When Voyager responds to an alien distress signal, they find a woman who already knows the entire crew. Memories of her species vanish from the minds of other life forms, and that's exactly what happened after the weeks she spent with Voyager already. Now she's seeking asylum from her own people... and hoping to rekindle the romance she claims to have had with Chakotay.
There's a lot of hand waving and heavy lifting to get this story off the ground. I suppose the "why" and "how" of the Ramuran aliens isn't really important: how every other species forgets them, why even technology is affected, what exactly people think they were doing in any missing time when a Ramuran drops out of their memories, and so forth. But it's somewhat harder to overlook the obvious things you might try to overcome such a situation: writing things down physically (which happens at the end of the episode), getting tattooed like Memento (if you really care deeply enough), hiding recordings of your own voice, and so forth.
Assuming you can just let all of that go and "enjoy the ride," this episode still has its hits and misses. The acting is good. Director Andrew Robinson (Garak from Deep Space Nine) is definitely focused on his two leads, Robert Beltran and Virginia Madsen, doing his best to make their relationship compelling and trying to breeze by the sci-fi trappings. Not much time is spent on her character, Kellin, trying to convince people to believe her story; it's accepted in pretty short order. What follows is then a pretty interesting variation on a love story: it's not so much about Chakotay falling in love as it is about Kellin convincing him to fall in love again.
But in a way, that's where the episode ends up a bit flat. The moment we hear about a technology that wipes the memories of Ramuran "runaways," we know where this story is going. Sure enough, the final act sees Chakotay trying to convince Kellin to fall in love a second time, just as she had to convince him. Of course, for the sake of episodic television, that's not going to work. But objectively, this seems to mean that Chakotay just isn't as convincing as Kellin is. He doesn't want the relationship as badly, isn't as resourceful or persuasive, isn't as invested. And if we sense, at some level, that he isn't fully invested, why should we be? (Particularly when, after all is said and done, this is kind of like one of those time travel stories where no one even remembers that any of this happened.)
As I said, though, the performances are committed -- and that extends to little moments for the rest of the regular cast as well. Paris and Kim banter about the latter's crush on Seven of Nine. Tuvok gets in a good Vulcan-style joke about Neelix's food. Seven and Kim have a nice scene awkwardly discussing the customs of courtship. And while it wouldn't be my choice to give Neelix the last (dramatic) word on love, Ethan Phillips does a lovely job with the episode's closing monologue. (I suppose Neelix is the one character on the show who to this point has been in a long-term romance, so maybe it's not that weird.)
Other observations:
- Kellin says that during her first (forgotten) stay on Voyager, she was quite fond of Neelix's cooking. Everyone should immediately doubt her entire story at that point.
- This is the first Voyager episode with no B'Elanna at all; Roxann Dawson was out on her maternity leave.
- This episode got me thinking about memory more generally. My memory was that when Seven of Nine was written onto Voyager, the character immediately took over the series. Here, near the end of the fourth season, that hasn't yet proven to be the case. Seven is a background character most of the time, and the fact that other characters feel under-serviced by the writers doesn't really have anything to do with the fact that there are "too many Seven of Nine episodes." (There aren't.) We'll see if that changes in season five.
It's the easy quip, but "Unforgettable" ultimately feels pretty forgettable to me. I give it a C+.
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