our initial conversations had to do with my physical condition: eating patterns, water intake, how much sleep I was getting, whether I was getting any exercise, and general attention to health issues. Even though I had been paying attention to the condition of my spiritual life for years, no one had ever called any serious attention to the connection between my physical well-being and my life in Christ. This was something of a revelation!

My early lessons in flesh and blood spirituality began with growing in my understanding that the physical and the spiritual were not as opposed to each other as I had thought. I am not merely a soul and spirit; I am an embodied human being, and my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In some unexplainable way God inhabits our bodies, making them a place where we can meet and know him. The Scriptures also seemed to indicate that it is possible to glorify God in our bodies rather than merely glorifying the body (the focus of the surrounding culture) or ignoring the body (the focus of the religious subculture). As I grew more and more curious about what it might look like to glorify God in my body, I was pretty sure that walking around tired, overweight and stimulated by sugar and caffeine was not it!

Paying attention to your breathing is one of the simplest ways of getting in touch with your existence as a body. Settle into a comfortable position, either in a chair or on the floor, and pay attention to your breathing. Notice if your breathing is shallow, and take time to breathe deeply. Allow your breathing to release any tension you are holding in your back, your shoulders, your arms. Adjust your body for greater comfort, and allow yourself to relax into your chair or cushion as a physical expression of your trust in God.

Gently turn your attention to your body and invite God to speak to you through your body. First of all, just notice how you feel about life in your body. Are you embarrassed about it? Do you enjoy it? What happens inside you when you consider the idea of honoring your body or meeting God in your body?

It's probably the end of the road for anything relating to the holodeck or holograms; with "Flesh and Blood," the Voyager writers have taken the concept as far as it can go. They've done it here with an abundance of compelling arguments and smart ideas, which is more than enough for me to set aside qualms with cans of worms opened by exploring these issues.

Like "Killing Game," this outing involves the Hirogen. It builds upon the previous episode's end solution, where Janeway negotiated a truce by offering the Hirogen holodeck technology so they could simulate their hunts as an alternative to hunting sentient beings.

Never mind. That's the underlying continuity/believability-breaker, but it's fairly minor and not worth dwelling on. (Given how flexible Voyager's position in the Delta Quadrant has been in the past, if the writers are going to break this rule again, they might as well do it for a worthwhile story, which this turns out to be.)

A distress signal brings Voyager to a Hirogen training facility where something has gone very wrong. The facility is a big holodeck, and it turns out that the holograms here took control of their environment and slaughtered all the Hirogen hunters on board. They then transferred their programs to a vessel equipped with hologram emitters and escaped. The only survivor the Voyager crew finds on the facility is a young Hirogen engineer named Donik (Ryan Bollman), a non-hunter who had the sense (or cowardice, depending on your walk of life) to hide.

Janeway agrees to help the Hirogen hunt down the renegade holograms and deactivate them. Forming an uneasy alliance (featuring the expected dosage of tension between Janeway and the Hirogen leaders), they undertake a mission that Janeway feels obligated to carry out; she gave the Hirogen this technology three years ago, and she doesn't want it becoming a roaming threat. The Hirogen, of course, see this mission as another hunt.

The story gets much more complicated when the holograms abduct the Doctor, transferring his program to their vessel. They are led by a man named Iden (Jeff Yagher), a hologram with Bajoran form. Iden tells Doc that the holograms are fighting for their own freedom and survival; the Hirogen use them simply as programmed prey, but, like Doc, they have the ability to evolve beyond their programming. Iden sees himself as a liberator; after he freed himself and obtained a ship, he liberated holograms from three Hirogen facilities, and intends to free more of "his people."

The beauty of the episode is its plentiful complexity. It's not simply about hunting the holograms, and it's not simply about the possibility that hunting down these holograms is wrong. It's about the dialog and situations that arise in the meantime, prompting us to ponder both sides of the issue. Who are these holograms, and have they earned the status of having rights? At what point does technology attain rights, exactly? Would reprogramming the technology to regress it into something more rudimentary be tantamount to a forced lobotomy? And would deactivating such technology be the same as imprisonment or a death sentence?

With its two-hour length, "Flesh and Blood" has plenty of time to dive into a lot of well-written discussions, in addition to the action that moves the story forward. Many of these discussions are between Iden and Doc and reveal different points of view, both of which have merit when considering the characters' origins. Iden thinks of Doc as a slave who serves "organics." Doc doesn't see it that way, since he has been afforded the opportunities to pursue interests that push beyond the boundaries of his original function. But Iden's prejudices against organics are certainly understandable. He was programmed to be hunted and killed over and over again by Hirogen hunters. His purpose was essentially one to be tortured (the Hirogen, thorough in their desire to create credible prey, programmed these holograms with the capacity to feel pain and suffering).

There's a nightmarish sequence where Doc suddenly finds himself being hunted by a sadistic Hirogen. This turns out to be an implanted memory from one of Iden's own people. There's perhaps nothing quite like living through the plight of someone else to possibly understand where they're coming from (cf. last season's "Memorial").

There's an abundance of plotting in the story's two hours, including several ship chases, a few clever tactical maneuvers, Hirogen ships firing on the holograms and on Voyager (and vice-versa), a technical procedure contrived by Torres as a temporary measure to try to shut down all the holograms' programs, and a trek through a nebula. Between directors Mike Vejar (part one) and David Livingston (part two) and all the writers involved in scripting the two teleplays, "Flesh and Blood" is well constructed and well paced. A lot happens, but we're never lost, and the story keeps a firm grasp on all the details to make it something that makes sense and also remains entertaining.

As a sign of trust, Iden agrees to negotiate, transporting Doc back to Voyager, where he pleads with Janeway to consider the holograms' position. Intriguing is how Janeway's position on the matter doesn't depict her as the episode's hero; she's more of an antagonist if we were to assume Doc as the story's hero. She won't put others in the potentially dangerous path of these holograms, even if means deactivating them. Really, there aren't clear-cut heroes anywhere here, which is to the story's credit. Instead, there are viewpoints. Janeway's position at least partially stems from the guilt of having uncorked these holograms by sharing the holo-technology in the first place. Doc is so immersed in the plight of others of his "kind" that he flees Voyager and willingly returns to assist the holograms.

All of this is well documented by the plot, but what makes this story stand out are the details in the characterization, particularly once Torres is beamed to the holograms' vessel to help them build a generator that will allow them to live on an isolated world. (Iden says his mission isn't one of continued violence, but finding a place where his people can live peacefully without being hunted by the Hirogen.)

Even the choices for the holograms' forms proves interesting. Iden's Bajoran identity is appropriate given DS9's milieu of Bajoran freedom fighters trying to end oppression, and Iden even comes preprogrammed with spiritual beliefs. There's also a Cardassian hologram character here, named Kejal (Cindy Katz). Her name is of Bajoran origin, given to her by Iden, which translates as "Freedom."

The Doc/Iden scenes are good, but equally impressive are the more subtle discussions between Torres and Kejal. Torres isn't sure if helping these holograms is a good idea, since the technology she's rigging could be abused for hostile purposes. I appreciated the added dynamic of Torres' discomfort with Cardassians, held over from her old Maquis days. There's a nifty little nod to stereotypes of Klingons and Cardassians, and an even niftier point where Kejal draws a parallel between Torres joining the Maquis to fight Cardassian oppressors and the holograms' current uprising against the Hirogen. (I'm tempted to wonder how much irrelevant Alpha Quadrant information these holograms would've been provided by the Hirogen, but why quibble.)

The story's latter passages involve a turning point where Iden evolves from what appears a sincere freedom fighter into a megalomaniac who sees himself as a messiah to save all enslaved holograms. This turning point is probably a bit extreme and sudden, but still reasonably portrayed. There's a well-depicted example of pointless violence where Iden steals some holograms from a passing merchant vessel, and then destroys the ship and its two "organic" pilots. The holograms he stole turn out to be non-sentient drones capable of only a few rudimentary functions. They do not have the ability to grow the way Iden and his crew do.

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