VOY: Alliances

         After yesterday's awesome episode about how awesome the prime directive is this one with the same theme felt a little ham-handed. The idea that terrible war criminals might continue to be terrible after having been oppressed for a while and then offered power again is so obvious as to make Janeway look kinda dumb for thinking it would work. Also the Kazon continue to look like idiots for first not being willing to negotiate with Janeway and then being willing to negotiate when it is obviously a trap. Also, in the original series photon torpedoes are the equivalent of nukes with huge blast radii. In this episode Janeway fires on the assassin ship with at least three, possibly four torpedoes when the ship is only feet from the unshielded building containing those she is trying to protect. Also, why did she fire at all? Torpedoes are a super limited resource and there is no way the Kazon are going to see her feeble rescue attempt as anything other than another assassination attempt.
         The episode opens with Voyager fighting two Kazon ships. It destroys one and forces the other to retreat but takes serious damage along the way. They lose a crew member in engineering and people start asking Janeway about why she is still fighting the Kazon instead of making a deal with them for free passage. She says "prime directive blah blah blah" but that isn't enough. She talks to Tuvok about it and even he seems to think some sort of alliance is a good idea so she reaches out to Seska and Culluh. They agree to meet but Culluh doesn't like negotiating with women so keeps making unreasonable demands he knows she won't accept and ruins the deal. Neelix goes to another group of Kazon but gets arrested and thrown into a holding area with a bunch of Trabe. Seeing that the deal with Seska is off crewman Jonas decides to take matters into his own hands and contacts her for secret negotiations.
         Neelix helps the Trabe escape and they return to voyager in what appears to be a fleet of Kazon ships, but it turns out the Trabe used to oppress the Kazon until they rose up and seized the weapons of their oppressors and became the galactic brigands we now know so well. Janeway decides she should obviously just ally with them instead of the Kazon and the Trabe leader does one better, he suggests that they should call a peace conference with all the Kazon leaders and settle things once and for all. Neelix gets word it is a trap of some sort so they keep the transporter locked at all times. For some reason all the Kazon leaders show up but are clearly uninterested in negotiating. A Trabe ship flies in and opens fire on the conference. Janeway and company beam out safely and she returns the Trabe leader to his ship with a harsh rebuke. 

         Review: The whole "allying with the Kazon" thing would have seemed more reasonable if it had been brought up in any recent episodes. As is it seemed to kinda come out of nowhere. 

4 out of 10