Bliss (Star Trek: Voyager)

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Star Trek: VOY episode
"Bliss"
False hopes
Episode no.	108
Prod. code	209
Airdate	February 10, 1999
Writer(s)	Bill Prady Robert J. Doherty
Director	Cliff Bole
Guest star(s)	Scarlett Pomers as Naomi W. Morgan Sheppard as Qatai
Year	2375
Stardate	52542.3
Episode chronology
Previous	"Gravity"
Next	"Dark Frontier, Part I"

"Bliss" is an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the fourteenth episode of the fifth season. The episode has an average rating of 4.6/5 on the official Star Trek website (as of August 18th, 2007).[1]

[edit] Plot

After Seven of Nine returns from an away mission she finds the crew have discovered what they think is a wormhole leading directly to Earth. Suspicious of everyone's unfettered optimism despite signs the anomaly may not be all it appears to be, Seven accesses Captain Janeway's logs. At first the captain reports that scans determined the wormhole was a deception, but in supplemental logs, Janeway suddenly believes it is real.

Seven locates an alien vessel in the wormhole after a re-scan, not originally detected by Voyager's sensors, she hails it. The alien, Qatai, warns her that her ship is being deceived, but they are cut off when Janeway routes power from the lab to another system. When Naomi Wildman tells her everyone is acting strangely, Seven realizes they are the only two unaffected by whatever is manipulating the crew, Seven because she cannot remember Earth, and Naomi because she has never been to Earth and considers Voyager her real home. She also finds that The Doctor is not affected either, since he is a hologram. The crew is suddenly and conveniently ordered by Starfleet to take the Doctor offline to avoid system interference, and to put Seven in stasis to avoid attracting Borg attention while Voyager passes through the wormhole.

Seven knows that it is the wormhole controlling the crew, and compelling them to enter it with the promise that they will see Earth, but no one will listen. She decides to act. As Chakotay escorts Seven to her alcove, she tricks him and erects a forcefield to contain him. With Naomi keeping security at bay, Seven transports to Engineering and stuns B'Elanna with a phaser. After erecting another forcefield there, Seven attempts to shut down the impulse drive to keep Voyager from entering the wormhole. Janeway transmits a surge to the engineering console that knocks Seven out.

With Seven incapacitated, Voyager proceeds to enter the wormhole. Once they enter the anomaly, the crew falls unconscious and begin to hallucinate. When Naomi wakes Seven, the two hail Qatai and convince him to beam aboard. He explains the crew has been a victim of psychogenic manipulation. They are inside a bio-plasmic organism, a beast that consumes starships by telepathically preying on their crews' desires. Qatai has been trying for years to destroy the creature, not always successful at evading its deceptions, as he at first believes Voyager and her crew to be hallucinations.

After reactivating the Doctor's program, Seven informs him that Voyager is being devoured in the digestive chamber of the organism. Realizing that bodies are designed to expel foreign objects, they plan to fire one of Qatai's tetryon-based weapons at a pocket of antimatter released from Voyager's warp core. It creates an unpleasant but harmless reaction in the beast that causes it to expel the two ships through its esophagus. Once Janeway and the others regain consciousness, Voyager resumes its course to the Alpha Quadrant, but Qatai returns to the beast, determined to defeat it.