S4 E04: Nemesis

Chakotay, having crash-landed on a planet after coming under fire, encounters a ritualistic military squad (of the Vori). They are in the middle of a war with an enemy who desecrates their corpses (the Kradin), and offer to help Chakotay get back home, but the team is ambushed and only Chakotay survives to find a Vori settlement. There, he nurses his wounds and befriends the locals, while above the surface the Voyager crew prepares to rescue him with the help of the planet's inhabitants - who turn out to be the Kradin. Chakotay watches as Kradin troops massacre the village, and offers to help hunt down Kradin soldiers in any way he can - until one of them turns out to be Tuvok, who was sent to rescue him. Chakotay allows Tuvok to rescue him, and the Doctor works on deprogramming him - he had been caught in an elaborate Vori ruse, designed to recruit new soldiers using holograms and chemical aids.

The language of the Vori practically gave my wife a seizure. The writers used a fairly common sci-fi trope here, wherein they replaced common words with less common pseudo-synonyms to signify an alien culture (particularly useful when the aliens are not actually wearing any alien make-up). Well, it is common in other sci-fi sources, but pretty absent from Trek, largely because it would be hard to explain why it would get through the universal translator when the meaning of the word is obvious to the viewer. It didn't bother me quite as much as it bothered her, but it still felt awkward.

The reveal that the group that Voyager was communicating with was the Kradin was painfully obvious. Especially so when, before showing the ambassador aboard Voyager, the writers took great pains to explicitly describe the ambassador's enemies the exact same way that the Vori on the planet described the Kradin. After that, the reveal seemed very ham-handed, like the racial allegory in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (TOS season 3). The difference was that TOS needed to do that so as to get around the censors, and Voyager wasn't really sneaking anything by anyone here.

Of course, once that "surprise" was over with, I did not expect there to be a second surprise: the whole propaganda/brainwashing angle. I guess that's largely because I want to believe that Chakotay still has the freedom-fighter in himself somewhere, that he's not really the pacifist he plays at the beginning of the episode (and every other episode). The closing line, after Chakotay can't hide his revulsion at the appearance of the Kradin ambassador, despite learning that his whole experience was a sham, was incredibly groan-worthy though: "I wish it were as easy to stop hating as it was to start."

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: Shrouded in dated sci-fi tropes, this episode teaches us that brainwashing is bad, and hate is bad; laudable goals to be sure, but the pacing is far too slow, so I spent most of my time drumming my fingers, waiting for the "surprise," and trying to convince my beloved to watch the rest of the episode. Of course, hours later, we still break into uproarious laughter when one of us turns to the other and says: "You know, I wish it were as easy to stop hating as it was to start." There's always that.