Jeffrey Rewrites Voyager: Ex Post Facto

Let’s get this out of the way right off: I love noir.

I love craggy, tough-as-nails gumshoes in battered fedoras and rumpled suits, rubbing their five-o-clock shadows while drinking scotch and talking about the mean streets. I love morally ambiguous detective stories where you’re not supposed to like the hero, you’re just supposed to respect him, and where his detective skills relied less on Holmesian deduction and more on telling when someone was lying, being fast with a gun, keeping the cops at bay, and never, ever trusting the dame.

It's not sexist when Bogey does it. That's the rule, right?

In many ways the entire genre is sexist, where women are either innocent virgins to be protected, or seductive vamps to be used and/or ensnared by, and more often than not the plot twist is that the former turns out to be the latter. And yet men are treated no better, being either crafty and manipulative villains or thuggish and stupid goons. It is a world where everyone has the worst intentions, and no one has virtue. And I love it.

And so when I talk about Ex Post Facto, Voyager’s obvious tribute to noir, I am predisposed to like it. But right from the start it’s an awkward mix. Roddenberry’s future is bright, clean, and idealistic. Noir is the opposite of all those things. It’s like if someone took Superman, a beacon of hope, truth, and justice, and made him a distrusted, hated outcast who eventually had to turn to destruction and violence to save a morally ambiguous people from a morally evil villain and… oh yeah.