“Retrospect”
Written by Andrew Shepard Price & Mark Gaberman and Bryan Fuller & Lisa Klink
Directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño
Season 4, Episode 17
Production episode 185
Original air date: February 25, 1998
Stardate: 51658.2
Captain’s log. Voyager has traveled to Enthara, where they have been negotiating with a weapons dealer named Kovin, trying to beef up Voyager‘s tactical specs in light of the ongoing Hirogen threat. Once they settle on terms, Janeway and Chakotay agree to let Seven out of the penalty box so she can help Torres and Kovin install the systems.
In engineering, Kovin is a condescending shit, and shoves Seven out of the way because he thinks she’s doing it wrong. Her response is to palm-heel him in the nose.
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The EMH treats Kovin, who is livid, thinking he has done nothing to warrant this treatment. Seven herself can’t explain why she had such an extreme reaction to Kovin’s behavior, which was creepy, but not really worthy of assault and battery. And then when the EMH examines her, she flinches when he brings instruments near her. When he tries to examine her, she has an anxiety attack when he puts the diagnostic cover over her.
According to a brain scan, she has evidence of repressed memories. The EMH recommends a psychiatric treatment that will help bring those memories to the fore. He’s been adding therapy-based subroutines to his program, since Voyager doesn’t have a ship’s counselor. Janeway gives the okay, and he proceeds in the cargo bay—a familiar setting to make Seven comfortable.
The memories start to come back to Seven: she recalls Kovin demonstrating some weapons for Seven and Paris. They want to make an adjustment to a rifle. Seven and Kovin go to do that while Paris checks out some other weapons. Once they’re in the lab, Kovin turns his weapon on Seven and renders her unconscious, then puts her on a table and extracts several of her nanoprobes, then alters her memories so she forgets what happened. When she “wakes up,” Kovin says that the rifle overloaded and rendered her unconscious.
The EMH believes Seven’s story that she was violated. Tuvok cautions that human memories are not always reliable, but the EMH also has the evidence in Seven’s own nanoprobes that indicate tampering. Janeway agrees that they must investigate further.
Kovin vociferously denies any wrongdoing. He also says that Entharan culture is such that even the accusation would torpedo his career as a weapons dealer. He insists that the rifle overloaded, and it caused the change in Seven’s nanoprobes that the EMH saw. However, Janeway refuses to back down, and so Kovin allows his lab to be examined by Tuvok and the EMH, under the direction of an Entharan magistrate.
The biological evidence indicates that Seven is telling the truth, and the magistrate says it’s enough to hold Kovin and starting a formal inquiry. Kovin’s response to this is to transport to his ship and run away.
While Voyager goes after Kovin, Janeway and the EMH examine the evidence further, and in the lab they realize that the rifle overloading could indeed have caused the change to the nanoprobes that the EMH detected. When they catch up to Kovin, they tell him that they misread the evidence, and to please turn himself in. He instead fires on Voyager, and then his weapons array overloads and the ship blows up.
Seven is confused by her feelings of remorse, while the EMH is devastated by the fact that he jumped to conclusions, and offers to remove his program additions. Janeway refuses to let him.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Kovin is peddling isokinetic cannons. The prefix “iso” means “equal,” so apparently the weapons have equal kinetics? I guess?
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is at her wit’s end with how to discipline Seven, as nothing seems to work. Of course, she was the one who thought it was a good idea to try to integrate an ex-Borg into the crew in the first place…
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok promises a thorough and impartial investigation, which only placates Kovin until that investigation doesn’t get the result Kovin wanted, at which point, he runs away.
Half and half. When reporting to Janeway on what went down in engineering when Seven decked Kovin, Torres is very obviously enjoying the fact that Kovin got socked in the face, and is almost admiring of how Seven hauled off and decked him. Given that it’s a method of disagreeing with a colleague that Torres herself used on Joe Carey way back when, this isn’t surprising…
Resistance is futile. Seven deals with repressed memories and anger and remorse. She also acts very much like someone who has survived a sexual assault in the early going.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH has been tinkering with his program again, this time adding therapeutic and psychiatric treatments to his program. This has mostly better results than the last time he tinkered…
Do it.
“When I started helping you improve your social skills, I’m fairly certain I didn’t include a boxing lesson.”
–The EMH’s response to Seven after she decked Kovin.
Welcome aboard. Michael Horton, who played Enterprise-E tactical officer Daniels in the movies First Contact and Insurrection, plays Kovin, while Adrian Sparks plays the magistrate.
Trivial matters: Bryan Fuller and Lisa Klink’s method of collaborating on this script was to each write every other scene.
Janeway refers to Seven having been behaving herself lately, a reference to Janeway having to confine her to the cargo bay and astrometrics at the end of “Prey.”
The last time the EMH altered his program, it was to improve his bedside manner, with disastrous results in “Darkling.”
The crew make reference to facing the Hirogen, whom they’ve had encounters with in each of the last three episodes, “Message in a Bottle,” “Hunters,” and “Prey,” and who will be back in the following two-parter.
Tuvok and the EMH discuss the last time Seven had repressed memories brought to the fore, in “The Raven.”
Set a course for home. “That guy is worse than a Ferengi.” I really have a deep-seated loathing for this episode. It fails on nearly every possible level, and provides a despicable message.
Okay, let’s start with the biggest problem, which is procedural. Yes, they do turn up evidence that supports Kovin’s account of what happens. But that, in and of itself, doesn’t negate Seven’s account! The fact that there are two possible conclusions to draw from the evidence doesn’t mean that one is automatically right and one is wrong. Yes, Occam’s Razor would indicate that Kovin’s story is more plausible, especially since Seven’s repressed memories included an Entharan being assimilated into a Borg, of which there’s no evidence (indeed it isn’t even mentioned again after the therapy session). But Kovin’s own behavior is indicative of guilt. Yes, just the accusation is damaging to his reputation, but so is running away from justice.
In an interview in the official Voyager magazine, Bryan Fuller said that he and Lisa Klink deliberately avoided there being anything sexual in the attack on Seven because they didn’t want it to be about rape. The notion that rape can only be sexual is a flawed one, which is probably why their intent so completely and totally failed. For one thing, Jeri Ryan 100% played Seven’s reactions to Kovin being creepy in the teaser and the EMH examining her in sickbay as someone who is suffering from PTSD after a sexual assault. If she didn’t really experience what she says Kovin did to her, why is she flinching at the EMH’s examination?
In 1998, this was very much an episode about the unreliability of human memory, and how repressed memories aren’t always dependable. But watching in 2020, all I see is a yet another woman who has been assaulted and nobody believes her once the slightest doubt is cast, plus there’s concern about the reputation of the man who is accused. I was appalled to watch this show turn into a colloquy on how horrible it is when women accuse men of rape because look at what that accusation does to the poor man, never mind that the woman was—to use the word the script itself uses—violated.
If the procedural elements had been better written, if it had been more clear that the evidence exonerated Kovin, that would be one thing. I’d still be unhappy about it, but at least it would’ve worked on its own terms. But everything in the episode points to doubt, and even if Kovin’s version of events is more plausible, he still ran away rather than face justice and fired on Voyager when they tracked him down. Whether or not he’s guilty of assaulting Seven, he’s definitely guilty of fleeing arrest and of assault on Voyager. And the fact that Janeway looks accusingly at Seven after Kovin blows himself up is absurd—it’s not Seven’s fault that this asshole went all fugitive on everyone. That was his choice, and if he paid the ultimate price for it, it’s of his own making, not Seven’s.
This had all the makings of a strong psychological thriller, and it has some excellent performances by Ryan as a traumatized Seven who doesn’t know what to do with the unfamiliar feelings she’s having, and by Robert Picardo as an EMH who’s trying out a new thing. But the execution is botched, and in a manner that is morally repugnant.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s next novel is Animal, a thriller he wrote with Dr. Munish K. Batra, about a serial killer who targets people who harm animals. It’s now available for preorder, and if you preorder it directly from WordFire Press before the 24th of December, you get a free urban fantasy short story by Keith.
I could never figure out what this episode was trying to do, and it seems like no one who worked on it could, either. This doesn’t really tell us anything new about Seven, since we already knew she had some repressed memories in “The Raven,” but since we never figure out what it is she is reacting to (and the episode seems to tell us that it wasn’t whatever happened with Kovin, so what the heck was it?) it doesn’t give us anything new about her. We don’t really learn anything new or interesting about an alien culture here (although props to the writing team for actually having the Hirogen attacks matter outside an episode they appear in), so it isn’t even good from that perspective. Honestly, I wish it had focused more on Janeway being in over her head with dealing with Seven (maybe if the Maquis had ever given her more than token problems she would have been more ready to deal with this), but the show always seemed to shy away from the idea that Janeway was ever overwhelmed or out of her depth, unless some time travel weirdness would fix it (minus “Night”), so we don’t get anything there.
I wish the show had done more with Torres and Seven, honestly. They are so much alike in so many ways, and it would have been interesting to see them move on from their disagreements and into real friendship, maybe even with B’Elanna in a big-sister type role for her. Once the B’Elanna-Tom will they-won’t they ended there wasn’t all that much for her to do, and it would have been a nice way to get Dawson some screen time where she got to do less technobabble and more character work.
This is an episode my wife and I always skip when we rewatch Voyager episodes. It was preachy about repressed memories back in the mid-1990s, and it hasn’t aged any better for all the reasons Keith lists in his analysis.
The authors might have been trying to deal with the furore over repressed memories that was fresh in the news at the time – stories of sexual abuse and satanic ritual at daycares, etc. – and how those ultimately false accusations had a ruinous effect on reputations. However, The Children’s Hour did a better job of the consequences of false accusations over thirty years earlier.
I would not be surprised if they’ve taken this episode out of syndication. Two things stand out other than horrified disbelief at the episode’s message. One is that I’m reasonably sure the Doctor’s approach to recovering memories is likely to result in the creation of false memories. Two, it could have been much worse. Seven’s accusations are taken seriously even if her account isn’t treated like “proper” evidence. In order to rescue everyone else from their skepticism, the episode really needed to state outright “The Borg made Seven thought she’d been assaulted.”
Now that I write that last sentence, I’m not sure it would have helped.
Making Seven the victim offers a convenient technobabble metaphor and solution, not that either worked as intended but it would have been a good call back to make Paris the focus. A male victim would have distanced the assault from rape as far as the mid-90s mainstream is concerned though it would have given them the chance for a new set of unfortunate implications.
I have trouble blaming Kovin for running here. Voyager isn’t the law or the local government; its just a ship full of people he was selling weapons to. If he was innocent, he wouldn’t really have had any way to know for certain that they weren’t just trying to avoid paying him for the weapons by setting this up.
That doesn’t make his death Seven’s fault. But I can see why he ran.
Otherwise I agree; this was a bad episode.
Rob: There was an Entharan magistrate right there in the room, and he was the one who wanted to detain him. Kovin wasn’t running from Voyager, he was running from the legitimate authorities on his own world.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One thing they didn’t talk about is the female Enaran who was supposed to be helping Kovin extract technology from Seven. They could have asked if she was real, or if anyone saw her in the lab. There could have been more shown on the investigation side. This episode gave me the “yucks” and I will not watch it again, that’s for sure.
Thank you. I agree with your analysis and appreciate your condemnation of this episode. I never watch this one on rewatches.
I was well into adulthood when this came out, and I’m still working through on why it bothers me so much. I am a woman, and I was not ever physically sexually abused. But I’m only now realizing how triggering this episode is for me.
It’s not just the fear and trauma of what might have happened to Seven and her not being believed, it’s the (to me) outright implication that she cannot believe or trust herself.
As I said, I was never raped or physically assaulted. But I went from a verbally and emotionally abusive childhood and adolescence, that included inappropriate comments and innuendo, to a spiritually abusive church in high school and college. You know, the kind where the women are made to feel responsible for every man’s every sinful thought and impulse, because no matter how modest we act or dress, we must still have a “seductive spirit.”
I can deal with people not believing me, but much, much harder to deal with the gaslighting, then and now. I know I can’t change those people. But that feeling like I can’t trust and believe myself, changing that is the most painful and excruciatingly difficult part of recovery. For me, that is by far the most long lasting and damaging consequence of abuse.
But I can trust how much I hate this episode.
I think I kind of liked this one at the time, for its skepticism about repressed memories and its reminder that everyone has a right to be presumed innocent, no matter how heinous the accusation against them. But I may have also been uneasy with the implications of a woman’s assault accusations not being believed. I’m not sure, really, since it’s been so long. In any case, it was going for ambiguity, a situation with no easy answers, and I appreciated that, at least. In retrospect, though, it does have unfortunate implications.
It was also unusual to see Michael Horton play an antagonistic character. I knew him best as Jessica Fletcher’s nephew Grady from Murder, She Wrote (a character who was frequently accused of murders he didn’t commit, so I wonder if there was a casting in-joke here) and as the voice of Arn in The Legend of Prince Valiant (a dreadfully animated but superbly written and acted syndicated series based on the classic comic strip, though Arn was reinterpreted as Valiant’s same-age sidekick rather than his son). He was also Colonel John Jameson (J. Jonah’s astronaut son) in the ’90s Spider-Man animated series, and apparently he was Rick Jones in the ’80s Incredible Hulk cartoon that I never saw. I was used to thinking of him as a friendly, soft-spoken nice-guy type, so seeing him cast as an arrogant jerk and a possible predator was quite a change.
The obvious analogy my mind jumps to is the ritual satanic abuse scares in the eighties. Now, I’d be really careful about doing that storyline at all, but if we were going to try and fit it into Voyager, it probably would have been better served by making it about the younger Ex-Borg who’ll eventually join the ship, and establishing their vulnerability to suggestion and prompted responses.
I appreciate the Doctor’s intention to fill an important gap in the crew’s need, but given what happened last time he tried to self adjust, I wonder where he dug up these particular subroutines.
I don’t like the ‘running = guilty’ trope almost as much as I don’t like the ‘but are you really sure you were raped’ trope. (So yay for an episode that shoves both in one crappy package.) They both lean into a just world mindset where people asking for justice must behave exactly perfectly or else obviously they are guilty/liars.
Running can only begin to be considered an indication of guilt if the accused can be sure they will receive a fair hearing upon capture. Any animal with a fight, flight, or freeze response is reacting in a completely predictable manner if their brain lands on flight. As Rob says above, there’s no way Kovin can be sure what kind of justice he can look for from the Voyager, regardless of his guilt or not, so it’s completely unsurprising to me that he’d try to run.
Ohmarshmellow: as I said above, Kovin wasn’t running from Voyager, he was running from the Entharen magistrate.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Another lazy forehead alien. This one was uncomfortable because if you look too closely it resembles another part of the human anatomy…
Not sure why this guy chose death over a trial. Run, yeah, but to deliberately force your death? Doesn’t make sense.
This is one episode that I must have seen first run but had no memory of until watching it again a few years ago. I assume that as a kid the implications went way over my head, but yeah watching it now is just exasperating at best. It all seems so deliberately constructed to tell us that Seven and the Doctor messed up and an innocent man died as a result, but the plot is full of holes, the characters aren’t acting like themselves, and the apparently unintended message is horrible. I’m surprised it even managed a 3, I’d call this a 1 personally.
erictheread: I went back and forth on the rating for this. Ultimately it went up to a 3 because of the superb acting by Ryan and Picardo.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Hypnotic retrieval of repressed memory is extremely iffy because of the suggestibility of hypnotic subjects, as we learned the hard way at the end of the twentieth century. But there is a major issue here, if Seven was not traumatized as she described what triggered her violent reaction and flinching? Something is definitely wrong there and cannot be explained away by a rifle misfire. Secondly Kovin’s reaction is not that of an innocent man. If even an accusation is damaging his only hope is to prove his innocence,running is not going to help, and firing on pursuit is incredibly stupid under any circumstances. Maybe he didn’t violate Seven but I’m betting he did something that he can’t afford to have revealed. And if he’s not responsible for her trauma the EMH has to find out what is because her symptoms are not imaginary.
@krad
“It fails on nearly possible level”
Missing an “every” in there?
@17: Sentence updated with “every”–thanks!
@krad: Ooh, fair point; I didn’t remember that.
Speaking as a criminal defense attorney the only “evidence” of Kovin’s guilt was Seven’s repressed memories and others here have pointed out the problem with those. Meanwhile there was evidence he was telling the truth. Defendants run all the time; as far as we know the Entharen criminal “justice” system is like the Cardassians’. Plus would you blame a young Black male for running from certain police departments? There certainly was not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.
But when they catch up with Kovin and tell him there’s evidence supporting his story he fires on them! That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And the fact remains that something is up with Seven and if it’s not Kovin they need to find out what it is.
Release voyager on Blu ray already for Christ sakes…and do a damn spin off of seven of nine already because the character is so badass.
My only addition to all of the already well though out and warranted critiques of this episode is that the writers may have well used such a terribly played out situation to also demonstrate to the viewer that any violation of the lingering socio-economic moral codes of Gene Roddenberry will see misfortune befall the crew, namely purchasing weapons.
ST was not comfortable with the concept of commerce for a long time, and even more so when it came to talking about the need to upgrade the defensive power of their ships in light of clear threats. DS9 was the first time they mentioned both upgrading stations weapons as a priority and the fact that ST built warships like the defiance. Even then, Quark is still looked down upon by the station authorities for dealing in weapons legally (though they at least acknowledge their acceptability when sold to *freedom fighters* like the Bajorans).
So here while it acceptable for a Starfleet vessel to develop their own weapons of mass destruction, they are not allowed to actually participate in the legal purchase of them.
Well, call me crazy but I actually liked this one and it goes beyond the good performances. I just think it’s a good story about the always timely issue of rushing to judgment and going on a witch hunt for a possibly innocent party no matter how sketchy the character of that party is. The ambiguity of Kovin and what transpired was well painted, because he definitely was not a likable person, but that doesn’t equal guilt. And as others have said, running away doesn’t equal guilt either, especially when it is known or likely that the enforcers have already presumed guilt against the suspected party. Besides, Kovin is from an alien society. We can’t expect aliens to act like humans or members of the Federation. It’s wrong for Janeway to make Seven feel guilty for Kovin’s death when Seven may have been very well violated by him. If anything, I thought the EMH portrayed himself very badly here because he seemed to be “hyping up” Seven’s outrage as well as presuming Kovin’s guilt instead of being impartial. Besides, as a doctor with a huge library of medical knowledge at his disposal, he should well know that human memory is not infallible. Also, people seem to be forgetting that Seven’s flinching reaction could have to do with a repressed memory as it relates to being violated and mutilated by the Borg when she was first assimilated. And I didn’t see it as Jeri Ryan necessarily playing it like a sexual violation. A violation of the body could be anything, not just sexual, such as torture and mutilation, or being confined and held in place against one’s will. I’d rate this one a 6.
I always saw this episode as a commentary on how some therapists often invent trauma and convince patients that they are victims when really nothing ever happened and nothing is really wrong. They talk patients into being angry and fighting back. This episode depicts how dangerous this can be and how innocent lives can be destroyed. The real villain in this episode is actually the EMH.
The subject matter of this episode also reminded me of the real life case and events portrayed in the documentary Capturing the Friedmans about a man and his adult son who were accused of child molestation of young students being taught out of their home. The suspects in question were “sketchy” and eccentric but they kept proclaiming their innocence and the memories and testimony of the children turned out to be not truthful and manipulated by the police. It’s a very good documentary and worth checking out.
I can see the problematic aspect of depicting a story about sexual assault where we’re asked to sympathize with the accused perpetrator. But I don’t have much of a problem myself with the episode. It certainly doesn’t play all that well in 2020, but I imagine it did okay back in ’98.
Obviously, the fact that Kovin runs away so readily on Act 5 is in itself a big cliché, and it makes for a very cheap resolution to what’s a very challenging and complex story. It’s that old tired ’90s sensibility. If you run away, you’re by definition guilty (that’s supposed to be sarcastic, to be clear). I used to hate stories where cops mowed down unarmed suspects just for running away from the scene. And then we get a story where the guy is under investigation, but could easily be cleared given the evidence. And yet, he just happens to make that stupid move because the plot demands action, conflict and a clear resolution. It’s lazy storytelling. Reminds me of the more clichéd populist police movies and shows.
Putting that nitpicking aside, I actually appreciate Retrospect more than most. A lot of that is obviously due to Ryan and Picardo’s superlative performances. I also have a soft spot for the episode in a more serialized context. Not only they’re involved in this weapons testing plot because of the ongoing Hirogen arc, but Seven’s trauma serves as an ice breaker for her and Janeway, following the events of Prey. Of course, Janeway the mother is going to put the punishment for what Seven did on Prey aside, so she can investigate and help a person she’s come to see as a daughter. Is it forced? Probably, but to me, it still works as part of the ongoing Janeway/Seven arc.
And having the Doctor be on full patient safeguarding mode never fails to generate tension. If Voyager were a legal drama, Picardo would be right at home playing the most staunch defense attorney. His actions speak loud with truth and conviction.
Retrospect would probably have been a much stronger episode, had they left it in a more ambiguous state. But there’s no way a Voyager episode under Rick Berman would end without some form of firm and clear resolution. So, to me, it’s a half-decent episode let down by an ending that creates more uncomfortable feelings in 2020.
Of course, there’s no way Klink and Fuller could predict in 1998 how Retrospect was going to age in our social context; but it’s unfair to ask for writers to future-proof their episodes. Nicholas Meyer said it best. “Art is byproduct of the era it was made in“. Not that the episode is off-limits from legitimate criticism regarding its very dated sexual politics either, but it’s a point still worth making.
@27/Eduardo: “It’s that old tired ’90s sensibility. If you run away, you’re by definition guilty …”
But the episode wasn’t saying Kovin was guilty. On the contrary, it said that he was probably innocent and died as a result of the Doctor’s mistake. It was the opposite of going for a clear, simple resolution. The simple resolution would’ve been him turning himself in and the investigation finding the truth. Instead, they went for the morally ambiguous ending — he disbelieves them and gets himself killed, and they realize they may have hounded an innocent man to his death, but they’ll never really know for sure.
Shooting at people who are telling you they’ve got evidence supporting your side of the story makes no sense. That should have been a signal for both Kovin and Seven to calm down and reassess. Something triggered Seven and she hit Kovin. Both should be interested in finding out what that was.
And Kovin’s death was his fault, not Seven’s or the Doctor’s. He opened fire.
“When Kovin gets what he deserves, you’re going to feel much better.”
Knowing where this is going, it’s hard not to wince at the mistakes the Doctor makes during the memory retrieval. He fails to consider the possibility that Kovin grabbing Seven in engineering was as innocent a trigger as his own medical examination and has resulted in Seven getting confused. He follows her mostly-accurate recollection of being alone with Kovin by asking her about the laboratory, creating a discontinuity and leading her to a false memory. He’s not alone in this. Janeway and Tuvok try to be impartial, but they’ve been presented with a theory and they’re trying to make the evidence fit it instead of judging it objectively.
The Doctor fails as a therapist as well. Instead of helping Seven come to terms with things, he stirs her up into a quest for vengeance, presenting it as the solution to all her problems. Except that revenge never comes and when Kovin does suffer, instead of satisfaction, they’re faced with a tragedy.
Paris mentions he’d like one of Kovin’s weapons next time they run into the Hirogen, a neat way of keeping the story arc alive.
I think some of the comments on here are overly suspicious of Kovin. This doesn’t come across as the cold act of a criminal, but as an act of panic from someone seeing his life destroyed by something he doesn’t understand. His death seems to be a complete accident because he’s paranoid and thinks everyone’s out to get him and doesn’t notice the danger lights. Yes, it’s a magistrate from his own world overseeing things, but otherwise it’s the friends of his accuser who carry out both the investigation and the pursuit, one of whom is clearly and openly biased and hostile towards him.
I have been fortunate enough to have never had any personal involvement in anything like this but I once served on the jury of a case of a sexual assault against a child. It was right after the whole scandal of it turning out the British police had ignored repeated accusations against Jimmy Savile, where things here in the UK had swung completely the other way, laying charges against everyone in the hope some would stick. The prosecution didn’t offer a shred of evidence except for the confused account of a child who contradicted herself and was contradicted by independent witnesses including ones on her side. It felt like her parents had influenced her, we saw from recordings of police interviews with her that they’d tried to put ideas in her head. And then we went into deliberation and there were three people in there who were determined to find him guilty: One claimed to be an ex-police officer (yet showed a shocking lack of awareness of court procedure) and took the viewpoint of “The police wouldn’t put him on trial if there wasn’t conclusive evidence”, one was apparently a psychologist and her argument was basically that children couldn’t lie, one just took the viewpoint of “How can you believe a man over a child?” And slowly nearly the entire jury was won over and he was found guilty by a majority verdict. I’ve no idea if he was guilty or not, but I didn’t see enough evidence to convince me, and whenever I think about it, I’m left to ponder whether I saw an innocent man’s life ruined and didn’t do enough to stop it. And that was someone who co-operated fully with the police to the point of reporting the accusation himself and it didn’t do him any good.
A few years later, it was reported that, with convictions being reviewed and overturned, the police had backtracked from a policy of “Always believe the accuser” to “Show the accuser sympathy but remain impartial.” Maybe it was too late for some.
I’m sorry if all that offends anyone but yes, sometimes an accusation can be damaging even without evidence.
@28/Christopher: But that’s just it. All the evidence in the episode points to Korin being likely innocent, but by having the character choose the rash running away option, it only gives ammunition to the more strident viewers who were already set on judging him guilty, regardless of the accuracy in the details. That’s why I put the sarcasm comment in parenthesis. I wasn’t saying he was guilty, but there are people who would label someone guilty just for acting scared and irrational when they’re being targeted, which is what Korin did. I’d rather the writers not give them that cheap ammo.
Personally, I feel it would have been far more effective if he hadn’t run away, with Doctor thus finding the evidence proving that his previous conclusions weren’t so conclusive after all, and he’d be declared innocent. Then, the episode could end with Seven being both frustrated and unsure of herself, not to mention having her faculties questioned by Janeway and the crew, making for a far more unsettling ending.
Plus it would plant a seed for the upcoming fifth season episode Infinite Regress. Seven was a Borg, and that episode’s multiple personality disorder plot is a clear sign that her mind is still struggling. If she can develop multiple personalities, there’s no reason to not assume her Borg memories could play other tricks, such as assume she was violated when in fact she was not.
This episode has undoubtedly aged badly – and was somewhat unevenly constructed even at the time of its first being aired – but it is if nothing else an outstanding argument in favour of that grand old tradition in Scottish Law, the verdict ‘Not Proven.’
As a number of observers have already pointed out, there’s very little unambiguous proof in favour of Mr Kovin’s Guilt or Innocence (one point I have yet to see made is that, given Mr Kovin has access to a transporter, there’s no guarantee Seven of Nine’s violation needed to have taken place on the premises where he demonstrated his wares – the ones that were later examined by Mr Tuvok & the Voyager EMH, under supervision of the local Magistrate); it’s also implicit, but not explicitly mentioned, that the Voyager crew stopped digging after Mr Kovin’s death ride (which leaves at least three loose ends – the female assistant in Seven of Nine’s recollection, the poor body infested with Borg nanotechnology in same and her own lingering trauma which, as mentioned above, is still there*).
* Though now without any readily apparent point of origin or, for that matter, any prior record of such behaviour from Seven of Nine; if this was trauma lingering for her days with the Collective, why erupt now and why focus on Mr Kovin? (Could it have been the brief regeneration of the nano machines in her left hand, triggered by that careless mishandling of the rifle?).
In all honesty this episode leaves us with at least one or two additional questions that all remain unanswered along with the ones posed above, yet declines to pursue the investigation any further in favour of the Voyager crew accepting guilt and pressing on, as is the way of a network show with a preference for self-contained episodes; a perfectly understandable reaction in the circumstances but quite possibly the most frustrating possible outcome to this particular case.
Of these unanswered questions, not the least important – and perhaps the one that would be the easiest & most useful to answer – is “Who are the Entharans?”
A more fully-rounded understanding of this species (and, given the world on which we meet them for the first and only time is described as a colony, it would have been perfectly possible to show the Voyager crew encounter this civilisation at least once or twice more in the course of this season as they headed deeper into their territory) would have helped us to better understand what pressures shaped Mr Kovin and drove him to his last extremity – allowing us to form a much more rounded, though not necessarily much clearer picture of his actions (that seem clearly enough motivated, for Fear is a hard motivation to misunderstand, but otherwise difficult to comprehend).
Given all that we know of the Entharan Justice System is that it operates through magistrates, apparently works on the presumption of guilt and tends to cater to valuable (alien) customers it’s easy to understand Mr Kovin’s desire to run, but his preferring to continue the attack runs that led to his own death even AFTER being told they’d found evidence apparently exonerating is quite incomprehensible … unless Entharan Law Enforcement has a very, very ugly reputation indeed (or perhaps unless Entharan society as a whole has a long tradition of failing to honour its promises for the sake of convenience).
Or perhaps Mr Kovin was just projecting some past dishonesty of his own onto Voyager and the magistrate; without any further encounters with Entharan civilisation on record, it seems highly unlikely we’ll ever know.
In sum, as a criminal case the only verdict I can return on the events of ‘Retrospect’ is Not Proven; as an episode of Voyager once can only say that it must have missed the mark more than it hit even at the time and has not improved with hindsight (though for my money what condemns it to this particular limbo is an ending that completely fails to stick the landing by insisting that not only is the case closed, there remains not even the slightest room to doubt Mr Kovin’s innocence).
Not the worst hour of STAR TREK – possibly not even one of the worst – but unquestionably amongst the more frustrating.
@31. Eduardo Jencarelli: I definitely agree that your take on the conclusion would have flowed more elegantly with the rest of this episode – Mr Kovin’s flight seems perfectly logical in the circumstances however ill-advised (if any merchant has a right to be nervous it’s a Delta Quadrant arms merchant), but his death ride against Voyager seems downright bizarre (registering less as a desperate man lashing out in panic, more as suicide by cop).
Honestly, the more I reflect on this whole sorry business, the more convinced I am that either he had something to hide (not necessarily the violation of Seven of Nine) or the Entharan Justice System has the sort of reputation that suggests some deeply unpleasant things about that culture …
Seeing a lot of comments that paint the picture of Kovin being an innocent victim just because he ran away. Did anybody finish watching the episode? Sure, Kovin runs away. But then he turns around and opens fire. Running away is not what got Kovin killed. This is not the same thing as cops shooting an unarmed suspect who was trying to flee. This would be like cops chasing someone, yelling at them to stop because they weren’t a suspect any longer. But the suspect opens fire on them instead. The cops don’t return fire but take cover and keep trying to plead for the suspect to stop and talk to them. The suspect ignores them, turns around, comes at the cops, and keeps firing at them. The cops still don’t open fire, but continue to plead with the suspect. The gun then jams, causing it to explode, killing the suspect with shrapnel. Not exactly the same thing as cops killing a fleeing suspect, now is it?
@29/roxana: “Shooting at people who are telling you they’ve got evidence supporting your side of the story makes no sense.”
He said he didn’t believe them and thought they were luring him into a trap. If you believe people are out to get you, then it’s understandable that you’d be suspicious of them suddenly saying what you want to hear. The saying “Too good to be true” exists for a reason.
@31/Eduardo: “But that’s just it. All the evidence in the episode points to Korin being likely innocent, but by having the character choose the rash running away option, it only gives ammunition to the more strident viewers who were already set on judging him guilty, regardless of the accuracy in the details.”
I don’t care about that. There will always be audience members who let their biases and agendas distort their reading of a text, so you can’t worry about that. All that matters is what the text actually says. If there are viewers who come away assuming he’s guilty, then they’ve missed the whole point of the story.
And I don’t agree at all that having Kovin survive and be exonerated would be more unsettling. Then the only consequence for the Doctor and Seven’s mistake would be a temporary inconvenience and insult to the guy. That’s minor compared to feeling partially responsible for his unnecessary death.
As a survivor of sexual assault who was told that she was lying and the man who didn’t couldn’t possibly have done so because he’s a nice man, this episode is inexcusable.
Not because it’s 2020 now, mind you. The events shown were inexcusable when the episode aired originally; people have been failing women like this for a long time. That this episode was made further indicts the authors, this is not a situation of historical relativism.
The fact of the matter is that no one believes Seven. The Doctor does at first, but given a single piece of thoroughly controvertible evidence, he leaves her out to dry. This happens every day in the United States and around the world – the minute a shred of doubt is introduced, the story of a sexual assault victim is discounted. Even here, we are discussing whether her memories might have been suggested by the Doctor, rather than saying “yes, I believe the woman saying she was assaulted.”
And Kovin might as well be Brock Turner. Who cares what happened to Seven, let’s focus on the man! His whole life has been ruined! What great things might he have gone on to if he hadn’t been wrongfully accused of assault?
I know what happened to me, and Seven knows what happened to her. Both of us were told that we had to put the idea of justice aside, because it might/did ruin someone’s life. I’m still angry about that, and she has every right to be as well.
@35/CLB: “There will always be audience members who let their biases and agendas distort their reading of a text, so you can’t worry about that. All that matters is what the text actually says.”
Or we could just believe the woman who says she was assaulted.
@36-MeredithP
I agree with what you said, and thank you for saying it – unsurprisingly I am also an assault survivor.
I don’t see the need to reiterate points that have already been made so I just wanted to bring up something else that really bothered me about this episode.
“Who cares what happened to Seven, let’s focus on the man!”
I’d say that same criticism could be made on the episode’s focus on the doctor. As excellent as the performance was, when I first saw this episode I could not shake my fury on how all the conclusion’s pathos was reserved for the doctor. His guilt, the lesson he learned, how he must be reassured of his value.
While Seven is sent to the corner to think about what she did, the doctor gets to have some one on one soul-searching time with the captain. By choosing to end the episode the way they did the writers made their beliefs clear – consequences for speaking up about an assault are the victim’s responsibility alone. The real tragedy is the poor people who’s sense of self is damaged after their efforts to aggrandize themselves don’t pay off.
@37, so you say that if a woman says she was assaulted we should not investigate, nor seek for any evidence, we should just believe her, because she is a woman? Should we do the same if a man says he was assaulted? I don’t want to dismiss the huge problem of victims not being believed, but I think there should be a reasonable middle ground where the accusations are taken seriously, but the accused person still gets the chance to prove his or her innocence.
As for the episode, I think they jumped to conclusions way too quickly. It would’ve been more effective if they had shown the crew more divided about Kovin’s guilt and discussing the ambiguity more.
@38 That is a good point about how much emphasis this episode places on the doctor, instead of on Seven. Don’t get me wrong, I love Picardo getting more screen time, but yea, that time should have gone to Seven here. It’s made even more frustrating by the fact that *something* clearly happened to Seven, even if it wasn’t the arms dealer assaulting her, and the episode just kind of skims over that and sends her to her room.
What I found upsetting was how quickly the crew turned this whole thing against Seven. While it is entirely possible Kovin was innocent, clearly Seven had something very bad happen to her that was triggered by this whole experience, and the fact that by the end they have so little compassion for her always felt rather cruel and jarring to me.
@37/Meredith: Of course I’m not endorsing the episode’s position. I’m addressing the fact that some viewers misread it as saying Kovin was guilty. Rather, it was saying he was probably innocent and Seven was wrong. And that, as you say, is what makes it objectionable. Those viewers missed the point and therefore didn’t see the real problem with that point.
I’m just saying it’s important to get our facts straight before we judge, for better or worse. Saying that someone misunderstands a text is not necessarily a defense of that text; on the contrary, it could mean that they’re being too kind to it.
@34. Austin: As fine-tuning to your essentially sound metaphor, one might argue the situation is comparable to seeing a suspect make a break for it, leap into their car and roar off with the detectives in hot pursuit – the detectives close the gap, the suspect fires at them (being a weapons dealer obviously he has a piece on hand), while the sleuths refrain from opening fire evidence arrives that suggests the suspect is actually innocent, the detectives draw alongside and attempt to reason with the suspect, the suspect (presumably out of bullets) attempts to ram their car and ends up missing them, resulting in a crash that claims only his own life.
It’s a scenario that makes perfect sense if the suspect is a gun-runner or an arms dealer to the underworld (who would obviously have excellent reasons to fear arrest, even if he was innocent of the crime being investigated), but much less so if the suspect is a representative of (say) BAE Systems – as appears to be the case with Mr Kovin (who would be more likely to lawyer up and ride the storm out, assuming a legal system comparable to that of the USA).
@36. MeredithP: The presumption of innocence is a doubled-edged sword, in that it spares both the innocent and the guilty alike – Proof, and not only strong evidence such as the testimony of a victim, is absolutely essential because in any criminal case the Judge must not find the accused Guilty if there is a possibility that they might be innocent.
As noted, this works to the advantage of the Innocent and the Guilty alike (proof that, like most human institutions, our Justice System is the very worst one imaginable, except for all the others).
@37. MeredithP: It bears repeating that the EMH, Captain Janeway and Mr Tuvok (doubtless the rest of the Voyager crew as well) did believe that Seven of Nine was assaulted – the problem is that they could find no conclusive proof that it was Mr Kovin who assaulted her and therefore had no right to treat him in any other way than ‘Innocent until proven Guilty’.
I agree that they went too far in other other direction, to Seven of Nine’s detriment (and the investigation was unquestionably bungled; if nothing else Mr Tuvok should have scanned for evidence of Seven of Nine being transported to another location – we know that Mr Kovin has access to a transporter and we know he had ample time to beam out & beam back if he did commit an assault on Seven of Nine); quite frankly the coda to this particular episode leaves an especially sour taste in the mouth, since it assumes the certainty of a miscarriage of Justice where the episode itself only gives us ambiguity.
Quite frankly this feels less like a completed tragedy and more like the beginnings of a conspiracy – if only to hush up this whole unfortunate incident, though Mr Kovin’s death ride feels horribly like the sort of action a man takes when he expects to be made patsy for a scheme bigger than himself …
38. Natalie: I’d suggest that the reason Kovin gets more attention than Seven of Nine in these comments is that we KNOW the once and future Anika Hansen will go on to be the (ex-)Borg Queen of the Space Rangers, having become a pillar of the Voyager crew during the remaining years of its odyssey.
We know Seven – we don’t know Kovin and we get barely a glimpse of him, so obviously there’s more to be said about this utterly obscure character than there is about this show’s much-discussed breakout character, not least given the unpleasant (and apparently quite deliberate) ambiguities of the episode in which he appears.
Having said that I definitely feel this episode’s handling of Seven of Nine, especially given her critical role in the plot and the adverse consequences thereof, are horribly misjudged – this should have been HER episode and not the EMHs (as the coda seems to infer).
@39. salix_caprea: I agree with the idea that while an accusation is more than enough to justify an investigation, it is important that we not believe the accuser without question. As noted above, Proof (or at least strong evidence, in the form of witness testimonies and physical evidence) is IMPORTANT to substantiate an accusation and secure a conviction in any court other than the court of public opinion.
@40. wyldefyrewarning: I heartily agree – even if Kovin was innocent, Seven of Nine’s trauma is a thread that deserved to be followed up on, if only in a proper epilogue to this whole sorry episode.
Yes, I think that ‘whole sorry episode’ sums up ‘Retrospective’ quite neatly.
I tell you this, if memory serves me the next two episodes are going to give us a bad case of whiplash after ‘Retrospect’ – please pardon my mistake in the post above, I’m horribly impatient when it comes to editing at the end of a fairly long commentary – I’m not sure ‘The Killing Game’ could be more different from its immediate predecessor without actively trying to cover it up!
The episode was clearly a response to the false memory accusations of the eighties and the terrible damage they did but it addresses the issue very badly. False memory syndrome also victimizes the subject who has false trauma imposed on them to their psychological harm. The EMH has presented Seven with a possibly false scenario explaining her feelings. This bad for her if less fatal than Kovin’s fate. More investigation was definitely called for even with Kovin dead.
@42-ED
My comment was about the focus on the EMH and not about Kovin. That being said, while I agree with your point that Seven’s story has had and will continue to have many opportunities for exploration, it wasn’t the screen time that bothered me.
Its like @40-wyldefirewarning said – the episode’s (not just the characters’) shift in compassion is alarming. I can imagine an alternate ending with the same outcome, but the coda is about Seven considering her situation, wondering how much she really does have buried in her past, and what this ordeal says about her reintegration among human society. It still would have sucked to have an episode that featured a barely concealed analogue to a false rape accusation, but at least it would have been about a real victims – AND THAT is the crux of the matter. Based on these choices they made, it’s hard not to believe that the writers really did see the EMH as the real victim at the end of the episode.
1. Weapons dealer is so inept he mishandled a potentially-deadly weapon and blasts me in the arm/hand, and I lose consciousness.
2. Weapons dealer is condescending, arrogant, and patronizing to my skills and knowledge.
3. Weapons dealer makes inappropriate physical contact and violently shoves me away from my work station.
Conclusion: Yeah, I’d want to punch him in the nose, too. *shrugs*
@47 Total aside from the main discussion, but this man has to be the worst arms dealer in the quadrant, given that TWO of his weapons have major malfunctions within a couple days of each other, one of which injured a potential client, and one of which resulted in his own ship blowing up.
@@@@@ 32 – The only real problem with the Not Proven verdict is the recent interpretation of it as “Not guilty but don’t do it again”, which results from Scotland having reintroduced “Not Guilty” in 1728. Not Proven is only interpreted as truly acquitting someone if “Not Guilty” isn’t an option.
@42/ED: I think a good way of looking at it is that the presumption of innocence applies to both parties. When someone makes an initial accusation, you should take their charge seriously and investigate it in good faith — that is, you presume them innocent of lying unless the evidence shows otherwise. But if it goes to trial, that’s when justice demands presuming the defendant innocent unless the evidence shows otherwise. In both cases, presuming innocence doesn’t mean jumping to conclusions; it means putting the burden of proof on the side that’s more damaging to the subject, so that you don’t harm them without good cause.
I bet this episode will be this season’s “Tuvix” in terms of controversy and comments received.
I think the fatal error on the part of this episode’s writers was conflating the issue of faulty memory, which I’m sure was the point of the story, with the also very important and currently very topical issue of sexual assault and believing the accuser. They’re both important topics but by combining the two issues, it’s like the writers are trying to make a statement on the believability of people who say they are sexually assaulted which I have to believe was not their intent. To avoid this problematic stance, the writers should have just crafted a story in which say, Seven, believes she witnesses someone else being killed by Kovin, such as that other Entharan she saw being injected with nanoprobes and becomes a Borg drone. But in my version, Seven witnesses Kovin killing that drone. Therefore, there is no longer the story point of Seven herself being violated and people not believing her. The focus just becomes on whether her memories are faulty because she was blasted accidentally by Kovin’s weapon which could have possibly triggered her traumatic memories of other people being assimilated by the Borg. The episode would thus be less icky and problematic and it can still end on the EMH doing soul searching because he was too quick to presume Kovin’s guilt without thoroughly analyzing all of the available evidence first.
@51/garreth:”They’re both important topics but by combining the two issues, it’s like the writers are trying to make a statement on the believability of people who say they are sexually assaulted which I have to believe was not their intent.”
Except that the false recovered-memory cases that were so infamous at the time were cases of alleged sexual abuse of minors. So they didn’t artificially combine two unrelated issues. The connection was there all along. The problem is that the falsity of those allegations could be twisted to cast doubt on all abuse allegations later on.
That’s the whole problem, really — there are overlapping issues that are hard to treat separately. Balancing the right of accusers to be taken seriously with the right of the accused to the presumption of innocence is a delicate matter.
@52/CLB: Right, I get that. Which is why I think the writers could have avoided any outrage by sexual assault/abuse survivors and their supporters by simply transferring the crime in question to someone other than Seven or one of the main stars, to a guest star or even an extra like the Entharan that was supposedly Borgified. That way the implication of sexual assault is removed and the plot focus is solely on the accuracy of Seven’s potentially faulty human memory and the EMH’s crusade to unquestionably support her and overlook Kovin’s possible innocence.
@46. Natalie: A fair point and one I quite agree with. (-:
@47. Alison: One of my favourite things about this stream of comments is that absolutely no-one has questioned the propriety of Seven giving her would-be instructor a nose job – it’s nice to see we call all agree on something!
@49. Muswell: The fact that ‘Not Proven’ provides a third option between ‘Guilty’ and ‘Not Guilty’ is to my mind a feature not a bug – being able to say ‘We can’t prove anything but we’re not convinced you’re wholly innocent’ is pretty darned useful (hence my original evocation of that grand old tradition).
@50. ChristopherLBennett: A fair & accurate summation – as noted elsewhere, I definitely think that the Presumption of Innocence beats the alternative hands down, despite being as vulnerable to manipulation as any other elements of Human politics & jurisprudence.
@51. garreth: I’m not sure anything will match a Tuvix-level controversy (heck, the Great Schism between Rome & Constantinople practically seems like a rather loud spot of small-talk between the bishops by comparison).
@54 ED – But it’s not a grand old tradition. Within the timeline of Scots law it’s something of an innovation, having come in in the late 16th/early 17th century and not for good reasons. It came in instead of Not Guilty; the choice the jury were left with was Proven or Not Proven, which created problems in cases where the prosecution had clearly proven the facts of the case but the jury felt that although the facts were proven, the accused was not actually guilty. This came to a head in the Finhaven case, where the accused had clearly killed Strathmore, so they couldn’t give a verdict of Not Proven as it had been proven, but it was also clearly unintentional, so the man was not guilty of the crime for which he had been charged. The defence lawyer, Dundas, managed to convince the court of the jury’s ancient right to acquit a person of guilt, and they returned a verdict of Not Guilty.
Not Proven is a hangover from a period when the jury judged the facts, and then the judge judged the person on the basis of those facts. It was a restriction of the rights of jurors, which is one of the reasons many lawyers hate it. In law it’s no different from Not Guilty and in popular opinion it’s just one step shy of Guilty, so it leaves the accused in a sort of indeterminate state that a trial should put an end to, not make permanent. They walk free, but everyone thinks they did it.
@@@@@ 55: By that reckoning it’s over 250 years old. That’d make it older than most Scots law and most of the traditions we still embrace. So where exactly’s the line here?
And I’d dispute ‘hangover’. It’s been kept in the law despite multiple attempts to have it scrapped. The last major one was defeated just few years ago in the Scottish Parliament. It hasn’t just hung around without thought.
What you say about it leaving people in an indeterminate state is certainly true, people think ‘guilty but they can’t prove it’. But because it encourages a higher standard of proof, it also stops people being put in jail when there’s doubt about the COPFS case.
It’s not all one thing.
@@@@@ dougie – For legal systems, I tend to think of “tradition” as either “over half its history as a system, regardless of what elements of that system are currently in force” or “been around long enough that we can’t say which century it began” (e.g. murder’s been a common law offence in both England and Scotland since forever; it’s a grand old tradition of both legal systems that deliberately killing someone to death is just not on except under special circumstances). I’ll admit that as a Classics graduate who thinks any year with four digits in it is ‘recent’ I’m probably in a minority there.
As to disputing ‘hangover’ on the grounds that attempts to get it scrapped have failed – have you ever tried to get rid of a hangover?
The standard of proof for both Scots law, with the Not Proven option, and English law, without it, is ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. I’ve never seen statstics showing that the availability of Not Proven encourages Scots juries to apply a higher standard of proof than English ones, but I’m geeky enough that I’d be interested in looking if you know of any (though having to adjust for Scots verdicts being allowed by simple majority would, I assume, make that a statistician’s playground). As I understand it, the mock jury project in 2018 with the results published last year showed high levels of ignorance among the ‘jurors’ about how Not Proven worked, and while individual jurors were less likely to vote to convict when Not Proven was available, the impact on the jury results wasn’t significant enough to show any trend given the sample size.
My Scots Law tutor was militantly anti-Not Proven and my barrister dad refers to it as The Scottish Verdict; I imagine both have rubbed off on me somewhat.
@46: I don’t think the episode believes the Doctor to be the victim. It’s more like the episode believes him to be the one most at fault. Whilst Kovin suffers the most permanent damage from his actions, he inadvertently becomes Seven’s abuser as well. She doesn’t know what happened because she’s had his version of events forced on her. She treats the reveal of Kovin’s apparent crime quite stoically: It’s almost as if her initial distress has been resolved by her knowing what caused it. Then, in a very disturbing scene, the Doctor pretty much grooms her, saying “He violated her, he chose you because you were alone and vulnerable, you need to be angry with him, you need to want to see him suffer.” Result, her being left very confused when things don’t go the way he told her they would.
@@@@@ 57/ Muswell: I get where you’re coming from now.
I’m afraid that I can’t point you at research on that, as while I have read a couple of things, it’s been a while and it was for personal interest (I don’t tend to bother write that stuff down unless its going to be needed for peer review). I did have a quick search earlier and I’d swear I found everything but what I was looking for. Anyway, most of what I’ve seen is qualitative data, there’s really very little work been done in general, let alone quantitative.
As to the mock jury project, I find it credible within its limits. The study was into unique features of the Scottish Jury System, it looks directly at the Not Proven but whether people are ignorant of or confused by other elements of the process and law was outside of its remit. Thing is that, ignorance of the law has been a real problem for jury trials for a long time, in fact there have been suggestions of using summary trials for more serious offences because of it. So incomprehension isn’t unique to the Not Proven. Whether its actually worse or not requires more research.
This is an issue that the biggest experts in Scottish law can’t come to a consensus on, so I doubt that we will. And this isn’t really the place to discuss this anyway. But I do chalk up any civilised discussion on the internet in the win column, so thanks for that.
@59 – You make some valid points, and I think your assessment of Seven’s initial reaction before the doctor intervened is spot on.
But I wouldn’t describe the episode’s depiction of the doctor as someone “at fault”. Responsible, yes. But the tone is too sympathetic, and in the face of his self-doubt he is reassured.
One thing I suspect happened, was once it was established that the central conflict in the story was in fact THE DOCTOR’S runaway idea, and not SEVEN’s assault, the writer’s made the mistake of assuming it was only natural to shift the episode’s focus accordingly. And this might have made sense if the story was about something else.
They treated the subject matter of this episode the same way as they would an episode where the crew discovers the thing they thought was an engine malfunction is in fact a rare alien species living in the warp drive. Exit B’Ellanna, enter Janeway.
Maybe they thought it didn’t matter as stoic Seven of Nine was never in any real danger, or maybe they were so focused on taking aim at the late-90s spectre of recovered memory therapy they didn’t see what was right in front of them.
@61/Natalie: “maybe they were so focused on taking aim at the late-90s spectre of recovered memory therapy they didn’t see what was right in front of them.”
Yup. It was an allegory for therapists who believed they were uncovering past traumas in their patients’ lives but ultimately turned out to be the ones traumatizing their own patients through their overzealous actions. So the focus was on the Doctor recognizing and regretting his own mistakes that harmed his patient.
Here’s the thing, though — I don’t think it was ever questioned that the patients were victims. It’s just that they were victims of their therapists rather than their parents or caregivers that they were led to believe had abused them. Convincing someone they endured a childhood trauma that never happened is traumatizing in its own right — not as bad as the real thing, of course, but still a form of abuse and exploitation. So I think maybe the reason the focus wasn’t on acknowledging the victims’ suffering is because that wasn’t considered to be in doubt. They were victims of their doctors, and thus it was the doctors that were held accountable.
Well, okay, I’m sure there were some who latched onto this as an excuse to dismiss legitimate accusations of sexual abuse, and that’s the kind of problem we’re dealing with now, but I don’t think that was the mentality that drove this episode at the time.
The issue of repression is still controversial and hypnotic techniques for ‘retrieving’ memories have been proven worse than questionable. If Seven had remembered abuse on her own it would be fair to criticize the episode for ignoring a victim’s accusation but the Doctor’s interference shifts the ground to the issue of false memory and therapist planted trauma. Further investigation is emphatically called for. Is Seven a victim of false memory? And if so what actually caused her problem.
@62/ChristopherLBennett
Of this I have no doubt.
In my opinion, one of the greatest insults in cinema history is from Casablanca, when Ugarte asks Rick “You despise me, don’t you?” and Rick famously replies: “If I gave you any thought I probably would.”
Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this?
I don’t believe the writers sincerely thought recovered memory and assault accusations go hand in hand when they wrote this episode, because I don’t think they thought about it at all.
The sordid history of false allegations from recovered memory therapy, its connection to the satanic panic, among other things, and the fallout that came after is legitimately fascinating. It makes for good story-telling, and by the time this episode aired it was both timely and low-hanging fruit. I don’t blame the writers for wanting to make an episode that referenced it.
What I blame them for is carelessly using a blatant stand-in for sexual assault as a vehicle to carry the story they wanted to tell, without any thought to what they were saying unintentionally.
It’s true that many lives were irrevocably damaged by false recovered memories, the accused and accusers alike, but that number is a drop in the bucket compared to how many people are sexually assaulted every. single. day.
It isn’t that there isn’t space to explore both of these things, but so much has already been said about that strange, sad blip in humanity’s collective conscious. Whereas most assaults will never even be reported to the police.
“If I gave you any thought I probably would.”
That is the insult that keeps me coming back to this thread, adding more and more comments. This episode is full of tone-deaf choices, and what they imply is hurtful to a lot of people. But the worst insult of all is they didn’t even do it on purpose. They didn’t even think of us at all.
@34: I can’t track if someone said already so… If the Voyagers decided that Kovin is off the hook, then why do they continue to pursue him? Do cops chase someone to tell them that they probably haven’t committed any crime? For British police it’s reason enough to stop a chase, with cars for instance, that someone may get hurt. If it’s a car full of guns then that’s different, but in the U.S. everyone has guns in their car I gather.
I’d turn back, send Kovin an e-mail, and let the magistrate re-open the case if nanoprobes turn up on sale at the next Entharan weapons fair: I may have got confused over whether Seven was allegedly assaulted in terms of lust (which usually would leave detectable physical “contagion” I think it’s called) or was mugged for her magical miniature robots, which would interest an unscrupulous arms dealer.
@@@@@ MeredithP & Natalie —
With you all the way there. Unfortunately I have a somewhat similar history, including “but he’s such a nice man, we’ve compiled dozens of pages of testimonial about how nice he is” being the main part of the successful legal defense.
Something I hate even more about the episode on a personal level is my own experience did take place in a special separate consultation room for privacy within an institutional setting. Albeit it’s quasi institutional in the episode.
But it touches a lot of personal buttons and I hate it with a passion.
So, in something akin to “misery loves company”, it was refreshing to read and see all of the discussion had already happened! So now all I had to do was thank you two for bringing up alla that stuff.
So thanks!
@3 NobleHunter
I would not be surprised if they’ve taken this episode out of syndication. Two things stand out other than horrified disbelief at the episode’s message. One is that I’m reasonably sure the Doctor’s approach to recovering memories is likely to result in the creation of false memories. Two, it could have been much worse. Seven’s accusations are taken seriously even if her account isn’t treated like “proper” evidence. In order to rescue everyone else from their skepticism, the episode really needed to state outright “The Borg made Seven thought she’d been assaulted.”
Now that I write that last sentence, I’m not sure it would have helped.
That bolded sentence struck me. When I first read it, as the mind occasionally does I inserted a word. I first read it as “The Borg made Seven thought she couldn’t have been assaulted”. Which would’ve been a very interesting angle to this. An episode tackling her vulnerability in a different way from not being perfect or feeling solitary. She’s lost her invincibility.
But this episode isn’t about that. It’s curious, this episode sticks out quite vividly in my mind, I even remember they were trying to buy an isokinetic cannon. Wasn’t there a weapons test where they blasted a whole in a giant armored plate in space? I was a teenager when this came out and I clearly remember two features of this episode. A rape allegory and The Doctor amping Seven up. What I don’t remember is there being any meaningful resolution. I think I kind of felt bad for everybody. It seemed like a waste over a big misunderstanding. But what I DIDN’T even a little bit feel was that it was talking about questionable memory recovery or therapists pushing patients to believe things that didn’t happen. I don’t think I was aware of that issue, so I was left with the parts that were honestly much more obvious.
Looking back and looking at this thread; there were much meatier questions left unexplored.
My college psychology professor told me that “repression” is bunk. She says physics of the brain does not work that way. People do forget things, but that is not the same as the concept of repression, which claims that people actively exclude negative experiences from their conscious. In fact, traumatic experiences are more vividly remembered because they cause more stimulus in the neural pathways in the brain.
What is common is denial. Some people pretend that things or experiences they don’t like do not exist because they do not want to deal with them. I know a woman who was married to an alcoholic for 20 years and she spent 20 years acting like her husband had no drinking problem because she didn’t want to make tough choices about her marriage.
I’m impressed by the person above who recognized Michael Horton as Grady Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote. Coincidentally, I discovered an account on Instagram yesterday called “Murder, She Trekked” which features actors and actresses who’ve appeared on both Star Trek and Murder, She Wrote. I know Kate Mulgrew and Robert Beltran both did, and I’m pretty sure Robert Duncan McNeill did as well.
This episode was pure shit, period. Why even bother filming an entire sequence of Kovin and that woman studying Seven and then assimilating another man if the intention was to just dismiss all of that with words and dubious evidence? As if some nanoprobes on the table mean that nothing else happened when it could very well mean that it all absolutely did happen, even if after an accident?
No amount of good acting can justify this episode receiving a score other than the absolute worst. I’ve been rewatching all of Star Trek recently and this is my first rewatch of Voyager, ever, and this episode has absolutely been the worst episode I’ve seen yet. I’ve never been so mad and disgusted at the conclusion of one of these episodes as I am now.
I just saw this episode for the first time and it left me feeling disturbed and shocked. I usually interpret Star Trek as forward thinking, but saying they missed the mark on this episode is an understatement. Many people don’t and will never be able to understand what it is like to be a woman, so will not understand why this episode is so damaging to watch as a female. So I will try to share my perspective here for you. As a girl, to keep me safe I was taught to be cautious because there are people that are going to want to hurt you because of your body. So, though Seven is not sexually assaulted here, she is violated because of her body, so naturally that would be triggering and a reminder of the constant potential of sexual assault for any woman. We are already afraid of being compromised and assaulted, this episode sees that fear realized. And by the end, it leads to the message that if you are assaulted, you should keep it to yourself unless you have proof (rarely is there quantifiable proof for sexual assaults), because you don’t want to ruin your attackers life. Either that, or nobody will believe you, or they might just think you’re exaggerating, especially if you’ve been difficult in the past. It’s a disgusting message that I never would have expected from Star Trek and I am disappointed. Like, Janeway’s smh look at Seven at the end made me want to barf. Now let’s look at the plot issues in this episode:
I want to note that the first time we see Seven’s memory, the doctor is not attempting hypnosis yet but is just giving her a medical exam. In that first glimpse of the memory (right before her anxiety attack), she is in her Starfleet uniform, not in her Borg state, implying that the memory was recent (and not from when she was part of the Collective) not because of the doctor’s memory retrieval attempt, so to me that tells the audience that an assault did indeed happen recently.
The doctor’s initial reaction was like a saving grace, I was thinking how awesome it was that he believed her without question. He was her advocate and that wasn’t a “mistake” (as it’s referred to later in the episode). I also want to point out that while the evidence they found doesn’t prove guilt, it also doesn’t point to Kovin’s innocence. I am a biologist, and one of the first things you learn in science is the scientific method. Just because evidence doesn’t prove your hypothesis, doesn’t mean it is necessarily disproven. The evidence they found neither proved nor disproved Kovin’s innocence, and even when they found that an accident might have caused Seven’s nanoprobes to regenerate, that does NOT prove that that is WHY they were regenerating. Ultimately, the episode never gives us scientific evidence to support either guilt or innocence. And the evidence was not mutually exclusive, so it leaves us with no proof of either. But for the rest of the episode, Seven is treated like she made this up for no reason and that it is her fault Kovin died. It was KOVIN’S actions that led to his death, not hers. And it will never be her fault that he died. Period. She also did not do anything wrong in informing the doctor of her memories, and I hate that it’s implied that she’s lying just because she’s been unreliable to the captain in the past. She had not reason to make it up. And why did Kovin just happen to know that he could modify that tool to modify their combadges to affect someone’s neurology. Who “just knows” something that specific off the bat? Let’s not forget they were gone for 2 hours, and Seven’s conscious memory is only like 5 minutes of interaction. SOMETHING happened. And what happened to the assistant woman? There are too many questions left unanswered to come to any conclusion about just WHAT happened, but based on the evidence we are shown as the audience, I don’t think it was nothing.
okay my rant on evidence is over. It’s just so frustraing that right after they got mad about people jumping to conclusions, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that Seven was just “confused”. This episode just made me even more grateful for the Me Too movement that is still happening, and this attitude of “shut up unless you have proof because look at the damage you can do” is fading. I just wish I didn’t have to be emotionally scarred by this episode to see the progress we have made as a society. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but I am an empathetic person and I was with Seven the whole way, so I personally felt a lot of feelings by the end, all of them bad. It just felt like Star Trek wasn’t supportive of women this time, and that was hard. In any case, I hope this woman’s perspective gave any readers a little insight into why this episode has negatively affected so many. I really just want to forget this episode, thanks for reading.
Running away from authorities = something to hide = guilty.
Give your head a shake, that’s weak. As weak as this episode. Most of us here live in a country where huge slices of the population—primarily minorities—flee the authorities without even having done anything wrong. Do you blame them, too?
Does Kovin really warrant treatment? I thought his conduct was more annoying than creepy. Perhaps the reason Seven flinched at the Doctor’s examination is because she’s starting to see the Borg’s treatment of her for what it truly was. Has Trek ever tackled a story of legitimate, sexual abuse rather than it wrapped up in the delusion of one? I know what it’s like to be disbelieved by your employers but I would not have resorted to Kovin’s extremes.
1: I agree that Seven and Torres should’ve been allowed to develop further but we do get to see some of that over the next four years and it’s always good to see. 3: No, it still gets syndicated. 4-5: It’s like that scene in The Fugitive, where Kimble recalls his encounter with Gerard over the phone, but all that Gerard recalls is “I remember you were pointing my gun at me!” 6: Entharan – the Enarans were from the S3 episode Remember.
9: I am glad that Janeway didn’t share the Doctor’s “self-improvement is a bad thing!” 12: Kovin was panicking and that led him to do some stupid things. 16: In The Fugitive and Retrospect, both Kovin and Kimble go through the legal process until, like Krad said, they didn’t get the verdict they were hoping for, and both felt they had no recourse but to run. But the ambiguity over whether or not Kovin did anything is rather frustrating.
22: She later appeared in ST: Picard, although I have yet to see it. 23: Trek has an inconsistent attitude towards weapons purchase, where Quark is deemed a pariah for dealing in weapons (twice!!!), while Janeway feels it’s a necessary evil. 28: It does make Kovin into a tragic character, where it forces you to see the stupid things fear can drive you to. 29: Is this a Star Wars thing of “who fired first?”
30: Like Worf says in The Drumhead, “if a man were not afraid of the truth, he would answer” only for Picard to throw Worf’s self-righteous argument back in his face. 46: In Human Error, Seven learns the Borg have fixed it so she may never fully reintegrate into human society. 56: COPFS? 65: If Kovin had tried to peddle Borg nanoprobes, surely the magistrate would want to know how he came by them. 71: SMH look? And Seven doesn’t wear a Starfleet uniform.
I remember liking this one on the 1990s because it took a skeptical attitude towards hypnotic regression therapy (which I interpreted in light of the Satanic Panic), but my God has it aged terribly. Maybe it was terrible all along and I was too young to notice.
In any case, then as now, I question what possibly utility a weapon that turns people in Borg drones could have for anyone other than the Borg themselves.
@74: I suppose if the Borg drones could be programmed to do one’s bidding then they’d be an effective relentless weapon.
@74/jaimebabb: “In any case, then as now, I question what possibly utility a weapon that turns people in Borg drones could have for anyone other than the Borg themselves.”
Mind control seems an obvious answer. If the Borg can use it to force people to obey the Collective, then someone else could reprogram the probes to force people to obey them instead. The nanoprobes’ ability to alter the body on a microscopic level could also be used to kill in any number of ways.
Another possibility that occurs to me is that they knew that they couldn’t keep Seven of Nine so they opted to assimilate someone else to use their body as a factory for producing more nanoprobes for other purposes.
@77/jaimebabb: Assuming any of it actually happened at all, instead of it being one of Seven’s Borg memories erroneously projected onto Kovin. The episode leaves that ambiguous.
This episode is genuinely awful, and it’s even more awful now that I watch it. As a survivor of sexual assault who was not believed when I reported it, this episode makes my skin crawl. I react to the way the episode treats Seven with complete sympathy for her and utter contempt for the way Janeway and the Doctor throw her under the bus and gaslight her as soon as some ambiguous evidence emerges that might look good for the arms dealer.
The reality is that sexual assault investigations are rarely able to be dismissed by clear physical evidence. It’s a crime that usually takes place away from other people and doesn’t leave a lot of evidence behind, and if it does, it’s usually ambiguous and able to be spun by either side. In this case, the fact that the nanoprobes can regenerate from an accidental injury doesn’t mean they do not also regenerate that way from a forcible reactivation. This should be taken as indicating both sides may have a point, or that the truth lies in some other evidence – e.g. did anyone question the assistant? Instead it’s taken as immediate grounds to exonerate the arms dealer. The end result hammers home the message that believing victims is bad and it’s more important to protect rapists’ reputations than to pursue the truth, wherever it may lie. It’s a repulsive message that does not stand the test of time.
Ultimately one of the low points of Trek, and one I find uncomfortable to watch.
3 is generous (tho the rating’s not important, I know). Otherwise, I agree completely, Krad. Only 7’s performance gives this episode any merit. It’s an utterly offensive storyline and would have been even when it premiered (tho, yeah, repressed memories were a major topic of discussion in the day). Ultimately it undercuts her performance entirely. Koven was a skeevy mansplainer and deserved to be decked. And a lot more too.
I can’t even believe how angry this episode made me. Absolute dreck. At the very least they could have left it ambiguous without judgement of 7. She — and everyone else — would still have to deal with unresolved feelings.
Instead it’s dreck dreck dreck. Utter dreck.