48 – Remember

Grade: D+

Summary

Voyager picked up some friendly aliens called the Enara, who also happen to be telepathic. B’Elanna Torres has some fairly graphic dreams. She is apparently experiencing someone else’s life during her dreams. Though the Doctor wants these dreams to stop, she really wants them to continue, so she can find out what happens to this other person.

Commentary

Overall, I wasn’t all that impressed with this episode. I think there was a cop-out ending, but possibly it was the only one they could have used. Once again, the Prime Directive gets mentioned. I wish they’d either give that tired old plot device a rest, or decide once and for all what it means and stay consistent.

I didn’t think the acting was particularly good. To say that Roxann Dawson was mediocre would be an exaggeration. The rest of the actors were just OK as well. This was a pretty heavy-duty story, but it was handled rather clunkily.

This episode was originally a Brannon Braga story that he intended to use on the Next Generation with Deanna Troi in place of B’elanna Torres. I’m not surprised – this feels exactly like a TNG episode to me. In fact, it seems really out of place for a Voyager episode. We’ve seen several times already that Janeway needs allies, but she can never hold onto them. Every single time they find a friendly alien race, something bad happens and ruins any possible chance of continuing their alliance. It’s far too predictable to be enjoyable.

But on the other hand, as a TNG episode, this would have been just fine. Picard wasn’t on the lookout for making new allies. He could afford to throw away a potential friendship because he wasn’t 60,000 light years from home.

I don’t think the storyline would have been any better in TNG, though. Marina Sirtis tends to do her best work in the least-demanding roles. Dawson plays the part well enough to make it work, but the story itself just seems to come out of nowhere. It’s hard to relate to because we have no association with these telepathic aliens. I think it could have been used as an introduction to the Cardassians with the Bajorans in place of the “Regressives”.

The episode ends on a rather bizarre note. Voyager has no allies in the Delta Quadrant, and very few friends. Torres uncovers something painful that may (or may not) have happened 50 years before that these people either deny or are unwilling to deal with. So Janeway makes a decision to cut off all diplomatic relations with these people. What if these people had uncovered something in the history of Starfleet that Janeway didn’t want to admit to? Do these people deserve to be treated as undesirable people just because something bad happened in their past?

Let me take the analogy where it obviously wants to go, and that’s to Nazi Germany. Personally, I agree that we should never forget the Holocaust, but I don’t think it means we need to end diplomatic relations with Germany. Suppose your ancestors were among the soldiers who re-located the Japanese-Americans to interment camps during WWII. Would you want to be judged for that? Would you want a friend to turn away from you only because of an event in the history of the US? I realy don’t get it. Unless Janeway uncovered some evidence that this is still going on or that these people are truly xenophobic and genocidal, I disagree with her decision to totally turn against them.

I also don’t like episodes that try too hard to tell an important story. They are far too contrived for my enjoyment. I don’t like being manipulated. Just tell the story and let me draw my own conclusions. When Star Trek is at it’s best, it doesn’t need to be manipulating.

Of Note

Seven years after playing Korina’s father in this episode, Bruce Davison also stars in X2 (the second X-Men movie) as a senator who wants to relocate all the mutants. The similarities are strong enough that he could have been playing the exact same character.