“Random Thoughts”
Written by Kenneth Biller
Directed by Alexnander Singer
Season 4, Episode 10
Production episode 178
Original air date: November 19, 1997
Stardate: 51367.2
Captain’s log. Voyager has spent the last several days visiting the Mari homeworld. The people there are telepathic, and Voyager has been taking shore leave and resupplying. Neelix is building up the courage to ask out Talli, one of the fruit merchants, and Janeway and Torres are purchasing equipment from Guill.
A Mari named Frane bumps Torres, who briefly yells at him before getting her temper under control. A few minutes later, Frane starts beating another merchant with a stick.
Tuvok is taking Chief Examiner Nimira, the Mari’s chief of police, on a tour of Voyager when the attack happens, and they return to the surface. Janeway offers full cooperation, and she, Torres, and Neelix are all interviewed both verbally and telepathically, and their thoughts and memories are recorded and examined as well.
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To the crew’s shock, Torres is arrested after she’s questioned. The Mari have virtually eliminated crime, and considers even unpleasant and violent thoughts to be taboo. But Torres had a brief violent thought when she was bumped, and that apparently had an adverse effect on Frane, and it caused him to get violent. Because the Mari aren’t used to such thoughts, they overwhelmed Frane.
Janeway is livid, but Nimira is insistent. The punishment is to have the violent thoughts excised from her brain. The problem is that there’s a risk of brain damage to Torres from the procedure. Tuvok and Janeway conduct their own investigation, including the discovery that Frane has been detained for violent thoughts before. Nimira, however, insists that that isn’t relevant, because those thoughts were purged each time.
While shopping on the planet, Seven and Neelix hear a scream: it’s Talli, who was killed by an old woman. Nimira questions and scans the old woman, who was also influenced by Torres’s anger. But both Frane and Torres are in custody and didn’t meet the old woman. Nimira is at a loss as to how that would happen, and she agrees to let Tuvok investigate further before they lobotomize Torres.
Paris approaches Chakotay about mounting a rescue mission before Torres can be taken. Chakotay says they don’t want to antagonize the Mari, but he also tells Paris to go ahead and make a rescue plan, which can be considered as a last resort. Paris correctly thinks he’s just being given busy work, but goes ahead to make the plan.
Tuvok mind-melds with Torres, which she isn’t thrilled about, but she’s thrilled about the Mari’s procedure even less, so she goes along. Tuvok helps her remember that Guill seemed to be all over her when she was bumped also. Tuvok goes to question Guill, who provides reasonable answers, but Tuvok remains suspicious. Guill cuts the interview off because he says he needs to go home to dinner, but Tuvok follows him to a meeting with another Mari to whom he gives cash.
Tuvok confronts Guill, saying that he buys and sells illicit thoughts, and Guill admits to it. Tuvok pretends to also be a seeker of such thoughts in order to gain Guill’s trust. Guill admits that he and Frane set Torres up to be angry so they could capture her thoughts and sell them to various Mari voyeurs. However, he didn’t expect the effect to be so brutal as to cause Frane to commit assault and the old woman to commit murder.
Having gained a confession, Tuvok tries to arrest Guill, but his friends gang up on the Vulcan and subdue him. Guill forces himself to feel some of Tuvok’s violent thoughts that he promised. At first Tuvok holds back, but then he gives Guill everything, the full brunt of turbulent, violent Vulcan emotions, and Guill is utterly overwhelmed.
Tuvok brings Guill onto Voyager and puts him in the brig. Janeway convinces Nimira to not lobotomize Torres in light of this new evidence. Nimira is stunned to realize that there’s an entire black market dedicated to selling illicit thoughts.
The EMH treats Torres to make sure there are no ill effects from the abortive procedure. Seven castigates Janeway for their reckless first-contact policies that got their chief of security and chief engineer damaged, and could have gotten them killed. But Janeway points out that they will never learn if they don’t contact other cultures. Seven doesn’t get it.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Mari have adapted their technology to their telepathy to the point that they can record thoughts. While Nimira uses this for law-enforcement purposes, Guill does likewise for profit.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is eager to cooperate with Nimira initially, but refuses to accept that Torres is responsible for an assault and a murder just because she briefly got angry.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok and Nimira bond instantly, with Tuvok explaining the need for a brig on Voyager (Nimira finds the idea barbaric). Tuvok also does mostly excellent work in his investigation, including pretending to be a nasty-thought-voyeur just like Guill and his clients, and then later giving him a lesson in being careful what you wish for. (I say “mostly” because he neglected to have any backup and tried to arrest Guill by himself, which backfired rather spectacularly.)
Half and half. Torres’ temper finally gets her in serious trouble, just like pretty much everyone thought it would…
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix asks Talli out, and is actually successful. It’s the first time he’s tried dating anyone since Kes.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH doesn’t show up until the end, giving Torres a once-over.
Resistance is futile. Seven thinks that the whole notion of stopping at a planet and hanging out with the locals and being arrested by them is counterindicated to a ship that claims to be trying to get home.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Paris buys a present for Torres on the surface, but doesn’t get the chance to give it to her before she’s arrested. He spends the entire episode fuming over her being detained and lobotomized. Meanwhile, Neelix flirts with a woman for the first time since Kes. He castigates telepaths and says they’re bad for relationships, which is odd considering that Kes is a telepath…
Do it.
“Fortunately, the Mari didn’t get very far with the procedure. You can return to duty, Lieutenant—though perhaps with one or two fewer violent engrams in that fiery head of yours.”
“It’s all right, Doc, there are plenty more where those came from.”
“Duly warned.”
–The EMH treating Torres.
Welcome aboard. The excellent Canadian actor Gwynyth Walsh returns to Trek as Nimira, having played the Klingon B’Etor in the “Redemption” two-parter and “Firstborn” on TNG, “Past Prologue” on DS9, and the movie Generations. Wayne Péré plays Guill, Rebecca McFarland plays Talli, and regular stunt performer Bobby Burns gets a rare billed role as Frane.
Trivial matters: Gwynyth Walsh was eager to return to Trek but less eager to subject herself to hours in the makeup chair, so she was only willing to do a guest shot that did not involve facial prosthetics.
This episode is the first time Kes has been mentioned since she left the show.
The violent thoughts seen by Guill and Tuvok in this episode recycled footage from First Contact, “Fair Trade,” “Unity,” “Nemesis,” Generations, and the Paramount film Event Horizon.
The matte painting created to show the Mari homeworld is a kitbash of buildings in the Los Angeles area, including a university library and the MTA Building, plus reuses of towers, scenes, and buildings used in other episodes of TNG and DS9.
Janeway mentions that Neelix is lodging a formal complaint with Mari authorities, a nice use of his ambassadorial title that was official in “Revulsion.”
The depth and breadth of uncontrolled Vulcan emotion was seen with Spock in the original series’ “The Naked Time,” “This Side of Paradise,” and “All Our Yesterdays,” with Sarek (and the mind-melded Picard) in TNG’s “Sarek,” and with Tuvok in “Meld.”
Set a course for home. “I guess it’d be pretty tough to keep a secret from you.” This is a prototypical Star Trek episode, using a science fictional conceit—in this case, telepathy, which has been a part of the genre since the 1940s—to take a look at contemporary society. The commentary is nicely broad-ranging, which also means it isn’t particularly heavy handed. But the episode nicely shines a light on the notion of how difficult it can be to legislate behavior.
The episode was also originally inspired by the notion of whether or not portrayals of violence in media provokes violence in people, which was an especially hot topic in the 1990s when this episode first aired.
But what makes the episode so strong is that it can apply to so many things, from the war on drugs to Prohibition. And throughout history, the hardest laws to enforce are ones that a) bring pleasure to someone and b) don’t do active harm to anyone. The word “active” is important there, because technically Torres’s thoughts are responsible for both the assault and the later murder. But that’s only because the Mari aren’t used to thoughts on the level of violence that Torres, with her Klingon heritage is capable of. And it’s why Guill really really really can’t handle Tuvok’s full Vulcan craziness.
Tuvok is magnificent in this episode, as his investigation is straightforward and sensible and clever, and I love how easily he modulates into the role of someone eager for illicit thoughts to feel in order to entrap Guill.
Credit also to Kenneth Biller’s script and Gwynyth Walsh’s performance in making Nimira a sympathetic character who is simply trying to do her job. She could easily have been antagonistic, and it’s to Biller and Walsh’s credit that she isn’t. She’s likeable and her actions make sense by her own lights. And she’s apologetic about what she has to do—she’s still a kind, compassionate person.
One other bit of social commentary here is Nimira’s complete and total shock at the notion of this underground thought-selling. It never even occurred to her that this could happen, which belies Tuvok’s earlier comment that she was probably a good investigator. A good investigator would have had that in her head as a possibility, if perhaps a remote one.
Still, this is a strong, powerful Trek episode that beautifully does what Trek does best.
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido hopes everyone in the United States either already has voted or will be voting tomorrow.
I love this episode, although I think a couple things would have made it a 10. But I adore the idea of an underground market for thoughts and feelings. It’s such an awesome sci-fi premise, and I’m sad we didn’t get to see more of it throughout the series. The idea of telepaths having laws about thoughts makes a certain amount of sense, and it is an interesting look into a society where you are constantly hearing other people’s thoughts. At what point does your right to think what you want infringe on someone else’s right not to have to hear your worst, most graphic, most disturbing thoughts?
That said, I wish this episode had been done as a follow-up to the Year of Hell two-parter. It would have been easy to say that they were there for repairs, since the majority of the episode takes place on the planet, and the parts on Voyager don’t really require the ship to have to do much. Having the emotions that B’Elanna is experiencing be from her experiences with the Kremin, instead of just another “she is angry because she is part Klingon and is always angry” would have made for a much stronger story, IMHO. “Extreme Risk” in Season 5 does a good job of showing her working through her emotions over a very legitimate cause, and I wish we had gotten something more like that here.
And for an organization so devoted to scientific discovery and peaceful contact with other races, you would think that Starfleet vessels would have some sort of legal representative on board. Seriously, between this episode and “Justice” over on TNG it seems like there isn’t any kind of expectation that *someone* on board receives and studies the laws of a culture before they engage with them, in order to avoid this exact kind of thing. Voyager should certainly have one, given that their mission was to apprehend criminals, and you’d think there would need to be someone who made sure their rights were respected and the proper paperwork was filed. Instead, it is apparently just the job of the Tactical Officer, who is also the Head of Security (a pet peeve of mine all by it’s self), to use their free time to sort of skim over local law. It’s downright bizarre to me that random officers are just picked (usually by how high their names are in the opening credits) to serve as legal liaisons, investigators, and attorneys. Tuvok does a good job here, and Tim Russ is excellent as always, but seriously, why is this even his job? He’s neither a lawyer, nor an expert on inter-galactic law, nor a diplomat. Considering how often their officers get themselves into sticky situations, and considering that various Starfleet ships have room for things like historians, personal stewards, and bartenders, you’d think they would at least have some sort of legal aid on each ship.
wildfyrewarning: That is an excellent point. At least “The Measure of a Man” (written by actual lawyer Melilnda Snodgrass) established a JAG office at a starbase, but given how remote and cut off most starships are, they absolutely should have a legal officer on board.
Having said that, Tuvok’s role here isn’t legal, it’s as an investigator — he’s not being a prosecutor, he’s being a cop, which is totally part of his job description as security chief.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Tuvok was beat up by a couple of pacifists. Right.
I’m with Seven during her talk with Janeway at the end. Getting her crew nearly killed or maimed because of bending over backward for laws they were ignorant of is pretty stupid.
No pretext of alien makeup again. I guess that’s better than forehead aliens?
I thought this one was okay. It was an interest concept for sure and it shows Tuvok being an excellent investigator. I don’t feel Nimira is as likable or sympathetic as Krad feels she is. For one, on the professional side of things she comes across as incompetent if she’s not considering all of the possibilities for the origin of or passing around of violent thoughts which is very crucial if she’s going to pass judgment on B’Elanna and scramble her brains. And Nimira also seemed kind of scary in her interrogations of B’Elanna which I get she has to come across as tough but that’s also why I couldn’t say I found her likable. It is nice that she and Tuvok had a rapport though and I thought it was even verging on romantic.
It’s a shame there weren’t more pairings of Tuvok and B’Elanna on the series because I enjoyed their scenes together here.
And I actually agree with Seven’s complaint to Janeway at the end. If Janeway (and the series) are going to do the whole “embrace the adventure” motif that’s one thing. But then the series redirected with Janeway explicitly vocalizing how important it was to get the crew home. She even changes the past in “Endgame” to save Seven and Tuvok and get the crew home faster. So she can’t have it both ways!
The Mari must not get a lot of visitors or they’d make more of a point that certain thoughts are illegal. Sure visitors should be expected to familiarize themselves with local laws but there’s a difference between murder is still illegal and thinking the wrong thing can get you arrested.
And I hope the officers hauling Torres around were inoculated against violent thoughts because she was probably thinking about doing some awful things to them.
I did like how Tuvok going undercover had a rough trade kind of feeling to it. They could have passed it off as a drug deal or speakeasy. Instead it was like Guill was trying to see if Tuvok was into guys and wanted to hook up. I thought those scenes could have come out of a 50-60s clip warning about the dangers of homosexuals. Extending the metaphor gives rise to unfortunate implications so I wouldn’t take it too far but it was still more interesting than passing isolinear chips back and forth.
@2 KRAD. It’s one of my pet peeves on Trek, and Tuvok at the end saying that he would have let B’Elanna face the the punishment if she had been guilty always annoyed me, because it seems like she should still get a lawyer to argue her case, even if Tuvok thinks she is guilty. Tuvok in this episode basically was in the position of being the arbiter of if she would be subject to punishment, which in the real-world military is either a command decision (so, Janeway) or a Judge’s decision (which he isn’t).
It irks me more here than it does in other Trek series, because Voyager really should have come equipped with a legal team, given the purpose of their mission. Even without the Maquis, people subject to Starfleet regulations should still have the right to an attorney if they are facing a court-martial, let alone all the weird alien legal shenanigans that are always happening.
It’s fairly easy to let Voyager off the hook for crew deficiencies since they lost a solid chunk of their crew, but yeah, some sort of crew advocate trained in rhetoric and legal research would certainly be useful. Even more than that, it seems like the sort of a thing a holodeck program could be useful for- upload the local legal code and have the Emergency Legal Hologram help construct the defense.
@3/Austin: I also noted how we have another very human-looking alien species here but it’s happened so many times already on this series and will continue to do so that I didn’t bother remarking on it. You’d think that maybe the show would budget for giving all of the aliens funny hats to wear or maybe bushy eyebrows or a uni-brow!
New on CBS:
Star Trek: JAG – starring David James Elliott as Harmon Rabb XIV
NCIS: Andoria
Articles of the Federation by Aaron Sorkin
(Yeah the bit about a having a legal officer on board set me thinking – I could see given their original brief and proximity to space stations Voyager not needing a full time officer, but I always wondered about it on ships like Enterprise (Archer and Picard versions) etc that were on longer self-contained missions)
@9 In fairness, I could see Voyager not having one normally, but you’d think one would get added to them for this specific mission. The last thing you’d want is to apprehend a bunch of dangerous terrorists only to have to let them go because someone didn’t read them their Space Miranda Rights or mishandled the chain of evidence. And yea, there is really no reason why TNG and TOS shouldn’t have had one on board (I’ll cut ENT some slack, for once, considering they got rushed out of space dock before they were ready). Heck, even DS9 called up a Bajoran Arbiter when they needed Dax’s legal issue to be heard, and Odo had the appropriate credentials (for good reason) to help O’Brien when the Cardassians put him on trial.
@8:
Always wondered, but then I actually saw the bill for how much some of those practical effects cost, and the use of less made a lot more sense. Each setup of B’elana’s ridges may have been easily a couple thousand to manufacture and a few hundred to apply each time. If you need a whole race of them for one episode where you cannot spread out the production cost it gets unweildy… (Rumor mill has the practical effects cost of Discovery upwards of $2million per episode just for actors – and at least they can re-use the main races even on different similar build actors with just some minor paint changes
)
I don’t find Seven’s argument convincing. A single starship can’t be expected to make a 70-year journey alone and unsupported. They need what allies they can find along the way, to shore them up for the journey in terms of both supplies and crew morale. And it’s just basic courtesy to be a good guest when you show up at someone’s orbital doorstep looking for trade goods or repairs — not to mention that you’re less likely to get help if you don’t make nice. So there’s a pragmatic argument aside from the pure-curiosity argument Janeway offers. You’d think Seven, so recently a member of a collective, communal consciousness, would be the one arguing against trying to go it alone, not in favor of it.
It’s interesting that they used stock footage from Event Horizon for Tuvok’s violent memories. It occurred to me a few years ago to be surprised that the original Trek didn’t do that sort of thing, except as historical footage in the Guardian in “The City on the Edge of Forever” (which they apparently used without permission). Lots of TV series have built whole episodes around stock footage from movies as a money-saving move; it was The Time Tunnel‘s bread and butter, and it was also done by The Incredible Hulk and the original MacGyver a few times. (And of course the whole Power Rangers franchise is built around recycling tokusatsu footage from Japan.) I can imagine TOS building episodes around stock FX footage from Paramount films like maybe Conquest of Space, When Worlds Collide, or Crack in the World. And they could always have used historical-epic footage Time Tunnel-style in parallel-Earth episodes. Given all the ways they pinched pennies on the production of TOS, I’m surprised they never tried it.
@7/benjamin: Emergency Legal Hologram, huh? Hey, that could be a way to give William Shatner a role in a modern Trek show! “It’s modelled on an infamous 21st-century attorney named Denny Crane.”
@11/Jeff: “(Rumor mill has the practical effects cost of Discovery upwards of $2million per episode just for actors – and at least they can re-use the main races even on different similar build actors with just some minor paint changes)”
Indeed, I gather they tend to reuse the same actor as multiple aliens of the same species (such as Andorians and Tellarites). Maybe this explains why they do that — it lets them reuse the same makeup molds.
A few nitpicks:
1. Nimira finds the concept of a brig “barbaric,” yet Torres is confined to one on the planet.
2. Since Torres is a traveler, not a citizen, they could simply tell her to stay on Voyager where she won’t share any more violent thoughts. Mari citizens will be protected without the need for the potentially dangerous procedure. Punishing someone for a crime they didn’t know they were committing hardly seems like justice.
Otherwise a good episode. I did enjoy Tuvok playing detective on those mean streets.
Since no one in Starfleet has apparently heard of “diplomatic immunity”, a legal briefing would seem to be essential for away teams. Something like “These people are telepathic, and sharing violent thoughts is a crime punishable by brain surgery.” Or, “Breaking any law, no matter how minor, is punishable by death if it occurs in a randomly selected unmarked area that changes every day.” I imagine there would be fewer away team volunteers after that.
Also seems like a fertile plot line for “Lower Decks”.
You’d think the Mari would give visitors from off planet either protective shielding from telepathy to keep them from harming the populace or some sort of limited trade area staffed by the mentally sturdy. There are all kinds of intense thoughts that could prove contagious.
Janeway (and Starfleet in general) needs to do a better job of studying up on a given alien culture’s rules and customs before allowing their crews on the alien planet so the problems like those in this episode don’t happen or are at least minimized.
@13/John: “Punishing someone for a crime they didn’t know they were committing hardly seems like justice.”
It’s a longstanding legal principle that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” Laws need to be applied uniformly to be fair. And denying ignorance as a defense gives people an incentive to learn the laws that they’re expected to follow — an area where Voyager‘s crew dropped the ball, as discussed above. Otherwise people could just be willfully ignorant and use that as a license to behave lawlessly.
I laughed at Janeway’s line about having to respect the planets laws when that is so inconsistently applied throughout the series.
I’m not sure how a society that has so deeply eliminated violent thoughts survives so close to violent societies we know are relative close by based on past and future episodes
@17 – True, but you would be hard pressed to apply that to aliens, who literally have no understanding of your species. Indeed, an alien race might not even comprehend your plane of existence. This episode would have been better served if Voyager learned of these laws and Torres insisted she could keep her thoughts pleasant but then inevitably messed up. But I guess they were going with the shock factor of thoughts being policed.
@18/John: Yup and Janeway is about to commit a HUGELY unethical infraction when it comes to the property of an alien species coming up shortly in “Message in a Bottle” and “Hunters” but I’ll save my thoughts for when we get to those episodes.
I’ve still never understood why nobody argued that the quickest way to resolve the situation so that Voyager would not cause any more harm to the citizens would be for everybody to leave immediately.
If Voyager isn’t visiting, nobody from Voyager is infesting the planet with violent thoughts, problem solved.
@21/Uly: Laws aren’t optional. If the law says a crime has to be dealt with in a certain way, you can’t just shrug it off and ignore the law. Maybe you can make some sort of deal or plea bargain, but that’s usually for accepting a reduced punishment, not for getting away with it completely.
Sure laws can be shrugged off and ignored — if you have a starship! Trek is chock full of people visiting messed up cultures, pointing out how messed up they are, then buggering off to the next planet. (Psst, and they’re usually right to do it. Aliens are weird, y’all. Just ask Wesley Crusher about his death sentence fall into a garden.)
@23/JFWheeler: Treating power as a license to ignore law and flout justice is the mentality of a psychopath, a mobster, a Trump. It’s not what Starfleet stands for. Power must be constrained by law; anything else is corruption and tyranny.
Not to mention that all these glib observations about how easy it should’ve been to avoid the problem are ignoring that this is fiction, and if things were easy, the story wouldn’t be worth telling at all.
@23 There is also no reason why a culture of EMPATHS, who can tell, 100%, that B’Elanna did not know about the rule, intended no harm, had no purpose of evasion, and isn’t capable of controlling her thoughts the way they can, shouldn’t make an exception for her. There is really no reason why aliens in the Delta Quadrant should follow the conventions of Earth’s Western law tradition at all, for that matter. Hell, even the aliens who implanted that punishment in Tom’s head said they wouldn’t have done it if they knew that it would effect his brain in such a severe way. So not only is Torres being punished, she is being punished disproportionally to what the procedure would do to the people on the planet, and for what? It isn’t to maintain order in their society, since she is leaving and never coming back. It isn’t for justice, since lobotomizing her hardly counts as that. It isn’t to keep their people safe, since her leaving would accomplish the same thing. It seems like a remarkably regressive move for such a theoretically enlightened people.
Even on earth in our unenlightened time, exceptions are made for people for committing some crimes when they are visiting diplomats, *and* for people who can’t be held accountable for their actions. Even if B’Elanna doesn’t count as the former, she darn well should count as the latter, since she isn’t an empath and has no real way of keeping her thoughts “contained” from people who can read minds. Also, subjecting people to what amounts to torture is…bad, and it seems odd that there is no alternative punishment she could be given to compensate for the fact that something that is harmless to them would irreparably harm her. Heck, even the Cardassians figured out you could find someone guilty and then just decline to administer a punishment, and they are Space Nazis.
@25/wildfyre: “There is really no reason why aliens in the Delta Quadrant should follow the conventions of Earth’s Western law tradition at all, for that matter.”
No reason they wouldn’t either. And the reason why is obvious: Because it’s a story, and stories are about conflicts and problems, and the laws of any alien culture in any story will be whatever the story requires.
Maybe the last three cultures Voyager visited had exactly the kind of legal system you’re talking about, and that means nothing bad happened, and that means we didn’t see those visits because they weren’t worth writing stories about. We only see the cases where things go badly. It’s the weak anthropic principle of fiction.
“Heck, even the Cardassians figured out you could find someone guilty and then just decline to administer a punishment, and they are Space Nazis.”
More like Space Soviets, I think, at least where their legal system and politics are concerned.
Law and Order: Star Trek (or JAG: Star Trek given cbs ownership) is definitely a spin-off I’d watch!
@26
Yea, that is my exact complaint; it is lazy story telling. What made episodes like “Tribunal” and “Dax” interesting is that they weren’t just NCIS: IN SPACE!, but were episodes that showed us very different concepts of justice for alien cultures, and we learned something about Chief O’Brien and Dax (both Jadzia and the Dax symbiant) through them. We also learn something about both the Cardassians and the Trill through interacting with how the law effects them and what they consider serving justice to be, which was unique to their cultures and physiological beings. Heck, even “Justice” brought us a character moment for Wesley. What we learn here is that Torres is angry- something we already knew, and is being tortured for something she has no control over an no one bothered to mention was even a problem to begin with, because the writers couldn’t think of a more interesting legal framework for aliens who can read your mind. I like the episode, and watching Tuvok play inspector is always fun, but her being arrested is just there because the story needs it to be, and like so much of Voyager, could have actually been interesting if they’d put a little more creativity into it. Instead we get a weird mish-mash of various 20th century American legal ideas, and a case that any lawyer who wasn’t drunk could have gotten thrown out.
“Here, people are considered responsible for their own thoughts.”
This one’s vaguely similar to “Ex Post Facto”, in that a crewmember falls foul of peculiar alien justice and the focus is then on Tuvok conducting his own investigation to get to the truth. It’s quite compelling and rather dark in places, with Guill making a creepy villain. The character arc of both Tuvok and Nimiri is interesting to watch. As the episode opens, she is convinced that her society has solved the problems of crime and violence and Tuvok embraces their philosophy wholeheartedly, only for them to both find their confidence shattered by the snake in paradise. Tuvok is convinced of Nimiri’s solution, up until Janeway points out some evidence that she hasn’t considered. Nimiri finds her open and shut case solution seeming more and more shaky, as first another crime is committed, then Tuvok goes missing, and finally she is forced to face the truth about her society.
First time we see Paris in the captain’s chair, although it’s only so he can have a quiet chat with Chakotay. With B’Elanna in the firing line, he’s even more eager to go in all guns blazing than usual. It’s an interesting contrast with the previous episode and indeed with earlier appearances. It’s hard to imagine that Chakotay would have been able to defuse him this easily in the first two seasons, or that Paris would have fallen into line so readily.
The first mention of Kes since her departure in “The Gift”: It’s a shame the previous story didn’t credit the audience with remembering her…) Neelix somehow manages to find himself another attractive and sweet-natured young woman who’s willing to, ahem, “tug his whiskers”. Then she gets brutally murdered. Lucky girl.
After having significant roles in eight of the nine episodes prior to this, Seven is largely incidental to the plot here, but then someone bolts on a tag scene that’s all about her anyway. Sigh.
I remember in the 1990s and 2000s when violence on TV, movies, and video games was frequently blamed for violence in society as well. I always thought it was a whipping boy because people wanted something to blame rather than human dysfunction. Certainly some people are much more violent than others, but it should be obvious violence is a facet of human nature, and there are plenty of dysfunctional people and relationships.
I remember in the 1990s and 2000s when violence on TV, movies, and video games was blamed for human behavior. I always thought it was a whipping boy meant to divert attention from human dysfunction. It’s much easier to blame objects for bad behavior than it is to change people’s behavior. People were very bad to each other long before TV and video games created and blaming media for something which has been part of human nature since the dawn of humanity is simply ridiculous.
@12/CLB: Voyager can still make allies along the way home but perhaps the crew could avoid setting foot on these alien planets so there’s less chance of running afoul of their laws or being used as scapegoats for crimes the aliens are committing against each other. The crew already has the holodeck to cater to their every whim and they can always find planets for shore leave that don’t have other alien intelligent life on them.
1. I don’t know where you live, but from where I’m standing, laws are very optional. For some people, anyway.
2. Back on topic, though, I’m not saying that argument would necessarily have worked – it’d be a very short episode if it did! – just that it’s weird that nobody even brought it up as an option. “Okay, instead of removing her violent thoughts, why don’t we just remove her and then it’s like… problem solved?”
@10
Good point as to why Voyager on her original mission might have had a legal expert on board.
Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.
If they did, what are the odds they were one of the casualties of season 1, episode 1?
@33/Uly: “I don’t know where you live, but from where I’m standing, laws are very optional. For some people, anyway.”
But Starfleet officers are not those kind of people. That’s my point. They aren’t sociopaths or thugs or predators. They’re the heroes of the show, for pity’s sake. They don’t see their power as a license to violate other people’s laws and rights; they see their power as a responsibility to be used wisely and selflessly.
Anyway, in the passage you quoted, I was speaking from the perspective of the planet’s officials, the people responsible for enforcing their laws. I meant that you couldn’t just have a talk with them and get them to decide to ignore their own laws and let you go, because that’s not how legal systems work. They aren’t just informal agreements or preferences, they’re clearly delineated rules that the authorities are obligated to follow. They would be breaking their own laws if they just ignored them and let an offender go because it was convenient.
Okay, I guess there are cases where that does happen, where the state declines to press charges due to mitigating circumstances. But evidently Mari law doesn’t have provisions for that. Maybe it’s because they have so little crime that their laws don’t have a lot of complexity, because they haven’t had occasion to encounter all the possible situations that might need to be adapted to.
@35
Well, considering what the Equinox crew is up to right now, I’m not sure this argument holds water. Also, even though the show frequently forgets it, a good chunk of the Voyager crew aren’t Starfleet officers, and it turns out at least one of them was, in fact, a sociopath, thug, and predator. It is odd that not even one member of the Maquis is like “screw this nonsense, let’s get our person back to avoid her being lobotomized for a crime she had no way to not commit.” I’m not saying that had to be the episode, but they could have referenced it. Heck, they could have shown people volunteering to help Tom as an acknowledgement to not everyone supporting the “well of course she should have controlled her thoughts!” premise that Tuvok believes.
And considering how much value the Federation places on diversity and diplomacy, I’m not sure why they wouldn’t try to argue their case against having to follow that rule. Pushing for her be found guilty but that her punishment be commuted on the grounds of the pain and suffering it will cause is also a reasonable thing to try to do, as would be not turning her over to be tortured.
@36/wildfyre: “I’m not sure this argument holds water.”
It might not if it were an argument about what can potentially exist within the Trek universe. It isn’t. It’s an argument about how narrative fiction works. The kind of people you’re talking about, people like the Equinox crew, people who place self-interest and personal convenience over respect for others’ laws and rights, would not be portrayed as the protagonists of a Star Trek episode. They would be the antagonists, as the Equinox crew will be. Voyager‘s crew are the protagonists, so of course they would not just disregard the planet’s laws and run away like amoral cowards. Not only would that be unbecoming of the good guys, but it would make the story very short and uninteresting, so that story would never be told. So of course it’s not going to happen, and it’s disingenuous to argue that it should. It makes no sense to argue that a story should be told in such a way that the story ends in the first act.
I mean, heck, that’s one of the key steps in the Campbellian hero’s-journey formula — the hero accepting the call to adventure, choosing to face the danger or difficulty rather than retreat from it. Yes, it would be easier to turn away from the challenge, but the people who make that choice are not the ones who get stories told about them.
@37 Not only would that be unbecoming of the good guys, but it would make the story very short and uninteresting, so that story would never be told.
The whole premise of one of the best episodes of Star Trek is a captain doing something that is extremely unbecoming of the good guys. I’m not saying this episode needs to be “In The Pale Moonlight” on Voyager, but I don’t think there is anything wrong with Star Trek showing something other than black-and-white morality. The idea that the Voyager crew would be “the bad guys” for attempting to use diplomatic means (including sheltering Torres on Voyager) to attempt to work through this situation seems ridiculous to me. It seems even more ridiculous to me that showing some of the non-Starfleet personnel disagreeing with this situation would somehow make them all into villains. The whole point of this show was supposed to be that there were people on board who DIDN’T chose to live as Starfleet officers, and who just found themselves there through extremely odd circumstances. I don’t think asking the show to explore it’s own premise is somehow ruining the morality of Trek.
@38/wildfyre: “The whole premise of one of the best episodes of Star Trek is a captain doing something that is extremely unbecoming of the good guys.”
But this is not that story. Story tropes are not random. What matters is the effect they have on the narrative. “In the Pale Moonlight” is a story where the moral compromise created the problem, where every compromise dragged Sisko in deeper. What people are proposing here is Voyager making a moral compromise that would entirely avoid the problem, and that means there would be no story. This is not about abstract morality, this is about storytelling logic. The job of the writer is to create problems for the heroes, not to avoid them by giving them a simple way out.
Telepaths are trouble. Always. So for that matter are perfect, pacifist societies. In this case it seems the Mari are so desperate for emotionally intense experience they have a flourishing black market in forbidden thoughts. I can’t say I’m surprised.
Appropos of nothing Mari was the name of a RW Mesopotamian city state. To the best of my knowledge they were not telepathic.
Our hypothetical Emergency Legal Hologram, counseling Janeway on her options, might have cited Picard’s decision in “Justice,” to prevent Wesley Crusher from being executed for breaking a greenhouse, or Kirk’s refusal, in “A Taste of Armageddon,” to allow his crew to be disintegrated as casualties of a simulated war. One presumes that these cases, along with similar ones, would have been chewed over by the Federation’s best legal minds and that there ought, by now, to be a fairly well articulated policy governing when it is and is not acceptable for a Starfleet Captain to ignore local rule in the interests of protecting her crew members.
Of course, Janeway must also enter a streak of unusual necessity into her considerations. While no Starfleet Captain is likely to consider any of their main cast named non-redshirted crew members as casually expendable, they are, in a general practical sense, replaceable. That’s not necessarily the case with Torres- the loss of any crew member, given the dearth of replacements (especially now that their Ocampa has left the ship and any children will have to grow up on a significantly longer timescale) let alone Voyager’s Chief Engineer, could substantially impact the ship’s ability to function going forward.
(In another show, there might also have been the potential for blowback from the former Maquis. ‘She never would have let one of her precious ‘real Starfleet’ officers be executed!’ But Voyager has by this point pretty well set aside that conflict, though they’ll kind of revisit it in season seven.)
@41 Yea, the idea that the Federation must just blithely allow its members to be permanently harmed or murdered because of a misunderstanding of local law is both a silly premise and just not in line with what we’ve seen on the other series.
I’m now really hoping that Lower Decks has a episode where some beleaguered Starfleet JAG has to deal with all the ridiculous legal problems that the cast manages to stumble their way into!
You know, the more I think about this episode, the more I feel that it’s just bad storytelling, which plagued Voyager throughout it’s run. Why did Mari treat Torres as though she was a denizen of the planet? She was only temporarily visiting, so the lobotomy doesn’t make sense in that regard. You could call it a punishment, but the Mari specifically said they don’t believe in punishment. The only reason for the Mari lobotomize someone is to correct the behavior and prevent further transgressions. But, again, Torres is only visiting!
I wonder if Janeway’s comment about the Mari only creating a black market for violent thoughts is a commentary on society’s drug prohibition…
So that was the stock footage that they used for the episode. I knew it wasn’t from a Trek production. I actually saw Event Horizon in theatres, back in 1997! But I didn’t get to around to seeing Random Thoughts until last year! Who would have thought they would borrow footage from another sci-fi property?
Random Thoughts is well executed concept. And one that I’d argue is even more timely now than it was back then. In this era where every minor opinion is documented and used against the other, and there’s enough ideological divide going around that someone out there even coined the term ‘cancel culture’. Usually a situation where a person accidentally spills something without thinking of the moral implications or editing their inner thoughts, and since the world is connected, everyone knows instantly and reacts even faster. That’s when we begin to see the real person behind the social facade. There’s a reason so many websites have guidelines regarding hate speech. If people were to know everything that went through everyone else’s minds, society would crumble.
It makes perfect sense that Torres’ inner Klingon would be the catalyst for this kind of plot. And it makes great use of Tuvok in an investigative role. In retrospect, it was a smart move to the Vulcan their chief of security. A job that dwells rather close to investigating motive, which usually involves some form of emotion. It’s a plate ripe for conflict.
Besides all of that, it should be noted that Random Thoughts could still work as TNG episode any day (which would obviously involve Worf and Troi). The plot itself has no bearing on Voyager’s goal. This could easily take place on the Alpha Quadrant with the Enterprise. Nevertheless, this approach has been working well for Voyager since season 3, putting the baggage from those first couple of seasons behind them.
@44/Eduardo: “Who would have thought they would borrow footage from another sci-fi property?”
As I mentioned in comment #12, a number of shows in the past built whole episodes around recycled movie footage, and I’m surprised TOS didn’t try it. Generally, as long as a movie is from the same studio as the show, it’s fair game.
On the broader topic of a Starship Legal Officer, agreed. This also pops up in TNG’s “The Ensigns of Command.” Let’s see, we’re dealing with legal-minded people and our relationship with them is governed by a treaty, so on a starship of a thousand people the only two who have the time to look at it are… Picard and Troi. All due respect to both characters, but this is about as nonsensical as having a lawyer act as ship’s counselor or take the bridge during a firefight. If there’s room for a barber there’s definitely room for a lawyer. And basically the same thing happens in “Justice,” Worf and Yar actually do look over the penal code of the planet, but they never thought to ask what the punishments are in the event of a violation. Voyager, at least, has the excuse that it was only supposed to be a three hour tour.
@46 One of the places the lack of it really baffled me was in “The Drumhead,” where poor Simon Tarses is stuck with Will Riker as his legal counsel in the proceedings. So not only does Enterprise not have a legal counsel on board, apparently no one in Starfleet could be bothered to send one along when they were sending Admiral Satie from the Legal Division already. Between that and Starfleet sending only one person to set up the JAG office in “The Measure of a Man,” I’m starting to wonder if there are only about 4 lawyers in the entire Federation. Honestly, the whole legal system of the future seems like a nightmare, with seemingly no requirement that someone have adequate counsel, civilians able to be sentenced by Starfleet officials for crimes that had nothing to do with Starfleet, and apparently no conflict of interest laws.
@47/wildfyre: “civilians able to be sentenced by Starfleet officials for crimes that had nothing to do with Starfleet”
What are you referring to here?
“and apparently no conflict of interest laws.”
In the military, there wouldn’t be, at least not when it applies to recusal for personal reasons. I found this out when researching military law for my depiction of the Stargazer court-martial in my novel The Buried Age. Apparently if you’re ordered to prosecute your own lover, like Philippa Louvois or Areel Shaw was, you can’t recuse yourself; you have to follow orders and set aside personal feelings to do the job to the best of your ability, or else you’re guilty of dereliction of duty. See also Riker being ordered to prosecute Data in “The Measure of a Man.”
Where they did drop the ball on conflict of interest was in “Court Martial.” Commodore Stone was the one who brought the charge against Kirk in the first place, so that should’ve disqualified him from being on the court-martial panel. At least, it would have under US Naval law.
@48, Richard Bashir is sentenced by a Starfleet judge for his procuring genetic augments for his son, even though Richard does not appear to be or have ever been a member of Starfleet, nor was his son a member at the time it was done, nor does the doctor who performed the augments appear to be a Starfleet doctor. There is no reason I can tell why the military, and not the civilian courts, should have jurisdiction over that case, and I never found Ronald Moore’s explanation for it to be very convincing.
The Naval JAG library states that
So it seems entirely possible that a JAG lawyer can be taken off a case for conflict of interest reasons in the Navy, and I have personally seen it happen in the Army, and in particular there are quite a lot of rules regarding sexual relationships. I don’t know how recent a change that might be, though. It seems like that would apply even more so to people who aren’t even actual lawyers, and where there is no urgency of the case (as in “Measure of a Man”). It makes for more compelling TV, but there is no reason why the whole thing can’t just be moved to another starbase that is actually set up to handle the case, and there is REALLY no reason why poor Simon Tarses shouldn’t have a real lawyer instead of his XO.
@49/wildfyre: Yes, that regulation allows for removing someone due to conflict of interest, but does not require it. That’s the point.
And the reason is the same as it was on the other topic: because it’s a story and poetic license is a thing. We want to see stories about the characters we know and care about facing conflicts and challenges. Very, very few works of courtroom fiction have depicted the laws and procedures accurately. Sometimes they’re incredibly far removed from anything like legitimate, legal, ethical courtroom procedure (I’m looking at you, Daredevil season 2). That’s because they’re fictional, so drama outweighs accuracy.
@36, 37, 38
The whole point of Errand of Mercy was that the Federation and the Klingons weren’t that different. The Organians told Kirk not to do anything to antagonize the Klingons, so what does he do? Goes out and blows up an ammunition dump. And that backed Kor against the wall in his holding of the hostages. It was Kirk’s actions that led to the “death” pf those Organians. Sure, Kor is the one that gave the order but Kirk is the one that deliberately did something that would cause Kir to make good on his threat.
I’m not saying Kor wasn’t a total bastard for giving the order but Kirk was amazing naive to think that the Klingon was bluffing.
There’s also ignores all the times that the Federation ignored request to leave people alone. Sure, it worked out for the best but only because the inhabitants of the planet aren’t in the opening credits.
An Illicit Thoughts Market. A Telepathic Dark Web. It honestly makes the whole thing pride before the fall. The Mari are convinced that they have completely eliminated violent thoughts and the compulsions for them. When all they’ve done is drive them underground, BUT they’re so convinced of their own enlightenment and infallibility that Nimira doesn’t even consider that a desire for negative emotions exists and has been commoditized. I don’t think she lacked in competence, I think she lacked in humility.
As a Navy man, we had a JAG officer on my ship…which usually seemed like a very boring job due to lack of work (most things were NJP/Captain’s Mast), though I didn’t see them very much so I could very well be wrong. We also had an NCIS office which amused me years later when the show came on. I can see why the Voyager crew didn’t have one assigned to go after the Maquis. They were primarily going to retrieve Tuvok, arresting Chakotay and company was a concurrent mission. I think Starfleet officers have the authority to make arrests, as Starfleet also covers the duties of the Coast Guard. But also they were on a retrieval mission, in the Alpha Quadrant there’s no great delay in due process for a Starfleet crew to arrest Maquis and bring them back to a Starbase for processing. An ELH isn’t actually a bad idea.
This conversation reminds me of the “There are no Therapists” Trope, except in Star Trek we actually have Therapists, but we have no lawyers.
I am concerned about a pacifist, empathic species with such rigidity in their application of the law. There is a compassionate argument to be made here. A surgical procedure on an alien neuro-physiology for the purposes of removing a memory that has risk of brain damage has to reach a degree of limitation. If there are a society that wishes to do no harm to the point that physical confinement is seen as a barbarity, then surely causing brain damage is beyond the pale. I wouldn’t say that Torres is innocent, even if she was set up, but the sentencing phase of the proceedings could take into account that this “enlightened” disciplinary action could end up being much more brutal on an alien than on of their own. It was concerning that THIS was the only punitive action on the books.
Also, how extensive was the procedure? Excising a thought is basically a memory erasure, but that does nothing to prevent the thought from recurring. They were talking about removing memory engrams not the Medulla Oblongata.
Another thing is how does the fact that Torres was deliberately framed to experience violent thoughts affect the charges against her? The crime seemed to be that she had a violent thought, without any consideration for the fact that it was coerced.
I get the feeling that this episode came from someone making a crack about an episode revolving around the Thought Police.
For all that people get on Starfleet characters for following the local laws where possible, it is funny to consider how lucky these aliens are to be running into Starfleet Officers. If it had been Klingons being charged for having a violent thought then the Mara planet would’ve been left an ash heap after threatening to lobotomize one of them for it. “He had a Violent thought!” “We are Klingon!“
I most definitely agree with those who describe this as a quintessentially STAR TREK episode – and as a rather good one to boot – though one must admit to having Dark Suspicions of the local ‘Chief Constable’ (that scene where Mr Tuvok mentioned the assault & battery type’s criminal record made me wonder if she was faking up charges to protect her ‘perfect’ system from accusations of imperfection and when that murder went down, the nastiest portion of my imagination anticipated something rather worse than a cover-up… ).
But then we got to the very, very Best part of a good episode and (unsurprisingly) it involved Mr Tuvok donning the metaphorical deerstalker to walk the mean streets (almost any episode where our favourite security officer gets to play sleuth is likely to be all the better for it); I can only wonder if those scenes between our man Tuvok and the perp played out as so hilariously slash-y by accident or to quite deliberately set up the Big Mind-Wrestle as an “Aw YEAH, now we’re talking!” moment.
In any case that moment where the local Sleaze suddenly realises he’s a sad puppy trying to chew the tail of a full-grown panther is one of those Golden Moments that makes watching television truly worthwhile (I’m only sorry we don’t get to see the moment where his equally-telepathic accomplices get hit by the psychic blow-back and RUN LIKE HELL, that can be inferred by the fact that there are three of them and only one of Tuvok).
That’s why the call him MISTER Vulcan (also why this episode wouldn’t have worked as well were it set in the Alpha Quadrant; one can only hope that after, several centuries of case studies, the Alphas would have got the message by now that we do NOT mess with a Vulcan’s brain).
Oh, and this episode provides strong evidence that Mr Neelix has a type; blonde, adorable, blessed with considerable psychic powers and doomed to die tragically young …
@49 This is why I have a fun little headcanon in which the Federation is a military dictatorship run by Starfleet. There almost never seems to be any authority who is NOT in Starfleet…
@54 One of the people sitting on the dias with the president at the end of TVH is in a Starfleet uniform as wearing the same medallion as the council members. My take on that is that when you join Starfleet, it’s like they have their own representative on the council. In a way, it’s like they’re their own planet.
I had almost no memory of this episode which is a surprise as it’s a really strong Tuvok story and Tim Russ is superb. I Guess this part of my memory of the show is heavily Seven of Nine orientated. The plot is not too taxing but it’s acted out well and the sinister Tuvok in the mind meld is truly frightening. A big call maybe but I think only Leonard Nimoy and Mark Leonard have been as good as being Vulcans as Tim Russ is and I am including Discovery and The JJ Abrahams movies in that. I am looking forward though to see Ethan Peck continue to play the younger Spock on Strange New Worlds. he showed flashes of promise on Discovery and I was never really a big fan of Zachary Quinto’s portrayal
The Mari do incarcerate people until the engramatic purge so doesn’t Nimira’s attitude towards imprisonment seem hypocritical? I think Tuvok should have been able to physically overpower the Mari. Seven’s closing arguments are mirrored by much of VGR’s fanbase – the crew seem to spend more time getting in and out of ever more dangerous situations than finding a way back to the AQ. They had to use footage from a film like Event Horizon because Paramount already owned the rights to it. Biden’s got my vote Krad (even though I’m coming to this review ten months after it was written).
1: The reset button at the end of Year of Hell negates Voyager repairing any more battle damage. 4: Janeway wants to have her cake and eat it. 5: Passing isolinear chips? 6: Tuvok said the exact same thing to Paris at the end of Ex Post Facto. 7: I like the idea of a legal hologram in the databanks because what would a real lawyer or a legal expert do in Voyager’s situation in between any legal disputes? 12: Why weren’t TOS sued? Denny Crane
There are some actors that don’t mind the makeup so it makes sense to rehire them because there are some who do it once and then swear off doing it ever again.
16: How is Voyager supposed to know anything about the species it encounters because the crew hails from a whole other quadrant? Neelix was able to provide the crew with knowledge of what they were about to face but that knowledge ran out about 10,000 light-years back. 20: In fairness, the crew believed the Hirogen relay network to be abandoned in Message in a Bottle but in Hunters, Janeway allowed her “selfish desire to get home” (to quote Arturis) to override her better judgment. 25: I would say the Borg fit the description of “space Nazis” more than the Cardassians do (even Paris makes that comparison in The Killing Game). Cardassians are more like jackals.
29: Paris has been in the captain’s chair before, like in Initiations. “Tug his whiskers” – she’s got him by the short and curlies! 30-31: Deja vu! 32: Uninhabited planets can still present danger, like the one that infected Janeway and Chakotay in Resolutions. 33: Nimira probably felt Torres has already done the crime so she may as well do the time. 35: That’s probably why Starfleet has the “psych test” to root out any potentially unstable Starfleet Academy candidates. 36: Well, the crew of the Equinox are only human and so is the Voyager crew. But I agree it’s unusual that more of the crew don’t leap to Torres’ defence.
39: Unfortunately we do get a lot of lazy writing where the writers come up with some magic, quick-fix solution. That’s what the fans thought at the end of Sacrifice of Angels. 40: There is something a bit Orwellian about the Mari the way they try to regulate how people think but like the future seen in Demolition Man, everyone is so nice about it. 46: Data could have examined the Treaty of Armens in half the time but he was away from the ship and would he have arrived at the same creative solution as Captain Picard? 50: I’ve often wondered how different Federation laws are to our own? How do you learn about Starfleet’s fictional legal precedents?
51: If you’re not an opening-credits regular that can make you more expendable. 52: Starfleet officers do have the authority to arrest people, like when Dax threatens Fullerton with arrest in Let He Who Is Without Sin… Babylon 5 had its own “Thought Police” with the Psi-Corps. 53: “hilariously slash-y” – it does recall the way Meld ended, doesn’t it? 55: What about when Worf and Nog joined Starfleet? Are there Klingon and Ferengi representatives on the Federation Council?
57: Watch Initiations again. Even though Paris is in command, he’s still sat at the helm when he’s not standing. I think the only other times we see him in the captain’s chair are when Janeway leaves him in charge of the bridge in Hunters and when he’s acting first officer in Unimatrix Zero, both of which come later.
In a world where violent thoughts let alone violent behaviour are extremely rare, how did Guill’s associates manage to overpower Mr Vulcan, somebody who presumably has had a great deal of training in unarmed combat, not to mention street fighting experience? My memory from watching this episode when it was first broadcast was that they were overwhelmed by the difference between violent thought and true violent action.
I have two complaints about this episode:
1) the Mari kept B’Elanna in the brig/prison until the procedure started. Funny, considering how Nimira reacted to keeping anyone in a brig even for a short time.
2) Tuvok not having any logical concerns with the idea of having Nimira as investigator, judge and executioner of the judgement…If i didn’t know him better, i’d say he was…biased. :)
I’m curious why so many people think the Voyager crew should have had more knowledge about the Mari laws. It’s uncharted space for them. Heck, even on TNG where the space was explored, a mind as amazing as Data’s often had to resort to “we know little about the _________.” And Nelix’s own knowledge of this quadrant was vastly oversold. In Year of Hell, he didn’t know anything about the Kremil.
Still. the subject of this episode was fascinating. I got into that. I didn’t get into Janeway’s need to uphold the laws of the Mari. Tores got back to the ship for a bit of a bit. Just leave orbit. There’s nothing righteous about following an unjust law, particularly if you’re just passing through.
As to why the Mari didn’t just let them go, well, maybe scrambling people’s brains is Nimira’s own sublimation of repressed violent thoughts. Plus, it lets people know there’s still teeth in the law, I guess.
Funny thing. Memory Alpha says one of the clips used in Tuvok’s negative thoughts is the energy ribbon from Star Trek: Generations. I don’t know which ribbon scene they used, but it’s funny that Tim Russ in a different role saw the ribbon. I’m guessing this was a blink-and-you’ll-miss it joke and not an implication of some alternate universe, but it’s pretty neat.