Voyager Flashback: Dragon's Teeth

"Middle era" Star Trek would occasionally conclude an episode with an open-ended ending, teasing future stories... only to never actually pick up and continue the story later. To me, one of the bigger missed opportunities was in Voyager's "Dragon's Teeth."

Voyager seeks shelter from an alien attack on the surface of a bombed-out world once home to a technological species. When they find survivors of that species and revive them from stasis, they don't realize who it is they've truly awakened: a ruthless menace from centuries past.

With Voyager on a long journey back to the Alpha Quadrant, it makes sense that any recurring villain on the show would last only for a while before needing to be replaced. This episode seems to explicitly tee up a new one in the Vaadwaur. They're sort of pitched as "space Nazis," assured of their own race's purity and disdainful of any others. The threat they once posed in the past was sufficient for multiple other factions to ally in war against them.

Now on the one hand, I can see why the writers may have soured on any long-term potential for these aliens. Voyager had kind of already done "space Nazis." The Hirogen began as something very different, but then a memorable two-parter clothed them in a direct Nazi metaphor and sort of consumed the obvious story angles that further episodes around the Vaadwaur might have mined. Indeed, "Dragon's Teeth" itself was reportedly conceived as a two-part episode, but when Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky were working on the script for "part one," they concluded there wasn't actually enough material there for a part two.

On the other hand, I feel like there are other interesting avenues of Vaadwaur that might have been explored. There are only a few hundred left, period, at the end of the episode. The sorts of tactics they might have resorted to in their desperation might have made them a truly unpredictable and menacing adversary. The fact that some of their ancient technology was still cutting edge even today might have made for a threat able to "punch far above its weight class."

I appreciate the signs along the way that Voyager's new allies aren't actually the "good guys": the way the first person revived seems to express disdain rather than grief for his dead wife, the way they want to pursue and exterminate adversaries even once they're fleeing, the appreciation they show for the bloodiest aspects of Klingon culture. At a certain point, though, it strains credibility that the Voyager crew hasn't figured out the truth that the audience -- hell, that Naomi Wildman -- has figured out about the Vaadwaur. (That it takes Neelix researching fairy tales to make the final breakthrough feels almost insulting somehow.)

I kid a bit about Neelix there (because I always do), but it's actually quite clever that his cultural heritage is key in unmasking the Vaadwaur. (It's a much more subtle incorporation of Nazi and Jewish themes than the Hirogen two-parter.) There's also a lovely scene with Seven of Nine, who talks about the gratification of reviving an alien species from extinction after having been responsible for the assimilation of so many.

But the real missed opportunity here is not embracing a more morally ambiguous ending. Sure, it's a bummer to make a point of saying "a few hundred Vardwaur escaped" if you're never going to use them again... but it would have been far more profound had they not escaped. Bad as the Vaadwaur are, it would be quite a thing for Voyager to ultimately be responsible for the true and total genocide of the last of their species. But the Voyager crew doesn't have to contend with that either.

Other observations:

• This episode really showcases how far CG had come in a short span of the 90s. Barely five years earlier, most visual effects on Star Trek were still being done with models. Here, we get a bombed-out city skyline (with Voyager flying among the buildings), the debris-littered tunnels of their space travel network, and more. And it looks pretty good.

• When Voyager detects faint life signs on the planet they thought uninhabited, why don't they bring the Doctor on the away mission?

• Actor Robert Knepper gives good villain here as a Vardwaur soldier. While he's arguably best-known for the villain he played on the TV series Prison Break, Star Trek had previously cast him as a good guy -- the man engaged to Deanna Troi in one of The Next Generation's earliest episodes.

• While the alien character of Gedrin is essentially presented as a pacifist for the entire episode, I still don't feel like his behavior at the end of the story makes a lot of sense. He sacrifices himself when there's pretty clearly no one left among his people to advocate for his views after he's gone. I guess he goes out being true to himself.
  

What's here is a decent episode of Voyager. But I can't help but feel like there might have been more to the story... or at least a more impactful version of this story. I give "Dragon's Teeth" a B.