2026-10-25 18:03 UTC
VOY S4 E20, E22, & E23: "Vis à Vis", "Unforgettable", and "Living Witness"
My Voyager watch is in the last stretches of season 4 now. I noticed a pattern in episodes 20, 22, and 23 ("Vis à Vis", "Unforgettable", and "Living Witness"). They all have different writers, and vary in subject matter, tone, and quality, but they all have the same flaw: a failure to deal with the question of trust. "Vis à Vis" is the weakest of the three. Tom Paris having a sudden crisis where he has trouble reconciling his bad boy past with being a responsible officer and boyfriend is potentially interesting, but this wasn't really a compelling approach from my point of view. But the sci-fi gimmick is that the alien-of-the-week, Steth, is a body-swapper, so he puts Tom in "his" body and ships him off back where Steth came from, where Tom encounters Daelen, Steth's previous victim, still stuck in the body that Steth had occupied before he took the one that Tom now occupies. Meanwhile, Steth in Tom's body is going full rebel without a cause on Voyager. Tom convinces Daelen that he's not Steth, but another victim like "her" (we don't know Daelen's original gender). How does he convince her? We don't know. This critical scene is omitted to that we can watch Steth mess with B'Lanna and get drunk.
#VOY #startrek
Replies (1)
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@toddhorowitz@fediscience.org 2026-10-25 18:06
"Unforgettable" is a cut better than "Vis à Vis", in that the central concept of a romance initially doomed by one partner's inability to remember and then ironically by the other's, has some emotional resonance. A big problem is that Robert Beltran and Virginia Madsen lack chemistry. A bigger problem is that Madsen's character, Kellin, seems not to have thought anything through. She knew that the Sandmen -- excuse me, the trackers -- would come after her, but she doesn't seem to have thought of any countermeasures until the last minute, offering to adjust Voyager's sensors. She should have done that first thing...