S3 E06: Remember

The Enterprise Voyager takes on a group of friendly telepathic aliens (Enarans). While they're on board, Torres begins experiencing vivid dreams of another person's life on the Enaran homeworld. At first, they are highly erotic, but those dreams give way to the story of an ambitious woman, played by Torres, who finds herself to be a pawn in a plan to kill all the members of a social movement, at the behest of her father. Through a combination of fatherly lies, self-deception, and an unwillingness to believe that people she trusts would be so brutal, she plays her part, even sentencing her lover to death. Once awake, she confronts the Enarans, who deny everything, but one of the younger engineers consents to telepathically gaining the memories second hand from Torres, giving hope that the truth that the Enarans have denied about their past will someday come to light.

The first half of this episode is highly reminiscent of Violations (TNG, season 5), to the point where I was wondering why I was still watching. In fact (according to memory alpha), this episode started out as a discarded premise for a TNG episode, with Troi being the one to receive the memories. I actually like Torres a lot better as the recipient, because, as the writer put it, it was more effective to have a less "sensitive" character be affected by the revelations.

As an intentional holocaust allusion, I think this episode works well. In the sixties, psychologists set about to find out if Americans were fundamentally different from Germans; to see if it were possible that they'd allow themselves to commit murder when called upon to do so by authority figures. In particular, the Milgram experiment (familiar to anyone who has taken an intro psychology course ever) showed that it was not only possible, it was probable. This episode gives us a case study to illustrate the point, though even with knowledge of the study, sometimes the "protagonist" of the dreams doesn't seem to have sufficient motivation for following her course of action - I'm thinking in particular of the scene towards the end where she begins chanting along with the crowd after the public execution of her lover. Things seemed to move awfully quickly between covert mass killings to burning people alive in front of a throng of followers.

What really frustrates me about the episode isn't really that central to the plot: I am sick of the tired "luddites are better people" trope. The genocidees (screw you spell check, it's a word because I said so!) in this parable are persecuted because they don't like technology. It's especially bad in Insurrection, where the enlightened Ba'ku are the ones who live fulfilled lives because they got rid of technology, while their creepy, disgusting, murderous offspring, the Son'a, chose to embrace it, and gee shucks, look where it got them! Comparatively, it is just a footnote here, but it still rubs me the wrong way. I am extraordinarily thankful for the DS9 episode Paradise (season 2), wherein the luddites are actually huge jerks - the only counterexample I can think of in all of Trek. I touched on this a bit in my Jetrel review, where I was concerned that the episode would move in a "science is bad" direction, but I watch Trek (in part) because I believe that science and technology can be used as a tool in creating a better future. Technology is not good or evil, it is just an instrument that can be used for beneficial or nefarious ends. There are tons of shows you can watch to get the message that scientific advancement is bad. I want Trek to be the show that deviates from that path.

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: Good episode, frustrating elements. I feel like I keep saying variations on that for every bottom line. I want an episode that I can just call a good episode.

Side Note: This is the first episode I've seen for this project that I haven't seen ever before, or even had spoiled from reading synopses. That was nice.

Side Side Note: The lover is played by Charles Esten, otherwise known best as "Chip" on Whose Line Is It Anyways?, the show that eroded my Voyager watching habits in the pre-DVR days. Well, I guess I still don't have a DVR...