Jeffrey Rewrites Voyager: Prime Factors

One of the unwritten rules of Star Trek is that the Federation will generally be the most advanced, most enlightened organization out there. Oh sure, they might run into super-advanced aliens every so often, but those are mostly one-off adventures, or technologically advanced but socially-stunted groups like the Borg.

But Voyager is all alone in the Delta Quadrant. What if they ran into a planet that was more advanced than the Federation? What if suddenly Voyager was on the other side of the fence? What if they were the backwards aliens, and this other culture were the enlightened ones? And what if this enlightened culture had their own version of the famous Prime Directive, and that rule kept Voyager from getting the help they need?

What a fantastic high-concept Star Trek episode that would make! What a unique twist on an old Roddenberry staple! It is the sort of plot that could really only happen deep in the Delta Quadrant, almost tailor-made for Voyager!

Let's look at how Voyager screws it up, and see if we can rewrite it to be better.

As always this will be a thematic rather than chronological rewrite, so you may want to familiarize yourself with the original plot over at the Memory Alpha Wiki.

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.