Voyager is transporting a group of telepathic aliens back to their homeworld. B'Elanna begins having vivid dreams that seem to be memories shared to her by one of these visitors -- and they reveal a dark history from their planet's past.
"Remember" was first created by writers Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky as a Counselor Troi episode for the Next Generation. It was revived by Lisa Klink, who rewrote it as a B'Elanna episode for Voyager. Menosky thought this was an improvement, that the story worked better with a less "sensitive" character like B'Elanna at the core. On the other hand, Braga thought the episode should have been done the first time around, or not at all; the movie Schindler's List had been released in the intervening years, and he thought that broader awareness of the Holocaust robbed this episode of its "edge."
For sure, this episode is not at all subtle... but there is more here than simply declaring that the Holocaust was bad. (Hot take!) The episode is really decrying efforts to cover it up. And there are perhaps more nuances in it that can be perceived today than at the time the episode first aired. Authoritarianism was not as obvious a threat in the 1990s. The way the character of Jareth (played by major "That Guy" Bruce Davison) describes the "regressives": as people who reject technology and thus lead to spreading disease. It sounds so adjacent to reasonable... right up until he's executing people by burning them alive, and making you question what (if anything) he claimed was actually true.
Roxanne Dawson gives a really solid performance here -- and she must have been thrilled to finally have a real scene partner in a B'Elanna episode that wasn't a computer, herself, or both. Her voice and demeanor are completely different in her "Korenna" memories. She's thrown a really tough scene where she has to rant and plead at a silent crowd, and manages to make it feel credible.
And yet, the episode doesn't do a very good job of making the stakes seem personal and pressing to B'Elanna. The medical threat to her is taken off the table early. She cracks the "mystery" of where her dreams come from too easily (not that there are any other suspects). Yes, exposing a genocide is the right thing for one of our heroes to do, but there isn't any sense that B'Elanna personally will be changed one way or the other if she succeeds. For too much of the episode, her interest in getting to the truth amounts to little more than a need to know how the sexy book she's "reading" ends.
The production values are rather spotty. Half the cast gets brand-new costumes to wear for the party at Neelix's... but most of them look like pajamas. Most of the scenes are set on an alien world... but the sets are sparsely decorated, and the aliens just look like humans with "salad wrap" heads. (And, for some reason, truck nuts on their chests. Seriously, what is that pendant B'Elanna-as-Korenna is wearing?) A featured alien instrument doesn't really have any operating parts, it's just some kind of cheap-looking sphere/keytar thing.
Other observations:
- Guest star Charles "Chip" Esten was best known to me at the time this episode first aired as a regular player on Whose Line Is It Anyway? (And he was still in some of the episodes made more recently in the U.S.)
- The character of Jor Brel tries to dismiss B'Elanna's experiences not as actual history, but as an imaginary synthesis of several different Enarans' memories. I feel like there's an interesting Star Trek story of its own in that idea somewhere, about some sort of shared fantasy built on snippets of truth. (They had to have done something like that at some point, right?)
There's a nice story and message here, but it could just as easily have been a Troi episode of Next Generation, or even something like a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits tale that wasn't even Star Trek at all. The Voyager characters feel a little too superfluous here for it to seem really special to me. I give "Remember" a B-.
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