| Voyager stumbles into a kind of subspace tunnel, and travels 200 lightyears before being ejected from it by an alien ship. The Turei are very suspicious of Voyager, and demand to board the ship in order to ensure that all sensor readings of the tunnel are erased. Janeway refuses, and when the ensuing firefight begins to turn sour, Voyager is forced to set down in a destroyed city on an irradiated planet. While Voyager repairs, faint life signs are detected far below the surface, and an away team finds active stasis chambers. Seven activates one, and finds a member of the Vaadwaur species - who had been placed in his chamber almost 900 years ago, but it failed to reawake him (and hundreds of his comrades) five years later. Janeway agrees to help him and his people reactivate their ships in exchange for their help with the Turei and passage through the tunnels that it turns out the Vaadwaur made/mapped. The leader, Gedrin, mentions a familiarity with Talaxians when he meets Neelix, who mentions that the word vaadwaur in the old Talaxian language means "foolish." After Naomi reports to him that the Vaadwaur have been making fun of him, Neelix does some research in the (presumably, his own ship's) database, and discovers that the Vaadwaur may be violent conquerers who had been vanquished by the Tarei and others 900 years ago in an act of self-preservation. Seven confirms his suspicions based on her own Borg database, and they approach Janeway. She in turn approaches Gedrin, who doesn't exactly deny anything, so she demands that half the Vaadwaur ships take off with their weapons powered down as a precaution against them turning on Voyager. This move appears to be warranted when the Vaadwaur fleet decides to just attack Voyager and turn the odds against themselves in the overall battle. Voyager calls upon the Turei for help, and Gedrin for some reason also helps, and Voyager escapes while both fleets are busy with each other. |
I love the set-up for this episode. We start with big scenes of the capital bombardment 900 years ago, and scared people huddling underground and going into stasis. The visuals are great - while DS9 had a tendency to blow its budget on big space battles, Voyager has the opportunity to spend it here and there on scenes like the ones in this episode. The great wasteland cityscapes really set the mood for the episode. You won't often hear me compare Voyager favorably with DS9, so savor it. Also, encountering people from the Delta quadrant's distant past is a great opportunity, and it isn't wasted. These guys remember the Borg as more of a pest than a pestilence, back in the time of their own greatness. Their attitudes (think Cardassians - so were the make-up designers) give a Ozymandias feel to the ruins of their once powerful world.
The Vaadwaur plot loses steam over the course of the episode through. It's obvious that they're going to turn out to be not as nice or benevolent as they originally claim to be, but if they could have been a little more ambiguously evil that would have greatly strengthened the episode. Then we could have had a real choice as to whether or not Voyager should help them, or accept their help with the tunnels. Sure, it was 900 years ago that they were jerks, but that's yesterday to them. And let us not forget, as much as they may have been sinister then, becoming the oppressed has a way of changing attitudes (see: Damar), and maybe it would still be okay to show them a little compassion.
But, no, rather than have the Vaadwaur be sly enough to continue manipulating Voyager, they decide to just outright assault them. Not only does this action not make a lot of sense, but it really undermines the ending of the story. Gedrin's assistance of Voyager is also weird: I mean, even if he truly has had a change of heart about the "old ways" as he says, I truly doubt that would extend to helping people kill the few remaining members of his species. This episode was originally intended to be a two part or feature length episode, so maybe they had other plans, but there's no evidence of that here. If this is all they had, I'm glad they didn't try to stretch this over two hours.
Watchability: 4/5
Bottom Line: Though it loses momentum, the idea and presentation of the first half of the episode go a long way.
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