Retrospect

In Seven's memory she remembers a lab assistant.. but there was no attempt to find the witness. A huge misstep in the handling of a sensitive subject. This episode was poorly written, focused to much on he said/she said and less in actual investigation.

I agree that this episode has a weak handling of Seven's complaint of treatment by Kovin, it should be noted that she is taken seriously by the Doctor and the Captian. But that the idea of there being no female viewpoint in the story on the part of the writers, one should notice that both Jeri Taylor and Lisa Klink have writing credits on this episode.

I can be noted that this episode was not written by the same writer as the last. I have noticed some reviews coming from anti-male writers. The episode is indeed balanced and does represent some real life situations. People react in the way in which people do in real life.

I would say the whole point of the episode is examining the notion of questioning emotion over logic. People with "witch-hunt" types of mentality ( always guilty regardless of whether they can be proved innocent) won't like it. The reason for this is because the episode reflects real life.

Unlike the last episode people stay in character this time. 7 of 9 (contrary to some people) IS taken seriously and people do seem to jump to conclusions probably because she is one of their own.

In no way does the episode suggest that a woman's rights are less than male's... none whatsoever. It is purely reflecting on the need to use sound judgement and seek the truth in an objective manner. There are plenty of times when perpetrators of some form of violation are truely guilty; some of those people get away with it and some don't. There are also several incidents where innocent people get wrongly convicted or have their life destroyed because of false allegations. It is just life.

This is one of my least favourite episodes of Voyager, almost as bad as The Thaw. The fundamental problem with the episode is that at no point does it make it clear to the viewer that Seven's memories are false. In the episode the case against Seven's story grows increasingly stronger but all of a sudden everyone changes their minds with no explanations at all for where Seven's memories came from or why she had them.

As much as I may agree with the fundamental premise, that the testimony of abused people should not always be taken at face value, the episode would have done much more to serve this view if it had offered up an alternative explanation to Seven's memories, something they instead gloss over.

I have read the other reviews and agree that it is unclear, for better or worse, what actually happened to Seven of Nine. The writers tried to trick the viewer at the end, in a way, by introducing doubt about the evidence collected. But it was only doubt and not a conclusion one way or the other.

What I would have liked to know is: did they get that super weapon from the arms dealer? There have been many episodes where the Voyager crew seem to acquire advanced tech from their contacts along the way but rarely do they seem to keep any of it. It's frustrating, like when you see people running under fire who leave behind perfectly useful weapons and ammo dropped by the enemy.

This was one of the details I appreciated about the Enterprise series; they upgraded as they went on their journey and used it.

The exception to this up to now in Voyager is the integration of Borg technology provided by Seven of Nine.