Episode Review - Prophecy
Reviewed by Andy Taylor

Synopsis
Voyager suffers a surprise attack from a cloaked vessel, which is soon discovered to be a very old Klingon battle cruiser via a metaphasic scan. Voyager returns fire, disabling the vessel’s cloak whilst allowing Janeway to open hailing frequencies. She orders them to stand down, but the captain of the ship, Kohlar, makes a point of not surrendering to sworn enemies of the Klingon Empire. Janeway says that there has been a misunderstanding since the Federation and Klingons signed a peace treaty 80 years ago. Kohlar’s lack of trust prompts Janeway into telling him of her Klingon engineer.

Kohlar boards Voyager to discover Torres is indeed Klingon. He also notes that she is pregnant, and when he finds out that the baby was conceived during a holy month, he returns to his ship to announce that the prophecies of the scrolls have come true – the ‘Day of Separation’ has arrived.

Soon after, the Voyager crew discovers that the Klingon vessel is experiencing a warp core breach. Kohlar asks for an emergency transport, so all 204 Klingons from the vessel are beamed into Voyager’s shuttlebay. Voyager escapes at warp, as Janeway and Tuvok confront Kohlar with information showing that he blew up his own ship. He replies saying that it was the only way that he could get all of his people aboard Voyager – his crew were following a sacred text that told them to embark on a long journey to find their ‘Kuvah’Magh,’ translated as ‘Saviour,’ which he believes to be Torres’s unborn child.

In a meeting, Janeway asks the senior staff to respect the Klingons, and to make room for them by doubling up on quarters. The Klingons also fill up the mess hall, where Neelix is busy providing them with gagh. When a fight breaks out, Kim breaks it up, only to garner the interest of a large, lustful Klingon woman. Whilst this happens, Torres continues to try and avoid contact with any of the Klingons. When some of them start a hunger strike in order to try and get her to meet with their Council of Elders, Janeway asks her to cooperate. Torres agrees, but when she meets T’Greth, a sceptical Elder, she has her unborn baby accused of being a mongrel child, thanks to its human father, Paris, and Torres’s half-human/half-Klingon heritage. Kohlar argues that the signs of the prophecy are still there, but T’Greth believes that they have been led to a false saviour.

Kohlar informs Torres that whether her baby is or is not the saviour is beside the point – they must convince his people that it is. The group of Klingons have been searching for more than a hundred years and found nothing, and Torres’s child would be a way to stop the hard journey. If the Klingons accept the new baby as their saviour, then Torres will have a great hold over them and can guide them to a new home. Janeway and Torres tell him that they will not be deceiving his people, so Kohlar asks Torres to read the scrolls to see if they can be interpreted in a way that supports the events in her life so that they can convince the council of their claims.

After two days of reviewing the scrolls, Torres appears before the Klingon council and tells of an exaggerated role during a Hirogen conflict, much to the pleasure of the Klingons. However, T’Greth remains unconvinced, and accuses her of saying what Kohlar wants her to. Paris comes to her defense, but as a result, T’Greth challenges him to a fight to the death in order to determine his role in the prophecy. Paris accepts despite Torres’s worries. Janeway is also against the idea of a death-match, but is able to agree to a compromise of blunted bat’leths to ensure that no one would die.

Whilst this happens, Kim himself is having his own problems with a Klingon – Ch’Rega, the female Klingon that he had restrained earlier, is now determined to mate with him. Neelix offers his own brand of help by treating Kim with some Klingon-esque harshness, which in turn arouses Ch’Rega and turns her attention towards Neelix instead.

The match between T’Greth and Paris begins in a holodeck. Paris is quite capable in the match, but is surprised when the Klingon begins to tire easily. T’Greth then shortly collapses, and Kohlar realises that he is infected with Nehret – a fatal disease. Before long, The Doctor finds that all of the Klingons aboard the ship are infected with the disease, as well as that they have passed it on to Torres and her unborn child. Consequently, T’Greth decides that he does not wish to remain in sickbay, declaring that because of the child’s illness, it cannot be the Kuvah’Magh. In order to resume their search, they must take control of Voyager.

Voyager eventually arrives at a planet designated to be the Klingons’ new home. T’Greth, pretending to cooperate with Kohlar, asks to beam down as part of the survey mission, rather than die onboard. Kohlar agrees, but T’Greth is then able to take the opportunity to take over the Transporter Room, beaming many Voyager crewmembers to the surface. Unable to beam out the bridge crew, the Klingons beam to the bridge themselves to do battle, but they are eventually overcome.

T’Greth wakes up in sickbay and is told that the illness has been cured. The Doctor was able to create an antivirus using hybrid stem cells from the unborn mixed-breed baby. T’Greth realises that the baby cured him, and Kohlar declares that she really is their saviour. The Klingons settle on their new Homeworld and Torres accepts an ancestral bat’leth from Kohlar as a gift for the baby. Later, Paris wonders if the baby really is the saviour, what with the total coincidence of the two ships happening to meet each other. Torres brushes it aside, though she does agree to consider Kuvah’Magh as the baby’s name.

Review
Klingons? In the Delta Quadrant? Again?

When B’Elanna started having visions about her mother in ‘Barge of the Dead’ in the sixth season, I was fine. The episode was very good, and it’s not like Voyager had managed to bump into one of the most overused species in the Trek universe, despite them being thousands of light years away from their home. Of course though, a Klingon episode managed to happen. Was this gimmick good enough to justify itself though? Kind of.

I can’t go too far into the review without mentioning the B-plot of this episode – Harry/Neelix and Ch’Rega, which was hilarious. Neelix coming out of her quarters the morning after, all ruffled up, after mentioning to Harry that he’d take care of his problem was brilliant. Easily the best part of the episode.

However, there was also the other 70% of the episode that I watched, and I couldn’t help feeling bored throughout it. The reason the Klingons were in the Delta Quadrant in the first place was simple enough to buy, and when it was mentioned that the Klingons started their mission hundreds of years ago, I couldn’t help but feel that this was a bit of a prelude to Enterprise (an easy opinion to have in retrospect, considering that I had started watching Enterprise before season 7 of Voyager!) With that opinion onboard though, it made me feel as if the episode was nothing but a way of looking forward to the future, before Voyager itself has even finished – a view that isn’t really positive enough to generate a high quality of work.

I was shocked to see yet another Tom/B’Elanna story this year (have they become the same character or something?) especially since they had one (a very good one) only on a few weeks before. It wasn’t a bad surprise – their storylines this year have been great. However, once I was into the episode, it seemed that they’d had too many storylines this year, and that now we were just into filler-episode territory. The other Klingons on this show were nothing really special (just your generic, ‘honour this, P'TaQ that,’) which didn’t help to combat the ‘been there, done that’ feel.

It’s hard to comment on anything else really. The episode wasn’t anything special, so it was hard to feel anything about anything that happened. The fact that the two ships could just happen to bump in to each other was highly coincidental (although I liked how it was commented upon at the end). I just hope that what comes after this episode is better.

Final Opinion
Klingons, like the Borg, don’t fix everything.

5.5/10