160 – Prophecy

Grade: C+

Summary

A Klingon ship appears out of nowhere and fires on Voyager. This is a fairly old ship, however, and it’s really no match for Voyager. The Klingons however, destroy their own ship because they want to follow B’Elanna’s baby. Apparently, she will save the Klingon Empire.

Commentary

Ugh. Yet another episode when Voyager encounters something from the Alpha Quadrant. How many times is this now? 42? I mean seriously, they’ve stumbled across Ferengi, Amelia Earhart, a spaceship that disappeared near Mars 250 years before, dinosaurs that originated on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, etc. This series really can’t get away from the Alpha Quadrant at all. The odds of coming across this many AQ aliens and paraphernalia this far away from Earth are probably one in a quadrillion – if not worse. And yet here it happens again. Please, can we get some original ideas and stories?

Something else really bothers me about this series. Janeway insists on allowing hostile aliens to fire not once or twice, but even up to four times before she fires any shot back, and as usual, it’s only to disable their weapons – not to take down their shields or destroy their engines or anything else. Janeway is a terrible tactician. If she had served in the Alpha Quadrant instead, the Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, Ferengi, etc., would probably all have destroyed Voyager by the first season. But here in the Delta Quadrant, the aliens have been pip squeaks.

OK, sorry for the rant. There actually was a slightly different twist to this story. The Klingons in this episode hadn’t been through a time portal or some sort of wormhole or Caretaker’s array or anything like that. Instead, they’ve just been flying around in space for the last 100 years (or whatever). They don’t know that the war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire is over. They have not had any contact with any other Federation or Klingon ships, and they’re just looking for a new home world.

It wasn’t really clear to me why they needed a new world, and when they thought B’Elanna’s new baby would save the lives of all their people, I expected them to insist on having B’Elanna and Tom live on the planet with them. Well, that didn’t happen, because as I’ve said before, this is Voyager and it won’t take risks, even though the series is wrapping up in about 3 and a half months.

In reality, this episode is kind of a hodgepodge. There’s a fight to the death (ok, more like “to the pain”, but whatever), a fatal disease, an attempt to take control of the ship, some Klingon religious mumbo-jumbo, etc. It’s all over the place. I honestly wish they could have picked just one story and stuck with it. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a comedy or something else.

Well, at least they came up with a clever plot point – B’Elanna’s unborn child actually does save the lives of every Klingon on the ship, including her own mother. It was actually pretty interesting in that respect. But that’s what keeps this mess from being rated even worse.

Of Note

Apparently, Voyager can beam over 210 people all at once and in less than 10 seconds. Really? Gee, that would really have come in handy in literally dozens of previous episodes in this series. Kim explains that this ship has that ability because they have a wider beam or whatever. Yeah, right. When writers totally ignore technology, this is no longer science fiction – it’s now fantasy.