Voyager Flashback: Counterpoint

Star Trek is famous for wrapping present-day social commentary inside a science fiction wrapper. But science-fiction is also good for adaptations of history... and that's what Star Trek: Voyager seemed to be doing with "Counterpoint."

Voyager is traversing the space of the Devore, an alien race with a ban on telepaths. Forced to take extreme measures to hide Tuvok and the other telepaths on the crew (plus a dozen telepathic alien refugees), Janeway is given a way out when a Devore inspector named Kashyk requests asylum and begins helping Voyager avoid his people's inspection ships. But is Kashyk really on the level?

At a high level, this episode seems to be a sci-fi take on hiding Jewish refugees from Nazi soldiers. We join the story already in progress; Voyager has endured many Devore inspections and has been hiding telepaths from them for some time. The script cleverly reveals the situation bit by bit. It handles the characters and the audience with intelligence, acknowledging that Kashyk's defection could be a trap and never trying to pretend otherwise. There are great "cat and mouse" elements woven throughout; it's a well-crafted puzzle with good suspense.

Parallel to all this is a romance story for Janeway and Kashyk. I'm not sureif  this effectively raises the stakes on the story or detracts from the whole... but Kate Mulgrew and guest star Mark Harelik have good chemistry together and make their scenes interesting. They play "good cop, bad cop" when trying to extract information from an alien contact. They flirt with each other in fun, subtle (for TV) ways. Mulgrew in particular walks a fine line, showing us a Janeway who's both kind of smitten and unwilling to fully let her guard down.

Yet while good overall, this episode does stumble in spots -- especially at the finish line. Janeway ignores the Prime Directive. Sure, to defy "Nazis," but hypocritically right after demoting Paris and imprisoning him for a month for doing the same thing. The running metaphor of the "counterpoint" in music never really seems clear to me. At the end, it's a complete mystery where the telepaths on Voyager's crew are being hidden as the alien refugees flee in two shuttles gifted to them by Janeway. It's even more unclear why Kashyk doesn't just seize the Voyager crew he can get his hands on, instead letting Janeway go in a sort of "game recognize game" finale. (But it all then ends so quickly that you're barely given the time to question this stuff.)

Other observations:

• Keeping continuity, the character of Suder (a Betazoid) is mentioned. And in future continuity, the telepathic refugees here, the Brenari, are part of a key moment in one episode of Star Trek: Prodigy.

• The makeup design of the alien Torat is great: a fishlike being who can puff his nose area out to express emotion.

• I think the writers sometimes forget what the Prime Directive really is. (Or at least, how I understand it.) You're not supposed to interfere with pre-warp civilizations. If they have warp travel and invite you in, go crazy. Thus, while helping the Brenari here is said to be a Prime Directive violation, I'm not sure that it actually is.

If you can ignore the sloppy, rushed, "wait, what?" aspects of the ending here, "Counterpoint" is a fairly compelling episode. I give it a B.