Living Witness

"Living Witness" is an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the 23rd episode of the fourth season. It has an average fan rating of 4.2/5 on the official Star Trek website as of September 2009.

In it, an alien museum curator 700 years in the future hopes a Voyager relic containing a copy of the Doctor can confirm their version of history.

Plot

The episode opens with a scene on the "warship Voyager", quite obviously an unrealistic depiction of the ship which turns out to be the museum's recreation of events. Although the brutality and detachment of the crew is chilling, there are several dark, campy elements of the alternate reality that provide comic relief: the crew wear altered versions of their uniforms with no combadges or rank insignia, black gloves, and black turtlenecks. Chakotay's name is repeatedly mispronounced by the crew as ("CHAC-a-tay") and his tattoo has grown in size as to cover half of his face and appears in the design of Māori Tā moko markings. Janeway sports a butch haircut and excessive schadenfreude. Meanwhile, the Doctor has become an android mass murderer while Tuvok has adopted a sinister sense of humor; Seven of Nine is a full Borg with several other Borg drones serving as shock troops onboard Voyager- this is possibly an insight into what would happen later on in Voyager when the Borg children arrive on board (The information gathered by the Kyrians may have come from other races experiences at that time). There are also numerous Kazon actively patrolling the ship with phaser rifles in hand, and Neelix is depicted as a bridge officer.

In the actual course of events, Captain Janeway had agreed to provide the Vaskans with medical supplies in exchange for dilithium crystals. The Kyrians, who were at war with the Vaskans, boarded Voyager to stop the deal, which they thought was a weapons deal of some sort. During their time on the ship, they stole a data module carrying a backup copy of the Doctor. Seven hundred years later, this module was part of a Kyrian museum exhibit which showed their version of the encounter. This biased encounter showed Voyager as a warship with a savage and sadistic crew that was willing to commit genocide. Even the Vaskan in the simulation became horrified over the atrocities committed, but the simulated Janeway told him it was too late to stop now. Quarren, a curator at the museum, always fascinated by Voyager's story even though they were "the bad guys", had found (with the help from an archaeological team) the Doctor's backup module 3 weeks prior. He was able to activate it using Voyager's own tools. Initially, the Doctor's claims that Voyager was unfairly depicted by the Kyrians are ignored, and he is told he could be held accountable for war crimes when he presents his version of history before the Commission of Arbiters. The Doctor states, however, that a presently non-functional Starfleet medical tricorder would settle the issue of who killed Tedran, a Kyrian revolutionary hero who died during a raid on Voyager. Eventually, after fending off an angry mob, he convinces the Kyrian curator to help him set the 700-year-old record straight. The episode ends an indeterminate number of years later, as the museum's new curator explains that the two species finally made peace thanks to the efforts of the Doctor, although he always regretted that he would never see any of his friends again. Following that, the Doctor served as the surgical chancellor for the Kyrians and Vaskans for many years, but eventually he took a ship and departed for Earth; he said that 'He had a longing for home'.

Reception

This episode has been subject to criticism for introducing a backup EMH program as a plot device, displacing the long-established impossibility of backing the Doctor up ("Message in a Bottle", "The Swarm"). This inconsistency was later explained as the Doctors backup unit was constructed with materials that were unable to be replicated and that were never located by the Voyager crew. However, the episode was popular among fans, and has an average rating of 4.2/5 on the official Star Trek website (as of September, 2009).

External links

• Living Witness at the Internet Movie Database
• "Living Witness" at TV.com
• Living Witness at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)
• Living Witness at StarTrek.com