Season 4 Ep 22 / 23 "Unforgettable" / "Living Witness"
Oct 22, 2015 11:32:00 GMT -5
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Post by Prole Hole on Oct 22, 2015 11:32:00 GMT -5
Season Four, Episode 22 - "Unforgettable"
Forget me... what?
It would seem to be the very height of hubris to title you're ploddingly predictable, utterly unremarkable, by-the-numbers romance story "Unforgettable", but here we are anyway. Of course, nobody sets out to write a ploddingly predictable, utterly unremarkable, by-the-numbers romance story, but here we are anyway. In any season this would be weak sauce - trapped between the historical high point of "Living Witness" and the action-philosophy of "The Omega Directive" it looks even worse, and is unquestionably one of Season Four's lowlights. It's not even so bad that it sticks in the memory (ironically), it just slides past, another chuck of forty-five minutes you're not likely to get back any time soon.
As is often the case with scripts of this quality, though, it's also abundantly clear what the episode was going for, because despite the manifest failings of almost everything here there are some genuinely interesting ideas (compelling, even, in some places) that all sound like they should add up to very much more, so it's obvious why they thought this was worth doing. A race of people who prohibit you from leaving your home planet because they just want to keep you safe and because they care about you, even to the extent of chasing someone down for over a year? That's an appealingly interesting Orwellian idea, which isn't overplayed and adds a nicely creepy piece of motivation to events here, far more interesting and engaging as a motivation than some standard, "chasing down the dissidents" story would have been. The idea of a race of people who can't be remembered after you've seen them? Great idea, reminiscent of Neil Gaimen's Neverwhere without being just derivative of it, and a possible antecedent of Doctor Who's The Silence. The script is thought-through enough to at least pay lip-service as to why there's no physical or technological evidence of Kellin - a computer virus is a bit hand-wavey but OK, at least the effort has been made, suggesting some real thought has been put into not just the ideas but the implications of them. And, for what amounts to a bottle show, we have Andrew J Robinson, back on hand as director to keep things as interesting as possible. Which he does to the very best of his abilities - this is a generally strongly-directed episode of television, though one can only speculate that Robinson must have seriously pissed off someone in the Star Trek production office to first get lumbered with the execrable "Blood Fever" then this load of old tosh.
So, yes, it's not like it's hard to find good things to say about this episode, while still acknowledging that it falls far, far below the level of quality that we can now expect from this season. At least part of the problem here - and it's a biggie - is Virginia Madson, who is an incredibly bland on-screen presence. It's not that it's difficult to imagine her and Chakotay falling for each other, particularly, though there's not really a lot of chemistry between them. It's more that the story keeps switching up where they are in their relationship and she's not strong enough to be able to carry each distinct phase of that in a way that comes across as convincing. Rather, she plays everything at the same level and seems to hope that everything else will fill in the gaps, which it doesn't. So her scenes with Chakotay in the mess hall as they slowly approach each other are sweet - not flirtatious, exactly, but certainly questing - but she plays the dramatic scenes at exactly the same tempo and it all falls flat. This is an episode which could have done with a fair bit more melodrama, ratcheting things up with some actual intensity - it's a doomed romance, for Rassilon's sake, it's not like melodrama is an unreasonable response - but that's not what we get at all. It might, in honesty, have been a story which was a better fit for another character, because, while Beltran isn't bad here (it's not his best work or his worst, but it's servicable) Chakotay's laid-back movie-star charm also doesn't help the episode at all. These are meant to be (ahem) star-crossed lovers fighting their way back to each other's arms with the (well a) world against them, but with a shrug of a performance on one side and a laid-back performance on the other there's nothing to get to grips with, which leaves the audience floundering for a reason for any of this to matter. Because, in truth, it doesn’t.
But it ought to. If nothing else, "Unforgettable" is an object lesson in why goods ideas do not necessarily add up to a good final product. Because, actually, everything here is competent but just incredibly boring. Good ideas, of which we've seen there are plenty of here, only really become good when you actually do something interesting with them. Just having them sit there, stated by characters, isn't enough, you need to have a real engagement with them. Fine principals and noble stands are what Star Trek is, in many way, actually for, but you need to be given a reason to care about what's being stood up for. In this, "Unforgettable" aligns itself all too well with early TNG which was earnestly striving for a philosophical, interrogative approach to science fiction - that's part of the legacy of TOS , after all - and those episodes help to give TNG the philosophical underpinning that the later seasons would build on, while glossing over just how terrible (and, yes, boring) some of those early episodes were. Still, even something as embarrassingly awful as "Justice" had a point to it - "there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute" - which seems to be more than "Unforgettable" has. Because, what's this episode trying to say, really? It's got nothing to say about love or the affairs of the heart - the episode basically admits as much with Neelix's speech at the end about how love is essentially not something that can be analyzed (an odd conclusion for an episode that appears to be going for exactly that, but there we go). Yet even here, you would think, something could be found. Neelix is the character on this show who's had the biggest, "it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" story with Kes, but no, he's given yet another token speech on matters of the heart and that’s the end of that. So no traction there. And what else is there? A closed society of people with a pathological desire to protect their own out of care rather than xenophobia might be an interesting one for our characters to explore but they never do - we get a few tetchy scenes with Voyager being fired on, deciding to give Kellis asylum, then it's all washed away with more memory loss shenanigans and the whole thing is moot anyway.
Etcetera, etcetera. Limp, flaccid and almost completely unengaging, it's hard to even hate "Unforgettable". It's not even crappy enough for that. This is the last paragraph I will write about this episode, and I hope the last time I'll ever have to think about it. I can't imagine it being an episode anyone could be bothered to think about again. Though maybe that's the episode's ultimate victory - it brings its own concept of memory removal so vividly to life that it's impossible to even recall what happens in this episode a second after the credits have ended. That is, obviously, an overly-generous approach but I suppose it does give us some idea of the confusion Chakotay must feel while shuffling through this episode. All I was left with after watching the episode was a vague feeling that, while drinking some red wine, there were some kind of moving images in front of me, and the music implied that it was Voyager. I've now written 1,500 words on the episode, and I'm still not that certain I really watched it beyond a vague, impressionistic feeling of some kind of... story I guess. This is strange. It's all slipping away, What was I talking about? Why am I even writing this? Hey, my red wine is open, who's been guzzling my booze? Right, now I have a real mystery to solve... And oh yea, I must remember to watch the next episode of Voyager. "Living Witness", it's called. Strange, I was sure there was something between "The Omega Directive" and it. Ah well, must have made a mistake, because there's nothing I can remember...
Any Other Business:
• Structurally this episode is a complete mess, smearing flashbacks, the present, memory and guesswork into one big splatter of nothing. A script has to be whipsmart to pull off this kind of structure, and "Unforgettable" definitely isn't that.
• Once again, pity and sympathy to Andrew J Robinson. What a dud to get stuck with. As ever he does his best, and you can see visible effort being put into bringing certain scenes to life (the flashback where Chakotay captures Kellin for the first time, for example, where Beltran sparks into action as well).
• Nice "invisible" fight between the two cloaked ships at least.
• Though it's not really how his character should have been used, Neelix comes across as quietly decent in this episode, and Phillips does well with the material. Quiet compassion is something he and Neelix deliver well, so using him as Chakotay's sounding board makes a certain amount of sense, even though that speech at the end feels strangely miscalculated.
• No B'Elanna this week. Lucky girl.
• The idea that there is absolutely no evidence of Kellin feels a little improbable on screen, though as I said in the review the script goes far enough to address this that it's not really an issue. Ok the memories fade and there's a virus planted in Voyager's computers to delete records of her. But nothing else? Not a stray hair, or bit of clothing, or... anything?
• There's another scripted example of writers forgetting the Doctor is technology. During the scene in sickbay when the Doctor first examples Kellin he has a line where he explains the reason that the tricorders can't hold data on her. But he's just the same as a tricorder, all technology, so he ought really to be looking at an empty bed. Or is this final proof that the Doctor really is an emergent intelligence?
• This is the most boring episode of Voyager to date. The likes of "Parturition" might be worse, but this is duller.
Season Four, Episode 23 - "Living Witness"
How wilderness
"It's always about race," declares one of the Arbiters sneeringly about two-thirds of the way through the episode. You'd think that would be a mission statement enough for one episode. Race, after all, has always been one of the issues Star Trek has addressed through every iteration of the franchise, sometimes through allegory ("Let That Be Your Last Battlefield") and sometimes head-on ("Far Beyond The Stars"). "Living Witness" follows in that tradition, but race relations are but one part of a magnificently layered and complex script, which, while never side-lining the racial implications of revisionist history, finds plenty of other angles to explore beyond colonialism and apartheid (both of which are actively suggested here).
Indeed, really, despite the bold statement above, the whole piece is really about historical revisionism more than race relations, the impact that revisionism has on cultures, and how profoundly damaging this can be. It's made clear from the moment the Doctor is activated that the mere fact of his existence is going to great unbalance the perceptions of both the Kyrian and Vaskan societies, and thus it proves to be. The cleverest trick this episode pulls is, of course, having the Doctor fighting to clear Voyager's name, because we as the audience naturally side with him in wanting to put the record straight, yet by the time race riots break out in the museum, the Doctor is declaring that the facts no longer matter and that there are more important things to worry about. It's a deft move, because it undercuts audience expectations - there really are more important things going on here than clearing the names of people who have been dead for seven centuries - but in the very final scene (and the most important in the whole episode) we learn that, in fact, historical revisionism is wrong and what's more the damage it wrought could only be corrected by the truth. That final scene really bears the weight of the episode, because here it's made abundantly clear that, while the two societies may have reached a fragile but unbalanced truce during the time the bulk of the episode is set, it's only when the real truth is revealed that genuine social progress is made. Hiding behind lies, assumptions, hopes and guesswork leads to a society riven with racial tensions, inequality and unfairness. The embrace of the truth, however painful and difficult, is what leads to the material progress which is shown when a genuine reconciliation has occurred. Indeed "reconciliation" is really the key here, and this episode draws a direct line with the Truth And Reconciliation Committee in South Africa, whereby the admissions of what happened without prosecution allowed the beginnings of healing following apartheid, and allowed for the relatively peaceful transition to democracy. The pan away to the audience watching from the future, when we discover that everything we've watched has been a simulation, is foreshadowed earlier when we see the same move from the Warship Voyager simulation to the contemporary setting, yet it's never hinted or suggested at, which allows the final scene to deliver its killer blow all the more effectively. This isn't some lazy "time out of joint" but a genuine cut to the future to demonstrate the consequences of what happens.
This exploration of the consequences of the actions of the crew is one that's rarely afforded an episode of Star Trek and the fact that this episode is able to do it without resorting to time travel, God-Like Beings or any of the more typical sci-fi explanations also marks out an extremely unusual narrative positioning for the episode. We don't know how far in the future the very final scene is set (though we can assume centuries rather than year or decades from the way the museum guide talks), but the seven hundred years later setting of the episode really is seven hundred years on. This perspective is crucial when discussion historical revisionism because you need to have enough time passed for the events being discussed to not only pass into history but also to pass far enough into history that details can become foggy, lost, forgotten or just plain altered. From a contemporary perspective, if we go back the same period of time we'd be discussing Kublai Kahn and Edward I beginning (yet another) Crusade. Indeed, given the racial tensions in this episode, the Crusades might indeed prove to be a fertile point of comparison, but the point is that this is the time of the Plantagenet’s being on the English throne (Henry III was crowned in 1216) and the signing of Magna Carta, to take two examples, and even these events, well documented and crucial to the development of English history, are still shrouded in mystery.* With this in mind, then, it’s easy to see how this reflects on the situation the Kyrian and Vaskan societies find themselves in. Both want to claim ownership over history, one stubbornly clinging to the “established facts” to maintain social status quo (and vested interests, as is made clear when Kyrian Arbiter points out her people are forbidden from living in city centres), the other desperate to overturn the same facts to vindicate their own position in a war that neither side wants to accept responsibility for. But history doesn’t work that way – nobody claims ownership over it, and what’s most appealing about the way that history is presented in this episode is that it fully acknowledges that facts are not the end of historical understanding, but the beginning. Again, that final scene shows us how far facts can take us, but simply knowing that one side started a war, or one side didn’t, doesn’t resolve anything at all. Indeed, the mere implications of it start riots and fighting, before anything is even established one way or the other. It’s one of the most honest, and important, representations of history in all of Star Trek, and it never becomes didactic or hectoring, but, as with all the best scripts, allows its opinions to stand and have the audience draw their own conclusions.
So – a brilliant statement of how history is, how it functions, and what it represents. Fantastic. You couldn’t ask for much more, could you? Ah but we do get much more because, lest an episode about such weighty subjects sounds dry or hard work, what we also have is a huge amount of fun. The other great success of this episode is that it is clearly and distinctly an episode of Voyager. This isn’t a ponderous attempt to do something in a serious-minded way like “Far Beyond The Stars” but instead fully embraces the potential of Voyager’s action-adventure aesthetic to tell its story in a way that’s unique to this branch of the franchise. So yes, we have the crew being portrayed as evil (hardly a first), and everyone clearly relishing the opportunity to be let off the leash for a while, but this is a story about historical revisionism that would only work in this way with this crew. We've had mention previously of the effect Voyager's progress through this section of the galaxy (the similarly excellent "Distant Origin"), we hear in this episode of their reputation preceding them... it's crucial that it's this crew because this crew is the one who are most strongly defined by the history that they are creating with their travels, and it's this crew who seem to have the most interaction with history as a defined part of the show's existence. Other branches of the franchise create their history, of course they do, but it is Voyager that has the most active engagement with it (I'm not including time travel in this, which is a whole separate mode of historiography, this is purely on a scripted level). Seeing everyone here acting against type right from the very first moment when “Janeway” states that the only alternative she has is violence, is discombobulating, and the episode takes a commendable length of time before stopping to explain exactly what’s going on. All the “evil” characters are drawn just close enough to the real thing – like Chakotay claiming to be a man of peace while torturing someone – to make these feel like authentic yet warped versions of the people we know, re-enforcing the corruption of historical reality while still allowing us to see how easy it would be to get the evidence of the case so very wrong. The fact that the episode just manages to be so much damned fun, while never letting that fun undercut the seriousness of the subjects being discussed a real triumph – this is an incredibly difficult balancing act to strike, so the fact that this episode pulls it off so way should never be under-estimated. In this, putting the Doctor front-and-centre is of course a very smart move, because Picardo shines in the comedy moments but can deliver the drama (and sincerity) exactly when required, and he gets to do it all while still getting to play an evil version of his regular character (infinitely more successfully than he did back in “Darkling”, something for which we should all be grateful). He’s the ideal choice for this episode (not just because of the whole back-up thing) and using a character who already has an outsider status amongst the crew being the one who has to defend the crew’s honour and integrity adds additional layers of irony to his situation. And there’s also just something very pleasing about discovering the Doctor ended up helping the very society his presence disrupted (again, a smart use of someone who’s a healer, though here social rather than medical) before heading off for Earth again because he felt a “longing” for home. It’s a touching, wonderful conclusion to one of the strongest of all Star Trek episodes.
* During this period there is also the disputed reign of Louis VIII of France, so even monarchic history, some of the best-documented history that there is from the Dark Ages, isn’t clear to us, though Louis did eventually sign a document conceding that, following (Bad) King John, he was never a legitimate monarch over England. I don’t want to turn this into a run-down of English Dark Ages history, it’s just to make the point that fact and history are often interchangeable mistresses.
Any Other Business:
• Full confession – I studied (English and) history at University so episodes like this always hit my sweet spot, but to see a script which has such a confident, clear grasp of history and doesn’t muddle the execution is an absolute joy.
• There are some fans that complain that it’s previously been mentioned that the Doctor couldn’t be backed up ("Message In A Bottle"), but here he has been. To which I say two things – firstly, well, they’ve worked out how to do it since then and, well, get over yourselves.
• It’s an often unremarked upon fact that it seems clear that neither society here has come into contact with Starfleet or humans in the seven hundred years since Voyager passed through this system. I wonder what stopped them? Did Starfleet never expand into the Delta Quadrant?
• Yet, rather wonderfully, there’s a Kazon ensign on the bridge, so they’ve made it that far. He doesn’t get any lines, but it’s a great way to us Voyager’s own history without belabouring the point.
• For the second week in a row we get no B'Elanna, though the Doctor does give a rather sweet little speech describing her.
• Everyone is on top form here – Tuvok’s evil little smile to Janeway on the bridge, Harry taking real pleasure from torturing someone, Seven back as The Full Borg… lovely. Best of all is Janeway and Kate Mulgrew embracing her inner Red years before Orange Is The New Black came along.
• Welcome to the director’s chair Tim Russ! He does a great job here in what is obviously not an expensive episode (the “riots” near the end of the episode involving a horde of six extras throwing about some standard props is the only real moment that it shows though).
• The initial pan from Voyager’s mess hall after “Janeway” executes her “guest” is a terrific cutaway, and the same technique is used at the end of the episode as well – a lovely reveal. It also implicitly includes the audience (we're also watching through a "window" on to the creation/recreation of events seen here, but from the past rather than the future).
• This is, probably, the episode of Star Trek set furthest into the future, at least seven centuries, and quite possibly seven more.
• I wonder if the Doctor ever made it Earth?
Forget me... what?
It would seem to be the very height of hubris to title you're ploddingly predictable, utterly unremarkable, by-the-numbers romance story "Unforgettable", but here we are anyway. Of course, nobody sets out to write a ploddingly predictable, utterly unremarkable, by-the-numbers romance story, but here we are anyway. In any season this would be weak sauce - trapped between the historical high point of "Living Witness" and the action-philosophy of "The Omega Directive" it looks even worse, and is unquestionably one of Season Four's lowlights. It's not even so bad that it sticks in the memory (ironically), it just slides past, another chuck of forty-five minutes you're not likely to get back any time soon.
As is often the case with scripts of this quality, though, it's also abundantly clear what the episode was going for, because despite the manifest failings of almost everything here there are some genuinely interesting ideas (compelling, even, in some places) that all sound like they should add up to very much more, so it's obvious why they thought this was worth doing. A race of people who prohibit you from leaving your home planet because they just want to keep you safe and because they care about you, even to the extent of chasing someone down for over a year? That's an appealingly interesting Orwellian idea, which isn't overplayed and adds a nicely creepy piece of motivation to events here, far more interesting and engaging as a motivation than some standard, "chasing down the dissidents" story would have been. The idea of a race of people who can't be remembered after you've seen them? Great idea, reminiscent of Neil Gaimen's Neverwhere without being just derivative of it, and a possible antecedent of Doctor Who's The Silence. The script is thought-through enough to at least pay lip-service as to why there's no physical or technological evidence of Kellin - a computer virus is a bit hand-wavey but OK, at least the effort has been made, suggesting some real thought has been put into not just the ideas but the implications of them. And, for what amounts to a bottle show, we have Andrew J Robinson, back on hand as director to keep things as interesting as possible. Which he does to the very best of his abilities - this is a generally strongly-directed episode of television, though one can only speculate that Robinson must have seriously pissed off someone in the Star Trek production office to first get lumbered with the execrable "Blood Fever" then this load of old tosh.
So, yes, it's not like it's hard to find good things to say about this episode, while still acknowledging that it falls far, far below the level of quality that we can now expect from this season. At least part of the problem here - and it's a biggie - is Virginia Madson, who is an incredibly bland on-screen presence. It's not that it's difficult to imagine her and Chakotay falling for each other, particularly, though there's not really a lot of chemistry between them. It's more that the story keeps switching up where they are in their relationship and she's not strong enough to be able to carry each distinct phase of that in a way that comes across as convincing. Rather, she plays everything at the same level and seems to hope that everything else will fill in the gaps, which it doesn't. So her scenes with Chakotay in the mess hall as they slowly approach each other are sweet - not flirtatious, exactly, but certainly questing - but she plays the dramatic scenes at exactly the same tempo and it all falls flat. This is an episode which could have done with a fair bit more melodrama, ratcheting things up with some actual intensity - it's a doomed romance, for Rassilon's sake, it's not like melodrama is an unreasonable response - but that's not what we get at all. It might, in honesty, have been a story which was a better fit for another character, because, while Beltran isn't bad here (it's not his best work or his worst, but it's servicable) Chakotay's laid-back movie-star charm also doesn't help the episode at all. These are meant to be (ahem) star-crossed lovers fighting their way back to each other's arms with the (well a) world against them, but with a shrug of a performance on one side and a laid-back performance on the other there's nothing to get to grips with, which leaves the audience floundering for a reason for any of this to matter. Because, in truth, it doesn’t.
But it ought to. If nothing else, "Unforgettable" is an object lesson in why goods ideas do not necessarily add up to a good final product. Because, actually, everything here is competent but just incredibly boring. Good ideas, of which we've seen there are plenty of here, only really become good when you actually do something interesting with them. Just having them sit there, stated by characters, isn't enough, you need to have a real engagement with them. Fine principals and noble stands are what Star Trek is, in many way, actually for, but you need to be given a reason to care about what's being stood up for. In this, "Unforgettable" aligns itself all too well with early TNG which was earnestly striving for a philosophical, interrogative approach to science fiction - that's part of the legacy of TOS , after all - and those episodes help to give TNG the philosophical underpinning that the later seasons would build on, while glossing over just how terrible (and, yes, boring) some of those early episodes were. Still, even something as embarrassingly awful as "Justice" had a point to it - "there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute" - which seems to be more than "Unforgettable" has. Because, what's this episode trying to say, really? It's got nothing to say about love or the affairs of the heart - the episode basically admits as much with Neelix's speech at the end about how love is essentially not something that can be analyzed (an odd conclusion for an episode that appears to be going for exactly that, but there we go). Yet even here, you would think, something could be found. Neelix is the character on this show who's had the biggest, "it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" story with Kes, but no, he's given yet another token speech on matters of the heart and that’s the end of that. So no traction there. And what else is there? A closed society of people with a pathological desire to protect their own out of care rather than xenophobia might be an interesting one for our characters to explore but they never do - we get a few tetchy scenes with Voyager being fired on, deciding to give Kellis asylum, then it's all washed away with more memory loss shenanigans and the whole thing is moot anyway.
Etcetera, etcetera. Limp, flaccid and almost completely unengaging, it's hard to even hate "Unforgettable". It's not even crappy enough for that. This is the last paragraph I will write about this episode, and I hope the last time I'll ever have to think about it. I can't imagine it being an episode anyone could be bothered to think about again. Though maybe that's the episode's ultimate victory - it brings its own concept of memory removal so vividly to life that it's impossible to even recall what happens in this episode a second after the credits have ended. That is, obviously, an overly-generous approach but I suppose it does give us some idea of the confusion Chakotay must feel while shuffling through this episode. All I was left with after watching the episode was a vague feeling that, while drinking some red wine, there were some kind of moving images in front of me, and the music implied that it was Voyager. I've now written 1,500 words on the episode, and I'm still not that certain I really watched it beyond a vague, impressionistic feeling of some kind of... story I guess. This is strange. It's all slipping away, What was I talking about? Why am I even writing this? Hey, my red wine is open, who's been guzzling my booze? Right, now I have a real mystery to solve... And oh yea, I must remember to watch the next episode of Voyager. "Living Witness", it's called. Strange, I was sure there was something between "The Omega Directive" and it. Ah well, must have made a mistake, because there's nothing I can remember...
Any Other Business:
• Structurally this episode is a complete mess, smearing flashbacks, the present, memory and guesswork into one big splatter of nothing. A script has to be whipsmart to pull off this kind of structure, and "Unforgettable" definitely isn't that.
• Once again, pity and sympathy to Andrew J Robinson. What a dud to get stuck with. As ever he does his best, and you can see visible effort being put into bringing certain scenes to life (the flashback where Chakotay captures Kellin for the first time, for example, where Beltran sparks into action as well).
• Nice "invisible" fight between the two cloaked ships at least.
• Though it's not really how his character should have been used, Neelix comes across as quietly decent in this episode, and Phillips does well with the material. Quiet compassion is something he and Neelix deliver well, so using him as Chakotay's sounding board makes a certain amount of sense, even though that speech at the end feels strangely miscalculated.
• No B'Elanna this week. Lucky girl.
• The idea that there is absolutely no evidence of Kellin feels a little improbable on screen, though as I said in the review the script goes far enough to address this that it's not really an issue. Ok the memories fade and there's a virus planted in Voyager's computers to delete records of her. But nothing else? Not a stray hair, or bit of clothing, or... anything?
• There's another scripted example of writers forgetting the Doctor is technology. During the scene in sickbay when the Doctor first examples Kellin he has a line where he explains the reason that the tricorders can't hold data on her. But he's just the same as a tricorder, all technology, so he ought really to be looking at an empty bed. Or is this final proof that the Doctor really is an emergent intelligence?
• This is the most boring episode of Voyager to date. The likes of "Parturition" might be worse, but this is duller.
Season Four, Episode 23 - "Living Witness"
How wilderness
"It's always about race," declares one of the Arbiters sneeringly about two-thirds of the way through the episode. You'd think that would be a mission statement enough for one episode. Race, after all, has always been one of the issues Star Trek has addressed through every iteration of the franchise, sometimes through allegory ("Let That Be Your Last Battlefield") and sometimes head-on ("Far Beyond The Stars"). "Living Witness" follows in that tradition, but race relations are but one part of a magnificently layered and complex script, which, while never side-lining the racial implications of revisionist history, finds plenty of other angles to explore beyond colonialism and apartheid (both of which are actively suggested here).
Indeed, really, despite the bold statement above, the whole piece is really about historical revisionism more than race relations, the impact that revisionism has on cultures, and how profoundly damaging this can be. It's made clear from the moment the Doctor is activated that the mere fact of his existence is going to great unbalance the perceptions of both the Kyrian and Vaskan societies, and thus it proves to be. The cleverest trick this episode pulls is, of course, having the Doctor fighting to clear Voyager's name, because we as the audience naturally side with him in wanting to put the record straight, yet by the time race riots break out in the museum, the Doctor is declaring that the facts no longer matter and that there are more important things to worry about. It's a deft move, because it undercuts audience expectations - there really are more important things going on here than clearing the names of people who have been dead for seven centuries - but in the very final scene (and the most important in the whole episode) we learn that, in fact, historical revisionism is wrong and what's more the damage it wrought could only be corrected by the truth. That final scene really bears the weight of the episode, because here it's made abundantly clear that, while the two societies may have reached a fragile but unbalanced truce during the time the bulk of the episode is set, it's only when the real truth is revealed that genuine social progress is made. Hiding behind lies, assumptions, hopes and guesswork leads to a society riven with racial tensions, inequality and unfairness. The embrace of the truth, however painful and difficult, is what leads to the material progress which is shown when a genuine reconciliation has occurred. Indeed "reconciliation" is really the key here, and this episode draws a direct line with the Truth And Reconciliation Committee in South Africa, whereby the admissions of what happened without prosecution allowed the beginnings of healing following apartheid, and allowed for the relatively peaceful transition to democracy. The pan away to the audience watching from the future, when we discover that everything we've watched has been a simulation, is foreshadowed earlier when we see the same move from the Warship Voyager simulation to the contemporary setting, yet it's never hinted or suggested at, which allows the final scene to deliver its killer blow all the more effectively. This isn't some lazy "time out of joint" but a genuine cut to the future to demonstrate the consequences of what happens.
This exploration of the consequences of the actions of the crew is one that's rarely afforded an episode of Star Trek and the fact that this episode is able to do it without resorting to time travel, God-Like Beings or any of the more typical sci-fi explanations also marks out an extremely unusual narrative positioning for the episode. We don't know how far in the future the very final scene is set (though we can assume centuries rather than year or decades from the way the museum guide talks), but the seven hundred years later setting of the episode really is seven hundred years on. This perspective is crucial when discussion historical revisionism because you need to have enough time passed for the events being discussed to not only pass into history but also to pass far enough into history that details can become foggy, lost, forgotten or just plain altered. From a contemporary perspective, if we go back the same period of time we'd be discussing Kublai Kahn and Edward I beginning (yet another) Crusade. Indeed, given the racial tensions in this episode, the Crusades might indeed prove to be a fertile point of comparison, but the point is that this is the time of the Plantagenet’s being on the English throne (Henry III was crowned in 1216) and the signing of Magna Carta, to take two examples, and even these events, well documented and crucial to the development of English history, are still shrouded in mystery.* With this in mind, then, it’s easy to see how this reflects on the situation the Kyrian and Vaskan societies find themselves in. Both want to claim ownership over history, one stubbornly clinging to the “established facts” to maintain social status quo (and vested interests, as is made clear when Kyrian Arbiter points out her people are forbidden from living in city centres), the other desperate to overturn the same facts to vindicate their own position in a war that neither side wants to accept responsibility for. But history doesn’t work that way – nobody claims ownership over it, and what’s most appealing about the way that history is presented in this episode is that it fully acknowledges that facts are not the end of historical understanding, but the beginning. Again, that final scene shows us how far facts can take us, but simply knowing that one side started a war, or one side didn’t, doesn’t resolve anything at all. Indeed, the mere implications of it start riots and fighting, before anything is even established one way or the other. It’s one of the most honest, and important, representations of history in all of Star Trek, and it never becomes didactic or hectoring, but, as with all the best scripts, allows its opinions to stand and have the audience draw their own conclusions.
So – a brilliant statement of how history is, how it functions, and what it represents. Fantastic. You couldn’t ask for much more, could you? Ah but we do get much more because, lest an episode about such weighty subjects sounds dry or hard work, what we also have is a huge amount of fun. The other great success of this episode is that it is clearly and distinctly an episode of Voyager. This isn’t a ponderous attempt to do something in a serious-minded way like “Far Beyond The Stars” but instead fully embraces the potential of Voyager’s action-adventure aesthetic to tell its story in a way that’s unique to this branch of the franchise. So yes, we have the crew being portrayed as evil (hardly a first), and everyone clearly relishing the opportunity to be let off the leash for a while, but this is a story about historical revisionism that would only work in this way with this crew. We've had mention previously of the effect Voyager's progress through this section of the galaxy (the similarly excellent "Distant Origin"), we hear in this episode of their reputation preceding them... it's crucial that it's this crew because this crew is the one who are most strongly defined by the history that they are creating with their travels, and it's this crew who seem to have the most interaction with history as a defined part of the show's existence. Other branches of the franchise create their history, of course they do, but it is Voyager that has the most active engagement with it (I'm not including time travel in this, which is a whole separate mode of historiography, this is purely on a scripted level). Seeing everyone here acting against type right from the very first moment when “Janeway” states that the only alternative she has is violence, is discombobulating, and the episode takes a commendable length of time before stopping to explain exactly what’s going on. All the “evil” characters are drawn just close enough to the real thing – like Chakotay claiming to be a man of peace while torturing someone – to make these feel like authentic yet warped versions of the people we know, re-enforcing the corruption of historical reality while still allowing us to see how easy it would be to get the evidence of the case so very wrong. The fact that the episode just manages to be so much damned fun, while never letting that fun undercut the seriousness of the subjects being discussed a real triumph – this is an incredibly difficult balancing act to strike, so the fact that this episode pulls it off so way should never be under-estimated. In this, putting the Doctor front-and-centre is of course a very smart move, because Picardo shines in the comedy moments but can deliver the drama (and sincerity) exactly when required, and he gets to do it all while still getting to play an evil version of his regular character (infinitely more successfully than he did back in “Darkling”, something for which we should all be grateful). He’s the ideal choice for this episode (not just because of the whole back-up thing) and using a character who already has an outsider status amongst the crew being the one who has to defend the crew’s honour and integrity adds additional layers of irony to his situation. And there’s also just something very pleasing about discovering the Doctor ended up helping the very society his presence disrupted (again, a smart use of someone who’s a healer, though here social rather than medical) before heading off for Earth again because he felt a “longing” for home. It’s a touching, wonderful conclusion to one of the strongest of all Star Trek episodes.
* During this period there is also the disputed reign of Louis VIII of France, so even monarchic history, some of the best-documented history that there is from the Dark Ages, isn’t clear to us, though Louis did eventually sign a document conceding that, following (Bad) King John, he was never a legitimate monarch over England. I don’t want to turn this into a run-down of English Dark Ages history, it’s just to make the point that fact and history are often interchangeable mistresses.
Any Other Business:
• Full confession – I studied (English and) history at University so episodes like this always hit my sweet spot, but to see a script which has such a confident, clear grasp of history and doesn’t muddle the execution is an absolute joy.
• There are some fans that complain that it’s previously been mentioned that the Doctor couldn’t be backed up ("Message In A Bottle"), but here he has been. To which I say two things – firstly, well, they’ve worked out how to do it since then and, well, get over yourselves.
• It’s an often unremarked upon fact that it seems clear that neither society here has come into contact with Starfleet or humans in the seven hundred years since Voyager passed through this system. I wonder what stopped them? Did Starfleet never expand into the Delta Quadrant?
• Yet, rather wonderfully, there’s a Kazon ensign on the bridge, so they’ve made it that far. He doesn’t get any lines, but it’s a great way to us Voyager’s own history without belabouring the point.
• For the second week in a row we get no B'Elanna, though the Doctor does give a rather sweet little speech describing her.
• Everyone is on top form here – Tuvok’s evil little smile to Janeway on the bridge, Harry taking real pleasure from torturing someone, Seven back as The Full Borg… lovely. Best of all is Janeway and Kate Mulgrew embracing her inner Red years before Orange Is The New Black came along.
• Welcome to the director’s chair Tim Russ! He does a great job here in what is obviously not an expensive episode (the “riots” near the end of the episode involving a horde of six extras throwing about some standard props is the only real moment that it shows though).
• The initial pan from Voyager’s mess hall after “Janeway” executes her “guest” is a terrific cutaway, and the same technique is used at the end of the episode as well – a lovely reveal. It also implicitly includes the audience (we're also watching through a "window" on to the creation/recreation of events seen here, but from the past rather than the future).
• This is, probably, the episode of Star Trek set furthest into the future, at least seven centuries, and quite possibly seven more.
• I wonder if the Doctor ever made it Earth?
