OVEG: Dreadnought

Description: Dreadnought is an episode about a race against time with a weapon of mass destruction, so as you can imagine it begins with routine scans of a pregnant woman in Sickbay. Then again, maybe she should be scanned, considering the fact that Ens. Wildman's still pregnant. I gave Elogium a pass on this since it wasn't the creators' fault that UPN in their infinite stupidity decided to take four season one episodes and air them in the beginning of season 2. Lord knows with their hideous promos UPN had the touch of death. But this is something there's no excuse for. Ens. Wildman is still carrying a baby she was impregnated with before Voyager was taken - it is now two thirds of the way through the second season. She's been pregnant, what, fourteen, fifteen months now? What, did she hump an elephant or something? They also start getting into names for the baby - all the names are male... so I guess they're all in for a surprise when the baby turns out to be female. Maybe if a female baby takes two years to be born she has a penis, I don't know.

Up on the bridge, they've found the remains of a probe that's been blown to kingdom come, a worrying fact because it's made of duratanium... and you'll know that because they won't stop saying the name and how strong it is. After the third time you start to wonder if Duratanium Inc is a sponsor for the show: "It would take a colossal amount to destroy a duratanium ship, since it's so strong and resists even the toughest stains! Just touching it is like gargling orgasms." Oh, and this is really undermined in a second when we see samples of this powerful duratanium in Engineering, looking like little more than corrugated steel - you can almost see Torres trying not to accidentally bend the incredibly strong metal with her bare hands. It turns out that the cause of the destruction was Cardassian weaponry, but it wasn't sent by Seska, but by Torres. Dun dun duuuun!

Torres starts giving a briefing on the weapon. Apparently, the Cardassians sent this weapon to destroy a Maquis installation, but instead of blowing it up the detonator failed and it skipped off into orbit, where the Maquis got their hands on it. Torres attempts to defuse the obvious plothole by saying, "Leave it to the Cardassians to build such an incredibly advanced tactical weapon and then arm the warhead with an old kinetic detonator." Unfortunately, this statement just doesn't do it for me. As we see the story unfold, this weapon is going to be simply incredible - that the most important part of the whole thing is a cheap bit of obsolete technology is just stupid, and cannot be handwaved away. It's better than a technobabble explanation, but not by much.

Anyway, Torres gives some background on this uberweapon with the major design flaw, stating that it has a 2000 kilogram explosive (half matter, half anti-matter). Everyone's impressed, and Tuvok comments that it's "Enough to destroy a small moon." Surprisingly enough, I did some back-of-the-envelope number crunching, and it looks to be more than enough energy released to blow up the tiny Mars moon of Phobos. Now, technically, the two moons of Mars are so bloody small its theorized they're just captured asteroids, but considering how very rarely anybody on Trek does the math, I'm calling it a win for the Voyager team. Lord knows they need it. Besides, who doesn't love a 44 Gigaton warhead that says "Good morning" in a sexy voice?

Anyway, Torres explains about this weapon some more. Essentially, it's super-stealthy, well-armed, and practically indestructible, but since Torres was the one who completely reprogrammed it, there shouldn't be any problems. Yeah, I'm not buying it either. Janeway assigns her and Tom to look for ways to find it, but first Tom has another run-in with Chakotay. He'd shown up late for the meeting and with what's either a severe case of bedhead or he was making a little personal time with one of the ladies of Voyager... or a shuttlecraft, you never know when it comes to Tom. You might remember from the previous episode that Tom got busted for running a gambling ring, and now he's getting it for showing up late. Down in Engineering, Torres asks him about why he's been acting weird lately - turns out Tom had gotten into a fistfight with another officer for no reason. Well, it is something for him to do besides mutate or spout one-liners from the pilot's chair. Funny thing, while he and Torres pour their hearts out about their situations (his antics and her sending off a weapon of mass destruction) the thing I noticed the most was that Torres eyebrows are so much bigger than Tom's. I don't know why I just noticed it, and kind of wish I hadn't... now every time I look at her I can't help but think she's a muppet.

This is a harder episode to review. As we've established, Torres job on Voyager is to shout at people, spout technobabble, and spread. This means that, when we get a Torres centered episode, it will be about one of those three things: her anger issues, her need to get laid, or about overcoming some artificial problem with an equally artificial solution. We saw this in the last Torres episode, Prototype, where much of the episode is spent spouting jargon, most of which doesn't actually make any sense. The long and short of it is that they're trying to follow the missile, and when they finally catch up to it, it's armed, which it should only do when it's near its target. It turns out that it's locked onto the wrong target, an inhabited planet of near-pacifists (that's always the way, isn't it?).

Carth Onasi makes his brief appearance, telling the Kazon about the missile and how powerful it is. However, he has to cut himself off prematurely because someone might be able to detect his signal. We now return to our regularly scheduled program already in progress.

Janeway's in contact with the First Minister of the planet in question, trying to explain the situation. She gets up and approaches the screen, for some reason triggering the camera on the other end to zoom into a tighter shot of the First Minister. I wonder what happened to cause that? Maybe it was another one of Tom's troublemaking bits. "I want to sit in the chair, and then feel like I'm shrinking as I run at the screen!" Anyway, Janeway tries to explain the serious danger of the missile (and since it's about nine hundred times more powerful than the most powerful nuke humanity has yet tested, it's a pretty serious threat), but the ambassador is untrusting. He says he's heard about Voyager and how much trouble it causes, but Janeway dismisses it as fabricated tales by the Kazon... and it's just a coincidence that a weapon of mass destruction programmed by her chief engineer is set to blow up a continent on his world.

Torres manages to beam over using her codes (man, two years and she still remembers them... I know some people who can't remember their PIN number half the time). Torres comes on board and confirms that the Caretaker brought the Dreadnought to the Delta Quadrant. I don't know why, since there wasn't anyone on board for him to poke in the chest, but who knows the wiley ways of the banjo players. Dreadnought has determined that this planet is the one it was supposed to target based on some similarities, so Torres does some stuff to a data rod (those of you familiar with the It's A Fake!!! meme will recognize it as the little glow stick in the Romulan's hand) and it changes its mind. Torres pats herself on the back and beams back over, but since the episode's not even half over yet, you know what's going to happen. Besides, even without checking the clock, what drama is there to showing up, running a doohickey over another doohickey, and calling it a day? I don't see Star Trek: Plumbers becoming a big hit, do you?

With the problem supposedly solved, Voyager gets down to going at Dreadnought with knife and fork, planning to take anything they can use from it. "The Dreadnought's quantum torpedoes could be modified to be compatible with our launchers," Chakotay says. Well, yeah, if the Cardassians could make a Federation weapon fit their launchers, I'm sure you could make them fit the launcher of a Federation ship. Torres says the engine components can be "easily converted to Starfleet specs. We'll have spare parts for years." So, they can salvage stuff from a ship built by a foreign nation and work just fine, but can't salvage anything from the holodeck of their own ship. It just wouldn't be Voyager if it made sense, would it?

Well, faster than you can say "You will be assimilated," the plan to strip Dreadnought for parts is shelved when Tom reports the missle taking off back towards the target. Voyager catches up, but Dreadnought won't recognize those security codes any more, so Torres can't beam over to technobabble the problem away yet. Janeway decides to do things the way she does best: shoot it! However, Torres designed it to be resistant to all weapons (it scans the weapons and adapts to them), so the photon torpedoes just detonate harmlessly on the shields without any effect at all. Oh please, she's Torres of f*cking Borg now? If she can do that to Dreadnought, why didn't she do it for the Maquis ships or Voyager? Of course, the answer is obvious: because otherwise the episode would be over right now.

*Sob* The episode would be over now!!!! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!

So, Torres tries talking with Dreadnought while Chakotay stands there glaring at her (she sent the thing off in the first place without his permission, see). It turns out that it decided she was trying to deceive it, so it played along until she was off. It's weighed the possibility of being somehow relocated across the galaxy against the odds of Torres being captured and coerced into falsifying navigational data, and decided that the latter was more likely. Pretty clever for a nuke, I'd say. Janeway asks if there's any way to convince it that it's in the delta quadrant, but it says there's no way since the probability is virtually nonexistent. This prompts Janeway to circle Torres and stand right next to Chakotay, crossing her arms, and out-doing him in the nasty expression department. "Now what, you stupid Oscar the Grouch-looking bitch?"

Well, under the weight of all that indignation, Torres comes up with a plan: get Dreadnought to fire a full burst, and she might be able to destroy it with a magic tachyon beam. They fire off a few photon torpedoes, which provokes Dreadnought into firing back. They fire the beam (it's a lovely shade of green), but Dreadnought sends a plasma burst along the beam (tachyons aren't real, but even if they were, this wouldn't make any sense) like an egg through a snake, which completely blows out Voyager's systems.

As a brief aside, I know some wonder why I nitpick the tech details, since it's all obviously made up anyway. The reason is because, regardless of their made up physics, they're still using real terms in improper ways. If you watched The Longest Yard, and they said that so-and-so was such a great football player because he was a goalie for the Brooklyn Red Socks, where he played with Vince Lombardi and O. J. Simpson in the '62 Superbowl at Montreal, you don't need to know much about football to know it's wrong, but the more you know the worse it gets.

Anyway, now that leaves Torres in a really embarrassing position. After they finally get the ship fixed so they can get back to chasing it, Torres is trying to beam over. Of course, Dreadnought won't let her, so she's fiddling with the transporter while getting a lecture from Harry. Damn, you know you've fallen when Harry's the one smacking some sense into you. Well, this seems to do the trick, because she beams back over to Dreadnought. This is good news, so it's obvious why she tosses her toolbox on the floor in a fit of pique. After failing to get in with the panels, she hauls the toolbox back over and starts pulling crap out again to shine lights at it. You know, seeing the contents of her toolbox and seeing what she's doing, I've come to a realization: if you ever want to lock out the Federation, forget about security protocols, replicating parts, or forcefields. To truly stop them, close the panel with some screws. They'll be sitting there while the missile in its final countdown shining a red light at the screws trying to get the right frequency to make it unscrew.

Torres does some running of props over things, and now manages to get out one of the orange glow sticks, but it turns out there's more sinister goings on. The pacifists have sent out what little in way of a military they have, distracting Dreadnought enough so that Torres can do her voodoo. Boy, that's weird - the ship can scan and adapt to any weapon Voyager throws at it, but it can't coordinate a defense against fifteen warships without leaving its systems defenseless? Are we saying this thing has less power than a Wii? This is rendered even more absurd a second later, when the pacifists get their asses kicked and Voyager gets smacked around. Dreadnought magically replaces all the systems Torres took off line. Makes you wonder why it didn't do that with the detonator that failed to blow up its target in the first place.

This is really just getting ridiculous. The Cardassians aren't all that impressive technologically, and Torres washed out of the Academy, yet Dreadnought is the f*cking Juggernaut of space. If this were an alien weapon Torres had found and sent, that at least would allow a reasonable explanation for all this, but as it is this ship is like some ten year old's imagination made it, so that every time you have a weapon against it you're told it just doesn't work. At this point it wouldn't be any more ridiculous if Torres said it was possessed by the soul of Mr. Rogers and is powered by cotton candy and incestuous thoughts. And the more we see of this, the more I question the very idea of this being a missile. Why design a missile with so much wasted space inside? Why design a missile with so much clearly advanced technology to be disposable rather than building a small launcher into it to fire out the actual warhead once the target was reached. For crying out loud, the retired Peacekeeper ICBM could launch ten warheads from a single missile - why on earth is this ubership not equipped with something found on a twentieth century weapon?

Anyway, Torres gets cut off from Voyager once Dreadnought realizes there was nothing to be gained from listening to her and Janeway talk to each other. I know it hasn't done me any good listening to them either. So, on her own, Torres decides to hook up her cellphone to the wall and use it to try to prematurely trigger the detonation circuit. This puzzles Dreadnought, since if Torres was being coerced she would be unlikely to sacrifice herself. However, as unlikely as that is, it's still more likely than the alternative: that some banjo-wielding urinal cake threw the missle across the galaxy in the hopes he could f*ck it. That is a hell of a hurdle to get over. So, Torres turns it into a hypothetical game: if Torres was telling the truth and the missle was heading towards the wrong target, what would cause that? Corrupt data modules, and isn't that always the case? So we watch Torres read a file listing for a while, until something comes up that's supposed to be a file, but looks more like a blown up version of Sim City. It's a backup of an old Cardassian file, but Torres can't learn much about it, because Dreadnought has decided that Torres must have switched sides - since being in the delta quadrant doesn't make sense, it's the only logical response. Life support is immediately turned off, though I really don't see why it was on in the first place for all this time... once it was sent off on its mission, there wasn't any need for it.

Since the clock is ticking for Torres, Janeway decides to up the ante by blowing up Voyager in the hopes of taking out Dreadnought. This obviously wasn't an easy decision for her: on the one hand, she could keep everyone on board and slaughter the lot of them when the self-destruct happens, or send them off in the escape pods to live out their sad lives with no hope for ever making it back home. Since the self-destruct would be quick and painless, she opts for the escape pods instead. Chakotay gives the command to the bridge crew: "Everyone except senior officers, with me," at least, that's what I think he said. The sound is so muffled I think it might have been, "Everyone except Senor O. Jesus, with me," which would explain the angry man pounding his console as Chakotay leaves. "Oh yes, don't rescue the Latino! He's far too great a threat to your manliness! ¡Vete a chingar a tu madre!" Meanwhile, the captain initiates the auto-destruct, "Janeway Pie 110." You can question the decisions of the captain, but when it comes to Janeway Pie, no authority can resist (as we saw in Prime Factors).

Over on Dreadnought, Torres turns on the Cardassian backup file, and it and Dreadnought start arguing. Since we've seen that the supergenius computer can be distracted by shiny objects, we know this will allow Torres plenty of time to do whatever voodoo is needed to stop it. She crawls in by the warhead and starts shooting the magnetic containment of the missile (the thing that keeps the anti-matter and matter from mixing and going boom). Dreadnought tries to talk her out of it, but Torres blasts it right 'til the end, when she's beamed back in The Nick Of Time. Voyager's self-destruct sequence is quickly shut down by the mighty Janeway Pie while the Doctor grumbles about being left to die on Voyager along with Senor O. Jesus. Naturally, being at the heart of the explosion of a muti-gigaton bomb, Torres has a few second and third degree burns (her uniform, of course, is pristine, thus proving that Federation uniforms are one hundred percent asbestos), though the muppet eyebrows are just fine. The escape pods are picked up so that they can get back on their way towards heading for home, or at least the next horror they've unleashed on the unsuspecting people of this quadrant.

Rating: 3

Janeway Pie: The self-destruct was initiated to destroy Dreadnaught. Averted by Janeway at The Last Second.

Swiss-Army Particle of the Week: Tachyons, which Torres theorized could penetrate the reactor core of Dreadnought and destroy it.

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