Distant Origin

Veteran Trek Director David Livingston is given a try at writing, and he transwarps it out of the park.

This is the hardest science that I've ever seen inserted in Star Trek's fiction, an absolutely fascinating episode that clearly references the inquisitional trial of Galileo Galilei, with added dinosaurs. It even holds true to the result and consequences of Galileo's persecution, a bold move for a mass appeal show.

There's even a delightful nod to Larry Niven's "Known Space", letting you know that Livingston is absolutely on top of the canon.

If you have the slightest interest in science fiction, even if you have no interest in Voyager, or in Star Trek, this episode is required reading as a standalone flash of genius.

This is a really well thought out and "realistic" offering. A couple of Saurian paleontologists from Voth have theorized, with great evidence, that their race originated on Earth during the time of the dinosaurs. But because they have a leadership that doesn't allow for challenges to its dogma, they are seen as threats. They escape in a ship and locate Voyager, the inhabitants of which will provide evidence of their theories. All that said, millions of years of entrenched dogma are hard to overturn through evidence and power loves to keep power. One of the very finest of the Voyager series.

"Distant Origin" is a highly creative episode--perhaps the most creative in the series. It begins with a molecular paleontologist, Gegen, finding remains of the human killed in the season 2/season 3 cliffhanger episodes "Basics". He brings these to show his superiors on Voth--but they don't want to hear about his research and his crazy theory. What is this crazy theory? That his race and that of the body parts they found have a common ancestry--so a reptilian species and a mammalian one are, in fact, cousins of sorts.

To prove his theory, Gegen and his research assistant go in search of the ship from which this dead man originated. Soon they find Voyager and use their advanced cloaking technology to sneak aboard the ship. Unfortunately, the crew are able to detect their presence and soon an unexpected first contact occurs.

Up until this discovery, you never seen or hear anything from the viewpoint of the Federation--it's all Voth. I don't think another episode has been done like this. Additionally, what happens AFTER is something that was really creative and makes this a must-see episode. I nearly gave this one a 10, but it did seem a tad preachy late in the show.

One thing that I found odd in this episode is the absolute absence of any theory other than the one put forth by Janeway and Chakotay when it comes to the Voth: that this race of 'sauropods' evolved to the point of super-advanced technology (warp capable) at a time when the rest of the earth was populated by amazon forests and dinosaurs. And NO humans. In this situation, the sauropods evolved and thrived to the point of joining the Space Age in a big way-- and yet never bothered to explore the rest of Earth. Instead they apparently stayed on their little now-lost continent, and, when they discovered that an asteroid was going to devastate the planet, they got on space ships and flew away.

Two more likely theories (well, relatively speaking, that is) would be if either A) some race of space travelers 'rescued' the Voth species from doomed Earth and took them halfway across the galaxy. OR, option B) some debris from the collision of the asteroid and earth was thrown into space, and contained microscopic cells that later developed into life forms that eventually evolved into the Voth. But no, instead the theory is that a whole race evolved, learned, and thrived on one isolated continent, and,without ever exploring their own planet, they flew to the other side of the Milky Way.

If this 'theory' had been tempered or at least mentioned as being only ONE possibility, this episode would have been much better.

You would think "Voyager finds a race of super-smart dinosaurs who left Earth millions of years ago" would end up being dumb or corny like so many of the other more out-there episodes of the show, but everyone involved really went off. The writing is relatively grounded, there's a clear ethical message (trust science!!), and the acting and prosthetics are both killer. Also, is this the best Chakotay episode? The only other one that comes to mind is "Shattered", from season 7, which I also love. And "The Fight", of course (jk kimora).