S5 E25: Warhead

Kim, who has been taking the night shift in order to get command experience, sends Voyager off to respond to a distress signal. On the planet, he and the Doctor find some sort of device, buried in a rock, and capable of communicating only with the Doctor through some sort of machine code. It is heavily damaged, but seems to be intelligent but unaware that it is a machine. The Doctor advocates helping it, and Kim, despite feeling cautious about the whole thing, agrees. The device is found to have an explosive payload, so Kim, the Doctor, and Torres (after a spirited briefing room debate) attempt to interface it with the holoemitters in sickbay, trying to separate the intelligence from the bomb. The bomb discovers what is going on and routes itself into the Doctor's program, taking over some ship functions along the way. He demands for Voyager to take him to his destination, which Janeway accedes to. In the meantime, while Janeway is following up on a dead-end lead that Neelix came up with, Kim begins trying to talk the bomb out of exploding. He helps him recover some of his lost memory, which includes instructions from home to abort the mission. At first the bomb is resistant to Kim's approach, but when a fleet of like-minded missiles surrounds Voyager, he comes around just in time to blow up all the other missiles and save billions of lives in the process.

The "artificial intelligence is continuing a war that its creators have stopped" theme is picked up again from Prototype. But instead of being a rehash of that previous episode (like Bliss was for Persistence of Vision), Warhead takes the idea of the story and explores it further. In Prototype, Voyager was in no position to try to reason with the androids; their options were (a) prevent them from procreating and run away or (b) be swept away by their superior firepower and die. I don't fault them for picking option 'a'. But because of the particulars of this story, we get to see an attempt to solve the problem.

It's a bit weird that a bomb would be given such and advanced, emotional AI, but once you get past that conceit, the episode flows just fine. Since the AI is so advanced to start out with, I don't have any problem with the effectiveness of Kim's negotiations. I find it reasonably natural that placing this intelligence into a social situation would affect it in strange ways. The development arc for the bomb is good, though the flip is a bit sudden, and the noble turn at the end is powerful.

We get a little bit of rare Voyager banter here, between Kim and ensign-we'll-never-see-you again, which is a kind of a waste. These little moments were what DS9 was so good at, things that gave us little bits of not simply character growth but also relationship growth. Fortunately, his bridge scene is followed up by a short scene with him and Paris in the hall which delivers some of the friendship which faded in the middle of the series but has started to reemerge this season. Unfortunately, the Paris-as-an-ensign-too-now dynamic is not really explored, something that would play right into this episode's Kim-still-harbors-ambitions-despite-being-an-ensign-for-five-years theme.

Also disappointing is the lack of interplay between Torres and Kim, considering that they were stuck in sickbay for more than half the episode. The two share some lines, but there's no hint of the grudging friendship that they established in Caretaker, but then petered out over the next couple of seasons. Their friendship was something I was very happy with in early Voyager, the best bridging between the two crews in the entire main cast, and I am consistently let down when it fails to resurface.

We do get some good (and rare) interaction between the Doctor and Kim. Kim has ambition, which drives him to act confidently without real confidence to back it up. The Doctor, on the other hand, is brimming with confidence, which fosters an ambition that just feels like a side-effect of the confidence. In addition, the Doctor and Kim get to play opposite sides of the "advocating for the artificial life-form" debate, only to have the tables turned when the Doctor is overwritten by the bomb. It's all natural and effective.

Watchability: 5/5

Bottom Line: I know, from the review it looked like I just whined about relationships throughout the whole thing, but the AI a-plot and the Kim's enthusiasm/ambition b-plots were both very engaging and strongly worth a watch.