So I really wanted to do something special for Living Witness. It's one of my favorite episodes. Top ten? Maybe top five? (Note to self: make a Voyager Top Ten List at the end of 2015) But I've been feeling really cruddy the past few days. This morning I woke up with my lymph nodes all painful and swollen so I finally dragged myself into the doctor and got a Z-pak for my third sinus infection of this year.
I ended up laying on the couch most of the day and didn't even really do an Inktober except for, of course, a quick sketch of me... laying on the couch:
Still, it's nearly 11PM and I didn't want to hit the hay without first at least attempting to get something up about this one. So here we go.
Sit Rep: Janeway's a bond villain with the hair and calf-skin gloves to prove it. The Voyager bridge is appropriately dark and moody. Chakotay has a full face tattoo. Tuvok flashes a super creepy smile. Harry Kim is beating answers out of a guy when The Android Doctor enters and offers his help. Are we in an alternate timeline? A mirror universe? Well, almost.
Living Witness is pretty much Voyager's answer to the Trek mirror trope but, instead of plunking them down in the actual mirror universe, we get an appropriately Voyager-esque approach to the situation. The Doctor's back-up holo-emitter (WTF?! he has a backup?! I thought they only had one. I thought it was this BFD about him not losing it because then he'd lose his freedom) has been found on an alien planet 700 years after Voyager passed by and they're recreating the ship's involvement in their own rather messy history. They've got Voyager all wrong and The Doctor spends a lot of time setting their reluctant historian straight. No he wasn't an android. No Janeway didn't spend most of her time stroking a white Persian cat in her ready room. No Harry Kim wasn't a badass.
Living Witness has everything I love in an episode. Crazy, rompy fun. Mixed-up, bananas alternate history. Action. A well-considered, nuanced culture clash. And real, honest-to-goodness heart. After all, according to The Doctor, he saw all of his friends and colleagues yesterday, for the rest of the universe, it's been seven hundred years. All of everyone The Doctor cares about died a long time ago. That's pretty damn sad.
My favorite stuff about this one:
-It's pretty meta. I mean, come on.
-Tuvok's smile. Obviously. Somebody get me a screengrab of that. I'm too tired to re-watch!!
-Seven is still 100% Borg.
-These folks think the reason there were aliens on board Voyager is that they were "assimilated" and made to work for Janeway.
-They all pronounce "Chakotay" the way only about 30% of them pronounced it in the first season--before everything got ironed out.
-And, of course, Chakotay even sneaks in a little, "My native people..." bit which made me literally laugh out loud. Then I started coughing and wheezing. Then I went to sleep and woke up later in a cold sweat. It's after 11, y'all. I'm going to bed.
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