Warhead

DVD, Voyager S5 (Warhead)

The EMH makes friends with a WMD. The Doctor tends to be an advocate for any artificial sentience he encounters - you wonder what he'd have done with Moriarty or the Exocomps on the Enterprise-D. Probably would have gotten the ship into trouble as he does here. But it's not just his fault, there seems to be a general naivety on display. Granted, Harry Kim isn't the most experienced officer, though he's no longer green thanks to his variety of experiences aboard Voyager. Still, a device that looks like a torpedo lodged in a rocky wall does appear suspicious without even having to think too hard about it, and while it may be hindsight, knowing what the episode was about, it's not like the crew haven't dealt with this sort of thing before! 'Warhead' is one of those episodes difficult to pin down as a Season 5 story simply because it has the feel of late Season 4 (Seven's involved), and could just as easily have taken place in an early season (she's not in it that much) - it's actually an amalgamation of various previous stories, which is why it seems so out of place here in The Best Season of 'Voyager' as I'm calling it (though Season 4 can be argued for). The way I came to think of it was in the same vein as the 'DS9' episode 'In The Cards,' a delightful nostalgia romp for Jake and Nog, revisiting the style of adventures they used to have in Season 1, thoroughly and unashamedly a throwback. Weirdly, 'Warhead' is in exactly the same position: the penultimate episode of Season 5.

It could be that this stage of the season and series meant the writers wanted to kick back a little and reminisce about the old days, it could be complete coincidence, or it could simply be a budget-saving initiative (after all, you have to have the 'Transfigurations' to get 'The Best of Both Worlds'!). The latter is most likely because this isn't really a nostalgia trip like 'In The Cards,' it just happens to share many elements of Seasons 2 and 3: 'Darkling' is an obvious link since in that the Doc was taken over by the evil sides of various holo-characters. 'Dreadnought' is the most strongly associated story for me, where B'Elanna was dealing with a sentient bomb, only on a larger scale. Even the title is similar! 'Prototype' is yet another early episode where we can see connections, in which an alien war that is now over is being continued by the robot weapons they built... There's also the sight of Kim and Torres working together, something you just don't see so much these days, but was a common pairing early on (beginning with 'Caretaker'). Then there's 'Lifesigns' in which a living consciousness is housed in a holographic body. Not to mention 'Drone,' which pretty much gave them the ending, and which, while not remembering anything about this episode, I guessed would end the same way, the character of the week sacrificing itself against the enemy. Perhaps my imagining of this being a latter Season 4 episode is because it uses the same cave set with glowing yellow lighting as the location of the weapon as that seen as the planet in 'Demon.'

All told then, this isn't the most original story and smacks of trying to knock one more out before the season finale rather than being especially memorable in its own right. And yet, this mashup of so many things that had gone before does have that nostalgic element to it. At the same time it does have some problems - why would you beam up a torpedo-shaped device and put it right next to the Warp Core! That was the single most dunderheaded move of the whole thing - perhaps because all these modern Treks have such vast sets, endless rooms of empty space, that more realistic Trek of old looks comparatively claustrophobic, but even without ginormo-sets there must be a Science Lab free where they could house this thing which wouldn't make it a direct threat to the Core! Of course if it had blown itself up it wouldn't have mattered where, it would still have taken out the ship in its entirety. Another big issue is how these warheads can travel at warp. It's certainly a sight to see thirty-plus of them warp off into space, but don't you need at least a couple of nacelles to create a warp field? Unless these are miniature ones housed within the casing like the USS Defiant? I enjoyed Neelix getting yet another role as Chief Cosmetic Surgeon, but could a Dermal Regenerator really be used to make someone's skin looked burned as he does to Seven? Surely it's a healing device, and though I don't think it's ever been explained exactly how it works, you'd think applying prosthetics would be outside of its capabilities from what we've seen.

While I'm pointing out the flaws, there's also the big issue of the weapon being a little too easy to talk down. It's not like Captain Kirk exploiting the logic of a machine to make it blow steam out of its 'ears,' Harry isn't really the kind of guy to have that ability. Tuvok, yes, but Harry's much more of an emotional young man whose passion is his strength, not robot-turning argument. He has shown to be argumentative at times in the past, whether with Janeway or Tuvok, or maybe Chakotay or Paris. He's learned to go for it when he thinks he's right, but that also means he can push for things when he's wrong. Somehow this machine is swayed by that nature into accepting the reality of the situation. It goes a big step further by coming up with the idea of a suicide run to take out its mistaken brethren and I didn't see how it would go from staunchly defending its mission and purpose, to standing down, and then proactively forcing the others to do so, too. It was a bit of a turnaround not entirely earned. Still, it was a better ending than that of 'Drone,' since instead of a guest character it's our Doc who voices the confusion and concerns, and that was the best scene where he's trying to come to terms with the likelihood that he's going against the wishes of those who sent him, for all the lack of especially well constructed argument it's very well played.

It's not a BIG story, it's pretty much the Doc/Warhead, Harry and B'Elanna in Sickbay while the whole ship is held hostage, and it's whether they can trick this thing into releasing control or do something drastic to stop it. But it's not a team episode, it's really down to Kim to keep bashing away at it, and from his perspective it is a good episode since we see he's risen to being in command of the night shift, gains the respect of the lower deckers, and even leads his own Away Mission. These are all important parts of the Ensign's growth, and while other characters in modern Trek go from even lower ranks to higher in a much shorter time (Cadet Sylvia Tilly and Kelvin Timeline Kirk from Cadet to command are two obvious examples, and Michael Burnham and probably others, too), giving those series' a lack of believability for Starfleet's strict protocols and progression, Kim's very gradual progression is pleasant to watch. He probably should have advanced in rank in the following season, but they really lost momentum after this season, as I recall, and though he had his moments (captaining a ship in Season 7's 'Nightingale'), he still ended the series as he began. Voyager's case is a little different in that they don't have much room for ranking up (aside from Paris being demoted and the occasional loss of a crew-member), so Kim is probably doing as much as he could in that regard and it was nice to see some fulfilment, though that kind of continuity needed to be seen more often and worked at.

Kim's overseeing of these lower deckers, represented by Ensign Jenkins at helm (played by Makeup Head Michael Westmore's own daughter, McKenzie Westmore! She'd had minor roles as far back as 'TNG' Season 1 ('When The Bough Breaks'), 'Insurrection' as one of the Ba'ku women, and even recently in 'Picard,' though uncredited), was quite nice since he was in much the same position when he started so it shows he has some ambition to stand out from this crowd. I would have liked a little more of that, perhaps scenes with Jenkins or introducing other lower deckers so that there could be a little core of recurring characters, but the series was very bad at doing this sort of thing after the first two or three seasons and it really took away from so much potential in the series that they were too scared to take time away from main cast or to define more of the crew - it's not like the cast got a fair shake every episode anyway. I think Tuvok had about one line in this one when he's Head of Security and should be seen at the forefront of dealing with this internal threat to the ship. B'Elanna's engineering expertise is again sidelined, as although she's alongside Harry in Sickbay there doesn't seem to be anything much she can do so she doesn't have a compelling contribution as has happened occasionally this season (though I liked her story about leading her first mission and getting stuck in a cave. I thought she probably meant in the Maquis rather than Starfleet, and it made me think of Kira and the kind of scrapes she got into in the resistance). It wouldn't have hurt if Jenkins had been the one with Harry and maybe they could have developed a friendship there, anything to add to the drama rather than merely having characters there because they should be used.

Other than Jenkins there weren't many guest characters (another money-saver), but the one alien they had, Onquanii, was played by Steve Dennis who had also been the night alien at the start of this season, in 'Night' and would appear as a crew-member in the following episode. I don't know if this is the same actor credited as 'Steven' Dennis, who also played a role this season (Fennim in 'Think Tank,' though uncredited), and would go on to be the Andorian Tholos in two episodes of 'Enterprise.' They could be the same guy, but it's difficult to tell as he's usually under so much makeup, so I'll have to look out for him in 'Equinox' to see if he resembles Tholos... Onquanii was another reason this felt like an early season episode since Neelix makes the introductions and he proves not to be very helpful to our crew! Even more obscure was another uncredited guy, David Keith Anderson, who played 'Ashmore,' apparently - he'd had uncredited roles in various Trek films but would appear in an episode the following season, too ('Memorial').

The concept of the night shift was interesting because I hadn't really thought of what happened after the main shift was over. Obviously we know there are different shift rotations and we've seen the crew interact outside of working hours, but it's not something to think about much when it comes to the less important part of the 'day.' There isn't really a day anyway since they're travelling through space and so they're only going by their own internal clock (and Stardates). There have to be times when the main cast are sleeping and the ship carries on under other people. Again, they could have really done something with this concept and built up the Voyager B-team that we could have seen occasionally over time, but they didn't care enough to do that. As it is, the episode isn't one of the most substantial, but somehow, like plenty of episodes of predecessors 'TNG' and 'DS9' sometimes it's enough to merely be on the ship with these characters, it doesn't have to be big, bold and brassy. It could have been a Kim episode, then it could have been a Doctor episode, but in the end it curls round to being a Kim story since the Doc isn't even conscious of all that happened when his holomatrix was being used. They still managed to get some nice attention to detail in there, as old Trek was good at: the Doc says the warhead is speaking in Duotronics, which is the type of computers Starfleet uses in its ships, or did do (there was the whole thing about Multitronics in 'The Ultimate Computer' on 'TOS'), so that was an obscure but appreciated reference. And I was wondering why the Doc asked for the containment field to be deactivated so he could get closer to the machine in Engineering as he usually walks right through, but then I saw he was wearing his holo-emitter which obviously can't phase its matter as the Doc can. Well done!

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