Wait a minute. Wasn't there some kind of non interference rule. How was it called ? Main rule. Ahh, what the heck, we can get a thousand light years out of that and I can face the music later. After all I just bend the directive but I don't break it. And who's ever gonna hear about it anyway?
Everything that's coming out of this is on Janeway. Seven revived one of them but the captain made the deal with the devil. And switched sides in an instant. What a prime example of captaincy.
Now it's all Seven's fault? She shouldn't be reprimanded. It was Janeway who agreed to wake up the bataillon before thinking of the repercussions. As soon she saw the carrot (a few thousand light-years closer to home) she forgot the prime directive.
All in all it's a mediocre episode. The premise is interesting (nuclear war, stasi chambers, 900 year old survivors) though. They totally missed the chance that the Vaadwaur report something surprising from the early Borg or Talaxian history.
... and we are back to the incompetent Janeway that would rather be obstinate than protect the crew. At the start of the episode, she just sits there while the warp drive is damaged and half the shields are depleted. She waits way too long to take action.
... then later we have a hostile enemy launch ships ahead of schedule. Instead of continuing with the launch of Voyager, Janeway does what? You guessed it. She does nothing and waits for the ships to ascend to altitude and target Voyager before she continues with the launch.
A Starfleet captain should be aware that seconds count and Janeway wastes more time than any other character in Star Trek, especially when time is critical.
The plot is a little predictable and Seven seems out of character at the beginning which sets up the rest of the episode. Not up to the quality of the past few episodes. Definitely a return to the mediocrity that is Voyager at large.
Review by LeftHandedGuitaristBlockedParent2018-09-04T14:50:32Z
An episode that changes tone quite a lot along the way. It started out fairly poor then evolved into something quite epic. I wasn't surprised to read that this was originally intended to be a double episode.
There is some creative stuff going on throughout this, although its execution left something to be desired. Maybe I'm now too familiar with '90s Star Trek, but it seemed obvious to me that the Vaaudwar were not going to be good guys from almost the moment Gedrin is revived. From there it just became a matter of waiting for my suspicions to come true.
But I was quite pleasantly surprised by how far the episode goes in increasing their threat. It feels like a lot is crammed in that needed to be expanded upon - for example, Neelix researching the Vaaudwar in his people's language history, and the random scene of a depressed Naomi Wildman hinting at more story to be told - but in some ways this worked in the episodes favour as it kept things pretty exciting all the way through.
I now also expect any opportunity for Voyager to get home faster to be rendered useless to them, so I really wish that episodes would stop dangling the possibility.
There was a really well done space battle towards the end, reminiscent of what we would see in Deep Space Nine. In general, it felt like the effects work (both digital and practical, for example in the alien makeup) were of a higher quality than usual. The episode's story itself doesn't do anything all that remarkable, but it kept all of the characters working together well and even Janeway didn't suddenly change her personality as she is wont to do in times of crisis.
However, Chakotay's dialogue that shoehorned in the "dragon's teeth" reference of the title was awkward as hell, and didn't fit at all. Also, the ending suggests that we'll see the Vaaudwar again, but I just don't believe that for a second.