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Re: VOY S4: Retrospect

The Real Trent: “IMO this episode would have played better as a straight up witch-hunt. Go full Salem Witch trials on Kovin. Have Janeway and Seven militantly hounding the guy, and Tuvok and Chakotay defending him. Make all the women side with Janeway. Make the episode about hysteria and shared delusions. Make the episode about Janeway's mad desire to protect Seven no matter the cost. Seven's been abused and bashed around her whole life, and Janeway overcompensates. Push all the sexist cliches to the limit (evil hectoring women out to get the men!), but then own them, and make us nevertheless sympathize with Janeway despite her errors.”

They didn’t need to have the Voyager crew being the ones engaging in a witch hunt.

Kovin claims that the Entharan authorities only care about appeasing potential offworld customers and that being accused of a crime by an offworlder is a crime in itself, but it’s very much a case of “tell” over “show”.

I would also consider the fact that the Entharans spent three days grilling the Doctor about what had happened to be clear evidence that they were not nearly as biased as Kovin claimed. Had his claims been true, I would have expected that they would brush Kovin’s death under the table, and most likely cite his flight as proof of guilt, instead of interrogating offworlders.

I think that the question of Kovin’s guilt should have been left open-ended, with characters unsure if he was an innocent man hounded into destroying himself or a guilty man who wasn’t about to let himself be taken alive and who also protected his accomplices by dying. The Entharan representative should have been shown to take it as evidence of guilt, and to send Voyager on its way, vowing that they will investigate all of Kovin’s family, friends and known associates to find his accomplices and punish them.

Janeway, far less certain of Kovin’s guilt, knows that the incident has sparked a witch hunt that could destroy the lives of pretty much everybody Kovin knew. Perhaps, thinking it better to let the guilty go free than to let the innocent be condemned, she intentionally misleads the Entharan representative, acting as if the experiment conclusively proved Kovin’s innocence in order to ensure that the witch hunt does not take place. She leaves, hoping that she made the right call and that Kovin hasn’t left accomplices continuing to experiment with stolen nanoprobes.

Re: VOY S4: Retrospect

It bothers me that we never get an explanation for Seven's sudden fear of medical procedures, and that Kovin's death convinces Seven that she was wrong.

The only physical evidence was the behaviour of the nanoprobes, and while the dispersal pattern potentially supported Kovin's version of events, all it proved was that Seven had been hit by the blast. Which they already knew. The Doctor initially assumed, wrongly, that the nanoprobes would have been inactive, and speculated that Kovin must have been experimenting with them, but while the experiment proved that the dispersal pattern of the nanoprobes couldn't be considered evidence of Kovin's guilt, it didn't explain Seven's reaction to Kovin or her panic in Sickbay, both of which preceded her or why she remembered Kovin performing the procedure on her. What are the odds that suppressed memories of trauma from her time as a Borg would surface during an encounter with an alien who (a) is a weapons dealer with an arguable motive to steal Borg technology, (b) happened to be alone with her for a couple of hours, and (c) accidentally shot her without causing injury or unconsciousness?

I can see why the experiment would lead them to disregard the dispersal pattern of the nanoprobes as evidence, one way or the other, but not why they would go from believing Seven to taking it as a given that Kovin was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Kovin's flight fits equally well with a guilty man who feels the net closing around him and knows that he has no hope of getting away with his crime as it does with an innocent man who has no faith that he will receive a fair trial.

It also really bothers me that Seven is just left to get on with it. Whether or not her memories were accurate, they were real to her. Worse, Captain Janeway gives her a reproachful look after Kovin's suicide as if Seven has done something wrong.

Kovin's death feels like it was intended to be a final resolution to the story, confirming his innocence beyond all possible doubt, but it doesn't work for me because there are too many unanswered questions.

One possible alternate ending would be if the experiment with the nanoprobes and the possibility of Seven misremembering incidents from her time in the Collective, combined with the Entharan representative's lack of interest in the truth, led Janeway to conclude that they simply didn't have enough evidence to prove that was Kovin was guilty to Federation standards of justice, and that as the Entharans regarded him as guilty by virtue of being accused by a customer, dropping the charges was the only way to keep Kovin from being executed or whatever. Basically, better to risk that a guilty person go free than that an innocent person be wrongly convicted.