“Dragon’s Teeth”
Written by Michael Taylor and Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 6, Episode 7
Production episode 225
Original air date: November 10, 1999
Stardate: 53167.9
Captain’s log. On the Vaadwaur homeworld, orbital bombardment is destroying their capital city. In an underground cavern, Gedrin and his wife Jisa have put hundreds of their fellow Vaadwaur into stasis pods, though some pods have failed. Their plan is to wake up in five years and rebuild their civilization.
Nine hundred years later, Voyager finds itself accidentally sucked into a subspace corridor, where they’re dodging debris. Paris tries to find a way out when they’re hailed by another ship in the corridor. A member of the Turei claims ownership of the “under-space” they’re in, and views Voyager as invaders. Janeway insists they’re there by accident, and the Turei hit them with a shield modulation that kicks them out of the corridor (they’re also two hundred light-years ahead of where they were five minutes ago when they entered the corridor). However, the Turei insist on boarding Voyager and wiping all records of the corridor from their computer. Janeway refuses, and a fight breaks out.
Seven finds a planet they can hide in: the Vaadwaur homeworld, which is lifeless and awash in radiogenic particles. Voyager goes into the atmosphere and lands, their shields able to protect them from the radiation. They gambled that the Turei shields wouldn’t be able to handle it, and won.
After landing, Kim picks up faint life signs. Janeway, Tuvok, and Seven beam to the caverns where they find the stasis pods, which obviously didn’t wake them up five years later as planned. Seven revives Gedrin without consulting Janeway first. Gedrin passes out after seeing that Jisa didn’t survive in stasis.
He wakes up in sickbay, knowing that nine centuries have passed, and shocked to learn that the Turei now control the subspace corridors. The Vaadwaur used to control them, and explore the galaxy as merchants. Gedrin even recognizes Neelix as a Talaxian—using an ancient term for the people—as the subspace corridors extended as far as Talaxian space.
The Turei have proven unwilling to allow Voyager passage through the corridors to get home faster. They’re also bombarding the ship from orbit. However, the Vaadwaur know the corridors very well, and are willing to give Voyager information on how to navigate them in exchange for getting the remnants of their civilization to a new homeworld. As a make-good, Gedrin gives Voyager access to a defense satellite, which Voyager can use to get sensor readings on the Turei ships in orbit and target them with phasers. This drives them off for a time, but they’re likely to come back.
With help from Voyager’s crew, they revive the Vaadwaur from the stasis pods, and Gedrin also shows them their battleships, which Chakotay refers to as dragon’s teeth from Greek myth: when a dragon was killed in battle, its teeth were spread on the battlefield, and new warriors sprung up to continue the fighting.
Neelix is disturbed by Naomi’s reactions to the Vaadwaur children, who are incredibly mean-spirited, especially toward Neelix, as they view Talaxians as inferior and idiotic. Neelix reassures Naomi, then digs into the Talaxian database and finds references to the Vaadwaur in some ancient fairy tales, all of which paint a picture of conquerors and imperialists.
After being refused photon torpedoes, Gaul and Gedrin meet with some other Vaadwaur and express a desire to take Voyager for themselves, as they stand a much better chance of rebuilding with the starship than with a bunch of nine-hundred-year-old battleships.
Janeway confronts Gedrin about what Neelix—with Seven’s research help—has turned up about the Vaadwaur. Gedrin admits that, yes, they were also conquerors. After consulting with Chakotay, Janeway changes the plan so that fewer Vaadwaur ships are involved in the attack on the Turei. Gaul isn’t thrilled, and he has the Vaadwaur ships fire on Voyager. Gedrin, however, is not as trapped in the past as Gaul, and is willing to help Janeway by regaining control of the satellite, which will enable Voyager to target the Vaadwaur ships.
After convincing the Turei to take on the Vaadwaur, Janeway has Kim suck radiogenic particles into the nacelles to power the ship, since they’ve lost power from the Vaadwaur attacks. It works, and they blast off into orbit and space, leaving the Turei and the Vaadwaur to fight it out.
Seven apologizes to Janeway, and Janeway rebukes her, but admits she probably would have done the same in Seven’s position.
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Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, if you absorb radioactive particles into the nacelles you can power the ship. Nifty.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is willing to trust the Vaadwaur up to a point, but proves willing to shift gears when it becomes clear that they’re assholes.
Half and half. Torres helps Morin revive more Vaadwaur, and they talk about Klingons, which Morin has read up on in Voyager’s database. He particularly likes the phrase about how it’s a good day to die, as Vaadwaur children are taught to go to sleep imagining how many different ways they can die.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix only knows “vaadwaur” as a word meaning “foolish” in the ancient version of Talaxian. However, hearing what jerks the Vaadwaur were toward himself and Naomi makes him dig a little deeper, and he uncovers their mendacity.
Resistance is futile. Seven is eager to rebuild a civilization for a change, having spent her time as a Borg drone destroying civilizations.
Do it.
“We don’t know anything about this species. They could be hostile.”
“Most humanoid cultures are.”
–Tuvok being cautious, followed by Seven with the burn.
Welcome aboard. I started doing Trek rewatches exactly ten years ago yesterday, with the Star Trek: The Next Generation Rewatch debuting on the 9th of May 2011. A month later, when I did the rewatch of “Haven,” I noted with surprise that the character of Wyatt Miller was played by Robert Knepper, an actor I knew well from his later roles in things like Carnivale and Prison Break, and had never realized that he was on TNG back in the day with a mullet.
As the rewatch went on, I found this happening with other actors (Brenda Strong in “When the Bough Breaks,” Anne Ramsay in “Elementary, Dear Data,” Teri Hatcher in “The Outrageous Okona,” etc.), and the “Robert Knepper moment” became a thing in my rewatches on this site.
And now we’ve come full circle, because here we are a decade later, and we have a Robert Knepper moment with the actual Robert Knepper! After spending ten years using my shock at his appearance in “Haven” as the basis of a running gag about being surprised by actors showing up, he surprises me again by showing up here! Knepper plays Gaul.
Jeff Allin plays Gedrin, having previously played Sutter in TNG’s “Imaginary Friend.” Ron Fassler plays Morin, Mimi Craven plays Jisa, and Bob Stillman plays the Turei. Also Scarlett Pomers shows up as Naomi Wildman.
Trivial matters: This episode was originally planned as a two-parter, but then was reduced to a single hour.
One of the worlds Gedrin suggests going to is shot down by Seven, as it’s now controlled by the Devore, whose space Voyager traversed in “Counterpoint.”
Janeway tells Chakotay that she wishes they had a Betazoid on board to read the Vaadwaur’s minds. Of course, “Counterpoint” established that there was a Betazoid on board, Ensign Jurot. Maybe she was one of the ones killed in “Equinox, Part II.”
The Vaadwaur will also appear briefly in “The Void,” play a major antagonistic role in the game Star Trek Online, and appear in the post-finale Voyager novels Protectors and Acts of Contrition by Kirsten Beyer.
Set a course for home. “I wanted to help revive a civilization, not start a war.” This is a solid little first-contact story, one that creates an interesting alien species, and which shows the pitfalls of jumping in to trust and help someone without knowing much about them.
As a matter of fact, this episode is a great example of why the Prime Directive is a good thing—without ever actually mentioning the PD—because Voyager’s interference wound up doing serious damage to both the Vaadwaur and the Turei, as they revived their nine-century-old war at the end.
And yet, you can’t really fault Seven for reviving Gedrin—as Janeway herself says, she would’ve probably done the same if she was the junior officer on an away team and saw the stasis pods. It was the compassionate thing to do, especially given that the pods were meant to have reactivated after a few years rather than a few centuries.
I particularly like that we get hints right away that the Vaadwaur aren’t just victims here. Gedrin at one point speaks poorly of his dead wife because she was scared before going into the pod, which strikes Janeway as being appallingly cruel. Then we have them upsetting the usually quite cheerful Naomi, which is a nice way to show the nasty underbelly.
Well, that, and casting Robert Knepper as one of their leaders. Knepper so rarely plays a nice person that it’s not really much of a shock when he proposes that they take over Voyager rather than work with them.
(Speaking of Naomi, this episode oddly acts as if Samantha Wildman doesn’t exist. Neelix is tucking her into bed and saying he doesn’t have time to read her a bedtime story with no mention of Naomi’s mother at all. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that Wildman’s duty shifts overlap Naomi’s bedtime, but it’s still odd.)
I really like that one Vaadwaur praises the Klingon phrase “it is a good day to die,” which was co-opted by the writers from Crazy Horse, while another uses a metaphor that’s right out of Hagakure, a warrior’s guide for samurai (Gedrin’s line about walking with dignity through the rain instead of dashing from door to door). And then there’s Chakotay’s titular citing of Greek myth in relation to the Vaadwaur ships.
The episode is also one of Voyager’s most visually impressive. The opening shots of the Vaadwaur city being bombarded are striking as hell, the turbulent atmosphere of the Vaadwaur planet is beautifully rendered, and Voyager’s landing, and especially their flying through the atmosphere being fired upon by the Vaadwaur are among the most fantastic special effects renderings on the show.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest book is All-the-Way House, which is part of the Systema Paradoxa series of novellas about cryptids. His tale, which spans three centuries, is about the origin of the legendary Jersey Devil, and is available to order.
There isn’t much “probably,” about it. Janeway has ordered people to be awoken from stasis at least twice before (in “The 47s” and again in “The Thaw”). Now, Seven obviously shouldn’t have done so unilaterally, but I find it odd that Janeway is acting like this is a theoretical situation she has never faced before. This seems to be a case where Janeway is acting like waking people up from stasis is wrong because the script says so, and not because it is particularly consistent with what she has done before. In fact, Seven does pretty much exactly what you would expect Janeway to do in this situation- wake up one person, find out more of what happened, and then make a plan from there. Seven needs a lecture on not overstepping her authority, but are we really supposed to believe that there was a serious question of if they were going to wake these people up or not? Before they wake them up there is no reason to think that they are going to be blood-thirsty fascists, so it isn’t like there was some glaring warning sign Seven missed in her enthusiasm to thaw one of them out that would have led Janeway to make a different choice.
I also think Janeway transfers a little too much of the blame onto Seven for this. True, she woke up Gedrin (which, again, should have asked first)- but Janeway is the one who decided to help wake everyone up. The resulting fallout is more on her than it is on Seven, IMHO.
As always, I can’t resist bringing up the SF Debris review and Chuck Sonnenburg’s thoughts on this episode.
Anyway, one of my favorites of Season Six, but like so much of VOY, it was a missed opportunity to keep the Vaadwaur as recurring adversaries for at least a little while (which would’ve been feasible with the Corridors).
Thus, I’m glad Beyer brought them back for the VOY Relaunch.
Not a bad episode, but I would’ve liked it better if it had been followed up on. The subspace corridors seemed like a way to set the Vaadwaur up as recurring villains that could pop up anywhere, but then we hardly ever saw them again.
The episode complicates the Borg’s chronology, since it claims the Borg were a minor power 900 years before, when it’s previously been indicated that they’d thrived for thousands of years. I tend to assume they suffered a major setback or near-total eradication and were still rebuilding in the Vaadwaur’s era.
“This seems to be a situation where Janeway is acting like waking people up from stasis is wrong because the script says so, and not because it is particularly consistent with what she has done before.”
It’s not about the act itself, it’s about the chain of command. Right or wrong, it’s the captain’s decision to make, or at least the away team commander’s decision. Janeway choosing to do it unilaterally is one thing, Seven doing so is another.
wildfyrewarning: The issue wasn’t Seven reviving Gedrin as such, it was her doing it unilaterally, without prior authorization, before the away team had even finished exploring the caverns.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
You’d think that there would be some sort of protocol for these situations. After all, they’ve been finding people in some sort of suspended animation going at least as far back as Khan. What if the reason they’re all in stasis is due to having a disease? And Starfleet never seems to think that people may actually be lying, at least until it’s too late.
“Tuvok, take a security team and scout the facility.”
“Apologies, Captain, but we need the main cast for the away team.”
“So silly of me; how did I forget that? Tuvok, Seven (?!), come with me, the Captain, on this away mission.”
@5: you’d think so, but we saw in TNG that Picard didn’t really give one whit about whether Data revived the people he found. Granted, Picard’s attention was on the incipient diplomatic incident with the Romulans but could you imagine what would have happened if Data had revived a Khan-type figure in the middle of that?
@6: that sounds straight out of Scalzi’s Redshirts :-)
@6, I had the same thought. Probably not the best idea for the Captain and Tactical Officer to go exploring when the enemy could adapt their shields or get a fix on their location or whatever at any moment. Even stuck with the “main cast does everything” constraint, a far more logical choice would be Chakotay/Kim/Seven. I sort of understand the contrivance of having Janeway beam down personally to setup the conflict with Seven, but not sure what’s up with Tuvok. Kim’s skillset is more science-orientated and Tuvok doesn’t really end up doing anything anyway. Some strange character selections recently when you consider that Janeway was also the medical assistant last week for some reason.
I particularly liked Neelix’s moment with Naomi in this one. He tries a little to get her to be more open minded and forgiving, in case its just children being children, but ultimately respects and supports her boundaries when she says no to having anything more to do with them. He does probably what most guardians should do in trying to guide her, but leaves her with agency in making her choices otherwise. He really rises to the occasion in being her godfather.
I just rewatched this episode last night in anticipation of this review. Janeway referred to Neelix’ home planet as “Talaxia,” when it was established early on as being called “Talax.” In fact, the writers screwed up the planet’s name several times over the course of the series.
@10/bgsu98: Well, Spock was a “Vulcanian” for most of TOS season 1 and a Vulcan ever since. The Bajorans were originally “the Bajora” in TNG: “Ensign Ro,” and I think the planet name was originally pronounced “buh-ZHOR.” And the Andorian homeworld was “Andor” in TNG and DS9 (as well as numerous tie-ins) but then became “Andoria” on ENT.
@10, in addition to what 11 said, there’s a good chance whatever country you’re reading this from has two or more valid names (even if those names don’t describe exactly the same thing)– USA/United States/America, United Kingdom/England/Britain, Mexico/United Mexican States, Canada/Dominion of Canada, etc. So completely believable that Neelix’s home planet goes by two (or more) names. If anything, Trek should have more situations like this, but understandably the writers like to keep it simple unless it’s plot-relevant.
I agree that the vaadwaur should have been on more. It would’ve been interesting to see how quickly they adapt to 900 years of technological advances.
“You haven’t been completely honest about your past and that leaves me a little uncertain about the present.”
Hmm. This is decent on one level but it has a few problems. There’s a cat and mouse aspect to the way that we spend the episode flicking back and forth as to who the biggest threat is out of the Vaudwaar and the Turei. The opening is nicely ambiguous as to whether the Vaudwaar are innocent victims or not, but there does seem to be a harsh side to their culture right from the off. But the Turei seem pretty paranoid themselves. Setting them at each other’s throats may be Voyager’s only way out: Despite Seven indicating she nearly destroyed Voyager by reviving the Vaudwaar, it’s hard to see what they’d have done without them as a distraction, even if it’s not good news for the Turei or arguably the Vaudwaar. There’s a certain irony about the fact that Seven’s random act of compassion, and pride at the idea of saving a species instead of assimilating them, unleashes a deadly threat on the Delta Quadrant.
I’ve never liked the way Voyager just abandon Gedrin to almost certainly be killed after he’s helped them, which just makes them seem callous. It’s like the episode wrote itself into a corner and couldn’t think of anything else to do with him, so Tuvok just leaves him behind without a word and no-one comments on it. (I don’t recall Janeway doing much consulting with Chakotay, although I could be wrong there, and she definitely doesn’t suggest the Vaudwaar use less ships in the attack, she insists they disarm the ships that aren’t supposed to be taking part.)
Despite the sequel-hook ending, and despite publicity for the episode hyping them as a new recurring villain, we never hear from the Vaudwaar again. And…yeah. It does feel a bit as though the episode’s forgotten that Naomi has a mother on the ship and almost seems to be implying that she’s living with Neelix: It’s possible those are her quarters and he’s just visiting, but the lack of a mention for Samantha is odd. Something to keep an eye on going forward, perhaps…
I believe Samantha Wildman only appears in one more episode – “Fury” – and only in scenes that take place in the past.
#14 re: Samantha Wildman- if there is one thing I wish Ron Moore was able to bring to Voyager before he left, it was “maybe you should have a whiteboard to keep track of who is dead and how many people are on your ship,” because they do seem to forget 1. how many people are on board at any given time (as KRAD has pointed out numerous times) and 2. who exactly those people are. I mean, maybe they knew Samantha and Carey were alive, but it sure seems like they forgot at some point, and then they only appear in flashbacks or alternate realities (until Friendship One).
This episode does seem like it’s setting up for a new recurring antagonist. The Vaadwaur are more fleshed out and interesting than the typical villain of the week, and the special effects are indeed impressive, making the entire encounter feel like an important one that would be followed up on. And it’s too bad it wasn’t, this was a promising start.
I imagine that, when creating a Sci-Fi show with alien races, there are a bunch of little things that can trip you up. Earth standard is the default assumption. For instance, in this episode, Gedrin is told that he has been in stasis for 900 years. But that info is given to him with no thought or regard to the measurement of time his species would use. Outside of Earth, our standard year is basically meaningless. Even if they were to calculate the revolution of the planet to its star, they are assuming that the Vaadwaur use that as a meaningful measure of time. It’s a TV show, I know, and stuff like this is overlooked for expediency of storytelling. But it wouldn’t kill anybody to pay lip service to this concept.
@16,
Yeah, I’ve said it before throughout the Rewatch, but I’ve never understood VOY’s almost fanatical aversion to maintaining a supporting cast.
You can definitely see BSG’s preference for its own ensemble cast founded upon Moore’s experiences on DS9 and his frustration with VOY.
My one issue is that it all ends too abruptly. It could have been a two parter indeed. It would have given more breathing room to develop Gedrin and the Vaudwaar. Otherwise, Dragon’s Teeth is a good example of a “be careful what you wish for” story. A nice subversion of Trekkian values, where Seven’s well-meaning deed ends up backfiring for all involved, and realizing that sometimes being the victim at the right moment can function as a cover for one’s past sins and grievances. A rare, but welcome instance of a more ambiguous morality at play on Voyager, well crafted by Braga, Menosky and Taylor (I’m guessing the nod to Counterpoint was the latter’s idea).
I agree that the Vaudwaar could have made a comeback later on, and the episode sure seemed to be setting it up.
Some top tier visual effects sequences across the board, plus the ever reliable hand of Winrich Kolbe behind the camera. I particularly like the way the story employs Neelix and Naomi, as we pull back the layers of the Vaudwaar. Plus, it’s nice that the episode doesn’t backpedal on the Turei either, making clear that neither race is innocent in this conflict.
@18 I know that Star Trek does try to reflect the time measurement differences at least on the margins. I know at least on DS9 they have a 26 hour day, now if that’s just for Bajor or if that’s a Federation standard I’m not entirely sure. Though I wonder when approaching or what their sensors show, they can predict how many times it will take for a planet to make a full rotation as well as go around it’s sun so they can make a more accurate measurement when saying to someone “900 years”.
This was a solid outing. I loved the bait and switch in that the Vaadwaur weren’t such the helpless victims that the beginning of the episode implies them to be and their impending double-cross of Voyager provides some nice tension. Excellent CGI and action scenes. This felt like a “big” episode so I can see how it could have been a two-part episode or one long two hour episode as the writers kept going back and forth on.
It just is a shame that the Vaadwaur were set up as a major recurring adversary and then nothing was done with them. They are interesting and they could plausibly show up whenever and wherever because of the subspace corridors no matter how far Voyager has travelled. I would have seen them come back than the repeated use of the Borg which just lessened them as a threat with each appearance.
Robert Knepper’s performance here is a far cry from Wyatt in TNG. Much better role and acting from him. He does good at gritty and menacing characters.
@21/navibc31: DS9’s 26-hour day is the Bajoran day length. It was chosen to convey a sense of alienness about DS9, to underline that it’s not a place made for humans. There have been many references throughout Trek to 24 hours still being the standard in Starfleet.
As for year lengths, it’s generally implicit that universal translators are converting alien chronological references into Earth-standard years, days, etc. and adjusting the numbers to match. Although that’s harder to justify with a newly contacted civilization. As you say, though, the computer could easily enough calculate the Vaadwaur planet’s orbital period from astronomical observations.
Dragons Teeth was am amazing episode. The episode should have ben a two-parter. It has all the hallmarks of a two part story, but it still works as a single episode. And the Vaudwarr should have returned and become a recurring villain. They were very interesting and being over 900 years old this would have been amazing. They could have been the villain until the end.
Whoo Boy. As to the Star Trek Online continuation, The Delta Rising expansion will certainly make you hate the Vaadwaur’s guts. They coincide with a general increase in difficulty in the game. You could call them the game’s Knights of Cerebus, in that they’ll make you check your difficulty setting. Liam O’Brien takes over as Gaul and if anything he’s even less pleasant thirty years later. That said, the Turei also come off as jerks again. Truthfully the Delta Quadrant is probably the most morally ambiguous arc and the place just seems to be filled with jerks.
This was a great episode to my eye, Seven’s just trying to do a good thing and fate deciding to laugh at her. The fact that the Turei’s obstinacy directly led to the revival of their worst enemy, and the Vaadwaur being…well the Vaadwaur. They’re a species that makes you wonder what Voyager’s journey home would’ve been like with a Klingon or Romulan ship instead. Because any of the Federation’s classical adversaries would’ve happily firebombed the Vaadwaur on the way out. The Klingons for firing on them, the Romulans for the same reason, but they’d claim it was for being ingrates.
@23 – I knew the UT was going to be brought up. Unless you go with the theory that the UT can read your mind, it’s not going to help you with cultural knowledge. Not every species is going to measure time in the same way we do. In fact, it would probably be impossible to find another species that calculates time and uses the same units that we do. It would be like an alien species waking a human up and informing them that they have been in stasis for 22,000 atomic cycles. The human would be like, “Umm…ok?”
@26 – The UT reading minds isn’t a theory. It’s flat out stated the first time it showed up in Metamorphosis.
COCHRANE: What’s the theory behind this device?
KIRK: There are certain universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. This device instantaneously compares the frequency of brainwave patterns, selects those ideas and concepts it recognises, and then provides the necessary grammar.
SPOCK: Then it translates its findings into English.
Anything that says otherwise is a retcon.
@27 – I know. That comes up whenever the topic of the UT comes up. But CLB has basically debunked it every time. I believe that was really the only time that concept was ever brought up.
@26/Austin: ” It would be like an alien species waking a human up and informing them that they have been in stasis for 22,000 atomic cycles. The human would be like, “Umm…ok?””
If you mean cesium-133 atoms, that’s about 2.4 microseconds, so I wouldn’t blame the human for being unimpressed.
As for universal translators, they’re not supposed to make actual sense; they’re just a plot handwave to justify writing alien characters’ dialogue in a way that’s meaningful to the audience. Saying “assume the translators render alien time units into Earth units” doesn’t mean “believe that this is actually practical in real-world terms,” it means “understand that this is the narrative conceit they’re using to get around the issue.”
Re years, dialogue in the version of the story that we watch doesn’t have to make sense to the alien characters, it has to make sense to us. Years is fine, like in Star Wars which apparently is in the same galaxy as Shrek. It isn’t painful headcanon for us pickier viewers to suppose that the aliens heard “x number orbits of the star”, which even if that isn’t their time metric, well informed aliens would recognise.
I wonder how people reading know the length of a Mars year. (I don’t, it turns out.) It’s our nearest inhabited neighbor. Inhabited by robots flown in from Earth mostly, but it counts?
…can I make that “how many people reading” know how many pages in the Martian calendar (NASA licensed, price $20 plus shipping $744 million).
I wasn’t a big fan of this one and I can’t really pinpoint why. Perhaps the fact that it was supposed to be a two-parter, but was condensed into one, has something to do with it, I don’t know. I did like the Vaadwaur makeup however. Since they turned out to be ungrateful snakes, their cobra-like visage was appropriate and quite well done.
I seem to recall the writers saying in interviews around the time of this episode that they intended the Vaadwaur to be the recurring villains for season 6, like the Malon in season 5 or the Hirogen in season 4, but that they weren’t satisfied with how they turned out. I can kind of see where they’re coming from: I liked this episode and the concept of an ancient threat, remembered only in a handful of surviving folktales, being revived from hibernation; but in execution they seemed like just another generic warrior culture, of which Star Trek already has too many.
Also, I wish we’d heard more about the Borg of the 15th century! In “Q Who,” Guinan suggested that the age of the Borg was on the order of “thousands of centuries,” but she may have only been speculating. Of course, given that the collective could, in principle, regenerate from a single surviving drone (or even a single nanoprobe), they could easily have been wiped out almost to nothing at some point, or even several times throughout their history. Gedrin’s dialogue can also be read as implying that the Ancient Borg were somewhat less cybernetically enhanced (he recognised Seven of Nine at a glance, even though she only has a few implants) and perhaps less averse to negotiation than their 24th century counterparts.
Hmm, seems to me that the strategy of the Vaadwaur was horrible. They just woke up after 900 years and their best idea is to get two enemies in 5 minutes. I mean this is beyond idiotic. They are lucky that some of their ships managed to escape…
The other thing. Considering that the Turei ships did not seem to be more advanced than Voyager, i don’t understand how their enemy’s 900 year old ships could be ANY threat to the Voyager…that makes no sense to me.
@34/th_1: “Considering that the Turei ships did not seem to be more advanced than Voyager, i don’t understand how their enemy’s 900 year old ships could be ANY threat to the Voyager…that makes no sense to me.”
Progress is not inevitable. We tend to assume it is because we live in an era of rapid progress, but in the grand sweep of history, that’s the exception, with the rule being long periods of stability with little change or innovation. It’s possible that civilizations eventually reach a period of technological equilibrium where innovation slows. Indeed, that seems to be the case with the Federation, since the advances from the 23rd to the 24th century are little more than incremental improvements on existing technologies rather than radical innovations, and even 32nd-century technology is only more advanced in some ways (e.g. they have programmable matter but haven’t devised a better form of FTL than dilithium-based warp drive).
It could even be that the Turei went into a period of decline from which they subsequently recovered back to their former level.
@35/ChristopherLBennett True, can’t argue with that. :)