it as "my classic moment in Voyager first season". Critical reception The Vidiians have received positive feedback from television critics. Marc Buxton of the website Den of Geek! included the Vidiians on his list of the 50 best alien life forms in the Star Trek universe, describing them as "Wes Craven nightmares". While commenting on the episode "Lifesigns", TrekToday Michelle Erica Green questioned the show's decision to focus on the Kazon and described the Vidiians as a more suitable and compelling candidate to serve as the primary antagonists for the first two seasons. Today's Ree Hines called the Vidiians one of the greatest Star Trek villains, writing that "their method of organ extraction upped the fear factor" and made them unsympathetic. Jamahl Epsicokhan of Jammer's Reviews commended the development of the Vidiians in "Faces", writing that they were portrayed as complex villains. Even though he felt that the Vidiians had a compelling premise, he criticized their repeated appearances as distracting from the series' story arc of a lost crew on a journey home. Juliette Harrison of Den of Geek! ranked Susan Diol's performance as Danara Pel as one of the top ten guest performances on Star Trek: Voyager. Pel's storyline was praised by Harrison as portraying "the on-going effects of chronic illness on the sufferer's sense of self"; for Harrison, Diol approached the role through "carefully understated but heartfelt reactions to her situation". Academic analysis A number of academics have identified the Vidiians as potentially adversely influencing public knowledge and perceptions of scientific issues, including genetics and organ donation. Clarence Spiger and colleagues, in a study of student perceptions of organ donations, highlighted the Vidiians as an example of a problematic source of information about the topic on television, a medium which many participants had identified as a key source for their understanding. "We can only speculate", they wrote, "that students' responses could have been indirectly or subconsciously influenced through the viewing of such programming." Literary critic John Kenneth Muir wrote that the Vidiians were an example of the prevalence of organ harvesting story arcs in science fiction, comparing them to characters in the British television shows UFO, Space: 1999, and Blake's 7. He also questioned the connection between storylines such as the Vidiians to the spread of urban legends involving organ trafficking. In his 2016 The Politics of Star Trek, political scientist George A. Gonzalez argued that the Vidiians