Star Trek: Voyager Episode Everyone Hated Is Loved By Showrunner

For this story to make sense, we need to bring you up to speed on the plot of this strange season 1 episode. “Ex Post Facto” was an episode where Tom Paris was falsely accused of murdering someone and subjected to a strange punishment where he had to keep reliving the final moments of his alleged victim. Eventually, Tuvok does his best impression of Sherlock Holmes, sussing out the real killer and helping to clear his colleague’s name.

Aside from the interesting sci-fi premise of how Tom Paris was punished, the most notable thing about “Ex Post Facto” is that it was styled very explicitly as a noir story. That meant black-and-white scenes, a life-and-death bit of professional detective work, and dialogue that would have seemed more at home in the mouth of Humphrey Bogart than Robert Duncan McNeill.

All of this noir stuff came at the insistence of showrunner Michael Piller, who helped to write the episode and was highly inspired by the neo-noir Pulp Fiction.

After “Ex Post Facto” came out, Piller was very pleased, later saying “It was one of my prouder moments of sitting home watching television.” However, the Voyager showrunner seemed to be the only one who felt this way.

Many in the cast and crew disagreed with the noir theme, including episode star McNeill, who complained that “it ended up being like a Murder, She Wrote episode, with all the characters sitting around, and here’s the big summary of what really happened.”

McNeill seemed ambivalent about how the episode “was “It “was written in a very Raymond Chandler-ish tone,” but this was something that producer and future showrunner Jeri Taylor explicitly hated.

Listing her complaints about “Ex Post Facto,” she mentioned that “[It] has suburban housewives, dogs, smoking, and people talking like they came out of a Raymond Chandler novel,” and she felt all of these things didn’t really fit the mold of a traditional Star Trek episode.

Taylor also had another major critique of the episode, one that is shared by much of the fandom. While Tom Paris is cleared of murder, the investigation reveals that he really did beam down to an alien planet and almost immediately began having an affair with a married woman. 

Publicly, Jeri Taylor complained that the Paris of “Ex Post Facto” came across as “very one dimensional, very unattractive. Piller, meanwhile, was blunter in sharing how she actually felt: according to him, Taylor believed the episode “assassinated” the Paris character and portrayed the character as “a low-life womanizer.”

At any rate, his portrayal was quite literally out-of-character: the episode was scripted before Paris was cast, so he was written as a relentless womanizer like Kirk or Riker before the casting of family man Robert Duncan McNeill softened him into the more familiar Voyager helmsman.

As for audiences and critics, they were a bit mixed on “Ex Post Facto:” the episode had some great character moments, but both womanizer Paris and the noir elements  felt out of place, and the whole thing felt like it cribbed too much from The Next Generation episode “A Matter of Perspective.”

Michael Piller disagreed with the comparison, though it’s possible he was so close to his beloved noir episode to see that it wasn’t all that original. 

It’s also possible, of course, that Piller had absorbed the wisdom of Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon for writing his beloved noir episode: “Don’t worry about the story’s goofiness.” Honestly, can anyone think of a better guiding philosophy for Voyager?