10 Times Star Trek: Voyager Went Woke

6. The Duty To Remember

The episode Remember centres around B'Elanna receiving the memories of an elderly guest aboard the ship. She relives the descent of a society into fascism as they persecute, isolate and execute a group of people because of their beliefs. A dark chapter of their history that was later covered up.

Guest star Athena Massey said of the episode:

The Holocaust and so many different genocides have happened in our history, and I think it's important that people always be reminded and to keep humanity in check and not let this happen again.

Just a couple of years before Remember aired, Steven Spielberg formed the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. The project aimed to record as many video testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses as possible, so they could be preserved.

And that sentiment is at the core of Remember. An ageing witness saw the real story disappear from history and decided to pass her testimony to someone who could carry it forward.

But this wasn't just an abstract, historical concept. It was also happening in real time. In the same year Remember aired, the first trial at the tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia began. People were having to come to terms with atrocities that were happening in their own lifetime.

But the tone changes ever so slightly by the time Memorial arrives in 2000. It was more than just another Star Trek anti-war story.

When crewmembers of Voyager experience flashbacks about their involvement in war crimes, they eventually discover that a war memorial is the cause of the misplaced memories. The inscription on the memorial reads: words alone cannot convey the suffering, words alone cannot prevent what happened here from happening again.

In Cinefantastique, Brannon Braga is quoted on this episode:

It's about more than post-traumatic-stress disorder. It's about memorials, and the controversial nature of memorials.

That's not a random observation, given that Germany had just spent a decade debating how to memorialise genocide. And in 1999, the harrowing investigation into the atrocities that had just taken place in Kosovo was a stark reminder that humanity wasn't learning the lessons from history.

This speaks to a pivotal cultural moment, when the international community was debating how memories and evidence of war should be preserved, how they should be commemorated and whether doing so could help prevent repetition.

And not long after, in an episode of Star Trek, Chakotay and Janeway are arguing about whether people should be forced to relive the traumatic memories from a memorial...or whether they should be preserved, both for remembrance and as a warning.