Episode 166: Friendship One

We start with Janeway on the space phone to StarFleet and telling them about the Distant Origins episode. Not surprising really if you think about it. “No really, we had some times we didn’t see spatial anomalies”. She’s given a mission to find a probe powered by antimatter that went missing in the area 300 years ago. The mission will take them slightly out of there way. Does StarFleet actually want them to come back? The human bridge crew all reminisce about how they had to learn about it in school. Even Neelix is getting bored by it. They eventually find the irradiated planet it’s on and have to send an away team in a shuttle. The away team consists of Chakotay, Harry, Neelix, Paris and Ensign Ricky. Sorry, I mean Carey. He might as well be two days away from retirement too. Which if you were, you’d be mightily annoyed you were in the Delta Quadrant. On the planet, they find pieces of the probe before everyone but Chakotay and Harry are captured. They make it back in the Flyer with a stowaway. On Voyager the Doctor uses Seven’s amazing fix all Nanoprobes (Order now and get this free pen!) to heal the stowaway’s radiation sickness. On the planet it transpires that when the probe crashed there people used the antimatter to fashion weapons and destroy each other, which is apparently the humans fault. They want transport off the planet to a more hospitable one, but that would take years. I’m sure StarFleet wouldn’t mind. Neelix tries to empathise with them by saying they’re better once you get to know them because he thought they were arrogant at first. He did? Don’t remember that at all. All the aliens on the planet seem to be warming to them except the leader because that’s how it works. Minority leaders is the in thing in the Delta Quadrant. Oh and Carey died. Eventually the hostages are freed by using the Doctor which I honestly didn’t see coming. Janeway modifies a few of the plentiful photon torpedoes on the atmosphere and shally me gally me zoop everything’s fine again! Thus ends their second StarFleet mission in seven years. The first they get thrown across the galaxy and this one a crewman dies, they don’t have much luck do they?