Star Trek: Third Eye Blind

This post is my response to the Star Trek Voyager review of Meld from Confused Matthew. It's a  wonderful review that reminded me of just how much wasted potential there was in Star Trek Voyager. What had not occurred to me before Confused Matthew's review however, was how awesome Suder might have been as a long-term  recurring character. It also got me thinking about the Betazoids and how much smaller their presence in the franchise is compared to, say, Vulcans or Klingons. Given the facile, uni-dimensional approach to fictional species on Voyager, Suder's status as a Betazoid is meant to be a novelty and is only ever mentioned once or twice. But then I remembered something Deanna Troi said during the TNG episode, "The Loss".  During the course of the episode, Deana loses her empathic sense completely. At one point, her friend and ex-lover, Will Riker, tries to comfort her and she sobs that he's no more real to her than a character in a holodeck program. I think that this offers us a possible reason for not only why he was able to so easily take people's lives, but also why he didn't seem able to express why he was driven to kill. It's not that he was driven by anything; it's that nothing was holding him back.  Just like Commander Troi, people aren't real to him. Killing them is  like erasing a hologram.

Troi's loss of her empathic sense is much more profound than her ability to read emotions. Even when she encounters Ferengi whom she normally cannot read, she can still sense their consciousness. They're still real. In "The Loss", it's as if there's nothing there in the people around her.  Most of the times that Troi uses the Holodeck she tends to use landscapes rather then programs where she interacts with characters. Likely this is because she cannot suspend her disbelief enough to do so. This puts her friendship with Data in an interesting light, Does she perceive a vague unreadable something emanating from his positronic brain? Or does she learn to recognize his personhood in the absence of the evidence thereof that she relies on. This would have been a fascinating interaction to explore given that she's a psychologist and he's an autonomous, artificially intelligent person.  I like to imagine that she published a mountain of articles and case-studies about him or that whenever they played 3d-chess, she was engaging in participant observation or something.

I think of how lost and angry Troi becomes in the Loss. Obviously, she was reeling from losing one of her senses. What if she was also afraid? Maybe she was anxious about becoming a monster like Suder. Maybe the dirty little secret of the Betazoids is that when they succumb to solipsism they become  more violent than any Klingon and more twisted than any Romulan.

With a bit of effort and attention, the Betazoids could have been a fascinating and, frankly dangerous species. The trope of gentle empaths is ubiquitous in Sci-fi. Having their telepathy be the only thing keeping them from being super-creepy monsters might have yielded a narrative goldmine for Star Trek.