127 – Dragon’s Teeth

Grade: C+

Summary

Some aliens are under attack and they take cover in some caves. Then when they realize they can’t escape, they place themselves into stasis tubes, planning to wake up 5 years later.

Voyager stumbles into a sub-space corridor (looks like a wormhole) filled with junk. Suddenly, a ship appears and threatens them for violating their corridor. These aliens attack Voyager, but they land on a planet that is going through a nuclear winter. They find the aliens who have placed themselves into stasis until they could come out and re-build their society. The trouble starts when Seven revives one of them.

Commentary

This was kind of a fun episode for the first little while. It’s interesting that these aliens have been sleeping for 900 years, and certainly a lot has changed since then. But then when you think everything has been figured out, the aliens turn against Voyager and the episode becomes everyone vs Voyager. Then there are lots of nice effects shots, some small ships attacking Voyager, the original hostile aliens back, and perhaps the stupidest ending of all time (more on that later). It becomes a very mediocre mess of an episode.

Actually, the first clue that this would be a stupid and lazy episode was when the first set of aliens attacks Voyager and Janeway doesn’t even fire one single shot back at them. Not even phasers. Not even the deflector dish. She doesn’t even hurl insults at them. Lame.

In addition to that, there were some pretty convenient facts that were just brought up for the audience to simply accept. For example, it sure was convenient that Seven knew exactly how to re-activate the stasis tube and wake the sleeping aliens. It’s also convenient that Neelix knew the Old Tongue from 900 years before. Funny. I don’t know anything about Old English from the year 1115. In fact, I don’t even know if that qualifies as Old English or Middle English or what. In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t understand someone from 1615 either.

The last scene was terrible. It has become typical for this episode to end with a conversation between Janeway and Seven – I suppose it’s so that they can wrap up the storyline in case we were too stupid to figure it out by ourselves. Sometimes, this last scene has added a few insights to Seven’s character and we also catch a glimpse of Janeway’s management style combined with her mothering instinct. But in this case, the scene starts with Seven’s apology for starting off the entire mess by waking up one of the sleeping aliens. Janeway correctly points out that she probably would have done the same (in fact, we have seen her do this exact same thing at least a couple of times).

Seven also tells her that 50 of the alien ships escaped and Janeway says something about how this could be catastrophic on the Delta Quadrant, and that we will probably see these aliens again. First of all, does anyone really believe that we’ll see these aliens again? I certainly don’t. Voyager rarely does that. Second, they have lost 150 of their total 200 ships. We just saw how easily 150 of their ships were destroyed by Voyager and the other aliens. And now we think the remaining 50 ships are going to wreak havoc on the Delta Quadrant? Just how stupid do Berman and Braga think we are?

One thing that struck me almost immediately is that this episode is Voyager’s version of the TOS episode “Space Seed.” The only real difference between them is that Khan and his followers were genetically enhanced. But other than that, it’s a group of “friends” who turn into enemies because they want to take over the ship. But that episode was great. This one is just going through the motions. And it does a really poor job of it.

Of Note

Apparently, this was originally supposed to be a two-part episode that turned into one and then half-way through, they tried to expand it back into two episodes, but by then it was way too late, so they stuck with one and crammed 40 minutes of a new episode into the last 20 minutes. This thing is a giant mess.