VOY: The 37's

         All I remember from my initial watching of this episode was that it had Amelia Earhart being abducted by aliens and I thought that was hella lame. Upon rewatching though it has a lot more going on than I remembered. Somehow in my memory they meet the aliens responsible for the abductions and their reasons are hella dumb, but that is totally incorrect. We never meet the aliens and their apparent motive was to raise a race of slaves which will still a bit questionable at least makes sense. Also our one source for this information is a human who has never actually seen the aliens and is the ancestor of the frozen abductees. 

         We begin with Voyager detecting a trace of rust in space which clearly doesn't make sense. They follow it and find a 1936 Ford pickup truck floating in space, still in operating condition no less (clearly the battery should be dead as is pointed out later on Earhart's plane, but whatever, it is fun to see Paris fire it up). Turning on the radio they detect an SOS signal and follow it to a planet. For some reason they can't beam down or send a shuttle so they land the ship. As they search the surface we see them being observed by cloaked figures. They find a cryogenic chamber with 8 frozen humans inside including Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan. The revival goes well but the frozen people aren't willing to take their word on what happened and Noonan pulls out a gun and takes them hostage. 

         Tuvok leads a party of security officers along with Chakotay to attempt a rescue, but they are attacked by the cloaked figures. Just then Janeway convinces Earhart to listen to her and along with Noonan and Kim they exit the cave right in the middle of the firefight. Janeway outflanks the cloaked figures but once they surrender she is shocked to find they are human. It seems they are the descendants of the original abductees who were already unfrozen and they were originally used as slaves. But they rebelled generations ago and have built cities on the planet which they now happily call home. Janeway tours the cities (off camera to save money I am sure) and is impressed. They offer to let the crew of Voyager join them and it is very tempting to a lot of the crew. Earhart and the other abductees decide to stay, but after a dramatic build up all the crew of Voyager decide to stay on for the trip home.

         Review: Interesting science fiction going on here, much more so than the cliched flying saucer plot I was expecting. It is cool to see female Captain Janeway meeting female aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and how impressed they both are with the other. Not sure if they needed to tension about who would stay behind, but it was terrible. Also Neelix can cook finally! And isn't the worst!

7 out of 10