In the thirteenth episode of the seventh season of Voyager, the crew is tested when they rescue a ship full of condemned criminals. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For extended talk of capital punishment, racism, ableism.
Oh, I wanted to like this, y’all. I really did! It’s a bold and uncomfortable story, one I imagine received some flak from Star Trek fandom because it so outwardly challenges the brutality of capital punishment. I’ve long been the sort of person who believes that all forms of state violence need to be abolished, and so I began to feel thrilled as this episode delved into the complications that surround efforts to maintain a system like this. I knew that there’d be conflict right from the start because the Federation has outlawed the death penalty, but I was impressed that the show brought up two of the major reasons why we shouldn’t have one.
Iko represents one of those problems: mental disability and its connection to crime. There’s a complicated dance this show has to make between respecting the loss that the victims’ families experienced while also demonstrating that there are people like Iko who have committed crimes. You can’t disrespect someone’s loss, and in the end, the victims’ family got the right to decide what would help them find justice. That’s one of the main reasons this episode is so challenging; it would be much easier to talk about all of this if the government of Nygea were the only body asking for capital punishment. However, they designed a criminal justice system with the victims in mind, not the criminals. And that’s not a terrible thing! I only wish the American justice system had the same power dynamic at work.
But where this episode falls apart so spectacularly for me is in the writers’ refusal to paint Joleg in the same light as Iko. I honestly thought that’s where this was all leading to! The difficulty in watching this unfold is knowing that Iko was a sociopath and a murderer, someone who delighted in causing pain to others. Once the Doctor accidentally discovers that Iko’s brain did not develop as Nygean brains normally do, we see Iko in a new context. He’s capable of feeling empathy, guilt, and remorse, meaning that he lacked key abilities when he murdered someone. Now, Voyager really couldn’t liberate Iko, but vouching for him just so he can get an appeal started was a noble thing to do.
My problem, then, is why NO ONE ADDRESSES HOW FUCKED UP THE TREATMENT OF THE BENKARANS ARE. You can’t introduce the idea of racial profiling into this narrative and then completely drop the ball. Look, I’ll just say it outright: Who cares if Joleg manipulated Neelix into sending a letter to his brother? The Benkarans are regularly committed of crimes that are, at best, circumstantially connected to them. Because there’s a stereotype that Benkarans are all criminals, no one questions this. Which makes matters worse because of how they Nygean system is set up. There’s no way for there to be any accountability of the victims who let their bigoted prejudices influence their decisions. Where is the justice in executing an innocent person? Indeed, by the end of this episode, I appreciated Seven’s chance to reflect on the things she’d done while she was a different person, and I think every scene between her and Iko was electrifying.
However, the real crime was unaddressed. Unaccounted for. Unacknowledged. If there is even the slightest chance that an innocent person has been executed, then the entire system must be held to suspicion. There’s a wonderful non-profit, The Innocence Project, that has shown us that there are tons of people in our system who were wrongly committed of crimes. Look at how many people they’ve helped exonerate, and notice just how many of them are black men. It’s not hard to then extrapolate that to people who were already executed, and we have absolutely executed innocent people in this country.
Yet this episode bizarrely makes it seem like Joleg’s betrayal of Neelix is enough for us to discount his case. That is bullshit, and I’ll make it even more awkward: the fact that Joleg is played by a non-white actor makes this even more fucked up. That means the white man WHO ACTUALLY MURDERED SOMEONE AND WAS ALWAYS OPEN ABOUT THAT deserves more sympathy and understanding than the non-white one, who may or may not have killed anyone in the first place.
Bleh. No, thanks.
The video for “Repentance” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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