“Ex Post Facto”
Written by Evan Carlos Somers and Michael Piller
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 1, Episode 7
Production episode 108
Original air date: February 27, 1995
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Paris is on a couch on an alien world, being asked what he sees. He is reliving a person with a ridiculous hairdo being murdered, apparently by Paris himself after being caught with his wife, whose hairdo is even more ridiculous. He has been punished for killing Tolen Ren by reliving his death from Ren’s own point of view.
Kes and the EMH’s discussions of the latter’s attempts to decide on a name are interrupted by Kim arriving in a shuttlecraft and being beamed directly to sickbay, as he’s barely conscious. The EMH treats him, and Kim explains that Paris was arrested. Kim has no idea why.
Paris and Kim went to Banea at Neelix’s suggestion, as they need help with a repair that the Baneans should be able to provide. Because Banea is at war with Numiria, they went in a shuttle, which could sneak past Numirian patrols more easily than a big-ass starship.
After meeting Ren to discuss the repair, they return to his home, where his wife Lidell is waiting, and is unhappy at him bringing home unexpected guests. Kim and Ren discuss the repair while Paris goes off on his own, apparently to talk with Lidell. The next thing Kim knew, Ren was murdered, Kim was questioned for two days (trying to determine if he was a Numirian spy) and then sent off on the shuttle. He was not allowed to visit Paris.
Voyager sets a course for Banea, at which point they’re confronted by Numirian ships who give them one warning to go about their business and leave and to not do anything to aid the Baneans. Janeway assures the Numirians that she only wishes to clear the name of one of her crew.
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Neelix is surprised at the comparative calm of the Numirians’ response. Janeway and Tuvok beam down and meet with Minister Kray, as well as the doctor who performed the memory engram transfer. Janeway and Tuvok are allowed to see Paris. Kray explains that Paris has already been found guilty, as the Baneans are able to read the memory engrams of murder victims. This enables them to not only find the guilty party, but also place those engrams in the perpetrators’ minds as their punishment. Every fourteen hours, Paris relives Ren’s death.
But Paris insists on his innocence. He says that he went to talk to Lidell when Ren and Kim started burying themselves in technobabble. She talked to him about how she wished to leave her husband, even though he’d always been kind to her.
While in the middle of telling his side of the story, Paris again relives the murder and falls unconscious. This is not normal behavior, and Janeway requests that they bring Paris to Voyager to be examined. Kray agrees as long as they don’t leave orbit, and Janeway assures him that they aren’t going anywhere until they prove Paris’s innocence.
Tuvok visits the crime scene, and talks to Lidell (and also meets their dog, who reacts badly to Tuvok—Lidell explains that the pooch doesn’t like strangers). Lidell tells Tuvok of her and Paris walking to see the eclipse and then getting drenched by a rainstorm. She made him tea, and then Ren showed up, and Paris killed him. (Paris mentioned none of this stuff.) Lidell says that her affair with Paris gave her the strength to finally leave her husband. She also asks Tuvok to tell Paris that she forgives him for killing her husband.
Tuvok requests that Paris be hooked up to an autonomic response analysis device to measure if he’s telling the truth. After interrogating him further, Tuvok determines that Paris believes that he didn’t kill Ren, but he also can’t account for his whereabouts during the murder. The EMH says that the doctors on Banea found no drugs in his system, but any such drugs would have been out of his system by the time Paris arrived on Voyager.
Two Numirian ships attack Voyager. Chakotay does some nifty piloting based on some Maquis moves to get rid of them.
Tuvok suggests that he perform a mind-meld with Paris during his next reliving of the murder. The EMH thinks it’s a terrible idea, but Tuvok goes ahead with it. He sees what Paris sees, including some text running across the bottom and Paris standing next to Lidell at the same height as her.
Once the EMH examines Tuvok and finds no brain damage, the security chief says he thinks he knows the truth. However, he needs to confer with Kim on something and then use Paris as bait.
Janeway contacts the surface and talks to Kray and the Banean doctor. Paris is suffering neurological damage from the punishment, which is not normal—but his brain chemistry is different than Baneans. Kray is willing to consider removing the engrams, but that may mean employing the sentence that would’ve been carried out before the engram technology was developed, to wit, the death penalty.
Expressing concern that the transporter will further complicate Paris’s medical issues, Janeway says Paris will head to Banea on a shuttle.
Said shuttle is immediately attacked and boarded by Numirians. Janeway then beams Paris and Kim off the shuttle and informs the Numirians that if they don’t withdraw, she’ll set off a mess of explosives on the shuttle. The Numirians back off.
Tuvok then pulls a Hercule Poirot and gathers everyone with a speaking part at the Ren home. First, he queries Paris about the writing along the bottom of his visions. Paris had just assumed them to be part of the process, but Kray doesn’t know anything about it, and Tuvok has confirmed with Kim that the writing in question is Ren’s weapons research.
In addition, Paris and Lidell are the same height in Ren’s memories, but Paris is half a head taller than her in real life. Also the murderer knew precisely where to stab Ren to cause near-instant death, whereas Paris has no clue about Banean anatomy.
The Numirians attacked Voyager when they knew they could get at Paris there. Tuvok believes that someone altered Ren’s memory engrams to frame Paris for Ren’s murder and then told the Numirians when Paris would be in orbit and available to be taken, so the Numirians could suck out the memory engrams and get the weapons specs.
The doctor (who is never given a name for some reason) is the same height as Lidell (and has the most ridiculous hairdo out of all of them), he knew when Paris was beaming to Voyager—indeed, he encouraged Kray to agree to send Paris there for better medical treatment than he could get on Banea—and he has the skill to change the engrams and insert Ren’s research text.
The final proof: the dog knows him, belying his claim that he’s never been in the Ren home before. He’s arrested, and Paris is exonerated.
Later in the mess hall, Paris tells Tuvok that he’s made a friend today. For his part, Tuvok insists that, had he found evidence that Paris was guilty, he would have been just as thorough. Paris thanks him anyhow.
There’s coffee in that nebula! It’s not clear whether or not Janeway is bluffing with regards to the explosives on the shuttle, but she was convincing enough for the Numirians, even if she was pulling a corbomite maneuver…
Mr. Vulcan. While “Caretaker” established only that Tuvok had a family, this episode specifies that he’s married, and that the marriage has lasted for sixty-seven years (and counting).
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is considering several possible names, including those of various physicians throughout history: Galen of Pergamon, Jonas Salk, and Benjamin Spock (that last name being a total coincidence, ahem).
Forever an ensign. Kim is the one who is mainly supposed to go to Banea, as he was the one consulting with Ren on fixing the broken piece (probably something damaged in “Caretaker”).
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix advises Janeway about the expected behavior of the Baneans and the Numirians. He is surprised at the fact that the Numirians aren’t openly violent on first meeting, but the later revelation that they were lying in wait to capture Paris explains that handily.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Paris is bored within two seconds of Kim and Ren neeping at each other, so he goes and hits on Ren’s wife, because of course he does. It’s not like that will end badly…
Do it.
“That’s one trick you won’t be able to use again when we get back.”
“I have more.”
–Janeway tweaking Chakotay about his using Maquis tricks in front of Janeway and Chakotay tweaking her right back.
Welcome aboard. Francis Guinan plays the first of three Trek roles as Kray. He’ll be back in “Live Fast and Prosper” as Zar and Enterprise’s “The Communicator” as Gosis. Robin McKee plays Lidell, soap actor Aaron Lustig appears as the never-named doctor (he’ll be back in Enterprise‘s “The Catwalk” as Guri), and Ray Reinhardt returns to Trek as Ren, having previously played Admiral Aaron in TNG’s “Conspiracy.”
Trivial matters: This episode was the subject of a bit of controversy, as Daniel Keys Moran and Lynn Barker pitched a similar story to Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Evan Carlos Somers for DS9 called “Injustice.” After “Ex Post Facto” aired with Somers having a co-writing credit, Moran considered suing, but then Wolfe bought “Injustice” for DS9, which was retitled “Hard Time.” (See the rewatch entry for that episode for more on that.)
This is the first of eight episodes of Voyager to be directed by LeVar Burton, who played Geordi La Forge on TNG (and will appear in the fifth season’s “Timeless” in that role, an episode which is also one of those eight times in the director’s chair). Burton had previously directed two episodes of TNG, and would go on to also direct ten of DS9, and nine of Enterprise.
Paris declares that humans have given up smoking as dangerous, a declaration that was just last week belied by the Picard episode “The End is the Beginning.” (I prefer Paris’s notion, myself, especially given that I have no memory of my paternal grandmother who chain-smoked and died when I was two.)
The autonomic response analysis that the EMH does on Paris while Tuvok questions him is likely the same technology that was used on the original series’ “Wolf in the Fold” when various people were questioned about the murders committed by Redjac.
Set a course for home. “That rehab colony in New Zealand doesn’t seem so bad right now.” I both love and hate this episode in equal measure.
As a police procedure junkie in general, and also a fan of the character of Tuvok, I love the episode. It’s a good use of twenty-fourth-century technology as part of an investigation, from the insertion of memory engrams as punishment to the ARA analysis (which, of course, only proves that Paris believes he’s telling the truth). I also like that the main reason why the doctor (and why the hell wasn’t he given a name?) was almost able to get away with it is because he could not possibly have known that there was someone on Voyager who was telepathic. Only Paris saw the images, and he assumed the text was part of the process (hell, I assumed it was some kind of status update or other when we first saw it in the teaser), and most people don’t notice relative heights. (Points to director LeVar Burton, who avoided showing Paris and Lidell standing straight next to each other until the climactic gather-the-suspects scene.) Only Tuvok’s hyper-observational nature saved the day.
On top of that, there’s two lovely old-school tributes: besides the very Agatha Christie-esque gathering of suspects at the climax, the final proof that the doctor is guilty is that the dog knows him, which is right out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze.”
But that’s also a big part of the problem: it’s a dog. An Earth dog with no explanation. Here we are on an alien planet in another frikkin’ quadrant, and the “aliens” are almost completely indistinguishable from Americans in the 1940s (the only sop to their alienness being those absurd feathery hairdos).
They’re also indistinguishable from the characters in TNG’s “A Matter of Perspective,” and it’s never a good thing when you do a callback to one of the franchise’s absolute worst episodes. The suspicious death of an elderly scientist married to the pretty young thing whom our horndog crewmember flirts with. She even smokes, in case it wasn’t 1940s enough, and there’s absolutely nothing about the Baneans that indicates that they’re an alien species beyond where Ren was stabbed and their hilarious hairdos.
This episode is, at least, better than “A Matter of Perspective,” partly because Tuvok does an excellent job leading the investigation, doing what a security chief is actually supposed to be doing. But it’s frustrating that it does so well on the science fictional aspects of the technology (and Tuvok’s telepathy), but so completely drops the ball on the science fictional aspects of the guest aliens.
Warp factor rating: 6
Note: Because of the President’s Day Holiday, the rewatch of “Emanations” will go up on Tuesday the 18th of February.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is the author of many science fiction/fantasy tales that involve police procedure of some sort, including the series that started with Dragon Precinct (the most recent of which is Mermaid Precinct), as well as the Spider-Man novels Venom’s Wrath and Down These Mean Streets, the Supernatural novel Nevermore, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel Blackout, and various tales in his Super City Cops setting.
You get Presidents Day off?? Huh! Sweet gig!
This is pretty much exactly how I feel about this episode. I hate all the callbacks to that truly terrible TNG episode, but I love a good mystery and love that this highlights how good Tuvok is at observation and analysis.
Dr Gori: I don’t, but the Tor.com offices are closed on Monday, and it’s just logistically easier to push it back one day….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I would rank this episode a good deal lower than you did, Krad – it was the first Voyager episode I truly despised, despite also liking Tuvok as a character. I couldn’t believe that they essentially re-made A Matter of Perspective (already such a weak version of Rashomon) and somehow made it even more dumbed-down. It also indicated to me just how little the show was going to do with the Delta Quadrant plot angle – just as you say, there is essentially nothing “alien” about these aliens. They’re just as human as some Alpha Quadrant species we’d have seen on TOS, only with truly terrible hair. This is actually the only episode I skipped on a recent re-watch.
The mechanics of this all really bug me, especially on a rewatch.
Clearly the unnamed doctor (well, the guest star unnamed doctor) is able to communicate with the Numirians somehow, because we’re supposed to believe he coordinated this plan with them and was also able to keep them updated on Paris’s movements. Well, fine, if he has access to the equations to implant in Paris’s head, and also has a way to communicate, why even go through the roundabout method of implanting the equations into Paris’s head? Just transmit them encrypted in whatever way you’re already communicating. It can’t be THAT much data, since apparently the plan was to abduct Paris and force him to tell them what he’s seeing.
And the actions of the principles just don’t make sense here, or at least I can’t make sense of them. First off, it probably isn’t best for Voyager to blab to everybody that they’re alone and unsupported 70,000 light years from home, the Baneans don’t need to know just how vulnerable you are. Yet the scientist knows their backstory. And the Baneans also should be more cautious, for all they know Voyager is in cahoots with the Numirians and contrived a story to get access to one of their top scientists. Oh, and if Numirians violate Baneaen orbit not once, but twice, you’d think there’d be some form of response. But nobody on the planet reacts with even so much as a sternly worded hail.
The concept of implanting the memories of a murder victim in the killer is intriguing and credit to Voyager for going out of their way to make the aliens of the week compassionate and non-barbaric. But this episode just doesn’t gel.
The Baneans do have “alien” forehead bumps as well as hair decorations. As for the dog, we’ve seen plenty of “alien” animals that looked nearly or exactly like Earth animals, e.g. horses, birds, and the like. Not to mention the countless planets whose trees and other vegetation are exactly like Earth’s. No doubt the ancient genetic programming seeded 4 billion years ago to promote humanoid evolution on worlds throughout the galaxy also promoted parallel evolution of animals and plants as well.
I don’t have a clear memory of how I reacted to this episode, but I think I liked it. Doing a futuristic version of a noir mystery was fun, and I recall particularly liking the music.
KRAD wrote:
And there’s the rub when you take a plot created in one genre and transpose it to another — there may be elements that shouldn’t exist in the destination.
I wonder what the script envisioned? Something more convincing, that the producers rejected as impractical? Maybe an animatronic pet (too expensive, not necessarily convincing — those endangered-puppet-serpents from later TNG), or a dog-with-prosthetics (dog-with-horn-and-antennae from TNG “The Enemy Within”). Consider the challenge of Worf’s pet targ in TNG “Where No One Has Gone Before”, played by a boar in a furry vest.
* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Corvan_gilvo
* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Unnamed_non-humanoids_(23rd_century)#Canine_001
* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Targ
* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Emmy-Lou
@@.-@ I was worried on rewatching that we’d get a Roshomon episode. Despite the similarity to the TNG episode, that’s not what we get. The narrative quickly accepts that the audience is going to believe Tom is innocent. The plot is about Tuvok proving it wasn’t Tom without really entertaining the idea that a main cast member is a murderer.
Now I wish they had leaned even more into the 1940s of it all. Heck, just make it a Noir Planet straight out of TOS’s theme planets. “Set a course for Bogart 9.”
If they can have aliens that look exactly like humans except maybe for some tiny facial feature, they can have alien animals that look superficially indistinguishable from dogs. Heck, dogs recognize each other more by scent than sight anyway. Maybe an Earth dog would’ve thought the Banean canid smelled strange in a manner analogous to a bumpy forehead.
Keeping with the planetary theme, the dog should have had an absurd hairdo.
@10 – Let’s just call a spade a spade. Too much logic twisting going on here.
@12/Austin: I’m just saying that in a franchise with so many aliens who look nearly or exactly like humans, and so many planets with exactly the same kinds of trees and grass that we have, it’s kind of an arbitrary double standard to complain about a dog not looking alien enough.
And shouldn’t that be “spayed”? ;)
Not one of the most memorable Voyager episodes, but I do like it for the great turn by Tim Russ as Tuvok here. From the opening, you think the episode is going to be about Paris, but it isn’t long before we realize that Tuvok is front and center – and he really shines here too. Undoubtedly, the best touch in the episode was the tip of the hand to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intrepid and legendary investigator by incorporating the use of the dog to ‘reveal’ the real killer.
@7/ Phillip Thorne – Trek did a very good take on an alien pet in Star Trek III: TSFS with Kruge’s “dog”. Was that supposed to be a Targ? The vicious animal helped contribute to the alien-ness and fearsome-ness off the Klingons, at least up to that point. But I suppose creating an equally alien-like critter wasn’t going to be practical on Voyager‘s budget or allotted episode production time.
I am going to dissent just slightly on the praise for the Tuvok character to this point. Perhaps it’s unfair, but I can’t help but compare him to Spock. Nimoy was somehow able to convey Spock as a creature governed by logic, yet with nuance and expressiveness implied below the surface. Perhaps Russ doesn’t have as much to work with- after all this is really the first episode where his character is front and center instead of a mere contrarian, but he seems to have no capacity for any expression other than the one in the screenshot of him here. This is not a re-watch for me. I’m watching it for the first time, But I hope the character develops Beyond this one-dimensional Vulcan who ways looks like he just stepped in dog poop, which in this episode, could have actually happened.
The concept of punishment in repeatedly re-living a victim’s last moments doesn’t really work for me. It seems to me it would act to punish the empathetic and remorseful more than those who perhaps enjoyed perpetrating their crime.
@15/GarretH: Klingon targs were not invented until TNG’s first season, three years after The Search for Spock, so no, Kruge’s pet was not meant to be a targ. A targ is more of a boarlike creature, while the “monster dog” in ST III was described in the script as “half timber wolf, half lizard.” Star Trek Online calls that species warriguls, after the given name of Kruge’s pet in the ST III novelization by Vonda McIntyre. I don’t care for that, though, partly because “warrigul” is an indigenous Australian name for a dingo, and partly because it means that Kruge basically named his pet “Dog.” (Well, if it worked for Lt. Columbo…) There’s an older computer game that calls its species jadashha.
@16/fullyfunctional: I always found Russ’s performance as Tuvok a bit too stiff myself. It also bugged me that he looked so young, when he was supposed to be even older than the gray-haired Sarek was in “Journey to Babel.” I think I read once that they initially planned to put him in a gray wig with a more conventionally Vulcan haircut, but decided not to.
On the other hand, Russ’s performance as Tuvok was, prior to 2009, the closest thing I ever saw to a decent Spock impression.
With his habit of flirting with holograms and chivalrous attitude towards Kes, and now this, it’s pretty obvious Paris was originally planned as the show’s ladies’ man, as we’ve discussed in threads for other episodes. This kind of both is and isn’t followed through going forward: His chat to Harry about pursuing a relationship you know isn’t going to work is somewhat ironic given that that’s basically Harry’s thing in later seasons. We get a good bonding moment between Paris and Tuvok at the end as well. The reference to Tuvok having been married 67 years is the first evidence that he’s older than he appears to be.
Tuvok’s solution hinging on demonstrating that a dog knows the culprit is, of course, lifted straight from that famous Sherlock Holmes incident. And it’s nice that a vital clue is hidden in plain sight: Both we and Paris assume the symbols on the memory are unremarkable.
Still, there are an awful lot of plot holes and unanswered questions here. To what extent was the memory altered? Tuvok makes a big deal about the fact the doctor is the killer’s height and Tom isn’t, but they seem to have added extra speech from Ren identifying Paris as well. We don’t get any real motivation or explanation as to why the villains have decided to betray the Beneans to the Numiri: As krad says, the real killer doesn’t even get a name! And there’s huge confusion as to what exactly Paris’ sentence is: We get told his punishment is to relive the murder from the victim’s perspective every fourteen hours, but even though that sentence has been carried out, the Beneans tell Voyager not to take him out of the system. Is there an incarceration element to it as well?
@16: “The concept of punishment in repeatedly re-living a victim’s last moments doesn’t really work for me. It seems to me it would act to punish the empathetic and remorseful more than those who perhaps enjoyed perpetrating their crime.”
That did cross my mind but I guess they’d have to experience the pain and fear of their victim, rather than any enjoyment they might have felt at the time. So, hard to enjoy perhaps.
I guess I’m the only one that really enjoyed this episode. I also really enjoyed TNG’s take, so since they are about the same, I liked it. Voyager is also my favorite of the 4 series of that time. (TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT). Again not the mainstream opinion. I was really glad when I learned Krad was going to rewatch this series. Keep up the great work. I enjoy your write ups every week, even if I don’t always agree.
@17/CLB: I always seem to learn more about Star Trek when I’m not even planning too. I had always thought that the STIII Klingon “dog” was a targ. Always fun to learn something new about my favorite IP.
Weskan: I did enjoy the episode! For reasons I gave in the article! But I would’ve enjoyed it more if it was more imaginative in its alien world. It was a good, fun episode that could’ve been a great one.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
There was a book or magazine article where Jeri Taylor herself complained about how human the aliens were in this episode, specifically pointing out the cigarettes and the dog.
@15 & 17 – The name for Kruge’s pet came from the FASA role playing game, specifically Stardate Magazine #2, December 1984
Jadashha
Well, “alien culture that happens to resemble an Earth historical period” is an old Trek trope, and if you’re going to do a noir-mystery riff, it kind of requires an alien culture that feels like the 1940s. Hey, at least it wasn’t a holodeck story.
I am extremely disappointed with this review – so many mentions of crazy hairdos but only one picture!
Reliving this episode after watching Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is not a good idea (as long as we’re addressing the Agatha Christie-ness of it all). For whatever reason, Michael Piller-era TNG always had this fascination with murder mysteries. A trend that continued in the early seasons of DS9 and now again at Voyager. And it rarely works out, if ever (DS9’s Necessary Evil, being one of the very few exceptions; because it strayed from the format and told a story specific to the occupation).
Berman-era Trek aesthetics isn’t really compatible with this attempted dive at film noir territory. Voyager would get more comfortable with aping old-timey audiovisual cultural references later on, with much better episodes like Bride of Chaotica!.
Honestly, I can barely stand this episode. It’s only watchable because Tim Russ plays Tuvok in a way that makes for a slightly entertaining version of an ominuous super-detective type character. Something that Knives Out did far better with Daniel Craig and his over-the-top accent.
Ex-Post Facto is not only uninspired and bland, but it’s also yet another attempt at aping past TNG episodes, and a forgettable one at that. The Rashomon-esque take on A Matter of Perspective couldn’t that save that slog of an episode, and it does no favors here either. It tries to piggyback on the idea of Paris being a creepy cheating weasel, and McNeill – who’s a good actor and director on any other day – doesn’t even try to sell that idea convincingly. Everytime the show suggests that Paris has a dark side, it mostly falters. Case in point, the pitiful attempt at a Paris goes rebel arc in the 2nd season. We all know he’s innocent and that everything will be neatly resolved by minute 44.
Facto also loses points for once again giving us unremarkable aliens. You can tell they’re trying to save up after the pilot. As if Time and Again wasn’t generic enough. It’s not even a matter of design, or lack of. It’s the fact that these characters are so boring, to the point where they make the Kazon of all people more interesting. I don’t care for the conflict between Banea and Numiria. Stock Delta Quadrant species with no memorable characterization. This will be a recurring problem on Voyager.
And of course, the dog once again proves the solution to the dilemma, as if TNG’s Aquiel hadn’t done it before.
If it weren’t for Tuvok, I might’ve ranked this a 0. He’s the only reason this plays at all.
I really liked this episode; it was entirely appropriate that Mr Paris’ tendency to indiscretions would catch up with him and seeing Mr Tuvok give his best Sherlock Holmes was an extra pleasure (personally I like his performance in the role, since he’s so very Vulcan in a subtly different way to Mr Spock – one might argue he takes being a Vulcan for granted in a way that the Son of Sarek never can, which in an odd way makes him both more and less mellow).
As for the fact he doesn’t show his age quite as much as Sarek, I tend to chalk that up to some Vulcans showing their age more than others (in the way that some people cheat the ageing process while others get their debt to Father Time called in early); in all fairness having Sybok, Spock & Michael Burnham as children would probably bring a veritable snowstorm of grey hairs down on the head of ANY parent!
@26/ED: With Tuvok, it’s not so much about the plausibility of his appearance as about how they chose to present the character. Tuvok was initially conceived to be an older character, a sort of wise father figure for Janeway, and from what I read about the character pre-series, I was expecting an older actor in the role. Imagine what someone like Roscoe Lee Browne or Robert Guillaume could’ve done with the character. It kind of disappointed me that they ultimately went for a younger actor, someone without the sense of well-traveled wisdom I felt the role called for. Especially once it became clear that Tuvok was still supposed to be much older than anyone else in the crew.
Huh, I think I always took it for granted that Tuvok was much older than he appeared to be, because it was always my impression that Vulcans were a much longer-lived species than humans and thus took much longer to show their age.
Although, I don’t think I would have even given it any thought when this episode first aired, considering I was about nine at the time. I was already a mystery fan at that age, though, so I’m sure I probably loved it. I’d already decided Voyager was “my favorite” Trek by then, purely on the basis of the captain being “a girl,” like me. Nowadays, I think I prefer DS9.
@28/denise_l: Except that Tim Russ was about the same age at the start of Voyager that Leonard Nimoy was at the end of TOS, and Spock was supposed to be relatively young (enough that his human mother was still alive and vigorous, no older than her 60s). Spock’s appearance in the movie era belies the notion that Vulcans don’t show their age (unless you attribute it to his half-human genetics).
This is the first episode I didn’t enjoy. I can’t feel sorry for Paris – I just don’t like him. And the bored, sexually deprived housewife is probably my least favourite female stock character. Do we have to have housewives on alien planets, anyway? Who arrange flowers and feed little doggies? How unimaginative is that?
Kes telling the doctor that holograms and organic people aren’t so different was nice, and Janeway and Chakotay quipping about Maquis tricks, and Tuvok investigating. But that isn’t enough to save the episode.
“Paris declares that humans have given up smoking as dangerous, a declaration that was just last week belied by the Picard episode “The End is the Beginning.” (I prefer Paris’s notion, myself, especially given that I have no memory of my paternal grandmother who chain-smoked and died when I was two.)”
Wow, these 21st century Trek shows just go on to tear down every notion of human improvement. Not watching Picard was apparently the right decision.
In this case, the more optimistic notion is even more likely, as smoking rates are falling in almost all countries.
@29 This is true. In my defense, I first came to that conclusion at a very young age, without having watched more than one or two episodes of TOS and maybe one of the movies–and I definitely had not seen “Journey to Babel” at that point. For a long time, I was more familiar with Tuvok than Spock, so you can see where the idea might have originated.
Maybe my situation is unusual: my parents were fans of the Original, and I grew up with TNG, DS9, and Voyager (I was born in 86, for reference). I didn’t see any of TOS until much later–just so you know where I’m coming from with this. Until the point that Netflix became a thing, my only access to TOS was through catching the odd episode on cable TV at my grandpa’s house; whereas we had innumerable VHS tapes at home with dozens of episodes of the other series that my dad had recorded so we could watch them together (because they usually aired way past my bedtime).
Perhaps we can assume that Tuvok just has very good genes? ;)
@31/Jana: The only characters in Picard who smoke are ones portrayed as disreputable, damaged outsider types. Martia smoked a cigar in The Undiscovered Country — this isn’t so different. And only one character smokes cigars — the other, I gather, is “vaping” an intoxicating Orion plant called snakeleaf, which seems more analogous to cannabis than tobacco.
@33/Christopher: Ironically, ST6 just happens to be directed by Nick Meyer, who was well known for being a smoker on set, and who openly questioned the notion that smoking would fall out of style in 300 years. In fact, there’s a production still on Star Trek Memories that shows both Meyer and Iman sharing a cigarette.
@34/Eduardo: And Meyer put “No Smoking” signs in the TWOK bridge simulator and transporter room. But then, Meyer didn’t care for any kind of futurism in his Trek movies.
Count me among those who believe that smoking will be around for as long as beings have lungs. If the idea is that people of the future will be so enlightened they won’t want to smoke, that’s just ridiculous. No matter how enlightened, people will still be tempted by vices they find pleasurable. And anyway, one would think a couple hundred years from now, lung cancer will be cured by one of those pills McCoy had in his bag in Star Trek IV
@36/fullyfunctional: Granted that there will always be intoxicants and mood-altering substances of various sorts, but it seems to me that technology should be able to come up with a less problematical delivery system than inhaling the combustion products of ignited leaves. Or to engineer substances that provide the pleasurable effects without the toxic, carcinogenic, or addictive aspects.
@33/Christopher: Ah, Martia. I wonder, is smoking even bad for her? Or can she just shapeshift away cell damage?
@35/Christopher: “Meyer didn’t care for any kind of futurism in his Trek movies.”
Yep. Meyer wasn’t good for Star Trek. Or at least, the Star Trek I care about. I guess he created his own brand of Star Trek and attracted new and different people.
@36/fullyfunctional: “Count me among those who believe that smoking will be around for as long as beings have lungs.”
I believe the opposite, and I think the evidence is on my side. We only learned about the connection between smoking and lung cancer in the middle of the 20th century. Force is a strong habit. Smoking is addictive. There is a powerful cigarette industry that lied and falsified studies and did all they could to keep people in the dark about the dangers. And yet smoking rates are falling (see my comment #31). We learn slowly, but we learn.
@38/Jana: You’d think that shapeshifters could easily repair any damage, but it’s an odd, persistent conceit of fantasy/SF that shapeshifters are unable to heal any injuries they sustain. Look at the first couple of X-Men movies where Mystique was stabbed by Wolverine in the first and still had the scars in the second, no matter what form she was in. One of the most absurd extremes I’ve seen it taken to was in the Heroes Reborn miniseries from 2015, the brief revival of NBC’s Heroes. There was a character there who could turn his whole body to mist and move anywhere he wanted in mist form, but when he suffered a mortal wound, he still had it even after changing to mist and then back to human. How?? If he has such incredibly fine control over every individual molecule in his body that he can literally vaporize himself and then put his particles back together in their original arrangement, then restoring a wounded body part to its original arrangement should be much, much easier.
Although I suppose you could say it’s more of a reflex action, that he doesn’t have conscious awareness of every particle but more just the gestalt, and that all he can do after changing to mist is to revert back to his configuration before he vaporized, so that he’d reassemble with any wound he had when he started. But for someone like Mystique or Martia, who has to have the conscious control to shift among multiple different forms and even restructure their body size and anatomy, you’d think they’d have more ability to cope with wounds. Although repairing genetic damage from carcinogens might not be possible; a shapeshifter might be able to rearrange the positions and surface appearance of their cells, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean they could alter their internal composition.
Heck, if anything, a shapeshifter might be more prone to cancer, because cancer is what happens when normal cell replication processes run out of control, and shapeshifters would probably make much heavier use of the processes involved in bodily growth and repair, so that there’d be more chance of something going wrong or breaking down within those processes.
@39/Christopher: I can see that we need more research on the molecular biology of shapeshifters.
@40/JanaJansen:
Who wants to hijack the thread? I do! :)
Consider Marvel Comics aliens the Skrull, as depicted in Captain Marvel (2019). Their ability to shapeshift is said to extend even to DNA — but if you have human DNA, how do you retain your alien abilities? When a human doctor examines a corpse, he declares “whatever they’re made of, it’s not on the periodic table” — if so, how are you even able to measure it? Later, one of the Skrull is able to recognize that a cat named “Goose” is actually a Flerken, a creature that’s apparently dimensionally transcendental like the TARDIS — are we to believe that all Flerkens look like Earth-cats?
Let’s posit that both Skrull and Flerkens have hyperspace biology. A Skrull doesn’t transform his cells into those of a human, but rotates them to expose a surface that mimics a human, like shuffling a hyperdimensional Rubik’s cube — and this requires continuous attention, so upon death, the cells revert. Their hyper-atoms, when fed through human chemical assays, have mass and electric charge, but don’t otherwise register like mundane 3-space atoms — their chemical reactions don’t follow our rulebook. Finally, as a fellow hyper-organism, a Skrull is able to recognize the hyperspace aspect of the Flerken, so its 3-space feline guise is irrelevant.
@41/Phillip: Ugh, I loathe that sci-fi trope of saying that alien technology or biology uses elements not known to Earth chemistry. That’s not how the universe works! It’s all made of the same stuff! Stars and planets are made of the intermingled remains of earlier generations of stars and planets, all coalesced out of the same cosmic cloud that formed the galaxy. Not to mention that we have telescopes and spectroscopes and can see other galaxies all across the universe and tell what they’re made of. If there were exotic elements out there, we’d observe their spectroscopic signatures and already know about them. (Which is another bad sci-fi trope that drives me crazy, the failure to understand that space has no horizons and you can see anything for billions of light-years as long as you have a powerful enough telescope.)
Maybe, just maybe, there could be younger, later-generation stars out there that have been through more cycles of nucleosynthesis and possibly produced a small quantity of semi-stable transuranics higher on the periodic table than we’ve gotten, in trace quantities too small for our spectroscopes to detect, but those would be in addition to all the far more abundant, ordinary stuff like hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and silicon and iron. Most living things are probably based on carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, and the few that aren’t would have to be based on known elements like silicon or fluorine (in combination with stuff like hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen). As far as technology goes, those heavy transuranics would only have limited applications and it would make no sense for them to replace lighter materials like carbon or iron or aluminum or tungsten. Heck, the most cutting-edge materials science tends to involve things built from commonplace carbon, like nanotubes and graphene. Looking at the high end of the periodic table is going in the wrong direction.
Not to mention that if Skrulls were not made of any Earthly elements, then they couldn’t breathe our air or subsist on our food and water. They certainly couldn’t live among us for decades.
@37– your point is well taken- that said, there have already been so many developments in that regard. If we’re talking about mood altering drugs like cannabis, people are taking THC in drops, gummies, and vapes, etc., but there is an inherent pleasure some still find in the act of inhaling it. It may be primitive, but lots of vices are rooted in primitive pleasure. And while Jana is correct in pointing out how insidiously the tobacco companies addicted the citizenry and while cigarette smoking rates are historically down- there was a big spike in cigar smoking well after the health risks were known, and lately, vaping is the thing. So I would respectfully disagree, I really do think that so long as people have lungs to inhale, some will find it pleasurable to suck god-knows-what into their lungs for the sensation of doing so, especially if the health consequences are mitigated or perhaps even eliminated by advances in healthcare.
The Doctor’s consideration of Benjamin Spock for a name was actually the second Trek reference of the name that I remember. The first was in Strangers From the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno. Spock (and other crew members) are accidentally displaced in time and Spock ends up at the home of an ancestor on his mother’s side, Jeremy Grayson. When Spock tells Jeremy that his name is Spock, Jeremy remembers Dr. Benjamin Spock and decides to call Spock “Ben”.
Really nothing to add about this episode, except that it seemed to me like the bastard child of Frame Of Mind and Hard Time. I’m not certain if I saw Hard Time or this one first, though.
@29 – Chris: I chalk this up to the fact that people looked older in the 60s, more worn down. Thus, someone Sarek’s age in the 60s looked elderly, because he’s the equivalent of a 60-70 year old human. But Tuvok, in the 90s, could look younger, because someone in their 60s or 70s can look more vital. And then there’s the fact that he’s alien, and by then the writers/producers had decided that Vulcans still looked like younger humans. Of course, YMMV.
@45/MaGnUs: Again, I’m not as concerned about how Tuvok looked as about how he acted. I never felt Russ convincingly sold the illusion that he had over a century of wisdom and experience. I think a genuinely older actor with more gravitas could’ve done better, and made a more interesting contrast with all the young pretty people in the cast.
@16 fullyfunctional I always attributed Tuvok’s ‘stiffness’, as opposed to Spock, as the difference between fully and half Vulcan heritages, and whatever Tuvok may have done in the past to purge emotions, as was brought up later in the series. Plus, Tuvok always seemed a little like an odd duck out type of person, a little awkward as a written characteristic rather than a lack in acting. That last assumption is an uninformed opinion, though.
As someone who has never seen Rashomon, even though I know I should considering it’s reputation, I hold TNG‘s A Matter of Perspective in high regard. Needless to say that the aspects of this episode based on that, don’t bother me. Also as a Sherlock Holmes super fan, I loved the dog twist! Despite all that, I still would only rate the episode a modest 7.
Delta Quadrant, galactic headquarters for funny foreheads and worse hairdos.
@47– I just ran across your comment to my comment, and smiled. When I originally wrote that comment I was early in my first watch of Voyager. I’ve since finished all seven seasons, and Tuvok definitely grew on me. Meld, Riddles, Gravity, and Innocence, all Tuvok-centered stories, are among my favorite Voyager episodes. So my apologies to Tuvok, and Tim Russ, for my premature judgment.
@11/Almuric:
That would have been cool. It reminds me of the DS9 episode where we saw a Cardassian vole and it had the classic Cardassian spoon feature on its forehead. (Although in that case the vole was just a puppet. It would be much harder putting some extravagant appliance on a real dog.)
Thanks for mentioning yet another way Picard contradicts long established canon. Little Green Men on DS9 makes it clear smoking is a thing if the past on earth, just like television, dystopia, there is very little swearing, starfleet is a humanistic organization, the federation is a humanist and utopian place, people with mental illness get cured and don’t lull themselves, Picard knows his own family history and would certainly know if his ancestor was the first to Europa, federation personnel follow the orders of the ships captain, ten firward isn’t the name of the freaking bar but the deck and location of a place on the enterprise, etc.
Good Lord that show is awful.
@54/Kurt: Picard did know that his ancestor was the first to Europa. In the season premiere he gives a speech to the Starfleet Academy graduating class stating as such.
@54/Kurt: There are exceptions to every rule. Society as a whole may have given up smoking, but there will always be a few outliers.
And the “no swearing” thing was just because of TV and PG-movie censorship, not a real worldbuilding choice. So there’s no reason to keep it in a more permissive medium.
I like the idea of incorporating plumage into an alien make-up design; I just wish it had been done better than this.
“How Come My Dog Don’t Bark”