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Star Trek Voy - Season 1 - Episode 08

Star Trek Voy - 1x08 - Ex Post Facto

Originally Aired: 1995-2-27

Synopsis:
Paris is convicted of murder. [DVD]

My Rating - 4

Fan Rating Average - 5.31

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# Votes: 14 6 4 7 8 15 11 12 21 5 9

Problems
- The judicial system of our aliens of the week is a little strange. Seems to me, forcing someone to relive their victim's death once every 14 hours will just further desensitize a murderer, making him more dangerous, rather than discourage further crime.

Factoids
None

Remarkable Scenes
- The Doctor discussing the choosing of his name with Kes. One of the names the Doctor was considering was Spock. :)
- Paris: "Smoking is a bad habit. My species gave it up centuries ago when we finally got it into our heads it was killing us." Lidell: "You must be a very superior species." Paris: "That's not what I meant." Lidell: "Maybe I kill myself slowly because I don't have the courage to do it quickly."
- Chakotay's "play dead" trick.
- Neelix, regarding Tuvok's proposition of mind melding with Paris: "A, a what? What, what did he say? A mind what?"
- The Doctor's objections to Tuvok's mind meld idea. The Doctor: "Believe it or not, I know more about mind melds than you do!"
- Paris regarding taking another man's woman: "Some day it will be you Harry. You'll meet her and you'll know it's wrong from the first moment you see her. And you'll know there's nothing you can do about it.'"
- Tuvok uncovering the Numiri plot.
- Tom's way of expressing his gratitude to Tuvok.

My Review
This episode uses the classic "flashback" story template. Meaning, we see the effects of the story (Paris' sentence) before the cause (the story of the murder). Fortunately, it doesn't dominate the story, like certain other episodes do. So only parts of the story are wasted, which is mostly the beginning. So the episode gets off to a bad start, but eventually becomes interesting when Tuvok begins his criminal investigation. Tuvok is my favorite character on Voyager, and it's nice to see him shine here. As nice a job as Tuvok did though, the Numiri couldn't have done a worse one. Surely there would have been easier ways to transmit intelligence info than to encode military secrets in someone's mind, set this person up for a murder conviction, and then steal the prisoner? The episode has weak points, but overall comes off as pretty solid, so I don't take off too many points.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Pete Miller on 2006-06-14 at 4:21pm:
    I tend to enjoy the flashback story template. This one was good; however, none of the flashback episodes can compare to DS9 "Whispers", which is absolutely wonderful.
  • From JRPoole on 2009-01-07 at 10:33pm:
    Okay, so the aliens of the week don't look (quite) exactly like humans, but they have DOGS?

    Here's my observation on Voyager up to this point: the character development B plots are almost always very good, while the alien or anomaly of the week A plots are generally lame.

    The one notable exception is the Romulan temporal plot in "Eye of the Needle," which is excellent. Other than that, we get re-hashed space entity cliches, an awful time travel episode, and this mess about Paris' troubles, which are strikingly similar to the trouble Riker managed to get himself into in "A Matter of Perspective."

    The characters, however, are all getting good treatment. I love the interaction between Neelix and Janeway when they lock horns, and the Doctor is proving to be pretty interesting.

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