Sfdebris.net

http://sfdebris.com/videos/startrek/v834.php

With the release of this review, Chuck has completed the first 2 seasons of Voyager. He did bring up an interesting point that Torres was arguing with essentially a past version of herself and the mistake she made. I think that’s why he bumped the score higher than what he had originally.

He also made a Jedi joke... and following the latest episode of STD I really think it was in poor taste... fucking Myceleal network with it's fucking spores and it's fucking dark side and it's fucking force ghosts. AH well, at least STD makes us appreciate ENT and VOY episodes more. Episodes like this one were the certainty and arrogance of youth and fundamentalism is faced with the experience and growth that comes with living long enough to see the folly of your ways. Also: fuck Discovery.

Yeah, the Cardassians never seemed like the people who were building super-advanced unstoppable warships. And the idea that the thing was just supposed to blow itself up?

The thing is, there's an interesting character story being told with Torres here. It's one of my favorite Torres-centric episodes. It's just that it seems like they couldn't figure out how to set this up. I wouldn't be surprised if the ship was supposed to be something the Maquis built, only someone pointed out how insane it would be if the Maquis could build an unstoppable supership, and they fixed it by having it be a Cardassian ship the Maquis somehow lucked their way into.

I think this episode speaks to the psychological power of the suicide weapon. Killing trained airplane pilots in kamikaze runs is a waste of resources, but it has a psychological appeal for the attacker and a psychological horror for the victim because of just how acute the damage that can be inflicted by such a strike, if successful. This neglects that multiple less dramatic strikes is almost certainly a better use of resources. As a robot drone this thing could apparently have done far more damage doing lots of conventional attacks (Voyager could not stop it and it ran for over a year on its own) rather than one big explosion. So the psychological power of such a weapon is in this story somehow translated into physical power?

Perhaps they could have made a better story if they had had Torres run across such a thing while on a supply run in a runabout and Voyager was unable to intercept the dreadnought before it reached its target. Then the dreadnought would have only had to have been slightly tougher (or faster) than a runabout rather than the uber war machine seen here, which maybe makes more tactical sense if it could deliver moon cracking power in its final move. This would have been obviously contrived but perhaps less of a plot hole.

AllanO wrote:Perhaps they could have made a better story if they had had Torres run across such a thing while on a supply run in a runabout and Voyager was unable to intercept the dreadnought before it reached its target. Then the dreadnought would have only had to have been slightly tougher (or faster) than a runabout rather than the uber war machine seen here, which maybe makes more tactical sense if it could deliver moon cracking power in its final move. This would have been obviously contrived but perhaps less of a plot hole.

I like this a bit better. You can have Chakotay and maybe one other person in the shuttlecraft with her, and they're going to be struggling to figure out what they can accomplish with just a shuttle. It's contrived that they'd be out of range of Voyager to prevent it moving at high warp, sure, but makes sense that this warhead has more limited defensive capabilities, just being survivable enough to reach its target and then blow up. Then you can have the scene where they're planning to dismantle it for parts and it makes a bit more sense.

Roxanne Dawson did a nice job in this one. Having LeVar Burton direct it probably didn't hurt any, either.
I need to re-watch it and find out if they ever explained why they couldn't just beam a photon torpedo into it or beam away vital parts, like the circuitry of the antimatter containment system.
Edit: I finally re-watched it, and they never did explain that.

AllanO wrote:I think this episode speaks to the psychological power of the suicide weapon. Killing trained airplane pilots in kamikaze runs is a waste of resources, but it has a psychological appeal for the attacker and a psychological horror for the victim because of just how acute the damage that can be inflicted by such a strike, if successful. This neglects that multiple less dramatic strikes is almost certainly a better use of resources. As a robot drone this thing could apparently have done far more damage doing lots of conventional attacks (Voyager could not stop it and it ran for over a year on its own) rather than one big explosion. So the psychological power of such a weapon is in this story somehow translated into physical power?

Perhaps they could have made a better story if they had had Torres run across such a thing while on a supply run in a runabout and Voyager was unable to intercept the dreadnought before it reached its target. Then the dreadnought would have only had to have been slightly tougher (or faster) than a runabout rather than the uber war machine seen here, which maybe makes more tactical sense if it could deliver moon cracking power in its final move. This would have been obviously contrived but perhaps less of a plot hole.

The Kamikaze pilots were not really all that trained except in how to get the plane off the ground, fly it to a target and aim it. That was part of the reason the Japanese resorted to them. They had aircraft but most of their rigorously trained pilots were dead and could not be easily replaced with equivalently trained pilots.

I did not remember that Torres said it was a "kinetic" detonator that failed, which suggests it needed to physically hit the target to go off, but somehow that did not damage the Cardassian berserker (which would have been a better name than "Dreadnought" but they probably did not want to get into a copyright dispute with Saberhagen).

Cardassian Engineers can't make an anti-matter bomb which blows up. Now that's some IMPRESSIVE bad engineering. It gets a Bloody Stupid Johnson award.

Zor

I'm with Chuck on what the Voyager crew should've done with the Dreadnought: remove the warhead and keep it. It would be perfect to send into situations where they'd rather not risk Voyager being destroyed, doubly so if it was possible to remote pilot it from a console on the bridge. Hell, put some more weapons on it and use it as a beatstick against the Borg and some other hostile powers.

It's just such a pity how the status quo was God so much on Voyager. I could see Voyager doing a Battlestar Galactica-style thing of leading a ragtag group of ships across the quadrant, some staying and some going occasionally - refugees, resource issues, a mini-Federation heading towards a place some called home and others wanted to make home.