1x08 Ex Post Facto

[6.9/10] So funny story. When I revisited “A Matter of Perspective” from The Next Generation last year (a.k.a. the episode where Riker is accused of murdering an alien scientist and canoodling with his wife), I was surprised at how much it differed from what I had remembered. The basic outline of events was the same, but the details, the perspectives, the images, were very different. I’d chalked it up to the vagaries of memory, which is ironic given that episode’s themes.

Well, it turns out I’d just been conflating it with Voyager’s “Ex Post Facto”, another Star Trek episode where a Starfleet officer is accused of murdering an alien scientist and canoodling with his wife. Rewatching this episode, it was clear why I had my wires crossed. While it’s too much to call the situation with Tom Paris an exact duplicate of the one with Will Riker, they’re cut from the same cloth, to where a little confusion after a couple decades is understandable.

But I’ll admit, it reinforces my priors about VOY as a whole, which is that it’s largely a watered down retread of TNG. I don’t want to be too precious about that thesis. The Next Generation itself started out much more indebted to the rhythms and style of The Original Series before it founds its own voice; there’s plenty of time for Voyager to do the same. More to the point, Star Trek shows recycle many of the same story shapes all the time, from the strange anomaly of the week, the prime directive dilemma, to the good ol’ whodunnit. What matters is not necessarily pure originality, but rather the ability of the show’s creatives to do the story well and find one or two unique spins to put on the familiar.

And as I seem to say a lot about Voyager’s first season, god bless them, they try. Instead of a courtroom drama, it’s a film noir pastiche. Instead of a game of different recollections, it’s a game of falsified memories. Even the twist that part of Paris’ punishment for the murder is having to relive his victim’s final moments every fourteen hours adds a macabre twist to the proceedings, especially when the punishment seems to be killing him.

The problem is that “Ex Post Facto” isn’t particularly good at any of this stuff. The show never fully commits to the film noir homage, and given the results, I can understand why. The actress who plays Lidele, the alien scientist’s femme fatale of a wife, isn’t particularly good. Her performance is often labored and unconvincing, and unfortunately the story asks a lot of her. But some of that may simply be due to the fact that the show tries not just for the tone of classic film noir, but tries to replicate the dialogue, which sounds out of place and unnatural in a comparatively modern production. The whole setup is a little cheesy, with the sense that, unlike those classic movies, everyone here is just playacting.

That said, while the soul of the episode is a bit below par, it’s well-built. The opening scenes featuring a POV perspective of someone being stabbed by Tom is suitably attention-grabbing. Each flashback/recollection adds enough additional context to aid the audience’s understanding of the situation. And key details, like the conflict between the locals and their neighbors, are established well in advance of when the story needs them for plot purposes.

The smartest move “Ex Post Facto” makes, though, is to channel most of this through Tuvok, as the ship’s chief security officer and de facto detective in this scenario. Doing a whodunnit with a Vulcan as the gumshoe is a unique spin on things. There’s much more to say about Tuvok in the seasons to come, but suffice it to say, he and Tim Russ are a worthy successor to Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, finding a noble bearing, a wry wit, and a devotion to the truth that see both characters through tough times. Seeing him carry out the investigation and gather the evidence that exonerates Tom is the best thing in the episode.

There’s one big problem though -- Tuvok finds the exonerating evidence via a mind meld. I don’t love that choice from a continuity perspective, if only because human-Vulcan mind melds have generally been treated as a big deal that could screw the human up, so Tuvok doing one almost casually with Tom seems a bit cheap. Granted, that could have been suitably handwaved with a simple line of dialogue saying, “The risks are worth it to potentially save Mr. Paris’ life”, so I don’t want to harp on that too strongly.

The bigger problem is that Tuvok has to use what he learns to convince the local authorities that Paris was framed -- and all his best evidence is stuff he saw in another person’s mind. The show at least has the decency to raise the issue, but it strains credulity to think the planet’s prime minister would just take the word of some alien who claims to be psychic. The fact Lidele’s dog recognizes the turncoat doctor is pretty thin evidence, and everything else is circumstantial. The suspects just give up the game immediately, which scans as a bit too convenient.

Still, I might be more inclined to tolerate these weak spots if the episode itself were better on a nuts and bolts level. It takes too long to get to Tuvok’s investigation. The film noir scenes with Paris and Lidelle are stock and uninvolving. The fact the culprit was the doctor who inflicted the legal punishment on Paris, as a means to ferry secret information to the opposing camp, has some juice. But the path to get there is too clumsy and familiar for the journey to be worth it.

There’s nothing wrong with redoing something past Star Trek episodes have done. Even TNG’s “A Matter of Perspective” pulled a little from TOS’s “A Wolf in the Fold” with the murder mystery setup. But if you recapitulate something the audience has already seen, as recently as five years ago, without making the material sing or providing something truly new in your interpretation, it’s easy to get different takes on the same thing mixed up.

(SPOILERS for later in the series: It’s neat to me that The Doctor considers the name “Galen” considering what nom de guerre he adopts in a later episode.)