S4 E16: Prey

This episode starts with a pair of Hirogen chasing down an 8472 creature and mercilessly filling it with phaser fire. When Voyager finds their ship, it is in disarray - the 8472 (unlike the crew, I don't like saying the whole clunky phrase "species 8472 member" every time I need to refer to it) was more more powerful than the Hirogen realized. One of the Hirogen is still alive and is rescued and revived, but the 8472 thing begins to disrupt Voyager. It is attempting to open a portal to its home dimension, and Janeway is prepared to let it do so, but for some reason they have to hunt it down first. The Hirogen helps, but soon proves to be a liability, as he is only interested in killing the creature whose catch phase has been "The weak will perish" and wants to destroy all life in our galaxy. The thing is cornered and wounded and communicates its sob-story to the crew through Tuvok, but many Hirogen ships come to claim the beast. While Janeway would rather get everyone killed in an attempt to save a single-minded killing machine, Seven is more of a pragmatist and overrides her commands and beams the hunter and the 8472 over to a Hirogen ship. Janeway, enraged that she and her crew are still bound to this mortal coil, strips Seven of her duties so she can have some paid vacation time.

8472 was introduced as a new Big Bad by beating up on an old one: the Borg. When this episode opened with the new bad guys, the Hirogen, beating up an 8472, that induced an eye roll. What will the next bad guy do, show up with a ship that is covered in Hirogen corpses? It felt lazy. It isn't even a full season later. And if we're still close enough to see an 8472 straggler, why haven't we seen any Borg around? The next scene pulls back from the teaser's assertion that "Hirogen > 8472" but when an episode starts off by annoying me, it really has to work to pull itself out of a nose dive.

The conflict that this episode creates between Janeway and Seven does just the opposite. Seven opposes Janeway's plan to board the stranded Hirogen ship, and when nothing immediately goes wrong, Janeway turns to her and says something like "See? My plan worked out just fine!" Janeway seems to be physically incapable of not jumping on every "I told you so" moment that she possibly can. That tendency in itself is obnoxious, but is made worse by the writers making her (often nonsensical) choices "correct" by having a good outcome. I do appreciate that Seven's insubordinate actions are allowed to save the ship, but then I just had to endure more "Janeway preaching at Seven" time as a result. Instead of Seven overriding Janeway's orders, if she had followed them only to have something awful happen, that would have been genuinely brave on the part of the writers.

The question of punishment on Voyager is tricky, and the writers need to come up with a solution. There are some creative non-execution non-brig options out there, but "confined to quarters" is all they ever seem to come up with. As a punishment, that's pretty weak - "Hey, you committed mutiny against me... have some time to relax with a good book without anyone making you do any work." Now, for the starfleet officers, I can buy that as good enough - they have status to lose. But they're not typically the ones to act up. I know that there's no Maquis conflict anymore, but I think that a large part of that conflict's absence is because the writers couldn't decide how to punish them. Now we've got Seven, and she's all over the place from episode to episode. I somehow doubt we'll get a suitable resolution to her integration, just like we didn't get one for the Maquis - one day, she'll just fit in, and the writers won't look back until they have no ideas for a story and have to rework an unused fourth season story.

Worst of all, this episode is a complete waste of Tony Todd, who has played both Kurn and old Jake Sisko. Not much is demanded of the Hirogen that he plays in this episode in terms of acting. He's just a simple by-the-book all-Hirogens-are-for-the-hunt guy. If you're going to call in a big gun veteran Trek actor, use him for some other reason than just because he's tall. With all this awfulness surrounding him in this episode, he just doesn't get a chance to shine. I've mentioned before that I'd like Voyager to make some friends some time, and while it doesn't have to be the Hirogen, it'd be nice if they could have found any common ground at all with this individual. However, he isn't written as an individual, but as a caricature of a one-dimensional culture.

Watchability: 1/5

Bottom Line: I try to be generous with my ratings, but I've noticed a pattern. Even in the 4s and 5s, there are often (typically Janeway-related) elements that annoy me but aren't enough to spoil the whole episode's score. However, those annoyances build up, and when I get to an episode that rubs me the wrong way, it just can't seem to get anything right. Put this episode in the first half of season 2 and it would have been an easy 2/5, or possibly even higher. But the element that it chose to focus on, the Janeway/Seven relationship, has been so wretched that I was just seeing red the whole time.