WHY WE LIKE IT: Cool planet.
WHY WE DON'T: The action scene padding.
REVIEW: We finally get to Chakotay, and he's on an island (I was thinking a mountain top since the ocean is covered in mist/clouds, I almost like that better), roughing it, catching eels for their eggs, making a chess set based on his dead crew, and the Janeway hologram his only company for ten long years. Well, there's no one better to go camping with. This was even an episode of Voyager, where he and Janeway were quarantined, they thought, forever. He must have been having flashbacks. His avian XO had a plan to get off the planet, but Chakotay wouldn't listen. He's been missing for years, presumed dead. And the Protostar looks the worse for wear, and jettisoned the proto-core long ago. (THAT'S going to make restoring the true history harder!) Given all that, it's no wonder Chakotay refuses the kids' mission.
We're reminded that he knows about the alien weapon aboard, so he's confined himself so it's never deployed on the Federation. Of course, it already has (if the timeline holds), and Starfleet has counter-measures if it were to happen again. But he doesn't know that, and Gwyn's presence (out of uniform and a member of the enemy race) isn't helping him trust. Janeway's hologram acts as his conscience (oh look, I think she scored a chess piece), and the crew's natural goodness makes them want to "fix" the captain by giving him hope again. They start restoring the ship, doing chores, and he starts to warm up to them, but he's the most galvanized when Dal gets into trouble with the planet's persistent sandworm problem, and he goes into action.
Finding the XO's corpse down in the tunnels is a bit of a dark moment for this show - I honestly expected him to be found alive, if stranded somewhere else - holding the answer in his hands (home-made anti-matter). I'm happy they still give him a funeral. I'm less happy with the tunnel chase that gets us there, even if it's cool that the rover can do that. It just goes on too long, and we JUST had a similar race sequence in a previous episode. Show needed action, I guess, but I was far more interested in tracking Chakotay's moods and attitudes. This show has already done well by Janeway, but it looks like it's going to outright save Chakotay.
LESSON: The needs of the many outweigh the comfort of a few.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: Interesting problems, emotional solutions... this might be the best Chakotay episode in recorded history.
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