Star Trek: Voyager: Memorial

After returning from an away mission, Chakotay, Kim, Paris and Neelix start to experience visions of fighting in a war that are so real their minds may not be able to take it.

From an interesting opening, Memorial goes further and further downhill until it dies on its feet. From the moment you first see Paris fighting in a war he doesn't recall being in, a whole host of Trek episodes leap to mind that have used similar 'false memory' plotlines as a basis. It then becomes simply a matter of guessing which kind of hallucination this is: a blocked one like in TNG's Clues or an enforced one such as in Voyager's own Remember?

It becomes obvious quite quickly that it's b), and we're in the middle of a World War allegory cunningly disguised by putting a totally transparent sheet over the top of it. As Janeway and the crew argue about whether or not to deactivate the beacon that is transmitting images to them, you already know how it's going to finish: with a heavy-handed speech talking about how we should never forget wars as they teach us not to do something like that again. And assuming you haven't fallen asleep long before, it's at that point that you groan and switch off. Even the original series 30 years earlier did better allegories than Voyager.

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