4x10 Random Thoughts

[5.3/10] I’m a firm believer in the idea that we should judge films and television shows for what they are, not for what we wish for them to be. In other words, it’s tempting to come up with a better story in your head and slate an episode of T.V. for not doing that instead, rather than judging it based on the merits and flaws of the story it did choose to tell.

So I will start out by telling you that “Random Thoughts” is a pretty tepid mystery story. On a planet full of telepaths named “the Mari”, the local police chief, Nimira, arrests Lt. Torres for thought-crime. B’Elanna had an angry thought about a random dude who bumped into her, and the violent retribution she imagined, but did not actually commit, turns out to be a criminal offense in a society of psychics who claim to have eliminated aggressive thought. When that random dude commits a beating of the shopkeeper after interacting with B’Elanna, she’s the one who has to pay the price for such “violent mental contamination” under Mari law, and it’s up to Tuvok to prove her innocence.

You can kind of see the appeal. A detective story where the only clues are thoughts has a certain sci-fi charge to. And the smartest choice writer Kenneth Biller makes in the script is to center Tuvok in a story about a society founded on mental discipline. Having him conduct an investigation in a community that might seem like a paradise to a Vulcan security officer -- one practically free from crime and full of citizens in control of their thoughts -- only to discover its dark underbelly, could be a major growth moment for the character.

Unfortunately, the mystery, and its major figures, aren't very interesting. The mystery itself depends on the conceit that there’s something sinister going on here beyond B’Elanna having an idle thought, which already gets the story off on the wrong foot. Beyond that, it rests on B’Elanna having perceived an important negative thought from a creepy shopkeeper that she conveniently forgot (or had repressed). The fact that it can be dredged up with a minor targeted mindmeld, a technique normally treated as intense and potentially dangerous, also drips with convenience.

Some shortcuts would be easy to forgive if the characters made more of a splash. The random dude who commits the attack is little more than a cardboard cutout. Neelix’s alien crush on the planet is as stock as anything. The creepy shopkeeper antagonist isn’t fit to stalk Lon Suder’s boots. And Chief Nimira, who gets the most fleshing out, is fine as the law enforcement representative devoted to her people’s ways, but still comes like a cipher ready to be forgotten as soon as the credits roll.

The big twist is that it turns out the creepy shopkeeper (named Guill, for the record) is running an illicit ring where enthusiasts steal and trade negative thoughts with one another, and he’s the real source of thought contamination here. I can mildly appreciate the inventiveness of the idea, but in execution, the baddies are completely cheesy. There is some juice when Tuvok gets into a psychic battle with Guill and shows how terrifying Vulcans can be despite their calm exteriors. For the most part, though, Tuvok’s dalliance with the underworld is a cartoony, overstretched bout of tedium.

“Random Thoughts” does make a point that offers food for thought -- suggesting that societies which try to suppress or even outlaw negative or aggressive thinking don’t snuff it out; instead they only push such ideas into the shadows where they fester and metastasize into something worse. It’s easy to transpose that concept onto retrograde groups with strict norms about propriety that only succeed in shunting into the dark corners of their communities. More basically, you can take it as a commentary on 1990s pearl-clutching about violence in film and television, and attempts to censor or suppress it. This limp mystery and strained reveal makes for a pretty weak vehicle to convey those ideas, but there’s something under the hood here, which counts for something.

So taken on its own merits, “Random Thoughts” is a meager mystery story, with some potential given its character focus and social commentary, that’s largely wasted on its stock and uninvolving execution. That describes any number of Voyager episodes, so while this one is a disappointment, it’s not a particularly remarkable one.

What’s maddening about “Random Thoughts” though is that it sidesteps a more interesting story. When Chief Nimira tells Janeway “We’re going to perform a potentially dangerous surgical operation on your crew member’s brain for having a Bad Thought:tm:,” the interesting response isn’t, “Well, I’ll set my security officer to prove that she didn’t, in fact, have a Bad Thought:tm:”; it’s “We mean to respect your laws and principles, but I won’t allow a member of my crew to have their personal and mental autonomy violated for having an idle thought they didn’t act on.”

On the one hand, I low key loathe this episode because it feels like Tom is the only member of the crew who isn’t taking crazy pills in his reaction to this situation, and even he’s treated a bit like he’s blinded by his personal attachments. Everybody else seems cool with this “work through the Mari investigatory system” approach, and no one seems to take Tom’s “We should have a back-up plan to protect B’Elanna in case these aliens try to crack her skull open and pick through what’s inside” suggestion seriously. You can write it off as confidence in Janeway to solve the problem, but the fact that it’s B’Elanna’s oldest friend on the ship, Chakotay, who basically tells Tom “relax and do some busywork rather than worrying about this” is maddening.

On the other hand, challenging this system rather than solving a mystery within it is simply the more interesting story. Voyager’s “Random Thoughts” is basically a redo of “Justice” from The Next Generation. In that episode, Wesley is sentenced to death for the minor crime of accidentally trampling some flowers in a forbidden area on the planet of the week, and Picard has to balance Starfleet’s principle of respecting other species and their laws with the Federation’s values of substantive justice. It’s not a perfect episode, but the richness of that debate makes it a highlight of TNG’s early years.

“Random Thoughts” had a chance to surpass that episode because, frankly, Wesley’s situation was stupid. The TNG writers put a fig leaf on the aliens’ system of justice, with their leaders acknowledging it was harsh but claiming it was necessary to preserve the 1980s Skinemax paradise their community represents. Even if you could accept that, the idea that respecting their culture means letting a Federation citizen, who had no understanding or warning about this system of laws, and caused no actual harm, be put to death by a foreign government, is absurd, and weakens the ethical dilemma at the center of the episode.

“Random Thoughts”, on the other hand, has a much more compelling case to make. Chief Nimira can point to harm that B’Elanna caused, in the way her violent thought led a random Mira citizen to commit grisly acts of violence. (At least before the silly twist where B’Elanna got that thought from elsewhere and then plum forgot about it.)

Moreover, Chief Nimira could argue that the consequences demanded by the Mari justice system are curative, not punitive. She doesn’t want to mess with Torres’ head just to punish her, as with Tom in “Ex Post Facto”. Instead, she wants to extract that violent thought from B’Elanna’s head so that it can be excised from the Mari community to prevent something like this from happening again. The fact that an old lady, similarly consumed by violent thoughts, randomly murders Neelix’s crush could add to the urgency of Nimira’s point: “I’m not trying to punish a criminal; I’m trying to stop a contagion.”

That would raise all sorts of fascinating ethical, political, and practical questions. Where do you draw the line when it comes to respecting another nation state’s laws? (There’s a big difference between, say, making your citizens pay local fines when they violate alternate speed limits versus subjecting them to amputation for committing theft.) Is it fair for a community to impose those sorts of rules on uninitiated outsiders, even if that outsider causes grave harm? And if you’re the technologically superior power, does might make right? Is it just to use your advanced technology or greater firepower to exempt one of your people from local justice, just because you think their system is wrong?

How do you balance the safety and security of your crew member against the potential damage to a whole society? Does a reflexive revulsion to punishing “thought crime” warrant reexamination when interacting with a society full of telepaths? There’s no easy answer to any of these questions, and “Random Thoughts” minimizes all of them or sidesteps them entirely in favor of a soggy whodunnit.

There’s other big questions that situation could present in a dramatically-interesting way. On a purely pragmatic level, on a vessel where you’ve already lost needed crewmembers, how do you balance the strictures of the Prime Directive against the risk of someone screwing with the mind of your chief engineer who’s proven vital to keeping the ship humming? And on a more philosophical level, there’s an interesting question about whether invading people’s mental privacy like the Mari do could be justified by a society free from crime, or if our mental and physical autonomy should be sacrosanct and inviolable, to where no outcome could justify such an invasion.

I veer toward the latter perspective, of course, but having Janeway and/or Tuvok actually engage with this clash of values, alongside the diplomatic and practical intricacies of the situation is a rich vein to explore in the proud Star Trek tradition. Far richer, I would add, than a tepid mental investigation to prove B’Elanna’s innocence. The starting point should be, “Yeah, she had a negative thought. So what?” and let the conflict spin out from there, not “What if her negative thought was secretly caused by something else?”

The best we get is some idle conversation from Seven about how these types of situations keep happening with Starfleet in general and Voyager in particular, and it’s pretty foolish to continue allowing them to pop up under the circumstances. And honestly, she has a point! Especially given Voyager’s predicament, risking conflicts with every wide alien colony in the road is arguably misguided, or at least somewhat questionable, and it’s nice to see someone not named Seska acknowledge that. Aside from the fact that there wouldn’t really be a show if Janeway took Seven’s advice, in-universe, it’s still nice to hear Janeway affirm Starfleet’s values of exploration and stand-up for the idea that the benefits of cultural exchange are worth the risks.

But that is thin gruel in an episode that isn’t really about that, and instead plummets headlong into a story that is far less worth telling. I still believe in judging a show or a movie for what it is, not what it isn’t, let alone what it could be. Only, when an episode like “Random Thoughts” comes along and gestures toward a much more interesting path, before wandering down a much more boring one, I cannot help but walk away frustrated, if only from the boatloads of missed potential.