Voyager discovers an undetonated weapon of mass destruction that's driven by an artificial intelligence. Unconvinced that its war has ended, the weapon seizes control of the Doctor and takes hostages in pursuit of its last designated target.
This episode has a lot in common with two previous episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. In "Dreadnought," B'Elanna had to convince a weapon that its destructive protocols were malfunctioning. But that older episode felt stronger to me: the fact that B'Elanna herself had programmed the weapon was a personal connection. It made for a more compelling story with more present emotional stakes than can be felt here.
But "Warhead" also feels similar to "Darkling" simply for being an "evil Doctor episode." And here, I think "Warhead" comes out ahead. Robert Picardo's performance as the "Mister Hyde" of "Darkling" felt to me like an unhinged caricature, but the weapon of "Warhead" feels like a more bounded performance, with many moments where the danger feels earned and not cartoonish. Picardo also spends the first 10-15 minutes of the episode carrying on weird "C-3PO to R2-D2" types of conversations where we're only hearing half the dialogue. The writing there feels forced at times to me, though Picardo handles it rather well.
There are elements of the story that don't feel like "remixes" of previous episodes. For one thing, this is a pretty good episode for Harry Kim. He gets a nice subplot: he's been captaining the ship during night shifts, and worries that his decisions have now facilitated a crisis. There's an especially nice scene harkening back to his early friendship with B'Elanna, where she confesses one of her own command failures. And as the warhead/Doctor's prisoner, he tries repeatedly to talk the weapon back from the brink of destruction.
While this episode wasn't written as a parable about "confirmation bias," the episode makes a prominent and effective sub-theme of it. Every new bit of information the warhead gets is integrated into the narrative it already wants to believe. Indeed, it's so good at rationalizing contradictory information that it's a bit unclear how our heroes truly manage to get through to the warhead to change its mind in the end.
There are other threads in the episode that I wish the dialogue had highlighted more specifically. The Doctor pushes hard to help this AI, and ends up learning that "no good deed goes unpunished" when he gets possessed. It would be nice for some character (Janeway?) to let him off the hook in the end by pointing out that he was only acting in accordance with his most core identity as a doctor, to render aid. Elsewhere, Seven of Nine has had a pretty long run of being "equal to any challenge" -- but here she isn't able to act quickly enough to carry out the plan to disable the warhead. In an episode where "flesh-and-blood life vs. artificial intelligence" is a prominent theme, it would have been good for Seven to express her own crisis of self over her "lack of efficiency."
Other observations:
- The writers reach into the "sitcom husband plot bag" and pull out "last minute planning for an anniversary" as a gimmick for Tom Paris.
- Ensign Jenkins, who sits at helm during the night shifts, seems kind of flirty with Harry Kim.
- Early on in the crisis, they have the chance to beam the warhead off of Voyager, but they don't do it because they can't get it far enough away to avoid being caught in the explosion. Well, why not just "beam it up" and never materialize it again?
I'd give "Warhead" a B-. It's not a bad episode, and I especially like the Harry Kim elements. But for me it lives too much in the shadow of "Dreadnought" (which, while not an "all-time great episode of Star Trek," was one of Voyager's better early installments).
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