“Remember”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky and Lisa Klink
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 3, Episode 6
Production episode 148
Original air date: October 9, 1996
Stardate: 50203.1
Captain’s log. Voyager is ferrying a group of Enaran colonists back to their homeworld of Enara Prime. In exchange for getting them home in a fraction of time that their own slower ships would get them there, the Enarans provide Voyager with their superior energy-conversion technology.
Torres and Kim are working in engineering with two Enarans named Jora (who’s much older) and Jessen (who seems to have the hots for Kim). They knock off for the evening, and Kim suggests dinner. Jora begs off, wanting to just go to bed, and Torres hastily does the same when she realizes she’ll be a third wheel with Kim and Jessen.
When Torres goes to sleep, she finds herself in a very vivid dream in which she’s a young Enaran woman named Korenna having a secret torrid affair with a young Enaran man named Dathan.
The dream is sufficiently intense that Torres oversleeps and only awakens for her shift when Chakotay breaks into her quarters and wakes her up. Torres promises she’ll make up the time but, to his credit, Chakotay doesn’t care about that, he’s more worried about her. But she reassures him that it’s just because she’s having awesome sexy dreams.
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The Relentless Moon
However, as the days go onward, the dreams get more intense and seem to have a plot and narrative structure. Korenna’s father Jareth doesn’t approve of Dathan and doesn’t want her to have anything to do with him. Dathan’s part of a movement called the Regressives, who reject technology.
The Enarans are telepaths who are able to, in essence, download memories into people. One Enaran, Jor Brel, mistakes Janeway’s desire to learn how to play an Enaran musical instrument with permission to download his memories of how to play into her. Brel apologizes, which Janeway accepts, as it was a wonderful experience.
While on her way to engineering, Torres collapses in the corridor and has another dream, this one with Korenna receiving an academic award and then has a brief, clandestine meeting with Dathan. Kes finds her in the corridor and brings her to sickbay. The EMH reports that her brain has received a considerable amount of memories telepathically. He prescribes a cortical inhibitor. Torres wants to know the rest of the story, but the EMH doesn’t want to risk brain damage, so Torres acquiesces.
Janeway and Tuvok question Brel, who is shocked that any Enaran would do this without consent. Further, from the way Torres describes the dream, it could be a composite of various memories from all the Enarans on board that are bleeding into her subconscious for some reason.
Tuvok will continue to investigate, while Janeway orders Torres to take some time off and rest.
Deciding that she needs to risk brain damage to find out how the story ends, Torres removes the inhibitor. In her next dream, we find out that the Regressives are considered too dangerous to live on Enara Prime, and they’ve agreed to move to a colony world. However, it soon becomes clear that not all the Regressives are leaving willingly. When the Regressives are being processed onto the colony ship, Dathan’s name is called, but he’s nowhere to be found. Jareth accuses Korenna of warning him, but until his name was called, Korenna had no idea Dathan was going offworld. And then another Regressive resists going and there’s a riot, and Korenna is hit.
Torres wakes up with an injury on her face from the blow in the dream—one that is an exact match for the scar on Jora’s face. She immediately goes to Jora’s quarters and finds her collapsed on the deck. Jora reveals that she is Korenna and these are her memories—she must give them to Torres so that someone will know the truth who won’t deny it.
And then Torres is back in Korenna’s bedroom, playing a musical instrument. Dathan sneaks in, and says that he doesn’t want to go offworld, he’s heard that the Regressives aren’t being resettled, they’re being rounded up and killed. Nobody’s heard from the ones who’ve gone offworld, and all attempts to communicate with the Regressive colony have gone unanswered. Then Jareth enters; Dathan hides, and Jareth convinces Korenna that the Regressives are starting those rumors to avoid going to the colony, that they must be taken away to preserve their society. Korenna is convinced, and gives Dathan up.
Dathan and several other Regressives are arrested and put to death publicly. Korenna joins in the cheering at their punishment. We then jump to years later when Korenna is a teacher explaining to children that the Regressives all killed each other due to their stubbornness and they’re all gone now, thus preserving Enaran society.
Torres wakes up, and Jora is dead.
Janeway is throwing a going-away party in the mess, which Torres interrupts and accuses the Enarans of rewriting their history to erase the atrocity they committed. Brel and the other older Enarans are in denial, however, and the younger Enarans like Jessen refuse to believe it.
The party ends awkwardly, with Torres accusing Brel of killing Jora to cover up the truth. However, the EMH’s autopsy reveals no foul play. The Enarans disembark and Voyager prepares to go on their way once they’re gone. However, while Janeway can’t force the Enarans to confront the truth of their history, she encourages Torres to share her story with the other Enarans.
Torres goes to Jessen and they link their minds so Jessen can receive Torres’ memories. And Torres shares with Jessen what Jora shared with her.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Enarans have super-duper energy-conversion technology, which they share with Voyager in exchange for a ride home. The nature of this technology is never discussed, nor will it ever be referenced again.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is very taken by the Enaran music, and learns how to play Brel’s instrument via their telepathic sharing of memories. She also encourages Torres to tell the story Jora died telling her to anyone who’ll listen.
Half and half. Torres is chosen by Jora to be the receptacle of her memories, probably because Jora recognizes that Torres won’t be bound by politeness, y’know, ever.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok expresses a great deal of curiosity about Enaran telepathy, and he also promises to investigate Torres’ dreams.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. When their arrival on Enara Prime is imminent, Neelix throws a party in the mess hall where he serves only Enaran food, redecorates the place to look Enaran, and also insists that everyone dress in Enaran clothes instead of their uniforms. It’s actually quite a nifty little bit.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kim and Jessen are shown to be into each other in the teaser, which is barely referenced again after that. Meanwhile, Torres experiences the passionate romance Korenna/Jora had with Dathan—as does Jessen at the end.
Do it.
“The situation will resolve itself.”
“And yet, you fully intend to continue investigating.”
“I wonder how long it’s been since I did anything that surprised you.”
–Janeway and Tuvok doing the usual banter, with Janeway apparently forgetting that she surprised him just a couple episodes ago.
Welcome aboard. Eve H. Brenner, having played an elderly telepath in TNG’s “Violations,” plays another elderly telepath here as Jora. Charles Esten, having played a young Klingon who sees visions in TNG’s “Rightful Heir,” plays a young Enaran troublemaker here as Dathan. Legendary character actor Eugene Roche plays Brel while Athena Massey plays Jessen.
But the big guest is the great Bruce Davison in his first of two Trek roles as Jareth. He’ll be back in Enterprise’s “The Seventh” as Menos.
Trivial matters: This was originally a story that Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky came up with when they were both on staff on The Next Generation, and they had conceived of it as a vehicle for Deanna Troi. The story never got to the production stage, and Lisa Klink dusted it off and rewrote it for the Voyager crew.
Set a course for home. “I don’t think satisfying your curiosity is worth brain damage, Lieutenant.” I want to like this episode a lot more than I do. When I was watching it, I was very much into it, at least for most of the episode’s run-time, and fully expected to say nice things, and then I got to the climax and it all kinda fell apart, and I finished the episode being annoyed by it and fully expecting to write a scathing review, and then I wrote the plot summary and remembered all that was good about it.
Sigh.
All right, for the first four acts, this is excellent. Roxann Dawson, scripter Lisa Klink, and director Winrich Kolbe deserve a great deal of credit here, as Dawson does a superlative job of playing Korenna. This isn’t Torres inserted into someone else’s life, this is very specifically her being Korenna and she is fantastic at it. On top of that, Kolbe does his usual brilliant job of creating the atmosphere of Enara Prime, with Klink’s script doing a fine job of economically introducing us to this culture. On top of that, you’ve got Bruce Davison, who is never not wonderful, perfectly embodying the tyrannical father.
But then Act 5 kinda ruins it. The entire scene where Torres bursts into the middle of a party and starts accusing the guests of honor of genocide just falls completely flat. Especially since the genocide itself doesn’t have the oomph that it should. We see the Enarans execute some agitators, including Dathan, and then later Torres-as-Korenna tells the kids that the Regressives killed themselves off, but it loses something in that particular telling, and Torres blurting it all out in the middle of a party just doesn’t work, and provides nothing like the kind of catharsis that the script wants it to. It’s just awkward.
The ending, mind you, is perfect. Torres going to pass on the story to Jessen is exactly the right thing to do. Because, as both Torres and George Santayana have said, those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And cultures live by their stories, something that has been the subject of some great Trek episodes in the past, notably “Birthright II” and “The Inner Light.”
I just wish the climax had worked better.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest Star Trek project was announced this week: he’ll be one of the contributors to the Star Trek Adventures Klingon Empire Core Rulebook. He’ll be talking about it as part of the “Day of Honor” virtual conference on Saturday the 11th of July, on Modiphius’s panel at 3:15pm Eastern Time, alongside Rick Sternbach, Jim Johnson, Kelli Fitzpatrick, Derek Tyler Attico, and others. Keith will also be doing a panel on The Mandalorian as part of the virtual “Shore Leave 41.5” this weekend, also on Saturday the 11th, at 1:30pm Eastern Time, along with Mary Fan, Christopher D. Abbott, Glenn Hauman, and Laura Ware.
This is an episode I absolutely love (even though it is *really* obvious that it is a TNG script), for a lot of the reasons the review mentions. I love B’Elanna, and I love how good Dawson is in this episode, the subtle differences between her in the real world and her in the dream are great. I love that she was picked to receive the memories specifically because she’s not the kind of person who will let something like this go (where Troi often felt like she was picked because she was empathetic and the writers didn’t know what else to do with her). And I love how personal the memories are. It would have been easy to make those flashbacks a history lesson that hit all the major events, but it isn’t, it’s the very private story of how this history intersected this one woman’s life. Her failings are small in scale, but show how her actions, multiplied a million times over across a society, caused an atrocity.
I actually liked the scene at the party, because it felt so true to Torres. She doesn’t care that it is a party, or that it will be awkward, or that people aren’t likely to believe her. She is B’Elanna, and she will do what she thinks is right, and hang everyone else. It’s why I think she is the most believable Maquis character- because she is the kind of person who sees what she perceives as an injustice, and she goes all in on trying to fix it. And she gets one person to believe her, at least enough to see what she had already seen. I love how it bookends the episode, and leaves you with a hopeful feeling, despite the heavy subject matter.
Even though this is just pretty obviously just a reason to have this TNG episode take place on Voyager, I really like this detail. It’s the kind of thing you would think they would end up doing more often as they try to get home, but it doesn’t come up all that often. But it’s a nice reminder that there are things out in the Delta Quadrant they need, and they have to rely on others to help them.
Now that you mention it, I notice the climax didn’t work for me either. Maybe because it’s not entirely clear anyone there had the same close connection to the genocide. It’s suggested Brel killed Jora but it’s not really supported by the narrative. I think it would have been better served if we saw a young Brel directly involved in the massacre. Give someone other than Torres a direct stake in the confrontation.
For once a TNG story benefits from the transition to Voyager as it makes their dilemma about how to react to the information sharper. If they were in or near the Federation, they’d have all sort of options if they can’t get anyone to believe and a lot longer to work on the problem. Voyager can only cancel some negotiations for a one-off trade deal and express official displeasure before leaving.
I also had a strong “could be gayer” reaction. If Korenna had been male, they could have had an intense on-screen gay romance without ever showing a gay kiss. They could have even made revealing Korenna’s gender a thing, for better or worse.
ETA: @1 The problem with the party scene is that all of Torres’ energy is going out into a void. She’s righteous and furious and it doesn’t feel like it’s connecting with anything.
I couldn’t get past whatever that was on the “aliens'” heads. Was it a wrap? But it also looked like the “hair” the Kazon had. The alien designs on Voyager really suck.
Austin: I thought the Enarans looked a little too much like the aliens in “Ex Post Facto.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think this was a brilliant, powerful episode all the way through. Maybe the flashbacks jump forward a bit too abruptly at the end, but it’s a minor imperfection. And I don’t mind the awkwardness of the party confrontation because I think it fits, for reasons I’ll get into below:
@2/noblehunter: “I think it would have been better served if we saw a young Brel directly involved in the massacre. Give someone other than Torres a direct stake in the confrontation.”
I think that’s exactly the point, though — that the descendants of those who committed atrocities do have a direct stake whether we admit it to ourselves or not. We pretend that they’re a relic of history irrelevant to our lives, but we inherited the fruits of our ancestors’ genocides and war crimes, and we inherited the comfortable certainties based on the lies they constructed to absolve themselves. So if we perpetuate those lies and dismiss those crimes as “not our problem” because we weren’t personally involved, then we are complicit in the conspiracy of silence.
And that’s why the party scene worked. It felt awkward and disconnected because these nice, friendly Enarans didn’t believe they had any connection to the ugly history B’Elanna revealed, but that in itself was the lie she was trying to get them to confront. Confrontations like that are often awkward, because the listeners are too immersed in their cozy certainties and may not be willing to hear the truth.
(I had an experience like that on Facebook just the other day. Someone in the comments on a Facebook friend’s link said she was “confused” about the fuss over Confederate monuments because we have museums about the Holocaust and so forth. And when I pointed out the obvious difference that such museums commemorate the victims while Confederate statues celebrate the victimizers and most of them were built in the 20th century specifically to terrorize the descendants of their victims, she said “Well, that’s what yewwwww think, and I think different.” Silly me, I thought “I’m confused” meant “I actually want to know the reason.” Hard to become less confused if you reject any new information out of hand.)
I skip re-watching this one when the rerun pops up. I find it really sad and depressing. I’m glad Torres gets to share the memories with Jessen because I’d forgotten that bit after the party disaster. I remembered the ending as Enarans in denial about the regressives and how they died. It’s better Jessen can carry on the memory and share it .
The thing about that act 5 climax is that it’s consciously designed to play out as it does. The Enarans have been supressing the memory of that genocide for a couple of generations. That supression is so ingrained in their culture and thinking that it would be impossible for them to break their friendly manners and be hostile to Torres. The only thing I’d change in that scene as a writer is that I would have Janeway and Chakotay openly reprimand Torres in front of everyone for her undiplomatic outburst. Otherwise, I think the climax hits all the right notes.
Needless to say I find Remember to be one of Voyager’s all-time best episodes. To me, this is the real start to season 3. The Chute and The Swarm were warm up shows, and the others were S2 leftovers. This type of episode sets a template for future VOY moral play episodes such as Distant Origin and Living Witness. Very episodic in nature, and it doesn’t necessarily rely on VOY’s unique settings and play closer to the TNG storytelling model (as seen with this very episode, literally borrowing an unused Braga/Menosky TNG story) and still working beautifully within these parameters.
Remember isn’t just about about memory and history. It’s also about storytelling. A beautiful, superbly written, thoughtful take on a brutal case of Holocaust and ethnic cleansing. Another A+ effort from Klink and Kolbe, following last season’s equally superb Resistance. Kudos also to Dawson for the way she fully inhabited this character.
It works as well as it does because the genocide angle isn’t given to us viewers up front. When I saw this, I had no idea what to expect. It seemed to be going for a classic forbidden love story, mixed with the telepathy and projection aspect also used in TNG’s Violations (but way better than that episode). I was satisfied already two acts in. It was a good enough love story as it was that used Dawson’s talents well.
But then the real story sneaks up on us. When I saw the mass deportation scene where Korenna is unable to give more explanation to the other person, it was a gut punch for me as I realized the uncanny parallels to Jews being herded towards concentration camps. They try to maintain the image and notion that it’s for everyone’s mutual benefit, but deep down we know the truth – the truth and history they chose to conceal. By the time we get to the executions, there’s nothing left to hide, even though the signs were there from the start. It’s a scary and frightening portrait of a supposedly enlightened, evolved and decent society. We see just how easily their society was able to slide down a steep slope, their destiny being their equivalent of an oppressive Nazi Germany.
It’s also a story about shame. They held back this part of their history because of shame. It’s a story about oppression told from the point of view of an unwitting oppressor. The people who stood by and let their society rot to the point of institutionalized removal and killing of people who had different views.
A strong entry that really gave season 3 some meat.
@5/Christopher: I see this often on social media political debates. Whenever someone uses “I’m confused” as a starting point, most of the time it seems to me as if they’re not really expressing confusion or bewilderment, but rather they’re just trying to convey that innocent impression in their attempts to sell their argument as the dominant one.
I often think of this episode as a less scary version of Violations due to the lack of mind-rape (which does and should make the viewer feel very uncomfortable), yet it is interesting in that neither Troi (in Violations) nor Torres in this episode asked for the telepathy they received.
As for the episode itself, I actually love it. Being white and American I can see a lot of parallels here… a group of people in power did a terrible thing under the guise of some sort of destiny or good of society justification and now is trying to erase or soften their actions to pretend all is well. I think it’s a classic sci-fi morality play and would not be out of place (although a little more ham -fisted) in TOS.
Fortunately we still have textbooks and the internet to teach about slavery, treatment of Indigenous Peoples and various other dark parts of our history and don’t need to rely on telepaths. (We also don’t seem to have learned a whole hell of a lot either but that’s another conversation…)
@9/borgqueen: I think it was meant more as an allegory for Holocaust denial, but you’re right that, unfortunately, there are plenty of other real-world genocides it can work as an allegory for.
Eduardo: “Basics, Part 2,” “Flashback,” “False Profits,” and “Sacred Ground” are NOT “season 2 leftovers,” they were always intended for season 3, written for season 3, intended for season 3, and written after season 2 was done. They were produced early for budgetary reasons, so reading story significance into a budgetary decision makes for a specious argument.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
From a character perspective, yes, the mess hall scene made sense on the face of it, but dramatically it utterly failed for me. I can intellectually agree with why it was written that way, but for me the execution failed to make me care about what happened.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@11/krad: As I said before, while it’s true that those episodes were always meant to be aired in season 3, they were written during season 2, and thus it makes sense to say that they are detached from the creative direction the show began to take in season 3.
For the life of me, I could not figure out how Torres realized that Jora was Korenna (though I had kinda figured it out given that she was the only elderly female Enaran we met). I rewatched the two scenes several times and was still scratching my head. So glad it was explained here, because it was driving me crazy!
The general opinion seems to be that this one is meant to be “about” holocaust denial. I guess it’s closer to that than anything (and Torres’ belief that hiding the truth could cause it to happen again is a rather clunky message moment…frankly, people who favour ethnic cleansing seem to do it whether the history books say it’s a bad thing or not), but in a way the cover-up is the least interesting part of the story. On a broader level, it’s about how those with the power can be pretty ruthless in getting rid of anyone who disagrees with their view of the world. That said, watching in 2020, and seeing that one of the authorities’ main problems with the regressives is that they think they’ll cause a plague by not washing enough leaves the message seeming rather mixed…
It’s another abrupt end (this, I’m afraid, is another one that had me going “…That’s it?” on first viewing) and another case where there’s a limit to what Voyager can do. In this case, it’s got little to do with their isolation: If this was a first contact with an Alpha Quadrant species, they’d be similarly restricted in exactly how much they can “fix” things. All they can do is provide the impetus for the younger Enarans to do the work for them.
I must admit I hadn’t noticed Mirell’s scar which gives B’Elanna her final clue. Chakotay and Torres having a way too much information chat about the dreams is a bit odd. Another Harry Kim romance that goes nowhere, although it says a lot about his friendship with B’Elanna that he immediately takes her side when Jessen opposes her. Watching knowing where this is going, Jor Brel comes across as monumentally shifty when he tries to deny the reality of what Torres has experienced. Is there a reason why Dathan suddenly dies in the middle of a romantic encounter with Torres/Korenna, other than “We need an ad break cliffhanger”? That’s clearly not what literally happened.
I also responded to Janeway wondering when she last surprised Tuvok with “Two episodes ago.” A rather odd continuity error where Torres collapses in a corridor and Kes finds her in engineering.
Was it ever said the Regressives were meant to be going to another planet? I always assumed they were supposedly being sent to another part of the same planet.
@15/cap-mjb: “Torres’ belief that hiding the truth could cause it to happen again is a rather clunky message moment…frankly, people who favour ethnic cleansing seem to do it whether the history books say it’s a bad thing or not”
Yes, but the key difference isn’t about them, it’s about the rest of us, and whether we know our history enough to recognize the warning signs of another genocide and stop it before it’s too late.
This was definitely the first strong entry for season 3. (Incidentally, this is also the first episode of Voyager I recorded on VHS, during the ’97 hiatus, and I watched it again and again, solely on the strength of Roxann Dawson’s performance.) Even back then, I saw it as an allegory for any number of atrocities, and of course it’s even more timely today. The mess hall scene is definitely clunky, but I appreciate what they were going for, even if that scene isn’t particularly satisfying.
I didn’t understand how B’Elanna put together it was Jora, as I never noticed the scar on Jora/Korenna’s face. Thanks for the clarification; I only had to wait 24 years:)
Honestly, I felt this episode was kind of ho hum and frankly before I began the rewatch I struggled to “remember” (hardy har har!) what it was about. The only thing I had a vague recollection of was B’Elanna having sexy fun time with a hunky alien. Rewatching it for the first time in nearly 24 years I can see why I forgot about it for I just wasn’t very engaged in the plot. It seemed to me like a less interesting variation on TNG’s “Violations.” And while that story was hardly a home run, at least it provided a little bit of insight into some of our hero characters. Here, it’s obviously a Torres episode, and while Roxann Dawson does a stellar job with the material, I don’t feel like we’re really learning anything new about Torres herself. Her character is just reliving the memories of someone else we don’t really care about. So I get that it was a message episode, I just didn’t find myself particularly moved by it despite recognizing the events that transpired in the story were tragic.
@15/cap-mjb –
seeing that one of the authorities’ main problems with the regressives is that they think they’ll cause a plague by not washing enough leaves the message seeming rather mixed…
Except it’s pretty clear in ep (especially considering the messenger) that the ‘cleanliness’ issue was total BS and propaganda. Them not wanting to use the magical thingy-bobs doesn’t mean they never bathed.
@19 It is also pretty common for genocidal governments to use propaganda to spread the idea that certain people are “unclean” or carrying diseases, in order to stoke fear and anger from the general population.
@20 – I was thinking about that when I made my comment, but never got it from my brain to the comment! Thanks for expressing it & for doing it better than I could have.
@19/treebee72:Try saying you don’t need to use the magical hand sanitisers because you had a bath yesterday and see where it gets you…
I liked the idea of Voyager working charter. Exactly how are they making a living in the Delta Quadrant? Transporting people and cargo seems a bit Firefly, but I don’t see any other way. And as they make more and more connections to people in the DQ risking everything to get home becomes less and less appealing. People get off the ship, people get on, gradually the DQ becomes home…
Anybody else realize we are taking one woman’s witness for what happened? How stable is Jora? Given her choice to download without consent one has to wonder about her. She could have started by telling her story the ordinary way and asked for consent to share her memories. We could have established that many of the crew are willingly accepting memories, you’d think the engineers would really appreciate a download on maintenance of the device they’re trading for and others might be intrigued by the idea and curious about Enaran culture.
I’d also like to know more about exactly what the Regressives wanted and the means they took to get it. Luddites are not terribly attractive. How far back did they want to regress and how many people would die getting there?
Mass murder is never acceptable and if that’s what happened it should be remembered but I am not a fan of generational guilt. And I say that as a Jew. My grandmother lost almost all her extended family still in Romania to the Holocaust. Two aged aunts and a wounded male cousin were the only survivors. I don’t believe that Romanians or Germans born after 1945 should carry the guilt of what their forbearers chose to do. I don’t believe young Enarans deserve to be accused of what their grandparents might have done. They should know but they are not guilty. Anyway confrontation may feel righteously good but it seldom has a positive result since people tend to resist when attacked.
@24/roxana: “I don’t believe that Romanians or Germans born after 1945 should carry the guilt of what their forbearers chose to do.”
But the Germans have faced what their forebears did. As a society, they admitted it, learned from it, and strove to make amends and do better. It’s a totally different situation when a society denies its past, when it lives the lie that a past atrocity never happened, or that it wasn’t really a big deal after all. Such a society has failed to come to terms with its past, failed to weed out the factors that led to the atrocity, so there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. That’s where the United States is right now, and it’s no way to live. Guilt doesn’t just magically evaporate once an expiration date is reached. You have to face up to it before you can truly move beyond it. Germans have done that. Americans haven’t. And in the story, neither have the Enarans.
Oh, I agree with you. Stuffing it down the memory hole is bad.
This episode, incidentally, is one in which the episodic nature of Voyager, and the fact that we’re not really expected to relate the plots of previous episodes to current ones except in a couple of specific cases, is really necessary. Otherwise the fact that we’d had an episode less than a month ago with a telepathic virus that implanted false memories into its hosts probably would have really undercut the themes of this one.
Seriously, by now the news that telepaths are coming aboard ANY Federation ship should put everybody on edge. That’s gone bad so many times in so many ways!
@28 – THIS! So much this!
And it’s very likely that what’s happened on the ships named Enterprise is pretty much standard, at least for ship on missions of exploration or diplomacy. You’d think that someone at headquarters would take notice.
That’s the problem with shoehorning an episodic series into one with season long arcs and all sorts of continuity call backs. You invariably run into the need to recon things. So it ends up that what you saw in the earlier episodes isn’t actually what you saw, regardless of the fact that the older episode hasn’t changed.
@28/roxana: “Seriously, by now the news that telepaths are coming aboard ANY Federation ship should put everybody on edge. That’s gone bad so many times in so many ways!”
It’s probably quite uneventful the majority of times, but if it’s uneventful, there’s no story to tell, so we don’t see it on TV. Fiction is intrinsically biased in favor of the exceptional situations where things go interestingly wrong.
@28 I always think it’s funny that basically the only time we ever see telepaths is when they are going to mess something up. I guess because if they are there to help, they solve a problem in like 10 seconds (like Lwaxana Troi realizing the two aliens were dangerous assassins after one look), so they are usually there to be a problem for our characters instead. It’s kind of like how the Trek universe seems to be full of evil non-corporeal beings, because the cheapest way to show them on TV is to have them posses a character, and that usually isn’t something you do for innocent reasons.
@ChristopherLBennett, I have really enjoyed your analysis on this episode, especially as it relates to real-world issues!
True enough, CLB. I’ve often reflected on the number of peaceful , according to plan missions we never see.
My problem with this episode is that I really don’t see why B’Elanna had to get involved. True, she doesn’t hold back and confronts everyone, but no one believes her, and she can’t DO anything. She takes the chance (and we don’t even find out if it works) that experiencing the memories will convince Jessen… and that is something Jora could have done directly without taking a detour through B’Elanna.
Also, it’s established that Korenna is Jora, right? If she is convinced to participate in this terrible injustice to the point that she grows up to teach children propaganda about it, at what point does she have a change of heart? It would have given more weight and plausibility to what she was trying to do, if we had seen that.
I suppose one of the points is that opposing large-scale injustice that mainly happened 100 years ago isn’t easy, however angry you are about it. There are questions of restitution, but you can’t compensate victims who are dead. You may be able to offer justice to their descendants or their community, and reverse unjust enrichment of the perpetrators. But you can’t change the past. And you can’t really fix the present either. You can improve things, but we have to go on living with the differences between us, forever… except when the “people who are different” are wiped out, of course.
Incidentally, wouldn’t you suppose that a telepathic species who exchange memories will collectively remember turbulent events for longer? My sister reminded me recently that our father served in the Second World War and he didn’t say much about that: she knew more than I did. But suppose if we shared those experiences of his telepathically like in this story? Then we’d know it and feel it personally.
Another issue IMO is the victims. The Regressives aren’t a victimized ethnic group they are a political movement with a controversial ideology and goals. The means they use to further those goals are never gone into. Mass murder is not, repeat NOT an acceptable solution but the Regressives seem to have posed a genuine physical threat to the planet. Ideally everybody would have been reasonable and negotiated a compromise. Regressives can live the way they want but mustn’t force the rest of us. Nobody seemed to be reasonable unfortunately.
@35/roxana: “but the Regressives seem to have posed a genuine physical threat to the planet.”
Where in the world did you get that idea? First off, everything that was said about their “threat” came from the bigots who eventually exterminated them, so of course it can’t be taken as truth; it was just hate speech to give them an excuse, like everything the Nazis said about evil Jewish conspiracies or Trumpers say about immigrants stealing jobs (and it’s already been pointed out in earlier comments that “they spread disease” is one of the stock excuses for racism).
Second, even the bigots never went so far as to say they “posed a genuine physical threat to the planet” — just that they threatened the Enaran social order by refusing to conform to it.
“Regressives can live the way they want but mustn’t force the rest of us.”
Again, where are you getting these ideas? Nobody ever said the Regressives were forcing anyone to live their way, just that they were spreading “dissent and doubt.” It was the rhetoric of a society that wanted to force the Regressives to conform and saw their desire for independence as a threat, as authoritarian states always do with free thinkers.
Here. Read the transcript for yourself:
http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/302.htm
If they really do have colonies I don’t see why they didn’t do exactly as they claimed they had and send the Regressives off.
I did say mass murder is not acceptable remember? No question but the people who ordered that are villains of the first water. I just wonder why they were so threatened.
There must be or have been something very, very wrong with Enaran culture to have resorted to mass murder. I’d still like to know more about what the Regressives wanted. Pure Ludditism can be pretty bad.
Count me as one of the commenters who thinks the party scene did not bring the episode down whatsoever. This is B’Elanna Torres we’re talking about here. She wears her heart on her sleeve and there’s no way she’d pass up such a juicy chance such as a party to confront the Enarans. Whether it was a good idea or not, whether it accomplished anything or not is besides the point to B’Elanna. Even if I agreed with the doubts about how effective act 5 was, this story is so tragic that I personally would have had a hard time giving it less than a steller rating.
Looking over the transcript, I’m more convinced than ever that the alleged Regressive colony was meant to be on another part of the planet, not out in space somewhere. The Enarans seem to have only just started space colonisation in the flashback, and even in the present it seems to take years if not decades to get to colony planets, so not having heard anything after two months wouldn’t be too remarkable. The transports mentioned sound more like some sort of a van than a spacecraft. And Torres tells Jessen “Go down to Enara and find the colony where the Regressives were meant to live”, which could mean just finding the information on it but is more likely to mean it was meant to be on Enara.
But it’s hard to find anything hopeful in that ending. If the older Enarans are as ruthless as they appear to be, and Torres is right about them killing Mirell because she revealed the truth, then she’s probably just handed Jessen a death sentence by encouraging her to ask questions.
EDIT: Other thing bugging me about this recap (sorry) is Mirell being consistently referred to as Jora, which seems to be her title, not her name. Torres refers to her as Mirell once, otherwise it’s Jora Mirell, until her identity is revealed and Jor Brel calls her Korenna Mirell. Given the similarity, I’m assuming Jor is the male version and Jora is the female version, and it could be as basic as the Enaran equivalent of Mr and Mrs: Title Jora, first name Korenna, last name Mirell.
By the way, either wholesale extermination of a community of people or removing and sending them elsewhere counts officially as genocide with the United Nations, although, well, a slightly less obvious type. But, if you think about it, still really bad.
@5 – Chris: I agree with you.
@9 – borgqueen: It’s still mind rape, even if that wasn’t the intention.
I haven’t been the biggest fan of Roxann Dawson (though she’s growing on me) – – but that first dream moment, when she wakes up and realizes her lover is at the window, is a purely lovely joyful moment, and makes up for a lot of the flaws in the episode. Well, a few.
“the genocide itself doesn’t have the oomph that it should.”
– – Not a sentence you see often…
I feel like KRAD is going to be copying and pasting this phrase a lot through this rewatch.
It looks like Kim has finally moved on from Libby, which is more development than he’ll get in seven years of storytelling. Is Chakotay overriding the lock on Torres’ quarters breaking in? Kes finds Torres unconscious in Engineering and not in a corridor. Does Torres wake up with an injury like Korenna, and did Korenna change her name as she got older?
Although Janeway surprised Tuvok in The Swarm, according to the production order, that episode directly followed Remember, so it wasn’t a continuity issue at that time. The moral of Remember is the same one as in Learning Curve, “If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you will be doomed to repeat them.”
1: Remember isn’t bookended by Torres’ dreams. 4: I was also thinking that about the Sakari in Blood Fever. 9: And both Remember and Violations have the same actress playing a telepath. 38: Act 4 or Act 5? 39: Korenna was also the name of a telepathic projection in the DS9 episode Second Sight.
Scratch that last fact – her name was Fenna and not Korenna (although they rhyme!).
@45/David Sim: Yes, I meant act 5; it’s been corrected.
@47/Shoregrey: It’s not about guilt or blame, it’s about accepting responsibility for making sure it never happens again. We can’t avoid repeating past mistakes if we refuse to admit that they happened at all. This is how we learn — by studying past mistakes and failures and understanding how to avoid them in the future.
This has always been Star Trek‘s message — that bettering humanity requires acknowleding the flaws we have to overcome. We don’t pretend we’re already perfect; we admit that we’re killers, but decide that we’re not going to kill today, and strive to reaffirm that commitment every day. The people who deny they ever did anything wrong are the ones who are guaranteed to keep doing wrong, because they never make the effort to do better.
I liked the way Torres went literally knocking on doors after waking from the (penultimate, I think) dream – just like people do in Korenna’s memory – instead of using the door beepy thing everyone else uses ever to request entrance.
A very minor subtle detail suggesting after waking she still felt somewhat like Korenna? I’m wondering what other minor details I may have missed now.
The climax of this episode worked for me precisely because it didn’t provide any sort of catharsis; the crime took place before most of these people were born: it’s a fait accompli; there’s nothing you can do to make things right, or even meaningfully punish the guilty, so all that’s left is one woman’s impotent rage in the face of smug indifference, and the desperate, flailing hope that someone, at some point, will uncover the truth and force this society to actually learn from its crimes. It is a feeling that is very familiar when studying history.
jaimebabb: I see your point, and it’s a good one, but I wasn’t talking about the characters’ catharsis, I was talking about the viewer’s catharsis.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad: the fact that there’s no catharsis even for the viewer made the scene very very realistic to me. Maybe because I can relate to the situation too well and understand Torres and also the feeling when such outburst falls flat. It helps me as a viewer to relate to her even more. So for me, Act 5 is actually the best part of the episode. :)