S7 E21: Friendship One

Four years after the initial warp flight by Zefram Cochrane, Earth launched an unmanned warp ship; its mission was to initiate first contact and share technology. Starfleet contacts Voyager and informs Janeway that they're in the neighborhood of that probe, Friendship One, and asks them to please investigate. Turns out that the people of the planet it landed on learned from the technology, but suffered a global ecological disaster as a result and blame humans for it. They take the Delta Flyer's crew hostage, and kill Joe Carey when Janeway tries to negotiate. A Voyager commando force retrieves the captives, and once they are no longer acting under duress, they help restore the planet's atmosphere.

I like the idea here, but I feel like they could have made it a bit more interesting. It's just terribly... uncomplicated as it stands. I mean, it's pretty obvious from the teaser alone that Friendship One did something bad to the planet. The direction the episode takes it in honestly takes all the blame off of human hands. Sure, they gave them the technology, but it is entirely not the humans' fault what those people did with it. Maybe this episode is intended as a "prime directive is good after all" episode, but the people on this planet need to take a little responsibility for their own actions. Humans had the same technology that they did, and Earth is fine. Maybe if those guys didn't suck, they'd still have a planet.

What might've been more interesting is if some other unintended consequence of the probe's arrival had caused the disaster. My wife suggested maybe something like the introduction of small pox to the new world - since it is possible for microbes to survive on a vehicle like this, maybe those microbes could have been dangerous to introduce to this new planet's ecology. Or if they still want to go with the technology route, anti-matter technology could be damaging to the populace on its own, even without a containment failure. Then they'd have had the societal problem of a new, powerful fuel source that they must sacrifice population to in order to maintain the quality of life for the rest of the planet. Sure, that's an old trope, but I'm just throwing stuff out there. Combine that with the arrival of the people who gave them the technology generations ago, and they could have come up with a new and interesting story.

Most of the population of the planet are painted in pretty broad strokes, but I guess there's nothing outright offensive going on at least. Any time the crackpot scientist is cast as the good guy and the new, responsible leader of his world, I can walk away happy. Neelix gets to bring up the destruction of his homeworld's moon again, and though it doesn't work, it seemed like a decent way to try to build common ground.

This is also Joe Carey's first real-timeline appearance since State of Flux, and I had been pretty content to just assume he'd died at some point. Not really sure why they brought him back just to kill him. *shrug*

Watchability: 3/5

Bottom Line: I would have been happy to see a lot more layers here. Or, really, even one more layer would have been nice. I suppose though that if my biggest complaint about a Voyager episode is that it is only uncomplicated, then that's pretty big progress.