52 – Warlord

Grade: D+

Summary

Neelix, Paris and Kim are wasting time on the Holodeck, when suddenly Voyager encounters a ship in severe distress. They beam aboard three survivors into Sickbay. One of them is severely injured, but just before he dies, he is able to transfer his consciousness into the mind of Kes, and he takes control of her body.

Commentary

I must admit I didn’t like this episode. The dialogue was awful. I really can’t believe that someone could have actually written it. To me, it seemed like they copied the script from a rejected B movie from the 1950s. Trust me, I’ve seen a ton of bad 1950s sci-fi, and the dialogue in this episode is definitely on par with some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It really doesn’t look like there was much thought put into this story.

I struggled to make it to the end of this episode. If I weren’t on a quest to watch every single Star Trek episode and add my comments here on my website, I would probably have turned this off within the first 10-12 minutes of it. Maybe it was because I’ve never been impressed with Jennifer Lien as an actress, or maybe it’s because the storyline was a ripoff of several other episodes that have already been done before, or maybe it was because of the banal dialogue. The writer obviously didn’t take this story seriously enough to write an intelligent script, so why should I care about it?

Lien was not my favorite actress on this series. Actually, I preferred Roxann Dawson over all the other actresses on Voyager. But this episode didn’t really do Lien any favors. She was finally able to do something totally different and we saw the limits of her range here. Honestly, I don’t think she did that great of a job, but it might have been the ridiculousness of the script.

Finally, this turns out to be one of the most forgettable episodes this series produced in a long time. In about two weeks, I hope to have completely forgotten about how pathetic this episode is.

Of Note

In this episode, Kes ends her relationship with Neelix, but while she was under the influence of the alien. Even after Kes is restored to herself, she never has the same relationship with Neelix as before.