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.

Turn your brain off or you won't enjoy this one. Aside from all of Voyagers random time wasting diplomatic encursions that don't get them any closer to home, there's the inability to resist random space garbage. They always must beam it aboard, even if it clearly looks like an evil doomsday weapon, perhaps especially so. I would say they primarily avoid most of the safe looking objects in space because then they might get home faster.

Anyways... As usual the doctor steals the show protraying the AI of an evil space missile that has warp capabilities somehow (its about 1m long...) Also as usual Harry Kim presents all the emotion of a dead kipper.

Non essential, but not thoroughly unenjoyable.

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 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.