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| A mysterious alien (Virginia Madsen) insists Chakotay is her lover. |
Voyager stumbles into a space battle between two cloaked ships. One ship is destroyed, and a voice from the other ship calls out for help - asking for Chakotay by name! Chakotay rescues the pilot, a young woman named Kellin (Virginia Madsen), who asks for asylum from her people. She is a member of the Ramuran race, a species whose unique biology makes it impossible for others to form lasting memories of them. Once she is gone, anyone from a race other than hers will not remember that she was ever there.
Kellin informs them that this has already happened. She was on Voyager weeks earlier, doing her job as a "Tracer," tracking down Reskat (Chuck Magnus), a member of her race who was attempting to flee their society. For whatever reaosn, the Voyager crew helped her track down her prey - But after the hunt was done, Kellin found she was in love with Chakotay, and she eventually turned back in order to be with him.
Chakotay is still working out whether he believes her story and whether he can share her feelings, when a complication arises: The Ramuran are no more willing to allow Kellin to escape than she was, Reskat. Cloaked Ramuran ships begin attacking Voyager, and Kellin knows that this is only the beginning!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: When Kellin begs for asylum, Janeway assures her that they "won't turn [her] over to anybody without knowing the whole story." Since this is an episode in which the regulars are only cardboard versions of themselves, Janeway seems actively surprised that Chakotay doesn't instantly trust her - Even though in a well-written episode, Janeway should be extremely skeptical of this stranger and shouldn't trust her at all.
Chakotay: Ever since Unity managed to make him work as a character, both the writers and actor Robert Beltran have transformed one of the show's weakest regulars into one of its strongest. But you certainly couldn't tell that from this episode. Chakotay is back to being a two-dimensional stick figure here, a facial tattoo in search of a personality. Beltran is terrible, but I can't fully blame him. This is a Chakotay romance which does nothing to delve into or reflect any of his established traits. Consider that you could rewrite this into a Harry Kim episode by only changing a handful of lines, and that doing so would make no difference to the overall effect.
Harry Kim: Speaking of Harry, his first lines of the episode see him whining about having to configure his Technobabble to Seven of Nine's, until an annoyed Chakotay outright tells him to just work with her from the start in the future. This makes two episodes in a row that see Harry whining about Seven being more useful than he is, making we wonder if this is going to become the new cornerstone of his characterization? If so, and notwithstanding his genuinely good showing in The Killing Game... Is it too late to send Harry and his People Magazine article out an airlock?
Hot Alien Space Babe of the Week: When Virginia Madsen is given a good role in a good script, she can be terrific. Unforgettable provides neither of these things. Instead, Madsen is left to engage in a romance that never develops organically on-screen, reciting bad dialogue to the block of wood meant to be her love interest. She doesn't even try to insert anything extra into these scenes. A bit of playfulness, a hint of sexual tension, some light teasing in her line deliveries... A little of that might have brought at least a few scenes to something resembling life. Instead, she just recites her lines by rote, making already dull material even duller.
THOUGHTS
Titling an episode Unforgettable is just asking for trouble, isn't it? The jokes to make at such a title's expense are so obvious, it would feel redundant to even bother.
Unnecessary, too, given that one doesn't have to scrape to easy potshots to find inept or wrong-headed elements in this story. This is a romance in which the entire relationship has already occurred. We aren't watching Chakotay and Kellin fall in love; we're hearing about how they did before. Romance through exposition is not particularly compelling, and we see nothing in the interactions of the two to show us that they have feelings for each other. We just get scene after scene of Kellin telling him they do, until he seems to more or less give in out of resignation.
We also aren't given any compelling reason for her return to the ship. If she had discovered she was pregnant, and that her people would not allow her to carry a "half-breed" child to term, then... That would have been massively cliched, but at least it would have motivated her decision to turn away from her previous life with something a little more tangible than, "Your face tattoo haunted my nightmares!" Alternatively, the episode could have been rewritten to play out chronologically, with the first half following Kellin's initial hunt and her building romance with Chakotay, and the second half following her return to a Voyager where no one remembered her. This would have shifted the point-of-view from Chakotay to Kellin, and perhaps made her decision stronger for our having actually seen the couple in love (something we really never see in the episode as it was made).
There's also the troubling issue of the ease with which Voyager's crew apparently went along with capturing and wiping the memory of Reskat, the stowaway Kellin had first hunted. From the sketchy background we're given, we have no reason to see any difference between Reskat's bid for freedom and Kellin's, except that Reskat was presumably motivated by something other than hormones. But somehow, hunting him down is a good thing while allowing Kellin to be similarly hunted would be unthinkable. I guess being a beautiful blonde really does make all the difference, because the entire situation makes both Kellin and the Voyager crew look like massive hypocrites.
I'd add that the regulars seem far too easily convinced of Kellin's story, which makes them look like a collection of utter dupes. I kept waiting for the inevitable twist when she would turn out to be evil. But... That twist never comes, because everything really is exactly as it appears to be. And it appears to me that this script was probably banged out in a weekend, on the stipulation that it be as cheap as possible while still allowing a role for a name actress. As for Madsen, I can only speculate that her agent thought it was a good idea for her to do a Star Trek episode, and wasn't actually too concerned about seeing a script first.
Overall Rating: 1/10.
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