85 – Retrospect

Grade: D

Summary

Voyager is negotiating a trade with a weapons dealer. He claims to have an isokinetic cannon for sale, which would make Voyager a very powerful starship. Meanwhile, Seven is in engineering tying to decrpyt the message from Starfleet. This arms dealer bothers her to the point that she breaks his nose. Then the Doctor uncovers some evidence that perhaps this arms dealer has assaulted Seven.

Commentary

I did not like this episode very much. The story is awful, dialogue is lousy, and the characters are terribly inconsistent. Janeway still doesn’t use the brig in this episode, though she certainly could have. There’s even a voiceover in the middle of the episode, and I usually hate it when they do that. Basically, this is an episode that just seems to be going through the motions. It contributes absolutely nothing to the series, since nothing that happens here has any effect on any future episodes.

One thing I really hated is how quickly the entire crew turns against Seven. At first, it seems everyone is on her side and the accused alien starts to act like he knows he’s guilty. But as soon as they discover evidence that doesn’t necessarily support Seven’s story, they completely turn against her and try to convince her that she’s misremembering. I wouldn’t want friends like this.

The evidence is shaky, at very best. We don’t discover anything that only supports one side of the story. All evidence seems to be able to support both sides. So there’s no reason for every single member of the Voyager crew (including the Doctor) to side with the alien.

Janeway even sheds tears when the guy’s ship blows up. It’s ridiculous. If this really happened, I find it impossible to believe that every single friend and associate that Seven has would turn completely 100% against her. This isn’t how things work in the real world. Somebody would have believed Seven, especially considering the lack of evidence and the alien’s actions.

After they accused him, his actions are not those of someone who knows he is innocent. In fact, they are the actions of someone who knows he has just been caught. So that makes this story even more confusing.

To add insult to injury, the Doctor says he wants to get rid of his emotions or something so that he can be MORE objective. Yeah, whatever. If he actually WERE objective, he would have seen that there is no clear-cut winning argument supported by the evidence.

I’m guessing this episode is supposed to be some kind of allegory of what happens to those who are falsely accused. But I really couldn’t go down this road because I was never convinced that the alien was innocent. If they wanted to make the point that sometimes people are falsely accused of assault, they should have made it more obvious that this man was innocent. Aside from that, the guy was a jerk anyway, and he had no redeeming qualities. So why would we even want to believe him?