The Secret Connection Between Star Trek: Voyager And Sherlock Holmes
When you think about Star Trek’s connections to Sherlock Holmes, you most likely think about The Next Generation. In two episodes of that classic show, the android Data had holodeck adventures as the famous detective, with his foe being a hyper-intelligent holographic Moriarty. However, what many fans don’t realize is that Star Trek: Voyager is secretly connected to Sherlock Holmes because “Ex Post Facto” ends with a moment straight out of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories.
The Sherlock Connection To TNG
Before we can talk about this Star Trek: Voyager moment, we need to briefly review the franchise’s weirdly consistent fascination with the Sherlock Holmes character. It began with the TNG episode “Elementary, Dear Data,” where Data recreated the original detective stories and Geordi accidentally turned Moriarty into a threat to the ship by asking the computer to create a foe capable of defeating the android. Moriarty returned in “Ship In a Bottle” and a version of even made a surprise appearance in the final season of Picard.
Sherlock References In Star Trek VI
A few years later than “Elementary, Dear Data” introduced the detective to the series canon, and a few years before the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Ex Post Facto,” Sherlock was referenced (though not by name) in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
In that film, Spock mentions that “An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains–however improbable–must be the truth.” This is a famous Sherlock Holmes quote and even caused some fans (the ones that can’t recognize an obvious joke) to speculate that Sherlock Holmes was somehow both a real character and a Spock ancestor in the Trek canon.
Voyager Takes A More Subtle Approach
Compared to those more explicit references, Star Trek: Voyager homages Sherlock Holmes in a much subtler way. The episode “Ex Post Facto” is designed as a murder mystery where Tuvok tries to clear Tom Paris of murder by finding out who really committed the crime. One of the ways he does so is by proving that the victim’s dog knew the doctor who claimed he had never been in the home before, revealing the physician to be a killer.
The Dog In The Nighttime
How does this weird Star Trek: Voyager episode conclusion tie to Sherlock Holmes? In short, this is the exact way that the Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” ended, with a dog who didn’t bark at a man helping reveal the real criminal. This helped popularize the phrase “the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime” which has since been used to name a popular book and a Broadway play.
Not Just Sherlock
It’s worth noting that this Star Trek: Voyager adventure had homages to other famous detectives besides Sherlock Holmes…look closely and you’ll notice some similarities to Agatha Christie’s various stories featuring Hercule Poirot, and Robert Duncan McNeill compared the ending to that of a Murder, She Wrote episode. Still, Sherlock remains the most famous detective in Star Trek history: Starfleet has a vessel named after him and Picard showrunner Michael Chabon (once a Sherlock fan-fiction writer) compared Jean-Luc’s retirement to Holmes retiring and becoming a beekeeper.
It’s ultimately no mystery why, in or out of the holodeck, with or without Moriarty, this franchise keeps bringing Sherlock back: when the game’s afoot, he always makes the best episodes even better.
