But at some point, somebody back at the Federation should probably take notice of the fact that attempting to strictly adhere to it turns you into Space Hitler.Īlso, there is the matter that exactly two episodes earlier, Janeway happily jettisoned the Prime Directive to save a much smaller civilization from a much less serious threat. Look, we all get the concept behind the Prime Directive. Sure guarantor of instant moral dilemmas, the Prime Directive is invoked here by Janeway to explain why she does not intend to intervene to save an entire civilization from being wiped out by a preventable disaster. The Prime Directive: Oh, the damn Prime Directive. Janeway and Paris get most of the meaningful screen time, and I continue to find Janeway appealingly direct. (The effect-preceding-cause paradox was mentioned in “Parallax” as well.) Twelve Monkeys it ain’t, but I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, so I liked it. The time travel paradox: the big reveal at the end of the episode is that Voyager itself has caused the polaric detonation, even though it arrived at the planet after the detonation occurred. This isn’t terrible-I imagine this is just an early precursor to the development of Kes’ psychic powers later in the show-but we’ll just have to see where they go with this. In this case, Kes tags along with the away team that is trying to rescue Janeway and Paris but not much comes of it and the episode is resolved without her. Telepathy is not new to Star Trek, but this episode reminds me why I generally don’t like psychic powers as they are used in science fiction shows: the exact nature of the psychic power is left deliberately vague and employed largely as a lazy means of involving characters in a plot that they would otherwise have no business participating in. She senses the death of the planet when it first occurs (Obi-Wan Kenobi style), and later uses some form of telepathy to contact Janeway and Paris through space-time. Kes has psionic powers: Kes (whose psychic powers have been mentioned briefly before) plays a minor, and weirdly ineffectual, role in this episode. So I’m not sure what this episode is saying, beyond that powering your George Foreman Grill with the equivalent of liquid hydrogen is a poor idea. This made me initially take this episode for a morality tale about the perils of nuclear energy (Star Trek is known for its subtle social messages), but later in the episode, Janeway and Paris encounter a band of (thoroughly unconvincing) anti-polaric energy protestors/terrorists who shoot children, muddling the moral message. It turns out that this civilization was destroyed because polaric energy is actually super dangerous, and yet it was being used to power the entire planet. Will they find a way to prevent the disaster and travel back to their own time? Or will Voyager come to a tragic end three episodes into its first season? When the bridge crew sensibly immediately beams down to check out the death planet, Janeway and Paris are transported one day back in time, to the final hours before the civilization-ending catastrophe takes place. Plot synopsis: Voyager encounters a planet that has very recently been wiped clean of life due to a massive detonation of nuclear polaric energy. Oh, before I forget: you should probably consider all of these episode recaps to have a “spoiler” warning attached. But I always try to listen to what my heart tells me, and what my heart tells me is that time travel paradoxes are awesome. And perhaps it does not bode well that Voyager is breaking out a time travel plot exactly three episodes into the series. Intellectually, I might agree with this criticism. The various Star Trek shows have taken heat for too often falling back on time travel as a plot device. It wouldn’t be Star Trek without a time travel paradox.