Living Witness: The legend of Star Trek 'Voyager'

The Plot

Seven hundred years after the starship Voyager's pilgrimage across the Delta Quadrant, the Kyrians and the Vaskans (two conflicting peoples) look back on their encounter with Voyager as a critical moment in their age-long struggle:

The curator of the museum of the Voyager encounter is Quarren - a Kyrian. The centerpiece of the museum is a holographic reconstruction of the crew of Voyager during the crucial events. But it is not the crew we have come to know and love: The Voyager is a warship (not just a starship). The crew are brutal, sadistic war criminals. Captain Janeway is a psychopathic murderer who cheerfully orders the unleashing of biological weapons of mass destruction, causing the deaths of millions of Kyrians, as the Voyager sides with the Vaskans.

Then the curator discovers another artifact from the Voyager encounter: This is a generator module for the ship's Emergency Medical Hologram - the doctor. When the doctor is "resurrected", his testimony about what really happened is totally different from Quarren's reconstruction. The doctor is the "living witness" of the episode's title.

At first, Quarren is unwilling to admit that the doctor could be right and he could be wrong. He struggles to accept a truth different from the legend he has known. Meanwhile, the existence of the doctor (and public knowledge of his testimony) leads to renewed clashes between the Vaskans and the Kyrians, and attempts to destroy the museum of the Voyager encounter. The doctor heroically tells Quarren to delete his program (i.e. to destroy him) as the only way of bringing about peace. Quarren, however, is by now desperate to find the truth, and will not destroy the doctor.

There is one other piece of evidence that will confirm or refute the doctor's testimony. Unfortunately, it has been lost in the rioting. Quarren and the doctor search for it together.

At this point the camera zooms out, to reveal that the whole story has itself been a holographic re-creation, in a museum from even further in the future, - an exhibit to show how the heroism of Quarren and the doctor was a turning point in the history of the two peoples, leading to peace between them.

How we are told the story

The way the story is told is important: we come in "in the middle" of the Voyager encounter (as reconstructed by the Kyrians) - but we do not know it is a reconstruction. All we know is that something is wrong. This is not the Voyager that we know and love. Only as events unfold do we discover that it is a reconstruction seven centuries later. And only at the very end do we discover that the whole story is itself part of a later reconstruction.

Revisionist history

There is an important truth in this story, about 'revisionist history' - history is usually written by the victors, and they show themselves as the "good guys". It is no coincidence that the bad guys usually lose. By definition, the losers were the bad guys.

This challenges our view of history: Is what we believe reality or myth? Was Columbus a heroic explorer or an imperialist conqueror? Your answer may depend on whether you are a white European or a native American. Did Jesus rise from the dead, or was this a myth made up afterwards by his followers? If you are a follower of Christ, you are likely to answer this one way. If you are an atheist, you will answer it a completely different way.

Doubt about history

Today we live with doubt about history: Many people believe there's no such thing as objective history. What we have is not 'reality', but a construction - and you can write a different construction according to your gender, color, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. The way we write history depends on our political agenda, rather than on any idea of "real" truth.

Doubts about doubt

Is this pessimism justified? Or does it throw out the baby with the bath-water? Obviously our knowledge of history is not perfect. It's affected by all kinds of prejudices, known and unknown, on the part of the historian (both the writer at the time, and the present day historian seeking to deconstruct their writing). But does this mean it is completely false non-knowledge?

At first glance that is what this episode of Voyager seems to say. But in the end, it contradicts this view: We know that Quarren's reconstruction is wrong. We have been watching previous episodes of Voyager, and we know that Janeway and the crew are not like that!

Evidence

The new evidence that comes to light (the EMH module) contradicts Quarren's reconstruction. There is a truth to be known. There is evidence, and the evidence does matter. The testimony of someone who was there at the time (the doctor) is vital. There is a truth which we really can discover.

We do need to take bias into account when we examine history - whether it is the bias of the original writer, or our own prejudices now. But does this mean we have to give up altogether on finding reality, and substitute propaganda for our own political agendas? If we believed that finding reality was completely beyond us, shouldn't we be honest? We ought to give up on history altogether, and start writing fiction instead! But we do not believe that: we believe that it is possible to know something about history, and that eyewitness testimony does matter.