Warhead

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.

My review would give them 3 out of 10 for originality, anyone who has seen the 1974 indie film Dark Star would recognise the part of the story line that John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon wrote all those years ago. Then it was written as a black comedy, this story tried to make it a serious subject, it doesn't work.

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.

...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.

Another prime example among many other particular episodes where writers once again denote StarFleet "Principals" in usual confusion and immense frustration to the viewer!

So tired of the Star Fleet/Janeway making decisions off rationalizations. It's like find the most illogical idea and do that one.

The irrationality is nicely demonstrated here. Kim cites Starfleet protocol. Doctor cites is morality (anyone else want to add some philosophical construct that will make real consequences for the crew based on more abstraction, which can't ever be argued with?) Then the scientific fact of an explosion is noted, Ah, but any medical procedure has risk is countered with (What?) But of course the illogical nebulus comment is what drives the reality of the crew to keep explosive on board (What?) Then planets are at war. Janeway says won't help one against the other because... "we can't interfere with the affairs of planets (What was that contradiction?) If won't interfere with plants that have their own dispute... then you're actually interfering with the planets by not letting them dispute...?

Of course it does! Base real decisions on conjecture and irrational sayings and sentiments... it's the Starfleet way on Voyager!

Just off the wall thinking and it's like the crew says, "Ah, darn. Guess we got to do that silly thinking and base reality and harm on that!. Doesn't make sense from some general conjecture speculating thing. So... let's pick that one to base fact on!" Set a course....

Half the series has this conflict. Just another inconsistently irrational situation, or a benefit in being obtuse. You can't argue with an abstraction, conveniently so.