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| Janeway attempts diplomacy with Species 8472. |
Starfleet Command, San Francisco. As groundskeeper Boothby (Ray Walston) tends to his work, Admiral Bullock (Tucker Smallwood) greets a group of cadets. Not far away, Chakotay takes pictures of the area, evading questions by both Boothby and the attractive Commander Valerie Archer (Kate Vernon). While talking (and flirting) with Archer, Chakotay sees a nearby ensign clutch at his throat. The man's face begins expanding and contracting, and people nearby hustle him out of the room.
"Have you ever reverted?" Archer asks, adding that while she can hold her human form, she finds the concept of sleeping difficult. She then makes a date with Chakotay, who agrees to meet her that night - much to the surprise of Tuvok, who has just arrived to escort him back to the coordinates they will use to return to Voyager.
This is not the real Starfleet Command, of course. It's a space station, in which replication technology and holographic imagery have been used to recreate Starfleet - with, as a concerned Janeway notes, startling accuracy. When they discover that the aliens impersonating humans are none other than Species 8472, the race that fought the Borg to a standstill and threatened to "purge (the) galaxy of life," the Voyager command crew fear that this space station is preparation for an invasion that would likely end with the destruction of all life on Earth!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Janeway: Once she learns that the aliens are Species 8472, she begins preparing for war. She demands Seven prepare vast numbers of the Borg nanoprobes they used the last time they came into conflict with this species, and she orders genetic testing be performed on all members of the crew to make sure there are no Species 8472 impostors on board. She still insists on trying to find a diplomatic resolution, however, and when the negotiations start to look promising she takes a risky action to show that she can be trusted, all but daring her adversaries to prove her wrong in doing so.
Chakotay: Though Janeway takes over at the climax, this is primarily a Chakotay-centered episode. Thankfully, Chakotay's improvement over the last season and a half remains in evidence. He is instantly attracted to Valerie Archer, but he never behaves stupidly while talking to her. He enjoys talking with her on their "date" - but he also continually steers the conversation in the direction needed to learn information, and he takes advantage of her departure from the room to download information from her computer terminal.
Hot Alien Space Babe of the Week: Valerie appears at first glance to be a potential ally. She has immersed herself in human culture, and expresses enthusiastic appreciation of human literature. But as she and Chakotay talk, it becomes clear that she believes humanity is a violent species that poses a direct threat to her people. Despite this, it remains clear that she and Chakotay very much like each other, and Kate Vernon and Robert Beltran play nicely off each other... All of which makes their not-quite-romance a lot easier to take than might have been the case.
THOUGHTS
I'll get this out of the way up front: Janeway effectively disarming her ship as an olive branch to Species 8472 is, plainly and simply, foolhardy. Had her instincts been wrong, Voyager would have been all but instantly destroyed and the species would have carried on with their plans to invade Earth. I would have a different opinion if a tag had indicated that she had a backup plan ready (on the mantra of "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst") - but in the absence of any backup weaponry, she basically placed humanity's head on a chopping block, armed Species 8472 with an ax, and dared them to swing.
But if the resolution is plagued by naivete, and if a Cold War allegory is far from timely in an episode made more than a decade after end of the Cold War, neither of those things keep this from being a good episode. It's not a great one - but Nick Sagan's script has some clever touches. Particularly effective is the portrayal of mutual fear on the part of the Voyager crew and the members of Species 8472. As the episode progresses, we see that neither side particularly wants open conflict - but at the same time, both Janeway and Boothby separately express the feeling that conflict is inevitable.
The moralizing at the end, and the way in which a complex situation is solved a little too quickly and easily, keep this from being all it might have been. The episode also forever destroys Species 8472 as a proper "monster" - though I think their potential as such was already pretty fully tapped out, so I find myself less than sad about that. This variant of Species 8472 has potential to be interesting, and certainly more three-dimensional than "intelligent killer insects." As such, I'm hopeful we'll see them again, either as adversaries or allies, as I see plenty of interesting ways to use them in either capacity.
Overall Rating: 7/10.
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