Warhead

In this episode, Picardo plays the role of a manic A.I. with a confused identity. Not only does Picardo steal this episode from Wang (Ensign Kim), he demonstrates why the writers and producers of Voyager consistently gave him episode that would showcase his acting skills.

Picardo doesn't receive enough credit for his acting on Voyager. Time after time, episodes such as "The Darkling", "Warhead", "Latent Image" and "Real Life" demonstrate Picardo's depth, not only in dramatic acting, but also an ability to connect emotionally with the audience. He absolutely is more than a projection of light.

"Warhead" is a good episode for Picardo. Although, as I mentioned above, there are other episodes in which Picardo is great and exceeds his accomplishments in Warhead. If you don't believe me watch "The Darkling".

7 out of 10.

Voyager's night-shift receives a distress signal..

It has the feel of an original series episode, with a simple Cold War, sci-fi premise, but with 90s era technobabble.

The plot has a number of contrivances that I find implausible to the point of distraction. Certain characters get Voyager into a predicament with what feels to me like idiotic decision making that no amount of debate about sentience can justify. It might have helped my capacity to suspend the disbelief if the title of the episode was something other than "Warhead".

What follows is a body possession story where the central character is unlikeable and blinkered for the majority of the episode, until another plot contrivance suddenly changes their perspective to bring about what feels like an obligatory spectacular ending.

Robert Picardo gives a strong committed performance, but the writers make him so continually aggressive it is a hard watch for me.

Garrett Wang is required to be assertive and involved in some heated discussions, and I think he feels like the emotion is being unnaturally forced out at times. That being said it includes some reasonably good development for his character.

Some of the themes about sentient beings struggling to break free of their programming to think ethically feels an allegory of humanity at its most destructive. I like this aspect of the story a lot but little else.

It's a 5.5/10 for me but I round upwards.

...I can excuse boring characters, which Voyager has quite a few, but it's a complete showstopper when the "heroes" act unbelievably stupid, over and over again. Which they do in this one, even more than in most other episodes. This ship should have been destroyed at least a dozen times, by now, just because of their mind-blowing dumb "ah, lets do it, what could happen?" mindset.

Voyager follows a distress call to an abandoned planet but only finds a rocket-like device there, which is able to communicate with the doctor and appears to be intelligent and sentient. The doctor sees it as his duty to bring this new life form on board Voyager and to help it. When it crashed onto the planet, this being apparently lost some of its memories and is not directly aware of being a machine.

Of course, this machine is not beamed into a specially secured cargo bay but directly into engineering, next to the warp core. Although secured with a force field, you should not beam an alien creature that looks very suspiciously like a rocket directly next to the warp core.

In any case, the crew realizes that this is an intelligent weapon of mass destruction. However, the doc is able to convince Kim and Torres not to simply beam the rocket into space. Instead, they try to transfer this machine's "brain" into a holomatrix, but this triggers a defense mechanism. Instead, the machine transfers its consciousness to the doctor, through whom it now speaks and acts. I found this artistic decision rather unfortunate. The machine now uses the doc to communicate with the crew and move around. I would have found it better if the machine's consciousness had been transferred into its own holomatrix. Kim has tried several times to convince this machine that with the right "body" it could be more than just a weapon. And it would have helped if this machine had had its own body, its own appearance and thus its own identity.

After that it's all about the weapon wanting to resume its original mission, namely the destruction of a military complex of an enemy of their people. However, Kim finds out in the machine's logs that the war is already over and that the crash on the planet was triggered by its own people, as the missile was mistakenly launched along with several others. We then see a back and forth in the best "Crimson Tide" style until this machine finally gives in and realizes that it has to stop the other rockets also.

When this episode was written, AI wasn't as hyped and part of everyday life as it is today. Unfortunately, Star Trek had several episodes about intelligent and autonomous machines that were then described as sentient life forms. However, a machine that has AI is not the same as a new form of life. Especially since who would build a weapon of mass destruction that is sentient and can not only make tactical decisions autonomously according to its programming, but also perceives itself as a living being, wants to develop and be more than what its programming dictates? That might make sense for a combat robot, but no one would implant a life-form-like consciousness into a rocket. Just imagine: At some point a sentient rocket will be sitting in the pub with the sentient vacuum cleaner and the sentient refrigerator, drinking beer and talking shop about Parrises Squares.

I feel like this episode would have been improved so much if the bomb didn't look so much like a weapon when they initially encounter it and wasn't revealed to being a bomb until the doctor is usurped. I feel like it would be one of the better episodes of the season if the viewer wasn't scratching their head wondering why the hell they beamed an apparent alien weapon on board the ship and decided after learned that it's a weapon that they should salvage parts of it. It shows how unfriendly the physical appearance of a weapon seams when an AI personality becomes the friendly part of the weapon give that AI is so commonly the root of evil for science fiction stories.