"Star Trek: Voyager" The Thaw (1996)

Director:

Marvin V. Rush

Writers:

Gene Roddenberry (creator: Star Trek)
Rick Berman (creator) ...

TV Series:

"Star Trek: Voyager" (1995)

Original Air Date:

29 April 1996 (Season 2, Episode 23)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Sci-Fi

Plot:

Voyager finds a group of people connected in stasis chambers and something has gone terribly wrong. |

Plot Keywords:

Alternative Reality | Simulation | Virtuality | Virtual Reality | Simulated Reality

Cast

Kate Mulgrew	...	Captain Kathryn Janeway
Robert Beltran	...	Commander Chakotay
Roxann Dawson	...	Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres (as Roxann Biggs-Dawson)
Jennifer Lien	...	Kes
Robert Duncan McNeill	...	Lieutenant Tom Paris
Ethan Phillips	...	Neelix
Robert Picardo	...	The Doctor
Tim Russ	...	Lieutenant Tuvok
Garrett Wang	...	Ensign Harry Kim
Michael McKean	...	The Clown / Fear
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Tony Carlin	...	Physician
Thomas Kopache	...	Viorsa
Patty Maloney	...	Little Woman
Shannon O'Hurley	...	Programmer
Carel Struycken	...	Spectre

Company:

Paramount Television

Quotes:

Viorsa: He's already killed two of our colleagues.
Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres: How is that possible?
Clown: I cut off their heads.
Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres: But none of this is real!
Clown: Of course it's real - as real as a nightmare.
Ensign Harry Kim: The two we found dead. Both suffered from massive heart attacks.
Clown: Heart attack. Now what might cause a heart attack? Hmm... Unmanageable stress, perhaps? Unmanageable fear? The fear of losing a head, perhaps?

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) meets The Matrix (1999)

The Voyager crew inspects an apparently deserted planet only to receive an automated message from a cryogenic system which was created to hold the planet's last survivors. It is then found that even though the disaster that the survivors were trying to ride out has come to pass they are still in stasis. When the crew realizes this they beam the cryopods to the cargo bay and find that the people are connected together in some sort of program where their brains are reacting with one another. Inside the program the personification of fear torments the survivors with their deepest darkest fears to the point where some die from the stress. It has been one of my personal favorite episodes of Star Trek: Voyager" (1995) since it first aired and raises many questions about fear, and how we react to it.