508. RememberFORMULA: Violations + The Inner Light + The Cloudminders
WHY WE LIKE IT: Roxann Dawson creates a fairly engaging new character.
WHY WE DON'T: Hardly stars any of the main characters.
REVIEW: Didn't we just have an implanted memory episode? Well, in this one, an Enaran, part of a group of telepathic aliens hitching a ride on Voyager, reveals her story to B'Elanna in vivid dreams that eventually overwhelm her. Dawson does a good job playing Korenna, an impressionable girl who betrays her lover to her father, but while her story is a fairly well-told cautionary tale about genocide and cultural guilt, it's not really about Voyager's crew, is it?
The experienced memory can easily be linked to the Nazis' Final Solution, though the Regressives sound more like the Amish. Given that it happens long ago to people we don't know, it's a testament to Dawson's strong acting that Remember works at all. The scene where she is made to flip on her lover by her father is a rather powerful close-up, played in one continuous shot, for example. One does wonder how a telepathic people could ever keep a conspiracy under wraps though. Why was B'Elanna the outsider the only possible recipient of the memory, when you consider Jessen's attitude at the end? The device that makes the story possible is also what makes the story improbable.
And it's a little sad that the memory scenes are better than the shipboard stuff. B'Elanna rushing into the mess hall (nicely redecorated though it is) and making her accusations while Janeway stands idly by and simply no one stops her... Well, that's not a particularly well written scene. It's nearly unplayable, in fact. If it didn't have enough problems ("Murderers!"), wooden Anthena Massey's Jessen is in it too.
LESSON: Just because B'Elanna plays a character doesn't mean that character is B'Elanna.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: The Enarans are actually well-drawn aliens, and their story isn't without merit, but this isn't Star Trek: Enara Prime.
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