4x23 Living Witness

[7.9/10] My mom loves Richard III of England, and she curses Shakespeare’s name for the play the Bard wrote that maligns the deposed king, casting him as a self-described villain rather than a more noble figure. Context matters though. Shakespeare wrote in the reign of the Tudors, the dynasty that toppled Richard III. Of course he was going to frame the torchbearer of the prior administration as the bad guy, one who deserved to be beaten by the current monarch’s forebears. Shakespeare was liable to find himself in prison or worse if he did anything less.

Despite that, my mom can’t get over the way Shakespeare’s play set the historical narrative about Richard III for centuries. And I get it. If you care about something, and someone tore it down so definitively that their work became the mental landmark for it in the popular consciousness, it’s easy to bear some resentments, even if their reasons were understandable.

That’s what I like about “Living Witness”. It is, ultimately, an episode about history: how we tell it, how it’s deliberately and unintentionally distorted, how our perception of it shapes the here and now and vice versa. The episode serves as a reminder that history is not fixed, but rather a living thing, one that evolves at the same time our understanding of it does, but also as our needs as a society do, for good and for ill.

Writers Bryan Fuller, Joe Menosky, and Brannon Braga get at that idea with a compelling sci-fi setup, by juxtaposing the image of Voyager and her crew as we know them, with the funhouse mirror version reconstructed by a civilization that had a chance encounter with our heroes seven hundred years later.

The term “funhouse mirror” is appropriate, since this is the closest Voyager comes to doing a Mirror Universe episode. (Give or take Tuvok’s cameo in “Through the Looking Glass” from Deep Space Nine.) As with those installments (and “Yesterday’s Enterprise” from TNG), it’s fun to see a dark-tinged version of our usually high-minded protagonists in a “What If?”-type scenario.

God help me, Kate Mulgrew totally kills it as the nigh-fictitious captain of the “Warship Voyager. Her malevolent air of practically gleeful brutality and no-nonsense boss vibes are an entertaining counterpoint to the typically ethical and empathetic to a fault leader. Seeing a Tuvok who half smiles, a Harry Kim who beats up prisoners, a Tom Paris who calls Neelix a “hedgehog”, a Doctor who uses his talents to wound rather than heal, is undeniably compelling and even fun in a transgressive sort of way.

True to the Mirror Universe roots of this one, there’s something cartoonish about the alt-Voyager crew’s villainy in this one, which makes their escapades as much of a fun monotony breaker as it is a serious commentary on how the writers of history can, if they’re not careful, invent or ignore details that turn complicated people into heroes and villains.

Beyond the scene-chewing glory of this dark turn, there’s also entertaining visions of the little details Quarren, the curator of a museum devoted to “the Voyager encounter”, got wrong. Simple things like a Kazon member of the crew, Neelix being a bridge officer, or a fully-Borged Seven leading a troop of drones and assimilating fresh meat, play like an amusing exaggeration of the real deal. There’s potent commentary in how easy it is for small inconsistencies to snowball into larger misconceptions. But for the most part, it’s just fun to see this kooky caricature of the ship and crew we’ve been watching for four seasons.

But the smartest choice “Living WItness” makes is not to dwell on it. One of the big problems with Mirror Universe episodes, past and present, is that the gimmick soon wears out its welcome. You can only see upstanding Starfleet officers acting devious for so long before the novelty runs out. This episode has its cake and eats it too, giving us plenty of subversive fun, while eventually pivoting to a broader reflection on how these sorts of skewed versions of the past come to be.

That happens when Quarren unearths the Doctor, miraculously recovered from a back-up module, and brought seven hundred years in the future, though to him it’s like he was aboard Voyager just yesterday.

What a cool concept! This is another Voyager episode where, even if the execution isn’t quite perfect, the ideas at play are so enthralling that the show can get by on them alone. As the best Star Trek episodes do, “Living Witness” doesn’t just deliver thematic meditations on how the historical record is formed and changed, or plot-heavy events as alien races jockey back and forth to establish their official stories, but also on the personal side of all of this.

The Doctor is understandably bewildered and disoriented to be revived centuries in the future. He is aghast, as my mom is, at the way Quarren and other historians from his planet have maligned the good name of people he served with and admires. He is incensed at the prospect of being held to account for crimes he didn’t commit. And he is noble, willing to sacrifice himself to keep the peace, even for a pair of alien races he barely knows.

That may be my favorite part of “Living Witness”. In truth, the episode is thematically muddled. You can suss out a broader takeaway, but the script is more of a grab bag of observations about how our conception of the past solidifies and shifts than a story built around a unified thesis. But my favorite motif in the episode is a simple one: that people from history are just that -- people.

In Quarren’s conception of Voyager, the Doctor is an amoral mechanical henchman, unbothered by torture and unconcerned with the loss of life. When Quarren meets the actual man, he discovers that not only is Doc a hologram, not an android, but that he misses his friends, has a self-sacrificing sense of martyrdom, has a loyalty to his crewmates, has a talent for holodesign, has a sensitivity to being shut off mid sentence. It’s so easy to flatten the figures of the past into icons or walking ideas, right or wrong. The Doctor’s mere presence is a reminder that there are layers, flaws, and multitudes in all of us, ones that the frosted looking glass we use to observe the past often struggles to make out.

In truth, though, “Living Witness” isn’t really about that. It’s more about the fallibility of history, the way it’s written by the victors and bent or twisted to suit the needs of the present culture, in ways that make new facts that challenge the accepted story, and threaten to upend the foundations upon which our cultural narratives are founded, hard for modern people to accept.

To illustrate that idea, the episode sees Quarren’s people, the Kyrians, tell and preserve the story of the Voyager encounter as the time their community was brutally slaughtered by our heroes. In this telling, Janeway was convinced to intervene by a representative of the Vaskans, a different race who wanted to conquer Kyrian territory in the past, and now marginalizes Kyrians in the present day. In Quarren’s history, Tedran, the Kyrian leader killed on Voyager, is a martyr, who symbolizes his people’s spirit of resistance that persists to the present day.

It is based on an incomplete record, as most histories are, and the extrapolations used to fill in the gaps are self-serving. The Kyrians were innocent victims who fought bravely to the last. The dominating Vaskans invited Voyager to defeat them out of a reckless lust for land and resources. But even then, the Vaskan government will allow this recreation of history because the real villains are outsiders, ones whose heedless genocidal violence faces objections from the Vaskan representative aboard the ship, and absolves the Vaskans of direct responsibility for the war crimes committed. You can understand why the Kryians would cling to the story, and why their erstwhile oppressors would permit it.

It is also, of course, almost completely wrong. The skillfulness of the script comes through in how we get to see a sort of contrast and compare. After Quarren’s dramatic recreation, the Doctor creates a simulation of his own that is, if nothing else, much closer to what really happened. And here, Voyager’s crew are bystanders drawn into this conflict with no dog in the fight. The Kyrians are the ones who attack unprovoked. Tedron the supposed rebel hero takes innocent hostages as leverage and seems unconcerned with their safety. And it’s the Vaskan representative, not Janeway, who ultimately kills him.

You can understand why Quarren and others would balk at The Doctor’s version. It recasts the Kryians from innocent victims to no less cruel aggressors who got what was coming to them. It recasts the Vaskans from ambitious but decent foes who unfortunately got more than they bargained for when inviting Voyager into the fray, to no less bloodthirsty foes who killed the Kyrians’ folk hero themselves. The true rendition of events upends the cultural myths that have defined relations between the Kryians and the Vaskans for hundreds of years, and no one’s ready for that.

That too is a cool idea! The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman wrote a compelling comic about this sort of thing entitled “You’re Not Going to Believe What I’m about to Tell You”, exploring the backfire effect and how even objective evidence that happens to push our emotional buttons can lead to resistance and even hostility. Upending or undermining cultural signifiers is a tricky business, one that can lead to harsh and sometimes violent rebukes. Using the lens of fiction to explore that--with skeptical historians, combative political leaders, and angry clans--is a boon.

There’s just one problem -- the narrative framing of “Living Witness” is problematic as hell.

Because in this instance, it’s the modern day oppressed group who is twisting history, and the dominant culture who is upset at how they’re unfairly depicted in the marginalized people’s story of repression and near-annihilation. And hoo boy, I have qualms with that approach.

I feel about it the same way I feel about “Retrospect”, the “Seven accuses an alien of violating her” episode. In both that episode and this one, I agree with the general principle at play. We should take major allegations seriously, investigate them impartially, and be careful not to pass judgment until the facts are established. And we should recognize the subjectivity of history, be open to revising our views of it when discovering new information, and work toward the truth regardless of our loyalties or affiliations.

But in both that episode and this one, I have major issues with the examples Voyager uses to draw that lesson out, and the intentional or unintentional takeaways that follow. For “Retrospect”, it’s the idea that false rape accusations are a bigger deal than a culture that discourages and even punishes the reporting of sexual assault. For “Living Witness”, it’s the idea that we should be skeptical of novel readings of history from marginalized groups because they’re self-serving fictions meant to serve modern political or social causes.

I didn’t find any member of the creative team going on the record about the specific inspiration for this episode, beyond the intent to offer a polemic against the generalized notion of “revisionist history.” I want to give the writers the benefit of the doubt as to good intentions here. But from modern eyes, it’s hard not to see this story through the lens of present day moral panics over “Critical Race Theory”, resistance to acknowledging how racism shaped the United States, and dismissing such historical analyses as mere attempts to make white people feel bad. You could even read the episode as an unintentional defense of Holocaust denialism.

The way the writers frame the story takes it beyond a simple but powerful point of “View history as the inevitable product of individuals with blind spots and biases” to a more specific, and pernicious point of, “Look upon the histories told by marginalized groups with skepticism because they contort the past to support their current grievances.” Deliberate or (probably) not, I have problems with an episode that points its audience in that direction.

“Living Witness” lands on an uplifting note, with the Doctor willing to sacrifice history, the truth, and his own life to preserve peace for the Kyrians and the Vaskans, and Quarren willing to upend his life’s work to share the truth with his countrymen, no matter how uncomfortable it may make them. The story rewards their nobility and integrity, “yada yada yada”-ing over another centuries-long stretch and showing that, fraught or not, the revelation of the truth was the beginning of a new harmony between the two peoples, not a wedge between them.

It’s a lovely thought, albeit one that the script doesn’t fully earn. Despite that, the episode closes on another clever twist, where this very story we’re watching is, in fact, another simulation from an even later civilization, reflecting on the turning point in relations between their ancestors’ clans. Who knows if they got it right, or if theirs too is a distorted and reconstructed history, doing the best to piece the understood facts and unknown details together into a story that helps them make sense of their past and themselves.

History is ultimately that -- a story. Certain facts and figures are objective truths. But how we weave them together, how we frame the events of the past, how we connect them to the present and the future, say as much about us as they do about those who came before. Where those stories land, who they favor and who they chastise, can make us proud, or angry, or simply give us an appreciation for the infinite complexities of humanity. “Living Witness” acknowledges that through the captivating lens of fiction, and the ever-elusive nature of fact.