As Star Trek: Voyager turned 30 at the start of this year, I’ve had a lot of fun revisiting the first season of the show and re-examining what really works about that debut season three decades later. I’ve hit my first snag, perhaps of many to come in Voyager‘s decidedly mixed run of episodes: the first one that just kind of doesn’t really mesh together for me now, all these years later.
That episode is “Ex Post Facto,” a weird but loosely familiar format for Voyager to dive into just eight episodes into its run. Primarily set on an unidentified alien planet, home to a people called the Beneans at war with a neighboring species, the Numiri, the episode focuses on the plight of Tom Paris. Accused of a murder he swears he didn’t commit, despite seemingly overwhelming evidence against him, Tom is forced to relive the memories of his victim’s final moments every 14 hours—an alien process that is slowly but surely degrading his brain functions to a point of almost certain death.
It is and it isn’t a kind of take on one of Star Trek‘s most beloved tropes, the trial episode. The trial itself is over before the episode even begins—there’s a reason I didn’t include “Ex Post Facto” in my ranker of Trek trial episodes, because it mostly concerns Tuvok’s post-trial investigation of the crime to prove Tom’s innocence, rather than the trial process. But that in and of itself is still a riff on the idea, as much as “Ex Post Facto” itself riffs on other episodes in that genre that came before it. It’s got elements of “A Matter of Perspective,” the TNG trial episode that uses the Holodeck to alter recreations of the incident that update in real time based on witness testimonies. In playing with memory itself—the evidence against Tom is that the Beneans can use technology to withdraw “memory engrams” from the deceased and put them in a technological host during criminal investigations, letting them provide evidence in their own murder trial—there’s echoes to a similar early DS9 episode, “Dax” where Jadzia is put on trial for a crime her predecessor as host of the Dax symbiont, Curzon, allegedly committed.
The thing is, while aping episodes like that, “Ex Post Facto” just kind of isn’t as interesting. Tuvok makes for an interesting investigative foil, of course, as the cool and collected logical arbitrator. It leverages early Voyager‘s clear interest in Tom as a focal character on the crew, but it never really leans into his unorthodox background—that he’s an ex-convict still trying to prove himself—as an interesting complication during the episode. For all the times “Ex Post Facto” has Tuvok remind Paris that he’s going to prove the truth of the case regardless of whether or not it condemns Tom or absolves him, the episode never really goes far enough to make that feel like it’s actually on the table.
It kind of knows you know that Tuvok is going to find a way to prove Tom’s innocence. There’s no drama in their relationship here, pitting them on either side of an ethical debate, like there is in Riker and Picard’s debate over Data in the legendary “Measure of a Man”. The shocking opening aside, showing Tom supposedly committing the murder, “Ex Post Facto” almost treats his absolution as a foregone conclusion. Which it would be in most Star Trek shows—imagine how wild it would be if this was something Tom and the Voyager crew just had to live with going forward!—but “Ex Post Facto” never makes it feel like that absolution is truly earned.
It’s a problem Voyager begins to face more and more as it brushes up against some really great ideas. An episodic Trek show that has a premise that craves some sort of long-form serialization, there are so many examples of Voyager having a killer idea that just has to be put on the wayside because everything has to be back to the status quo in time for the next episode. Last week in my anniversary musings over “Eye of the Needle,” I touched on how sometimes, in spite of that, Voyager could still play with expectations and make things work in that push-and-pull in really cool ways. Alas, “Ex Post Facto” is just kind of an episode that barely tries to do that, and suffers for it.
So why is its anniversary worth nothing then, 30 years later? Well, because this is what revisiting a series is about. Especially one with such an up-and-down reputation like Voyager has—and I say that as someone who loves it dearly as my first Star Trek! But just discussing the greatest hits of it wouldn’t be a fair assessment or tribute to the series as it passes this major milestone. Not every episode is going to be great. Some are going to be middling, some are going to be awful (I’m dreading getting to “Cathexis” in my season one rewatch). But Voyager wouldn’t be Voyager without those peaks and valleys—and in the grand scheme of things, “Ex Post Facto” is a pretty minor bump on that road that’s still worth acknowledging.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
