Star Trek: 12 Best Alternate Reality Episodes

Living Witness is an oddity of an episode. It is a very strong hour of Voyager, directed by Tim Russ. However, none of the characters, as know them, appear in the episode at all. It is instead told from the perspective of a backup copy of the Doctor, featuring recreations and reconstructions of events.

Living Witness is both a fun foray into a different version of the crew, while also serving as a somewhat dark lesson on the dangers of rewriting history. When the Doctor awakens 700 years in the future, confined to a museum that has remembered Voyager as a warship, he is horrified to find a society built on mutual fear of his ship.

The tension that runs through the episode is not entirely one of simply trying to correct the recorded history, but also serves to highlight the division in society built by a false narrative. In an age where history is constantly being remembered one way and then another, this episode serves a timely reminder that the truth is often held in the eye of the beholder.

The cast are all in excellent form playing the evil versions of the themselves, with Kate Mulgrew in particularly infusing Janeway with a chilling, casual evil. However it is Bob Picardo who truly gets to shine, lending an urgent humanity in his request to right the wrongs of history.