The Voyager crew comes upon a deadly Cardassian drone that's wreaking havoc on the Delta Quadrant, after also being brought there by the Caretaker. Yet also to blame is B'Elanna Torres; as a Maquis, she reprogrammed the weapon for her own purposes. Now she must defeat her own programming to stop this "Dreadnought" before it decimates the population of an innocent planet.
"Dreadnought" is a fairly solid episode of Voyager. It's an ideal story for B'Elanna, leveraging her engineering skills and her personal history. She's undergone something of a Kira Nerys-like transformation; at the time she was a freedom fighter, the death of bystanding "collaborators" likely would not have bothered her much. Now, she sees more shades of grey -- not that this is a particularly "grey" situation.
Meanwhile, this episode nudges along three other continuing stories. We check in with the pregnant Samantha Wildman, reviving the "Doctor needs a name" thread and getting a sense of his feelings for Kes in the process. We see more of the Kazon conspirator Jonas, who gets a new "handler" (I assume because the previous Kazon actor wasn't available or wasn't invited back). We also get more of the unraveling Tom Paris, who gets dressed down by Chakotay in front of the captain, is said to get in a fist fight over bad punctuation, and inches closer to an eventual relationship with B'Elanna as he envies her ease aboard a Starfleet ship.
Unfortunately, the main drag on this story is that it's already been done. Recently. This is essentially the exact same plot as "Prototype," just four episodes earlier. B'Elanna creates a technological monster that becomes a threat, and ultimately has to destroy her own creation to save the day. What's more, as a performer, Roxann Dawson has basically no scene partner in either story: there, she was acting opposite a fully masked actor incapable of expression (whose muffled dialogue would be re-recorded later); here, she's playing opposite her own voice (to be recorded later).
It's too bad, because this episode is better than "Prototype," and would seem better still without the many points of comparison. LeVar Burton directs, getting two good performances from Roxann Dawson, and moving the camera in a dynamic and interesting way that makes "talking alone in a room" far more interesting than it has any right to be. Though you have to accept that Cardassian technology seems a hell of a lot better here than 7 seasons of Deep Space Nine suggested, you get a return on that suspension of disbelief. The cat-and-mouse deceptions between B'Elanna and the Dreadnought are fun, the "creator" metaphor is astute (can "God" make a weapon so unstoppable that even she can't stop it?), and the stakes feel much higher -- allowing Janeway and Tuvok to share a cool "go down with the ship" moment too.
The episode might have been stronger still with a little more budget. The Dreadnought has an interesting set (that's lit effectively), but it doesn't look like much flying through space. The launching of escape pods (and their later retrieval) happens off-screen, denying the audience a very cool visual. There's also not enough budget for a larger scene with the aliens to complete their story arc: after not trusting Voyager because of the preceding rumors, their planet is saved and we never get to see their gratitude.
Other observations:
- We seem to be moving away from the idea of photon torpedoes being a limited resource. Voyager fires half a dozen this episode, and no comment is made about how much they're giving up in their campaign to destroy the Dreadnought.
- When the Dreadnought's original programming re-asserts, we should get the female computer voice we always hear on Deep Space Nine. I presume they went with a male voice to better distinguish that "Cardassian computer" from B'Elanna's voice, but the lack of consistency there is unfortunate.
- Besides the similarities between this and "Prototype," B'Elanna's other major episode ("Faces") also had her acting opposite herself. In advance of season three, Roxann Dawson reportedly begged the writers to give her a normal scene partner in the next big B'Elanna episode.
- Staff writer Lisa Klink observed another bit of repetition at work in this episode: that season two had seen the Voyager interacting with Alpha Quadrant elements of Star Trek on too regular a basis (including their own past). (Plus next week's episode!) As she astutely put it: "Individually those episodes worked well, but I think in general they had the effect of making this a familiar neighborhood."
If "Dreadnought" had been more unique, or even had it been the first of these similar episodes to air, I think it might have earned a B+. As it stands, I'll scale back a little to a B.
1 comment:
Re Cardassian technology, I always took Dreadnought to be the Cardassian equivalent of the Manhattan Project in WWII; technology wildly out of sync with the rest of the civilization at the time. The best scientific minds would have built this to permanently end the Maquis threat. Still should have had a female voice though.
-John B.
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