Warhead

Ensign Kim has been given the chance to command Voyager during the 'night' shift (there's no night or day in space!). However, this shirt is anything but dull in this episode. It all begins with the ship receiving a distress call. When Harry and the Doctor land on a craptastic planet, they find that the call is NOT coming from a living being but a machine that THINKS it's alive! Naturally the Doctor is excited, as he thinks he'll have some new mechanical friend. However, when they bring it aboard they learn the truth--it's a type of smart WEAPON. Way to go, Harry!

This is a decent episode. It also gives Robert Picardo a chance to act a bit outside his normal range as he's soon taken over by the weapon and it makes him act a tad grumpy, to put it mildly. Original and worth seeing.

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.

...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.

Why was Kim in command? There's at least one more ensign who's been on Voyager just as long and is wearing a red command uniform.

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.