VOY: "Living Witness" (4x23, 4/19/2000)
Trivia quiz time! What is the only
Trek episode of any series (or film) to both feature no human characters
and contain the last chronological scene of the franchise to date? ... No points for the correct answer. (Hint: it's "Living Witness", which, apart from a deliberately hilarious sequence in "Author, Author", is also the closest thing we get to a
Voyager Mirror Universe tale.)
--> Good grief, Season Four had
26 episodes?! No wonder A) so many were lame, especially after all the prior
Trek series had done so many eps and basic sci-fi setups, and B) the writers were wary of being too focused on continuity. Don't get me wrong: a lot of
Voyager was straight-up bad, and the scribes were no geniuses. Still, with a mandate from above to always be on the move, often feature space battles and phaser fights, rely mainly on your core cast without being able to depend on or afford regular secondary crew characters
and crank out ~25 eps per year for seven years straight... I'm not sure I've ever realized just what a
Kobayashi Maru they were in. It's easy to say "well, they should have done story arcs", and sure, okay. But then think how frustrating it would have been to be meeting and getting to know interesting aliens over a course of time only to always leave them behind once more, and always start over from scratch. Again, the show could have and should have been better, but maybe it's a feat it was as good as it was at all.
Anyhow, this is a very solid ep with a great hook (and an even better ending), in which a backup copy of the Doctor (a bit of tech never mentioned again, and the possibility thereof denied, but I'm glad the ep exists anyway) is activated 700 years after
Voyager passed through, and... things didn't necessarily go so well. (
SF Debris had a field day with this one.) The alien culture(s) of the week are as un-subtle as usual, but to the ep's credit, at no point is it suggested that there are any easy answers to the problems at hand, even when it comes to Telling the Truth.
Voyager may have been a scattershot show, but if even a fifth of its 172 episodes were good and continue to hold up, that's 34 good eps. Maybe you only think a tenth were good? That'd make 17 good eps, and hey, that's not nothing.
A-, on the all
-Trek scale.
