[VOY] Season 2, Episode 13 (Netflix: S2 E13): Prototype
Rating: 2
There are some interesting themes in this episode but it feels like they fall short of what could’ve been. They do a decent job of having an episode that tries to show B’Elanna being an expert engineer to a greater extent than her just coming up with miracle solutions. In the end it’s still just a lot of technobabble though.
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Read more at Memory Alpha
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Notes:
Voyager beams something aboard. Whatever it is, people have to stick their faces really close to it in order to see it
It’s a robot. B’Elanna wants to fix it in the hope that someone will finally give her a high five
B’Elanna, it’s rude to hold a tricorder right up to someone’s face.
It turns out the robot is from a robot civilization that was created by people called “the builders”. The robots can’t make their power source and therefore can’t reproduce. Their species might go extinct. Janeway says it’s against the prime directive to help them in this way.
The robot steals B’Elanna and beams over to his ship.
They hold Voyager hostage and make B’Elanna build a prototype for a robot that they can reproduce. They had an interesting moral dilemma going on, but it becomes much simpler with the robots wanting to kill everyone
After ten minutes of technobabble they get the prototype running
Then gold robots show up and start to fight the silver robots. It provides for a distraction to launch a rescue attempt
We find out that the robots were programed to fight a war, but when the people reached a peace agreement the robots killed their makers. I guess this episode turned into a decent argument for the prime directive, or to at least make sure that if you help robots, they aren’t murder robots
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