Dragon's Teeth

 DVD, Voyager S6 (Dragon's Teeth)

The real crime of the Vaadwaur was that they were never brought back. Designed as a new recurring threat I really don't know why this idea was abandoned as they were good villains. Maybe it was felt they were too derivative of an existing race: I noticed a lot of parallels with the Cardassians with their slicked back dark hair, angular, bony faces and thick, ridged necks, not to mention the characteristics of their race, being ruthless and militaristic with a long history of subjugating others. Perhaps the writers felt they couldn't do anything that hadn't already been done better with that well-established Trek race? The annoying thing is it's left very much on an ominous note that these people are going to be cropping up again, and would have been a great warning to those who dismiss history as irrelevant, not to mention one of those occasions when curiosity killed the cat and Starfleet's mandate to seek out new life was chillingly turned around on them. It was Seven of Nine's fault in the first place for activating Gedrin, against Starfleet protocol which she apparently hasn't bothered to brush up on, though you can say in that regard Janeway was to blame since she should have ensured all crew-members were up to speed on such matters before selecting them for an Away Mission! And while Seven takes the rap in the episode, reiterated at the end when she shows appropriate contrition for taking matters into her own hands, it was surprising Janeway herself didn't take any of the responsibility upon herself since she agreed with Gedrin's wish to awaken the other Vaadwaur. She could just as easily have dismissed his wishes and taken him to some other planet to start a new life.

That wouldn't have worked out too well for him, he was clearly a man out of time, though it is rather weakly presented by showing minor confusion about how to operate Harry's station when contacting the satellite (a piece of tech that has, incredibly, survived all the forces arrayed against its creators for almost a millennium, when you'd think the enemies of the Vaadwaur would have destroyed every last trace of their technology, if not commandeered it for their own - maybe it had some kind of stealth mode that meant it was able to evade enemies in its vicinity?). Any alien coming aboard Voyager would likely share the same uncertainty since Federation symbols and computer layouts aren't likely to correspond with that of other races or groups. But Gedrin was also of a race that was hated for its past conquests, so he wouldn't have been able to fit in anywhere local. We see the first hints of a ruthless character when he talks in a rather heartless way about his dead wife, and one thing the episode does well is in that gradual turning up the heat on who these people are and what they're capable of. The most effective scene in this regard was little Naomi Wildman's cameo which was very well shot to put us right in the unhappy child's face as she's turned away from her friend Neelix, unable to articulate just what's wrong with the Vaadwaur children, but knowing instinctively from her childish perspective that she doesn't like them: they're arrogant and cruel, something Naomi isn't used to, and that whole scene was one of the most realistic uses of a child in Trek.

Neelix is the ideal person to be ridiculed by callous minds (as he was in real life by some viewers), because we can see his deficiencies on the surface in so much of the series, but he's also a very kind and gentle man, just the sort of person who could have his good graces be used against him, the weakness of such noble attitudes, but one that can be increased as he's pushed. He wasn't always like that, he used to be much more a manipulator of kindness himself, but his real nature had been allowed to come to the fore. The fact that he looks different also makes it easy to laugh at him, but he can laugh at himself. The point of the whole exchange is to unsettle us about the Vaadwaur, but it's not until we meet a couple more of Gedrin's people, Gaul and Morin, that we slowly come to see these negative intuitions sliding into focus. The latter is brisk and easy to get on with, the former is the most Cardassian of them all, very sharp-faced with a martial bearing, insistent on what he wants without straying openly from the bounds of diplomacy. Another great scene is when he and Janeway clash over whether his ships will have Photon Torpedoes, the Captain adamantly holding her ground - it's a great episode for her. She gets to be the inspiring Captain and remind us once again why she's in command, robustly holding her own, even getting her hair mussed in the battle (though it's not quite the same as when the bun used to unfasten and begin to thrown down strands onto her face in the old days!).

I continue to be pleasantly surprised that Season 6 hasn't yet become the Janeway/Seven/Doctor show, continuing to feature the cast very nicely - Neelix is well used as part of the deductive investigation into the mysterious history of the Vaadwaur, Chakotay is very visible, as is Tuvok. No one stands out as the 'main character' of the episode, it's about the ship and crew coming up against these two implacable foes, the newly awakened, treacherous Vaadwaur, and their age-old enemies, the Turei. The designs of both, while reminiscent of other species, were very well implemented and the clash of their fleets, though small by 'DS9' standards is one of the closest we'd get to a proper space battle, Voyager letting rip Phaser blasts while the pursuing enemies, first the Turei, then the Vaadwaur, go at them like mosquitoes, draining their shields. There were some inconsistencies, however: I first thought things weren't quite right when these piddling little alien ships force Voyager to flee for its life. At first there seemed to be only one and Voyager's gone up against far worse odds than that, but suddenly there's three or more and it makes a little more sense. Still, those ships didn't seem all that powerful, yet Voyager has to scarper to a radiation-heavy atmosphere to get out of their attack. If the Turei ships were so tough Voyager couldn't stand and fight, why couldn't they take entering such an atmosphere? Equally, they were already shown to have advanced shield knowledge by the fact they could drop Voyager out of the 'underspace' corridors by shooting them with a particular beam, so these things added up to confusion and inconsistency for me.

Then there's the fact the Vaadwaur ships, no matter how powerful they were nine hundred years ago, are somehow still a danger. It's repeatedly said that their technology isn't advanced enough to realise their threat to return the area to their dominion, but they can still cause Voyager severe problems so that Janeway has to use their own technology, the satellite, against them, and ally with the unfriendly Turei. And did the Turei know the Voyager crew had brought these 'dragon's teeth' back to life, because if so I imagine they'd be hunting them down with a vengeance (though they had some blame in the matter for forcing Voyager down to the planet), if they weren't busy going after the Vaadwaur! There were so many opportunities inherent in this storyline for ongoing drama, but it was seemingly all thrown away. We're left to assume the Vaadwaur ships that did make it into the subspace corridors were never able to build up their forces sufficiently to pose a threat. Clearly the Turei know their history, so they must have put every effort into extermination of the species. But what if there had been an ever-present temptation for Voyager to use those tunnels to get closer to home? They already shaved off two hundred lightyears, so it could have made a huge difference, maybe the writers even had it in mind as a potential route back to the Alpha Quadrant had it been decided to bring the ship home before the end (and in fact they did exactly that in the end, except they were the Borg equivalent).

It could have been explained that in the nine centuries since the Vaadwaur ruled the roost, those tunnels could have been altered by the passage of time so as to render their detailed mental knowledge irrelevant, and that's the solution to why they never reappeared in my mind. Still, there was yet more to jar with the story logic for me: Gedrin, though he's not presented as a villain as such, merely that he carries the same cultural ruthlessness as the rest of his people, and while he speaks against Gaul's plan to turn on the very crew that had helped them, becomes a bizarre ally of Voyager by going down to risk his life to make sure they can contact the satellite again allowing the Turei to pinpoint their enemies' locations. I never saw anything that would justify such a base treachery to his own kind, and as much as it suits the story and enables it to wrap up neatly in the allotted time, I did feel it was a disservice in the earlier part of the episode that we didn't get some kind of gradual change in Gedrin's point of view, as if being around these more principled people and with the knowledge of so much time having passed, or even the death of his wife changing his perspective, he'd find some logical reasoning to reach that point of sacrificing his life for Voyager. It didn't make sense in the context of the story, and even makes Tuvok look a bit lax in his duty - he was ordered to go with Gedrin and when the former refuses to leave and urges him to go as the roof is unstable, he just takes off. Now you can cite logic, and that there was nothing further he could do, but they didn't have a strong reason to trust Gedrin, he could just as well have been planning some mischief to assist his people.

Finally, when it comes to inconsistency, I have to mention the disappointing omission of Blue Alert, the rarely used condition, in the same style as Red Alert or Yellow Alert, that signifies landing on a planet. They used to make a fuss about the ship landing, but in this case they just drop down without any preamble or any suggestion of danger in the process. I know they were under attack at the time, but that, more than any other moment, should have meant Janeway stuck rigidly to protocol, that's what it's there for: to guide and keep on track. Something that has been consistent, this season in particular, is how many people have sat in the Captain's Chair other than the Captain! First we had Harry Kim in charge of the night shift, then it was the Doctor as the ECH, and now Gedrin just wanders over when he's on the Bridge and takes a little rest! I was expecting Janeway or Chakotay to say something, either as a humorous aside or to highlight that this is an alien ship to him and he doesn't understand Starfleet has strict protocols, etc, but it passed without comment. We get a reminder there are no Betazoids aboard (not since Lon Suder was killed way back at the beginning of Season 3), when Janeway, suspicious of the Vaadwaur's intentions confides to Chakotay how much she'd give for someone of that species, which also infers there are no other empathic races on board. Even without them Janeway is shrewd in her dealings with both Vaadwaur and Turei, and though I did feel the relaxed atmosphere of the early part of the episode where little concern was shown about these mysterious tunnels that sucked them in, undermined what should have been a steadily growing tension up to the reveal of the nature of this new race, in general it was a strong episode for the Captain.

The good old cave set is revamped once again to provide a different look for the underground bunker which housed the stasis pods containing the Vaadwaur in suspended animation, this time with a hard, concrete floor, or equivalent, and much debris around and blocking the upper floor. While a Trek connoisseur would recognise those indelible marks of 'Planet Hell' as it was known within the production, it was well disguised yet again (though amazing that even a nine hundred year old race used those big blue barrels beloved of that era of Trek!). The historical side of the episode should have been played up more - it put the Borg in perspective that they were a race recognised by the Vaadwaur (although it always annoys me when Seven is called a Borg and no one ever points out that was her former identity, but now she's human - she may carry the physical 'scars' of her former life, but she's no more a Borg now than Jean-Luc Picard!). The Devore Imperium get another mention (I think Seven called them both Devor and Devor-ee!), they seem to be one of the few races to be so, strange when you consider they were only in one episode. And I can't reiterate enough how pleased I was to see Janeway not being naive in her dealings. She's helpful, but firm in her decisions, exactly how you want to see a Captain act (take note Captain Pike!), she can see what an advantage the Vaadwaur might have if they were to prove treacherous and she's not going to let them get one over on her. So it's a rather good examination of the importance of history (even if these people weren't just part of history, they were actually from that time!), and not dismissing old tales as outdated and unimportant, since Neelix' research into his own people's folktales is the basis from which Seven works and redresses some of the damage she did. It should have been a big blot on Voyager's reputation in the Quadrant, but they got off easy.

My complaint, and what prevents the episode from reaching classic status, is that it is a little too lacking in building tension. You can see the structural work being built, letting us in on the Vaadwaur's way of thinking and their characteristics as a people, but there's never a time when they're wholeheartedly trusted (like, say, the Trabe in 'Alliances'), and we the audience are in on their plans to take over Voyager so there's never much mystery, while certain scenes like Naomi's would have been ideal for generating an impression of mounting horror. Equally the way in which it ends doesn't do enough to apportion blame, Seven taking it all and supposedly learning a lesson, but it wasn't part of the episode, it was just thrown in at the end. Not that I'd have wanted it to be yet another Seven episode, but if you're going to do that you need to build to that point. It had it's good qualities and is a rip-roaring adventure but I can see it being even better in the right hands, and perhaps if they'd gone with their original plan to make it a big feature-length story in the style of 'Dark Frontier' it may have better lived up to the concept. A couple of 'TNG' guests return as the two main Vaadwaur: Robert Knepper, Gaul, had been Wyatt Miller, Deanna Troi's betrothed from way back in Season 1 ('Haven'), which was quite a memorable role so I'm surprised I didn't recognise him through the makeup, though he had the same intensity in both roles. And Jeff Allin was Gedrin and played a less memorable role as Clara Sutter's Father, Daniel, in 'Imaginary Friend,' so it was fun to realise who those guest stars were.

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