S4 E26: Hope and Fear

Voyager takes on a passenger (Arturis) who has a gift for linguistics, and makes headway on the encrypted Starfleet message they received half a season ago. Coordinates in the message lead them to an empty Starfleet ship (the Dauntless) capable of quantum slipstream drive, which could fly them home in three months. They are cautiously optimistic, and a review of the message proves it to be a forgery. Arturis has a vendetta against the Voyager crew: because Janeway stopped 8472 from killing the Borg, they went on to assimilate Arturis' home. The Dauntless is actually his ship, a trap designed to warp the Voyager crew back to Borg space for assimilation. He starts the ship's drive, although everyone but Janeway and Seven are beamed off in time. Voyager activates its makeshift slipstream drive, catches up, shoots the dauntless, beams Seven and Janeway back, and Arturis is left by himself to be assimilated by the Borg.

How bold a move would it have been to actually give the show a new ship like this? I mean, you know it isn't going to happen, and that detracts from the drama of the episode, but a new ship? Pretty cool. I suppose if they had actually gone ahead with a ship switch, it would have felt kind of cheap, especially if it had been this easy, but I like the sets for the Dauntless and the ship itself is an interesting design. Of course, the real reason I'm so interested in the possibility of a ship swap? The Dauntless had no holodecks.

Now, don't let the episode recap fool you: half of the screen time was spent on the Janeway/Seven conflict. I'm going to save a fair amount of my griping about it for tomorrow's season 4 evaluation, but one thing in particular really got to me. In the episode right before this one, Seven makes progress with her interpersonal skills, and that development is completely swept aside here. More egregiously, Seven made a huge sacrifice for the ship and crew, and Janeway has the audacity to say that it is time for Seven to give back, that she's given Seven so much this season. What. The. Eff. You abducted her, severed her link to her people against her will, made her follow your stupid rules, and subjected her to your incessant self-righteous lecturing... and you wonder why she's ungrateful. Being Voyager, Janeway of course gets the last word, and Seven has to wallow in contrition, and as a result a full half of this season finale is unwatchable.

Arturis is great though. He's a tragic villain, driven by good, old fashioned revenge... for a tough decision made in the cliffhanger last season. His take on the Borg, of seeing them as simply a force of nature, is fresh and a reasonable way to shift his hate onto the Voyager crew. After all, who else saw much of 8472? All anyone else knows is that the enemy who was the only real threat to the scourge of their quadrant is gone, and Voyager is to blame. It casts Janeway's decision in a new light: I agreed with it at the time, but now I wonder if perhaps she was a bit hasty. Maybe she could have allowed 8472 to beat on the Borg for longer, and approached another delta quadrant power with the nanoprobe solution once the Borg were out of the way. Instead, driven by a lust for getting home, she damned the delta quadrant's non-Borg.

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: It it always hard to rate these episodes that are half great and half terrible. I'm gonna stick with a three.