Voyager‘s First Riff on the Star Trek Trial Episode Is a Weird Experiment

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 ... Read full article.