3-6. Remember.

B'Elanna Torres experiences another woman's memories.

THE PLOT

Voyager has picked up a group of passengers: The Enarans, a race of people with the ability to share their experiences through a telepathic link. Janeway has agreed to transport them to their home planet, a journey which Voyager can make far faster than the Enarans can. In turn, their guests have agreed to help them conserve their ship's power for their long voyage home.

Not long after the Enarans come aboard, B'Elanna Torres begins having vivid dreams, in which she has an Enaran lover, Dathan (Charles Esten). She says they are the most sensual dreams she has ever had. But when the dreams take a darker turn, in which she witnesses the opression of "the regressives," the caste to which Dathan belongs, she realizes that these are not dreams at all. She is reliving the memories of one specific Enaran, and these memories are telling a story of a horrible crime in the Enarans' past!


CHARACTERS

Capt. Janeway: When she hears Jor Brel (Eugene Roche), the Enaran elder, playing music, she wistfully observes that she always wished she'd learned how to play an instrument. She is startled when Jor Brel then telepathically transmits that knowledge to her, but is gracious when he apologizes for misinterpreting her statement as an invitation to form a link. "You tried to give me a gift," she tells him. An artful way of setting up the Enarans' abilities to make sense of what happens to Torres, and a good character moment for Janeway.

Chakotay: As Torres' former commanding officer and the person on the ship who's known her the longest, he is the first to notice that she isn't quite her normal self. When B'Elanna's dreams take on a disturbing tone, he is the one who insists on informing Janeway. He recedes into the background after that, but it is nice that this script actually remembers that these two characters have a shared history and mutual trust that makes them natural confidantes.

Torres: This episode is a showcase for Roxann Biggs-Dawson. She plays two roles here: B'Elanna and Korenna, the young woman in the flashbacks. As Korenna, she shows an innocence and vulnerability that she her usual role doesn't allow. As B'Elanna, we see more familiar performance beats, as she refuses the Doctor's treatment in order to carry the memories through to their conclusion. Dawson is terrific as always, carrying a demanding episode with a sincere performance.


THOUGHTS

Remember is the first episode since Tuvix to have any genuine substance. The episode follows two strands: The memories B'Elanna experiences, and the crew's reaction to B'Elanna as she experiences them. The one strand is decidedly more successful than the other.

This episode is a fairly direct Holocaust story. This is not exactly new material for science fiction, not even for Star Trek. But writer Lisa Klink, working from a story (originally submitted for TNG) by Joe Menosky and Brannon Braga, displays admirable restraint in unveiling this. We aren't told up-front what B'Elanna's memories are leading to. Instead, the direction of the story reveals itself gradually. We see only what was seen by the sheltered young woman whose memories B'Elanna relives. As a result, though we can tell fairly early on that something isn't quite "right" with her society, it takes almost half of the episode for the Holocaust parallel to truly become clear.

All of this is splendidly done, and the flashback scenes involve in a way that Voyager frequently doesn't manage to do. The flashback strand is made all the more effective by the excellent guest performance by Bruce Davison as Jareth, Korenna's father and a leader in the Enaran society. An actor with a gentle voice and kind eyes, Davison is a perfect choice to portray the calm and oh-so-reasonable face of evil.

These scenes form the core of Remember, and the success of the "memory" strand solidifies this as a good episode. It doesn't become a great one for me, though, because the material on Voyager isn't anywhere near as good.

Generally, I would say it's a good thing for a series script to connect its stories to the regulars. This is done well, by having B'Elanna experience the memories. That, and the tag in which B'Elanna passes the story on to one more person to keep the truth alive for the Enarans, is all that is needed on the ship. The rest of the Voyager material should be allowed to simply act as bookends for the real story.

Unfortunately, the script keeps insisting on trying to give active roles to the crew in a plot that has no room for them. We get ham-fisted attempts to "raise the stakes," bits that go nowhere and simply distract. The Doctor gives dire warnings that indulging in these memories may lead to brain damage for B'Elanna... warnings that come to nothing and are never even mentioned again. After Jor Brel gives a plausible and oh-so-reasonable explanation for B'Elanna's experiences, Janeway still insists that she's going to investigate... an investigation that never occurs. We even get a scene in which B'Elanna publicly confronts the Enarans, a scene that smacks of the kind of heavy-handed melodrama the rest of the episode has so carefully avoided.

The relative weakness of the Voyager scenes isn't enough to blunt the impact of the very well-done flashback story. The episode's final moments are highly effective, promising that this memory will be kept alive without wrapping everything up as tidily as Trek stories usually do. All of this makes this an above-average Voyager episode, if not quite the dramatic knockout that might have been.


Overall Rating: 7/10.

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